Jack Ray

[Jason, @jasonc_nc]

I need a philanthropist willing to fund my upcoming firefighter exchange program, with the goal of turning graduates into internal advocates for right-sized fire trucks, single stair buildings, and safer streets.

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

BREAKING: Israeli ambassador Danny Danon lost it on camera at the UN after Israel was added to a blacklist of parties suspected of conflict-related sexual violence.

At a meeting Friday, Danon erupted at UN officials, demanded the resignation of Pramila Patten, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, and tried to shout down Vanessa Frazier after she objected that the findings were based on verified evidence.

“You will be quiet now,” Danon snapped.

I interviewed Danny Danon 15 years ago on HuffPost Live. When I held him to account, he walked out of the interview. Sadly, the footage has been lost.

But the pattern was not lost.

This is what Israeli officials so often do when confronted with evidence they cannot bomb, bury, spin, or intimidate into silence: they attack the messenger. They accuse the institution. They demand resignations. They perform outrage as a substitute for accountability.

The issue is not whether Danny Danon is offended.

The issue is whether victims of alleged sexual violence, Palestinian detainees, and children in Israeli custody will be heard over the shouting of a state that has grown accustomed to impunity.

Israel was recently added to a UN blacklist for conflict-related sexual violence. Danon revealed the strategy: when the evidence speaks, tell the room to be quiet.

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

The difference a hundred years of reforestation can do. The mountains north of Kobe were completely denuded by the end of the 19th century: rock and gravel like desert. Without trees rampant soil erosion ruined the once excellent local water (and you can't operate a world class port without being able to offer visiting ships high quality water), there were frequent catastrophic landslides and flooding was common. In 1902 the mayor began an ambitious reforestation program, the mountainsides were cut into terraces and locals planted millions of trees. Still the 1930s saw more disasters, flooding continued. The government ordered check dams and soil control dams to be built on every river. Dozens were built every year (there are now over 1,500 dams and weirs).

To prevent forest fires intensive forestry starting in the 1950s, thinning and several firebreaks were planted among the red pine and oak foresrs: 3-4km long, ten meters wide belts of fire resistant trees like bayberry, gingko etc.

Today the mountains are covered in lush thick forests, popular for hiking and scenic nature trails. Floods and landslides are very rare. There is no erosion so the water is plentiful, pure, and exported all over Japan.

[Dan Pfeiffer @danpfeiffer]

Trump spending $19 million to beat an incumbent in a safe seat in a district Trump won by more than 30 points is not the flex he and his people think it is.

[Jedi @dhe3g]

Well then, fuck you and your wife.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

A public option:
- is still insurance-based
- costs more than our current system
- leaves millions without coverage
- leaves healthcare unaffordable for most

Medicare for All:
- covers everyone
- saves families money
- creates jobs
- expands coverage
- cuts spending
- eliminates copays, premiums and deductibles.

Anything short of universal healthcare with Medicare for All is fiscally and morally irresponsible.

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

HORRIFIC: A video shows an Israeli settler killing a dog in the Palestinian village of Atara in the West Bank, beating the dog to death with sticks.

Barbarians.

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

“Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”
– Nicolás Gómez Dávila

[Political Polls @PpollingNumbers]

New - 2028 president poll

🔵 AOC 26%
🔵 Buttigieg 22%
🔵 Newsom 21%
🔵 Harris 13%
🔵 Beshear 4%
🔵 Booker 4%

Atlasintel #A - 5/7

[Emotion & Music @Emotion78687]

Dutch Opera Singer Maria Fiselier covering Eminem's "Lose Yourself", in 2018. What an amazing rendition! 👏

[Jason, @jasonc_nc]

Is 2026 the year that rightsized fire truck discourse goes mainstream?

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: New polling shows Sherrod Brown leading his Republican opponent by 2 points in Ohio. This race could determine the Senate majority. Retweet to make sure every Ohioan knows to vote for Brown in November.

[maddie rune🪰 @themaddierune]

You are not the only one who has felt this very peculiar and unspeakable thing. Someone has already written it down. Someone sat alone with the same unbearable weight you are carrying right now and they survived it long enough to find words for it. That is what the whole of human literature is. Millions of people saying: me too, me too, me too…in the dark, across centuries, reaching forward through time to find you. You are not alone in this, you never were. The writers were always writing specifically to you. They just didn’t know your name.

[Hassan Mafi ‏ @thatdayin1992]

The craziest thing about gas prices going up from $2.89 to $4.50 in the US in just 6 weeks is that Donald Trump raped a 13 year old girl.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

$500K earners are more financially stressed than $200K earners according to Goldman Sachs. The data shows why.

The paycheck-to-paycheck stress rate at $200-300K is 16%. It rebounds to 41% at $300-500K, then holds at 40% for $500K+ earners. This isn't noise. It's a structural break point.

Most people assume financial stress tracks income inadequacy. At $200-300K, you've crossed into a bracket where the median home, the standard school, the acceptable zip code all align with what your income can absorb. You're no longer stretched.

Cross $300K and the cost structure shifts. Your peer group now includes people shopping in different neighborhoods. Different schools carry different price tags. Your "normal" suddenly costs more. A $500K earner in Manhattan doesn't feel rich because they're pricing themselves against people making $1M+. A $500K earner in Austin feels wealthy until they move to Palo Alto.

