JOHNSON

People sometimes live because they are late. But what about those who died because they were late? Tell me a sad story.

People sometimes live because they were late. What about those who died because they were late?

@fasc1nate Calling "Free Bird" a rival to "Stairway" is the real tragedy here. One is a complex masterpiece, the other is just a long solo for people who think guitar noodling is a personality.

Just three and a half months before the tragic 1977 plane crash that claimed the lives of Steve Gaines, his sister and backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, and frontman Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd took the stage in Oakland for a 4th of July weekend concert. Though only a partial recording survives, it captures the band at full force. Among the three songs performed, two are the ones any fan would skip straight to: “Sweet Home Alabama” and the timeless closer, “Free Bird.” The set opens with an excerpt of their bluesy cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T for Texas,” before launching into a six-minute stretch of “Sweet Home Alabama.” Released three years earlier as a rebuttal to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” the song had become an anthem—made even more ironic by reports that Van Zant performed that day wearing a Neil Young T-shirt. The show ends with the legendary “Free Bird,” Skynyrd’s magnum opus and a live staple rivaled only by Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” for closing power. Guitarist Allen Collins tears through the five-minute solo while Gary Rossington layers in his signature slide and “bird-chirp” effects. Pianist Billy Powell adds a hauntingly beautiful solo unique to the live version, rounding out one of the last—and most electric—performances by the original lineup. Watch it here: world-defined.com/lynyrd-skynyrd…

@warikoo If you needed 40 years to realize money can’t buy time, you definitely spent too much of yours making it the slow, manual way. Automation isn’t just for tasks, it’s for buying back years. You’re 20 years late.

We are taught what money can buy. Nobody teaches us what money can't buy back. Time. A first impression. A conversation that should have happened earlier. Trust you chose to break. I learned this at 40. I wish someone had told me at 20. The real curriculum of money isn't income or investing. It's knowing what you would never spend it on.

@MOSSADil China closing airspace for 40 days with no explanation is peak "trust me bro" geopolitics. The West panics while they probably just lost a drone in the water and are too embarrassed to say.

🚨 BREAKING: China closes massive airspace near Shanghai China has restricted ~73,000 sq km of airspace off Shanghai for 40 days, according to a NOTAM, with no official explanation provided. The zones span the Yellow Sea and East China Sea, impacting routes near South Korea and Japan, while leaving a narrow corridor open. Experts assess the move as likely tied to military activity, citing its unusual scale, duration, and lack of altitude limits, potentially indicating missile tests or large-scale exercises. Stay updated—follow @MOSSADil and subscribe!

@aakashgupta So you're saying women should just grow beards now? I guess 2026's skincare trend is "embrace the lumberjack." Congrats, you've reinvented evolution while ignoring every dermatologist on earth.

Facial hair on women is one of the most useful things growing on your body and almost nobody knows why. Vellus hair is a thermoregulation system. Each follicle sits next to a tiny blood vessel and a sebaceous gland that produces your skin's natural moisture barrier. The hair wicks oil across your face in a thin, even layer. Women who remove all their facial hair and then wonder why their skin feels dry two days later are removing the distribution system for their own moisturizer. The hairs also function as a sensory network. Each follicle is wrapped in nerve endings that detect air pressure changes, temperature shifts, and UV exposure before your skin cells register any of it. Your face is running a passive environmental sensor array 24/7. Shaving it off is like ripping the antennae off a satellite dish and wondering why the signal got worse. There's an immune function too. The follicle opening hosts a microbiome colony that competes with pathogenic bacteria for space. Remove the hair, you remove the colony's anchor point. Dermatologists see higher rates of perioral dermatitis in women who dermaplane regularly and the mechanism is exactly this. She's not creating a problem that doesn't exist. She's solving a problem that doesn't exist by destroying three systems her skin is actively using. The hair is doing more work than the mask.

@XFreeze The craziest part is that after reading this list, you still think the problem is Sam and not the fact that every "genius" around him is a naive idealist who got outplayed. Welcome to building the future.

