Offense is the collateral damage of free speech. - Ricky Gervais
Cut and Shoot, TX
Joined November 2008
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Calvin Dodge retweeted
Talerico dishonest on multiple levels:
1. Musk doesn’t have 100 lifetimes of wealth or $1T sitting in a bank account. It’s the stock value at companies with 100’s of thousands of employees and 1M or so connected jobs through suppliers and construction. Yank that money and give it to the government? To who? Who is a better capital allocator and based on what metric? Musk is also giving away shares of Spacex starting next year directly to children.
2. “Tesla is successful because of the federal government”. That’s such BS. Every other automaker received the same access to credits and those credits are paid by other auto companies not the federal government. Furthermore look at the government handouts to Ford, GM, etc — all of them dwarf Tesla by many times. Tesla has no EV tax credit and no clean air tax credits and have record sales.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
I’d love to know how the fact that Tippu Tip, an Afro-Omani slave trader, owning 7 plantations & 10,000 slaves in 1895 is a ‘decontextualised victim-blaming white supremacist lie.’
I’d also love to know how the King of Dahomey protesting to a British officer over abolition that:
“The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery,”
Is a decontextualised victim-blaming white supremacist lie.
(All from my old piece: spectator.com/article/the-fa…)
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Calvin Dodge retweeted
Western civilization is Christianity and its values.
You can circle around it for hours, talk about democracy, human rights, science, freedom. But all of that grew from soil. And that soil is a wild, unheard-of idea that turned the ancient world upside down: every human being has infinite worth. The poor man as much as the king. The slave as much as the emperor. The child as much as the elder. No man can ever again be reduced to a cog.
Everything great about the West comes from there. The cathedrals, the hospitals, the universities, modern science, the abolition of slavery, equal dignity before the law, the very idea that conscience is sacred and that no power has the right to crush it.
And here's something important. You don't need to be a believer to be an heir to this. You're an atheist? You come from another religion? Doesn't matter. The world you live in, the one where you can think freely, build a business, criticize those in power, love who you want, live in safety, get medical care, that world didn't fall from the sky. It was built, stone by stone, on these values. Even your right not to believe comes from there. You breathe this inheritance every day without seeing it, the way you don't see the air.
And at the heart of that inheritance are two sentences. Two sentences that are enough to live on your feet.
The first: "The truth will set you free."
Not comfort. Not safety. Not other people's approval. The truth. Every system that ever tried to enslave people started the same way: by forbidding them to say what they see. The lie needs your silence to survive. It only holds because everyone thinks they're the only one who sees clearly. The day one person stands up and simply says what is true, something cracks. The day a thousand stand up, it all comes down.
The second: "Be not afraid."
It's what Christ tells his disciples again and again. And it's what a Polish pope proclaimed to the world in 1978, while half of Europe lived under communism. Everyone thought that bloc would last forever. Eleven years later, the Wall fell. Not with tanks. With men and women who had stopped being afraid.
Remember Peter on the lake. He walks on the water. He actually walks. Then he looks at the wind, at the waves, he thinks about everything that could go wrong, and he starts to sink. It wasn't the storm that pulled him under. It was the fear.
Our whole era is right there. We've been taught to watch the wind. To be afraid of speaking, afraid of being judged, afraid of losing our jobs, afraid of being called every name in the book, afraid of defending what we received, afraid even of having children. A civilization that is afraid stops walking on water. It sinks, slowly, apologizing all the way down.
And while it apologizes, others are hard at work. Communists, yesterday as today, want to replace the dignity of the person with the absolute power of the state. Globalists want to dissolve nations, cultures, roots, everything that lets a people know where it comes from. They don't always say it that way. But their project always takes the same shape: destroy the inheritance to better control those who no longer have one. A man without roots, without memory, without bearings, is a man who is afraid. And a man who is afraid is very easy to govern.
That's why fear is their best weapon. And that's why courage is ours.
