Olivia
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Tom Konantz
@tkonantz
Joined June 2009
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We joke about winning the life lottery, because we were born in the USA, but it’s not far from the truth.
These visitors here for the World Cup are getting to experience what we often take for granted.
I live in Alabama. I can start in Mobile and drive north for 5 hours, and still be in Alabama.
My state has beautiful sandy beaches, and also has the foothills of the Appalachians. In between, we have a super speedway that pushes the limits of American muscle. Talladega.
NASA is here. The Army’s rotary wing flight school is here.
We have a festival every year to celebrate peanuts. We celebrate the harvest of a crop with funnel cakes and music.
2 teams from my state are currently in the College World Series, and that isn’t even our most popular sport.
Don’t even get me started on football Saturdays in the fall. It’s something else entirely.
My state is just 1 of 50 states that are all equally wonderful.
This country is awesome, and I do love it so. 🇺🇸
On this day in 1777, the United States chose its flag in one sentence, and the men who voted on it had no idea what they had just done.
The timing could not have been worse. The country was barely a year removed from declaring independence and it was losing. The British had taken New York. Washington's army was battered and short on everything. Congress was drowning in crises: no money, restless officers, a war that might collapse at any moment. Survival, not symbolism, was the daily business.
Yet on June 14, 1777, in the middle of all that, the Marine Committee tucked a brief resolution into the day's work. The full text was almost absurdly simple. "Resolved, that the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation."
That was the entire thing. No record of debate. No designer credited. The popular story that Betsy Ross sewed the first one is a charming legend that appeared a full century later, told by her grandson, with no solid evidence behind it. The resolution did not even specify how the stars should be arranged, which is why early American flags came in wild variety, stars in circles, rows, and scattered patterns, each maker improvising.
These exhausted men, fighting for their lives, voting between a dozen other emergencies, accidentally created one of the most recognized symbols on the planet. That flag would go on to survive a civil war, fly through two world wars, get planted on the summit of Mount Everest, and be driven into the gray dust of the moon, where it still stands today.
249 years ago it was a single afterthought in the minutes of a desperate Congress. That sentence is why we celebrate Flag Day. Happy Flag Day.
Neat video
Dogs n them
Five years ago today I called out Fox Corp live on air, then did several independent reports on how they’d become compromised:
⚫️Fox had threatened to fire me for covering the story they assigned me to cover, all because the true narrative was different from the “safe” narrative they had anticipated.
⚫️The true narrative was that four times more lives were being saved at a hospital that used a COVID treatment protocol that the CDC/FDA recommended against using.
⚫️Fox had been pushing its reporters to only tell people to do what the CDC/FDA said to do, rather than pursuing journalism which is: Go out and see what people are actually doing and cover what’s actually working and not working.
⚫️So when Fox sent me to a hospital to cover COVID treatment, they expected me to report the copy/paste version of what CDC/FDA said to tell people was happening.
⚫️When I adhered to journalism and covered what was actually happening there, Fox issued a letter for my files, lying about me, threatening to fire me, and they put me on a social media blackout—no posting anything unless it is “safe news” approved by management before the post.
⚫️All because I approached a COVID story the same way I approached crime stories: Go out there, be curious, ask the people’s questions, report what’s actually happening.
⚫️When Fox crossed the line and later sent their HR lady in Atlanta after me to tell me standing up for free speech is not something I’m allowed to do, I knew it was time to leave that compromised company. (I’ve posted all the receipts from this showdown in the past and still have more receipts I haven’t posted.)
⚫️I left the company and then found out there were Fox Corp employees all over the nation going through similar stories. I heard from staff at other news companies—ABC, CBS, etc.—with very similar stories.
⚫️It was much easier for me to leave and sound the alarm as a single girl who didn’t have a family to provide for. My heart goes out to those who have not left and are still within the compromised machine at news companies across the country.