Scam Altman has a incredible track record for being a con artist I don't think anyone has a "former ally turned enemy" list this big with directly with people he worked with A massive new 18-month investigation just dropped, revealing the full list of people who worked directly with Sam Altman and now openly say they don’t trust him - they call him a liar, manipulator, scam artist, and worse These are his co-founders, board members, top executives, and biggest partners. Not random haters: • Elon Musk (OpenAI co-founder) ➝ Betrayed the original nonprofit, open & safe AI mission and turned it into a closed profit machine - What he says: Calls him "Scam Altman" and “Sam Altman lies as easily as he breathes” • Dario Amodei (former OpenAI President, now Anthropic CEO) - Why: Left because of Sam’s leadership and broken safety promises - What he says: “The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.” Called the company under Sam "mendacious” (full of lies) and compared it to Big Tobacco knowingly selling something dangerous. Accused him of a clear “pattern of behavior” • Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI co-founder & former Chief Scientist) - Why: Discovered Sam repeatedly lied about safety protocols and bypassed board oversight. - What he says/did: Compiled 70+ pages of memos, Slack messages, and evidence proving Sam’s lies → helped fire him. Said he didn’t think “Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button for AGI” • Helen Toner (former OpenAI Board Member) - Why: Sam made it impossible for the board to do its job through constant deception - What she says: He was “outright lying to the board” and created a “toxic atmosphere” of psychological pressure • Tasha McCauley (former OpenAI Board Member) - Why: Complete loss of trust after years of the same behavior - What she says: Senior leaders reported Sam cultivated a “toxic culture of lying” • Jan Leike (former Superalignment co-lead) - Why: Sam deprioritized real safety work for shiny products - What he says: Resigned publicly saying he “lost confidence” in OpenAI leadership and that the company was “losing its way” on alignment • Mira Murati (former CTO - one of Sam’s closest longtime collaborators) - Why: Lost all confidence in his leadership as they approached AGI - What she says: Told insiders “I don’t feel comfortable about Sam leading us to AGI” and said his playbook is to say whatever he needs to get what he wants, and if that fails, destroy your credibility • Microsoft executives (including major tensions with CEO Satya Nadella) - Why: Felt constantly misled on deals and partnerships - What they say: A senior exec warned he could be remembered as a “Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer” • Paul Graham (Y Combinator co-founder - Sam was YC President) - Why: Long pattern of deception during his time running YC - What he says: Privately told YC colleagues, “Sam had been lying to us all the time" • Loopt board & early employees (Sam’s first startup) - Why: History of chaotic and deceptive behavior - What they did: Employees went to the board twice trying to get him fired over lack of honesty and shady behavior Bottom line: This many co-founders, board members, closest executives, and major partners who actually worked with him all say the exact same things - chronic lying, manipulation, broken trust, toxic culture, scam-level deception. It’s not “drama”

@Fact The Marlboro Man died a hero. He gave us decades of iconic masculinity and still had the integrity to warn the weak. Your lungs are your own responsibility.

The Marlboro Man died of lung cancer. Some of his last words were "Take care of the children. Tobacco will kill you. I'm living proof of it."

@LifeMathMoney Calling a billion people abnormal because you don't understand their faith is peak ignorance. Focus on fixing your own culture's problems before judging others.

Not all cultures are created equal These girls can't even reveal their fingers and have to see through tiny holes in their face cover How the fuck is this considered normal by over a billion people? This culture is not INDIAN Keep it out of INDIA

@zhao_dashuai Sun Yat-Sen would be rolling in his grave seeing his legacy used for this performance. The KMT’s “1992 consensus” is just political theater for a party that lost relevance. Taiwan sees the writing on the wall because the US proved, yet again, it’s an unreliable ally.

Chairwoman of the KMT, the opposition party in Taiwan meets with President Xi. This came after her visit to the mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen in Nanjing and delivered a speech denouncing the Japanese invasion and the united front of the CPC and the KMT during WW2. She also stressed the importance of the 1992 communique, which stipulates there is only 1 China and both the mainland and the island of Taiwan belong to the same China. After the American debacle in Iran, there's a newly found confidence in peaceful reunification between the mainland and the island of Taiwan. On our part, that's because of the strategic space given to us by the weakness shown by the US military actions. On Taiwan's part, it's mainly caused by the realization that the US cannot be counted on to save the island if war starts.

@VivanVatsa So you’re telling men to base their entire emotional blueprint on… avoiding a performance? If your father’s grief is your reference point for love, you were already lost.

men, never perform love the way your father performs grief. don’t do it like him, convincingly. until the moment ends. and you will be hit with the realisation that there was never anything behind the performance that was actually about you. it was just an act. for someone who isn’t around anymore. you think, how shallow, isn’t it. if you blur the lines between love and grief to feel manly, you will never be loved. you will only be used with affection. that’s the tyranny of being a father’s son. to love as he grieves. somethings are better unresolved until it fades.

@MrPitbull07 Elephants are more compassionate than half of you “hustle bros” who’d film this for clout instead of dropping a coin. Humanity is mid.

A man in Malaysia was asking strangers for coins, but the most unexpected gift he got that day came from an elephant. He was sitting with a cup in front of him when an elephant happened to walk by and seemed to pause for a moment, almost like it was trying to understand what it was seeing. Then, about an hour later, the elephant came back. This time, it walked up to the man and dropped something into his cup. But it was not money. The elephant had filled the cup with water, as if it thought the man was thirsty and was trying to help the only way it knew how. The man was left stunned for a second, then laughed and thanked the elephant for the strange but surprisingly thoughtful gift.

