Greg Meboe

[Greg Meboe @gregmeboe]

Can my parents possibly be saved?
If you love and appreciate your parents deeply, how might they be saved?
1. Virtually
2. Actually

#RayKurzweil #TheSingularity

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

If you were born in 1970, you will be 62 in 2032 and eligible to collect Social Security benefits, which you paid into your entire working life.

But, in 2032, SS will be bankrupt and won’t be able to pay people’s SS checks which is their money!

Thats just over 6 years away.

We can’t afford another foreign war and a $1.5 Trillion dollar military budget.

But Trump doesn’t care, he’s a billionaire playing war games and playing the market.

Neither do Republicans or Democrats, they actually are the ones who robbed SS which will lead to its bankruptcy.

Just imagine how bad it will be for senior citizens when they don’t receive their SS checks, many of them barely get by now as it is.

[Paroles d'auteurs @Paroles_auteurs]

Merci à Christophe Clavé pour cet éclairage sur l’appauvrissement de la langue et la ruine de la pensée 🙌

"La disparition progressive des temps (subjonctif, passé simple, imparfait, formes composées du futur, participe passé…) donne lieu à une pensée au présent, limitée à l’instant, incapable de projections dans le temps.

La généralisation du tutoiement, la disparition des majuscules et de la ponctuation sont autant de coups mortels portés à la subtilité de l’expression.
Supprimer le mot «mademoiselle» est non seulement renoncer à l’esthétique d’un mot, mais également promouvoir l’idée qu’entre une petite fille et une femme il n’y a rien.
Moins de mots et moins de verbes conjugués c’est moins de capacités à exprimer les émotions et moins de possibilité d’élaborer une pensée.

Des études ont montré qu’une partie de la violence dans la sphère publique et privée provient directement de l’incapacité à mettre des mots sur les émotions.
Sans mot pour construire un raisonnement, la pensée complexe chère à Edgar Morin est entravée, rendue impossible.
Plus le langage est pauvre, moins la pensée existe.

L’histoire est riche d’exemples et les écrits sont nombreux de Georges Orwell dans « 1984 » à Ray Bradbury dans « Fahrenheit 451 » qui ont relaté comment les dictatures de toutes obédiences entravaient la pensée en réduisant et tordant le nombre et le sens des mots.

Il n’y a pas de pensée critique sans pensée. Et il n’y a pas de pensée sans mots.
Comment construire une pensée hypothético-déductive sans maîtrise du conditionnel ? Comment envisager l’avenir sans conjugaison au futur ? Comment appréhender une temporalité, une succession d’éléments dans le temps, qu’ils soient passés ou à venir, ainsi que leur durée relative, sans une langue qui fait la différence entre ce qui aurait pu être, ce qui a été, ce qui est, ce qui pourrait advenir, et ce qui sera après que ce qui pourrait advenir soit advenu ? Si un cri de ralliement devait se faire entendre aujourd’hui, ce serait celui, adressé aux parents et aux enseignants : faites parler, lire et écrire vos enfants, vos élèves, vos étudiants.

Enseignez et pratiquez la langue dans ses formes les plus variées, même si elle semble compliquée, surtout si elle est compliquée. Parce que dans cet effort se trouve la liberté. Ceux qui expliquent à longueur de temps qu’il faut simplifier l’orthographe, purger la langue de ses «défauts», abolir les genres, les temps, les nuances, tout ce qui crée de la complexité sont les fossoyeurs de l’esprit humain. Il n’est pas de liberté sans exigences. Il n’est pas de beauté sans la pensée de la beauté."
Christophe Clavé

[𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 @Hoang_HQ]

Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, and he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully in freedom by the River Kwai. He is an extremely gentle and sensitive elephant who enjoys music, especially this slow movement by Beethoven, which is often played for him during the day and night.

[tawny @tawnniee]

design is art constrained by science
and design is science liberated by art

[Greg Meboe @gregmeboe]

"You can't see me yet I can see you" is the opposite of Equality & High Trust in society.
This fellow elucidates omnipresent surveillance's "one way mirror" effect on individual behavior and interpersonal connection.

[Financial Physics @FinancialPhys]

Perspective

[Greg Meboe @gregmeboe]

Reading this as a fourth grader in Government class was fascinating. I remember the paradoxical feeling.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Neither the spirit of this Declaration nor due respect for the red lines contained therein resides in our nation’s capital.

