George M @GeorgeMo

I did a little better on the 2nd round of world coin grading at the @ANACoins #SummerSeminar

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I was only wildly off on one of the coins in our afternoon grading test over Modern World coins. The New Caledonia coin was my worst guess. #SummerSession #ANA #ColoradoCollege

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Having a blast @ColoradoCollege for the ANA #SummerSeminar At the World Coin Grading class:

Ireland shipped $308 million in alumina to Russian smelters in one year. The EU bans aluminum exports to Russia. It still permits exports of the powder that Russia smelts into aluminum, later sold through traders serving more than 100 defense-sector firms. Now, 100+ civil society groups want that loophole closed. euromaidanpress.com/2026/06/29/ire…

@Globalstats11 I haven't seen that spelling of "atheism" before. Typo or alternate form of the word?

@SandyofCthulhu The Me163 often gets overlooked, but it's hard to beat the Komet rocket plane for sheer impractical insanity.

Don't dial down your own flavor of awesome; creative endeavors are primarily about expressing fidelity to your muse. Marketability follows being genuine & passionate, not the other way around. #WritingCommunity #CreativesUnite #WritersOfTwitter #AuthorsOnX

MEMPHIS WOMAN CALLS CHANNEL 3 AFTER KROGER SELF-CHECKOUT ASKS HER TO COVER A SHIFT MEMPHIS, TN — A frustrated Memphis woman says she was shocked Tuesday afternoon when a self-checkout machine at a local Kroger allegedly asked her to cover a four-hour shift after she finished scanning her groceries. According to witnesses, 38-year-old Brittany Scanlon simply stopped by for milk, bread, and a frozen pizza. Forty-five minutes later, she claims she had unknowingly completed most of the duties of an entry-level employee. "I scanned my own groceries, bagged my own groceries, fixed a price error, looked up produce codes, and helped the guy next to me figure out why his rewards card wasn't working," she explained. "Then the machine asked if I could stay until 6 p.m. because Cheryl called in sick." Customers say the situation escalated when the self-checkout screen reportedly displayed: 'Great Job! You're now qualified for Assistant Front-End Manager. Press CONTINUE to review available shifts.' Store employees became suspicious after Scanlon was seen helping three customers, collecting abandoned shopping carts, and explaining the digital coupon system to a confused retiree. "Honestly, she was doing better than most new hires," said one shopper. The final straw came when the machine allegedly informed her that she was required to complete a mandatory online training module before leaving the store. Witnesses report the machine then asked if she would be willing to work weekends. Kroger officials declined to comment directly on the incident but released a statement saying they remain committed to "creating an efficient shopping experience" and that customers should not be alarmed if self-checkout terminals occasionally ask about open availability. Meanwhile, Scanlon says she has retained legal counsel and is seeking compensation for approximately three years of retail experience she accumulated during a single shopping trip. At press time, the self-checkout machine had reportedly been promoted to district manager

Timely. Just saw this & I'm heading to @TheBigTexan tonight. I will *not* be matching wills with a 72oz steak. But, I will eat one of its smaller cousins.

NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga

5 days ago

A restaurant in Amarillo, Texas. Yellow building. Blue trim. Bull statue out front the size of a small house. Sign on the door: 72 OZ STEAK — FREE IF YOU FINISH IN ONE HOUR — $72 IF YOU DON'T I read it three times. A cowboy in a black hat was leaning on the door frame.

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@fasc1nate He was on the run for longer than the Nazis were in power! How did escapees using the ratline to reach South America fund their false identities? Were they squirreling away plundered loot even before the war?

