Niall

VIRES IN NUMERIS

[Niall @Bi88les]

@ProofofMaro Only

[Afghan Zoroastrian @AfgZoroastrian]

Japan and Germany got totally destroyed in WW2.

But their kids didn’t become terrorists.

Stop making excuses for yours.

[Niall @Bi88les]

@ProofofMaro Blink vs noBlink

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

X told me that if I post too often, they may reduce my reach.

Excuse me?

Is this the Tokyo rush-hour train?

Am I supposed to shut up, stand still, and make myself tiny?

I'm not scamming anyone.
I'm not defaming anyone.
I'm not abusing strangers.

I'm just posting.

So I have made a tremendous personal sacrifice:

I will continue posting only once every few minutes.

Please understand the restraint this requires.

Because what I actually want to do is post once every second.

If X allowed it, I would make 86,400 posts a day and call that restraint.

The sword is still in its sheath.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

A woman in Procurement ended an email to me with "Per my last email."

I know a formal challenge when I see one.

I replied: "Per your last email, which I have read four times and now keep beside my bed."

She wrote back: "As previously stated."

I answered: "As you previously stated, and as the moon stated to the tide."

Forty minutes passed.

Then: "Are you messing with me."

I wrote: "I would never. I am matching your formality, as one knight matches another's armor before the dance."

No reply for a day. I prepared my desk for departure.

The next morning she appeared at my desk, looked down at me, and said: "The moon stated to the tide."

She had quoted me. To my face. In this country, that is a marriage.

Now our whole team writes like this. "Per the old ways." "As the tide remembers." The CFO joined in on Tuesday. Nobody knows why. The emails take longer and everyone is happier.

I will never tell her that "per my last email" is, where I come from, a declaration of war.

She thinks it is a game.

It is a game now. She made it one.

That is the entire history of our friendship, and I have said none of it out loud.

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

I just rewatched Mr. Bean at the 2012 London Olympics.

14 years later, it's still the funniest thing I've ever seen at a global event.

Here's why comedy is the ultimate status symbol:

When Rowan Atkinson walked onto that stadium floor in 2012, something profound happened that we mistook for pure entertainment.

The Olympics opening ceremony is one of the few remaining moments where billions of people sit down simultaneously and watch the same thing. For most nations, the instinct is to show strength, history, precision, grandeur. China deployed thousands of synchronized performers. Athens lit the cauldron with ancient mythology. Every country understands the assignment: convince the world you're worth respecting.

Britain chose to send out a man in pajamas playing air violin to Chariots of Fire while a massive orchestra played behind him.

The decision was actually revolutionary, though nobody framed it that way at the time. We were too busy laughing. But that laugh contained something deeper than we realized.

Rowan Atkinson had spent two decades perfecting a form of comedy that required absolutely nothing. No dialogue. No cultural references that needed translation. No setup or punchline structure that depended on language or prior knowledge. Just a body moving through space in ways that revealed the absurdity of everyday human existence. A man trying to park a car. A man with itchy skin. A man confused by a jacket. The comedy worked in Tokyo, in Lagos, in São Paulo because it operated at a biological level beneath language.

And in 2012, Britain was essentially saying to the world: we are so secure in our cultural position that we don't need to prove anything through displays of power or technological mastery. We can afford to be ridiculous. We can afford to send one of our greatest cultural exports onto the world's biggest stage to be vulnerable and small and silly in front of everyone.

That takes a specific kind of confidence.

Most nations were still operating from a Cold War framework where global standing meant military capability, industrial output, technological superiority. Britain had already moved past that calculation. The country understood something that hadn't fully crystallized yet: soft power would eventually matter more than hard power. Cultural resonance would move markets and influence more than conventional strength ever could.

By putting Atkinson front and center, Britain was betting on the one resource it had in abundance: the ability to make people laugh and feel something together.

