Larson Els

@LinkofSunshine There was Joseph Heller's self-limiting Major Major Major Major.

The only reason America uses “General of the Army” instead of “Marshal” for a five star general is because the five star rank was George Marshall and we thought Marshall Marshall would sound silly

Poliziano Rosso di Montepulciano 2023 Sangiovese from Montepulciano, Tuscany, Italy Sangiovese 80%, Merlot 20% Purchase Price $18.99 Vinous 90, Cellar Tracker 88, ElsBob 89 ABV: 14% A ruby red, clear wine with vibrant tastes of red fruits. A acidic medium finish that smooths out the tannins. This is meant to be a young wine so don’t overdo it with meal prep. It will go fine with spaghetti in a marinara sauce. A very good fine wine slightly overpriced at $20. Buy it if you can find it under $14. Current prices range from $14-16. This wine needs to breathe. The first sip from a just open bottle will be rough. Give it 30 minutes. Trivia: The village of Gracciano, Italy, near the Poliziano vineyard, sits in a Tuscan landscape where everything has happened but nothing that will ever make it to Jeopardy. But it does lie heavily at the crossroads of Etruscan, Roman, medieval, and Renaissance history. Not a place of singular world‑shaping events, but of continuous layers of civilizations that march through and over the land that helped shape the modern world. From 700 to 100 BC, the entire Montepulciano–Gracciano ridge was Etruscan territory, and they were already cultivating grapes. God bless ‘em. Beyond that, very little was known: their language vanished, their tombs were looted, and Rome’s shadow seemed to erase them…until last year. In 2025, archaeologists from Baylor University uncovered a sealed Etruscan chamber tomb at San Giuliano, northwest of Rome. Dating to roughly 2,600 years ago, the 7th century BC, it is one of the most significant Etruscan finds in decades. Inside were four individuals laid on carved stone beds, surrounded by more than 100 grave goods: iron weapons, bronze ornaments, ceramic vessels, and delicate silver hair spools, all in their original placement. This tomb, along with two others discovered recently, is giving researchers an unprecedented chance to illuminate the civilization’s inner life: family structure, gender roles, trade networks, ritual practices, and social hierarchy. The emerging picture suggests a culture older and more urbanized than early Rome. A society whose religion, architecture, and political symbolism Rome borrowed heavily. Etruscan elites were likely not destroyed but absorbed into the expanding Roman world.

@Mustangrde1 @CollinRugg Across the US for all towns and cities it is 2.16 police officers per-1000 people. For large cities its 3-5 officers per-1000 people. For towns less than 1000 it is between 0 and 3.

Lets see that is one officer per 500 people... You do understand officer work shifts, typically 8 hour shifts 7 days a week 365 days a year. You have two on duty officers each shift maybe 3 with 2 off and can be recalled. So 2 officers for 500 or 3 for every 300... Might even be 1 duty and 2 school resource we dont know for sure. But do Know this mayor abused his power for vengeance.

Georgia mayor fires the entire police force for making his wife upset. Cohutta Mayor Ron Shinnick fired all 10 employees of the Cohutta Police Department for making “inappropriate comments” that upset his wife, Pam. Pam was fired as the town clerk after creating a “hostile work environment,” but allegedly continued to work and have access to personal information. Officers shared their complaints on Facebook, which Ron claimed were “inappropriate” and upset Pam. After initially resolving the dispute with Police Chief Greg Fowler, Ron posted a sign on the department's door one week later that read, "The PD has been dissolved, and all personnel have been terminated." "This all comes to personal vendetta from the mayor and I wholeheartedly believe that," said Sgt. Jeremy May.

@45johnmac @RogerBernards These are kitchen table discussions with her maid who is an illegal alien from Mexico.

Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal admits that she is communicating with foreign countries to supply Cuba with oil, despite ongoing U.S. sanctions to limit oil imports, sounds treasonous.

