Radical Middle

@JohnCleese They don’t want to be threatened or stabbed.

Missing the point completely If the majority of Muslims - the non-radical ones - are not in favour of radical Islam, could some of them start speaking out and saying so What is the reason why they are not doing this ?

@FedupUSExpat @NikkiHaley I’ve heard this said by John Spencer and other military commentators.

@RadicalMiddle4 @NikkiHaley And you know this because........................?

Taiwan makes almost 70% of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips powering your phone, your car, and the AI race. If China controls Taiwan, the Communist Party gains leverage over the world’s most critical tech supply chain. That’s not just a threat to Taiwan’s 23 million people living in a thriving democracy — it’s a threat to global freedom, security, and the future itself.

@Glen_Binnie @anishmoonka Russian physics doesn’t count.

@anishmoonka So about 12 years after Sputnik had proved it. But it only counts if Americans confirm it.

In 1920, the New York Times told a 37-year-old physicist he didn't seem to understand high-school physics. His mistake was claiming a rocket could work in space. Forty-nine years later, the Times printed a retraction. Apollo 11 had launched the day before. His name was Robert Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had written a paper for the Smithsonian called "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," laying out the math for a multi-stage rocket that could leave Earth's atmosphere and, theoretically, reach the moon. The Smithsonian put out a press release. The Boston Herald ran it on the front page: "New Rocket Devised By Prof. Goddard May Hit Face Of The Moon." The Times' editorial response came 24 hours later, under the heading "A Severe Strain on Credulity." The mockery wrecked him. As the takedown spread to newspapers across the country, Goddard withdrew, working almost in secret for the next 25 years and refusing interviews. On March 16, 1926, he launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket from his Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket rose 41 feet and crashed in a snowbank 184 feet away after 2.5 seconds of flight. His wife Esther had set up a movie camera, but the fuel burn delay meant she missed the flight itself. In 1930, Charles Lindbergh personally lobbied the Guggenheim Foundation to fund Goddard's work. The grant came through: $183,500, about $3.7 million today. Goddard moved to Roswell, New Mexico and spent the next decade launching rockets in the desert with a small crew. Between 1926 and 1941 he flew 34 of them, the best one reaching an altitude of 1.6 miles at 550 mph. A Worcester paper covered one failed launch with the headline: "Moon rocket misses target by 238,799½ miles." He died of throat cancer in August 1945. He had filed 83 patents during his lifetime; Esther filed another 131 in his name after his death, working from his notes. NASA would not exist for another thirteen years. Apollo 11 lifted off on July 16, 1969. The next morning, the New York Times printed three short paragraphs under the heading "A Correction." The paper quoted its 1920 editorial and conceded Isaac Newton had been right about rockets working in vacuums. The closing line was five words: "The Times regrets the error." Goddard had been dead for 24 years. He never read the apology. Three days later, men walked on the moon.

@RobertLusetich @MacFarlaneNews Bucks County went for Trump not Harris.

@MacFarlaneNews Fitzpatrick has already won his primary and is in a battle for his political life in a purple seat that narrowly went with Harris in 2024. Expect more of this pushback from vulnerable Republicans in the coming months.

This doesn’t bode well for Trump’s $1.7 billion fund for convicted crooks and rioters: Rep Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA): “we’re gonna kill it”

