SCD @CaptConscript

If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it. Start with misery. For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset. Today it's around 1 in 10. That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have. Now meet Friedrich Hayek. An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society. His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge. When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one. His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way. Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere. The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth. Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules. Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark. Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it. Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero. Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design. "But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate. Now let me tell you about my country. France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world. And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade. Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works. And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem. I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards. One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet. So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right: You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away. Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results. Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you. Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism. And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things. That's you. That's the job.

This just about sums it up. Stakes gone, implications gone, urgency gone, meaning gone.

I have personally flown with the new “Touch Screen Control Display Unit” TSCDU and I am not a fan. The first significant issue I encountered was trying program it during moderate turbulence. It was difficult to push the correct place on the screen and actuate the proper command. I prefer the textile feel of pushing a button, especially in turbulence. I also despise all the greasy fingers prints from previous pilots. I’m sure maintenance appreciates these new screens, however I am guessing I’m not alone with pilots despising them…..just my personal observation. Anyone else flown with them?

✈️ NEWS: @SouthwestAir is adding three new nonstop destinations from PIT for Summer 2027: 🌴 Panama City (ECP) 🌳 Savannah/Hilton Head (SAV) 🏖️ Punta Cana (PUJ) The additions make Summer 2027 the largest Southwest schedule in PIT history. brnw.ch/21x67Yh

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September 26, 1918. The United States launched the largest and deadliest battle in its entire history, a massive assault in France that helped end World War I but cost more American lives than any battle before or since. Here is the whole story. By this point in the war, America had been fighting for over a year, and its forces in Europe had swelled into a huge army under the command of General John Pershing. Germany's last great gamble to win the war had failed, and now the Allies were pushing to finish the job. The Americans were handed one of the toughest assignments on the entire Western Front. The scale is hard to grasp. Roughly 1.2 million American soldiers took part, making it the biggest operation the United States military had ever mounted. Their objective was to smash through the German defenses in the region between the Meuse River and the dense Argonne Forest, and to cut the crucial railroad lines that supplied the entire German army along the front. Sever those lifelines, and the German position would collapse. But the ground they had to take was a nightmare. The Germans had spent four years turning it into a fortress, layering the hills, ravines, and thick woods with trenches, endless coils of barbed wire, hidden machine gun nests, and pre aimed artillery. Much of the American army was green and inexperienced, and just getting hundreds of thousands of men, guns, and supplies into position created colossal traffic jams on the muddy roads behind the lines. The early days were brutal and slow. The Americans pushed into a wall of fire and often got bogged down, taking heavy losses for every yard against fierce German resistance. It was grinding, deadly work, but the sheer weight of American numbers and relentless pressure kept the assault moving forward. The battle produced some of the most famous stories in American military history. A group of around 550 men, later called the Lost Battalion, got cut off and completely surrounded deep in the Argonne Forest. For days they held out against constant attacks, running out of food, water, and ammunition, refusing to surrender even when the Germans demanded it. With their own artillery accidentally shelling them, they sent a desperate message by carrier pigeon to call off the friendly fire. Only about a third of them walked out alive. It was also here that a soldier named Alvin York became a legend. A humble marksman from rural Tennessee who had once questioned whether he could morally fight at all, York found himself in a fierce firefight and, in an almost unbelievable feat, helped kill or capture an enormous number of German soldiers, personally taking scores of prisoners. He came home one of the most celebrated heroes of the war. The cost of it all was staggering. More than 26,000 American soldiers were killed in the offensive, with total casualties well over a hundred thousand. No single battle in American history, before or since, has killed more Americans. The rows of white crosses at the vast American cemetery in France, the largest in Europe, stand as testament to that price. But it worked. The Americans, alongside their allies, broke through the German defenses and threatened the vital rail lines, adding enormous pressure to a German army that was already crumbling. Within weeks, Germany asked for an armistice, and the war ended on November 11, with this offensive still underway right up to the final hour. The battle announced to the world that the United States had become a major military power, and it was a proving ground for a generation of officers, including future giants of the Second World War. Yet despite being the deadliest battle the nation ever fought, it is strangely under remembered today, overshadowed by the wars that came after. That enormous, bloody, decisive assault began on this day.