On this 250th anniversary of our Founders’ bold assertion of these principles, let’s honor them by keeping this flame burning within us.

[𝙼𝚁. 𝙻𝙴𝙰𝙳𝚂𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙶𝙴𝚁 @MrLeadslinger]

The Star Spangled Banner played with steel targets is about as American as it gets. 250 🇺🇸

[PNWGUERRILLA @pnwguerrilla]

This is not only a reminder to be there for your fellow man.

But also a reminder to never self harm.

You are better than that. And you know you are better than that. We all get down, we all get sad, we all struggle and that’s okay. Never hurt yourself.

WAGMI
Family & Tribe
ATS

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Nobody ate three square meals a day until a factory whistle told them to.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner are a shift pattern dressed up as tradition. The rigid three-meal day took shape in the Industrial Revolution, when workers pouring into the cities needed feeding before the shift, on the midday break, and after clocking off. The Royal Navy ran the same timetable at sea. Then the cereal makers and the advertisers finished the job last century and sold the nation the line that breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

Go back further and the whole structure dissolves. The Romans thought it healthiest to eat one proper meal a day. Medieval Europeans and the Norse got by on two. Hunter-gatherers ate when there was food and went without when there was not, sometimes for days at a stretch. Feast, then fast. That rhythm is written into us far deeper than any timetable, because a body shaped by lean spells learned to run smoothly on its own fat between meals.

Two meals is the natural home for most people, and one trick makes it effortless. Stack each meal with fatty animal food. Eggs and butter, a ribeye, a pan of mince, oily fish, cheese. Hunger stops knocking at eleven and again at three, because protein and fat fill you and hold you. You stop grazing because there is nothing left to chase.

The snacking, the little and often, the breakfast forced down with no appetite, all of it came from a factory timetable and an advertising budget.

Eat twice. Eat richly. Then let your body do the thing it was built for, running calm and fuelled on good food and its own reserves until the next proper meal.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Adult rights may be significantly curtailed in the future.

Teenagers rights are limited because relative to adults, their decision abilities are seen as inferior. If teenagers were the most cognitively advanced people on earth, they'd be in charge because of their relative superiority.

Rights follow from relative competence.

As AI scales, this same calculus will inevitably apply to adults.

Humans drive cars today because of their relative competence superiority. Once autonomous systems prove statistically superior, human driving will become unacceptable as a public safety hazard.

AI will manifest in similar ways across society, demonstrating superior judgment in law, medicine, finance, governance and beyond. I can also imagine individuals and companies willfully opting into outsourcing critical functions.

I'm not saying I want this world or that I think it's inevitable, only this is directionally where the patterns point if I follow the lines, and only if competence is the criteria for determination.

Of course, with the emergent complexity of AI it's impossible to know. And the guessing often says more about the guesser than the future itself.

[Owen Benjamin 🐻 @OwenBenjamin]

Because being able to think about and discuss ideas without accepting them as fact or identity makes low IQ people furious. So you either have to accept constant anger or hide who you are. I don’t think it’s a curse but it’s understandable why people would.

You also can track patterns and effects far out into the future, so you have to watch people self destruct. And when you tell them what you see they think you’re full of hate or “unhinged” and keep self destructing and there’s nothing you can do about it besides accept it

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Dynamic Digital Radiography (DDR) allows you to observe movement like never before.

This novel low-dose X-ray imaging technique enables visualization of anatomy in motion.

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

As we approach our 250th anniversary, I believe it's worth noting that our government is only actually 165 years old.

The American Republic established in 1776 ended in 1861.

The Civil War cost almost a million lives: one out of every five white men of military age in the South and one out of every ten in the North. It destroyed virtually all of the wealth in the South — a 90% reduction to per capita GDP. The South would not recover economically until 1950.

But the real cost of the war wasn't economic. It was political.

The Civil War destroyed the Federalist system that our founders built to ensure the central government's power remained genuinely limited. Not limited by the goodwill of its legislators, which is no limit at all, but limited by the existence of rival sovereign States, which could restrain the central government and each other through competition.

After 1865 the only real limit to federal power was the self-restraint of the men in office. And that didn't last for long...

But, before we look at the long-term impact of America's first war of aggression, let us dispel a critical myth: that the Civil War ended slavery. Slavery was ending because of technology and economics. And it would have ended just as surely if no war had ever been fought between the States.

