Jeff Gill

Rejoice in the Lord always;
again I will say, Rejoice.

~ Philippians 4:4

[Jeff Gill @Knapsack]

"Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays."

~ Aldo Leopold, 1947 in "The Ecological Conscience"

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump is BIG MAD about Obama saying the White House now looks like Saddam opened a Cheesecake Factory: "He's not a smart guy. He's not smart at all ... for you to say it's a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president"

[John Hudson @John_Hudson]

Bob Woodward names his sources, most of whom are dead, some of whom gave him permission and others who became identifiable in public records as his sources https://t.co/07zLLJ5kx9

[Jeff Gill @Knapsack]

@dfwatson3 @markdtooley Higher Ed pieties have been a solvent across many liberal categories; accreditation pressures created an island of doctrinal leftism, which grew out of trying to dig channels for diversity in the early 1900s. Leaving sectarian values behind, they moved into uncharted territory.

[Jeff Gill @Knapsack]

@markdtooley …in the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the 1910-1930 era; somehow complicators of race & evolution put the “left” into an academic box, w/ evangelicalism boxed into a consumerist/populist dead end on the “right.” Meanwhile, socialism gets more credit than its due.

[Jeff Gill @Knapsack]

@markdtooley It is an interesting study from Rauschenbusch through Niebuhr into the Brueggeman/Hauerwas era to ask how modern U.S. Protestantism has tried to address the “Social Question.” Marx had his innings in the mid-1800s; Leo XII took a swing in 1891. Our attempts all got bogged down…

[𝘚𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘑. 𝘋𝘶𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 @StevenJDuffield]

Pat Sajak is 80 years old today. Here he is while serving in Vietnam.

[The Martin Sheen Podcast @themartinpod]

Working on a film in Texas and doing my laundry in the hotel bathroom. Yes, I'm a man of many talents.

#TheMartinSheenPodcast 💙

[Paul J. Pastor @pauljpastor]

A few warm fatherly tears shed today by an empty fort in the woods, so lovingly built, and so lately left, by a growing child with (quite rightly) more grown up things to do. I wish I could find her in there peeking out again, just a little smaller.

Too fast; it is all too fast.

[NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports]

Ukraine will observe a ceasefire from 03:00 Kyiv time on October 27 in a designated area around Russian-occupied Oleshky, Kherson region, to enable a humanitarian operation, deliver aid and prepare civilians for safe movement from the city. #Ukraine

[Matt Lindner @mattlindner]

If you are a bar -- hotel, dive, high class, any kind of bar -- and a group of people from Milwaukee roll in 30 minutes before closing and you like money, you chug a Red Bull and stay open as late as you physically can because they will make it worth your while financially.

[MoundLore @MoundLore]

A Florida pond preserved human brain tissue for more than 7,000 years. Construction equipment found the cemetery in 1982 while a subdivision road was being built.

This was Windover, near Titusville. Archaeologists recovered the remains of at least 168 people. Ninety-one had preserved brain tissue.

But spend a minute with what they were buried in. Some had been wrapped in handwoven textiles before being placed beneath the shallow water and into the peat. Wooden stakes held a number of the burials in place. The people tending this cemetery were handling fabric, folding bodies and securing them beneath the pond.

The peat preserved work that almost always disappears: cordage, woven material, wooden implements. Researchers could examine how fibers had been twisted and how threads crossed one another. Different weaving techniques survived in the same cemetery.

That changes how much of ancient America you can picture. At a dry site, a stone point might survive while the cord that fastened it, the wooden shaft and the bag it traveled in all rot away. You inherit the durable pieces and have to reconstruct the rest.

Windover kept some of the rest.
Its excavation director, Glen Doran, made a point I wish appeared beside more museum cases: these kinds of perishable objects belonged to a much wider world. Exceptional preservation lets one place show you what other sites have lost.

The developers rerouted the road. Part of the cemetery was left unexcavated.

[Superman @thesupermannx]

This paper answers why confident idiots run the world.

Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy.

It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception.

And the results are wild.

participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile.

they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence.

the paper revealed a brutal paradox:

the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain.

if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing.

this creates a dangerous systemic loop.

the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions.

meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse.

top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else.

they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add.

we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence.

the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't.

the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.

[Darrel Rowland @darreldrowland]

For real?

[Jeff Gill @Knapsack]

Yikes.

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

"The director won’t protect even our most respected analysts when they tell hard truths, so they stopped telling them and learned to avoid topics the White House didn’t want to hear,” newly retired CIA official tells @shaneharris https://t.co/BEKFgD5fLY

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

"The director won’t protect even our most respected analysts when they tell hard truths, so they stopped telling them and learned to avoid topics the White House didn’t want to hear,” newly retired CIA official tells @shaneharris https://t.co/BEKFgD5fLY

[Brian Stelter @brianstelter]

An on-the-record quote 👀

[Wayne @WayneClips]

Miles Teller says he broke out in hives after a flight while filming Top Gun: Maverick, and was shocked to discover he had flame retardant, pesticides, and jet fuel in his blood. Tom Cruise’s response was priceless.

“I landed, we got done, and I was like, ‘Man, I’m not feeling too good.’ I was really hot, and I just started itching like crazy. I get out of the jet, and I’m covered in hives. Like, head to toe.”

“My blood work comes back and I have flame retardant, pesticides, and jet fuel in my blood.”

“I told Tom, ‘Well, Tom, it turns out I have jet fuel in my blood.’ Without even skipping a beat, Tom just goes, ‘Yeah, I was born with it, kid.’”

“I thought, wait a second, this is actually kind of cool. And it was ,there’s your Top Gun. That was a very Tom moment for me.”

[Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* @EsotericCD]

"Teachers are the real heroes. Gotta admit though, that guy who planted the flag at Iwo Jima? He's *close*."
- Norm Macdonald

[Dr Anna Wilmore @seatofwisdomopn]

Some highlights from my trip to Rome earlier this month. Despite being there for a conference, I still found some time to make little pilgrimages - as a long-time Oratory parishioner, it was particularly special to pray at St Philip Neri's tomb!

[Sam Stein @samstein]

dying that Bessent got to do this one. A man who has a home in Provincetown would never hang with the "Martha's Vineyard set."