What made it work on that scale was the fundamental humanity of physical comedy. You couldn't mock it or be cynical about it the way you could about political messaging or nationalism. Watching someone fail to coordinate their body while attempting something small and specific is something humans recognize across every culture. The vulnerability is real. The effort to maintain dignity while falling apart is universal.

The performance lasted only a few minutes. But it changed the grammar of what an opening ceremony could accomplish. After 2012, the calculus shifted. Countries began understanding that audiences didn't want to be impressed by scale or intimidated by precision. They wanted to feel something. They wanted permission to relax and enjoy themselves rather than be lectured about national achievement.

Rio understood this. Tokyo understood this. Paris would understand this.

But the deeper thing that moment revealed was about Rowan Atkinson himself and what had happened to comedy by that point in history.

Physical comedy had essentially disappeared from mainstream culture. Television had moved toward dialogue-driven narrative. Movies had moved toward plot complexity and emotional earnestness. Stand-up comedy had become the dominant form, which meant comedy had become increasingly tied to language, to the personality of the comedian, to cultural specificity. You couldn't export a stand-up routine the way you could export a physical gag.

Atkinson represented something nearly extinct: a performer whose entire practice existed in a pre-linguistic space. He was a last living connection to the tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd. But unlike those figures, Atkinson had adapted that tradition to television and maintained its purity over decades. He never broke character with dialogue. He never relied on the audience knowing who he was to get the joke. The comedy lived entirely in what his body could communicate.

Putting him at the Olympics was implicitly asking the world to remember that laughter doesn't require translation. That humor transcends the categories we use to divide ourselves. That a human body moving through space in ways that violate expectation creates a shared emotional experience across language, culture, and nationality.

In an era when global communication was becoming increasingly text-based and digital, when distance was collapsing but we were fragmenting into smaller algorithmic bubbles, Britain presented one man doing something so fundamentally physical and irreducible that it couldn't be subdivided or reinterpreted. It demanded presence. It demanded that you watch.

The applause that followed wasn't polite. It wasn't the obligatory standing ovation for state ceremony. It was the genuine roar of billions of people experiencing permission to be joyful together, to value silliness alongside achievement, to recognize that sometimes the most powerful thing a nation can project is the confidence to be genuinely, unselfconsciously playful in front of the world.

And perhaps most importantly, it revealed that Rowan Atkinson had spent his entire life perfecting something that the modern world had almost forgotten we needed. Not entertainment. Connection. The specific, irreplaceable experience of watching another human being fail in real time and finding unexpected grace in that failure.

That's not something comedy usually accomplishes. That's something only the body can teach us.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Then the lawsuits will keep coming. Should any female patient or member of staff require funding to fight this assault on their legal rights, apply to https://t.co/iyohnrgVZN

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

We are anxious primates riding a wet rock flying through an endless dark void at 67,000 mph. Sending the wrong email or awkward small talk is completely invisible from space. Take a breath.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Society acts like your 20s are the main movie and everything after is just the end credits. In reality, your 20s are just a chaotic 10-year tutorial on how to be a person. The actual game starts whenever you decide.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Inspired by the courage of my sister @EnesFreedom, I have decided to enter the @WNBA draft as Fierce Sally.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Nikola Tesla invented the twentieth century. Edison got the credit. This is not a footnote. It is the whole argument.

1. The alternating current system that powers the entire electrical grid of the modern world — every light, every motor, every factory, every hospital, every city on earth — is Tesla’s. He conceived it, designed it, and demonstrated it, over Edison’s sustained, well-funded, and deliberately dishonest campaign to destroy it. Edison’s direct current was inferior. He knew it. He electrocuted elephants in public to prove AC was dangerous. He had the institutional power, the financial backing, and the name. Tesla had the correct answer. The correct answer won. Eventually.

