SensibleContemplations

Trying to make sense of it all
Observations from the sanitarium
Drivel from my brain to yours
Widow with 3 little birds to help launch

[The Coaches Site @TheCoachesSite]

At #TCSLive, Dan Ceman, Head Coach of HC Košice, emphasized that offensive-zone play only happens if teams can first exit their own zone with control. Find out his principles for breakout success. WATCH NOW: https://t.co/IRbHeRSpHQ

[Topher Scott @HockeyThinkTank]

COACHES: Here are two great Dzone clips of winger placement, anticipation, and effort.

When the puck is low, the Dzone wingers are low taking away the house. As the puck goes low to high they work hard (EDM SPRINTS!!) to get out to the point. Both Kapanen (thru work) and Tuch (thru anticipation) create turnovers that lead to offense the other way.

You're seeing some teams much more aggressive allowing their wingers up high even to create pressure on the offensive D, though they're further from the front of the net. These clips are great examples!

[Michelle @Michell33650674]

The ONLY reason Trump, Musk, and their GOP accomplices are OPENLY trying to RIG the 2026 Midterm elections is because they ALREADY successfully RIGGED 2016 and 2024! Had this been STOPPED, at the GET GO, none of this would be HAPPENING! Trump would never have been allowed in the White House, and he and his Epstein Class cronies wouldn't be DESTROYING America in a FASCIST COUP! When, the FUCK, will everyone in America and the world UNDERSTAND this????

[Owen @Owennfa]

I came across a Reddit post that described AI in a way I can’t stop thinking about:

“AI allows the wealthy to access skills while stripping skilled people of their ability to access wealth.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the purpose of AI captured so brutally and accurately.

[Wiki Leaks 1.0 @WikiLeaksQ]

Today we learned that the Prime Minister of Israel repeatedly raped, choked and beat Virginia Guiffre and the media today won't even say his name or the country he was the Prime Minister of.

It's impossible to hate the media enough.

[ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 @ImBreckWorsham]

BREAKING: This is HUGE.

Iranian officials say they’re preparing to release voicemails left to them by Donald Trump and if they do so, the political fallout could be explosive.

They claim Trump begged, threatened and even tried to bribe Iranian officials to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—because soaring gas prices were becoming a political nightmare ahead of the midterms.

Not national security. Not principle. Not peace.

Just a desperate scramble to keep voters in line until November 3.

If those recordings exist, America may finally hear what desperation sounds like when the cameras are off and Trump can't control the narrative.

How humiliating.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Don't forget that nearly all Republicans in Congress stood by and supported Trump's...

-Tax cuts for the rich
-Cuts to the social safety net
-Iran War
-ICE abductions & National Guard deployments
-Inflationary tariffs
-Blatant corruption

His unpopularity is theirs too — and the midterms are here.

[Kyle MacLennan @MacLennan28]

UTAH Exploiting the 3 Up Diamond PK

• Bumper drops to the goal line
• High spread & puck movement at the top
• 2v1 at the net

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

What is currently happening in America is exactly why 1789 France happened.

[Antonio J Martinez H @AntonioJMarti]

Leopoldo Emperador Altzola

ÚLTIMA HORA: Donald Trump acaba de enfrentarse a una de las descripciones más brutalmente brillantes —y precisas— de su abominable carácter que JAMÁS hayamos leído.
El autor Oliver Kornetzke no se contuvo. Así describió a Trump:
“Miren. El cadáver purulento de la podredumbre estadounidense embutido en un traje que no le queda bien: la sordidez de un estafador, la cobardía de un evasor del servicio militar, la glotonería de un parásito, el racismo de un miembro del Ku Klux Klan, el sexismo de un canalla de barrio, la ignorancia de un borracho de bar y la avaricia de un depredador de fondos de cobertura; todo pintado de naranja con aerosol y exhibido como un cerdo premiado en una feria del condado”, escribe Kornetzke. Ni un presidente. Ni siquiera un hombre. Solo la destilación enfermiza de todo lo que este país jura no ser, pero siempre ha sido: arrogancia disfrazada de excepcionalismo, estupidez presentada como sentido común, crueldad vendida como dureza, avaricia exaltada como ambición y corrupción venerada como evangelio. Es la sombra de Estados Unidos hecha carne, un ídolo de calabaza podrida que demuestra que cuando una nación se arrodilla ante el dinero, el poder y el rencor, no solo pierde su alma, sino que defeca esta obscenidad inflada y la llama líder.
Nunca se escribieron palabras más ciertas.

