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"Poison"☠️ Learned from Mr. Matthews PE Central Justin Cahill Drew Burris 🙌 (many diff variations) "Taggers" kick hoop⭕, trying to make it slide & hit others' 👣 (could use deck ring instead, too). Scarves ⬇️ confusion on who kickers are. Lots of cardio🫀 & fun!😊 #physed

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Kyle.PE.Bragg

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19,740 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr •via X (Twitter)

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@WestNewtonPE @pecentral @justybubPE @projectphysed Another hoop kick variation that our Ss enjoy

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Do you ride a bike? Or an e-scooter? Or walk a dog? If so, please take a second to read this. If you are on a bike or scooter on a shared pathway and approaching someone walking a dog, please be courteous and slow down a little. Especially if coming up from behind. I am a wheelchair user with a dog and we have way too many close calls with fast moving bikes and scooters. People not using a bell and whipping by within inches. If the dog turned it's head or stepped a bit wide, they'd be hit. I'll happily move as far to one side of the path as possible, and if I've got the younger dog who isn't as experienced around fast moving things, I'll stop at the very side and have him sit in front of me to give everyone as much space as possible. If I don't know you're approaching, I can't do that. So please, for the love of dog, use your bell. Don't wait until you're right behind someone with a dog. Use it while you're still at a distance, and if you aren't sure they noticed it, ring it a few more times. Give them as much time as possible to move to the side and prepare the dog. If it's a puppy or a dog that hasn't had much experience with bikes, being able to get them off the path or give them a little extra distance from the fast moving bike helps prevent them from getting scared. The vast majority of cyclists are great and really respectful, but there's always a few that aren't. This year the challenge is kids on e-scooters. They are going fast and having fun. Safety isn't at the forefront of their mind. They often don't use a bell or slow down at blind corners, and many don't think about giving the dog any space. I've been startled a few times by them so I can only imagine how the dog felt. This is one of the reasons why I do a lot of desensitization and counter conditioning. Dog owners-you need to do your part to. If you've got headphones on, make sure you can still hear the bike bell. Make sure to give the cyclist or scooter rider as much space as possible from your dog. And of course, unless you are on a designated off leash trail, keep your dog on a leash. If you have a puppy or a newly adopted dog that might not be comfortable around bikes, take some kibble or treats and go hang out with them near a multi use path. Let them watch. As the bike or scooter approaches, drop a few treats on the ground. For many dogs, this is all it takes, but if your dog is visibly stressed, fixated on the bike, or reacting, try moving a further from the trail and once they're comfortable at a slightly further distance, try closer again. If they are still stressed or fearful even with more distance, don't force the issue. Instead introduce them to a bike that isn't moving, and gradually work them up from there. If they are struggling, talk to a trainer. Regardless of if you are holding a leash, riding a bike or scooter, or enjoying a walk outdoors, just be respectful. And of course, be safe. Thanks, Admin 🎥 Puppy walk for cuteness
0:33

Do you ride a bike? Or an e-scooter? Or walk a dog? If so, please take a second to read this. If you are on a bike or scooter on a shared pathway and approaching someone walking a dog, please be courteous and slow down a little. Especially if coming up from behind. I am a wheelchair user with a dog and we have way too many close calls with fast moving bikes and scooters. People not using a bell and whipping by within inches. If the dog turned it's head or stepped a bit wide, they'd be hit. I'll happily move as far to one side of the path as possible, and if I've got the younger dog who isn't as experienced around fast moving things, I'll stop at the very side and have him sit in front of me to give everyone as much space as possible. If I don't know you're approaching, I can't do that. So please, for the love of dog, use your bell. Don't wait until you're right behind someone with a dog. Use it while you're still at a distance, and if you aren't sure they noticed it, ring it a few more times. Give them as much time as possible to move to the side and prepare the dog. If it's a puppy or a dog that hasn't had much experience with bikes, being able to get them off the path or give them a little extra distance from the fast moving bike helps prevent them from getting scared. The vast majority of cyclists are great and really respectful, but there's always a few that aren't. This year the challenge is kids on e-scooters. They are going fast and having fun. Safety isn't at the forefront of their mind. They often don't use a bell or slow down at blind corners, and many don't think about giving the dog any space. I've been startled a few times by them so I can only imagine how the dog felt. This is one of the reasons why I do a lot of desensitization and counter conditioning. Dog owners-you need to do your part to. If you've got headphones on, make sure you can still hear the bike bell. Make sure to give the cyclist or scooter rider as much space as possible from your dog. And of course, unless you are on a designated off leash trail, keep your dog on a leash. If you have a puppy or a newly adopted dog that might not be comfortable around bikes, take some kibble or treats and go hang out with them near a multi use path. Let them watch. As the bike or scooter approaches, drop a few treats on the ground. For many dogs, this is all it takes, but if your dog is visibly stressed, fixated on the bike, or reacting, try moving a further from the trail and once they're comfortable at a slightly further distance, try closer again. If they are still stressed or fearful even with more distance, don't force the issue. Instead introduce them to a bike that isn't moving, and gradually work them up from there. If they are struggling, talk to a trainer. Regardless of if you are holding a leash, riding a bike or scooter, or enjoying a walk outdoors, just be respectful. And of course, be safe. Thanks, Admin 🎥 Puppy walk for cuteness

Team Servicerottie🇨🇦🐕‍🦺🦽

15,632 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

It’s abundantly clear to me that Tim Walz does not understand what masculinity is, based on his demeanor and his constant comparisons of manhood to activities rather than attributes. When Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Democrats immediately saw it as an opportunity to "win back" the men they had alienated with their anti-male, antagonistic rhetoric and irreverent messaging toward us. Kamala Harris had a quintessential "man problem," and they thought Tim Walz could shore up her failing male support in the polls. MSNBC fawned over him, portraying him as a sort of modern or new-age man who is highly emotional yet somehow internally macho. Through the lens of there being only two types of men—toxic and non-toxic—they spent so much time painting Trump as the toxic man that they were left with a try-hard, insecure figure like Tim Walz. There are many ways to tell if someone is insecure about who they are, but a clear sign is that they spend far too much time trying to prove what they are instead of simply being it. Trump doesn’t incessantly talk about how he’s a "real man" or use every media appearance to convince you he’s relatable to men through some stereotypically male activity. Whether you love or hate Trump, he just is himself. He’s confident—not because he says he’s confident, but because he simply is. A person who explicitly tells you how smart they are likely isn’t smart and doesn’t believe it themselves. This applies to any other internal attribute. It’s not for someone to tell you their character; it’s for others to assess for themselves. Tim Walz believes that masculinity is measurable by the activities he’s participated in and by bragging about how great he is at a given male-associated pursuit. While there are activities typically associated with men, those activities don’t make you masculine or a man. Tim Walz loves to bring up how he hunts, but there are women who hunt too—that doesn’t make them men or masculine. Walz’s insecurity aligns with my biggest problem with the political left and how they equate the essence of manhood with a list of activities instead of personal qualities. It’s no different from saying womanhood is equivalent to wearing dresses and makeup, which is an absurdly low threshold. So, what is a masculine man? Masculine men are balanced individuals who are not easily toppled emotionally. They are confident in their capabilities while maintaining humility and acknowledging where they fall short. Masculine men are calm under pressure yet recognize the need to step away from conflict when necessary. These men are purpose-driven and willing to sacrifice themselves for the people they love. Plenty of masculine men don’t know how to fix a car, play football, or hunt, because these activities never defined what it is to be a man. They are simply pursuits that men can bond over, learn from, or use to accentuate what they already possess. Walz is what I would define as a performative man. He’s a guy who is always trying to prove himself to the world, which is why he’s constantly talking about the supposedly manly things he does. He sounds incredibly goofy when he tries to talk tough, as if this middle-aged man is prepared to get into a street fight at a moment’s notice. But masculine men don’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone. They don’t speak recklessly, especially about engaging in violent acts. If you are something, you don’t have to convince anyone to believe it. People can tell what’s genuine and what isn’t. Tim Walz isn’t some new-age masculine man; he’s an insecure guy who desperately wants you to believe he’s something more than he actually is.
11:15

It’s abundantly clear to me that Tim Walz does not understand what masculinity is, based on his demeanor and his constant comparisons of manhood to activities rather than attributes. When Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Democrats immediately saw it as an opportunity to "win back" the men they had alienated with their anti-male, antagonistic rhetoric and irreverent messaging toward us. Kamala Harris had a quintessential "man problem," and they thought Tim Walz could shore up her failing male support in the polls. MSNBC fawned over him, portraying him as a sort of modern or new-age man who is highly emotional yet somehow internally macho. Through the lens of there being only two types of men—toxic and non-toxic—they spent so much time painting Trump as the toxic man that they were left with a try-hard, insecure figure like Tim Walz. There are many ways to tell if someone is insecure about who they are, but a clear sign is that they spend far too much time trying to prove what they are instead of simply being it. Trump doesn’t incessantly talk about how he’s a "real man" or use every media appearance to convince you he’s relatable to men through some stereotypically male activity. Whether you love or hate Trump, he just is himself. He’s confident—not because he says he’s confident, but because he simply is. A person who explicitly tells you how smart they are likely isn’t smart and doesn’t believe it themselves. This applies to any other internal attribute. It’s not for someone to tell you their character; it’s for others to assess for themselves. Tim Walz believes that masculinity is measurable by the activities he’s participated in and by bragging about how great he is at a given male-associated pursuit. While there are activities typically associated with men, those activities don’t make you masculine or a man. Tim Walz loves to bring up how he hunts, but there are women who hunt too—that doesn’t make them men or masculine. Walz’s insecurity aligns with my biggest problem with the political left and how they equate the essence of manhood with a list of activities instead of personal qualities. It’s no different from saying womanhood is equivalent to wearing dresses and makeup, which is an absurdly low threshold. So, what is a masculine man? Masculine men are balanced individuals who are not easily toppled emotionally. They are confident in their capabilities while maintaining humility and acknowledging where they fall short. Masculine men are calm under pressure yet recognize the need to step away from conflict when necessary. These men are purpose-driven and willing to sacrifice themselves for the people they love. Plenty of masculine men don’t know how to fix a car, play football, or hunt, because these activities never defined what it is to be a man. They are simply pursuits that men can bond over, learn from, or use to accentuate what they already possess. Walz is what I would define as a performative man. He’s a guy who is always trying to prove himself to the world, which is why he’s constantly talking about the supposedly manly things he does. He sounds incredibly goofy when he tries to talk tough, as if this middle-aged man is prepared to get into a street fight at a moment’s notice. But masculine men don’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone. They don’t speak recklessly, especially about engaging in violent acts. If you are something, you don’t have to convince anyone to believe it. People can tell what’s genuine and what isn’t. Tim Walz isn’t some new-age masculine man; he’s an insecure guy who desperately wants you to believe he’s something more than he actually is.

Adam B. Coleman, Proud Father & Imperfect Man

79,419 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

First of all, we here at AMGI want to thank you all for being on this journey with us. We have been extremely busy. Over the last few weeks we have delivered a huge early access patch to My Pet Hooligan, delivered a new on-chain governance solution with WinVote, brought back NFTs in game, started testing the Street Kred system, made some new hires, delivered a new site for AMGI Studios and smashed the largest gaming event in the USA, PAX West. What does all of this mean and importantly what is next!.... PAX West You have seen the videos, you know the vibes were on point, but let's dive deeper into this and what the key takeaways are. PAX West was completely different to the WAGMI Crypto events that we are mostly used to in this space, although these are always fun and important, when creating gaming products, it is also important to get directly in front of people who have a passion for gaming. That's what PAX West was, hosting over 100,000 gamers who just want to play games and have fun. PAX West was a great success for us on many fronts. It confirmed that we have something special in our hands. Gamers loved both the brand and the game and were eager to get involved. It opened up new exciting opportunities with gaming and hardware companies. It was a blast seeing event goers from Day 2 onwards wearing the My Pet Hooligan t-shirts around the city. It was great to see parents playing the game together with their kids. The choices to not include blood and gore made a huge difference and have opened some new unexpected doors for us. If we truly believe in the progression and adoption of this industry we need to move beyond degen products and into real life consumer products that people can truly enjoy. That's what we are here to do, no matter how difficult it is, and no matter what the current ‘meta’ is. We have been here for many years grinding day in and day out and are still here today delivering like we are the new kids on the block trying to prove ourselves. The Game PAX West marks the end of a phase of the project, whilst we now posture more into continued efficiency, growth and retention. The game is not feature complete by any means yet but the foundations are strong. There are a number of features still being developed, including a progression system, consumables system, further build out of questing, token utility and more. As these are continuing to be developed we also continue on our journey to make the game more accessible. This will start with Steam and then Consoles. A Microsoft rep at PAX told us “we are going to make it”, who are we to disagree!... Lots of new ideas, lots of new feedback to work from and a renewed drive and hunger which are only going to help make this an even more compelling and fun game. The Web3 Marketplace In the coming days, Version 1 of the My Pet Hooligan Web3 Marketplace will be going live. Version 1 for now will allow for the trading of My Pet Hooligan NFTs, OG Hooligans and Zuckbots for $KARRAT. It will also serve as the marketplace for all of our upcoming in-game blockchain assets. This will eventually become part of your online My Pet Hooligan central hub and will include features such as rentals and subscriptions. It's been a long time coming but it shall be here very soon. Everything's coming together, one step at a time. It is important to note that there are many pieces of a complex puzzle that must come together in order for us to succeed. Between payment solutions, L1 & L2 blockchains, wallets, distribution platforms and the laws of the land. We are in uncharted waters and continue to do things in the most flexible ways possible to ensure we have strong resilience with our operations. The MPH website is next on the list for an uplift too as well as an overhaul of the user accounts system UI/UX. Team We continue to strengthen the team bringing in new hires and stepping up individuals from the community. Some of the new resources being brought in include a new Game Producer, Senior Game Engineer, Senior Blockchain Engineer and the former Dean of the Epic Unreal Fellowship Programme. Collectively bringing in experience from Epic, Solana, Blizzard and more. There are also some community role changes and new advisors that will help with social strategy and web3. As well as new marketing efforts through new channels of distribution that we are exploring. More to come on this… WinVote V1 Governance isn't sexy but building tools for the benefit of the space that others can license is. Governance is a key part of the industry and a need for most of the foundations in the crypto space. WinVote has started its trial with the KARRAT Foundation. Whilst the trial continues it will continue to be built out with an aim to be the premier tool for on-chain governance in the space. Access to WinVote for other communities and organizations wishing to use WinVote will be secure through licenses that utilize $KARRAT. We still have much more at work here in the studio, such as continued R&D, The Others, AI, Feature Development and more. This list is long, but we are grateful to get to do it. Stay tuned and let us cook, this s#it ain’t easy! Karrat Gang, thank you again for being on this journey with us. We love and appreciate you all! Look out for a catchup with the team next week. Hooli-hoo!!
0:26

First of all, we here at AMGI want to thank you all for being on this journey with us. We have been extremely busy. Over the last few weeks we have delivered a huge early access patch to My Pet Hooligan, delivered a new on-chain governance solution with WinVote, brought back NFTs in game, started testing the Street Kred system, made some new hires, delivered a new site for AMGI Studios and smashed the largest gaming event in the USA, PAX West. What does all of this mean and importantly what is next!.... PAX West You have seen the videos, you know the vibes were on point, but let's dive deeper into this and what the key takeaways are. PAX West was completely different to the WAGMI Crypto events that we are mostly used to in this space, although these are always fun and important, when creating gaming products, it is also important to get directly in front of people who have a passion for gaming. That's what PAX West was, hosting over 100,000 gamers who just want to play games and have fun. PAX West was a great success for us on many fronts. It confirmed that we have something special in our hands. Gamers loved both the brand and the game and were eager to get involved. It opened up new exciting opportunities with gaming and hardware companies. It was a blast seeing event goers from Day 2 onwards wearing the My Pet Hooligan t-shirts around the city. It was great to see parents playing the game together with their kids. The choices to not include blood and gore made a huge difference and have opened some new unexpected doors for us. If we truly believe in the progression and adoption of this industry we need to move beyond degen products and into real life consumer products that people can truly enjoy. That's what we are here to do, no matter how difficult it is, and no matter what the current ‘meta’ is. We have been here for many years grinding day in and day out and are still here today delivering like we are the new kids on the block trying to prove ourselves. The Game PAX West marks the end of a phase of the project, whilst we now posture more into continued efficiency, growth and retention. The game is not feature complete by any means yet but the foundations are strong. There are a number of features still being developed, including a progression system, consumables system, further build out of questing, token utility and more. As these are continuing to be developed we also continue on our journey to make the game more accessible. This will start with Steam and then Consoles. A Microsoft rep at PAX told us “we are going to make it”, who are we to disagree!... Lots of new ideas, lots of new feedback to work from and a renewed drive and hunger which are only going to help make this an even more compelling and fun game. The Web3 Marketplace In the coming days, Version 1 of the My Pet Hooligan Web3 Marketplace will be going live. Version 1 for now will allow for the trading of My Pet Hooligan NFTs, OG Hooligans and Zuckbots for $KARRAT. It will also serve as the marketplace for all of our upcoming in-game blockchain assets. This will eventually become part of your online My Pet Hooligan central hub and will include features such as rentals and subscriptions. It's been a long time coming but it shall be here very soon. Everything's coming together, one step at a time. It is important to note that there are many pieces of a complex puzzle that must come together in order for us to succeed. Between payment solutions, L1 & L2 blockchains, wallets, distribution platforms and the laws of the land. We are in uncharted waters and continue to do things in the most flexible ways possible to ensure we have strong resilience with our operations. The MPH website is next on the list for an uplift too as well as an overhaul of the user accounts system UI/UX. Team We continue to strengthen the team bringing in new hires and stepping up individuals from the community. Some of the new resources being brought in include a new Game Producer, Senior Game Engineer, Senior Blockchain Engineer and the former Dean of the Epic Unreal Fellowship Programme. Collectively bringing in experience from Epic, Solana, Blizzard and more. There are also some community role changes and new advisors that will help with social strategy and web3. As well as new marketing efforts through new channels of distribution that we are exploring. More to come on this… WinVote V1 Governance isn't sexy but building tools for the benefit of the space that others can license is. Governance is a key part of the industry and a need for most of the foundations in the crypto space. WinVote has started its trial with the KARRAT Foundation. Whilst the trial continues it will continue to be built out with an aim to be the premier tool for on-chain governance in the space. Access to WinVote for other communities and organizations wishing to use WinVote will be secure through licenses that utilize $KARRAT. We still have much more at work here in the studio, such as continued R&D, The Others, AI, Feature Development and more. This list is long, but we are grateful to get to do it. Stay tuned and let us cook, this s#it ain’t easy! Karrat Gang, thank you again for being on this journey with us. We love and appreciate you all! Look out for a catchup with the team next week. Hooli-hoo!!