⚫️May you find a way to take a stand, even if from the inside. Never compromise your conscience. Take a stand—even a small one—and God will protect you. Life’s too short not to.
⚫️We’re not in the pandemic anymore, but there are countless news stories where the corporations just don’t have the spine to tell the truth, and they’re ready to persecute their reporters for sticking with journalism.
⚫️Yes, COVID treatment was not the only story Fox was compromised on. I went on to cover how they hid anomalies related to elections to help viewers believe elections are always perfect. I covered how they acted as a PR team for vaccine companies rather than seeking answers to their viewers’ concerns about them. And I covered how they used crime coverage to deceptively pit races against each other in an effort to increase ratings.
⚫️I thank @JamesOKeefeIII and @Project_Veritas from the bottom of my heart for picking up my story and sending it so viral. I do believe it made at least a small difference in challenging news outlets to get back to honesty over “safety.”
B-29 Superfortress Emergency Ditching off Iwo Jima (May 26, 1945) 🇺🇸
Rare color footage shows a damaged B-29 Superfortress (Circle R, 6th Bomb Group, 313th Bomb Wing based on Tinian) making an emergency water landing after losing two engines during a night mission over Tokyo.
The massive bomber skims across the ocean surface before coming to a stop just off Iwo Jima. The successful ditching allowed the entire crew to escape safely.
Following the capture of Iwo Jima, the island's airfields and surrounding waters became a vital lifeline for crippled B-29s returning from Japan.
🇺🇸 Double Shot of Badass Americans: William J. Crawford
He was a janitor at the Air Force Academy for many years. The cadets who passed him every day had no idea they were walking among a living legend.
Born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1918, Crawford was drafted into the Army in July 1942.
By September 1943 he was serving as a Private and squad scout with Company I, 3rd Platoon, 142nd Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division in southern Italy.
On September 13, 1943, his platoon attacked German positions on Hill 424 near Altavilla.
After reaching the crest, they were immediately pinned down by machine gun and small arms fire from multiple enemy positions.
Without orders and completely on his own, Crawford moved forward alone under heavy fire.
He first located one machine gun dug in on a terrace directly in front of the platoon.
He crawled through open ground under fire, closed to within a few yards of the emplacement, destroyed the gun with a hand grenade, and killed three of the crew.
He kept going.
Crawford spotted a second machine gun position firing on his men.
Again moving alone and exposed, he advanced on the crew under fire. When he got close enough, he threw a grenade, destroyed the gun, and eliminated the crew.
He still wasn't finished.
He located a third German machine gun that was continuing to pin down his unit.
Once more he advanced alone through enemy fire, closed on the position, killed one of the Germans with rifle fire. Two other Germans who were there fled.
Crawford, the badass he was, grabbed the German machine gun, turned it around, and fired on them as they were running down the hill.
Crawford had single handedly taken out all three machine gun nests that were holding up his entire platoon.
A few days later he was captured by the Germans. His fellow soldiers thought he had been killed.
He would spend the next 19 months as a prisoner of war.
Because the Army believed he was KIA, the Medal of Honor for his actions was awarded posthumously and presented to his father in 1944.
When the war ended and Crawford was returned home, he had technically already received the nation’s highest award, but he was never formally presented with it.
He would stay in the military until the 1960's, retiring as a Master Sergeant.
He then took a quiet job as a janitor at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
For many years he mopped floors and cleaned the cadet squadrons without ever mentioning his service. Thousands of cadets passed by him over the years without the slightest clue.
Then, in the late 1970s, a cadet was reading a book about the Allied campaign in Italy and stumbled upon his name. He asked the janitor about it.
Crawford simply replied, “That was one day in my life and it happened a long time ago.”
They were shocked to find out their janitor was that same person.
The cadets spread the word and helped arrange for him to have the recognition he deserved.
On May 30, 1984, nearly 41 years after his actions, President Reagan personally awarded Master Sergeant William J. Crawford his Medal of Honor during the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.
