On this day in 1835, Mexico demanded the surrender of a cannon. Texans said, “Come and Take It.” Things escalated quickly. Happy Battle of Gonzales Day, Texas. 🤠💥

BEE KIND ALWAYS 🐝 My dad has bees. Today I went to his house and he showed me all of the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off of a 5 gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose. I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside. Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside. We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all of their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters. When it was time for me to leave we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty. Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free. Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates. We could all learn a thing or two from these bees. Bee kind always.

COMMON SENSE FROM AN OLD COWBOY . . Keep skunks and bankers at a distance. Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. Words that soak into your ears are whispered . . . not yelled. Do not corner something that you know is meaner than you. When you wallow with pigs, expect to get dirty. The best sermons are lived, not preached. The stuff people worry about ain’t never gonna happen anyway. Don ‘t interfere with somethin’ that ain’t bothering you none. If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin’. If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around . . . Don’t pick a fight with an old man.If he is too old to fight, he’ll just kill you.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

When you're a war fighter in the United States military, most of the time you start very young. 18, 19, 20 years old. You haven't seen the world yet. You haven't seen politics. You haven't seen war. You haven't seen how ugly humans can be to each other. Then people ask: Why do young Americans join the military? The most common reasons are actually very simple: Patriotism — they genuinely love their country Education — GI Bill, college, training Opportunity — travel, career, stability Family tradition — father, mother, grandfather served Discipline and purpose — structure and direction Financial stability — steady pay, benefits To be part of something bigger than themselves Very few 18-year-olds are thinking about geopolitics, oil routes, trade lanes, NATO alliances, deterrence strategy, or global power balance. They just sign up to serve. Then they deploy. They see things no human being should see. They lose friends. They operate in places most Americans can’t find on a map. They come home if they’re lucky — and many come home different people. And then the questions start: Why are we fighting all these wars? Why are we spending so much money overseas? Why are Americans dying in countries most Americans don’t know about? Is it worth it? If that veteran starts reading history, geopolitics, military strategy, economics, world wars, Cold War strategy, trade routes, global power competition — they sometimes begin to understand why America is involved everywhere. Not because war is good. But because power vacuums are worse. However, if instead they only listen to certain political voices, media narratives, or one-sided explanations, they can form a worldview based only on their deployment experience, not the full global picture. Their view of the world becomes frozen in time — the year they deployed, the war they fought, the friends they lost. Then they go home. They build a life. They raise kids. And they pass that worldview to their children. Now look at the military families. Wives raising kids alone during deployments. Parents waiting for phone calls. Families seeing their son or daughter come home changed. Birthdays missed. Funerals attended. Marriages strained. PTSD, injuries, memories that never leave. War doesn’t just affect the soldier. It affects entire families for generations. Now here’s the uncomfortable truth: War is never good. Nobody sane wants war. But saying you want a world without war is like saying you want a world without crime, greed, power, religion, resources, borders, or ideology. In other words, you’re saying you want a different humanity. Civilization itself has always been protected by people willing to fight for it. No military = no deterrence. No deterrence = power vacuum. Power vacuum = someone else takes control. And history shows that the people who take control are usually not the nice ones. So the bottom line is this: In America, you sign up voluntarily. Not by force. You choose to serve. You choose to fight. You choose to defend something you believe in. You may grow older and question the wars, the politics, the decisions. You may even become a voice trying to change the system. But to completely eliminate war, conflict, and power struggles… You wouldn’t just have to change governments. You would have to change human nature itself.

Hi. My name is Threat.

I’m a Marine, always will be. That part of me doesn’t change. But I’ll be honest, sometimes I stop and wonder if I could’ve endured what the troops of the Continental Army did in 1776. Those men marched for miles without shoes, leaving blood in the snow. They wrapped rags around their feet and kept moving. No Gore-Tex, no medevac, no hot chow waiting at the end of the march. They were hungry, constantly. Rations were scarce or nonexistent. Pay was late, sometimes never. Disease killed more men than British bullets. Smallpox, dysentery, typhus, sweeping through camps with no real medical care to stop it. They slept in the open, in threadbare coats, through freezing rain and brutal winters. At places like Valley Forge, men froze at night and drilled by day. Muskets misfired in the cold. Powder went damp. Still, they trained. They were farmers, blacksmiths, clerks, teenagers, fathers. No promise of victory. No guarantee the country they were fighting for would even exist. Just an idea, liberty, self-rule, something worth suffering for. That was their secret weapon. Not superior arms. Not numbers. Resolve. The willingness to endure misery without quitting. As a Marine, I respect that on a deep level. We train hard. We suffer by design. But those men suffered because there was no other choice, and they stood anyway. It humbles you. It reminds you that the freedoms we inherit were paid for in blood, frostbite, hunger, and faith. Different uniforms. Same spirit. 1776 didn’t just create a nation, it set the standard.

