Here I am @TrackerRunDMC85

"An Associated Press journalist heard at least seven explosions and saw at least four plumes of black smoke rising near or inside a military base hosting U.S. forces in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, around 9:30 a.m. local time Friday."

AZ Intel @AZ_Intel_

5 days ago

Initial reports of explosions near Erbil International Airport in Iraq. - AFP/Al Arabiya

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Yup

Kevin Bass @kevinnbass

5 days ago

Barack Obama promoting "far right" views about illegal immigration in 2008:

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Girl, 11, becomes first in UK to receive innovative sight-saving gene therapy news.sky.com/story/girl-11-…

The crucifixion gets denied in a single verse, and that verse is a linguistic riddle even its own scholars can’t agree on. Surah 4:157: “They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to APPEAR so to them”, wa lakin shubbiha lahum. That phrase, shubbiha lahum, appears exactly ONCE in the entire Quran. A hapax legomenon, a word that occurs a single time, so its meaning depends entirely on interpretation. And Muslim scholars have never agreed: Ibn Kathir and al-Tabari: God cast Jesus’ likeness onto someone else, who was crucified in his place. But WHO? Some say Judas. Some say Simon of Cyrene. Some say a volunteer disciple. No consensus. Some modern scholars: it means Jesus WAS crucified, but his enemies didn’t truly “defeat” him. One verse. One word. A dozen contradicting explanations. Now compare the crucifixion in the Bible: four Gospels, written within the eyewitness period, in complete agreement, plus the non-Christian historians Tacitus (Annals 15.44) and Josephus, who both record Jesus’ execution under Pilate. Friend and enemy agree He died. I was staking my soul on the single most disputed word in my book, against the single best-attested event in ancient history. “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3. He wasn’t rescued from the cross. The cross was the rescue.

Today, our nation pauses to honor four American heroes. 🇺🇸❤️ We lift their families in prayer, give thanks for their service to our country, and mourn alongside them. God bless our fallen heroes, and may God bless the United States of America.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged roughly 300,000 years ago during the Pleistocene, when CO₂ cycled between 180 and 300 ppm (recorded in ice cores). Yet our broader ancestral tree traces back 25 million years to the warm Miocene, when Old World Monkeys and early hominids diverged in an atmosphere hovering around 400–500 ppm. Today’s level of 426 ppm is not an unprecedented planetary ceiling; it's a return to an atmospheric baseline where complex primate life originally flourished. Human biology handles these levels effortlessly. Commercial greenhouses regularly enrich air to 1,200 ppm to accelerate crop yields, while US Navy submarines maintain safety limits up to 5,000 ppm. Furthermore, Earth’s biosphere is still recovering from glacial cycles so severe they carved out North America's Great Lakes. Geologically, we remain in an ice age, enjoying a warm holiday-style interglacial — the Holocene. During the Last Glacial Maximum, CO₂ plunged to 190 ppm — perilously close to the 150 ppm threshold where many plants face photosynthetic shutdown. CO₂ is not a pollutant and it's life-giving role in the biosphere has been cruelly exaggerated. It's the fundamental building block of the global food chain, and the historical data proves it's a catalyst for life, not a pollutant. At 426 ppm, the planet has rebounded from that ecological bottleneck, evidenced by NASA satellites documenting a sustained global expansion of green foliage. The world isn't choking; it's breathing a sigh of relief. IMAGE: Rainforest thriving in far north Queensland.

Elon: it says here we're spending $80b for "save the baby pandas" treasury: yeah Elon: hmm, well have we ever seen the pandas? treasury: no Elon: text them right now, ask for a photo of the pandas treasury: uhhh, we're not allowed to do that Elon: do they at least submit an invoice and have a "charitable Panda causes" code? treasury: no Elon: we don't even have invoice codes?! how do we know they have a contract with us treasury: it's kinda the honor system with these NGOs Elon: well how about an address, do they have an address treasury: I already know you're not going to like this, it's in Somalia Elon: 😑

DogeDesigner @cb_doge

5 days ago

🚨 Elon Musk on DOGE: "I think the goal of DOGE was to try to do something about the deficit, which is massive, where the interest payments exceed the amount of money spent on the Department of War. Like basically, if you add up all the money spent on on what is now the

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True

David J Harris Jr @DavidJHarrisJr

6 days ago

That's just the truth.