William J. Crawford is an American Badass 🇺🇸
WATCH: This video is exploding across social media right now!
Arthur McCann from Norwood, Massachusetts has transformed this lawn into the most jaw-dropping, massive, and perfectly precise American flag you've ever seen.
Doggos loving bath time 🥰
“I’ve been to 27 different countries…. and nothing comes close to the USA.”
This British lady gets it. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
This is Lio and Mat, Lio is deaf so when he sleeps he doesn’t notice what’s happening around him.. so when Dad got home with treats his brother Matti knows and he makes sure to wakes Lio. So when Matti nudges him Lio gets up right away cause he knows Matti wouldn’t wake him for no reason.
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.
Everyone knows John Hancock for his giant signature. Almost nobody knows the actual man, and his real life was wilder than the legend.
He was an orphan. His father died when he was 7, and he was taken in by his uncle Thomas, the richest merchant in Boston. John was groomed to run the family shipping empire, inherited the whole thing in 1764, and became one of the wealthiest men in all of America before most people his age owned anything at all.
He was also, by the crown's definition, a criminal. In 1768 the British seized his ship Liberty for smuggling, and Boston rioted in his defense. The man we now put on patriotic posters was, to London, a wealthy smuggler dodging customs.
He didn't just resent the crown quietly. He bankrolled resistance and became such a thorn that the British wanted him gone. On the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere made his famous ride, the warning was not vague. He rode to Lexington specifically to warn two men that the British were coming to arrest them: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The opening night of the Revolutionary War was, in part, a manhunt for Hancock.
Weeks later, General Gage offered a pardon to every rebel in Massachusetts who would lay down arms, with exactly two exceptions: Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Being left off that list was essentially a public death warrant.
Here is the part nobody tells you. As president of the Continental Congress, Hancock actually wanted to be named commander of the army himself. He sat in the chair and watched as the Adams cousins instead rose to nominate George Washington. He was reportedly stung by it. Then he did the thing most people never manage. He swallowed his pride, signed Washington's commission, and spent the next eight years pouring his personal fortune into the war he could not lead.
So when Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence first, big and bold across the top, it was not a cute flourish. He was already a hunted man with a price on his head, putting his name, his fortune, and his neck on the line before anyone else dared lift a pen.
And that famous line about signing large "so King George can read it without his spectacles"? He almost certainly never said it. It is a myth stitched onto him generations later. The real story is better. He just signed first, as president, knowing exactly what it could cost him.
The flamboyance was real, though. He lived in princely splendor in a granite mansion on Beacon Hill overlooking the harbor, with imported mahogany furniture and apricot trees shipped from Spain. In 1775 he married Dorothy Quincy, and the two became one of Massachusetts' first political celebrity couples, famous for endless lavish dinners that slowly drained his fortune.
He went on to become the first Governor of Massachusetts, serving roughly eleven years, and died in office in 1793. His funeral was one of the grandest ever given to an American up to that point. Samuel Adams declared the day a state holiday.
The orphaned smuggler with a target on his back had become the face of American defiance.
That is why, 250 years later, we still say "put your John Hancock right here."
😂😂
The goat gets left out of every serious conversation about sustainable food, which is a shame, because it does a job no other farm animal will touch.
A cow is a grazer. A sheep is a grazer. Both want grass, on ground that is at least walkable. The goat is a browser, and its tastes run somewhere else entirely:
- It eats scrub, bramble, gorse and thistle, the spiky stuff everything else avoids.
- It strips the woody growth and lower branches that choke a neglected hillside.
- It works terrain too steep, too rough, and too overgrown for cattle or sheep to bother with.
- It thrives on exactly the marginal, reverting, abandoned land that grows nothing anyone wants.
This makes the goat the pioneer of the whole system. Put goats onto a bramble-choked hillside and they browse it back, season by season, until grass can establish again. Once the grass comes, the sheep and cattle can follow. The goat opens ground the others could never use.
