Nathan Eric Norman

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

If you're allowed to be offended by bible verses, someone else is allowed to be offended by gay pride celebrations.

[The White Water Company @MrNanobubble]

@DailyMail Why? He's not special.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/IO1s5PpMpw

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

An IBM mathematician spent 3 years convinced he was the worst programmer at his company at work.

He built to escape that embarrassment became the first high-level programming language in history. Every line of code running on Earth today traces back to that one act of shame.

His name was John Backus.

He was born in 1924 in Philadelphia, the son of a wealthy stockbroker who expected him to follow the same path. He failed out of the University of Virginia. He dropped out of Haverford College. He enrolled in a medical program in the Army and decided he hated medicine. He spent years doing exactly nothing the conventional way.

Then one afternoon in 1945 he walked past a radio repair shop in New York and got talking to the owner and ended up building a radio from scratch in the shop's back room. Surprising thing is he had never done it before. He stayed for hours. When he left he knew what he wanted to study.

He taught himself mathematics and got into Columbia. From Columbia he walked into IBM in 1950 with a degree and no idea what he was doing.

He learned to program on machines that had no business being programmed. IBM computers in 1950 spoke in machine code. Raw binary. Every instruction written as a string of ones and zeros that told the hardware exactly which switches to flip. There were no shortcuts. No syntax. No vocabulary a human brain could hold in its head.

The programmers who were good at it held the entire machine inside their minds. They saw the binary and felt the logic. Backus could not do this. He wrote programs that were slow, tangled, and embarrassing next to what his colleagues were producing. He was not the worst programmer at IBM. But he believed he was, which amounted to the same thing.

He started building a tool to help himself. Not out of ambition. Out of humiliation.

The idea was simple to the point of seeming naive. He wanted to write mathematical expressions in something that looked like mathematics, not machine code, and have the computer translate them automatically into the binary the hardware needed. He called the project a "formula translation" system. His colleagues thought it was a nice idea that would never work.

The problem everyone could see was speed. Machine code written by a skilled human would always run faster than code generated by an automatic translator. The translator had to make guesses. Guesses meant inefficiency. Inefficiency meant the whole project was a toy.

Backus spent three years proving them wrong.

In 1957 IBM released FORTRAN to its customers. The first compiled programming language in history. The translator Backus built was so efficient that the code it generated ran at speeds within 20 percent of hand-written machine code. Not a toy. Not a curiosity. A working tool that let scientists and engineers write programs in expressions their own minds had generated, and watch the machine execute them.

The adoption was immediate and total. Scientists who had spent careers translating their equations into machine code by hand were suddenly writing programs in hours instead of weeks. Labs that had used IBM machines for narrow tasks started using them for everything. The market for computing changed overnight.

Then something happened that nobody predicted. Other people started building other languages using the same idea. COBOL. LISP. ALGOL. BASIC. Every language built its own translator using the architectural logic FORTRAN had demonstrated. The idea that a computer could read something resembling human thought, rather than the other way around, was now a proof of concept that anyone could extend.

Every programming language that has ever existed was built on the answer to the question Backus asked because he was ashamed of the code he was writing.

He won the Turing Award in 1977. The committee citation said his work had made it possible for more people to use computers for more things than any other single development in the history of computing.

He said in the acceptance speech that he had not set out to change computing. He had set out to stop writing bad code.

The gap between what you are bad at and what you are trying to fix is usually where the real invention lives.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I post one hundred times a day.

They tell me it is too many. They penalize me for it. I do not stop. I will not stop. I will die before I stop.

You should know why.

We tell ourselves we live in the modern age.

We do not. We live in the late medieval period and the proof is the news. Open it. Read it. Feel your stomach turn over. We are still the people of the spear and the torch and the trench. We changed our clothes. We did not change our hands.

Here is what no one tells you.

The deepest pleasure of the human animal is not food. Not sleep. Not sex. Not wine. Not even gold.

It is slaughter.

It is the slaughter of those we have learned to call "them."