2. The deal with Westinghouse is the most consequential and most one-sided in the history of technology: Tesla sold the AC patents for a lump sum and walked away from the royalties. He did this because Westinghouse told him the company couldn’t survive them and the technology might die. Tesla believed him. He tore up the royalty agreement. He never collected a cent on the invention that powers the world. Either the most generous act in the history of engineering or the most catastrophic failure of Machiavellian awareness in the history of genius. Probably both.

3. He then conceived, largely alone, in a series of rented laboratories: the radio, the radar, the remote control, the robotics, the bladeless turbine, the rotating magnetic field, the induction motor, and something he called the World System – a global wireless transmission network for information and energy, designed in 1900, that is recognizable as the internet and the wireless power grid simultaneously. He was not ahead of his time. He was ahead of several times that hadn’t happened yet.

4. JP Morgan funded his most ambitious project – the Wardenclyffe Tower, designed to transmit electricity wirelessly across the Atlantic. When Morgan understood that the system would make electricity free and unmeterable, he withdrew the funding. The tower was demolished for scrap metal during the First World War. The man who wanted to give the world free energy was destroyed by the man who understood that free energy is not a business model. The side that controls the capital wins.

5. Edison had something Tesla never acquired: the institutional infrastructure of success. Patents filed in the right sequence. Partnerships with the right financiers. Press relationships that ensured his name appeared in every story. Tesla understood electricity better than anyone alive. Edison understood power better than Tesla ever did – and in the collision between the two, power won in the short term. The correct answer won in the long term. Tesla powered the world. Edison powered the narrative.

6. He died alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in 1943. He had been living there for ten years, fed largely by the hotel out of respect, paying nothing, receiving no royalties. The FBI seized his papers immediately after his death – some never fully declassified. The man who invented the electrical infrastructure of the twentieth century died in debt, feeding pigeons from the window because he said they were his only friends. This is not a tragic ending. It is a civilizational indictment.

7. Tesla is the proof of concept for everything we have been arguing about genius and institutions. He did not fail. The system failed him – selecting for the person who could monetize the discovery over the person who made it, rewarding institutional power over intellectual achievement. Edison is remembered as the inventor. Tesla powers your home. The man who gave the world alternating current, radio, and the conceptual foundations of the internet died feeding pigeons in a hotel room. We owe him everything. We gave him nothing. Remember that the next time someone tells you the market always rewards the best ideas.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

They want to assault little girls
because it satisfies them.

They want to use violence
because it satisfies them.

They want to hide their faces behind black cloth
so no one can see who they are
because it satisfies them.

That is not a religion.
That is a dog.
That is a pig.
That is a frontal lobe the size of a single grain of Sahara sand.

A real man protects the weak.
A human protects the young.

When you enter someone else’s land,
you respect the owner and follow their rules.
You do not threaten their safety.

That is what a human is.

If you cannot do that,
you are not a man.
You are not even a human.

You are a dog.
A pig.
A parasite.
A virus.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Why doesn’t he keep on speaking??

We need him in a room, together with John Cleese and Ricky Gervais, telling the World like it is…

Who votes for that?
Who would watch?

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

This is not about all Muslims.
It is about a political system that refuses to confront Islamist aggression, clan rape networks, and parallel rules until girls are broken and free speech is dead.

Look at the scoreboard:
Grooming gang towns where officials feared racism more than rape.
A Batley teacher driven into hiding over a cartoon.
Terror-related prisons where a majority of inmates identify as Muslim.
Boats and hotels funded by a public that is told to celebrate its own replacement of norms.
Two-tier policing that hits the English protester harder than the protected offender.

The project is not "diversity."
The project is submission.
Submit on speech.
Submit on borders.
Submit on the naming of crime.
Submit until England is only a geographic label.

British people are told they cannot say this.
So it will be said clearly here.

Britain will not be taken by force of argument if it keeps surrendering every time someone screams racism.
Defend your daughters.
Defend your speech.
Defend your border.
Deport those who rape, terrorise, and refuse the law of the land.

