Jon Hsu

[Hillbilly @JamesHu27192912]

Delta Flight 15 takes off from Frankfurt at dawn.

On board: 218 passengers. Families. Business travelers. A pregnant woman. Shirley Brooks-Jones, 65 years old, heading home to Columbus, Ohio.

Five hours into the flight, a note reaches the cockpit.

All U.S. airspace is closed. Land immediately.

The captain says nothing about why. He tells passengers it's a minor instrument problem. Privately, the crew already knows about the World Trade Center.

Gander International Airport. Newfoundland, Canada. Midday.

The plane touches down 400 miles off its route. Out the window, passengers count 38 other jumbo jets already parked on the tarmac.

By nightfall, 53 international flights sit grounded here. Nearly 6,600 people are stuck, with nowhere to go.

Nobody is allowed off.

For 28 hours, 218 people sit inside that plane. No real answers. No word on what's happening back home.

Here's what makes it worse: most of them don't yet know if their own families are safe.

Word finally spreads through the cabin. Two hijacked planes. The towers. The Pentagon. A field in Pennsylvania.

The plane goes silent.

Gander. Day two.

Passengers finally step off the aircraft. They're bused 45 kilometers to a town called Lewisporte.

Population: just over 3,300 people.

Lewisporte has no idea 218 strangers are about to double its guest capacity overnight. It doesn't matter.

The mayor puts out one call for bedding and food.

The whole town answers.

Schools close. Churches open. The Lions Club clears its hall and sets up cots by hand. High schoolers skip class to serve meals and translate for confused travelers.

The pregnant passenger is placed in a home across the street from urgent care.

Elderly passengers are welcomed into private houses, not shelters.

Phone lines are opened for free, unlimited, day and night.

When passengers try to pay shopkeepers back, the answer is always no.

Nobody in Lewisporte will take a dollar.

Local volunteers even bring out screech, the region's famous rum, and host a mock "screeching-in" ceremony to make the exhausted travelers laugh.

For three days, this town of fishermen and loggers cares for people it has never met and will likely never see again.

Brooks-Jones later calls it something simple.

She says: "the most beautiful experience I have ever had in my life."

Gander Airport. Three days later. Departure.

Flight 15 is finally cleared to fly home.

Before takeoff, Brooks-Jones asks the captain for one thing: permission to speak on the intercom.

He hands her the microphone.

She reminds everyone what Lewisporte just did for them. Then she asks for something back.

Pledge sheets start moving up the aisle.

Business travelers write checks. Strangers pass around pens. By the time wheels touch down in Atlanta, passengers have pledged $15,000.

Brooks-Jones doesn't stop there.

Back in Columbus, she calls the Columbus Foundation. An anonymous donor hears the story and matches it instantly, doubling it to $30,000.

In 2002, the fund gets a name: the Lewisporte Area Flight 15 Scholarship Fund.

It's built for one purpose. Send local kids to college.

More than two decades later.

The fund is still active.

It has sent more than 300 students from the Lewisporte area to college and trade school. Doctors. Nurses. Engineers. Teachers.

Some of them weren't born yet when Flight 15 landed.

Brooks-Jones has flown back to Newfoundland more than two dozen times since 2001. She still shows up for graduation ceremonies.

The friendships that started on cots in a high school gym are still going, more than 20 years on.

Most people who know this story didn't hear it from a history book.

They heard it from a Broadway stage. Lewisporte and Gander's kindness became a musical called "Come From Away." It has since played in cities across the world.

Few people watching that show realize the scholarship fund behind it is still cutting checks to real students, every single year.

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

College/university is in the same spot right now that the housing market was in 2007. Easy access to essentially unlimited borrowing has predictably led to millions of people being "underwater" (so to speak) on their college loans.

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Mike Rowe: “I don’t know if you saw this, but the stat that got me within the democratic party, 59% of Democrats who support socialism have college degrees. 40% who support socialism don’t. this thing that’s being called a ‘worker uprising,’ it’s not.”

[MAZE @mazemoore]

If you think that Keir Starmer's censorship is bad, imagine what would happen if Democrats ever got their way in this country.

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

"It’s a wealth transfer with a loyalty program attached."

Yes, that's what communism is.

[Ramin Ekhtiar @raminrealtalk]

Everyone’s yelling “communism” about Mamdani’s housing plan. They’re missing the actual trick.

His own plan says the city will “engage lenders to trigger foreclosure” on landlords.
I’ve done real estate 20 years. Here’s what that means: they let the building go distressed, force the bank to eat the loan, then hand it off with NO mortgage.

A building with no loan is a money printer. And they pick who holds it.

