Matt Allen

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at...

The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power.

Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually.

That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made...

Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept.

There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it:

"Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@simonsarris IM fractals is the concept that links your thoughts on beauty together. Venice is a great example of several natural and man made constraints combining to create a seemingly chaotic yet beautiful scene. Once you begin to see it, you notice the fractal nature of beauty everywhere.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@ShortSeller @SecWar @realDonaldTrump Didn't Lebanon and Israel just sign a treaty where Lebanon agreed to kick Hezbo out?

Sounds like a pretty big, good deal.

Oh, and oil is at 70.24🤷‍♂️

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@phil_mcalister Have often thought this, but there are downsides. Fed gov't has been centralizing power since Civil War and will not easily give up power. Current tax split btw fed/state & local is approx 65/35. If we could begin to flip that, would help a lot, but there would be pain.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@Polymarket Hyperscalers should subsidize cost of energy where datacenters are allowed. 2 birds, 1 stone.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@BarryRoland19 Was once back in hometown for a funeral. Started to run out of gas, and went from one spot to the next where there had been a station before, but no more. As engine began to run on fumes, panic began to set in.
That is how they feel. Every day. Good decisions are difficult then.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@WillManidis That feeling you get when you really don't want to do something for another, that you know you should; that is the feeling of your selfishness dying.
Recognize the feeling for what it is, and put a knife through your selfishness.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

June 5, 1944. You've been awake for 40 hours.

Yesterday, the operation was called off. Eisenhower stood in a muddy airfield in England, stared at the forecast, and postponed the largest invasion in human history by 24 hours because of weather. So 156,000 men sat on ships, in ports, crammed into LSTs and Higgins boats, trying not to think about what tomorrow meant.

You're 19 years old. You're from a town so small your whole graduating class fit in one room. You've been in the Army 14 months and you've never fired a weapon at a person. None of that prepared you for tonight.

The chaplain holds a service on deck. It's dark and the ship is rocking. Half your platoon shows up. The other half write letters. The guy next to you, Kowalski from Cleveland, keeps folding and unfolding the same piece of paper. You ask if he's going to send it. He says he doesn't know who to send it to.

At 0100, the order comes down. You climb the rope net over the side of the ship in the pitch dark, down into the Higgins boat bucking in the swells below. 35 men in a steel box 36 feet long. The smell of diesel and seawater and vomit hits you before you're even seated.

The English Channel in early June is not kind.

Eight-foot swells. The bow punches up and crashes down, again and again, spraying ice-cold seawater over everyone. Within 20 minutes, the guy across from you is sick. Then the guy next to him. Then the guy next to you. Then you. There's nowhere to go. Nowhere to look. You're soaked through your wool uniform and the wind is in the low 50s and you've been awake so long the fear has almost become boring.

One sergeant keeps whispering the Hail Mary. Not loud, not for anyone, just to himself, over and over, like a machine that can't stop. A kid from Georgia named Willis is crying and doesn't seem to know it. Nobody says anything to him. Nobody has the energy.

Then the battleships open up.

USS Texas. 14-inch guns. The shockwave from a single salvo is so violent it physically moves the air in your chest. The noise is past sound. It's concussive, it's physical, it rewires something deep in your brain. The sky over Normandy turns orange. Then red. Then orange again. B-17s roll over in formations so vast they blot out the stars, 1,000 planes heading for the coastal batteries, the bunkers, the gun emplacements.

You think: nothing on that beach is still alive. Nothing could be.

You are wrong, and you don't know it yet.

What you don't know: the Air Force bombers delayed their drop by 30 seconds to avoid hitting the fleet. Thirty seconds at bombing speed puts 13,000 bombs 3 miles inland. Into French farmland. Into empty fields. Not one bomb lands on Omaha Beach. The German 352nd Infantry Division, dug into concrete bunkers along the bluffs, is untouched. Alert. Waiting.

You also don't know about the tanks.

Command planned to send 64 amphibious Sherman DD tanks ahead of the infantry to provide cover on the beach. They were supposed to float. In calm water, they could. But this is not calm water. The 741st Tank Battalion launches their tanks from 6,000 yards out. The swells hit the inflatable canvas screens. The screens collapse. Twenty-seven of 32 tanks sink straight to the bottom of the Channel, 100 feet down. The crews inside most of them never get out. The infantry landing in the first wave will hit the beach with almost no armor. They just don't know that yet either.