WHO WANTS A SECOND SEASON? The campaign starts here! #thependragoncycle #AmazonPrimeVideo #tomsharp

Dear @marvel @marvelstudios: Please, for the love of it all, give us a one-shot of Michael Pena as Luis doing a recap of the entire MCU saga leading up to @Avengers: Doomsday.

Penn State is honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks this week with 2,977 American flags on Old Main lawn, one for each person who died in the attacks 25 years ago.

🔊 WHEN A 24 YEAR OLD FERRARI MADE 2026 FEEL SLOW 😭 Watching Seb chuck the F2002 around Monza with that V10 howling like it still had unfinished business did something to me. Instant, unfiltered jealousy of every fan who actually lived through that era instead of just watching it on grainy YouTube compilations. 🥲 They got cars that screamed to 19,000 rpm, drivers who could just go flat out, and weekends that didn’t come with a side of energy harvesting homework. We got what Max called Formula E on steroids. Lift, coast, manage the battery, don’t brake too late or you’ll ruin the recharge window. Pure racing replaced by spreadsheet driving. The old heads talk about the sound like it was a religious experience. We talk about deployment maps. 📊 Seeing that red missile carve through the park, Seb doing donuts at the second chicane while the Tifosi lost their minds, felt like peeking through a window at a party we were born too late for. I wanted to be twelve in 2002, sitting too close to the TV, covering my ears and grinning because the noise physically hurt in the best way. Instead I’m here in 2026 watching modern cars that look fast on paper and sound like expensive kitchen appliances. 😮‍💨 The previous generation didn’t know how good they had it. They just showed up, heard the V10s, and thought that was normal. We showed up, heard Max complain about energy management, and realised we’d been short changed. One demo lap in a 24 year old Ferrari and suddenly the whole current grid feels like a compromise. Give me the old days. Or at least give me a time machine and a pair of earplugs I don’t actually want to use. ❤️‍🔥 x.com/ScuderiaFerrar…

@smclaughlin93 At least you didn’t do a croissant

To someone who never lived in the pre 9/11 world, it’s inconceivable how much life changed that day. Those who were there lived through unimaginable destruction and loss that was not limited to the immediate havoc but extended to a long, dangerous cleanup that exposed workers to toxic, cancer-causing chemicals. For the nation, it was still a world of shared experiences rather than algorithmic isolation. We went through it together. As we received news one by one of each attack, we didn’t know if there were a handful of hijacked planes or if there were hundreds. Phone lines were jammed and you couldn’t get in touch with your loved ones. Then we all watched the same few news stations showing footage of the towers falling which we’d see over and over hundreds of times. We heard the same stories of heroism. We mourned with NYC for their first responders whose lives were wiped out as they tried to save injured and stranded victims. Todd Beamer became a household name, and everyone knew his famous words, “Let’s roll,” heard by his wife from his cell phone as he a revolt against the Flight 93 hijackers. Then, day by day, life as we knew it changed irrevocably. Daily headlines focused on al Qaeda’s terror plots. Osama bin Laden was still at large. The federal government’s newly instituted Department of Homeland Security developed a color-coded warning system for potential terrorist attacks and we’d be told on the news every day what color we were on. We soon learned we were going to war with Iraq, then Afghanistan. Brothers, fathers, classmates were sent to third world hellholes. Some didn’t come back. Others returned riddled with catastrophic injuries and PTSD. Plane travel became security theater. The foiling of an attempted “shoe bomber” meant we had to take off our shoes and couldn’t so much as bring our own water bottles on a flight and had to be subjected to humiliating rituals like having our benign personal effects confiscated, and our bodies molested and scanned by TSA, most of which continues to this day. It wasn’t like that before. Things weren’t perfect prior to 9/11/2001, and, although we had some understanding that we were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, we never imagined anything so catastrophic would happen. So, yeah. I guess you could say we get a bit “weird” about it.

Futuristic_Fudge @FudgeFuturistic

2 months ago

People born pre-9/11 have such a weird, worshipful attitude about it.

