Aaron Smith @ASmithCTE

J.R.R. Tolkien explains why he spent years building Middle-earth before writing The Lord of the Rings. In a rare interview, Tolkien is asked why he devoted more than a decade to creating the world behind his stories before writing them. He rejects the idea that Middle-earth emerged purely from his unconscious, describing himself instead as “a meticulous sort of bloke” who spent years working out timelines, languages, histories, customs, and genealogies until everything fit together. For Tolkien, the world existed before the story. He even says The Hobbit began almost by accident, explaining that the larger mythology was already in place and that the novel simply became absorbed into it. When asked why anyone would build an entire fictional world before telling a story, Tolkien points to what he calls “subcreation.” As creations of a Creator, he argues, humans naturally desire to create. Since we cannot create something from nothing, we instead reshape existing reality into new forms that are both imaginative and aesthetically satisfying. Tolkien also rejects the idea that art should be driven solely by moral purpose, insisting that beauty and aesthetics are just as fundamental to human creativity. Discussing good and evil, he explains that Sauron was not evil from the beginning but fell from grace, much like Lucifer. The One Ring, he says, symbolizes a power so absolute that even someone with good intentions would inevitably be corrupted by wielding it. He adds that this idea long predates the atomic age, noting that the foundations of his mythology were developed while he was still an undergraduate, not as an allegory for modern events. At the end of the interview, Tolkien is asked whether he would rather be remembered for what he said or for what he made. He dismisses the distinction, arguing that lasting creations endure precisely because they have something meaningful to say. Source: The Tolkien Professor interview with J.R.R. Tolkien (BBC, 1968), “J.R.R. Tolkien Interview (1968).

This isn't a one-off. Qatar has been running an industrial-scale operation to penetrate America's political class. 🔸️ Former Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years after accepting nearly $1M in bribes (gold bars, cash, a luxury car) tied to helping a NJ developer secure a $95M investment from Qatar. 🔸️ Richard Olson, former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the UAE, was sentenced for illegally lobbying on Qatar's behalf after leaving office — including support during the 2017 Gulf crisis. 🔸️ Qatar has poured over $1B into Georgetown University since 2005 — the school that trains a massive share of America's future national security professionals, diplomats, and foreign policy elite. 🔸️ The FBI has spent 3 years investigating a *current* senior House GOP staffer as an alleged unregistered Qatari agent. 🔸️ A former Member of Congress has been placing Qatari agents as interns in other congressional offices. How much longer is this treated as business as usual?

Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger

12 hours ago

Big 👀👀👀👀 from @RepKatCammack This could be a truly massive scandal. Will Qatar finally face some long-overdue scrutiny? Staffing foreign agents in congressional offices is just un-freaking-believable, but Qatar's penetration into American politics is unparalleled. And

