The Piercing Eye

Observing the unfolding conflict.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

This is what cognitive dissonance looks like.

[⚡️THOR⚡️ the Deplorable 🇺🇸 @ThorDeplorable]

Looped... I could watch it all day.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@Cernovich I’m 67. Just tried skipping. It took me three tries to get it right. And I run and lift regularly. I may add a skip-run just for fun.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

How to get ANY Japanese person to help you:

Say "Sumimasen."
Then 3 words max. Verb LAST.
Say it SLOW. One full second between words.

"Airport... Bus... Where?"
"Subway... Ticket... Buy?"
"Card... Pay... OK?"

My American buddy did exactly this his whole trip. Worked on everyone.

He came back grinning:
"When they understand you, they try SO hard to help."

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@EdLatimore Not surprising. I raised two Gen Z kids and they figured out every online thing they encountered then bent it to their will. Their friends did the same.

[Jacob @Burgess_33]

By far the best genre of slop so far 🤣

[Mister Lee @MisterLeeHODL]

The claude folks should just own this 🤣

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@DebbieKeelg9 @Mario_Sneh Back in my day we had tall tales, exaggerations, and stories with a point. I’m completely fine with AI doing the same thing. It was fun then and it’s fun now.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@CynicalPublius The peace symbol is an upside down broken cross with a circle around to soften the message. The two symbols on the car are different expressions of the same foundational belief.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@RobertFoxJr1 @CynicalPublius Season 5 starts like CSI: Mars. Didn’t have the stomach to continue.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@Cernovich Please watch videos on how to recognize when someone is about to drown. It’s a specific set of behaviors and facial expression. Note too that very cold water triggers an involuntary gasp and uncontrolled shivering. Always wear a life jacket.

[The Piercing Eye @ThePiercingEye]

@japan_nobunaga My fondest childhood memories are going to the library on Sunday afternoon with my Dad and brothers. I still remember my first foray out of the children’s section and into the world of adult knowledge. Thank you for helping me recall those memories.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America a woman named Miss Patricia handed me a small plastic card and told me I could now take any book in the building home, for free, and simply bring it back.

I did not move.

I waited for the rest of the sentence. The catch. The fee. The rank I had not yet earned. In my country, knowledge is a mountain you climb, with a master at every switchback deciding whether you may continue.

There was no rest of the sentence. The card was the whole sentence.

"Any book?" I asked.

"Any book, hon."

"And I keep it?"

"For three weeks. Then you bring it back for the next person."

For the next person. I nearly sat down on the floor.

A nation had built a palace, filled it with every thought its people ever had the courage to write down, and then decided the door would be free. Not free for the rich. Not free for the worthy. Free for a tired foreigner with an accent and a plastic card he did not have to bleed for.

I took out a book about your Civil War. Miss Patricia stamped it. That stamp was the softest violence I have ever witnessed. A whole empire of trust, enforced by a rubber stamp and the honor of strangers.

Then she said the words that undid me.

"If you like it, there's a whole shelf more. Take your time."

Take your time. In my country we do not tell a man to take his time. Time is the one thing we are always running out of, always apologizing for.

I read the book in two nights. I could have kept it. No guard would have stopped me. No wall. Only Miss Patricia, trusting me from across a whole town, the way you trust a man because trusting him is how he becomes trustworthy.

I brought it back one day early. I may have run part of the way.

I have since read forty books that were never mine to keep, and every one of them was mine completely while I held it.

America, you left the door of the entire human mind unlocked, and you put a woman named Patricia there, not to guard it, but to wave people in.

Who taught you to trust a stranger with everything you know? I would like to learn it before I go home.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Eat a mouthful of grass and you get nothing. It goes in green and comes out green.

Eat straw and you get nothing. Your gut cannot touch cellulose.

Eat acorns and you get tannins, and a very bad afternoon.

Eat bracken and you get a carcinogen.

Eat nettles, thistles, brambles, rushes and moorland heather and you get a mouth full of blood and no calories.

Eat the beet pulp, the oat husks and the spent brewer's grain and you get the waste the factory couldn't sell.

Now feed the lot of it to a cow.

She turns every one of them into steak, butter, cream, milk and a hide, on land that will never grow a vegetable, using four stomachs and a fermentation vat you do not have.

The grass she eats grew on rain and sunlight, for free, on a hillside nobody can plough.

She is the only creature on earth that can take a field of inedible fibre and hand you back the most nutrient-dense food there is.

The cow is not competing with you for food. She eats the ninety percent you cannot.

Best plant-based diet ever invented. It just has a cow in the middle doing the hard part.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I am personally a big fan of making voting day a national day off for everyone so that they can vote in person.

We have so many random, stupid holidays, the least we can do is give everyone off a day of work so that they can come and vote in person.

What do you think?

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

There is a diner in the Tennessee mountains where a little girl showed me a book.

She could not have been six. She held it the way grown men hold the deed to a house.

A thin paperback. The cover soft and bent from love. A cartoon bear.

I asked her, to be kind, if it was a good book.

She said, "The Book Lady sent it. She sends me one every month. She knows my name."

Then she went back to her pancakes, as if she had not just described something impossible.

I could not let it go.

All through breakfast I turned it over. A woman who knows the names of small children, sends them books, and asks for nothing. In my country she would have a shrine. Incense. One clean day a year when the town remembers her.