The quiet part OUT LOUD!

A Christmas morning reflection… 95% By the time your child turns 18, you've spent ~95% of the time you will ever spend with them in your lifetime. There are specific windows, much shorter than you care to admit, during which certain people and relationships will occupy your life. You may have only one more summer with all of your siblings. Two more trips with that old group of friends. A few more years with your grandpa. A handful of encounters with that coworker you love. One more long walk with your parents. If you fail to appreciate these windows, they will quickly disappear. Time Wealth is about an awareness of these windows. But more importantly, it’s about taking action against that awareness. It's about recognizing that you are in more control of your time than you realize. That you can take actions to create time with the people you love most. That you can bend these curves. That 95% is an average—and you’ve never wanted to be average in anything your entire life. So, show up to that recital. Plan that trip with old friends. Grab that quick coffee. Go on that walk with your parents. Have that meal with your sibling. In the end, it's not about the journey, it's not about the destination, it's about the company. The people along the way. Cherish the people and the rest will fall into place as it should.

My 72-year-old client has over $1.8M in his IRA and he's terrified to spend it. He called me: "I'm afraid to touch it." So he's living on $2,400 a month from Social Security while $1.8 million sits there doing nothing. He's not alone. Vanguard analyzed 70,000 retirees and found something shocking: 27% took nothing from their retirement accounts, 23% cashed out everything, and 50% made random withdrawals with no strategy whatsoever. Here's why. We spent 40 years building "accumulation by design." Auto-enrollment. Target-date funds. Automatic escalation. Put money in, watch it grow, repeat. It works brilliantly. But we never built "decumulation by design." You hit retirement with $1.8 million and the system just stops. No automatic distribution plan. No default withdrawal strategy. No system to convert your savings into income. You're completely on your own. My client worked his entire life doing exactly what he was supposed to do. He saved. He maxed out his 401(k). He built a nest egg. And now he has no idea how to use it. We sat down and built him a withdrawal plan. $6,000 a month. Taxes optimized. Medicare premiums factored in. Safe. Sustainable. He looked at me with relief: "Nobody ever told me it was okay to spend this." That's the real problem. We made it easy to save for 40 years. Then we made it terrifying to spend. You shouldn't need a PhD to spend money you spent your life saving. Source:Vanguard, "How America Saves," 2024

I am told that as a state representative this is the moment where I'm supposed to express my heartfelt condolences and then stand in solidarity with those on the other side of the aisle as we condemn political violence and stand unified as one people. But we aren't "one people" are we? The truth is we haven't been for some time now, and there is really no point in pretending anymore, if there ever was. We are two very different peoples. We may occupy the same piece of geography, but that is where the similarities seem to abruptly end. I convinced myself for a long time that whenever the left called me a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist, a "threat to democracy" for even the most innocent of disagreements, that it was simply hyperbolic rhetoric done for effect. And now the "effect" is a widow and two orphaned children, because the left couldn’t bear the thought of a peaceful man debating them and winning. I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is. It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose. Charlie tried to win that fight through argumentation, through discussion, through peaceful resolution of differences. And the other side murdered him. Not because he was “extreme” or “inciting violence” or any other hyperbolic slur they hurled at him. They murdered him because he was effective. Because he was unafraid. Because he inspired others and made them feel like they had a voice, that they were not alone. And he did it at the very institutions which have fomented so much hatred toward conservatives. I don’t want to “stand in solidarity” with the other side of the aisle. I want to defeat you. I want to defeat the godless ideology that kills babies in the womb, sterilizes confused children, turns our cities into cesspools of degeneracy and lawlessness…and that murdered Charlie Kirk. Social media is aflame right now with leftist celebration of Charlie’s death. I wonder if any among them understand what has just happened. If there is a Yamamoto somewhere in their midst warning, that all they have done is awoken a sleeping giant. I doubt it. I think they gave up such introspection and self-awareness long ago. I don’t know exactly what will happen next. I just know that it won’t be the same as what has happened in the past. There will be thoughts and prayers…Charlie would have wanted prayers. Not for himself but for those left behind and for the country that he loved. But then there will be a reckoning. My Christian faith requires me to love my enemies and pray for those who curse me. It does not require me to stand idly by in the midst of savagery and barbarism...quite the opposite. So every time I feel tired, every time I feel discouraged or overwhelmed, I am going to watch the video of a good man being murdered in Utah…I will force myself to watch it…and then I will return to the work of destroying the evil ideology responsible for that and so much more. Rest with God Charlie, your fight is over. Ours is just beginning.