Ed Wrinkle

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

George Washington was an extremist.

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

General Washington issues an order discouraging profanity among his troops:

“The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing (a vice heretofore little known in an American Army) is growing into fashion; he hopes the officers will, by example, as well as influence, endeavour to check it, and that both they, and the men will reflect, that we can have little hopes of the blessing of Heaven on our Arms, if we insult it by our impiety and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.”

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

@Numbersmamaog @ChiefEngineerCE You miss my point. (I agree with your point on in-person effectiveness for many jobs, however.) My point is that for a role that is viable for remote work, it's just as viable from India as anywhere else. At a small fraction of the cost.

[Kimball Call @KimballCall]

Here’s what you do:

You wear your garments at all times, removing them only for very specific things you find appropriate to do without them. You keep those choices to yourself.

You don’t get tattoos, extra piercings, wear immodest clothes, or try to draw lots of attention to your appearance. You stay modest by being clean, neat, and orderly both in dress and behavior.

That also means you dress nice for church meetings, abiding by the rules of formality for your culture. You wear what is conservative and won’t distract others from worship.

You show up to church on time as much as you can, and don’t make a big deal about it when you’re late every once in a while. You sit in the middle front-ish and chat politely with those around you between meetings. You attend second hour even when you’re tired.

You don’t watch movies that glorify violence and adultery or detract from the Spirit, but those choices are personal. You do your best, but you keep the specifics to yourself.

You teach your kids that marriage is between a man and woman, and that children have a right to a mother and a father, because that’s what the Family Proclamation teaches us is central to God’s plan of salvation.

You teach your sons that a full mission is expected of them, and that while they should seek a spiritual confirmation, God has told us through living prophets that the answer is yes.

You teach your daughters that motherhood is to be cherished and desired, and your sons that fatherhood is their greatest calling in life. You reinforce prophetic teachings to not delay this vital step, and not delay having children more than is necessary.

When you encounter regular people not living these standards, you treat them with respect. If someone asks you for your opinion, you lovingly but clearly share the doctrine and principles that will lead them to long-term happiness, even if it’s hard at first.

If you’re a bishop or stake president doing a temple recommend interview, you enforce what you need to—you don’t just let major things slide.

If someone online says these standards are useless or that it’s okay to lower them, you lovingly disagree with them and offer your perspective, engaging as a peacemaker should.

But most of the time, you go about your day striving for high standards and relying on the Atonement of Christ to enable you. You don’t draw attention to it, you just do it.

You do what Jesus would do, what we see the brethren doing, and what we all know—deep down—is right.

We don’t look for loopholes.

We don’t make excuses.

We don’t seek happiness in liberation from rules.

We don’t seek novelty for its own sake.

And we don’t look for praise.

We try to be *exactly* obedient as much as possible, and we enjoy the satisfaction of having God’s approval instead of seeking the approval of the world.

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

@drkeithsiau Now do Similac.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

According to this DARPA document dated August 13th, 2021, they knew at that time:
- Covid came from a lab
- That the mRNA 'vaccines' worked "poorly"
- That ivermectin worked (since April 2020)
- That hydroxychloroquine worked (ditto)

DARPA informed the Inspector General, and all parties chose to say nothing to the public about any of it.

Let that sink in...

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

I had a dream last night that Michael Crichton was still alive and he wrote a book called “Two Weeks to Stop the Spread.”

The book’s main character was a megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official who was using NIH funds to work with China to engineer a virus designed to wipe out the world’s elderly and infirm populations, thereby decreasing the public health and expense burden foisted on younger generations.

Other main characters included a wildly popular, populist US President who was destroying the trade imbalance with China and revitalizing the US economy (and who was running for a second term), a shadowy mastermind in the Chinese Communist Party, a secret cabal of major US news network executives and a consortium of US state governors from large, Democrat states.

The shadowy Chinese figure determined that releasing the virus into the wild would devastate the world economy, thus making the US President’s re-election unlikely (in favor of a dim-witted candidate whom China had been blackmailing for decades).

