@BrianEastwoodx I have a daughter who is IQ 42 and has poor bowel control at times. I am grateful that people have such kind understanding of what I need to do.
Can we debunk this nonsense?
Elon Musk was awarded (note: not given) cost-per-result contracts to perform a service for the US government. The total of those for SpaceX specifically is ~$22B, which includes repaid loans, state tax incentives, etc.
The deal was simple: put stuff into LEO at or below a set cost. If SpaceX does it below the set cost, SpaceX keeps the difference. If it doesn’t, the company is responsible for the overrun.
End result? SpaceX & Elon lowered the cost of getting 1 kg into LEO by 95-97% vs what NASA was paying previously.
And for the record, every other company around at the time was offered the same opportunity to bid on the contract - Musk/SpaceX just took it.
The handout narrative implies the taxpayer is the patron and SpaceX the dependent. The cost data shows the opposite: before SpaceX, NASA paid Russia’s Soyuz $80-86M per seat; SpaceX delivered at ~$55 million. SpaceX saved the US taxpayer $300M-$465M each year on that alone (the US sends 12-15 astronauts to space each year)
On the lunar lander, NASA estimated SpaceX’s fixed-price bid saved $20B-$30B vs the Boeing-preferred cost-plus approach.
So: SpaceX saved the US taxpayer more than the total value of contracts it earned on a single project, PLUS provided the US government with the requested services (put stuff in LEO) at the best possible price.
USA. A backyard. One man guarding a grill for four hours.
He never left it once.
Everyone else drifted and drank and laughed. But one man stood alone before the flames, turning meat with a long fork, immovable. I knew him at once. The keeper of the sacred fire.
I took my place beside him and said nothing. After a while, he spoke.
"Low and slow," he said, eyes on the coals. "You can't rush it. Rush it, you ruin it."
I bowed my head. A blade, a tea, a life. None can be rushed. I had crossed four thousand miles to hear my grandfather's words from a man in a "KISS THE COOK" apron.
"Everything worth doing is slow," I agreed.
He glanced at me. Something passed between us.
"My wife says just use the oven." He shook his head at the fire. "She doesn't get it."
"They never do," I said.
And this is where it turned.
For the first time in years, this man had been understood. And he rose to meet it. His back straightened. His voice dropped low. A teenager reached for the grill and the man lifted one hand without even looking. "Not yet." The boy retreated. He was becoming what I already believed him to be.
A woman asked when the food would be done. "It's ready when it's ready," he told the flames.
Three people approached. Three were turned away with a single word. By the fourth hour, no one questioned him. The whole party had arranged itself around the man and his fire, the way a village arranges itself around a shrine.
Then he handed me the fork.
"Watch it a sec. I gotta pee."
I have been trusted with castles.
I have never been more honored.
He served everyone before himself, and ate last, standing, still watching the coals. We never traded names. We did not need to.
He believed he had finally met a man who took his cooking seriously.
I believed I had finally met America's last samurai.
Neither of us will ever correct the other.
So tell me, America.
Who is the man at your gathering who will not leave the grill?
Have you ever once asked him why?
I think he is still standing there.
Guarding the fire.
Waiting for one person to understand.
Bro, let’s stop pretending.
Muslims make up about 25% of the entire world’s population — over 2 billion people across 50+ countries.
Japanese people? About 1.4% of the world. One single country.
Shinto exists only in Japan.
So when people say “Japan should prioritize minorities and be more accommodating to Islam,” who exactly are we talking about?
The global majority is coming to one of the world’s smallest ethnic and religious groups and demanding that Japan change its culture, food, and traditions for them.
That’s not “protecting minorities.” That’s the majority trying to colonize a tiny minority.
Japan has every right to protect its own people and culture first.
If Muslims want to live under Islamic rules, they already have dozens of countries where they can do that. They don’t need to come to Japan and turn it into another one.
Since the 1980s, the Sahara has shrunk by roughly 8%. Satellite data show widespread greening, a pattern that is playing out across the planet.