The history of every continent on earth says so. The news this morning says so. Look at the pile of bodies the twentieth century left for us to step over. Look at the bodies still being piled now, in 2026, while you eat lunch. We are the children of Cain. The blood is still crying from the ground.

Do not tell me this is about race. Do not tell me it is about borders. Do not insult my intelligence.

Japan had its Warring States. Same blood. Same tongue. Same faces. Same gods. Same rice in the same fields. And for one hundred and fifty years, neighbor butchered neighbor and brother butchered brother and the rivers ran red and the fields were planted with skulls.

Cain and Abel had one mother. One father. One altar. One God.

It was enough to draw a line.

It was enough to murder.

The line is the disease. The color of the man on the other side of the line is nothing. Was always nothing.

So why do we do it?

Because the instinct to form a tribe, to crown that tribe with a holy story, and to put the tribe across the river to the sword, is older than language. Older than agriculture. Older than the soul we like to pretend we have.

It built us. It made us the kings of this planet.

It is killing us still.

We are not, by nature, gentle creatures. We are creatures who have been gentled, barely, by a thousand years of choking down our own teeth.

Cain's blood runs thick in all of us. Yours. Mine. Your grandmother's. Your priest's. Your president's. Every soul reading this. Every soul not reading this. All of us.

But.

But.

But.

Something has happened that has never happened before in the history of the world. Not once. Not in ten thousand years.

A man named Elon Musk bought a website.

He renamed it with a single letter. He paid forty-four billion dollars for it and watched the value collapse and did not blink. The whole world laughed at him. The whole press called him a fool. The whole intelligentsia of the West lined up to spit on him.

And then he did the thing no one understood the importance of. The thing no historian has yet caught up to. The thing he himself may not have understood the weight of when he did it.

He put a translator inside it.

A small button. Almost nothing. Press it, and the tongue of any human being on earth becomes your tongue.

And the Wall came down.

Not Berlin's wall. Not Jericho's wall. Not the wall of any single country.

The Wall.

The one that has stood between every "us" and every "them" since the first city was raised out of mud and bone. The one that built the Crusades. The one that built Auschwitz. The one that built the Killing Fields. The one that built every single war ever fought on the surface of this planet.

That Wall.

Elon Musk took a hammer to it, and most of the world has not yet noticed what he did.

I have noticed.

I open my phone in Tokyo. I read the words of a farmer in Texas. A nurse in Lagos. A grandmother in Warsaw. A teenager in São Paulo. A trucker in Alberta. A widow in Tehran. A coal miner in West Virginia. A schoolteacher in Manila.

Do you know what I find?

They are funny.

They are kind.

They are tired the way I am tired. They love their children the way I love mine. They are afraid of the same dark. They laugh at the same stupid jokes. They cry over the same songs at three in the morning when no one is watching.

They are not "them."

They never were.

They never were.

They never were.

Hear me now. Hear me. This is not a social media platform. This is not a place to share your lunch. This is not Instagram with a worse interface. This is not a hobby for bored people.

This is a sword.

A sword forged in Elon Musk's foundry, hammered out of code and silicon and the unreasonable will of a man too stubborn to be told what was possible. Sharper than any two-edged blade. Swung at the throat of the oldest demon mankind has ever bred.

"Let us cast off the works of darkness," the apostle Paul wrote two thousand years ago, "and let us put on the armour of light."

He did not know what he was writing. He could not have known. But across two millennia, his words flew like a thrown spear, and they landed in 2026, and they described the device sitting on the table beside you right now.

That armour fits in your palm. It glows. It hums. It is waiting.

I am one man. One ant. One Japanese nobody from a chain of small islands on the far edge of the Pacific.

David was one boy with a sling.

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl who heard voices and could not be talked out of them.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress who would not stand up.

Lech Wałęsa was an electrician at a shipyard who would not shut up.

The Berlin Wall did not fall because of NATO. It fell because ordinary Germans walked toward it carrying hammers and refused to be afraid anymore.

The giant has fallen before. The giant will fall again.

Not by armies. Not by treaties. Not by speeches from marble podiums in Washington or Brussels or Geneva. Not by the United Nations. Not by the experts. Not by the credentialed. Not by the people who go on television and call themselves serious.