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My preferred model would be a pretty drastic shift from what CFB has been, but I think is best for the long-run health of the sport. - 6 top-flight leagues, each with 11 teams (66 total teams) - 10 conference games plus 2 noncon against who you wish, FCS/G6/FBS whomever - Bottom 2 teams get relegated based on conference play - Top 2 from lower tier get promoted - Complete reshuffling of the conferences to align competitively and geographically At the end of the top flight season, a 20-team playoff. Top-2 from each conference auto qualify for second round. 8 teams compete in a play-in round. A necessary concession is that contracts have to have buyouts, so If LSU wants to sign a player from ULM, they need to pay the buyout and then sign said player. All of this would need an anti-trust exemption, but any positive outcome needs that.

Nathan Carroll @Nathan_Boise

2 months ago

CFB NEEDS promotion/relegation. It’s the obvious solution to all of this and it will never happen because the Mississippi State and Boston College’s of the world would be forced to prove it on the field 🤷‍♂️

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Everyone keeps talking about the "male loneliness epidemic," but nobody seems interested in asking what happened to spaces where men could just be around other men. And here's something people don't like acknowledging: Simply adding women to a male group changes the social dynamic. Men behave differently around women than they do when it's just the guys. The jokes change. The conversations change. The shit-talking changes. Guys become more guarded. Certain subjects disappear completely. Men start filtering themselves because the social consequences of saying the wrong thing are different in a mixed group. That happens even BEFORE anyone complains. Then add another layer. Once women enter traditionally male spaces, there is often an expectation that the existing atmosphere should become more accommodating to feminine sensitivities. That's too crude. That's offensive. That joke went too far. That's immature. That makes me uncomfortable. Why do you guys act like this? Eventually the men aren't interacting naturally anymore. They're interacting through a filter. And that's the entire fucking point people miss. A male space isn't just a building with a "MEN ONLY" sign on the door. It's an environment where men feel comfortable dropping the social filter and interacting with other men in ways they often DON'T when women are present. Change the composition and you can change the behavior. Change the behavioral expectations and you change it even further. Eventually you've destroyed the very atmosphere that made it a male social space in the first place, even if men technically still gather there. Then society turns around and asks: "Why are men so lonely?" Maybe because we spent decades treating exclusively male social spaces as suspicious, exclusionary or outdated while simultaneously telling men they desperately need stronger friendships with other men. And the irony is incredible. Men constantly hear: "Leave women alone. Respect women's spaces. Women don't exist for your benefit." Okay. Then afford men the same courtesy. Sometimes men want to hang out with other men precisely BECAUSE there are no women around. Not because they hate women. Not because they're plotting against women. Not because women are inferior. Because the dynamic is different. Men should be allowed to have that.

Before Wi-Fi in your CHU, before FaceTime, before everyone carried a smartphone… There was the MWR INTERNET & PHONE CENTER. This was probably the most emotionally dangerous building on the entire FOB. You'd wait 45 minutes for a computer, log in, open Yahoo Mail, and then wait some more. And wait some more. "LOADING…" you'd finally get one email from home, only for the dude running the place to yell, “YOU GOT FIVE MINUTES LEFT!” 😂😂😂 And the phone booths were even better. You'd stand in line forever, clutching an AT&T calling card like it was classified material. Finally calling home: “Hey, babe, it's me.” 3-second satellite delay. “What?” “I SAID IT'S ME.” “What?” “NEVER MIND.” Meanwhile, somebody three booths down would be having the loudest deployment breakup in GWOT history, and 15 dudes in line would be pretending they couldn't hear every single word. And God help you if a COMMS BLACKOUT happened. Suddenly, everybody knew. Nobody asked questions. If you experienced the early-GWOT internet café/phone center, you probably have a story to tell. 👇 WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THESE PLACES? @Boots_N_Chutes @DropzoneBrief

