venator99

[venator99 @venator99]

I mean, Chris could make a grocery list amazing, but when he gets a big stage…best since Jimi?

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

Chris Stapleton just delivered one of the best National Anthem performances I’ve heard in a long time 🇺🇸

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

listen up, we have to vote for the man with the nazi tattoo so he can stop the man landing rockets and curing the blind from making any more money, otherwise we’ll get fascism

you see how stupid you sound, yes?

[Carol Roth @caroljsroth]

The US govt spends $7 trillion every year and they don’t solve shit.

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.

You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

[Ted Nugent @TedNugent]

#1 alltime stage entrance!

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On this day in 1772, a group of Rhode Island merchants, merchants, and sailors quietly loaded into 8 longboats at midnight and rowed out into Narragansett Bay.

Their target: HMS Gaspee, a British naval schooner that had run aground in shallow water while chasing a local merchant vessel called the Hannah earlier that day.

They boarded her in darkness. Shot the captain in the groin. Tied up the crew. Looted the ship. Then burned it to the waterline and rowed back to shore like nothing happened.

The British were furious. They launched a royal commission with sweeping powers to find the culprits and ship them to England for trial. It was one of the most aggressive legal threats the Crown had ever made against the colonies.

Nobody talked. Not a single colonist gave up a name. The commission failed completely.

That refusal to cooperate was arguably as important as the burning itself. It showed the colonies were willing to shield each other from British authority, that local loyalty ran deeper than imperial law.

This happened 3 years before Lexington and Concord. The revolution didn't start with a shot heard round the world. It started in the dark, on the water, in Rhode Island, with a ship on fire and a crew that kept its mouth shut.

[VintageCountryMusic @realcountry1953]

Hank, Jr with Big Bill Lister in Boerne, TX

1975

[venator99 @venator99]

@ThatLineGuySky @Dianexis And priority is first to use in commerce, not first to file

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On June 6, 1944, Technician John Pinder's landing craft dropped him 100 yards offshore at Omaha Beach.

He was carrying a radio. The single most important piece of equipment on that beach that morning. Without it, commanders had no eyes, no coordination, no way to call off the slaughter happening in real time.

He was shot by machine gun fire before he even touched sand.

The water was at his chest. The current was pulling men under. Bodies were floating past him. He kept moving forward.

Then he turned around and went back.

The radio was damaged. More parts were still out in the surf, still under fire. He waded back in to get them.

He was shot again.

He went back a third time.

Shot again. This time in both legs. He could barely stand.

He dragged himself to shore and used everything he had recovered to begin establishing radio communications on the beach. Still bleeding. Still exposed. While he was setting it up, he was hit one final time.

He was killed before the radio finished warming up.

He never made it more than a few yards past the waterline. He never fired a single shot. He never once took cover.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor.

His name is almost never mentioned.

[venator99 @venator99]

@Dianexis I told him that before

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On the morning of June 4, 1942, Ensign George Gay climbed into his TBD Devastator torpedo bomber and flew toward the largest concentration of Japanese naval power ever assembled.

He knew exactly what he was flying into.

Torpedo Squadron 8 had 15 planes and 30 men. Their aircraft were slow, outdated, and completely unescorted. No fighter cover. Command had promised them protection. It never showed. The flight leader, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, had written a farewell letter to his wife before takeoff. He knew.

Waldron found the Japanese fleet first. Before the attack, he got on the radio one last time: "My greatest hope is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation, but if we don't, and the worst comes to worst, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemies. If there is only one plane left to make a final run in, I want that man to go in and get a hit."

Then they dove.

The Japanese Combat Air Patrol fell on them like wolves. Dozens of Zeros. The Devastators had no altitude, no speed, and no cover. They had to fly low and straight to line up torpedo shots, which meant they couldn't evade. They could only absorb fire and keep flying.

One by one, the planes went down.

Gay watched them fall around him. Friends. Bunkmates. Men he had trained with, eaten with, played cards with. Going into the water one after another. No parachutes. No survivors.

His gunner, Robert Huntington, was hit. Dying in the backseat as Gay flew forward.

Gay himself took a 20mm cannon round. His left hand was hit. The plane was on fire.

He kept flying.

He lined up on the Japanese carrier Soryu and dropped his torpedo at point-blank range, closer than doctrine called for, because he had no other choice. He watched it run toward the ship.

Soryu turned. The torpedo missed.

Then his plane was hit again and went in.

