doxietrek

CPA, stitcher, Bernadette's mom, NASCAR fan. Missing my babies Oscar Worf and Penny Jasmine.
Nobody hires a liberal accountant.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

$1.69 billion.

That is what Americans gave to charity yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

Giving USA released the figures last month. $617.20 billion in a single year. The first time American giving has ever crossed $600 billion.

Most of it is not corporations. In 2024 individuals alone gave $392 billion, about two thirds of the total. Church envelopes. Food banks. The GoFundMe for the neighbor with cancer.

And bequest giving rose almost 20 percent. People who knew they were dying signed papers to hand money to strangers they would never meet.

The world calls this country greedy.
The receipts say something else. 🇺🇸

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@Mc_Driver Sending prayers for comfort for you and your family. We have the promise that we will all be reunited one day with our Lord.

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@mattvanswol @HistoryBoutique Congratulations! I've found that homeschooled kids surpass the public school product in just about every measurement. And your family has control - your child learns to THINK, not memorize propaganda. Good luck!!!

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨WOW!!!

Absolutely BEAUTIFUL footage has emerged of over 100 Amish men and women singing hymns in the caves of Chimney Rock NC after a day of rebuilding homes and businesses.

They are STILL HERE rebuilding, nearly TWO YEARS after Hurricane Helene.

GOD BLESS THE AMISH!!!!!!

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

Somewhere this week a church replaced the pulpit with a movie screen.

Not for a funeral. Not for a missionary update. For a sermon series themed around Hollywood films.

They call it "At the Movies."

It's spreading through non-denominational churches like fire through dry brush. And most people sitting in those pews have no idea what they're watching die.

Here's what's dying. The biblical purpose of the gathered church.

The New Testament shows the church assembling to worship God, preach His Word, observe the ordinances, pray, and equip the saints. None of that requires a projector and a Rotten Tomatoes score.

But the church industrial complex has a different theology. It believes the church has to compete with Hollywood to keep people's attention. So pastors become producers. Services become experiences. And the Word of God gets cut down to a clip between scenes.

The apostles never borrowed from Rome's entertainment to grow the church. They preached Christ crucified. They trusted the power of the Holy Spirit and the Word of God instead of movie clips, themed stages, and pop culture references stitched into a 25 minute talk.

Paul told Timothy to preach the word. Be instant in season, out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. That's 2 Timothy 4:2.

He didn't say make it fun or relatable. He said preach.

Yes, we should reach unbelievers. Nobody is arguing against that. But making church feel more like the world has never converted a single soul. The thing that converts is the uncompromised truth of God's Word. Something the world can't manufacture on its own.

When entertainment replaces exposition and attraction replaces discipleship, the church stops shaping the culture. It starts reflecting it. And it calls the compromise progress.

And before someone pulls the parable card. Jesus spoke in parables, yes. But Hollywood is not Jesus. His parables were not borrowed from the culture's entertainment. They were original teachings that revealed truth to those with ears to hear while concealing it from those with hardened hearts. Matthew 13:10-17.

He didn't need a clip from a Roman comedy to make a point about the Kingdom. His words cast out demons and calmed storms and raised the dead.

Your movie night can't do that.

The church was never meant to mirror the culture. It was meant to confront it. And every Christ-follower sitting in a sanctuary watching film clips instead of hearing the Word preached should be asking one question.

When did we decide the Gospel wasn't enough?

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

A SpaceX intern once described eating lunch next to Elon Musk in the company cafeteria.

The intern said Elon sat down at a regular table with a regular tray of food. No entourage. No reserved section. He sat next to two junior engineers who were clearly terrified. One of them was explaining a problem with a valve component to the other.

Elon listened without introducing himself or interrupting. After about three minutes he turned to the engineer and said "have you tried running it at a lower pressure gradient first." The engineer stared at him. Then realized the CEO of the company had just casually solved a problem his team had been stuck on for a week.

The intern said what happened next was the part that surprised him. Elon didn't leave. Didn't check his phone. He spent the next twenty minutes asking the engineers questions about their work. Not CEO questions about timelines and budgets. Engineering questions about fluid dynamics and material stress tolerances. He was genuinely curious. The cafeteria conversation was indistinguishable from a technical review.

The intern said he understood in that moment why people work 80-hour weeks for this man. Not because he's inspiring. Not because he pays well. Because he's the only CEO in the world who sits in the cafeteria and solves your engineering problem between bites of a burrito.

People follow leaders who are above them. People worship leaders who sit next to them and prove they understand the work better than the people doing it.

[Wojciech Pawelczyk @WojPawelczyk]

I've just found this TV commercial featuring William Shatner and it is cosmically wonderful.

I love people who are able to make fun of themselves.

[CanadianExMuslim @ExMuslimAz]

Islam destroyed every society it entered 💀

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

Most people still talk about 2020 like it was a story about one man who couldn’t accept losing. That framing was never accidental. It was the easiest way to keep the real issue off the table.

