Arch-Joshua

Father, Husband, Hillbilly Genius. Building The Kingdom of Joshua. Seeking communion with the Natural Order. Life is Inevitable.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

@grok, is this view from the east, west, north, south?
According to NIST, the fires that burned were primarily on the east side, causing floor 18 to collapse, and column 79 to buckle, which caused a cascade of floor collapses and the whole building.

[Jimmy Corsetti @BrightInsight6]

@ChrisK8201 “Hours of raging out of control fires” 😵‍💫

[Mila Joy @Milajoy]

Michael Hingson was on the 78th floor of the North Tower on September 11, 2001.

He has been blind since birth.

His guide dog, Roselle, was under his desk when the plane hit.

The building lurched.

Smoke filled the offices.

People shouted.

Roselle stood, calm, and waited for the harness.

They went into Stairwell B and started down. Seventy-eight floors.

Firefighters passed them going up.

Jet fuel burned in the air.

A woman stopped, too afraid to keep walking.

Hingson talked her forward.

Roselle never pulled away, never panicked, never stopped.

They reached the lobby and then the street.

Minutes later the South Tower fell and a wall of dust rolled over them.

Roselle kept leading.

Hingson lived.

Roselle lived.

They walked out of a building that would not be standing an hour later.

He has spent the years since telling the story not as a miracle of sight, but as a story of trust: a man who could not see the stairs, and a dog who did not need to be told that the only way out was down.

Remember Michael Hingson.

Remember Roselle.

Remember everyone who started down those stairs and never reached the street.

[Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630]

Many Such Cases.

Why? Why ARE moderately prejudiced, male or male-coded, jock and farmer and soldier types so much more tolerant than "Martha's Vinyard"-type liberals?

We've all seen it.

[Japan Embassy DC🌸 @JapanEmbDC]

Today marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks. In honor of those impacted, the Embassy has lowered its flag to half-staff. Japan continues to stand with the United States as an ally and friend.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

I was thinking old Kentucky long rifle, but Jezail is a strong contender.

[96 Quite Bitter Boners @BonerThe19989]

@wintersowl1 @pmamtraveller Jezail-maxxing

[Austin Justice @AustinJustice]

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn't building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending "Souvlaki" and "everything is alive" to anyone who'd listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair," and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He'd been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released "Reflections" under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin's ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him "Busty Wimsatt" and, in their newsletters, "ever-alert," "indefatigable," and at least once "American hero." @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of "The Independents" so they wouldn't disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf's Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn's own jokes.

"Boy did I feel special," Kirn wrote today. "Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement."

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people.

He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog's Dave's Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin's science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin's "Director's Cut," and appears in it, briefly, as "Greeting Cop." He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage "No Step on Snek" hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend's house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do "The Crawling Hand."

He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn't coming back next week.

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

Something must change.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

@pmamtraveller This is the best one and it’s not even close

[PmAmTraveller @pmamtraveller]

the art installation "My best gun-branches" by Dutch artist Maarten Brinkman.

[Daddy Warpig @DaddyWarpig]

>One developer felt so bad they built it “fruit fly heaven,” where it can fly around and eat fruit forever

It's a SIMULATED fly brain, you dipshit. It isn't real. It isn't even sort-of real. It's COMPLETELY fake.

You're one of those Tech Bros who did ayahuasca or something, aren't you?

[Giorgia Meloni @GiorgiaMeloni]

Un anno fa veniva ucciso Charlie Kirk. Aveva appena 31 anni ed era, ancora una volta, in mezzo ai giovani, in un’università, a fare quello che aveva scelto di fare per tutta la sua vita pubblica: confrontarsi, discutere, difendere le proprie idee.

Charlie aveva fatto della fede, della libertà di parola e del confronto la propria cifra. Era un cristiano convinto, un marito, un padre, un ragazzo capace di parlare a una generazione intera senza sottrarsi mai al dibattito, anche con chi la pensava in modo opposto.

È stato assassinato proprio mentre esercitava quella libertà.

A un anno di distanza, il modo migliore per ricordarlo è non lasciare che prevalga l’odio che ha cercato di zittirlo. Continuare a credere che le idee si affrontano con altre idee, che il dissenso non è un nemico da eliminare e che la fede può essere vissuta senza paura e senza vergogna.