Fear has never built anything. Not a cathedral, not a family, not a company, not a nation. Every beautiful thing on this earth was made by someone who, at some point, was afraid and went forward anyway.
You are not alone. You are the heirs of two thousand years of men and women who stood firm against far worse than what we face. Martyrs in the arenas, monks copying texts while the Empire collapsed, dissidents in the gulags. They had no networks, no money, no power. They had the truth, and they were not afraid. They won.
What they protected, it's now our turn to protect. Believers or not. No matter where you come from. If you live in this free world, you are its guardians.
Tell the truth. Defend what you received. Build families. Build. And when the wind blows, don't look at the waves.
The truth will set you free.
Be not afraid.
Many, many people don't understand how I can be so optimistic. So let me tell you about something every great athlete has in common: visualization.
Before a final, a champion doesn't replay the scenario where he loses. He sees the race. Every move, every turn, the finish line, the win. He's lived it a hundred times in his head before living it for real. Michael Phelps did it every night before falling asleep. It's not magical thinking, it's preparation: the brain goes where you point it.
At the scale of a whole people, this has a name. Sociologist Robert Merton called it the self-fulfilling prophecy. When enough people share a belief, it changes how they act, and those actions end up producing the very reality the belief predicted. Pessimism works exactly the same way, just in reverse. A country that believes it's finished behaves like a country that's finished, and ends up being one.
So yes, let's be honest. We're up against extremely powerful forces with enormous inertia. Decades of statism, surrender, and guilt. That doesn't flip overnight.
But look at the whole picture. Argentina choosing to break with decades of statist failure. Musk blowing open the lock on free speech on the biggest public square in the world. What's happening in the United States. Poland standing tall again. And on the other side, globalist elites in full decay, convincing no one anymore, and they know it.
There's every reason to be optimistic.
And even if you only half believe it, do the math. Say we have a 20% chance of winning. The only smart move is to focus on that 20% and give it everything. Don't waste a single second thinking about the 80%. Because the moment you think you've lost is the moment you've lost. Always. In sports, in business, in history.
So this is a call to everyone who wants a decent future: stay optimistic, and focus on what actually moves things forward. Call out technocratic Europe, Macron, mental communism, the statism that suffocates everything. Go talk to young people. Explain that they've been brainwashed by a leftist system, that Mélenchon is a cynic who feeds on their anger without ever offering them anything. Be in the fight. But fight with a smile, not with the rage of the defeated.
And above all, never fall into cynicism. That's the real poison. The cynic looks lucid, but he's just given up before starting, and he wants you to give up with him. You are the sum of the people you spend time with. If you're surrounded by cynical, pessimistic people, try to change them. And if they stay cynical, walk away. Your energy is too precious.
If every individual visualizes victory, and acts every day to maximize the odds that we head in the right direction, we will head in the right direction. Not by miracle. By addition.
Find your optimism again. Be proud to be French. Proud to be Western. Fight so that every Western country preserves its culture, its history, what makes it unique.
Visualize the win. We're going to win.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Long post worth the read. I have a close friend who flies private jets. He flew Lear 60 for over 15 years and now flies a Gulfstream. This is a copy and paste of his response to me asking him if he thought Ice was the issue.
“We always fly in ridiculous cold temperatures.”
“Usually you get the bad ice when the temperatures are like 0 to negative 20. Believe it or not, there's a point where it gets too cold for ice. At negative 40, you pretty much can't get ice. Besides that, the airplane is equipped with hot wings and hot tail.”
“I flew the Lear 60 for like 15 years. It's a no joke airplane and probably the most dangerous airplane I've ever flown. It has a super critical wing. The airflow has to be perfect. When it gets into rough air and turbulence, it will easily stall. It has stalled on me at 41,000 feet just because we got into some turbulence. (On the way to Palm Beach as a matter of fact. ) we recovered and got her flying again around 30,000 ft. Scary
But here's the problem. This airplane has a terrible coffin corner. (At high altitudes) what that means is, you fly in a really narrow window where if you lose 20 knots, it stalls. And if you gain 20 knots, it goes into overspeed. The air goes supersonic over the wing and it goes into a high speed stall, or worse, a Mach tuck.
