Alan Westley

[The Way Of Dad @wayofdad]

The Way of Dad is open. I'm a salt and pepper dad, an executive, and a coach, and I'm in your corner for the thing you haven't said out loud yet. Real talk, real care, no judgment. Pep talks by phone or video. Just reach out.

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@Rainmaker1973 This video is sped up and misrepresents the speed of the water.

Dammit Massimo, stop doing things that make me distrust you. I used to like you so much!

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@drleeclare Hi Lee! I'll be at Gobeklitepe on September 14th as part of an archeology tour. If you're around, would love to say hi and thank you for all the wonderful information and insight you provide!

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@IArtyukhin78909 @MichaelButtonX I'm going to Hattusa in September. So excited to see it!

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@RoyRogers_HTMS He's phenomenal, but this is not a good clip to demonstrate his skills. Check out the Drift Lab Moonlight album. So good!

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@DrHughT Very cool! I'm heading there in September as part of an archeology tour. So excited!

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Hello Julia, sans aucune ironie, c'est top que tu prennes le temps de te renseigner. Mais le problème quand on lit Marx aujourd'hui, c'est qu'on prend pour acquis sa prémisse de départ, alors qu'elle a été démontée scientifiquement il y a plus de 150 ans.

Toute la pensée de Marx repose sur la théorie de la valeur-travail. L'idée que la valeur d'un bien vient de la quantité de travail nécessaire pour le produire. Si tu acceptes cette prémisse, alors oui, tout son raisonnement tient. Le capitaliste "vole" la plus-value du travailleur, l'exploitation est mathématique, la révolution est inévitable.

Sauf qu'en 1871, trois économistes (Menger en Autriche, Jevons en Angleterre, Walras en Suisse) découvrent indépendamment la même chose : la valeur n'est pas objective, elle est subjective et marginale.

Un verre d'eau dans le désert vaut une fortune. Le même verre à côté d'une rivière ne vaut rien. Le travail incorporé est identique. Donc le travail ne détermine pas la valeur. C'est le consommateur qui valorise un bien selon son utilité marginale dans un contexte donné.

Exemple concret : tu peux passer 1000 heures à tricoter un pull moche que personne ne veut. Selon Marx, ce pull a énormément de valeur (beaucoup de travail incorporé). Selon la réalité, il ne vaut rien. Parce que personne n'en veut.

À l'inverse, Bernard Arnault crée des milliards de valeur non pas parce qu'il "exploite" mais parce qu'il a su anticiper et organiser des désirs humains à grande échelle. La valeur est créée par la coordination, pas extraite par le vol.

Cette découverte (la révolution marginaliste) a invalidé tout l'édifice marxiste. Pas pour des raisons idéologiques, pour des raisons scientifiques. C'est pour ça que plus aucun département d'économie sérieux au monde n'enseigne Marx comme un cadre d'analyse valide. On l'enseigne en histoire de la pensée.

Maintenant, le truc important. Si ton intention en lisant Marx c'est d'aider les pauvres (c'est une intention noble), alors tu vas être surprise par ce qui suit.

Regarde les chiffres de la Banque mondiale. En 1820, 90% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Cette chute historique ne s'est PAS produite dans les pays qui ont appliqué Marx. Elle s'est produite dans les pays qui ont libéralisé leur économie.

Chine post-1978, Vietnam post-1986, Inde post-1991, Pologne post-1989. À chaque fois qu'un pays libéralise, des centaines de millions de gens sortent de la pauvreté en une génération. À chaque fois qu'un pays applique Marx (URSS, Cambodge, Corée du Nord, Venezuela), c'est la famine et les goulags.

Ce n'est pas une opinion, c'est l'expérience la plus massive jamais menée en sciences sociales. Plusieurs milliards de cobayes humains, sur un siècle.

Donc paradoxalement, si tu aimes vraiment les pauvres, la position la plus cohérente n'est pas d'être marxiste. C'est d'être pour la liberté économique. Parce que c'est empiriquement la seule chose qui a jamais sorti massivement les gens de la misère.

