Tim retweeted
Out today handing out sample ballots and hearing the same thing over and over: people’s churches got involved in the VA amendments, and that’s why they’re here to vote NO.
So grateful to see churches stepping up. It’s rare, and it matters.
Tim retweeted
WE AUDITED ALL 58 FOREIGN-BORN FEDERAL JUDGES SITTING ON AMERICA'S BENCH FOR LIFE.
I spent over a billion tokens and about 45 days on this deep dive.
Through this deep dive and the over a million court cases we have combed through, we have launched an American First Index (AFI) for the site. (More on it as we improve the metrics and refine deeper.)
Out of 58 sitting foreign-born Article III judges, 43 were appointed by Biden or Obama. Among those drawn from ACLU and public defender pipelines, border enforcement is blocked over 80% of the time and 60% of criminal sentences fall below federal guidelines.
We have added an interactive tool on bench receipts that allows you to drill down and look at how each of these judges behave on the bench.
This is just the start. The federal judges are easier to identify than the state level judges. I assume there are 100s if not 1000+ foreign born or first-gen American on our benches.
They do not judge on our laws, they judge on the culture they came from. This is a huge reason our country has lost its identity.
Tim retweeted
Years ago, I was having breakfast with an older Roman Catholic priest friend in Salt Lake City. I had salmon eggs Benedict in front of me, coffee in my hand, and we were talking about Mormonism.
He looked at me and said, “Father Chris, Mormonism doesn’t have theology.”
Then he changed the subject. I took another sip of coffee and went back to my breakfast, honestly puzzled. It is a religion. It calls itself Christian. Of course it has theology.
Only after years of encountering Mormon apologists online have I understood what he meant.
You may hear a Christian explain that Joseph Smith taught God was once a man, that human beings may become gods, and that there are generations of gods. Then a Latter-day Saint will look you in the eye and say, “I do not believe that, and I do not have to believe that.” They may not be lying. They may sincerely mean it.
Joseph Smith did teach in the King Follett sermon that God “was once as one of us.” The LDS Church’s own historical material acknowledges it. Their hymn, If You Could Hie to Kolob, still asks where “Gods began to be.”
Yet teachings once preached forcefully can later become embarrassing, minimized, or optional. Brigham Young taught Adam-God ideas. The Church later rejected them. Plural marriage was once defended as divine and necessary, then abandoned under enormous legal pressure. Black members were excluded from temple ordinances, and Black men from priesthood ordination, until 1978. Temple ceremonies once contained severe symbolic penalties, including gestures representing throat-cutting and disembowelment; those were removed in 1990.
That does not mean every Mormon is dishonest. It means Mormonism has no settled, received faith that even its prophet must obey. Joseph Smith could revise Joseph Smith. Brigham Young could contradict him. Later leaders could set Brigham Young aside.
This is why Joseph Smith had to persuade his followers that the historic Church had failed and that the creeds were corrupt. If the faith once delivered to the saints still stood, he could not simply create a new God, new priesthoods, new scriptures, and new doctrines whenever revelation required it. The creeds matter because they preserve the apostolic truth about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit against exactly this kind of confusion.
Christ gave His apostles a faith to guard, not a blank page upon which every generation could write a new religion. “The faith which was once delivered unto the saints” is Jude’s phrase. The Church received what she had been given.
I have gone back and forth with Mormonism myself: angry, shocked, offended, and sometimes convinced I was being lied to. Perhaps you have felt that way too. But we must not let frustration make us cruel. Pray for Latter-day Saints. Love them. Tell them the truth plainly.
The God revealed in Scripture and confessed by the Church is the eternal Creator, not an exalted man who once had to become God.
Tim retweeted
Here's how it happened for me:
I accepted the Lord in an unassuming place: My bathroom.
I looked in the mirror and simply said, "Yeshua, if You are real, then I accept You."
And that was that. No fireworks.
But then something unexpected happened.
I was seeing a therapist at the time, who was a Christian.
I said to her, "Mary Lou, I think I accepted the Lord."
