Pegasus

@carlquintanilla blocked me for posting this reply. Is @cnbc staffed with trembling, petulant children afraid of any dissent from their talking points? @JoeSquawk @HowardKurtz @BillAckman

Larry Ellison just asked the one question no journalist on Earth can answer. A Wall Street Journal writer told Ellison to his face that Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing. Ellison didn’t argue. Didn’t get emotional. He just asked a question. Ellison: “This guy is landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean, and you’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You ever land a rocket?” One question. No recovery. Ellison: “Who are you? Why should I believe you as opposed to my friend Elon?” This is the question the entire media class has been dodging for a decade. Who are you to judge? What have you built? What have you shipped? What problem have you solved that didn’t involve a keyboard and a deadline? Ellison: “You’re there in front of your Apple Macintosh typing up an article saying Elon’s an idiot.” They sit behind a laptop they did not engineer. Using a network they did not build. Running on silicon they cannot explain. To tell the world that the man sending humans to space doesn’t know what he’s doing. They have never built anything heavier than a Word document. And they publish it with absolute certainty. That’s the part that should disturb you. Not the criticism. The confidence behind it. The total absence of self-awareness it takes to judge disciplines you wouldn’t last a single semester in. Musk does not operate in opinion. He operates in the physical layer of the universe where the math closes or the rocket does not come home. His critics operate in a text editor. He built the vehicle that carries NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The satellite constellation delivering internet to active war zones. The EV that forced every automaker on Earth to abandon their combustion roadmap. His loudest critics built a byline. So why the coordinated hatred? Because they lost the leash. The attacks didn’t escalate because Musk got worse at engineering. They escalated because he bought X. He cracked open the algorithm. He handed the public square back to the people. And he shattered their ability to control what you’re allowed to think. They don’t hate the engineer. They hate that the engineer took their monopoly. You cannot cancel a rocket. You cannot publish a hit piece on gravity. You cannot edit the laws of physics. They own the syntax. He owns the physics. One of them is going to Mars.

@ChrisMurphyCT Fascism. You mean you, right?

I am in Barcelona today to help unite progressive parties from around the world in a defense of democracy and a war against corruption. A first of its kind event. Necessary to beat back the forces of fascism.

@Logically_JC I agree. Let's fund it at ZERO. That would solve a lot of problems.

So many of our problems could be fixed by properly funding public education.

@SanFama @WSJ > you clearly don't care about the truth What a dumb thing to say. You don't know me. Reading the minds of strangers on the internet, especially to impute bad motives or character, is beyond foolish.

@DanceWithHorses @WSJ I could give you some real numbers but you clearly don't care about the truth. We had awful presidents here but Milei is among the worst. Just come visit and you will get the idea pretty quickly.

President Javier Milei’s radical free-market overhaul of Argentina is running into the same problems that plagued the political old guard he vowed to overthrow. on.wsj.com/41GZlc4

@WhiteHouse So many astonishing accomplishments and now this. Greatest president of all time. Sorry, Washington.

LIVE FROM THE OVAL: President Trump Announces Historic Reforms to Accelerate Access to Medical Research & Treatments Based on Psychedelic Drugs "Since 9/11, we've lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield... today, we're bringing them new hope."

@user_one0one @DavidS_Liberdad @WSJ You don't seem to understand how before-and-after comparisons work.

@DanceWithHorses @DavidS_Liberdad @WSJ Start today so in three months you can give an honest assessment.