My Pet Hooligan

26,616 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Admin post: The big, tough looking guy with the shaved head that had dogs in bite sports and upper level obedience once referred to me as the "Badass woman in the wheelchair with the Rottweilers" and told me I was probably the toughest person he knew. Most people see disability as weak. They have no idea the resiliency we develop to keep moving forward despite all the barriers, the biggest one being attitude. Even getting up, going to the bathroom, and getting dressed is hard work. There's always pain. Pretty much every single thing I do is significantly harder than when I could walk. It's isolating, but often it's too exhausting to notice. People see this middle aged woman with no legs in a power wheelchair walk her well mannered dog and think it's sweet. I'm constantly asked who trains my dogs because most people are quick to make assumptions that I can't. Where other people can simply say they're capable of doing something, I have to prove it to be believed. The past 2 years I've packed and loaded the van, driven myself and 2 powerful dogs hundreds of kilometers, lugged our stuff into hotels where I usually have to move furniture to get a plug in by the bed for my wheelchair charger. I've exercised and pottied dogs in hotel parking lots in wind, rain, and snow. I've done the same early mornings and long days as everyone else there. Sometimes we do ok. Sometimes we do brilliantly. Just because I don't have legs doesn't mean I can't go out there and kick ass. Despite being 2025, there's still a ton of barriers in the world and planning and decisions are typically made by able-bodied who often can't envision the impact they have on others. Being disabled comes with significant extra financial burden, and often policies are put in place that just make it more difficult. Very few days go by where I don't have to advocate for myself and others or fight for what should be a right. It can get extremely disheartening, and sometimes I want to just give up fighting and say they win. I don't. I don't call myself handicapped. I use the term disabled. The term handicapped is used in horse racing. The horse that has proven itself to be superior is required to carry extra weight to make it "fair" for others. The attitudes towards disabilities, the barriers that exist in the built environment, and many of the policies in government are what handicap us. They place the additional challenge on us that often prevent us from succeeding. They often prevent us from even participating. The big guy with the shaved head was right. I'm very tough. I have to be tougher than everyone else just to get to be there. When you see someone with a disability and judge them as weak, ask yourself just how well you'd do in their situation, facing the barriers they face. There's a good chance they're every bit as tough as you. Video description for inclusivity: clips of a woman in a power wheelchair and a large rottweiler competing in performance events at dog shows
0:29

Admin post: The big, tough looking guy with the shaved head that had dogs in bite sports and upper level obedience once referred to me as the "Badass woman in the wheelchair with the Rottweilers" and told me I was probably the toughest person he knew. Most people see disability as weak. They have no idea the resiliency we develop to keep moving forward despite all the barriers, the biggest one being attitude. Even getting up, going to the bathroom, and getting dressed is hard work. There's always pain. Pretty much every single thing I do is significantly harder than when I could walk. It's isolating, but often it's too exhausting to notice. People see this middle aged woman with no legs in a power wheelchair walk her well mannered dog and think it's sweet. I'm constantly asked who trains my dogs because most people are quick to make assumptions that I can't. Where other people can simply say they're capable of doing something, I have to prove it to be believed. The past 2 years I've packed and loaded the van, driven myself and 2 powerful dogs hundreds of kilometers, lugged our stuff into hotels where I usually have to move furniture to get a plug in by the bed for my wheelchair charger. I've exercised and pottied dogs in hotel parking lots in wind, rain, and snow. I've done the same early mornings and long days as everyone else there. Sometimes we do ok. Sometimes we do brilliantly. Just because I don't have legs doesn't mean I can't go out there and kick ass. Despite being 2025, there's still a ton of barriers in the world and planning and decisions are typically made by able-bodied who often can't envision the impact they have on others. Being disabled comes with significant extra financial burden, and often policies are put in place that just make it more difficult. Very few days go by where I don't have to advocate for myself and others or fight for what should be a right. It can get extremely disheartening, and sometimes I want to just give up fighting and say they win. I don't. I don't call myself handicapped. I use the term disabled. The term handicapped is used in horse racing. The horse that has proven itself to be superior is required to carry extra weight to make it "fair" for others. The attitudes towards disabilities, the barriers that exist in the built environment, and many of the policies in government are what handicap us. They place the additional challenge on us that often prevent us from succeeding. They often prevent us from even participating. The big guy with the shaved head was right. I'm very tough. I have to be tougher than everyone else just to get to be there. When you see someone with a disability and judge them as weak, ask yourself just how well you'd do in their situation, facing the barriers they face. There's a good chance they're every bit as tough as you. Video description for inclusivity: clips of a woman in a power wheelchair and a large rottweiler competing in performance events at dog shows

Team Servicerottie🇨🇦🐕‍🦺🦽

30,591 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Stargate Trivia: Casting Stargate: Atlantis While SG-1 was my first love (We were together for seven years!), my time on Atlantis proved equally memorable. The show was possessed of a similar tone in its mix of high adventure and humor, yet proved distinct in its exploration of Ancient mythology and an unfamiliar galaxy as seen through the eyes of a new set of heroes. Atlantis offered a sense of wonder and camaraderie born of isolation and constant danger. Whereas team SG-1 could always go home at the conclusion of their adventures, the members of the Atlantis expedition (at least for those first few seasons) could only draw comfort from the city of Atlantis itself – and, of course, each other. It was unique and compelling yet, at the same time, comfortingly familiar. Nowhere is this more evident than in its opening theme, composed by the late Joel Goldsmith, which is, at turns fresh, haunting, stirring and, throughout, discernibly Stargate. Stargate: Atlantis wasn’t envisioned as a companion to Stargate: SG-1. It was intended to replace the long-running series. The only problem was, with eight seasons under its belt, SG-1 wasn’t quite done yet. And fans (and the network) weren’t done with it either. And so, instead of passing the torch and segueing to a new Stargate series, we ended up producing both. In retrospect, it was quite an achievement: 40 hours of television! Today's productions can barely manage a third that output, but Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis delivered two fantastic 40 episode seasons before SG-1 took it’s final bow. It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly made easier by all of the enormously talented individuals who made it happen, from the office staff and crew to the cast and my fellow writer/producers. Still, it was not without its challenges. Take casting, for instance. It may surprise you to know that, when it comes to producing a show, not everybody cares about costumes or set design or whether the script’s fifth act denouement is emotionally satisfying - but everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, has an opinion on casting. Studio and network execs, producers, hell, even your significant other peering over your shoulder as you screen the auditions on your home computer, will want to weigh in. Of course, the more voices in the mix the more likely there are to be disagreements. So it is with every production and Atlantis was no different. Different individuals envisioned these characters in very different ways and, as a result, consensus was only achieved after many auditions, calls-backs, heated discussions, and not-so-gentle reminders that our start date was fast-approaching and we really needed someone to say the lines on camera. The part of Carson Beckett was one of the first we cast. The other producers were in Rob’s office, screening the first batch of local auditions when Brad called me in and told me to check out the guy onscreen. I hadn’t imagined Beckett with a Scottish accent but, after watching Paul McGillion in the role, I couldn’t imagine him without one. He’d brought something unexpected to the part, something we all responded to. Elizabeth Weir was not an easy character to pull off. She had to be smart, confident and strong yet needed to exude a certain warmth and empathy we were looking for in the civilian leader of the expedition. When it came time to (re)casting the role, several established names were considered (One had her own hit genre show back in the day while another went on to break out on a hit show soon after), but it was Torri Higginson who managed to strike just the right balance and vault her name to the top of the list. The role of Teyla Emmagan was a tough one to cast. Like Weir, she needed to be a strong, empathetic leader. But she also required something even more important – quite literally, an other-worldly quality that made her unique. Some equally talented actresses auditioned for the role but, as good as they were, they were never quite able to achieve that gravitas Rachel pulled off with such grace and seeming ease. Former VJ Rainbow Sun Francks won the role of Lieutenant Ford on the strength of a great audition, preceded by an equally great audition with a funny hat. I recall Brad Wright on the phone with our casting agent, advising him to ensure there would be no hat worn in the callback for fear the network would fixate on it. There wasn't, they didn't, and Rainbow delivered. The role of John Sheppard was the second to last one cast. It came right down to the wire and there were several candidates in play. The character was originally envisioned as a good ole southern boy, so it only made sense that Ben Browder’s name was bandied about early. However, he was too busy shooting Peacekeeper Wars to warrant consideration. A number of other actors were considered (one went on to play the lead in a hugely popular show the following year while another made his mark as a handsome heart throb on another hugely popular medical series) but it was Joe Flanigan who won the part based on his ability to pull off the devil-may-care attitude Brad and Robert were looking for. We come to the final role cast, a character who, in many ways, embodied everything Atlantis was about: exploration, discovery, fun, humor, and seat-of-your-pants-Holy-Sh&%-how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-get-out-of-this-adventure. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, he almost didn’t make the trip to Pegasus. Originally, the casting call went out for a completely different character, an earnest young doctor who would lend the team much-needed medical support on their off-world ventures. Unfortunately, no one could agree on who that actor should be. If the casting of Sheppard went down to the wire, then the casting of this final role went a step past it. Finally, days away from production, Robert Cooper had an idea: Forget the doctor character. Why not use an established character from SG-1? How about Rodney McKay? The writers were on board, but some executives weren't weren’t sold on the idea. They found him annoying! Hell yeah, but he’d be sooo much fun to write for! Rob got on the phone and went to bat for Rodney, pointing out that the character had come a long way since first being introduced way back in SG-1’s 48 Hours. He’d evolved, going from annoying jerk to endearingly irritating. To this day, I’m convinced that they weren’t totally convinced but, with production poised to commence, they relented, I suppose figuring they could just replace the character somewhere down the line. No one, even those who loved the idea of having the endearingly irritating Rodney McKay on board could have predicted how hugely popular the character would become.
0:57

Stargate Trivia: Casting Stargate: Atlantis While SG-1 was my first love (We were together for seven years!), my time on Atlantis proved equally memorable. The show was possessed of a similar tone in its mix of high adventure and humor, yet proved distinct in its exploration of Ancient mythology and an unfamiliar galaxy as seen through the eyes of a new set of heroes. Atlantis offered a sense of wonder and camaraderie born of isolation and constant danger. Whereas team SG-1 could always go home at the conclusion of their adventures, the members of the Atlantis expedition (at least for those first few seasons) could only draw comfort from the city of Atlantis itself – and, of course, each other. It was unique and compelling yet, at the same time, comfortingly familiar. Nowhere is this more evident than in its opening theme, composed by the late Joel Goldsmith, which is, at turns fresh, haunting, stirring and, throughout, discernibly Stargate. Stargate: Atlantis wasn’t envisioned as a companion to Stargate: SG-1. It was intended to replace the long-running series. The only problem was, with eight seasons under its belt, SG-1 wasn’t quite done yet. And fans (and the network) weren’t done with it either. And so, instead of passing the torch and segueing to a new Stargate series, we ended up producing both. In retrospect, it was quite an achievement: 40 hours of television! Today's productions can barely manage a third that output, but Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis delivered two fantastic 40 episode seasons before SG-1 took it’s final bow. It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly made easier by all of the enormously talented individuals who made it happen, from the office staff and crew to the cast and my fellow writer/producers. Still, it was not without its challenges. Take casting, for instance. It may surprise you to know that, when it comes to producing a show, not everybody cares about costumes or set design or whether the script’s fifth act denouement is emotionally satisfying - but everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, has an opinion on casting. Studio and network execs, producers, hell, even your significant other peering over your shoulder as you screen the auditions on your home computer, will want to weigh in. Of course, the more voices in the mix the more likely there are to be disagreements. So it is with every production and Atlantis was no different. Different individuals envisioned these characters in very different ways and, as a result, consensus was only achieved after many auditions, calls-backs, heated discussions, and not-so-gentle reminders that our start date was fast-approaching and we really needed someone to say the lines on camera. The part of Carson Beckett was one of the first we cast. The other producers were in Rob’s office, screening the first batch of local auditions when Brad called me in and told me to check out the guy onscreen. I hadn’t imagined Beckett with a Scottish accent but, after watching Paul McGillion in the role, I couldn’t imagine him without one. He’d brought something unexpected to the part, something we all responded to. Elizabeth Weir was not an easy character to pull off. She had to be smart, confident and strong yet needed to exude a certain warmth and empathy we were looking for in the civilian leader of the expedition. When it came time to (re)casting the role, several established names were considered (One had her own hit genre show back in the day while another went on to break out on a hit show soon after), but it was Torri Higginson who managed to strike just the right balance and vault her name to the top of the list. The role of Teyla Emmagan was a tough one to cast. Like Weir, she needed to be a strong, empathetic leader. But she also required something even more important – quite literally, an other-worldly quality that made her unique. Some equally talented actresses auditioned for the role but, as good as they were, they were never quite able to achieve that gravitas Rachel pulled off with such grace and seeming ease. Former VJ Rainbow Sun Francks won the role of Lieutenant Ford on the strength of a great audition, preceded by an equally great audition with a funny hat. I recall Brad Wright on the phone with our casting agent, advising him to ensure there would be no hat worn in the callback for fear the network would fixate on it. There wasn't, they didn't, and Rainbow delivered. The role of John Sheppard was the second to last one cast. It came right down to the wire and there were several candidates in play. The character was originally envisioned as a good ole southern boy, so it only made sense that Ben Browder’s name was bandied about early. However, he was too busy shooting Peacekeeper Wars to warrant consideration. A number of other actors were considered (one went on to play the lead in a hugely popular show the following year while another made his mark as a handsome heart throb on another hugely popular medical series) but it was Joe Flanigan who won the part based on his ability to pull off the devil-may-care attitude Brad and Robert were looking for. We come to the final role cast, a character who, in many ways, embodied everything Atlantis was about: exploration, discovery, fun, humor, and seat-of-your-pants-Holy-Sh&%-how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-get-out-of-this-adventure. And, as I mentioned in a previous post, he almost didn’t make the trip to Pegasus. Originally, the casting call went out for a completely different character, an earnest young doctor who would lend the team much-needed medical support on their off-world ventures. Unfortunately, no one could agree on who that actor should be. If the casting of Sheppard went down to the wire, then the casting of this final role went a step past it. Finally, days away from production, Robert Cooper had an idea: Forget the doctor character. Why not use an established character from SG-1? How about Rodney McKay? The writers were on board, but some executives weren't weren’t sold on the idea. They found him annoying! Hell yeah, but he’d be sooo much fun to write for! Rob got on the phone and went to bat for Rodney, pointing out that the character had come a long way since first being introduced way back in SG-1’s 48 Hours. He’d evolved, going from annoying jerk to endearingly irritating. To this day, I’m convinced that they weren’t totally convinced but, with production poised to commence, they relented, I suppose figuring they could just replace the character somewhere down the line. No one, even those who loved the idea of having the endearingly irritating Rodney McKay on board could have predicted how hugely popular the character would become.

Joseph Mallozzi 🏴‍☠️

28,063 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

The Great Equalizer: How I Iterated Through 90+ Strategies to Automate My Financial Freedom ninety strategies sounds like a death wish but it is actually the only way to find your edge in a market designed to liquidate you. most traders are out here gambling with their rent money while the big players are using automated systems to harvest their liquidations. i know this because i spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers for apps thinking i could never code myself. i was getting wrecked by over trading and watching my accounts hit zero while i slept. code became the great equalizer for me because it removed the emotion that was killing my bankroll. i decided to learn to code live so i could iterate to success and now i have fully automated systems trading for me instead of getting liquidated by every wick. i just saw someone lose ten million dollars in a single month because they were trading by hand and got addicted to the screen. you have to understand that if you are not automating you are the exit liquidity for someone who is. the reality of advanced futures trading is not about finding one holy grail bot that prints money forever. it is about research and back testing until you find a strategy that has a statistical advantage. one of the most slept on concepts is variable risk scaling where you actually change your position size based on how volatile the market is. instead of just betting the same amount every time you increase your size when volatility is low and scale back when the market starts moving like crazy. this keeps you in the game during the draw downs that usually wipe people out. most people do the opposite and revenge trade with bigger size when they are losing which is the fastest way to the cemetery. i used to think i needed to be the smartest guy in the room to make this work but i realized i just needed to be the most disciplined with my risk parameters. there is a secret hidden in funding rates and basis trading that most retail traders never even look at. while everyone else is trying to guess if bitcoin is going to the moon or the floor you can actually make consistent money through funding rate arbitrage. you basically buy the asset in the spot market and simultaneously sell it in the futures market when the funding rate is high. you just sit there and collect the interest payments from the gamblers who are over leveraged on the other side. it is basically free money if you can manage the fees and keep your execution precise. i used to ignore these low yield plays because i wanted the big home runs but those home runs usually came with massive strikeouts. now i look for these carry trades as a way to keep the equity curve moving up and to the right while others are sweating over every price change. most traders fail because they use lagging indicators and expect them to predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. the truth is that even the best trend following strategies like the golden cross or moving average crossovers only have about sixty five percent accuracy. you have to combine these with filters like the average directional index or relative strength index to make sure you are not just buying a fake breakout. a lot of people get chopped up in sideways markets because they do not have a trend strength filter to tell them to stay out of the trade. i learned to use multiple time frames to confirm my breakouts because if the one hour and the four hour charts are not saying the same thing then the trade is probably a trap. you have to be a searcher looking for those golden nuggets of alpha buried in mountains of data. i used to think that machine learning and genetic algorithms were just buzzwords that did not actually work for trading. then i realized that the 1990s tech trap is real and if you are still using basic indicators without any optimization you are decades behind. genetic algorithms are wild because they simulate natural selection to find the best parameters for your strategy through trial and error. you can actually build an environment where your bot learns from its own mistakes and optimizes its decision making process over time. i spent so much time thinking i was not smart enough to do this but once i started iterating live i found that the machines are much better at following rules than i ever was. code is the only way to compete with the high frequency firms that are looking for any tiny mispricing in the order book. slippage and bad execution will eat your profits faster than a bad trade ever could if you are not careful. most people just hit the market buy button and pay the spread and the fees without a second thought. you should be using smart order routing and limit orders to capture the bid ask spread instead of paying it to the market makers. i started using time weighted average price execution to spread my larger orders out over time so i did not move the market against myself. it is these tiny details in execution that separate the professional quants from the people who are just playing around. i had to learn this the hard way after losing a fortune on bad entries and exits that could have been avoided with a few lines of code. the ultimate goal of all of this is to build a compounding machine that grows your capital while you are living your life. you have to automate the reinvestment of your profits so that your position sizes grow as your account grows without you having to manually adjust anything. i like to use automated compounding algorithms that take a portion of my wins and put them back into the systems that are performing the best. this creates a snowball effect where your returns start to accelerate as the base capital increases. it took me years to realize that i did not need to be at the desk for eighteen hours a day to make life changing money. i just needed to build a system that was smarter and more disciplined than my own human brain. cross asset skew and volatility surface arbitrage are where the real quants play when the market gets efficient. you can look for mispricings between highly correlated assets like bitcoin and ethereum and trade the spread between them. when one asset gets overvalued relative to the other you short the leader and long the laggard until they revert back to the mean. this is a much safer way to trade because you are not betting on the direction of the market but rather the relationship between two assets. i spent a lot of money trying to guess the next big move before i realized that trading the relationship between assets was much more consistent. iteration is the only way to find these winks in the market that the average trader is completely blind to. it is a cold world in finance and most people are out here trying to step on your neck to get ahead. i believe that sharing this knowledge is important because code is the only thing that can give a regular person a fighting chance against the institutions. i started from zero and learned everything through failing and losing money until i finally figured out how to automate. now i spend my time building and testing instead of worrying about the next liquidation candle. you have to decide today if you want to keep being the exit liquidity or if you want to start building your own systems. the tools are all there and the data is accessible if you are willing to put in the work and stop negotiating with yourself. successful trading is not about being lucky it is about being prepared and having a system that can handle any market regime. whether the market is in a bull run or a total crash your bots should know exactly what to do based on the rules you have coded into them. i use risk weighted allocation to make sure that my capital is always moving toward the strategies with the highest sharp ratio and the lowest volatility. this keeps the portfolio stable even when the crypto market is going through its typical insane swings. i finally found peace in this game because i know that my automated systems are following the math while everyone else is following their feelings. code is the great equalizer and it is time for you to start using it to protect your future and build your empire there are over ninety strategies you can test and most of them will not work for your specific style but you only need one or two to change your life. i have built a fat list of ideas from research and i spend every day back testing and refining them to stay ahead of the curve. do not let the fear of coding stop you from taking control of your financial destiny because i am living proof that anyone can learn. i would rather spend my time iterating to success than getting liquidated by some random news event that i could not predict. the journey from losing hundreds of thousands to fully automated success was long but it was the best investment i ever made. keep your heart open and lead with love in this game and i promise the universe will start passing you those golden nuggets of alpha you have been searching for
2:40:29

