ColdWarNerd

Teacher, Firefighter, Retired Disaster Guy, Cheeseburger Fanatic
- Professor of Public Admin @ Point Park University. I post so I can find things later.

[Music Jim 🎩🪄 @MusicJim2]

John Lee Hooker🎩🪄 Boom Boom Boom

Remembering the legend John Lee Hooker on the 25th anniversary of his passing, June 21st, 2001 #RIP

#JohnLeeHooker

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

A random bear invited itself to a BBQ

📹 William McGuinn

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

My worst nightmare😬

[Mackinac Center @MackinacCenter]

It's not the climate, it's the fuel.
https://t.co/fHqW2IMs4j

[Military Support @MilitaryCooI]

"The enemy smelled our blood and thought we were prey. They forgot that a wounded animal is the most lethal. We tore that jungle apart to stay alive."

Major James Capers Jr stands as one of the greatest Recon Marines to ever do it. He enlisted in the Corps and fought his way into Force Recon where he became the leader of Team Broadminded. He completed more than 60 long range patrols and five major campaigns in Vietnam.

In 1967 near Phu Loc he was wounded 19 times while fighting a numerically superior enemy force. With broken legs, shrapnel across his body he refused evacuation until every Marine on his 9 man team was lifted out. His Silver Star citation states he continued to coordinate fire and movement under direct and indirect fire while suffering extreme blood loss.

That Silver Star, originally downgraded after his commander was kill*d and the Medal of Honor paperwork lost, is now being formally upgraded to the Medal of Honor. Capers was not only a mustang, he earned a battlefield commission in combat, a rare honor that speaks to the trust his Marines placed in him.

At eighty eight he remains a giant, a warrior who carried his team through hell and set the standard every Recon Marine still measures himself against.

[FirefighterCloseCall @TheSecretList]

Charlotte Fire this morning. @charlottefire @IAFFofficial @IAFF12thDVP #Charlotte #firefighters

[Richard Nixon Foundation @nixonfoundation]

On D-Day, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight D. Eisenhower sent thousands of young men into the hardest hours of their lives.

Nearly 20 years later, he returned to Normandy, not only as a former president, but as the commander who never forgot the cost.

“They bought us time so we can do better.”

[Pittsburgh Scanner @pgh_scanner]

Mt. Washington. Boggs Ave. Caller claims that their neighbor has a pet tiger and it's currently outside on the balcony.

[Trump Girl @TrumpGirlLove]

We had an interesting visitor on the plaza today at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in D.C. with Lake County Honor Flight # 30! 🫡🇺🇸

[ColdWarNerd @rskertich]

"… for the allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day" #dday #normandy #snoopy

[ColdWarNerd @rskertich]

@ThatEricAlper I'm a North Hills native, but I prefer that magical pizza joint on Ardmore Blvd with no defined shape, ridiculous portion control, and the lake of nectar the unrefined call "grease" #VinniePie

[Breaking911 @Breaking911]

WATCH: A massive explosion rocked a fireworks factory in Magħtab, near Naxxar, Malta.

[ColdWarNerd @rskertich]

@dvesean Working on the ambulance the night of Dead concerts was an experience!

[ColdWarNerd @rskertich]

@MarkSteynOnline @rickmcginnis The students at Point Park University, incredibly talented performers, ironically put on Caberet about the same time as the Tree of Life sho-ting in Pittsburgh. Gave renewed, heartbreaking meaning to the story.

[Bob Pompeani @KDPomp]

If you were not there, some of tonight’s #Pirates Drone show celebrating the USA 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives @dom_lucre]

🔥🚨LATEST: Thousands of Smokey The Bear fans are shocked after learning Sam Elliot was the voice of the iconic character.

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

A roller coaster in Texas stalled on a vertical section of track, leaving eight people stranded at the top. All eight were rescued by firefighters using a ladder truck.

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

Stevie Nicks was born on this day, in 1948.

Today marks her 78th birthday.

Happy Birthday to an iconic voice who performed some of the best vocals out there🎂🎈

One of those songs Mick Fleetwood defined as 'exorcism' for Stevie Nicks' vocals, Rhiannon live at the Midnight Special, in 1976.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

A Swedish psychologist did the research behind the most famous success rule of the last twenty years, and then spent the rest of his life trying to prove it was wrong.

His name was Anders Ericsson.

He died in 2020, and most of the people who repeat the rule he inspired have no idea he thought the popular version of it was broken.

In 1993 he published a paper with two colleagues called "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." It ran in Psychological Review and went on to be cited more than nine thousand times, which makes it one of the most influential psychology papers ever written.

The study itself was small and clean. He went to a music academy in West Berlin and asked the faculty to sort their violinists into three groups. The best students, the ones with real soloist potential. The good students, a notch below. And the ones headed toward becoming music teachers instead of performers.