I decided the Book Lady must be a gentle fiction. A story mothers invent, the way we tell children the old mountain is watching, so they behave.

I was wrong.

The Book Lady is real. She is the most famous woman in the state. Her name is Dolly.

I made errors. In a hardware store I called her "your empress." The man thought about it honestly and said, "Close enough."

I asked a waitress if Dolly was still living. She set down the coffee pot with great care. "Honey, Dolly will outlive us all, and then she will send flowers to the funerals."

Then they told me the thing, all of them, in the flat voice this country keeps for facts too large to raise the voice for.

Dolly grew up one of twelve children, in a one-room cabin, in these same mountains. Her father could not read a word his whole life.

So she built the thing that sends the books. Not the clever children. Not the deserving ones. Every child who signs up, from birth until they start school, free, their own name on the cover, whether the family has money or nothing at all.

The children do not know she is famous. They know only the Book Lady. Some will grow old and never learn it was her.

Two hundred million books, a man told me at a gas pump. Then, seeing the number had defeated me, he made it smaller and heavier at once.

"She did it for her daddy," he said. "He never got to read. So she made sure every child after him would."

I would like to tell you what happened in my chest when he said that. I do not have the words, and I distrust any man who claims he does.

I come from eight hundred years of men who wrote everything down. We cut our names into stone so the centuries could not misplace us.

My father was the last of that line before me. A silent man. For forty years I believed his silence was the only thing he ever gave me.

In that diner, I remembered something I had put away as nothing.

When I was a boy, my father worked among machines loud enough to take a man's hearing, and in time they took most of his. He came home each night with nothing left to say. But there was one year, when I was learning to read and ashamed of how badly it went, that every night, however late he came in, he sat beside me while I read one page aloud.

He never said a word. I thought he was only checking that I had done the work.

It took me forty years and a stranger's diner to understand.

He could not hear me. By then he could barely hear anything. He was not listening to the words. He could not have caught one of them.

He was only sitting where a small boy could look up and see that his father had stayed.

I carried that year my whole life as proof my father was cold.

It was the warmest thing anyone has ever done for me. I just never had the book to prove it, so I let myself forget.

There is a bookshop two doors from that diner. I have just bought a thin paperback with a soft-looking bear on the cover. I am mailing it tonight to my father in Japan. He is eighty-one. He still cannot hear.

He will not need to.

Inside the cover I wrote one line, large enough that he can read it without his glasses:

"I finished the page. I always finished the page. Thank you for staying."

The Book Lady learned it from her father, who could not read.

I learned it from mine, who could not hear.

And somewhere in the mountains between us, those two old men would have understood each other completely, and said nothing at all, which is the loudest thing men like them have ever known how to say.

[vjw @vjweiss]

@Alvin1492840 Good info...do you have codes for historical and historical fiction??

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.

The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.

Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.

Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.

They took until there was nothing left to take.

America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.

And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Not almost unprecedented.

It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.

The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.

Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.

That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.

Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.

No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has blood in its history.

But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.

It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.

When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.

By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.

Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.

The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.

They shaped the modern world.

AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.

1945 was the first test.

AI is the last.

That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.

The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.

[GearHead HP ™ @grhdhp]

@nicksortor The best is yet to come 🫡🇺🇸

[JAZBO_14 ✝️ @jazbo_14]

@Timcast This might be the only picture that surpasses the one above

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Dans le manifeste "techno-optimiste" de Marc Andreessen, il y a une phrase qui m'a marqué :

"Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas."

Nos ennemis ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Ce sont des mauvaises idées.

Prenons Jancovici. L'homme est brillant, sincère, travailleur. Il ne se lève pas le matin en se disant qu'il va nuire à l'humanité. Mais l'idée qu'il porte la décroissance, le rationnement, la frugalité érigée en horizon civilisationnel est une idée profondément destructrice. Elle prend des esprits brillants et les transforme en commissaires politiques d'un futur appauvri.

Et le plus fascinant, c'est ce que cette idée fait aux gens qui l'adoptent.

Dans mon entourage, une grosse partie de mes amis est sur cette ligne décroissantiste, avec tout le package qui va avec. L'argent c'est mal mais ils en veulent. Il faut moins prendre l'avion mais ils rêvent de voyager partout. Il faut consommer moins mais ils ne renoncent à rien de ce qu'ils aiment vraiment.

Et tous ont un point commun : ils sont déprimés. L'un d'eux m'a même confié qu'il était sous antidépresseurs.

Ce n'est pas un hasard. C'est mécanique.

Quand tu crois que ton désir de vivre, de créer, de t'élever est moralement suspect tu te détruis de l'intérieur. Tu passes ta vie à t'excuser d'exister. Tu vis dans la dissonance permanente entre ce que ton corps veut (plus, mieux, plus loin) et ce que ton idéologie t'ordonne (moins, sobre, immobile).

D'où ma théorie :

Quand on pense quelque chose de fondamentalement faux décroissance, communisme, extrémisme religieux (de tout ordre) ce n'est qu'une question de temps avant que ça devienne vraiment destructeur.

D'abord pour soi. Puis pour les autres.

Les mauvaises idées tuent. Lentement chez ceux qui y croient, brutalement chez ceux qui les subissent.

C'est pour ça que la bataille des idées n'est pas un luxe d'intellectuel. C'est la bataille la plus importante de notre époque.