Phil Tritschler (T-10)

Average unabashedly male, run-of-the-mill retired USAF, Christian, conservative. I mostly re-X (THAT’S awkward!) smarter, funnier, more introspective “Xs.”

[Eric Smith @Eric_Smith08]

A guy used Apple CarPlay for 2 years.

He plugged in his phone. He tapped Maps. He tapped Spotify. He drove.

Every time: 3 home screen swipes to find Google Maps (buried on the third page). Siri
misunderstanding his commands 40% of the time. Notifications buzzing during every drive.

Navigation voice drowning out his podcast. The cable disconnecting 4 times per commute.

And the TV button on his steering wheel opening the Apple TV app instead of the home screen.

His friend a driving tech reviewer who tests in-car systems for automotive publications
sat in the passenger seat, watched him swipe 3 times to find Google Maps for the 400th
time, and said:

"Every setting on your CarPlay is wrong. The app layout is the factory jumble. Driving Focus
isn't configured. Siri is fighting your accent because the language setting is off. The
navigation volume and media volume are cross-wired. Announce Messages is disabled. And
you're using a $3 gas station cable that's too short and too flimsy to maintain a connection. I
can fix 9 things in 8 minutes.

CarPlay goes from frustrating to seamless."

He changed 9 settings. The cable got replaced. CarPlay went from the most annoying part of
the drive to the most useful.
Here's every setting he changed 🧵

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Maybe the people saying Black people are too stupid to get an ID to vote… are the racists.

Maybe the people saying married women can’t figure out how to get a birth certificate… are the sexists.

Maybe the people who won’t name a single number they’d cap immigration at… are the extremists.

Maybe the people who claim to trust science… but can’t define what a woman is aren’t following it.

Maybe the people obsessed with “equity” while ignoring merit… are the ones holding people back.

Maybe the people calling everyone else a threat to democracy… are the ones trying to rig it.

Maybe the people who fight for the working class from a private jet… are fighting for something else.

Maybe the people who say they care about the poor… have run every major American city for 50 years and made them ALL worse.

Maybe the people calling for more gun control… travel with armed security paid for by taxpayers.

Maybe the people who demand unity while calling half the country fascists… don’t want unity, but surrender

Maybe it was never about justice, or equity, or tolerance, or democracy.

Maybe was always about power.

And maybe you can tell, because they never stop accusing YOU of exactly what THEY are doing.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Seventy-two. That is how many separate wounds John Cruickshank had in him, two of them through his lungs, while he lined up a burning flying boat for a second run at a U-boat that had just shot his aircraft to pieces. Most men have one of those wounds and they are finished. He had seventy-two and he pressed the attack.

He was 24, a former bank clerk from Aberdeen, flying a Catalina flying boat out of the Shetland Islands with Coastal Command. The job was the long, freezing, mind-numbing patrol, fourteen hours over the grey Atlantic hunting the U-boats that were strangling Britain. On the 17th of July 1944, far out over empty water, they caught one on the surface, U-361, and Cruickshank took the big slow flying boat down to attack.

The first run failed. The depth charges would not release. Any sane man makes a note and turns for home. Cruickshank swung the aircraft around and came back for a second pass, low and straight, and this time the submarine's gunners were waiting. Flak ripped through the Catalina. It killed the navigator, wounded half the crew, and tore into Cruickshank again and again, those seventy-two wounds, two punching into his lungs, ten into his legs.

And he flew the attack home anyway. Bleeding everywhere, in agony, with the fuselage holed and on fire, he held the aircraft dead level, aimed, and released the depth charges himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It broke apart and sank beneath him.

Then came the part that should have killed him. He collapsed from blood loss, and the wounded co-pilot, who had never landed a Catalina, took the controls for the long flight back. Cruickshank refused the morphine that would have knocked him out, because he knew the man flying needed him. Drifting in and out, he had himself carried back up to the cockpit again and again through the night to help nurse the shot-up aircraft down, and at dawn they got it onto the water safely. He had lost so much blood the doctors said he had no business being alive.

He lived. He took the Victoria Cross from the King, went quietly back to banking after the war, and rarely spoke of it. And he kept on living, and living, and living. John Cruickshank died in 2025 at the age of 105, the last man on earth wearing a Victoria Cross earned in the Second World War. Seventy-two wounds over the Atlantic, and he outlasted every other hero of that war by decades.

