Simon Silverby

@LarryTaunton I think he had a bit of a death wish after Lombard died.

This wasn’t merely a photo op. Gable flew real missions. Too old to be drafted, he joined and served in the Eighth Air Force stationed in East Anglia, England. His fellow B-17 Flying Fortress crewmen were initially skeptical of Gable’s service, thinking it a publicity stunt. But they soon realized it wasn’t. He (and fellow actor Jimmy Stewart) refused to stay on the glamorous sidelines as MGM, who held the rights to the Hollywood star, had urged. He flew no less than 5 combat missions and, according to those same crewmen, flew many more unofficially, eventually earning him the rank of major. Although he was at the peak of his post-“Gone with the Wind” fame, Gable tried to blend-in as much as he could and only leveraged his star power for the benefit of others. When Bob Hope came to London on a USO tour, he knew Gable was in the audience and called for “Rhett Butler” to stand up. Gable remained seated and servicemen around him refused to point him out. Generous to a fault, he treated them to nights out and took a keen interest in their lives. For their own part, they looked up to him and loved to follow in his wake on a weekend pass and a London pub crawl as British women flocked to be near him. Those he didn’t choose were fair game. He left the pretty ones to them. “They’re too much trouble,” he said. In his forties, Gable saw the young crewmen, who were mostly in their late teens or early twenties, as his own children. On one occasion, he went to visit the tail gunner of his B-17 who had been shot-up badly on a mission over Germany. The young man’s back was broken, his spinal cord severed, and a lung gone, he was bandaged like a mummy. Gable became emotional at the sight of him. The attending physician told him the boy didn’t feel anything due to morphine, said he wouldn’t live much longer, and began describing his injuries in detail on the spot. Gable, noticing tears welling in the boy’s eyes, grabbed the doctor, dragged him into the hall, and pushed him against a wall: “If you ever do anything like that again I’ll kill you!” Hitler, who liked Clark Gable’s movies — “It Happened One Night” was his favorite — offered a $5,000 reward for his capture. Fearing he’d be paraded around Berlin like a zoo animal if he ever parachuted from a wounded Flying Fortress, the actor said he’d “just go down with the sonovabitch.” Source: These stories and more are in Donald L. Miller’s excellent “Masters of the Air,” a book I finished just last week. Buy it.

Homeschooling isn't an "experiment" People were learning at home for thousands of years. Factory schooling is the experiment. And that experiment has failed.

@Camp4 Been married 38 years. Couldn't be happier. To universalize your own emotional poverty isn't wisdom; it's confession of failure.

There are only three types of marriages: 1. Those that end in a divorce. 2. Those that come close to ending in divorce. 3. Those in denial (the worst type). The whole ball game is weathering the inevitable storms.

@chartwell_press @paul_jkrause He was one of those writers, like Nietzsche, who had vision that arced over the horizon well into the future. A Clockwork Orange isn't about violence in the 50s or 60s. It's about idealized violence in 2020s. Kubrick too understood this.

@DocSilverby @paul_jkrause Burgess's "The Wanting Seed" is prescient. There's a reason it's not being talked about in 2026.

Reading Dickens is entering a world of heart and soul. The passion, the calculation, the determined and ruthless pursuit of power and wealth, memory, childhood, good and evil, truth and lies. Plus, sometimes just reading his prose is delightful as a reader.

Shake Shack burgers taste great But the wait? An entire 40-minute episode of Bryan McGee on BBC discussing Kant. Time left to continue with Schopenhauer.

