Artemis II Mission Shows There Are No Limits To American Exceptionalism

From The Federalist.com (Apr. 7):

Pushing the boundaries of what was once thought to be impossible is a hallmark of American greatness. And the recent mission to circle the moon is no different.

The crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission set a record on Monday for traveling further into space than any humans have ever gone before. As part of their “lunar flyby,” the four-person crew (consisting of three Americans and one Canadian) broke Apollo 13’s record by reaching an estimated 252,756 miles from Earth.

While traveling in their Orion capsule, the team viewed previously unseen surfaces of the moon and captured breathtaking images in the process. Amid their discoveries was a noticeably bright crater, which one of the astronauts suggested naming “Carroll” after mission commander Reid Wiseman’s wife, who died of cancer in 2020.

While the mission has certainly boasted its great moments, there was something the astronauts reportedly said before embarking on their journey that puts a perfect bow on the entire thing. As summarized by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, the Artemis II crew said that they hope their feat “will be remembered as the moment people started to believe that America can once again do the near-impossible and change the world.”

It’s a simple, yet important point to remember given the constant barrage of negativity Americans hear about their country from its most vocal institutions. From higher education to legacy media and Hollywood, everyday citizens are regularly inundated with anti-American rhetoric about why their nation is evil, stupid, and not that great after all.

Why would you want to try your best and work your hardest in a racist, bigoted, oppressive, hateful country like America? or so the conventional leftist groupthink goes.

The Artemis II mission provides a stark contrast to that backwards thinking. It teaches America’s people that adventure and risks are worth taking, that hard work wins, and that there are no limits to what their country can accomplish.

That’s American exceptionalism at its best.

So, dream big. Reach for what others believe to be impossible. Give 110 percent into what you do. And always remember that it could happen nowhere else except in the United States of America. [source]

USA! USA! USA! 

More articles on the mission:

• 16 inspiring Artemis II photos that’ll make you feel like a tiny Earthling
• Artemis II astronauts reflect on historic flight as they wrap up moon mission
• 9 highlights from Artemis II's epic journey around the moon
• NASA’s Artemis II mission’s return to Earth, hour by hour
• Artemis II's Grand Moon Finale Almost Here With a Pacific Splashdown to Cap NASA's Lunar Comeback
• Artemis II splashes down off the coast of San Diego, finishing historic journey around the moon
• Watch a recovery crew open Integrity’s hatch for Artemis II astronauts
  
• NASA Artemis II Zero Gravity Indicator & Moon Mascot 'Rise' Back Home on Earth
• Artemis, the Greatness of God, and Human Exceptionalism

Assisted Suicide for the Healthy

From Breakpoint.org (Aug. 5, 2020):

Physician-assisted suicide is sold to the public as a “compassionate” measure, necessary to spare those with no reasonable chance of recovery the unbearable pain and suffering of the last days of their lives. In every context in which it has been made legal, however, what might be called euthanasia-by-another-name has never remained limited to the rare instances on which it was sold.

There are reasons this slope has proven so slippery, literally everywhere it has been made legal. Once it is decided that certain lives are not worth living, the list of people eligible for physician-assisted suicide inevitably grows. As the list of people without intrinsic value grows, it becomes impossible not to re-evaluate lives based on some other criteria, perhaps convenience or financial costs. It’s a small step indeed from “eligible to die” to “expected to die.”

Wherever doctor assisted suicide is legalized, in a bait-and-switch from what is sold to the public, the category of “terminal” illness is often expanded to include “chronic” illnesses and permanent disabilities. Even mental illness and depression are now considered sufficient justification for suicide in places such as Belgium and the Netherlands. Given this trajectory, it’s only a matter of time before we dispense with the requirement of any illness whatsoever.

In fact, that’s what has just happened in the Netherlands. A recently introduced bill there would “allow healthy individuals over the age of 75 to request assisted suicide, if they have had a ‘strong death wish for at least two months.’” The bill, which is expected to be up for a vote sometime in 2021, would, according to the bill’s sponsor, give the elderly “…the choice at an advanced age, if [they] consider their lives complete, to die with dignity, with careful help.”

Thankfully, the two Christian parties in the governing coalition are strongly opposing the measure, but it will not be easy to keep it from becoming law. After all, the bill is the next logical step in the Dutch trajectory. Having embraced what novelist Walker Percy called “Thanatos Syndrome,” every promise to limit euthanasia in any way has not only been broken, but any so-called “safeguards” have been swept aside.

For example, the people were promised that only those certifiably in their right minds would be euthanized. That was a lie. Anyone who goes into an American emergency room and tells doctors they had a “strong death wish” and were “done with life” would be diagnosed with “suicidal ideation” and immediately admitted to the psych ward. To not do so, in fact, would be medical malpractice. Suicidal ideation is rightly regarded as a symptom of an underlying mental disorder. People with untreated mental illnesses are not allowed to make life-and-death decisions.

