Dana Ritenour

xFortune50 GlobalTechOps | Question Everything | 1A2A | Small Gov | Solzhenitsyn’s Warning to the West | DAR | AI Teaches Us Soul, By Its Lack | Dum Spiro Spero

[Dana Ritenour @Revel8Nation]

Hi, Jack,

Nice to see you again. Looking forward to continuing our chats about the concepts of Liberty and Free Speech and the important role of "Town Halls"...

[FireBarbaraLee.com @FireBarbaraLee]

While Oakland faced skyrocketing crime and businesses fleeing the city, Mayor Barbara Lee was in the German Alps staying at Schloss Elmau, a FIVE-STAR luxury resort paid for by lobbyists. Her husband’s costs alone exceeded $12,000.

She later became the #1 recipient of this kind of privately funded travel in Congress.

This is who has been leading Oakland…

[tag 🇬🇧 @tag4UK]

Thinking of Belfast today.

UNITE THE CLANS.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A TV writer with no philosophy degree read Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, and Scanlon back to back, built a sitcom around what he found, then explained in one book why the trolley problem is no longer a thought experiment and the people who need to understand this most are the ones building AI.

His name is Michael Schur.

He co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But The Good Place was the project that broke him open. On the surface it was a comedy about a woman who accidentally ends up in heaven. Underneath, it was a philosophy seminar. Every episode was built around a real ethical framework. He had to actually understand all of it to make any of it funny.

After the show ended, he wrote the book anyway. He called it "How to Be Perfect." It begins with the most honest opening line in any philosophy book ever written: Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason? No.

That is not a joke. That is his method. He starts with the obvious and builds toward the impossible.

Here is the framework he built, and why the most dangerous people in tech right now are running exactly one of the four schools of thought without knowing any of the others exist.

The first school is Virtue Ethics. Aristotle built it around 350 BCE. The question it asks is not "what should I do?" It asks "what kind of person should I be?" The idea: become genuinely good, and good actions will follow naturally. You build courage. You build honesty. You build practical wisdom. Then you trust the person you built.

The second school is Deontology. Kant built it in the 18th century and it is the exact opposite. Kant did not care about the person. He cared about the rule. His version: act only in ways you would be comfortable turning into a universal law. If everyone lied whenever it was convenient, the concept of truth would dissolve. So you never lie. Even if the truth gets someone killed. The rule is absolute because the moment you make one exception, it stops being a rule.

The third school is Utilitarianism. This is the one that should stop anyone building AI cold.

Jeremy Bentham invented it in the late 1700s. The principle sounds beautiful: the right action is whichever one produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Pure math. Pure outcome. Intention means nothing. Only consequences count.

Schur runs it through the trolley problem, the most famous thought experiment in philosophy.

You are driving a runaway trolley. Five people are tied to the main track. You can pull a lever and redirect it to a side track where only one person is tied. Do nothing and five die. Pull the lever and you kill one to save five.

A utilitarian says pull the lever. The math is obvious.

Now the same problem with one change. You are on a bridge above the track. A large man is standing next to you. The physics are clear: if you push him off the bridge, his body stops the trolley. Five people live. He dies. The math is identical.

Almost nobody will push the man. Even people who pulled the lever instantly in the first version refuse.

The utilitarian has no answer for why these two situations feel different. The numbers are the same. The outcome is the same. The only thing that changed is whether you are using another human being as a tool.

That gap between the math being correct and the action feeling monstrous is exactly where AI ethics collapses every single time.

The fourth school is Contractualism, built by the philosopher T.M. Scanlon. It asks the question that Kant's rules and Bentham's math both miss. What principles could be justified to everyone affected? Not the majority. Not the person with the most power. Everyone. Including the one person who ends up on the shorter end of the calculation.

Schur's conclusion is the part that people who live inside growth frameworks and optimization loops will resist the hardest. None of the four schools is correct on its own. Each one has a scenario where following it perfectly produces something most humans recognize as evil. Pure utilitarianism justifies harvesting one person's organs to save five dying patients. Pure deontology says you cannot lie to the murderer asking where your friend is hiding. Each system, taken to its logical extreme, becomes a machine that produces monsters while generating perfect internal justification for doing so.

The way out is not picking the right framework and following it harder.

The way out is using all four as lenses. Ask what Aristotle would do. Ask what Kant would allow. Do the utilitarian math. Then ask Scanlon's question: could you justify this to the person it hurts most?

Where those four answers overlap, you are probably on solid ground. Where they pull in different directions, you are in territory that deserves far more than a two-hour board meeting.

Schur also coined a term that has been stuck in my head since I finished the book. Moral Exhaustion. The feeling of living in an age where you can know, in real time, every ethical implication of every product you use, every company you work for, every piece of code you ship. The gap between what you know and what you can actually change becomes so large that the easiest response is to stop asking.