STAFFER SCUM: The Unelected Republican Vipers Castrating Congress and Selling Out the Republic​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The metastasizing rot devouring this Republic doesn’t originate in the marble halls or the mahogany desks of the “honorable” members, entirely. It festers in the warren of offices just behind them...staffer dens where twenty-eight-year-old Ivy League sociopaths with zero skin in the game, zero combat experience, and zero understanding of the American heartland decide what your congressman or senator will say, vote, or even think. Especially the Republican staffers. Those polished, ambitious little vipers in Brooks Brothers camouflage. Clinical pathology in human form: the managed-opposition mercenaries who’ve internalized the enemy’s frame so thoroughly they now police their own principals for any whiff of actual spine. They are not advisors. They are the ventriloquists. The members are the dummies...geriatric, C-SPAN-addicted, re-election-obsessed husks whose only remaining function is to read the script, smile for the cameras, and sign the omnibus that was already drafted in the staffer’s third-floor lair at 2 a.m. while the “representative” was asleep in his Georgetown townhouse. Fact: Over 80% of legislative language in modern Congress is written by staff, not members. Bills arrive pre-packaged, pre-compromised, pre-larded with donor carve-outs and lobbyist wet dreams. The congressman? He’s the brand mascot. The staffer is the CEO. And the Republican ones are the most lethal strain...because they wear the conservative mask while quietly castrating every instinct toward actual power. Psychologically, it’s textbook: the staffer class suffers from what Nietzsche would diagnose as ressentiment weaponized into policy. They despise the voters who sent their boss to Washington; they fear the base’s raw, unfiltered demands for blood and borders and sovereignty. So they manufacture “prudence.” They whisper “bipartisanship” like a sedative. They leak to the press the moment their principal even thinks about wielding the purse or the gavel like the Constitution demands. They are the psychological operation that turns lions into house cats...domesticated, declawed, and grateful for the kibble of committee assignments. Philosophically, this is the inversion of the Republic’s own design. The Founders feared standing armies and centralized power; they never imagined the soft tyranny of an unaccountable administrative class operating as the real legislature. Madison warned of factions. He never foresaw that the most dangerous faction would be the permanent bureaucracy’s younger, hungrier cousin...he staffer swarm that rotates seamlessly into K Street, think tanks, and media sinecures, all while the elected face changes every two or six years like seasonal drapes. These Republican staffers aren’t incompetent. They’re pathological. They are the ones who convinced McConnell’s office that “regular order” means surrendering. The ones who told the Freedom Caucus to sit down and shut up because “the adults are in the room.” The ones who draft the poison-pill amendments that gut border security while pretending it’s a “win.” They don’t lack intelligence; they lack loyalty to anything except the swamp’s gravitational pull...the revolving door, the cocktail circuit, the quiet contempt for the red-hat rubes back home who still believe in the myth of representative government. I see it with the cold, lethal clarity of a coroner over a corpse: the major issues in Congress are not the congressmen. The congressmen are the symptoms. The staffers are the disease. Especially the Republican ones...those sophisticated traitors who turned conservatism into a lifestyle brand for people who hate what conservatism actually requires: violence against the regime’s machinery, not accommodation with it. They have turned the People’s House into a whorehouse where the Constitution gets gang-raped by procedure, precedent, and “process.” And every time a Republican member stands up and bloviates about “fighting for you,” his staffer is already in the back room negotiating the surrender terms. Fuck these staffers. Fuck their polished treachery. Fuck the psychology of managed decline they peddle as wisdom. And fuck every congressman or woman...Republican especially...who lacks the balls to fire the entire lot and hire people who remember that they serve the sovereign citizen, not the other way around. The Republic is dying from a thousand staffer cuts. Time to stop pretending the elected are in charge. They aren’t. The shadows are. And the shadows wear lanyards, not lapel pins.

@Architectolder Like Rothko Chapel in Houston. Walls of nihilistic shit that pretentious idiots claim is 'mystical'.

She can sit there and stare all day, it is never going to be art

@cyrilXBT Slides? The second PowerPoint comes up, I leave. Every time.

A MIT professor gave a 1-hour lecture in 2019 that has 18 million views. He died 5 months after recording it. It was his final gift to the world. Patrick Winston taught at MIT for 50 years. The smartest engineers on earth sat in his classroom. And he spent his last lecture teaching them the one skill their degrees never covered. How to speak. 15 lessons that will change how you communicate forever: Never open with a joke. Your audience is not ready to laugh yet. Open with a promise of what they will know by the end. Your ideas are like your children. You are too close to them. What is obvious to you is invisible to everyone else. Explain the obvious. The 5-minute rule: the first 5 minutes of any talk determine whether people will listen for the next 55. Spend more time on your opening than anything else. Repeat your most important idea 3 times in 3 different ways. Once is never enough. Build a fence around your idea. Tell people what it is NOT before you tell them what it IS. Verbal punctuation. Pause. Let the idea land before moving to the next one. Ask questions nobody will answer. Then wait 7 seconds. The silence is not awkward. It is processing. Never read your slides. Your audience can read. They cannot listen and read simultaneously. Use the board not the slides. Writing forces you to slow down. Slowing down forces clarity. Inspire before you inform. Nobody learns from someone they are not inspired by. End with a contribution not a summary. Tell them what you gave them. Not what you said. Never say thank you at the end. It is weak. End with something that lands. Stories make ideas stick. Data makes ideas understood. You need both. In that order. The quality of your communication determines the quality of your ideas in the eyes of the world. Not the ideas themselves. Practice is not preparation. Practice IS the skill. Patrick Winston understood something most people spend their entire careers missing. Your ideas are only as powerful as your ability to transfer them into someone else's mind. You can be the smartest person in the room and be completely invisible. Or you can master communication and make average ideas feel like breakthroughs. He chose to spend his last lecture teaching this. Watch it tonight. Bookmark this first. Follow @cyrilXBT for more lessons from the people who built the future.

