Loving husband, proud father and happy to be living on the Jersey Shore. “Baby, I got my facts Learned real good”
New Jersey
Joined March 2009
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This incredible table mechanism was first patented in 1835! 😮
Nearly 200 years later, it's still mind-blowing.
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Doc Watson invented the idea of the guitar as a lead instrument in bluegrass. Decades later, Billy Strings carries that torch, and you can hear it here.
His cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” follows Doc’s arrangement, note for note.
The flatpicking lineage, alive and well.
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Ice is in Scottsdale. Please spread the word. McDonald and Pima. Don’t stop at any business. I’m asking for a retweet. Please.
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The first soldiers to go behind enemy lines in Afghanistan were Canadian JTF 2. They laser lit targets for American ordinance. Ask any REAL U.S soldier what they think of JTF 2, not this asshole. They were followed by PPCLI special operations forces from Canada. You are a liar.
Hegseth on Afghanistan:
I was a captain in Afghanistan, and we would go to the headquarters in Kabul, and there would be 50 flags at the headquarters.
It was a beautiful thing to see 50 different countries contributing to the NATO alliance and the ISAF mission there.
Except there were like maybe five that contributed. It was actually closer to one or two that, by the end, were actually involved in kinetic operations.
In fact, the ISAF patch, we would joke that it meant "I Saw Americans Fighting."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Over 1100 non-American soldiers from 31 US-allied countries were killed fighting in Afghanistan, approximately 1/3 of the total combat deaths.
t.co/x4tGhxJiFG
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This is not a joke.
The Russian biological war research should have us all concerned and stopping ALL flight from Russia, and all Russians from entry.
The longer this goes on the more countries we will have to stop flight from.
FYI: the Russians were working on a plague that is resistant to antibiotics
Russia's plague outbreak is getting worse, now with 5 hospitals in Irkutsk quarantined, universities canceling classes and accusations from healthcare workers that the government is attempting a media cover-up.
Nearly 200 contacts of a 28-year-old anti-plague laboratory worker who died last week are reportedly under isolation or medical observation.
Irkutsk universities are canceling classes citing a “case of pneumonic plague,” while an aluminum plant introduced mandatory masks. A local government warning advising residents not to travel to Shelekhov was published and later deleted.
Healthcare workers claim doctors are discussing plague internally while avoiding the diagnosis in official documents.
Russian health authorities continue to deny any plague outbreak, attributing the woman's death to “pneumonia of unknown origin.”
Pneumonic plague is far worse that it's Bubonic cousin as its transmitted directly between humans.
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Pretty clear Hegseth’s primary mission is to transform the military ideologically by overtly indoctrinating troops with Christian nationalism and apocalyptic holy war messaging while rooting out those who don’t want to participate and just want to serve their country admirably.
Listen to Roger
I fear that Stanford may be a uniquely poor choice to oversee AI safety. The university is too deeply embedded in the tech industry, too dependent on its stock returns. Stanford’s history w/ bad ideas embraced by leaders in AI, such as eugenics, may also be an issue. @chrmanning
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Americans:
Our political system elevated the most dangerous combination of psychopathologies & disorders known to man to the presidency.
Our financial system elevated a genocidally racist, messianic conman to be richest person in the world.
Malignant narcissists—the closest personality type to biblical evil—are in the most powerful positions our society can offer. The worst humans have been handed the best tools to hurt people.
This is suicidal behavior.
The entire elite class of billionaires and politicians is either a participant or an appeaser in a system that has been inverted to serve a psychologically aberrant minority. We are in a fight with deviants—and deviance itself.
It’s going to take a lot more than elections to fix this. It’s going to take the will to face that our nation, and our species has no special right to exist. We must come to accept that we are not in fact exceptional at all. We’re just people like anyone else.
If we cannot collectively agree that cruelty and deception are not acceptable strategies—that bigotry, lying, cheating, and betrayal cannot be tolerated whoever it comes from—our entire civilization will self-combust.
Germany is re-Nazifying itself and Musk is taking credit for it. Trump went to war with our best friends in North America to compensate for losing an oil war to terrorists. We colonized Venezuela to steal their oil and installed a puppet controlled through text messages by the Secretary of State. The “Secretary of War” is trying to turn the military into a lawless group of violent christofascist crusaders.
We are no longer the bulwark against fascism. We are the source. We do not confront the enemies of democracy, we have become its biggest threat.
None of what’s being done in our name, with our money, and our soldiers, is about America. It’s about ensuring that a small group of deviant elites can dominate the world forever.
Eventually in life, you find a hill you’re willing to die on. This is mine. We cannot go back to the system that allowed all of this to happen. I refuse to let my grandchildren grow up in a world that has everything completely backwards.
