Paul Thibodeau

Thomas Sowell called Barack Obama the worst President ever - displacing Jimmy Carter. Worse than Buchanan. Worse than Nixon. Why? The Iran deal alone put the world at risk of nuclear proliferation in our lifetime. He also explains why free markets fix recessions faster than government intervention. [Must Watch]

I just had the craziest experience at the airport. We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight. Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.” Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess. The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.” He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.” Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate… Start clapping. I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message. All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest. It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time. @Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

On this day 250 years ago, our forefathers gathered for a national day of fasting and prayer. Today, Americans will come together again as one Nation under God. This is who we are and who we’ve always been.

Photographer Phil Thurston shot a wave. Slowed it down until those few seconds became 40. Turns out the ocean is doing something extraordinary every single moment. We're just moving too fast to notice.

The globalist puppet Keir Starmer has NO IDEA what he has unleashed. Today, MILLIONS of furious British patriots STORMED the streets of our capital in a roaring tide of defiance. The battle for Britain has only JUST BEGUN and we will NOT stop.

Aaron Judge had 321 HRs in his first 1000 games with the Yankees. Babe Ruth had 321 HRs in his first 1000 games with the Yankees

No screaming. No fires. No broken glass. No threats, or machetes, or chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Just well-mannered, civilized Brits working to save their country from barbarism.

Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined. Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?” One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had. Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation. Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it. Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans. They conquered until they collapsed. America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined. And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated. Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.” Almost unprecedented? It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history. The Marshall Plan wasn’t foreign aid. It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed. America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership. Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a generation. Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth. Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin. A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it. That’s not policy. That’s a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything. You’re being told a story right now. That America is the villain of history. You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms. Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.” Every nation on earth has dark chapters. Every single one. The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it. And when nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities. Musk: “The history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.” Probably right. China has historically built walls, not fleets. But the real question isn’t about borders anymore. We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet. AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint. If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be? The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to? Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy. Billions lifted out of poverty. All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before. And carries no guarantee of being repeated. The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb. It was what it didn’t do after.

“The first Christian service on our soil was a Catholic mass.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliveres a powerful speech reminding America of its deep Catholic heritage

Swans have one off the coolest landing technique ever.. 😊

Milton Friedman on government’s four major functions: 1) Ensure national defense 2) Protect citizens from “abuse and coercion by other citizens” 3) Define and uphold private property rights 4) Maintain a judicial system to adjudicate disputes and enforce rules

On this Kentucky Derby day, here’s your reminder that Secretariat was faster than any horse who has ever lived. The year is 1973 and this is his track record run. Untouched for 53 years. The GOAT.

"El socialismo es una religión política cuyo Dios es el Estado y cuyos sacerdotes son los burócratas... Es una filosofía del fracaso, el credo a la ignorancia y la prédica a la envidia; su virtud inherente es la distribución igualitaria de la miseria" Winston Churchill

Ancient romans used lewis tools

Milton Friedman on 4 ways to spend money: 1) Your money on yourself (you’re careful about both cost and quality) 2) Your money on others (you care about cost, less about quality) 3) Someone else’s money on yourself (you care about quality, not cost) 4) Someone else’s money on others (you care about neither) The last one is how government spending works.

Elon Musk just exposed the one lie every modern nation tells itself. Musk: “In 1969, we were able to send somebody to the moon.” Rotary phones. Computers the size of rooms. Slide rules. We put a human on the moon with less processing power than your watch. Musk: “Then the space shuttle retired, and the United States could take no one to orbit.” The most advanced nation in human history went from footprints on the moon to zero capability of leaving the atmosphere. That is not a funding problem. That is civilizational decay dressed up as a policy decision. Musk: “People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves… it will, by itself, degrade.” That sentence should keep you up tonight. We treat progress like gravity. Like it pulls us forward whether we try or not. It is the opposite. Progress is a boulder on a hill. The second you stop pushing, it rolls back over you. And it never announces itself. Musk: “You look at great civilizations like ancient Egypt, and they were able to make the pyramids, and they forgot how to do that.” They did not run out of stone. They were not conquered. They got comfortable. And the knowledge bled out so quietly that nobody noticed until it was already gone. That is the real threat to everything we have built. Not a nuclear flash. Not an asteroid. Not some dramatic Hollywood collapse. A quiet forgetting. Every chip we fabricate. Every rocket we launch. Every data center we power. All of it held together by a thin fraction of the population working at a pace that would break most people. The moment that fraction gets tired or outnumbered by people who believe the machine runs itself, everything dissolves. And here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. We are not special. We are running the same operating system as every civilization that came before us. Comfort is the sedative. Complacency is the flatline. One generation that stops fighting is all it has ever taken. You do not lose the future in a war. You lose it in your sleep.