Then he reconstructed how many hours each group had practiced across their entire lives.

The pattern was almost too neat. The best group had logged an average of over ten thousand hours by the age of twenty. The good group sat around eight thousand. The future teachers were down near three to four thousand. More skill, more hours, in a near perfect line.

Fifteen years later Malcolm Gladwell picked up that one number for his book Outliers, gave it a name, and the ten thousand hour rule was born. The pitch was irresistible. Ten thousand hours and you become a master at almost anything. The Beatles, Bill Gates, every story wrapped neatly around the same figure.

It became gospel. It is probably the single most quoted idea in the entire self improvement world.

And the man whose research it was built on spent his remaining years saying it was wrong. He wrote a whole book in 2016 called Peak just to correct the record. He even put out an open letter with a title that did not hide how he felt, calling it the danger of delegating education to journalists.

His objections were simple, and they are worse than they sound.

First, ten thousand was an average, not a threshold. Half of the best violinists had not even reached it. There was no line in the sand where a person suddenly crossed from amateur to expert. In his own words there was nothing magical about the number at all.

Second, at twenty years old those violinists were not masters. They were very good students who still had years of work ahead of them before anyone would call them world class. The ten thousand hours had not bought mastery. It had bought potential.

Third, and this is the part that quietly takes the whole rule apart, the real number is wildly different depending on the person and the field.

Look at chess, where researchers tracked exactly how long it took players to reach master level. The average came out around eleven thousand hours, close enough to the famous figure to feel like proof. But the average was hiding the real story. One player reached master in barely three thousand hours. Another needed more than twenty three thousand. That is an eight to one gap between two people chasing the same title.

And some players put in more than twenty five thousand hours and never became masters at all.

So if it was never really about the hours, what was Ericsson actually trying to say.

His real finding was about the kind of practice, not the quantity of it. He called it deliberate practice, and it has almost nothing in common with what most people mean by putting in the hours. It is not running through songs you already know. It is working right at the edge of what you cannot do yet, with immediate feedback, with someone or something telling you exactly what just went wrong, over and over, in a way that is uncomfortable the entire time.

Most of the hours people log are the opposite of that. Comfortable repetition of things they already have. He watched professionals do this for decades and noticed something disturbing. Many of them stopped improving after the first few years and then simply held the same level for the rest of their careers, racking up hours that bought them nothing.

Then it gets worse, and this is the part that should matter most to anyone trying to build something real.

A team of researchers led by Brooke Macnamara pulled together every study they could find on practice and performance to ask one question. How much of the gap between good and great does practice actually explain.

In games it explained twenty six percent. In music twenty one. In sports eighteen.

In education it explained four percent. In professions, the actual jobs people do for a living, it explained less than one percent.

Read that again. In the messy, open ended domains where most of us actually live and work, the place where you are trying to build a company with no clean rules and no scoreboard, the number of hours you grind explains almost nothing about whether you win.

Here is what that means for you.

If you have ever felt behind because you did the math in your head and realized you have not put in your ten thousand hours, you were measuring the wrong thing the whole time. The hours were never the variable. There is no counter ticking up toward a moment where you suddenly become good.

What separates people is not how long they have been doing the thing. It is whether they spend that time pushing into what they cannot do yet and getting honest feedback fast, or whether they spend it comfortably repeating what they already know and calling it experience.

You can put in ten thousand hours and stay average. People do it every day. They have twenty years of experience that is really one year of experience lived twenty times.

Or you can build your hours so that almost every one of them stings a little, and pass people who started a full decade ahead of you.

Stop counting your hours. Start auditing them.

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

This is a serious, developing situation in Garden Grove, Orange County, California.

Quick Summary:

• A 34,000-gallon tank at GKN Aerospace (12122 Western Ave) containing methyl methacrylate (a volatile, flammable, and toxic chemical used in plastics/aerospace manufacturing) began overheating and leaking vapors on Thursday.

• Fire crews have been unable to fully stabilize it. Officials say the tank cannot be secured.

• Two possible outcomes remain:

1. The tank fails → catastrophic spill of ~6,000–7,000 gallons of toxic chemicals.

2. Thermal runaway → explosion that could ignite nearby tanks.
Current Status (as of May 23, 2026):

• Evacuation orders affecting ~40,000 residents across parts of Garden Grove and surrounding cities (Cypress, Stanton, Anaheim, Buena Park, Westminster).

• Shelters are open. Schools closed. Roads blocked in the area.

• Crews are actively cooling the tank with water to buy time.

• No injuries reported so far, and air quality is currently stable, but officials are preparing for the worst.

This is being treated as a major hazmat incident with very real risks of a large chemical release or explosion.

If you’re in the area: Follow official alerts from Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA), local police, and Nixle. Do not ignore evacuation orders.

Stay safe out there. I’ll keep an eye on updates if you want the latest.