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Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos , I’m asking you to look at this once through the eyes of the people wearing the uniform since you own @washingtonpost. We volunteered and accepted the bargain. Missed birthdays, broken bodies, years away from our families, hostile fire, and the possibility that if we die, our families get roughly $500,000 in life insurance. In much of America today, that barely buys a house. We know our lot and we’re not complaining about it. But the job is hard enough without having to wonder whether an American newspaper is going to publish classified wartime command deliberations because its newsroom despises the administration and wants another cheap political scalp. Fight the President, the Secretary, the Pentagon. Whatever, that’s politics. But when the ammunition for that fight is information tied to ongoing operations and the private judgments of senior commanders, you’re spending our risk to buy your headline. That’s the part WE need you to understand. Murphy already gets a vote. So does the enemy. Exhaustion, bad intelligence, mechanical failure and plain rotten luck all get votes. We volunteered to face those things. We did NOT volunteer to become collateral damage in the Washington Post’s feud with an administration it hates. Your reporters will publish the piece, watch the engagement numbers, and go home. Some American kid will still be standing watch when they do. Jeff, give us a fucking chance. Come on man. You’ve got to clean house at that paper. The journalists are too blackpilled to be of any use anymore. In fact, they’re literally harming us. Our brothers and sisters are in a worse situation now due to this reporting. Don’t agree with the combat operations, fine. But come on. Leaking an SDOB? That’s objectively insane behavior. ***to my followers: share so we know he sees this.***

Tara Copp @TaraCopp

2 months ago

EXCLUSIVE: Military leaders warned Hegseth that keeping the force of more than 50,000 troops in the Middle East is unsustainable, drawing “non-concurs” from them in recent orders to extend troops. (gift link) w/ @AlexHortonTX wapo.st/4wT23bL

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The Irish famine was not caused by a potato blight. It was caused by a law passed in 1663, and the blight simply arrived to collect. Ships left Cork the whole time it was happening, carrying butter and bacon under armed guard, past people dying on the quayside. The version taught in schools is a fungus. Blight arrives, potatoes rot, tragedy. It leaves out why eight and a half million people were standing on one South American tuber to begin with, and that part is not weather. It has dates and it has signatures. Ireland had cattle before it had writing. The national epic is a war over a stolen bull. Wealth was counted in cows, rank was counted in cows, and for a thousand years the country ran on beef, milk and butter. Then in 1663 the English parliament taxed Irish cattle out of the English market, and in 1666 banned them outright, in an act that called the importing of them a common nuisance. Ireland was pushed into salt beef, hides and butter for the navy, the colonies and the slave plantations. Produced on Irish land, sold out of Irish ports, eaten somewhere else. The good ground was reorganised around what would survive a sea voyage. What was left for the people was the crop that feeds a family off a quarter of an acre of bad land. That is not a folk tradition. That is what you are reduced to when the field behind your house is producing somebody else's dinner. In 1845 the crop failed and the food kept leaving. Butter, bacon, ham and live cattle going out of Cork and Limerick and Waterford while the workhouses filled. The relief that existed came with the Gregory Clause: hold more than a quarter acre of land and you were entitled to nothing. Give up the ground or starve on it. Somebody sat down and drafted that. A million dead. A million gone. Eight and a half million down to six and a half in six years, and Ireland is the only country in Europe with fewer people in it now than in 1840. The lesson everyone takes is about the fragility of monocultures, which is a comfortable lesson, because it blames a plant. Nobody starves for want of food in a country that is exporting it. They starve because two centuries of decisions, taken by men who were never going to be hungry, left them one thing to eat and that thing could fail all at once. Ireland's cattle are now the subject of national emissions targets, and the argument is once again about what that land ought to be producing, conducted by people who will not be eating the outcome either way. The blight came in 1845. The reason it killed a million people was drafted in 1663.

If there’s one flag that gets more questions online than any other, it’s the blue flag so… let’s discuss! To put simply, this flag means there’s a faster car behind you. But, why is there so much confusion about this flag? As simple as “faster car behind you” sounds it gets complicated because it can be both an informational flag or a command flag depending on who is displaying it and what type of track it is. Let’s start easy! The video is from Milwaukee, where we race this weekend, and you can see that I am using it three different ways. I’m pointing it back to inform a driver that a lead lap car is nearing, I hold it solid when a lead lap car is within attack range, and waving it when a pass is imminent. What does the driver that’s getting blue flagged by me have to do? Nothing. On an oval it’s purely informational. Let’s now get complicated and go to a road course. If you watch practice, you’ll see the corner stations quite often blue flagging more than what the video shows. Again, this informs a driver that there is a faster car approaching or potentially attempting to pass them. In a race, corner stations may blue flag a car that’s down a lap to inform them a lead lap is nearing. Well, that doesn’t sound complicated so far, right? Let’s get to if I blue flag a car on a road course. Should race control call for a “command blue flag” that driver MUST give way or incur penalty. This is the way F1 does it, but the difference in INDYCAR is that, to be command blue eligible, a driver must be one lap down to the entire field instead of about to go one lap down like F1. Until a command blue is called that driver is allowed to fight for position. Why fight? Should a full course yellow fly, and all the cars in front of them pit, they will get the wave around and will be back on the lead lap. Some people ant blues to always be command, others think that lap traffic is a part of racing so it should just always be game on. It’s always a bit of a controversial topic, but next time you see a blue flag being displayed and were wondering the rules, I hope this little blue flag discussion helped.