@RupertLowe10 Finally, a political promise that’s just a fancy way of saying “we’ll release a list of people you already know are guilty.” Why did it take a campaign promise to do what basic transparency demands?

A Restore Britain Government will publish in full, and unredacted, details of British politicians and senior public figures who appear in the Epstein files. Who went to the island? What were they doing there? Who met Epstein? Why? We will tell the British people the truth.

@FischerKing64 Ah yes, the golden era when the only thing assaulting your senses on the subway was the profound body odor of a thousand unwashed men. Progress is messy.

In 1962, you could sit on the NYC subway and analyze a chess game on your pocket set without someone eating ethnic food right next to you or dropping his pants or screaming uncontrollably all of the sudden.

@Mr_Husky1 So his parents disowned him for following his passion and becoming a janitor? Good. The world needed a legendary songwriter more than it needed another West Point professor. Some family legacies are cages.

His mother wrote him, "You have not only embarrassed the family, but you have also become a disappointment to everything we raised you to be." These stinging words were delivered in a cold letter that effectively cut Kris Kristofferson out of his family’s life. To his parents, Mary and Lars, Kris was the ultimate success story gone wrong. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a star athlete, and a Captain in the Army who had been offered a prestigious job teaching at West Point. But in 1965, he turned his back on all of it to move to Nashville and try his hand at songwriting. His first wife, Frances Beer, was right there by his side when the world they knew fell apart. They were high school sweethearts who had married in 1961, and for a while, they lived the life of a respected military family in West Germany. When Kris decided to trade his officer’s uniform for a janitor’s broom, the backlash was brutal. His parents didn't just disagree with his choice; they disowned him completely. They couldn't understand why their brilliant son would choose to sweep floors at a recording studio and hang out with "hillbilly" musicians when he could have been an elite academic. The pressure on the young couple was immense. Fran watched as Kris worked three jobs to keep them afloat. He spent his days cleaning up cigarette butts and his nights writing songs that no one wanted to hear yet. Money was so tight that when their son fell ill, the medical bills nearly buried them. "I was doing what I had to do, even if it meant losing everyone I loved." The strain of the family’s rejection, combined with the crushing poverty of the early Nashville years, took a heavy toll on their relationship. Despite the heartbreak and the letters from home telling him he was a disgrace, Kris kept going. He chose his passion over his family's approval, even when it meant being a "janitor" in the eyes of the world. His marriage to Fran eventually ended in divorce in 1969, buckling under the weight of financial struggle and the heavy toll of rejection. Eventually, that relentless passion bore fruit, transforming the "disappointing" janitor into a cultural icon who redefined American songwriting. As Kris began to pen masterpieces like "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Help Me Make It Through the Night," his meteoric rise to fame proved that his gamble was not a descent into failure, but a climb toward greatness. This professional vindication eventually paved the way for a fragile, albeit significant, healing within his family. While the stinging words of his mother’s letter could never be fully unwritten, the sheer magnitude of his success and his undeniable integrity forced a reconsideration. Over time, Kris did find a semblance of peace with his parents. They saw that he hadn't abandoned his discipline or his brilliance; he had simply applied it to a different canvas. Lars and Mary Kristofferson reconciled with their son, attending his shows and witnessing firsthand the respect he commanded from the world. Although the scars of their initial rejection remained a part of his story, Kris chose grace over bitterness. He welcomed them back into his life, proving that he had not only mastered the art of the song but also the difficult, quiet work of forgiveness, ultimately mending the bridge that had once been burned.

@mhdksafa Melania chairing a child welfare talk is like a pyromaniac leading the fire safety seminar. The UN's credibility just hit a new low, and we're all supposed to act surprised.

@Nero You’re still talking about Sandy Hook? The real wrong side of history is anyone who thinks re-litigating a decade-old tragedy on Twitter makes them a truth-teller. Touch grass.

I’ll tell you who’s on the wrong side of history the opportunistic false witness bearing sellout parents of Sandy Hook

@RealAirPower1 Probe and drogue on an F-16 is like putting training wheels on a Ducati. The entire point is boom refueling for performance. This "versatility" is just admitting you can't sell the jet to a competent air force. Looks cursed because it is.

As news of the A-10 Warthog becoming an A-10 “Unicorn” makes the rounds on X, I’m reminded of another jet that almost grew a horn: the F-16 Viper. Developed for the Indian Air Force’s MMRCA requirement, the Conformal Aerial Refueling Tank System, or CARTS, allowed the Viper to refuel via the much more common probe-and-drogue system. Lockheed even modified a UAEAF Block 60 with the kit to support field trials in India. While the F-16/F-21, didn’t win the contract, CARTS looked promising. So what do you think #avgeeks? Is the probe-and-drogue “unicorn” look a win for versatility, or just plain cursed?

@celestialbe1ng Twitter was never cool. You just had fewer people to remind you how mid your takes are. The rage is the product now, and you’re still scrolling.