The Currency of Cool

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Here is what we know: U.S. taxpayer money, funneled through USAID and NIH, funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That research likely caused the COVID pandemic that killed millions and cost trillions.

Dr. Fauci personally signed off on these experiments, then lied to Congress about it. Biden tried to protect him with a last-minute pardon. That’s the very definition of a cover-up.

[The Currency of Cool @currencyofcool]

@dragodimitrov Could you say all this in English so not only the smart people get to go to heaven

[The Currency of Cool @currencyofcool]

@samx_reels This lady surely doesnt have kids

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

For years, I raised alarms about dangerous gain-of-function research being farmed out to foreign countries, and I was told it was a conspiracy theory. Now, declassified documents show that the U.S. funded over 120 biolabs across more than 30 countries. Some of this research was conducted overseas precisely because scientists knew it would face scrutiny on American soil.

I'm calling for a presidential commission of scientists to review all gain-of-function research going forward. We're going lab by lab and pathogen by pathogen until the American people know the full truth.

https://t.co/gtv6sZ7viR

[HausenKS 🌾🇺🇸 @HausenKS]

I know plenty of you will downplay this, but I hope some of you will really take it to heart.

Just a regular dude telling you how it is.😎

[The Currency of Cool @currencyofcool]

@corbydavidson I’m seeing a concert at MSG next week…never been before so just picked a show that was available. Band is called Goose. Is this the band you like or is that Geese? I’m going in blind, haven’t listened to Goose or Geese.

[The Currency of Cool @currencyofcool]

@bhmorr @didem5654 This guy is still wicked smart!

[The Currency of Cool @currencyofcool]

@McJuggerNuggets Pure evil

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

If that addict on your street were your own son, what would you do? That is the defining question that guides my 5 step plan to fix the homelessness problem in LA. We *must* end this evil racket of corrupt politicians and NGOs who profit off the misery of these poor souls. They launder money and feed them more drugs, so they can keep their customers locked in this hell on our streets. We have a moral obligation from God to help them and make our city safe and clean for everyone. Karen Bass and Nithya Raman have forsaken this city. Time for real leadership. Time for real compassion.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This American needs to lead the Department of Education

“This is my audition to become the head of the US Department of Education

- My first act of office will be immediately abolishing the No Child Left Behind Act. Yes, we will be leaving children behind. If they fail a class, they will have to repeat it

- My second act is one that I'm very passionate about. We will be bringing zeros back. If you don't know, in many schools in the US right now, students receive 40% or 50% if they do zero work, if they do not complete an assignment. And my school included, and many other schools, are not going to be allowed to give a student a 50% if they do not turn in any work. They will have to receive a zero.

Likewise, there will be no completion grades, If you just attempt an assignment, that doesn't mean you get a 55%. Like, if you get a 1 out of 10, you earned a 10% on that assignment, and that's okay. Sometimes failing happens, and we don't need to just inflate the grades just for fun. Grades will reflect students' actual performance and understanding of the content

- The third one I'm very excited for as well. Teacher evaluations will take place once a year and teachers will be observed by another current teacher from a different school. Teachers would volunteer to be evaluators. They would get a sub for the day, no questions asked, and then they would evaluate objectively. That way the person evaluating you does not know you and does not have any personal bias towards you. Hopefully.

- The fourth one, I think this should be common sense, but I hear that it happens all the time at some schools. Never at mine. But teachers shouldn't be expected to work for free. I hear elementary teachers are doing these before and after work things that they aren't getting paid for, like lunch duty or recess duty or pickup duty, whatever it is. The school needs those things covered.

People can volunteer for it, and then they have to get paid for it. They can't force you to cover other people's classes for free. They have to pay you extra if they're gonna take away your lunch or your prep or whatever time that is supposed to be yours and then force you to do something without getting paid. There will be no more voluntelling.

Hire this woman. The most important thing we need to do is hold students back and force them to learn the work. No more dumbing down out standards

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Mike Hoffmann @MikeHoffmann]

Luke Falk shared a Mike Leach story that stopped me cold:

Two kids. One rich. One poor.

Every training camp, Coach Leach told his team about these 2 kids.

The rich kid has two choices.

Get soft. Get entitled. Expect everything handed to him because he was handed more.

Or take the resources, the coaching, the opportunities, and compound them into something greater.

The poor kid has two choices too.

Say nobody gave him anything. Blame the world. Make his circumstances the reason he never became what he could have been.

Or outwork everyone in the room.

Luke said the locker room had both. Kids from wealth. Kids from nothing. Kids with every advantage. Kids who scraped for every inch.

Same choice for all of them.

Ownership or victimhood.
Fuel or excuse.

The rich kid can waste the head start or build on it.

The poor kid can drown in the deficit or weaponize it.

Greatness doesn't come from where you start.

It comes from which kid you choose to feed.

Credit to @coachlukefalk for continuing to share golden nuggets about Coach’s legacy

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Mark Cuban just described the largest wealth transfer of the AI era.

Almost nobody understood what he said.

Cuban: “There are 33 million companies in this country. Aren’t going to have AI budgets. Aren’t going to have AI experts.”

Not tech startups.

The shoe store. The regional trucking outfit. The accounting firm with 12 employees.

The businesses that actually run the physical economy.

They know AI is coming. They have no idea what to do with it.

Cuban: “You’ve got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything’s going to be customized to your unique utilization.”

Software is dead.

The SaaS era ran on one rule. Build a generic product. Force millions of companies to bend their workflows around it. Charge rent forever.

AI ends the contract.

The business stops bending to the software. The intelligence bends to the business.

But customized by whom.

The third-generation manufacturer cannot tell Claude from Gemini. The county hospital is staring at a reactor asking where the light switch is.

Cuban: “Who’s going to do it for them?”

That question is worth more than the frontier models themselves.

Hundreds of billions are being burned to build the foundation. The smartest engineers alive are locked in a bloodbath over who owns the base layer.

Let them fight.

Let them burn the capital. Let them drive the cost of raw intelligence toward zero.

Because the wealth does not collect where the brain is built.

It collects where the brain meets the business.

Every ambitious kid in college right now thinks survival means a seat at OpenAI or Anthropic.

Cuban is staring at the other 99 percent of the economy.

Learn the models. Then learn the messy, unglamorous reality of how a 50-person company actually operates.

Walk through the door. Understand their problems. Wire the intelligence directly into their revenue.

That is not a job title. That is an entire economic class being born.

You do not need to build the brain. You need to build the nervous system.

The biggest winners of the electricity era were not the engineers who built the generators. They were the ones who walked into dark factories and showed the owners where to plug in.

33 million companies are standing in the dark right now.

Silicon Valley is racing to build the god. The fortunes will belong to whoever teaches him a trade.

[Fandom Pulse @fandompulse]

Project Hail Mary writer Andy Weir on social commentary in books:

"I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that."

"I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that."

"To that end, I also don’t talk about my personal political opinions publicly. I don’t want readers to even know, honestly. I don’t want that in the back of their minds as they read my stuff."

Is this why he has the #1 sci-fi movie in decades?

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

@HuffPost Go fuck yourself

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

Welcome to immortality sir! 🇺🇸 🦅

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

🇺🇸 A day every American will cherish forever! God Bless America! 🇺🇸

[Jimmy’s Famous Seafood @JimmysSeafood]

🇺🇸 For bringing home the gold and delivering an overwhelming sense of pride throughout America, we hereby grant FREE CRABCAKES FOR LIFE to all members of the 2026 USA Men’s & Women’s Olympic Ice Hockey Teams! This applies to both dine-in and shipping for all time. God Bless America! Johnny Hockey Forever! 🇺🇸