If I die and you get dibs on my gear, use the RAM sticks with scorch marks at your own risk.

ANd if you think that's some sh** let me tell you about Sheetz.

It is criminal that our government enabled a bat virus to infect and spread between humans. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a bigger betrayal of our species. It is equally troubling that the mad scientists who did this then gaslit all the people of the world about it, including those who CORRECTLY interpreted the evidence. Then, of course, the very same monsters amped up fear of the Covid frankenvirus and steered the panicked public away from safe medicines, and toward an obviously dangerous gene-therapy which they falsely called a vaccine in order to lure us into acceptance. These are among the greatest crimes EVER committed against humanity. We now have persuasive evidence of everything I have said above. If we don't correct the record and hold the perpetrators to account, this pattern will happen again, and again, and again--shortening our life expectancy, and degrading our quality of life each time that it does. This is our Nuremberg moment. We can not simply move on from this ghastly chapter of history. We must finish it. @brownstoneinst

Backstory:

When 102-year-old World War II veteran Wally King asks you to have a beer at the Stop Bar in Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy, you have a beer (or two) with Wally King at the Stop Bar in Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy. What an honor!  Wally flew 75 combat missions in the Second World War in P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts.  He was shot down in April of 1945, parachuting out of his P-47 over Germany and becoming a POW before then evading both German and Soviet forces on his way to freedom.  Legend!  I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Normandy with Wally three times for D-Day commemoration events with the Best Defense Foundation over the past few years.  We always have a blast!  🇺🇸

Listen to Granny Bibbins, folks. Once you give up privacy… you don’t get it back 👀

To you, it's just a Cracker Barrel parking lot. To me, it's where I gave my life to Jesus Christ. I was 21 years old. I was working at the Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee after some of the worst years of my life. I'd made mistakes. Real ones. I grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, raised by a mom who worked hard and didn't accept excuses. But I made decisions that should have ended my story before it ever really started. By the grace of God, they didn't. But every day, I was carrying them. One afternoon, a church group came into the restaurant, just back from a revival. I served them their meals like I served any other table. But something happened while I was serving them. I can't fully explain it to you. The Lord spoke to me. He said, “Stop running from Me.” It knocked me back. I went to find the table, and they were all gone. I could see through their windows that they were getting on their bus, and I knew deep down that if I let them drive away, I was going to keep running. So I went outside. The last woman, just as she was stepping onto the bus, turned to me and asked, “Are you okay?” I told her, “No ma’am, I’m not okay.” I told her the Lord was telling me to stop running. That whole bus emptied out, stood with me in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel in Tallahassee, Florida, and prayed over me right there. I gave my life to Christ that day. Right there. I still get emotional about it. Because I know what I was before that moment, and I know what He's done since. He gave me a wife who shares my faith. He gave me three sons. He gave me a career, a community, a calling I never would have dared to ask for. He took a kid from Crown Heights who’d run out of chances and gave him a life that doesn't make sense apart from grace. People ask me sometimes why I talk about it. Why I bring up the parking lot. Why I don't just keep that part private and let folks see the polished version. I'll tell you why. Because there's a young man out there right now — maybe in Tallahassee, maybe in Tampa, maybe in Miami, maybe in a small town in the Panhandle — who thinks his story is already over. Who thinks the mistakes he's made disqualify him from the life he could have had. Who thinks God doesn't want anything to do with somebody like him. I'm here to tell him: that's a lie. In life, you're not who you are at the lowest point. You're who you choose to become after. The Lord met me in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. He'll meet you wherever you are. You just have to stop running.

Why is the mere mention of Rhodesia or Cecil Rhodes enough to get you branded? Because it's the clearest evidence in history.

Wild when the least realistic thing about a Jason Statham movies is the racial demo of the phone scammers in the premise 🤣

You did the meme.

When American POWs tried to sneak her notes with their personal information to tell their families they were still alive, she gave them to the North Vietnamese. Some of them were beaten to death. You are both commies and you can both fuck off.

My favorite part is the idea of some right wing racist extremist militant who is a big fan of both Trump and DeSantis. That’s a category that includes zero actual humans on Earth. These people don’t have a theory of mind for conservatives at all so they have no idea how to effectively slander us.

Don’t let this go viral though.

I'm heartened to see the ratio. Maybe someday we'll live in a world where you're fridge can't report you to the Social Credit Bureau.

Elon Musk just revealed what’s actually holding AI back. It’s not chips. Not models. Not data. It’s concrete. Someone asked him the obvious question. Why not just build private power plants next to data centers? Bypass the grid entirely. His answer was four words. Musk: “The power plant makers.” There aren’t enough of them. You can design the best chip on earth. Train a frontier model. Raise $10 billion for a hyperscale data center. None of it matters if you can’t power it. Musk: “You can drill down a level further.” GPUs need power. Power needs turbines. Turbines need factories. Factories need permits. Permits need a government that hasn’t paralyzed itself. Every link in the chain is physical. And every one of them is breaking. We can train a frontier model in weeks. We can’t permit a power plant in under five years. The country that invented the assembly line now needs 40 agencies to approve a gas turbine. China doesn’t have this problem. They don’t run 7-year environmental reviews on infrastructure they need tomorrow. They break ground while America requests approval to break ground. The AI race won’t be decided by whoever writes the best algorithm. It’ll be decided by whoever can still build in the physical world. We spent 30 years getting faster in software and slower in steel. Outsourcing manufacturing. Hollowing out supply chains. Treating builders like liabilities instead of assets. Now the bill is due. Every breakthrough in AI is gated by atoms. Steel. Concrete. Turbines that take years to manufacture and decades to approve. The smartest code on earth is worthless without electricity. Musk didn’t give a speech about this. He didn’t need to. He answered one question and the whole infrastructure myth collapsed. “Where do you get the power plants from?” Follow that thread far enough and you stop finding a technology problem. You find a civilization that mastered thinking and forgot how to build.

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

Where is “here”? Your profile says South Asia.

"...the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of 'anti-Muslim extremism.' The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri shot him, cut his throat, and pinned a five-page letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a fatwa against me. I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy... The SPLC considers all of this beyond the pale, and accused me of using 'the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims." And "Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience." thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-…

I also have had a substantial drop in earnings. My prior job wasn't stealing tax money though.

Not just that the left cuddled up to their own lunatic fringe. They've done that to a great extent for decades. It's that they acually installed them in the government, and in corporate institutions so big and powerful that they might as well be governments. See @Mrgunsngear

Scott Adams on the SPLC: “So you can’t trust anybody who gets paid by the amount of hate they identify…they’re gonna find some hate.” Boy is this man missed.