Rod Recker @Recklight

Eat a mouthful of grass and you get nothing. It goes in green and comes out green. Eat straw and you get nothing. Your gut cannot touch cellulose. Eat acorns and you get tannins, and a very bad afternoon. Eat bracken and you get a carcinogen. Eat nettles, thistles, brambles, rushes and moorland heather and you get a mouth full of blood and no calories. Eat the beet pulp, the oat husks and the spent brewer's grain and you get the waste the factory couldn't sell. Now feed the lot of it to a cow. She turns every one of them into steak, butter, cream, milk and a hide, on land that will never grow a vegetable, using four stomachs and a fermentation vat you do not have. The grass she eats grew on rain and sunlight, for free, on a hillside nobody can plough. She is the only creature on earth that can take a field of inedible fibre and hand you back the most nutrient-dense food there is. The cow is not competing with you for food. She eats the ninety percent you cannot. Best plant-based diet ever invented. It just has a cow in the middle doing the hard part.

The greatest warrior who ever lived was told, after his death, that he should be happy. His answer is one of the most devastating things ever written... Achilles had been given a choice while alive: a long, quiet, forgotten life at home, or a short one at Troy that would make his name immortal. He chose glory. He chose to die young and be remembered forever. In the Odyssey, Odysseus goes down into the land of the dead, and Achilles comes to meet him. Odysseus tries to comfort him. He tells him he has nothing to mourn: "For of old, when thou wast alive, we Argives honored thee even as the gods, and now that thou art here, thou rulest mightily among the dead. Wherefore grieve not at all that thou art dead, Achilles." You are the most blessed man who ever lived, he says. You were worshipped in life, and now you are a king among the dead. What is there to grieve? Achilles answers immediately: "Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished." He would rather be a day labourer, working someone else's field, for a master so poor he can barely feed him. He would take that life over ruling every soul that ever died... Achilles chose to die young so that his name would live forever. And then, in the Odyssey, Homer let him speak from the other side of that choice. And this is his answer, to Odysseus and to us: being remembered is not the same as being alive. And the ordinary day you are living right now is the thing the greatest hero in the world would trade eternity to have back.

It tracks that the group of people who thought they should be treated as VIPs (and use Uber to feel like they have a chauffeur, TaskRabbit and GrubHub and Instacart to feel like they have an assistant), don’t want to come into the office, demand compensation from perceived slights at work, want to work from home, want to work less than five days a week, want everyone to walk on eggshells around them because of all their “invisible disabilities,” have their parents subsidize their life, etc, would want socialism. The final step in their line of shrugging off responsibility. I have yet to see someone who has worked hard for a living, regardless of income, advocating for socialism.

@Yakkubkk head down - no-look, incredible

This is so cool!!! The power of social media🇺🇸🇩🇪

We're introducing Claude for Teachers: free access to premium Claude capabilities for verified K-12 educators in the US, with a library of teaching skills and a direct connection to evidence-based curricula, mapped to academic standards in all 50 states. claude.com/solutions/teac…

@MagneticNorse @Rothmus 🤣

Sooooo, you’re saying there are a group of candidates who cannot win without people who can’t prove their identity voting in our elections? Whoops.

@johnkonrad Partly correct at least.

So lemme get this straight… The Dems happily ran a literal nazi, who also happens to be a serial rapist, and now after they endorsed him and he won the primary, they force him out, so the Party gets to choose the candidate. The Dems used a nazi to circumvent democracy… AGAIN!

The connective tissue running through both the Biden and Platner debacles is the press. Not because reporters conspired in a room, but because they picked a side and then behaved accordingly — dismissing, excusing, and waving away every alarm the right raised until the alarm became a fire no one could deny. Here is the irony the media has not absorbed: that protection is not a gift to the Democratic Party. It is a trap. A friendly press that suppresses a candidate’s weaknesses does not make him stronger. It preserves him, unvetted, until the general election — when the shield disappears and the voters who were never told the truth meet all of it at once. Biden was protected right up to the debate stage, and the protection is precisely what left his party no time to recover. Platner was protected right up until he wasn’t. ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-fire-ala…

It was one of the most EVIL bills we’ve ever seen. And now it’s back. California passed a law that could allow babies to be killed up to 28 days AFTER birth. By using the word “perinatal” (which is the period that includes up to a month after a baby is born) instead of “prenatal” (before birth), the law legalizes infanticide. Now a similar bill that could effectively legalize infanticide by blocking investigations of infant deaths in Washington has been signed by the governor. A pro-life bill that would ban infanticide nationally was BLOCKED by Senator Schumer. youtu.be/ypA9X7mdEQg?si…

Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something. There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.

@punt_rd 🤣🤣🤣 love the background of each shot too!!

I hear all the time about how Gen Z is turning socialist because they have no economic hope and how I just don’t understand that we need to do more socialist stuff so they’ll still vote for us. Well…. I’ve spent quite a bit of time as a Silicon Valley startup/VC lawyer, and there is no quicker way to turn a young leftist into a junior Milton Friedman than starting their own business. I saw it over and over and over—smart twenty somethings with coding skills, blue hair and a Che Guevara poster gradually becoming more and more conservative as they slowly comprehend just how many regulatory hurdles there are to running a business and raising capital (and the amount of money they had to pay me to help do that navigation). We should all be encouraging young people to start their own businesses. They don’t need to be some novel tech business that attracts VC funding either. Every community has service and product needs just itching to be filled by someone with a little energy and smarts. The way out of Gen Z’s economic malaise is not going back to school to get a master’s because you can’t get a job you think is good enough for you. No, the cure is entrepreneurship. Us olds should be pointing the youngs in that direction. We’ll grow a new generation of conservatives, and OBTW the best route to true wealth is to own your own business and not work for somebody else.

@Eliana_Goldin Thanks for the summary and congratulations on your success with math. How do you see this working for chemistry that has topics not so obviously hierarchical as math and physics?

Democrats went out and tried to find a candidate that they thought could resonate with young white men. The result was Graham Platner— a caricature of white men that they have in their heads.

When politicians are hanging onto power, even all the way to their graves, we have a huge problem in this country.

America is the most powerful empire. Yet, it has not annexed another sovereign country since 1898. It’s arguably the most morally constrained in history. No previous hegemonic power with military superiority exercised so little direct annexation during its period of dominance.

CORRUPTION? Three days after Mitch McConnell was found unconscious and hospitalized his wife, a private citizen, traveled to Beijing to meet with CCP leadership, including Chinese Vice President Han Zheng. Why is she meeting with the CCP? Why do it with her husband still hospitalized? What is really going on?