And she responded, "That's wonderful, Brian. In Christ Jesus, you're forgiven."
When she said those simple words, "In Christ Jesus, you're forgiven," I began to feel like electricity was surging through me.
With difficulty, I held in my trembling and tears until our session was over.
After, I ran into my car, and I let it happen. It literally felt like I put my finger in the electric socket. I began shaking, crying, shouting, uncontrollably.
I felt like heaven was downloading into me and I couldn't stop it.
In that intense moment, I felt that I understood everything. I knew who God was, who Yeshua was, who I was in the Kingdom, and what it meant to be saved.
I was too new in the faith to have any idea what was happening at that moment. But I know now.
I was being baptised in the Holy Spirit.
Tim retweeted
President Obama, you spoke about someone’s life being turned upside down by the full weight of the federal government.
My wife, Bevelyn Williams, received 41 months in federal prison under Biden’s DOJ. Our daughter lost her mother’s presence at home. Emails later released by DOJ called that sentence an “incredible result” and “excellent news.”
President Trump pardoned her and reunited our family. He did the right thing.
Before you condemn him, address what your own political party did. Take the plank out of your own eye before pointing to the speck in someone else’s.
Your statement hit home. I’m speaking from passion, firsthand experience with government weaponization, and victory.
You describe Congresswoman Omar’s situation as political targeting by Trump. Reporting describes investigative activity under Biden. The magistrate judge who approved the search was selected by the district court, previously donated to Clinton and clerked for an Obama appointee.
Those facts establish neither guilt nor motive. They belong in the whole story.
So does my family.
Bevelyn is a Black Christian mother and private citizen. The protest happened in June 2020. NYPD was present both days. She wasn’t arrested at the scene. James sued her civilly in February 2021. Biden’s DOJ obtained an indictment in December 2022, approximately two and a half years later and after Dobbs.
Our family experienced retaliation after Dobbs. Her requested First Amendment jury instruction was denied. Our daughter lived with the consequences.
Letitia James had plenty of fight for my wife. New Yorkers deserved that same fight from their attorney general.
She had already pursued Bevelyn civilly. Then she publicly promised to come after her again. Meanwhile, federal inspectors documented failures in her office’s criminal enforcement against Medicaid fraud and patient abuse and neglect.
Vulnerable patients. Nursing home residents. Taxpayers. Their interests were her responsibility too.
She made pursuing my wife a public priority. Her own office’s failures became a matter of public record.
I call that vindictive politics and failed leadership.
President Obama, putting her in the victim’s chair does not erase the people her leadership failed.
DOJ’s weaponization report documents coordination with outside advocacy groups, a dossier containing information about me and our infant daughter, and sentencing disparities in the cases compared.
Congratulations were exchanged over my wife’s sentence. We faced separation.
Since your party emphasizes identity, include this: Trump pardoned a Black woman and reunited a Black family. Biden’s DOJ obtained the sentence that separated us.
My family does not hate Democrats. Disagreement does not have to become hatred.
Many Democrats, Republicans and Independents reject socialism and communism and want secure borders and safe communities. What we agree upon can help heal this nation’s fractures.
Selective outrage and incomplete stories are exhausting. Put the whole record before the American people. They can draw their own conclusions.
Our family mattered before a pardon.
Our pain deserves to matter even when our politics don’t match yours.
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Tim retweeted
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.
But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.
No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.
Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.
What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.
There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.
So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.
You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.
Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.
I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Tim retweeted
For two thousand years, he has carried a nickname he never earned from Scripture. The Bible never calls him “Doubting Thomas.” John calls him Thomas, called Didymus, which means “the Twin.” The label came later, from one bad week. But read everything the Gospels record about this man, and a very different picture appears. Thomas was not a skeptic by temperament. He was a man who had to know.
The first time John lets us hear him speak is in chapter 11. Jesus announces that He is going back to Judea, to Bethany, where Lazarus has died. The disciples are alarmed. The last time Jesus was there, the crowd picked up stones to kill Him. Going back looks like suicide. And it is Thomas who speaks up, not to argue, but to say to the others, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” The man the world remembers as the doubter was the first disciple willing to walk into death beside Jesus.
