Mitch Harper

The very first moments of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope in St John's, Newfoundland 46 years ago this morning. The Marathon of Hope has raised over $1 billion for cancer research so far. credit: Terry Fox Foundation 🇨🇦

There is no doubt in my mind that the best writings of any U.S. President are Grant's memoirs, and his recollections of Lee's surrender in Appomattox---161 year ago this today---are perhaps the best parts of those memoirs.

@jimstinson @jstewartIndy How would you like it if people made personal judgments of you in such disrespectful terms? Is that what you parents, teachers or grandparents taught you? Treating people as objects is not good regardless of views or affiliations.

@MVHarper @jstewartIndy I personally know Jim Buck to be a fossil too.

INCREDIBLE! Former VP Mike Pence just endorsed Indiana State Sen. Jim Buck, who opposed mid-cycle congressional redistricting. His Trump-backed primary challenger is Tracey Powell. “I have known State Senator Jim Buck throughout my years serving Indiana from the State House to the White House and I have always seen him as a man of integrity and one of Indiana’s most conservative state legislators,” Pence said. “Jim Buck is a committed Christian who has championed faith, family and freedom throughout his long and distinguished career. Senator Jim Buck is a principled conservative whose unwavering stand for the Right to Life, Tax Cuts, Balanced Budgets and the 2nd Amendment have earned him the respect of conservatives across the country. Senator Jim Buck has always put Hoosier families, small businesses and family farms first throughout his many years serving Indiana and I know he always will.  “With gratitude for his longstanding commitment to conservative values and Indiana families, I am proud to endorse State Senator Jim Buck and urge Hoosiers in Senate District 21 to vote for State Senator Jim Buck in the May 5th Republican Primary!”

@HeidlerNeal @nkellyIN Legislators bank considerably more than 33K when per diem is factored in.

@nkellyIN Insanity. All over a seat with a salary of $33k a year/a race with 3 candidates whose votes in the in the legislature would be nearly identical.

Absolutely fascinating. nbcnews.com/politics/2026-…

@deb_judson @MoundLore Absolutely!

@MoundLore The Garden Of The God’s in Shawnee National Forest & Lake of Egypt.

If you were in this part of the country what would be a must stop spot?

@CourteousMax @MoundLore New Madrid fault is overdue for a repeat. Your trip could become exciting.

@MoundLore Is that near Cahokia?

@ImperialMaps @FerragamoWx This makes me feel quite a bit better about the possibility of a repeat of the 1913 flood that caused devastation in Indiana (Indianapolis, Fort Wayne) and Ohio (notably Dayton).

@FerragamoWx Historical hurricane paths for North America.

After months, I was finally able to combine both my hurricane landfall and return period datasets for the U.S. into one massive infographic. I absolutely love this. What an insane map to look at!

@jackbutler4815 It is quite unusual terrain. And Dubuque is a great place. I want to get back later this year. You might want to look at running the Galena Sky Trail Race. Galena Sky Trail Race share.google/LVjoJKluk9hQem…

I--a Midwesterner!--have somehow only just learned there is a part of my native region called the "Driftless Area," which is up there in the list of actual places that should be Zelda map names:

@ExploresMr I think you could put a little green around Fort Wayne. It has bounced back, grown in population and changed the mix of incoming businesses.

The Rust Belt is the region of the northeastern/ midwestern United States that once powered America’s industrial might through manufacturing, but later suffered economic decline, population loss, and abandoned factories after those industries collapsed in the late 20th century.

@EJens1894 @BGPaul @ExploresMr Battle Creek and Lansing look about right. You're right in that Saginaw is misplaced. Grand Rapids could be a tad more north.

@BGPaul @ExploresMr Lansing, Battle Creek and Saginaw are in the wrong places, too far south.

@erinldaly @BGPaul @ExploresMr You seem to be mistaking the black dot for Lorain as Akron. Akron strikes me as being in the right spot.

@BGPaul @ExploresMr Ugh you're right! It's got Akron perched on the shore of Lake Erie. (And how do you even misspell Erie??)

Gus Grissom, Purdue grad and the first astronaut to fly in space twice, was born in Mitchell, Indiana 100 years ago today. Here he is with his fellow Mercury 7 astronauts, in the center, below:

@Thomsen419 @mass_ave

Happy 100th birthday Gus Grissom!!!

@Eric_Erins And Captain William Wells (son-in-law of Chief Little Turtle) came up from Fort Wayne to try to take the besieged Fort Dearborn residents back to the safety of Fort Wayne. That plan did not succeed. But Indiana keeps trying to guide Chicagoans to Indiana.

It all really started with a Fort

Congratulations to Woodburn's native son, Philip Wegmann, on being named The Wall Street Journal's White House Reporter.

No US officeholder should be a cheerleader for Viktor Orbán.

