Tom Hamel

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

If I'm reading this right, America is giving Iran $300 billion dollars, unfreezing billions more, ending all sanctions, acknowledging Iranian hegemony over the Hormuz, and in exchange we got to kill an 86 year old man, make gas more expensive, and blow up an elementary school.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

This is known as LOSING A WAR

[Kevin Finnerty @timeimmemorial_]

genius

[William B. Fuckley @opinonhaver]

It remains an incredibly grim but admittedly very bleakly funny running bit that we got an administration obsessed with LETHALITY and WARFIGHTERS and then almost immediately had one of the most humiliating defeats in American military history

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

My family moved to the US when I was 8, but by the time I turned 20, my dad was still on an H1B (waiting to get processed for a green card).

Once I turned 21, I would age out as his dependent, despite the fact that I basically grew up in the US.

I thought I'd have to become a code monkey after college, and even that only if I was lucky enough to win the H1B lottery.

Otherwise, back to India.

I had become a huge fan of @paulg's essays in college. I was actually depressed that my desire to start a startup or do something entrepreneurial was basically hopeless.

Working on the promising podcast I was doing as a side project? A beyond impossible pipe dream.

Even after 9 years, my dad wasn't able to get a green card - and the lines were only getting longer over time. I figured I'd be an old man before I could quit some FANG job and build my own thing.

By some miracle, COVID travel restrictions cleared out the lines, and I got my green card literally months before I would have aged out.

If not for this unbelievable coincidence, I would not be hosting the podcast.

In the best case, I would be shifting pixels around in the 3rd sub-sub-menu of some big tech software.

I'm incredibly grateful I made it through.

But it's unconscionable that we put the kids of high skilled immigrants through all this anxiety, and in many cases make them repeat the nerve-racking indentured life trajectory that they had to watch their parents go through.

[Bill Simmons @BillSimmons]

This has been the worst Red Sox season since I’ve been alive.

[myles brown @mdotbrown]

Watching soccer is like babysitting. Nothing happens until you look away

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[Pat Dennis @patdennis]

Are you telling me my tax dollars are being sent to rebuild all the shit that Pete Hegseth blew up also with my tax dollars

[Brett Kollmann @BrettKollmann]

“Oh Balogun is just playing for the U.S. because he couldn’t make the England squad”…Folks, that is the entire promise of our nation.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

And then we’ll beat your ass with them.

[Josh Eberley 🇨🇦 @JoshEberley]

To me, this is beautiful. No excuses, no unassailable mountain.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

The Trump admin continues to treat AI like a screwdriver that is also enriched uranium:

That is, apparently advanced AI is such a normal technology that it’s crazy to limit chip exports to China but also such an abnormal technology that we can’t let British employees of NYC banks access it

[Matt Jones @KySportsRadio]

Thank goodness for Birthright citizenship

4-1

[Dave Mager @DaveMagerNews]

Larry David reacts to the now forgotten Josh Hart miss.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Being part of a generation that was told “Wikipedia is not a source” makes it genuinely baffling to me that jobs are now telling people to just use ChatGPT for everything.

[🐢✨America Is Musty✨🐢 @DragonflyJonez]

Yeah it’s a missed call, a flagrant 1 and all that. But every Wemby incident from the Naz elbow, to the Dort shove, to this has been Wemby letting opponents know if you try to play him too physically you might get hit with the Shaolin fists of fury and I honestly gotta respect it

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

This is absolutely insane. Trumps love of Russia is stunting the US military’s ability to modernize.

https://t.co/LYOkJmnKg5