Quantum Leap 🌊

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. (Immanuel Kant)

[Quantum Leap 🌊 @tunisgood]

After World War 2 the USA were to Europe like a parent, like someone you could always rely on to protect you. Later Europe became a teenager and rebelled against the USA. And now Europe has grown up and sees with infinite grief, that its parent has become demented. #Trump

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

When I heard about Senator Graham’s death last night, the first thing I thought about was not all the things he said and did in service of Donald Trump. I thought of the time before Donald Trump when he was a brother to Senator John McCain.

A time when senators from different parties could fight about politics and still be friends. A time when a conservative Republican from South Carolina could say of my father: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

That is the Senator Graham I will remember today. Not because I have forgotten what came after. Because in that memory there is hope. Hope for a country where brothers can fight like hell over policy and still share a meal, and a laugh, and the loss of the people they love.

I will choose to remember the time before Trump. Because I believe in an America after Trump.

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

This clip, from Larry David's new show "Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness" is one of his FUNNIEST ever.

Awesome to have Rob Reiner as George Washington in possibly one of his final on-screen performances.

Cameo by Kimmel is chef's kiss.
RIP, Rob Reiner.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of your cuts in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after you interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when you cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to him.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge you: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[Stephen King @StephenKing]

Epstein files. Release 'em.

[Der Postillon 📯 @Der_Postillon]

Die wenigsten kennen diesen Trick: Einfach Heizung auf FROST-Modus stellen, um die Wohnung zu kühlen
https://t.co/ckdGjJSGNH
https://t.co/ckdGjJSGNH

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad

I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.

Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.

I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.

I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.

I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.

Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.

That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

In the early hours of this morning, I directed our Armed Forces to intercept a shadow fleet oil tanker attempting to pass through the English Channel.

This successful operation delivers yet another blow to Russia and reminds those fueling Putin's war in Ukraine that we will not let them hide.

I want to thank those involved, including our Armed Forces and law enforcement officers who keep this country safe 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

[Today Years Old @todayyearsold]

Hollywood has spent nearly $600 million trying to bring Matt Damon home.

Have they considered maybe he just doesn’t want to come back?

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal.

Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan.

All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Mel Aura @mel__aura]

So sieht es aus!🏳️‍🌈

[Annie @AnnieForTruth]

Yes!

[Mike Murphy @murphymike]

Impressive

[best of kamala harris @archivekamala]

.@CoryBooker: “You may disagree with her [Kamala Harris] on 10% of her views, but you let someone get in office who you disagree with on everything. You let somebody get in office who is locking up our children. You let somebody in office who is taking away our healthcare.”

[Der Postillon 📯 @Der_Postillon]

Bayern führt Pflichtbier in Kitas ein, um zu verhindern, dass Kinder später Cannabis konsumieren https://t.co/CmlSXpXfdE

[Der Postillon 📯 @Der_Postillon]

Faktencheck: Ist Donald Trump wirklich Jesus? https://t.co/MFiqgsD9Lk
https://t.co/MFiqgsD9Lk

[Andrea Junker @Strandjunker]

If you hate Pope Leo because he is too “liberal”, I have some very bad news for you about Jesus.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Karoline Leavitt: “They were tested and they failed.”

Here’s the thing about NATO that apparently needs explaining to the most powerful government on earth: it is not a taxi.

You do not ring NATO. You do not place an order. You do not specify delivery within 72 hours and then stand in the Rose Garden bewildered that nothing has turned up. NATO is a collective defence alliance built on the radical concept that its members are, in fact, members, with votes and opinions and sovereign militaries they get to deploy according to their own national interests. This is written down. It has been written down since 1949. The documents are available in English.

Nobody in this administration has read them.

Let’s go back to Greenland for a moment, because this is apparently where the rot set in. Trump wanted Greenland. Just wanted it. Asked if he could have it. Was told no, it belongs to Denmark, which is a NATO ally, which means the whole thing was always going to be diplomatically awkward at best and catastrophically self-defeating at worst. His response was not to reflect on this. His response was to decide that NATO was a large problem. An alliance of thirty-two nations that has kept the peace in Europe for seventy-five years was, in his assessment, getting in the way of his property acquisition.
This tells you everything you need to know about how the man thinks. And it tells you everything about who he hired to think alongside him.

