Mere words will never be able to express how much I hate Trump and MAGA for their many crimes, including what they have done and continue to do to our closest ally, Canada, who stood with us in our hour of need and asked for nothing in return.
Delta Flight 15 takes off from Frankfurt at dawn.
On board: 218 passengers. Families. Business travelers. A pregnant woman. Shirley Brooks-Jones, 65 years old, heading home to Columbus, Ohio.
Five hours into the flight, a note reaches the cockpit.
All U.S. airspace is closed. Land immediately.
The captain says nothing about why. He tells passengers it's a minor instrument problem. Privately, the crew already knows about the World Trade Center.
Gander International Airport. Newfoundland, Canada. Midday.
The plane touches down 400 miles off its route. Out the window, passengers count 38 other jumbo jets already parked on the tarmac.
By nightfall, 53 international flights sit grounded here. Nearly 6,600 people are stuck, with nowhere to go.
Nobody is allowed off.
For 28 hours, 218 people sit inside that plane. No real answers. No word on what's happening back home.
Here's what makes it worse: most of them don't yet know if their own families are safe.
Word finally spreads through the cabin. Two hijacked planes. The towers. The Pentagon. A field in Pennsylvania.
The plane goes silent.
Gander. Day two.
Passengers finally step off the aircraft. They're bused 45 kilometers to a town called Lewisporte.
Population: just over 3,300 people.
Lewisporte has no idea 218 strangers are about to double its guest capacity overnight. It doesn't matter.
The mayor puts out one call for bedding and food.
The whole town answers.
Schools close. Churches open. The Lions Club clears its hall and sets up cots by hand. High schoolers skip class to serve meals and translate for confused travelers.
The pregnant passenger is placed in a home across the street from urgent care.
Elderly passengers are welcomed into private houses, not shelters.
Phone lines are opened for free, unlimited, day and night.
When passengers try to pay shopkeepers back, the answer is always no.
Nobody in Lewisporte will take a dollar.
Local volunteers even bring out screech, the region's famous rum, and host a mock "screeching-in" ceremony to make the exhausted travelers laugh.
For three days, this town of fishermen and loggers cares for people it has never met and will likely never see again.
Brooks-Jones later calls it something simple.
She says: "the most beautiful experience I have ever had in my life."
Gander Airport. Three days later. Departure.
Flight 15 is finally cleared to fly home.
Before takeoff, Brooks-Jones asks the captain for one thing: permission to speak on the intercom.
He hands her the microphone.
She reminds everyone what Lewisporte just did for them. Then she asks for something back.
Pledge sheets start moving up the aisle.
Business travelers write checks. Strangers pass around pens. By the time wheels touch down in Atlanta, passengers have pledged $15,000.
Brooks-Jones doesn't stop there.
Back in Columbus, she calls the Columbus Foundation. An anonymous donor hears the story and matches it instantly, doubling it to $30,000.
In 2002, the fund gets a name: the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund.
It's built for one purpose. Send local kids to college.
More than two decades later.
The fund is still active.
It has sent more than 300 students from the Lewisporte area to college and trade school. Doctors. Nurses. Engineers. Teachers.
Some of them weren't born yet when Flight 15 landed.
Brooks-Jones has flown back to Newfoundland more than two dozen times since 2001. She still shows up for graduation ceremonies.
The friendships that started on cots in a high school gym are still going, more than 20 years on.
Most people who know this story didn't hear it from a history book.
They heard it from a Broadway stage. Lewisporte and Gander's kindness became a musical called "Come From Away." It has since played in cities across the world.
Few people watching that show realize the scholarship fund behind it is still cutting checks to real students, every single year.
“No Kings” protestors carrying enough American flags and facing enough unprovoked tear gas from the police to look like II Corps stop Cemetery Ridge.
Courtesy of LA Times
If we’re going to call Harvard a hedge fund, then we need to acknowledge that it’s one that outperformed Bessent’s by >600bps annualized.
Hilarious to see so many people look at this and point to illicit activity when the answer is as simple as “hodl SPY or QQQ”.
Energy Twitter wins a “fell for it” award over its celebration of Wright as Secretary of Energy. With the elimination of the loan program and cutback to the research labs, his job is essentially to watch the nuclear weapons. You fucking idiots.
DOGE Is Obliterating American Industry trib.al/1CS262z
Damn, they got rid of DEI and the whole Navy went to hell.
F/A-18E Super Hornet Slides Off Deck While USS Harry Truman Was Evading Houthi Attack
The F/A-18E's loss is the latest in a string of incidents to befall the Truman, including a collision and friendly fire shootdown as combat ops grind on.
Latest: twz.com/news-features/f-a-18…
You god damn fucking moron. We’ve talked about COI problems for a decade and you didn’t care. Now you finally realize it can be a problem! How did this take you a fucking decade to realize?
