Chris Johnson

Clemson Grad '94
Enterprise Sales - Public Sector
KeyMark, Inc

[Victims of Communism @VoCommunism]

“Communism and freedom...signify two titanic ideas, two ways of life, two totally irreconcilable beliefs in the nature and destiny of man.”

-Dwight D. Eisenhower

[Chris Johnson @johnson_dchris]

@fitsnews @MarkSanford Can’t believe he “waltzed” in and “rolled” in to a group of folks who might not agree with him. Terrible politician, I guess.

Stop it.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: Democratic socialism is not Communism

DSA leader: Our goal is communism

[Chris Johnson @johnson_dchris]

@3rdeye_rav3n Good for you, brother

[REO Industries @reoindustries]

The affordable American truck is coming back.

Reservations are now open for the REO Runabout.

Target Specs:
-$21,500~
-4-cylinder gas engine
-Manual & automatic transmission
-Body-on-frame
-Mechanical 4WD
-600+ mile tank
-Texas built

Reserve for $25.
https://t.co/uJ1iV9jZVC

[Tyler Ratcliff @TylerRatcliff17]

Smoked bologna, I think so. Gotta add the slaw 🤣🤣

[John Gilreath @jgilreath9]

Let’s rally behind one of our own!!

100% of proceeds go to @StephenGarcia and his family

[Noah Pollak @NoahPollak]

Remember: Leftists think terrorism is cool and authentic and glamorous. It's not a new phenomenon.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A newborn sperm whale can’t swim. It starts sinking the second it’s born. If nobody pushes it to the surface, it drowns in mile-deep water.

On July 8, 2023, a sperm whale named Rounder went into labor off the coast of Dominica. Researchers from Project CETI, a $33 million AI initiative out of MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern that’s trying to decode whale language, happened to be there doing routine fieldwork. They had drones in the air and underwater microphones running. What they captured over the next six hours just got published in two papers, one in Science and one in Scientific Reports.

Eleven whales gathered at the surface before Rounder even started delivering. Her mother, Lady Oracle, was there. So was her daughter Accra. Three generations in the water. But the wild part: half those whales belonged to a completely separate bloodline that normally keeps its distance from Rounder’s family. On a typical day, these two family lines split off to hunt in different areas and rarely cluster together. For the birth, they all converged before labor started. The unrelated family somehow knew it was coming.

The delivery took 34 minutes. Sperm whale calves come out tail-first with their flukes still folded from the womb. They haven’t developed the oil-filled organ in their heads that helps adult whales float, so the moment they’re born, they’re dead weight in the ocean. Every adult whale in the group, related and unrelated, started taking turns pushing the calf up to breathe. They kept this rotation going for three hours. When a pod of pilot whales (known to be aggressive toward sperm whales) and a large group of Fraser’s dolphins showed up during delivery, the adults formed a wall around the newborn until the threat passed.

The underwater audio is where it gets interesting. CETI’s microphones picked up the whales changing their vocal patterns during the birth. The click-based sounds they use to talk to each other shifted at specific moments, and vowel-like structures appeared in the recordings. This builds on what CETI found in 2024 when they ran machine learning on over 8,700 recorded whale calls and discovered sperm whale communication isn’t a basic 21-sound code. It’s a system of about 300 distinct sound combinations, with the whales adjusting rhythm and timing in real time, speeding up and slowing down the way a musician does mid-performance. A 2025 follow-up from UC Berkeley found these clicks also contain vowel patterns, something scientists had assumed only humans could produce.

Sperm whales carry the largest brain of any animal on the planet. About 9 kg. Roughly six times heavier than yours. The evolutionary analysis in the new Science paper suggests this kind of cooperative birthing goes back over 36 million years, to the common ancestor of all toothed whales. The calf was spotted a year later, swimming with its family.

[Uzi @UziCryptoo]

The max one can pay into social security per year is $10,453.20.

If you did that every year from age 18 until retirement, the max you’ll get from SS is $4,873 /month.

If you put it into an S&P index fund instead, you would receive $32,583 per month.

Social Security is a scam.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Conor Neill on the 3 best ways to start a speech (most people get this wrong):

"I guarantee if you go to conferences, 19 out of 20 speakers will start in one of these ways: 'My name is Conor Neill. I'm from Tango, and this talk is about the latest trend in monitoring strategies.' But all of you are sitting with a piece of paper that already says who I am and what I'm going to talk about. By repeating what you already know, I'm giving a signal that it's time to get your BlackBerry out."

Conor explains the three best ways to start instead:

Third best: A question that matters to the audience.

"How do you phrase a problem that the audience faces in a question?"

Second best: A factoid that shocks.

"There are more people alive today than have ever died. Every two minutes, the energy reaching the earth from the sun is equivalent to the whole annual energy usage of humanity. Does that change how you think about energy?"

The best way: Start like you'd start a story to a child.

"How do we start a story to a child? 'Once upon a time.' And what happens when you say once upon a time? My daughter leans forward, gets ready to hear, engages. We were all trained as kids to know when a story's coming. We also know when a teacher is about to deliver a 40-minute boring lecture."

He explains the grown-up version:

"In business, you don't hear Jack Welch saying 'once upon a time.' Steve Jobs doesn't start his speeches with 'once upon a time.' So there's a grown-up way of saying it: 'In October, the last time I was in this room, there were 120 people here. I was having a conversation with one of the world's experts on public speaking and he said something to me that changed what I think about what's important in speaking.' Now I can pause for 30 seconds, and you want to know what he said."

Conor concludes:

"Stories are about people. They're not about objects. They're not about things. If you want to tell a good story about your company, don't talk about the software talk about the people who built the software. What they do. How they are. What's important to them. What they sacrifice."

[Ian Miles @ianmiles]

You’re allowed to wave Hamas flags. Hezbollah flags. Flags of the USSR. IRGC flags. ISIS flags. Gay pride flags. But don’t you dare wave the British flag or a police officer will confiscate it and arrest you for incitement and racism.

Welcome to the UK.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

A man named "Abdullah Khan" stabbed a police officer and set Conor McGregor’s pub in Dublin on fire for insulting the Muslim prophet…

Just a typical Irish lad.

[The Knowledge Archivist @KnowledgeArchiv]

“A people that has forgotten its traditions, its ancestors, and the sacrifices that bought its freedom is a people already conquered. For the man without memory is easily ruled, and the man without roots is easily led.”

—Hilaire Belloc

[P.T. Ward @HTWardish]

Reminder that Schumer killed a provision in the CARES Act that would’ve refilled the SPR at a historically low cost of $24 dollars a barrel. He called it a “bailout for Big Oil.”

[#ClemsonNFL @ClemsonPros]

Tigers take the series!

@ClemsonBaseball

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

It's so weird to see the narrative shift from "MAGA wouldn't love Alysa Liu if they knew her politics" to "We hate the American hockey team for no reason whatsoever except that our political enemies like them"

[Chris Johnson @johnson_dchris]

@alexchristy17 This is just weird.

[Roy Rogers Happy Trails Music Shop  @RoyRogers_HTMS]

Billy Strings performs Pink Floyd
"Fearless" 7/23/23 Essex Junction, VT