Every serious leader in history, every CEO worth the title, every general who ever won anything, has operated on the same basic principle: hire people smarter than yourself. Steve Jobs did it. Churchill did it. Every remotely competent executive who ever ran anything of consequence understood that your job is not to be the cleverest person in the building. Your job is to find the cleverest people in the building and then get out of their way. Surround yourself with people who will tell you when you’re wrong. Who know things you don’t. Who have read the documents.Trump inverted this entirely.

A cabinet selected not for expertise but for loyalty. Not for knowledge but for the willingness to perform agreement. Pete Hegseth at Defence. A communications team that announces things with confidence at a ratio entirely disconnected from understanding. An administration where the qualification for the job was, essentially, never making the man at the top feel inadequate.

The outcome of this philosophy is Karoline Leavitt at a podium reading four words as though she had just solved something. Delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has never had to sit in a room and actually work out what NATO is, how it functions, why it was built, or what the word collective means in the context of collective defence.

They were tested and they failed.
Europe is not shaking its fist. Europe is shaking its head. Slowly. Wearily. In the way you do when you’ve explained something seventeen times and the person across the table still hasn’t got it and you’ve finally accepted that they never will.

The allies are building their own defence architecture now, with people in the room who have read the documents. They stopped waiting for Washington to grow into the role some time ago.
And somewhere in all of this, Greenland is still Danish. Still will be tomorrow. NATO is still an alliance of sovereign nations who get to say no. Still will be next week. And the White House is still staffed by people who find both of these facts baffling.
Some things don’t change just because you haven’t understood them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Let me explain something to the MAGA crowd, because clearly someone needs to.

They seem to think NATO is cosmic room service. You pick up the phone, say “hello, we’re having a bit of a war here,” and thirty-one countries march to your rescue. A continental Uber for military adventures.

That is not how it works.
Article 5 is a mutual defense clause. The clue is in the word mutual. And it has been triggered exactly once in NATO’s entire history. After September 11. When America was attacked. Not Europe. America.

Every NATO member showed up. They went to Afghanistan. They fought. They bled. They died. In America’s war. On America’s behalf.

Now imagine they hadn’t.
Over 1,100 allied soldiers died in Afghanistan. British, Canadian, German, Danish, Polish. And yes, even Ukrainian soldiers, who had no NATO obligation whatsoever. Gone. Without them, those are American names on those graves. Sons from Ohio. Fathers from Georgia. Kids from Nebraska who never came home.

Then there is the money. NATO allies spent over 100 billion dollars on a war that started on American soil. Without that, Washington pays every cent. On top of the 2 to 3 trillion the war already cost.

And without allied bases across Europe and Central Asia, American supply lines collapse entirely. Without British forces in Helmand and Canadians in Kandahar, the Taliban reconstitutes in three years instead of ten. The gaps get filled one way. More American deployments. More American coffins arriving at Dover.

Afghanistan was bloody. But NATO took the hit. Without them, every single one of those casualties would have had an American name.

Trump called allies like these losers. Suckers.

If you are a certain kind of broken person, that probably makes sense to you. But for the rest of us, what those soldiers did has a different name. Honor. The bond between men who have been in the same dirt, under the same fire. Between Brits and Americans, Frenchmen and Norwegians, Canadians and Danes. Not a diplomatic relationship. A blood bond. Brotherhood forged in places most people will never see and cannot imagine.

In that culture, you do not mock a fallen ally. You do not sneer at the dead. It is the lowest thing a human being can do. Trump did it to a standing ovation.

If you are a MAGA supporter travelling to NATO countries, understand this. There are no friendly pats on the back waiting for you. No one will buy you a beer. The governments who share your worldview sit in Minsk, Moscow and Pyongyang. Brutal dictatorships where journalists disappear, elections are theatre and dissent is a medical condition treated in basements. Not London. Not Paris. Not Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin or Ottawa.

You have abandoned the open societies, the free press, the rule of law, the places where people actually want to live. You traded the best of civilization for a very small, very dark room. Frankly, it serves you right.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1