Social-Identity-Thief

@kausmickey @pmarca It's just that Mars is so much harder for everything except political oppostion. If one can get power, dig tunnels, etc, there...

Long impressive piece by @pmarca & Co., laying out Musk's grand interlocking vision --AI, moon colony, moon mining, moon manufacture, solar power, chipmaking, Optimus--all bent toward establishing a city of a million on Mars. Jaw drops every 3 paragraphs. The only problem is "Why go to Mars?" They make a not-bad stab at that one. But aren't their Sci Fi books (Foundation?) where humanity's survival depends not on becoming a "star-faring civilization" but on hiding in our little planet from the things that would destroy us? Putting Earth First! (I don't know which side I'm on. I guess I'm happy to send folks to Mars if it makes Elon get out of bed in the morning and we cure cancer on the way.) x.com/pmarca/article…

@Itssan17 Wonder Woman was great but the MCU introduction ... Well, in CA-CW, when Iron Man called out "UNDEROOS" to summon Spider-Man, that was a top tier "entry scene" too. I'd hate to surrender either intro.

This is how women superheroes should be presented on screen. Wonder woman entry scene in BvS is the best entry scene in a cbm

Hollywood cares about the fans of the franchises they've spent exorbitant amounts to acquire, every bit as much as GOP Senators care about the voters who keep asking for election security, immigration enforcement, balanced budgets, regular order, DOGE cuts to fraudulent claimants, putting controversial bills thru the talking filibuster ... To say they don't care is a mistake. They simply care about someone else.

Everybody wanted Sydney Sweeney as Supergirl, but Hollywood keeps proving one thing: they don’t care what fans want. She would have been perfect for the job!

@888pzzz @basedandbougie Then, please do.

@basedandbougie these are all one sided.. i could pull stats showing gay parents are better parents then straight parents…

🚨Last Saturday on GB News I promised to show statistics of Homosexual couples . Here is a thread of Do not shoot the messenger.   Facts do not care about your feelings.

@ingelramdecoucy @BBCWorld "Protest", they say. A mostly peaceful protest where only one police officer was shot in the neck.

@japan_nobunaga As you present yourself as a samurai, not a sumo, I must conclude you do ^not^ weigh 350 pounds (160 kg) Someday, if you please, you must describe your time in an US gymnasium, where you work off some of the vast meals you have already described.