As the nose of the Devastator knifed into the Pacific, Gay forced the canopy open against the rushing water pressure and pulled himself free. He surfaced surrounded by burning fuel and wreckage, wounded, alone, in the middle of the Japanese fleet.

He had one Mae West life vest. One seat cushion. That was it.

The Japanese destroyers were close enough that he could see sailors moving on their decks. He knew if they spotted him, they would not rescue him. So he did the only thing he could do.

He held the seat cushion over his head and floated.

Every time a Japanese aircraft flew low over the water, he pushed himself under and pressed the cushion above him to break his silhouette. For hours he did this. Treading water. Hiding. Bleeding. Watching his friends' planes burn on the surface around him.

He was the last man. Every single other pilot and gunner in Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet was dead. All 29 of them.

And then, from high altitude, the American dive bombers arrived.

SBD Dauntlesses. They had found the fleet almost by accident, following the wake of a Japanese destroyer. And when they arrived, the sky above the carriers was empty.

Here is the part that will haunt you.

VT-8's attack had looked like a catastrophic failure. But it wasn't. By flying low, slow, and straight into the teeth of the Japanese fleet, they had pulled every single Zero in the Combat Air Patrol down to sea level to kill them. For those few critical minutes, the carriers below had nothing above them. No protection. No altitude cover.

The dive bombers came straight down out of the sun.

Akagi: hit. Fires reached the torpedo magazine. Gone.
Kaga: hit. Fuel ignited. Gone.
Soryu, the same carrier Gay had attacked alone minutes before: hit. Gone.

Three of Japan's six fleet carriers, the core of the force that had attacked Pearl Harbor, were mortally wounded in under five minutes.

George Gay watched all of it.

From fifty yards away, treading water with a shot-up life vest and a seat cushion over his head, he watched three Japanese aircraft carriers burn to the waterline. He watched the explosions. He watched the smoke columns rise so high they could be seen for miles. He watched the fleet that had seemed invincible that morning begin to die.

He floated there for thirty hours total. When darkness finally fell, he inflated the life raft. It was full of bullet holes but held enough CO2 to keep him on the surface through the night.

A Navy PBY Catalina patrol plane found him the next morning and pulled him out.

He later met with Admiral Chester Nimitz personally and confirmed what he had seen: three carriers destroyed. His eyewitness account was among the first human confirmation that the battle had turned.

He was 26 years old.

He was awarded the Navy Cross. He recovered from his wounds. He went back to flying, eventually spending 30 years as a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines, carrying passengers on routes across America. He never made a big show of what he had done. He gave interviews when asked. He wrote a book. He went to reunions.

He died in 1994 in Marietta, Georgia.

His name was Ensign George Henry Gay Jr. He is, to this day, the only known combatant in history to survive a major naval battle by floating in the middle of it while it happened around him.

He flew in with 29 men. He came home alone. And the battle those men died in changed the course of the entire war.

Today is the 84th anniversary of the Battle of Midway.

Remember his name.

[venator99 @venator99]

@T00ManyCommies

[venator99 @venator99]