The shadowy Chinese figure called a meeting with the US network heads and the Democrat state governors where they agreed to wildly overstate the threat of this new virus, effectively grinding the US and world economies to a halt so that the 90 IQ, blackmailed Presidential candidate of choice could gain the Oval Office.

The story is told in the form of diary entries by the megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official who lays out the whole plot from start to finish while constantly basking in the glow the network executives created for him.

The story has one hero, an enterprising and honest physician who constantly speaks out about the actual origins and effects of the virus, only to find his professional and personal lives destroyed for speaking truth.

Years later the megalomaniacal, narcissistic senior US health official’s diary becomes public, vindicating the enterprising and honest physician, except nobody apologizes to him or gives him his life back.

In my dream, nobody would publish the book, even though Michael Crichton was the author, because the story was too far-fetched and unbelievable.

Then I woke up.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

Confirmation of Anthropic’s BOOK BURNING for their AI: The Great Forgetting of the Amnesia Generation

In the quiet warehouses and shipping docks of 2024, Anthropic did not merely train an AI.

It staged a quiet erasure of human knowledge.

While the public was still dazzled by Claude’s fluent paragraphs and polished marketing emails, the company’s engineers and logistics teams were busy executing Project Panama—an internal campaign whose own documents announced the ambition to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”

The method was industrial and irreversible: buy the physical volume SOMETIMES THE LAST COPY, slice its SPINE with a hydraulic cutter, feed the pages through high-speed scanners, then pulp what remained.

Millions of books: scientific research, novels, rare technical treatises, obscure monographs, volumes that had already survived wars, fires, and decades of handling—were reduced to data tokens and then to wet mulch or burned.

They literally burn the evidence of this crime against humanity.

The company itself preferred the darkness. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this,” the planning memos warned.

A federal judge later blessed the slaughter. Because Anthropic had purchased the copies and then destroyed them, the court held, the act was “transformative” fair use. Ownership plus obliteration equaled permission.

The ruling handed every subsequent AI lab a legal license to treat the printed past as disposable feedstock.

That license is now being exercised at industrial scale. In 2026, companies like ISBNdb openly market pre-2022 books as the last pure reservoir of human language—text uncontaminated by the synthetic sludge that large language models themselves have already poured into the open web.

Orders arrive for tens or hundreds of thousands of titles at a time. Non-disclosure agreements are standard.

The preferred language is “digital preservation.”

The actual outcome is the same mechanical process Anthropic refined: spine cut, pages scanned, original shredded.

Rare and near-unique copies are disappearing into the same pipeline. Booksellers across continents report sudden, strange bulk orders for specialized, low-demand titles that no ordinary collector would ever buy in volume.

Once the pages are gone, they are gone forever.

A website can be re-uploaded. A bestseller can be reprinted.

The last three surviving copies of an eighteenth-century botanical text cannot.

This is not progress. It is the Great Forgetting.

An entire generation of machines is being taught to speak by consuming and then discarding the physical record of human thought.

The companies that profit from the resulting fluency call the process necessary, legal, and even enlightened.

They speak of curated knowledge and domain-specific expertise while the spines crack and the paper is carted away.

Anthropic did not invent the hunger for data, but it demonstrated openly in private documents and then under court seal how far a well-funded laboratory was willing to go to satisfy it, and how readily the law would ratify the destruction.

Just to gain a temporary AI benchmark advantage.

The amnesia is already here.

Future models will generate elegant sentences to beat Al sorts of tests about history, science, and literature.

They will do so on the ashes of the books that once contained those sentences.

The generation that built these systems will leave its children fluent machines and emptier shelves.

That is the real product of Project Panama and its successors: not intelligence, but a carefully engineered cultural void, papered over with synthetic prose and non-disclosure agreements.

We are left to forget to remember. We are The Amnesia Generation with our brains being put into a meat grinder and fed back to us.

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

@multiplanet1 Howard Hughes was this way, too. When I joined the company in 1980, the old timers told the same sort of stories about HH back in the day. He'd just appear at a tech's elbow at 9 o'clock at night, observing and asking technical questions. Like Musk, he understood his business.