Pour creuser, je te recommande trois lectures qui vont changer ta vision :

"La Loi" de Frédéric Bastiat (court, lumineux, gratuit en ligne)
"La Route de la Servitude" de Hayek
"Économie en une leçon" de Henry Hazlitt
Bonne lecture, et vraiment chapeau de chercher à comprendre plutôt que de rester dans tes certitudes. C'est rare.

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@redrudytoo @BriannaWu She mentioned in another post that there are siblings, but she won't be talking about them on social media (to protect them from any kind of retaliation from her haters)

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@BriannaWu Thank you!

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This dude wins

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

The idea that being “indigenous” automatically grants moral ownership of land collapses the moment you look at actual human history and apply a consistent moral standard to it.

Long before Europeans arrived, Native American tribes fought, displaced, absorbed, and sometimes wiped out other tribes. The Iroquois Confederacy expanded by crushing rivals. The Aztec Empire grew through conquest, coercion, and tribute. Entire peoples vanished not because of outsiders, but because stronger neighbors took their land. This was not an exception. It was the rule.

Morality cannot selectively ignore facts. If land was already changing hands through violence and domination, then “who was there first” cannot logically create an eternal moral claim. A past act of conquest does not become morally sacred simply because enough time has passed.

This is not a uniquely American story. It is the story of Homo sapiens everywhere. Humans migrate, compete, conquer, assimilate, and redraw borders. Always have. Always will. No population on earth holds land because history peacefully granted it moral title. Land is held because, at some point, power determined the outcome.

Modern moral legitimacy therefore cannot come from ancestry alone. It comes from present responsibility. From how societies govern today, how rights are protected today, and how power is exercised now. Morality applies to living systems, not frozen historical snapshots chosen for political convenience.

“Indigenous” is not a scientific or ethical category. It is a political one. It freezes history at a convenient moment and declares that everything before that moment does not count. Who decides that moment? Whoever benefits from it.

If you rewind history far enough, every group was once indigenous.
If you stop history early enough, every conqueror can reinvent themselves as a victim.

Moral arguments about land that ignore this reality are not about justice. They are about power, timing, and narrative control.

[Eric Schwalm @Schwalm5132]

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore.
It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

[Shipwreckedcrew @shipwreckedcrew]

There is a very sad parallel for me between two groups:

These left-wing Democrat Socialists quasi-communists who are marinating in the anti-Trump propaganda that is entirely fictional, to the degree that it pushes out all common sense and reason ...

And the influence that I saw crazy right-wing conspiracy nut-job lunacy have on otherwise relatively normal and well-adjusted individuals who decided storm past police barricades and violently break into the Capitol when they found the doors locked.

Sane people need to step back and understand that the raging idiots at the outer edges of both extremes MIGHT HAVE in interest in the agitation they are creating that is something different than what your interest is, and they are playing you for suckers with their online rage-bait because they are conning you into doing their dirty work.

[Chris Nelson 🏝️🇺🇸 @ReOpenChris]

🚨Sheriff Grady Judd shuts down reporter!

“I call them illegal immigrants because that's what they are. They're illegal immigrants.

74% of the illegal immigrants that we've detained have had criminal charges against them.

The other 26% were riding with them.”

[Achilles99 @Achill_es99]

Once again you make so much sense. We need more people like this. This post wins the internet today. So well reasoned. Thank you!!

[Deon Joseph @ofcrdeonjoseph]

- She was a mother.
- She was a Christian
- She was a good person
- She wrote poetry…

Gonna let you in on a secret. You may want to sit down for this one. The logic is going to blow your mind. Ready?

- The officer didn’t know any of that at the time she struck him. Nor did her actions reflect any of those characteristics at the moment.

When an officer percieves someone’s actively trying to harm them, the officer doesn’t have the luxury of asking at that moment who you love, what your hobbies are or if you like feeding stray kittens.

She may have been all of those wonderful things, but when you commit criminal acts, then strike an officer trying to lawfully detain you for it with your car, you are the following

- A suspect.
- A threat.

This isn’t meant to come off cruel. But I feel as if the truth can prevent more of these things from happening better than emotionalism.

[Alan Westley @AlanWestley]

@RichardHanania My respect for you continues to drop with every idiotic post you write

[Sassafrass84 @Sassafrass_84]

Dang, she nailed it. Absolutely spot on in her assessment of the left.

Group think is cultist behavior libs.