82 years ago nearly all of the men on the first few boats that landed on the beach in Normandy were dead before days end.
Sit here with that for a while.
Look at them.
Really look at them.
Look into their eyes.
Many of them are boys, they are someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s sweetheart someone’s father.
They never came home.
And every privilege, every convenience, every freedom and every little thing that you want to bitch about you have because of them and they paid the ultimate price for you to have those freedoms. #dday #FreedomIsNeverFree
Ray’s Rock - Omaha Beach
On the morning of June 6, 1944, 23 year old Staff Sergeant Arnold “Ray” Lambert came ashore with the first wave of the 1st Infantry Division on the eastern side of Omaha Beach. At this small patch of concrete he saved nearly 20 lives:
The division came under intense fire from several German bunkers surrounding the entrance to the Colville Draw (one of two exits off Omaha Beach). Ray, a medic, immediately went to work.
He was shot in the arm. Moments later he was hit by shrapnel in the leg, but Ray kept pulling men to safety. He pulled nearly 20 wounded soldiers to cover behind this 8ft wide obstacle, treating each soldier before going out in search of others.
After several hours under fire, while pulling a wounded soldier from the ocean, he was struck by a landing craft. It dropped its ramp on top of him, breaking his back. He fell face down in the water, drowning. The craft backed up and nearby soldiers pulled an unconscious Ray to safety, eventually evacuating him off the beach.
Remarkably, Ray had already earned two Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts in Sicily and North Africa, prior to landing in France. But here in Normandy his war would end.
He awoke in a hospital back in England a day later. In the next bed over was his brother, who had also been wounded at Omaha.
When asked about his work on D-Day, Ray simply said, “I did what I was called to do.”
Ray Lambert passed in 2021 at 100 years old. He exemplified the best of American grit and why remembering this day is so important.
“Growing up in Jerusalem, I was surrounded by incredible flavors, spices and food that told stories. I wanted to bring that same feeling here, not only for the local Jewish community, but for all of South Florida.”
Chef Raz Shabtai and his team celebrate as they learn that their restaurant, Mutra, earned a Michelin star.
Mutra is now, after only a year of operation, the first and only Kosher restaurant to have earned a Michelin star in the world.
Mazel Tov to everyone at Mutra!
Let's understand a few things about what's actually about to happen here if Zohran gets his way -- which he almost certainly will, unless courts intervene.
First and foremost, Cea Weaver and DSA 'organizers' will be unleashed with the full institutional and legal support of the city government to ramp up tenant complaints in targeted buildings. No complaint will be too small. No building will be too small. Everything will be treated as catastrophic. Full-scale demagoguery will ensue, complete with protests, rent strikes, street theater, and harassment of property owners.
Accordingly, the city buildings department will be weaponized to begin writing as many violations as possible in order to bolster the city's effort to justify a seizure. It won't matter how small or large the violations are, the total number will be breathlessly cited as evidence of mismanagement. It will be impossible for landlords to clear these violations in good faith.
The combination of a weaponized buildings department writing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, rent strikes, and constant threats and harassment against landlords by militant activists will make the situation untenable for any property owner to realistically fight back, and the city will seize the property. The landlord will be lucky to walk away without prison or being beaten to death in the street by an angry mob (as Zohran's buddy Hasan Piker referred to landlords -- 'let the streets run red with their capitalist blood').
But that's only the first half of the plan, and everyone needs to pay very close attention to the big picture here, because it's hugely important and has national implications.
The properties will then be turned over to nonprofits. This is no small detail. This is in fact the whole point.
The idea here is to build up Zohran's DSA-connected nonprofits with a multbillion-dollar portfolio of hard assets -- New York City real estate. This portfolio could theoretically reach into the hundreds of billions or even the trillions, depending on how aggressive they get.
Now these highly political nonprofits would become the new land barons of New York, complete with all the political clout, leverage, and reach that goes along with it. It would be a true nightmare scenario.
As it stands now, the nonprofits depend mostly on the largesse of grants, donations, and other third-party resources to stay afloat. They are lavishly funded of course, and many do hold significant assets, but it would all pale in comparison to simply handing them the keys to a New York City real estate empire, courtesy of Zohran Mamdani and the DSA.
The resources at their disposal would be immense. The organizing potential that goes along with those resources will have national implications. Every DSA candidate in every town and city in the country would be trained, funded, and staffed by organizers with ties to the NYC nonprofit empire backed by a trillion dollars in free real estate. And they would be shameless in leveraging those resources for pure political power.
That's the game plan here. That's the whole ball of wax.
Zohran isn't interested in making housing better for anyone. If he was, we'd be talking seriously about solving the NYCHA disaster.
Hell, if he was even remotely sincere about seizing these properties from 'bad landlords' for the 'public good' he'd be focused on turning them over to the city itself, as misguided as that would be.
No, this is about nothing more than consolidating political power for the DSA. Just like everything else these people do. Giving the DSA a massive war chest backed by seized real estate.
Once you understand that they have no interest in fixing anything other than elections, it all makes a lot more sense.