The Great Equalizer: How I Iterated Through 90+ Strategies to Automate My Financial Freedom ninety strategies sounds like a death wish but it is actually the only way to find your edge in a market designed to liquidate you. most traders are out here gambling with their rent money while the big players are using automated systems to harvest their liquidations. i know this because i spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers for apps thinking i could never code myself. i was getting wrecked by over trading and watching my accounts hit zero while i slept. code became the great equalizer for me because it removed the emotion that was killing my bankroll. i decided to learn to code live so i could iterate to success and now i have fully automated systems trading for me instead of getting liquidated by every wick. i just saw someone lose ten million dollars in a single month because they were trading by hand and got addicted to the screen. you have to understand that if you are not automating you are the exit liquidity for someone who is. the reality of advanced futures trading is not about finding one holy grail bot that prints money forever. it is about research and back testing until you find a strategy that has a statistical advantage. one of the most slept on concepts is variable risk scaling where you actually change your position size based on how volatile the market is. instead of just betting the same amount every time you increase your size when volatility is low and scale back when the market starts moving like crazy. this keeps you in the game during the draw downs that usually wipe people out. most people do the opposite and revenge trade with bigger size when they are losing which is the fastest way to the cemetery. i used to think i needed to be the smartest guy in the room to make this work but i realized i just needed to be the most disciplined with my risk parameters. there is a secret hidden in funding rates and basis trading that most retail traders never even look at. while everyone else is trying to guess if bitcoin is going to the moon or the floor you can actually make consistent money through funding rate arbitrage. you basically buy the asset in the spot market and simultaneously sell it in the futures market when the funding rate is high. you just sit there and collect the interest payments from the gamblers who are over leveraged on the other side. it is basically free money if you can manage the fees and keep your execution precise. i used to ignore these low yield plays because i wanted the big home runs but those home runs usually came with massive strikeouts. now i look for these carry trades as a way to keep the equity curve moving up and to the right while others are sweating over every price change. most traders fail because they use lagging indicators and expect them to predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. the truth is that even the best trend following strategies like the golden cross or moving average crossovers only have about sixty five percent accuracy. you have to combine these with filters like the average directional index or relative strength index to make sure you are not just buying a fake breakout. a lot of people get chopped up in sideways markets because they do not have a trend strength filter to tell them to stay out of the trade. i learned to use multiple time frames to confirm my breakouts because if the one hour and the four hour charts are not saying the same thing then the trade is probably a trap. you have to be a searcher looking for those golden nuggets of alpha buried in mountains of data. i used to think that machine learning and genetic algorithms were just buzzwords that did not actually work for trading. then i realized that the 1990s tech trap is real and if you are still using basic indicators without any optimization you are decades behind. genetic algorithms are wild because they simulate natural selection to find the best parameters for your strategy through trial and error. you can actually build an environment where your bot learns from its own mistakes and optimizes its decision making process over time. i spent so much time thinking i was not smart enough to do this but once i started iterating live i found that the machines are much better at following rules than i ever was. code is the only way to compete with the high frequency firms that are looking for any tiny mispricing in the order book. slippage and bad execution will eat your profits faster than a bad trade ever could if you are not careful. most people just hit the market buy button and pay the spread and the fees without a second thought. you should be using smart order routing and limit orders to capture the bid ask spread instead of paying it to the market makers. i started using time weighted average price execution to spread my larger orders out over time so i did not move the market against myself. it is these tiny details in execution that separate the professional quants from the people who are just playing around. i had to learn this the hard way after losing a fortune on bad entries and exits that could have been avoided with a few lines of code. the ultimate goal of all of this is to build a compounding machine that grows your capital while you are living your life. you have to automate the reinvestment of your profits so that your position sizes grow as your account grows without you having to manually adjust anything. i like to use automated compounding algorithms that take a portion of my wins and put them back into the systems that are performing the best. this creates a snowball effect where your returns start to accelerate as the base capital increases. it took me years to realize that i did not need to be at the desk for eighteen hours a day to make life changing money. i just needed to build a system that was smarter and more disciplined than my own human brain. cross asset skew and volatility surface arbitrage are where the real quants play when the market gets efficient. you can look for mispricings between highly correlated assets like bitcoin and ethereum and trade the spread between them. when one asset gets overvalued relative to the other you short the leader and long the laggard until they revert back to the mean. this is a much safer way to trade because you are not betting on the direction of the market but rather the relationship between two assets. i spent a lot of money trying to guess the next big move before i realized that trading the relationship between assets was much more consistent. iteration is the only way to find these winks in the market that the average trader is completely blind to. it is a cold world in finance and most people are out here trying to step on your neck to get ahead. i believe that sharing this knowledge is important because code is the only thing that can give a regular person a fighting chance against the institutions. i started from zero and learned everything through failing and losing money until i finally figured out how to automate. now i spend my time building and testing instead of worrying about the next liquidation candle. you have to decide today if you want to keep being the exit liquidity or if you want to start building your own systems. the tools are all there and the data is accessible if you are willing to put in the work and stop negotiating with yourself. successful trading is not about being lucky it is about being prepared and having a system that can handle any market regime. whether the market is in a bull run or a total crash your bots should know exactly what to do based on the rules you have coded into them. i use risk weighted allocation to make sure that my capital is always moving toward the strategies with the highest sharp ratio and the lowest volatility. this keeps the portfolio stable even when the crypto market is going through its typical insane swings. i finally found peace in this game because i know that my automated systems are following the math while everyone else is following their feelings. code is the great equalizer and it is time for you to start using it to protect your future and build your empire there are over ninety strategies you can test and most of them will not work for your specific style but you only need one or two to change your life. i have built a fat list of ideas from research and i spend every day back testing and refining them to stay ahead of the curve. do not let the fear of coding stop you from taking control of your financial destiny because i am living proof that anyone can learn. i would rather spend my time iterating to success than getting liquidated by some random news event that i could not predict. the journey from losing hundreds of thousands to fully automated success was long but it was the best investment i ever made. keep your heart open and lead with love in this game and i promise the universe will start passing you those golden nuggets of alpha you have been searching for

Moon Dev

11,196 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Dave Chappelle’s story is one of the rawest examples of what happens when a black genius gets too powerful for the machine to handle—and how he clawed his way out on top. Back in 2003, Chappelle’s Show hit Comedy Central and changed everything. Those sketches—Rick James, Clayton Bigsby, the Racial Draft—weren’t just hilarious; they cut straight through America’s bullshit on race and power. The show blew up, pulling millions of viewers and raking in hundreds of millions from DVDs and reruns. Dave was thirty, suddenly the sharpest voice in comedy. But the deal he’d signed early on gave him almost nothing on the back end. Comedy Central—and its parent Viacom, run by the Redstone family—kept the real money. Dave watched his work get bootlegged and monetized while he got crumbs. Then Season 3 rolled around in 2005. During filming, something felt off. One sketch had a Black character in a pixie costume, and a white executive was laughing a little too hard, in a way that made Dave’s skin crawl. He started telling people privately, “They’re trying to make me wear a dress.” In Hollywood, that’s code for forcing Black men into emasculating roles to diminish their threat—think of the patterns with Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, or countless others. The pressure built. They dangled a $50 million deal for two more seasons. Insane money on paper, but Dave could smell the trap: even less control, more ways to twist his voice into something that served the system instead of exposing it. So he did what almost nobody does—he walked away. Dropped the $50 million, got on a plane, and vanished to South Africa. Stayed on a farm in Durban with a Muslim friend, took a breath, and reflected. The media went feral: “Chappelle’s having a breakdown,” “crack addiction,” “mental health crisis.” Same smear playbook they use on anyone who says no—Kanye, Katt Williams, you name it. Label them crazy, bury the real story. While he was gone, Comedy Central took the unfinished Season 3 footage, slapped it together as “The Lost Episodes,” and aired it anyway. Hosted by Charlie Murphy and Donnell Rawlings, no Dave in sight. They still made bank off his genius, sending a clear message: We own your art even if you run. For years after, Hollywood painted him as difficult, unstable, the guy who “blew” $50 million. Doors quietly closed. No big specials, no major movies. Dave went underground—small clubs, quiet tours—rebuilding on his own terms. Then, around 2016-2017, Netflix came knocking. This time Dave negotiated like a boss: massive paydays—reportedly $20 million per special—full creative control, real ownership. His comeback specials dropped and hit harder than ever. He talked openly about the “dress” incident, the industry’s traps for Black artists, the way they try to break you. In *Sticks & Stones*, he shredded cancel culture. In *The Closer*, he took on the trans debate and refused to bend. The outrage machine came for him full force—walkouts, petitions, headlines screaming “transphobe.” Didn’t matter. Arenas sold out, Grammys won, legacy cemented. And the sweetest part? In 2022, after years of the show being pulled from streaming (Dave had publicly asked platforms not to run it until he got paid fairly), HBO Max finally caved. They cut him a proper check, and Chappelle’s Show came back—with Dave in control. Fast-forward to right now, December 2025: Dave just surprise-dropped his newest Netflix special, The Unstoppable recorded live in his hometown Washington, D.C. back in October. In it, he dives fearless into the chaos of the year—Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Puff Daddy’s downfall, the Riyadh comedy fest backlash, National Guard deployments, free speech crackdowns, and wraps with an epic 30-minute closer weaving American history from Jack Johnson to Nipsey Hussle. Bold truths, no holds barred, and as unstoppable as ever.
1:03

Dave Chappelle’s story is one of the rawest examples of what happens when a black genius gets too powerful for the machine to handle—and how he clawed his way out on top. Back in 2003, Chappelle’s Show hit Comedy Central and changed everything. Those sketches—Rick James, Clayton Bigsby, the Racial Draft—weren’t just hilarious; they cut straight through America’s bullshit on race and power. The show blew up, pulling millions of viewers and raking in hundreds of millions from DVDs and reruns. Dave was thirty, suddenly the sharpest voice in comedy. But the deal he’d signed early on gave him almost nothing on the back end. Comedy Central—and its parent Viacom, run by the Redstone family—kept the real money. Dave watched his work get bootlegged and monetized while he got crumbs. Then Season 3 rolled around in 2005. During filming, something felt off. One sketch had a Black character in a pixie costume, and a white executive was laughing a little too hard, in a way that made Dave’s skin crawl. He started telling people privately, “They’re trying to make me wear a dress.” In Hollywood, that’s code for forcing Black men into emasculating roles to diminish their threat—think of the patterns with Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, or countless others. The pressure built. They dangled a $50 million deal for two more seasons. Insane money on paper, but Dave could smell the trap: even less control, more ways to twist his voice into something that served the system instead of exposing it. So he did what almost nobody does—he walked away. Dropped the $50 million, got on a plane, and vanished to South Africa. Stayed on a farm in Durban with a Muslim friend, took a breath, and reflected. The media went feral: “Chappelle’s having a breakdown,” “crack addiction,” “mental health crisis.” Same smear playbook they use on anyone who says no—Kanye, Katt Williams, you name it. Label them crazy, bury the real story. While he was gone, Comedy Central took the unfinished Season 3 footage, slapped it together as “The Lost Episodes,” and aired it anyway. Hosted by Charlie Murphy and Donnell Rawlings, no Dave in sight. They still made bank off his genius, sending a clear message: We own your art even if you run. For years after, Hollywood painted him as difficult, unstable, the guy who “blew” $50 million. Doors quietly closed. No big specials, no major movies. Dave went underground—small clubs, quiet tours—rebuilding on his own terms. Then, around 2016-2017, Netflix came knocking. This time Dave negotiated like a boss: massive paydays—reportedly $20 million per special—full creative control, real ownership. His comeback specials dropped and hit harder than ever. He talked openly about the “dress” incident, the industry’s traps for Black artists, the way they try to break you. In *Sticks & Stones*, he shredded cancel culture. In *The Closer*, he took on the trans debate and refused to bend. The outrage machine came for him full force—walkouts, petitions, headlines screaming “transphobe.” Didn’t matter. Arenas sold out, Grammys won, legacy cemented. And the sweetest part? In 2022, after years of the show being pulled from streaming (Dave had publicly asked platforms not to run it until he got paid fairly), HBO Max finally caved. They cut him a proper check, and Chappelle’s Show came back—with Dave in control. Fast-forward to right now, December 2025: Dave just surprise-dropped his newest Netflix special, The Unstoppable recorded live in his hometown Washington, D.C. back in October. In it, he dives fearless into the chaos of the year—Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Puff Daddy’s downfall, the Riyadh comedy fest backlash, National Guard deployments, free speech crackdowns, and wraps with an epic 30-minute closer weaving American history from Jack Johnson to Nipsey Hussle. Bold truths, no holds barred, and as unstoppable as ever.

X

96,080 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Oh No, The People Who Defend Genocide Think I'm Bad Israel supporters really expect you to be intimidated when they mob your replies yelling at you and calling you names. Like oh no, the people who defend bombing hospitals think I’m bad. Yeah sorry there’s nothing you can say to me to make me sit here and go along with the latest fake antisemitism scare or whatever the current narrative of the day happens to be. You don’t get to assault free speech throughout the western world to protect the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state and then demand I be silent about it. Yell, scream, call me names all you want — I’m going to call the bullshit what it is. Good luck with your emotions about it. ❖ The other day I posted a 36-minute video on Twitter compiling various mainstream TV news reports about Jewish Zionists who were caught staging fake antisemitic incidents to advance their agenda, with links to each individual story. It got ten thousand shares and almost a million views. Normally when I have a tweet go viral criticizing Israel or Zionists I get high-profile hasbarists quote-tweeting me and calling me an antisemite, but nobody touched this one. None of them wanted to inadvertently bring more attention to that tweet than it was already getting. ❖ There are two types of people: ardent anti-Zionists, and everyone who ignored the video footage coming out of Gaza from 2023 to 2025. ❖ On social media I’m seeing Zionists trying to revive the debate about whether Israel is guilty of genocide, which is just silly. The debate is over, guys. It’s been over for a long time. Every relevant human rights group says it’s genocide. Zero comparable human rights groups say it’s not. The end. You lose. ❖ I sometimes see Israel defenders saying that the average person who sides with the Palestinians lacks an intimate familiarity with all the facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Really that’s just saying the average Palestine supporter hasn’t been confronted by a trained hasbarist who’s learned to gaslight people into thinking genocide and apartheid aren’t happening. And it’s true, most haven’t. If they practiced arguing with such hasbarists extensively, though, they’d soon learn the hasbara arguments are fallacious and the claims are false. An internet debate bro is always going to have an advantage over someone who doesn’t yet understand the debate. That’s why hasbarists do what they do; they’re taking their practiced debate tactics to people who aren’t familiar with them, like a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner taking a kickboxer to the ground where he’s not familiar with the techniques. But it doesn’t take much learning to understand that all their arguments are piss weak. That’s why all hasbarists eventually collapse into empty name-calling. ❖ So here’s the thing: you actually do need to work on your trauma. Your inner wellbeing is in fact your responsibility. I totally get the increasing pushback against the liberal emphasis on trauma and inner peace because of the way it shifts the burden onto the individual and lets the system off the hook — but the truth is we need both. The need for collective revolution doesn’t excuse you from your responsibilities for your own actions as an individual, any more than your work as an individual takes the blame off the system for the abuses it inflicts upon the collective. It is true that our society’s focus on individual healing is used to deemphasize the need for systemic changes, but it is also true that many on the left use the abuses of capitalism and the fucked up nature of our society as an excuse to blame all their misery on the system instead of taking responsibility for their own inner condition and doing the hard, scary, confrontational work necessary to heal. It is true that a huge amount of our stress and psychological issues are at least partially due to the economic and social pressures inflicted upon us by an unjust system. But it is also true that there are plenty of miserable people who have all their material and financial needs met, because they haven’t healed their trauma and done their inner work. Utopia could dawn on us tomorrow and most of us would still find ways to make ourselves unhappy until we bring the inner tendencies which give rise to our suffering into consciousness. We need both sides of the coin, and in fact each side of the coin complements the other. Just as a healthy system will lead to far less misery and dysfunction among individuals, doing your inner work as an individual will make you much more useful in bringing about the revolutionary changes necessary for the rise of a healthy system. You’re not going to be any use to anyone in a revolution where you’re too neurotic to function or get along with other people. We all have problems that can’t be fixed under the current status quo, and we all have inner wounds we won’t be able to fully heal right away. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless. Our happiness and inner clarity isn’t fully bound to the whims of the ruling class. We can’t fix everything, but we’ve all got a responsibility to do what we can, in our community and in ourselves. ❖
5:47

Oh No, The People Who Defend Genocide Think I'm Bad Israel supporters really expect you to be intimidated when they mob your replies yelling at you and calling you names. Like oh no, the people who defend bombing hospitals think I’m bad. Yeah sorry there’s nothing you can say to me to make me sit here and go along with the latest fake antisemitism scare or whatever the current narrative of the day happens to be. You don’t get to assault free speech throughout the western world to protect the information interests of a genocidal apartheid state and then demand I be silent about it. Yell, scream, call me names all you want — I’m going to call the bullshit what it is. Good luck with your emotions about it. ❖ The other day I posted a 36-minute video on Twitter compiling various mainstream TV news reports about Jewish Zionists who were caught staging fake antisemitic incidents to advance their agenda, with links to each individual story. It got ten thousand shares and almost a million views. Normally when I have a tweet go viral criticizing Israel or Zionists I get high-profile hasbarists quote-tweeting me and calling me an antisemite, but nobody touched this one. None of them wanted to inadvertently bring more attention to that tweet than it was already getting. ❖ There are two types of people: ardent anti-Zionists, and everyone who ignored the video footage coming out of Gaza from 2023 to 2025. ❖ On social media I’m seeing Zionists trying to revive the debate about whether Israel is guilty of genocide, which is just silly. The debate is over, guys. It’s been over for a long time. Every relevant human rights group says it’s genocide. Zero comparable human rights groups say it’s not. The end. You lose. ❖ I sometimes see Israel defenders saying that the average person who sides with the Palestinians lacks an intimate familiarity with all the facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Really that’s just saying the average Palestine supporter hasn’t been confronted by a trained hasbarist who’s learned to gaslight people into thinking genocide and apartheid aren’t happening. And it’s true, most haven’t. If they practiced arguing with such hasbarists extensively, though, they’d soon learn the hasbara arguments are fallacious and the claims are false. An internet debate bro is always going to have an advantage over someone who doesn’t yet understand the debate. That’s why hasbarists do what they do; they’re taking their practiced debate tactics to people who aren’t familiar with them, like a Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner taking a kickboxer to the ground where he’s not familiar with the techniques. But it doesn’t take much learning to understand that all their arguments are piss weak. That’s why all hasbarists eventually collapse into empty name-calling. ❖ So here’s the thing: you actually do need to work on your trauma. Your inner wellbeing is in fact your responsibility. I totally get the increasing pushback against the liberal emphasis on trauma and inner peace because of the way it shifts the burden onto the individual and lets the system off the hook — but the truth is we need both. The need for collective revolution doesn’t excuse you from your responsibilities for your own actions as an individual, any more than your work as an individual takes the blame off the system for the abuses it inflicts upon the collective. It is true that our society’s focus on individual healing is used to deemphasize the need for systemic changes, but it is also true that many on the left use the abuses of capitalism and the fucked up nature of our society as an excuse to blame all their misery on the system instead of taking responsibility for their own inner condition and doing the hard, scary, confrontational work necessary to heal. It is true that a huge amount of our stress and psychological issues are at least partially due to the economic and social pressures inflicted upon us by an unjust system. But it is also true that there are plenty of miserable people who have all their material and financial needs met, because they haven’t healed their trauma and done their inner work. Utopia could dawn on us tomorrow and most of us would still find ways to make ourselves unhappy until we bring the inner tendencies which give rise to our suffering into consciousness. We need both sides of the coin, and in fact each side of the coin complements the other. Just as a healthy system will lead to far less misery and dysfunction among individuals, doing your inner work as an individual will make you much more useful in bringing about the revolutionary changes necessary for the rise of a healthy system. You’re not going to be any use to anyone in a revolution where you’re too neurotic to function or get along with other people. We all have problems that can’t be fixed under the current status quo, and we all have inner wounds we won’t be able to fully heal right away. But that doesn’t mean we are powerless. Our happiness and inner clarity isn’t fully bound to the whims of the ruling class. We can’t fix everything, but we’ve all got a responsibility to do what we can, in our community and in ourselves. ❖