Charlie Kirk non c’è più. Ma ciò per cui ha vissuto continua a parlare.
E merita di essere ricordato.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Remember earlier this year, when the Trump admin said the quiet part out loud about Greenland and half the Western press treated it like a cartoonish land grab? The coverage was almost entirely about manners. Denmark was insulted. NATO was “at risk.” Greenlanders were “not for sale.”

Some of us talked about the geostrategic strategy going on here but people were too caught up in the passions of the topic to listen.

9 months later, the same institutions are writing about China’s Arctic shortcut as if they just discovered the world map. The New York Times is now explaining that Beijing has launched the first regular container service across the Northern Sea Route, the so-called Polar Silk Road, and asking whether the voyage of the Dubai Tower is commerce or a geopolitical flex.

Bro I was saying that in JANUARY. Could've been real useful for this explainer to come out then in the heat of the debate, no?

China is a self-declared “near-Arctic state” more than 800 miles from the Arctic Circle. That tells you everything does it? It has run joint Arctic patrols with Russia and has turned a seasonal ice corridor into a viable alternative to Suez and Hormuz. Russia controls the permits and the icebreakers while China supplies the cargo, the capital, and the long game.

This is a northern flank opening above North America.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at Greenland's neighbor, Canada! On September 4, Canada held a “defence coordination dialogue” with China, the first since April 2018, when the Meng Wanzhou (Huawei exec) crisis froze the channel. All of this is part of a broader Carney-era pivot to realign with Beijing.

Canada didn't mention anything btw until Beijing printed the read-out.

You can oppose annexation, oppose coercion, and still admit the media sequence did not serve the public interest. The US has to start building a political community inside Greenland with control, basing rights in perpetuity, and resource jurisdiction. What the US needs is the ability to deny hostile infrastructure built inside Greenland.

The Northern gateway to the Western Hemisphere cannot depend on Danish autonomy while China and Russia industrialize the ice and Canada reopens defense talks with Beijing. Too much is at stake.

By the way China's ambitions on the polar Silk Road have been public for more than 8 years now. There's no excuse not to publish this kind of investigative reporting when it was salient and relevant.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

Beautiful

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

@StefanMolyneux I know plenty of low/middle class people that own and ride horses.
This is just someone having fun, and this response is just “wealthy people shouldn’t be allowed to have fun”

[Sabine Brinkmann @Sabine_BC]

I did a thing yesterday 🇺🇸

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

This is why cost of living feels impossibly high. It's not the price of gas per se, or eggs. It's that your discretionary spending is squeezed, due to Obamacare. John McCain cast the deciding vote to force you to have to get it. Neocons and communists are one in the same.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

I used to work with a guy who believes nuclear weapons don’t exist, atom bombs sure, but not nukes.
He was also a flat earther.

[Garand Thumb @GarandThumb1]

after posting my surviving a nuclear blast video I’ve run into a conspiracy I was not familiar with. And that conspiracy is that nukes aren’t real. Let’s hear the arguments gents.

[Hunter Kozak @HunterEKozak]

Hey! This video is of me. Sorry to put a damper on the funny little meme campaign that we have about a man dying but just want to share that I went to a carnival today to celebrate my daughter’s birthday and I had a persistent thought like ten times about someone shooting the place up. I know I have PTSD and I shouldn’t rewatch these videos but for a year now they’ve been inescapable on the internet, simply because people find it funny. Like seriously, look at the fucking context that this is in response to. It’s sick. You guys have something broken inside you to use this video as a response in the way you did.

[Arch-Joshua @wintersowl1]

Whoever thought of putting a humanoid torso bot on the end of an industrial robot arm is a genius.

[Space and Technology @spaceandtech_]

Zinova and LimX Dynamics tested the Tron 2 platform in a scaled-down construction demonstration to explore how robots could handle real building tasks.

Tron 2 is a modular robot that can switch between dual-arm, wheeled, and bipedal configurations, allowing it to work at different heights and angles.

During the demonstration, the robots assembled wooden formwork and placed and tied multiple layers of steel reinforcement bars.

[Space and Technology @spaceandtech_]

Zinova and LimX Dynamics tested the Tron 2 platform in a scaled-down construction demonstration to explore how robots could handle real building tasks.

Tron 2 is a modular robot that can switch between dual-arm, wheeled, and bipedal configurations, allowing it to work at different heights and angles.

During the demonstration, the robots assembled wooden formwork and placed and tied multiple layers of steel reinforcement bars.