FrzPch_NoNeed

Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
-Christopher Hitchens

[Leading Report @LeadingReport]

DHS Secretary confirms Rep. Illhan Omar married her brother, investigation pending.

[Paul @WomanDefiner]

It's really crazy how every conspiracy theory I believed for 20 years turned out to be very real.

[Cristine Rice @PstafarianPrice]

America has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.

[Oliver Traldi @olivertraldi]

Because of the peer review system, lowering academic standards has a massively compounding effect. And it would be difficult to overstate just how poor peer reviewing has gotten

[Jordan @ituajiv]

Karl Urban, as a true professional, studied DeForest Kelly's performances intently, trying to truly understand both the mannerisms and the character, then building on the original. So really, we have had it backwards all along:

DeForestation leads to Urbanization

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

I apparently made a bunch of OECD researchers pretty upset last cycle, but that's no reason to engage in censorship.

https://t.co/EU8XEkb7t1

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn't building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending "Souvlaki" and "everything is alive" to anyone who'd listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair," and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He'd been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released "Reflections" under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin's ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him "Busty Wimsatt" and, in their newsletters, "ever-alert," "indefatigable," and at least once "American hero." @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of "The Independents" so they wouldn't disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf's Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn's own jokes.

"Boy did I feel special," Kirn wrote today. "Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement."

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people.

He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog's Dave's Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin's science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin's "Director's Cut," and appears in it, briefly, as "Greeting Cop." He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage "No Step on Snek" hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend's house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do "The Crawling Hand."

He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn't coming back next week.

[Paul @WomanDefiner]

My boy has been looking for a new job for the past year and cant even get an interview. He's stuck where he is. Meanwhile the younger ladies in the family can change jobs at will.

Something weird is going on for sure.

[planefag @planefag]

If you want me to upend my entire life and move multiple states away, yes. $50 fucking minimum. If he can't find the labor locally then that's what he needs to do. If he's not willing then he's not that desperate. And with inflation the way it is you can get 18 an hour working at a damn gas station.

He's not that desperate. And neither am I. He and his data centers can pound sand.

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

Room full of women on the Oprah show starts cheering after a doctor says that black female child murderers need to be supported too, not just the white child murderers like Lindsay Clancy.

"I want us to have the same passion for [female child murderers] who don't look like Lindsay."

"There are women of color sitting around this country in prisons for [murdering their children]. I just wanna remind us to have the pink shirts and the energy for them as well."

Totally insane.

[Zoomer @ZoomerHistorian]

Derek Chauvin is rotting in prison for FAR less than this

[Karel Mercx @KarelMercx]

A few weeks later, Europeans are no longer paying 8.6 times as much as Americans for natural gas. They are now paying 12.2 times as much.

The chart shows the European TTF gas price.

[Andy Lee @RealAndyLeeShow]

This is probably a good time to show CBC Board of Director Bill Tam and Mary Ng hanging out with Consul-General Tong Xiaoling - the PRC official that boasted of interfering with our elections to help the Liberal Party of Canada win two seats in 2021.

[i/o @avidseries]

Just extraordinary.

This woman, her party, and nearly the entire political and media establishment of Germany, did everything they could for years to avoid having a "fact-based debate" — indeed everything they could to control the narrative around the statistical data clearly showing the damage that immigration from the Muslim world was doing — and sought to marginalize and shut down or even ban persons, political groups and parties begging for such a debate.

[Chaofan Shou @shoucccc]

I bought a Fable dataset from one of the top Chinese LLM routers yesterday.

With just 6TB data, I can take over 7 Chinese/CIS gov entities & 19 top Chinese firms like Xiaomi, Huawei, NIO, Minimax using SSH keys, VPN configs, Aliyun keys, GitLab tokens sent to the router.

[St. Rev. Dr. Rev ⏭️☯️🏴😻 @St_Rev]

🤔
Definitely slanted, but makes a point I've made in the past: The doomers believe that intelligence strongly correlates with something like rapacious malice, and everything follows from that. Superintelligence = supermalice = everyone dies. It's ridiculous when spelled out.

[FrzPch_NoNeed @frzpch_noneed]

@cremieuxrecueil Would really like to see an unadulterated China score one day

[Jamie Sarkonak @sarkonakj]

Fun fact: I requested access to this hearing as a journalist but was denied. When it comes to human rights tribunals, there is no open-court principle. If this doctor had been sued in regular court, we would have at least been able to listen in on the proceedings.

[Lyndsey Fifield @lyndseyfifield]

Murphy knows the Obama DOJ put four innocent police officers (including @Spaulding3030) in prison for "racial targeting" because they busted a massive crime ring of fake license plates in CONNECTICUT.

The only people driving around Connecticut with fake plates in the early-00's were (shocker)... illegal immigrants.

There was no racial targeting. Hispanic FBI agents did an investigation and tried to get pulled over, but never did - because their plates were *not fraudulent*

Obama's DOJ made an example of the officers anyway because they refused to stop enforcing the law (read: doing their job) and kept arresting the criminals.

Because the officers were seeing the hit and runs and insurance scams and KNEW these types of tragedies were only going to keep getting worse.

And they were right.

So instead of answering her question, Murphy pivots like an actual sociopath.

Bone chilling.

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @CrimeanVoyager]

Four years ago today, Ukraine liberated Izium.

What was uncovered shocked the world: 447 graves, including 414 civilians and 5 children. Most died violently.

This is what russian occupation leaves behind.

Mass graves.

Never forget. Never forgive.