Lawry's. Beverly Hills. The hostess tied a small white bib around my neck. I could not tell if it was for a child, or for a soldier going to war. I chose the higher meaning. A samurai eats with armor. A woman named Estela arrived first. She wheeled out a ten-pound metal bowl on a bed of crushed ice. Greens. Eggs. Croutons. She rose onto her toes. She lifted a bottle of dressing high above her head. The bowl began to spin on the ice. She did not look at the salad. She looked at the ceiling. I rose from my chair. "Sir, you can sit." "I cannot. A dance is in progress." At the next table, a man in a navy suit looked up from his menu, looked at me, looked at his wife, looked back at me, and slowly stood up too. "What are we doing?" his wife asked him. "I don't know," he said, "but I think he knows." Estela did not break her pour. "Both of you, please, sit. The salad is fine." "...Estela," I said, "you do not understand. We are honoring you." Estela smiled the way one smiles at a very polite mistake. "Then please honor me by being seated, sir." I bowed deeply, and sat. The man in the suit sat. His wife mouthed "thank you" at Estela. Estela mouthed "you're welcome" back. The bowl kept spinning. Sherry dressing rained down on the lettuce from a height of three feet. I have never seen anything more beautiful happen to a vegetable. Then came the cart. Six hundred pounds of polished silver, art-deco lines, rolled to my table by a man in chef's whites, white gloves, and a red-ribboned medal pinned to his chest. His name was Thomas. He bowed slightly when he stopped. So did I. If he could bow, so could I. "And how would you like your cut, sir?" I did not answer. I was looking at the medal. "...You wear a medal." "It's our carver pin, yes." "For what war?" "...For finishing carver training. Six months, sir." "Then you have killed many roasts." "...I have prepared a great deal of beef, yes." "Then you have lived a meaningful life." Thomas looked at me for one long, kind beat. "I'm going to remember that, sir. Thank you." He lifted the lid of the cart. A small interior light came on. Four standing roasts of beef, glowing pink, lit from underneath. The cart had a stage light. The meat had a stage. I, without thinking, sat up straighter, the way one straightens for a curtain rising. "Five cuts, sir. Lawry's, California, English, Diamond Jim, or the Beef Bowl Cut." "Which cut wins?" "...They are all excellent." "I am not asking which is excellent. I am asking which one wins." "Most of our guests choose the Lawry's Cut. It's our signature." "Then the Lawry's. A signature is a name. A name is a duty." "And how would you like it cooked?" "What are the ranks?" "Rare, medium rare, medium, medium well, well done." "Then well done. The highest rank." Thomas paused. A small, kind, well-trained pause. "Sir, well done at Lawry's, we will absolutely prepare it that way for you. Most of our guests find that medium rare is the best treatment of this particular beef." I sat back down. (I had not realized I had stood up again.) "...So the ranks are inverted here. Well done, which sounds like the highest, is in fact the lowest. And rare, which sounds like an apology, is the prize." "That's a fair way to put it, sir." "Then medium rare. I will not embarrass the beef." Thomas nodded once. The way one general nods to another after a treaty. A small fluffy white bowl arrived next. "Whipped horseradish, sir." "...Horse radish." "Yes." "You name this root after a horse." "Yes." "And then you whip it. Into a cloud." "...Yes." "You serve a samurai a horse vegetable, made into weather. Whoever first named this dish was a poet hiding inside a kitchen." Thomas considered this. "I will tell the kitchen, sir. They will appreciate that." The man at the next table leaned across to me. "Sir," he said, very quietly, "could I ask you to explain everything you're saying, after dinner, at the bar, on me?" I bowed to him. "It would be my honor." His wife said, "oh, this is going to be the best night." A small ceramic cup of brown liquid arrived next. Steam came off it like prayer. "Au jus, sir. The meat's own broth." "...The meat is giving me back what it carried for a lifetime." "You can dip the slices in it, sir." "I will not dip. I will drink it last. A man drinks the broth of his opponent last. It is the closing of the conversation." "Take your time. It will stay warm." "Thomas." "Yes, sir?" "You have, in this single sentence, told a samurai both that he may take his time, and that the broth of his opponent will wait warm for him. You may not know what you have done." "...I'll take that as a yes on the au jus, sir." The meat came on a warm plate. The cut was the length of my hand and the height of two fingers. I lifted one slice. It bent under its own weight, slowly, like a flag in a low wind. I ate it. I had to set the fork down. Eighty-eight years of one restaurant doing exactly one thing, and that one thing was on a plate in front of me, and the meat was so tender it did not require teeth. Only consent. I came for dinner. I attended a coronation. "Would you like to add the lobster tail, sir?" "There is more?" "Yes, sir." "...After the land battle, you offer me the sea." Thomas smiled. "If you have room." "A warrior makes room. A warrior does not refuse a second front." The lobster arrived. Beside it, a small ramekin of drawn butter. I dipped the lobster. I ate it. It tasted like a calm ocean had agreed, just once, to let itself be eaten. At the next table, the man and his wife were now openly watching me eat. They were not laughing. They had decided, at some point during the salad, that the only proper response to me was reverence, and they were sticking with it. At the end, Thomas wheeled the cart away. The light inside dimmed as the lid closed. The roasts went on to the next table, to be admired by someone else, by people who did not yet know what was about to happen to them. I bowed to it as it left. The table beside me bowed too. Without knowing why. Without needing to know. The man in the suit lifted his glass to me from across the floor. I lifted mine back. We had been knighted together. We had not known each other forty minutes earlier. We knew each other now. I rose. I did not stagger. A man who has eaten this much must walk out straight, out of respect for the cow that bore him. On my way to the door, Thomas was already standing beside the next cart. He saw me, paused, and bowed exactly one inch. A samurai recognizes a samurai, even one whose war was a six-month carving exam. A man does not forget who carved his coronation. He returns, with the same bib, and the same straight back, and asks again for the second-lowest rank, which is the highest. Because here, the ranks are inverted, and a man who knows that is no longer a stranger. I am no longer a stranger.

@WEschenbach Kamala Harris has progressed even beyond that.

It's designed to be illegible … “One of the key questions I asked at the beginning was, are people supposed to read this?” says designer Micheal Bierut, who typeset the lettering with a team at Pentagram, led by designer Britt Cobb. “Is legibility the primary goal here? Do we want people to be able to stand on the ground, look up at this tower, and read those words? And that was discussed on the client end, and the answer came back, ‘No, it should have the promise of meaning, it should be decipherable, everything should be spelled right and it should make sense.’” Totally on-brand for Obama … all that is required is the "promise of meaning". w.

