Bob Donaldson

[ThePersistence @ScottPresler]

If we’ve learned anything from the California elections,

we MUST pass the SAVE America Act before November 2026.

[Disgraced Propagandist @DisgracedProp]

People demanding "proof" of election fraud are not understanding how crime works. I worked at Manhattan DA for over 2 years, one in Homicide. We never had video proof of the crime. We almost never had DNA. These are things that occur on CSI on TV, not in real life. And we still convicted people all the time.

What we had was testimony and circumstantial evidence. Travel times, bank records, cell phone data, gate access codes. Motive, capability, benefit, time and place. Never direct proof. Of course the defendant always denied the crime, but there was enough evidence to show that one had to have occurred nonetheless.

If what we have in the LA Mayoral election is a statistical anomaly that is beyond reasonable explanation with anything besides fraud, that is enough to prove a crime. This has been true since the beginning of Western Civlization.

[Rep. Chip Roy Press Office @RepChipRoy]

California is showing, in real time, why Rep. Roy’s SAVE America Act is needed.

The House has passed it THREE times. The Senate needs to act and get it done.

[Bob Donaldson @BobD_Austin]

Maz

[Vinny’s Corner @VinnysCorner1]

Age yourself….

Name the second basemen from your favorite MLB team growing up.

I’ll start: Chuck Knoblauch

[Autosport @autosport]

"Hybrid cars should not be racing" 👀

[Chip Roy @chiproytx]

Congressional Republicans should be on offense every day.

Pass the SAVE America Act, permanently secure the border, and codify the A1 agenda.

Midterms are won by persuasion and bold actions, not complacency.

[Bob Donaldson @BobD_Austin]

Circulated this to our Composition teachers earlier today ... glad to see it reposted here for a wider audience.

[Jessica Hooten Wilson @HootenWilson]

A classical ed teacher on LinkedIn just shared CS Lewis' response to plagiarism and it's brilliant. Let's use it with students to shun AI -->

[Bob Donaldson @BobD_Austin]

Go Bari!

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

"60 Minutes" is the most prestigious TV news program in America. But a new review of the last 20 years of its reporting reveals serious inaccuracies and partisan bias on immigration, transgenderism, climate change, Covid, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and more.

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Why did C.S. Lewis say that Hell is locked from the inside?

He explores this idea in his book The Great Divorce.

In it, souls of the damned are allowed to visit heaven on a bus ride, but they are not pleased with what they see — and they leave of their own accord.

The fact is, the damned cannot touch Heaven. They can't so much as disturb the dew drops on the grass. Nor can they even gaze upon the garden properly.

Why? Because they are blinded by their own sins:

– The philosopher would rather philosophize about God than meet him
– The painter would rather make beautiful art than gaze upon the source of all Beauty
– The clingy mother would rather fret over her son than give her full love to God

Lewis' point is that God cannot force man into salvation. Damnation is not God's rejection of man, but God tragically accepting man's rejection of him.

Hell itself is the ultimate monument to human freedom; for a human with true free will is even free to divorce himself with paradise.

What Lewis suggests is that you don't fully understand human nature until you understand that some humans really do not want paradise.

Conversely then, true freedom does not mean using your free will however you want. True freedom means surrendering your free will by forming your soul to the Good.

By sacrificing your free will in this manner, you gain glory, virtue, and happiness — for man was made to know and love virtue above all.

[Bob Donaldson @BobD_Austin]

I learned this story in college, but it has taken a while to learn the lessons.

[Handre @Handre]

https://t.co/68ch8TLl2X

[Peter Leithart @PLeithart]

"A story is like music in that it fills time, 'fills it up so nice and properly,' 'divides it up,' so that there is 'something to it,' 'something going on' ... Time is the element of narration, just as it is the element of life—is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space.

"It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly, brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation.

"That much is perfectly obvious. But that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which it gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years.

"A musical piece entitled 'Five Minute Waltz' lasts five minutes - this and only this defines its relationship to time. A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes, however, could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long—and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling."

-Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Chicago philosopher wrote one book in 1940 proving that 95% of the books you have read in your life, you didn't actually read, and Charlie Munger has been telling people to read it for 50 years.

His name was Mortimer Adler.

He spent 40 years at the University of Chicago, ran the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and built his entire career on one uncomfortable observation about the people around him.

Most adults who called themselves well-read had not actually read a book in the real sense even once. They had run their eyes over the pages, registered the words, formed a vague impression, and put it back on the shelf.

The book had passed through them without ever entering them.

In 1940 he wrote How to Read a Book. It has stayed in print for 86 years.

Charlie Munger recommends it. Naval Ravikant recommends it. Fareed Zakaria recommends it.

Every serious thinker who builds a career on absorbing information eventually finds their way to this book, and the reason is that Adler had isolated something nobody else was naming clearly.

There are four levels of reading. Almost everyone is stuck on the second one. The fourth level is so different from what most people call reading that you have probably never done it in your entire life.

Level one is elementary.