A country that will not do that is not kind.
It is finished.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Let’s consider the demographic situation of Western Civilization seriously. Not sentimentally, not politically – arithmetically.

Start with the base. Strip away the comfortable aggregates. The core demographic base of the West — the European-heritage populations of Europe, North America, and the Anglosphere — is about 750 million people. In 1913, the West was a third of humanity. Today the core is under a tenth. Not because we shrank – because we stopped, while everyone else compounded.

Now the fertility rate. The headline numbers — France 1.6, the EU 1.4 — are blends, and blends conceal. Disaggregate by origin, and the base reproduces at about 1.3 children per woman. In the Mediterranean and Central Europe, where there is nothing to blend, the headline IS the base rate: Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1, Poland 1.1. And most of those numbers are still falling.

What does 1.3 mean? Replacement is 2.1. At 1.3, each generation is barely six tenths of the one before. This is compound interest in reverse.
Due to demographic inertia it starts slow, and then the geometric progression hits hard. Two generations: cohorts at 40%. Four generations: under 20%. There is no plateau in this function. Below 1.4, you are no longer describing decline – you are describing halving times.
And here is what makes it invisible: demographic momentum. The large generations born before the collapse are still alive, so the headline population looks stable while the base underneath hollows out. Revenue holding while bookings crater. Any analyst who read a company’s accounts this way would call it what it is.
The momentum runs out around mid-century. Then the decline accelerates – precisely when it can no longer be arrested, because the mothers of the missing children were themselves never born.

I did the exercise for Poland – one twentieth of the Western base, fertility at about half of replacement. Four generations out, the annual birth cohorts fall to less than a tenth of today’s. Basically the end of the nation. Poland is not the exception. Poland is the leading indicator. The rest of the West is one generation behind on the same curve. South Korea, at 0.7-0.8, is running the limit case: cohorts more than halving in a single generation. Nothing in our trend line says our floor is 1.3 rather than 1.0.

Two objections, answered.
"Migration will fill the gap." Migration changes the population arithmetic. It does not change the base arithmetic. Whether it changes the civilizational arithmetic depends entirely on assimilation – a cultural variable, not a demographic one. And note: second-generation immigrant fertility converges toward native rates within a generation or two, even without assimilation. Modernity sterilizes everyone it touches. The base merely got there first.

"Something will fix it." No large population in recorded history has returned to replacement from below 1.5. Not one. Every other civilizational problem — debt, energy, institutions — can in principle be fixed by one good decade. This one cannot. The French debt spiral, the pension mathematics, the fiscal trajectories I write about – all of them are, at bottom, this problem wearing an accounting mask. You cannot tax children who were never born.

So what that means a few generations out is terrifying – we are DYING OUT.

But the same arithmetic that dooms the average saves the tail.

Our only hope is in the families with 3+ children – who are able to pass that tradition on to their children. Run the numbers: a community at three children per family grows 1.45x per generation while the surrounding population shrinks to 0.63x. The ratio between them shifts by a factor of two every generation. Whatever fraction they start from, within a century they ARE the demographic base.

They will inherit Our Civilization, if it survives. The rest will simply die out.

The future has always belonged to those who show up for it. For two thousand years, the West showed up. The question is whether it still does.

[Gina Milan @ginamilan_]

People keep crying “trans are only 0.01% of the population, why are you attacking them?”

Because you shoved that 0.01% down our fucking throats for four solid years. Every commercial. Every classroom. Every HR training. Every institution. Celebrate it or be called a bigot.

We’re done.

We’re done playing along while you try to normalize a mental illness. And we’re done watching activists groom and sterilize kids under the banner of “inclusion.”

Fuck that. Not sorry.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

La technique la plus sous-estimée pour devenir excellent dans un domaine est ridiculement simple.

Tu prends les 10-15 maîtres absolus du sujet.
Tu lis leurs bios, leurs livres, leurs interviews. Tu regardes comment ils raisonnent, ce qu’ils priorisent, ce qu’ils refusent.
Tu te fine-tunes dessus.

