Chavak the Hawk

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

David Sedaris tells Bill Maher a drug addict’s dog bit a hole in his leg while he was walking in Portland.

He wrote an essay, thinking the story would spark outrage.

But he got a rude awakening when liberals blamed him and defended the addict.

He couldn’t figure it out until Maher bluntly told him why:

SEDARIS: “Nobody said how awful that you got bitten by a dog. They said, ‘What kind of a dog was it?’”

[Maher laughs]

SEDARIS: “One person said, ‘Did you get the names?’ And I said, ‘Oh, they’re fentanyl addicts… weren’t going to give me their names.’ ‘No, of the dogs, it would help to rescue them.’”

“But if I had said, if I had said I was walking down the street and these tech bros… they’d be incensed.”

“But because they were drug addicts, then everybody took their side. They felt like they couldn’t say that it was, they treated me like it was my fault. Or you just, ‘well, that’s the way it goes. You’re better off than they are.’”

MAHER: “You get to, I think, what is just the heart of so much of our f*cked up politics.”

“You say, ‘why is it so hard for people like me to say that it’s wrong for a drug addict’s dog to bite you?’”

“And your answer is because then, oh, then you’re a Republican. Which is crazy because then it puts the Democrats in the position of the pro-drug addict dog biters.”

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Your brain never stops telling your paralyzed legs to walk.

It fires the command every time. A faint electric pulse reaches the skin. The legs just stopped listening years ago.

So a professor in Japan spent 20 years building something that listens instead.

A suit that reads that pulse off the skin and moves the legs the brain can no longer reach. The man thinks walk. The machine hears what his own legs cannot. He stands.

It is called HAL. Japanese health insurance has covered it since 2022. The company that makes it fit its entire mission into four words.

Zero people left bedridden.

Paralysis told him to make peace with the chair.

A lab in Tsukuba spent two decades telling it no.

[Amy Mek @AmyMek]

🚨MUST SEE AMERICA! TEXANS ARE RISING UP

"I WAS KIDNAPPED BY MUSLIMS" - GREAT-GRANDSON OF SAM HOUSTON & DAVY CROCKETT DESTROYS FRISCO MOSQUE PLAN

This one hit like a thunderbolt.

Joel Teemi, direct descendant of Texas legends, stood before the Frisco City Council last night and delivered pure fire:

“My great grandfather was the first president of the Texas Republic… Sam Houston.

Another great-grandfather fought at the Alamo… Davy Crockett.

My great-great-great-grandfathers fought under George Washington in the Continental Army.”

Born on Langley Air Force Base. Military family for generations. He went into ministry instead, preached in 58 countries.

In 2021 he was kidnapped and held hostage by Islamic supremacists in the Middle East while caring for the widows and children of the 21 Coptic Christians beheaded by ISIS on that Libyan beach.

His own young children have lived on the front lines.

Their friends were killed by Muslims.

His message was crystal clear and unapologetic:

“I don’t want to bring a mosque to Texas ever. We shouldn’t have one here. It’s incompatible with what it means to be an American.”

He pointed to true assimilation: his brother’s wife, a former Muslim from India, converted to Catholicism, learned English, and joined a church, instead of demanding a mosque.

“Christ is King… Stay true to your roots.”

Real Texas bloodlines are showing up and saying NO.

Frisco is awake. Texas is awake.

The fight continues.

[Tali Goldsheft @TaliGoldsheft]

Amazing letter by @Cornell President rejecting the resolution. Should be read by all:

Dear Zora,

Thank you for conveying SA Resolution 61: Calling for the Termination of Cornell University’s Partnership with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology While Preserving Cornell Tech. I reject this resolution, which fundamentally conflicts with Cornell’s principles of academic collaboration and our core commitment to academic freedom.
Cornell Tech is not a political entity. It is an academic partnership, created through shared investment by Cornell University, the Technion, and the City of New York for the benefit of the city and the state, according to a negotiated set of conditions that govern its development and the terms of its 99-year ground lease on Roosevelt Island. As one of Cornell University’s many international partnerships and collaborations, Cornell Tech deepens, enriches, and strengthens the ability of our students, faculty, and staff to pursue knowledge and advance the university’s academic mission. The Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, the core international partnership upon which Cornell Tech is based, is an extraordinarily valuable collaboration focusing on education and research in health tech, media tech, and urban tech, and supporting the development of new startup companies.

Severing our relationship with the Technion—or with any entity affiliated with governments, institutions, or enterprises with which some of our community members disagree—as a statement of political protest, would not only hinder our research, teaching, and public engagement; it would imperil our academic principles.