Dreams Anton Chekhov is considered the seminal force behind modern theater, penning two of the most honest accounts in the genre of Realism: The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, both probing life’s basic desires and finding them an elusive force in his protagonists’ lives. The Cherry Orchard anticipates Hemingway’s “slowly, then suddenly”; the Ranevskaya‑Gaev family drifts toward ruin not through catastrophe but through inertia. Unable to adapt, the play is a tragedy of pathological unwillingness. In The Three Sisters siblings Masha, Irina, and Olga dreams fail to ignite any transformation, all talk of a better, brighter future but no action towards that new beginning. The sisters are caught up in eternal desire but no ability to reach for it. Chekhov’s genius in both of these plays is to keep dreams of the future just out of reach leaving everyone frozen in their past. The true tragedy is not that the characters explode in catastrophe, but they just slowly fade away into their past. Life inexorably slipping from their grasp, like old photographs losing their color, the outlines of their lives fading into the bygone era that holds them fast. Chekhov first developed his theatrical themes with the short story. All of which are partially autobiographical and truly analytical of the human condition and their dreams. He wrote to sustain himself, sometimes financially, but always psychologically as not so much a need but a release, stating, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress: when I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other.” After 17 plays and more than 500 stories one suspects that he never really got fed up with the latter, but his stories suggest that he did with the former, frequently. To understand why Chekhov wrote the way he did; with such clarity about humiliation, inertia, and the erosion of possibility, one must understand the life that shaped him. Anton Chekhov was born in 1860 in the small port town of Taganrog, the third child of a grocer whose piety was matched only by his cruelty. His childhood was marked by poverty, debt, and the constant threat of his father’s bankruptcy; with the family eventually fleeing to Moscow to escape creditors and debtor’s prison. Chekhov, then sixteen, was left behind to tidy up the business mess and finish school alone, tutoring younger students to pay for food and rent. This early apprenticeship in hardship shaped the clarity with which he later wrote about poverty, humiliation, want, and the quiet heroism of endurance. In his twenties, as a medical student supporting his entire family through magazine sketches, he contracted tuberculosis that would shadow him the rest of his life. Yet it was during this same period that he experienced his brief season of happiness: a deep, tentative love for Lika Mizinova, a friend of the family whose warmth and volatility left a lasting imprint on his stories. The relationship dissolved under the strain of his illness, his obligations, and his own emotional reticence, but its memory forever haunted him. By the time he achieved literary fame, the disease had already begun to hollow him out. His later years, split between Moscow and his beloved estate at Melikhovo, were a race between artistic maturity and physical decline, a life lived with the knowledge that time was running out. That same sense of dwindling time permeates his fiction, where characters are trapped in systems; social, economic, bureaucratic, that grind them down long before death arrives. Yet he was never overtly polemical, nor was he didactic. In the introduction to The Greatest Short Stories of Chekhov, translator Constance Garnett repeats the claim that Chekhov “held no fixed political or social views.” But the only way to reach that conclusion is never to have read him. Chekhov writes of poverty with a doctor’s precision and a patient’s pain. His contempt for the idle rich is unmistakable. Serfs, bureaucrats, and petty tyrants appear again and again, not as caricatures but as symptoms of a society drifting toward moral exhaustion. His work is not overtly political because it refuses the cheap clarity of slogans. Instead, it offers something far more radical: an unflinching, cold account of a world in which people are crushed not by oppression but by inertia, habit, and the slow suffocation of possibility; the lack of imagination and drive. Critics mistook this subtlety for neutrality, his refusal to preach for a refusal to see what everyone else saw. But his stories are saturated with social vision, but rather than openly ideological he settles triumphantly for the diagnostic with surgical precision. This is Chekhov’s most devastating political insight. Chekhov returns again and again to the question of human purpose, usually finding his characters unequal to the task of rising to higher ideals. In 1889, after losing his older brother Nikolay to tuberculosis at only thirty‑one, he wrote A Dreary Story, a novella that confronts the terror that death renders all human effort meaningless. The narrator of the story; an aging, clinically depressed professor at the end of a brilliant medical career, examines his life and finds it hollow. He watches his family suffer and feels nothing. He listens to his closest friend and cannot understand his glee, his optimism. Speaking to his adopted daughter, Katya, he delivers a confession that is part lament, part self‑indictment: “Something is happening to me that is only excusable in a slave… I am full of hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing, and dread… What is the meaning of it?” He calls these feelings shameful, but he is past shame. He is simply exhausted. When Katya finally leaves