One of the things that I think people don't understand is that Israel is actually a relatively old country.
And I'm not talking about Talmudic Biblical Israel.
I'm talking about the modern state of Israel, founded in 1948, became the 59th state in the world, and there are now 193 states represented at the United Nations.
That means if you're doing the math, Israel is actually older than 67% of the nations in the world, and that's because so many countries were created just like Israel was—by having colonialist powers, mostly European in origin, draw lines kind of randomly on a map, creating countries out of whole cloth without very much regard for the populations that were being swept up into the newly formulated states.
That's how a lot of states were formed in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in the Middle East. That's how a lot of states were formed in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in Asia, and especially in Africa.
But of course, nobody protests the creation of Cameroon or of Botswana.
Nobody's protesting the creation of Lebanon or Syria or India and Pakistan or Iraq.
Remember, there are 57 Muslim countries in the world and 22 Arab countries with two billion citizens. But the world cannot stomach one tiny Jewish state in its ancestral homeland with only seven million Jewish citizens.
A Jewish rapper just released a song scolding a Palestinian for not loving Palestine correctly.
That is what is happening on track four of Iceman, the first of three albums Drake dropped overnight. He goes after DJ Khaled for not being pro-Palestine enough.
> “Your people are still waitin’ for a Free Palestine. But apparently, everything isn’t black and white and red and green.”
Read it twice. There is no Gaza in the lyric. No mention of a single Palestinian besides Khaled himself. There is a Palestinian artist being publicly dressed down by a non-Palestinian for not performing his identity correctly.
Khaled has stayed quiet on Gaza since October 7. In this climate, that is not betrayal. It is self-protection. Anything he says will get ripped apart by the loudest faction in the room. A Palestinian-American producer in Miami is allowed to live his life.
What Drake is doing is the opposite of pro-Palestine. He has appointed himself the man who decides how Palestinians should behave in public.
This is exactly what Kendrick was pointing at on “Not Like Us.” Drake doesn’t have an identity. He has a marketing department. He locates himself wherever the audience is loudest, and Free Palestine is the loudest audience right now. That’s the costume.
The timing tells the rest. Kendrick called Drake a certified pedophile on the biggest song of 2024. Drake sued his label for defamation. He lost. Now he is back with three albums in a single drop, and the first political move he reaches for is “Free Palestine” deployed as ammunition against another artist.
That is what celebrity image rehab looks like in 2026. Find a justice cause that is currently flattering. Wear it loud enough that the cause and your comeback blur into the same press cycle.
Solidarity used to mean helping people. Now it means using them.
Claiming Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinians is modern day blood libel — propaganda pushed as more horrific details emerge about Hamas’ systematic torture on Oct. 7.
For being Jewish — Hamas raped a woman and burnt half of her face off in front of her husband; shoved nails, metal, and sharp objects into Israeli women; forced family members to sexually assault each other so that if they survived they would be traumatized by the sight of each other; raped corpses; the list goes on.
Distracting from these atrocities and smearing Israel while victims still fight for acknowledgment is sickening.
Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion.
The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else.
The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject.
This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X.
Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility.
The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting.
This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier.
Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price.
It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence.
Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters.
The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record.
Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously.
It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.
And this is why we do it✍️
Back in November 2024, we flagged Debbie Schultz's buy of $VSAT
At the time, she sat on the House Military Construction Subcommittee
And Viasat... They focus on military communications equipment for the U.S. military
Since we posted, it's up around +759%
The biggest wealth transfer in American history isn’t happening on Wall Street. It’s happening on U-Hauls.
Over $2 trillion in income fled high-tax blue states for low-tax red states in just 11 years.
And blue states’ solution? Raise taxes again.
Look at this astronaut's face during reentry, knowing the capsule exterior is at 5,000°F.
The physics of why he's alive are wild.
The air in front of the capsule compresses so violently at Mach 25 that it turns into plasma. 5,000°F on the surface. Half the temperature of the sun. The heat shield absorbs that energy by literally burning itself away, layer by layer, carrying the heat with it as gas.
One inch of material is the entire margin. On the outside of that inch: 5,000°F. On the inside: 75°F. Room temperature. The thermal gradient across that single inch is the steepest temperature drop humans have ever engineered.
The orange glow in the window is ionized nitrogen and oxygen. That plasma is why comms go black for six minutes during reentry. Ground control can't reach the crew. The astronauts are alone inside a fireball, falling at 25,000 mph, watching the laws of thermodynamics keep them alive through a 1-inch wall.
Artemis II did exactly this last night. Four astronauts hit Earth's atmosphere at 24,664 mph, rode a 4,900°F plasma sheath for six minutes of radio silence, and splashed down a mile from target.
The heat shield is now being inspected for cracks. They found over 100 on the last unmanned test.
Miami is not just a city, it is the capital of the Americas.
With the IDB opening its office here and my IDB Capital Increase Act now law, we are bringing investment, jobs, and opportunity directly to our hemisphere. This is how we strengthen America’s leadership, counter our adversaries, and deliver real results for our community.
When Latin America grows stronger, America grows stronger, and Miami is leading the way.