Donna Blackwelder

[Patricia Heaton @PatriciaHeaton]

👀

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Think before you vote this November.

[Stephen A Smith @stephenasmith]

Sound bite of the Year!

[YouVersion Bible App @YouVersion]

1 Corinthians 10:31

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.

The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.

Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.

An airplane. In a 1993 report.

Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.

Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.

They literally made it a trading center.

The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.

Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.

He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.

People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.

He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.

By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.

Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.

It was stunning.

Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.

He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.

The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.

He was one of the 13.

He was a hero in every sense of the word.

Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Spread the word.

[Mark Hankins Ministries @markhankins1123]

Your obedience will take you where talent alone never could.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

Yep.

[Donna Blackwelder @dlblackwelder]

@PatriciaHeaton

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

A junior-high kid from Arkansas named Carlos asked to meet all nine Supreme Court Justices. Two said yes.

Clarence Thomas gave him two hours, talking with a kid whose upbringing reminded him of his own.

Before Carlos left, Thomas handed him an Emmitt Smith-signed Super Bowl ticket—with one condition: get A’s next year.

Going Further is full of stories like this about the Clarence Thomas most Americans never get to see.

Pre-order at https://t.co/2ANWgLIPqD

[Mark Hankins Ministries @markhankins1123]

God’s not just a redeemer He is my redeemer

[Donna Blackwelder @dlblackwelder]

@RennerRick study

[Capps Ministries @CharlesCapps1]

Confession of the Day— The blessing of the Lord makes truly rich, and He adds no sorrow with it. (Reference: Proverbs 10:22)

—from 𝙂𝙤𝙙’𝙨 𝘾𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙋𝙤𝙬𝙚𝙧® 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙨 by Charles Capps & Annette Capps

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

My story about pulling our son out of NC public schools to homeschool him reached far more people than I expected.

So I owe you the full explanation. Fair warning: it's worse than you think.

1) My son was in a class with many kids that could not speak the English language.

Zero English. None. Not a word.

You might be asking yourself... well, how did lessons occur in the classroom?

I'm glad you asked.

In fact, the way the teachers communicated with the Spanish-speaking only students was by using their personal iPhones as translators, speaking instructions into the iPhones, and the iPhones spitting out the Spanish instructions to the Spanish-speaking students, and then the Spanish-speaking students speaking Spanish into the iPhones, and the English questions/answers coming are read out for the teacher.

If you're exhausted just reading that...good. Now hold that feeling.

Imagine you’re an English-speaking student sitting in that same classroom, like my 5 year old son was.

Every lesson is interrupted while translations happen and naturally, the teacher’s attention is constantly divided.

The pace of learning slows DRAMATICALLY for everyone else.

The consequence is that the classroom stops being optimized for the students who can already understand the instruction and instead becomes an exercise in overcoming a language barrier that never should have existed inside an American, English-language classroom in the first place.

A place built to teach kids who are ready to learn quietly becomes a place mostly occupied with bridging a gap in language.

I don't think my five-year-old should spend one irretrievable year of his early schooling waiting at that bridge.

2) I saw the writing on the wall for the future of my county's school system and realized that not only was the future incredibly bleak, but downright aggressively woke in a way words fail to describe.

For multiple months, our school system allowed kids to:

a) Create Anti-ICE protest signs inside of the schools
b) Exit the school grounds, often WITHOUT SUPERVISION by ANYONE
c) Stand along busy highways and scream "FUCK ICE" for a few hours

Most shockingly, it was clearly encouraged by the schools, by leadership, and by many of the teachers.

That was political activism.

It gets worse... for years Buncombe County has forced biological girls to deal with biological males (who call themselves trans) to enter into girls locker rooms and bathrooms.

This has been happening for years and no one dared to try to change or speak up until very very recently... that should tell you a lot about what the school leadership believes and their political bent.

There is an evil lie that I see being spread by many that have condemned our decision to homeschool.

That lie is this:

“Public schools are neutral. By homeschooling, you’re only exposing your child to one side.”

This is a grossly evil lie.

In fact, the opposite is happening.

Schools are not neutral institutions simply because they are publicly funded; every school day has a limited number of hours, and every lesson taught means another lesson isn’t.

There is a finite amount of time in school, everyone understands this, which means priorities matter.

Every hour spent discussing political activism is an hour that isn’t spent on reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, or civics.

So when schools increasingly prioritize activism, identity politics, or current political causes... something else inevitably gets pushed aside.

Guess what? That’s not neutrality, that’s a choice.

What so many parents continue to discover is that their child comes home with a head full of ideas about the world that are purely one-sided because that's all there was time for.

Nuance is lost because nuance is time-consuming.

Is there TIME for nuance when half the class cannot speak English and you're speaking into a translator?

Of course not.