Or at least they weren’t. In Oregon, since doctor-assisted-suicide was legalized, over 96 percent of people given lethal drugs did not undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Not to evaluate is neglect, but if this Dutch bill becomes law, any elderly person who admits suicidal wishes will be referred to those who will help them turn their desires into reality.

This is why, as our recent “What Would You Say” video so clearly explained, there’s nothing compassionate about physician-assisted-suicide. In fact, it is the exact opposite of compassion, the abdication of a civilized people’s responsibility to offer compassion to those who need it most when they need it most.

In his book The Thanatos Syndrome, Walker Percy described how a society devolves to the point of thinking that killing patients instead of healing them is compassionate. A psychiatrist, he wrote of well-trained and exquisitely credentialed doctors who “turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind.”

Percy’s literary prophecy, written in 1987, is becoming reality. Some form of assisted suicide is now legal in nine states and the District of Columbia. That number will only grow unless we convince people what true compassion is and make the idea that assisted suicide is compassionate unthinkable.

Come to WhatWouldYouSay.org for the latest video on assisted suicide, and be equipped to make the case. And please, share it with your pastor, community leaders, and legislators. It’s literally a life-and-death issue. [source]

Canada isn’t much better with its “Medical Assistance in Dying” law.

Hitler, Islam, Iran, Hezbollah and 9/11

One twentieth-century European, however, was disappointed that Charles Martel had defeated the warriors of Islam, for the same reason that Gibbon was relieved. He exclaimed:

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.

The man expressing that regret was Adolf Hitler.

…….

[U.S. District judge George B.] Daniels found that Iran and Hezbollah had cooperated and collaborated with al-Qaeda before 9/11 and continued to do so after the attacks.

Before 9/11, Iran and Hezbollah were implicated in efforts to train al-Qaeda members to blow up large buildings—resulting in the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Shortly after the Cole attack, the 9/11 jihad plot began to come together—and Iran was involved. Former MOIS operative Abolghasem Mesbahi, a defector from Iran, testified that during the summer of 2001, he received messages from Iranian government officials regarding a plan for unconventional warfare against the U.S., entitled “Shaitan dar Atash” (“Satan in Flames”).

“Satan in Flames” was the elaborate plot to hijack three passenger jets, each packed full of people, and crash them into American landmarks: the World Trade Center, which jihadis took to be the center of American commerce; the Pentagon, the center of America’s military apparatus; and the White House.

A classified National Security Agency analysis referred to in the 9/11 Commission report reveals that eight to ten of the 9/11 hijackers traveled to Iran repeatedly in late 2000 and early 2001. The 9/11 Commission called for a U.S. government investigation into Iran’s role in 9/11, but none was ever undertaken. Kenneth R. Timmerman of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran was, in his words, “engaged by the Havlish attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Commission report called on the U.S. government to handle.”

Timmerman noted that during the 9/11 hijackers’ trips to Iran, they were “accompanied by ‘senior Hezbollah operatives’ who were in fact agents of the Iranian regime.” Iranian border agents did not stamp their passports, so that their having been inside the Islamic Republic would not arouse suspicion against them when they entered the United States.

The CIA, embarrassed by its failure to recognize the import of these trips, tried to suppress this revelation. But Timmerman contends that even the available evidence is explosive enough, revealing that the Islamic Republic of Iran, in his words:

• helped design the 9/11 plot; 
• provided intelligence support to identify and train the operatives who carried it out;
• allowed the future hijackers to evade U.S. and Pakistani surveillance on key trips to Afghanistan where they received the final order of mission from Osama bin Laden, by escorting them through Iranian borders without passport stamps;
• evacuated hundreds of top al-Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan to Iran after 9/11 just as U.S. forces launched their offensive;
• provided safe haven and continued financial support to al-Qaeda cadres for years after 9/11;
• allowed al-Qaeda to use Iran as an operational base for additional terror attacks, in particular the May 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 

The Ayatollah Khamenei knew about the plot. During the summer of 2001, he instructed Iranian agents to be careful to conceal their tracks and told them to communicate only with al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Imad Mughniyah of Hezbollah.

Source: The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS (2018) by Robert Spencer.

More reasons why Trump felt compelled to stop Iran.

Japanese company successfully tests a manned flying car for the first time

From koat.com (Aug. 30, 2020):

A Japanese company has announced the successful test drive of a flying car.

Sky Drive Inc. conducted the public demonstration on Aug. 25, the company said in a news release, at the Toyota Test Field, one of the largest in Japan and home to the car company's development base. It was the first public demonstration for a flying car in Japanese history.

The car, named SD-03, manned with a pilot, took off and circled the field for about four minutes.

"We are extremely excited to have achieved Japan's first-ever manned flight of a flying car in the two years since we founded SkyDrive... with the goal of commercializing such aircraft," CEO Tomohiro Fukuzawa said in a statement.

"We want to realize a society where flying cars are an accessible and convenient means of transportation in the skies and people are able to experience a safe, secure, and comfortable new way of life."

The SD-03 is the world's smallest electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and takes up the space of about two parked cars, according to the company. It has eight motors to ensure "safety in emergency situations."

"In designing an unexplored, new genre of transportation known as the flying car, we chose the keyword "progressive" for inspiration," Design Director Takumi Yamamot said.

"We wanted this vehicle to be futuristic, charismatic and desirable for all future customers, while fully incorporating the high technology of SkyDrive.

The company hopes to make the flying car a part of normal life and not just a commodity. More test flights will occur in the future under different conditions to make sure the safety and technology of the vehicle meet industry standards.

The success of this flight means that it is likely the car will be tested outside of the Toyota Test field by the end of the year.

The company will continue to develop technologies to safely and securely launch the flying car in 2023, the news release said. No price has been announced. [source]

Cool. Here come the Jetsons.

A Tax Man with Convictions and Courage

From Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Apr. 15, 2025):

Have you ever heard of someone so principled that he quit his job rather than do something he knew to be wrong?

I admire people of such integrity. We need more of them. Let me tell you about one whose story is especially relevant on April 15, the date the federal government demands we meet our income tax obligations. This man was head of the IRS. His name was T. Coleman Andrews.

Born in Virginia in 1899, Andrews possessed a head for numbers. He loved accounting, an affection which I personally could never understand. Accounting baffled and frustrated me during my undergraduate days; I scraped by with a “C.”  I agree with whoever described an accountant as “someone who solves a problem you did not know you had in a way you don’t understand.”

Andrews was not only good at it, but he also founded several successful accounting firms and worked in high accounting positions for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the US State Department, and the General Accounting Office in Washington.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him Commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. In an interview while still new in the job, Andrews said that he would insist that every employee engage taxpayers with “a sincere desire to be helpful,” but he promised to come down hard on anybody caught cheating on his taxes.

Andrews moved to simplify complex tax forms. He changed the Bureau’s name to what we know today—the Internal Revenue Service. He adopted numerous measures to improve efficiency, but when Congress overhauled tax law in 1955, he realized how “unreformable” the system was. Isaac William Martin, in his 2013 book titled Rich People’s Movements, quotes Andrews as lamenting that the congressmen who wrote the bill “do not themselves know what they mean.”

Barely two years into his tenure on the inside, Andrews abruptly resigned. His views on the agency and the income tax had evolved. Andrews was one of those rare public servants who “grew in office.” He could no longer hold a position that put him at odds with his conscience. He came to see the IRS and the tax code as oppressive, incomprehensible, and corrupt. Shortly after his departure from the IRS, he issued a statement explaining his position:

Congress went beyond merely enacting an income tax law and repealed Article IV of the Bill of Rights, by empowering the tax collector to do the very things from which that article says we were to be secure. It opened up our homes, our papers and our effects to the prying eyes of government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vaults and for inquiries into our private affairs whenever the tax men might decide, even though there might not be any justification beyond mere cynical suspicion.

The income tax is bad because it has robbed you and me of the guarantee of privacy and the respect for our property that were given to us in Article IV of the Bill of Rights. This invasion is absolute and complete as far as the amount of tax that can be assessed is concerned. Please remember that under the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress can take 100% of our income anytime it wants to. As a matter of fact, right now it is imposing a tax as high as 91%. This is downright confiscation and cannot be defended on any other grounds.

The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men.

The income tax is fulfilling the Marxist prophecy that the surest way to destroy a capitalist society is by steeply graduated taxes on income and heavy levies upon the estates of people when they die.

As matters now stand, if our children make the most of their capabilities and training, they will have to give most of it to the tax collector and so become slaves of the government. People cannot pull themselves up by the bootstraps anymore because the tax collector gets the boots and the straps as well.

Clearly, this was a guy who didn’t allow power or a paycheck to turn either his brain or his spine into jelly. Agree with him or not, you must admit there’s some impressive personal character there.

Andrews continued to speak out against the income tax and the ever-bigger government it was financing. In 1956, he even ran for President of the United States on a third-party ticket—a campaign that, controversially, was built around a states’ rights platform. While some saw it as a principled stance for limited government, others rightly noted its alignment with political figures and movements that defended segregation. He died in 1983 at the age of 84.

The school in my native state of Pennsylvania where I struggled in that accounting class more than a half-century ago is Grove City College. In researching this article, I was proud to learn that in 1963, GCC bestowed an honorary doctorate upon T. Coleman Andrews.

What Andrews had to say may not be much consolation to you this tax season. Perhaps it will be of at least small comfort, however, to know that we once had an IRS Commissioner who saw the harm of the whole business and possessed the courage of his convictions to wash his hands of it. [source]

Wow. If the IRS was corrupt back then, how corrupt is it now? Not very many bureaucrats quit a job because of its corruption. That’s integrity for you.

Trump Signature Set for US Currency in Historic First

From Newsmax.com (Mar. 26):

U.S. paper currency will bear President Donald Trump's signature to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, the Treasury Department said Thursday, a first for a sitting president, while deleting the Treasurer of the United States' signature from U.S. money for the first time in 165 years.

The Treasury said in a statement to Reuters that the first $100 bills with Trump's signature and that of U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will be printed in June, followed by other bills in subsequent months.

The Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing is currently still producing notes bearing the signatures of former President Joe Biden's Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, and Treasurer Lynn Malerba.

Malerba will be the last of an unbroken line of Treasurers whose signatures had appeared on U.S. federal currency since 1861, when it was first issued by the U.S. government.

The signature change is the latest effort by the Trump administration and its allies to put the president's name on buildings, institutions, government programs, battleships and coins. The design of a commemorative gold coin with Trump's image was approved by a federal arts panel whose members he appointed.

Bessent said in a statement that the move was appropriate for the U.S. 250th anniversary, given strong U.S. economic growth, financial stability and "lasting dollar dominance" during Trump's second term.

"There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S. dollar bills bearing his name, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial," Bessent said.

An effort for a circulating $1 Trump coin was set back by laws prohibiting the depiction of living individuals on U.S. coins.

A statute governing the printing of Federal Reserve notes gives the Treasury broad discretion to change designs to guard against counterfeiting. The law requires keeping certain elements, including the words "In God We Trust," and only allows portraits of deceased individuals.

The overall designs of bills will not change, except for Trump's signature replacing the Treasurer's, Treasury officials said. [source]

Nice. Although, the Left will probably find a reason to complain about this small, temporary (I believe) change.

Trump targeted by four FBI code-named counterintel probes that ensnared hundreds of Americans

From Just the News.com (Mar. 9):

President Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News.

FBI Director Kash Patel has personally led the effort to review the operations code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo and Arctic Frost that stretched from summer 2016 to January 2025, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet that in some cases may have been predicated on false, misleading or uncorroborated justifications, officials said.

Many of the investigative files were hidden from view, even from most FBI agents, because they were marked "prohibited access" and controlled carefully by FBI leadership.

Patel's search has been aided by whistleblowers inside his agency, a handful of senior bureau executives close to the director and some members of Congress, particularly Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

FBI's work hijacked by politics, invading citizens' privacy

Those who have seen the records told Just the News they chronicle how the FBI's expanded counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions after the Sept, 11, 2001, terrorist attacks eventually became hijacked by politics and led agents to deploy tools meant for terrorists and spies against everyday Americans in a bid to find a way to bring criminal cases against Trump.

One whistleblower this month told the FBI that surveillance and monitoring of Trump figures continued right up to the president’s January 2025 inauguration, according to multiple interviews.

Few inside Trump’s orbit were spared from targeting by their stature: a dozen members of Congress and their staffers, his future chief of staff Susie Wiles, journalists, campaign advisers, defense lawyers, and even Patel himself had their privacy pierced by warrants, wiretaps, FISA surveillance, phone record analysis, FBI assessments, or grand juries.

Many targets and subjects fell under the bureau’s definition of special circumstances targets because they have recognized constitutionally protected privileges – like lawyers, members of Congress, journalists, and political figures.

Even a political consultant turned documentary filmmaker who investigated Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign was recently notified he was targeted in a criminal investigation that only recently was shut down, according to letters between Congress and the FBI reviewed by Just the News.

Michael Caputo had his emails and communications seized in 2023 by a “classified subpoena” issued about two weeks after he joined the Trump campaign and the email account the bureau penetrated “contained correspondence on The Trump Campaign’s private strategies and deliberations,” the correspondence stated.
Patel’s FBI has informed Congress that probe has been shut down. But the question of how so many Americans were targeted remains open.

At least 1,200 people that fall into the categories of special circumstances targets or subject were investigated under assessments by the FBI between 2018 and 2024 during Wray’s tenure, an explosive recent audit report to Congress revealed.

You can read that report here.

File

Gao_Report_Fbi_Assessments.pdf [read more]

Disgusting.  Abuse of power? I would say so.