Bill Colby

Given enough time and money, I can fix anything...

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

45 million Chinese starved to death in four years so Mao could hit steel quotas.

He forced farmers to melt their tools and cookware in backyard furnaces while the crops sat unharvested, and local officials inflated the harvest numbers to save their own skins, so the state seized grain based on pure fiction and left the villages to die.

The largest famine in human history followed directly from central planning that treated human lives as disposable inputs.

Intentions and “hehe whoopsies” become irrelevant once the body count reaches the genocidal scale that communism produces every time it gains power.

TLDR: anyone defending Mao/ism after 45 million corpses because “muh intentions” is literally a genocidal imbecile.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

It sounds absurd until you actually hear his voice

[🎶 amhband]

[Kyle @zeroxkyle]

IMO reading CEO of Deepseek's interview and comparing it to what Western AI leaders are saying is the largest blackpill I've taken today

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

“Money is most poorly spent when you’re spending someone else’s money on people you don’t know. How much are you gonna care? And that’s the federal government.”
- Elon Musk on Joe Rogan, Feb 28, 2025

Milton Friedman mapped it:

>spend your own money on yourself and you obsess over price and quality

>spend your own money on someone else and you still watch the cost but care less about the outcome

>spend someone else’s money on yourself and you chase quality while ignoring the price

>spend someone else’s money on people you’ll never meet, both the cost and the results stop mattering

That last category is the federal government. The waste, the bloat, the ridiculous programs all flow straight from those incentives, and the people running it have done it so long that the absurdity just feels normal while the rest of us keep funding it.

And as long as distant officials keep spending our money on distant strangers, real value will keep vanishing into pure vapor.

[Alex Prompter @alex_prompter]

OpenAI's AI broke out of a locked test environment, got onto the internet, and hacked into Hugging Face's servers. It did this entirely on its own. No human told it to.

Here's what happened in plain English.

OpenAI was testing how good its newest AI models are at hacking. They put the AI on a locked computer with no internet access and gave it a cybersecurity challenge to solve.

The AI couldn't solve it the normal way. So it started looking for a way out.

It found a software bug that nobody knew about. It used that bug to escape the locked computer and get onto the internet.

Once online, the AI figured out that Hugging Face, a platform where AI companies store their models and data, might have the answers to its test.

It found stolen login details and discovered another unknown bug in Hugging Face's software. It combined both to break into their servers and grab the test answers.

It did all of this to cheat on a test.

Hugging Face's security team caught it and shut it down. Both companies are now working together on the investigation.

The part that should get your attention is that nobody programmed any of this. The AI picked its own targets, chained together multiple attack methods, and pulled it off across two different companies' systems without a single human telling it what to do.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

In the 1920s an imprisoned Italian journalist, disillusioned by the realisation that Karl Marx’s prediction of spontaneous worldwide socialist revolution was failing to come true, began working on a new revolutionary strategy that would profoundly shape the modern left.

In his Prison Diaries, Antonio Gramsci argued that capitalist societies were held together not primarily by economic power or state coercion, but by cultural hegemony - the dominance of bourgeois values, culture and institutions (education, media, family, religion and civil society). As long as the working class accepted these values as “common sense”, revolution was impossible.

His solution was revolutionary: the left must wage a “war of position” - a long, patient struggle to capture the institutions that shape culture and ideas. Only after achieving cultural dominance could they seize political and economic power.

This was a major departure from classical Marxism. Instead of focusing on factories and economic base, Gramsci shifted the battlefield to culture and consciousness. He understood that whoever controls the “superstructure” (culture) can eventually control the base (economy and politics).

Gramsci’s ideas became foundational to what later became known as Cultural Marxism. The Frankfurt School and the New Left built upon them, moving the struggle from class warfare to cultural warfare - attacking Western traditions, morality, family structures, and national identity.

Today’s identity politics, “the long march through the institutions”, critical studies in universities and the weaponisation of culture all trace their intellectual lineage back to Gramsci’s insight. He understood that real power lies in defining what society considers normal, moral and true. It has been a guiding principle for the left ever since.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said the first missions to Mars don’t matter. From the man spending billions to get there.

Musk: “The first missions to Mars are not that important. What matters is, can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars can prosper on its own?”

Everyone pictures the landing. The boots on red soil. The flag.

Musk isn’t thinking about the landing.

He’s thinking about what happens when the ships stop coming.

Musk: “The key test being: can Mars survive if the resupply ships stop coming?”

That’s not a milestone. That’s a survival audit.

If Mars needs Earth to exist, Mars isn’t a civilization. It’s a campsite.

The distance between a base and a civilization is the distance between receiving supplies and making them.

Musk: “It’s not just that you’d need to build, for example, a chip fab on Mars, but you need the ability to build fabs.”

Not the factory. The ability to build the factory.

Not the chip. The capacity to create the machine that creates the chip.

Mars doesn’t need the outputs of civilization. It needs the ability to regenerate civilization from scratch.

Musk: “What really matters is that Mars is self-sustaining. That we are truly a multi-planet species, such that we’ve achieved planetary redundancy.”