The actual damage wasn’t that Donald Trump lost an election. The actual damage was that millions of Americans were left with the sickening possibility that their consent no longer determines who holds power in this country. That’s not a personal grievance. That’s a direct assault on the principle that government derives its authority from the governed.

When the system that’s supposed to translate the people’s will into leadership becomes untrustworthy, the injury doesn’t stop at the candidate who got the short end. The injury lands on every citizen whose vote was supposed to carry real weight.

The ballot isn’t just a counting exercise. It’s the mechanism by which “We the People” actually exercises authority over those who rule. Corrupt that mechanism, and you don’t just change an election result. You break the chain of consent that makes self-government legitimate in the first place.

That’s why the entire conversation was relentlessly dragged back to Trump’s reaction. A fight about one man’s ego can be mocked, contained, and eventually forgotten. A fight about whether the American people still get to decide who governs them cannot be dismissed so easily. So they made sure the second conversation never happened.

The presidency doesn’t belong to any politician. It belongs to the citizens who are supposed to grant temporary authority through elections they can actually trust. Once that trust is gone, everything else is just theater.
(article below)

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup ends today. One game left. By tomorrow most of you visitors will be packing up, heading to the airport, going home.

So before you go, let me say the thing I actually want to say.

A few weeks ago I wrote a silly post about all the things you were discovering here. Free refills. Free water. Ice like civilized people. Chips and salsa before you even order. Air conditioning that is a fact and not a moral debate. Drive-throughs. Ranch by the gallon. The Germans standing in the HEB meat aisle in reverent silence, finally understanding why we do not have trains. Buc-ee’s, for which there are still no words.

It blew up, because it was true, and because you were so delightfully stunned by all of it.

Even the Wall Street Journal caught on. Their headline this week: how the US lost the World Cup and won over the world. We did not lift the trophy. But apparently we lifted something else.

We even learned a few things about ourselves along the way. Like the fact that Elon Musk, the single richest man on the planet, shops at HEB. Just rolls in and queues up for fresh tortillas with everybody else. The man could buy the tortilla company, the state it is in, and the moon it sits under, and instead he is standing in line at the hot-tortilla counter like the rest of us, because that is where the good ones are. Only in America is the wealthiest human alive elbow to elbow with a mom of four at the salsa bar. That is the whole country in one aisle.

And here is the part I want every one of you to hear on your way out the door.

None of it was a show.

We did not roll all this out because you were coming. The ice was always there. The refills were always free. The grocery stores were always the size of aircraft hangars at ten on a Tuesday. The stranger who adopted your whole section, the guy who gave you a ride, the waitress who remembered your order, the family that invited you to the cookout, that is not World Cup America. That is just America. That is Tuesday.

We are exactly like this when nobody is visiting. Loud, generous, ridiculous, overfed, and genuinely thrilled you came. We will still be exactly like this tomorrow when the stands are empty and the flags come down.

So thank you. To everyone who came, who sang in our streets, who cleaned our stadiums, who turned our cities orange and filled our bars and taught us your chants. You were wonderful guests, and you made a country that just turned 250 feel young and seen and loved.

And to everyone who could not make it this time, the door does not close today. We meant all of it. Come whenever. The porch light stays on, the fridge stays full, and there is always room for one more at the table.

You found out who we are these last few weeks.

Good news. We are like this all the time.

Safe travels home.

Y’all come back now, you hear. 🦋

[✝️ Shawna Nonna 🇺🇸 @ShawnaNonna]

@mattvanswol

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

A US senator killed a 28 year old woman, left her to drown, spent zero days in jail, and then served 40 more years in the Senate. 57 years ago tonight. Almost nobody remembers her name.

57 years ago tonight, July 18 1969, on a tiny island called Chappaquiddick that most Americans could not find on a map, the most infamous car accident in US history happened while the entire world was staring at the sky waiting for men to walk on the moon.

Senator Ted Kennedy left a cottage party for the "Boiler Room Girls," the young women who had worked themselves to exhaustion on his brother Bobby's campaign the year before Bobby was shot, and he drove off with 28 year old Mary Jo Kopechne around 11:15 pm. He said he was taking her to the ferry.

Instead the car went off the Dike Bridge, a narrow wooden bridge with no guardrail, and flipped upside down into the black tidal water of Poucha Pond. Kennedy got out. Mary Jo did not.

And here is the part history never forgave: he did not knock on the lit up house just yards away that had a phone, he did not call police, he walked back to the party and then he went to bed.

He reported it roughly 10 hours later, the next morning, only after two fishermen had already found the car and her body. The diver who pulled her out, John Farrar, said she had likely survived for a while inside an air pocket and might be alive today if anyone had simply called for help that night.

Two days later Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and so the greatest achievement in human history shared the front page with a drowned woman and a senator who waited until sunrise.