A child who can chant but cannot argue the other side hasn't been educated, they've been conditioned and the conditioners always, ALWAYS believe they're doing the child a kindness.

3) I'm fairly confident that today's school system is not designed for boys at all, it's purely designed for girls.

I'll give an example.

One of the schools in my area noticed that boys were throwing pine-cones (calling them grenades) and playing with sticks (calling them guns and swords).

This made the girls in the class uncomfortable.

So the school banned the boys from playing with sticks or pinecones outside, saying that the boys were playing "violent games" and should stop.

One group's nature (the girls) became the rule.

The other group's nature (the boys) became an problem... and once you see it, you see it everywhere.

Classrooms rewards staying still, staying quiet, non-aggression, obedience.

So ask yourself honestly... if you designed an institution that graded children partly on their ability to sit motionless for six hours, who would you expect to win?

Girls, of course.

Boys "get into trouble" FAR more often than girls, and the "offenses" are things like being too aggressive, not staying in line, fidgeting, or being "defiant" for staying buried in a book instead of the worksheet.

The punishment schools reach for first is often to take AWAY recess, which is literally the physical release every study says he needs, as the penalty for needing it!

At my table, he can stand up when he needs to move. He can go deep on the thing that lights him up instead of being dragged off it. He can build his imaginary armies.

He can be exactly the boy he is and have that be an ASSET instead of someone saying that's a problem.

4) No teacher, no matter how gifted, no matter how well-meaning, walks into that classroom knowing my son the way we know him, and no one ever will.

The single most important qualification for teaching a child isn't a degree or a curriculum or a district budget..

...it's just how much do you actually care whether this SPECIFIC kid makes it?

How far would you go for him?
How late would you stay for him?
How many times would you explain it again and again?
How completely would you refuse to give up on him?

And on that measure, the whole world loses to his mother (who will be homeschooling him), it's not even close.

Nobody on earth will ever love him more than she does.

Nobody will study him, root for him, ache for him, and delight in him the way she does every ordinary day.

There has never been anyone on this earth more qualified to raise my son than the woman whose love for him knows no depths and has no end.

Hope that helps clarify a few things.

[Jesse Duplantis @jesse_duplantis]

I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart; I will shew forth all thy marvellous works. I will be glad and rejoice in thee: I will sing praise to thy name, O thou most High. Psalm 9:1-2

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On this day in 1944, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. died in his sleep in a stone farmhouse in Normandy. He was 56 years old, and he had spent almost his entire adult life trying to be worthy of a famous last name.

He was the eldest son of President Theodore Roosevelt. In the First World War he went to France and was gassed and badly wounded at Soissons leading his men. That same summer his younger brother Quentin, a pilot, was shot down and killed over France. Ted came home with lungs and a leg that never fully recovered, and before he even left Europe he helped found the American Legion so that ordinary soldiers would have someone looking out for them.

Between the wars he did almost everything. Governor of Puerto Rico. Governor General of the Philippines. Businessman, explorer, writer. He could have spent the Second World War safe behind a desk. Instead, at 54, arthritic and walking with a cane, he talked his way back into uniform and into combat.

By 1943 he was fighting in North Africa and Sicily under Terry Allen, and their loose, unpolished, soldier-first style rubbed General Patton the wrong way. Patton had them both relieved of command. Roosevelt didn't sulk. He asked for another job, any job, as long as it kept him near the fighting. They made him assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division.

Then came D-Day. He hid a heart condition from the Army doctors. He wrote to his commander three separate times, in writing, begging to go in with the very first wave rather than watch from a ship. He was the only general to land in the first wave on any beach that morning, the oldest man in the invasion, walking through machine gun fire with a cane in one hand and a pistol in the other.

The boats came in a mile off course. Officers froze. Roosevelt limped up and down the beach under fire, studied the ground, and said, "We'll start the war from right here." Then he spent the morning waving men forward and sorting out the chaos so calmly that terrified 20 year olds looked at this old man with a cane and decided that if he wasn't scared, they wouldn't be either.

His son Quentin, named for the uncle killed in the last war, landed at Omaha Beach the same morning. They were the only father and son to come ashore together on D-Day.

He died a month later. A heart attack in his sleep. And here is the part that gets me. On the very day he died, the orders had just come through promoting him to major general and giving him his own division. He never saw the paperwork. He never knew he'd earned the Medal of Honor either.

At his funeral his pallbearers were seven of the most famous generals of the war, Bradley, Hodges, Collins, Barton, Huebner, and George Patton. The same Patton who had fired him. Patton wrote in his diary that Roosevelt was one of the bravest men he had ever known.

Years later Omar Bradley was asked to name the single most heroic thing he witnessed in all of World War II. He didn't pause. He said, "Ted Roosevelt on Utah Beach."

[Donna Blackwelder @dlblackwelder]

@jesse_duplantis Happy Birthday