him, his last thought is not regret or memory, but a small, mournful stab of self‑pity: “Then, you won’t be at my funeral?” Depression and the meaning of life enter again into one of my favorite and most psychologically penetrating Chekhov stories: Ward No. 6, a psych ward in a small provincial hospital; if it can even be called a psych ward, more like a containment room for lost causes. Most critics read Ward No. 6 as a parable of moral collapse, institutional cruelty, or the slow degeneration of a complacent doctor. But this interpretation misses the deeper, more unsettling truth Chekhov, as a practicing physician, was actually dramatizing: the plight of medicine at the close of the nineteenth century. The story is not about a man who loses his mental hold on reason. It is about a doctor who realizes, with devastating acuity, the futility of medicine as it was practiced in his world. Chekhov knew this intimately. As a provincial doctor, he treated thousands of patients he could not cure, including his brother’s tuberculosis and eventually his own. He understood that much of medicine consists of gestures; reassurance, ritual, placebo, the performance of care in the absence of real efficacy. The doctor in Ward No. 6 comes to the same realization. He sees that the best he can offer is comfort, not cure; that his diagnoses change nothing; that his authority is largely symbolic. And once he sees this, he cannot unsee it. He turns inward, looking for an escape. At one point he describes his dilemma to his after‑work companion: “You know of course…that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind…Consequently the intellect is the only possible source of enjoyment.” But he finds none, not at home, not in the hospital, not in himself. Nowhere in his world. This recognition does not make him immoral; it makes him despair. His inability to help the people who come to him, combined with the professional obligation to pretend otherwise, corrodes him from within. The depression that follows is not a personal flaw but the natural consequence of witnessing suffering he cannot alleviate. Chekhov understood this emotional collapse with painful precision. In this state of disillusionment, the doctor finds an unexpected mirror in a patient in Ward No. 6. This man is not simply “mad”; he is the doctor’s alter ego: the part of him that refuses comforting illusions, the part that speaks honestly about pain, the part that sees the world without anesthetic. Their conversations are not the doctor’s descent into madness but his first encounter with truth. He is drawn to the patient because he recognizes himself. But in Chekhov’s world the clarity of medicinal limits is dangerous. The doctor’s colleagues, committed to the rituals and hierarchies of their profession, interpret his honesty as emotional instability. His refusal to maintain the performance of medical omnipotence becomes, in their eyes, a symptom of disease. His attention to the mad patient; the only person who speaks to him without pretense, is labeled “unhealthy.” And so, the institution does what institutions do: it protects itself by diagnosing dissent as madness. The tragedy of Ward No. 6 is not that the doctor goes insane. It is that the system cannot tolerate a doctor who stops keeping up with pretense. His final confinement is not a moral punishment but a professional one. He is destroyed not because he collapses, but because he stops pretending to have answers. Seen against the backdrop of late‑nineteenth‑century medicine, Ward No. 6 becomes not merely a story about madness but a diagnosis of an entire profession. The doctor’s despair, his attraction to the patient who speaks without illusion, and his final misdiagnosis by his own colleagues all point to the same conclusion: the real sickness lies not in the individual but in the medical culture that cannot admit its own impotence. By ending the story with a stroke, a clinical event that was misdiagnosed as psychological collapse, Chekhov underscores that the tragedy was never moral degeneracy but the catastrophic failure of a profession unable to tell illusion from reality, or performance from truth. In this sense, Ward No. 6 is Chekhov’s most radical indictment: a recognition that when medicine cannot heal, it must at least see clearly, and that clarity itself may be the one thing the system lacks. Chekhov only rarely lifts the veil of universal futility that hangs over his work, but when he does, he finds solace in the human need for connection. In The Lady with the Dog, love arrives unbidden, and once found, must be seized and held with the tenacity of a vow. Yet the most surprising Chekhovian uplift comes from The Student, an early story that stands against the pervasive loss of meaning and purpose in Chekhov’s world. Here a young seminarian suddenly senses that the past is not dead but vibrantly present; “an unbroken chain of events, one flowing out of another,” and that touching one end makes the other tremble. That the full arc of time and history provides “the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness.” In that moment Chekhov anticipates both Bergson and Proust: the endurance of duration, the trembling continuity of memory, the way a present emotion can awaken ancient sorrow. After the despair of A Dreary Story and the clinical futility of Ward No. 6, The Student offers Chekhov’s final insight: that meaning does not arise from certainty or cure, but from the continuity of human experience itself. Time endures. Memory binds. The chain of humanity holds. And for Chekhov, that is enough. Graphic: Anton Chekhov by Osipp Braz. Oil on Canvas. 1898. Source: The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, 2023.

