Mark Miller

@HappyMotorhead I would love to have that Falcon Sprint in my garage. The Corvair, not so much.

1963 Ford Falcon Sprint OR 1962 Chevrolet Corvair Monza 900

🇺🇸 Most Badass Americans You Don’t Know: Samuel Whittemore Samuel Whittemore is an American badass and my inspiration for this series. It is only fitting I tell his story as well. He was a 78-year-old farmer who became the oldest known combatant in all of U.S. military history. Born in 1696 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He served as a private in Colonel Jeremiah Moulton’s Third Massachusetts Regiment during King George’s War. In 1745 he helped capture the heavily fortified French stronghold of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. Later he rose to Captain in the elite British King’s Dragoons. He captured an ornate French officer’s sword and a pair of dueling pistols as trophies. Some accounts say he fought again in the French and Indian War at age 64, once more at Louisbourg in 1758 and joined a military expedition against Chief Pontiac in 1763 at nearly 70 years old. Then he settled down as a farmer in Menotomy which is now Arlington, Massachusetts. He raised eight children, and served as town assessor and selectman. But when the British marched back from Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, everything changed. Whittemore was working in his fields when he spotted Earl Percy’s relief column of Redcoats heading toward Boston. The 78-year-old grabbed his musket, two horse pistols, and his saber. He crouched behind a stone wall near his home and waited. As a flank guard from the 47th Regiment of Foot approached, he fired his musket and dropped one grenadier. He drew his pistols, killed a second soldier, and mortally wounded a third. Then he drew his saber and charged. The British swarmed him. They shot him in the face, tearing away part of his cheek. They bayoneted him at least six times with some accounts say as many as thirteen. They clubbed him in the head with the butts of their muskets and left him for dead in a pool of blood. His family found him and thought he was gone. But Dr. Tufts of Medford patched him up anyway. Samuel Whittemore refused to die. He recovered, went back to his farm in Menotomy, and lived quietly for the rest of the war. By the time he passed away peacefully in 1793 at the age of 96 or 98, he had 185 descendants down to the fifth generation. In 2005 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts officially named him the state hero. Samuel Whittemore is an American Legend 🇺🇸

This is an Amazing Find

As an Iranian still inside Iran, writing through Starlink with a broken heart and burning rage, I am showing you what the regime desperately tries to hide Look at these streets. Look at the blood. They killed so many of our brothers and sisters on January 8th and 9th that the ditches filled with blood, the streets ran red, and the walls were soaked with the blood of innocent protesters. This was one of the most savage massacres of peaceful demonstrators in modern history — and the Islamic Republic’s internet blackout is their attempt to bury the evidence. Yet while Iranians the ground reject their lies — IRGC propaganda gets almost zero traction and tiny impressions on our social media — the English-speaking world, especially Western platforms, keeps consuming and amplifying the regime’s propaganda non-stop. This is not the free world. This is not independent journalism. This is betrayal. Stop listening to the Islamic Republic’s propaganda. Stop giving oxygen to the butchers who murder our people and then cry “victim” in English. While they hunt Starlink users with $2,000 bounties, torture fathers to death, and roll out their loyalty-based internet tiers, mainstream media stays shamefully silent on the rivers of blood we have shed. For 47 years we have lived this nightmare — economic pressure crushing every family, blackouts, arrests, and now open bounties on anyone seeking truth. We danced with pure joy when Khamenei was removed because we saw the beginning of the end. That hope still lives in us. We are willing to endure everything — the fear, the threats, the hunger, the daily terror that our children feel — because our country and our people are on the line. But we will not let our suffering be in vain while the outside world platforms the regime’s lies. President Trump sees through them. The rest of the free world must wake up and do the same. The blood on these streets cries out. The souls of our martyrs demand justice. The Lion and Sun will rise again. #IranMassacre‌ #DigitalBlackOutIran‌ #FinishTheJobMrPresidentTrump

@ImWickedJess @F0XYOU Thanks for the lead - followed you both 👋🇺🇸👋🇺🇸!

How does this account not have hundreds of thousands of followers?! He's literally one of my favorites. If you aren't following F0𝕏 YOU, you must be a commie. Don't be a commie. That's wicked gross.😂 @F0XYOU

@trumplicans2024 Life changing move from Buffalo, NY to Southern California. It was December 12, 1959. I was nine years old. Biggest favor my dad ever did for his family.

where...

@Col2Vintage The car is top five all time. No need to do that kid stuff in it. The Ford GT speaks for itself.