[hunter @hxxntrr]

Elon Musk hasn't sold a Tesla share in years and lives off $1 billion in personal loans

His Tesla stock keeps appreciating
The loans charge him 2-3% interest
The IRS never sees a single dollar of capital gains tax

This is exactly how the wealthiest people in America accumulate wealth without paying taxes

When you SELL an asset that has appreciated, you owe capital gains tax. For someone like Elon selling $1B in Tesla stock:

Federal capital gains at 20%: $200M
Net investment income tax at 3.8%: $38M
Texas state tax: $0 (this is why Elon moved there)

Total tax bill on selling $1B: $238M

When you BORROW against appreciated assets, you owe ZERO tax. Loan proceeds are not income. They never appear on your tax return

Sell $1B in Tesla stock: $762M after tax
Borrow $1B against it at 2-3% interest: $1B tax-free, and he still owns the stock

Tax planners call it "buy, borrow, die":

Borrow against appreciated stock
Use the loan for homes, cars, business operations
Never sell the underlying stock
Refinance when the stock goes up
Pass everything to heirs at a stepped-up basis
Heirs sell with $0 in capital gains tax owed

The regular person version:

If you have $100K+ in stocks at Schwab or Fidelity, you can open a pledged asset line. Borrow up to 50% of the portfolio at roughly 6-8%. No fixed monthly principal payments

$200K in stocks:
Borrow $100K at 6.5%
Annual interest cost: $6,500
Tax you didn't pay by not selling: 20,000-30,000

And if you don't have $100K in stocks, you have the other thing banks lend against. A 700 credit score borrows $100,000 to $250,000 at 0% for 12 months on business credit cards. Elon pays 2-3%. You'd pay nothing for the first year

Most middle-class Americans never do any of this because they follow advice that says "live within your means and don't borrow"

The wealthiest Americans borrow constantly

Elon never sells Tesla. He never pays capital gains tax. The strategy is legal and it's been in the tax code since before any of us were born

[Sgt Pepper @MzSgtPepper]

mAgats in my comments 👇

[Knoxie @KnoxieLuv]

Whitney Webb is explaining how Palantir was built. It is the same story Danny Casolaro died chasing, and Israel and Robert Maxwell are in the middle of it.

Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. Wrists slashed a dozen times. Ruled a suicide. He had told his brother that if he turned up dead, it would not be an accident. The files for the book he called The Octopus were gone.

What he was tracking was not one scandal. It was a network. The Inslaw/PROMIS theft. Iran-Contra. BCCI. The October Surprise allegations. Arms and intel cutouts like Cabazon-Wackenhut. A bankruptcy judge had already found the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit." That ruling was later tossed on jurisdiction, not on the facts. The allegation that stuck was that the software was backdoored and sold or given to foreign governments so intelligence services could read the databases it sat on. Israel was at the front of that list.

Webb's Palantir history is that pattern, a decade later, with some of the same people.

John Poindexter was the highest-ranking Reagan official indicted over Iran-Contra. After 9/11 he was put in charge of DARPA's Total Information Awareness, a dragnet built to fuse commercial and government data and predict crime and terror before they happened. Congress defunded it in 2003 after the backlash. The same year Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Richard Perle introduced Thiel and Alex Karp to Poindexter. Perle had already been caught in the 1970s passing classified material to the Israeli embassy, and he later had deep ties to Netanyahu's first government. Karp has said the CIA was the intended client from the start. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, was an early backer. Palantir engineers were at Langley every other week in the early years.

PROMIS was the 1980s case-management system allegedly turned into a spy tool. The claim Casolaro was chasing, and that Webb has documented, is that Robert Maxwell helped move the bugged version. A trapdoor was planted so Israeli intelligence could read any database the software touched, and Maxwell was the salesman who carried it to governments and institutions abroad. Palantir Gotham is the 2000s version of the same job. Stitch the databases. Surface the hidden links. Sell pre-crime as predictive policing. Same function. Private letterhead. So the constitutional fight Congress already won does not have to be refought.

The part most people miss is at the end of the clip. Webb says CIA CIO Alan Wade, who helped shape the early Palantir product and had been inside the TIA world, teamed with Christine Maxwell on a homeland-security program called Chiliad. Christine is Robert Maxwell's daughter. The Maxwell family did not stop at Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell was tied to the PROMIS distribution story. His daughter shows up later on pre-crime software with a CIA official out of the same surveillance program Palantir was built to replace.