So let me get this straight. You think kids will study Trump and Netanyahu the same way they study Hitler and Stalin? Trump, who lost an election and left. Netanyahu, who lost an election, sat in opposition, and won the next one. Those two compared to a man who banned every political party in Germany within six months, built industrialized death camps, and gassed six million Jews, and another man whose secret police killed 700,000 people in eighteen months for insufficient loyalty, who collectivized every farm in the Soviet Union and deported millions of families to freeze to death in Siberia, who ran a state where the concept of a free election simply did not exist. You’re comparing countries where courts block the government, where the press publishes vicious criticism every single day, where millions of citizens march in the streets against their own leaders and go home after to regimes where owning the wrong pamphlet got you sent to a camp, where the Gestapo’s orders were literally exempt from judicial review, where the NKVD planted informants in schools and churches and secretly marked ballots to find out who voted no so they could disappear them? You’re comparing free-market economies where you can start a business, own property, and sue your own government to a regime that forced Jewish families to sell their businesses at a fraction of their value then seized their bank accounts, their insurance payments, and their personal belongings, and another that labeled any farmer who owned his own land a class enemy and shot him? You’re comparing countries with constitutionally protected religious freedom to regimes that seized synagogues, dissolved Jewish communities, imprisoned rabbis, and in one case, built an entire industrial apparatus for the purpose of erasing a people from the earth? You are comparing a body count of zero politically motivated state killings to a combined body count of tens of millions people gassed in chambers, starved in engineered famines, worked to death in frozen camps, shot in ditches and dumped in mass graves? And you did all of this from a phone, on a free platform, in a free country, where the worst thing that will happen to you for calling your elected leader a dictator is that someone quote-tweets you? The people who actually lived under Hitler and Stalin did not get to post. They got a knock on the door at 3 AM. And then they were never heard from him again.. You should be embarrassed by your ignorance, but you’re not. Because you represent the most privileged class in the most privileged country in the history of the world and you’re so uneducated that you don’t even have the common sense to appreciate it.

@DavidS_Liberdad @WSJ Fair point. But I would also need to have lived there for three months beforehand to have a point of comparison.

@DanceWithHorses @WSJ Stop looking at numbers and spread sheets. Come and live here for three months. Then talk.

@tbw24431703 @WSJ "Vimar" It's hard to look educated when you misspell something basic so grievously.

@DanceWithHorses @WSJ He's as much as hero as the Vimar Republic

@Scott_Wiener Buckle up, buttercup. Here comes an epic ratio, and a well-deserved one, at that.

Creepy Chaya is triggered by rainbow flags. Thankfully Philz just reversed its Pride flag ban & listened to its baristas instead of grifter cult members like you.

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible. He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort. Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order. He couldn't remember a single item. She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention. Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why. The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all. But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone. Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology. Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed. She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups. The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones. Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running. She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all. This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism. In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention. Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished. The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale. But television is not where this gets dangerous. Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing. The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process. The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards. David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down. The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion. Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it. Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention. Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it. The café in Vienna is long gone. The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time. Every "to be continued." Every unread notification. Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow." All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished. Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927. A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media. And nobody taught it to you in school.

In 1900, John D. Rockefeller controlled approximately 90 percent of all petroleum refining in the United States. He was, by some calculations, the richest private individual who had ever lived. He had a problem. Scientists were discovering that compounds derived from coal tar, a petroleum byproduct, could be used as synthetic medicines. Aspirin, derived from coal tar, had been launched by Bayer in 1899. The petroleum waste stream Rockefeller had previously had to dispose of could now be sold back to the public as medicine at a markup of roughly 10,000 percent. He had another problem. American medicine in 1900 was a competitive ecosystem of homeopaths, herbalists, naturopaths, osteopaths, midwives, and traditional doctors who used food, plants, water, and lifestyle as the primary tools of healing. Approximately half of all American medical schools taught some form of natural or alternative medicine. Rockefeller bought into the German pharmaceutical industry, eventually taking a substantial stake in IG Farben, the conglomerate that included Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. He then commissioned a report. The report was written by Abraham Flexner, an educator with no medical training, funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, and published in 1910. It declared that natural and alternative medical schools were unscientific quackery. It recommended the closure of more than half of all American medical schools and the standardisation of the rest around medicine based on synthetic patented drugs. Congress acted. Half of American medical schools closed within a decade. The remainder accepted Rockefeller and Carnegie funding on the condition that their curricula be reorganised around pharmaceutical treatment. Nutrition was removed. Herbal medicine was removed. Lifestyle intervention was removed. The doctor's job was redefined: diagnose the symptom, prescribe the drug. The drugs were petroleum-derived. The petroleum was supplied by Rockefeller-controlled refineries. The medical schools were funded by Rockefeller. The journals were funded by Rockefeller. The AMA was supported by Rockefeller. The hospitals were funded by Rockefeller. By 1925, the American medical system was a vertically integrated extension of the petroleum industry, operating under the marketing slogan that it was scientific. This is the system that exists today. The pharmaceutical industry generates approximately $1.5 trillion in annual revenue. The American population, 4 percent of the global total, consumes approximately 50 percent of all pharmaceuticals manufactured. The system was not designed to make people healthy. The system was designed to manage symptoms in a way that produces lifetime customers. A healthy patient is a former customer. A managed patient, who takes the pill every day for the rest of their life, is an annuity. The objective has always been to keep you in that profitable corridor between healthy and dead. Long enough to keep buying. Not so well that you stop. The doctor who advises you to fix your metabolism by changing your diet is, from the point of view of the system that trained him, a defective product. The doctor who prescribes you a statin, a metformin, an antidepressant, and a blood pressure medication for life is performing exactly as designed. The system was designed by an oil baron who needed to sell the waste products of his refineries. It still functions, 116 years after the Flexner Report, exactly the way he designed it. You are the customer. The corridor is where you live.