Dope or Nope 🤔

For the record. Iran’s Historic Mistake Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is “the continuation of politics by other means.” President Trump grasped this from the start: Operation Epic Fury exists to stop Iran’s nuclear march and restore deterrence, not to pursue the familiar neocon fantasy of occupation and nation-building. Epic Fury is peace through strength in action: credible force applied decisively when adversaries mistake restraint for weakness. By weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran committed a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Tehran meant to punish America. Instead, it exposed every power built on imported energy, vulnerable sea lanes, and the delusion that globalization repealed geography. China is exposed. Europe is exposed. Britain is exposed. Iran has created a world where hard resource power decides outcomes. Start with China. Beijing’s industrial machine depends on imported oil and gas moving through vulnerable maritime chokepoints, the old Malacca dilemma in modern form. A great power reliant on long, exposed sea lines cannot be secure, regardless of economic scale. The Hormuz shock forced China to scramble for alternatives, proving that size is not resilience. Europe and Britain face the same problem. After escaping Russian dependency, they traded one vulnerability for another, leaning on imported LNG and maritime flows exposed to coercion. When chokepoints tighten, they absorb shocks rather than project strength. European criticism says less about American failure than about discomfort with a world where hard power still matters. Iran’s mistake is that once Hormuz becomes structurally unreliable, the world builds around it. That means bypass corridors, revived pipeline politics, and urgent planning for routes linking Aqaba to Mediterranean outlets near Gaza and the long-stalled Basra-to-Aqaba pipeline. The old energy order is cracking. The UAE’s OPEC exit signals cartel discipline giving way to national advantage under pressure. Trump deserves credit, not European scolding. Operation Epic Fury struck thousands of targets, degraded Iran’s offensive capabilities, and shattered assumptions that the West would absorb escalation without response. The administration acted while others lectured. It restored deterrence in the only language Tehran understands. The larger lesson matters more. Secure natural-resource hard power is what the Western Hemisphere possesses in abundance. The United States, Canada, and the Americas command hydrocarbons, LNG, farmland, freshwater, critical minerals, and strategic depth on a scale import-dependent Europe and Asia cannot match. This crisis clarified, not weakened, the Americas structural position. The financial dimension reinforces the point. Demand for Federal Reserve swap lines during crisis proves King Dollar remains supreme. When stress hits, governments run toward dollar liquidity, not away from it. Hard resource power and monetary power reinforce one another, and the United States sits at the center of both. That is Epic Fury’s real significance. Clausewitz wrote that “the political view is the object, war is the means.” Trump understood that. Iran tried to weaponize geography, Trump turned the confrontation into a demonstration of who is exposed and who is not. The Trump administration deserves far more praise than it has received, and history will likely judge that Iran’s greatest miscalculation was not merely closing Hormuz, but revealing which powers still command the real sources of strength.

@Dynostang Of course you're doing it right Steve!

French man arrives in Texas and gets the French beat out of him YEEHAW PARTNER

10 Legendary US Military Quotes: "I have not yet begun to fight." Captain John Paul Jones, 1779 His ship was sinking under him. The British captain demanded surrender. That was Jones answer. He then won the battle, boarding the enemy ship as his own went down. 🧵1/10

🧵 4/4 The work continues today. The American Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency operates with over 100 million dollars in annual funding to find lost servicemen. They cross reference dental records. They run DNA tests on living relatives. The work gets harder every year. Most of the men who never came home were 18 or 19 years old. They had no children to pass DNA to. The Japanese government, families, and private organizations search for their own missing pilots. The wrecks of Mitsubishi Zeros are sometimes recovered, restored, and placed in museums. Some are returned to the families of the pilots who flew them. In 2025 there are likely thousands of WW2 aircraft still out there. American and Japanese. In the jungle. On the seabed. In valleys nobody has walked since the war. The boys who flew them are still waiting to come home. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

@Bozate1A @US_OGA I'll be driving through some of that sad scene tomorrow on the way to Paso Robles. My state is a joke. Hilton for Governor!

@US_OGA As I stood in the middle of both the mckittrick, kettleman hills and Coalinga oil patches that were or are shutting down because of regulations

The good Senator is 100% correct. If only there was a way to produce oil right there in California so they didn't have to import it from Iraq. That would be a game changer - right? And who would be opposed to that? Oh wait .....

@67gta390 Note my old pal Bob Kearns (the red head) using that state-of-the-art hearing protection in the background. Yours truly has a rag in his back pocket as usual back then.

@67gta390 Ok, since you posted a picture of the "Care Free" car, here's another one from my archives just for fun. Springnationals 1973, Columbus, Ohio.