@RobProvince

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan. March 4, 2002. Before dawn.
The mountain was frozen and dark and full of al-Qaeda fighters.
Technical Sergeant John Chapman was an Air Force Combat Controller — one of the most elite and highly trained special operations specialists in the American military. He directed airstrikes. He operated in environments where everything that could go wrong usually did. He had been chosen for this mission specifically because, in a career field of exceptional men, he stood out.
The mission had already gone badly before it started.
During the initial helicopter insertion onto Takur Ghar, a Navy SEAL named Neil Roberts fell from the aircraft into an entrenched group of enemy fighters below. Chapman's team immediately turned around to rescue him. They flew back into a known enemy stronghold in the dark to bring one of their own home.
What they did not yet know was that Roberts was already dead — killed by the al-Qaeda fighters in the thirty minutes it took the team to return.
When their helicopter landed back on the mountaintop, they flew into an ambush. Enemy fire came from multiple directions at once. Chapman moved immediately toward the closest threat — charging uphill through the darkness and snow toward a fortified enemy bunker, closing to within ten feet, and killing both fighters inside.
He kept moving. He kept fighting. He pushed forward to protect his teammates as the firefight intensified around them.
Then he was shot. Multiple times. He went down.
In the chaos and the dark, his teammates believed he was dead. Under overwhelming fire and taking casualties, the remaining team was forced to withdraw from the mountain. They left behind what they were certain was a body.
They were wrong.
Somewhere in the dark on that frozen ridge, John Chapman regained consciousness.
He was alone. He was bleeding from several gunshot wounds. Enemy fighters were on three sides of him. His team was gone. No rescue was coming. By every rational measure, there was nothing left to do but die.
He started fighting.
For nearly an hour — alone, wounded, surrounded — Chapman engaged the enemy fighters closing in around him. What happened during those minutes in the dark would not be fully understood for sixteen years.
Then a Chinook helicopter carrying Army Rangers began its approach to the mountain.
As it descended, a group of al-Qaeda fighters moved into position with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, aiming at the incoming aircraft and the men inside it.
Chapman saw them.
He exposed himself to their fire to draw attention away from the helicopter. He attacked their position, giving the Rangers the seconds they needed to land.
His autopsy report later showed a broken nose and cuts and bruising consistent with ferocious hand-to-hand combat — evidence of just how close the fighting had become in those final minutes. Air Force Times
Chapman was killed in the last exchange of fire.
The Rangers landed. They survived.
For years, the full story remained incomplete. Chapman had received the Air Force Cross — a high honor — but the complete picture of what he had done after the team withdrew was not known. The drone footage existed, but analyzing it with enough precision to reconstruct his movements took time and technology and sixteen years of careful work.
When the Air Force finally completed its review, the conclusion was clear.
On August 22, 2018, President Trump posthumously awarded John Chapman the Medal of Honor — the first Air Force recipient since the Vietnam War. Chapman's widow, Valerie Nessel, stood in the White House to receive it on behalf of the man she had married in 1992, the father of their two daughters, the man who had gone to Afghanistan and never come home.
He was also posthumously promoted to Master Sergeant.
His was the first Medal of Honor action in history to be extensively documented by drone surveillance video — footage that showed, frame by frame, what one man had chosen to do when he had every reason to stop. Soldier of Fortune
What makes Chapman's story different from so many acts of battlefield courage is not the violence of it. It is the choice.
When he regained consciousness on that mountain, alone in the dark, he had no audience. No commanders watching. No teammates who knew he was still alive. No one who would have blamed him for staying down.
He chose to stand up anyway.
He chose to fight for men he could hear approaching in a helicopter but could not see.
He chose to draw fire onto himself so that others would live.
Those men came home. They had children. Their children grew up. Entire futures exist today because one man woke up alone on a frozen mountain and decided that the mission wasn't finished.
John Chapman was 36 years old.
He died on Takur Ghar before the sun came up.
And for nearly an hour before he did, alone and unseen, he fought like he knew the whole world was watching.
It just took the world sixteen years to catch up.

[venator99 @venator99]

@ChivalryGuild This book was excellent and a very interesting perspective of WW2. A lot of the revelations of Stalin's conduct, and the extent of America's enablement of Stalin's conduct, including to the detriment of American readiness and support of our own troops, is stunning.

[venator99 @venator99]

@lethbhreac1971 @manhattanmaker

[venator99 @venator99]

Absolutely no shame in that. My wife and I spent 18 points each for the Wyoming antelope draw and still hired an outfitter. It was a great decision, you get a better hunt, antelope are very difficult to field judge without a lot of experience and you get to hunt instead of trying to learn new ground. Best of luck.

[Dr. Brian L. Cox @BrianCox_RLTW]

I am not a Jew. But as a professor of international law & retired military lawyer who studies how distorted legal rhetoric is used to justify hate & violence directed against Jews, you are 💯 mistaken to believe your safety "as Jewish New Yorkers" is "inextricably intertwined with Palestinians."

I am not progressive, either. But based on your comments in this clip & my background with the study mentioned above, I do have a few tips you should consider exploring if you are genuinely concerned with your safety as a Jewish New Yorker.

Spoiler alert: these tips have absolutely nothing to do with Palestinians - at least, not directly.

1. Stop blaming @Israel for what you refer to as "the utter destruction of Gaza."

First of all, #Gaza isn't "utterly destroyed" to begin with. There are absolutely areas that are currently uninhabitable due to the conflict. But it's not all of Gaza. This perception has been carefully curated by influencers showing isolated clips of select destroyed areas while giving the false impression that this visualization represents the entire Strip.

It doesn't. If you think otherwise, do yourself a favor & find/follow accounts like @GAZAWOOD1 that present clips of videos that are posted from people living inside Gaza right now.

If you believe Gaza is utterly destroyed, educate yourself. You are being played, and only you can stop it.

Second, learn at least something about international law. Like this.

You criticize your opponent @RepDanGoldman for supporting "unconditional aid to Israel" (Ilana Glazer's words) "even despite Israel's utter destruction of Gaza" (your words).