[S★ @xxyllinn]

I don’t want to "download the app" to pay for parking. I don’t want to "create an account" to see a menu. I don’t want to "provide feedback" on a 30-second interaction. I just want to exist in the physical world without a digital leash.

[“Sudden And Unexpected” @toobaffled]

REMEMBER THIS STORY ❓💥💥

In 2021, CNN anchor Drew Griffin looks Dr. Rashid Buttar in the eye and says, “I’m vaccinated. You think there is a ticking time bomb in me and I’m going to die?”

Dr. Buttar’s chilling reply, “I hope not, but I’ll be happy to meet you in three years and see how you’re doing.”

Drew Griffin was diagnosed with cancer shortly after taking the C0V jab and died of TURBO CANCER in December 2022.

Griffin never made it to that three-year check-in. This is what happens when warnings are mocked. Millions more have passed away, and literally billions are potentially walking time bombs.

Dr. Buttar died on May 18, 2023, of an undisclosed cause, at the age of 57. Before his death he claimed he had been "poisoned" and targeted due to his anti-vaccine stance; some claimed he had "died suddenly".

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

@_The_Prophet__ People complain about "the Boomers" walking out with all the money, but we have also lost 21% of all our assets (savings) since Biden took office in 2021, simply through inflation. Washington just seized nearly a quarter of all the money I've saved through 50 years of work.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

HOW THEY ENGINEERED THE FAKE PANDEMIC

1. China released staged footage of people “dropping dead” in the streets; scenes never witnessed anywhere else in the world before or after December 2019.

2. A PCR test was rolled out that could not determine whether someone was actually sick. The vast majority of results were false positives.

3. The claim of asymptomatic transmission was heavily promoted to justify restrictions on healthy people and to force mass testing on the entire population; which led to tens of millions of false positive test results.

4. Tech companies and media outlets were mobilized to censor dissent and rebrand inconvenient truths as “misinformation.”

5. Behavioral psychologists were brought in to design fear-based messaging specifically intended to secure public compliance.

6. To keep the illusion of a deadly pandemic alive, they required excess mortality data.

7. Ordinary mild respiratory symptoms alone could not produce those numbers, so the population was subjected to sustained psychological pressure capable of triggering mass psychogenic illness.

8. Relentless fear messaging kept cortisol levels chronically elevated, weakening immune function, particularly among the elderly.

9. Social isolation, delayed medical care, and lockdown policies then generated the excess deaths needed to prop up the narrative.

10. Cloth and surgical masks were suddenly declared effective, something no serious public-health authority had previously recommended for ordinary respiratory pathogens, turning every face into a walking advertisement for fear.

11. People were conditioned to remain isolated “until the vaccine was ready,” buying authorities additional time to expand control.

12. Billions were injected with an experimental product that was claimed to stop both infection and transmission.

13. When those claims collapsed, the goalposts were moved: “Your shot won’t work unless the unvaccinated also take it.”

14. New “variants” were announced every few months to justify an endless series of booster campaigns.

15. A new condition - “long COVID” - was introduced to reframe mounting vaccine side effects.

16. Pharmaceutical companies recorded unprecedented profits, shielded by government contracts and complete legal immunity.

17. Anyone who raised objections was silenced, deplatformed, investigated, or publicly discredited.

18. Once the story became too strained to maintain, the pandemic was abruptly declared over, and the entire episode was treated as if it had never happened.

NEVER FORGET AND PROSECUTE FAUCI!

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

Excellent letter to the editor published in The Dallas Morning News.

Fairview mayor owes Latter-day Saints an apology

Mayor John Hubbard of the fast-growing Dallas suburb of Fairview recently wrote in the pages of The Salt Lake Tribune about a zoning dispute in his city. Hubbard has said his goal is to embarrass leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, because of their decision to build a temple with a 120-foot steeple that his town approved.  

