Sola Gratia✝️ 🫏 of all Trades 🤔UGA Alumni 🔴⚫2+2 =4⚠️ Back the Blue👍Love America 🇺🇸 Sports Enthusiast 🏈🏀🏐🎳🥋🏓🎯🏃🏌♂️🧗♂️⛹♂️🚵♂️⛷🚣♂️
Joined October 2010
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Steel retweeted
Vaccine hesitancy is the fault of those who have covered up and failed to address the vaccine safety issues.
The Covid vaccines don't prevent infection, transmission, or illness.
They have very serious possible side effects.
Healthy people weather Covid well.
Not universal but, In general, the more shots you got, the more bouts of Covid you got, and the sicker you got.
Steel retweeted
Christian McCaffrey's grandpa was the fastest man on Earth, and at the 1960 Olympics he was quietly helping the CIA try to flip a Soviet athlete.
That's the family tree behind this jersey swap, and the rest of it is even better.
His name was Dave Sime. He showed up at Duke on a baseball scholarship as a premed kid, taught himself to sprint by reading every track book in the library, and in 1956 he tied the world record in the 100-yard dash. Sports Illustrated called him the world's fastest human and put him on the cover.
At the Rome Olympics he lost the 100 meters in a photo finish and took silver. On that same trip he was working on getting a Soviet long jumper to defect.
Pro baseball teams wanted him and the Detroit Lions drafted him, but he went to med school and spent his career in Miami doing more than 10,000 eye surgeries.
Then his youngest daughter Lisa went to Stanford to play soccer and fell for a wide receiver named Ed McCaffrey. Ed played 13 years in the NFL and won three Super Bowls, the first one with the 49ers.
Ed and Lisa had four boys, and all four played big-time college football. Max played receiver at Duke, the same school where his grandpa set records. Christian was the Heisman runner-up at Stanford. Dylan played QB at Michigan. Luke, the youngest, was a quarterback at Nebraska who transferred to Rice, switched to receiver, and got drafted 100th overall in 2024.
Three of them made the NFL. Christian had played with or against every brother except Luke, which is why he said going into Monday that this game would complete the cycle.
Luke has one thing on his famous brother too. He ran a 4.47 forty at the 2024 combine, and Christian ran a 4.48 back in 2017. So the fastest McCaffrey brother, by one hundredth of a second, is the kid who spent most of college playing quarterback.
The 49ers won 23-17 and Christian punched in two touchdowns. After the whistle Luke was already out of his Commanders jersey while Christian pulled off the one with the captain's C.
The man who said no to the Lions ended up grandpa to three NFL players. He died in January 2016, before any of them had played a down.
Steel retweeted
Imagine that American Jew with Israeli ancestry @DanielBiss thinks that @AbdulElSayed is the guy to "protect" the Jews in the US. Imagine being such a castrato as to subcontract your survival to your Muslim overlord (and Muslims are roughly 1% of the US population). Get back to me if they are ever at 10%. Biss is a disgrace to the millions of Jews who have been exterminated by various ideologies of Jew-hatred (including the beautiful and peaceful Noble Religion).
🚨 BREAKING:
Hunt: "Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?"
Abd El-Sayed: "Now, the question of the right to exist is interesting, because I've never been asked whether I believe Palestine has a right to exist. Israel exists. The question is whether we want a policy where our money is sent to Israel to commit genocide and apartheid, rather than investing it in our children."
Hunt: "Does it have a right to exist?"
Steel retweeted
Britain has already tried a plant-based alternative to wool. It was called cotton, and it went about as well as you'd expect.
For five hundred years this country ran on sheep. The Lord Speaker still sits on a sack of wool in the House of Lords, put there in the 1300s so the room would never forget where the money came from.
Then the mills of Lancashire found a cheaper fibre. By the 1850s about three quarters of it came from the slave plantations of the American South, and every bale started the same way.
The day began when it was light enough to see the plants and ended when it was too dark to see them. When the moon was full, it often went on till the middle of the night. Every basket was carried to the gin-house and weighed. Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped into twelve years of it, said nobody walked up to those scales without fear. Two hundred pounds was an ordinary day. Come in light and you were whipped. Come in heavy and tomorrow's quota went up to match.
Manchester called it progress.
When the American war cut the supply, Lancashire found out what it had built on. By the winter of 1862, in Stalybridge, five mills out of 39 were working full time. Families queued for relief. Some of the mill hands crossed the Pennines to find work in the Yorkshire woollen mills, which were still going, because the sheep hadn't gone anywhere.
