my new favorite bit in one of the group chats is when world cup games go to the second half hydration break, a bunch of dudes put up 4 fingers for the 4th quarter like it's college football

This rendition by Dan & Shay is fantastic, but credit to the sound guy who absolutely nailed this mix. It's perfect. The blend between the harmonies and the live mics in the stadium is what makes the hair on your arm stand up.

Incredibly proud of this team and our country!

Opening Statement. 🇺🇸

You simply cannot overestimate how much Midwesterners love and appreciate far-away visitors and want them to have the best time possible in the places they call home. People just want to share what they love. Lawrence is a special place.

We’re all appropriately charmed by the German tourist exploring Georgia, but I met 4 separate guys in Spain who were going to be road tripping through not-super-cool America this summer between matches, and they were ALL excited One asked me if I knew of anything fun to do in Biloxi So I think we might have thousands of these folks around this year and it’s our patriotic duty to show them the coolest, weirdest corners of the US

NEW VIDEO: For decades, America treated soccer like a joke. Then something changed. For Americans under 35, soccer is as popular as the NBA, and more popular than MLB. So how did a country that spent decades mocking soccer suddenly embrace it?

High-agency is contagious. You spend time around someone who just does things and suddenly your own list of "impossible" tasks starts looking suspiciously possible.

Insane story from NYC:

Claude Code has unprompted been occasionally providing time to complete estimates over the last couple of weeks. These estimates are clearly based on pre-AI workflows and as a result, much longer than the actual completion time. Anyone else seeing this?

No one cares, and that’s amazing. “Nobody is coming to save you also implies that nobody is coming to stop you.”

Everyone who learned things the hard way in the past is still learning new things the hard way today. Learning the hard way isn’t a form of learning. It’s a form of personality.

Never again is now. We owe it to ourselves and the generations before us like my grandfathers that fought Nazis in WW2 to prevent the Nazis of today from winning. Respect to you Bill Maher.

Saturday morning and it’s a good time to think a bit about how our functional systems are being torn down by a mind virus by two philosophers: Foucault and Derrida Foucault: His framework tells you that every institution claiming to know something is really just exercising power. Medicine, engineering, law, science. Apply that at civilizational scale and you get exactly what Dan Wang warns about: a society that lost the will to build. Process knowledge — the tacit know-how that only exists in the hands of people who actually make things — dies when a culture decides that all knowledge claims are suspect. America went from building the Interstate Highway System and the Apollo rockets to being unable to build a train from LA to SF. That didn't happen because we forgot the engineering. It happened because we built an entire intellectual class whose job is to interrogate every system rather than improve one. Derrida: His move is that every commitment contains its own contradiction, so you can never land on firm meaning. Run that as societal firmware and you get the bureaucratic paralysis we now live in. Infrastructure projects stuck in 15 years of environmental review because every statement of purpose deconstructs under the next round of stakeholder input. Institutions that can't say what they're for because every draft mission statement gets wordsmithed into mush by people trained to find the hidden hierarchy in any clear sentence. Derrida is the OS behind a civilization that can write a 4,000 page environmental impact report but can't pour concrete. The real damage is these ideas escaped the lab. Every institution that adopted this operating system stopped trying to discover truth and started managing narrative. DEI bureaucracies, academic hiring committees, media editorial standards. All running on Foucault and Derrida whether they know it or not. The antidote is building. The physical bridge across a river holds or it doesn’t. The code compiles or it doesn't. Reality keeps score and it doesn't grade on a curve. Foucault and Derrida gave a generation a sophisticated excuse to never build anything. Their followers inherited the sophistication and the impotence. It’s time to build again.

The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that people will have a religion, or something that plays the role in their lives played by religion in the lives of people of faith. The only question is what religion (or pseudo-religion) they will have, and whether it will be a good one or a bad one--one that upholds human dignity and teaches genuine virtue, or one that does not.

I will not be psyopped by a transparent Chinese influence campaign to oppose data centers and allow a foreign enemy to dominate AI development Crazy how all the third worldist slop accounts pivoted from saying it’s great China builds things to being anti-data center in the US