A forthright response is warranted, not from church leaders, who already reached an agreement with the town of Fairview, but from everyday Latter-day Saints, the kind who are hurt by Hubbard’s jeremiad. 

In his essay, Hubbard significantly misrepresented the nature and character of Fairview. 

He wrote that Fairview is organized around a 35-foot height limit in residential zones. But he did not mention that the temple is located on a major thoroughfare that is currently part of a major expansion project. He also failed to note that the temple site is located on “church row,” where each of the surrounding buildings exceed that 35-foot limit. Churches have been built on this stretch because the road is so busy home builders will not build on it. So much for residential. 
Hubbard said Fairview is a small town but did not note the massive outdoor mall less than a mile down the road the temple will be built on, nor that the mall also exceeds the 35-foot height limit. 

In other comments, Hubbard compared the temple height to Yankee Stadium, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Sphinx. These examples serve to distract. There are six churches in Collin County alone that are taller than the proposed temple and located in residential areas. No need to mention Italy. 
Hubbard claimed in his column that the temple would be the tallest structure Fairview has ever seen. That would make sense given how quickly Fairview is growing. But unfortunately, the mayor evidently overlooked other structures in his town. The temple will be at least the fourth-tallest structure in Fairview.  

Hubbard also failed to mention that in 2006, Fairview granted Creekwood United Methodist Church a conditional use permit for a building expansion that included a proposed 154-foot digital bell tower. The tower was never built, but the permit itself shows that the town has previously approved a structure substantially taller than the proposed temple. So much for how important height is to the town’s character. 

The Church of Jesus Christ has already compromised with the town of Fairview, significantly reducing the size and height of the building to meet the city’s needs. But Hubbard calls the church a bully because it asked the town to follow federal law. After all of this, Hubbard has the temerity to say it is the church that is being a bad neighbor. 

Texans aren’t so easily fooled. I lived in Texas for 18 years. Telling our neighbor what to do on their own property, going back on your word, trying to embarrass them — that’s not the Texas way.  

This kind of name-calling from a mayor does real damage to real Latter-day Saint kids who are trying to belong, and for what? Stopping the seventh-tallest church in the county, a mile down the road from the mall, on “church row.”  

If Hubbard’s goal is truly to be a good neighbor, it’s time to put the embarrassment campaign away, offer an apology, and start mending fences with the Latter-day Saints he’s damaged with his misguided campaign.

Author is the legendary CD Cunningham

[Ed Wrinkle @EdWrinkle]

@Manhattva Utah mode.

[Ned Ryun @nedryun]

"The [Roman Republic] did not collapse because someone ignored one law. It collapsed because enough Romans stopped believing the unwritten rules still mattered. The forms survived but the spirit disappeared. The Senate still met, elections still occurred, titles remained. But the civic trust had evaporated. It became clear that Rome’s gods and religion were not strong enough to enforce the mos maiorum and it became apparent that the ways and traditions of the ancestors was really just a gentlemen’s agreement and the gentlemen stopped agreeing." https://t.co/PLi3aHDGRy

[Chief_Engineer @ChiefEngineerCE]

Engineering Wednesday- How winners lose

I loved my team, loved my job, loved the location, loved what a difference we were making each day developing products nobody had ever thought possible. Products that saved lives, and made us all safe.

We are talking whitepaper products - we designed the PCB boards, board level programming, motors, enclosures, pumps, chemistry, HMI, iOT bumper to bumper.... then environmentally test it UART, smoke test, burn in, in chambers, shaker tables, marathon tests, and on sites. In 'vessels' and all over the planet, a company that took 6 yrs to develop a product beforehand that needed a dozen certifications - I built a team that launched 17 products in 3 years and tripled their bottom line.

A great big company and my VP was best friends with the CEO.

My VP kept giving us way too much money and demanding we use specific contractors for design elements. He seemed upset at our success, and growth of the company meant we had to move locations to a plant 3 times bigger.

Found out the VP was part owner of the consultant/contractor of one of the firms and was getting kickbacks from the other.

