Job creator. AFSOC Veteran.
Michigan, USA
Joined March 2009
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TJDIV retweeted
The year is 2035. AI has taken over the internet. Nothing online is real anymore. Every video, every influencer, every girlfriend, every news story is fake. So everyone logged off.
Digital work was obliterated and automated. The most valualbe skills are now cooking, fixing a truck, farming and fixing things with your hands.
You moved to the land with your wife and 5 close couples.
Farmers and mechanics are the new millionaires. Dinner parties are the new social media. People write letters again. Your kids grow up barefoot, climbing trees and eating steak and eggs instead of scrolling.
News? the only news is your 6th kid on the way.
Turns out AI didn’t destroy humanity. It just made the internet so fake that we finally went back outside.
TJDIV retweeted
Yezhov – The Butcher.
His old boss once said he had never met a more ideal worker: "Give him a task and you don't need to check on him – he'll get it done. He has only one shortcoming: he doesn't know when to stop."
Nikolai Yezhov was a small man, barely five feet tall, a former factory worker with little schooling who rose through the Party as a diligent, obedient bureaucrat. He was exactly the man the system needed.
A small and vicious man – in power, he drank heavily and liked to go down to the prisons to watch interrogations – sometimes joining the beatings himself. When his wife had an affair with the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, Yezhov had their hotel room bugged and listened to the recordings. He watched his own bedroom just as he watched over the whole country.
His philosophy fit in one sentence: better that ten innocent people suffer than one spy escape. English law had said the opposite for centuries: better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer. That one reversal is the whole difference between a civilization and a terror.
In 1936, Stalin put him at the head of the NKVD. The old boss who had praised him was shot in the terror that followed.
The West calls it the Great Purge. Russians remember it as the Yezhovshchina – "the Yezhov times." But it was not a frenzy. It was a plan.
An order of July 1937 gave every region a quota: so many to be shot – the "first category" – and so many to be sent to the camps – the "second category." Local chiefs competed to fulfill the plan and asked Moscow to raise their limits. Moscow usually agreed.
Torture was authorized from the top. Then came the national operations – Germans, Latvians, Finns, and above all Poles. Order 00485, signed by Yezhov, hunted an organization that did not exist. The verdicts came in albums, a few lines per person. In Moscow, two signatures sealed them – Yezhov's and the prosecutor Vyshinsky's – hundreds of death sentences at a sitting.
The wives of the condemned went to the camps. Their children went to orphanages.
Propaganda posters showed him crushing a many-headed snake in a spiked glove. His name means "hedgehog," and "hedgehog gloves" is the Russian idiom for an iron grip.
In two years, around seven hundred thousand people were shot.
Then the machine needed a culprit. In 1938, Beria arrived as his deputy, and by November Yezhov was out. In April 1939 he was arrested, tortured with the methods he had perfected, and made to confess to being a spy. At his secret trial, he asked that Stalin be told he would die with his name on his lips. He was shot in February 1940.
Then he was erased – from the photographs, from the records, from the story. The terror kept his name, Yezhovshchina, so that it would not carry the Master's.
His adopted daughter was sent to an orphanage, like the children of his victims.
The machine is never satisfied. It always needs the next name on the list – and, when the time comes, the name of the man who made the lists.
Next: Beria.
The Butchers – The Men Who Ran the Soviet Terror.
Moscow, a winter night in 1937. Long past midnight in the Kremlin, a man with a pipe sits at his desk under a lamp. In front of him, a stack of typed lists – names, one per line. He runs a blue pencil down the pages. A tick. A note in the margin. Sometimes a name crossed out, sometimes one added. The same pencil he uses to edit film scripts and poems.
His officials stay awake at home, next to the phone, in case he calls before dawn.
Hundreds of lists. Tens of thousands of names. On a single day, December 12, 1937, he and Molotov approved more than three thousand death sentences. Then, historians tell us, they went to watch a film.