Caitlin Johnstone

18,151 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

FULL DISCUSSION: Tucker, Botswana, Zimbabwe & Sierra Leone Leaders Clash on China, U.S. and Europe Tucker Carlson: Gentlemen, thank you for doing this. It’s awfully nice of you to do this. I’d just like to go right down the line. Um, and first to you, President Mnangagwa. Again, thanks. In as clear terms as you can, I wonder if you would, um, contrast your experience with China versus the Western powers. Do you think that Zimbabwe and other African countries, to be totally blunt, get a better deal from Chinese investment than they have with Western powers over the past 150 years? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): Well, um, my view is that, um, initially as we became independent, we had, um, most of our development thrust was from the West. But as we evolved, we have also benefited from investment and cooperation from countries like China. But what are... I mean, the basic structure seems the same? Foreign powers extract mineral wealth from various African countries. But do you think that the arrangement that Zimbabwe and other countries currently have with China is better or worse for Zimbabwe than it was under, say, the Brits? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): I think the premises upon which you construct your question... I don’t think is perfect. Yes, Zimbabwe is a sovereign state. And we move on the basis that gives us the best results for our resources. Whether it is relation with the West or the East, what is primarily important is what we ourselves, as an officer, are satisfied with. We don’t need to please the West or please the East. We please ourselves. Tucker Carlson: That seems like a good model for every sovereign country. President Mnangangwa, thank you for this. Do you think that there is a substantial difference? I’m just trying to understand from a Western perspective how the East does business in Africa versus how the West does. It may be too sensitive a topic to talk about out loud, but to the extent you have a view, you can share, would you? President Mnangangwa (Zimbabwe): I’m sure relations cannot be measured country by country. Yes, relations depend on the historical background of countries between one country and another. That’s the base on which relations grow and are nurtured. For us in Zimbabwe, yes, we are a former British colony, but we are very happy with the relations that have now developed with countries like China and so on. Yes, despite being a former British colony. Tucker Carlson: I think this may be one of these topics that's too difficult to talk about in public. Let me just ask you, President Bio, about one of the strengths of your country and the continent, which is its birth rate, which so far surpasses that of any other region in the world, and that seems like a strength. How has your country, Sierra Leone, but also many other countries in Africa, been able to maintain a birth rate at replacement when Europe, the US, Canada, and lots of other parts of the world have not been able to? President Bio (Sierra Leone): Thank you very much. I think, um, we are hard workers, and, uh, we work both in the day and at night. That is such great advice. It is essential to have, uh, young people and to keep the birth rate at the right level so that, uh, there is sustainability in development. What we do today, or as leaders, we provide the enabling environment, provide them with the tools, uh, the young people to navigate the world, which is extremely tough, complicated, and evolving and changing all the time. So it is our responsibility to bear that in mind. We have to plan ahead, be ahead of the curve, to be able to replace accordingly, so that we don’t have a gap in our development process. So we have been busy producing, um, as much as we can, a lot of good people, and we are investing in their education so that they are fit for purpose for a world that is becoming digital and of course going extremely to the edge of technological advancement. Tucker Carlson: If I could just ask a quick follow-up, uh, to you, Mr. President, do you keep track precisely of how many of your young, educated citizens leave and how many stay? Are you thinking hard about how to retain the smartest, most energetic people? President Bio (Sierra Leone): Definitely. Um, in fact, what, uh, my administration did was to make sure that, uh, we provide basic primary and secondary education free of charge to the citizens. Every child born in Sierra Leone, uh, can go to school, be, um, and finish high school without paying a penny. We don’t just provide tuition. We also make sure that we provide other essentials to make it possible for so that nobody has an excuse not to go to school. Because, um, in the 21st century, without education, definitely you can’t make it, and we do not just want to make it at the personal level, family level. We want to grow as a nation. We want to be, um, useful citizens of West Africa, um, the community that I chair today, but we also want to be useful citizens globally, useful citizens that can contribute to the world. So we are taking stock of that, and we are educating them, equipping them, in fact, I call education as an equip—equipment, a navigation equipment in a world that is becoming very, very complicated and complex. Tucker Carlson: Thank you, President Boko. If, as you look at young people in Botswana who are educated and energetic, what’s your pitch to them? What’s your argument to them to stay in Botswana, not go to South Africa, Europe, or the United States? President Boko (Botswana): Young people are generally innovative. They are entrepreneurial. They now have become digital natives. And that presents immense opportunities to them. These opportunities mean they can pretty much operate wherever they are, and they must, as a matter of course, remain within Botswana so that they can then spread their reach and influence to every part of Botswana. And so the opportunities that there are in Botswana, the training, the education, the acquisition of skills, the support, the environment that nurtures them and, uh, feeds and fuels their vitality is what, uh, Botswana offers and what, uh, will power Africa. Africa generally is a very young continent with a median age of 19.3. Botswana's median age is 25. And so with such a population, Africa is poised to rule the world. Tucker Carlson: So what are your plans for the world once you rule it? President Boko (Botswana): To make it fairer, to make it more equitable, to ensure that, uh, intellectual property is internalized in every part of the African continent, that innovation serves humanity, not just a predatory elite, and that everybody can partake equitably and benefit from the fruits of the economy and the vast opportunities that are available in the world. Tucker Carlson: Well, I look forward to being treated fairly under your rule. Thank you. President Mnangagwa, I wonder, you’ve been in the government of Zimbabwe for decades in various roles, including through a very turbulent period where your predecessor famously kicked out the whites and then the economy tanked, and now it’s rising again. I wonder if you would summarize the lessons that your country has learned from that experience. President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): I'm not so sure what you have in mind, [clears throat] but let me say, um, our economy has faced challenges. I'm sure you're aware. Yes, Zimbabwe has been under sanctions for decades as a result of us claiming our land from the British and making ourselves independent. Uh, we seized the land and gave it to our people. So sanctions were imposed on us. But in spite of all that, uh, constraint, we have developed, and we are happy that, um, we have developed on our own and we feel very independent. Tucker Carlson: Well, some of the land was seized from people who were born there. Um, so I wonder if there's a lesson about targeting people on the basis of their skin color. Do you think? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): No, land did not belong to a race. It belonged to Zimbabweans. [snorts] [clears throat] So when the colonialists took land from us, time came when we asserted ourselves to take back our land. Those who wanted to have land at the same basis as the African people of Zimbabwe remained. But those who felt superior left. Tucker Carlson: Okay, um, Mr. Bio, I—it does seem like President... Mr. President, that, um, the model of government around the world seems to be changing, or people seem to have lost confidence in democracy. At least in the West, people aren’t quite as keen to promote democracy. Do you notice this? Do you think democracy is in retreat around the world? President Bio (Sierra Leone): I think the world is in transition. Yes, and normally that comes along with instability. I normally refer to it as we are in a state of flux. Yes, we have been told to go democratic, and those who are leading the way or who have been teaching us to be democratic are no longer committed to that method of governance. So we are left to choose. But I still believe that democracy is the best method of governance, choosing who leads, especially liberal democracy, with all the freedoms that go with it so that human rights and other liberties are observed and maintained. We remain committed to democracy, irrespective of the fact that, um, there are now reversals, um, even in Africa, around the world. In fact, these days when you listen to world news and other things, you hardly hear about democracy.
20:05

FULL DISCUSSION: Tucker, Botswana, Zimbabwe & Sierra Leone Leaders Clash on China, U.S. and Europe Tucker Carlson: Gentlemen, thank you for doing this. It’s awfully nice of you to do this. I’d just like to go right down the line. Um, and first to you, President Mnangagwa. Again, thanks. In as clear terms as you can, I wonder if you would, um, contrast your experience with China versus the Western powers. Do you think that Zimbabwe and other African countries, to be totally blunt, get a better deal from Chinese investment than they have with Western powers over the past 150 years? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): Well, um, my view is that, um, initially as we became independent, we had, um, most of our development thrust was from the West. But as we evolved, we have also benefited from investment and cooperation from countries like China. But what are... I mean, the basic structure seems the same? Foreign powers extract mineral wealth from various African countries. But do you think that the arrangement that Zimbabwe and other countries currently have with China is better or worse for Zimbabwe than it was under, say, the Brits? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): I think the premises upon which you construct your question... I don’t think is perfect. Yes, Zimbabwe is a sovereign state. And we move on the basis that gives us the best results for our resources. Whether it is relation with the West or the East, what is primarily important is what we ourselves, as an officer, are satisfied with. We don’t need to please the West or please the East. We please ourselves. Tucker Carlson: That seems like a good model for every sovereign country. President Mnangangwa, thank you for this. Do you think that there is a substantial difference? I’m just trying to understand from a Western perspective how the East does business in Africa versus how the West does. It may be too sensitive a topic to talk about out loud, but to the extent you have a view, you can share, would you? President Mnangangwa (Zimbabwe): I’m sure relations cannot be measured country by country. Yes, relations depend on the historical background of countries between one country and another. That’s the base on which relations grow and are nurtured. For us in Zimbabwe, yes, we are a former British colony, but we are very happy with the relations that have now developed with countries like China and so on. Yes, despite being a former British colony. Tucker Carlson: I think this may be one of these topics that's too difficult to talk about in public. Let me just ask you, President Bio, about one of the strengths of your country and the continent, which is its birth rate, which so far surpasses that of any other region in the world, and that seems like a strength. How has your country, Sierra Leone, but also many other countries in Africa, been able to maintain a birth rate at replacement when Europe, the US, Canada, and lots of other parts of the world have not been able to? President Bio (Sierra Leone): Thank you very much. I think, um, we are hard workers, and, uh, we work both in the day and at night. That is such great advice. It is essential to have, uh, young people and to keep the birth rate at the right level so that, uh, there is sustainability in development. What we do today, or as leaders, we provide the enabling environment, provide them with the tools, uh, the young people to navigate the world, which is extremely tough, complicated, and evolving and changing all the time. So it is our responsibility to bear that in mind. We have to plan ahead, be ahead of the curve, to be able to replace accordingly, so that we don’t have a gap in our development process. So we have been busy producing, um, as much as we can, a lot of good people, and we are investing in their education so that they are fit for purpose for a world that is becoming digital and of course going extremely to the edge of technological advancement. Tucker Carlson: If I could just ask a quick follow-up, uh, to you, Mr. President, do you keep track precisely of how many of your young, educated citizens leave and how many stay? Are you thinking hard about how to retain the smartest, most energetic people? President Bio (Sierra Leone): Definitely. Um, in fact, what, uh, my administration did was to make sure that, uh, we provide basic primary and secondary education free of charge to the citizens. Every child born in Sierra Leone, uh, can go to school, be, um, and finish high school without paying a penny. We don’t just provide tuition. We also make sure that we provide other essentials to make it possible for so that nobody has an excuse not to go to school. Because, um, in the 21st century, without education, definitely you can’t make it, and we do not just want to make it at the personal level, family level. We want to grow as a nation. We want to be, um, useful citizens of West Africa, um, the community that I chair today, but we also want to be useful citizens globally, useful citizens that can contribute to the world. So we are taking stock of that, and we are educating them, equipping them, in fact, I call education as an equip—equipment, a navigation equipment in a world that is becoming very, very complicated and complex. Tucker Carlson: Thank you, President Boko. If, as you look at young people in Botswana who are educated and energetic, what’s your pitch to them? What’s your argument to them to stay in Botswana, not go to South Africa, Europe, or the United States? President Boko (Botswana): Young people are generally innovative. They are entrepreneurial. They now have become digital natives. And that presents immense opportunities to them. These opportunities mean they can pretty much operate wherever they are, and they must, as a matter of course, remain within Botswana so that they can then spread their reach and influence to every part of Botswana. And so the opportunities that there are in Botswana, the training, the education, the acquisition of skills, the support, the environment that nurtures them and, uh, feeds and fuels their vitality is what, uh, Botswana offers and what, uh, will power Africa. Africa generally is a very young continent with a median age of 19.3. Botswana's median age is 25. And so with such a population, Africa is poised to rule the world. Tucker Carlson: So what are your plans for the world once you rule it? President Boko (Botswana): To make it fairer, to make it more equitable, to ensure that, uh, intellectual property is internalized in every part of the African continent, that innovation serves humanity, not just a predatory elite, and that everybody can partake equitably and benefit from the fruits of the economy and the vast opportunities that are available in the world. Tucker Carlson: Well, I look forward to being treated fairly under your rule. Thank you. President Mnangagwa, I wonder, you’ve been in the government of Zimbabwe for decades in various roles, including through a very turbulent period where your predecessor famously kicked out the whites and then the economy tanked, and now it’s rising again. I wonder if you would summarize the lessons that your country has learned from that experience. President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): I'm not so sure what you have in mind, [clears throat] but let me say, um, our economy has faced challenges. I'm sure you're aware. Yes, Zimbabwe has been under sanctions for decades as a result of us claiming our land from the British and making ourselves independent. Uh, we seized the land and gave it to our people. So sanctions were imposed on us. But in spite of all that, uh, constraint, we have developed, and we are happy that, um, we have developed on our own and we feel very independent. Tucker Carlson: Well, some of the land was seized from people who were born there. Um, so I wonder if there's a lesson about targeting people on the basis of their skin color. Do you think? President Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe): No, land did not belong to a race. It belonged to Zimbabweans. [snorts] [clears throat] So when the colonialists took land from us, time came when we asserted ourselves to take back our land. Those who wanted to have land at the same basis as the African people of Zimbabwe remained. But those who felt superior left. Tucker Carlson: Okay, um, Mr. Bio, I—it does seem like President... Mr. President, that, um, the model of government around the world seems to be changing, or people seem to have lost confidence in democracy. At least in the West, people aren’t quite as keen to promote democracy. Do you notice this? Do you think democracy is in retreat around the world? President Bio (Sierra Leone): I think the world is in transition. Yes, and normally that comes along with instability. I normally refer to it as we are in a state of flux. Yes, we have been told to go democratic, and those who are leading the way or who have been teaching us to be democratic are no longer committed to that method of governance. So we are left to choose. But I still believe that democracy is the best method of governance, choosing who leads, especially liberal democracy, with all the freedoms that go with it so that human rights and other liberties are observed and maintained. We remain committed to democracy, irrespective of the fact that, um, there are now reversals, um, even in Africa, around the world. In fact, these days when you listen to world news and other things, you hardly hear about democracy.

Solomon Harudzibwi

16,356 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

🦕💬 • 260611 [01:03 AM KST] 41 voice notes transcripted/translated in order: hi how did you like made by riize? you’re asking if i ate dinner? i didn’t eat. i ate lunch kind of late, but i ate a hearty lunch. i also wanted to do a live as i finished work, but while wondering if i should do a live or not, something new to do popped up. and while i was doing it, it got too late. so i'll do a live later. go knicks! lately, the NBA's a hot topic lately. knicks. crazy. i don't know, you know... basketball that well, but i remember growing up they were sort of *the team* that people, yk cheered on. but i don't remember anyone saying that they were doing great, or anything. but apparently they're in the finals rn and they're doing rly well, so also can't forget the world cup. world cup season rn, so... just sports season.. sports season, crazy, yeah? [singing dyd] how is it? riize's challenge. easy, right? do it lots, please~ these days, a lot of short-form [videos] are coming up, as you've probably seen. I thought it might be fun if everyone did that together... what do you think? live... there's a way to turn it on, but even if i turned it on, i'm not sure if i could do it well. i don't have confidence rn so i'm talking like this wa, but there's only 4 days left for our comeback.. only 4 days left... how is it? are you guys looking forward to it? are u guys excited? we're going to ulsan the 15th, and wonbin hyung, said he's buying us lunch... not really. but it's our first time going to ulsan all together. we'll have our comeback there. i think it'll be fun. also, the 15th we're doing a comeback live.. we've been doing it every comeback... and at the live stream we'll be high school students.. but it could honestly be university students too.. or really just do it without a concept, but i think it'll be fun... just... it'll be fun... so, while doing that we'll talk about the comeback whatever happens i want us all to just create fun memories together, and since it’s summer, how about you all enjoy summer together with riize... how does that feel? how's this pfp? i like it ㅎㅎ engddongi, eng, engddon ah, right. also with taro hyung, we'll appear at salon drip... i also think that will be fun when it comes out. the recording was also fun, with doyeon nuna.. please watch it ah... you guys can hear the dryer? i won't tell you who's clothes it's drying, it's a secret~ since you could look at this as something im trying out instead of doing a live stream i won't be able to do it super often or every single day, but I think it wouldn't be bad to use this feature again sometime what do you think? ah, but languages are difficult it's not easy to unify into just one language now, but on the other hand, it's really fun. somehow, this chat room..? is that right? realizing that this place is totally global and international is in a way pretty cool. haha anyway, after a long time i rode a bike again.. there was a lot of sunlight... sunlight.. did lots of photosynthesis but what was a real mistake was first of all the bicycle didnt have a basket, and I didnt wear a comfortable backpack. i came out carrying a somewhat awkward/uncomfortable bag, so i really messed up on top of that the bicycle was incredibly heavy, but then the battery completely died... so I almost cried. without even realizing it I had gone so far away so I suffered a bit. that’s the story i also have the feeling i bruised my butt a bit... ㅎㅎ but that will also become a funny memory, right? how's riizing summer vacation? i think there were really a lot of funny moments... sungchan hyung was so funny... sungchan hyung said somewhere he hasn't eaten ramyeon in a year ㅎㅎ and sungchan hyung honestly isn't the type to eat ramen alone, he's on the not eating it side... but he's always like 'one bite, one bite'... so if we put all that together, wouldn't it be a plate of ramen?ㅎㅎ for me, at the beginning of our debut, it was a bit... you know how while filming content, i ended up grilling meat and all? but now, grilling meat... well, i don't think it's that bad also, back when we went to japan to shoot our album jacket photos and the trailer, we visited a lot of vinyl (LP) shops... and that was actually the first time in my life buying an LP with my own money when i was young i went to la to play, and then there was this famous 'amoeba music' store. i looked around and everything, but honestly back then i really wasn't that much interested in LPs. so i bought things like a lot of stickers and used them to decorate my laptop. somehow, after that time, [it was like] I truly spent time in a vinyl shop? but visiting now that I'm a bit older, it was so much fun there are so many songs I don’t know, and tons of songs that aren't even famous so back then in japan, duran duran is a really famous band, but I bought duran duran's Notorious LP and then I also bought Barry Finnertys,, barrynims NY City LP. what was so surprising was that as soon as I listened to the LP, the sound and quality were so good that I was like, 'wow, what is this?' but when I looked it up on the internet, it only had like 3,000 views on YouTube? I think it was 3,000, so because it was so good, I bought it. and after that yesterday too while wandering around here and there, i happened to walk into a cafe and they had LPs there too so yesterday, I bought one or two ㅎㅎ lp's no mater how you look it they have a vibe... its true that nowadays you can just look up and listen to everything on your phone, but another good thing about it (lps) is that I think it’s really great for finding songs you don't know so when going to the lp shop you get to learn a lot of new songs that you didn't know before. even if you don't go with the sole purpose of buying an LP, it's just... really great for discovering things... should I say? a riize lp would also be good... back then, during boom boom bass, we even went there and did all that stuff with our LP too... how was the video editing? back then when i went to school when doing things like presentations, together with other students we would edit videos.. i did lowkey find that kind of stuff pretty fun though because it was pretty much my first time [doing that] since back during those days... but really i think it was fun like... yeah.. i want to try to do it again when i was young i did draw. i drew for fun but it had been such a long time since i last properly sat down and tried to draw something properly with a pencil.. i think it's been such a long time i'm probably the worst at drawing in my family? ㅎㅎ my dad's good, my mom's also good.. my grandpa also draws reaññu well. but it was fun drawing again, so i also want to try that again... why is there so many things i want to do? really why is it? and above all, i want to work really hard on music so that someday i can show you even more. now, like from the trailer to the full version that was uploaded to our site... those kinds of things are a bit different from just being a song, though.. now everyone, let's try meditating together with me sorry.. anyways.. i have to leave in a couple hours actually, so.. time to hit the hay, yeehaw i can't fall asleep right away ㅎㅎ this.. seems like it might be a bit difficult to interpret/translate.. (yes anton, it is,,,) next time it might be better to just turn on a live stream instead ㅎㅎ sorry wow... sleep is really not coming... [1 video] [1 picture] ok jinja gn
0:01

