Michael

Getting old is a strange experience

[Michael @hulkshark2]

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

[TimOnPoint @TimOnPoint]

As the Communists continue their “march” through the Democrat Party… a warning from the old world.

“This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit.”

KS is my new favorite follow.

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@japan_nobunaga 11 hours

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I was added to a group chat.

Nobody asked. My phone made a sound and I was in a room with nine Americans and a name at the top that said "THE BOYS 🏈🔥."

I did not know four of them.

Inside I said: I HAVE BEEN CONSCRIPTED INTO A COUNCIL WHOSE PURPOSE AND MEMBERSHIP HAVE NOT BEEN DISCLOSED TO ME.

The first message I received was a photograph of a lawnmower with no caption.

Eleven replies. Nobody asked what the lawnmower was. Everyone understood immediately. One man replied "LMAOOO" with four O's, and another replied "no way he did it again."

He did it again. Somebody had done something again. With a lawnmower. Previously.

I have never learned what happened. There is no way to ask. To ask would reveal that I am new, and I have been in this chat for fourteen months.

Then I learned the rules.

You do not say hello. There is no greeting. You simply begin, mid-thought, as though continuing a conversation that has been running since 2019, because it has.

You do not answer questions directed at the group. Someone else will. If nobody does, the question dies, and nobody mourns it, and the man who asked it will bring it up again in six weeks with no reference to the first attempt.

You do not leave. Leaving generates a system message. The system message is visible to all. There is no discreet exit. The only way out is death, and even then someone will post in it.

Inside I said: THERE IS NO GATE OUT. THE WALLS FACE INWARD.

I said nothing for four months.

Then one night at 11 PM, a man posted "anybody up."

Two words. No question mark.

Three people replied within a minute. Then a fourth. Then they talked for two hours about nothing.

I understood then what the chat is for.

It is not for information. It has never carried information. It is a light left on in a window so that a man who cannot sleep can see that the house is still there.

Last month my father was ill.

I did not say so. I would not say so.

At 1 AM I typed "anybody up."

Four replies in ninety seconds. Nobody asked why. Nobody asked if I was alright. They simply began talking about a football game from 2011 and an argument they have been having about it for a decade.

They talked until 3 AM.

Then one of them wrote, "night, brother."

Just that. To me. Singular.

He knew.

They all knew.

Nobody said a word about it and nobody ever will and I have never in my life been held so carefully by people who refused to admit they were doing it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I folded a towel at an American house and the woman stopped.

She did not say anything. She just watched me finish.

Then she said, "That's how my mother-in-law does it."

I had folded it in thirds.

She folds in half.

She has been folding towels in half for thirty-one years and her mother-in-law folds in thirds and she has known this the entire time and has never said a word about it.

I asked if it mattered.

She said, "No."

Then she said, "It fits better in thirds."

Then she said, "I know it does."

She knows the other way is better. She has known for three decades. She is not going to change.

I asked why.

She said, "Because then she'd have been right."

Her mother-in-law has been dead for four years.

She is still not folding in thirds.

I asked if her mother-in-law ever said anything.

She said, "She refolded them once."

Once. In thirty-one years, one time, that woman refolded a towel, and the war has outlived her by four years and is currently being fought in a linen closet in Ohio.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I said "a red big truck" and an American winced.

He could not tell me why. He said, "It's just big red truck."

I asked what the rule was.

He said, "There's no rule, it just sounds wrong."

There is a rule.

Opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. In that order. Always. Every native speaker follows it perfectly and not one of them has ever seen it written down.

"A lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife."

Change any one of those and every American in the country will flinch, and none of them will be able to explain what happened.

I showed him the rule.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he said, "I've been doing that my whole life?"

Yes.

Yes you have.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“The Spirit is capable of reversing the direction of even the most fatal process. It can pull us back even from the brink.”

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“[I]n the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.”

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@mrdavidrowe Eliade discussed the reality of the sacred and how the sacred breaks through via hierophanies or manifestations of the sacred . His ideas might’ve of interest to you

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@mrdavidrowe Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane may interest you on this topic.

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@POTUS: Yet as we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack. A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of Communism, there is now a resurgence of the Communist menace in our land—including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life.

These are not mere political disagreements, like differences over taxes or regulations. Communism is a mortal threat to American Liberty. It is the Greatest Threat to our Country including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11.

Because Communism is the enemy of Free People everywhere. It is the enemy of the Constitution. Above all, it is the Enemy of July 4th, 1776.

Even while the Radicals and Extremists attack our incredible history at every turn, they are SILENT on the miserable history of Communism itself. Their system has led to more death and destruction than any system ever tried—it killed 100 million people in the last century.

Communism is the exact opposite of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.

The Godless Communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about the inhuman visions they propose. They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights.

It is an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder. Such doctrines can be given no quarter in a Democracy, because the first thing they do when they get into power is turn around, and destroy it—just as Communists have done in other countries all over the world.

Very simply, Communism represents the worst ideas and abuses in history by the worst people—the American Founding represents the best ideas and traditions in history by the best people.

You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a Communist, or you can be a Patriot. You cannot be both.

As for those who would peddle Marxist lies about our heritage—who tell our children that we live on stolen land, or that our heroes were oppressors—they are doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are attacking our future. They are trying to tear down the American Character, to destroy the people who declared Independence, crossed the Delaware, settled the West, and conquered the skies. But we will never let that happen.

Our American Ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves and radicals could come in and loot and pillage the nation our heroes died to win, build, and save.

So on the eve of this 250th anniversary of American Liberty, we resolve and swear for all to hear that the Citizens of the United States of America will vanquish Communism from our shores, and send it into exile once and for all. America will never be a Communist country!

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@JackPosobiec I was 11 and I’ll never forget how 200 years ago today would come on tv every night! BTW I had an awesome bicentennial t shirt

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@Elohim_Gadol Not teacher not system but Scripture alone is authoritative

[Michael @hulkshark2]

@inimitablepgw Aged relative - only in the aged relative now

[NASA @NASA]

Liftoff.

The Artemis II mission launched from @NASAKennedy at 6:35pm ET (2235 UTC), propelling four astronauts on a journey around the Moon.

Artemis II will pave the way for future Moon landings, as well as the next giant leap — astronauts on Mars.

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“It's a system where...there haven't been genuine elections.... It's a system without an independent press; a system without an independent judiciary; where the people have no influence...where any thought which is different from what the state thinks is crushed.”

[Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec]

They're storming churches, infiltrating institutions, lying in media, seizing wealth, attacking reporters in the streets, and agitating the dregs of society as weapons against the middle class

Has anything like this ever happened before?

[James A. Furey @JamesAFurey]

One of the strongest arguments for teaching classic literature is simply this:

If students are never asked to inhabit minds from other times and cultures, they will confuse their own narrow historical moment with universal truth.

The canon is an antidote to chronological snobbery.

[Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays]

A Final Message From Scott Adams

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

@DrJBhattacharya “Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”