Frank Reilly

Texas lawyer, judge, and political science instructor. Reposting is not an endorsement.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Ages of Founding Fathers in 1776:

James Monroe, 18
Aaron Burr, 20
John Marshall, 20
Alexander Hamilton, 21
James Madison, 25
John Jay, 30
Thomas Jefferson, 33
Thomas Paine, 39
John Adams, 40
George Washington, 44

This nation was built by brilliant young men.

[Texas Capitol History @TXCapHistory]

July 4, 1845, the Republic of Texas convened a convention of delegates to vote on annexation to the USA🇺🇸. The question passed 55-1, where they also created a state constitution, which we still abide by today. Texas officially became the 28th state on December 29th, 1845. #txlege

[Frank Reilly @FrankReilly]

Happy 250th U.S.A.!

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

Micheal Butler, the man who crashed his car into a home in Texas killing a grandmother, has just been arrested and charged with manslaughter

[Miranda Devine @mirandadevine]

The only way the Totenberg-Alito story makes sense is that this veteran NPR legal reporter had a trusted and highly placed source inside SCOTUS who confirmed that Alito was retiring.
- No editor would publish such a story unless the reporter were reliable.
- A reliable reporter does not say 'oh I thought I heard something' without double-checking with a source to confirm. Ideally she would call Alito to confirm as well.
- But somehow Totenberg and her editors at NPR were satisfied that her sourcing was impeccable without official on the record confirmation.
- That leaves a very small list of suspects: someone close to Alito who was very confident that he was retiring.
- As people have speculated, Alito may have planted a false tale to catch out the leaker: a canary trap. Now what?

[History Calendar @HistoryCalendar]

Mel Brooks, age 100, was born closer to the death of Thomas Jefferson (July 4, 1826) than to the present day.

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Thomas Jefferson submits the final draft of his Declaration of Independence to Continental Congress.

[NWS Austin/San Antonio @NWSSanAntonio]

A plume of the Saharan Air Layer, a dusty airmass that originates from Africa and frequently moves across the Atlantic, will move across South-Central Texas tomorrow (June 29). This dusty air causes milky white daytime skies and can produce vivid sunrises and sunsets. #txwx

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

A young SpaceX employee asked Elon what happens if they fail to reach Mars in his lifetime. The room was full of engineers and the question landed heavier than anyone expected.

It was a simple question but it cut to the core of everything SpaceX exists for. The entire company, every late night, every exploded prototype, every engineer who missed their kid's birthday for a launch window, it all points at Mars. What if it doesn't happen in time?

Elon paused.

He said that the goal was never for him personally to walk on Mars. The goal was to build the infrastructure that makes it inevitable. That even if he dies before the first crew lands, the system he built would carry the mission forward without him.

He said the rockets, the factories, the team, the culture, all of it is designed to outlast any single person. Including him. Especially him.

Then he said something that reportedly moved people in the room.

He said that if he thought success depended on him being alive, he would have already failed. The whole point is building something that doesn't need its founder to keep going.

He compared it to a cathedral. The architects of medieval cathedrals knew they would die before the building was finished. They designed it anyway. They poured their life into something they would never see completed because the completion wasn't the point. The commitment was.

SpaceX is his cathedral. He may never set foot on Mars. But the road between here and there will exist because he refused to accept that nobody was building it.

The most ambitious man alive has already made peace with the possibility that his greatest achievement might happen after he's gone. That's not failure. That's faith in something bigger than yourself.

[Frank Reilly @FrankReilly]

From the father of political digital campaigning: "The old ways are over."

[Vincent Harris @VincentHarris]

We spent almost half the total media buy for @Bobby4Maine on digital + ended up over 60% of the vote in a 7 way field. The old ways are over. It isn’t “digital first” it’s “digital everything” and authentic, constant content first.

[Dr Manhattva @Manhattva]

My money is safe.

[Warren Redlich - Chasing Dreams 🇺🇸 @WR4NYGov]

Since 2008, $15B taxpayer dollars have been invested in California High Speed Rail. There is no working track and zero passengers so far.

In the same time frame $12B in private funds were invested in SpaceX pre IPO.