🦕💬 • 260611 [01:03 AM KST] 41 voice notes transcripted/translated in order: hi how did you like made by riize? you’re asking if i ate dinner? i didn’t eat. i ate lunch kind of late, but i ate a hearty lunch. i also wanted to do a live as i finished work, but while wondering if i should do a live or not, something new to do popped up. and while i was doing it, it got too late. so i'll do a live later. go knicks! lately, the NBA's a hot topic lately. knicks. crazy. i don't know, you know... basketball that well, but i remember growing up they were sort of *the team* that people, yk cheered on. but i don't remember anyone saying that they were doing great, or anything. but apparently they're in the finals rn and they're doing rly well, so also can't forget the world cup. world cup season rn, so... just sports season.. sports season, crazy, yeah? [singing dyd] how is it? riize's challenge. easy, right? do it lots, please~ these days, a lot of short-form [videos] are coming up, as you've probably seen. I thought it might be fun if everyone did that together... what do you think? live... there's a way to turn it on, but even if i turned it on, i'm not sure if i could do it well. i don't have confidence rn so i'm talking like this wa, but there's only 4 days left for our comeback.. only 4 days left... how is it? are you guys looking forward to it? are u guys excited? we're going to ulsan the 15th, and wonbin hyung, said he's buying us lunch... not really. but it's our first time going to ulsan all together. we'll have our comeback there. i think it'll be fun. also, the 15th we're doing a comeback live.. we've been doing it every comeback... and at the live stream we'll be high school students.. but it could honestly be university students too.. or really just do it without a concept, but i think it'll be fun... just... it'll be fun... so, while doing that we'll talk about the comeback whatever happens i want us all to just create fun memories together, and since it’s summer, how about you all enjoy summer together with riize... how does that feel? how's this pfp? i like it ㅎㅎ engddongi, eng, engddon ah, right. also with taro hyung, we'll appear at salon drip... i also think that will be fun when it comes out. the recording was also fun, with doyeon nuna.. please watch it ah... you guys can hear the dryer? i won't tell you who's clothes it's drying, it's a secret~ since you could look at this as something im trying out instead of doing a live stream i won't be able to do it super often or every single day, but I think it wouldn't be bad to use this feature again sometime what do you think? ah, but languages are difficult it's not easy to unify into just one language now, but on the other hand, it's really fun. somehow, this chat room..? is that right? realizing that this place is totally global and international is in a way pretty cool. haha anyway, after a long time i rode a bike again.. there was a lot of sunlight... sunlight.. did lots of photosynthesis but what was a real mistake was first of all the bicycle didnt have a basket, and I didnt wear a comfortable backpack. i came out carrying a somewhat awkward/uncomfortable bag, so i really messed up on top of that the bicycle was incredibly heavy, but then the battery completely died... so I almost cried. without even realizing it I had gone so far away so I suffered a bit. that’s the story i also have the feeling i bruised my butt a bit... ㅎㅎ but that will also become a funny memory, right? how's riizing summer vacation? i think there were really a lot of funny moments... sungchan hyung was so funny... sungchan hyung said somewhere he hasn't eaten ramyeon in a year ㅎㅎ and sungchan hyung honestly isn't the type to eat ramen alone, he's on the not eating it side... but he's always like 'one bite, one bite'... so if we put all that together, wouldn't it be a plate of ramen?ㅎㅎ for me, at the beginning of our debut, it was a bit... you know how while filming content, i ended up grilling meat and all? but now, grilling meat... well, i don't think it's that bad also, back when we went to japan to shoot our album jacket photos and the trailer, we visited a lot of vinyl (LP) shops... and that was actually the first time in my life buying an LP with my own money when i was young i went to la to play, and then there was this famous 'amoeba music' store. i looked around and everything, but honestly back then i really wasn't that much interested in LPs. so i bought things like a lot of stickers and used them to decorate my laptop. somehow, after that time, [it was like] I truly spent time in a vinyl shop? but visiting now that I'm a bit older, it was so much fun there are so many songs I don’t know, and tons of songs that aren't even famous so back then in japan, duran duran is a really famous band, but I bought duran duran's Notorious LP and then I also bought Barry Finnertys,, barrynims NY City LP. what was so surprising was that as soon as I listened to the LP, the sound and quality were so good that I was like, 'wow, what is this?' but when I looked it up on the internet, it only had like 3,000 views on YouTube? I think it was 3,000, so because it was so good, I bought it. and after that yesterday too while wandering around here and there, i happened to walk into a cafe and they had LPs there too so yesterday, I bought one or two ㅎㅎ lp's no mater how you look it they have a vibe... its true that nowadays you can just look up and listen to everything on your phone, but another good thing about it (lps) is that I think it’s really great for finding songs you don't know so when going to the lp shop you get to learn a lot of new songs that you didn't know before. even if you don't go with the sole purpose of buying an LP, it's just... really great for discovering things... should I say? a riize lp would also be good... back then, during boom boom bass, we even went there and did all that stuff with our LP too... how was the video editing? back then when i went to school when doing things like presentations, together with other students we would edit videos.. i did lowkey find that kind of stuff pretty fun though because it was pretty much my first time [doing that] since back during those days... but really i think it was fun like... yeah.. i want to try to do it again when i was young i did draw. i drew for fun but it had been such a long time since i last properly sat down and tried to draw something properly with a pencil.. i think it's been such a long time i'm probably the worst at drawing in my family? ㅎㅎ my dad's good, my mom's also good.. my grandpa also draws reaññu well. but it was fun drawing again, so i also want to try that again... why is there so many things i want to do? really why is it? and above all, i want to work really hard on music so that someday i can show you even more. now, like from the trailer to the full version that was uploaded to our site... those kinds of things are a bit different from just being a song, though.. now everyone, let's try meditating together with me sorry.. anyways.. i have to leave in a couple hours actually, so.. time to hit the hay, yeehaw i can't fall asleep right away ㅎㅎ this.. seems like it might be a bit difficult to interpret/translate.. (yes anton, it is,,,) next time it might be better to just turn on a live stream instead ㅎㅎ sorry wow... sleep is really not coming... [1 video] [1 picture] ok jinja gn

🧼

37,315 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

In the back of my 9th grade English class, there was a poster hung on the wall by my boomer English teacher. It said "What if they gave a war and nobody came?". A simple boomer hippie sentiment. I always wondered about that poster. Fourteen year old me didn't know the words "game theory", but I still understood some basic concepts of the field just from being alive. And so I knew that if "they" gave a war, and only one side showed up, that side won, and could do whatever they wanted to the losers. And that not showing up for a war doesn't do a thing to prevent the other side from showing up. In fact, it incentivizes them to do the opposite. So I wondered... why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? I quickly learned that asking this question of boomer adults produced nothing but a blank look. The TV never told them how to answer questions like that. So I continued wondering, and thinking about it. Why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I figured it out. They were. They were putting it in the enemy classroom. Because I was the enemy. We, all of us, the white western children of GenX, were the enemy they wanted to defeat. I didn't realize that at first, because I thought of that English teacher, who hung the poster, as a full and complete human being, equipped with her own ideas and opinions, who decided to hang that poster. But she wasn't. She was a boomer. Which means she was a programmable tool in the hands of those who wished to rob western civilization of the will to commit violence in our own interests. She had no idea what she was dong. She wasn't thinking philosophically. She probably thought philosophy was a bunch of books written by Wittgenstein about the "nature of selfness" or whatever. She had no mental tools to think about game theory. She had simply been programmed by books, newspaper, magazines, and television, to think of certain things as "bad". War? Bad. Violence? Bad. Colonialism? Bad. Racism? Bad. Patriarchy? Bad. Talking back to the teacher and asking uncomfortable questions that the TV didn't tell her how to answer? Bad. This fully programmable unit, equipped with no more sophisticated thinking mechanisms than assigning a binary "good" or "bad" label to various concepts, was simply acting out a program written by someone else when she hung that poster. But who wrote those TV scripts, news stories, magazine articles? Were they the enemy, or were they more idiots? And who programmed them? Still more idiots? I had no way of knowing. I only knew that there was a chain of programmable NPCs, and at the other end was the enemy. I couldn't trace the chain back, of course. I was an impoverished twentysomething, not a team of investigative reporters. But I knew damn well it had to be the Soviets on the other end. Who else would want the children of the West to be unconditional pacifists, and had the money, organization, power, and above all, patience, to spend decades manipulating the Western media that the boomers uncritically sucked down? And later, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own socialism... oh, look, I was right. The USSR is gone, of course, but that web of useful, progammable idiots still exists, ready both to be idiots, and to teach children to be idiots. And there is no shortage of people who hate Western civilization and are willing to plant themselves in the programmer's chair. Chase Oliver is a programmable idiot. He has been programmed to abhor violence under any circumstances, even in defense of Western civilization, and to program children with his pacifism. He has been programmed not to reproduce, and to groom children into sterility. He has been programmed not to defend the borders of our nation, and to program others not to do so. He has been programmed to prefer other races and cultures to what is nominally his own, and to program others to denigrate their own culture as well. He has now successfully been integrated as the candidate of a party whose original philosophy was the very antithesis of everything he stands for. By himself, he is a joke... a mincing little queer who couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But in concert with other useful idiots, he managed to infiltrate and destroy the Libertarian party, to render it no longer libertarian. A drop of water is weak. But a flood can wash away anything. These people are dangerous, and to oppose them, you need the proper philosophy. How are you to know what that is? Simple. It's everything they are trying to program you against. You must be willing to commit violence, rather than unwilling to defend what you claim to value. You must unashamedly prefer your race, culture, and civilization to other races, cultures, and civilization, rather than being too broadminded to take your own side. You must reserve your compassion, and your loyalty, for those who make common cause with you, rather than valuing all humans equally. You must have children if you can, and find ways to support others of your tribe having children if you can't, rather than being sterile and allowing yourself to be replaced. You must raise those children to be strong, willing to commit violence, and able to understand and pursue their own interests, rather than reflexively obedient... even if reflexive obedience on the part of your children would make parenting easier. You must treat useful idiots of the enemy as enemies, remembering Grey's First Law: Any insufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. and Grey's Second Law: Any sufficiently subtle malice can be disguised as incompetence. Your civilization is under threat from those who wish to use the Chase Olivers of the world to accomplish what they could never hope to do with military force. Do not reject political violence. Be willing to fight.
14:53

In the back of my 9th grade English class, there was a poster hung on the wall by my boomer English teacher. It said "What if they gave a war and nobody came?". A simple boomer hippie sentiment. I always wondered about that poster. Fourteen year old me didn't know the words "game theory", but I still understood some basic concepts of the field just from being alive. And so I knew that if "they" gave a war, and only one side showed up, that side won, and could do whatever they wanted to the losers. And that not showing up for a war doesn't do a thing to prevent the other side from showing up. In fact, it incentivizes them to do the opposite. So I wondered... why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? I quickly learned that asking this question of boomer adults produced nothing but a blank look. The TV never told them how to answer questions like that. So I continued wondering, and thinking about it. Why weren't they putting that poster in the enemy's school classrooms, instead of mine? It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I figured it out. They were. They were putting it in the enemy classroom. Because I was the enemy. We, all of us, the white western children of GenX, were the enemy they wanted to defeat. I didn't realize that at first, because I thought of that English teacher, who hung the poster, as a full and complete human being, equipped with her own ideas and opinions, who decided to hang that poster. But she wasn't. She was a boomer. Which means she was a programmable tool in the hands of those who wished to rob western civilization of the will to commit violence in our own interests. She had no idea what she was dong. She wasn't thinking philosophically. She probably thought philosophy was a bunch of books written by Wittgenstein about the "nature of selfness" or whatever. She had no mental tools to think about game theory. She had simply been programmed by books, newspaper, magazines, and television, to think of certain things as "bad". War? Bad. Violence? Bad. Colonialism? Bad. Racism? Bad. Patriarchy? Bad. Talking back to the teacher and asking uncomfortable questions that the TV didn't tell her how to answer? Bad. This fully programmable unit, equipped with no more sophisticated thinking mechanisms than assigning a binary "good" or "bad" label to various concepts, was simply acting out a program written by someone else when she hung that poster. But who wrote those TV scripts, news stories, magazine articles? Were they the enemy, or were they more idiots? And who programmed them? Still more idiots? I had no way of knowing. I only knew that there was a chain of programmable NPCs, and at the other end was the enemy. I couldn't trace the chain back, of course. I was an impoverished twentysomething, not a team of investigative reporters. But I knew damn well it had to be the Soviets on the other end. Who else would want the children of the West to be unconditional pacifists, and had the money, organization, power, and above all, patience, to spend decades manipulating the Western media that the boomers uncritically sucked down? And later, when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own socialism... oh, look, I was right. The USSR is gone, of course, but that web of useful, progammable idiots still exists, ready both to be idiots, and to teach children to be idiots. And there is no shortage of people who hate Western civilization and are willing to plant themselves in the programmer's chair. Chase Oliver is a programmable idiot. He has been programmed to abhor violence under any circumstances, even in defense of Western civilization, and to program children with his pacifism. He has been programmed not to reproduce, and to groom children into sterility. He has been programmed not to defend the borders of our nation, and to program others not to do so. He has been programmed to prefer other races and cultures to what is nominally his own, and to program others to denigrate their own culture as well. He has now successfully been integrated as the candidate of a party whose original philosophy was the very antithesis of everything he stands for. By himself, he is a joke... a mincing little queer who couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But in concert with other useful idiots, he managed to infiltrate and destroy the Libertarian party, to render it no longer libertarian. A drop of water is weak. But a flood can wash away anything. These people are dangerous, and to oppose them, you need the proper philosophy. How are you to know what that is? Simple. It's everything they are trying to program you against. You must be willing to commit violence, rather than unwilling to defend what you claim to value. You must unashamedly prefer your race, culture, and civilization to other races, cultures, and civilization, rather than being too broadminded to take your own side. You must reserve your compassion, and your loyalty, for those who make common cause with you, rather than valuing all humans equally. You must have children if you can, and find ways to support others of your tribe having children if you can't, rather than being sterile and allowing yourself to be replaced. You must raise those children to be strong, willing to commit violence, and able to understand and pursue their own interests, rather than reflexively obedient... even if reflexive obedience on the part of your children would make parenting easier. You must treat useful idiots of the enemy as enemies, remembering Grey's First Law: Any insufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. and Grey's Second Law: Any sufficiently subtle malice can be disguised as incompetence. Your civilization is under threat from those who wish to use the Chase Olivers of the world to accomplish what they could never hope to do with military force. Do not reject political violence. Be willing to fight.

Devon Eriksen

707,557 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

I Am a J6er It happened after J6 I don't remember when I first thought about killing myself. Perhaps when i received the dear John email my Ex sent, asking for a divorce while I was locked up, or when my father called me a fvcking insurrectionist. Maybe the business failing or my face all over the headlines. Almost every J6er has thought of this escape. I have learned that if someone expresses suicidal thoughts, you have to ask them if they had a plan. My only plan was to try to get out of bed, pray, get some exercise, and go to work. I was lucky i found a job and kept my faith. Some couldn't make it. Like Matthew Perna. I heard of his story from his Aunt Geri Perna And her consostent message might have saved my life. The video is what cost himnhis. Every J6er carries a story of persecution, the likes of which we haven't seen since slavery. The grief and mental anguish rose and fell as we wrestled toward acceptance of where we were. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Some moved through these stages quickly. Others remained trapped and are still to this day. We grieved the lives we lost, the country we thought was real, the families, jobs, and friends who walked away. Those who couldn't make it. Rest in Peace — Matthew Perna Jord Meachum Mark Aungst Christopher Stanton Matthew Weble Most of us slid back and forth, and still do, trudging toward acceptance. And yes… we had all thought about it. Ending it all. J6er Grief. I tried to untangle the grieving process of my own J6 journey. It was a tangled web of intertwined emotions — explosions of pain where one stage bled into the next and I could no longer tell where one ended and another began. In August of 2021 I wrote this to mark where I stood: Denial: March to November 2020 Anger: November 2020 to January 2021 Depression & Bargaining: January 2021 onward I did not yet know what true acceptance would look like. Would it mean becoming a doormat? Or would it mean finally learning to dissent and fight from a place of peace? I was still working on it. The multi-headed hydra of calamity hit all at once: The trauma of my arrest. The destruction of my job and finances. Family and friends walking away. My life being ripped apart forever. And the divorce. I went from a baseball dad with a successful real estate business, living on a lake with my family… to an old man, lyingnlow, selling homes, keeping exoenses low renting out rooms, and living in the basement of a rental home. If i get pinched again i can survive. And I am one of the lucky ones. I cried the Tuesday before Thanksgiving a few years ago. In a support group I attended, I shared how heartbroken I was that I would not be with my family for the holidays for the first time in nearly twenty years. For a few seconds I broke down in a room full of men. My sobs and silent tears echoed in that still church basement. I was sadder than I sometimes allowed myself to feel… but I came to believe I was healing. My J6 persecution took so much from me that I could never be made whole. Only by God’s divine grace was I still standing. Many arent. I had wondered: If they had simply given me the $50 ticket every other liberal illegal picketing protester received — before J6 and after — would she have stayed? If I had spent years in prison instead of 30 days, would absence have made the heart grow fonder? Or was the outcome already written? I became okay. The holidays were hard. I understood that firsthand. Many suffered far worse than me. This, too, passed. I had faith. Fear and faith cannot live in the same house. I grieved deeply. And in that grieving, I found acceptance. By God’s grace, the darkness lifted. The grief shaped me but did not define me. I rose from the ashes — scarred, but standing. There is still pain, but there is also peace. There is still loss, but there is also love. The best days are not behind us. They are still ahead. Acceptance God Bless the J6ers.
1:00

I Am a J6er It happened after J6 I don't remember when I first thought about killing myself. Perhaps when i received the dear John email my Ex sent, asking for a divorce while I was locked up, or when my father called me a fvcking insurrectionist. Maybe the business failing or my face all over the headlines. Almost every J6er has thought of this escape. I have learned that if someone expresses suicidal thoughts, you have to ask them if they had a plan. My only plan was to try to get out of bed, pray, get some exercise, and go to work. I was lucky i found a job and kept my faith. Some couldn't make it. Like Matthew Perna. I heard of his story from his Aunt Geri Perna And her consostent message might have saved my life. The video is what cost himnhis. Every J6er carries a story of persecution, the likes of which we haven't seen since slavery. The grief and mental anguish rose and fell as we wrestled toward acceptance of where we were. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Some moved through these stages quickly. Others remained trapped and are still to this day. We grieved the lives we lost, the country we thought was real, the families, jobs, and friends who walked away. Those who couldn't make it. Rest in Peace — Matthew Perna Jord Meachum Mark Aungst Christopher Stanton Matthew Weble Most of us slid back and forth, and still do, trudging toward acceptance. And yes… we had all thought about it. Ending it all. J6er Grief. I tried to untangle the grieving process of my own J6 journey. It was a tangled web of intertwined emotions — explosions of pain where one stage bled into the next and I could no longer tell where one ended and another began. In August of 2021 I wrote this to mark where I stood: Denial: March to November 2020 Anger: November 2020 to January 2021 Depression & Bargaining: January 2021 onward I did not yet know what true acceptance would look like. Would it mean becoming a doormat? Or would it mean finally learning to dissent and fight from a place of peace? I was still working on it. The multi-headed hydra of calamity hit all at once: The trauma of my arrest. The destruction of my job and finances. Family and friends walking away. My life being ripped apart forever. And the divorce. I went from a baseball dad with a successful real estate business, living on a lake with my family… to an old man, lyingnlow, selling homes, keeping exoenses low renting out rooms, and living in the basement of a rental home. If i get pinched again i can survive. And I am one of the lucky ones. I cried the Tuesday before Thanksgiving a few years ago. In a support group I attended, I shared how heartbroken I was that I would not be with my family for the holidays for the first time in nearly twenty years. For a few seconds I broke down in a room full of men. My sobs and silent tears echoed in that still church basement. I was sadder than I sometimes allowed myself to feel… but I came to believe I was healing. My J6 persecution took so much from me that I could never be made whole. Only by God’s divine grace was I still standing. Many arent. I had wondered: If they had simply given me the $50 ticket every other liberal illegal picketing protester received — before J6 and after — would she have stayed? If I had spent years in prison instead of 30 days, would absence have made the heart grow fonder? Or was the outcome already written? I became okay. The holidays were hard. I understood that firsthand. Many suffered far worse than me. This, too, passed. I had faith. Fear and faith cannot live in the same house. I grieved deeply. And in that grieving, I found acceptance. By God’s grace, the darkness lifted. The grief shaped me but did not define me. I rose from the ashes — scarred, but standing. There is still pain, but there is also peace. There is still loss, but there is also love. The best days are not behind us. They are still ahead. Acceptance God Bless the J6ers.