[Sean @scs_real]

Never really told this story. Back during the government’s response to COVID, we were working with a bunch of defense contractors. They all told me my entire staff was required to get the vax shot or they would terminate our contracts.

I simply replied, “No. It’s none of my business what my staff puts into their bodies as long as it doesn’t affect their work. So go ahead and buy out our contracts.”

All six of them called me personally and said basically the same thing: “You can’t tell us no. Everybody has to get the vax!”

Me: “I couldn’t care less if they get the shot or don’t. Seriously, it isn’t any of my business.”

Them: “But you have to get the vax!!!”

Me: “No, we’re not going to do that. By the way, this benchmark is coming up on day so-and-so. If you’re going to buy out the contract, it’ll be cheaper for you if you do it prior to that benchmark.”

Them: “You’ll hear from our lawyers!!!”

Me: “Tell them to ask for Doctor Sean.”

Never heard another word from any of them.

Unfortunately we had a number of contracts up for renewal in 2020–22, and I figured we lost their business because I told them no. Turns out only the idiot DEI retards cared if we got the shot or not. Their engineers loved us and wanted us back, so we were renewed in every single case.

But I threw a new clause into the contracts: “Since COVID is so dangerous, we cannot come into contact with commercial airports or commercial air travel, so all air travel for us connected to this contract will be provided by you as executive private aircraft.” I don’t remember the exact lawyer-speak, but basically you’re paying for us to fly around in private jets.

Y’all know I’m a smart-ass, and frankly I just kinda threw it in as an afterthought. They’re going to call me a dumbfuck and red-line it, obviously.

They agreed. They motherfucking agreed. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

For the remainder of those contracts, some corporate jet or a leased one would drop down to a jetCenter, pick us up, and fly us to wherever the hell we were going.

It was glorious. You’d board the aircraft and they would ask, “Dr. Sean, would you like a glass of Pappy?”

Why yes, yes I would. 😂😂😂😂😂

That contract clause might be the single greatest triumph I’ve ever pulled off. It certainly put me at legend status in our little neck of the industry. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Adam | Faithful Messenger @Adam_FaithfulM]

Most people assume Christianity's problem with sex outside marriage is that it thinks sex is dirty.

It's the opposite.

The Bible's sexual ethic exists because it holds a higher view of sex than the culture around it does, not a lower one.

Here's the actual biblical case, including the part that's usually preached badly. 🧵

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Helping hands

[ℳ𝒜𝒢𝒜_𝒳_𝒯𝒾𝓂𝑒𝓈 𝒟𝒶𝒾𝓁𝓎 𝒩𝑒𝓌𝓈🇺🇸 @MAGA_X_Times]

In a country where “shall not be infringed” has been slowly rewritten into “shall not… unless you’re the right kind of citizen,” one company just drew a bright red line.

A New Jersey teacher hits record. She’s not a lobbyist.
Not a manufacturer. Just a mom and educator living under one of the most restrictive gun regimes in America. She looks into the camera and reads a press release out loud — word for word — from a company most people outside the 2A world barely know: CMMG.

What she reads isn’t corporate PR. It’s a declaration of war on the two-tiered system that has quietly become normal.

CMMG’s position, issued June 30 :

“We do not have 2 classes of citizens in the country; we are ALL subject to the constitution.
CMMG will only fulfill state and local government agencies and officers to the same configurations as they restrict to their own citizens.
… If a state cannot trust us with equipment, we cannot and will not trust them.
Our loyalty is to the People of this country and to the Constitution of the United States of America. We support law enforcement, but not at the expense of disarming and restricting our fellow citizens.”

@CMMGinc just set the standard.
No special “LE only” guns, mags, or suppressors in states that ban them for law-abiding citizens.
No two classes of Americans.
Loyalty to the Constitution and the People first.
Who else is ready to stand with them?

@Smith_WessonInc @sigsauerinc @DanielDefense @palmettoarmory @Springfield_Inc
@Ruger_Firearms @GLOCKInc @Beretta_USA @aero_precision @GeisseleAuto
@WilsonCombat @HenryRifles @KelTecOfficial @HecklerAndKoch
The two-tiered system ends when manufacturers refuse to feed it.
Will you match CMMG’s position, or keep selling the “rules for thee but not for me” version?