So the chain runs like this. Stolen DOJ software in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell and Israeli intelligence on the backdoored version. Iran-Contra figures. Then the same Iran-Contra figure running TIA. Then a Maxwell daughter and a TIA-linked CIA official on pre-crime software. Then Palantir as the scaled private version, introduced by a man already tied to Israeli intelligence channels.

Casolaro was trying to map the first half. He never got to the second half. Palantir did not exist yet. His files disappeared. The architecture did not.

The Octopus was a thesis about a standing network that builds surveillance software, routes it through private cutouts, and uses Iran-Contra-era operators and Israeli intelligence partners to keep it off the books. PROMIS was tentacle one. Robert Maxwell was the courier. TIA was the failed government version. Palantir is tentacle two.

The software Casolaro died investigating, after it learned to survive a congressional ban by becoming a company.

[Josh Nashed @j_nashed]

Straight from the mouth of a mid-major D1 coach a few minutes ago. I told him I needed to write this stuff down and share with everyone.

We were talking about a few players that I work with and he was telling me about how ridiculous recruiting is getting.

"Everyone's running out of roster spots... so we are all like, 'this guy sucks' [when watching a player] because he's not an absolute dude. And we're all passing on good players because you'll probably be able to find an older or more experienced guy down the road".

"We basically have 3 different recruiting classes each year. High school, JC, and portal. And you don't even know how many roster spots you're actually gonna have".

"We have so few roster spots that we are grading kids on such high scales. Like a high school guy has to be a starter as a freshman or we can't recruit him. And then if he shows up and actually starts as a freshman for us he'll probably leave and get more money from a bigger school. So you can't win. And then we just end up sitting in a holding pattern."

"The value of a single roster spot for us has gone up a ton because the total amount of spots we have has gone down, but the dollar amount per spot has gone up with scholarships increasing. So we are investing more in these guys, and expecting more."

This is the sentiment amongst most D1 coaches at this point and honestly a large population of D2 and D3 programs that are incentivized to be patient and wait for an older guy rather than recruiting young. High tier academic schools operate on a different timeline, and there are certainly some other exceptions. But this is the new reality for most programs.

Players and families... do not assume that you are the exception and that this doesn't apply to you!

[Irlandarra @irlandarra2019]

They want us to believe that Hamas did this on October 7, 2023, with rudimentary weapons; this is the work of Israeli Apache helicopters.

Hannibal Directive .

[Topher Scott @HockeyThinkTank]

KIDS: Here are two clips from Auston Matthews and Frankie Nazar on the difference between shooting to score and shooting to create.

Great players understand percentages - both Matthews and Nazar see they're in a spot where it will be tough to score so they shoot to create a rebound or second chance opportunity for a teammate.

Incredible hockey sense from two great players!!

[James @jamescoder12]

A guy pays $895/year for the Amex Platinum.

He uses it for airport lounge access and 5x points on flights. That's it. Two benefits. The lounge is nice. The points add up. He considers the card "expensive but worth it for travel."

His financial advisor who also carries the Amex Platinum told him something during a quarterly review that made him pull the card out of his wallet and stare at it.

"You're paying $895/year and collecting roughly $600 in value. The card provides over $3,500/year in credits, reimbursements, and benefits and you're using 17% of them. You haven't enrolled in the $400 Resy dining credit $100/quarter at 10,000 restaurants you already eat at. You haven't activated the $300 digital entertainment credit $25/month that covers the Disney+, Hulu, and Audible subscriptions you're paying for separately. You haven't claimed the $155 Walmart+ credit which includes a free Paramount+ streaming subscription inside it. You haven't used the $100 Saks credit that resets every 6 months. You haven't filed a cell phone protection claim the benefit that replaces the $13/month AppleCare you're still paying for. You're paying $895 for a card that returns $3,500. You're collecting $600. The other $2,900 expires every December 31 because most credits reset annually and you've never enrolled in them."

He showed him 11 Amex Platinum benefits most cardholders either don't know exist, haven't enrolled in, or let expire every year without claiming.

Here's the full playbook for the most benefit-dense credit card in America 🧵

[Censored Humans @CensoredHumans]

🇵🇸🇮🇱 Nine minutes of testimonies from both Israeli soldiers and civilians explaining how the IDF killed their own people on October 7.

[Maria Sederholm @Wordofbeak @Wordofbeak]

@RealJamesWoods Question is; where were the IDF?