54 361 1K 98K 45

I recently listened to the Texas Commissioner of Education talk about how to get children (or anyone) to learn to read, and it was compelling enough that I want to share. As he presented it, there are basically two ingredients to becoming literate, but actually there are three (which he presented, just organized differently): 1) Enable student readers to recognize/decode words; 2) Make sure student readers know words; 3) Make sure student readers know idioms, references, allusions, etc. The two ingredients, as he presented them, were to know how to decode words and to know the meanings of the things they're technically able to read. I would consider these the basic foundations of reading and add a fourth component as reading skill develops: 4) Develop the capacity to work through, retain, and understand an argument that spans a paragraph, pages, section, chapter, or book. Let's look into these. (1) Learning to decode written language and recognize words: The Commissioner rightly pointed out that the only known way in English, at least, to consistently and effectively teach new readers to decode words from written language to something they can recognize is with phonics, sounding words out. He is absolutely correct. Any basic literacy program that doesn't emphasize phonics as the main tool for decoding written language is wrong. Full stop. He identified that there are, as he put it, 44 basic sounds in English encoded across combinations of 26 letters, plus some foreign imports. Teaching new readers, perhaps especially children, to associate sounds with letters and their combinations and to "sound-out" words is the most effective way that has been developed to get them taking words off the page and into comprehension. (2) Knowing lots of words; lots and lots of words Again, rightly, the Commissioner then explained that it doesn't do a reader much good to be able to correctly sound out words if he doesn't know what they mean. We have to teach readers vocabulary, lots and lots and lots of vocabulary. Any literacy program that isn't teaching a huge volume of words to new readers sucks. I have a neat first-hand experience with this phenomenon aside from my own education in English. I tried for a while to learn Korean, which is a language with an alphabet, somewhat similar in that regard to English. I learned the alphabet in Korean, and I can (slowly) read Korean writing in the sense that I can make all the right sounds (kind of) for the words written on the page. I don't know what almost any of them mean. I don't have very much Korean vocabulary. It doesn't matter almost at all that I can sound out Korean words because I can't read Korean without knowing what those words mean. That requires learning LOTS of words (and grammar, to be clear). There's a double benefit to combining phonics and vocabulary (plus grammar) in a literacy program: when you increase your vocabulary, you start learning to recognize words much more quickly and to associate them with meanings rather than with sounds (phonemes and their combinations). This increases the speed of comprehension, not just the depth of comprehension, at the same time. I am palpably aware of that with my faltered efforts to pick up Korean, and I'm certain it's generally true. 3) Knowing expressions, idioms, references, allusions, etc. It isn't enough to know words and grammar, which will unlock the most basic levels of literacy. Language is much more symbolic than that in real use. Our use of language is riddled with expressions, idioms, reference, allusions, and other clever constructions where the plain meaning of the words and phrases on the page is not actually instructive of what is being communicated. For a simple example, a reader encountering the word "cool" with regard to a person who doesn't understand the very common slang meaning of that term is going to be lost when he comes across it. A more poignant example involving an actual idiom that I witnessed myself was with a child who ran into the phrase "don't put your cart before your horse." She couldn't figure out why it was suddenly talking about horses when the story didn't have anything to do with horses. She was a little too concrete, you might say, and wasn't aware of the meaning of the idiom. Other idioms are even more abstruse, like, "it's my North Star." Anyone who has helped a new English speaker who is technically proficient but unskilled has had this experience, and every new reader has it too. Literary allusions and other cultural references can be even more confusing for new readers. Saying "calm down, Hamlet," to someone who just launched into a melodramatic soliloquy (*vocabulary!) is confusing or meaningless to someone who doesn't know the play. The same goes for more contemporary allusions, like identifying a situation as "Friday night lights." Knowing what it means when someone says an economic argument is "very Hayekian" is also important for similar reasons. It is imperative that student readers learn not just what these allusions mean, when they're allusions, but the stories and lessons to which they refer. If characters such as Socrates, Solomon, or the harpies are invoked, a literate person understands not just the reference but the contents of the reference. This adds subtle depth that is required for full literacy. The point is that learning readers need to develop this kind of second dimension of vocabulary which includes all of the fundamental idiomatic constructions, common and deep cultural references, etc., that are part of written communication to be truly literate. For example, while he's a fantastic writer in all regards, famously so, I found some of Christopher Hitchens's writing to be almost impossible to understand due to the density of literary references and allusions he conjured, as I was raised in physics and math and didn't read widely beyond the basic classics of core curriculum. I simply wasn't literate enough to understand him in many cases. Thus, literacy means having some familiarity with, well, the literature, at least the foundational literature of your language and culture, even as that evolves (e.g., "Friday night lights" isn't exactly an old allusion). Eventually, even, to be truly literate requires knowing idioms and allusions even from certain foreign languages, notably including Latin, French, and, to a lesser extent, German, for the English speaker/reader. Therefore, beyond phonics, grammar, and lots and lots of vocabulary, becoming literate requires lots and lots and lots of just plain reading, and reading not just anything, but lots of cultural reference points. 4) Reading comprehension Once you have someone who can actually make sense of what they are reading, the new reader also has to develop the capacity to follow the argument and themes presented in writing. Whether it's nonfiction and argumentation, in which case the argument has to be followed, or fiction and storytelling, in which case themes, lessons, and plot have to be recognized, there's a deeper element to literacy beyond the basic mechanics of recognizing and understanding words and phrases. While it's true that vocabulary and cultural background are places where reading comprehension break down for many people, at least sometimes, here is where the rubber really meets the road for literacy. Can the reader understand what is written and take away what it communicates? We have a term for people who are reasonably skilled at (1) and (2) and maybe even (3) above but who are incompetent at (4): functionally illiterate. These people can read words on a page (phonics), make sense of them (grammar and vocabulary), and even understand specialized constructions in speech (idioms, allusions, etc.) to a degree, but they cannot extract the meaning from the text. They can read but not truly comprehend what they have read. The functionally illiterate might be able to read a list of instructions, for example, and then still not know what to do to follow them. They might be able to read an argument without ever getting its point, even when it isn't subtle. They might be able to read a story and never discover its underlying themes or even to fully follow the plot (which they might follow easily in film format or even in oral storytelling). When I was teaching at university almost 20 years ago, it was estimated by the admissions department that perhaps 50% of new admits to the school were functionally illiterate, which I certainly saw reflected in my classrooms. I hear this is much worse today, and I believe it. As we transition from a largely written communicative society to a largely oral (via reels, videos, clips, etc.) society again at a rapid rate, functional illiteracy should be expected to increase, even if the schools aren't failing at teaching literacy. As we transition to less time on the page (including digital pages) and more time on social media (very short form posts), videos, audios, etc., we fail to develop or even lose the capacity to comprehend, follow, and restate (in our own words) an argument, story, plotline, theme, etc. This is a crisis in the making that is already developed to an alarming degree. The key to this last, deepest, and most important aspect of literacy, and to unlocking all its benefits in terms of how we are able to think (for ourselves!), is to have to spend slow time reading increasingly long and intricate things while being required, in some way or another, to demonstrate that we can accurately and reliably communicate back what has been communicated to us on the page. Only reading, and reading a lot, and reading difficult things, can develop this capacity and maintain it. There's no other way: a lot of time on the page, and some accountability measures to make sure we're actually getting it. Imagine a world where most people are actually functionally illiterate in this sense. At that point, even the people teaching literacy cannot adequately assess the contents of written work, so they cannot adequately assess if their students have done so. What you end up with in terms of literacy education is truly the blind leading the blind. Reaching that state would be an emergency, and it might be as little as a generation away. To summarize Literacy is a skill. Literacy can be taught. Almost everyone can become not just literate but highly literate. Teaching literacy has certain ingredients that cannot be left out that increase in complexity. True literacy requires being able to read a long-form argument and to understand it reliably enough to explain what you read in your own novel yet accurate terms. The fundamental steps in literacy education are not negotiable. They are: 1) Learn to decode written words. Phonics is the only way. If there is no phonics education (in languages with a roughly phonetic alphabet), there is no literacy education. Some grammar instruction is required here as well. 2) Learn to recognize the words being decoded. Vocabulary and grammar lessons are nonnegotiable. Understanding the construction of language and learning to know the meanings of lots and lots and lots and lots (tens of thousands) of words is foundational. Linking them to familiar spoken language is foundational. 3) Learning to recognize speech constructions that go beyond basic vocabulary, including idioms, references, allusions, etc., which must include understanding the context of those constructions. Literacy is a huge network of knowledge, understanding, and comprehension all located in long strings of the written word. 4) Becoming literate requires large volumes of accountable reading. Long-form writing must be engaged and produced to become literate. Any literacy program (e.g., in K-12) that isn't based on these elements is not a literacy program. It is a sham, at best, and a cheat, at worst. This is all nonnegotiable for creating literate people. Literacy, though, as I said, is a skill. It can be taught. It's up to people who want to teach literacy to do that. PS: Woke "literacy" programs are usually mechanically anti-literacy programs, and in purpose are actually "political literacy" programs, at least since Paulo Freire insisted that political literacy is the true literacy. Of course, "political literacy" means adopting a "critical theory" lens applied to one's personal circumstance as generated and evoked through reading assignments. They are worse than a disaster. They are a catastrophe. They should be avoided, even at high cost.