SpaceX has 10,000 Starlink satellites serving 10 million customers and has taken 74 passengers into orbit.

Politicians tell you they’ll do better with Elon’s money than he does. California shows the truth.

[Texas Darlin' 🎀 @TexitDarling]

Courtesy of Atascosa County Sheriff’s Office FB page.

🇸🇪 WHEN SWEDEN MEETS SOUTH TEXAS 🤠

This afternoon on I-37, Deputy Chief Eric Kaiser responded to a minor accident involving five guys from Sweden — and found a Swedish flag flying proud off the back of their rental motorhome on the side of the highway.

It's World Cup time, and it turns out these five Swedes flew into Dallas, picked up an RV, and have been chasing their national team across North America — already caught a match in Monterrey, Mexico, with stops in Houston and Los Angeles still ahead. Talk about dedication to your nation's team!

Good news: everybody was okay. Texas DPS Troopers and our Deputy Chief made sure they were safe and squared away before they got back on the road.

They told us that back home, Texas and our Deputy Sheriff's are something they'd only seen in the movies...they didn't expect to find the genuine article out here in Atascosa County.

We showed them some real South Texas hospitality, and they even wanted a photo for the journal of their American road trip.

Safe travels, fellas! While we'll be cheering for Team USA, we'll give a wink and a nod to Sweden winning a few games along the way. 💙💛

⭐ Atascosa County Sheriff's Office

[sonoken - 海外にスポーツを観に行く人 @sonoken0503]

テキサス大学オースティン校へ！！

・移動用カートがあるキャンパス
・中央にあるUTタワー
・アメフト場
全てが規格外の大きさ！

学食は一般人でも入れて、
$14(約2,300円)の食べ放題ビュッフェでした！
🥗🍗🥪🍔🌮🍕🎂🥤
なんでも揃ってて、アレンジ自由で楽しい！

[Ryan Autullo @RyanAutullo]

New: SpaceX’s rocket blasts can continue near public beach in Texas following ruling from state supreme court.

Justices won't say if closures violate Open Beaches Act.

But private groups that sued to stop them can't do so, court says.

#txlege

https://t.co/H53VoUt2U5

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Dr. Joseph Warren died on this day in 1775, and he might be the most important Founding Father you were never taught about.

He was born in Roxbury, went to Harvard, and by his early thirties he was the most sought after doctor in Boston. He inoculated the Adams family against smallpox. He took on apprentices. He treated patients on both sides of the growing fight, redcoats included, because he was a doctor first. He was 34 and a widower raising four small children alone after his wife died in 1773.

He was also the quiet engine of the entire revolution in Massachusetts. He wrote the Suffolk Resolves. He ran the Committee of Safety. He stood up twice to give the Boston Massacre orations, and the second time, with British officers packing the room to intimidate him, the story goes that he climbed in through a window rather than be turned away, then delivered the speech to their faces.

On the night of April 18, 1775, it was Warren who learned the British army was about to march. He sent Paul Revere out one way and William Dawes the other to raise the alarm toward Lexington and Concord. There is no midnight ride without Joseph Warren. People have argued for two centuries about where he got his intelligence, and one long running rumor is that his secret source was close to General Gage himself.

The next morning he didn't sit safe behind a desk. He rode out to the fighting at Lexington and Concord and got into the thick of it. A British musket ball came so close it knocked a pin out of the hair beside his ear.

Three days before Bunker Hill, the Provincial Congress made him a major general. When he walked onto the hill on June 17, the officers there offered to hand him command of the whole field. He refused. He said he had come to fight as a volunteer, not to give orders, and he took a musket and went into the redoubt with the ordinary men, in the most dangerous spot on the line.

The Americans held off two British charges. On the third, low on powder, they were overrun. Warren stayed to cover the retreat and was shot in the head. The British knew exactly who they had killed. They stripped him, ran him through with bayonets, and threw him into a shallow pit with another body. A British officer later bragged that he had stuffed the scoundrel into the ground. General Gage is said to have remarked that Warren's death was worth that of 500 ordinary men.