A French ad company once pitched the city of Paris on a strange deal: let us put ads on your bus stops, and we'll build you public toilets that clean themselves every time someone uses them. Paris now has 435 of them on its sidewalks. Taxpayers paid nothing. The toilets are called Sanisettes. JCDecaux invented them in 1981 and put the first two near the Centre Pompidou museum. They cost 1 franc back then. The city made them free in 2006. People used them 18 million times in just the first nine months of 2025. The cleaning is what people film and share. After you walk out, the door locks. The floor swings open. Jets spray the toilet, the walls, and the floor with disinfectant. The whole cabin gets a wash. About 30 seconds later, the door unlocks for the next person. If you try to walk in during the cycle, the door doesn't open. There's also a 15-minute timer inside, so you can't move in. Cities don't pay for any of this. JCDecaux builds the toilets, installs them, cleans them, and maintains them with their own staff (who, by the way, stay on the job for an average of 18 years). In exchange, the city lets the company sell ads on bus stops, info displays, and other things on the sidewalk. JCDecaux pulled in nearly €4 billion in revenue last year doing this around the world. This same trade was offered to New York. In 2006, NYC signed a $1.4 billion deal for 20 of these toilets plus 3,300 bus shelters. Two decades later, only 7 toilets are in service. The rest spent years sitting in a warehouse in Queens. The reasons get bureaucratic fast: neighborhood boards rejecting locations, state laws getting in the way, fights over wheelchair access, fights over which agency cleans them. Paris was swapping in 7 new toilets every single week during its 2024 rollout. New York managed 7 in 20 years. The same model now runs in 28 countries. The full network is 2,500 toilets strong, used by over 30 million people every year. Berlin alone has 278 of them, the second-biggest network in the world. San Francisco, Stockholm, Lagos, and Abidjan all use the same trade. Nobody pays except the advertisers. A private ad company has been keeping millions of strangers in 28 countries from peeing on the street, for free, for 45 years now. And most cities still can't pull it off.

@cptdankkk People spend money on coffee and lunch in part because it has a social dimension that is importabt to them.

Kevin O'Leary says most people waste $15,000 a year on stupid stuff like $5 coffees "Stop buying coffee for five dollars and fifty cents" "You go to work and you spend $15 bucks on a sandwich, what are you an idiot. It costs you 99 cents to make a sandwich at home and bring it with you" "Bring your own water, your own drink or your own coffee mug. You start to add that up every day it's a ton of money" "Most people starting on their job making their first $60,000 piss away about $15,000 a year"

@JonahDispatch Witty

It’s only nominally Occam’s Street.

@Lughos1 Odysseus is an epic hero, but he’s also an epic liar, the consummate survivor con man. Maybe Damon he’s not right for the role, but the choice isn’t a simple one.

There are many valid critiques of the dismal casting for the Odyssey movie, but they're missing the elephant in the room, Matt Damon. Damon has a great acting career, but if we're being honest, all his characters are simply a subtly different flavor of Matt Damon; nerdy-adjacent-yet-tough-guy guy. He could never pull off epic hero, much less The Epic Hero of western canon.

@ramzpaul The acting wasn’t poor, it was just right.

Star Wars was never meant to be sophisticated thought-provoking science fiction. Released in 1977, it paid homage to the 50s serial action shows that brought back nostalgia for the people of the time. It was basically meant as a kid's movie. The plot was shallow and the acting was poor. It was a cultural phenomenon in 1977 because the special effects were amazing for the time. The sound score was fantastic. And it was a welcome relief from the dark and angsty movies of the 1970s. Trying to milk the franchise for 50 years is a bit much.

@MyersCalev Neither

So does Israel completely depend on US financial aid, or does Israeli money control the US? Which is it? Please help me understand.

There are a lot of terrible white wines, especially in the US. But great white wine is elite. Chablis. Meursault. Chassagne-Montrachet. Pouilly-Fuissé. Sancerre. Pouilly-Fumé. If you want to understand white wine, start in Burgundy and the Loire (France). Pouilly-Fuissé is a great Burgundy entry point because it can be generous and round without becoming a butter bomb. Chablis is sharper and mineral. Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé are Sauvignon Blanc from the Loire at a very high level but solid price. Higher in price, you have Meursault: richer, rounder, and more luxurious. And Chassagne-Montrachet: can give you that power and texture people think they want from California Chardonnay, but with more nuance and elegance. The problem isn’t white wine. The problem is mass-produced white wines tastes like buttered popcorn, vanilla frosting, and oak chips.