But Stalin didn't invent the machine. He perfected it.
In August 1918, Lenin sent a telegram to his comrades: hang at least a hundred kulaks – hang them so that people see it for hundreds of kilometers around. Trotsky, the "good communist" of Western nostalgia, ordered the families of officers taken as hostages.
The founders gave the orders. Then the machine needed men – men who would build the apparatus, fill the camps, write the confessions and pull the triggers. And sooner or later, it devoured many of them.
1. Dzerzhinsky – the Founder. "Iron Felix," a Polish noble's son, who built the Cheka in 1917.
2. Trotsky – the Myth. The revolutionary Western intellectuals still romanticize, who wrote a whole book defending terror – until the machine he helped build killed him with an ice axe.
3. Stalin – the Editor. The man at the desk, with the blue pencil, long past midnight.
4. Yagoda – the Builder. The Gulag as an economy: canals dug by prisoners who died by the tens of thousands. Then shot by his own machine.
5. Vyshinsky – the Prosecutor. "Confession is the queen of evidence" – so he got confessions. "Shoot the mad dogs!" at the show trials, then the Soviet seat at the United Nations.
6. Yezhov – the Butcher. The Great Terror, the quotas, the Polish operation – then shot, and erased from the photographs.
7. Beria – the Strategist. Katyn, the atomic bomb, the deportations – and a predator. Shot by his own colleagues three months after Stalin's death.
8. Blokhin – the Executioner. In the spring of 1940, at Kalinin, he personally shot thousands of Polish prisoners over a few weeks, in a leather apron and cap.
9. Serov – the Hunter of Poland. He crushed the Home Army, lured the leaders of the Polish Underground State to "talks" and had them tried in Moscow. Then Hungary in 1956, and the first chairman of the KGB.
10. Andropov – the Modernizer. Dissidents sent to psychiatric hospitals instead of camps: softer, quieter – same goal: erasing people. The first secret police chief to rule the country.
11. Epilogue – The Chekists Never Left. From the KGB to the FSB to the Kremlin.
Why name them? Because their whole work was erasure – of people, of records, of memory. Remembering is the opposite of what they did.
And erasure didn't die with them. Today it rarely needs a bullet. It is called cancelling, deplatforming, debanking, lawfare. The inconvenient person isn't shot – he is removed: from his job, his bank account, his platform, the conversation. Yezhov needed a retoucher. Today a terms-of-service update does the job.
For Poles, these are not names from a history book. They are the names behind our grandparents' graves – and that is why we recognize their heirs.
TJDIV retweeted
"Why does nobody run for the school board?"
"Why are the Rotary clubs empty?"
"Why does every town meeting feel like it's run by the same motley assortment of terrible people?"
Because the men who ought be doing so--the successful local men of prominence, typically businessmen and lawyers--came to the conclusion in the mid-20th century that participation in and leadership of civic life was someone else's job.
This is the desire of the so-called conservative to simply "work" rather than do all the other things that keep entropy at bay and ensure things function. Their doing so left open the field to the worst among us: spiteful malcontents
It wasn't always like this.
The planters of the Virginia gentry served as vestryman, justice, militia officer and burgess, usually before he turned thirty and usually for no pay, other than perhaps having some travel expenses covered as a burgess.
It was expected of him, and he expected it of himself: as a man whose success made him privileged, he was duty-bound to be the one to show up and lead
That habit can come back. It ought come back. It starts with showing up to the boring meeting, and being the sort of man to whom others listen. The sort of man whose reputation for success and competence, and cultivated but not overdone and always aesthetically pleasing look makes others want to follow him
This is what the great men we look back to did, and is indeed what their whole soceity was geared toward producing: great men who were great leaders at every level of civic life, from the humblest station at the bottom to the greatest at the top
Re-engaging in that way will be critical if we are to retake our country.
Read more about what we can learn from the Virginia gentry here: theamericantribune.news/p/ho…
TJDIV retweeted
The sheer fucking hypocrisy surrounding Elon Musk is breathtaking.