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and you were told this was the moment the system "let one fail." A noble act of discipline. Tough love from Washington. Lehman failed because Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs CEO, had personal and political reasons to draw the line at that particular firm on that particular weekend. Look at what happened on either side of Lehman. Bear Stearns got a $29 billion backstop in March so JPMorgan could swallow it. AIG got $85 billion the day after Lehman died, then billions more, because AIG owed money to the right people (Goldman collected $12.9 billion through the AIG bailout, at par). Fannie and Freddie got nationalized on September 7. Then came the $700 billion TARP, the alphabet soup of Fed lending facilities, and trillions in emergency liquidity. Lehman was not the rule. Lehman was the exception that let everyone pretend a rule existed. This is what discretionary central planning actually looks like. Not a market clearing bad bets, but a handful of men in a conference room deciding who lives and who dies based on relationships, optics, and the phone calls they took that night. Free market economists have warned about this for a century: once you build a lender of last resort, you do not get neutral rules. You get favoritism dressed as crisis management. The Fed picks winners. Always has. The real scandal is that Lehman was the single institution forced to obey the law of consequences while everyone around it got a printed-money parachute. Failure is the only honest feedback a market gives. Bad firms holding worthless paper should die, and their creditors should eat the loss. That is how capital gets reallocated to people who do not set fire to it. The next time someone tells you 2008 proved capitalism needs adult supervision, ask them why the adults rescued every reckless gambler except the one whose CEO Paulson happened to dislike. You will not get a coherent answer. You will get a lecture about systemic risk from the people who built the system.

The Reflecting Pool story is comforting precisely because it is small. A Trump golf club manager recommends a Mar-a-Lago buddy. The Park Service hands that buddy a no-bid contract with a fat margin. The buddy does shoddy work. The pool fails in two weeks. The administration blames vandals, terrorists, antifa. Roughly sixteen million dollars, no one killed, graft you can almost laugh at. That is an old-fashioned scandal. We obsess over it because it lets us pretend we are back in normal territory, where the worst thing a president does is reward a crony and lie about the result. But the comfort is the trap. The pool is a member-berry. It invites you to file this presidency under "scandal" when the actual ledger is full of things that word cannot hold. Last is right to refuse the word. When you call everything a scandal, you launder the difference between a no-show contract and a coup. The pool is the distraction. The distraction is the point.

The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline

a week ago

"That’s my question for you today: What are the standards we should demand for factual accuracy across mediums? I think it’s pretty clear for the written word. And it’s pretty clear for scripted-broadcast...But what about the other broadcast formats?" JVL fact checks himself and

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@BookBizCo Don't see a pool, but; "consistency". Consistent tone, character voice, ratio of wit:dick jokes, output rate / tine set aside for effort, etc. Consistency does a lot of heavy lifting.

Is there a colonial Zombie outbreak story? If not, why not??!? #WritersOfTwitter #WritingCommunity #AuthorsOnX

Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories

6 days ago

During the winter of 1609 and 1610, Jamestown came close to disappearing. The settlement had already struggled with disease, poor water, weak leadership and a lack of reliable food. Then the situation became far worse. Relations between the English colonists and the

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So, people have been asking me my thoughts on Trump’s mishandling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflection Pool. My response. Why isn’t Trump in prison for sexually assaulting children on Epstein’s perverted island?

@Greg32654189 @deadlyweapns Think I saw a video of "modern" Russian troops uncrating Lend-Lease shipments of Thompson Submachine guns: machinegunboards.com/forums/index.p…

@deadlyweapns How was quality control just before the fall of the USSR? I would think stocks from the 70s might be somewhat more reliable.