A century later the Soviet Union decided to grow its own. It took the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, then the fourth largest lake on earth, and poured them onto the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.
Moynaq was a fishing port, with a cannery that turned out 21 million tins of fish in 1958. As the water went, the cannery kept going on fish trucked in from the Baltic and the Pacific, thousands of kilometres, to be canned in a port with no sea. It shut in 1990. The water is now more than 100 kilometres away, the fishing boats are rusting on the sand, and the wind lifts salt off the old seabed and drops it on the town.
And somebody still had to pick it. Every autumn the Uzbek state marched teachers, doctors, nurses and schoolchildren into the fields, and it only stopped in 2020.
As much as a fifth of the world's cotton comes from Xinjiang, and America has turned it away at the border since 2021, on the grounds that it was picked with forced labour.
That's the plant fibre's CV. Slave plantations, a starving county, a dead sea and a ban at the border.
The sheep's CV is a hillside, some rain and a haircut once a year.
Sounds like the folks building the high speed rail in California are using the same playbook...🤔
The railroad that connected America coast to coast was built on one of the biggest corruption schemes in the country's history, and the man at the center of it got a giant pyramid built in his honor.
In the 1860s, the federal government wanted a transcontinental railroad badly. It handed the Union Pacific millions of acres of land and backed it with huge government loans. The more track the company laid, the more money it got.
The men running Union Pacific realized the real money wasn't in running a railroad. It was in building one.
So they set up a separate company with a fancy French name, Crédit Mobilier of America, and hired it to do the construction. The catch was that Crédit Mobilier was owned by the same insiders who ran Union Pacific. They were basically hiring themselves.
Crédit Mobilier then charged Union Pacific wildly inflated prices for the work. Union Pacific paid with government money and borrowed funds. The profits flowed to the insiders through Crédit Mobilier, while Union Pacific itself was loaded down with debt. Investors in Crédit Mobilier saw enormous dividends.
There was one risk. Congress might start asking questions.
That's where Oakes Ames came in. Ames was a wealthy shovel manufacturer from Massachusetts, a congressman, and one of the leaders of Crédit Mobilier. He started offering shares of the company to fellow members of Congress at a bargain price, often letting them pay out of the dividends the stock itself produced. In his own letters, he said he was putting the stock where it would do the most good.
In 1869, the golden spike was driven at Promontory Summit in Utah. The country celebrated. Nobody knew yet what it had cost.
Then a former partner of Ames named Henry McComb, who felt he'd been cheated out of his share, leaked Ames's letters. In September 1872, in the middle of the presidential campaign, the New York Sun broke the story.
The list of names was brutal. Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Henry Wilson, who was about to become the next vice president. Future president James Garfield. Several powerful committee chairmen.
Congress launched investigations. Some of the men admitted taking stock but claimed they didn't know what it was. Others said they'd backed out. Colfax gave explanations that fell apart under questioning and left office in disgrace when his term ended. Garfield denied doing anything wrong and survived to win the presidency eight years later.
In the end, the House censured just two men, Oakes Ames and New York congressman James Brooks. Many people saw it as a cover. The men who took the stock got off, and the man who handed it out took the fall.
Both Brooks and Ames died within a few months.
Ames's family and supporters spent years insisting he'd been made a scapegoat for a scheme half of Washington had profited from. In 1883, the Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution praising him.
Around the same time, the Union Pacific built a monument to Oakes Ames and his brother Oliver. It's a granite pyramid about 60 feet tall, placed at the highest point on the original transcontinental line in Wyoming, where every passing train would see it.
Then the railroad moved its tracks a few miles south. The pyramid still stands today, alone on the Wyoming plains, honoring a man censured by Congress, next to a railroad that isn't there anymore.
It's called the Crédit Mobilier scandal, and almost nobody learns about it.
Steel retweeted
I like numbers. I also like basic math. And by the looks of it, neither are your friend.
The U.S. is $40 trillion in debt, yes. The deficit is now on the order of $2 trillion / year.
But if the $885 billion U.S. defense budget was cut entirely, we'd still be running a $1 trillion deficit. I hate the endless wars in the Middle East, too, but it is a mathematical impossibility to balance the budget without making reforms to welfare and entitlement programs, which, unlike defense spending, grow as a percentage of GDP every single year on autopilot.
Steel retweeted
Oct 20, 1803: The Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase. The president who made the deal wasn't sure it was constitutional.
