Joined July 2023
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130 Photos and videos
Yep. Really hard to fight Mother Nature. The Reflecting Pool is looking mighty green today. They fixed the leaks and cleaned the pool. They did little to stop the regrowth of the algae (the upgrade to the filter was the only thing that was for water quality). In fact, stopping the leaks means they no longer have to add clean(er) water too the pool each day, which might accelerate the algae. The pool is shallow, with little water circulation, in an area that used to be a swamp. Sealing the bottom changed none of that.
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 14
I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is.
University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.
Jun 14
Elite university students are now incapable of reading a book.
Instead of fixing this, universities are simply reducing reading requirements to shorter and shorter excerpts.
This is no mere literacy crisis. It is a civilizational one.
To fight back, we started an online book club to study the great texts of Western Civilization — if the schools and universities won't teach the great books, we must form reading groups to study them ourselves.
Every month, we read a new great work. We've covered texts like Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote.
We're now reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
We must study the ideas upon which the West was built if we are to preserve it. It takes effort to read these texts, and even more to read them well. Thats what we're doing, slowly, in dialogue with each other.
If you'd like to be part of this, please join our reading group and consider a paid subscription. It makes a HUGE difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this project. We are entirely funded by our members.
You'll get:
- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
- Access to our incredible community chat
- Essays to guide you through the Great Books
- All past recordings, essays, and podcasts
- Ability to vote on what we read next
athenaeumbooks.com/welcome
Welcome!
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
End the federal mental-health mission creep in schools.
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Universal mental-health screening in K-12 produces up to 90% false positives. A 19-year RCT on school-based mental-health services found zero gains in test scores or attendance. Just more kids funneled into treatment, with no way to tell whether they needed it.
Kids in real emotional distress need real clinical support. But universal programs do the opposite. They spread resources thin, divert attention from the few in genuine crisis, medicalize ordinary distress, and convince healthy kids they're sick.
So why did the House Appropriations Committee just vote to lock ~70% of the federal "Safe Schools" fund—built for physical security, violence prevention, and emergency preparedness—into mental-health grants with this track record?
Congress should shut this down. Schools will never be equipped or accountable for clinical work. Stop treating them like mental-health clinics.
@ManhattanInst fellow @CarolynGorman_ in @CityJournal city-journal.org/article/sch…
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 13
The UFC just released an AI promo for the White House event featuring Theodore Roosevelt
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 12
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
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Jun 12
Musk is helping paralyzed people interact with the world using just their minds, he's helping them to return to independence, and working on helping the blind see again. Nothing in your little fascist life will ever compare to that.
Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
Let’s make sure he’s also the last.
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Jun 12
Holy Toledo! Hitting hard and not going away!!
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 12
Saving LA - Phase III
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 10
Have progressives ever adopted/implemented a policy, program, or practice that has actually helped the students they claim to be most interested in helping? They seem to do far more harm than good to the most vulnerable students.
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
The price of unnecessarily long school closures has never been more clear
New NAEP results are out and it’s clear the bottom has fallen out for our lowest performing math students:
The bottom 10% of students performed worse than any cohort of students on the history of the test going all the way back to the 1970s
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 10
If a private pension company did something like Social Security, its executives would be thrown in prison, but politicians in Washington refuse the fix the program by shifting to personal retirement accounts (2/2) danieljmitchell.wordpress.co…
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 10
There are those who would argue that starting the war was a mistake. But choosing to end the U.S. bombing and declare a “cease-fire” that the Iranians violate with metronomic regularity has compounded the mistake. Frustrated Iran hawks have tried to tell the administration that the Iranian mullahs were never going to change, and were stalling for time in the negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two specialists in Manhattan real estate. The administration had no interest in listening.
It is very difficult to see a path to clear and lasting victory in this war with a president this erratic and negotiators this naïve.
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Jun 10
Exactly. This problem first came to my attention when I was reading a newspaper in my college dorm senior year. Back then I did the math, the crisis year would be the year I turned 67.
The crash year has meandered around a bit since then, but it still hits right around my retirement.
There was a survey a few years ago that said Gen X has a greater belief in UFOs than in Social Security. This was taken as proof of crazy conspiracies, instead of just cold hard facts.
Breaking news from 40 years ago
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Jun 10
CA needs more goats!
Jun 9
He's right, you know?
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Jun 9
I listened to an interview with two people who had jumped of the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. They had campaigned hard for suicide netting and were celebrating the installation. Both of them said the same thing:
The instant they let go, they regretted it.
Scenic California bridge puts up massive barriers across edge for terrifying reason trib.al/vX8kzYh
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 7
I was willing to chalk up Raman's comeback to 1) organic support, as evidenced by LAT poll 2) breaking late due to Gov. uncertainty, DSA push, etc. 3) coupled with well-organized but legal "harvesting" operation. Then I read Callahan's tweet, which if true suggests that maybe bogus ballots were counted. Needs to be investigated.
Jun 7
Third part of this seems to be a huge admission. The defense against voting a false ballot relies on signature verification. But "If you’re unable to sign, you can make a “mark” like a dot or slash... I asked them how they verify these signatures. Turns out, they simply don’t."
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Peter Shrinks retweeted
Jun 7
Third part of this seems to be a huge admission. The defense against voting a false ballot relies on signature verification. But "If you’re unable to sign, you can make a “mark” like a dot or slash... I asked them how they verify these signatures. Turns out, they simply don’t."
Wildest takeaways from my time at the Ballot Processing Center today.
✍🏻 Signatures only need to be 40% accurate (!) this is the setting the machines are set at for LA County (called the ASV)
🗳️ The last two drops disproportionately supported Raman. Are those coming from specific neighborhoods since they’re such an anomaly? Or are the neighborhoods pretty spread out that you count from on a given day? “We’re not sure.”
💌 If you’re unable to sign, you can make a “mark” like a dot or slash instead of signing. A witness then signs below.
I asked them how they verify these signatures. Turns out, they simply don’t.
Well, you must check the witness signatures, right? “No, we don’t.”
So what if I stole a ballot, made a dash by the person’s name, and signed my name? “You shouldn’t do that, but in theory it would be counted,” they said.
How many of these “marked” ballots get in per election? “We don’t know,” they said.
Ripe for fraud, no?
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Jun 7
"Break the glass," Gov Newsom.
The sole purpose of mass-mailing ballots is to produce millions of unwanted, unclaimed ballots floating around in the wild.
California takes it a step further by insuring there is no way to know who filled out the ballot, who collected the ballot, or who delivered the ballot.
The whole thing is a transparent sham ... BY DESIGN.
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The sole purpose of mass-mailing ballots is to produce millions of unwanted, unclaimed ballots floating around in the wild.
California takes it a step further by insuring there is no way to know who filled out the ballot, who collected the ballot, or who delivered the ballot.
The whole thing is a transparent sham ... BY DESIGN.
Jun 6
Elephant in the room: There is NO WAY FOR ANYONE to know who filled out a received mail ballot. Therefore, there is no way to check the eligibility of the voter. YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE VOTER IS.
Has everyone lost their damn minds?
x.com/PatriotMarkCook/status…
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