@tatumturnup The propophyl kicked in.

This is the greatest video I’ve ever seen. No notes. The lifeless clanker carcass just laying there. No crowd reaction, anything. Just Billie Jean. Until its lifeless shell is shamefully dragged off. Purely amazing.

@MarcoFoster_ Fran Lebowitz doesn’t see the point of sports or billionaires. She’s an emblematic New Yorker and a clown.

Fran Lebowitz on the billionaires: “Every time someone suggests [a wealth tax] they say I’m moving. Go! They add nothing to New York. In the 19th century, those robber barons, they employed people. All this money magic employs no one. Goodbye, go. We don’t need you”

Olive oil. Liquid gold. The reason the Mediterraneans live forever. The single most romanticised ingredient in modern cookery. The bottle on the counter you paid £18 for because it had a Tuscan hillside on the label and the words "extra virgin" printed in a serif font. Let's have a look at what you actually bought. There is a non-trivial chance, depending on which study you read, that the bottle in your kitchen has been cut with seed oils. The olive oil industry has been caught doing this so many times that Italian organised crime built an entire revenue stream around it. The FBI has a unit. The unit has been busy. You did not know this, because the bottle on your counter has a Tuscan hillside on it, and the Tuscan hillside has been doing the heavy lifting on the marketing for forty years. The polyphenols, the supposed miracle compounds that the entire Mediterranean diet narrative rests on, degrade rapidly with heat, light, and time. By the time the oil has been pressed, bottled, shipped, sat on a supermarket shelf for nine months, brought home, sat next to your hob for three more months, and finally poured into a hot pan, the polyphenol content is approximately what you would get from licking the label. You then heat it. Olive oil has a smoke point lower than butter and dramatically lower than tallow. The moment it begins to smoke, the few remaining polyphenols are destroyed and the oil itself begins oxidising into compounds nobody wants in their body. You are now cooking with a degraded industrial product wearing the costume of a peasant tradition. The Mediterraneans, by the way, did not eat olive oil in the quantities you have been led to believe. They ate olives. They cooked, primarily, in lard and animal fat, because animal fat was what you cooked in, everywhere, for the entire history of cooking, until a small group of researchers in the 1950s decided otherwise. The olive oil was for dressing salads and for lamps. The notion that the Mediterranean diet is built on olive oil is a marketing project, beautifully executed, that began in the 1970s and has not stopped since. Butter has a higher smoke point. Ghee higher still. Tallow higher again. All three contain the fat-soluble vitamins. All three are stable when heated. All three are cheaper. All three have not been cut with anything by an organised crime syndicate in the last six months. Cook in butter. Cook in tallow. Cook in lard, dripping, suet, duck fat, bacon grease. Keep the olive oil for the salad you are no longer eating.

One of the most inconvenient facts for the modern anti-Zionist narrative is George Eliot. And yes, George Eliot was not a Jewish man. She was Mary Ann Evans: a brilliant Victorian Englishwoman, one of the great novelists of the 19th century, and the author of Middlemarch. Her final novel, Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, did something extraordinary. Long before Herzl, long before the Holocaust, long before 1948, and long before the fashionable campus slogan version of history, Eliot treated Jewish national restoration not as racism, colonialism, or supremacy, but as dignity. In Daniel Deronda, the Jewish people are not presented as a religious curiosity to be tolerated by Europe, or as a broken minority expected to dissolve into someone else’s civilization. They are presented as a people. A historic nation. A scattered civilization with memory, language, faith, continuity, and the right to recover political life in its ancestral homeland. That is what ruins the lazy narrative. Because we are constantly told Zionism was some artificial 20th-century European colonial invention. But here is a non-Jewish English novelist in 1876, writing before political Zionism became an organized movement, before Israel existed, before Auschwitz, before the UN, before the British Mandate, before every modern excuse people now use to explain Jewish sovereignty away. And what did she see? She saw that Jewish emancipation in Europe was not enough if it required Jews to survive only as guests in other people’s nations. She understood that a people can be both ancient and modern. Dispersed and still connected. Religious and national. Wounded and still sovereign in spirit. That is the part anti-Zionists cannot tolerate. Zionism was never merely a reaction to European guilt. It was never simply a post-Holocaust compensation scheme. It was never just a colonial project dressed up in biblical language. The idea of Jewish restoration was older, deeper, and morally legible even to serious non-Jewish thinkers who bothered to look at Jews as a people rather than as a problem. George Eliot did. And that is why Daniel Deronda remains so dangerous to the fashionable lie. It shows Zionism before Israel had power. Before it had an army. Before it had borders. Before it had anything except memory, longing, and a claim that should have been obvious: The Jewish people were not asking to become someone else. They were asking to come home.

@r0ck3t23 The Buddha said the same thing 2500 years ago.

Elon Musk said five words on Joe Rogan that explain everything wrong with your life right now. Musk: “Happiness is reality minus expectations.” Five words. And it explains why the most comfortable generation in human history can’t stop feeling empty. Musk: “If you just go try living in the woods by yourself for a while, you’ll learn that civilization is quite great.” He’s right. On Naked and Afraid, people tap out in days. Sometimes hours. They crawl back to the same civilization they spent years resenting. Because comfort is invisible until you’re sleeping in the dirt. But the formula has a second variable. It’s the one destroying you. Reality didn’t get worse. By every measure, it’s the best it’s ever been. Expectations did. Your grandparents compared themselves to their neighbor. Maybe a cousin. That was the whole universe. You compare yourself to 10,000 strangers before your first cup of coffee. Curated. Filtered. Showing you a life that doesn’t exist. Theodore Roosevelt said it a century before any of this was built. Roosevelt: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” No Instagram. No TikTok. No algorithm designed by the smartest engineers on the planet to show you precisely what you don’t have. And he still called it. Now run the equation. Reality holds steady. Expectations spike every time you unlock your phone. The distance between them stretches. And happiness doesn’t fade. It collapses. Not because your life got worse. Because your reference point moved. We built the greatest civilization in human history. Then we built the perfect machine to make sure nobody enjoys it. Every scroll. Every notification. Every “suggested for you.” None of it connects you. It’s recalibrating what you think you need. Upward. Constantly. Without your consent. And you wonder why you feel behind. You’re not behind. You’re running toward a finish line that moves every time you look up. The most dangerous lie of this generation isn’t that life is hard. It’s that everyone else figured it out. And you’re the only one who didn’t. Nobody figured it out. The formula doesn’t negotiate. It just runs. Raise expectations faster than reality improves and you will be miserable inside a paradise you built with your own hands. That’s not philosophy. That’s arithmetic. And the calculator is in your pocket right now.

Reconciliation is only necessary to receive communion if one has committed a mortal sin. Not going to Sunday Mass (which somehow separates one form the love of God) is a moral sin requiring reconciliation. So most people need reconciliation. But then the penance is so absurdly simple - five Hail Marys - it’s hard to believe that most mortal sins really are mortal sins.

And they aren’t supposed to receive communion without it. Collapse of the sacramental system. A spiritual disaster, and most people don’t care

Or maybe it’s because Tyrion Lannister was the heart of GOT.

@jimgeraghty It’s not hard to imagine. No one is going to defend Taiwan if China invades.

It is extremely hard to envision China invading Taiwan and not taking some sort of preemptive attack (kinetic, cyber, sabotage) against Taiwan’s allies like the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Australia and perhaps other regional militaries, to prevent them from defending Taiwan. Picture the entire Pacific Rim looking like the Strait of Hormuz — very few ships going in, very few ships going out. Add it all up, and the economic fallout from an invasion of Taiwan is projected to be roughly twice as damaging as the Covid-19 pandemic.