The second time he speaks is at the Last Supper. Jesus tells the disciples that He is going to prepare a place for them, and adds, “You know the way to where I am going.” The others nod along. Thomas does not. He says, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” It is an honest question, the kind others were too embarrassed to ask. And because Thomas asked it, the world received one of the greatest sentences Jesus ever spoke: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Thomas’s honesty pulled that answer out of Him.
Then came the cross. Thomas had been ready to die with Jesus, and instead he watched Jesus die. Everything he had committed his life to was nailed to a Roman cross and sealed in a tomb. On the evening of the first day of the week, the risen Jesus appeared to the disciples behind locked doors, showed them His hands and His side, and breathed on them. John records one small fact: Thomas was not with them. We are not told why. Perhaps he could not bear to be with the others. Grief sometimes goes off alone.
When the others found him and said, “We have seen the Lord,” Thomas gave the answer that defined his reputation: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” The Greek is emphatic, a double negative: I will absolutely not believe.
Notice exactly what he asks for. He doesn’t ask to see Jesus’ face. Faces can be mistaken in the dark, and a ghost or a vision could have a face. Thomas asks for the wounds. He wants to touch the holes made by the nails and to put his hand into the gash where the spear went in. He wants proof that the man they are claiming is alive is the same man who was crucified. Not a look-alike, not a vision, not a spirit. The same body, with the same nail wounds. As we saw with the heel bone of Yehohanan, the only crucifixion victim ever found, Roman nails left real holes in real bone. Thomas knew exactly what crucifixion did to a body, and he would not believe until he had touched it.
For eight days, he lived with that. Eight days of everyone around him being sure while he was not. Then, John says, the disciples were inside again, this time with Thomas present, and the doors were locked. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then He turned to Thomas.
Jesus had not been in the room when Thomas made his demand. But He answered it word for word: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Every condition Thomas had set, Jesus repeated back to him, and then offered His body to meet it. He did not scold him for asking. He came back, for one man, and gave him what he needed.
Here is something most people miss. John never says that Thomas actually touched the wounds. Paintings almost always show his finger in the side, but the text goes straight from Jesus’ invitation to Thomas’s response. The proof he had demanded was no longer necessary. Being seen and known so completely was enough.
And Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God.”
That is the highest confession anyone makes in all four Gospels. Others had called Jesus Teacher, Messiah, Son of God. Thomas, standing in front of the risen body of the man he saw crucified, calls Him God, directly and personally: my Lord, my God. And Jesus accepts it. A Jewish man who was not God, receiving that confession, would have torn his clothes in horror. Jesus does not correct him.
This is also where John’s whole Gospel has been heading. It begins with the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It reaches its climax with a disciple on his knees saying, “My Lord and my God.” The book opens and closes on the same truth, and the man chosen to say it at the end was the one who demanded the most evidence.
There is something else worth noticing. Jesus’ resurrected body still had the wounds. He rose in a glorified body that could pass through locked doors, and still the nail holes were there. The book of Revelation describes Jesus in heaven as a Lamb standing “as though it had been slain.” The wounds were not erased by the resurrection. They are the marks by which the risen Christ is recognized, forever.
Then Jesus says the words meant for every reader who would come after: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” And John immediately adds why he wrote his Gospel: these things are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. Thomas got to touch. You get Thomas’s testimony.
Church tradition says Thomas traveled farther with the gospel than almost any other apostle. Ancient Christian writings say he went east, through Persia and into India, and was martyred there by a spear, near modern Chennai. Christians in Kerala, on India’s southwest coast, have called themselves Saint Thomas Christians for well over a thousand years and trace their church back to him. The man who refused to believe without evidence carried the faith to the other side of the known world once he had it.
Some people say that Christian faith means believing without evidence. But Thomas shows the opposite. He demanded evidence, and Jesus came back and gave it to him. Faith in Christ was never meant to be blind. It rests on witnesses who saw, heard, and handled the risen body of Jesus, and who were willing to die rather than deny it.
