Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮

Native Conch currently in exile in Missoula, MT, and Kona, Hawaii. Former submarine XO. Cirrus Owner/Pilot. Bon vivant.

[County Highway @countyhwy]

One of our 250 Great American Things.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

@GadSaad Morphing into Judd Hirsch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. There is a white sauce here that the people pour upon everything, with the devotion of a sacred rite. I have become a believer.

I noticed it slowly. A bowl of it beside the vegetables. A cup of it beside the bread. Beside the meat. Beside the other sauce. Children dipped fruit in it. A grown man beside me poured it onto a slice of pizza that already had a sauce of its own, closed his eyes, and sighed like a man coming home.

I asked its name. They told me with a small reverence: ranch.

For it is written that every great people anoints its food with one sacred thing — a drop of gold pressed from olives, a paste of beans aged in cedar. This nation has chosen a cool white elixir, and it anoints not one dish but all dishes, holding nothing back. For to leave a single food unblessed would be the deeper impiety.

So I anointed. Everything. The vegetable, yes. But also the rice. The egg. The morning fish. I would not be the one barbarian who left his plate unblessed while a whole nation dipped in joy around me.

And here my heart rose, and I declared the thing a calmer man would not:

"I will pour this holy elixir upon every food beneath the heavens — the noble and the humble, the savory and the sweet — until I find the one dish it cannot improve. And on that day I will know I have reached the very edge of the world, for everything within it has been made better by ranch."

The teenager refilling the dip station watched me anoint a bowl of rice.

"...that's a lot of ranch, my guy."

"It is the correct amount," I told him, "for a god."

I have not yet found the dish it cannot improve. I have stopped looking. So I brought a great vat of it to the next gathering and set it at the center of the table, and the whole room descended upon it with cries of joy, and a woman I had never met looked at me and said, "okay — YOU get it."

I have never felt more accepted.

So tell me, America.

You call it ranch. A condiment. A thing on the side.

I call it the one sauce a whole nation agreed to love together —

and I dip, with all of you,

gladly.

[Steve Lookner @lookner]

WaPost: "The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use...It [is] unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent. One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved 'continuity of government' operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes...Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence"
https://t.co/UkecjzEXpf

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

She ate lunch alone for 730 days straight. What this 16-year-old built from that pain now protects millions of kids worldwide.

Seventh grade. Natalie Hampton carried her tray through a packed cafeteria and felt it — that specific, suffocating dread of not knowing where to go.

She'd already learned what happened when you approached the wrong table. The silence. The turned backs. The whispered laughter that followed you all the way to the empty table by the wall.

The one everyone could see.

The one that said: nobody wants her.

For two full years — 730 consecutive lunches — that table was hers. Alone.

The bullying went further than whispers. She was shoved into lockers. Four physical attacks in two weeks. She came home with scratches and bruises. When she finally reported it, school administrators sent her to counseling — to find out what she was doing wrong.

The isolation grew so heavy she was hospitalized for anxiety.

Then ninth grade came. A new school. And almost overnight — everything changed. Students welcomed her. She made friends within weeks. She finally knew what safe felt like.

But she couldn't stop thinking about the kids still sitting at the wall table. Right now. Today.

She remembered what she'd needed most during all those lunches. Not a teacher. Not a pamphlet. Just one person saying: "You can sit with us."

So at 16 — with zero coding experience and "a lot of enthusiasm," as she put it — Natalie built exactly that.

She called it Sit With Us.

The idea was simple and genius: students sign up as "ambassadors," keeping their table open. Other kids privately browse available tables on their phones before ever walking into the cafeteria — and show up knowing they're already welcome.

No public rejection. No moment of judgment. Just a guaranteed seat.

Within 7 days of launching: 10,000 downloads.

Then the world found her. NPR. The Washington Post. CBS News. Messages from Morocco, Australia, the Philippines, France — kids who'd been eating alone for years, finally finding a place to belong.

Sit With Us now operates in 30 countries.

"Even if it helps one person," Natalie said quietly, "it was worth building."

She turned 730 lunches of loneliness into a lifeline for millions.

That's not just survival. That's transformation.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

@cpr2k2 Decent amenities in the area?

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Years ago my wife fell in love with Sedona, and when we were considering moving back West, it was high on her list. The crystal, tarot and psychic people made Sedona a non-starter for me. Since then, and given where my heme/onc team are, her & my daughter have been pushing Cal.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Every single Democrat just voted against $100 million to fund operations for Child Exploitation Investigations and save children from s*x trafficking.

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

Reminder that Chinese spy Christine Fang (Fang Fang) worked for Ro Khanna’s 2014 congressional campaign.

This is why Ro has never commented publicly on the matter and why he opposes the FBI releasing the entirety of the Fang Fang files. He’s all over them.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Love the 406 but at this moment it just doesn’t work for us. So, to make a long story short, she wants the Palm Springs area because we can Cirrus our way into SoCal/UCLA medicine any time we want. With our 2nd kid now relocating to CA it looks like Palm Springs is the winner.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Woke up to the news my eldest son is finally being transferred off Kwajalein for a few weeks R&R in Honolulu and then on to Port Hueneme. He can commute to HNL from our place in Kona daily. We’re irrationally excited to have him home again for a little while.

[Alex Byrne @byrne_a]

Authored by the bluest of blue-ribbon committees. You can guess which field of philosophy is singled out for criticism. "Much work in the philosophy of sex and gender is organized around the political project of securing social justice for trans people and other gender minorities, where this project is taken to presuppose the substantive thesis that trans women are women in every sense. While this view is in fact controversial even among feminist philosophers, the field has devoted considerable energy to closing off discussion by blocking the publication of dissenting views."

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Let’s hope “The Habsburg Way” is doing things completely differently than the unsaintly and incompetent Karl.

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

Two-thirds of young Americans say U.S. democracy is no longer working, and you want me to care about the “youths’” opinion on Israel? You think you scare me by saying, “Israel lost young Americans”? They hate democracy itself.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

This is justice in a blue state (New York).

State Trooper Christopher Baldner pulls over a family SUV for speeding on the Thruway.

Driver Tristin Goods refuses to show ID and escalates the stop. Trooper uses pepper spray.

Driver floors it and flees at high speed.
Trooper follows training and uses pit maneuver to ram the vehicle and stop the threat.

The SUV crashes. Goods’ own 11-year-old daughter Monica is tragically killed.

Result?

Trooper Baldner was just sentenced to ~7 years in prison for manslaughter.

The father - who caused the deadly chase - walks free after claiming he was “scared for his life.”

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

@The_JBS About everything, really.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

@walterkirn Working exactly to design ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Daniel O'Connor @DSDOConnor]

Outrageous. Yet completely unsurprising.

Cardinal Robert McElroy just removed Monsignor Rossetti as exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, because Msgr. Rossetti--absolutely correctly--linked UFOs/ETs to the demonic.

Behold the persecution of faithful priests opposing the Great Deception. And it comes from precisely the type of Cardinal you'd expect.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Felt that one.

[Mike vonTschudi 🇨🇭🇱🇮 @ICUStat]

Totes sounds like the Trump WH is working subjugate to Netanyahu. Have another cocktail and perhaps divine yet some more brilliance when you sober up.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

"You're f****** crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your a***. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."

That's what a U.S. official tells Axios President Trump unloaded on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a heated phone call over Israel's military actions in Lebanon.

Trump was reportedly furious that Israel's moves risked blowing up U.S. diplomatic efforts in the region, at one point also asking Netanyahu: "What the f*** are you doing?"