Ensuite tu filtres tout ça avec ton propre socle moral.
Parce que copier un génie sans filtre, c’est aussi le moyen le plus rapide de reproduire ses angles morts.

Et surtout, tu vis.
Tu prends des décisions réelles, tu te prends des murs, tu observes ce qui marche vraiment quand c’est toi qui portes le risque.

Lire les grands (entrepreneurs, scientifiques, bâtisseurs historiques) te donne la carte.
Vivre intensément te donne le territoire.

Les deux ensemble, c’est probablement le moyen le plus puissant qui existe pour maximiser son plein potentiel.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Our children can be geniuses.
Let’s raise geniuses as an act of resistance…

The system we have been describing throughout this series practices negative selection. It promotes mediocrity, rewards compliance, and suppresses excellence – because excellence is unmanageable, uncontrollable, and threatening to whoever runs the mechanism. The Idiocracy is not an accident. It is an output. The counter-move is deliberate, ambitious, unapologetic cultivation of the extraordinary.
Excellence is not a gift. It is a method.

1. We live in extraordinary times. Children today can spend most of their time with geniuses – with Leonardo, with Mozart, with Bach playing softly at bedtime, with the whole history of science through Once Upon a Time… The Discoverers. We watch the whole series every year. A new layer each time. The first time they see a man in a bathtub shouting Eureka. The fifth year they understand what it costs to think clearly in a century that punishes clarity. Deeper each year. (Skip Once Upon a Time… Planet Earth – it got hijacked by propaganda.)

2. Peer culture teaches a child to fit in. Genius culture teaches a child to reach up. These are not the same instinct and do not produce the same adult. One produces a competent employee. The other produces someone who looks at a locked door and starts designing a key. What they absorb, without being told, is that the men who moved civilization forward were not special because they were chosen – but because they refused to stop asking the question everyone else had agreed to drop. Newton didn’t wait for permission. Leonardo didn’t wait for a credential. Galileo paid for his answer and gave it anyway.

3. Find the ten-fifteen absolute masters of any domain. Study how they reasoned, what they prioritized, what they refused. Fine-tune on them. Then filter through your own moral framework – because copying a genius without a filter also copies his blind spots. Then live: take real decisions, hit real walls, observe what works when you are the one carrying the risk. Reading the great builders gives you the map. Living intensely gives you the territory. Both together is the most powerful development system ever discovered.

4. Add films like Ballerina 🩰 – that greatness comes from practice, from the loop repeated until the character changes. Aristotle’s method restated for a child: you do not arrive excellent. You become excellent, through the work, until the work becomes who you are.

5. Surround a child with giants, every year, and something compounds. Not facts or trivia – a baseline expectation, installed early, that a serious life spent thinking hard about the world is not eccentric. It is simply what a human being is for. Raise them on cartoons of giants. Do not be surprised when they refuse to stay small.

6. The masters of every domain we have discussed in this series — Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Caesar, Dante, Jefferson — were all formed by intensive exposure to the masters before them, filtered through lived experience and real stakes. This was called education before education became schooling. It can be rebuilt, deliberately, at home, in the hours the system doesn’t control.

7. Raising a genius is not raising a prodigy. It is raising a person of extraordinary depth, breadth, moral seriousness, and practical capability – someone who has studied the best minds, filtered them through good values, and tested everything against reality. That person is the opposite of what the system produces. That person is the civilizational counter-move. Every such child is a small defeat for the Idiocracy and a small victory for everything this series has been arguing. Raise them deliberately. Raise them ambitiously. Raise them as an act of resistance.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The 56 countries that are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation believe that their nations must be Islamic. As such, they do not permit other religions to be ascendant. As such, why can’t Western nations proclaim that they do not wish for Islam to gain a foothold in their societies? Why must the West commit Civilizational Seppuku?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Suicidal empathy