That’s not a housing plan. It’s a wealth transfer with a loyalty program attached.
New York’s the test kitchen. California’s next.

Follow me — I’ll show you the part nobody else is reading. 🔨

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

this is the kind of messaging you craft for public education when you believe the purpose of public education is giving unions money rather than educating children

[Phillip.png ⚡🐢 @phillipstewart]

- Michael Anschel (Minneapolis, BMW i7 ~$100k): Total tab renewal $2,496, with nearly $600 from the EV surcharge.
- Sonja Anderson (Edina, 2023 model bought for $50k): Total $1,456, with over $300 EV-related; state calculated it as if worth $64k.
- Kevin McDonald (2023 Hyundai Ioniq): ~$900 bill, sparking online complaints from other EV owners ($500–$2,500 range).d21509

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@shulsie Granted, I worked in a private school, but a staggeringly high percentage condoned violent BLM riots. Way over 51%.

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

In 1913, only 1% of households filed income tax

Now, 100% do.

Every time a tax scheme is created, it starts with "just the rich" and quickly applies to everyone.

Every time.

California will seize assets of every citizen if this passes.

Not income, assets. Your house. Your furniture.

This would end the Golden State.

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@xaqwsx

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

Artemis II’s projected reentry path and timing

A tightly controlled return corridor across the Pacific, timed to the minute

[Deepak Patel @x_deepakpatel]

This is probably closer to the truth than most education policy conversations are willing to go. Because underneath every argument about curriculum, assessment, screen time, phonics, project based learning, is a prior question that nobody wants to have out loud. What is school actually for? What kind of person are we trying to produce and why?

Those are values questions. And the reason they never get resolved is that the people in the room do not actually agree on the answers. They just argue about the methods instead because that feels more manageable.

Your opt in idea makes sense for exactly that reason. Not because competition fixes everything but because alignment between what a family believes and what an institution is actually building in their child matters more than almost any other variable.

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@MurphyAJC @ajc Please never restart this.

[Resist the Mainstream @ResisttheMS]

ELON MUSK: "The value of a college education is somewhat overweighted… Too many people spend four years, accumulate a ton of debt, and then often don't have useful skills that they can apply afterward."

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@EndWokeness I'm Asian. Been here my whole life. The only "oppression" I've ever experienced was at the hands of an employer committed to DEI who wanted more black employees.

[James A. Furey @JamesAFurey]

I think most teachers are basically this lady.

All the credentials programs, all the PD, and most of the education books push a model of education which is essentially bunk and damaging to students.

At some point, many realize that not only are they not reaching students by doing what they were told is best practice, but they are actively harming them.

That realization doesn’t track at all with how much they care for their students and cause the sort of grief we see here.

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@VickieforNYC Another entry in the "make the roads more dangerous to make them safer" school of civil engineering

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@NYCSanitation These guys seem friendly

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 HOLLYWOOD TAKES ORWELL'S ANTI-COMMUNIST MASTERPIECE - MAKES IT ANTI-CAPITALIST AND WOKE INSTEAD

Andy Serkis spent 14 years adapting Animal Farm.

Added a billionaire villain not in the book. Made her the main threat.

Napoleon - Orwell's Stalin stand-in - gets downgraded to supporting antagonist voiced by Seth Rogen.

The new villain drives a Cybertruck knockoff. Producers claim resemblance to Elon is "unintentional." Sure.

Then Serkis rewrote the ending. Orwell's original: pigs become indistinguishable from humans, revolution betrayed, totalitarianism wins.

His version: animals overthrow pigs, plan "brighter future."

Director's explanation: "We wanted some hope."

Here's the problem: Animal Farm wasn't about capitalism.

Orwell wrote it as a direct allegory for Soviet Russia - how revolutionary ideals get corrupted by power-hungry authoritarians.

The pigs ARE the communists. That's the entire point.

Hollywood just inverted the message. Took a socialist's warning about socialism becoming tyranny and turned it into "corporations bad."

Added an outside capitalist villain so the animals' internal corruption - the actual story - becomes secondary...

Orwell spent his life warning about totalitarianism from the left.

Now Seth Rogen voices Napoleon like it's a buddy comedy while the real villain is tech billionaires.

14 years to completely miss the assignment. F.

Source: GB News

[Jon Hsu @jhsuosu]

@cspan @NTSB @JenniferHomendy This is typical of what happens in legislatures, both at the federal and state level. Shameful, but unsurprising.

[CSPAN @cspan]

.@NTSB Chair @JenniferHomendy: "The NTSB vehemently opposes section 373 of the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA…it does not in any way enhance safety, in fact, it reverses safety changes made after the midair collision..."