You learn it as a child. You decode the letters into words and the words into sentences. You finish the sentence and understand roughly what it said. This is reading the way a 7-year-old reads, and almost every adult on earth has stopped developing past this point in some quiet way.

Level two is inspectional.

This is skimming. You move through a book quickly to figure out what it is broadly about. You read the back cover, scan the table of contents, glance at a few paragraphs, and form an opinion. Most adults who claim to have read 50 books a year are actually doing this. They are inspecting books, not reading them. They walk away with a vague sense of the argument and almost none of the evidence that supports it.

Level three is analytical.

This is the level Adler said most people have never properly experienced. You take one book and you wrestle with it for as long as it takes. You identify the question the author is trying to answer. You map their argument from front to back. You write your disagreements in the margins. You force yourself to articulate, in your own words, what the author is claiming and why. The point is not to finish the book. The point is to argue with it as if the author were sitting across the table from you. Most people never do this once in their life, because it is exhausting and slow and feels nothing like the reading they were taught as children.

Level four is the one almost nobody knows exists. Adler called it syntopical reading. The word means "across topics," and the technique is something closer to running a small private research lab in your own head.

You pick a single question that actually matters to you. How does power corrupt people. Why do civilizations collapse. What makes a marriage last. How does a person change their own mind. Then you assemble five or ten or twenty books from different authors, different centuries, different traditions, all of them taking a swing at the same question.

You do not read any of them cover to cover. You move between them. You find the chapter in book three that addresses the same question as the chapter in book seven. You force those two authors to argue with each other inside your own head.

The book stops being the unit of reading. The question becomes the unit. And the authors become voices in a conversation you are now hosting.

This is the level where reading stops being consumption and starts being construction.

You are no longer absorbing what someone else thinks. You are building a position of your own out of the friction between people who disagreed.

Adler argued that this is the only level of reading where you stop being a passive receiver of other people's ideas and start being someone who can produce ideas of their own.

The reason Charlie Munger has been recommending this book for 50 years is that this is exactly how Munger has always thought. He calls it building a latticework of mental models. The technique he is describing is just syntopical reading applied for a lifetime.

You take the strongest insight from psychology, the strongest insight from biology, the strongest insight from economics, and you stack them against the same problem until something new falls out the bottom.

The reason most people never reach level four is not that it is intellectually difficult. It is that it is logistically uncomfortable. It requires you to keep multiple books open at once.

It requires you to take notes that nobody is going to grade. It requires you to abandon the goal of finishing books and replace it with the goal of answering questions.

This is also why AI just changed everything Adler was teaching.

NotebookLM, Claude, and tools like them let you do syntopical reading at a speed that would have looked like magic to a Chicago philosopher in 1940.

You upload 10 books on the same question. You ask the AI to surface every place those authors agree and every place they contradict each other.

The technique Adler said almost nobody on earth had reached can now be run on a Sunday afternoon by anyone with a laptop and one good question.

The technique was always the unlock. The bottleneck used to be time. The bottleneck is now curiosity.

Most people will keep reading the way they always have. A book at a time. Eyes over the pages. No question driving it. No other authors in the room. Adler called that level two for a reason.

You are not behind on your reading list.

You are behind on the level you are reading at.

[@amuse @amuse]

TEXAS SENATE RACE: Ken Paxton won 252 counties out of 254 with Cornyn only winning Travis County (Austin) and tiny Kenedy County (winning just 6 out of 8 votes). Cornyn and the Senate Republicans spent more money on this campaign than any other Senate campaign in history and lost by double digits. Imagine what the GOP could have done with that money in the 12 House toss-up seats. Embarrassing hubris on display in Texas - shame on you Cornyn, shame on you Thune.

[Cleta Mitchell @CletaMitchell]

Tomorrow is runoff day in Texas. For everyone who cares about election integrity, Chip Roy is THE choice for Attorney General. Please vote - turn out and help elect @chiproytx as the next AG of Texas.

[Wade Miller @WadeMiller]

Vote tomorrow in Texas.

[Isaac @isaacrrr7]

Javier Milei: “No tengo nada en contra de los artistas. Yo mismo tuve una banda de rock. Mi problema es que si necesitas una subvención del gobierno para hacer arte, ya no eres un artista, eres un empleado público.”

Milei es un número uno.

[Bob Donaldson @BobD_Austin]

Khan Academy is free and worth what you pay for it. Try live online classes from @_WilsonHill Academy.

[Culture War Notes @culturewarnotes]

Homeschool, tell your kids to use Khan Academy 30 minutes a day, don't care what subject - kids can pick their own and pace themselves as they choose, as long as they do 30 minutes a day.

Do this starting at around age 7.
Follow the instructions in the linked essay below on the four or five basic universal rules to do math.

They will be doing calculus before freshman year of high school.

Math is literally no harder to teach than phonetic reading. It's all about the practice, and treating each problem like a jigsaw puzzle, not a test of moral character.

https://t.co/u2D8BVI9Oc

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

In the last chapter of Suicidal Empathy, I discuss the importance of immediate vs delayed gratification as it relates to seeking an immediate empathy-based dopamine hit. This research goes hand-in-hand with my point.