If Trump manages to successfully address Venezuela, Iran (including the Strait of Hormuz), and Cuba after having removed Chinese control of the Panama Canal, and entering into a Malaysian joint-military relationship to put our Navy in the the Malarcca Strait thereby putting 80% of China’s oil imports at risk (awarding the US massive/unheralded leverage) then how can anyone argue it was all understaken and accomplished by Trump just hamhandedly throwing darts at a wall and hoping for the best? The obvious answer is you can't. It will be considered some of the most bold & courageous moves ever made in world history. Moves whose outcomes will reshape the humanity moving forward. Trump went all in, and on the grandest stage of all time. And by all appearances, this is EXACTLY where things look to be heading. What will the late-state TDS crowd say then? They won't be able to stand the adulation coming his way. Sadly, many of them are going to lose their damn minds, more than we've ever seen. And I mean like legit lose them.

@sciencegirl AI. So not exactly a life lesson.

Survival, despite the burdens of life

@LPNational Don't forget about the national debt. That's debt slavery that our children and grandchildren will have to contend with.

Don’t forget, the taxes stolen from you today are only a portion of what is actually taken. Inflation, regulation, sales taxes… the theft by the State is endless, and endangers the future of every citizen.

What we really should aspire to in this 250th year of our nation is a government that stops asking how much restriction on our liberties it can get away with and instead asks how it can protect and promote our all our rights, including our right to keep and bear arms.

I genuinely don’t know whether to laugh or lose my mind anymore at this European hypocritical double standards. When it comes to Vladimir Putin, suddenly it’s Churchillian resolve. No compromise. No dialogue. Arm Ukraine to the teeth, sanction everything that moves, wreck your own energy security if necessary - because tyranny must be confronted. Fine. I actually respect the consistency of that … in isolation. But then you turn around and lecture us - us - the Gulf monarchies, Jordan and Israel, about showing restraint with Tehran? About dialogue? About coexistence? Are you serious? For forty years - forty bloody years - this regime has been waging a shadow war across the region. Militias, proxies, sleeper cells, terror networks, destabilizing entire countries - Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen - and threatening the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, and Israel nonstop. This isn’t theoretical. This isn’t abstract. This is lived reality. And yet here come Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and the rest of the European choir, gently advising us to calm down, de-escalate, and - what was it again? - “give diplomacy a chance.” Diplomacy with who, exactly? With a system that has built its entire regional strategy on plausible deniability and proxy terror violence? You were willing to absorb inflation, energy shocks, and political backlash at home to confront Moscow. You made that choice. You said: this is the price of standing up to a tyrant. So don’t come here and tell us - after decades of being on the receiving end - that we should just sit down, smile politely, and “coexist.” Either you believe in confronting tyranny everywhere .. or you don’t. Macron, Starmer, rest of EU leaders and top bureaucrats should just STFU and spare us the self righteous sanctimonious lectures!🤐🤫

The Republicans are one fair election away from destroying the Democrat Party and the Democrats are one stolen election away from destroying America. The SAVE America Act is that important. Simple.

Did you know this was a sport??