Britain abolished slavery, without a war, throughout its empire in 1833, freeing some 700,000 people in the West Indies alone. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Russia — the most backward great power in Europe — emancipated some twenty-three million serfs in 1861, the very year of Sumter. The Netherlands freed the slaves of Surinam and Curaçao in 1863. Across the entire industrializing world, unfree labor was abandoned within a single compressed generation. And, in no other great nation, was war required.

In America, slavery did not end because of General Grant and the boys in blue. It did not end because of a moral awakening. The cause was economic.

Chattel slavery extracts muscle power from human beings. Therefore, slavery only makes economic sense if muscle power is the binding constraint on production. Once machines had multiplied the labor output of muscle by hundreds of times, slavery was not only immoral but inefficient. In an industrial economy a slave costs more than he yields. As a result, capital flees from slavery into factories. All over the world. And even in the South.

Slavery ended everywhere at roughly the same time for the same reason: innovation and economics. It would have ended in the American South regardless of who won at Gettysburg. Even Brazil, the last holdout in the Western hemisphere, freed its 725,000 slaves with the Golden Law of 1888. No war was required: slavery was no longer productive.

With apologies to the celebrants of Juneteenth, slavery was not legally abolished in the United States until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The institution died, not because of the war, but because the world had entered the machine age.

The unnecessary destruction of half of our country and almost a million people wasn't the greatest tragedy of the Civil War. The greatest tragedy was the loss of Federalism and the hard-won liberty Americans won in the Revolution.

The Civil War destroyed the federal structure of the American republic, in which the several States were sovereign in their own spheres, with genuinely different legal systems, cultures, and traditions. The national government was beholden to the States, with only limited and enumerated powers.

The clearest proof of this change lies in our language. Before 1861, the United States was a plural noun. Men said the United States "are." After 1865 our country became singular. The United States "is."

The doctrine that a state could check the central government — by interposition, by nullification, in the last resort by departure — died at Appomattox, and with it the last structural brake on the power of the federal government died too.

The framers had not relied on parchment to limit the government they created. They relied on competition. So long as the States were genuinely sovereign — so long as a man oppressed in one State could remove to another, so long as the national government had to reckon with twenty or thirty rival centers of authority each jealous of its own jurisdiction — the central government could not easily grow into a Leviathan. The States were not administrative subdivisions. They were the Constitution's immune system.

What followed the Civil War was America's first empire -- in the South. And Empire's require a strong central government. Thus began a long erosion of the line between the citizen and the State, and between private institutions and public power.

Twelve years after the war, the Supreme Court considered whether a State could fix by law the prices a private grain warehouse charged its customers. The owners argued it was a taking of their property without due process — that what a man does with his own property, and what he charges for its use, is rightfully his own affair. The Court disagreed. Chief Justice Waite ruled that when private property is "affected with a public interest, it ceases to be juris privati only," and may be regulated by the government for the common good (Munn v. Illinois, 1877).

That was the end of private property in America. After all, if the national legislature may decide which property is "affected with a public interest," and may then dictate its prices and uses, there is in principle no property the government may not control.

Justice Stephen Field saw it and dissented with prophetic fury. The doctrine, he warned, "is nothing less than a bold assertion of absolute power by the State to control at its discretion the property and business of the citizen." A legislature that could fix the uses and prices of property "against the consent of the owner" could "deprive him of the property as completely as by a special act for its confiscation or destruction."

New York City's landlords are finding out the truth of this reality. They believe they own their properties. But they are about to find out otherwise, as rents will now be controlled by the mayor, who is a communist. This will spread. A communist ruling over all of America is only a matter of time. Why? Because the law provides an unlimited incentive for such power. There is nothing in America the government cannot take from you. Nothing.

The proof of the unlimited central authority was established in blood. The courts followed where the armies led. And the first American Empire — the North's conquest of the South — led to more such military adventures, which continue to this day.

In its first century, the United States heeded its founders' warnings against entangling alliances, a large standing army, and foreign military adventures. But the creation of the massive Northern army created its own momentum. Only 20 years after Reconstruction, the country clamored for another Empire and war against Spain. America became an imperial power, with possessions from the Caribbean to the far Pacific — Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines.

The consolidated nation that emerged from the Civil War was the precondition for the American Empire that emerged in 1898. Power flows to the center, and the center's reach has no natural boundary.

The Leviathan must be fed.

In 1913, every American became a direct serf to the national government: The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to tax incomes directly. The size of a government is set, in the end, by the size of its revenues. The income tax removed the ceiling.