If you have doubts, bring them to Him the way Thomas did. Be honest. Name what you need. He is not offended by a sincere question. He came back through locked doors for one man who asked. And when you see Him clearly, there is only one response left: my Lord and my God.
Jesus is the risen Lord who still bears the wounds of His love.
Tim retweeted
非洲真的很缺水吗？其实“懒”才是他们穷的根本原因。有数据显示，非洲地下水储量是地表的100倍，为何他们不挖井，而是到处找水？
我之前跟着一支海外工程队在那边待了快八个月，亲眼见过太多让人匪夷所思的事，说出来真的好多人都不敢信。我们当时的营地建在一片开阔的草地上，刚过去的时候要解决用水问题，队里找了个测水的师傅随便找了个地方打井，打到不到十二米就出了清水，水质甜得很，除了供我们队四十多个人吃喝洗澡，还能引出一垄水浇我们开出来的小菜园，天天浇水都用不完。
而离我们营地不到两公里的地方，就有一个百十来口人的部落村子，我第一次跟着采购去村里的时候，就看见全村人都围着一个半米深的泥坑接水，那水浑得放半小时都澄清不了，水面上还飘着虫子和牲畜的粪便，小孩渴了蹲下来直接舀了就喝，大人也不管，不少小孩隔三差五就拉肚子，缺药耽误着能拖出大病，看着真的让人心疼。我当时就问翻译，咱们这边打井出了这么多水，他们咋不来打一口？翻译笑笑说，你往后看就知道了，不是水的事。
没过多久工程闲下来，队长说反正咱们设备人都有，不如免费帮他们打一口井，也算做件好事，结果第一步就卡壳了。村长带着一群人堵在我们选好的井址，说这块地是他们部落的公用土地，要打井就得给他们十袋面粉五桶食用油外加两箱汽水，不然别想动土。我们队里想着反正也不多，给就给了，就当换一口井给村里人用，这点东西对我们来说不算什么。
接下来要找几个当地人帮忙打下手搬东西，我们说好一天给一斤玉米面两瓶汽水，这个待遇在当地已经够一个三口之家吃饱喝足了，比他们自己瞎晃赚得多太多，结果来了五个人，干了不到四十分钟，全都撂挑子坐到树底下乘凉去了，说太阳太晒，会晒伤皮肤，祖宗规矩就是正午不能干活，要等太阳落山再干活。我们想着入乡随俗那就等，结果太阳落山之后，连个人影都没见着，第二天上午好不容易来了三个，还要求必须先给汽水玉米面，不给就不动手，我们给了之后，三个人晃悠着挖了不到半米，又坐下来歇着聊天了，一聊就是一上午，第三天干脆全都不来了，托人带话来说拿到的吃的够喝够吃好几天，先回家休息，吃完了再来。
最后没办法，我们工程队自己上手，不到十天就打出了一口出水稳定的井，还给他们在井口安了简易的提水架，放了两个大木桶，跟村长说以后大家随便来打水，只要别往井里扔垃圾就行。一开始村里人可开心了，天天排着队来打水，结果半个月不到，井口就堵了，我们过去一看，大大小小的树枝石头烂叶子堵了小半井，原来大家打完水垃圾随手就扔在井口边上，下雨一冲全进去了。我们免费帮他们清干净，反复跟村长和村民说不要扔垃圾，要保持井口干净，结果不到两个月，又堵了，之后村长干脆来找我们，说井坏了，你们再帮我们打一口新的吧，那语气说得理所当然，好像我们就该天天给他们收拾烂摊子。
我之前还碰到过一次，营地的围墙坏了一段，找了四个当地工人来修，说好一天干完给对应的工钱，结果四个工人八点开工，九点就歇着喝茶，十点吃早饭，十二点要睡午觉，睡到下午三点才起来，干了不到一小时又说要回家喂孩子，一天下来只码了不到五块砖，第二天还过来要全额工钱，说我们没给他们提供茶和饼，所以干得慢，钱不能少给，当时给我们队长气得直接把他们赶走了。
待得久了我才发现，这种事真的不是个例。有个二十多岁的小伙子天天来我们营地卖野果，我们看他挺活络，就说你干脆天天给我们营地送菜，我们一个月给你固定的工钱，比你卖野果稳定多了，结果他干了三天，第四天就不见了，过了一周晃悠过来，问他为啥不来，他说前三天赚的钱够花了，在家歇着花完了再来。还有国际援助组织免费给他们发蔬菜种子，教他们开荒种地，说种好了够全村吃大半年，结果一半种子被他们煮着吃了，剩下的随便往地里一撒，既不浇水也不除草，长不出来就接着等着发援助。
真的，很多人说非洲穷是因为气候不好历史遗留问题，可我们明明看到脚底下十几米就是清水，储量够整个村子用几十年，有人免费帮你打出来，就只要随手维护一下都做不到。他们不是没有力气，跑出去找野果跳篝火舞能折腾一整天，一说到干活赚饭吃，半小时就喊累；也不是没有资源，地下水摆在那，援助摆在那，就是不肯伸手去动。
我待了八个月见过好多口废弃的援助井，全都是打完没两年没人维护废了，当地人宁愿背着水桶走三四公里去接脏雨水，也不肯花半天时间清一清堵了的井口。你说这到底是延续了几千年的靠天吃饭的生活方式已经刻进骨子里改不了，还是真的就是“懒”才导致一直摆脱不了穷呢？你怎么看这件事？
Tim retweeted
The jacket that kept the pilots of the Battle of Britain alive was designed by a Hollywood stuntman, and it was a sheep turned inside out.
Leslie Irvin grew up in Los Angeles jumping out of balloons for the cameras. In 1919 he became the first man to leap from an aeroplane and open a parachute by hand in free fall. He broke his ankle on landing and started a company on the strength of it. In 1926 he opened a factory in Letchworth, in Hertfordshire.