The People are watching 👁️👁️

[Jota @jota_snchez]

En 1979, un presentador de TV le preguntó a Milton Friedman si no le daba vergüenza defender un sistema basado en la codicia.

La respuesta se estudia hasta hoy:

«—Cuando ves la mala distribución de la riqueza, tan pocos que tienen tanto y tantos que no tienen nada… ¿nunca has dudado del capitalismo, de si la codicia es una buena idea?

—Primero dime: ¿conoces alguna sociedad que NO funcione con codicia? ¿Crees que Rusia no funciona con codicia? ¿Que China no?

¿Y qué es la codicia? Ninguno de nosotros es codicioso, claro. El codicioso siempre es el otro.

Los grandes logros de la civilización no salieron de despachos del gobierno. Einstein no construyó su teoría por orden de un burócrata. Ford no revolucionó el automóvil así.

Los únicos casos en la historia en los que las masas escaparon de la pobreza son aquellos donde hubo capitalismo y libre comercio.

—Pero parece premiar la habilidad de manipular el sistema, no la virtud.

—¿Y qué premia la virtud? ¿Crees que un comisario comunista premia la virtud? ¿Un Hitler? ¿Crees que los presidentes americanos eligen sus cargos por virtud… o por peso político?

Dime: ¿dónde están esos ángeles que van a organizar la sociedad por nosotros?

Yo ni siquiera confío en ti para hacerlo.»

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Scott Galloway just explained why China doesn’t need to build better AI than America. It only needs to make American AI worthless.

Galloway: “I think China is beginning to engage in what I’ll call AI dumping.”

Not competing. Dumping.

It’s the term economists use for flooding a foreign market with below-cost goods until the domestic industry collapses.

Galloway: “They’re going to have a series of open-weight models. About a third of corporations now are supposedly using Chinese lightweight open-weight models that are cheaper.”

Not better. Cheaper.

A third of corporations. Already.

China isn’t trying to out-innovate Silicon Valley. It’s trying to collapse the economics beneath it.

Price warfare at the infrastructure layer.

Galloway: “If I were Xi, I would just dump cheap AI into the US market.”

This playbook is old. China ran it with steel. Ran it with solar. Ran it with semiconductors.

Flood a market with a cheaper version until the domestic industry can’t sustain itself.

AI is next.

Galloway: “The moment large corporations start announcing they’re disengaging these multi-million dollar site licenses with Anthropic or OpenAI, they’re using these inexpensive Chinese models…”

One CFO after another decides the Chinese model at a fraction of the cost is good enough.

Not better. Good enough.

“Good enough” at a lower price has killed more market leaders than any superior product ever has.

Galloway: “…and the market realizes that there’s no way they can justify these incredible valuations, I think the US market crashes.”

Not because the technology failed.

Because the business model did.

American AI companies are valued on the assumption that corporations will pay premium prices for premium models.

China’s whole strategy is to make that assumption false.

Galloway: “40% of the S&P now is directly or tangentially related to this giant bet America’s making on AI.”

40% of the S&P. Tied to one sector.

Galloway: “The majority of GDP growth over the last two years has come from AI CapEx.”

The majority of GDP growth. From one source.

America didn’t diversify its future. It concentrated everything into a single bet, then left that bet undefended.

Galloway: “If that slows down, we are immediately in a recession.”

Immediately. Not gradually. Not over quarters.

The distance between AI boom and American recession is one procurement decision.

America built the most advanced AI on Earth and forgot to build an economy that survives someone selling it cheaper.

The threat to American AI was never that China would build something smarter.

It was that China would build something cheaper, and American corporations would choose the price.

China’s real weapon isn’t Chinese technology. It’s American capitalism.

The same rational self-interest that built the AI industry will dismantle it the moment a cheaper alternative appears. The market has no patriotism. Only price sensitivity.

The technology race was never the real race.

The real race was always whether America could turn its AI dominance into something that survives being undercut.

America hasn’t even started running it.

China already has.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

I left something out of that one.

