Vern Eastley

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

Knowing this fills me with profound gratitude.

[Fr. Daniel☦️ @Fragbaza]

At night, when people in the world go to sleep, three thousand monks on Mount Athos wake up to begin their nightly prayer for the whole world.

Every time you go to sleep, or while other people begin a different kind of wakefulness—going to bars or discos—the monks on Mount Athos stay awake all night to save the modern world from perdition with their prayer.

And if you cannot fall asleep at night and take medicine for insomnia, remember this and pray.

[Dylan Allman @dylanmallman]

I’m mortified that I ever expressed an ounce of support for this man. He’s a disgrace.

The charge of antisemitism has been thrown around so frivolously that the word is degraded, exactly the way “racist” was degraded through years of indiscriminate use.

I am sick to death of being lectured about whether I am sufficiently intolerant of antisemitism. It is the same sanctimonious bullshit as “it isn’t enough to not be racist, you must be actively anti-racist,” complete with the compulsory rituals, purity tests, and demands for ideological submission.

Fuck you. I will not close my eyes, plug my ears, and mutilate my own capacity for reason so I can profess that Israel is uniquely righteous. I am not a thought criminal. I am not a hater. I owe no state, government, army, religion, or ideology a ritual declaration of reverence.

If you keep telling people that opposing a genocidal terrorist ethnostate on the other side of the world makes them antisemites, eventually some of them may believe you and embrace it.

Once someone accepts that “antisemite” is simply the name society gives them for making completely reasonable observations, morally obvious conclusions, and judgments any sane person could arrive at, actual antisemitic ideas suddenly have a much easier path in. The label becomes an identity. The identity becomes a community. The community supplies beliefs that go far beyond anything the person originally thought.

Spare me the shocked fucking face when people come out of this genuinely hating Jews.

[Liam McCollum @MLiamMcCollum]

My politics in one image

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

By implying that anyone who criticizes Israel must be on Qatari payroll or affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, RFK Jr. does what the establishment has done for decades: weaponize accusations of anti-Semitism to silence moral criticism of a political ideology.

This conflation is a lie. Zionism is a political program, not a people. Judaism is a faith, not a blank check for any government that claims to represent it. Millions of Jews around the world oppose Zionism, oppose the occupation, and oppose what is being done in Gaza in their name.

To pretend otherwise is to insult the entire Jewish people and all of humanity.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

@jasonfried Take my money. This should be a product. A tiny, simple product. Just these features. I've wanted exactly these capabilities for years but never thought of building it. This concept is perfect.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

After capturing over 100 hours worth of exposures, I'm pleased to share my latest "Deep Field" image, containing THOUSANDS of galaxies and a brand-new supernova that just kicked off ~2 weeks ago!

Timelapse showing the supernova, prints, and more details in the thread 👇

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[EternalFaithEO ☦︎ @EternalFaithEO]

They hate him because he speaks the truth!

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

“You’re like a cartoon character of the archetype of evil, like Satan’s spawn, who mastered in legalese, who gets OJ & Epstein off and morally judge me? Your generation needs to let go of the wheel. You’ve given us enough disasters, $40T in debt, millions killed, enough of this.”

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

On a hill late at night
Wendell Berry

The ripe grassheads bend in the the starlight
in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness
of the grass, fathomless, the long blades
rising out of the well of time. Cars
travel the valley roads below me, their lights
finding the dark, and racing on. Above
their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard,
and felt the country turn under the stars
toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here
between the bright silent thousands of stars
and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.
The hill has grown to me like a foot.
Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

Wendell Berry is one of the greatest men America has ever produced. I owe him a great debt of gratitude for the beauty and wisdom of his poetry, fiction and essays.

[Tibor M. Kalman @kalmantibs]

Wendell Berry, revered American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer.

August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026.

Rest in Peace, sweet soul.

❤️‍🩹🕯️🕊️

[Will Knowland @beherleader]

When your wife gets emotional whereas you stay calm, you might assume she's being irrational and you're seeing things clearly.

But you should be cautious of dismissing her as merely emotional.

Aquinas associates women with stronger affective movement and says that stronger passions can become disordered, but he says strong affection can also produce extraordinary virtue when it's directed toward something truly good.

At Calvary, the male disciples flee, but the women remain.

Mary Magdalene’s love moves her to stay close to Christ, to seek Him at the tomb and to persevere when others have disappeared.

Her greater emotionality results in greater constancy.

So your emotional detachment isn't automatically rationality. For example, perhaps your 'calmness' is actually indifference, fear or the refusal to feel the weight of what truly matters.

And your wife’s stronger emotional response isn't automatically irrationality:

- Her anger might be responding to a real injustice.
- Her grief might reveal a real loss.
- Her anxiety might notice a danger you've ignored.
- Her compassion might perceive a person’s suffering more quickly and deeply than you do.

Yes, reason should govern emotion, but governing emotion doesn't mean extinguishing it.

Often, it's irrational for a husband to tell his wife she's 'just being emotional.'

Instead, he should ask, 'What good is her emotion responding to? Is there something here that I've failed to see?'

At Calvary, the supposedly 'weaker' affection proved stronger than the men.

So don't focus on who feels less.

Focus on whose passions are more faithfully ordered toward the good.

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

The last time Americans were forbidden from criticizing a foreign leader, it was 1775. We are a sovereign nation now with a right to insult and humiliate scumbag politicians. Anyone not disgusted, alarmed, & enraged by this, should have their loyalties to America scrutinized.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

I feel like this every freaking day.

[Stephen R. C. Hicks @SRCHicks]

Only slightly exaggerated.

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

Newton was wrong about gravity.
Einstein was incomplete.

What replaces them is stranger than both.

For a century, physicists have shoved gravity into the same box as electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, hoping to find a particle called a graviton, that carries it.

But, nobody has ever detected one. Every attempt to quantize gravity the way we quantized light has collapsed under its own math.

The new frameworks emerging from Queen Mary University and Physical Review X suggest we were staring at the wrong shelf the entire time.

Gravity behaves less like a force and more like pressure in a gas. An emergent statistical tendency, born from information trying to spread out.

Matter curves spacetime because the universe is running an entropy calculation, and mass is what happens when quantum information gets locally concentrated.

Gravity is like reality reorganizing itself toward states with more available microstates.

This quietly explains the deepest embarrassment in physics: why gravity is 10^40 times weaker than electromagnetism. Weak forces don't need a particle. They need a gradient. And a gradient across the entire observable universe would feel exactly as faint as gravity does.

Dark matter, dark energy, the cosmological constant and every ghost in the machine may just be entropy accounting we hadn't learned to read yet.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

@ThomasEWoods You're far more diplomatic than I am. He's a fucking retard.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

Elon's GitHub replacement is looking really good today.

[Jonathan Pageau @PageauJonathan]

It’s called liturgy. You’re all invited 🙂

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

@jasonfried Hey made me actually enjoy email again. I'm never going back to the Gmail shit-show.

[Vern Eastley @VernEastley]

@HealthRanger I built a sophisticated healthcare application over the past few months using Cursor for $100 in tokens that would have taken me years to build by hand. My startup would be impossible without either 1) AI or 2) a giant pile of VC money and tons of time.

[smit @itsoksmit]

God was the first vibe coder.

“Let there be light.”

No design doc. No tests. No staging environment. Just shipped the universe directly to production.