His parachutes were silk. Anyone whose life was saved by one was sent a small gold pin in the shape of a caterpillar, after the creature that had spun the canopy.
Then he turned to the other thing that was killing airmen. Aircraft were climbing higher every year, and the cockpits had no heating. At 30,000 feet it is 45 degrees below zero. A pilot's hands stopped working. He could not think.
Irvin's answer was approved by the Air Ministry in 1932. Whole sheepskins, the fleece left on and turned inwards, the leather out to the wind. He insisted on the most supple skins, because a man in a Spitfire can barely move his shoulders as it is.
In the summer of 1940 that jacket was hanging on a hook at every fighter station in the south of England. The bell went, the pilot pulled it on and ran. Twenty minutes later he was five miles up with no heater, fighting for his country in a sheep.
By 1945 more than 34,000 airmen were wearing the caterpillar pin.
So the Few went up wrapped in a fleece and came down under a silkworm. The Spitfire gets the statues.
Tim retweeted
The Brooklyn store Kelly Clarkson criticized on here yesterday has responded with a statement.
Tim retweeted
This is a good question that deserves a detailed reply.
The Haredim are a reactionary strain in Judaism that appeared a little over 100 years ago in response to the enlightenment. Most of them are xenophobic and intolerant. The ones who spit on Christians also spit on Jews, so don’t feel too special.
Most of them oppose Israel because they believe God should have miraculously returned the Jews to Israel through obvious magic rather than through the actions of humans. However, that’s just flavor at this point, the true problem with them has nothing to do with religion, or rather with Judaism.
This is because their true religion is not Judaism. Judaism is more of a hobby for them. Their actual religion is welfare. They are possibly the most skilled welfare abusers on the planet, though ironically also its biggest victims.
Their education system doesn’t teach any core skills such as math, science or English. It produces people who are only skilled at abusing welfare and feel a deep disdain for the state. Many of them openly refer to Israel as the enemy state and call all other Jews damned heretics. This doesn’t stop them from loving our money, however.