Biosphere 2 had a working farm, and the farm had pigs, chickens and goats. Only one of those three was still alive when the door opened, and the reason why is the most useful thing the entire two years produced.

https://t.co/lDF7L4LZsV

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world's press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life's work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat's milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford's verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Nuclear Family is a Technology of Western Civilization – So It Needs to Be Destroyed With All the Others.

The nuclear family is not a natural unit. It is a technology – the most successful child-rearing, wealth-transmitting, civilization-building technology ever developed. And like every other Western technology that works, it is currently being systematically dismantled.

1. Every society in history has organized reproduction and child-rearing somehow. The Eastern clan, the tribe, the loyalty network – these are the alternatives. They work, up to a point, for the societies that run on them. They produce strong internal solidarity and fierce external competition. They also produce nepotism over meritocracy, loyalty over competence, the network over the individual. Low-trust societies stay small and family-based – unable to build the large institutions, the corporations, the rule of law that require trust between strangers. The nuclear family is the Western solution: small enough to invest maximally in children, open enough to produce citizens who can cooperate beyond the clan.

2. It is a technology in the precise sense: a solution to a problem, developed through trial and error over millennia, encoding accumulated wisdom that is not immediately visible to those who inherit it. It aligned incentives with extraordinary precision – the man invested in children he was certain were his, the woman had a committed partner for the most vulnerable years, the children had two adults with maximum skin in the game. And crucially: it introduced a free market for mating rather than arranged marriage. Individuals chose their partners – which meant attraction, compatibility, and genuine commitment rather than clan negotiation. The most intimate human bond brought into the competitive, meritocratic framework that produces everything else the West does well.

3. The attack follows the standard pattern. Reframe the technology as oppression. Celebrate the alternatives as liberation. Restructure the incentives – welfare systems that replace the husband, legal systems that make marriage a liability for men, cultural systems that mock the committed father. Then watch the institution dissolve.

4. The data is not ambiguous. Children raised by married biological parents outperform children from every other arrangement on every measurable outcome. This is one of the largest and most replicated findings in social science. The nuclear family is not one lifestyle choice among many equivalent options. It is the arrangement that produces the best human beings at scale. Which is precisely why it had to go.

5. The deepest damage is not measurable. The nuclear family was the primary transmission mechanism of civilization – values, habits, language, culture, and identity passed from one generation to the next in the most intensive possible environment. Destroy this transmission mechanism and you don’t just produce worse outcomes for individuals. You break the chain. The torch cannot change hands if the hands are gone.

6. The replacement is the state. When the family dissolves, the state expands to fill the functions the family performed. This is not a coincidence. It is the design. Tocqueville described it: the soft despotism that replaces every horizontal bond with a vertical dependency on the government shepherd. The nuclear family was the primary horizontal bond. Its dissolution is the prerequisite for the complete vertical dependency the administrative state requires.

7. The nuclear family is not a conservative preference or a religious requirement. Defend it not because it is traditional. Defend it because it works – and because what is offered in its place doesn’t. The clan and the tribe produce loyalty. The administrative state produces dependency. The nuclear family, with its free market for mating and its maximum investment in the next generation, produces citizens. That is the one thing the system replacing it cannot afford to produce.

[𝕮 @XCzsnx]

went to my uncle's vow renewal and it was fine until the officiant asked "do you take this woman" and my uncle said "yes but I have notes." my aunt's face went completely blank. he pulled out index cards. numbered. said "I've been married to you for 30 years and there are some things we need to address publicly." my mom whispered "oh no" and my dad said "this is amazing." first note: "you never close cabinets and I've hit my head 47 times." the officiant looked panicked. my aunt said "are you serious right now" and my uncle said "I'm on card one of twelve." my cousin started filming. someone's grandmother said "this is unconventional" which felt like an understatement. card four was about how she puts empty containers back in the fridge. card seven was about her "alarming" true crime podcast addiction. my aunt just stood there. when he finished she said "my turn" and pulled out her own cards. had fifteen. first one said "you've been pronouncing 'chipotle' wrong for six years and I've been too nice to correct you." they read all their cards. took 40 minutes. everyone was crying laughing by card 20. they renewed their vows after. my uncle's final card said "despite all this you're still my favorite person." my aunt's said "you're lucky you're cute." marriage is just keeping detailed records of grievances and still choosing each other.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I don't give a damn if taking a side creates a mountain of enemies, if even my former fans turn against me, if my 300,000 followers shrink to three.