He says that response is understandable. He also says that choosing not to ask is itself a moral choice, and the consequences of that choice scale in exact proportion to the power you hold.

A person building a product one billion people will use is not operating at the scale where shrugging is a neutral act.

The people who built the most consequential technologies of the last decade were not evil. Most were genuinely trying to do good. They ran the utilitarian math. They saw a billion users. They saw engagement numbers that looked like impact. They optimized for the greatest good for the greatest number and did not notice until much later that the people being turned into variables in the math were still people.

Schur read 2,500 years of philosophy and the lesson he came out with fits in one sentence. You cannot use a single framework because every single framework, followed perfectly, eventually produces the wrong answer.

The people who cause the most damage are not the ones who do not care about ethics. They are the ones who found one framework they liked, felt good about it, and stopped asking.

The trolley problem is not a thought experiment anymore.

It runs on servers. It gets optimized overnight. And the people making those decisions right now have never once asked what Scanlon would say.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Just when you think Claire Fox couldn’t be more brilliant … she is. Here’s Claire on Alien Culture.

“We do not think for example that stoning women for adultery is modern, that it’s just a cultural practice, what’s wrong with that? We do not think that child marriage is an interesting cultural expression. We have to say that’s a backward medieval thing. So ‘Alien culture’ was well chosen, it’s importing Alien culture”

Exactly what we were all thinking🔥

[Gregory K Bovino @GregoryKBovino]

The same problem is hitting every developed nation in the West: we’re being flooded with millions who don’t share, and often openly reject, our culture, values, and rule of law.

The solution is also the same everywhere: Stop immigration from incompatible regions and begin mass deportations of those who refuse to assimilate or who commit crimes.

We don’t owe the world our civilization. We owe it to our children to protect and preserve what our ancestors built.

Stop immigration. Begin mass deportations.

Western civilization is worth defending.

Who’s ready to take their country back?

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

Put "ballot harvesting" on the ballot in California.
And also if people want voter ID.
Let's see if the citizens want that.
Pretty simple.

[The SCIF @TheSCIF]

Nithya Raman tied to HOMELESS NGO in L.A. receiving $600k, with thousands of homeless voters registered at shelters with ZERO beds.

I believe we found where Raman's magical mail-in ballot drops came from. U.S. Attorney launching probes into major fraud.

James O'Keefe and many others showed you that the homeless are being paid for votes. Direct link to Nithya Raman, St. Joseph Center received $600,000 in taxpayer funds from the homeless/housing committee while Raman was chair.

A photo of her presenting the check was quietly removed from the center's website after NY Post article. Raman's campaign and the center did not respond to questions.

7,600 voters registered at homeless shelters and service providers across LA. Midnight Mission, Skid Row, 1,160 registered voters, but the shelter only has beds for 84 men + 36 women.

St. Joseph Center, Venice drop-in center, 185 registered voters at its address, offers no beds or accommodations whatsoever.

Hundreds more tied to supportive/affordable housing projects, with nearly 200 added in the final weeks before the registration deadline.

Over 80 voters registered at four behavioral health/addiction facilities, Corner of Hope, Volunteers of America Alcohol Services, LA Centers for Alcohol & Drug Abuse, Homeless Health Care LA Harm Reduction Center.

313 voters tied to LA County social services facilities. Voter registration drives witnessed outside grocery stores, one homeless man, Norman, claimed he was paid to sign people up and saw cigarettes offered as incentives during "big push" efforts.

One registered voter, Bo Jackson, near Midnight Mission couldn’t remember registering and couldn’t name a single candidate in the LA mayor’s race.

The story ties directly into the heated LA mayor's race and major concerns over California's election integrity with clear ties to fraud.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Perhaps it's just one of those everyday beheadings
that the Welsh Methodists are usually involved in

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Belfast Tonight. Britain Tomorrow. The Trajectory Is Set.

On Monday night a man was pinned to a residential street in north Belfast and stabbed repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened. One used a hurling stick. By Tuesday night three houses and a Middle Eastern supermarket were burning. Infants were carried from neighbouring properties. A police vehicle was set alight. Politicians called for calm.

Remember this night. Not because it is exceptional. Because it is not.
This is where the road leads. Not in twenty years. Now. Belfast has experienced serious immigration-related disorder for three consecutive years. The same cycle every time. Attack. Outrage. Disorder. Calls for calm. Nothing. The next incident. What is playing out in Belfast is not a malfunction. It is the destination. A state that cannot name the cause manages the consequence instead, and calls it governance.