Napoleon had offered to sell all of Louisiana, about 828,000 square miles, for $15 million. It doubled the size of the United States overnight. Thomas Jefferson was thrilled, and also uneasy. He had always argued the federal government could only do what the Constitution specifically allowed, and it said nothing about buying land from foreign countries.
He drafted a constitutional amendment to make the purchase legal. Then his diplomats warned him that Napoleon was unpredictable and might change his mind if the US took too long. Jefferson dropped the amendment and sent the treaty to the Senate.
Federalists in New England hated the deal. They feared new western states would shrink their power, and a few even talked about breaking away from the Union. It didn't matter. The Senate approved it 24 to 7.
The US didn't have $15 million on hand. It paid largely with bonds sold through British and Dutch banks. That meant British bankers were helping finance a deal that put money in the pocket of Napoleon, Britain's worst enemy.
Two months later the American flag went up in New Orleans. The next spring, Lewis and Clark set out to see what the country had bought.
Steel retweeted
An audience member left me a gift anonymously at one of my shows this weekend, and I hope this message finds them.
Inside the box was an antiquity coin minted in Judea during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, nearly 2,000 years ago.
Inscribed in ancient Paleo-Hebrew are the words “Harut Zion” — “The Freedom of Zion.”
[It came from Zak’s Antiquities in Jerusalem, a place familiar to anyone who grew up loving the Land of Israel and bringing small pieces of history back home.]
The Zealots deliberately used the script of their ancestors, dating back to the time of King David, to assert their claim to Jewish sovereignty in their own land.
Two thousand years later we keep those same words, that same struggle, and that same land.
One of the great privileges of being on tour has been knowing the people on the other side of the audience. No comment on Instagram could replace laughing with you in person.
To whoever gifted me this thoughtful piece of history, thank you.
עם ישראל חי
Steel retweeted
Thanks to mandatory minimum wages in blue states, you guys did this, not Trump.
Steel retweeted
It doesn’t make any difference really who holds the match. It’s never the guy with the match. It’s the guy who funds the guy with the match. It’s the political party who funds the guy who funds the guy with the match. It’s finally the communists every time and always has been.
BREAKING:
The arsonist of Limoges city hall has been detained
He is a 40-year-old far-left Antifa activist on France’s national security watch list for his ties to radical ultra-left extremist movements.
He also has a history of police records for “violence against a person holding public authority.”
🇫🇷
Steel retweeted
Translation: If Americans own guns, how are we Noble Muslims supposed to massacre them?
Steel retweeted
Cottonseed oil spent its first half century in the American kitchen travelling under other people's names.
In the 1870s the cotton gins of the South had a problem the size of a mountain, and it was the seed. Millions of tons a year, far more than any farm could plough back in, with an oil inside it that nobody would knowingly buy.
So nobody was told.
In 1881 a Georgia farm paper reported, almost cheerfully, that refined cottonseed oil was being shipped in quantity to Italy and Spain, cut two parts to one with olive oil, and sold to the world as pure olive oil. In Maine, the same paper said, herring were being tinned in straight cottonseed oil and labelled in French as sardines in the best olive oil.
Then it went into the lard.
By 1884 the crushers had pooled their mills into the American Cotton Oil Trust, modelled on Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and a trust that size needed a bigger customer than the sardine.
In March 1888 a House agriculture committee in Washington took evidence on what the meat packers were selling as lard. Two former workers from a Boston pork packer testified that the firm made two grades, one pure and one a compound. Affidavits were read out stating that petroleum tanks had been cleaned before being used to carry the cottonseed oil.
Cleaned, they wanted it on the record.
The trade's answer to the scandal was a new name for the product: compound lard.
In 1895 California's olive growers were still complaining in print that American cottonseed oil was crossing to Europe, being blended into olive oil, and coming home labelled pure olive oil, undercutting their own pure oil at half the price or less.
The government got round to prosecuting eventually. In 1914 a New York importer pleaded guilty over a shipment labelled Lucca Oliv Oil that was largely cottonseed, with the word cottonseed printed in smaller type. His fine was $25.
By then the oil had found a better disguise. In 1911 Procter and Gamble hydrogenated it into a white paste, called it Crisco, and sold it to housewives as the modern, scientific replacement for the lard it had spent the last thirty years counterfeiting.
After that it went into the margarine. Then the salad oil. Then the labels stopped naming it at all and called it vegetable oil, as if a cotton gin were an allotment.
French sardine oil, Italian olive oil, compound lard, Crisco, vegetable oil.
It has had more names than a conman, and the one it never seems to use is its own.
