Jesse Cone

Head of School of The Saint Constantine School, Pittsburgh Campus and Instructor of Philosophy @UofDallas.

[Jesse Cone @JesseSCone]

Things got a little silly during Bright Week and they made me the Head of School @TSCS_ Pittsburgh.

[Cav Senpai @cavannastan]

Again for those in the back, Elon once offered to cut a check for $6 BILLION to the WFB to "eliminate World hunger" as they said the money could. His one condition was that the accounting was public.

They did not accept.

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

When I give my savings to @elonmusk they multiply. When I give them to you and all of the US government, they disappear.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it.

But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

[Skyson @notagrocer]

Heartbroken. All the preparation in the world doesn’t stop the grief the day of. Perhaps I’ll have better words tomorrow, but for today… thank you, @AnthonySHead, for your hand in giving me the best memories of my life. Give Sarah a big hug and rest easy, lovely man. 💙

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

So true

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Why can you see 50 documentaries about the Nazis on streaming services, but none about Communism? Dont get me wrong, Nazi docs are important. I watch them and learn. You should too. But come on! The West has memory-holed Communism. Why?

[Jesse Cone @JesseSCone]

Post of the year.

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

i can still live another 50 years if @Mike_Pence has the courage

[Orthodox Church OCA @ocaorg]

St Tikhon’s Seminary and the OCA Diocese of the Midwest Announce Creative Partnership to Train Unique Cohort of Seminarians
https://t.co/Q4BPn8fVnh

[Father Christopher @FChristopher77]

The Tomb of the Holy Great Martyr George in Lod, Palestine.

[Bob Pompeani @KDPomp]

In case you missed the BEST moment of day 3 of the #NFLDraft, this was the moment that Mt. Lebanon's @EHeidenreich44 realized a childhood dream @MTLSD @mtlebofootball @MtLebanonSports

[Pittsburgh Steelers @steelers]

OH MAMA‼️

📺: 2026 NFL Draft on NFLN/ESPN/ABC

[Pittsburgh Steelers @steelers]

RT IF YOU LOVE THE BURGH 😍

📺: 2026 NFL Draft on NFLN/ESPN/ABC

[Byzantine, TX @byzantinetx]

This may be one of the best archpastoral Paschal letters I've ever read.

https://t.co/ua21qYW9fs

[Orthodox History @OrthodoxHistory]

In 1882, a Lutheran pastor in Pennsylvania gave a Good Friday sermon by St Innocent.

(Chester Times, 4/8/1882)

[Hagia Sophia Apologetics ♱ @orthodox22790]

“0’ Lord of Powers, Be with Us” in Arabic

Orthodox Christian Chanter Ribale Wehbe, from Lebanon 🇱🇧 📿

[Josh Kraushaar @JoshKraushaar]

"Higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution. Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation"
https://t.co/zLkJhvL8Wo

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Ben Sasse, man. Ben Sasse.

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

I concluded my Henry Family lecture at the University of Miami last Thursday by saying:

“Two things are important right now in life: deep learning and fertility. Everything else is noise.”

We are only starting to glimpse what these two forces will do to global life over the next fifty years. And they interact: deep learning will reshape demographics, and demographic collapse will reshape automation.

Nearly all my posts on X (except some parochial commentary on Spanish economic policy) revolve around these two facts. So does most of my current research. Even work that does not seem directly connected turns out to be, once you look carefully.

My papers on geoeconomics and international macro are about figuring out some of the consequences of deep learning and fertility. For example, my work on China focuses on its abysmal demographic future and how the U.S. is positioning itself (rightly or wrongly) to address it.

And my work on political polarization and the welfare state is about the consequences of decades of low fertility in Western Europe. When people talk about political change in Western Europe, they are talking about low fertility, whether they know it or not. It is not clear that modern representative democracy can survive sustained fertility rates of 1.3. I do not say that with glee.

The reason I decided to spend my life on academic work in economics is that I realized, when I was much younger, that daily events are irrelevant. The things that concern the media and 99 percent of commentary on X are largely irrelevant. One political party does better or worse in the next electoral cycle because of internal fights or a good campaign. At a fundamental level, none of it matters: the political outcome 25 years from now will not depend on those accidents. As Alexander Gerschenkron said, Clio is not a tidy housewife. The rise of any political movement is always full of advances and retreats. Social change waxes and wanes.

But at the end of the day, as my favorite historian Fernand Braudel put it:

“The events of history are merely surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.”

or in the much better original:

“Les événements de l’histoire ne sont que des agitations de surface, des crêtes d’écume que les marées de l’histoire portent sur leur dos puissant.”

The tides of history today are deep learning and fertility.

[Physics & Astronomy Zone @zone_astronomy]

The highest quality video of the moon was just released… this is so beautiful.

[Jesse Cone @JesseSCone]

@richardrohlin This week we’ve been singing verses of “Rejoice oh Bethany” as part of the school’s morning prayers. 10/10 highly recommend.