Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that's true. It's not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington. The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health care, where women routinely died in childbirth. Then a US-funded maternity clinic opened through @UNFPA in December, and not one woman has died since. I showed up, and people mistakenly thought I was responsible for the clinic. One new mom wanted to name her baby for me, and the village elders thanked me and hailed America's generosity. What they didn't know was that Trump/Musk had cut all funding for UNFPA and that as a result the maternity clinic will close this month, and women will once again be bleeding to death in the dust. Here's a giftlink to my report from ground level about what the shutdown of USAID means: nytimes.com/interactive/2025…

Throwing more money at public schools, even doubling teacher salaries, has virtually no effect on student outcomes.

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving. Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free. I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these." "They just come with the table, man." They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner. This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat. I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared. "Did we…?" "Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless." Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined. My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude." Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man. I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy. Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived. I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most. Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

Jet lag increased my biological age by ~13 years. > as measured by grip strength > pre-travel: 141 lbs, grip age 48, ~98th percentile > post-travel: 125 lbs, grip age 61, ~98th percentile Traveled across 7 time zones, Los Angeles to Australia. Grip strength predicts mortality better than almost anything you can measure at home. A published study of a comparable eastbound flight found the same pattern, about a 7% morning drop.

Top of the seventh, and the entire stadium rose at once. Forty thousand people stood as a single body. No command given. No signal I could see. I had been watching a game. Now I was watching a nation stand up for something, and I did not yet know what. I stood faster than all of them. Whatever was coming, I would not be the last man on his feet. Then they sang. About peanuts. About not caring if they ever came back. A hymn of total devotion, sung by a people who had clearly decided this ground was worth defending. I did not know the words. I sang the shape of them. Loudly. (I am told I was a full beat behind for the entire song. I was not behind. I was holding the rear.) The song ended. Everyone sat. I did not. A man does not stand for a thing and then sit back down forty seconds later as though it never mattered. I had risen. The matter was not settled. So I held my post, scanning the field, guarding a lead that was — I will be honest — not even ours. "Down in front!" a man called. "I am watching," I said, "for all of us." "Buddy, you're blocking the whole row." He was right. I was failing the very people I had stood to protect. There is no honor in shielding a man from the thing he came to see. I sat. It was the hardest retreat of my life. The cheapest seat in the house still buys you the right to stand when your heart says stand. The trick is knowing when your heart is just showing off. They won, by the way. I like to think the standing helped. So tell me, America — forty thousand strangers stood up together for a song about snacks, and not one of them was embarrassed. I have never felt more at home anywhere. What is that? What did I just feel?

he is the best.

Bang up job Donald!

USA. Summer. It is 95 degrees outside, and I am shivering inside a sandwich shop. I have discovered how Americans forge strong souls. Outside, the sun is trying to kill everyone. Inside this small restaurant, it is winter. My breath does not fog, but it is thinking about it. A man near me is eating a cold sandwich while wearing a jacket. In summer. Indoors. In Japan we would simply turn it down. Americans do not turn it down. And now I understand them better than they understand themselves. This cold is not an accident. This cold is a gift. The owner has built, inside his shop, a second season. He invites you in from the brutal heat and hands you the one thing the sun has denied you all day: a reason to be cold. To endure it is to be tempered. You walk in soft and sweating. You walk out sharp and clear, a slightly stronger person than you were. So I did not complain. I removed my outer layer and offered it to the woman at the next table, who was hugging herself. She said, "Oh, no, I'm fine, thank you." She was not fine. Her lips were blue. But she, too, understood the training. She would not break first. I respected her deeply. The owner asked if everything was okay. "It is perfect," I said, through my teeth, which were chattering. "Thank you for the winter." He said, "...I can turn the AC down if you want?" I told him no. A man does not ask the mountain to be shorter. I stayed two hours. I ordered a hot coffee to survive. Then a second one, to hold. By the end I could no longer feel my hands, but my spirit had never been clearer. So now, on the hottest days, I seek out the coldest rooms. I sit. I shiver. I sharpen. And when I finally step back out into the summer heat, and it wraps around me like a warm bath, I feel it. Reborn. A man who has survived the winter, in August, indoors, for the price of a sandwich.

Six years ago today.

This is serious. This is urgent. We need a change in culture. White lives matter too.

Pretty much all of the prominent voices who supported the Iran War assured us it would be over by now. None of them will admit they were wrong. Even less will they admit that their initial assurances were based on nothing but their own wishcasting. This whole shitshow has been an enormous waste of time and resources and our country has not benefited from it at all. Its advocates have moved the goal posts repeatedly and have even to this day refused to clearly articulate what constitutes a victory and how we’ll know that it’s been achieved.