H-Hour. 0630. June 6, 1944.

Your ramp drops.

The lieutenant in front of you steps off and is dead before he hits the water. Not wounded. Dead. You don't stop. There's no stopping. 35 men are behind you in a boat with nowhere to go but forward.

You jump left. The man to your right jumps right. You never see him again.

The water is chest deep and 50 degrees and you have 70 pounds of gear on your back. German MG-42 machine guns are firing 1,200 rounds per minute from the bluffs 300 yards ahead, and the sound is not like the movies. It's mechanical. Industrial. Like a factory running at full speed. The rounds hit the water around you so fast you can't track individual splashes, just a constant disturbed surface in every direction.

You cannot run. You can barely walk. The beach is still 80 yards away.

The soldiers from Company A, 116th Infantry made it to shore first. They were from Bedford, Virginia, a town of 3,200 people. There were 35 men from Bedford in that company. The German guns had been pre-sighted on the waterline. Before most of them could clear the ramp, before they could even get wet, the machine guns hit them. Nineteen of the Bedford boys died in the first 15 minutes. Bedford, Virginia lost more men per capita that morning than any community in America. The town wouldn't know for weeks.

You make the shingle. A narrow strip of gravel at the base of the bluffs. You press yourself into it so hard you feel the rocks through your jacket. The guy beside you is a technical sergeant you've never met, from a different unit entirely, blown here by chaos. He's got blood on his sleeve and he is absolutely furious. He looks at you and says what Colonel George Taylor will say to everyone still pinned on this beach:

"Two kinds of people are staying on this beach. The dead and those who are going to die. Now let's get the hell out of here."

You get up.

It takes six hours to clear 300 yards of sand.

Not with a charge. Not with anything glorious. In tiny groups, one gap in the wire at a time. Sergeant Philip Streczyk crawls through the smoke near the E-1 draw and finds a seam the Germans left in the defenses. He takes six men through it. Another cluster flanks a machine gun nest from an angle the Germans didn't fully cover. A corporal nobody has heard of stands up in the open and throws two grenades into a bunker aperture and clears it by himself. Acts of individual, unrepeatable courage happening in the smoke all across a 6-mile front, uncoordinated, unrecorded, unwitnessed.

Meanwhile, half a mile off the beach, USS Frankford sees the infantry getting slaughtered and makes a decision that violates every piece of common sense a naval officer has. She drives her destroyer to within 800 yards of the beach, so close she's bouncing her keel off sandbars, and opens up direct fire on the bunkers at point-blank range. They can't miss at that distance. Three other destroyers follow her in. The crews know they are one lucky German shell from being sunk in 15 feet of water. They do it anyway.

By noon, small groups are on the bluff.

By early afternoon, you can stand on the high ground and see the entire beach below. The tide came in. The men who were wounded and couldn't crawl fast enough are gone. The obstacles are still there, draped with things you don't look at directly. You eat half a K-ration because it's the first food since yesterday and your hands are shaking too much to open the other half.

By nightfall, 2,000 Americans are dead, wounded, or missing. On this one beach. In one day. It is the single costliest day in American military history.

You sleep in a shell crater in French soil. Still wet. No sleeping bag. 40-something degrees now that the sun is down. The man a crater over is crying softly. You don't check on him. You need him to be fine. He probably is. You tell yourself he probably is.

Tomorrow the hedgerows start. Weeks of fighting through walls of vegetation 10 feet thick, every field a potential ambush, every sunken lane its own kill zone. The Germans mastered it. The terrain was not on the maps. Nobody had planned for it.

But tonight you're alive.

You think about Kowalski and his unfolded letter. You think about the Bedford boys. You think about the tanks on the bottom of the Channel with their hatches sealed.

You get out your paper and you write your own letter.

This time you address it.

82 years ago today. Most of them were teenagers. Most had never left their home states. They were seasick and soaked and terrified and they went anyway.

The youngest survivors are over 100 now. Most are gone.

Remember them today, not as marble statues. As kids who threw up over the side of a boat at 3 AM and climbed a cliff at dawn anyway.

That is what courage actually looks like.