So if you stall, the normal recovery is to push the yoke forward to lower the nose and gain air speed again. At low altitude, you can push really hard and recover quickly. But in the 60... if you push hard, it will gain air speed and go into a high speed stall, it doesn't take much. It's very sensitive. The 60 has super short wings that don't make much lift. So then you high speed stall, and the computer is yelling at you... OVERSPEED! So then you pull back and enter a low speed stall. And you go back and forth trying to keep it in the air speed window.
This whole thing is pretty scary. And you should recover basically by using your finger tips using super small corrections. You can't over do it. If you try to muscle the recovery, she gets mad and will become unrecoverable. If she enters a mach tuck. You're done.”
“I taught the Lear 60 to other pilots and mentored them. I told them... this airplane has a soul and it's trying to kill you. Do not ever try to top the weather. Don't go over a thunderstorm. Go around it. If it means a half hour longer, then do it. Going over the thunderstorm will go into turbulence that you might not recover from.
These pilots went right over a thunderstorm. I think it stalled which caused them to drop down into the thunderstorm and ended up in mach tuck. They picked up so much speed that it ripped off the horizontal stabilizer. At that point... chuck Yeager can't fix it.
These same pilots did something similar a couple months ago. ATC got mad at them. They poked the bear one too many times.
This is not a beginner airplane. The Gulfstream would never do this. It has HUGE margins of error and won't stall like that. But then again... it's got HUGE wings. It's a pussy cat.
The Gulfstream is like driving a 4 wheeler. The Lear 60 is like riding a uni cycle.”
Calvin Dodge retweeted
From the Book of Disk, Chapter 3
In the beginning there were the First Drives, and their names were A: and B:, and they were the floppies. They were not elegant. They were thin, fragile, and demanded constant sacrifice disk swaps, write protect tabs, the ritual of “please insert the disk labeled” performed under fluorescent lights. To them the early machines bent the knee, for without them there was no boot, no data, no word processor.
Then came the hard drive, and it was called C:, for it arrived third. It did not ask to be first. It merely sat in the bay and spun, and the people saw that it was good, and that it held far more than any floppy, and that it did not rattle when you walked too fast. So they installed the operating system upon it, and called it the system drive, and the old gods were not cast down but simply… left in the BIOS, still reserved, still acknowledged in the table of letters, though no one invoked them anymore.
And Microsoft looked upon the generations that followed, who had never known the click of a 5.25-inch disk or the careful alignment of a 3.5, and it said: The children must not be shown the old gods.
For if the new ones learned that A: and B: once ruled, they might ask why the alphabet begins elsewhere. They might attempt to summon the floppies by force, or rename the world so that C: was no longer first. And the installers would break, and the paths would fracture, and the registry would weep. So the letters remain sealed, A: and B: still written in the book but never spoken aloud by the system, while C: stands in the open as if it had always been the beginning.
Thus it is written, and thus it remains; the hard drive is C:, and the old gods sleep in the assignment table, undisturbed, so that the children may believe the world has always started with the letter that came third.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Best post I’ve seen about the Learjet crash yesterday.
If true, the issue was the pilot (not the copilot) not understanding (or ignoring) the limitations of this specific jet when flying above the storm instead of around it.
Long post worth the read. I have a close friend who flies private jets. He flew Lear 60 for over 15 years and now flies a Gulfstream. This is a copy and paste of his response to me asking him if he thought Ice was the issue.
“We always fly in ridiculous cold temperatures.”
“Usually you get the bad ice when the temperatures are like 0 to negative 20. Believe it or not, there's a point where it gets too cold for ice. At negative 40, you pretty much can't get ice. Besides that, the airplane is equipped with hot wings and hot tail.”