A Patriot missile costs four million dollars. A Ukrainian Sting interceptor drone costs two thousand. Both destroy the same Shahed kamikaze drone. One of them can be manufactured at a rate of 10,000 units per month. The other cannot. And the country that invented the cheap one is now training Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari operators to use it against the exact same Iranian drones it was designed to kill in Ukrainian skies. Ukraine spent three years learning how to destroy Shaheds. Not with expensive air defence systems designed for Cold War scenarios but with small, fast, AI-assisted quadcopters that chase them down at 280 to 450 kilometres per hour, lock on with thermal imaging and computer vision, and ram them out of the sky or detonate a proximity charge at close range. The Sting, built by a volunteer unit called Wild Hornets, has destroyed over 3,000 Shaheds since May 2025. The Bullet, produced by SkyFall and General Cherry, reaches 450 kilometres per hour with AI-assisted terminal guidance. The success rate in Kyiv’s high-threat corridor reached 70 to 90 percent in February 2026, according to Ukrainian Air Force Commander Syrskyi. The mechanism is elegant. Sensors detect an incoming Shahed. An interceptor launches. A pilot wearing FPV goggles tracks the target using thermal imaging while AI handles detection, lock-on, and terminal-phase precision. The interceptor closes the speed gap at double or triple the Shahed’s velocity and destroys it through kinetic impact or proximity detonation. The pilot retains final manual control for jamming resistance. The entire engagement costs less than dinner for two in Dubai. Now Zelensky has turned this battlefield necessity into a geopolitical asset. Under defence pacts signed in March 2026, Ukrainian training teams are actively working with Gulf state militaries on co-production, operator training, and AI guidance module integration. The same drones that protect Kyiv from Russian Shaheds will protect Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha from Iranian ones. The technology is identical because the threat is identical: Iran manufactures the Shahed, Russia deploys it against Ukraine, and Iran deploys it against the Gulf. The supply chain of the weapon created the supply chain of the countermeasure. A country fighting for its survival against Russia is simultaneously becoming the Gulf’s primary anti-drone technology supplier during a war between the Gulf and Iran. Ukraine is broke, surrounded, and losing territory. It is also the only country on earth with three years of operational data on destroying Iranian kamikaze drones at scale. That data is worth more to Saudi Arabia right now than any weapons system America can sell, because America has never fought a sustained Shahed campaign. Ukraine has fought one every night for a thousand consecutive nights. Zelensky offered Russia an energy ceasefire. He offered sea drones for Hormuz. And he is selling drone-killing technology to the countries whose oil infrastructure those same drones are threatening. Ukraine is converting its most painful vulnerability, the nightly Shahed bombardment, into a revenue stream, a diplomatic lever, and a security partnership that binds Gulf states to Kyiv’s survival in ways no UN resolution ever could. The molecule meets the machine. The drone that threatens the refinery is destroyed by the drone that learned to kill it over Kyiv. The war that created the threat created the countermeasure. And the country nobody expected to matter in the Gulf is suddenly indispensable to it. Watch the intercept below. This is what a $2,000 drone killing a Shahed at 300 km/h looks like in real time. Read the full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

A Parliament of Charity Workers and Lobbyists. In a Time of War. Of 238 new Labour MPs elected in July 2024, 72 worked in the charitable sector, 72 were political employees and 70 worked in communications or lobbying. Roughly ninety percent have never worked in defence, manufacturing, engineering, medicine or law enforcement. A parliamentary source quoted in the Sunday Times put it plainly. If only we had the same number with defence or military experience, maybe we'd be in a different place. Maybe. But the problem runs deeper than defence spending. It runs to the question of what kind of person ends up in parliament, what professional formation shapes their instincts, and whose interests they are constitutionally equipped to represent. Charity sector workers are trained to see the world through the lens of vulnerable groups, international obligations and institutional compassion. Political employees are trained to manage narratives and avoid uncomfortable truths. Communications and lobbying professionals are trained to advance the interests of whoever is paying them. Not one of those professional backgrounds prepares you for the question of how to defend a sovereign nation, manage a border, hold a foreign state accountable or protect a citizen from an Iranian proxy group that is firebombing Jewish ambulances on British streets. The parliament that responded to the Golders Green firebombing by debating the language used to describe it is a parliament staffed by people whose entire professional lives have trained them to manage perception rather than confront reality. The government that rolled out an anti-Muslim hostility definition while twenty Iranian backed terrorist plots were being planned on British streets is a government whose instinct is accommodation rather than accountability. The thirty six MPs who wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner demanding Nick Timothy's investigation were not all acting from professional instinct. Several have documented histories of antisemitic language or associations. Others represent constituencies where the Muslim vote is the primary electoral consideration. The Sunday Times source suggests the problem is defence spending priorities. It is that. But it is also the Trafalgar Square response, where Keir Starmer reached for Tommy Robinson rather than engaging with a theological argument he knew he could not answer. It is the Attorney General deploying his Jewish identity to provide cover for a false equivalence he knew to be false. It is the parliamentary machinery mobilised to silence the people naming what is happening while the people doing it operate without consequence. All of it flows from the same source. A political class whose professional formation is compassion, accommodation and message management, governing in a moment that requires clarity, resolve and the willingness to say plainly what the evidence shows. Britain is not short of intelligence assessments. MI5 has thwarted twenty Iranian plots. The Walney report documented Iranian influence operations in the charitable sector. The security services know what is happening. The problem is not knowledge. It is the absence of the professional formation, the instincts, the language and the willingness that would allow the people in power to act on what they know. Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies. They were never going to see it coming. And even now that it has arrived, on the streets of Golders Green, in the WhatsApp groups of the Green Party, on the Embankment where death to America was chanted on a Sunday afternoon, they are still reaching for the tools their professional lives gave them. Compassion. Accommodation. Message management. And the instruction not to take the bait. "Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies."

@JayinKyiv @tufkaa Strangely, he appears sober for once. Deranged, of course, but sober.

With the Kremlin in horror witnessing Zelensky lock down defense agreements with Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Jordan in a single 48 hour period, Putin rolls out Medvedev with the most ridiculous piece of deranged propaganda of the entire war.