What I remember admiring about Burroughs was the gradual "hoist" on disbelief, until the reader was suspended a mile above caring. The original narrator, in the role of Watson, uncovered the diary, the notes, the message in the bottle, and gives us another protagonist, who gets in deeper and deeper. ... {in the case of David Innes, literally so.}

It doesn’t have to be solely action. But SOMETHING interesting needs to be happening. Too often they waste time “setting the stage” instead of bringing the stage to life around you. The first chapter of Count of Monte Cristo has the heroic Dantes proving his competence, and then Danglars starts spreading lies. The first chapter of Phantom of the Opera has a troop of young dancers terrified because they saw the Opera ghost. There isn’t a fight, but both are gripping.

The problem with modern books is they tend to be really dull early on. Pick up the book A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It OPENS with the hero besieged in a cave by Apaches and no way to escape. Next scene? He's being charged by a hideous 9 foot tall alien lancer on an elephant-sized mount. The action literally never stops. It's like Indiana Jones but on Mars. Or read The Moon Pool by A. Merritt - it starts with a deserted ship; an insane captain lashed to the wheel. He fights against the protagonists' rescue, and they learn his family was taken by "The Dweller". The tale rolls right along. Compare this to the Game of Thrones books - there's a bit of action at the start, but then you don't get more until about Chapter 7. Or read Stephen King’s Tommyknockers - almost nothing happens for the first 250 pages. That's actually LONGER than A Princess of Mars' entire book. 1/2

My wife and I own Forest Park Pharmacy, and we don't accept insurance. None of it. That decision is exactly why we could fix what happened to a patient today. A family came in wanting to transfer their kid's antibiotic to us. The child had already STARTED the course. Then, mid-treatment, the insurance company decided the last 14 tablets suddenly needed a "prior authorization" before the other pharmacy could hand them over. A sick kid, halfway through an antibiotic, and the answer was "please hold." The drug is linezolid. It's a generic. It's been generic for over a decade. It treats serious gram-positive infections — the kind you do NOT want to stop antibiotics in the middle of, because an interrupted course is how you breed resistant bugs and end up right back where you started. So why the hold-up on a cheap, common generic? Follow the fake math. Insurance and the PBMs behind them price drugs off a number called AWP — "Average Wholesale Price." People in my industry have another name for it: "Ain't What's Paid." It's a benchmark number, not a real-world cost. On paper, the AWP for just those last 14 tablets is about $2,500. My cash price for the same 14 tablets? $18. Read that again. The system that's supposedly "protecting" this family from cost is the same system that inflated an $18 medication into a $2,500 line item, then slapped a prior auth on it to "review the expense" THEY invented. They manufactured the problem, then billed everyone for the privilege of solving it — and made a sick kid wait while they did it. This is the whole game. When a drug is priced honestly, there's nothing to "manage." When it's priced off a fantasy benchmark, you get spread pricing, PA paperwork, pharmacy phone trees, and delayed treatment — all dressed up as cost control. Here's the part nobody tells you: roughly 90% of prescriptions are low-cost generics. For the vast majority of what people pick up every day, running it through insurance does two things — raises the real cost and risks delaying your care. That's it. That's the value-add. That's why we fired the insurance companies. No middleman deciding your kid can't finish their antibiotics on schedule. No fake prices. Just the real number, on the shelf, today. The medication was always cheap. The insurance was the expensive part.

I have an app* on my phone that "forecasts" the weather hour by hour, day by day, week by week... Forecasts are never realized. They don't even remain the same from morning to noon. The prediction of "63% chance of .21 inches today" made at 8 a.m. becomes "22% chance of 0.3 inches today" at noon; then we actually get 1.7 inches at 2 p.m. Forecasts aren't 'sobering', they are a clown's attempt at making us all look foolish. [Weather Underground, if you care]

It's very sobering to consider it's forecasted to rise to 44 degrees Celsius in some areas of France and up to 40 in the UK over the next few weeks and these are likely to be the coolest summers of the rest of our lives. For our grandchildren, much, much worse is to come.

@volcaholic1 I, for one, am pleased to disappoint you.

Climate change deniers. I hope you feel stupid now.

@antonioguterres GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? So, if you '[call' upon the Chinese to lower their emissions of methane, CO2, and other GHG ... will they march to your call?

Methane drives around 1/3 of global warming and is 80 times more powerful than CO2. But aggressive cuts could deliver visible temperature benefits within a generation. That's why I’m launching a global call to cut methane emissions – in waste, agriculture & fossil fuels. This includes setting a new global standard for the oil & gas sector: near-zero methane emissions across the value chain.

In the case of the Colorado small bakery that refused to sell same-sex wedding cakes, the core conservative defense was that small businesses shouldn't be forced to provide services that violate their core beliefs. Why doesn't that principle apply to a coffee shop that doesn't want to serve a Congressman who supports US financing and arming of Israeli aggression?

@GeoffreyLean The choice of verb is overly confident. Some research PREDICTS rising temperatures kill more than they save ... But no amount of research can measure things that haven't happened.

