I have committed myself to read my family’s voluminous war correspondence. I picked this letter out of the pile of some 200 letters. This one written by my Grandfather, Major E.R. “Robbins” Kimball Jr. M.D. to my Grandmother Alicia Barber Kimball on the 16th of June 1945. Some 38 days after VE Day. It is written on Beckleidungswerk Waffen SS stationary from the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. “Beckleidungswerk” meaning “clothing works or garment factory” Dachau housed the first main SS clothing factory and a major depot for uniforms. It was chosen for the access to forced labor and their utility as supply and production centers for the Waffen SS. The camp was the 1st concentration camp established, on March 22, 1933. The reign of terror at #Dachau ended 12 years later when the camp was liberated by American soldiers, that included my beloved Grandfather, on April 29th, 1945. 9 days before VE Day. Chills ran up my spine just as I opened it and realized what I was reading. Which includes a brief account of some of prisoner living conditions.

Is she actually lecturing us about rich people from the back of a limousine 🤣

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.

When Spock beamed up the city of Portland; and a young Tucker McElroy who later founded & drove the Winnebago for The Good ‘Ol Boys.

Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings. He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why? Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself... Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees." He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely. This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot. Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil. The hobbits meet Bombadil early on in their quest, before they reach Bree and the Prancing Pony Inn. He rescues Merry and Pippin from Old Man Willow, and invites the hobbits to stay at his house in the Old Forest. There, the hobbits realize something strange about him: the Ring has no power over Bombadil whatsoever. When he wears it, he remains visible. He treats it as a plaything, making it disappear with a magic trick. Indeed, at the Council of Elrond, Gandalf rejects the idea of giving the Ring to Tom, for he would likely misplace it or forget about it entirely. So just who is he, exactly? When Frodo asks this very question to Tom's wife Goldberry, she simply responds "He is." It's a cryptic answer that echoes God's famous answer to Moses in the Book of Exodus: "I am who I am." Thus, many theorize that Bombadil is God, some kind of angelic being, or even the spirit of the Music of the Ainur (due to the fact that he is constantly singing). But Tolkien's letters reveal something considerably more interesting… In April 1954, Tolkien wrote: "The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship… but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control.But if you have, as it were, taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself… then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…" So, Bombadil is a representation of what it means to take pure delight in the world around you — to experience people and things simply as they are, without any thought for what they could be or how you could use them. And this is why the Ring has no power over him. To Bombadil, the One Ring is simply a ring, and the possibilities of what can be achieved through its power are of no importance. He is able to resist its evil precisely because he is entirely content with the world around him. At the end of the story, having accomplished what he set out to do in Middle-earth, Gandalf pays Tom a visit before returning to the Undying Lands: "I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time." If Bombadil is the epitome of simply enjoying life and being, Gandalf is the epitome of doing. He guides the hobbits, fights the Balrog, and runs up and down Middle-earth to help destroy the One Ring. But now that he's finally liberated from doing, he immediately heads to Bombadil's. He does so with a sense of relief, as if he's at last able to access a purer and higher mode of being — a sort of innocence that cannot be fully experienced by those consumed by doing. Of course, by this Tolkien doesn't disparage the value of action. The entirety of LOTR displays the importance of rising up against evil, even in the face of all odds. But with the inclusion of Bombadil, he does remind readers that fighting isn't all there is. Bombadil reminds us that while it's important to strive and *do*, it is just as important to occasionally step back and *be*. Indeed, your ability to do so plays a crucial role in helping you resist the allure of evil… Read the full piece here: theculturist.io/welcome The unsung hero of The Lord of the Rings...

I bet when Aimee Mann made that recording she did not expect to be doing this 41 years later: youtube.com/watch?v=qi_YjsBX…

🔥🚨DEVELOPING: Pastor Manning is facing backlash yet again after claiming America should get rid of all Black politicians as he pleads we need fathers instead. Manning: “you need to get rid of every black politician. I don't care who it is. Hakeem Jeffries, Jasmine Crockett, or whoever the hell Crocker, you can get rid of get rid of every we don't need no black politician. What we need are black fathers, we get that father in that home, we don't need no nigga.”

Illinois has the most state pension debt in America — by a wide margin. How bad is it? IL Pension Debt: $145.49B The bottom 41 states combined: $145.77B IL population: ~12.7M Bottom 41 states: ~180M And Pritzker and his allies in Springfield are considering pension sweeteners that could add $76B more in costs for Illinois taxpayers. This is not sustainable. This is a crisis.