[The Iceman @the_iceman64]

90% of the soldiers on the first boats to hit the beach didn't live to see the end of the day. Look at those faces. Some of them never made it to 18.

Never forget that they paid the ultimate price for our freedom. We live our lives the way we do because of them.

[Barrett Linburg @DallasAptGP]

I hit my lifetime limit on alcohol right after I turned 21.

I wouldn’t have my family or business today if I hadn’t quit.
23 years without drinking for me today.

I had the benefit of watching a family member I admire get sober a few years before me. I knew the path existed.

Now there are eight of us in the family sticking to iced tea at Thanksgiving.

One person’s decision can change a family for generations.

The first stretch is the hardest.

Being around drinking is uncomfortable at the start. The fear that you’ll be boring or different is real.

It passes.

I’m glad to share my experience with anyone who thinks they may need to quit.

The most important thing I’ve done with my account here is help a few people quit once they were ready.

My DMs are open.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@blondesnmoney

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@BrentBeshore @BenSasse Not all, but many of the lies that we tell ourselves fall away when confronted w inescapable truth.
Each day is a gift. You don't get to negotiate the terms of the gift. You either accept w gratitude, or not.
There is such great beauty in the world, but pales to what is to come.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

Each day is a gift. You don't get to negotiate the terms of the gift. You do get to choose whether you accept the gift with gratitude, or not.
Thank you God for the gift of today and all the beauty it contains.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

God is a creator and man cannot meet Him without building. the most divine act of building is the creation of human life and you will never experience divinity as much as becoming a parent. seeing the miracle of childbirth, the creation of life, is the closest man can be to God.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@Banana_Oncology As one with a recent PDAC .diagnosis, thank you for these most informative posts. Great for getting up to speed quickly. Can I DM you? Thanks.

[paintbrush @TXpaintbrush]

I’ll say the same thing here I tell my Catholic (or Catholic-adjacent) friends and family when it comes to the church or the pope in the news:

Whichever way you’re interpreting the teachings and writings through an American political lens - it’s gonna be wrong. R or D, conservative or woke, whatever.

Don’t use a few sentences from the Pope - and definitely don’t use anyone else’s characterizations of what the Pope says - as the basis for understanding of what is being taught or offered.

The spiritual lens is always broader than the political lens.

For example:

When the Church, or the Pope, says “access to healthcare should be universal” it should be understood in the context of the gospel which both speaks about loving neighbors and traveling strangers.

The Augustinian traditions and the Jesuit missions are pretty clear historical documentation of where “city of man” meets “city of gods”.

“Universal access to healthcare” from the church doesn’t mean “universal healthcare” in the same sense that Obama, Bernie, AOC buzzword it. The church doesn’t opine on Medicare rates or Medicaid eligibility or rebate structures or agency personnel sizes. Or whatever socialist structures the EU has names for. The Pope has also called out, in writing and in speeches, specific EU countries multiple times with “universal” schemes that still have massive struggles with poverty and available healthcare.

So this isn’t not a political opinion. But man, being man, can interpret through his daily lens and isn’t always fed the larger context.

The church being downstream of the gospel (rightly) thinks that the individual has a moral duty to themselves and their soul to make decisions, freely, that promote a more “ordered love”.

No one person is being told to fix the system, or make a new system, or whatever.

We are called to do what we can in our communities to help our neighbors. (Or traveling strangers in need.)

Example A - I donated to a small town hospital this year that badly needed a CT machine to serve its population.

Example B - My dad is a semi-retired doc but will take holiday shifts at small town ERs so full-time attendings can be with families on Easter and the population doesn’t miss emergency service.

The church doesn’t care about socialist vs capitalist health care structures. It cares about human suffering and human souls. It views that it’s in everyone’s individual interest to help alleviate human suffering, because that’s also the path for safeguarding our own individual souls.

[Charlie Camosy @CCamosy]

Real and beautiful story. https://t.co/JA9iGJfdx7

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@lichthauch The loss of a loved one can cause this fire. It is called anamnesis-opposite of amnesia. The kind of amnesia where the body even forgets to swallow, ending in death. A simpler definition is remembering forward. Anamnesis is strongly related to epiclesis, which means to make real.

[Matt Allen @silverlining63]

@ValueStockGeek @lhamtil Thank you.