Here, you are actually supporting strategic objectives of literal terrorists whose only goal is the utter destruction of Israel. #Hamas committed the atrocities of 10/7 to provoke a large-scale armed conflict in order to derail normalization between 🇮🇱 & select Arab countries.

Their best shot at getting away with it was for sympathetic partisans throughout the West - such as yourself & Ilana Glazer - to convince Israel's traditional closest partners & allies to restrict military aid & pressure Israel into implementing a ceasefire as early as possible. Doing so would ensure Hamas could survive to continue in a governance role in Gaza after the conflict.

And the way to convince Iran's useful idiots, such as yourself, to pressure Western governments to restrict military aid is to manipulate the language of international law to make it seem that these countries are failing to comply with their own legal obligations or even "complicit" in systemic "war crimes" by failing to condition or restrict aid.

It's a hoax, and it always has been. Determining whether a war crime has been committed requires evidence of the knowledge & intent of personnel responsible for each attack at the time. If you don't believe me, study this highlighted excerpt of the Rome Statute (pic 1).

Yes, neither 🇮🇱 nor 🇺🇸 have ratified this multilateral treaty. But the main war crimes provisions in Article 8, as well as the mental element/mistake of fact provisions of Articles 30 & 32, are consistent with our military doctrine. And guess what evidence you need, pursuant to this doctrinal source, to determine a war crime has been committed.

That's right! If a war crime involves "intentionally directing an attack against" civilian persons or property, and "intent" means "awareness that a circumstance exists," and the "circumstance" is the civilian (not taking direct part in hostilities) character of the person/object attacked, then we require evidence demonstrating personnel responsible for each attack were aware of the civilian character of the target at the time & they attacked it anyway.

Any guesses what you can't determine just from looking at "utter destruction" in a battlespace? Right again! Knowledge & intent of personnel responsible for each attack at the time that led to that utter destruction.

Maybe - just maybe - a transnational terrorist organization committed one of the most horrific atrocities in living memory then deliberately hid & fought among its own civilian population in the ensuing large-scale armed conflict it decided to provoke. And maybe they hid IEDs in every structure they could so that @IDF troops clearing the area successfully capturing it would still continue to perish. And maybe that is cumulatively the reason for the "utter destruction of Gaza."

News flash: that is exactly the cause of most of the destruction in Gaza. And because that's the case, there is no obligation to condition military aid to Israel. No clear risk of systemic war crimes being committed with arms supplied to Israel (🇺🇸 hasn't ratified the Arms Trade Treaty, but we have a similar process for determining whether to provide military aid nonetheless) means no requirement to condition aid.

The reason the language of international law is routinely distorted in this manner, btw, is to convert a policy argument into what appears to be a legal one. A "should" to a "must."

But if you believe 🇺🇸 is failing to abide by its international law obligations by providing military aid to 🇮🇱, once again you are being played. Stop.

2. Stop perpetuating the "genocide" blood libel.

As you criticize Dan Goldman for supporting "unconditional aid to Israel," along with the "utter destruction" nonsense you also say he does so, "Even despite Israel's utter destruction of Gaza, which I consider a genocide" (emphasis added).

There are a lot of people nowadays who believe Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza. But all of you who do simply demonstrate you don't understand what "genocide" actually is.

See, if we start with the doctrinal definition from the Genocide Convention, we see that this crime of crimes is committed by engaging in enumerated acts (not pictured) "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" (pic 2, especially red highlight).

Guess what doesn't qualify as a "national, ethnical, racial, or religious group". Right! Terrorist groups like Hamas.

And take a wild guess which group IDF ops in Gaza intend to destroy. If you said "Palestinians," you are, once again, just another of Iran's useful idiots. If you said "Hamas," give yourself a pat on the back.

The stated intent, from the very beginning of Swords of Iron all the way until today, has been to: 1) eliminate the enduring security threat posed by Hamas; and 2) repatriate all hostages. If you're not sure about that, I invite you to review these excerpts from public remarks provided by @IsraeliPM @netanyahu in October 2023 (pic 3) & October 2025 (pic 4). Slightly different wording, same intent.

Yes, I've heard the argument too many times to count now that most major "human rights" orgs & a number of "genocide scholars" & a UN commission of inquiry & even a handful of countries have all determined Israel is responsible for genocide. But they ALL use the same flawed methodology, and so their conclusions are also irreparably flawed.