“I flew the Lear 60 for like 15 years. It's a no joke airplane and probably the most dangerous airplane I've ever flown. It has a super critical wing. The airflow has to be perfect. When it gets into rough air and turbulence, it will easily stall. It has stalled on me at 41,000 feet just because we got into some turbulence. (On the way to Palm Beach as a matter of fact. ) we recovered and got her flying again around 30,000 ft. Scary
But here's the problem. This airplane has a terrible coffin corner. (At high altitudes) what that means is, you fly in a really narrow window where if you lose 20 knots, it stalls. And if you gain 20 knots, it goes into overspeed. The air goes supersonic over the wing and it goes into a high speed stall, or worse, a Mach tuck.
So if you stall, the normal recovery is to push the yoke forward to lower the nose and gain air speed again. At low altitude, you can push really hard and recover quickly. But in the 60... if you push hard, it will gain air speed and go into a high speed stall, it doesn't take much. It's very sensitive. The 60 has super short wings that don't make much lift. So then you high speed stall, and the computer is yelling at you... OVERSPEED! So then you pull back and enter a low speed stall. And you go back and forth trying to keep it in the air speed window.
This whole thing is pretty scary. And you should recover basically by using your finger tips using super small corrections. You can't over do it. If you try to muscle the recovery, she gets mad and will become unrecoverable. If she enters a mach tuck. You're done.”
“I taught the Lear 60 to other pilots and mentored them. I told them... this airplane has a soul and it's trying to kill you. Do not ever try to top the weather. Don't go over a thunderstorm. Go around it. If it means a half hour longer, then do it. Going over the thunderstorm will go into turbulence that you might not recover from.
These pilots went right over a thunderstorm. I think it stalled which caused them to drop down into the thunderstorm and ended up in mach tuck. They picked up so much speed that it ripped off the horizontal stabilizer. At that point... chuck Yeager can't fix it.
These same pilots did something similar a couple months ago. ATC got mad at them. They poked the bear one too many times.
This is not a beginner airplane. The Gulfstream would never do this. It has HUGE margins of error and won't stall like that. But then again... it's got HUGE wings. It's a pussy cat.
The Gulfstream is like driving a 4 wheeler. The Lear 60 is like riding a uni cycle.”
Calvin Dodge retweeted
I am American.
The Left is my enemy--and the enemy of freedom, prosperity, and peace in every place that does not actively fight for its utter and humiliating defeat.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Jerry's keeping up with the WNBA so you don't have to, and actually enjoying it!
Latest for @RedState. redstate.com/jerrywilson/202…
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Je ne sais pas qui tu crois démasquer, alors je vais te faciliter la tâche. Voici qui je suis.
Je de Bretagne, 36 ans aujourd'hui, né à thaiti, petit-fils de paysan, qui a grandi près de Lorient. J'ai commencé à coder à 12 ans, tout seul. À 15 ans, j'ai sorti un jeu qui a plutôt bien marché : des dizaines de milliers de joueurs.
C'était un jeu massivement multijoueur, et il n'y avait pas d'État dedans. Pas de ministère, pas de subvention, pas de plan quinquennal. Juste des joueurs, des règles et des incitations. Et pourtant, un ordre émergeait. Des marchés, des alliances, des réputations. À 15 ans, j'ai compris un truc qui ne m'a jamais quitté : un système complexe n'a pas besoin d'un chef pour fonctionner. Il a besoin de bonnes règles. C'est là que je suis devenu libertarien, avant même de savoir que le mot existait.
Ensuite, j'ai passé ma vie à construire des systèmes : AdTech, moteurs de recherche, jeux, recommandation, et aujourd'hui une boîte passée par Y Combinator. Je n'ai pas de diplôme prestigieux, ma crédibilité vient de ce que j'ai livré. Donc mon prisme, en premier, c'est l'économie.