Cost of living in the neighborhood where $500K earners live is the actual variable. That neighborhood exists in three versions: overpriced urban hub ($4-6M median home), suburban high-COL ($2-3M), or regular city ($800K-1.2M). Pick any of them and your $500K income no longer feels abundant. You're servicing debt. You're paying private school tuition. You're surrounded by people with better cars, nicer homes, and more flexibility.

You can't earn your way out of financial stress if you live among people who earn more than you. The relief is temporary. It expires the moment you move neighborhoods or change peer groups.

At $200K, you feel ahead. At $500K, you feel behind again. The numbers just got bigger.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Persian scholar finished a single math book in 9th century Baghdad that quietly became the foundation for every line of code running on Earth today.

I started reading about him at midnight and could not believe how many things in my daily life trace back to one man.

His name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. The book is called The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing.

Every time you say the word algebra, you are saying his book title. Every time someone says the word algorithm, they are saying his name. Both English words come from him. Both are Latin transliterations of Arabic and of his own identity. The man did not just contribute to mathematics. He named it.

Here is the part almost nobody tells you.

Al-Khwarizmi was born around 780 CE in Khwarazm, in what is now Uzbekistan. He moved to Baghdad and worked at a research institution called the House of Wisdom, which during the Islamic Golden Age was the single most important center of learning on the planet. The caliph al-Mamun hired the best mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers from across three continents and put them in one building with one job. Translate, study, and produce new knowledge.

Al-Khwarizmi finished his book on algebra around 820 CE. The Arabic title contained the word al-jabr, which referred to one of the two operations he used to solve equations. When the book was translated into Latin in the 12th century, the Latin world did not have a word for what he had built. So they kept his Arabic word. Al-jabr became algebra. The discipline was named after a single Arabic word in the title of a single book by a single man.

The deeper insight is what he actually changed about how humans think.

Before al-Khwarizmi, mathematical problems were solved geometrically. You drew shapes. You measured them. You compared areas. The Greeks had built an entire mathematical tradition on visual proofs and physical constructions. It was beautiful and limited. You could not solve a problem you could not draw.

Al-Khwarizmi did something nobody had done before him at this scale. He said you could solve any problem using abstract symbols and rules. You did not need a shape. You needed a procedure. You moved terms across the equation. You cancelled like terms on both sides. You isolated the unknown. He invented the idea that mathematics is a manipulation of symbols according to rules, not a study of physical figures.

That single shift made everything that came afterward possible. Calculus. Differential equations. Linear algebra. Quantum mechanics. None of it works if math is locked inside geometry. He pulled it out.

The second thing he did is the one that changed how the world counted forever. He took the Hindu numeral system from Indian mathematics, refined it, and wrote a book introducing it to the Arab world. That system included the concept of zero as a placeholder, and a positional notation where the value of a digit depends on its location. Roman numerals could not do complex calculation. Hindu-Arabic numerals could.

When his book on numerals was translated into Latin as Algoritmi de numero Indorum, the word Algoritmi was just the Latin spelling of his own name. Europeans started calling the new method "doing algorism," then "running an algorithm." The word for the most important concept in computer science is literally his name in Latin.

The third thing he did is the part that should haunt anyone who works in tech.

His method of solving problems was systematic. Step one, do this. Step two, check that. Step three, if condition A, then do X, otherwise do Y. He wrote down procedures that could be followed by anyone, anywhere, who knew how to read. The procedure did not depend on intuition or genius. It worked because the steps worked.

That is exactly what an algorithm is. A finite, deterministic procedure for solving a problem. He did not just give us the word. He gave us the entire concept of programming a thousand years before there was anything to program.

When Alan Turing built the first abstract model of computation in 1936, when John von Neumann designed the first stored-program computer in 1945, when every engineer at Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind writes code in 2026, they are working in a paradigm that started with one man in Baghdad twelve centuries ago.

The strangest part is what happens when you walk into any tech office in San Francisco or Bangalore or Lahore today. Engineers say the words algebra and algorithm hundreds of times a day. They do not know whose name they are saying. Almost nobody can spell al-Khwarizmi correctly on the first try.

His original Arabic manuscript is preserved at Oxford. His book on Hindu numerals survives only in Latin translation. The Latin version was the textbook that taught medieval Europe how to count.

The man who built the foundation of the AI revolution did not live to see a calculator. He died around 850 CE, a thousand years before the first electric current was sent through a wire. The civilization he built mathematics for collapsed. The library he wrote in burned. His own grave is unmarked.

But every algorithm running on every machine on Earth right now still answers to his name.

[Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 @NickKnudsenUS]

Wow this is WILD.

The White House and Fox News attacked the creators of this ad.

You know what to do.

RETWEET and let’s spread it EVERYWHERE!!!

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

You do not earn a billion dollars. You steal it. Nobody works a billion times harder than a nurse, a teacher, or a farmer. That money comes from underpaying the people who actually did the work. Stop worshipping hoarders who are just really good at wage theft.

[worms cited @christapeterso]

@WSJopinion Who?

[𝒢𝒾𝓁𝒷ℯ𝓇𝓉 @AbakpaJob]

The clitoris has over 8000 nerve endings and it's still not as sensitive as a man on Twitter who has been told he's wrong.