A farmer in Rajasthan used to ration his pumping because diesel cost money, so he pulled up only the water he could afford. Now his solar panel makes the electricity free, all day, every day, and the only limit left is how deep the water sits. In parts of Rajasthan the rock is now dry down to 400 feet, which is as far as the pumps reach. Many of them lie abandoned. India is installing these pumps by the hundreds of thousands, and the same machine that frees a farmer from diesel is draining the aquifer he farms on top of. Whatever the technology, if the cost of pumping is zero, people pump until something physical stops them. Diesel and grid power came with a meter, and the meter was the brake. A diesel pump that costs money to run is a farmer rationing water against his own wallet. A solar pump with no fuel cost removes the brake entirely. The water was never really limited by the aquifer. It was limited by the price of lifting it, and solar set that price to zero. India is the world's largest consumer of groundwater, already pumping roughly 50 cubic miles more onto its fields each year than the monsoon puts back. PM-KUSUM, the national scheme, subsidizes about 60% of a solar pump and has put well over 800,000 in the ground, aiming for millions. Each one is a genuine win for the farmer who gets it: diesel costs gone, payback in three to four seasons, croplands pushed into the dry months. And each one is another straw in a shared glass that nobody owns and everybody drinks from. A World Bank economist calls it a classic tragedy of the commons, with the worst impacts landing on the most vulnerable. When the rich farmer buys a more powerful pump to chase the falling water table, he leaves his poorer neighbor's shallower well sucking air. This is a post that argues with my own posts. I have spent weeks writing that distributed solar is a quiet miracle, Pakistani rooftops and Filipino payback periods and a grid assembled from the bottom up. All of that holds. This is the same technology showing its other face, and the difference between the two is the resource on the other end of the panel. Point a free solar electron at the sky to make power, and it displaces a fossil fuel, pure gain. Point that same free electron at a borehole to lift water, and it depletes a shared aquifer that takes centuries to refill. Identical hardware, identical economics, opposite outcome, because in one case the input is infinite sunlight and in the other it is finite ancient water. The same pattern is spreading along the same logic everywhere the water is shallow and the diesel is expensive. Yemen, where 100,000 solar panels are draining the Sana'a Basin so hard that farmers who found water at 100 feet now pump from 1,300, even through above-average rainfall. Afghanistan's Helmand, water tables dropping 10 feet a year. Sub-Saharan Africa, where researchers see room for 11 million more pumps across an area the size of France, a real lifeline for small farmers and a real threat to the shallow aquifers that 255 million people drink from. The fix is not to take the panels away. The technology is not the problem. The problem is a free resource with no limit attached, and the answer is to attach one. Sell the pumps with sensors that meter output. Pay farmers a good price to send solar power to the grid instead of into the ground, so the panel itself becomes the cash crop rather than the water. Gujarat tried exactly this; the early results were muted, the paperwork and the pricing did not yet favor the small farmer, but the design principle is right. The brake that diesel used to provide has to be rebuilt deliberately, because the technology that removed it is not coming back out of the field. Physical constraints win over narratives, and this is the one the optimistic version of the energy transition keeps stepping around. Sunlight is genuinely infinite. The water table is not. A technology that turns one into the other for free is a gift right up until the well runs dry, and the well does not care that the electrons were clean.

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The TB-2 Bayraktar is back. The Ukrainian Navy just posted footage of a TB-2 striking Russian unmanned boats in the Black Sea. I have been stating this would happen in interviews and podcasts over the past few years. Here is why. The TB-2 is a medium altitude long endurance unmanned aerial system. It fires relatively short range missiles similar to the U.S. Reaper and Hellfire used in the Global War on Terror. The TB-2 was designed specifically to target Soviet and Russian style battalions. Soviet style battalions have some air defenses but rely on regiment, division, and above for the majority of protection. Battlions mostly have SA-15, SA-9, and similar mobile air defenses in addition to gun systems and man portable air defenses (MANPADS). The are decent for defending against small fixed-wing drones and close air support attack aircraft. The TB-2 was designed to fire from outside of the maximum range of battalion organic defenses. This shows an understanding that many countries lack capacity for regiment and above air defenses. However, the TB-2 are still vulnerable to fighter aircraft. Early in the war TB-2 were highly successful as Russian long range air defenses were slow to advance and Russian fighter aircraft weren't terrible capable at clearing the skies. As both improved, the TB-2's quickly lost combat abilities and many were destroyed. For years, Ukraine has been systematically targeting Russian long range air defenses and fighter bases in Crimea. Russia has pulled air defenses back to Moscow and refineries and bombers and their air refueling further from the fight. This has left a window where the TB-2 can successfully operate over the Western Black Sea. They may even be able to operate over occupied Kherson, but that is to be seen. The TB-2 and its missiles are very capable at hitting unarmored vehicles in water or land. The range of missiles matches the sensors very well and the long endurance of the platform allows for long search durations. The videos from the Ukrainian Navy show this via the TB-2 targeting camera. Expect more footage and keep an eye out for similar videos over Occupied Kherson and please share. Photo via @UA_NAVY