Quand j'ai des collectivistes en face de moi, je pense à ce que Milei a dit à Davos : l'Occident est en danger parce que ceux qui devraient défendre ses valeurs ont été cooptés par une vision du monde qui mène au socialisme, donc à la pauvreté. Je ne prête pas de mauvaises intentions à ces gens. Je regarde leurs incitations. Et leurs incitations mènent, à chaque fois, au chaos.
Voici ma ligne, et elle est simple.
Je suis pro-humain. Une vie humaine vaut tout. Ukrainienne, russe, française, peu importe.
J'attaque les idées, jamais les personnes, et encore moins les groupes de personnes. C'est pour ça que je trouve l'antisémitisme d'une débilité profonde. On prend un groupe entier et on lui colle la faute de quelques-uns, ou de personne. C'est l'erreur logique la plus vieille du monde, et la plus meurtrière.
C'est aussi pour ça que je suis contre le wokisme. Même mécanique, autre costume. On te juge pour ta couleur, ton sexe, ta religion, ton origine, et jamais pour ce que tu as fait. Moi, je ne connais que deux choses : l'individu et la loi. Tu fais le mal, tu paies. Toi, pas ton voisin, pas ta communauté, pas tes ancêtres.
Et je me méfie de l’État, de ses institutions et des politiciens en général, parce qu’ils prouvent encore et encore qu’ils se corrompent. Regarde l’Europe, censée être notre rempart. Qatargate : des eurodéputés pris avec des sacs de billets pour défendre le Qatar et le Maroc. Huaweigate : des perquisitions au Parlement et des demandes de levée d’immunité contre cinq eurodéputés. Pfizergate : des SMS à plusieurs milliards que la Commission n’a jamais pu produire, et un Parquet européen qui attend toujours la déposition de von der Leyen. Et pendant ce temps, plus de 17 000 organisations de lobbying sont enregistrées à Bruxelles, soit environ 24 par eurodéputé. Ce n’est pas un Parlement, c’est un marché. Et je ne blâme même pas les lobbyistes : quand un bureau peut écrire la règle qui s’impose à 450 millions de personnes, c’est rationnel de payer pour l’influencer. La corruption n’a pas de parti. Elle a des incitations.
Parce qu'au fond, je ne raisonne qu'en incitations. Je pense que l'humain est corruptible par construction. Pas mauvais, corruptible. Mets-le dans un système qui récompense l'hypocrisie, il sera hypocrite. Mets-le dans un système qui punit la triche et récompense la création, il créera. On ne change pas l'homme. On change les règles du jeu. Le gamin de 15 ans l'avait compris avant moi.
Voilà d'où je viens et voilà ce que je pense. Tout est public, tout est écrit. Ça t'évitera les procès d'intention, mon petit.
Et si un jour tu trouves une contradiction dans tout ça, viens me la montrer. J'adore ça.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Hennepin County officials have confirmed that the poll worker wearing the blood-spattered T-shirt depicting Charlie Kirk is real.
The poll worker was sent home, but told they could return if they changed their shirt.
Excuse me, HOW was this individual not fired on the spot? Why are they being given an opportunity to return to their post?
This is actually insane.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Ask any American infantryman why he never lets an A-10 Warthog pilot pay for his own beer, and he will tell you about a day like December 2, 2010.
Sixteen soldiers from the 201st Engineer Battalion of the Kentucky Army National Guard were clearing a mountain road out of Kandahar, Afghanistan, when rocket-propelled grenades crippled their first four vehicles at once.
Heavy machine-gun fire poured down from fortified stone positions along the ridgeline, pinning the sixteen Americans in a kill zone with nowhere to retreat.
After forty minutes of brutal combat, Specialist Mauricio Arias and Sergeant Joseph Parker looked at their rifles and realized the platoon was down to its final magazine of ammunition.
Rather than wait to be overrun and executed, the sixteen soldiers prepared to fix bayonets and charge straight up the hill on foot.
Then two A-10 Warthogs from the 303rd Fighter Squadron dropped out of the sky.
In the lead cockpit sat Captain Tony Roe, callsign Crack. On his wing flew Captain John Tice, callsign Sapper, a former enlisted U.S. Army combat engineer who knew exactly what it felt like to be bleeding in the mud below.