A 92-year-old North Carolina man got so bored 2 months into retirement that he applied to work at Chick-fil-A... ...his smile, kindness, and passion for Jesus became so contagious that when he got sick and missed 3 days of work, an ENTIRE TOWN began asking where he was. His name is Gilbert Martin. Everybody calls him "Mr. Gil." Mr. Gil is 92 years old, and works at the Chick-fil-A on Oleander Drive in Wilmington, NC. He spent decades working in the natural gas industry and when he retired, he greeted people at Sam's Club for 12 MORE years, until they eliminated his position. Most people would call that a sign to finally rest, but not Mr. Gil! Two months into retirement, he got bored... so he walked into Chick-fil-A and put in an application. He was 86 years old at the time. He's been there ever since. Not one or two shifts a week either. Monday through Friday. He says the full schedule gives him more chances to be there for people who need him. His official job is dining host. Clean tables. Clean floors. But Mr Gil doesn't see it that way... as he describes it, his real job is: "I get a lot of people that are coming in, just been to the doctor, and got bad news... I'm able to be an encourager; the Lord gave me that." A 92-year-old man who could be resting at home... chooses to stand in a dining room five days a week... so strangers on the worst day of their lives don't have to be alone. And Wilmington noticed. When Mr. Gil caught a cold and missed a couple of days, the owner said he was FLOODED with HUNDREDS of customers who were panicked about him. Mr. Gil has zero plans to retire. He says if you ever see him working, come say hi. "I don't know what 92 is supposed to feel like, but I feel great. Serving others has always brought me joy because I believe that a smile and a kind word can make someone's day a little brighter.” We need more of this in the world!!!!