Flash of LIGHTNING and a rainbow. Patrick captured this bright strike on the back edge of the storms in Ellsworth, Illinois, a little while ago.

Today in 1990 at age 43 Nolan Ryan pitches his 6th career no hitter…here’s the final full at bat against Willie Randolph. Amazingly RHB would hit just .158 off him that season in 410 PAs…

Nine of the biggest lightning crawlers I spotted over Chicago. Extracted from 20 minutes of footage.#ilwx

BOOM 💥 Bears great Brian Urlacher rips Pritzker You look at the money given to Illegal immigrants, where it's like ($2.5-to $3B) they could've used that money to keep the Bears in town, not for people who's not supposed to be in our Country Illegals first.. Chicagoans last

I had to read this three times before I could believe it was real. Rotherham. A small town in northern England. For sixteen years, at least 1,400 children — some as young as eleven — were raped, gang-raped, and trafficked between cities by organized groups of men. Eleven years old. Petrol was poured on them so they would stay quiet. Their families were threatened with death. Photos were taken and used as blackmail. The police knew. The council knew. The social workers knew. For sixteen years, not one of them moved. Why? Because officers were afraid of being called racist if they acted on what they were seeing. That was the whole reason. While children were being sold, adults were protecting their own reputations. That is the moment something in you breaks. And here is the part that makes it worse. The TV networks did not report it. The papers did not chase it. When the journalist Andrew Norfolk finally broke the story, even he thought maybe 150 girls had been hurt. The real number was 1,400. He was staggered. This should have been the biggest story of the decade. It was not. The networks looked away. The advertisers preferred safer topics. The cover-up did not end when the report was published — it continued in the silence of every newsroom that refused to chase it. Then Elon Musk bought X. The advertisers fled. The press declared the platform finished. X almost did not survive. But it did. And on X, the names of those towns started trending. Rotherham. Telford. Rochdale. Oldham. Towns the country had been told to forget. Britain understands itself differently today. Not because the politicians confessed. Not because the broadcasters apologized. Because one platform refused to let it stay buried. X almost did not survive. 1,400 children almost stayed forgotten. That is worth saying out loud.

Holy Cow!! Jordan Peterson exactly describes Candace Owens when he was on the Joe Rogan Experience #2308 in April 2025.

If there was a Nobel Prize for choosing the dumbest possible people to lead, Chicago would win, no contest.

Citadel Securities just put institutional weight behind what the AI bulls won't say out loud. In a new macro note titled "Tokenomics," Citadel makes the argument plainly: even the most powerful technology on earth still has to pass through the boring discipline of cost curves, capacity limits, and marginal returns. The evidence is piling up: – Amazon removed its token usage leaderboard – Microsoft cancelled Claude Code subscriptions – Multiple companies reporting unexpectedly massive token bills Their conclusion is the part that matters. Adoption is no longer about what AI can do in principle. It's becoming about the price and scarcity of the inputs needed to run it at scale. Compute. Power. Cooling. Memory bandwidth. Inference budgets. All real, all binding constraints. And here's the kicker from the chart. The Silicon Data LLM Token Expenditure Index, a benchmark for how much the market is actually spending on AI tokens, has started rolling over. Citadel reads it as a shift toward cheaper models. Companies substituting away from expensive frontier AI toward "good enough" alternatives. That's economics 101 doing what it always does. When the price of something rises, people use less of it, or find a cheaper version. Citadel sees a bifurcation forming. Frontier AI concentrated among a few firms with the balance sheets to absorb the cost. Everyone else quietly downgrading to simpler, cheaper models. This is the part of every technology revolution the early narrative ignores. The technology being real was never the question. The question was always whether the economics could carry the valuations. When one of the most sophisticated trading firms on earth starts writing about AI in the language of cost curves and rationing instead of limitless demand, the conversation has quietly changed. The hype was about what AI could do. The reckoning is about what it costs.

German mathematician Joachim Klement has correctly predicted the past three FIFA World Cup winners. He explains to CBS News' @RamyInocencio why he picked a non-favorite to win it all.

Lorenzo, NE a few days ago definitely did not suck. June 7th, 2 years in a row has pumped out epic colors and structure. #newx

Trees down on LaSalle street #chicago

Every Major Leaguer were once a kid having fun playing baseball. Paul Skenes was driving by Little League baseball fields last night and saw the lights on and decided to stop and throw the ball He was there over 2 hours signing, chatting and playing