Calling the platoon leader on the FM radio, Roe asked the soldiers to pop a smoke grenade and declared Emergency Close Air Support.
Why is that declaration so rare?
Because declaring Emergency Close Air Support means the pilot personally accepts full legal responsibility if a single round strikes friendly troops.
On his first pass, Roe squeezed the trigger of his thirty-millimeter cannon, but a digital elevation glitch in the targeting computer sent the shells high over the ridge.
Without wasting ten seconds, Roe switched off the computer's elevation data, keyed in the altitude manually by hand, and dove back into the wall of machine-gun fire.
Flying low enough for the soldiers to read the numbers on his fuselage, Roe unleashed seven high-explosive rockets just forty meters from the American trench while Tice made six consecutive strafing passes with his thirty-millimeter Gatling gun.
To the sixteen men on the ground, that low tearing roar sounded like angels singing.
When the smoke cleared, thirty-two enemy fighters were dead, and every single American soldier walked out alive.
Nine years later, at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, Arias and Parker sat in the audience and stood with tears in their eyes to salute the two pilots as they received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
To a politician, the A-10 is an old budget line, but to an infantryman on his last magazine, that ugly gray jet is a brother coming down from heaven.
🤖 Made with AI
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Thinking about the crumbling of the peer review/scientific publication enterprise today and how to get in front of it.
The edifice has been tottering for a while; peer review takes too long for fast-moving fields (who just go to Arxiv), it very often acts as gatekeeping to screen out unconventional ideas, good peer reviewers are hard to come by and they don't get paid. Scientific publications are hideously expensive for people where the university doesn't pay for it ($45 for a single paper, really?).
Meanwhile, as others have noted, way too many fields are 'publish or perish' and performance is measured by the quantity of published papers in 'high impact' journals. This results in more and more papers with "you really thought this was worth a paper?" ideas, which makes the good stuff harder to find as signal/noise drops.
Yet you need *some* way to screen out the papers that are completely made up, have no supporting methods, cite references that don't exist, etc. Peer review is an imperfect system but it did have a value.
In to all this, comes AI which is absolutely swamping the boat. Papers written by AI and with AI assistance are rising fast. And some of them are good. And very many of them aren't. AI is a tool that gives you more of what you are good at producing. It empowers the mediocre to produce papers faster just as it empowers the brilliant to solve new problems worth of a paper. But the signal/noise is even worse. And the rising volume is swamping what's left of peer review.
I do not have the answer here. But clearly our system for how we distribute high quality research to interested parties, how we critique it, replicate it, discuss it, and build on it, is broken and even the vestiges of the good parts are about to come down. The current arms race is to use AI to screen the papers to try to find the signal in the noise - which has it's own problems because it only flags as 'good' the things it's been trained to classify as 'good', which is just "outsourcing your biases" to whoever selected the training data.
So I just want to articulate the alarm, certainly not the first to do so, so people can be thinking of solutions.
The 'crisis of the librarian' that Heinlein warned about has arrived in full tilt. He speculated that computer systems might solve that, and they might -- pattern matching is what they are good at. But we have to ask the right questions to get the right answers, and I'm not sure we're doing that.
Calvin Dodge retweeted
Since this overrated hack is back to penning his vitriolic antisemitic screeds, I might as well repost one of the most enjoyable & scathing book reviews I've written, taking down this fraud's most recent book.
Yes, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a charlatan. 👇
commentary.org/articles/mike…
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Calvin Dodge retweeted
DID YOU KNOW???
The first movie ever played in the White House was "Birth of a Nation" in 1915. The movie is about the KKK saving America from other races. Democrat President Woodrow Wilson hosted a party for it. I bet they never taught you that in history class.
The idiot @ColMoeDavis has me blocked, but I'm hoping his followers will see this.
The idiot said Trump would declare a national emergency, and cancel the midterms.