And at the end of it you get milk that many people who cannot tolerate cow dairy digest perfectly well, meat that more of the world's population eats than any other, and a cleared hillside that was an impenetrable thicket the year before.
The goat asks for the worst land on the farm and quietly makes it useful. It has been doing humanity's roughest groundwork for ten thousand years, and we still treat it as an afterthought with a comedy reputation.
CIA: Cat Investigation Agency..🐈🐾😅
By age 40, nearly every person with Down syndrome has the same brain protein deposits that mark the beginning of Alzheimer's disease. The extra chromosome they are born with carries the APP gene, which produces the precursor to amyloid (the protein that clumps into Alzheimer's plaques). Three copies of that gene instead of two means 50% more output from birth. By their 60s, roughly half have developed clinical dementia.
For the 7 million people worldwide who have Down syndrome, there are zero treatments addressing the genetic root cause. Life expectancy jumped from 25 to 60 years since 1983, but that came entirely from better management of secondary conditions. Nobody has ever touched the source.
In February 2025, a team at Mie University in Japan, led by Ryotaro Hashizume, published the first successful physical deletion of the extra chromosome 21 from Down syndrome cell lines. The core challenge: three copies of chromosome 21 look nearly identical, so standard CRISPR (a gene-editing tool that uses molecular scissors to cut DNA) cannot tell them apart. The team genetically fingerprinted each copy, identified which was safest to remove, then designed precision cuts targeting only that one. Chromosome removal rates hit 30.6% in stem cells and 13.9% in skin cells. No accidental extra chromosomes appeared in treated cells.
Neurologists at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston published a second study in April 2026, using a completely different approach. Instead of deleting the chromosome, they silenced it. The body already has a natural silencing mechanism: in biological females, one of the two X chromosomes gets switched off at birth by a gene called XIST. The Harvard team used modified CRISPR to insert XIST into the extra chromosome 21, telling it to go quiet. Standard CRISPR inserts large genes at under 2% success rate. Their modified version hit 20-40%, a roughly 30-fold improvement. Lead researcher Volney Sheen said that 30% "is high enough efficiency that you would get a clinically appropriate response." Both studies remain at the cell stage, with animal testing and human trials still ahead.
The urgency behind both labs: chromosome 21 does not just cause Down syndrome. That same APP gene is the best-known genetic trigger of early-onset Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's affects 55 million people globally. Anything either team learns about silencing or removing that chromosome matters far beyond the 7 million people with Down syndrome.
Me: at a Japanese aquarium.
peaceful day, families everywhere, soft piano music.
then I notice one employee SPEED WALKING past us carrying bucket.
Employee: Excuse me.
another employee runs by, then another.
suddenly whole aquarium staff moving with Avengers-level urgency.
Me: ...
Friend: Something happened.
we follow crowd to penguin section.
absolute chaos, one penguin missing.
not metaphorically, ACTUALLY escaped.
staff members whispering intensely into walkie-talkies.
tiny child beside me: The criminal has escaped.
Me: WHY DID HE SAY IT LIKE THAT.
then I spot the penguin.
bro is BOOKING IT down hallway at shocking speed.
sliding on stomach around corners like furry torpedo.
staff chasing respectfully.
one employee holding fish like hostage negotiator.
Employee: Kenta please.
PENGUIN'S NAME IS KENTA.
Kenta ignores authority completely, runs directly into souvenir shop.
now people buying keychains while rogue penguin commits grand theft atmosphere.
finally old aquarium worker appears.
everyone parts ways dramatically.
this man kneels down calmly.
pulls out single sardine.
Kenta stops immediately.
walks over with zero shame.
Old Worker: Enough adventure.
penguin allows himself to be carried away like drunk friend after party.
crowd applauds.
Friend whispering: He'll do it again.
Honestly? absolutely.
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