Deep in my soul I respect Elon Musk to the absolute maximum.
If he hadn't risked everything, succeeded, and bought X, free speech in Japan would already be dead.
We would all be living exactly as the leftist and Chinese-controlled television tells us to — and we would already be becoming Islamic.
By the time my daughter entered elementary school there might have been a law forcing us to hand her over to Muslims.

Human beings are not born to be liked by others.

We do not live so that our daughters can smile and say "you're a good person" while we enjoy a peaceful, smiling life.

Even if I lose everything, I will still protect my daughters somehow.
That is the definition of being human.

The only platform that still gives us any chance of protecting that is X.
From the very moment Twitter was renamed, I have deliberately and loudly called it X.

I have done nothing wrong.
I will never apologize to anyone.

America should be a country for Americans.
Japan should be a country for Japanese.
Britain should be a country for the British.

That is all.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Que tu sois de gauche ou de droite, arrête-toi deux secondes.

Je vais te raconter comment on nous a tous scammés.

Pas « les riches ».
Pas « les patrons ».
Pas « les méchants ».

Une structure.

Après 1945, une classe a compris quelque chose de génial : on pouvait vivre extrêmement bien en se présentant comme les protecteurs permanents des opprimés.

Ils n’ont pas pris le pouvoir par les armes.
Ils l’ont pris par la moralité.

Ils ont dit au peuple : « On va vous faire mieux vivre. »
Et pendant qu’ils disaient ça, ils capturaient l’État, les universités, les médias, les ONG, les organisations internationales, puis le langage lui-même.

Mai 68 a été le moment de basculement.

Celui où l’Occident est entré dans une longue phase de stagnation et de décadence culturelle.

Une phase où l’on a préféré déconstruire plutôt que construire.
Soupçonner plutôt qu’admirer.
Gérer le chaos plutôt que le résoudre.

Ensuite le globalisme.
Puis le wokisme.

À chaque étape, le même deal : plus il y a de chaos, plus il y a de budgets.
Plus il y a de victimes, plus il y a de postes.
Plus le monde est « complexe », plus ils sont indispensables.

Et pendant ce temps, ils vivaient très bien.
Salaires élevés, statuts, appartements, conférences, moral high ground permanent.

Le peuple, lui, devait croire que tout ça se faisait pour son bien.

Ce n’était pas un accident.
C’était le modèle économique de la structure.

Les gens qui y croient encore ne sont pas des monstres.
Ce sont des âmes qui ont reçu un logiciel pourri.
Les mauvaises idées tuent d’abord ceux qui y croient.

Aujourd’hui cette phase touche à sa fin.
Le système fuit de partout.
La réalité revient.
Et les bâtisseurs, ceux qui préfèrent les faits aux récits, sont en train de reprendre le terrain.

Le 21e siècle ne sera pas celui des gardiens du mensonge.
Il sera celui de ceux qui construisent.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

🚨 Flock has a hidden weakness many don’t know: public records requests.

Activists have successfully forced at least 8 cities to shut down Flock programs, either by exposing unauthorized data access or showing the footage was publicly accessible.

One of the most effective ways to take down Flock cameras? FOIA/PRA requests.

Here’s a template to file one in your city:

To the Custodian of Records:

Pursuant to the (your state here) Public Records Act (your state's public records act code.), I request access to and copies of the following public records relating to the (your local police) Police Department’s surveillance camera network reportedly consisting of more than 2,600 cameras deployed throughout the city.

Please provide records covering the period January 1, 2020 through present unless otherwise specified.
1. Policies and Legal Authority

All policies, procedures, memoranda, directives, or legal analyses governing:

-The deployment and operation of surveillance cameras within __________

-Any legal justification for the program under federal or state constitutional law

-Policies governing Fourth Amendment considerations or privacy protections

-Any City Council ordinances or resolutions authorizing the camera network

2. Contracts and Vendors

All contracts, agreements, memoranda of understanding, purchase orders, or amendments with vendors or service providers related to:

-Surveillance cameras

-Automated license plate readers

-Real-time crime centers

-Video analytics, facial recognition, or artificial intelligence

-Data storage or cloud services used for camera footage

Please include vendor proposals, RFP responses, and bid documents.