Now project forward. Not with imagination. With arithmetic. Over 200,000 people have arrived by small boat since 2018. The majority are unvetted young men from countries with no cultural alignment with the host society. They are housed in communities without consent. Dispersed without warning. The removal rate is four percent. The government knows the other ninety-six percent are staying. It has decided to manage that fact rather than reverse it. Every year the number grows. Every year the concentration deepens. Every year the friction increases.

In ten years those concentrations will not be streets. They will be districts. In twenty years they will be cities within cities, governed by parallel authority, answering to parallel loyalties. We have watched this happen in France. The banlieues were built accommodation by accommodation, retreat by retreat, until the French state no longer entered them except in force. Britain is on the same road, travelling faster.

The trigger events will multiply. One policing incident. One foreign conflict landing on a British street. One court case, one arrest, one viral video. Any spark will do because the kindling has been laid by policy and left to dry by neglect. The riots will not be contained to one city for one night. They will spread, as they spread in France, as they spread across England last summer, because the grievance is not local. It is national. And the anger on both sides will harden with every cycle.

Public order will not hold at current trajectory. The police already negotiate where they once enforced. Investigations are quietly dropped. Reports go unfiled. The state keeps the peace by lowering the bar for what constitutes peace. That bar will keep falling because the alternative requires confronting what the political class has spent thirty years refusing to confront.

The political system will bend to the new demography. It already has. Candidates selected on foreign conflicts. Councils controlled by sectarian bloc voting. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. That process will accelerate as the demographic weight shifts.

And somewhere in this trajectory a trigger event will occur that cannot be managed. A mass casualty attack. A riot that becomes an insurrection. A video so barbaric it breaks the remaining political consensus around managed silence. After that the response will be less controlled, less proportionate and less reversible than anything a government could have delivered by acting fifteen years earlier when the choice still existed.

Britain is not sleepwalking into this. The eyes are wide open. The trajectory is known. The choices being made are deliberate. Every week that passes without a closed border, a functioning removal system and an honest political reckoning is a week in which the future described above becomes more certain and less avoidable.

Belfast on Monday night is not a warning. The warnings came years ago and were ignored. Belfast on Monday night is the bill beginning to arrive.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Can I just say: I’m an Irish-German Catholic from the Bronx who works in shipping.

I’m not full-blooded Irish, so I was never invited into the innermost circle.

But I know exactly who kept Belfast on speed dial.

And they weren’t thugs. They were partners at major NYC law firms.

So if @Keir_Starmer thinks @TRobinsonNewEra’s crowds are “far right” and “violent,” he may want to study what real Irish conservative fury looks like.

If he thinks @elonmusk is meddling in elections just wait until the Irish partners at big law firms get involved.

I don’t know if this video is real or not but the network behind the IRA absolutely is. And they will straight up laugh in your face if you try to intimidate them by saying they’re racist. 1/2

[Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec]

This is the equivalent of the Hatfield and McCoys coming together

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

My son is three years old. For the past two weeks he’s been at a summer camp a few hours a day. The teachers have complained to my wife three times already. Here’s what they reported:

He pushed another kid.
He didn’t sit still when told to.
He tried to leave the room when they said no.
He can’t stand in line.

I’m not exaggerating. Grown adults pulled my wife aside, three times, to report that a three-year-old acts like a three-year-old.

They warned her that if he doesn't change his behavior then he can't continue attending the camp.

Maybe we should medicate him. Fix the defect of being a small boy with energy and a will.

He won’t be going back. I don’t want people like this anywhere near my son.

A civilization that pathologizes a toddler for refusing to sit in a line can't raise men willing to stand and defend it.

[Dana Ritenour @Revel8Nation]

I so miss Scott Adams.

[American Debunk @AmericanDebunk]

The laugh is what I might miss most.

Here’s a laugh compilation.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

This would not "mess up" even a single Christian.

The existence of life on other planets would do nothing to disprove the Bible, and Christians understand that all things are possible with God.

However, I can see how this WOULD "mess up" a lot of secular humanists, because they can't conceive of anything greater than humanity.

[Ethan Brooks @alt_w_v_g]

Tried to log into my bank this morning

Not a new bank. My bank. The one that has my money

First it wanted my password

Wrong

Tried the other one

Wrong

Reset it

"New password cannot match any of your last 24 passwords"

That is every password I have ever used

Created a new one that I will forget next week

Then it said "please verify you are human"

I am human

I have a mortgage

I paid $52.18 for bread, milk, and eggs last week

Only a human would do that

But the bank was not convinced

"Select all squares with traffic lights"

Nine squares

Three had traffic lights

One had the edge of a traffic light pole

Maybe two pixels of yellow paint

Stared at it for a full minute

Selected it

Wrong

"Select all squares with stairs"