I just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes.
It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income. It’s an irreconcilable conflict of interest.
President Elon eliminating the 18F team proves DOGE is a total fraud and the goal of these SV bros is just to line their own pockets with the public purse and then cut their own taxes again.
How can you be an LP of one of this guy’s funds after you see what he posts? He’s clearly stupid since the government posts this detail for everybody to see! But, the answer David is that the country is an insurance company with a side gig as a military.
Spatch1003 retweeted
New populist Republican Party strips pediatric cancer research funds from funding bill lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/202…
Good chart from GS. Nearly 85% of HF ADV coming from pods and quants with a very different time horizon/factor outlook than the typical equity long/short fund.
During Trump's first term, retaliatory tariffs were targeted against states that backed Trump. I wonder if we'll see something similar in Trump's second term, but now directed against, say, Tesla.
I guess we’re going to do that 2016 thing again where people get pumped about various oil & gas folks becoming Secretary of Energy and guiding us toward a CO2 filled energy future, not realizing that the job is mostly about the nuclear weapon stockpile.
Liberty Energy’s Chris Wright is Harold Hamm's Top Choice for Energy Secretary
Read the full article: hartenergy.com/exclusives/li…
Among the many startling facts on US WW2 production is the USS Kwajalein (CVE-98). It was laid down on 2/19/44, just 16 days after the namesake battle.
I picture an exhausted officer in the Navy Dept, eagerly awaiting each victory, so he could use the name for one more carrier.
AI engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
This forced birther weirdo lives in Canada, so he can criticize doctors knowing that he will never have to face the wrath of a psychopathic GOP DA trying to make a name for himself and that his wife and daughters will always have access to life saving health care.
Bill wants to make America healthy again by supporting the party that’s trying to stop vaccinations, pollute the air, and dump chemicals in the water.
If you want to know how smart Bill is about health care, check out how many billions he lost on Valeant.
This is a long-winded waste of electrons. The argument here seems to be that it was better to let tens of millions of Eastern Europeans and Chinese die to keep the Soviets contained so they couldn’t rule those tens of millions. Literally destroying the village to save it!
There are deep problems with the outcome of WWII. Most disturbingly, the war ends with the Josef Stalin and the Soviets in control of half of Europe and dominant in Asia.
Yet the narrative is that WWII was fought to end tyranny.
In the Atlantic Charter FDR stated that one of the core aims of Allied intervention was to establish "a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want."
But that isn't what happened. Instead, WWII ended with a brutal dictator in control of vast swaths of new territory. WWII did not end aggression or tyranny. If anything, the conflict ended with even more human beings worldwide under totalitarian domination.
Was WWII fought to free Poland? If so, it was a failure. Poland remained under Soviet control for another 40+ years.
Was WWII fought to free China from aggression and genocidal? If so, it was a failure. The communists immediately seized control and brutally murdered and starved tens of millions.
I have been told that Germany invading Poland in September of 1939 was a terrible international crime. Yet, the USSR also invaded Poland in September of 1939, seizing more territory than the Nazis! The communists also immediately killed nearly 10x the number of Polish civilians during the period between 1939-1941.
Yet, at Nuremberg Soviet judges sat in judgment over their former Nazi allies! How can we call this justice?
What a farce.
Claims that the holocaust justified American intevention are also flawed. For one, no Allied leader made alleviating the plight of the Jews a central cause of going to war. Not one! Jewish suffering was not important to FDR. It certainly was not important to Josef Stalin. Historical honesty means we need to understand the Allied leaders as they understood themselves.
We must also confront the way in which the war was fought.
Every major allied combatant targeted civilians for destruction and employed concentration camps. This raises a question: if murdering civilians in death camps is evil then how can we justify killing them with high explosives and nuclear weapons?
If the Nazis rounding up and imprisoning Jews was wrong then why was FDR rounding up and imprisoning Japanese justified?
Is murdering civilians always evil or is it only evil when the bad guys do it?
I have never seen defenders of the mainstream narrative provide a satisfactory answer. In the end, the chief defenders of the mainstream narrative revert to arguing that the Allies had "no choice."
We had to give $300 billion in aid to Stalin. We had to let him take over half of Europe and virutally all of the Far East. We had to help Mao come to power. We had to firebomb all those women and children. We had to nuke those Japanese.
We had no choice.
In the end, I find this argument childlike and weak. A serious thinker considers alternatives.
Even more disturbing, virtually every defense of Allied conduct in WWII ultimately becomes a defense of communism and the Soviet Union.
It is clear that we desperately need to take a fresh look at the most important conflict of the modern world.
Of course, WW2 didn’t end with a clean conclusion, every survivor a paladin and every deceased a monster. The real world doesn’t work that way. We can criticize the western Allies for what they did wrong; that’s one of the Four Freedoms they fought for!