Elon Musk just described the most sophisticated theft operation in American history. Not a heist. A system. Your tax dollars leave Washington. They enter a non-governmental organization. The government. With different letterhead. Musk: “Obviously if it’s a government-funded non-governmental organization, it’s just the government.” They cross a border. American law stops following them. They pass through three more entities in three more countries. They come home. Different pocket. Clean hands. Perfect crime. Musk: “The government can send money to an NGO that is then no longer governed by the laws of the United States.” Now run the math. Congressional salary. $200,000. Average net worth of a longtime member of Congress. North of $20 million. Musk: “There are a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress. I just can’t connect the dots of how they got $20 million earning $200,000 a year. Nobody can explain that.” Nobody is supposed to. This machine ran untouched for decades for one reason. Human limitation. A forensic team cannot trace ten thousand wire transfers across fifty global jurisdictions at once. The corruption does not hide in darkness. It hides in volume. They built a labyrinth so deliberately complex that the sheer weight of it collapses every investigation before it starts. Paper buries paper. Bureaucracy absorbs inquiry. The entire architecture was engineered to exhaust you. Then artificial intelligence arrived. AI does not get tired. It cannot be bought. It does not lose the thread at wire transfer 4,000. You give it the entire global ledger. It maps every node, every transfer, every shell entity, every offshore NGO across every jurisdiction. Not in weeks. In hours. It finds the signal inside the noise. It flags the pattern. It traces a dollar from a D.C. appropriation to a Cayman shell to a congressional portfolio in the time it takes a human auditor to find his parking spot. The labyrinth was built to defeat human eyes. It is defenseless against a machine that reads the entire maze at once. This is why the establishment is not just annoyed by DOGE. They are terrified. Musk: “We’re going to try to figure it out and stop it.” He did not arrive in Washington to trim budgets. He arrived with supercomputing, AI audit systems, and a mandate to map the full financial architecture of the federal government. For the first time in history, the complexity that protected the corruption is the very thing that will expose it. Every shell entity is a signature. Every routing pattern is a fingerprint. Every congressman who walked in earning $200,000 and walked out worth $20 million is now a variable in an equation that will be solved. The swamp was never impenetrable. It was just too big for human hands. It was never built for this.

Thomas Sowell is 95 years old. Let that number sit with you. Ninety-five years on this earth, and in all of them, he has never held public office, never had a viral moment, never begged for anyone’s attention. What he has done is write 30 books and spend 50 years of patient research building a body of work that has outlasted every fashionable idea his critics tried to bury him with. While the loudest voices in Washington were chasing polls and the cleverest minds on campus were chasing grants, Sowell was in the library reading the data, tracking the outcomes, and dismantling one bad idea after another. He doesn’t argue feelings. He measures results. He isn’t selling anything. His whole approach boils down to one line that every politician and activist in this country should be forced to recite before they open their mouths: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” Sit with that, too. Every federal program, every mandate, every well-meaning crusade carries a cost, and somebody pays it. Sowell’s life work has been the simple act of asking who. Listen to him on the “help” our communities have been promised for two generations: “I’ve been doing studies now for 20 years of programs designed to increase equality. They increase inequality.” “Even when the programs are designed for disadvantaged groups, they help the affluent members of the disadvantaged groups, while the lower members of those groups fall further behind than ever before.” That is the whole affirmative action racket laid out in two sentences. The kids from the same zip codes as the Harvard faculty get the slot, while the kids from the neighborhoods that actually need a ladder are told to wait their turn. Sowell says it plain: “The vast majority of blacks who go to places like Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford are not blacks from the ghetto. They’re from the same neighborhoods as the whites there.” The race hustlers don’t want you to know that, because they need the grievance to stay in business. Sowell’s advice to young people cuts right through the hustle: “Stay away from the race hustlers.” “Equip yourself with skills that people are willing to pay for.” That is the whole ball game right there, a matter of skills, work, and accountability rather than slogans, hashtags, or another federal program designed to pad a consultant’s salary while leaving the South Side worse off than before. Here is the line I want every young person in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and every other corner of America to read tonight: “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” That one sentence explains our schools, our cities, and why the neighborhoods the War on Poverty was supposed to save are in worse shape now than they were before the checks started flowing. Sowell has pushed a whole generation of us to stop reacting and start asking harder questions. What are the incentives? Who actually benefits from this policy? What do the numbers look like five, ten, twenty years later? Ask those questions honestly, and the illusion falls apart. The most dangerous man in America right now isn’t the one shouting on television. He is the 95-year-old professor in Palo Alto who doesn’t need you to agree with him, because he has the data on his side. Ninety-five years of telling the truth. Thank you, Dr. Sowell.

One of the greatest and oldest special effects in history can be witnessed in Rome today And it has been playing out, on cue, for nearly 2000 years... Each year on April 21, the traditional birthday of Rome — the legendary date Romulus founded the city in 753 BC — the midday sun pierces the oculus at the crown of the Pantheon's dome and casts a perfect disk of light that settles squarely on the temple's entrance. For roughly two minutes and fifty seconds, the bronze doors blaze gold... At that exact moment, the Emperor would step across the threshold, his body swallowed in sunlight, as though the heavens themselves were handing him the city. Hadrian's engineers designed the entire building as a cosmos in miniature: the interior is exactly 43.3 metres wide and 43.3 metres tall, meaning a perfect sphere fits inside it. The Roman senator Cassius Dio wrote that the vaulted roof was meant to resemble the heavens themselves...