Ten months later, after the British finally gave up Boston and sailed away, his friends went looking for him. The body was beyond recognition. The only reason they ever found him is that Paul Revere, a silversmith by trade, had once wired a false tooth into Warren's jaw with silver wire. Revere dug through the grave, saw his own work in the teeth, and knew. It is remembered as one of the first forensic dental identifications in American history.

His orphaned children were nearly forgotten too, until people like Benedict Arnold, years before he became a traitor, chipped in money to make sure they were raised and educated.

The most famous painting of the battle, by John Trumbull, isn't really about the battle at all. It's about the death of one man in the smoke.

The doctor who could have commanded an army chose to die in the dirt as a private soldier. He was 34 years old. 251 years ago today. Remember him 🇺🇸

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

The biggest improvement ever made to the most complex machine in human history came from a guy holding a camera.

Not a propulsion engineer. Not a systems architect. Not anyone on the SpaceX payroll.

A YouTuber named Tim Dodd.

Dodd was touring Starbase when Musk explained how they eliminated the entire cold gas thruster system on the Super Heavy booster.

Instead of a separate mechanism with its own weight and its own failure points, they just vented hot gas straight from the propellant tanks.

Zero added weight. Zero extra parts.

Dodd asked one question.

“But this is only for the booster, right?”

Musk stopped.

Musk: “Although, arguably, now you mentioned it, it might be wise to do this for the ship too. We’re gonna fix that.”

Seven months later, Musk confirmed it was one of the biggest improvements ever made to the vehicle.

That moment should have been impossible.

Thousands of the most brilliant aerospace minds alive work at SpaceX. They designed this system. Reviewed it. Tested it. Shipped it. Defended it in rooms where challenging the architecture has a cost.

None of them asked the question.

Not because they were stupid.

Because they were expert.

We worship expertise. We hire for it. We pay for it. We promote for it.

We have built entire civilizations on the assumption that the person who understands a problem most deeply is the one most qualified to solve it.

But depth is not the same thing as sight.

Expertise is not a straight line toward truth.

It is a circle.

You learn enough to solve the problem.

Then you learn enough to justify the solution.

Then you learn enough to defend the justification.

And eventually you know so much about why things are the way they are that you lose the ability to ask whether they should be.

The SpaceX engineers understood exactly why the cold gas thrusters existed on the ship. Thermal constraints. Attitude control requirements. Heritage design logic.

They had context and history and institutional memory and ten perfectly valid reasons the ship was different from the booster.

Every single one of those reasons was a wall between them and the obvious.

Dodd had none of it. No history telling him the question was already answered. No career incentive to leave the architecture alone. No knowledge of why things were the way they were.

He just had the question.

And the question was right.

The cold gas system on the ship was not a mistake anyone was hiding.

It was a mistake nobody could see.

Because the only way to see it was to know less. Not more.

Now think about your own expertise.

The thing you have built or maintained or defended longer than anyone around you.

The system you understand so deeply that nobody questions your judgment on it anymore.

What is the question nobody around you is asking? Not because it is hard.

Because it is so simple it feels beneath the room.

That question is probably worth more than everything your smartest people have produced this quarter.

And right now it is sitting in the mouth of someone you would never think to invite to the meeting.

The rocket got lighter because someone didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to ask.

Most expertise will spend its entire life making sure no one does.

[Rocketshipalx @rocketshipalx]

My thoughts after 3 months in the US/Texas🇺🇸:

- Americans are way more extroverted than Europeans
- Talking to strangers is normal here
- My first H-E-B trip felt like Boris Yeltsin seeing an American grocery store
- Some food is more artificial, but the amount of choices is insane
- You can still eat healthy. You just have to choose it
- High risk, high reward is real
- Way more people are entrepreneurial
- People dream bigger than in Europe, and they actually execute
- Obv not everyone is smarter, but the smart people are world-class
- Successful people here are way more down-to-earth. In Europe, successful people care about status and can be arrogant
- Cars. Enough said
- Americans have perfected artificial sweets
- There’s still more freedom here than in Europe
- One thing I didn’t expect: some Americans talk down on America
- As an outsider, that’s weird, because imo it’s still the greatest country on Earth🇺🇸🇺🇸