Our university, like all of our peer institutions, regularly faces pressure—from across the political spectrum, from within and beyond our own community—to make academic decisions according to political priorities. The phenomenon is not a new one: universities have grappled with such pressures from governments and societies for as long as the institution of the university has existed. When we yield to these pressures and proscribe specific collaborations or collaborators on grounds other than merit, we compromise our principles of academic freedom, undermine our own institutional excellence, and damage public trust in our work.  
Moreover, this resolution inaccurately asserts that “the continued operation of Cornell Tech as a Cornell University campus does not require an ongoing partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.” Cornell Tech, while part of Cornell, is a joint effort of the university, the Technion, and the City of New York. It is no more possible for Cornell to unilaterally terminate that effort and claim full control of the campus than it would be for the Technion or the City of New York to do the same.

Finally, I am deeply troubled by the selective manner in which this resolution singles out the Technion, alone of Cornell’s many international partners, for censure. Cornell currently maintains 159 active agreements with institutions in 59 nations and regions; all of these institutions have some government affiliation, and many conduct research with military and security applications. Cornell itself has military research contracts, conducts research with potential military applications, and has relationships with companies whose products are used in military contexts. Cornell also has relationships with institutions in countries whose governments have been accused of human rights violations—as our own has been. 
None of these publicly available facts are mentioned in the resolution; only our partnership with an Israeli institution is targeted for erasure. The political bias evident in this selective approach is deeply disturbing, and the resolution is incompatible with both the Student Assembly’s purpose and Cornell University’s core values. I reject it fully and forcefully.

Sincerely,

Michael Kotlikoff
President and Professor of Molecular Physiology
Cornell University

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

@GovPressOffice You do realize I’m trying to help America eliminate fraud and waste right? No need to try and make me look like the bad guy for exposing fraud.

People are over it. Start working for the people and not against them.

[0HOUR1 @__0HOUR1_]

Guess he didnt see that one coming.

[Dr Manhattva @Manhattva]

For all the kids who see this.

This photo looks like the 80-90’s

This is what America felt like back then

Feels good.

Let’s keep it up.

[Trophy Dad @HypertrophyHub]

7 years on the job. Zero complaints. Two Instagram posts made off duty and my career might be over because of it.

They thought they could write my story for me. They were wrong.

Now I’m telling it myself. Read the link in the comments to join the fight with me

[Resist the Mainstream @ResisttheMS]

MUST-SEE: Batya Ungar-Sargon absolutely destroyed Ana Navarro.

Navarro: "The problem is that Donald Trump lives in a white billionaire bubble…"

Batya: "For every billionaire who gave Donald Trump money, Kamala Harris got two…"

[Austin Charters @C5_roller]

A lot of you have probably seen this video by now, but I wanted to share it here for anyone who hasn’t — and to say a huge thank you to @MattRife.

He’s honestly one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met and has been nothing but kind to me, both during and after the show in Anaheim. Most people out there — celebrity or not — don’t usually give wheelchair users the time of day. They avoid us, look away, or pretend we’re not even there.

But if you’ve followed Matt for a while, you know he’s different. He doesn’t shy away… he includes us. He takes his time with the disabled community and roasts us just like anyone else, and we absolutely love it. Some people might think that’s mean or taboo, but for us, it’s the opposite. It makes us feel seen, normal, and human again.

So with this post getting some attention, I want to use it to say this: stop being afraid to interact with us — the “lazy people sitting on our ass all day” 😂. If you see someone in a wheelchair, go out of your way to say hi. And if that’s not your vibe, at least give a smile. It’s quick, it’s free, and it might make someone’s whole day.

And if Matt Rife ever comes to your city.. go see him. He’s not only one of the funniest dudes out there, but also one of the most down to earth and genuine people I’ve met.

Much love to Matt and to all of you for the support.
Peace, love, and blondes with tattoos ✌🏻

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@aaditsh Ai

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@JDHaltigan Tell me more

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@gilestelscanvas This was so good

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@TheDataHasYou @5solas @Romans116SDG Helpful overview, and forgive me, but I’m still actually interested in the answer about your top 3 theologians. I’d love to learn from them

[Yam Peleg @Yampeleg]

We are all so fucking lucky.

We are the luckiest mfers in history.

You can fly anywhere on Earth in less than 24 hours.

Your great-grandfather died within 50 miles of his birthplace.

You can talk to anyone alive from your pocket, for free.

You can start a business from your toilet.

You can learn ANYTHING, instantly, for free.

Nearly everyone before you died young, never left their village, had three career options.

They’d sell their fucking souls for ONE DAY of your life.

Travel the world. Make friends. Build cool shit. Enjoy it. We won the lottery.

You can just do things.

So go do them.

Plan later what.

Fortune favors the fast.

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@TheDataHasYou @5solas @Romans116SDG Well, would you answer it for me?

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@TheDataHasYou @5solas @Romans116SDG Can you not read? He wrote “name your top three theologians…”

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@TheDataHasYou @5solas @Romans116SDG Who are your top 3 theologians?

[Chavak the Hawk @ChavakH]

@5solas @Romans116SDG I’m sorry you didn’t answer his question, it was a good one