There is no simple test for people like the evil men who have seized power. But we know the behavior when we see it. If we do not rebuild a government and an economy that makes this kind of deviance unprofitable, it will continue to replicate as an invasive species—a metastasis that kills the host.
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I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink just openly stated that the trillions of dollars being used to build data centers and power grids will come from ordinary people’s savings accounts and pension funds, calling it "mandatory" that people will be forced to “invest” in it.
“Much of this will come from savings accounts and pension accounts.”
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This is Marta Kostyuk from Kyiv telling you how her family survives the war.
The official US Open channel avoided posting this. Please share this video so a Ukrainian voice can be heard. 🇺🇦🙏
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The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital.
I played soccer for 20+ years.
Grassroots.
Academy.
D1 college.
Pursued professionally after.
And I’ll say the quiet part out loud:
The US soccer infrastructure is broken.
In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement.
For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal:
Get recruited.
Get a scholarship.
Play college soccer.
But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path.
From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival.
Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France.
That player has likely been in a professional environment for years.
Training daily.
Playing meaningful matches year-round.
Competing against grown professionals.
Getting thousands more touches.
Learning how to solve the game under pressure.
The gap is massive.
And it shows.
American players are usually athletic.
They are usually fit.
They usually compete hard.
But at the highest levels, that is not enough.
The biggest difference is technical comfort.
We do not move the ball like Spain.
We do not combine like Argentina.
We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood.
That comes down to volume.
Volume of touches.
Volume of street soccer.
Volume of futsal.
Volume of unstructured play.
Volume of high-level training environments.
Volume of meaningful games.
In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23.
Parents spend thousands.
Clubs charge thousands.
Travel teams fly all over the country.
Showcases become the product.
Recruiting becomes the scoreboard.
But the return on invested capital is poor.
We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment.
That is a broken operating model.
And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer.
You inspect the system.
The US has talent.
The US has athletes.
The US has money.
The US has facilities.
But the foundation is wrong.
We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system.
Those are not the same thing.
Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources.
I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer.
I’m saying it because I lived it.
And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.
Mark has a remark retweeted
Thank you for reminding people of Czesława Kwoka’s story. It is important that her name and fate are remembered.
There are, however, several important points that should be corrected or treated with more care.
The image was a camp registration photograph taken after her arrival at Auschwitz on 13 December 1942. Czesława’s mother, Katarzyna Kwoka, did not die “just a month” after arrival. She died on 18 February 1943, and Czesława was murdered less than a month after her mother.
The description of the person who struck Czesława also requires caution. Wilhelm Brasse’s recollections are cited in somewhat different versions. In some accounts, he speaks of a female SS auxiliary or SS guard; in others, of a female Kapo, meaning a prisoner functionary. The version mentioning an SS auxiliary became widely known mainly because it appears in the biographical documentary about Brasse.
It is also important not to suggest that Wilhelm Brasse alone photographed all prisoners or saved the photographs by himself. He was one of several prisoners forced by the SS to work in the camp photographic identification unit. Other prisoner photographers also worked there. In January 1945, during the evacuation of Auschwitz, Brasse and Bronisław Jureczek helped save thousands of camp photographs from destruction.
Another important correction concerns the phrase that the Nazis forced Brasse to photograph “every person who entered the camp.” Not every person deported to Auschwitz was registered or photographed. Many deportees, especially Jews murdered after selection, were never entered into the camp records. These photographs were registration images of prisoners recorded in the camp system.
Finally, while the emotional language of the post is understandable, we should be careful about assigning thoughts and reflections to Czesława that we cannot document. We can say that she was frightened, that she did not understand German, and that she was a child subjected to violence and terror. But phrases such as “she did not understand why she was in a place called Auschwitz” go beyond what sources allow us to know.
Remembering Czesława is profoundly important. Precisely because her story matters so much, it should be told as accurately as possible.
In precise historical language, “the Holocaust” refers primarily to the genocide of Jews. Czesława's story belongs to the broader history of Nazi German crimes, expulsions and persecution of Poles, and Auschwitz. The German campaign in the Zamość region led to deportations to concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
The history of the people displaced from the Zamość region and deported to Auschwitz is tragic. Of the 1,301 people, including 667 women and 634 men, deported between December 1942 and February 1943 in three transports from the transit camp in Zamość to KL Auschwitz, at least 1,010 lost their lives, accounting for almost 78% of the entire group. This included 488 women, 73% of the women, and 522 men, 82% of the men. Only 183 people survived, including 142 women and 41 men, while the fate of the remaining 108, 37 women and 71 men, is unknown.
