One of my favorite quotes from Ronald Reagan:
“Sometimes when I'm faced with an unbeliever, an atheist, I am tempted to invite him to the greatest gourmet dinner that one could ever serve and, when we finished eating that magnificent dinner, to ask him if he believes there's a cook.” 🔥
The US Navy operates a 50,000 acre forest in Indiana whose entire job is keeping one wooden ship from 1797 afloat.
The ship is USS Constitution, still a commissioned warship with an active-duty crew. Cannonballs bounced off her in 1812 because the hull sandwiches a wall of live oak ribs between two layers of white oak planking, nearly 2 feet of solid wood so dense it barely floats. British 18-pounders hit it and dropped into the sea. A sailor yelled "her sides are made of iron" and the nickname stuck.
Here's the problem with owning a 229-year-old wooden ship: you can't buy the parts. Hull planks run up to 40 feet long and 7 inches thick, cut from single white oak trunks. A white oak takes over a century to grow that big. No lumberyard on earth stocks it.
So the Navy grows its own. Constitution Grove at Naval Support Activity Crane holds trees over 100 years old, reserved exclusively for this ship. Foresters there are managing oaks today that will become hull planking in the 2100s. The maintenance plan literally runs on tree time.
Every 20 years or so she enters dry dock and shipwrights swap out rotted timber. After two centuries of this, estimates put original 1797 wood at maybe 10 to 15 percent of the ship. The Navy keeps replacing her plank by plank because Congress mandated her preservation and because she's the only active US warship that has sunk an enemy vessel.
Every other asset in the Navy has a decommission date. This one has a tree farm.
How do I know media brainwashing is real?
Obama’s ICE Chief received an award for removing over 900,000 illegal aliens.
Trump’s ICE chief was called a Nazi.
It is the same person - Tom Homan.
The difference? What the media told people to believe.
2006. Senator Obama slams the Bush Administration for not doing more workplace raids to catch and deport illegal immigrants.
It appears that the Democrat party has changed a little bit over the past 20 years. 🤪
While today’s politicians pledge nothing and risk even less…
56 men in 1776 pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
And they delivered.
No empty virtue signals.
No safe spaces or excuses
Just raw courage and total commitment.
Zero defectors.
That’s how freedom was purchased.
We owe them everything. Never forget. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Today in 1937, a 24 hour honor guard was posted for the first time at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
It has been continuously guarded ever since.