Due to their political power, their leadership managed to create a system in which as long as they “study” (for lack of a better term) the Torah, they don’t have to enlist to the IDF and get their lifestyle funded by the state. By the time they finish their “studies” they are too old to enlist.
During this time, it’s difficult for them to work without breaking the terms that allow them not to serve. This creates a system in which people cannot work or serve even if they want to without losing their privileges. This keeps them enthralled to their political leaders. This is why I said they are also the victims of this system.
When they were a small percent of the population, it was tolerable. The problem is that they’re also the fastest growing group of people in the country, with an average birthrate of 6.5 per woman. They’re already almost one sixth of the population.
Just to give you a sense of how bad the situation is, the average non-Haredi Jewish household contributes around 6,100 shekels to the state. The average Haredi household costs the state around 4,100 shekels. And the gap is growing.
Coincidentally, the average Arab household costs the state about 1,000 shekels per month, because Arabs also benefit from this system. However, in their case the gap is shrinking.
So Israel is funding an education system which creates people who hate the state, don’t serve in the military, and never acquire a profitable trade. As a result, about 50% of Haredi men don’t work. Naturally, this leads to a huge sense of entitlement and a fear of losing this privilege.
Faced with the danger of a slave rebellion from the rest of the country, they lash out.
Since they don’t work, they can’t go on a strike. Since they don’t serve, they can’t stop volunteering. There is nothing they’re doing that’s useful to anyone except them.
Instead, they’re terrorizing the country by blocking roads and assaulting drivers. However, these are just tantrums.
Their main power is having a large political block which makes it very difficult to form a government without them at the moment (at least as long as Bibi is in the game), allowing them to continue blackmailing the nation.
A body can only have so much fat before the muscles can no longer carry it. Unless Israel deals with it soon, the country will collapse and the enemy won’t even have to fire a single shot.
Explain the Heredim (orthodox jews) to me like I'm a child. Their behavior is baffling to me. Like many non-Jewish Americans, I look at them and see "Jewish". I tend to (perhaps wrongly) equate being Jewish with Zionism. I have been pro Zionism my whole adult life, but I see these Heredim flying Palestinian flags, spitting on Christians, and engaging in rituals that most Western people would consider unholy, or even Satanic. I've even heard Heredim deny the holocaust. Help me understand this, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Tim retweeted
When Jews were being slaughtered in Europe and Russia, they didn’t invade anyone, they went home, they bought land, legally.
The region had no sovereign state at the time, only centuries of occupation under foreign empires.
They drained swamps, built cities, created infrastructure, and that success attracted migrants, from Egypt, from the Levant, from the Arabian Peninsula, who came seeking opportunity in the land they were reviving.
When the Ottoman occupation ended, everyone in the region got a state.
The Maronites in the north got Lebanon.
The Hashemites got Jordan. Iraq was born. Syria too.
So Jews asked for one state, just one, but they were told no.
They still agreed to share the land, even though they were offered the worst half, mostly desert.
Their neighbors still said no.
Then came 1948.
Five Arab armies invaded to wipe them out. They fought, survived and won.
Then they offered peace again, but the Arabs answered with the Three No’s of Khartoum: No peace. No recognition. No negotiations.
Arabs tried again in 1967 to destroy them. Jews survived again. They captured more land, not out of ambition, but necessity.
But when peace was possible, they gave land back.
They returned Sinai to Egypt.
They withdrew from Southern Lebanon. They offered to withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank.
They offered the Palestinians everything they asked for in 2000.
Yet, Palestinians walked away.
In 2005, they unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. In return they got rockets, terror tunnels, kidnapped civilians.
Then came October 7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Civilians slaughtered, babies burned, women raped.
So I ask: What do you want them to do?
Because “Never Again” means never again.
You don’t get to massacre their people and then cry about the consequences.
You don’t get to raise your children to hate them and then blame them when war comes.
They will not apologize for surviving, they will not apologize for fighting back.
Never Again means Never Again.
Tim retweeted
Got my first American chestnuts. First time they pollinated and filled out.
Planted from seed 10 years ago.
Tim retweeted
“Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.”