In total, at least 162 minors, 79 girls and 83 boys, were deported, including 68 children, 28 girls and 40 boys, who were under 15 years of age at the time of deportation. The end of the war was survived by 40 girls, 50% of the girls, including 16 under the age of 15, and only 7 boys, 8% of the boys, including one under the age of 15. Thirty-nine girls and 74 boys, almost 90% of the boys, were killed. Forty-eight of them were murdered by phenol injection. Historians have not been able to determine the fate of two minor boys deported to Auschwitz from the transit camp in Zamość.
Learn more: lekcja.auschwitz.org/dep_zam…
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"When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?" It was 1931, and American journalist Dorothy Thompson was permitted only three questions during a rare interview with Adolf Hitler that many considered impossible to secure. The leader of Germany's rapidly ascending far-right Nazi party gave her a chillingly candid reply.
"I will get into power legally," Hitler told her. "I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below."
Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."
As one of America’s most respected foreign correspondents and the first American woman to head a foreign news bureau, Thompson had been tracking the Nazi movement since 1923. At the time of the interview, she was deeply familiar with Hitler, having watched his speeches, read Mein Kampf, and interviewed numerous German politicians and Nazi supporters.
"When I walked into Adolph Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany," Thompson later reflected. "In something like fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."
She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting. Thompson found the interview nearly impossible to conduct: "One cannot carry on a conversation with Adolph Hitler... In every question, he seeks for a theme that will set him off. Then his eyes focus in some far corner of the room; a hysterical note creeps into his voice, which rises sometimes almost to a scream. He gives the impression of a man in a trance. He bangs the table."
Following the interview, in numerous articles and her book "I Saw Hitler," she warned about the threat Hitler represented to democracy and highlighted Hitler's embrace of racial prejudice, noting that persecution of the Jewish people was among the first planks in his program. But ultimately, she viewed an outright Nazi victory in the upcoming election as "unlikely," not believing that German citizens would embrace such an extremist demagogue in an election.
Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After he came to power in 1933, Hitler began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups. Thompson quickly became one of the most vocal chroniclers of Hitler's growing brutality, warning a world that was largely oblivious. “It must be said, it must be re-iterated,” she wrote, “that there has been and still is a widespread terror, which extends throughout the whole of Germany.”
Hitler was sufficiently threatened by Thompson's work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. In August 1934, Nazi government expelled Thompson from the country, making her the first American journalist banned from Nazi Germany.
© A Mighty Girl
#archaeohistories
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A young woman named MacKenzie Tuttle graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a degree in English. One of her professors was Toni Morrison, who later described her as one of the finest creative writing students she had ever taught.
After graduation, MacKenzie took a job at the New York investment firm D. E. Shaw. There she met a colleague named Jeff Bezos, who had an ambitious idea: selling books on the internet.
She didn’t laugh at the idea.
They married in 1993, and the following year drove across the country to the Seattle area to build what would become Amazon.
In the beginning, there was no global empire.
There was a garage.
MacKenzie handled accounting, wrote business materials, answered customer emails and phone calls, and packed orders alongside Jeff. Like many startups, everyone did whatever needed to be done.
As Amazon grew, MacKenzie stepped away from day-to-day operations to raise their four children while continuing to pursue her own passion for writing.
Her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, won the American Book Award. She later published a second novel and quietly built a respected literary career.
Meanwhile, the story of Amazon became one of the most famous business stories ever told.
Jeff Bezos became one of the world’s most recognizable entrepreneurs.
MacKenzie’s role was rarely part of the public narrative.
She never seemed interested in changing that.
What many people don’t know is that she also knew financial hardship.
Her family filed for bankruptcy while she was still a student, and she has spoken about the kindness of people who helped her through difficult times—acts of generosity she never forgot.
In 2019, after her divorce, MacKenzie Scott received approximately 4% of Amazon’s shares.
Almost immediately, she made a decision that surprised the world.
She signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate the majority of her wealth during her lifetime.
Then she did something even more unusual.
Instead of building a massive public foundation or attaching her name to buildings, she began giving away billions of dollars through large, unrestricted grants.
Universities.
Food banks.
Housing organizations.
Rural communities.
Women’s health initiatives.
Tribal colleges.
Climate organizations.
Small nonprofits that had never imagined receiving gifts of that size.
Many recipients reportedly thought the phone calls were scams.
They weren’t.
Since 2019, MacKenzie Scott has donated tens of billions of dollars to thousands of organizations, making her one of the most significant philanthropists of the modern era.
Despite giving away enormous sums, her fortune has remained substantial because of Amazon’s continued growth.
The woman who once packed Amazon’s first orders is now helping fund opportunities for millions of people she will probably never meet.
She never asked for buildings in her name.
She never demanded headlines.
Sometimes the greatest legacy isn’t the company you help build.
It’s what you choose to do with the success that follows.