John M. Cameron

53,627 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. 🫡
14:49

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someone’s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldn’t just be a builder — you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of “no, that can’t be done” or “another team owns that so don’t touch it”. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant it’d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasn’t fully empowered to run the company since he wasn’t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the company’s future notoriously included the phrase “fiduciary duty”. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didn’t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic – I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didn’t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldn’t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and he’s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didn’t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I don’t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I can’t say I’d bet against Elon or count him out. He’s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually he’ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and he’s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but they’re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. It’s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, let’s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I don’t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasn’t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule – truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you can’t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater — I’m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesn’t deserve to be venerated or vilified. He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that I’d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. I’m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later I’ll jump back into a high intensity company but I’m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something — which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. It’s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep “better angels” around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because I’m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world that’s both safer and wealthier. I don’t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and I’m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. I’m here for whatever comes next — on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so I’ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I don’t want to, and probably can’t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. 🫡

Esther Crawford ✨

5,497,553 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

A video-text summary of my argument that we now live in the age of TECHNOFEUDALISM (in 16', 2000 words): Wherever we turn, we witness the triumph of capital. Capital has prevailed everywhere: in warehouses, factories, offices, universities, public hospitals, the media – in space but also in the microcosm of genetic engineering. So, how do I dare claim that capitalism has been killed? By whom? The deliciously ironic answer is that capitalism was killed by its own hand… by capital! If I am right, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what has already happened: Capital became so dominant that it mutated into a variant so toxic that, like a stupid virus, it killed off its host, capitalism, replacing it with something far, far worse. This new mutant capital, that killed capitalism, lives in the proverbial cloud – so, let us call it cloud capital. What is cloud capital? What makes it so different? Cloud capital, of course, does not really live up in the cloud. It lives down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and of course it lives on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest. Unlike traditional capital, from fishing rods to the steam-engines of the Industrial Revolution to today’s modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce anything – it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. That’s what Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri is: It is a produced means of behavioural modification. It is a machine, a piece of capital, which we train to train us to train it to determine that which we want. And, once we want it, the same networked machine sells it to us, directly, bypassing markets. As if that were not enough, the same machinery succeeds in making us sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour. We are sustaining it as we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants, photos - we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs! Meanwhile, in the factories and the warehouses, where waged proletarians work under increasingly precarious conditions, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us directly – those algorithms are deployed, usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists, to make proletarians, workers in the warehouses, in the factories work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time. I started by saying that wherever we turn, we stumble on the triumph of capital. But it is cloud capital that is the real winner. It is amazing how it performs, at once, five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: Cloud capital grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, that which is going to satiate the desires it made us have. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs. Is it surprising that the owners of this cloud capital – let’s call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt power to extract? To extract gargantuan surplus value from proletarians; untold quantities of free labour from almost everyone; and mind-numbing cloud rents from vassal capitalists – from sellers? Is it a wonder that they are vastly more powerful than Henry Ford or Rupert Murdoch could ever be? “Hang on”, I hear you say. “Is Jeff Bezos really different to Henry Ford? Aren’t they all a species of monopoly capitalists? Monopolists?” No, is not a monopolistic capitalist enterprise. The moment you enter you have exited capitalism altogether! Sure enough, the place is teaming with buyers and sellers. So, yes, it is an enormous trading platform but, no, a market it certainly is not! One man called Jeff owns everything. But he is much, much more than a mere monopolist. Jeff doesn’t own the factories that produce the stuff sold on his platform by traditional capitalists who have to use it to ply their trade. What he does own is more important: Jeff owns the algorithm that decides which products you see and which you don’t – the very algorithm that you have trained to know you perfectly so that it matches youwith a seller, whom it also knows perfectly well, with a view to maximising the probability that every such match, transaction, will generate, for Jeff, the highest rent that Jeff can charge the seller for what you buy: up to 40% of what you pay is pocketed by Jeff, the cloudalist! The mind rebels at the enormity but also the radical novelty of this kind of exploitation: The same algorithm that we help train in real time to know us inside out - that same algorithm both modifies our preferences and administers the selection and delivery of commodities that will satisfy these preferences. If you and I were to type “electric bicycles” or “binoculars” while in you and I would get totally different recommendations. In a traditional market or shopping mall it would be as if you and I were walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, the same shop window, but we were to see different things depending on what Jeff’s algorithm wants each one of us to see. Everyone navigating around – except Jeff Bezos of course – everyone in is wandering around in algorithmically constructed isolation as if in a Panopticon where, unable to see each other, we only see Jeff’s all-seeing algorithm or, more accurately, only what his algorithm allows us to see with a view to maximising his cloud rent – which is, of course, today’s version of the ground rent that the feudal lords used to extract from their vassals and their peasants. This is not capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to technofeudalism! How did cloud capital kill capitalism? How did it rise up? Who paid for it? Capitalism, lest we forget, had two pillars: markets and profit. Of course, markets and profit remain ubiquitous. Nevertheless, cloud capital has evicted both markets and profit from the centre of our socioeconomic system, pushing them out to its margins, and replacing them: Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by cloud fiefs – digital trading platforms like or Alibaba which, as we saw, look like, but are not, markets. And Profit? The fuel of capitalism? Well, that has been replaced by its feudal predecessor: rent. But, specifically, a new form of rent, a cloud rent that must be paid for access to those cloud fiefs or digital platforms. But how did cloud capital emerge?It began life in the late 1990s when the original Internet, which was a Commons – it functioned as a capitalism-free-zone – that original Internet, Internet 1.0 if you want, was privatised by the emergent Big Tech. Who paid for the trillions it cost to manufacture and to accumulate cloud capital so quickly in the hands of so very few cloudalists? The startling answer is: The G7 countries’ central banks, mostly! How did that happen? Well, by accident, or – to be more precise – by… crisis! After the financial sector collapse of 2008, our central bankers printed up to $35 trillion to bail out the bankers at a time when the governments were subjecting our peoples to harsh austerity. Capitalists were clever enough to foresee that the many would be too impecunious to buy their stuff. So, instead of investing, they took the central bank money to the stock exchange and the bond markets, where they bought shares, bonds – along with yachts, art, bitcoin, NFTs any ‘asset’ they could lay their hands on. The only capitalists who actually invested in capital were Big Tech owners. For example, 9 out of every 10 dollars that went into creating Facebook came from these central bank monies! That’s how cloud capital was financed and how the cloudalists became our new ruling class. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. These old-fashioned, terrestrial capitalists continue to extract surplus value from waged labour, but they are no longer in charge, as they used to be. They have become vassals in relation to the owners of cloud capital, of the cloudalists. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour — in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance to do it. But surely, someone will say, this is still capitalism, isn’t it? So, you are still unconvinced? I know, it is hard to part with the term, with the word, capitalism. It is not just liberals who think of capitalism like fish think of the water they swim in – as natural. Socialists too need to feel that our purpose in life, the reason we landed on this Earth, is to overthrow capitalism. The news that I bring that capital beat us to it, and now we have something worse in capitalism’s place, that news is hard to accept. Indeed, it is mostly my fellow-travelling leftist friends who try to dissuade me – to convince me that, yes, cloud capital may be important but “this is still capitalism mate”. Let’s call it rentier capitalism or monopoly capitalism, they suggest. But that simply will not do! Cloud rent is not like ground rent, because it requires massive investment in new tech. And it is not monopoly rent either, because Bezos and Zuckerberg, instead of monopolising markets to sell their manufactures (like Ford and Eddison did), Bezos and Zuckerberg have replaced markets and have no interest in manufacturing anything (unlike Henry Ford and Thomas Eddison). How about surveillance capitalism? Again, no, it won’t do. Cloudalists do not simply use algorithms to brain wash us on behalf of advertisers in an otherwise capitalist setting. No, cloud capital reproduces itself through our free-labour, it directly exploits waged labour, and it squeezes cloud rents from vassal capitalists in trading platforms that are not markets. This is not capitalism folks! Any kind of capitalism. But what about the observation that technofeudalism is parasitic on the capitalist sector within it? Yes, it is true. Were the conventional capitalists to die out, cloudalists would perish, unable to skim off cloud rents from the manufacturers. So what? After capitalism overthrew feudalism, capitalists were also parasitic on landowners, in the sense that, without private land producing food, capitalism would wither. Similarly, now: While the traditional capitalist sector feeds technofeudalism, it is cloud capital and cloud rent that dominate. Does it matter whether we call it technofeudalism or some form of capitalism? At this point, it is important to recall Marx’s maxim that the point is not to interpret but to change the world. So, does it matter if this is still capitalism or whether we call it technofeudalism? I think it does. Recognising that our world has become technofeudal helps us grasp the enormity of what it will take to organise the victims of exorbitant power, the exploited who, now, include not only waged labourers but also the hordes of cloud serfs who are reproducing the very cloud capital that keeps them in a state of deepening precarity. The concept of technofeudalism drives home the point that organising auto-workers and nurses, while still essential, is insufficient. It elucidates what it will take to organise the movements against the fossil fuel cartel when our means of communication are run on cloud capital primed to poison public opinion. It explains how the shift to electric cars caused German deindustrialisation, as profits due to precision mechanical engineering are being replaced by rents extracted by owners of the cloud capital keeping tabs on the drivers’ routes and in-cabin habits. Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter suddenly makes a lot more sense. Twitter for Musk is an interface between his mechanical capital stock at Tesla and SpaceX and cloud capital. The New Cold War between the USA and China, especially after the war in Ukraine, is explained as the repercussion of an underlying clash between two technofeudalisms, one whose cloud rents are denominated in dollars the other in yuan. Isn’t it mindboggling? It took mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks, and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? To create a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. To own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Once we have reclaimed our minds, we can put them collectively to work out a way to create a new cloud capital commons. It will be damned hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a produced means of behaviour modification to a produced means of human collaboration and emancipation. Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud vassals of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our mind-cloud chains! US Edition: UK Edition: Greek Edition:
17:20

A video-text summary of my argument that we now live in the age of TECHNOFEUDALISM (in 16', 2000 words): Wherever we turn, we witness the triumph of capital. Capital has prevailed everywhere: in warehouses, factories, offices, universities, public hospitals, the media – in space but also in the microcosm of genetic engineering. So, how do I dare claim that capitalism has been killed? By whom? The deliciously ironic answer is that capitalism was killed by its own hand… by capital! If I am right, the issue is not what AI will do to us in the future but what has already happened: Capital became so dominant that it mutated into a variant so toxic that, like a stupid virus, it killed off its host, capitalism, replacing it with something far, far worse. This new mutant capital, that killed capitalism, lives in the proverbial cloud – so, let us call it cloud capital. What is cloud capital? What makes it so different? Cloud capital, of course, does not really live up in the cloud. It lives down on Earth, comprising networked machines, server farms, cell towers, software, AI-driven algorithms – and of course it lives on our oceans’ floors where untold miles of optic fibre cables rest. Unlike traditional capital, from fishing rods to the steam-engines of the Industrial Revolution to today’s modern industrial robots that are produced means of production, cloud capital does not produce anything – it comprises machines manufactured so as to modify human behaviour. That’s what Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri is: It is a produced means of behavioural modification. It is a machine, a piece of capital, which we train to train us to train it to determine that which we want. And, once we want it, the same networked machine sells it to us, directly, bypassing markets. As if that were not enough, the same machinery succeeds in making us sustain the enormous behavioural modification machine network to which it belongs with our free voluntary labour. We are sustaining it as we post reviews, rate products, upload videos, rants, photos - we help reproduce cloud capital without getting a penny for our labour. In essence, it has turned us into its cloud serfs! Meanwhile, in the factories and the warehouses, where waged proletarians work under increasingly precarious conditions, the same algorithms that modify our behaviour and sell products to us directly – those algorithms are deployed, usually by digital devices tied to the workers’ wrists, to make proletarians, workers in the warehouses, in the factories work faster, to direct and to monitor them in real time. I started by saying that wherever we turn, we stumble on the triumph of capital. But it is cloud capital that is the real winner. It is amazing how it performs, at once, five roles that used to be beyond capital’s capacities: Cloud capital grabs our attention. It manufactures our desires. It sells to us, directly, outside any traditional markets, that which is going to satiate the desires it made us have. It drives proletarian labour inside the workplaces. And it elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs. Is it surprising that the owners of this cloud capital – let’s call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt power to extract? To extract gargantuan surplus value from proletarians; untold quantities of free labour from almost everyone; and mind-numbing cloud rents from vassal capitalists – from sellers? Is it a wonder that they are vastly more powerful than Henry Ford or Rupert Murdoch could ever be? “Hang on”, I hear you say. “Is Jeff Bezos really different to Henry Ford? Aren’t they all a species of monopoly capitalists? Monopolists?” No, is not a monopolistic capitalist enterprise. The moment you enter you have exited capitalism altogether! Sure enough, the place is teaming with buyers and sellers. So, yes, it is an enormous trading platform but, no, a market it certainly is not! One man called Jeff owns everything. But he is much, much more than a mere monopolist. Jeff doesn’t own the factories that produce the stuff sold on his platform by traditional capitalists who have to use it to ply their trade. What he does own is more important: Jeff owns the algorithm that decides which products you see and which you don’t – the very algorithm that you have trained to know you perfectly so that it matches youwith a seller, whom it also knows perfectly well, with a view to maximising the probability that every such match, transaction, will generate, for Jeff, the highest rent that Jeff can charge the seller for what you buy: up to 40% of what you pay is pocketed by Jeff, the cloudalist! The mind rebels at the enormity but also the radical novelty of this kind of exploitation: The same algorithm that we help train in real time to know us inside out - that same algorithm both modifies our preferences and administers the selection and delivery of commodities that will satisfy these preferences. If you and I were to type “electric bicycles” or “binoculars” while in you and I would get totally different recommendations. In a traditional market or shopping mall it would be as if you and I were walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, the same shop window, but we were to see different things depending on what Jeff’s algorithm wants each one of us to see. Everyone navigating around – except Jeff Bezos of course – everyone in is wandering around in algorithmically constructed isolation as if in a Panopticon where, unable to see each other, we only see Jeff’s all-seeing algorithm or, more accurately, only what his algorithm allows us to see with a view to maximising his cloud rent – which is, of course, today’s version of the ground rent that the feudal lords used to extract from their vassals and their peasants. This is not capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to technofeudalism! How did cloud capital kill capitalism? How did it rise up? Who paid for it? Capitalism, lest we forget, had two pillars: markets and profit. Of course, markets and profit remain ubiquitous. Nevertheless, cloud capital has evicted both markets and profit from the centre of our socioeconomic system, pushing them out to its margins, and replacing them: Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by cloud fiefs – digital trading platforms like or Alibaba which, as we saw, look like, but are not, markets. And Profit? The fuel of capitalism? Well, that has been replaced by its feudal predecessor: rent. But, specifically, a new form of rent, a cloud rent that must be paid for access to those cloud fiefs or digital platforms. But how did cloud capital emerge?It began life in the late 1990s when the original Internet, which was a Commons – it functioned as a capitalism-free-zone – that original Internet, Internet 1.0 if you want, was privatised by the emergent Big Tech. Who paid for the trillions it cost to manufacture and to accumulate cloud capital so quickly in the hands of so very few cloudalists? The startling answer is: The G7 countries’ central banks, mostly! How did that happen? Well, by accident, or – to be more precise – by… crisis! After the financial sector collapse of 2008, our central bankers printed up to $35 trillion to bail out the bankers at a time when the governments were subjecting our peoples to harsh austerity. Capitalists were clever enough to foresee that the many would be too impecunious to buy their stuff. So, instead of investing, they took the central bank money to the stock exchange and the bond markets, where they bought shares, bonds – along with yachts, art, bitcoin, NFTs any ‘asset’ they could lay their hands on. The only capitalists who actually invested in capital were Big Tech owners. For example, 9 out of every 10 dollars that went into creating Facebook came from these central bank monies! That’s how cloud capital was financed and how the cloudalists became our new ruling class. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. These old-fashioned, terrestrial capitalists continue to extract surplus value from waged labour, but they are no longer in charge, as they used to be. They have become vassals in relation to the owners of cloud capital, of the cloudalists. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour — in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance to do it. But surely, someone will say, this is still capitalism, isn’t it? So, you are still unconvinced? I know, it is hard to part with the term, with the word, capitalism. It is not just liberals who think of capitalism like fish think of the water they swim in – as natural. Socialists too need to feel that our purpose in life, the reason we landed on this Earth, is to overthrow capitalism. The news that I bring that capital beat us to it, and now we have something worse in capitalism’s place, that news is hard to accept. Indeed, it is mostly my fellow-travelling leftist friends who try to dissuade me – to convince me that, yes, cloud capital may be important but “this is still capitalism mate”. Let’s call it rentier capitalism or monopoly capitalism, they suggest. But that simply will not do! Cloud rent is not like ground rent, because it requires massive investment in new tech. And it is not monopoly rent either, because Bezos and Zuckerberg, instead of monopolising markets to sell their manufactures (like Ford and Eddison did), Bezos and Zuckerberg have replaced markets and have no interest in manufacturing anything (unlike Henry Ford and Thomas Eddison). How about surveillance capitalism? Again, no, it won’t do. Cloudalists do not simply use algorithms to brain wash us on behalf of advertisers in an otherwise capitalist setting. No, cloud capital reproduces itself through our free-labour, it directly exploits waged labour, and it squeezes cloud rents from vassal capitalists in trading platforms that are not markets. This is not capitalism folks! Any kind of capitalism. But what about the observation that technofeudalism is parasitic on the capitalist sector within it? Yes, it is true. Were the conventional capitalists to die out, cloudalists would perish, unable to skim off cloud rents from the manufacturers. So what? After capitalism overthrew feudalism, capitalists were also parasitic on landowners, in the sense that, without private land producing food, capitalism would wither. Similarly, now: While the traditional capitalist sector feeds technofeudalism, it is cloud capital and cloud rent that dominate. Does it matter whether we call it technofeudalism or some form of capitalism? At this point, it is important to recall Marx’s maxim that the point is not to interpret but to change the world. So, does it matter if this is still capitalism or whether we call it technofeudalism? I think it does. Recognising that our world has become technofeudal helps us grasp the enormity of what it will take to organise the victims of exorbitant power, the exploited who, now, include not only waged labourers but also the hordes of cloud serfs who are reproducing the very cloud capital that keeps them in a state of deepening precarity. The concept of technofeudalism drives home the point that organising auto-workers and nurses, while still essential, is insufficient. It elucidates what it will take to organise the movements against the fossil fuel cartel when our means of communication are run on cloud capital primed to poison public opinion. It explains how the shift to electric cars caused German deindustrialisation, as profits due to precision mechanical engineering are being replaced by rents extracted by owners of the cloud capital keeping tabs on the drivers’ routes and in-cabin habits. Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter suddenly makes a lot more sense. Twitter for Musk is an interface between his mechanical capital stock at Tesla and SpaceX and cloud capital. The New Cold War between the USA and China, especially after the war in Ukraine, is explained as the repercussion of an underlying clash between two technofeudalisms, one whose cloud rents are denominated in dollars the other in yuan. Isn’t it mindboggling? It took mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks, and imagination-defying AI programs to accomplish what? To create a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. To own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Once we have reclaimed our minds, we can put them collectively to work out a way to create a new cloud capital commons. It will be damned hard. But it’s the only way we can turn our cloud-based artefacts from a produced means of behaviour modification to a produced means of human collaboration and emancipation. Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud vassals of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our mind-cloud chains! US Edition: UK Edition: Greek Edition:

