USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then â I must report this calmly â the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we�"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished â an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
Courtside at MSG is funny because itâs like beloved former Knicks star from the â90s next to an insanely famous actor next to the CEO of a company that turns orphans into AI data center liquid coolant.
đš | Luca Cordero di Montezemolo on the new Ferrari Luce:
"If I said what I really think, I'd harm Ferrari. We're risking the destruction of a myth, I'm very sorry about that. I hope they at least remove the Prancing Horse from that car"
Iran was trying to use the North Korean model to get a nuke: create sufficient conventional deterrence so you wonât be challenged in acquiring one (itâs called the Seoul Hostage Problem).
This has been explained over and over since day one.
Everyone claiming shifting goalposts or no imminent threat has been lying.
The reason North Korea was allowed to get nukes is because Seoul (and its 10 million inhabitants) is within artillery and rocket range of North Korea.
During the 1994 nuclear crisis, the Clinton administration seriously considered airstrikes on North Koreaâs Yongbyon reactor but backed off precisely because of the artillery threat to Seoul.
Iran was trying to accomplish the same by stockpiling missiles and drones which would have had the same deterrent effect. The proof is what Iran has been doing in the past month: attacking all its neighbors in order to pressure the US to stop attacking it
Beyond this, they were building medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Paris and London, meaning all of Europe could be held hostage as they built a nuclear bomb.
The reason Iran has not built a nuclear weapon until now is not because it couldnât, but because it knew it would be attacked and denied this capability.
So by allowing them to continue developing this conventional deterrence, you would be allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon.
And unlike North Korea, Iran is led by an eschatological death cult
Reagan saw nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both morally bankrupt (because of the innocent-body-count problem) and dangerously fragile because it assumed flawless rationality between adversariesâŠthis means it only takes one irrational actor to destroy the world.
Working backwards from the conclusion that Iranâs Islamist regime must never have a nuclear weapon, it was necessary for the US to attack Iran to deny it the conventional capacity to hold the entire eastern hemisphere hostage.
Every European leader knows this and behind the scenes praises the US for this action. But they are cowards, held hostage by their own internal Muslim populations, and so adopt these ridiculous public positions.
This was never about Israel. And if your argument is that Iran should be allowed to get a nuclear weapon then you are a fool and a traitor to western civilizationâŠyouâre a useful idiot
âą be Torakusu Yamaha
âą the son of a low-ranking samurai astronomer in 19th-century Japan
âą obsessed with Western machines, you make a living repairing watches and medical equipment
âą 1887: a local elementary school has a broken American reed organ. Nobody in the small town knows how to fix it.
âą you take it apart, realize itâs just two broken springs, and easily repair it
âą but instead of just handing it back, you realize: "If I can fix this, I can build it."
âą you draw a blueprint of the inside of the organ and build the very first Japanese-made reed organ from scratch
âą you show it off. People tell you it sounds terrible.
âą most people would quit. You sling the heavy wooden organ over your shoulder on a bamboo carrying pole.
âą you physically carry it 160 miles (250 km) on foot, trekking over the brutal Hakone mountains just to reach the Tokyo Music Institute to get real feedback from experts
âą the professors play it. They tell you the mechanics are brilliant, but the tuning is completely wrong.
âą you don't get defensive. You stay in Tokyo for a month, sitting in on university music theory lectures, holding a single tuning fork to your ear until you completely master the mathematics of sound frequencies
âą you walk 160 miles back home
âą you build a second organ. The professors test it and declare it "as good as those from abroad."
âą you found Nippon Gakki Co. (which later becomes Yamaha Corporation)
âą you decide to make your company logo three interlocking tuning forks to remember the pain and discipline of learning music theory from scratch
âą decades later, your company uses its piano woodworking expertise to build wooden airplane propellers in WWII
âą after the war, the company uses its new metallurgical expertise from the airplane engines to build motorcycles
âą you accidentally create a timeline where repairing a broken elementary school organ directly leads to the creation of the Yamaha YZF-R1 superbike
âą absolute, relentless horizontal integration based purely on figuring out how things work
The ultimate testament to reverse-engineering reality.
My favourite part of U.S. history is the sheer number of countries around the world that had some profound, nothing-was-the-same, year-zero interaction with the U.S. that the Americans have almost completely forgotten about. Japan had TWO of them, and the Americans only remember the latter one because it had a-bombs.
@LegacySiu Blaise Matuidi! We actually played a 4-2-3-1 with Griezman as a 10, and Matuidi on the left dropped back a bit more. Still a weird tactic to put him there, but Deschamps praised his agressivity as a justification for his choice.