jazzfst

Southern, conservative, Catholic; Tulane grad; 2A supporter; Constitutionalist; wife of a disabled Vietnam combat vet; I swear like a sailor; Am Yisrael Chai!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

[0HOUR1 @__0HOUR1_]

They are celebrating gay pride in England today.

We get it.

You kind of did take it in the ass on July 4th, 1776.

[Peter Schweizer @peterschweizer]

There have been 4 major revolutions in the past 250 years: American, French, Russian, and Chinese. Only one led to individual rights and prosperity. The others led to mass death and tyranny. The US revolution was unique because it said two things: 1. Our rights come from God not from the govt. 2. Humans are power -hungry so we need to limit govt power. So the next time someone attacks the nation of one revolution that succeeded and recycles the the idea of those that miserably failed, you can ask them: are you ignorant, or malicious?

[Mostly Peaceful Memes @MostlyPeaceful]

“We wish you a happy 250th Patriot”

[jazzfst @jazzfst]

I would totally watch this.

[PJ Ace @PJaccetturo]

Everything they taught you about July 4th, 1776 is a lie.

The Redcoats weren't soldiers. They were something else.

We recovered the real footage using Utopai 🧵👇

[Planet Of Memes @PlanetOfMemes]

Banger. 🧨

[Turtle @3ToedBoxTurtle]

Stop being a bitch.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

UK police really don’t want you to share this video of their officer arresting an assault victim, while letting his attackers go free

[Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 @Kristinawong]

When you like a post that mentions America 250, the like button turns into a little 250 firework!

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

One of the richest men in all of America signed the Declaration of Independence knowing it could cost him everything. Then he left home to serve, died far away in a borrowed town, and never came back. Meet Philip Livingston.

This guy was not a scrappy underdog. Just the opposite. He was born in 1716 into the Livingston family, one of the wealthiest, most powerful dynasties in colonial New York. Manor lands, a Yale education, and a shipping empire he built into one of the biggest merchant fortunes in New York City. He had everything the British system was designed to reward.

And he spent that fortune building things that still exist. He helped found King's College, which you know today as Columbia University. He helped start the New York Society Library. He helped create the New York Chamber of Commerce. The man was basically constructing the civic backbone of New York with his own money and time.

Here's the thing though. He was not some hothead revolutionary. He actually feared independence. He worried it would bring chaos and disorder, and he was cautious about the whole idea for a long time. This wasn't a man itching to burn it all down.

But when New York finally gave its delegates the go-ahead, Livingston signed. He put the name of one of the great fortunes in America onto a document the crown treated as treason. A rich man betting his wealth against the empire that made him rich.

And the war came straight for him. When the British took New York, they seized and used his properties. He started selling off his holdings to help fund the fight, watching the empire he'd defied pick apart the life he'd built.

Then comes the ending that gets me. His health was failing, and he knew it. Congress had been driven out of Philadelphia and was meeting in the small town of York, Pennsylvania. Livingston could have gone home to rest. Instead he told his family he probably wouldn't see them again, and he went to York to keep serving anyway.

He died there in June 1778, in the middle of a session of Congress, far from home. He's buried in York, Pennsylvania to this day. He never made it back to the New York he spent his whole life building.

A man who had every reason to stay comfortable and loyal, who gave his fortune and his final months to a country he wasn't even sure would work.

Philip Livingston. He died at his post, a long way from home.

[Batya Ungar-Sargon @bungarsargon]

80% of DSA members have a college degree.
60% work professional jobs.
Just 4% are blue-collar.
85% are white.
This isn't a working-class movement but an elite one, for whom "Free Palestine" and "Abolish ICE" operate as a smokescreen for class privilege—just like climate and trans activism and identity politics once did.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

1000 days ago, today.

These are the girls whom Hamas killed on October 7th.

These are the girls who are gone forever.

[Pub @PubWanghaf]

“Do you guys remember Peanut? Peanut the squirrel. And they killed him. Killed him like a dog. That’s who these people are. We can’t ever forget that.”

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

We dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, twice, and 80 years later they light up their cities in our colors as a show of how much they love us.

Meanwhile, we bailed half of Europe out, twice, and their governments take every last opportunity to signal how much they despise us.

[Mosab Hassan Yousef @MosabHasanYOSEF]

Yasser Arafat was Egyptian. He literally invented the “Palestinian people” in the late 1960s.

Now we’re supposed to believe this 60-year-old political invention is an ancient indigenous population.

The historical illiteracy is actually embarrassing.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

💯