Matt Ringstad 🤙

A simple man, entrepreneur, enjoys the ocean, sunshine & sand in SoCal. Dabbles in the markets - not investment advice, just random musings.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

🌹

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

Elon Musk is right about fallen warrior Charlie Kirk:

“Charlie Kirk was killed because his words made a difference. He was showing people the light, and he was killed by the dark.”

Rest in power, Charlie. Your voice exposed the darkness, and the darkness struck back.

We will never forget. The fight continues!

The radical left’s violence and hatred has gone too far.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

250 years ago today, a man with four fingers missing from his left hand stood up in a sweltering Philadelphia room and said the words that could have gotten him hanged.
It is June 7, 1776. The Pennsylvania State House. The windows are shut against eavesdroppers despite the summer heat. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia rises from his chair.
He knows how to hold a room. They call him the American Cicero. Years before, a hunting gun had exploded in his hands and taken the fingers of his left hand clean off — and ever since, he has worn a wrapping of black silk over the ruin. He has learned to use it. When he speaks, he lifts that shrouded hand and lets the dark silk fall, and every eye in the room follows it.
Today he lifts it, and he reads three sentences.
The first is the one that changes the world: "Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."
He is not asking a question. He is proposing that thirteen colonies stop being British.
John Adams seconds it before Lee has fully returned to his seat.
And then — nothing happens.
This is the part almost everyone forgets. There was no roar, no signing, no leap. Congress looked at what Lee had just put on the table and flinched. They voted to wait. Several delegations had no authority from home to take so enormous a step. Some men wanted alliances and a plan of confederation settled first. And some were simply afraid. They called a recess so the delegates could ride home and ask their people the unaskable question: are we ready to commit treason together?
Because that is what it was.
Every man who would eventually say "aye" understood the arithmetic exactly. There was no legal independence yet, no nation, no army that had won anything decisive. There was only a king with the largest military on earth and a very long memory. If the war was lost, the document they were debating became a confession. The punishment for that confession was a rope.
They knew it. They debated anyway.
The next day, Congress appointed a small committee to draft a statement explaining the decision, should they ever find the nerve to make it — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston. They handed the pen to the quiet Virginian, Thomas Jefferson. The famous parchment we frame on walls and read aloud every Fourth of July was, in a sense, the footnote. It exists to justify Lee's motion. The motion came first.
And here is the detail that ought to be carved somewhere.
When the final vote on independence finally came, on July 2, 1776 — Richard Henry Lee was not there.
His wife had fallen ill. Virginia was building itself a new government and needed him home. So the man who stood up and proposed American independence climbed onto a horse and rode away before the question he'd asked was ever answered. Adams stood in for him and carried the argument across the line.
He proposed it.
He didn't cast the vote for it.
He never seemed to mind who got the credit.
The resolution passed on the second of July. Adams was so certain that date would be remembered forever that he wrote home predicting Americans would celebrate it for all time with bonfires and parades. He was off by two days. We kept the fourth — the day the explanation was approved — and let the seventh, the day a man first dared to say it out loud, slip quietly out of the calendar.
But the courage was never really in the parchment.
The courage was in being first. In standing up in a closed room, lifting a maimed hand, and reading three sentences that made you a traitor the instant they left your mouth — with your name attached, in front of witnesses, before a single other colony had promised to stand with you. Then trusting that strangers would find the same nerve, and finish what you'd started, even if you weren't in the room

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

🎯🇺🇸🎯

[Anna Paulina Luna @realannapaulina]

Meanwhile in California:

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

@mattvanswol @JustineBateman I wonder if Nancy gave her the game plan to beat the odds?!

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

Torn cloth in the flag…

[ThePersistence @ScottPresler]

Why am I so angry with Senate Majority Leader Thune?

He has the power to secure our elections & REFUSES to pass the SAVE America Act!

Now — a week AFTER Election Day — Spencer Pratt is in third place in the Los Angeles mayoral election.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

Good

[XANDER GEOGRAPHIC 🏕️ @actionxander]

Could I perhaps interest you in this handsome roseate spoonbill I photographed earlier? This was the closest I've gotten to a spoonbill they're usually incredibly skittish wading birds.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

@CAHWisco @mattvanswol @spencerpratt You must be new here. 👋

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

@ssjgus1 @mattvanswol @spencerpratt And can’t read 🤷‍♂️

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

🎯

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Why is it only pushed in the West?

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

Super cool.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.

Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.

She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central "hubs" or "mother trees," supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.

Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.

What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

❤️

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

In this photograph, a single poppy stands in a field in Calvados, Normandy, bathed in the soft light of the evening sun.

They were, and remain, the Greatest Generation.

We will remember them.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

The idea was brilliant. The execution was catastrophic.

Allied planners knew that the men hitting the beaches of Normandy would be cut apart without armor support in those first critical minutes. The solution was the DD tank. The Duplex Drive Sherman. A standard 33-ton Sherman tank fitted with a collapsible canvas flotation screen and two small propellers bolted to the rear. Raise the screen, drop into the water, swim to shore, lower the screen, start shooting. Tanks arriving with the first wave, ahead of the infantry, suppressing German positions before the ramps even dropped.

The concept worked perfectly in testing. The designers had one requirement: waves no higher than one foot.

On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the waves off Omaha Beach were six feet high.

Nobody stopped the launch.

At 5:40 AM, the 741st Tank Battalion began dropping their DD tanks into the English Channel, six thousand yards from shore. More than three miles of open water, in seas that were six times rougher than the tanks were designed to handle. The first tank hit the water. The canvas screen, designed to hold the weight of a Sherman afloat, was immediately overwhelmed. Waves crashed over the top. Water flooded in. The tank went down.

Then another. Then another.