Climate change sceptics rightly say that, at present, many more people die of cold than heat. But research shows that rising temperatures kill more than they save, until heat becomes the bigger cause of death. theguardian.com/environment/20…

@AndrewDesiderio To whom does Thune refer when he speaks about "others"? On an 80/20 issue, there are a lot of "others" on the other side of the issue than he is.

“I hope that people, on that issue, speak up,” Thune told us re: the filibuster/SAVE Act. “Because I’m not saying anything that isn’t a view that wouldn’t be shared or articulated by a lot of my colleagues… It’s always helpful if others would speak up, and it’s not just me.”

NEW: Can Thune win the Trump meeting? It could be a disaster, but it could also be an opportunity to finally get through to Trump—by leaning more on other R’s so that it’s not just him telling Trump “no” Or, as Thune quipped, delivering “the bad news” punchbowl.news/article/senate…

Remember that poll that said 30% of Cornyn voters were gonna vote Talarico? Uh huh All these polls are trash, even this one. #txlege

@boriquagato Tobacco use is way down "since the days of disco", too. I conjecture the fraction of the population prone to over-doing things has started bingeing junk food (and maybe Netflix) since giving up cigarettes.

so, the stats with cats part of me was all ready to launch in here with a lesson about "yeah, to be sure there's obesity but this is not how to measure it" and about means and outliers and how 2 100 pound women and 1 300 pounder average 167, but then i looked at medians. yeah, they are a bit lower, but they are still 5'4" and 162 for women. that's insane. and i would not go sniggering about this if i were you, fellahs. you guys are the size of water buffalos. the change since 1970 is startling. median man: +21 pounds +12% median woman: +25 pounds +18% median male would have been 76th percentile in the days of roller rink birthday parties. median woman would have been 77th. i know everyone likes to claim "this is why we need cheap GLP-1's for everyone!" but that's a bit like saying "this is why we need universal SSRI's because people are sad." GLP-1's are a deep, fundamental endocrine alteration and they have A LOT of side effects. you cannot just smack the big red button in the middle of a system that complex and expect only one or 2 good things to happen. fixing bad diet and lifestyle with drugs is a far from ideal solution as is the ongoing pathologization of normal issues. sad? take pill. anxious? take pill. confused? take shot. fat? take shot. it's not a good trend and while perhaps there are cases where the reward outweighs the risk, using it as first resort rather than say "changing your life choices" seems unwise and like a path to dependecy. and no, i don't buy the "we're sick, it's not normal!" argument. sure, a few may be, but the idea that in 1-2 generations 40%+ of our gene pool started carrying some obesity defect is ridiculous. try eating real food and see what happens to your "bad genes." seeing fat people in the 70's was noteworthy, like "look, a fat person!" the horrendously, morbidly obese who are now so common were outright rare. we're not some different species now whose obesity is uncontrollable through non-pharma means. we're just eating bad food and taking too many disruptive meds and living like sloths. "taking a shot with cascading effects through your endocrine system to try to offset the effects of hyper-processed food and over medication that's having cascading effects through your endocrine system" is a rough road to head down. wait until they start piling on the drugs to offset the side effects of GLP-1's. you can play at pharma turtles all the way down or you can step back and look at root cause: what kind of food are you eating and what kind of activity level do you have? that's what changed since the days of disco. and you can change it back.

@FreeSpeech4Me_U I'm pretty sure that graph has incorrectly spliced together the legal fees paid by @michaelemann, personally, on the 'shaft' of the stick; to measures of fees paid on his behalf by politically-motivated donors, which funds drive the rapid rise of the 'blade'.

Pal-reviewed.... by this one... #ClimateBrawl... what a joke 🤣🤣🤣

Leader of ANTIFA Cell Members in North Texas SENTENCED TO 100 YEARS IN PRISON for Terrorist Attack on ICE Facility: Seven additional defendants also sentenced before one-year anniversary of attack to a combined 450 years in prison This is the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following @POTUS’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025. "The sentences handed down today make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice,” said Acting Attorney General @DAGToddBlanche. “Their violent extremism has no place in our country, and the Department of Justice will continue to aggressively investigate, disrupt, and prosecute those who threaten law enforcement officers or undermine the rule of law." Read more: justice.gov/opa/pr/leader-…

Then amend the House-passed Act, pass it as amended, and send it back to conference committee. What is so stinkin' wrong with the House version that GOP senators walk away from it? What is so awful it can't be amended? And if such a defect exists, why not try to persuade the 80% of voters who advocate for the SAVE Act to secure elections that defect actually prevents the solution voters want?