For decades, billionaire-funded foundations have financed advocacy groups, political campaigns, legal organizations, and efforts to reshape public policy.
George Soros is one of the most prominent examples.
And somehow that influence is routinely presented as enlightened philanthropy.
Then Elon Musk enters politics, spends openly, challenges powerful institutions, and suddenly the entire establishment discovers the dangers of billionaire influence.
Give me a fucking break.
The man has built companies that launch rockets, connect the world through satellites, manufacture vehicles, and advance technologies with enormous implications for humanity.
His long-term ambition is to make civilization multiplanetary.
He has a profound personal interest in a future where technological progress remains possible.
You can disagree with his politics.
But pretending he’s just another billionaire looking for influence ignores the extraordinary scale of what he’s actually trying to accomplish.
TJDIV retweeted
Ryan Cohen has purchased 5,144,810 $GME shares in 2026, for about $118.56 million (average price ~$23.04/share)
He's fully aligned with shareholders.
I hope the warrants don't expire worthless, but I trust the man behind the plan, even if he is slow and mentally disoriented.
TJDIV retweeted
The public outcry toward Ryan Cohen, who sits atop an issuer, for not yet 'making' a free derivative product go in the money, is utterly ridiculous.
Nine profitable quarters in a row. The CEO has put nearly $100,000,000 of his OWN MONEY into the common stock over the past month and change.
What more do people want?
$GME
TJDIV retweeted
I see how some people can watch flashy robot demos on the timeline and think with a shiver that the robot apocalypse is around the corner, but reality check:
There is no robot in the world that can change the batteries in a jack-o-lantern.
If you have a robot friendly door handle it might be able to walk outside, pick it up, and carry it back inside. The robot could open the drawer with your batteries in it, but then things get tough.
Opening the package of AA batteries?
Extracting a precision screwdriver from its case?
Unscrewing four tiny screws that require a hard press and twist?
Popping batteries out of the case?
Yes, you could build and train a specialist robot to do that today, but there is a very long way to go to replace the full range of human capabilities. Near term doomer scenarios should stop at “secretly controlling humanity” instead of “wiping humanity out” 😀
TJDIV retweeted
This Irish farmer hilariously sums up the entire world’s problems.
“Why we bes bend over…”
My man!
TJDIV retweeted
"The dose makes the poison" is undefeated.
Even the internet's favorite supplements must follow the rules of toxicology.
There's a drug that treats and causes the same disease.
The difference? The dose—how much you take.
@adolaskie explains in @ACSHorg's latest video. Expert review provided by Dr. @JoshBloomACSH.
TJDIV retweeted
There's a drug that treats and causes the same disease.
The difference? The dose—how much you take.
@adolaskie explains in @ACSHorg's latest video. Expert review provided by Dr. @JoshBloomACSH.
🎯
My friends know my wife is a huge anti-Trumper. She believes firmly that he's gonna seize permanent power and never let go. She knows this in her soul and cannot be dissuaded from the certainty by any argument. I know. I've tried.
Setting aside the fact the man is *old* and has no desire for a third term, I keep coming back to the fact that Trump has become the defining personality of American politics in the 21st century. Doesn't matter if I think he's a showboating showman with no real statesmanship. He towers over Obama, W. Bush, every Senator, every Congressman, every Governor, etc.
Everyone and everything just pings and pongs off the hull of the U.S.S. Trump and it's all reactive politics all the time. Even the DSA—who are Communists cloaked in Millennial metrosexualism—just hurl rotten fruit at this guy. Using him to hype up their growing base. If he did not exist they would have to invent him.
The Orange One is the dragon breathing fire across the American political scene, and the number of jousting pugilists who tilt at the Orange windmill is legion.
He defines who they are. Never the opposite. And I suspect in many ways this is what drives their hate.
TJDIV retweeted
Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