Around 50% of Earth's vegetated land has become significantly greener, an area roughly three times the size of the United States.
The dominant driver is not rainfall or land use change, it is rising atmospheric CO2.
Higher CO2 lets plants photosynthesize more efficiently, they lose less water, they tolerate heat and dryness better.
The effect is strongest along desert margins, across the Sahel, the Middle East, Australia's interior and the southern edge of the Sahara.
Rising CO2 is making the deserts, and the planet as a whole, greener.
@BarackObama You LIED to We The People .. “be the change” you never explained the “changes” you planned on to destroy our country - you are a lyin deceitful despicable subhuman! You and everyone involved will reap what they sow when you go to meet your maker
So in 1829, a 23-year-old farmboy dictates the Book of Mormon in about 65 days — no notes, no rewrites.
In 1980, statisticians ran it through a computer. Not the doctrine — the tiny words every writer uses without thinking. a, of, the, and. The fingerprint you can't fake.
The verdict: two dozen DISTINCT authors inside the book. Odds of one author writing it all — under 1 in 100 billion.
How did Joseph Smieth fake two dozen fingerprints in 65 days? Unless....
@piratecapt16@Latterdaytruth Funny, I have read the Old and New Testaments repeatedly and never seen where either mentions a definition of the word, "Christian".
“Free Palestine.”
I grew up on those words.
In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them.
In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to.
Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all.
Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge.
What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that.
Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine.
In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence?
Palestine is still first.
So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with.
So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews.
And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state?
You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media.
Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position.
📍#Israel
When I was on my mission I had a period of time where there was some confusion and frustration.
Many Elders around me were having lots of baptisms and they openly did not follow the mission rules.
I began to get discouraged.
I was trying my best to follow the rules and work as diligently as I could, but no success was coming.
I remember praying and asking God why this was. Why did the disobedient get to baptize and me who was trying to be obedient have none.
A distinct thought came to my mind one day after praying.
“They are baptizing because it gives them the experience of seeing someone else becoming converted to the Gospel. It gives their testimony a chance to be strengthened and their conversion to grow.
Baptizing is not what you need. You need to struggle right now. Are you going to still be obedient even if you don’t have success?”
It was both a difficult but then special experience.
The next transfer I got one of my favorite companions and we baptized 3 people that we had been teaching a long time.
I learned to never judge someone else by what blessings you perceive they are having or not having.
It’s still not easy, but I’ve seen the joy in it when I do it.
I know that the blessings God has for us will come as we are obedient. Some come now, some come later, and some come really later but they will always come.
@IronRodWarrior Fifty years ago , a branch president in Spain told us a similar story. He and nine other men saw a spaceship and discussed calmly with those in it about the Book of Mormon. One of the 9 men who was with him became the mayor of a major city. The mayor verified the story to us.
It was 1820. A 14-year old Joseph Smith came up with a brilliant idea.
The end goal?
Booze, women, and money.
But how could he get his fantasy of tons of wives? Why, make it sound like the idea was God’s.
So he went to his father — Joe Sr., a 42nd degree Mahan Mason (the ones descended from Cain) — and together they deliberated in the halls of a sacred chamber they called “Leek De’bulls.” This was a special chamber containing histories and scrolls from all over the world — even ones many believed lost.
You see…
Joe Sr. was a sacred keeper of libraries passed down for thousands of years. This secret profession goes all the way back to Babel. Ever since then, this cult has hidden in plain sight while secretly collecting and preserving records because they believed the masses could not handle the full truth of history.
Cortes was one of these keepers. He found ancient records in the Americas and hid them away. Eventually those records passed through the ancient librarian bloodline until finally Joe Sr. became steward of the archive.
Which means Joseph already knew everything archaeology would later uncover about ancient America.
And naturally, when Joseph turned 14, the secret library was passed down to him — making it the perfect time to launch his plan to get everyone to give him 10% of their income in exchange for “salvation,” so he could live in luxury with all his women.
Truly history’s first kingpin.
Thank goodness the good guys took him out.
Can you imagine if he had been given the power to fire nukes?