Cody Lee

@DeniseStrain6 @EchoesofWarYT Ron Chernow wrote a biography on him that is incredible. He dug as deep into every facet of Washington’s life that he could.

@EchoesofWarYT Could you recommend a good book about his life and work? I will read it and then pass it to my Dad.

George Washington never went to college. His father Augustine died when George was 11, and the money for English boarding school died with him. His two older half-brothers had already been polished at Appleby Grammar School across the Atlantic. George got Virginia, a demanding mother named Mary, and whatever books he could find at home. At 14 he tried to escape it all by joining the British Royal Navy. His mother shut it down. So he did the next best thing: he taught himself surveying from his late father's instruments, and at 16 he rode west into the Shenandoah wilderness on a commission from Lord Fairfax, who owned over five million acres of Virginia and needed them mapped. His teenage journal survives. It is brutal, funny, and absolutely not the voice of a marble statue. On his first night at a frontier inn, he stripped down and climbed into what passed for a bed, only to find "nothing but a Little Straw Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas etc." After that he preferred sleeping outside by the fire, even when it rained, even when his clothes froze stiff on him by morning. One journal entry, almost in passing: thirty Native warriors walked into camp carrying a fresh scalp from battle. The teenage surveying party shared their liquor with them and watched them perform a war dance by firelight. George wrote it down the way a modern teenager logs a weird night out. He swam horses across swollen rivers. He ate roasted meat off forked sticks because "our Spits was Forked Sticks our Plates was a Large Chip as for Dishes we had none." He met German settlers and noted in frustration that they "would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch." He measured timber in country where almost no English speaker had ever walked. By 17 he was the commissioned surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest official surveyor in the colony of Virginia. By 18 he had parlayed the earnings into nearly 1,500 acres of Shenandoah Valley land in his own name, bought outright, while boys his age back east were still reciting Latin in heated parlors. The man who would one day command the Continental Army, defeat the largest empire on earth, and then voluntarily refuse a crown, did not learn leadership in a lecture hall. He learned it at 16, in a tent, in the dark, hundreds of miles from anyone who could save him.

"Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well-adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults. Schools, even much better schools, cannot solve this. Here's the truth: Nobody loves your kids as much as you do." - @BenSasse at the 2026 Alexander Hamilton Awards

Bobby Cox was ejected from one out every 158 games played by the #Braves—not during his tenure as manager, rather the franchise's entire history, dating back to April 22, 1876.

Ted Turner spent 20 years making sure a kid in Montana could watch the Braves. MLB spent 20 years making sure a kid in Atlanta couldn’t

Raising teens is fun if you want someone to think you’re the dumbest human alive while simultaneously needing your help to do anything

i can still live another 50 years if @Mike_Pence has the courage

Amazes me that people will wait in long lines & purchase tickets for the best views but will sit next to an airplane windows, 35k feet above Gods creation & not open the window or look out. We flying over mountains, oceans, sunsets most people will never see in their lifetime.

@AndThatsBB My childhood ideal lineup in the 90s: 1. CF 2. SS 3. 3B 4. 1B 5. RF 6. LF 7. 2B 8. C 9. P

I miss old lineup construction: 1. Fastest player 2. Bat control guy (he sucks) 3. Best all-around hitter 4. Best power hitter 5. Lumbering power or bust hitter 6. High-OBP guy who leads off now 7. Bad switch hitter 8. Catcher 9. Gold Glove defender (-5 DRS, can't hit)

Home, again! Mission complete. I hope we glorified God, humanity, our families and our terrific teams a @NASA and @csa_asc. Time to share the good news!

Both societies exist simultaneously Really incredible to think about

Earthset. The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon.

One last look at Earth before we reach the Moon. This view of the Earth was captured on April 5, the fourth day of the Artemis II mission, from inside the Orion spacecraft. The four astronauts will reach their closest approach of the Moon tomorrow, April 6.

There are no words.

@rahulbali @wabenews @GASenatePress @LtGovJonesGA @patricksaunders @DitchDst @SaveStandard @AASMorg This will be awful for my wife, who lives in Georgia and works in Tennessee.

BREAKING UPDATE: Georgia State Senate passes a bill to switch Georgia to the Atlantic Time Zone. Georgia would observe year-round Daylight Saving Time and not change clocks twice a year. #gapol House Bill 154 now goes to the State House. Learn more here: bit.ly/4rI6DGZ

being right-leaning and high openness is so funny. "this is one of my favorite musicians, i disagree with everything they stand for, highly recommend"

Kissinger on Europe in 1966. Remarkable foresight here. This is from ⁦@nfergus⁩’s amazing biography of Kissinger, Vol. 1.

LLMs are living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world, just like Nietzsche said secular liberals live off Christianity. What happens when the inheritance runs out? Using LLMs well — knowing when to trust them, how to interrogate their outputs, what questions are worth asking — depends on capacities that are pre-LLM in origin: critical judgment, domain expertise, philosophical seriousness, taste. People who use LLMs well right now tend to be people formed by traditions of deep reading, argument, and intellectual discipline that were not themselves produced by or optimized for interaction with language models. The tool works for them because they bring something the tool cannot supply. Nietzsche thought secular liberals were coasting on the fumes of a Christian metaphysics they'd officially abandoned. The shadow of God lingering on the cave wall. The question is whether LLM-native thinking is the same kind of afterglow.

@megha_lilly Yes. The thing with this book in particular is that you slog through 30 difficult, boring pages to get to a page or two of absolute thunder. Those long boring passages are the cost of admission.

Before I was reading any classic novels, I could never get past the difficult boring parts. What helped me break through and enjoy a classic novel was when I went on a camping trip to the backwoods with my friends and my only entertainment was “Brothers Karamazov”. I had been languishing on page 35 for ages. But the solitude, the lack of constant stimulus in the woods, the simplicity of the time spent, allowed my mind to rest enough to concentrate. I read 200 pages in a weekend and it was the most beautiful experience ever. Even now, when I read classic novels, it forces my mind into the state it was in when I was in that more soothing mental environment.

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath just delivered the brutal truth parents and educators need to face: “Even in schools, it doesn’t matter what the size of the screen is… and it doesn’t matter who bought it… All of these things are going to hurt learning, which in turn are going to hurt our kids’ cognitive development.” His core warning: Gen Z is the first modern generation to be less cognitively capable than their parents — despite more years in school. Attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, even general IQ — all declining. The culprit isn’t school itself. It’s the widespread introduction of screens and digital tools for learning. Across 80 countries, once tech floods classrooms, performance drops sharply. Kids using computers ~5 hours/day for schoolwork score over 2/3 of a standard deviation lower than those who rarely touch tech. US NAEP data mirrors it: states adopt 1:1 devices → scores plateau, then fall. The biological reality: Humans evolved to learn deeply from other humans, not screens. Screens circumvent the natural mechanisms of attention, memory consolidation, and deep processing. When the tool fails to deliver, we don’t remove it — we redefine success to fit the tool (e.g., SAT reading comprehension reduced to skimming short sentences instead of deep passages). That’s not progress. That’s surrender. The cost is a generation losing cognitive sharpness at the exact moment the world needs them sharpest. Parents, teachers, policymakers: How much longer do we let screens dictate what “learning” looks like?