3. Camera Locations

Records identifying:

-The number and location of cameras deployed

-Maps, GIS datasets, or inventories of surveillance devices

-Any classification of cameras as public, private-partner, or third-party integrated cameras

(If precise coordinates are withheld, provide generalized location records or district-level inventories.)

4. Data Retention and Access

All records describing:

-Video retention schedules

-Policies for deletion or archiving of footage

-Which agencies or departments have access to the camera network

-Any data sharing agreements with other agencies including but not limited to:

-(your state) Highway Patrol -Federal agencies (FBI, DHS, ICE, etc.) -Regional task forces

5. Private Camera Integration Programs

All records relating to programs that integrate privately owned cameras into the police network, including:

-Agreements with homeowners, businesses, or HOAs

-Terms of participation

-Data access rights granted to the police department

6. Surveillance Technology Capabilities

Records describing whether the system includes or supports:

-Facial recognition

-License plate recognition

-Behavioral analytics

-Crowd detection

-Real-time monitoring centers

7. Crime Reduction Claims

All records, reports, studies, or internal analyses supporting claims that the surveillance network caused reductions in crime, including:

-Statistical reports

-Internal evaluations

-Communications discussing the effectiveness of the system

8. Communications

Emails, memoranda, and internal communications between (your city) Police Department personnel, City officials, or vendors referencing:

-Expansion of the camera network

-Privacy concerns

-Public opposition or legal review

Search terms should include: “camera network”, “surveillance cameras”, “real time crime center”, "Aerodome", "Raven", “ALPR”, “Flock”, “facial recognition”, and “camera integration”.

Format

Please provide records in electronic format via email or download link.

If any records are withheld, please provide the specific statutory exemption relied upon and produce all reasonably segregable portions of responsive documents.

Fee Waiver

This request concerns matters of significant public interest involving government surveillance and constitutional rights, and any fees should be waived or minimized.

I look forward to your response within the statutory timeframe.

[Phil Tritschler (T-10) @T10Phil]

Often, I despair at how my generation allowed government , institutions of learning (universities, high schools, elementary schools), and culture to be captured by the progressive left. I pray that future generations will be able to look back and say, “They lost their minds; fortunately, we were able to save Western Civilization!”

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Thousand Years We Lost
Not because it burned.

In 240 BC, a man named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth in a library in Alexandria. He was accurate to within 1%. Euclid worked there. Archimedes studied there. Hero of Alexandria built a working steam engine there. Aristarchus proposed that the earth orbits the sun – 1,800 years before Copernicus. The question nobody asks about the Library of Alexandria is not who burned it. It is: what happened to all of that? Why did we spend over a thousand years rediscovering things already known?

The answer has nothing to do with fire.

The Library didn’t burn in one dramatic catastrophe. That is the myth – Julius Caesar’s fleet accidentally igniting the greatest repository of knowledge in the ancient world in 48 BC, everything consumed in a single night. It makes a good story. It is mostly wrong. The Library was damaged, partially, by Caesar’s fire. It continued in diminished form for centuries afterward. What finally ended it was not flame but the slow withdrawal of the resources and attention that any living institution requires to remain alive. It was administered to death. Budget by budget. Scholar not replaced. Wing not maintained. Political priority shifted. The most consequential loss in intellectual history was not an act of destruction. It was an act of indifference.

What the Library contained mattered less than what it made possible. Eratosthenes, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus – these were not isolated geniuses working alone. They were the product of an institutional ecosystem: scholars from every civilization gathering in one place, arguing about the same texts, cross-pollinating disciplines that had never been in the same room before. When the scholars dispersed — to Rome, to Constantinople, to Persia — they took the texts but not the conversation. What was lost was not the inventory. It was the living intellectual culture that gave the inventory meaning.

Think about what that means. The steam engine existed in Alexandria in the first century AD. The heliocentric model existed in the third century BC. The circumference of the earth was known. If the Library had survived and transmitted continuously, the Industrial Revolution might have happened a thousand years earlier. What humanity lost in the slow death of Alexandria is not a collection of scrolls. It is twelve centuries of compounded progress – every discovery that would have followed from the discoveries that were made and then forgotten, every generation that spent its intellectual energy rediscovering what the previous civilization already knew.