Timescape Cosmology & Density‑Indexed Time: A Bold New Take on Cosmic Time This speculative framework combines Density‑Indexed Time (DIT) with Timescape cosmology to rethink how we understand the universe’s evolution. Instead of a single, uniform cosmic clock, it proposes a hierarchy of temporal domains shaped by density and structure. This leads to a new interpretation of dark energy, dark matter, and cosmic puzzles like the Hubble tension and the Fermi paradox. The key insight is that time itself is not uniform but varies with gravitational environment and cosmic structure. This desynchronization explains many observed phenomena without invoking mysterious forces or particles. Galaxies can be seen as mini temporal universes, each with its own clock. The universe’s apparent acceleration is actually a result of these diverging clocks. This view challenges conventional cosmology by suggesting the universe ends not in heat death or collapse but in a mosaic of temporal layers, each evolving on its own schedule. It invites further discussion and critique, offering a fresh perspective on the nature of time and the cosmos. Embedded X links no longer seem to work. If you wish to read the full paper do a search on the following: Timescape Cosmology and Density-Indexed Time: A Speculative Unified Framework for Emergent Cosmic Clocks.

St. Francis Old Vines Zinfandel 2021 Zinfandel from Sonoma County, California Zinfandel 83%, Petite Sirah 17% Purchase Price $19.99 Wine Spectator 90, Wine Enthusiast 88, ElsBob 88 ABV: 14.8% A clear, crisp ruby red wine with sparkling flavors of cherries and raspberries. Medium-bodied with a fairly short finish. Will pair well with rich spicy foods. A very good fine wine but overpriced at $20. A fair price would be $12 or less. Current prices $16-20. Trivia: The St. Francis Winery sources its old‑vine Zinfandel, 60 to 100 years old, from a mosaic of small, family‑owned vineyards across Sonoma County, including some of its own estate parcels. Dry Creek Valley, Russian River Valley, and Sonoma Valley are the classic AVAs for old vine Zinfandel, and no single winery holds enough old‑vine acreage to produce a meaningful volume alone. St. Francis relies on long‑standing relationships with these growers, making this wine neither a négociant bottling nor a strictly estate‑grown one, but a true grower‑partner expression. The winery takes its name from St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the nature. Themes of reverence for creation, harmony with the land, and care for living things shape the winery’s identity. St. Francis of Assisi founded the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, and inspired both the Poor Clares and the Third Order for laypeople. He embraced absolute poverty as the spiritual core of his movement. In 1224 he received the stigmata, becoming one of the earliest and most famous stigmatics in Christian history. His life remains a model of humility, peace, and solidarity with the poor, a faithful imitation of Christ. This ideal of poverty has deep roots in Christianity. In the early Church, renouncing wealth was a way of rejecting the Roman system of power and status. The Desert Fathers of the 3rd to 5th centuries carried this impulse into the wilderness of Egypt and Palestine, seeking God in radical simplicity. For them, poverty created an interior stillness: freedom from the noise of desire (from material possessions), a state they called apatheia. The word is Greek, meaning “without passion,” but in the ancient world it carried a positive sense of clarity and freedom rather than the negative connotation the modern term “apathetic” suggests.

@BeecuzWecan @FoxNews Yup

@elsbob @FoxNews Atlas Shrugged. 🤷‍♀️

NEW: The 11 dead or missing U.S. scientists are now being viewed as a "NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT." “It does appear that there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here,” House Oversight Chair James Comer tells Fox. "Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat."

Cause and Effect? The difference in overall happiness across the political spectrum is well documented. Also the increase in ‘unhappiness’ across the entire political spectrum over the previous 15 years is also well known. Whether causative or not, the mental well being of the overall population began to degrade about the same time social media became universally available. From Grok: Social Media Tipping Point: Late 2000s (2008–2010): This period marks when social media transitioned from a trendy tool to a mainstream powerhouse: •2008: Facebook reached 100 million active users. The introduction of the "Like" button and other features boosted engagement. Smartphones (e.g., iPhone in 2007) started making access easier. •MySpace peaked around 2006–2008 but was quickly overtaken. •Twitter (launched 2006) gained traction for real-time updates and news. •U.S. adult usage jumped from just 5% in 2005 to much higher levels by the end of the decade. Globally, Facebook went from covering ~1.5% of the world population in 2008 to rapid expansion. Social Media Dominance: Early 2010s (2010–2012): This is when social media truly became inescapable: •Instagram (launched 2010, acquired by Facebook in 2012) emphasized visual content and mobile use. •Facebook hit 1 billion users in 2012. •Smartphone adoption exploded, turning social media into a pocket-sized, always-on experience. Apps proliferated, and features like news feeds, hashtags, and viral sharing amplified reach. •Usage in the U.S. climbed toward 70%+ of adults, and platforms began rivaling or surpassing traditional media for news and influence. Brands shifted budgets heavily toward social advertising. americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to… by Musa al-Gharbi, American Affairs Journal.

