Michael Eckstut

Collecting Dust sports cards founder, Father of 4, Married to the love of my life. Lenape/Duke/Duke Law. PHL to Vegas

[exisdential @exisdential]

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts.

Adam Phillips

[Ambassador Mike Huckabee @GovMikeHuckabee]

There were some people from Netherlands in our church this morning who are flying back tomorrow & have to check their souvenirs to make sure they aren’t from Judea/Samaria-possible 6 yr prison term. A Nativity set from Bethlehem could put you in prison! Insane!

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

How do two teenage girls decide that of all possible choices that they have in life, the optimal one is to seek to kill as many Jews as possible? Well, if you normalize the demonization of Jews in ways that hark back to the good old days of Nazi Germany, you arrive an increase number of such cases.

[Shabbos Kestenbaum @ShabbosK]

Last year, the University of Maastricht banned me from speaking on campus due to "security concerns."

I offered to provide my own security at no charge, but the University still refused.

Simultaneously, and unbeknownst to us, Maastricht had recruited a Gazan Muslim, who took part in October 7th, to attend the school.

Due to the sheer scale of Nazi collaboration among the civilian population, the Netherlands boasts the highest number of Jewish victims in all of Western Europe during the Holocaust.

A truly pathetic country full of pathetic leaders.

[James A. Furey @JamesAFurey]

After thirty years of atheism, belief in God came soon after I realized that the love I felt for my wife and children wasn’t sufficiently explained by evolutionary pressures, a burst of oxytocin in my brain, or any other naturalistic account. There was something supernatural about this love that simply didn’t fit within a materialistic worldview.

That realization opened me to belief. But it isn’t why I believe in God.

I believe in God because I became convinced by the arguments. I read William Lane Craig, C. S. Lewis, Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, and others, and realized that the versions of their arguments I’d encountered through Dawkins and others were sad little straw men that never addressed the sophistication of what these thinkers actually argued.

It was the most extraordinary experience of the scales falling from my eyes that I’ve ever had. I had made an idol of atheism and discovered it to be as false as the golden calf in the desert.

So when I consider the atheist position now, and when I encounter atheists, I know where they’re coming from. I know how they feel and what they think. I know they can be good people even when they disagree with me.

But I also know there are basically two things keeping them from seeing the light of God: a hardened heart or a lack of understanding.

I don’t mean this patronizingly, and I don’t yet know how to help someone overcome either. In my own case, that opening came purely as a gift of God’s grace.

The only thing I can say to those who don’t believe is that He is there if you seek Him. He is there in the love you have for your children. He is there in the kindness you feel toward strangers. He is there in your ability to make sense of the world. He is there in the logical consistency of mathematics.

He is everywhere for those with eyes to see.

[Homer Pavlos @HomerPavlos]

There was a demographic problem 2,200 years ago, and Polybius wrote exactly what caused it. Read carefully:

"In our times, Greece as a whole is experiencing a lack of children and, more generally, a decrease in population. Because of this, cities have become deserted and there is a lack of productivity, even though we do not suffer from constant wars or epidemics. So if someone advised that we send priests to the gods to ask them what we should say or do to become more numerous and better inhabit our cities, he would not seem foolish, since the cause is obvious and the solution lies in our own hands.

People have turned to arrogance, greed, and laziness, and they neither want to marry, nor, if they do marry, to raise their children. Instead, they have only one or two children with difficulty, just to leave them wealth and raise them in luxury.

This evil grew rapidly, and we did not notice. For when there are only one or two children, and one is lost to war and the other to illness, it is obvious that the cities will inevitably become deserted, just as a beehive weakens little by little, so too do cities that lack population become unable to survive."

Source: Histories, Polybius, 36 (ΛΣΤ)

The similarities after 2,200 years.

The demographic issue has been a problem several times throughout history, and none of those times was it due to the economy, but rather a result of prosperity, comfortable living, and laziness. My Greek grandparents had children even when they had nothing to eat, and the kids grew up barefoot, eating bread with olives and feta cheese. Money was never an obstacle.

Nowadays, people prefer partying, doing drugs, and living for today rather than having a purpose, building a family, and leaving a positive footprint in this world. They choose the easy life. It’s sad watching people who passionately want to have kids but can’t, compared to people who don’t want kids because it would take them out of their comfort zone, because a child would stop them from going to clubs, drinking, and partying like a meaningless person.

- Homer Pavlos

[NFL Films @NFLFilms]

Philadelphia's MVP 🏆

One of the game's most cerebral players, @JalenHurts is fueled by his losses and his doubters to be great.