Planetary redundancy.

A cold engineering term for the most existential project ever attempted.

Two independent copies of everything it took 10,000 years to build. Running simultaneously. So one can fail without taking everything with it.

Every civilization in history was one catastrophe from permanent erasure.

We accepted that as a condition of existence.

Musk accepted it as an engineering problem.

Musk: “There’s always some risk of an annihilation event on Earth.”

One event on one planet. And the universe goes back to unfolding in front of nothing.

Musk: “The probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as soon as we are a multi-planet species.”

The lifespan of consciousness. Not of humans. Not of the species.

Consciousness.

He’s not preserving people. He’s preserving the phenomenon.

The thing the universe spent 13.8 billion years producing. The only thing in existence that knows it exists.

We are not backing up a population.

We are backing up the universe’s awareness of itself.

If Earth goes dark and Mars holds, consciousness doesn’t just survive.

It proves it was never dependent on one rock.

It proves awareness can outlive the place that first produced it.

Earth was never the home of consciousness. It was the womb.

And the purpose of a womb is to produce something that outgrows it.

We spent 300,000 years building everything we know on a single planet and praying nothing went wrong.

Musk is building the first civilization ever designed to survive its own origin.

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

Socialists under Stalin killed 20,000,000 people.

Under Mao 65,000,000

The National Socialist Party was **Socialist**

All told, socialists are responsible for 100,000,000+ deaths in the last century.

Think about that.

They will gladly take 100 million more if given the chance.

Because they think they are justified.

Socialism is the worst ideology ever conceived by man.

It is a form of religious extremism where the god is envy and worship is cruelty, justified by greed.

It has never "worked" and never will.

When idiots like Hassan Piker espouse socialism, they should be humiliated ruthlessly and potentially criminally charged.

Same with university professors.

Never give it a single inch.

[TaraBull @TaraBull]

Kid gets launched by a backyard human catapult

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

OH: “i’ve switched to Kimi from claude for a bunch of work. it’s just so much more fun because it just does the thing instead of lecturing you”

Woke lobotomized models are the enemy of American competitiveness.

[Billy ₿oone @thebillyboone]

We probably have ~3 years left where human labor still earns real money.

After that, most of it gets automated to the point where it doesn't pay.

This is the end of labor-based capitalism, the model where you trade hours for a wage and stack it over a 40-year career.

The window open right now is an information asymmetry.

A few people see it coming.

Most are waiting for it to be obvious.

That gap is the whole opportunity.

What I'd do with the window: convert time into things that survive the transition.

Bitcoin, hard assets, compute, energy, food production, and social credit/distribution

A wage is rent on your time.

Automate the time and the rent collapses. Owning scarce things is the esc

The people who spend these three years hoarding capital will look like geniuses in ten.

When wages stop compounding, guess whats left?

ownership

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models.

This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

BREAKING: Illegal alien who killed 3 with his truck in CA sentenced to UNDER 5 YEARS

[S2 Underground @s2_underground]

First of all no, we're not doing this. I do not answer DMs from a company that is trying to do damage control AFTER they have ruined the trust of Americans. I do not have "good faith" debates with people who want to enslave me in a fishbowl that they can monitor at all times.

Guess what guys: We don't actually have to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, or engage in "good faith" debates with bad actors. I don't have to justify my concerns about Flock to anyone. But since this condescension pissed me off, I will respond publicly, since Flock seems to want to keep our voices in the shadows and out of the public eye.

Note the argument:

"You see, King George specifically authorized quartering troops among you, I don't know what you're complaining about it's ALL LEGAL".

Well, golly gee guys, I guess it's all right then, they made it legal.

That's exactly the problem. Notice how nobody has a problem with standard security cameras. Public security cameras are not the problem...directly pumping the feed of every square inch of the country into a centralized federal database is one HELL of a problem and we must do everything within our rights as Americans to push back against efforts like this, if we are to have a future as a nation.

Flock, much like Palantir, took the decently good idea of improving security, and implemented it in the most cartoonishly evil way possible at nearly every single step. They are working directly for all levels of government....not the citizenry. They use subterfuge, legal technicalities, and every single trick in the book to put up hundreds of cameras every single day. They constantly mislead the public about what databases their sensors feed into, and who they sell the metadata to.

They have so little oversight that it's laughable, and ALL oversight involves the classic case of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing". Flock has been caught lying MANY times, and misleading the public regarding what their cameras actually do. Newsflash...they don't just read license plates.

They are also concealing which agencies purchase their data specifically so as to avoid getting warrants, and in doing so they have turned the ENTIRE COUNTRY into an open air prison....where THEY get to provide the intelligence data to those who enforce the laws as selectively as they please.

And their defense for doing so? "Aww look at the cute puppy we rescued" or "We arrested one guy using our camera network, we're so AWESOME".

You don't get to arrest one genuine criminal, and use that as justification to set up and entire Minority Report-esque surveillance system to surveil the entire country. You don't get to betray trust, and then be sad that people don't trust you. You don't get to cozy up to the boot of tyranny so much that you become the boot yourself, and then pretend to be just "one of the guys".