@AbakpaJob Also about a disciplined focus that few in the MBA world can muster.

people think writing is about being smart but actually it's about being honest which is way harder

@MrWinMarshall Living in some alt-reality where every foreign entanglement was a "world war." Can't fix stupid.

Someone should’ve paid more attention at the Quality Learing Center

@Noirchick1 None of these. The energetic presence of Teresa Wright trumps them all.

Who is your favorite 1940s Beauty?

@eugyppius1 Many such villages across Europe, Latin America, and the US (though in the US not with that clean demarcation between village and prairie--the unfortunate sprawl is a blight). They will be our retreat and salvation.

yes my country is awesome

@epaleezeldin @rosadelauro Bring back witch trials, and begin with DeLauro.

Nothing infuriates an uninformed Congressional Dem more than when they realize they voluntarily triggered a debate with someone who actually knows what they are talking about, reads federal statute and adheres to Supreme Court precedent. Today’s self-implosion by @rosadelauro was quite remarkable to witness. Without apology or regret, I will always adhere to the best available reading of federal statute pursuant to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright.

@InfragilisTee Blind Melon.

@fightsarchived Sergeant Sagpants needs extensive range time on quick draw and target acquisition. He also needs to lose about 100 lb or move to desk duty.

📍Houston, Texas. 2026 😳👀 Wild sh00tout erupts after officer confronts man standing in front of a school with a pink bag and a gn 😳😳

@EliAfriatISR Golda

I will follow back anyone who recognizes her. 💙

@walterkirn Fauci is worse then Mengele. He should be hanged on a cheap 8-foot gallows of knotted pine.

Light a candle for the good doctor. One of those candles with his picture on it.

@ksorbs I live in Texas. I understand.

The new projected Florida map is beautiful. If you don’t live here, you wouldn’t understand.

@eugyppius1 A bad day on top of a psychotic break. There's no rational explanation of such a mental break. It just happens.

The big mystery in the Eastburn family murders case is not the perpetrator, but exactly what precipitated the crime and why it occurred. What sequence of events inspired Hennis, this family man, to sexually assault his casual acquaintance on Thursday, 9 May 1985, and kill her and two of her three children in overwhelmingly aggressive and gruesome assault? Three points that may bear on this question, directly or indirectly: 1) Hennis had just adopted Katie Eastburn's dog. He told police that she called him around 9pm on the night of the murders to ask how her dog was doing. If true (afaict the phone call was never confirmed, not sure if such a thing was even possible given 1980s telecommunications technology) that would suggest she invited him over, or he invited himself over – on a night when Hennis's wife was away, while Katie Eastburn's husband was away for training, after the kids were put to bed. 2) After Hennis was arrested for the crimes, his ex-girlfriend Nancy came forward to provide an alibi. She said he had come over to her place around 9pm that evening, watched television, and then left maybe around 9:30pm. So after Katie calls him he goes to his ex's place? Anyway, as alibis go this was not a good one, the Eastburn murders could've happened anytime the night of 9 May. Nancy and Hennis had a friendly relationship, both had married other people, and crucially both Nancy's husband and Hennis's wife were away that evening. I am going to draw on my experience of human sexual relationships and say there was some kind of hookup, at least planned, in this case. Nancy didn't want to say so (husband) and Hennis didn't either (wife) but there's no reason you visit your ex-girlfriend's place on Thursday night when both of your spouses are away just to watch television. Let's not be stupid. And also, the most crucial point: Hennis initially tried to conceal his meet-up with Nancy from police. Why? 3) The hair evidence: Pubic hair in living room (where Katie was initially assaulted) and other hairs in Katie's bed were not a match for her husband or other acquaintances and not a match for Hennis either. That's just odd. The DNA evidence is conclusive, Hennis did the rape and thus the murders. I'm not disputing his guilt or driving at any specific theory here, also I don't know how to put these different pieces together, or even if they belong together, but I think about them.