Heather Flack

Christian, Wife, Mother of 6, Grandmother of 14, Connecticut Yankee living near Cleveland OH, Amateur Euphonium Player, Former Homeschool Mom, Conservative

[Heather Flack @momflack]

This thread is the best.

[Vincent Alexander @NonsenseIsland]

THREAD: Lots of us learned classical music from watching old cartoons, so I’m going to identify the pieces that frequently popped up.

One of the most recognizable is Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” performed by those great piano virtuosos Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

@katsuxbt

[Heather Flack @momflack]

@CurtisHouck So… her patenting skills have resulted in her (and I’m guessing others) not wanting to be around her children. Hmmm…..

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[The Gospel Coalition @TGC]

We can take heart, because the hope of the world isn’t an increasingly ascendant America—it’s our ultimately victorious Savior, who brings blessing to his chosen people.

https://t.co/H44RxmbSDj

[Xavier Bands @XavierBands]

And for those of you who are not Star Wars fans, Happy Dave Brubeck Day! https://t.co/Km60UgndnG #WeAreXavier

[Kim Hume @HumeKim]

Bible Gateway Verse today:
For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.
https://t.co/2PTKWuOMrv

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

https://t.co/y9vSEqKkBT

[Matt Smethurst @MattSmethurst]

“What would you say to a young Christian who is nervous about the future?”

I love @TimKellerNYC’s answer. I think about it every Easter.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

@Rebecca285075 @libsoftiktok Yup.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

@DannoActon @libsoftiktok @StrictSpeaking @scottsandsmedia @ICEgov @TriciaOhio @MehekCooke And anyone who commented negatively to their Facebook post has been blocked from the @CalicoJCoffee FB page, which is why you will only now see positive comments.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

@RealCandaceO

[Rep. Dan Crenshaw @RepDanCrenshaw]

Who is this guy and why isn’t he our spokesperson for border security and the moral need for lawful deportations? What a perfectly delivered argument for holding people accountable for breaking the law and also recognizing the millions of law-abiding immigrants waiting in line around the world.

[Snowbelt Musical @snowbeltmusical]

SMAA's Super Bowl Squares fundraiser is back. Get your squares before they're gone!

https://t.co/UXxCtvK4LH

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Frey's not being asked to enforce federal immigration laws. He's being asked to prevent sometimes violent protestors from interfering with federal immigration authorities as they enforce those laws.

[Tony Seruga @TonySeruga]

Every Christmas Eve, I think about George Bailey.

He dreamed of escaping Bedford Falls—of shaking off the dust of a small town, building skyscrapers, exploring the world. Instead, he stayed. He ran the Building & Loan his father left behind. He sacrificed his college money, his honeymoon savings, his chance to see the world, over and over, because people needed him.

By the time the crisis hits, George feels like a failure. His life looks like one long series of missed opportunities, thwarted ambitions, and quiet resentments. He stands on the bridge, convinced the world would be better without him.

Then Clarence shows him the truth: a Bedford Falls without George Bailey is a darker, meaner, hollowed-out place. The people he quietly helped, the small acts of integrity he performed without recognition, the risks he took to protect others—those weren’t detours. They were the substance of his life.

The film’s deepest insight isn’t just that “no man is a failure who has friends.” It’s that real impact is almost always invisible in the moment. The lives you steady, the small kindnesses you extend, the responsibilities you shoulder when no one else will—these things ripple outward in ways you may never see.

A strong sense of purpose doesn’t erase pain; it transforms it. It doesn’t merely explain why hard things happened. It asks: What are you now responsible for because they happened?

Faith, at its best, does the same. It doesn’t promise that everything was “meant to be” in order to make suffering palatable. It invites you to look at what has been entrusted to you in light of what you’ve endured.

George’s story reminds us that meaning is rarely found in the grand escape, but in the faithful presence. The dreams we surrender don’t always vanish—they often become the raw material for something more enduring than we imagined.

If you’re carrying the weight of roads not taken, of dreams deferred, of a life that feels smaller than you once hoped—watch It’s a Wonderful Life again tonight. Not as nostalgia, but as revelation.

You may not see the full difference you’ve made yet.

But it’s there.

And it matters more than you know.

Merry Christmas, friends.

🎄🇨🇽🎅🦌☃️⛪️✝️❤️

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[Brant Hansen @branthansen]

Okay... I'm going to sound like real-life @ChrchCurmudgeon here, but here goes...

If you are a church musician, and you honestly want to "lead people in worship" through music, you may want to do the following:

1) Pick a singable key for the median person who doesn't sing all the time. Don't pick a key to highlight your voice.

2) Lower the volume so people can hear the voices of those around them, and themselves.

3) Let people sing the melodies that are familiar to them. While you may want to jazz up or do the latest CCM twist of "Hark the Herald" or "Silent Night"--people can't follow you. They just want to sing the song.

Picking keys to highlight your voice; playing at concert volume; doing creative rearrangements to make the familiar suddenly unfamiliar... all discourage us from singing.

There's NOTHING wrong with highlighting your voice, or playing at concert volume, or doing creative rearrangements of songs... if you are a performer.

Book a gig somewhere! Play out! Be great! Build a following! But please, when we all get together and sing, don't put up barriers to stop us.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

Crazy!

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

A woman driving a G-Wagen rammed a car belonging to suspected burglars who were about to rob her Los Angeles home.

The mother, who has lived in the U.S. for over a decade, was out running errands while her three children were home with their grandmother when she heard strangers shouting during a phone call. She immediately turned back and crashed into the suspects’ parked Honda, causing the criminals to panic and flee.

Police later found burglary tools inside their vehicle.

[Heather Flack @momflack]

Be there. You’ll be glad. No, you will be THRILLED!

[Snowbelt Musical @snowbeltmusical]

The Snowbelt Symphony Orchestra will present its annual holiday concert, “Joy To The World” Thursday, December 18 at 7:00pm at Lake Catholic High School in Mentor. Tickets: https://t.co/KezQrTaRKU

[Defiant L’s @DefiantLs]

Chuck Schumer in 1996: "The number one reason people come to the US illegally is to defraud systems like social security and I want to stop it."