The parallel is precise and uncomfortable. The Western university was the Library’s successor – the institution that gathered, preserved, and transmitted the accumulated knowledge of civilization across generations. It is currently being emptied. Not by fire. By ideological capture, administrative indifference, and the replacement of open inquiry with approved conclusions. The scholars and the books are still there. The conversation is being shut down – not dramatically, not visibly, but in the same slow way the Library’s conversation ended: one cancelled course, one retired professor not replaced, one field of inquiry made professionally dangerous. The Library of Alexandria didn’t need an arsonist. Neither does the university.

Civilizational memory doesn’t burn. It is defunded, dispersed or erased until nobody notices it’s gone. The most dangerous threat to what we know is never the barbarian at the gate. It is the administrator at the budget meeting, the ideologue in the curriculum committee, the funding body that decides, for entirely reasonable institutional reasons, that this particular conversation is no longer a priority. We know how this ends. We watched it happen once already, in Alexandria, across three centuries of entirely reasonable decisions. We called what followed the Dark Ages.
We are still deciding what to call what comes next.

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

Grateful for Catherine’s take on all of this. She is one of the last journalists we have in this country.

🚨BREAKING: DECLASSIFIED CIA EMAILS ADMIT OFFICIALS “DELIBERATELY MASSAGED” PRESIDENT TRUMP’S DAILY BRIEF TO HIDE CHINA’S 2020 ELECTION OPERATION🚨

Fifty years ago, the Church Committee warned America about what happens when our intelligence agencies turn their immense power against the people they serve. This week, we learned it happened again. Newly declassified documents released by the Trump Administration show that intelligence officials deliberately altered what President Trump was told about China’s operation to influence the 2020 election.

Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge found the proof in their own words, and she started finding it within hours of the release.

The email is dated Friday, November 20, 2020. The sender’s name is redacted, but the signature line identifies the author as a Strategic Intelligence Analyst working on China and North Korea Strategic Assessments. The email reads, “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”

The PDB is the President’s Daily Brief, the most sensitive intelligence document in the United States government. It exists for one purpose, which is to give the Commander in Chief the unvarnished truth so he can defend this nation. These officials admitted, in writing, that they doctored it.

The email confirms what a whistleblower inside the intelligence community alleged years ago.

According to Herridge’s reporting, that whistleblower sounded the alarm in the summer of 2020, right as the country headed into the election.

Analysts were seeing indicators of a Chinese influence operation, which means an effort to shape how Americans vote and how they feel about a presidential candidate. That differs from an interference operation, which means penetrating voter rolls and voting systems.

The whistleblower raised the warning through proper channels, and then the whole thing was suppressed.
Herridge describes what the intelligence community calls a multi-domain operation. Beijing pulled every lever of power it had. That included trade, diplomacy, open-source information, and social media, all aimed at one American election.

The scale goes beyond messaging. Herridge also reports allegations that China hacked the data of more than 220 million American voters. She warns that Beijing can combine those records with stolen security clearance files and health data to build digital dossiers on millions of Americans, opening the door to voter registration fraud, identity theft&espionage recruitment.

A foreign adversary now holds a file on you, your family&your neighbors&the officials paid to sound the alarm chose silence instead.

The bias was even written by hand. Herridge reports that some intelligence documents contained edits in officials’ own handwriting showing they wanted out anything that could help President Trump win reelection.

Personal political feelings drove decisions inside the agencies our tax dollars fund to protect us&the people who wrote those edits knew exactly what they were doing.

When unelected officials hide a foreign adversary’s operation from a duly elected President, they betray their oath, they betray the Constitution, and they betray you.

Our founders gave us Article III for a reason.

They knew the gravest danger to a republic comes from those who aid its enemies from within.

Every official who touched that briefing should face investigation under oath&prosecutors should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Herridge made one more point worth remembering.
The administration released these documents so the public can fact-check every claim for themselves.

You do not have to take my word for it&you should not take the media’s word for it either. Read them yourself.

Then ask why the same people who lectured us about protecting democracy were quietly rewriting what POTUS was allowed to know.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump