Bill Belichick was born in April 1952. That makes him 73. Jordon Hudson is 24. Waste Management picks up my garbage cans every Friday, except on certain holidays. And Jollibee Food Corporation, some Philippines-based conglomerate, bought out the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (CBTL) corporation for $650 million in 2019. CBTL has more than 1,000 stores, and is a competitor to Starbucks. If you have been reading me these past ten years, you know I am an Orthodox congregational rabbi, practiced and taught American civil law for 20 years, was MAGA before the slogan was coined, and am loving the first quarter of the baseball season, with both New York teams leading their respective divisions. As they say among Ivy League presidents, that is the context. I care deeply that those Philippine coffee mongers bought out CBTL. Until they messed up a small part of my life six years ago, at least I had one single place in all of Orange County, California, where I could go for a bagel, a tuna sandwich, or a croissant. If in the mood, I could bring my wife. I could meet there with law students who wished to discuss their grades or their lives. I could take law clients there. And my favorite Christian pastor and a very special personal friend, Pastor John Blue, could meet me there to talk about G-d, coffee, his professional NHL career as a goalie for the Boston Bruins, our kids, and more about G-d. You see, Coffee Bean was kosher. Not only their coffee, which can be true of any coffee shop from Starbucks to Peet’s to the local brew, but Coffee Bean’s ownership made it their business to have all their everything in the stores strictly kosher, under rabbinical supervision. The syrups. The pastries. The sandwiches. Everything. In a region that is so bereft of kosher establishments that you can’t even go to a pizza store, there was Coffee Bean. At least I had somewhere to take people out — for something. The only other two kosher establishments available: Krispy Kreme and Baskin-Robbins. Both those are kosher-certified, but how could I invite a serious law client for a business meeting there? Or a law student on Ozempic? Krispy Kreme was primarily for December — Chanukah season — and jelly donuts. And Baskin-Robbins was exclusively for my wife and me the day after my monthly blood labs would come back. A1C under 6.0? Let’s go to Krispy Kreme or B-R. Over 6.0? Let’s go there anyway; I can dilute the sugar during the rest of the month. Cholesterol under 200? B-R. Under 200 but with antisemitic LDL and Triglycerides numbers? B-R anyway. Otherwise, nowhere to go out. And then the Philippines guys buy out Coffee Bean, switch everything to non-kosher, and I can’t even order a bagel there anymore. Imagine: a place where a rabbi cannot order a bagel. This I care about. I also care about when Waste Management picks up the garbage. If I forget to roll out the cans on Thursday night, it is worse than missing a court date. That means I have no room for the next week’s garbage to accumulate. Yes, I came up with a back-up plan: If I forget thee, O Garbage Cans, then I will dump all the next week’s detritus in the dumpster ten minutes away from home, behind the Coffee Bean of the Philippines. But I can’t. Someone might be passing by, see the Rabbi doing that, and ask for a selfie with me. But that’s the sum of what I care about besides the basic stuff: my family’s well being, America being strong, Israel being safe, my congregants being satisfied and fulfilled in their lives, and Newsom soon being out so that, as he frantically builds his credentials to next run for president, he suddenly acts to throw the homeless off the streets and, maybe, to permit plastic straws and showerheads that are not just for show but actually allow water to flow at a speed faster than the stream typified by a urology patient combating nocturia. That’s what matters: Coffee Bean going non-kosher. Missing the Morning Glory of Trash Day. But I do not care a whit about Belichick and Jordon. I know that America is great again, that the memory of Biden (a moron’s oxymoron) is past tense, when all we Americans need to fill our news and conversations is Belichick and Jordon. Why do they matter? Really, a serious question. Their appearances, their ages, anything about them? Why do they matter — everyday in the news and on TV — and why does their age gap matter? Do we actually have so much empty room in our heads that they deserve a four-suite spread inside them without their paying the proverbial rent? I personally don’t “get” it, but the lawyer and rabbi in me have taught me how to “get” that other people need to be absorbed with it daily. Belichick once was a legend as a football coach, a coach for the Ages. And then Tom Brady left the Patriots, and all of football history will be mired in the great debate: Was he ever a good coach? For football fans who love following the sport, it is an intellectually stimulating controversy. It forces people who follow such things to analyze deeper whether superficial truths ignore less compelling realities. If Belichick never was any good, but Brady made him so, it is fair to wonder whether certain men — myself included — ever would have achieved great things without the extraordinary wives who stood cold in our shadows but were the wind beneath our wings. Would great achievers ever have achieved without the unsung heroes on their teams, standing and contributing alongside them? Would Ronald Reagan have been positioned to change history if not for Nancy Davis influencing his career priorities? It not only is an interesting question, worthy of discussion, but it can give rise to important revelations for one’s own development. And to help us better appreciate our spouses and to choose them wisely in the first place. But why should any of us care if a 73-year-old man now consorts openly with a 24-year old girl? They are open, no sneaking around. Is it that we are jealous? I am not. I don’t think most of us are. What do they talk about? If she was born at the start of the millennium, has she heard of the Twin Towers? Did she ever learn about Pearl Harbor? Ozzie and Harriet? Martin Luther King or a Kennedy without a suffix? And when she does talk to him — about anything — can he hear it? Does it matter? Is he going out of his way to “show off” his pal? How does his life affect me? You? Does it matter whether he uses Viagra, Cialis, or Alprostadil injections? Why would it? Is she a gold digger? Why should I care? Or maybe they are soulmates, whose very names were declared loudly by a Divine Voice in the Heavens, when each was born, as intended for the other? Why care? Honestly, why care? She is not digging your or my gold. You don’t need to make sure she has access to Clearasil. There is something deeper here besides the very obvious benefit for a septuagenarian of having someone nearby to explain how to use TikTok or Instagram. It bothers me deeply that others become obsessed with other people’s business when there is no point. Yes, there is reason to care when society starts forcing effeminate boys and masculine girls — and their parents — to believe that they never will grow into perfectly fine cisgendered people but must immediately tag themselves as homosexual or lesbian. It is even more viciously evil and criminal when players intervene and con these children and their parents to believe they are boys born into girts’ bodies, or vice-versa, and need to undergo a sex change that will destroy their lives, defacing them, cutting off their precious organs, forcing them onto a mistaken lifetime of horribly severe chemicals, a mistake they never will be able to reverse. That is despicable, and society has the power to stop much of that, cut off the public funding of sex-change procedures in the military, prisons, and elsewhere. That matters. But Belichick and Jordon do not matter. When Sen. Strom Thurmond, age 66, married his state’s beauty contest winner, age 22, tongues wagged. Even so, they remained actively married for the next 23 years before separating. They had four kids, and Thurmond even outlived one of them. Belichick and Jordon do not belong in the headlines or in our minds. They are two grownups. Whether they both are deeply in love, or Belichick is a golddigger trying to get her beauty contest money, or she needs him as an entry point to meet Tom Brady is none of my business. My business is my wife and kids, my congregation, and my country. Aren’t those your priorities, too? Do you see how — even in this — the corrupt Fake News misleads us, with fake journalism, into thinking that something meaningless is important to know? But I do wonder: Is the new Qatari “Air Force One” that they just gifted to President Trump manufactured from parts of Malaysia Flight 370? Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. To be invited to attend his three weekly Zoom classes, send a request to rabbi@yioc.org The post Bill Belichick, Crossing the Jordon, and My Morning Croissant appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

This week, President Donald Trump generated a significant amount of attention by focusing on something the world has abjectly refused to focus on for the past 30 years or so. Namely, that South Africa has devolved into a hellish failed state run by gangsters, and the primary victims of this devolution are the descendants of the people who established civilization there. And that in reaction to this abysmal and outrageous development, the United States’ proper response is to offer asylum to the Afrikaners, the descendants of European settlers who formerly controlled that country but have fallen to just 5 to 7 percent of South Africa’s population and now face violence and discrimination in a place they’ve inhabited for four centuries. Here was BBC’s treatment of a tiny number of Afrikaners arriving in America as a response to the Trump administration’s granting asylum: A group of 59 white South Africans has arrived in the US, where they are to be granted refugee status. President Donald Trump has said the refugee applications for the country’s Afrikaner minority had been expedited as they were victims of “racial