The punishment for all of it: a guilty plea to leaving the scene, a two month suspended sentence, not a single day served. He kept his Senate seat for 40 more years until he died in 2009, one of the most powerful men in the country.

Strip away the famous last name and you are left with something painfully simple. A young woman trusted the wrong man to drive her home, and he chose himself.

Say her name tonight. Not his. Mary Jo Kopechne.

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@mattvanswol Follow the money. It's flowing.

[Mike Lee @SenMikeLee]

American elections should not be less secure than Olive Garden’s endless pasta.

Pass the SAVE America Act.

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk was asked at a private dinner what he thinks about when he can't sleep at night. The table expected him to say Mars. Or AI. Or some engineering problem he was working through. His actual answer made the room go quiet.

He said he thinks about whether he's a good person. Not whether his companies are successful. Not whether the rockets will fly. Whether he, as a human being, is good.

He said the question terrifies him because he doesn't know the answer. He said by most conventional measures he's failed at the things that make someone good. He wasn't there for his kids. He hurt the women who loved him. He drove employees past their limits. He made decisions that prioritized the mission over individual human beings every single time.

He said the defense he tells himself is that the mission is bigger than any individual. That the suffering he caused is justified by the future he's building for eight billion people. But he admitted at that dinner that some nights the defense doesn't hold. Some nights the math doesn't work. And he lies there knowing that "I'm building a better future" might just be the story a workaholic tells himself to avoid confronting the damage.

The richest and arguably most impactful man alive isn't sure he's a good person. And the honesty of that doubt tells you more about his character than any rocket launch ever could. The people who are certain they're good rarely question it. The ones who question it at 3am might be the ones actually trying.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Elon Musk exposed the one lie every modern nation tells itself.

Musk: “In 1969, we were able to send somebody to the moon.”

Rotary phones. Computers the size of rooms. Slide rules.

We put a human on the moon with less processing power than your watch.

Musk: “Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit.”

The most advanced nation in human history went from footprints on the moon to zero capability of leaving the atmosphere.

That is not a funding problem.

That is civilizational decay dressed up as a policy decision.

Musk: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves… it will, by itself, degrade.”

That sentence should keep you up tonight.

We treat progress like gravity. Like it pulls us forward whether we try or not.

It is the opposite.

Progress is a boulder on a hill. The second you stop pushing, it rolls back over you. And it never announces itself.

Musk: “You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.”

They did not run out of stone.

They were not conquered.

They got comfortable. And the knowledge bled out so quietly that nobody noticed until it was already gone.

That is the real threat to everything we have built.

Not a nuclear flash. Not an asteroid. Not some dramatic Hollywood collapse.

A quiet forgetting.

Every chip we fabricate. Every rocket we launch. Every data center we power. All of it held together by a thin fraction of the population working at a pace that would break most people.

The moment that fraction gets tired or outnumbered by people who believe the machine runs itself, everything dissolves.

And here is the part nobody wants to say out loud.

We are not special. We are running the same operating system as every civilization that came before us.

Comfort is the sedative. Complacency is the flatline.

One generation that stops fighting is all it has ever taken.

You do not lose the future in a war.

You lose it in your sleep.

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

“You see, down South, we don’t deal with all that tomfoolery that y’all are dealing with over there in New York City, California, Maine, Minnesota, or any of those woke states. We don’t deal with that.

You see, around these parts, yeah, around these parts, we believe in God, guns, and butter, and in that order.

God, and His name is Jesus Christ. Let’s not be confused.

Pretty much all of us concealed carry. There will be no “entering into every household in America.” That part. Catch it.

And we love to eat, so we put butter on everything. And I mean everything. That part.

And I did not mention it, but let me be very, very clear: God, guns, butter, but also, we are very, very commonsense and patriotic.

See, unlike Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, we know what a woman is. That part.

And there will be American flags flying in everybody’s yard, okay? So, if you have a problem with that, you may not want to move down South.

Yes, the homes are cheaper, but they look just as good as those high-priced homes y’all are paying for up North and on the East and West Coasts. That part.

We’re comfortable classifying all the white boys in the Cajun Navy as our friends. That part.

You see, when the tornadoes and hurricanes happen, they come on through, and they don’t care what color the hand is that they’re helping. That part.

Our men are not emasculated. At least around these parts, they ain’t.

And chivalry sure enough ain’t dead.

And last but not least, we believe in keeping our babies around here, okay?

So, I lied to your oddball over there: You will not be entering into every household in America. And all that yelling and screaming in pro-lifers’ faces around these parts doesn’t work.

You feel me? Because we hit back. That part.

God bless. Welcome to the South.”

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@MckinneyDiane1 @BuzzPatterson Uh.... no. IndyCar all the way. Call Roger Penske.

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@FloppingAces @grok is this true?

[doxietrek @doxietrek]

@Michele55872184 @ksorbs We are actively looking at an ECO congregation.