Greg Cranford

Coach: FOOTBALL :::: TX HS Coach - 1998 to Now...
Aggie: Class of '92...
Texan - Bred/Born/Raised

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Greg Cranford @CoachCran]

@BrandonClay88 Text me

[Greg Cranford @CoachCran]

@BrandonClay88 How much time does it take to set up?

[Traces of Texas @TracesofTexas]

The Texas Quote of the Day is a collection of quotes by the great Mike Leach, former football coach at Texas Tech:

"Golf’s pretty much for people that don’t swear effectively enough or need practice at it, and so there are people that need golf. I don’t think I do."

******

"I do have a Viking axe by the bed if I need to whack someone. My wife bought me a Viking axe. The axe side curls down so you can grab the adversary around the neck and you can use it to climb walls, as a grappling hook.”

*****

“I ought to have Mike's Pirate School. The freshmen, all they get is the bandanna. When you're a senior, you get the sword and skull and crossbones. For homework, we'll work pirate maneuvers and stuff like that.”

*****

"Growing up in Wyoming, I can tell you that If a pinecone war breaks out you have no choice but to engage in it. There are no neutral countries in pinecone wars."

*****

"If you're calling 50% run plays and 50% pass plays, you're 50% stupid."

*****

"First advice — elope! Just eliminate all the family input aggravation, change of constant, change of course that exists with planning weddings, and the anxiety and the pressure that almost drives people to divorce before they even start."

*****

"They’d start talking about evolution, like if you don’t use a certain part of your body, as time evolves over century upon century, in natural selection, that part of the body disappears and even that animal might disappear.

I’m genuinely fearful that, on our team, if me and the other coaches don’t get them right, that about a generation from now our receivers' kids and their grandkids won’t have hands. Because from a lack of use those hands just disappear. Maybe they’ll be like this (Leach does raptor hands at the podium), like those dinosaur hands like this. And you’ve got like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is clearly really good at eating things, with big ol’ jaws and all that stuff, certainly athletic and can run. But those hands are like this (gestures again).”

*****

""Well eggs create life, so you could argue this is the most important game there is." --- Mike Leach, explaining how important the egg bowl game (between Mississippi State and Ol' Miss) is.

*****

"There's 3 tigers in the SEC. Well, that's what makes it a tough conference." ---- Mike Leach, as part of an exploration as to who would win in an SEC mascot brawl

*****
"First of all, what kind of mystical powers does a sun devil have? We've got to consider that. I'm going to say the wildcat's out. The Trojan, does he have a horse or is he on foot? Does he have a bow and arrow or just his sword? The bruin is definitely formidable. Another bear up there at Cal. The tree... I imagine that tree is going to get chopped down unless we're going to go with the bird and then someone might get pecked or something, I don't know. And then the duck. The duck might lose interest and fly away and get out of there which may be good advice under the circumstances. The husky, no chance. The beaver? Well, we'll see how long that beaver can hold his breath. The Ute? Again, we're back to: is he on horseback? Does he have a bow and arrow? Did he trade for a rifle? I mean, because if that Ute's got a rifle, there's some definite problems. You know, you'd have to get one of those Harry Potter activists to read up on how you kill a sun devil because there's a lot of outside stuff there. Just as far as a beast alone, a buffalo is going to be pretty hard to tangle with. I mean, a buffalo is utterly outstanding. Butch (the Washington State mascot) is going to have to be clear minded and crafty. I mean, Butch will find a way, there's no question. The cougar will find a way ---- clear minded and crafty, a combination of stay out of harm's way and attack when you get your chances or your openings." ---- Mike Leach, exploring who would win in a Pac-12 mascot brawl

[Greg Cranford @CoachCran]

@grok
What country Is this frim?

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Greg Cranford @CoachCran]

@MargoMartin47 @SebGorka @realDonaldTrump Ha. No vegan

[Stewart Wiseman @stewartwiseman]

Today, the Civil Commission released Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity — the product of more than two years of documentation, legal analysis, archival work, and testimony collection. It is the most important work I have ever been part of.