discrimination”. The South African government said the group were not suffering any such persecution that would merit refugee status. The Trump administration has halted all other refugee admissions, including for applicants from warzones. Human Rights Watch described the move as a cruel racial twist, saying that thousands of people – many black and Afghan refugees – had been denied refuge in the US. The group of white South Africans, who landed at Dulles airport near Washington DC on Monday, received a warm welcome from US authorities. Some held young children and waved small American flags in the arrival area adorned with red, white and blue balloons on the walls. The processing of refugees in the US often takes months, even years, but this group has been fast tracked. UNHCR – the United Nations refugee agency – confirmed to the BBC it wasn’t involved in the vetting, as is usually the case. Asked directly on Monday why the Afrikaners’ refugee applications had been processed faster than other groups, Trump said a “genocide” was taking place and that “white farmers” specifically were being targeted. “Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white, but whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me.” But South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said he told Trump during a phone call the US assessment of the situation was “not true”. “A refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution,” Ramaphosa said. “And they don’t fit that bill.” What was the response from the Democrats to this? Well: In a statement to the BBC, Gregory Meeks, ranking Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration’s refugee resettlement was “not just a racist dog whistle, it’s a politically motivated rewrite of history”. This was another response: The Episcopal Church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation.” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe announced the step Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation. Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said. President Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall U.S. refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing. And we’ll get to Ramaphosa in a minute, but first, let’s give a quick summary of the Democrat response to these 59 people. Perhaps the most illuminating example of that response came from former Joe Biden hack Ashley Allison, who appeared on CNN Monday night on Abby Phillips’ show. You might have seen this: Just wow… “The white [South] Africans, are not originally from South Africa… if the Afrikaners don’t like the land, they can leave that country. They can go to where their native land is, which is probably Germany, or Holland.”pic.twitter.com/sNi3DUd54i — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 13, 2025 Allison probably isn’t intelligent enough to recognize that she’s offering every one of the Right’s arguments against illegal immigration, all of which she disagrees with, in opposition to refugee status for a minority group facing prejudice and violent attacks who applied legally for asylum before arriving in America. Here is Chris Van Hollen, the representative from Maryland in the U.S. Senate who humiliated himself by having margaritas with a wife-beating, human-trafficking illegal alien MS-13 gangster named Kilmar Garcia in El Salvador a couple of weeks ago, throwing a fit about Trump’s new asylum policy for Afrikaners: Trump and Musk are about to give refugee status to 60 white South Africans — who do not need it — while Trump locks up and deports refugees here who face genuine dangers in other countries.⁰ This is the sick global apartheid policy being adopted by this lawless administration.… pic.twitter.com/hDN3qbk9Fe — Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) May 9, 2025 Is Van Hollen correct? Here is Julius Malema, who runs the Economic Freedom Fighters (which is an unapologetically communist organization different from the African National Congress, Ramaphosa’s party and that of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela), at one of any number of his party’s rallies: Why should White people care about the White South Africans??? Plays clip of South African political leader Julius Malema shouting “Kill The Boer.” (White farmer) to the thunderous applause of thousands of people…. That’s why. pic.twitter.com/FGBWBPdhAH — Uncommon Sense (@Uncommonsince76) February 8, 2025 Malema’s party slogan is “Dubul’ ibhunu,” which translates from Xhosa as “Shoot the Boer.” A video of him leading 90,000 people, Nuremberg-style, in chanting that murderous slogan induced an organization called AfriForum, which advocates on behalf of Afrikaners, to bring a legal case against Malema on the grounds that it violated the nation’s hate speech laws. How’d that go? Here’s Wikipedia’s summary: Malema, now leader of the EFF, again appeared in court in 2022 for allegedly singing the song in a case brought by Afriforum where the issue of whether or not the song was hate speech was debated. The Johannesburg High Court ruled that the chant and song