The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified the same year, provided for the direct election of United States senators. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. This was the last vestige of State sovereignty. It could not be allowed to stand. The Senate stopped being the guardian of federalism.

And… then… with these Constitutional impediments finally vanquished, you saw Leviathan act to ensure its permanent dominance: it would control the money supply.

In December of 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System. The power over money, which the Constitution had strictly withheld from the central government, was enshrined into law. Income tax, a central bank, and the removal of the states from the Senate — all in one year.

The Revolution that began in 1861 was complete. America's Empire had begun.

Munn established that the government may dictate the use of private property. 1898 established that the consolidated nation would project power without limit beyond its borders. 1913 established the revenue, the money power, and the removal of the states from their guard post. The 1964 Civil Rights Act expanded this dictatorial power into every private transaction in America.

Government of the people, for the people, and by the people has been destroyed.

We now live in an Empire, not a Republic.

The Civil War didn't free any slaves; it enslaved all of us.

[Greg Meboe @gregmeboe]

@gjmooon And our appreciation of that state is attuned across eons.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

It communicates with us using a 23-watt transmitter.
Less than a refrigerator light bulb.

The signal takes 22 hours to reach us, traveling at the speed of light.

By the time it arrives, it's 20 billion times weaker than the power of a digital watch battery.

NASA's Deep Space Network picks it up using 70-meter dish antennas cooled to near absolute zero to reduce electronic noise.

The engineering required to hear a 23-watt signal from 24 billion km away is arguably more impressive than the spacecraft itself.

Launched 1977.
Still transmitting.
Still being heard.

We built something that works perfectly, 47 years later, in conditions no one has ever tested in.

That's what engineering for the long term looks like.

[Tock @yvan_theriault]

Je n’avais jamais vu ça avant…

Un “téléphone du vent”.

J’ai découvert ça sur Instagram il y a quelques jours et je trouve l’idée incroyablement touchante.

À l’origine, ce concept viendrait du Japon.
Il s’agit d’un vieux téléphone installé en pleine nature… mais il n’est relié à rien.

Les gens s’y rendent pour parler à quelqu’un qu’ils ont perdu.
Un parent. Un ami. Un amour. Quelqu’un qui leur manque encore.

Le téléphone ne fonctionne pas vraiment.
Personne ne répond.

Mais parfois, le deuil a simplement besoin d’un endroit où aller.
Parfois, l’amour a encore besoin de parler.

Et je trouve ça profondément beau.

On passe tellement de temps à faire semblant d’aller bien.
À rester fort.
À continuer d’avancer coûte que coûte.

Alors qu’au fond, manquer à quelqu’un est normal.
Continuer à lui parler dans sa tête est normal aussi.

Et quelque part, au milieu du vent…
ce vieux téléphone rappelle doucement aux gens qu’ils n’ont pas à avoir honte de leur douleur.

Franchement, je trouve ça magnifique.

Via Anonymes Dla Night

[History With Jacob @HistoryWJacob]

May 1918. Blackstone Hotel

Taft checks in and the clerk mentions Roosevelt is eating dinner there. The two hadn't spoken in six years.

They ran against each other in 1912, splitting the Republican Party and handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson. The friendship was dead.

Taft walked into the dining room anyway.

Roosevelt's friends saw him coming and went silent. He turned around. Taft was smiling.

Roosevelt jumped up and bear-hugged the man he had once called a "Fathead" with "Brains of a guinea pig".

The dining room stood up and applauded. Strangers who had read about the feud for years watched it end in real time.

Eight months later, Roosevelt died.

At the funeral, Taft stood alone and wept.

He later told Roosevelt's sister: "Had he died in a hostile state of mind toward me, I would have mourned the fact all my life. I loved him always and cherish his memory."

Don't wait.

[Greg Meboe @gregmeboe]

But why still lose patience when your son does normal kid stuff? I'm genuinely curious. Kids are literally designed to exploit boundaries. They thrive within increasingly complex rulesets.
Let them fail within their domains of responsibility and set artificial consequences outside of that.

[Owen Benjamin 🐻 @OwenBenjamin]

Stay at home moms don’t have to sacrifice their career. They get to do all the careers. For the people they love.
Women being “absent from history” is a good thing. Men fight the battles, give the speeches, and he the resources so the woman can focus on what matters. Making good people.
Men and women should never be in competition in any way. That’s a depopulation spell and very evil.