This report was born in the space between atrocity and denial. It documents patterns of sexual and gender-based violence committed during the October 7 attacks and in captivity, preserving evidence that too many sought to minimize, dismiss, or erase.

The work demanded confronting materials and testimonies of extraordinary brutality. Justice cannot exist without recognition, and recognition cannot exist without people willing to preserve the truth with rigor, care, and moral clarity.

What makes this report so significant is not only the scale of the investigation (hundreds of testimonies, thousands of visual records, years of analysis) but its insistence that these crimes be understood within the frameworks of international law, accountability, and human dignity.

Contributing to this report has been one of the most meaningful and consequential responsibilities of my life. Working alongside an extraordinary team of lawyers, archivists, and documenters, I had the privilege of contributing to the report’s legal findings and analysis under international human rights and international criminal law, helping document and assess crimes that many sought to deny, minimize, or erase.

I hope people will read the report in full, engage seriously with its findings, and understand what is at stake when sexual violence in conflict is denied, politicized, or ignored.

The truth deserves a permanent place in the historical and legal record.

Link to full report below.

@CochavElkayam @theCC07

[GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE @GOP_is_Gutless]

Tomi Lahren just named the exact reason Gavin Newsom is paying 50 cents per diaper when Target charges 16 cents

— the $20 million contract has to launder the money through his wife’s nonprofit network. Eric Daugherty surfaced the segment and Steve Hilton ran the math.

Newsom’s office announced $20 million of California taxpayer money to send 100,000 babies 400 diapers each at 50 cents per diaper.

The funds are going to a Los Angeles nonprofit called Baby2Baby. Baby2Baby’s co-CEO Norah Weinstein also sits on the board of California Partners Project, the nonprofit run by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the First Lady of California.

Tomi Lahren explained: “They have to launder the money through the nonprofit that is not only filled with Newsom’s wife’s pals but Democrat donor pals and Hollywood elites. Anytime you see nonprofit, you should be very, very skeptical. If they really wanted to help out mothers, they would do it in the most cost-effective way possible. They would find a way to give vouchers or coupons. But they had to do it through Baby2Baby, through their friends and their pals and through co-CEO Norah Weinstein who also serves on the board of Jennifer Newsom’s California Partners Project.”

This is the modern Democrat fundraising ecosystem in one transaction. The state writes a $20 million check that goes to a nonprofit whose co-CEO sits on the First Lady’s separate nonprofit. Mothers end up with the same diapers they could have bought at Target — at roughly 3x the unit cost.

The other roughly $14 million of markup disappears into salaries, overhead, and the political-donor network that powers California Democrats. Tomi Lahren just laid out the entire Newsom grift in 90 seconds — and the math was Steve Hilton’s.

[Liz Wheeler @Liz_Wheeler]

Odds of dying from hantavirus: 1 in 30-35M

Odds of dying from a lightning strike: 1 in 15-20M

Odds of dying in a car accident 1 in 8,000-9,000

Odds of dying from medical error: 1 in 1,000-1,400

If someone is telling you to freak out about Hantavirus, they're lying to you.

[Robert W Malone, MD @RWMaloneMD]

A virus or some other pathogen emerges somewhere in the world.
The media shifts into apocalyptic mode.
"Experts" appear to be predicting catastrophe.
Computer models project millions dead, if the right circumstances coalesce.
Politicians declare emergencies.
Pharmaceutical companies announce new products.
Social media turns into a digital panic attack.
And ordinary people, who just wanted to buy eggs and walk the dog, suddenly feel like civilization is one cough away from collapse.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
This is how psychological bioterrorism works.
The pathogen itself matters less than the emotional payload attached to it.

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

California gubernatorial candidate @SteveHiltonx exposes two MASSIVE tax fraud scandals connected to the Democratic Party:

“There’s a scheme that’s been operating for the last 10 years. This is from the gas tax money. One of the uses is the Climate Mitigation Fund, and it’s been $1 billion over the last 10 years that was supposedly spent on installing solar panels on low-income apartment buildings.

