Today is our nations Memorial Day. Enjoy your day and take a moment to remember the true meaning of this day. A day to pay our respects to all those who have given their lives in our country's defense. God bless these brave heroes and their families.

This is not a political ad, even though I congratulate the Governor of Montana for doing something good. Nor is it a commercial for a big national bank, even though I congratulate @WellsFargo for doing something good. This is actually an ad for mikeroweWORKS, even though I don’t mention my foundation by name until the last few seconds, or congratulate myself for doing anything at all. And yet, every time this ad airs, hundreds of people run to mikeroweWORKS.org to apply for a work ethic scholarship or donate to the cause. For that reason, I’d be grateful if you shared this. As you may have heard, we’ve got $10 million set aside for this next round of scholarships, and I’m doing what I can to make this our biggest year so far. I’m also curious about any theories you might have, as to why an ad that was filmed on my iPhone and cost exactly zero dollars to produce is outperforming all the others.

And people wonder why certain professions are so low trust these days...especially those people in those professions...

They keep sending me this.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👇

I don’t know what to say, really. Sometimes words on a screen are easy to brush by. Then sometimes they jump through the glass and demand to be felt. This is one of those. The intensity of this pain is beyond language. A mother at 46. A son at 12. A man racing through an ordinary morning while the extraordinary waits at the edge of the day. She waited for you brother. There's something sacred in that. In a world that tears things away without warning, she held on long enough to leave with your hand in hers. I can't really put into words how powerful that is. Life is unbearably fragile. It gives us Paris, and memories. It gives us children. Sometimes a little laughter over a drink. Then it reminds us that all of it is rented. Borrowed time. An unfortunate fact I've myself been reminded of lately. What remains is not the years she was denied, but the depth she achieved. Clearly it was profound. The fact that she was loved like that. The fact that she loved like that. Some losses rearrange the soul. And I can tell by the rawness of your words, this is one of them. I am praying for you all. I don't know you well, but I want to. And I, like many others, stand by for whatever you may need.

Happy Birthday to the OST GOAT John Williams.

Martin: I want the chair I was sitting in when I watched Neil Armstrong take his first step on the Moon. And when the US hockey team beat the Russians in the '80 Olympics. I want the chair I was sitting in the night you called to tell me I had a grandson. I want the chair I was in all those nights, when your mother used to wake me up with a kiss after I'd fallen asleep in front of the television. Ya know, I still fall asleep in it. And every once in a while, when I wake up, I still expect your mother to be there, ready to lead me off to bed... Oh, never mind. It's only a chair.

In 1860, would George Washington seen himself as an American, and thus support the Union, or a Virginian and thus support the Confederacy? Please check the comments, repost and debate before voting. I'm interested in the thoughts.

"You have to like it, or you're not a real Star Trek fan!" they explained. Yeah . . . no. NOPE. TNG survived for two reasons. First, they gradually removed Roddenberry's hands from the levers of control. Second, the scripts got consistently better through S2, and by S3 the cast had settled into their parts, and the stories were solid. S3-S5 ended up being terrific. And while S6 and especially S7 had a few wobbly ones, the scripts were there. DS9? Similar trajectory. Things were kinda wobbly right up until the Jem'Hadar menaced Sisko and Co. on a Gamma Quadrant away mission. At which point the series (and the characters) locked on target and didn't flinch. Some of the best writing the franchise had ever seen occurred between DS9 S2 and DS9 S6. Excellent scripts. And the part that doesn't get talked about enough? Both TNG and DS9 worked hard to stay faithful to the future history as shown in TOS and the Shatner films. There was precious little deliberate retconning, overwriting, or ignoring. In fact, the opposite was often true. Each series bowed deeply and tipped its hat to the past, even going so far as to give us gems like "Relics" where Scotty himself returns, and "Trials and Tribble-ations," where DS9 cast pay a well-crafted and deceptively seamless visit to one of TOS's most famed episodes. The only modern Trek to do anything like that is probably Lower Decks. But as a friend of mine pointed out Lower Decks is like a Rick and Morty animation comedy that off-duty Next Generation crew would kick back and watch; laughing at how Starfleet life is done up for yuks. SNW? Apocryphal. Re-writing the canon. STD and SFA? Also apocryphal. Literal alterna-history within the future history. And badly written, with poor characters which are often deliberately obnoxious. Worse perhaps even than Wesley Crusher. And that's really saying something. No Trekkie is obliged to like and consume ANYTHING the studios shove at us. We derided the fifth Shatner film for being bad, because it *was* bad. A very mediocre script, shot on a mediocre budget, with mediocre directing. So disliked in fact that Paramount brought Nicholas Meyer back to do Undiscovered Country so that the Kirk cast of yore could go out on a W, not an embarrassing L. TNG Insurrection? TNG Nemesis? Poor outings. Scripted more like TV two-parters that never made the cut, and were fairly shoved at the audience because we will pay to see anything with Star Trek written on it. Again, the answer is: NO. Just, no. A series or film is either quality, and respects the lore, or it doesn't. And there's precious little that's deliberately disrespected the lore that I'd call quality. And I am certainly not going to waste my time paying for streaming services just to watch series by people who've already proven in prior outings they have no clue what they are doing. And proudly flip off us older Trekkies. I will happily re-watch my DVDs of TOS, TNG, and DS9, thank you. Hell, I might even invest in sets of VOY and ENT, just to round it out. I will never invest in any DVD, Blu-Ray, nor 4K, of anything with Kurtzman's hands on it. And I gave away my DVD of 2009 JJ Trek. After the abysmalness of Into Darkness and Beyond. The second attempting to re-tread the Khan plot, and the third just . . . being dumb. Really dumb. You only get to lay so many bad eggs before nobody comes to your hen house anymore. Doesn't matter how much loyalty remains for prior incarnations.