were not intended to be taken seriously; that Afriforum had failed to establish a causal link between the song and violence; that the reference to Boer did not literally refer to White or Afrikaans people; that the song did not incite hatred towards White people generally; and ruled the song was not hate speech. Afriforum appealed the decision and in 2024 the Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed the High Court’s verdict that the song, as sung during the Senekal incidents, was not hate speech. Estimates of Boer farmers murdered on their land in South Africa run into the dozens every year, something the legacy corporate propaganda press in America refuses to recognize but is nonetheless a phenomenon that is difficult to deny. Please can someone tell Mariandra and her 4 children that ‘kill the boer’ is just a song. He was murdered on his farm on South Africa. “One bullet narrowly missed the-six-year-old daughter as she screamed hysterically, but her daddy Johann, 43, was shot beside her five times.… pic.twitter.com/MQoMlUtR6Y — Boer (@twatterbaas) December 12, 2024 In the next election cycle, it’s said that Malema could succeed Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa said that his strategy for dealing with South Africa’s white population would be like “boiling a frog alive,” in that “[b]eing cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.” Of course, while Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, isn’t chanting “Dubul’ ibhunu” at rallies, at least not so much anymore, they are using their political power to (1) dispossess the Boers from their real property and (2) look the other way when mobs of marauders descend on Afrikaner farms with pangas, the South African version of machetes, and chop the residents into bloody messes. Among other methods. Above, I mentioned AfriForum. One of its founders is a writer and filmmaker named Ernst Roets, who has been doing interviews in large American podcasts in recent weeks. Here’s his interview with Jordan Peterson: Just as interesting is Roets’ interview with Tucker Carlson and his conversation with Ben Shapiro. What you’ll see in those interviews is that Roets, while he voices his appreciation for Trump’s offer, largely rejects asylum in America as the answer for his people. Why? Because for Afrikaners, who have a rich and stubborn heritage deeply and passionately tied to the land they settled, are as patriotic about their country as Americans are about ours. And that is understandable, but incredibly sad. In the Carlson interview, Roets vows that he will stay in South Africa no matter what, even though he has had charges of treason filed against him — and he’s hardly alone — for having engaged in advocacy on behalf of his people. It might be fair to call him a bitter-ender. But put yourself in his shoes and his position is understandable. Roets comes from a community that Trump rightly recognizes has value. Condemn white South Africans for apartheid, which was certainly an unjust system but came from a place far more complicated than what you’ve heard about it (apartheid was established in South Africa not just as a means of keeping whites and blacks segregated but also of attempting — not so successfully — to keep Bantus from murdering Khoisans in intraracial violence, for example), if you will, but the achievements of that community are considerable. Afrikaners are some of the world’s best farmers, for example. And in the previous century, when the world turned against South Africa over the question of apartheid, resulting in an oil embargo against that country, South Africa’s preeminent energy company, Sasol, perfected the process by which coal, in plentiful supply there, could be converted into diesel fuel at scale. There are many beautiful places built by Afrikaners that are now owned by a government made up of communist gangsters and those people who owe them allegiance. And the Afrikaner population of South Africa is rapidly declining due to outmigration, as grains of sand might drain from an hourglass. The less than three million of them remaining are a hated, persecuted, and disregarded minority not all that dissimilar, in their current circumstances and more specifically to the easily foreseeable future, to the Jews of Germany. And this might be the only place you see such a reference within the realm of “acceptable” media. And yet Trump is offering to the Afrikaners what Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to offer to German Jewry in the 1930s — asylum. You see the response. Western civilization failed this test, famously, once. European Jews were able to recover from the Holocaust, at least in some respect, by refounding Israel as their ancestral homeland state after World War II. What can the Afrikaners do? Despite Roets’ advocacy for a decentralized South Africa where minorities like the Afrikaners are able to hold together in some form of autonomy and community, the real answer is, likely, nothing. And this is a tragedy. Forget about the horrors of apartheid — every society is haunted by its horrors, and the Afrikaners are paying for theirs by the loss of their country to groups that hate them and cheer on their slaughter.  