…

[… @CatoFidelis]

My favorite post on twitter. Replies are priceless!

[Julian Shapiro @Julian]

What’s the most beautiful piece of writing you’ve ever come across?

Bonus points if you can screenshot a paragraph and share it below. I’ll consider including it in my writing guide.

Props to anyone who takes the time ❤️

[… @CatoFidelis]

@dom_lucre That’s Bangladesh.

[… @CatoFidelis]

@LozzaFox “…. we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

[THE SKIN DOCTOR @theskindoctor13]

A daycare employee at Capgemini's Bengaluru campus couldn't bear the abuse of the kids at the centre.

She reported it to supervisor, but instead of taking action, they fired her. She then became a whistleblower and leaked videos that exposed the abuse.

In the videos, toddlers were made to sit inside the drum of a front-loading washing machine, had water sprayed into their mouths using a toilet jet spray, were locked inside bathrooms, and were forced into narrow, water-filled pipes to frighten them. The videos triggered outrage, forcing authorities to act.

Today, according to media reports, the police have arrested the whistleblower only for allegedly "leaking sensitive videos." Lol! What a system! A poor woman with a clear conscience stood up to the powerful and went public, not for personal gain or with any malicious intent, but solely to protect those children. And she's the one who gets arrested.

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

To the Americans:

I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.

And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.

This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.

Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.

This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.

But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.

This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:

Thank God for the United States.

Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.

Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.

Thank God for the USA.

Happy 250th.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

[… @CatoFidelis]

@RadioGenoa Don’t see any immigrants in this march.
So weaken the men of the nation with woke mind virus.
And when barbarians come to the gate, there’s barely any man left to protect the nation.

[… @CatoFidelis]

@AtticusJazz @naomirwolf @NatGeo shouldn’t you do another cover telling people what idiots you were in calling this a revolution?

[Emrah Erken 🔥🎺 @AtticusJazz]

Das Januar-Cover von National Geographic aus dem Jahr 2017 zeigt Avery Jackson aus Kansas City, damals 10 Jahre alt.

Die Mutter des Kindes, eine überzeugte Queer Theory Anhängerin, liess ihm Pubertätsblocker und Hormone verabreichen, was bei diesem zu Infertilität/Sterilität führte. Nachdem diesem jungen Menschen jede sexuelle Erregung geraubt wurde, fing er damit an, sich als "non-binär" zu identifizieren.

Heute lebt der chemisch kastrierte junge Mann zurückgezogen und hat den gesamten öffentlichen Aktivismus, der ausschliesslich von seiner Mutter ausging, aufgegeben.

[… @CatoFidelis]

@visegrad24 I so hope that the internet will identify this man who for half his life has enjoyed the opportunities, freedoms and generosity America extended to him and yet he chants ‘Death to America’. He is just one of millions who would never assimilate with the American way of life.

[… @CatoFidelis]

@EricLDaugh Speeches are great but real reform will start at schools and colleges.
Unless the woke Marxist ideology is nipped in the bud at schools, America would continue to face the threat posed by Marxism.

[Tunku Varadarajan @tunkuv]

What Mamdani doesn't get, & will never get, is that America's greatness lies in the fact that people like him--who revile America, detest its values, & strive to destroy its economy--are not herded into jails or gulags or frogmarched to face shooting squads but get, instead, to run for and win elections. America's greatness lies in its limitless tolerance of obnoxious, ungrateful wretches who spit in its face. America is wasted on Mamdani. Think of the many millions of people the world over who would trade places with him in a heartbeat--and actually be thankful to be in America.

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

J-Cal’s advice to founders: “If you partner with OpenAI or Anthropic, they will slit your throat and take your business wholesale. Don't trust them. Use your own models.”

“There is no free pizza. There's no free beer. When somebody like Sam Altman comes to you and says, ‘Here's some free tokens,’ your alarm should go off.

If you follow the Microsoft example, Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect were their partners. They were replaced with Excel. They were replaced, obviously, with Microsoft Word. You don't even know those other two.

That's exactly what OpenAI has to do, and they have no choice but to do that now because they have a trillion-dollar market cap. They must win the application layer.

And Sam Altman went to Y Combinator and he said, ‘We'll give you $2 million worth of free tokens.’

And I came out and I said, ‘Listen, this is nothing personal against Sam. Sam's a very aggressive deal maker and he wants to get access to those startups because he knows, having run Y Combinator, that if he can get their innovations, those founders' latest thoughts about what's around the corner, he can incorporate them into the platform.’

Zuckerberg did the same thing. He said, ‘Hey, I'm going to give people a bunch of access, going to give them money. Come to the Facebook platform.’

Nobody who went to bed with Microsoft in the '80s, Facebook in the 2000s, or Sam Altman now in the 2020s did not wake up with their throat slit.

This is a message to founders. If you partner with any of these people, they will slit your throat and take your business wholesale.

There is nothing to discuss here. Don't trust them. Use your own models.”

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

America is also about enabling a phony like Zoran who became a citizen only 8 years ago to become mayor of our most iconic city and be ungrateful about it all, and worse, attack the meritocratic values this nation was built on.