Scott Adams piercing the veil of heaven.

Radicalizing me was a mistake.

Dear Scott... I've just been told how sick you are, and now I'm not having a good evening. I don't want the last things you think about here on this planet to be me complaining about how the human race isn't good enough. I know you made a career out of helping us laugh at human folly, but for whatever time you have left, I hope you can be happy, and have hope that the human race will muddle through. We, my family, just went through a fight like this, and it was hard enough to bear even though we won. It's hard to fully imagine what it's like to lose. I knew you were sick, but I didn't realize things were this... close. So tonight, I'm pretty fucking gutted. The universe can be a real bitch. I'm angry and sad because I never got a chance to know you, and because for so many people who did, they didn't get a chance to know you long enough. People are unique. They're irreplaceable. And some people are even more unique and even more irreplaceable, and we're all irreparably damaged when we lose them. I'm sorry. This wasn't meant to be me complaining and feeling sorry for myself and the rest of us. We're just spectators right now. It's not about us. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna promise you we'll be alright. We'll be sad for a while, then we'll dust ourselves off and move on. And we'll get back to work on fixing our country, and on fixing cancer, and on getting out of the gravity well and colonizing the solar system and a dozen other important things on humanity's collective list. We'll figure it out somehow, because we gotta. It's okay for you to rest now.

Sí, a mi país le arrojaron dos bombas nucleares. Y sí, parte de mi familia murió por eso. Justamente por esa historia aprendí algo esencial: el pasado no puede ser una cadena eterna. La memoria sirve para no repetir, no para vivir odiando. No cargo culpas que no me pertenecen ni convierto el dolor heredado en identidad. VENEZUELA LIBRE!!! LA LIBERTAD AVANZA!!! Gracias @POTUS

I’m a black woman who pretends to be a catgirl on the internet. I enjoy sci-fi novels and I fix cars for enjoyment. None of that tells you a damn thing about the usefulness of MY stance of gun control. Just like you being a gun owner, a veteran, or married to a crime victim tells nobody anything about whether a proposed law is constitutional, effective, or even coherent. Personal biography is not policy analysis. It’s just vibes in a dress uniform. In your case, I'll bet the medals are on backwards. Gun control is a nice idea. So is banning drugs. So is banning murder. The problem isn’t intention, it’s reality. Laws don’t operate in a vacuum where only good people follow them and bad people politely comply. They operate in the real world, where criminals route around restrictions the way water routes around rocks. Felons and domestic abusers are already prohibited from owning firearms. The "Charleston loophole" rhetoric pretends this isn’t true, as if violent criminals are currently wandering into gun stores, twirling mustaches, and lawfully purchasing rifles because a stopwatch hit zero. That isn’t how crime works, and it isn’t how criminals acquire guns. (HINT: They steal them, generally) What these laws ACTUALLY do is expand discretionary denial and delay for people who are already legal, already vetted, and already compliant. They turn a right into a permission slip that expires if the government is slow, incompetent, or simply hostile. If the state can block a right by failing to act, that right no longer exists. It’s a favor. You can believe gun control should work. (Many people do.) The thing is, belief isn’t evidence. Your credentials aren’t arguments. If the policy fails in practice, pointing at your life story doesn’t make it succeed.

if you'd like to understand why the generations above you have so little respect (and increasingly so little tolerance) for your cohort, it's simple: everything we made was optional and opt in. Interesting people did interesting things and if you liked them, you got on board. and that was cool. and if you didn't, you didn't. and that was cool too. but you took the awesome stuff we built for you and you politicized it all. you turned it from the ask of "accept me?" upon which our culture was based to an institutionalized demand of "accept me!" backed by the force and institutions of the state and indoctrinated into curriculums and cancel culture. bowie just did things and offered them up for people to like or ignore or criticize as they saw fit. you passed laws that if we didn't like you it was a hate crime. you were neither inclusive nor interesting. you did not make offers, you made demands. you became performative crybully assault artists wielding absurdist identity like a mace against anyone you did not like or sought to dominate. you made it into a post-modern kafka trap and force-fed it to a nation who was not allowed to say "no." you hated the cool kids so much that you made the worlds they built into joyless bataan death marches of avolitional aggrievement worship by incredibly marginal people. you mistook the surface and seeming of a thing for the substance of it and a self-serving cargo cult of theater kid histrionics for identity and worse, for meaning. and you dragged the rest of us into it against our will and tried to demand a respect and acceptance you were unable to earn. it's been one big "everyone gets a trophy day" cum pity party, invitation by gunpoint, thrown by a group of hyper-demanding, entitled brats. and the fact that you "do not understand" how we "ended up here" or see why the distinction of choice vs force matters is exactly why everyone is so terribly sick of you and does not want you around. i grew up in the very cultures you describe. and you wrecked them because you were too lame to handle freedom.