#legendsofdragracing Putting on a smoke show! @mdmiller50 📸internet

I am the Director of Strategic Planning at the California High-Speed Rail Authority. I have held this position for seventeen years. In that time I have written four business plans, overseen six revisions, and authored eleven methodology updates. The train has not moved. There is a hard hat on the shelf behind my desk. It was given to me at the Fresno groundbreaking ceremony in 2015. It is still in the cellophane. I use it as a bookend for the business plan binders. There are four binders. They are substantial. The hat holds them upright. In 2008, California voters approved Proposition 1A. San Francisco to Los Angeles. Two hours and forty minutes. Fifty-five dollars per ticket. Ninety-five million annual riders by 2030. Total cost: $33.5 billion. Fifty-three percent said yes. The current cost estimate is $231 billion. I am sometimes asked to provide context for that figure. The state housing shortage is 2.5 million units. At the California median home price, $231 billion would produce 577,000 of them. The average public school teacher in California earns $95,000. $231 billion is every one of their salaries for eight years. The state has a documented wildfire suppression staffing gap. $231 billion would fund 6,400 additional fire crews for a century. I include these comparisons for context. They are not relevant to my work. We have built 119 miles of infrastructure. Columns. Viaducts. Grade separations. You can see them from Highway 99 between Madera and Bakersfield. They stand in rows across land that used to grow things. No track runs on them. No train has touched them. Some of them have graffiti now. I have seen the photographs in the quarterly progress reports. I have not visited. There was an almond grower outside Hanford. She is in our files as Parcel 417, Hanford East. The Authority acquired twelve acres of her property through eminent domain in 2016 for right-of-way clearance. The trees were removed. The soil was graded flat. The right-of-way has been clear for nine years. Nothing has been built on Parcel 417. Her file notes that she attended three public comment hearings between 2014 and 2016. I do not know what she said at those hearings. I know what we said. We called the acquisition "a critical milestone in the project's advancement." I wrote those words for the 2016 Annual Report. They were well-received. Her contact information has been flagged in the Phase 2 preliminary assessment, in case additional right-of-way is required. Phase 2 does not yet exist. Her contact information does. The original completion date was 2020. The current target is 2032. The route has been revised from San Francisco-to-Los Angeles to Merced-to-Bakersfield. One hundred seventy-one miles. I refer to this as Phase 1. The French national rail company, SNCF, joined the project as a consulting partner in 2010. They left in 2011. They used the phrase "political dysfunction," which is diplomatic language for a country that built the Eiffel Tower in two years telling you it cannot build your train. SNCF then went to Morocco and built a high-speed rail line from Tangier to Casablanca. Two hundred miles. Operational by 2018. Seven years. We are in year eighteen. I included the SNCF departure in the 2022 business plan as a "comparative international case study." The lesson I drew was that Morocco has simpler permitting requirements. This is accurate. I did not draw other lessons. The $9.95 billion bond that voters approved costs the state $647 million per year for thirty years. Roughly $20 billion in total repayment. The bond is being serviced on schedule. $647 million leaves the state treasury every year and arrives in accounts associated with a train that does not carry passengers. It has done this since 2010. The bond repayment is the most functional transit system we have built. It moves $647 million a year. On time. Every time. In 2019, Governor Newsom said the project "would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long." He then continued funding it. I appreciated the word "respectfully." It acknowledged the problem without producing an obligation to solve it. My team delivered the 2020 business plan revision the following quarter. It was well-received. The Governor also supported legislation to shield certain cost details from public disclosure. That same year, thousands of pages were removed from the Authority's website. I was not involved in that decision. I was involved in the pages. Last Friday, a television host told the Governor on camera that the project now costs $231 billion. The Governor said, "No, it's not. It's not." The $231 billion figure is from the 2026 draft business plan. Page 47. I wrote page 47. The Governor then said we had gotten the project "back on track." I noted the phrasing. A rail project that has not yet laid operational track is not, in a strict sense, on one. I did not raise this. The ridership projection has been revised from 95 million annual riders by 2030 to 36 million by 2060. I updated that figure personally during the 2024 planning cycle. The ticket price has been revised from $55 to $105. Both figures describe a service that does not yet exist. The State Auditor published a report. The title is: "Flawed Decision Making and Poor Contract Management Have Contributed to Billions in Cost Overruns and Delays in the System's Construction." That is twenty words. We have 119 miles of columns that carry nothing. I read the report carefully. It was thorough. We incorporated its findings into the next business plan revision. The board was scheduled to vote on the latest business plan on April 29th. The vote was delayed. Additional review was requested. I support additional review. My pension vests in 2034. The project's current completion target is 2032. If the train is finished on schedule, my position becomes unnecessary two years before my pension matures. The completion date is determined by the business plan. I write the business plan. The plan says the project should continue. It has always said this. I have never written one that recommended otherwise.

Las Vegas, Nevada Francine Maric goes head to head with a blackjack dealer, she occupies all five places in the pit, betting $10 K, $2000 at each position, going ahead to head her odds are 1:73…if the dealer throws herself a weak up card (doesn’t) the odds change dramatically, she came fully prepared to do this as many times necessary until she wins. WINNER she was the one out of 73 on the first round of blackjack…I wish I had that kind of luck.☘️

@BuzzPatterson 100% yes - third grade, as I recall it, in Niagara Falls, NY. Hyde Park School.

Does anybody else remember us doing this foolishness? Without gloves?! 🤣

@_GrandPaD Across LV Blvd from the Stardust as I recall. Not far from The Flame steakhouse. That was a great restaurant.

It's 1979 and it looks like lunch is a shrimp cocktail and a kosher dog. Then grab a pack of smokes and play a little $1 blackjack. Ya gotta love old #LasVegas.

This video should be broadcast 24/7. The Muslim Brotherhood leader explains in his own words that, after 700 years of failed attempts to conquer Europe by force, they are now conquering it peacefully with the help of naive Western governments. The EU's weak and corrupt politicians have caused a disaster of biblical proportions. This won't end well.

Let's be honest about something the world is too proud to admit. Without America: Europe speaks Russian or German. South Korea doesn't exist. Kuwait is still occupied. Israel is surrounded with no ally. The Pacific belongs to Japan or China. Every nation that sleeps peacefully tonight does so because America is awake. You're welcome.