Of course, we can debate whether election machines were manipulated, whether false ballots were introduced at 2 a.m., whether systems were hacked, or any number of other possibilities. But that debate misses the larger point. It is like debating the size of the hole in the Titanic. The fundamental issue is that there is a hole. With elections, the hole is the machines themselves. Any system that relies on computer programs is, by its nature, vulnerable to manipulation. Whether that vulnerability is ever exploited is totally beside the point, because the mere possibility that it could happen is toxic to democracy itself. If people cannot know with confidence that their vote was accurately recorded and counted, there is no trust, and we enter an Orwellian world where no one can be certain what is real anymore. The only solution is to restore a verifiable paper trail, meaning actual physical paper ballots. A ballot that a voter fills out, that is counted, and that can be checked, audited, and recounted as many times as necessary. That is the short of it and the long of it. Every other argument is a waste of time.

@pepesgrandma And in many of these states you will find a bought and paid for elected official, now more than ever, undoubtedly installed by foreign influence & ballot 'corrections'. It wasn't all about T, but installing dozens of compromised officials in Congress, who are corrupt as well.

🚨 Sec. Marco Rubio just NAILED IT: "One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.'" "That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul." "The world that envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes, or glory, or great causes to strive towards, without a world without miracles, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things." "And the world communism envisions is a world without God." "For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy." 💯

It is Day 32 of the medical mystery that is Mitch McConnell. His hospitalization is now closing in on five weeks. For what was officially described as a mild case of pneumonia and a fall without a concussion or broken bones, the continued hospitalization is becoming increasingly unusual. At this point, maybe he just doesn’t want to go home until Home Depot finishes the new floors and Elaine Chao apologizes. But honestly, who knows anymore?

You may not know that Tolkien was homeschooled. His mother taught him his love for calligraphy, botany, and especially languages. The number of languages he mastered is disputed primarily because it simply doesn’t seem possible. (English, Old English / Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Welsh, Medieval Welsh, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Modern Icelandic, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, Serbian) This is Tolkien’s own hand writing in an elvish language he created.

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson July 15, 1813 “Never mind it, my dear Sir, if I write four letters to your one: your one is worth more than my four.” After nearly 11 years of silence, John Adams reached out to Thomas Jefferson on January 1, 1812, wishing him a happy new year. In this remarkable letter written 213 years ago today, we see two aging Founders, battle-tested giants who helped birth the Republic, still grappling with profound questions. Adams reflects on his political writings, his favorite authors (Locke, Harrington, Milton, Montesquieu, and others), his deep disillusionment with European upheavals, and his strong distaste for Thomas Paine. He expresses skepticism about the rapid “progress” promised by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which he feared would set back liberty and human improvement for generations. Above all, the letter reveals their shared wrestling with timeless issues: human nature, republican government, the necessity of moral and religious foundations for liberty, and the search for order amid chaos. “You and I ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” Even in their later years, these larger-than-life men sought truth, clarity, and reconciliation. A beautiful reminder that ideas have consequences, revolutions can devour their own, and principled friendship can endure profound disagreement.

We need PERMANENT Standard Time. NOT daylight savings time. Just imagine a winter sunrise at almost 10 freaking AM in North Dakota. 😩🤣🤦🏻‍♂️🤡

Julian Mille☈ @ATLAreaWx

5 days ago

This will be such a nightmare.

3K 2K 32K 8.2M 4K

Permanent Daylight Savings Time is a mark of a deeply corrupt society. The existing timezones are designed around solar noon of the reference meridian for that zone, every 15°. Permanent DST breaks this. The proper solution is to end DST and for organizations to adopt "summer" hours where they adjust their schedules to 1 hour earlier if that suits them. The need to deceive ourselves regarding something as superficial as the time of day suggests a deep seated corruption. Repeal DST.

Go Tom go!

The Calvin Coolidge Project @TheCalvinCooli1

5 days ago

🚨Just in: Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton is expected to block the Permanent Daylight Saving Time bill in the U.S. Senate

2K 402 6K 1.2M 177

Oh no! What do you think? They aren't thinking this out properly. I LOVE the Fall Back time change in November. A major change to our clocks may be moving one step closer. The House has approved legislation that would make Daylight Saving Time permanent. It still has to pass the Senate and be signed into law, so nothing has changed yet. Most people think about lighter evenings or darker mornings. I have a different perspective. Weather models run on UTC year-round. If we stay on Daylight Saving Time all winter, every major weather model arrives one hour later on the clock. That means one less hour each evening to analyze new data before preparing forecasts. It may sound like a small change, but for those of us who depend on the latest weather data every day, that extra hour has always been valuable.