—J.C. Ryle, English bishop, author, and traveling preacher who ministered to major industrial hubs including Manchester
Tim retweeted
UPDATE for those keeping up with the eminent domain situation with Fenn Church. Since when is a for profit utility company a "Sovereign Power?" Alabama Power is so hell bent on taking his land, they are taking this to the AL Supreme Court. Pray for Fenn. Pls watch, and repost👇
Tim retweeted
On this day—October 2, 1947
David Ben-Gurion stood in Jerusalem and asked the Arabs to take a state of their own and meet the Jews as sovereign equals.
Not after the war. Seven months before it. The UN had not yet voted. No Arab army had crossed a border. The British were still the government.
Ben-Gurion admitted the Arabs had refused to even sit at the same table as the Jews. But he made the offer anyway:
“We will do everything in our power to maintain peace, and establish a cooperation gainful to both. It is now, here and now, from Jerusalem itself, that a call must go out to the Arab nations to join forces with Jewry and the destined Jewish State and work shoulder to shoulder for our common good, for the peace and progress of sovereign equals.”
Six weeks later, the UN recommended two states. The Arab Higher Committee said no. In May 1948, five Arab armies invaded to kill in the crib the state whose chairman had just asked them to be partners.
The people who left during that war are now described as the victims of a plan drawn up in the Jewish Agency. The plan on the table that October was the opposite: have your own country, and those who stay in ours will become citizens and together we will build our countries as equals.
The Arabs heard him, and then chose war.
Tim retweeted
CNN published a deeply misleading story and headline suggesting that my diplomatic work in the Middle East somehow benefited investments in Israeli defense companies.
But CNN’s own reporting says otherwise. Buried behind a paywall, it acknowledges: “CNN found no indication that Kushner’s actions as a diplomat directly affected the investments reviewed.”
Phoenix is not a defense company. It is one of Israel’s largest publicly traded financial institutions, highly regulated and managing approximately $220 billion across thousands of investments.
Think of Phoenix as the Israeli equivalent of Vanguard or Fidelity. It manages the retirement savings of millions of Israelis. The savers don’t choose the individual investments, and neither do I. I have no role in deciding what Phoenix buys or sells. It has performed very well for Affinity and our investors, up more than five times since our initial investment.
Affinity is an SEC-registered investment firm. Our investment in Phoenix is public and dates to before President Trump was re-elected and before I returned to public service. Affinity does not own the defense companies highlighted in CNN’s story.
Those facts make for a less provocative headline, but a much more accurate story.
Misleading stories will not distract me from the work President Trump asked me to do: help end wars, bring people together and pursue peace. That work is too important.
Tim retweeted
There is no coherent Christian argument that the death penalty is immoral. God prescribes it for a whole host of crimes in the Old Testament. So if your position is that it is fundamentally evil to execute someone, then you must be saying either that the Old Testament is not the word of God, or that God was morally confused, or that the inherent morality of the action has changed, rendering vast swaths of Scripture irrelevant. None of those positions are compatible with Christianity.
I understand that some Christians try to get around this by claiming that the death penalty was "necessary" a long time ago but isn't necessary anymore. I'm afraid this argument doesn't remotely work. The death penalty is very explicitly prescribed as a matter of JUSTICE in the Bible, not out of "necessity." So, again, either the Bible is just flatly wrong, or God was flatly wrong, or the inherent essence of morality and justice has changed. Basic Christian theology does not leave any of those options open to you.
Tim retweeted
A self-portrait taken on the set of FULL METAL JACKET using my Rolleiflex's self-timer in 1986.
Although never spoken in the film, Private Joker's real name is J.T. Davis (as seen on the back of his PT sweats). He was named after Specialist James T. Davis, the first U.S. casualty of the Vietnam War. He was killed in action on December 22, 1961.
If interested in supporting the @FMJDiary project and exhibition, click on the links below.
ebay.io/m/IxjGyd
ebay.io/m/J04FYp
Tim retweeted
My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery.
Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster.
He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.
I wish Captain Machchhar a speedy and full recovery.
He is a true hero.