Yanis Varoufakis

1,816,715 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Stargate Trivia: Casting Stargate: Atlantis While SG-1 was my first love (We were together for seven years!), my time on Atlantis proved equally memorable. The show was possessed of a similar tone in its mix of high adventure and humor, yet proved distinct in its exploration of Ancient mythology and an unfamiliar galaxy as seen through the eyes of a new set of heroes. Atlantis offered a sense of wonder and camaraderie born of isolation and constant danger. Whereas team SG-1 could always go home at the conclusion of their adventures, the members of the Atlantis expedition (at least for those first few seasons) could only draw comfort from the city of Atlantis itself – and, of course, each other. It was unique and compelling yet, at the same time, comfortingly familiar. Nowhere is this more evident than in its opening theme, composed by the late Joel Goldsmith, which is, at turns fresh, haunting, stirring and, throughout, discernibly Stargate. Stargate: Atlantis wasn’t originally planned as a companion to Stargate: SG-1. It was intended to replace the long-running series. The only problem was, with eight seasons under its belt, SG-1 wasn’t quite done yet. And fans (and the network) weren’t done with it either. And so, instead of passing the torch and segueing to a new Stargate series, we ended up producing both. In retrospect, it was quite an achievement: 40 hours of television in a year! Today's productions can barely manage a quarter that output, but Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis delivered two fantastic 40 episode seasons before SG-1 took its final bow. It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly made easier by all of the enormously talented individuals who made it happen, from the office staff and crew to the cast and my fellow writer/producers. Still, it was not without its challenges. Take casting, for instance. It may surprise you to know that, when it comes to producing a show, not everybody cares about costumes or set design or whether the script’s fifth act denouement is emotionally satisfying - but everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, has an opinion on casting. Studio and network execs, producers, hell, even your significant other peering over your shoulder as you screen the auditions on your laptop, will want to weigh in. Of course, the more voices in the mix the more likely there are to be disagreements. So it is with every production and Atlantis was no different. Various individuals envisioned these characters in various ways and, as a result, consensus was only achieved after many auditions, calls-backs, heated discussions, and not-so-gentle reminders that our start date was fast-approaching and we really needed someone to say the lines on camera. The part of Carson Beckett was one of the first we cast. The other producers were in Rob’s office, screening the first batch of local auditions when Brad called me in and told me to check out the guy onscreen. I hadn’t imagined Beckett with a Scottish accent but, after watching Paul McGillion (Paul McGillion) in the role, I couldn’t imagine him without one. He’d brought something unexpected to the part, something we all responded to. Elizabeth Weir was not an easy character to pull off. She had to be smart, confident and strong yet needed to exude a certain warmth and empathy we were looking for in the civilian leader of the expedition. When it came time to (re)casting the role, several established names were considered (One had her own hit genre show back in the day while another went on to break out on a hit show soon after), but it was Torri Higginson (torri higginson 🌻 🇺🇦 🕊) who managed to strike just the right balance and vault her name to the top of the list. The role of Teyla Emmagan was a tough one to cast. Like Weir, she needed to be a strong, empathetic leader. But she also required something even more important – quite literally, an other-worldly quality that made her unique. Some equally talented actresses auditioned for the role but, as good as they were, they were never quite able to achieve that gravitas Rachel Luttrell (Rachel Luttrell) pulled off with such grace and seeming ease. Former VJ Rainbow Sun Francks (Rainbow Sun Francks) won the role of Lieutenant Ford on the strength of a great audition, preceded by an equally great audition with a funny hat. I recall Brad Wright on the phone with our casting agent, advising him to ensure there would be no hat worn in the callback for fear the network would fixate on it. There wasn't, they didn't, and Rainbow delivered. The role of John Sheppard was the second to last one cast. It came right down to the wire and there were several candidates in play. The character was originally conceived as a good ole southern boy, so it only made sense that Ben Browder’s name was bandied about early. However, he was too busy shooting Peacekeeper Wars to warrant consideration. A number of other actors were considered (one went on to play the lead in a hugely popular show the following year while another made his mark as a handsome heart throb on another hugely popular medical series) but it was Joe Flanigan (Joe Flanigan) who won the part based on his ability to pull off the devil-may-care attitude Brad and Robert were looking for. We come to the final role cast, a character who, in many ways, embodied everything Atlantis was about: exploration, discovery, fun, humor, and seat-of-your-pants-Holy-Sh&%-how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-get-out-of-this-adventure. And he almost didn’t make the trip to Pegasus. Originally, the casting call went out for a completely different character, an earnest young doctor who would lend the team much-needed medical support on their off-world ventures. Unfortunately, no one could agree on an actor to fill that role. If the casting of Sheppard went down to the wire, then the casting of this final part went a step past it. Finally, days away from production, Robert Cooper had an idea: Forget the doctor character. Why not use an established character from SG-1? How about Rodney McKay played by David Hewlett (David "Stargate Genius Leader" Hewlett)? The writers were on board, but some executives weren't weren’t sold on the idea. They found him annoying! I mean, hell yeah, but he’d be sooo much fun to write for! Rob got on the phone and went to bat for Rodney, pointing out that the character had come a long way since first being introduced way back in SG-1’s 48 Hours. He’d evolved, going from annoying jerk to endearingly irritating. To this day, I’m convinced that they weren’t totally convinced but, with production poised to commence, they relented, I suppose figuring they could just replace the character somewhere down the line. No one, even those who loved the idea of having the endearingly irritating Rodney McKay on board could have predicted how hugely popular the character would become. How do you think we did?
1:01

Stargate Trivia: Casting Stargate: Atlantis While SG-1 was my first love (We were together for seven years!), my time on Atlantis proved equally memorable. The show was possessed of a similar tone in its mix of high adventure and humor, yet proved distinct in its exploration of Ancient mythology and an unfamiliar galaxy as seen through the eyes of a new set of heroes. Atlantis offered a sense of wonder and camaraderie born of isolation and constant danger. Whereas team SG-1 could always go home at the conclusion of their adventures, the members of the Atlantis expedition (at least for those first few seasons) could only draw comfort from the city of Atlantis itself – and, of course, each other. It was unique and compelling yet, at the same time, comfortingly familiar. Nowhere is this more evident than in its opening theme, composed by the late Joel Goldsmith, which is, at turns fresh, haunting, stirring and, throughout, discernibly Stargate. Stargate: Atlantis wasn’t originally planned as a companion to Stargate: SG-1. It was intended to replace the long-running series. The only problem was, with eight seasons under its belt, SG-1 wasn’t quite done yet. And fans (and the network) weren’t done with it either. And so, instead of passing the torch and segueing to a new Stargate series, we ended up producing both. In retrospect, it was quite an achievement: 40 hours of television in a year! Today's productions can barely manage a quarter that output, but Stargates SG-1 and Atlantis delivered two fantastic 40 episode seasons before SG-1 took its final bow. It wasn’t easy, but it was certainly made easier by all of the enormously talented individuals who made it happen, from the office staff and crew to the cast and my fellow writer/producers. Still, it was not without its challenges. Take casting, for instance. It may surprise you to know that, when it comes to producing a show, not everybody cares about costumes or set design or whether the script’s fifth act denouement is emotionally satisfying - but everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, has an opinion on casting. Studio and network execs, producers, hell, even your significant other peering over your shoulder as you screen the auditions on your laptop, will want to weigh in. Of course, the more voices in the mix the more likely there are to be disagreements. So it is with every production and Atlantis was no different. Various individuals envisioned these characters in various ways and, as a result, consensus was only achieved after many auditions, calls-backs, heated discussions, and not-so-gentle reminders that our start date was fast-approaching and we really needed someone to say the lines on camera. The part of Carson Beckett was one of the first we cast. The other producers were in Rob’s office, screening the first batch of local auditions when Brad called me in and told me to check out the guy onscreen. I hadn’t imagined Beckett with a Scottish accent but, after watching Paul McGillion (Paul McGillion) in the role, I couldn’t imagine him without one. He’d brought something unexpected to the part, something we all responded to. Elizabeth Weir was not an easy character to pull off. She had to be smart, confident and strong yet needed to exude a certain warmth and empathy we were looking for in the civilian leader of the expedition. When it came time to (re)casting the role, several established names were considered (One had her own hit genre show back in the day while another went on to break out on a hit show soon after), but it was Torri Higginson (torri higginson 🌻 🇺🇦 🕊) who managed to strike just the right balance and vault her name to the top of the list. The role of Teyla Emmagan was a tough one to cast. Like Weir, she needed to be a strong, empathetic leader. But she also required something even more important – quite literally, an other-worldly quality that made her unique. Some equally talented actresses auditioned for the role but, as good as they were, they were never quite able to achieve that gravitas Rachel Luttrell (Rachel Luttrell) pulled off with such grace and seeming ease. Former VJ Rainbow Sun Francks (Rainbow Sun Francks) won the role of Lieutenant Ford on the strength of a great audition, preceded by an equally great audition with a funny hat. I recall Brad Wright on the phone with our casting agent, advising him to ensure there would be no hat worn in the callback for fear the network would fixate on it. There wasn't, they didn't, and Rainbow delivered. The role of John Sheppard was the second to last one cast. It came right down to the wire and there were several candidates in play. The character was originally conceived as a good ole southern boy, so it only made sense that Ben Browder’s name was bandied about early. However, he was too busy shooting Peacekeeper Wars to warrant consideration. A number of other actors were considered (one went on to play the lead in a hugely popular show the following year while another made his mark as a handsome heart throb on another hugely popular medical series) but it was Joe Flanigan (Joe Flanigan) who won the part based on his ability to pull off the devil-may-care attitude Brad and Robert were looking for. We come to the final role cast, a character who, in many ways, embodied everything Atlantis was about: exploration, discovery, fun, humor, and seat-of-your-pants-Holy-Sh&%-how-the-hell-am-I-going-to-get-out-of-this-adventure. And he almost didn’t make the trip to Pegasus. Originally, the casting call went out for a completely different character, an earnest young doctor who would lend the team much-needed medical support on their off-world ventures. Unfortunately, no one could agree on an actor to fill that role. If the casting of Sheppard went down to the wire, then the casting of this final part went a step past it. Finally, days away from production, Robert Cooper had an idea: Forget the doctor character. Why not use an established character from SG-1? How about Rodney McKay played by David Hewlett (David "Stargate Genius Leader" Hewlett)? The writers were on board, but some executives weren't weren’t sold on the idea. They found him annoying! I mean, hell yeah, but he’d be sooo much fun to write for! Rob got on the phone and went to bat for Rodney, pointing out that the character had come a long way since first being introduced way back in SG-1’s 48 Hours. He’d evolved, going from annoying jerk to endearingly irritating. To this day, I’m convinced that they weren’t totally convinced but, with production poised to commence, they relented, I suppose figuring they could just replace the character somewhere down the line. No one, even those who loved the idea of having the endearingly irritating Rodney McKay on board could have predicted how hugely popular the character would become. How do you think we did?

Joseph Mallozzi 🏴‍☠️

61,189 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Israel is the excuse to snatch away freedoms we once took for granted: In interviews and a comment article over the weekend, the UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson made clear she plans to exploit the pause in the Gaza genocide to snuff out criticism of Israel’s criminal actions – and, of course, her own government’s collusion in that criminality. Naturally, the British establishment media have been keen to amplify her message that there will be painful consequences both for individuals who continue protesting against Israeli atrocities and for institutions, such as universities, that mistakenly assume they have a duty to uphold centuries-old freedoms by tolerating such protests. These protests, let us remember, are fully in line with a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which declared: a) Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian populations there – and has been doing so for decades. b) Western governments are obligated to do what they can to bring that illegal occupation and Israel’s apartheid system to an end as quickly as possible. Instead, those same governments are violating the ruling, and international law, both by continuing to support Israel’s criminality and by preventing their own citizens from putting pressure on them to end their support. The government of Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has even categorised protest against genocide as “support for terrorism”. For the first time in British history, a direct-action group, Palestine Action, has been banned as a terrorist organisation – in its case, for targeting weapons factories in Britain arming Israel’s genocide. It is now illegal to express any support for the group. In a commentary in the Sunday Express, Phillipson said she wanted the government’s campaign against free speech to go even further to protect Israel. She intends to import to our shores Donald Trump’s full-frontal assault on academic freedom. She has written to vice-chancellors warning them that their universities face fines and public funding cuts should they allow students to protest on campus against Israeli genocide and apartheid. She added: “I’m clear the buck stops with universities when it comes to ridding their campuses of hate. Institutions have my full backing to use their powers to do so and keep their students safe.” But as the rest of the article made clear, the universities don’t just have her “backing” to act against the protesters. They will be compelled to crack down on protests against Israeli apartheid and genocide – what she calls “hate” – or face stiff financial penalties. This comes in the wake, as Phillipson notes, of separate plans announced by home secretary Shabana Mahmood to give the police further powers to outlaw protests that have a “cumulative impact”. In other words, the police will be empowered to crush the very kind of protests that discomfit governments the most – those that are repeated because there is a strength of popular feeling to which the government is utterly unresponsive. It should hardly need pointing out that western governments are most likely to be unresponsive when it is their own criminal behaviours that are the target of protest, whether it is their collusion in Israel’s genocide or their collusion with corporations to gut meaningful action to halt climate breakdown. Though you would not know it from the media’s cheering, what the British government is doing is stripping out the last vestiges of the right to protest, a right that has been under relentless assault in the UK for the past 40 years. Phillipson’s Sunday interview with Trevor Philips on Sky was illustrative. He pushed the education secretary to be even more draconian in hollowing out speech and protest rights, as well as academic freedom. In turn, Phillipson sought once again to rationalise the government’s demolition of the last pillars of a free society on familiar grounds: as a supposed fight against antisemitism. After conversations with Jewish students and their parents, Phillipson said she had come to appreciate that they are “worried about what it is to be a young Jewish person on campus at the moment in the UK, and we can’t tolerate that”. The reality is that the police already have plenty of powers to deal with what she called antisemitic “harassment and intimidation”. Forces have the government’s backing and wide social support to tackle real race hate. So why are the police not cracking down on these antisemites supposedly roaming our university campuses? The answer – the one Phillipson wants to conceal from us – is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases she’s referring to, Jewish students are not the victims of an attack or even of personal criticism. They have simply been made uncomfortable by the presence of other students exercising a basic democratic right to protest in the public space of a campus – in this case, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and our own government’s material, diplomatic and financial support for it. Any discomfort felt by some Jewish students flows not from the actual protests but from the fact that these students have been raised as Zionists. They have been raised with a political ideology that makes them identify with Israel. They have chosen to associate their Jewish identity with a state the World Court has declared is both illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian population. It is not the protesters making an association between Jews and Israel. It is the Zionist Jewish families Phillipson has spoken to – and non-Jews such as Phillipson and Sky’s Philips who think like them. There is a quick fix to this “problem”, one that does not involve shredding the right to protest and freedom of speech, or fining universities who allow students to protest. And that is for the British government, and the British media, to stop treating Israel like it is a normal member of the community of nations – after it has just committed genocide and, on a very best-case scenario, is about to return to a status quo in which Palestinians are brutally abused under systems of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and siege. It is for the British government and media to make clear to Zionist Jewish families, and those non-Jews who think like them, that it is not okay to identify with a criminal state, or to expect any special privilege – protection from being offended – when others want to criticise that criminal state for its criminal actions. There are plenty of British Jews who do not identify with Israel. In fact, many are repulsed by its actions and take part in anti-genocide demonstrations like the one at the weekend in London. Anyone offended by the protests needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. Their offence signals not just an identification with Israel, but an endorsement of its actions, including its genocide and apartheid rule over Palestinians. So why is the government getting this issue so wrong? Here we get to the nub of the matter. The British establishment, including the government and media, are not a disinterested party simply concerned with protecting Jews. Rather, they are an elite desperately trying to protect their own interests in a system of US-driven military supremacy that confers on western powers a sense of their complete entitlement to control over the world’s material resources, most especially in the oil-rich Middle East. Israel is a central pillar of this criminal, militarised enterprise, which is why it needs to be protected at all costs. That cost has included hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed and maimed in Gaza over the past two years. But it also includes the freedoms and rights we once took for granted. Now we see that these freedoms were only ever on licence from the ruling class – a licence that is being revoked now that we have proved too unruly, too defiant, too rebellious.
2:56

Israel is the excuse to snatch away freedoms we once took for granted: In interviews and a comment article over the weekend, the UK education secretary Bridget Phillipson made clear she plans to exploit the pause in the Gaza genocide to snuff out criticism of Israel’s criminal actions – and, of course, her own government’s collusion in that criminality. Naturally, the British establishment media have been keen to amplify her message that there will be painful consequences both for individuals who continue protesting against Israeli atrocities and for institutions, such as universities, that mistakenly assume they have a duty to uphold centuries-old freedoms by tolerating such protests. These protests, let us remember, are fully in line with a ruling last year from the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which declared: a) Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian populations there – and has been doing so for decades. b) Western governments are obligated to do what they can to bring that illegal occupation and Israel’s apartheid system to an end as quickly as possible. Instead, those same governments are violating the ruling, and international law, both by continuing to support Israel’s criminality and by preventing their own citizens from putting pressure on them to end their support. The government of Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, has even categorised protest against genocide as “support for terrorism”. For the first time in British history, a direct-action group, Palestine Action, has been banned as a terrorist organisation – in its case, for targeting weapons factories in Britain arming Israel’s genocide. It is now illegal to express any support for the group. In a commentary in the Sunday Express, Phillipson said she wanted the government’s campaign against free speech to go even further to protect Israel. She intends to import to our shores Donald Trump’s full-frontal assault on academic freedom. She has written to vice-chancellors warning them that their universities face fines and public funding cuts should they allow students to protest on campus against Israeli genocide and apartheid. She added: “I’m clear the buck stops with universities when it comes to ridding their campuses of hate. Institutions have my full backing to use their powers to do so and keep their students safe.” But as the rest of the article made clear, the universities don’t just have her “backing” to act against the protesters. They will be compelled to crack down on protests against Israeli apartheid and genocide – what she calls “hate” – or face stiff financial penalties. This comes in the wake, as Phillipson notes, of separate plans announced by home secretary Shabana Mahmood to give the police further powers to outlaw protests that have a “cumulative impact”. In other words, the police will be empowered to crush the very kind of protests that discomfit governments the most – those that are repeated because there is a strength of popular feeling to which the government is utterly unresponsive. It should hardly need pointing out that western governments are most likely to be unresponsive when it is their own criminal behaviours that are the target of protest, whether it is their collusion in Israel’s genocide or their collusion with corporations to gut meaningful action to halt climate breakdown. Though you would not know it from the media’s cheering, what the British government is doing is stripping out the last vestiges of the right to protest, a right that has been under relentless assault in the UK for the past 40 years. Phillipson’s Sunday interview with Trevor Philips on Sky was illustrative. He pushed the education secretary to be even more draconian in hollowing out speech and protest rights, as well as academic freedom. In turn, Phillipson sought once again to rationalise the government’s demolition of the last pillars of a free society on familiar grounds: as a supposed fight against antisemitism. After conversations with Jewish students and their parents, Phillipson said she had come to appreciate that they are “worried about what it is to be a young Jewish person on campus at the moment in the UK, and we can’t tolerate that”. The reality is that the police already have plenty of powers to deal with what she called antisemitic “harassment and intimidation”. Forces have the government’s backing and wide social support to tackle real race hate. So why are the police not cracking down on these antisemites supposedly roaming our university campuses? The answer – the one Phillipson wants to conceal from us – is that, in the overwhelming majority of cases she’s referring to, Jewish students are not the victims of an attack or even of personal criticism. They have simply been made uncomfortable by the presence of other students exercising a basic democratic right to protest in the public space of a campus – in this case, against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and our own government’s material, diplomatic and financial support for it. Any discomfort felt by some Jewish students flows not from the actual protests but from the fact that these students have been raised as Zionists. They have been raised with a political ideology that makes them identify with Israel. They have chosen to associate their Jewish identity with a state the World Court has declared is both illegally occupying Palestinian territory and enforcing a system of apartheid rule over the Palestinian population. It is not the protesters making an association between Jews and Israel. It is the Zionist Jewish families Phillipson has spoken to – and non-Jews such as Phillipson and Sky’s Philips who think like them. There is a quick fix to this “problem”, one that does not involve shredding the right to protest and freedom of speech, or fining universities who allow students to protest. And that is for the British government, and the British media, to stop treating Israel like it is a normal member of the community of nations – after it has just committed genocide and, on a very best-case scenario, is about to return to a status quo in which Palestinians are brutally abused under systems of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and siege. It is for the British government and media to make clear to Zionist Jewish families, and those non-Jews who think like them, that it is not okay to identify with a criminal state, or to expect any special privilege – protection from being offended – when others want to criticise that criminal state for its criminal actions. There are plenty of British Jews who do not identify with Israel. In fact, many are repulsed by its actions and take part in anti-genocide demonstrations like the one at the weekend in London. Anyone offended by the protests needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. Their offence signals not just an identification with Israel, but an endorsement of its actions, including its genocide and apartheid rule over Palestinians. So why is the government getting this issue so wrong? Here we get to the nub of the matter. The British establishment, including the government and media, are not a disinterested party simply concerned with protecting Jews. Rather, they are an elite desperately trying to protect their own interests in a system of US-driven military supremacy that confers on western powers a sense of their complete entitlement to control over the world’s material resources, most especially in the oil-rich Middle East. Israel is a central pillar of this criminal, militarised enterprise, which is why it needs to be protected at all costs. That cost has included hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed and maimed in Gaza over the past two years. But it also includes the freedoms and rights we once took for granted. Now we see that these freedoms were only ever on licence from the ruling class – a licence that is being revoked now that we have proved too unruly, too defiant, too rebellious.