Should an entire Western Christian culture — its rights, its heritage, its existence — be erased out of pure political disfavor? We should be better than to allow that. I would expect, and argue, that we are better than that. And Trump’s embrace of those Afrikaners who are willing to emigrate to America and join our culture is a clarifying moment, because those people — Gregory Meeks, Ashley Allison, Chris Van Hollen, and lots of others — who would consign them to whatever fate Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema might impose on them are the ones who assign no value to our collective society. Or to our values. The plight of these people is a definitive test for Western civilization. A group of people who established that civilization where it did not exist in a part of the world where it is receding is in peril of disappearing from the earth, and it’s up to the West to at least save the lives of their remaining population. If the Democrats aren’t willing to do at least that much, we should at least know definitively that this is their position. And ask the question whether their party is worthy of outlasting the Afrikaners. The post The Plight of the Afrikaners Is a Clarifying Moment for Western Civilization appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

“Young people should be able to focus on what young people should be focused on, which is how to get laid and how to go and have fun.” So went the “wisdom” proffered last week by David Hogg, the 25-year-old activist and current vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, on Real Time With Bill Maher. What was pitched as a strategic insight into his party’s eroding support among young people — especially young males — did something far more revealing: It captured (and exposed) the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the modern Left. Hogg’s comment wasn’t a gaffe. It was the articulation of a worldview and a political program that confirms that the Democrat Party is no longer the party that left Bill Clinton behind. The Democrat Party is the party that has flatly rejected JFK’s exhortation to “ask what you can do for your country.”    In Hogg’s DNC, now is not the time to do something for your country. No, now’s the time for your country to do something for you — like give you more opportunities for sex and cheap entertainment.  I get the ostensible appeal, but let’s begin with the most obvious point: This isn’t just bad political analysis. This is a deeply unserious (and flawed) vision of young people, and of all people. Young people — whether they admit as much or not — are desperately looking for more. They’re searching for purpose, for meaning, for something or someone to give themselves to. They’re yearning for a vision of adulthood that doesn’t collapse into endless adolescence.   Even if Hogg were right — that the majority of young people have bought the lie that the Good Life consists of eating, drinking, and being merry — the response from any serious person, much less a major political movement, should be to call them out of it. Not to validate their childish hedonism but to challenge it. To exhort them to contend for the good, the true, and the beautiful. To speak hard truths and to proclaim a better way.  What if, instead of treating young people as a problem to be managed or a demographic to be placated, we exhorted them to love and good deeds? To public goods like marriage, parenthood, and church membership? Called them to lives of national service and civic duty? What if we just told them that there is more to life than getting laid and having fun? What then? This isn’t some appeal for a fascistic Christian nationalist super-state, or whatever other language the Left may manipulatively throw at it. It’s a call to common sense and the wisdom of the ages, both of which are deeply rooted in the traditions of this country. Every culture worth preserving has known that human beings flourish through duty, not decadence. Through structure, not chaos. Through virtue, not vice. We ignore that at our peril. Whether it’s a pastor in a pulpit, a teacher in a classroom, or a politician on the campaign trail, young people need to hear what the Left will no longer say: You were not made for yourself. You are made for others. For a wife. For children. For a cause and a community and a country — and perhaps even a Person — greater than you. Those who agree need to speak up.  Grayson P. Walker is an attorney, former chief of staff to Oklahoma Governor J. Kevin Stitt, and a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He has written for the Gospel Coalition, Front Porch Republic, Public Discourse, and American Reformer. The post ‘Get Laid’ and ‘Have Fun’: The Democrats (Still) Don’t Get It appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Former President Joe Biden appeared on BBC and The View on a press tour last week, with high hopes of a return to the public eye. Join Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo on this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast as they react to the out-of-touch responses that Biden gave in his interviews. Ellie and Lyrah criticize both Joe and Jill Biden for their persistent denial of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. They also express hope for the truth to be revealed with the upcoming release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s exposé on Biden in their book Original Sin. Tune in to hear their discussion!   Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here. Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify. Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.   The post <i>The Spectator P.M.</i> Ep. 138: Americans Shudder at Joe Biden’s Reappearance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Madness has a strange, bad rap. There’s nothing saner than a madman, often just a guy who wants to escape this planet, overrun with cold hearts, slumbering lives, and events that disgust still-warm, sensitive skins. A glance at history: Nearly all geniuses were mad; the rest settled for booze, a worse kind of madness, because it kills the genius slowly and then, after you wake up, drags you back to the slump of a blank page, the wasteland of imagination, or the silence of an untouched piano, with the great melody trembling, absent, at your fingertips. No artist has made history drunk on sanity. None has made history trying to make history.  More than once, I’ve crossed paths with those hollow-eyed, crooked-mouthed, bright-foreheaded lunatics. They pierce your sanity and appeal to your madness with the force of vultures clutching carrion. They seek it in the depths of your eyes, and I think they can see it, they know how to spot it in your reason, even if you don’t. From somewhere, the worst of consciousness’s chimeras peeks out. Since ancient times, madness has been a splash of color in the strange monotony of life. Maybe that’s why so many poets lost their minds long before their talent ran dry; that, or because they didn’t sell books, for there’s no one poorer than a poet. Take Hölderlin, who wrote his best verses when he’d already lost the main sail of his consciousness. Those who knew him say that, at his desk, surrounded by the singularity of his pen and a pile of papers, Hölderlin rediscovered his greatest sanity, forgot his recurring delusions, and reached towering heights of intellect, sensitivity, and art. Poems of Madness is the wildest example: When pale snow beautifies the fields And a high glow lights up the vast plain, The Summer that passed seduces, and delicately Spring approaches as the hour wanes. Splendid vision, the air is purer, Clear is the forest, no man Walks the streets, now so distant, and silence Becomes majestic, and all laughs. I reread these verses, free of rational coordinates. If this is the rapture of poets’ solitude, sign me up for that soul-storm, that madness that led Hölderlin to seal a secret pact with rhymed beauty. Without trivializing the bleak wasteland left in families by elders whom time or life strips of reason, there’s a certain poetic justice in forgetting, especially in this era with so much to see and little to gaze upon. Too many things to know and few to remember. Too many hands to shake and too few to hold. There’s magic, of course, in surviving bohemia in such shallow, frivolous, extreme times. In times broadcast live between TikToks and Instagrams. What saves us is that, after all, humanity’s great creations come forth with a certain claim to eternity, like love or dreams, unmoved across centuries and generations. A formula, a poem, the haphazard inner world of a novel’s character. Geniuses devote such intense time to these things, to a single cause, that maybe it explains why the rest of their brain ends up shadowed, until the inexorable twilight of reason invades and conquers their time and space. And then they’re lost, their little motor idling on a raft surrounded by water and fog, in that cursed, no-return destiny. So, there are two kinds of madness. The silent kind, like someone walking in a ceremonial procession through life, and the talkative kind, those lunatics who, angry or joyful, must show the planet all the eccentricity and loquacity of their exaltation. Against either, dialogue is useless. Talking is futile in the realm of delirium. Nothing said from reason reaches the shores of their consciousness, and any attempt to feign madness is seen by the lunatic as a grotesque act of hostility, which can unleash most violent aversions in their heart. It’s natural. They don’t want understanding or complicity, just, perhaps, a path to silence, solitude, and the absorbed gaze of someone who knows how to offer security without trying to fathom the oddities flowing from a mind that’s begun to break free from logic. In the end, many lunatics have only built a great insulating wall against the acidic reality that afflicts them. Perhaps it’s a beautiful metaphor for sanity, because in this century plagued by the worst remnants of the Enlightenment — from yesterday’s rolling heads to today’s cancellations — the smartest way to survive is to step away from reason now and then, stop the train of the ordinary, and descend slowly, like Martians, into the strange, alien world we’ve always had here, under our feet and our urgencies, waiting for us. Thus, savoring the beauty of a sunset, the smell of wet fields after summer rain, or the autumnal scent of a chimney’s white, slender, dense smoke — these are things only lunatics, evicted from this loud, arrogant world, have time to enjoy daily. They’re inhabitants of a better, quieter, happily irrelevant, hopeful future, like the sleepy yawn of a baby. The post Friedrich Hölderlin: The Man With an Eclipse in His Mind appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A Turkish copper wire manufacturer will invest $34 million dollars in a South Carolina operation and create 135 new jobs. “Mega Metal, a copper wire manufacturer, today announced it selects Fairfield County to establish the company’s first South Carolina operation,” Gov. Henry McMaster’s office stated. “Headquartered in Turkey, Mega Metal manufactures copper wire to serve critical industries including automotive, medical, aerospace and defense, and more. The company has over 700 employees and distributes products to more than 30 countries,” it added. Turkey-Based Cooper Manufacturer Mega Metal selects Fairfield County for first South Carolina operation – Charleston Daily – https://t.co/tSqHnikQy8#SouthCarolina #SouthCarolinaBusiness #SCBIZ #CharlestonDaily #ManufacturingNews pic.twitter.com/XiXJiXD5Qv — Charleston Daily (@ChuckTownDaily) May 14, 2025 From Gov. McMaster’s office: Located at 364 Blue Granite Parkway in Ridgeway, Mega Metal’s 91,000-square-foot facility will manufacture superfine electrolytic oxygen-free (EOF) copper wire. Once fully operational, the state-of-the-art manufacturing facility is expected to produce 55 million pounds of wire annually. Operations are expected to be online in September 2025. Individuals interested in joining the Mega Metal team should visit the company’s careers page. The Coordinating Council for Economic Development approved job development credits related to the project. “This investment in Fairfield County is not only a manufacturing milestone – it is a reflection of our long-term commitment to the North American market. We are proud to grow alongside the state of South Carolina, contribute to the regional economy and build a foundation of industrial excellence. Through this investment, Mega Metal is poised to become a key player in the U.S. supply chain, offering strategic support to high-demand industries across the continent,” Mega Metal Inc. Board Chairman Cuneyt Turgut said. “Congratulations to Mega Metal on establishing its first South Carolina location. This $34 million investment and 135 new jobs will bring opportunity to Fairfield County, boosting the region’s economy. Manufacturing is thriving in South Carolina, and I’m confident Mega Metal will be well-positioned with our strong workforce,” Gov. McMaster said. “Mega Metal is investing $34M and creating 135 jobs, bringing manufacturing back home,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said. HUGE WIN for SC-05!! Mega Metal is investing $34M and creating 135 jobs, bringing manufacturing back home. South Carolina is open for business and winning because of it!!https://t.co/skXPAqdvYn — Rep. Ralph Norman (@RepRalphNorman) May 13, 2025 The announcement follows Carrier Global saying it would invest $1 billion in the United States over five years. Carrier today announced plans to invest an additional $1 billion over five years in U.S. manufacturing, innovation and workforce expansion, incremental to its ongoing commitments to American operations. Read more: https://t.co/LrmQhgRxoD pic.twitter.com/EcjFCA4jIj — Carrier (@carrier) May 13, 2025 Per Reuters: Global firms are boosting their investments and presence in the U.S. after Trump’s policies have pushed companies across sectors, including Apple, opens new tab and Ford, opens new tab, to produce within the country and generate jobs. The additional headwind from Trump’s tariffs has also caused companies to rethink their supply chains. Carrier said the move would generate 4,000 jobs, as it aims to hire 1,000 U.S. service technicians, and train over 100,000 climate solutions service and sales professionals over the next five years. The additional investment will fund the expansion of existing facilities and construction of a new site to support production related to components of heat pumps and battery assemblies. Earlier this month, Carrier beat quarterly profit estimates and raised its 2025 forecast amid strong demand for heating and air conditioning products.

It's okay to feel broken, but with faith and action, healing and growth are always within reach.

In a season of chronic pain and unanswered prayers, we can find true peace and joy. These do not come from immediate solutions but from placing deeper hope and trust in Jesus, whose presence brings patience, purpose, and praise even in the waiting.