Remembering when Dolly did this ad for Wrexham. ❤️

Ryan Reynolds @VancityReynolds

2 years ago

She’s an international treasure. @DollyParton @WrexhamFX

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No, no, Adam. He wanted you to notice and bask in the pride of being AMERICAN, watch great racing and patriotism on display. Not only that, this was privately funded, not government although it drove thousands of folks to the DC area that have never been (that’s economic impact for you). It allowed folks who have never been to see museums, monuments, the White House and AMERICAN history for the first time as well. And guess what, hundreds of thousands of AMERICANS, blue & red, as well as fans from all over the world loved the #Freedom250! 🇺🇸

Senator Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff

2 months ago

While you struggle with the cost of gas, Trump offers you the spectacle of an IndyCar race hoping you will not notice. More taxpayer money spent on his self-aggrandizing distractions. And you get higher taxes and higher costs.

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On this day in 1777, a British army besieging an American fort suddenly packed up and ran for their lives, abandoning their tents, their cannons, and their supplies. They were not driven off by an attack. They were driven off by a rumor, carried by one very strange man, in one of the most brilliant tricks of the Revolution. Remember the setup from a few weeks ago. Colonel St. Leger's mixed force of British, Loyalists, and Iroquois allies had Fort Stanwix surrounded, the western prong of the grand British plan to split the colonies. Young Colonel Gansevoort had refused to surrender, and the garrison had held on grimly for three brutal weeks. To break the siege, the Americans sent a relief force, and it was led in part by a general who was, at this point in the war, a genuine hero: Benedict Arnold. Arnold did not have enough men to simply fight St. Leger head-on. So he got clever instead. His troops had captured a local Loyalist named Hon Yost Schuyler, a man widely regarded as eccentric and simple-minded, and condemned him to hang as a spy. Arnold offered him a deal: his life, in exchange for going into St. Leger's camp and spreading panic. Hon Yost's own mother and brother came to plead for him, and the bargain was struck. Here is where it gets inspired. Arnold's men shot several bullet holes through Hon Yost's coat, so he would look like a man who had just barely escaped a huge battle. And crucially, the Iroquois knew Hon Yost. Because of his strange, unpredictable manner, many of them regarded him as touched by the spirits, a man whose words carried weight from beyond. He was the perfect messenger for a lie. Hon Yost came stumbling into St. Leger's camp wild-eyed, coat torn by bullets, gasping that Arnold was coming with an overwhelming army. When the warriors asked how many men were marching on them, he did not give a number. He simply gestured up at the countless leaves on the trees. Arnold, meanwhile, made sure other messengers arrived to confirm the story. The rumor caught fire. The Iroquois, already tired of a siege that was going nowhere, began deserting in droves. St. Leger's whole force came apart around him. With his native allies melting into the woods and a phantom army of thousands supposedly bearing down, his position collapsed. On August 22 he abandoned the siege in such a panic that his men left tents standing and supplies behind, and retreated all the way back toward Canada. Fort Stanwix was saved without the relief force firing a meaningful shot. And the consequences were enormous. The western prong of the British plan for 1777 was now gone, evaporated on a bluff. Burgoyne's main army, waiting for support that would never come, was left dangerously alone, and that isolation helped doom him at Saratoga that October, the victory that brought France into the war. So much turned on so little: a besieged fort, a general's cunning, and one strange man pointing at the leaves on the trees. And the general who pulled it off was Benedict Arnold, still, for now, one of the greatest heroes America had.