The canvas screens collapsed like paper bags in the swell. Tanks that had been designed to float became 33-ton anchors the moment they hit the water. Crews inside had seconds. Some got out through the hatches. Many did not. The tanks took them straight to the bottom of the English Channel.

Some crews managed to get a radio signal out as their tank went under, warning the following units not to launch. The warnings either did not get through or came too late.

29 DD tanks were launched by the 741st Tank Battalion that morning. 27 sank before reaching the beach. The entire left flank of Omaha Beach, where the 1st Infantry Division was assaulting, had five tanks to support it. Five. Against fortified German positions housing hundreds of machine guns, 88mm guns, and mortars zeroed on every inch of that sand.

The infantry arrived first. Alone.

What happened next at Omaha Beach, the 2,400 casualties, the slaughter in the first ten minutes, the near-total destruction of Company A, is inseparable from the loss of those tanks. They were supposed to be there. They were supposed to be firing at German positions while the ramps were still closed. Instead they were on the bottom of the Channel with their crews.

The story of the 743rd Tank Battalion makes it worse.

The 743rd was assigned to the western sector of Omaha Beach. Their LCT flotilla commander looked at the sea conditions that morning, looked at the waves, and made a different decision. He refused to launch his tanks into the water. Instead he drove his LCTs directly onto the beach and dropped the ramps in the shallows. The tanks rolled off onto sand.

Nine tanks were knocked out by German fire during the assault. But they were there. They were fighting. The infantry had armor.

At Utah Beach, the sea was calmer, protected from the prevailing winds. 28 of 32 DD tanks launched there made it ashore. The infantry had support. Utah Beach cost 197 casualties. Omaha cost 2,400.

The sunken tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion still lie on the bottom of the English Channel off Omaha Beach. They have never been raised. Divers have visited them. Inside some of the wrecks, they found what they expected.

They are still there today, 82 years later, three miles off the coast of Normandy, on the bottom of the sea.

Today is June 6th.

Remember them.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

@mattvanswol @spencerpratt Never would I have imagined this happening when I was growing up. You went to the voting polls to vote. And yes, it worked back then because it was what you did it was your duty as an American. Now it’s such a disgrace and stains our nation’s cloth. I’m so sad.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

I’m 😔

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Me trying to figure out how votes get counted in LA

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Norway just released their official 2026 World Cup team photo — and the internet has completely lost its mind.

Every single player is dressed head-to-toe in authentic Viking warrior attire. Shields, swords, longships, and a dramatic Oslo fjord in the background. No airplane steps. No tracksuits. Just 26 footballers looking like they sailed out of the ninth century.
The photo is titled "The Vikings Are Coming."

It was shot by renowned British photographer David Yarrow, who privately secured a beach near Oslo and transformed it into a full Viking camp. The idea actually started back in 2023, when Yarrow first photographed Erling Haaland alone in Viking dress, waist-deep in a fjord. The photographer later said: "If you had to choose one sportsperson in the world that doesn't need much hair and makeup to look like a Viking, it's Erling Haaland."

One small detail that makes this even better — captain Martin Ødegaard couldn't make the shoot. He was busy winning the Champions League final with Arsenal in Budapest that day. So Yarrow photographed him separately afterward and digitally added him into the frame. Even the clouds matched.

The numbers behind this team are absurd. Haaland scored 16 goals in just eight qualifying matches — the most of any player across all of European qualifying. Norway won every single one of those eight games, including two victories over Italy: 3-0 in Oslo and 4-1 at the San Siro. Italy, a four-time world champion, will not be at this World Cup. Norway will.

They haven't been to a World Cup since 1998. That's a 28-year wait.

At the tournament, they face Iraq, Senegal, and France in the group stage — with their final game setting up a direct battle between Haaland and Kylian Mbappé.
The Vikings are not just coming. They're already here.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

Mars has never felt closer

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

❤️

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

Did you know that the first women to land on the Normandy beachhead in June 1944 were nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service?

Their task was to establish a field hospital for 600 wounded soldiers.

They succeeded.

Please remember these heroines who saved lives:

[Gary Sinise @GarySinise]

Thank you to all who fought and sacrificed in freedoms defense all those years ago. Incredible footage here. Blessed that both my uncles survived and will never forget the over 400,000 who did not come home.

[Matt Ringstad 🤙 @mattringstad]

Unusual nah just the norm

[Handre @Handre]

Andrew Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States in 1836, delivering the single greatest blow to financial tyranny in American history. You won't hear this story told correctly in any economics textbook, because it reveals how central banking works: as a government-sponsored cartel that redistributes wealth from productive citizens to politically connected bankers.

The Second Bank held a 20-year federal charter starting in 1816. It controlled the money supply, issued currency, and held government deposits. Sound familiar? Nicholas Biddle, the bank's president, wielded more economic power than any elected official. He could trigger financial panics at will by restricting credit. He bought newspapers and bribed congressmen. When Jackson opposed recharter in 1832, Biddle deliberately crashed the economy to punish him.

Jackson called it "a hydra of corruption" and he was right. The bank created artificial booms through credit expansion, then triggered busts when politically convenient. Biddle openly bragged about manipulating markets. Free market economists and Jackson both recognized the core insight: this was legalized counterfeiting with government backing, not free market banking.

The political establishment united against Jackson. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and the entire Whig Party defended the bank. Biddle spent millions buying influence. The press attacked Jackson as an economic ignoramus. Every "respectable" voice supported recharter. Jackson stood alone with the American people.

After Jackson killed the bank, the country experienced the strongest economic growth in its history. From 1837 to 1862, America operated without a central bank. Industry flourished. Wages rose. Innovation exploded. This wasn't coincidence. When you stop subsidizing financial speculation and let productive capital find its natural home, prosperity follows.

Central banks don't stabilize economies: they destabilize them for private gain.