#NFLFilmsPresents

[Mgoes (bio/acc 🤖💉) @m_goes_distance]

in the next 3-5 years:

- balding gets solved, real treatments after decades of basically nothing
- testosterone gets adjustable, no more "normal for your age"
- fertility gets decoupled from the biological clock
- organs get lab-grown, a real option instead of a waitlist
- genetic disease gets edited instead of managed for life
- aging gets its first credible human signals of partial reversal
- the immune system gets programmed to clear the cells driving age-related disease
- biological age becomes something you can actually move backwards
- cancer gets more tumors that are treatable, some potentially curable

we're already watching the first versions of all of this happen

bio/acc

[Yonan @yonann]

Ben Affleck says his 17 year-old roasted him for trying to give relationship advice

“My kids are talking at dinner and they'll talk about their friends and the drama and the relationships, and I have some lived experience. I think that's worth sharing, some lessons...”

“I was saying, you know, well, the thing about that relationship there with that person and the 17 year-old just turns to me and goes, ‘Oh, like you're the expert on relationships’”

“I went to a bookstore with them... and there's some book by a French guy and it's called I'm Sorry for Everything, and my kid immediately just turns to me deadpan and goes, ‘Oh, look, Dad, it's your autobiography’”

[deepfates @deepfates]

This is insane. Opus 5.5 can do this??

[Aaron @AaronEstel]

Holy Shit. Superpersuasion is here maybe? fuck this video like actually made me less scared

[Hoops @Hoopss]

Japanese scientists removed the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome for the first time using CRISPR.

[Gavin Purcell @gavinpurcell]

i'm still not sure people are fully getting how good opus 5.5

i gave my claude agent fig access to the runway MCP and told it to make a 'high-end netflix style documentary about superintelligence for normies' and...

it came back with this

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

These are devastating charts. Europe is cooked.

The European tech industry has always lagged America’s. But AI turbocharged the gap, and it’s growing by the day.

As AI starts displacing white-collar labor (in other words, as opex on token spend replaces opex on humans), a growing share of European GDP that used to get reinvested in EU economies will instead flow to US frontier labs and hyperscalers. Euros that used to go into the pockets of the continent’s top-quartile workers will instead be converted to dollars and accrue to the retained earnings of Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Google, and Meta.

For European tech companies, there’s no catching up. They’re not even playing the same game, let alone competing on the same field. US hyperscalers are projected to spend over $1 trillion on capex every year for the next three years; OpenAI and Anthropic are going to raise—and burn—hundreds of billions of dollars each.

Meanwhile, the EU—with its onerous regulatory burden, high barriers to entry, weak capital markets, and entrepreneurial brain drain—has:

- zero prominent frontier labs (no, Mistral doesn’t count)
- no organic hyperscalers
- minimal data centers construction, much of it owned by US companies simply trying to comply with EU data regulations
- a startup ecosystem comparable to that of a tertiary US market, at best

The continent that once gave the world steam engines, steelmaking, automobiles, synthetic fertilizer, X-rays, aspirin, nuclear fission, jet engines, and even the World Wide Web isn’t even on the map for the most disruptive technology innovation of our lifetimes.

An entire continent’s economy doomed to the permanent underclass.

It’s tragic. And it’s a tragedy entirely of their own making.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

holy shit
i asked claude to make a video on western civiization

[Sophie Cunningham @sophaller]

call me Patrick Mahomes from here on out

[bone @boneGPT]

"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"

You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.

One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.

A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?

"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.

My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.

"The social disruption will be enormous!"

Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.

Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?

A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.

Accelerate.

[John Clark @JClarkNBCS]

Jalen Hurts has a 65-29 record as a starting QB (including playoffs)

That is the 6th highest winning percentage since the 1970 NFL merger.

Patrick Mahomes (.765)
Tom Brady (.751)
Roger Staubach (.743)
Joe Montana (.712)
Bob Griese (.693)
Jalen Hurts (.691)
📸 Var

[Sassafrass84 @Sassafrass_84]

“Gays for Gaza” photographer Cameron Capara was shot dead outside a Tucson gay bar.

The gunman was a Gambian-born Muslim who showed up with a list of LGBTQ businesses and a note making it clear this was a targeted hate attack. He killed Capara, killed another man, then killed himself.

Police called it a hate crime. National media mostly shrugged.

Pro-Palestine gays keep marching for a movement that would throw them off a roof. Then act shocked when reality shows up in the parking lot.

Suicidal empathy strikes again.

[Jake @JakeCan72]

Harvard kids singing Radiohead’s “Creep.”

This could have gone very wrong.

Then the lead singer opens his mouth.

The Harvard Veritones have won at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella — the real-world competition that inspired Pitch Perfect.

Turn the sound on for this one.