@compliantvc It took me awhile but I finally realized this guy is the king of sarcasm. Check out some of his previous posts. Quite funny actually.

Just spoke with dozens of European VCs They all agreed: AI is over No one is putting money into AI startups anymore OpenAI is likely going bankrupt I asked what the next big thing is They all answered in unison: Regulation. And the hot spot for the best regulations? Europe. Meanwhile, America is getting left behind

@shortmagsmle Since you went there. Set it to Kid Rock’s song, “Devil Without a Cause”.

Libs: “we need to make Trump look bad” Journalist: “hey get a shot where he’s wearing royal purple and looks taller than a jumbo jet and has a 10 foot dick and everyone around him is kneeling or staring in awe”

@elonmusk The Garden of Eden was a teaching moment. Utopias were not meant for man. We need purpose to thrive.

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

These figures come primarily from Stanley Lebergott’s estimates (widely cited and adopted by the BLS in the 1940s). Annual average unemployment rates for each year in the 1930s: •1930: 8.7% (sharp rise following the 1929 stock market crash) •1931: 15.9% •1932: 23.6% •1933: 24.9% (peak year of the Depression, with roughly 12.8–13 million people unemployed, or about one in four workers) •1934: 21.7% •1935: 20.1% •1936: 16.9% •1937: 14.3% •1938: 19.0% (spike due to the “Roosevelt Recession”) •1939:

🚨 Thomas Sowell debunks the Great Depression’s most entrenched myth “There’s this narrative out there that the reason we had mass unemployment in the 1930s was because the market failed. It so happens that for the 12 months following the stock market crash, we never hit double digits of unemployment.” “Unemployment peaked at 9 percent two months after the crash and started going down. The unemployment rate was down to 6.3 percent when the federal government figured it had to intervene.” “And that’s when the downward movement reversed and we never saw 6.3 percent again for the next decade. It’s clear as crystal that the disaster came after federal intervention.”

@donallen59 @DailySowell The dust bowl occurred in the 1930s with worst years happening mid-decade.

A part of the Great Depression that some don’t know is that the Dust Bowl occurred in the 1920s in Oklahoma, TX, Kansas and surrounding areas. Huge agricultural regions that saw many farming families decimated. Resulted in many migrating to California in search of work. The market collapse of 1929 and ensuing economic fallout just brought the Depression to the rest of the US.

@HonorAndDaring Pope: "Our finances are not in the greatest shape right now. I wish there was a plan that would improve our cash flow in the short term." Democrats: "We have a plan."

This is obviously the play, and when you understand that 65% of revenue from Catholic Charities comes from the government, you will understand why the US bishops want the Democrats back in power.

@RippleXrpie Unfettered immigration is worse than anyone thought. Official population stats for the Union in January 2025 was 450 million.

🚨🇪🇺 URSULA VON DER LEYEN HAS SENT A MESSAGE TO OVER 743 MILLION EUROPEANS REGARDING THE ENERGY CRISIS: "The cheapest energy is the one you don't use. Stay home, don't drive, don't use electricity."

@Cathy2NotToday @RonDeSantis A $3 million structural deficit requires $9-11 million tax hike according to the NY Post.

I’m from there .. This isn’t a “blue state failure”—it’s basic math. South Hadley is an 18,000-person town facing a ~$3M structural deficit from rising healthcare costs, reduced state aid, and the end of COVID funds—not runaway spending. Property taxes fund schools, police, roads, and libraries. Remove them (like proposed in Florida), and you don’t get “relief”—you get either: • Massive service cuts • Or replacement taxes (sales/fees) that hit working people harder Florida already shows this: no income tax, but high insurance, fees, and HIGHEST regressive taxes to backfill THAT FALL ON MIDDLE CLASS ABD POOR

Oof. Wonder why these tax happy local governments never seem willing to reduce/eliminate administrative bloat?