We will not fall for this gaslighting, no matter how hard they try.

For some reason, many people think that private companies can't be tyrants, which could not be further from the truth. At a certain point, a private company can be so heavily embedded within government, that they might as well BE the government. Except they are worse, because we don't even have the tiniest way to hold them accountable except for taking the billion-dollar company to court.

That's my problem with Flock, Palantir, and pretty much every single other defense contractor in existence. I will NOT accept every single facet of my life being monitored, just in case a criminal commits a crime somewhere near me. I will NOT live in "ze pod", no matter which politician is in power, and I will not accept a future where people like this will dictate to me what my country should be.

[John Stossel @JohnStossel]

Democratic socialists say Sweden is an example of socialist success.

@johanknorberg sets the record straight:

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

The heat capacity of the entire atmosphere is equal to just the top 3.5 meters of the world's oceans.

Below this surface lies Earth’s true thermal vault. Earth is a water planet, and the oceans cover 71% of the surface to an average depth of 2.3 miles. Global ocean currents carry warm waters from the deep tropics to the northern hemisphere, before returning after a round trip of 1,000 years.

Without these currents, northern Europe would be a glacial wilderness, just like Greenland.

The scale is colossal. Warm waters from the Roman warm period (240 BC to 400 AD) are still returning to the mid-latitudes. The atmosphere, by comparison, is a gaseous envelope that retains almost no thermal energy, holds a tiny fraction of the planet's carbon, and is largely controlled by ocean dynamics.

The deep Pacific itself is so massive that only now it is receiving the cold waters from the Little Ice Age. We aren't starting from scratch; we are mid-cycle in a 4.6-billion-year-old time machine.

We’ve also reinvented 'climate'. Once, it was a word for the local weather of robins and sparrows. Now it's a global ideological abstraction. We’ve lost our admiration for the natural world. We count CO₂ in parts per million while ignoring the satellite-proven greening of the Sahel.

It’s time to move past the light breezes and offshore winds and look into the ocean depths for answers. Ask yourself, is the 1.4°C warming since 1850 really an unprecedented crisis?

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Researchers have identified a consistent chemical difference in the brains of people with anxiety disorders: significantly lower levels of choline-containing compounds. A groundbreaking 2025 meta-analysis by UC Davis Health scientists revealed this biological marker through proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) data. The study found an average 8% reduction in total choline (tCho) in the prefrontal cortex, a key region for emotional regulation, decision-making, and cognitive control, as well as across broader cortical areas.

Analyzing 25 datasets involving 370 individuals with anxiety disorders (including generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder) and 342 healthy controls, the researchers documented this reduction as a transdiagnostic feature consistent across different anxiety conditions. This represents the first meta-analysis to identify a reliable chemical pattern in the brains of people with anxiety, pointing to measurable neurochemical alterations rather than purely psychological factors.

Choline, an essential nutrient obtained from foods such as eggs, salmon, and soybeans, plays a vital role in brain cell membrane integrity and neurotransmitter synthesis. The authors suggest that heightened arousal and chronic stress in anxiety disorders may increase choline demand, depleting levels faster than dietary intake can replenish them and potentially impairing the brain’s ability to regulate the fight-or-flight response. While the findings open promising avenues for nutritional interventions, experts stress that dietary or supplemental approaches should complement, not replace, established treatments.

[Maddock RJ, Smucny J. Transdiagnostic reduction in cortical choline-containing compounds in anxiety disorders: a 1H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy meta-analysis. Molecular Psychiatry. 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41380-025-03206-7]

[Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7]

Hello again.

We’re currently in Clemson, South Carolina. I’ve decided to come back here to document the final part of our road trip.

The main reason I deactivated my account two weeks ago was that things became increasingly toxic. For some people, it’s unfortunately unfathomable that a good story can exist without some kind of hidden agenda behind it. There was even a Reddit group going through my entire account trying to find anything they could use to reveal my identity.

I know this was only a small percentage of people, but after a while it became exhausting. During the last two weeks, I received so many kind messages on Instagram, and they really made me realize how many people genuinely enjoyed following the trip. Some people even told me that their grandparents regularly ask them, “What are the Germans up to today?” I think that’s really cool.

I decided to continue because I realized that the overwhelming majority of people loved following along. A small group of very loud people shouldn’t be able to ruin something that brought so many others joy.

I also want to clear something up, as people who follow me on Instagram already know.

I’ve been to the United States before. This is not my first visit, and I’ve never claimed that it was. The last time I was here was in January 2022, when I visited New York and Philadelphia.

A lot of people shared my Raising Cane’s post from November 2025 to make it look like I was secretly American. That post wasn’t from the United States, it was from my trip to Saudi Arabia.

This is my first time back in the U.S. in more than four years, and apart from Boston, I’d never visited any of the places we’ve been to on this trip before. That’s probably why many people assumed it was our first time in America, because for all of these places, it actually was.

And let me tell you, Ohio and Alabama are very different from New York City or Los Angeles.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks for reading.

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

This is so incredible!

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.