Michael Bates 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿🇮🇪🇮🇱

@CodyLibolt @nath_ormond @EstherOfReilly This is the operating principle of mainstream media now: Report only the news that motivates the correct public response. Suppress news that might raise doubts or undermine obedience.

Arabs, Slavs, Africans, Scandinavians, et al. share design elements that reflect their shared history and kinship - it is completely natural and normal for British countries to do the same. How are people still bringing up these ignorant arguments in 2026?

@elonmusk @Oilfield_Rando Tis real @elonmusk — Bobby knows … youtu.be/LsL3eCWsEz8?si…

Months ago, @dustinkittle reached out to me to tell me how our farmers are losing their farmland and the government is allowing it to happen. Dustin was one of the inspirations for starting my show in the first place because I thought to myself, "if people only knew." Last week I drove down to Tennessee to film this episode of him telling his story. I know I am a very small fish, but I hope this reaches the right people to make a difference to save our family farms. Dustin is not just a farmer, he is also a very successful lawyer. If he can't stop this, our small farms have no chance. We need President Trump and congress to step in immediately. --- 01:18 Dustin’s Background 03:30 Buying a Farm 07:35 What is Farm Credit? 09:27 Farm Credit Administration 12:34 Getting a Loan 22:37 Farm Credit Goes After His Mom 41:09 Extortion 47:22 File Complaint with FCA 58:51 What the FCA Did 01:05:47 Why is this Happening? 01:10:38 Foreclosure 01:19:21 After the Loan was Paid 01:25:08 FCA Releases Findings 01:31:21 Dustin Kittle Sues the President 02:02:25 What can we do? 02:06:56 Why Dustin was Targeted 02:21:05 Keeping People Quiet 02:22:51 What can Farmers Do? 02:25:38 Farm Credit Sues Dustin 02:29:35 Threats Against Dustin 02:34:20 Suing Biden and Not Trump 02:36:32 Foreign Governments Buying Farmland 02:37:46 What Farm Credit Does with the Land 02:43:14 What can we do - continued Quick Hitters 02:51:52 Thoughts on Brooke Rollins 02:56:35 Subsidies 03:01:54 Bird Flu 03:08:34 Country of Origin Labeling 03:10:32 Pesticide Immunity

Imagine how many billable hours went into this one, to end up 9-0. I bet Sony wishes it could have settled the case when it had a billion-dollar verdict in hand, and now gets nothing.

@LinchCharity A lot of time and passion goes into platform writing under the mistaken hope that it can shape reality. That would only work if the same people who wrote the party platform controlled who got the party nomination, and that's not how it works.

@LinchCharity If a candidate was asked about, say, a plank calling Mexico a Communist country, his safest answer is, "I haven't read the platform, and I wasn't involved in writing it." He wants to push the issues that will help him win and not be forced off-message.

Oklahoma has a majority Republican?! One sitting Republican said the Republican platform is irrelevant. More on that today. Our platform is our values. When they don’t feel that is relevant, why are they claiming to be Republican? Oklahoma does not have a Democrat problem. We have a RINO problem. Working on that….

I ride the Metro-North and the NYC Subway every day. And frankly, I don't always feel like sitting next to anyone else. I don't take an Uber every day. And wouldn't. I want the option to take my wife to work, so that SHE doesn't have to get on a bus full of the mentally ill savages whose existence YOU enable. Because individualism disgusts and scares you, having MY own car is something YOU'RE trying to remove from existence. Like Neo said in the Matrix Reloaded (2003), "Choice. The problem is choice." And there it is. YOU and the rest of your fellow urbanist degenerates want to take that choice from me. Yes, ME. A Black man; a blue-collar Union worker. You HATE me. You hate the fact that I exist. You hate the fact that men like @progressiveact exist. You would take away my right to individual movement AND abolish private property in one stroke, because you're a filthy fucking Communist. You are hostis humanae generis. And you must be stopped.

@johnkonrad What is the deal with generals selling off / decommissioning useful assets? Is it that the short-term savings look good on their record? Is it to feel that they're making an impact?

Trump is NOT escalating this into a major ground war. Let me spell this out with crayons. I’m a US Merchant Marine Captain, O6 (not O3) equivalent. We are a tiny forgotten service with one MF overarching specialty: moving escalatory armies overseas. It’s true a general like McChrystal has far more knowledge about what to do AFTER his tanks roll off our ships. But BEFORE those tanks roll off? They are OUR cargo. We are the specialists. We climb all around those tanks. We secure them, move them, deliver them. Our Commandant, who I talk to every single week, is in charge of that lift. Not whatever general is waiting on the pier. Right now we are in the BEFORE stage. I absolutely 💯 know more about this than any general because I have spent decades training and living the life for THIS MOMENT. When generals want to move escalatory army divisions overseas, they call us. We don’t specialize in every branch. Naval, Air Force, USMC, Special Forces movements have their own lift pipelines. We can help, but that’s not our core mission. But if you want to escalate a war with heavy ground forces? I get a call. The Air Force has already called us to move more bombs into theater. So yes, the air campaign can escalate. But there are ZERO plans to escalate this into a large scale ground invasion. ZERO. This cannot be done by airlift. The USAF can’t even get their own bombs overseas right now, let alone divisions of army units. And if I do get the call, it will be months before we are landing tanks.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ So I repeat… this CAN NOT turn into a major war without my phone ringing. You can send Marines and air assault units without tanks to do raids but a major landing force like McChrystal is talking about just is not happening. Not yet. Not for months, if ever. And when it does happen I will tell you because you can’t move Army divisions in secret. Not since the Army, in a moment of idiocy, sold off its Merchant Marine preposition fleet last year.

Why do new buildings seem, on average, uglier than old buildings? We discuss some options: - Survivorship bias: only the beautiful old buildings have survived (we reject this option); - Cycles of taste: everyone always finds new buildings uglier (we mostly reject this too); - Ornament became too expensive because of rising labour costs (we reject this); - Ornament became too cheap because of mechanisation and then became low status (we reject this); - Some sort of Protestant or Puritan anti-beauty inheritance (we are doubtful); - Some kind of elite status game, perhaps a response to democratisation or elite overproduction (we think there is promise here, but serious work is needed on the details). I discuss this and more with @Aria_Babu and @bswud. Apple podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/did… Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2pIka6… Youtube: youtube.com/watch?v=qvueKt…

It's not just phonics: Schools have failed to teach reading because they ignore 50+ years of findings in cognitive psychology that reading depends on general knowledge. ED Hirsch has been banging this drum for a long time but Ed Schools shut their ears because the whole idea was unromantic & had a vaguely right-wing aroma. Now he joins with Dan Willingham to make a strong case that kids can't read if they don't have the background knowledge that makes sense of the rarer vocabulary, allusions, and understandings that allow us to read between the lines - which all reading requires. educationnext.org/rediscovering-…

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

Trump shared the report

I don't even need to say anything, I'm just tired of this.

There are two ways to understand the Middle East, and which one you choose determines whether Western civilization will survive or not.

CEO OF OREO: “I would advise that everyone eat 50 Oreos a day. Maybe even 100.”