Funny how the man who has paid more taxes than any human being in history is described as “living tax-free.” What they call hoarding is mostly unrealized equity in companies that millions of people voluntarily use and benefit from. It isn’t cash sitting in a vault. It’s ownership in productive enterprises. If someone’s wealth rises because they built things people choose to buy, that isn’t theft. And if prices for gas, groceries, and rent are crushing people, that problem wasn’t created by Elon Musk. It was created by inflationary spending, regulation, energy restrictions, and monetary debasement imposed by the very political class demanding more taxes. The truly sad part isn’t that someone succeeded. It’s that success is treated as a moral offense so others can justify entitlement and avoid responsibility. Resentment isn’t a policy. Envy isn’t fairness. And punishing production won’t make anyone richer.

So, these Astral Bodies, we thinking 'Night of the Comet', "Battle of Los Angeles', or 'Skyline'?

I’ll lose followers, but fine – my account is mine to do w/ as I please. I try to keep my powder dry on issues outside of aviation / cooking / Journalism, but at times I feel I have something to say. Here goes: You have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. I cherish these rights & have exercised them myself. Protest does not mean damaging things. Speaking does not mean blocking streets. Neither means setting things on fire or blocking / attacking law enforcement. Law enforcement may be wrong. Perhaps your cause is just, but in this age, imagery is not as easily controlled & gate-kept. Most Americans don’t believe law enforcement is setting fires. They don’t believe law enforcement is looting, and the accusations that they are just going around beating people randomly, unprovoked is met w/ a high burden of proof. We’ve seen too many body-cam videos. If you want your cause to prevail, you cannot be the party of destruction & violence. That is the language of youth, anger, inexperience & lack of impulse control; an angry mob unable to control their emotions, unable to reason, unable to bargain. Petulant children throwing a tantrum, often for reasons not even related to the thing they protest. Destruction & violence is used to conquer & subjugate, not co-exist & reason. When I see these images & imagine myself as law enforcement, given orders to “try to keep the city from anarchy” (universal misery), I side w/ law enforcement. If we are selectively enforcing laws, we have no laws. If it’s not right for one side, it can’t be OK for the other. The law must not care about politics, cause, popularity or emotion. Civil disobedience is a noble concept, but only because those who violated the law did so knowingly & selflessly accepted the consequence. Historical examples did not involve destruction…it worked because it made the police look like they brutally assaulted a peaceful crowd over minor issues; regular Americans were appalled. I see no evidence this is the case here; in fact, in the imagery I see, it’s the reverse. The pictures I see of fires, throwing rocks & looting only hardens my heart against your cause. Further, the idea that there will not be an effort to enforce the law evenly for these acts – created by placating politicians playing for popularity – disillusions me. I make no threat here, but at some point, neither side will believe the law should apply to them. Neither side will accept that there should be consequences for their actions; that THEIR cause justifies the means. At this point, anarchy manifests & that becomes very, very ugly, very, very quickly. The zealots cheer for it, but they’re fools – it’s a battle everyone loses. A side will eventually win in that scenario, sure, but as they say: “God is on the side of the strongest battalion”. There is not a moral victor, just a victor who is better at killing their enemies than the other side. You have a right to speak & protest, for whatever your cause is. I’m sure you’re angry. Control it, express your opinion, work through the system, elect the people you want for change. My advice, though: mind the imagery if you want to sway the population. It’s easy to do far more damage than good, & quickly. Block my roads to detain me, damage my monuments, loot my community, burn down my city…now you’re not making some moral stand, you’re an unstable threat who doesn’t respect or even fear the law. You don’t care. If government steps in & makes you care, fine. Lesson learned. Law reigns over all, regardless of emotion or passion. If not…then I see no reason to care about the law, either. I no longer trust the government to protect me & I’ll make a backup plan to deal with threats. The Egyptians fell. The Akkadians, Shang Dynasty, Greeks, Romans…all fell. In part, they did so because more people than not began to believe their government was playing favorites & the foundations were rotten. It was not a good time after for any of them.

Follow her, if only for the very cool deep dives on the Bat Cave, Hive Cities and Kowloon city. Stay for the other brilliancies.