Your post has several embedded points that I disagree with. Let's go. THE US MILITARY IS MADE IN CHINA "If China and the USA go to war..." (1) China and the US aren't going to war, because the US military is literally made in China. See the $400M Govini study commissioned by the Pentagon itself[a], which shows that famous American armaments like the JDAM and Tomahawk are ultimately dependent upon Chinese suppliers. (2) Unfortunately, that means China can simply turn off the Republican military. You can't fight your factory. The whole defense industrial buildup to "fight China" is essentially a LARP. I like a lot of the guys involved with that, and I appreciate their wishful thinking, and it may bear results on a multi-decadal time scale...but there's no way that 77M MAGA Republicans are competing with 1.4B Chinese in manufacturing anytime soon. China's flex on rare earths was just the beginning of their enormous leverage over the US economy and military. (3) However, most of the world didn't fully understand this. They thought the US military was still the military of 1991, or 2003. That's why the war in Iran should never have been fought; the Republicans should have instead spent their political capital quietly rebuilding, while everyone thought they were still strong. Instead, they just pursued a foolhardy campaign which ended in public defeat. US military bases across the Middle East got blown up by Iranian missiles, with soldiers reduced to working remote, and ships pulled back far from the theater. This sucks, but now even neocons like Kagan are acknowledging total defeat [b,c]. (4) So: after the defeat in Iran, it's unlikely there is war with China (which is >100X Iran). However, similar to how the post-Soviet Russia got into fights with its neighbors, like the Chechens and Ukrainians, the post-imperial America will probably get much more involved in Latin America. But that's a whole separate topic. CITY STATES VS NETWORK STATES "...what you’re actually talking about is just starting some small city states around the world..." (1) First, hopefully you'll agree that new cities are pretty cool in their own right, and are how America was born in the first place. The Massachusetts Bay Colony built the City on a Hill, remember? (2) Second, I'm expressly not only talking about centralized city states, which are entirely dependent on their geographic host, but also distributed network states. There's a concrete visual here[d], but to first order you can think of it as "just" a physical social network, albeit with financial and technological resources on par with a legacy state. Similar to how some countries are islands separated by oceans, you can imagine new countries that are groups of islands (or enclaves) separated by Internet. (3) The key precedent here is decentralized crypto, which is much bigger than the the vast majority of country-scale economies in the world. Were all the crypto datacenters wiped off the map, and all cryptocurrency holders killed the second a "superpower" decided crypto was inconvenient? No, crypto actually flipped both superpowers. It was a fight with words and code, not guns, but crypto is now legal in much of the world, including not just the US and EU, but even Hong Kong in China. (4) Fourth, your beliefs were likely also considered "subversive" by far leftists for many years. But technologists defended your right to free speech, with code. And ultimately what matters is whether a belief is true, and whether it produces human flourishing. NATION OF EMIGRANTS "...didn’t you flee to Singapore?" (1) This sentence makes no sense. It's like saying "didn't you flee to Stanford" or "didn't you flee to Google". Lest you didn't know, Singapore is by some measures now the richest country in the world[e,f]. You apply to move there, and it has borders, and rejects many applicants. You cannot simply "flee" there. (2) Now, with that said, your sentence does make sense in a different context, which is that millions of Republicans and technologists HAVE fled...because they fled Democrat-controlled states like California for places like Texas and Florida, to escape the violence and drug addicts. (3) I am sympathetic, of course. But there is a difference between simply fleeing Blue America for the next state over, as opposed to consciously moving and then coming up with a plan. The obvious plan is to just vote within your existing city or country, and of course you can do that, but perhaps one can do something more. (4) My plan is simple: use the Internet to peacefully build new opt-in communities, build new cities, and connect them together. In the fullness of time, I do think that we can use the Internet to build many alternatives to places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, drain them of their best people, and demonstrate that a new birth of freedom is possible. That will either reform places like SF and LA, or it will end them, but either way the people finally get a true democratic choice of governments, with 1000 cities to chose from. (5) In other words: we want 1000 startup societies and network states around the world, each for a different subculture, some for Americans, and some for others. That's also part of why I moved here, to learn from Lee Kuan Yew's work. (6) Again, this is how America itself was started. The Pilgrims and Puritans "fled" to New England and started a new city on the hill, which eventually outclassed most of the cities in the old world. A group of Irish Americans "fled" from Ireland to America to join them. Really, they didn't simply flee, they moved, and they built something better. (7) Finally: yes, of course, it did take centuries to scale Boston to a population of 673,000. But the Internet got to billions of users in just a few decades. With new tech, we might be able to scale new cities much faster than they did before. Elon's Starbase is already well on its way, by the way. And that's what I mean by printing out the Internet. [a]: govini.com/insights/numbers-… [b]: theatlantic.com/internationa… [c]: theatlantic.com/internationa… [d]: thenetworkstate.com/the-netw… [e]: straitstimes.com/singapore/s… [f]: asiaone.com/money/singapore-…

This is probably a long shot, but if anybody happens to be in DC this weekend and plans on visiting Arlington, I would love to see a fresh photo of my husband’s grave in Section 60. SSG Alan W. Shaw Section 60, Grave 8451 B Co 1/12 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division November 10, 1975 - February 9, 2007 There’s just something about knowing people still stop by, still say his name, still remember. 🇺🇸⭐🇺🇸

The lie that all jobs are a jail sentence is ruining an entire generation. A 400k a year job, for a non executive, is impossible to get. More than the average doctor makes. More than 99% of small business owners. You gotta hold on to that job for dear life. 1% salary.

China literally has trees in Xi Jinping’s garden that are older than the United States! 🤣