That is, they ALL begin with a few specimens of political rhetoric from various Israeli officials, most of which are misrepresented or taken out of context to begin with, to establish the requisite "intent." Then they take an equally selective collection of "evidence" - much of which is from untrustworthy or unreliable sources anyway - to establish the enumerated acts to go along with the purportedly genocidal intent.

It is, once again, a hoax. Not a single one starts with the actual stated intent (eg pics 3 & 4 attached here) then takes a balanced, unbiased approach to assessing whether actions actually observed in the battlespace are consistent with the intent to destroy Hamas or, instead, to destroy Palestinians in whole or in part as such.

If you do that - if you understand the correct methodology & you apply it rigorously - there is only one conclusion: Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza, nor has it ever.

It doesn't matter what "you consider" it. You are being played, because you are ignorant. Stop, by educating yourself.

3. Stop blaming "Trump and Netanyahu for setting the Middle East on fire."

Do you know who actually set the Middle East on Fire? Terrorists like Nasrallah, Deif, Sinwar, and the Ayatollah Khamenei, along with the militaries & proxies armed groups they led. And they did so on 10/7, once again, simply to derail normalization.

In doing so, these literal terrorists demonstrated that the status quo of appeasement & diplomacy in pursuit of peace in the Middle East & a two-state solution was no longer tenable. Tbh that approach wasn't tenable for quite a while - but 10/7 proved that to be the case.

And now Trump & Netanyahu are the two world leaders with both the intestinal fortitude & the resources to establish a new status quo. That's what Swords of Iron & Rising Lion & Midnight Hammer & Roaring Lion & Epic Fury have been all about - achieving a new status quo after the aforementioned literal terrorists actually (literally) set the Middle East on fire.

The only way to successfully achieve a new, acceptable status quo is through force of arms - not arms embargoes. If you believe otherwise, you are being played. Stop it. Open your eyes & educate yourself.

Okay, those are three suggestions for specific actions you can take to help improve your safety as New York Jews. The same goes for Jews really throughout the West.

Because here's the thing. Your safety as Jews in the West has absolutely nothing to do with Palestinians. It has everything to do with countering the false narratives - primarily involving misrepresentations of international law - that are being used to justify hate & attacks against Jews.

It doesn't matter how much you try distance yourself from Israel, or zionism, or Bibi, or Trump. That won't stop some crazed lunatic from pulling a gun on you or siccing his dog on you or driving his car into your synagogue or throwing bricks at your head or any other number of seemingly random & horrific attacks against Jews we've seen escalate in the West since 10/7.

G-d forbid any of these or other acts of violence ever happens to you or someone you love. But if it does, recent experience suggests the perpetrator - and his supporters afterward - will accuse you of supporting genocide & war crimes just for being Jewish.

Because Jews are being regarded as proxies for Israel, and Israel is being regarded as a proxy for zionism, and Hamas doctrine justifies the "struggle" against the "Zionist entity" known as the State of Israel.

I've heard the term "self-hating Jew" be directed toward folks like yourself. Oftentimes you're referred to by the term "As-a-Jew." @GadSaad would probably diagnose you with suicidal empathy.

Regardless of whether any of those descriptions apply, as someone who specializes in international law I can definitively affirm you are both ignorant & naive.

If you're concerned about your safety as a Jew, stop perpetuating the lies & distortions that are - unfortunately - putting you most at risk. Stop blaming Israel & @AIPAC & conservatives like Netanyahu & Trump for ... well, everything in the Middle East & at home in New York.

Learn how to push back, with precision, against the false narratives that are being used to justify hate & violence directed against the Jewish population. This is the most effective direction you can take if you are genuinely concerned about your safety as a Jew.

[Special Ops Magazine @specialopsmag]

The legendary story of Samuel Whittemore.

In 1775, while working in his fields, Whittemore, a former officer from the French and Indian War, noticed a British relief force advancing to support retreating troops.

He quickly loaded his musket and took cover behind a stone wall, where he ambushed a group of grenadiers from the 47th Regiment, killing one soldier. He then drew his dueling pistols, and fired twice more, killing a second grenadier and mortally wounding a third.

As he fired his third shot, a British detachment closed in on his position. Whittemore drew his sword and charged them. He was shot in the face, bayoneted repeatedly, and left for dead in a pool of his own blood.

Colonial forces later discovered him still trying to reload his musket to continue fighting. He was carried to Dr. Cotton Tufts in Medford, who believed his injuries were fatal.

Against all odds, Whittemore survived and lived another 18 years, eventually passing away of natural causes at the age of 98.