I am not a political person. The scientific community and the data and evidence overwhelmingly shows that morning sunlight is imperative for good health. There are Republicans and Democrats both on the right side of this as seen by legislation just introduced - bipartisan calling for permanent standard time. But there are also Republicans and Democrats on the wrong side of this issue that because of either intellectual laziness or willful ignorance have voted for a bill that will remove morning sunlight for hundreds of millions of people that they are financially medically responsible for, and it will increase the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease as well as certain types of cancers that we have evidence for. I am a boarded Sleep specialist, which means that I am an expert in this field. This is not my opinion, but the position of thousands of professionals who understand the circadian rhythm and the tremendous impact that this will have hundreds of millions of people in the United States. It is completely untenable that the supreme governing body of our country would make a decision about this without weighing the evidence. Making standard time permanent is literally the lowest hanging fruit that we could decide to improve the health of our country. Instead, we have politicians going on this platform to boast that they gave more sunlight to their constituents. As if the stroke of their mighty pen could add one second to the amount of sunlight that comes from the sun. Complete ignorance.

America already made daylight saving time permanent once. In December 1973, 79% of Americans supported it and Nixon signed it into law. By February 1974, eight weeks into the experiment, support had collapsed to 42%. The policy never changed. Winter arrived. Sunrise in Washington DC came at 8:27am. Kids left for school in total darkness, carrying flashlights and wearing reflective tape. When Congress moved to repeal, members cited the deaths of eight Florida schoolchildren in the first weeks of the change. The energy case collapsed too. The whole point was the oil embargo, and the Department of Transportation concluded the fuel savings were too small to matter. Ten months after signing it, Congress repealed it and Ford put the country back on standard time. There's a mechanism that makes this cycle repeat: permanent DST is only ever voted on when the sun is up. Polls run in the abstract, votes happen in warm months, and the benefit, a free hour of evening light, is easy to imagine year-round. The cost is concentrated in about 10 weeks of dark winter mornings and only becomes real after implementation. So the policy polls beautifully right up until January. Today's vote happened in July. The 1974 law passed in December, right before the exact winter that killed it. If this clears the Senate, the first real test arrives in January 2027, when sunrise in Indianapolis comes after 9am. Sleep researchers have watched this loop for 50 years, which is why the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the AMA, and the National Sleep Foundation all back the opposite reform, permanent standard time. Congress just picked the one version of clock reform America has already tried, hated, and repealed.

Polymarket @Polymarket

5 days ago

BREAKING: House votes 308-117 to make daylight saving time permanent, sending the bill to the Senate.

697 719 13K 19.5M 736

@HawleyMO Now apply this to Flock and move to get rid of them. The US does not, nor will not be a security state!

@DougBillings 👎

Call your congress members today (there’s a vote at 4pm ET), tell them to oppose the Sunshine Protection Act (permanent Daylight Saving Time) and support the new Sunshine for Our Kids Act (permanent Standard Time). News this morning from Anthony Iafrate: dailycaller.com/2026/07/13/day…

THE NUMBERS ARE IN. Processed food is dying a slow death and BIG FOOD is crumbling. There's a massive shift happening. Look how much processed food companies have LOST in value in the last 22 months. Stock value lost since August 2024: * Campbell's: DOWN 54.9% (Goldfish, Pepperidge Farm) * Conagra: DOWN 54.2% (Chef Boyardee, Slim Jim) * General Mills: DOWN 47.6% (Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Totino's, Pillsbury) * Kraft Heinz: DOWN 29.6% (Oscar Mayer, Jell-O) * Lamb Weston: DOWN 25.8% (Frozen fries at McDonald's) * PepsiCo: DOWN 17.6% (Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos, Quaker) * Mondelez: DOWN 15.5% (Oreo, Ritz, Chips Ahoy) * Hershey: DOWN 10.4% (Reese's, Kit Kat, Twizzlers) People are actively shifting away from ultraprocessed foods. Real food sales are outpacing ultra-processed sales by 7%. This is proof that we are changing the food industry. We have the power in our own hands. Every time you refuse to buy an ultraprocessed product, you are voting with your dollar and sending a strong message. Ultraprocessed foods are killing people every day. This is why we need to keep sharing the truth with everyone we know. The more people who find out that ultraprocessed food is poisoning them, the better chance we have to save our friends and family.