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"My name's Harvey. I'm 68. I work the night shift at TravelCenter truck stop on I-40. Pump diesel, ring up snacks, clean showers. Same blue vest for thirteen years. Truckers fuel up, grab coffee, hit the road. Most are gone in fifteen minutes. 🤩🤩But I see who stays parked. Like the trucker who'd been sitting in his rig for three days. Engine off. Never came inside except for bathroom. No food, no shower, just sitting. 🤩Fourth morning, I knocked on his cab. "You okay, buddy?" He rolled down the window. Looked exhausted. "Broke down. Waiting on parts. Can't afford to eat and fix the truck both. Truck wins." "When'd you eat last?" "Tuesday." It was Friday. 🌭☕️🍟I went inside, made him a hot dog, brought chips and coffee. "Store policy. Can't sell day-old stuff." It wasn't day-old. But he was starving. 😭😞He cried eating that hot dog. Started noticing others. The female trucker sleeping in her cab because shower credits cost too much. The rookie driver rationing gas station food because rookie pay barely covers fuel. Truckers choosing between eating and making deliveries on time. 💖✅I began keeping food. "Expired" items still perfectly good. When truckers looked desperate, I'd "find" extras they could have. Word spread on the CB radio. "Harvey at the I-40 TravelCenter helps drivers." ❤️Then something unexpected. A trucker I'd fed years ago made it big, started his own company. Came back, left $1,000. "For drivers who are where I was." 👆Now our TravelCenter has a "Trucker Relief Fund." Other truck stops copied it. Fifty-three stops across nine states. I'm 68. I scan Slim Jims and pump diesel fuel at a highway truck stop. 😕😓But I learned, truckers deliver everything we need to survive. And they're often starving, broke, sleeping in their cabs because one breakdown destroys them financially. 😢💔Watch your lot. Someone's been parked three days without moving. Someone's choosing between fuel and food. Find the expired snacks. Offer the shower credit. Sometimes a $4 hot dog is what keeps a trucker from giving up on a road that already gave up on them." 🥰Let this story reach more hearts.... By Mary Nelson

@CynicalPublius Free Audio Book: "Harrison Bergeron" youtu.be/uP_YwwwIScU?si…

To be clear, the non-juror list includes 3,566 non-citizens. Now, we need to cross-reference the voter rolls. In one county alone, they tried to hide the data from us until we threatened to sue them. In one county alone, there are thousands of non-citizens being summoned to jury duty. This should concern everyone in Pennsylvania & America. If it’s happening in Chester County, it’s happening in every major city across the USA. Finally, we have proof.

As we all digest the trove of evidence coming out of Senator Paul’s investigation into the origins of Covid and the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by Fauci and his scientific goons, one question always comes up: How was it possible to keep this covered up so effectively and for so long, with huge parts of our institutions, from academia and politics to the media and public health establishment, going along with it? After all, conspiracies involving large numbers of people are notoriously difficult to maintain. The answer is actually very simple: Trump. They all hate Trump. He was the glue that held the entire conspiracy together. That is the long and the short of it. If there are any honest people left, this will be taught in psychology classes 100 years from now as one of the clearest examples of groupthink, tribalism, and how hatred of a common enemy can override even the most basic principles of truth-seeking.

Senator Rand Paul @SenRandPaul

6 days ago

My committee has painstakingly combed through millions of documents related to the government’s response to COVID.  Our investigation reveals that Anthony Fauci destroyed government records and recommended that other members of government delete emails and then delete them from

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🚨 Elon just nuked the entire media playbook in under 90 seconds. Journalist: “You support the far-right!” Elon: “No. You support the lunatic left. What was completely normal 10-15 years ago is now called ‘far-right’… because your side went completely insane.” Safe cities. Secure borders. Biological reality. Common sense. None of that is “far-right.” It’s just not crazy. The Overton window didn’t shift right. The left sprinted off a cliff and started calling everyone who didn’t jump “extremists.” Elon said it out loud. And the media still can’t cope. Lunatic left. He’s 100% right. @elonmusk 👏🏻

Under the Hoseths' model, about 80% of the consumer dollar goes back to the farm and ranch gate. Under the national beef market model, it's 27% to 50%. That's the whole story. Cody Hoseth knocked on a rancher's door at 17 and asked to learn the cattle business. 14 years later, he and his wife Jen opened their own USDA-certified slaughter facility in Eltopia, Washington. It took nine attempts to get a kill floor. Nine months just to get a permit to build. "A smarter person wouldn't have done it." They built Lone Crow Meat Processing for $700,000 — Cody did all the construction himself. It should have cost three to four times that. 1,000 head of cattle. 400 acres owned, 2,000 leased. Two meat markets, a butcher shop, two 24-hour beef vending machines. 25 workers on payroll. Neither of them grew up in agriculture. They started selling meat at farmers markets and parking lots. Now five to six large family ranches will bring their cattle to the Eltopia site. "I've actually seen some very wealthy people try to build these and fail." — @MikeCallicrate "If you're not motivated enough to think about this in a 40-year perspective, I just would recommend doing something else." — @Lone_Crow_Ranch