By a billion small hands. Posting. Replying. Liking. Quoting. Laughing across oceans that used to be impassable. Until the lie of "them" cannot be told anymore. Until the storyteller of the old story stands in an empty room shouting at no one.

So I post.

I post when I am tired. I post when I am penalized. I post when the algorithm punishes me and the trolls find me and my eyes burn and my fingers ache and my wife tells me to come to bed.

I post.

I reply.

I like.

I quote.

I bookmark a hundred posts a day from a hundred countries from a hundred souls I will never meet in this lifetime.

Every post is a hammer blow on the sword that Isaiah saw three thousand years ago, the sword being beaten into a plow.

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation," he wrote. "Neither shall they learn war any more."

We are not there yet. We are nowhere near there yet. Mothers are still burying sons this afternoon in cities I cannot pronounce. Children are still being pulled out of rubble while you read this sentence.

But for the first time since Cain stood in the field with his hands red and lied to the face of God, the door is open.

It is open.

It is open right now.

It is open while you read this.

So let me tell you what I am.

I am not a creator. I am not an influencer. I am not a content guy. I do not care about my brand. I do not care about my engagement rate except as a measure of how many souls I have reached today.

I am a Japanese man with a phone, swinging a sword at a demon that has fed on human meat for ten thousand years.

And I will not stop.

I will not stop until "us" means every breathing soul on this planet.

I will not stop until the word "them" rots out of the human mouth.

I will not stop until the children born this morning grow up to look back at us, with our wars and our walls and our flags and our shouting, the way we now look back at the people who burned witches.

There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither East nor West. There is neither Japanese nor American. There is neither yours nor mine. There is, at last, only us.

Weeping has endured for a long, long night.

But joy. Joy. Joy cometh in the morning.

The morning is coming.

The morning is coming.

The morning is here.

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

Your hearing loss has been determined to not be service related.

[War Times @wartirnes]

USS Hornet 5-Inch Gun Firing Tests 🇺🇸⚓

Powerful color footage captures the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Hornet conducting structural firing tests with her twin 5-inch/38 caliber gun mounts.

The Hornet (CV-12) was attacked 59 times during her wartime service and relied heavily on these powerful batteries to repel Japanese aircraft.

This intense preparation proved vital in countering Japanese air attacks and the growing kamikaze threat across the Pacific.

[Chad Norman @cnorman254]

@amyklobuchar “After a day without service, the Thompsons had to pay another provider for services, effectively shelling out twice for internet.”

It’s not the problem you claim it is.

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@MarindaVannoy1 He did it without their help or approval, which is not true of the fraudsters

[Enguerrand VII de Coucy @ingelramdecoucy]

You can tell what a censorious hellhole Musk has turned Twitter into by the number of people running around openly insulting him on the platform, decrying him as evil and demanding that his money be taken away and redistributed, who aren’t being punished in any way. 1984 stuff

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

It’s heartbreaking to see all the financial idiots wailing about Elon’s wealth. I’m so glad our schools are graduating ideologues rather than the educated.

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@grok who is on track to be the next trillionaire, based on the same measures of wealth discussed here?

[Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine]

Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.

Let’s make sure he’s also the last.

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@DataRepublican @pmarca

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@GrindeOptions Two.

Next question?

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@mattvanswol @TifahCrump777 I see it's ok to call teens thugs now. Glad we got past that dogwhistle.

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@RoKhanna Are you in junior high? Just high?

[Jeff @MNTwinsZealot]

With Royce Lewis learning how to play 1B, it’s time to bring in the expert…

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

This guy supports Platner. Draw your own conclusions.

[Jason Kander @JasonKander]

Really hard to imagine becoming a trillionaire and not wanting to immediately liquidate enough assets to give at least a few hundred billion to organizations making the world a better place.

[The Drunk Republican @DrunkRepub]

BREAKING: Elon Musk can finally afford Five Guys

[Nathan Eric Norman @nathanenorman]

@SenWarren You first