[… @CatoFidelis]

@NHSMillion Here it is. It continues to go up in every decade.
Unless UK govt thinks that natives are not smart enough to be doctors, some investment in medical colleges is all it would take to fix the issue.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

UK police really don’t want you to share this video of their officer arresting an assault victim, while letting his attackers go free

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

> Be Jonny Kim
> Born to South Korean immigrants in Los Angeles
> Grows up in an intensely abusive household, constantly full of fear
> The night before he graduates high school, his father threatens the family with a gun
> Police arrive, a shootout happens, and his father is killed
> Decides he wants to protect people so he enlists in the Navy at 18
> Survives Hell Week and becomes a Navy SEAL
> Deploys to Iraq twice as a combat medic, sniper, and point man
> Completes over 100 combat operations under fire
> Earns a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for saving wounded comrades
> Watches his close friends die in battle and realizes he wants to heal people, not just fight
> Leaves active duty to get a degree in Mathematics from USD
> Auditions for medical school and gets accepted into Harvard
> Graduates from Harvard Medical School as an M.D. in 2016
> Starts his residency in emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital
> Gets bored of being a regular doctor and applies to NASA
> Selected as 1 of only 12 candidates out of 18,300 applicants
> Becomes a NASA Astronaut in 2020
> Decides space isn't enough, so he joins Navy flight school to face his fear of flying
> Earns his wings as a fully certified military pilot and naval flight surgeon
> Launches into space on a rocket to the International Space Station
> Logs 245 days in orbit, traveling 104 million miles around the Earth before returning home
> Returns to Earth as a SEAL, a Harvard Doctor, an Aviator, and an Astronaut at just 41 years old

And Jonny Kim is still the most humble guy on the planet who makes everyone else's resume look blank.

Jonny Kim is badass.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In 2015 a writer named Tim Urban sat down and counted the days he had left with his parents. He was 34, healthy, both parents alive and well. The number came back around 300. Less time than he spent with them in any single year of his childhood.

The post is called The Tail End, on a blog called Wait But Why. The idea is to stop counting your life in years and start counting it in events. Reach 90 and you get about 4,680 weeks, and every one of them fits on a single sheet of paper. Maybe 60 more winters after that. If you read five books a year, that is 300 books, picked from every book ever written.

Those things at least spread out evenly. A third of the way through life means a third of the way through your pizzas. Time with the people you love does not work like that. Almost all of it sits at the very start. Then it is gone.

For your first 18 years you are around your parents nearly every day. Then you leave for college or a job in another city, and a normal adult sees their parents maybe 10 days a year. So the day you move out, you are already at 93 percent. Urban was living in the last 5 percent and had no idea until he drew the chart. He called it the tail end.

It does not stop at parents. His two sisters, after a whole childhood in the same house, had around 15 percent of their time together left. The four friends he played cards with most days in high school were down to their last 7 percent. Nobody had a fight. Nobody moved away angry. Life quietly spends the time for you while you assume there is plenty left.

You do not have to be old to be near the end with someone. If your parents are alive and you live in a different city, you have probably already used more than 90 percent of the days you will ever spend in the same room as them.

His one instruction is about that last stretch. When you are down to the final days with someone you love, treat that time like what it is, which is almost gone. The rest is the tail end, and it is much shorter than it feels.

[Nandini @NBDwrites]

I was fourteen, walking home from school in Paris with my French-American friend. Summer was around the corner and the heat was relentless.

‘You must be used to this heat,’ she said.

‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘We lived in the hills in India before we came to Paris.’

‘Hills? I didn’t know India had hills.’

‘We have the Himalayas,” I had replied. ‘The highest mountains in the world.’

She stopped dead.

‘You’ve got to be kidding! The highest mountains are in America.’

That expression of absolute certainty is etched into my memory even today.

Twenty years later, when I met her again in New York, I reminded her of that conversation. We couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing.

So anyway that afternoon we went home, and I opened my Philips Atlas and showed her the Himalayas.

‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘ I’d always wondered about that weird name. I just assumed it was some Native American name.’

A few weeks later, in geography class, while studying the Alps, our teacher announced they were the highest mountains in the world.

My newly enlightened friend proudly corrected her.

‘Actually, the Himalayas are.’

The teacher shot me a look that instantly identified the culprit behind this inconvenient fact.

Then, without missing a beat, she recovered.
‘Yes… but the Himalayas are the newest highest mountains. The Alps were the oldest highest mountains.’

Case closed.

At fourteen, I learnt one of life’s great lessons: The West doesn’t just write history, geography, science. It often decides it.

If something is ancient, extraordinary or foundational, somehow it must have originated in Europe or at the very least be explained through a European lens.

The Rig Veda became “Aryan.” A Middle Eastern Jew named Jesus acquired blond hair and blue eyes.
Even Panini, at one point, seemed to belong to everyone except India.

Now, apparently, Panini is Pakistani.

Progress, I suppose.
From ‘ that’s impossible’ to ‘it was ours all along.’

The script changes. The narrator doesn’t.

#SundayMusings

[Arsen Ostrovsky @Ostrov_A]

Fifty years ago today, Air France Captain Michel Bacos showed the world what true moral courage looks like.

When Flight 139 was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and flown to Entebbe, the non-Jewish passengers were eventually released. Bacos and his crew were also offered their freedom.

However, Bacos, who also served in the French army under DeGaulle, refused to leave his Jewish passengers. All his crew also refused, without exception.

Instead, they chose to remain alongside the 94 Jewish hostages, fully aware of the danger they faced. As Bacos later said, abandoning his passengers was simply "unimaginable."

Days later, they were freed in the legendary Israeli rescue mission, Operation Entebbe, led by Yoni Netanyahu, who would die in the battle.

For his extraordinary courage, Bacos was honoured by both France and Israel. Yet his greatest legacy was not the medals he received, but the example he set: that decency, duty and humanity must never yield to terror or antisemitism.

Michel Bacos was a true hero. May his life, his courage and his memory forever be a blessing and an inspiration.