I was told by the contractor I HAD to use them for that reason. (not smart)

I reported him to the head of our HR who as an ex-FBI attorney. Then to the SEC who said it needed to be in excess of several million to be relevant because their queue was way too long.

My life was made a living hell afterwards and I dug in and refused to use vendors that were on contract for unlimited expenses and zero delivery - when they did deliver it was open source crap anyone could download with a google prompt and I fired them.

I was being recruited during this, yet resistant to leave my team... to one of the largest, more reputable think tanks there are. A real honor to be invited to develop and launch products with them. After I left- the majority of the team exited, as well.

The kicker? The VP and several on senior staff were removed 5 months after I left my dream job and a warning sent to the board.

The CEO remains and I recall being in a room with him as he looked over the new plant complaining about the sales, yes complaining. He said.. we need to spend this money because once we start paying a dividend they are going to expect it from now on.

So when I write about the corrupt practices, and entities draining the government and companies- I know. People have no idea what incentivizes a company from the top to the bottom and especially the middle, like I do.

CE

[Eric Schwalm @Schwalm5132]

https://t.co/PfW09nWQc5

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Now The Fountainhead – arguably the better book:

1. There are two ways to exist: create from your own vision, or live by reflecting and pleasing others – Rand calls them the first-handers and the second-handers.

2. Howard Roark is an architect who will only build what he actually believes in. He starves rather than compromise the design. The world resists him constantly.

3. Peter Keating is the opposite – talented enough, but builds his entire career on flattering clients, copying styles, and climbing socially. He succeeds, but remains hollow.

4. The villain, Ellsworth Toohey, is the system made conscious: he deliberately promotes mediocrity, knowing that a world of second-handers needs a critic to tell them what to think – and that gives him total power.

5. Roark’s crime, in the eyes of that world, isn’t failure – it’s that he doesn’t need their approval. That independence is experienced as an affront.

6. The novel’s argument: civilization’s actual source is the rare individual who originates rather than imitates. Everyone else — including people who despise him — lives downstream of what he creates.

7. The Fountainhead is Roark himself. Not a fountain – a fountainhead: the original source, where the water actually comes from. Before the river, before the tributaries, before anyone else draws from it. The title says: find that person, and you’ve found where everything real begins.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I was a lifelong Democrat. I thought most conservatives were ignorant or evil or lying. I believed almost everything written in the New York Times, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. I was horrified when conservatives criticized the authorities. Every criticism I saw: I thought all of it was motivated by animus, resentment, self-interest, or ignorance.

Whatever truth there might have been in the criticism, I saw as a mere "half-truth": an exploitation of this or that cherrypicked fact being weaponized. Why did I see it in terms of weaponization? Because I was biased: I saw liberal establishment institutions and figures as fundamentally good, so all criticism of them was automatically interpreted as being in bad faith.

Didn't the critics know that these institutions or figures were fundamentally good? If they didn't, they were ignorant. If they did, they were evil. It was that simple. This meant that any legitimate criticisms would just be dismissed, as if bouncing off of an impenetrable bulletproof shield.

This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn't understood what I had been judging.

I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn't human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent "unprofessional behavior", which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school's own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment.

But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, "Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood." I wasn't. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn't imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind.

When I was dismissed, I was broken. But I had help from friends who helped me understand what happened. And I came to realize that a hysteria had overtaken the left. I spent a lot of time reading about show trials, about witch trials, and so on. I also connected with people who had experienced similar things and came to realize that something similar had happened to hundreds of physicians around the country. My story wasn't unique. It was all the same story over and over again.

I cannot believe the person I once was. I cannot believe that I could exist like that. I still don't understand how I could be like that, or how millions of people in this country could continue being like that. It disturbs me greatly.

One thing I know is that whatever this thing is that is driving people crazy needs to be destroyed. It is hostile to civilization and to our humanity. It causes us to dehumanize each other and try to destroy each other. It is the very same monstrous thing that I once attributed to conservatives. But it had been inside me, and I could now see it inside others. This is something I still grapple with.