Well, we tracked it down. The actual amount of money spent on that? $72 million.

$928 million, nearly all of it, [was spent] on DEMOCRAT POLITICAL ORGANIZING.

This is what they do. This is their business model.

We just saw one over the weekend. Gavin Newsom’s diaper scheme: $20 millon to send diapers to 100,000 babies. 400 diapers each.

We did the math. That’s 50 cents per diaper.

We went into Target. You can get them for 16 cents a diaper.

In other words, Gavin Newsom’s government diapers are more than 3 times as expensive as in the store. Why? Because actually what it's doing is taking taxpayer money that's going into some nonprofit with his cronies, family members, and connections on there. They make the money, salaries raked off the top. And it builds their political machine. That's what's been going on in California."

[Mark Geist @MarkGeistSWP]

Pressure doesn’t create leadership.
Pressure reveals it.

Anybody can lead when the room is calm, the budget is full, and everyone agrees. Real leadership shows up when:

the mission is unclear,
people are scared,
resources are limited,
and failure has real consequences.

Under pressure, weak leaders protect their image.
Strong leaders protect their people.

Your team doesn’t need panic.
They need clarity, calm, accountability, and direction.

A leader’s composure becomes the emotional temperature of the team.

When things get hard:

communicate clearly,
make decisions,
own mistakes,
and keep moving forward.

Leadership isn’t proven in comfort.
It’s forged in pressure.

#Leadership #LeadershipUnderPressure #Resilience #DecisionMaking #Accountability #Teamwork #Veterans #Mindset #LeadershipDevelopment

[Unite_Republicans_Lets take back America. @Sunkized01]

Explain

[healthbot @thehealthb0t]

Dr. Ben Carson: We must not allow what happened during COVID to be "swept under the rug."

"Dr. Fauci eventually admitted that there was no science behind any of what he was saying."

"We know that the side effects from COVID vaccinations far exceeded anything else in the last 30 years combined."

[Sarah Adams @sarahadams]

Those who have never seen the October 7th footage should at least understand what it represents. The terrorists behind October 7th cross-trained with Al-Qaeda operatives tied to upcoming attacks against the U.S. homeland. The brutality seen in those videos is the exact kind of horrors we must work to prevent here at home.

The threat is real, the intent is clear, and history has already shown the consequences of ignoring warning signs. You have been given time to prepare yourself, your families, and your communities to recognize threats and prevent harm. Do not waste that opportunity.

Too many people are being paid to downplay, distort, and feed the public terrorist propaganda and misinformation instead of confronting reality. Complacency is what these networks count on. Awareness, preparation, and vigilance are what keep innocent people alive.

You will be your own first responder, please be clear eyed as to what you are up against.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

🚨ARTICLE: The Shadow Cabinet of Soros🚨

This is the story of National Security Action, a secretive Soros NGO.

Ten days after Trump's inauguration, a former Pentagon official publicly floated a military coup in Foreign Policy magazine. Within a year, she was advising a new Soros-funded organization that quietly assembled 70 former Obama national security officials under one roof.

46 of them went on to staff the Biden administration -- including the Secretary of State, CIA Director, DNI, NSA, and UN Ambassador. 88.6% were Obama alumni. The primary funder: the Open Society Action Fund.

The same woman simultaneously sat on the funder's board and the organization's advisory council. She also co-founded the Transition Integrity Project and spent 14 years at New America developing doctrine on military refusal of orders.

Read it here.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Remember when you were called a conspiracy theorist for questioning the origins of COVID? I was right there with you.

Fauci dismissed the lab leak theory on every major network while his NIH was actively funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Scientists who agreed with us were silenced. Careers were destroyed. The COVID cover-up ran straight through our own public health bureaucracy. Today is the final day for the DOJ to charge Fauci.

[Greg Cranford @CoachCran]

@JColemanFB @Matt_Stepp817 Laundry detergent...

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Obama promised that Obamacare would end waste, fraud, and unwarranted subsidies that go to insurance companies.

Let's check in on how that worked out.