Rhode Island state Rep. Enrique Sanchez to ICE: "Your day of reckoning will come motherf***ers. I swear to god." Yet Democrat politicians are mystified by the objections that they are fueling the exponentially rising violence against ICE officers...tinyurl.com/58h3b8nc

Third world countries are poor because of their flavor of socialism, Third Worldism. In 1955 newly independent countries met in Bandung and decided to reject Western capitalism, unite as the Third World, and chart their own SOCIALIST path to development. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah pushed it hardest with high tariffs, nationalized industry, and policies designed to discourage exports. South Korea made the opposite bet and went all-in on export driven markets. In 1970 the two countries sat at nearly identical incomes of $260 versus $250 per person. 50 years later, South Korea hit $32,000 while Ghana is still stuck at $1,786. 50 years later, Third World countries are still blaming the West and colonialism for their absolute failure to build anything.

@Vincent52072637 They built a sealed world, then discovered the building itself had been quietly eating the atmosphere. You couldn't write it.

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press. Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin. It produced 83 per cent of what they needed. Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut. So he called it a health programme. The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992. The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart. Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving. The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world. Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement. He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken. He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor. Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve. Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves. The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

Zohran Mamdani published a blood libel and two days later, it resulted in blood. A man heeded Mamdani's call, shouted "Allahu Akbar" and stabbed two people outside a synagogue.

141 years ago today, on July 23, 1885, Ulysses S. Grant died at 63. Most people know him as the general who won the Civil War and the two term president on the fifty dollar bill. Almost nobody knows how his story actually ended, and it's one of the most quietly heroic things in American history. Start with the fact that "Ulysses S. Grant" was never even his name. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. When he got to West Point, a congressman filled out the paperwork wrong and wrote him down as Ulysses S. Grant. The S stood for nothing at all. Grant just shrugged and kept it for the rest of his life. Later, when he forced a Confederate fort to give up with no conditions, soldiers said the U.S. stood for "Unconditional Surrender." Here's the strange thing though. Before the war, Grant was a failure at nearly everything he tried. He flopped at farming. He flopped at real estate. By his late thirties he was working as a clerk in his father's leather goods store, hauling hides for his younger brothers. Then the war came, and the quiet clerk turned out to be one of the greatest military minds the country ever produced. He took Vicksburg. He ground down Lee. He accepted the surrender at Appomattox and, instead of gloating, let the Confederate soldiers keep their horses so they could plant crops. Then he won the White House twice. So how does a man like that end up dying broke? In 1884 Grant trusted his savings to a Wall Street firm run by a young hotshot named Ferdinand Ward, basically the Bernie Madoff of his day. Ward was running a con. When it collapsed, Grant lost everything. He was so wiped out that he had to borrow money just to cover his household, and he handed over his war trophies and swords to pay a debt. The most famous soldier in America was suddenly poor. Then it got worse. Doctors found throat cancer. Grant had smoked as many as twenty cigars a day, a habit the public actually fed. After his victories, admirers mailed him cigars by the thousands, and it very likely killed him. Now here is the part that gives me chills. Grant knew he was dying, and he knew he was leaving his wife Julia with nothing. So a man in constant pain, throat closing up, some days unable to speak above a whisper, sat down to write his memoirs and out earn death itself. Mark Twain, who admired him, offered him a stunning book deal, far better than anything normal authors got. Grant took it and went to work. He wrote something like three hundred thousand words in about a year while cancer ate his throat. On the days he couldn't talk, he wrote on slips of paper. Witnesses said the pain was constant. He kept going anyway. He finished the manuscript just days before he died. And it worked. The memoirs became one of the best selling books of the century and are still considered maybe the finest memoir ever written by an American president. The royalties sent to Julia came to roughly four hundred fifty thousand dollars, an enormous fortune then, enough that she never had to worry about money again. He couldn't win the money back on Wall Street, so he wrote his way out and crossed the finish line with almost nothing to spare. When he died, the country stopped. Around a million and a half people lined the streets of New York for his funeral, the largest the city had ever seen. And look at who carried him. His pallbearers included Union generals and Confederate generals, side by side. One of them, Simon Bolivar Buckner, was the very man who had surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson decades earlier. He came to Grant's sickbed near the end, two old enemies making peace, and then helped carry him to his grave. That grave became Grant's Tomb in New York, the largest mausoleum in North America. A failed store clerk who saved the Union, lost everything to a con man, and then, dying and in agony, wrote a masterpiece to protect his wife. 141 years ago today. They really don't make them like that anymore.