Two squares had stairs

One had a ramp

Is a ramp stairs

A ramp is the opposite of stairs

I selected the two obvious ones

Wrong

It wanted the ramp

I am a CFO

I've fired people with more due process than this

But I cannot pass a test designed to keep bots out of my own checking account

"Click and hold until the image stops moving"

A jigsaw puzzle piece floated across the screen

Held it

"Verification failed"

Held it for thirteen seconds

My finger cramped

"Success"

Then a new screen

"Your account has been locked due to suspicious activity"

The suspicious activity was me

Trying to access my own account

Called customer service

The phone menu had ten options

None of them were "your website thinks I am a robot"

Thirty-seven minutes on hold

The same fourteen seconds of smooth jazz

Looping

Every ninety seconds a voice told me my call was important

It did not sound important

Finally a man answered

"Thank you for holding, my name is John"

That man's name was not John

We both knew it

I did not press the issue

John asked for my mother's maiden name, my first pet, and the street I grew up on

He unlocked the account in forty seconds

Forty seconds

The bank trusts John more than me

And John does not exist

Final tally

Nineteen minutes of captchas

Thirty-seven minutes of smooth jazz

One man who was not named John

To access money that is mine

At an institution that emails me every single day asking if I want a home equity line of credit

My wife walked in

She said "what are you doing"

I said "proving to a computer that I'm not a computer"

She said "are you winning"

I said "I just spent an hour deciding if a ramp is stairs"

She said "that sounds like something a computer would do"

She wasn't wrong

She usually isn't

Plz fix. Thx.

Sent from my iPhone

[KeriA @KeriA1776again]

Don’t mess with the Irish.

[Todd Bryant | Captain Klaa 🇺🇸 @RealKlaa]

Prophetic [WARNING] to the USA and the west perhaps? @thenodeproject #AmericaFirst 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🙏 https://t.co/dMUkOS808q

[Adventures in California History @pitsenberger]

This is a portion of the Johnson cut-off Trail (1852) at Lake Tahoe. Johnson blazed and cleared the trail as a shortcut off the established Carson River Route (which went over higher Carson Pass to the south). After descending from Spooner Summit along the east ridge, the trail followed the lakeshore area and then climbed directly over Cave Rock. Here we see the trail rising and crossing a swale formed by thousands of wagons. Just past that, the view of the lake is amazing, and a final look to the right towards Cave Rock. I've included a map of the trail around the rock in the comments. Coordinates: 39°02'46.94"N 119°56'48.57"W

[Jan Jekielek @JanJekielek]

“We have these emails from social media executives saying, ‘We can’t keep up with the volume of these censorship requests coming from the Biden White House.’”

The Censorship Industrial Complex was in full force under the Biden administration.

Jacob Siegel breaks down the scale of the censorship campaign and how the public eventually began pushing back.

“We now have this trail of emails from top Biden administration officials calling for RFK Jr. to be censored.”

“This is happening as soon as the Biden administration takes office.”

“They’re sending out quote unquote requests, but really orders to the social media companies.”

“The Biden administration’s COVID censorship became so extreme, so overt, and so absurd.”

“You can’t go to a loved one’s funeral.”

“You can’t attend the wedding of your sister.”

“And you’re not even allowed to speak openly about these things.”

“Or to investigate the origins of this disease.”

“The censorship efforts become impossible to deny.”

“This begins the process of a partial undoing of the information state.”

@jacob_siegel

[Supersonic Redhead🛫 @Supersonic_Red]

I keep seeing articles claiming Boomers are sitting on mountains of cash like Scrooge McDuck, and I always find them amusing because they assume an entire generation had the exact same experience.

The oldest Boomers were graduating into a very different America than those of us at the tail end. That’s one reason Jonathan Pontell coined the term “Generation Jones” for those born roughly between 1954 and 1965.

Many of us didn’t inherit a world of affordable homes, guaranteed pensions, and endless opportunity. We graduated into recessions, double-digit inflation, corporate downsizing, disappearing pensions, and an economy that was already changing beneath our feet.

Some did very well. Some struggled. Most worked hard, raised families, cared for aging parents, and did the best they could with the hand they were dealt.

The funny thing is that every generation seems convinced the one before them had it easy. History suggests otherwise.

My generation was raised by people who remembered World War II, practiced nuclear attack drills in school, watched manufacturing jobs disappear, lived through inflation, recessions, layoffs, wars, and technological revolutions that transformed nearly every aspect of life.

We’re not one story.

We’re millions of stories.

That’s why broad labels rarely work and why Generation Jones resonates with so many people. We were too young to be classic Boomers, too old to be Gen X, and our experience was uniquely our own.

Maybe instead of blaming generations, we should spend more time learning from each other. Every generation has carried burdens the others never fully saw.

https://t.co/bFQLc7Dk2i