Jonathan Cook

44,135 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

The Tradingview Source Code Hack: How Claude Code Actually Makes You Profitable building a trading bot in 2026 is less about being a genius coder and more about having the guts to stop letting your emotions drive your portfolio into a ditch. i spent years thinking that code was some secret language for the elite while i was busy getting liquidated on trades that should have been easy wins. the truth is that the simplest piece of automation can be the difference between a blown account and a system that actually grows while you sleep most traders are stuck in a loop of staring at charts until their eyes bleed and then making a panic decision at the worst possible moment. i used to be that guy who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers because i thought i was too far behind to learn it myself. the moment i realized that code is the great equalizer was the moment i stopped being a victim of market makers who can see every single move i make the hardest part of trading is the transition from manual clicking to full automation and that is where most people quit because they think it is an all or nothing game. you do not need a bot that does everything on day one but you do need a way to stop yourself from over trading and hitting the market button like a slot machine. imagine if you could just tell a script to enter a position for you slowly over time so you never have to worry about catching a falling knife ever again the secret weapon in this 2026 landscape is something i call the easy bot which is basically a remote control for your trading discipline. most people use too much leverage and never take profits because their brain tells them it will go higher right before the dump hits. by using a chunking entry system you can tell your bot to buy a position piece by piece which averages your entry and keeps your heart rate low most traders do not realize that exchanges and market makers can see your stop loss sitting right there on the order book like a giant target. if you are tired of getting stopped out only to see the price immediately reverse in your direction then you need to understand the power of a ghost stop loss. a ghost stop loss lives in your code and not on the exchange so the market makers have no idea where your pain point is until the bot actually sends the close order this invisible protection is a game changer for anyone trading on high volatility chains like solana or hyperliquid where the wick hunting is relentless. i learned this the hard way after watching my manual trades get hunted over and over while my automated systems stayed perfectly safe in the shadows. once you have a bot monitoring your positions for you the stress of a potential liquidation basically vanishes because the machine does not hesitate when it is time to exit the real fun begins when you start thinking like a market maker instead of a gambler who is just hoping for a moon shot. instead of guessing where the top is you can set up a simple logic loop that says buy under this price and sell over that price all day long. this allows you to capture the sideways chop that normally drains a manual trader through fees and bad entries while you are out at the beach or focusing on your business breakout trading is another area where manual traders lose their edge because they are either too slow to react or they enter way too late on a fake out. a simple script can sit there and monitor price action 24/7 with more patience than any human being could ever dream of having. when the breakout actually happens the bot triggers the entry in milliseconds while you are still trying to unlock your phone and open the exchange app i started learning to code live on youtube because i wanted to prove that anyone can do this if they are willing to iterate to success. it is not about getting it perfect on the first try but about building the foundation with functions that get the position and check the token price. every single bot i run today is just a combination of these basic building blocks that i have refined over the last five years of building in public if you are still trading by hand you are essentially bringing a knife to a gunfight in a market that is increasingly dominated by ai and high frequency systems. my goal with the road map and the open source code is to give you the same tools the big players have without you having to spend a fortune on devs. code allows you to backtest your ideas against historical data so you can see if your strategy actually works before you risk a single dollar of your hard earned capital the journey from a hand trader to a pseudo automated trader is the most important step you will ever take for your financial freedom. as you start to automate your entries and exits you will notice that your life gets better because the machine handles the boredom and the stress. eventually you will find that you are no longer chasing the market but instead you are letting your systems do the work while you live your life the way you want to i believe that the era of the manual retail trader is coming to an end but the era of the retail coder is just getting started. through the pain of my own liquidations i found the path to automation and i am never going back to the old way of doing things. keep building and keep iterating because the great equalizer is right there in the terminal waiting for you to take control of your future
30:38

The Tradingview Source Code Hack: How Claude Code Actually Makes You Profitable building a trading bot in 2026 is less about being a genius coder and more about having the guts to stop letting your emotions drive your portfolio into a ditch. i spent years thinking that code was some secret language for the elite while i was busy getting liquidated on trades that should have been easy wins. the truth is that the simplest piece of automation can be the difference between a blown account and a system that actually grows while you sleep most traders are stuck in a loop of staring at charts until their eyes bleed and then making a panic decision at the worst possible moment. i used to be that guy who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on developers because i thought i was too far behind to learn it myself. the moment i realized that code is the great equalizer was the moment i stopped being a victim of market makers who can see every single move i make the hardest part of trading is the transition from manual clicking to full automation and that is where most people quit because they think it is an all or nothing game. you do not need a bot that does everything on day one but you do need a way to stop yourself from over trading and hitting the market button like a slot machine. imagine if you could just tell a script to enter a position for you slowly over time so you never have to worry about catching a falling knife ever again the secret weapon in this 2026 landscape is something i call the easy bot which is basically a remote control for your trading discipline. most people use too much leverage and never take profits because their brain tells them it will go higher right before the dump hits. by using a chunking entry system you can tell your bot to buy a position piece by piece which averages your entry and keeps your heart rate low most traders do not realize that exchanges and market makers can see your stop loss sitting right there on the order book like a giant target. if you are tired of getting stopped out only to see the price immediately reverse in your direction then you need to understand the power of a ghost stop loss. a ghost stop loss lives in your code and not on the exchange so the market makers have no idea where your pain point is until the bot actually sends the close order this invisible protection is a game changer for anyone trading on high volatility chains like solana or hyperliquid where the wick hunting is relentless. i learned this the hard way after watching my manual trades get hunted over and over while my automated systems stayed perfectly safe in the shadows. once you have a bot monitoring your positions for you the stress of a potential liquidation basically vanishes because the machine does not hesitate when it is time to exit the real fun begins when you start thinking like a market maker instead of a gambler who is just hoping for a moon shot. instead of guessing where the top is you can set up a simple logic loop that says buy under this price and sell over that price all day long. this allows you to capture the sideways chop that normally drains a manual trader through fees and bad entries while you are out at the beach or focusing on your business breakout trading is another area where manual traders lose their edge because they are either too slow to react or they enter way too late on a fake out. a simple script can sit there and monitor price action 24/7 with more patience than any human being could ever dream of having. when the breakout actually happens the bot triggers the entry in milliseconds while you are still trying to unlock your phone and open the exchange app i started learning to code live on youtube because i wanted to prove that anyone can do this if they are willing to iterate to success. it is not about getting it perfect on the first try but about building the foundation with functions that get the position and check the token price. every single bot i run today is just a combination of these basic building blocks that i have refined over the last five years of building in public if you are still trading by hand you are essentially bringing a knife to a gunfight in a market that is increasingly dominated by ai and high frequency systems. my goal with the road map and the open source code is to give you the same tools the big players have without you having to spend a fortune on devs. code allows you to backtest your ideas against historical data so you can see if your strategy actually works before you risk a single dollar of your hard earned capital the journey from a hand trader to a pseudo automated trader is the most important step you will ever take for your financial freedom. as you start to automate your entries and exits you will notice that your life gets better because the machine handles the boredom and the stress. eventually you will find that you are no longer chasing the market but instead you are letting your systems do the work while you live your life the way you want to i believe that the era of the manual retail trader is coming to an end but the era of the retail coder is just getting started. through the pain of my own liquidations i found the path to automation and i am never going back to the old way of doing things. keep building and keep iterating because the great equalizer is right there in the terminal waiting for you to take control of your future

Moon Dev

38,657 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

🚨NEW - House Speaker Mike Johnson delivers first floor speech on border catastrophe, accusing President Biden of intentionally creating a "clear and present danger to our national security." "Since I was elected Speaker less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration. American schoolchildren have been forced into virtual schools so migrants can sleep in their school buildings. Korean War veterans have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants. Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Vulnerable children and women are being exploited and trafficked by cartels. Since President Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas assumed office, there have been more than 7 million encounters with illegal aliens just at our southern border alone. 35 of our 50 states, including my home state of Louisiana, don't have a population that large. More than 300 individuals who are on our terror watchlist have been apprehended on the southern border. The frightening question is, how many have entered undetected? We know there are at least 1.8 million gotaways that have escaped. Understand that the situation at our border presents a clear and present danger to our national security, and it demands that it be addressed. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Homeland Security Committee in November that these gotaways are a great concern for the agency, and all 56 of our Joint Terrorism Task Forces are trying to identify who these people are. We don't know how many terrorists are inside our borders. We do know that fentanyl is pouring into our communities like an open sewer. Right now, the leading cause of death of death in America for Americans aged 18 to 46 is fentanyl poisoning. To make matters worse, we've learned that the Biden administration is now simply just releasing 85% of the illegals who come across that border right into the country. For reference, by the way, in 2013, the Obama administration detained 82% of illegal aliens. How do we go from detaining 82% to releasing 85%? It only happens if this is by design. It only happens if it's an orchestrated intentional effort by the administration to do exactly that, and that is what the evidence shows. Earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country. The very first day President Biden walked into the Oval Office, he revoked Executive Order 9844. Do you know what that did? It ended the construction of the border wall that Congress had already paid for. Everybody has seen the images of the materials out there rotting in the sun. Why? Because Joe Biden decided unilaterally that he didn't want a wall. In February 2021, the administration stopped applying Title 42 expulsions to children and incentivize by doing that incentivize families to send unaccompanied children through Mexico under the watch of cartels and traffickers. Since then, the administration admits to losing track of more than 80,000 unaccompanied children somewhere in the US. We don't know where they are. Have they been put into trafficking rings? We know that some of these kids are being trafficked for free labor and being forced to do things that are too appalling for us to articulate on this floor. Everybody here knows that's happening, and we're not demanding the President stop it? He can. He has the power to do it. In October 2021, the Biden administration revoked the migrant protection protocols that had been instituted under President Trump. That's the policy that we all know colloquially as Remain in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico policy kept asylum seekers in a safe haven third country while they were seeking asylum in the United States. Do you know why that works magically so well? Because it sent a message around the world that you shouldn't pay your life savings to a cartel to traffic you through Mexico and drop you over the US border because you're not going to be dropped over the US border. The word goes out on social media to countries all around the world. They are not going to let you in. Man, is that the most common sense rule you've ever thought of? President Biden doesn't agree because he stopped it. He issued an executive order to stop that common sense rule. A senior border patrol officer told us on that trip to Eagle Pass that if President Biden, by the stroke of a pen, would issue an executive order today to just simply reinstate Remain in Mexico, they think that would stop the flow by 70%. One stroke of the pen by the President. He does not seem to care. I told President Biden this myself on multiple occasions, most recently, a couple of weeks ago on the phone, I read him the law that says that he has all this authority, but he refuses to act. And even that's even despite court orders, by the way that instructed the administration to reinstate the institute remain in Mexico while the litigation was going on. You know what they did? They ignored it. The Biden administration is actively incentivizing illegals to come to the United States. We have laid out the welcome mat. We told everybody around the world, come on, you know what? The US taxpayer will take care of you. It's costing the American people billions and billions and billions of dollars to provide for people who are intentionally breaking our laws, billions and billions of dollars to house them and educate them and clothe them and take care of them. Why should we bear the burden when they break our laws? In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the use of the Customs and Border Patrol One App so illegal aliens could just make appointments and then be released immediately right into America's interior. Guess what? 95% of all illegals who simply scheduled appointments through the app were released right into the United States. That's right. All you have to do is just download the app because they all have smartphones, make an appointment, and the President of the United States will release you into a network of NGOs who will put you on a plane to the destination of your choice. Without identification, by the way, while Americans are waiting in line to get through TSA. All on the dime of the American taxpayer. In December 2023, CBP recorded more than 302,000 encounters, almost double the population of my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. In just one month 302,000 people just walked right into the country. I could go on and on about the 64 actions we've documented that President Biden has specifically taken to open our border wide up, but it's crystal clear his policy choices and Secretary Mayorkas refusal to comply with the law are driving this border catastrophe. They have chosen disorder and chaos for us rather than securing the homeland. They've ceded the homeland to cartels and traffickers. In the Del Rio sector alone in Eagle Pass, Texas, the cartels are making an estimated $3.5 million dollars a day trafficking human beings into our country. Do the math. They are making billions of dollars a year trafficking undocumented children and victims into this country. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a taxi driver to just help traffickers complete the last few miles of their human smuggling operation, and they're making billions of dollars in the process. It's absolute madness, and it is dismantling the safety of our communities. More than half a million known criminals and illegal aliens are in the US in our communities, free to re-offend and victimize American people. When we were at Eagle Pass in the Del Rio sector earlier in January, they told us that 60 to 70% of the people coming across the border right there at that epicenter are single adult males. They're military-aged. These are not huddled masses of families seeking refuge and asylum. These are people coming into our country to do only God knows what. The Biden administration is allowing it, and we've noted that they are coming from adversarial nations and from terrorist regions. We have no idea what they're planning. But in fiscal year 2023, border patrol encountered illegals from 170 different countries, including hundreds from Iran and Syria, thousands from Russia, and tens of thousands have come in from China. Tell me that's not dangerous? Law enforcement and intelligence leaders are warning us that we may very well suffer a preventable terrorist attack here in the homeland if we don't immediately secure that border and remove these dangerous terrorists from inside our borders. I read the black letter law to the President of the United States on the phone about two and a half weeks ago. I said, Mr. President, it says very clearly that you have all the tools and the executive authority necessary to reverse the catastrophe that you have created. He has those tools right now, and he has since day one. We have to decide if we believe in the rule of law or not. We have to decide if we're a sovereign nation or we're not. I believe that border security is part of our solemn obligation to safeguard the well-being of our citizens and uphold the principles that define who we are as a nation. A weak border weakens America, and a strong border is good for America, and a stronger America is good for everybody around the world. And everybody in this chamber should acknowledge that. Just as we lock our doors at night to protect our homes, we secure our borders to protect our homeland. And my friends, that is our sacred obligation." Speaker Mike Johnson
29:19

🚨NEW - House Speaker Mike Johnson delivers first floor speech on border catastrophe, accusing President Biden of intentionally creating a "clear and present danger to our national security." "Since I was elected Speaker less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration. American schoolchildren have been forced into virtual schools so migrants can sleep in their school buildings. Korean War veterans have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants. Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Vulnerable children and women are being exploited and trafficked by cartels. Since President Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas assumed office, there have been more than 7 million encounters with illegal aliens just at our southern border alone. 35 of our 50 states, including my home state of Louisiana, don't have a population that large. More than 300 individuals who are on our terror watchlist have been apprehended on the southern border. The frightening question is, how many have entered undetected? We know there are at least 1.8 million gotaways that have escaped. Understand that the situation at our border presents a clear and present danger to our national security, and it demands that it be addressed. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Homeland Security Committee in November that these gotaways are a great concern for the agency, and all 56 of our Joint Terrorism Task Forces are trying to identify who these people are. We don't know how many terrorists are inside our borders. We do know that fentanyl is pouring into our communities like an open sewer. Right now, the leading cause of death of death in America for Americans aged 18 to 46 is fentanyl poisoning. To make matters worse, we've learned that the Biden administration is now simply just releasing 85% of the illegals who come across that border right into the country. For reference, by the way, in 2013, the Obama administration detained 82% of illegal aliens. How do we go from detaining 82% to releasing 85%? It only happens if this is by design. It only happens if it's an orchestrated intentional effort by the administration to do exactly that, and that is what the evidence shows. Earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country. The very first day President Biden walked into the Oval Office, he revoked Executive Order 9844. Do you know what that did? It ended the construction of the border wall that Congress had already paid for. Everybody has seen the images of the materials out there rotting in the sun. Why? Because Joe Biden decided unilaterally that he didn't want a wall. In February 2021, the administration stopped applying Title 42 expulsions to children and incentivize by doing that incentivize families to send unaccompanied children through Mexico under the watch of cartels and traffickers. Since then, the administration admits to losing track of more than 80,000 unaccompanied children somewhere in the US. We don't know where they are. Have they been put into trafficking rings? We know that some of these kids are being trafficked for free labor and being forced to do things that are too appalling for us to articulate on this floor. Everybody here knows that's happening, and we're not demanding the President stop it? He can. He has the power to do it. In October 2021, the Biden administration revoked the migrant protection protocols that had been instituted under President Trump. That's the policy that we all know colloquially as Remain in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico policy kept asylum seekers in a safe haven third country while they were seeking asylum in the United States. Do you know why that works magically so well? Because it sent a message around the world that you shouldn't pay your life savings to a cartel to traffic you through Mexico and drop you over the US border because you're not going to be dropped over the US border. The word goes out on social media to countries all around the world. They are not going to let you in. Man, is that the most common sense rule you've ever thought of? President Biden doesn't agree because he stopped it. He issued an executive order to stop that common sense rule. A senior border patrol officer told us on that trip to Eagle Pass that if President Biden, by the stroke of a pen, would issue an executive order today to just simply reinstate Remain in Mexico, they think that would stop the flow by 70%. One stroke of the pen by the President. He does not seem to care. I told President Biden this myself on multiple occasions, most recently, a couple of weeks ago on the phone, I read him the law that says that he has all this authority, but he refuses to act. And even that's even despite court orders, by the way that instructed the administration to reinstate the institute remain in Mexico while the litigation was going on. You know what they did? They ignored it. The Biden administration is actively incentivizing illegals to come to the United States. We have laid out the welcome mat. We told everybody around the world, come on, you know what? The US taxpayer will take care of you. It's costing the American people billions and billions and billions of dollars to provide for people who are intentionally breaking our laws, billions and billions of dollars to house them and educate them and clothe them and take care of them. Why should we bear the burden when they break our laws? In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the use of the Customs and Border Patrol One App so illegal aliens could just make appointments and then be released immediately right into America's interior. Guess what? 95% of all illegals who simply scheduled appointments through the app were released right into the United States. That's right. All you have to do is just download the app because they all have smartphones, make an appointment, and the President of the United States will release you into a network of NGOs who will put you on a plane to the destination of your choice. Without identification, by the way, while Americans are waiting in line to get through TSA. All on the dime of the American taxpayer. In December 2023, CBP recorded more than 302,000 encounters, almost double the population of my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. In just one month 302,000 people just walked right into the country. I could go on and on about the 64 actions we've documented that President Biden has specifically taken to open our border wide up, but it's crystal clear his policy choices and Secretary Mayorkas refusal to comply with the law are driving this border catastrophe. They have chosen disorder and chaos for us rather than securing the homeland. They've ceded the homeland to cartels and traffickers. In the Del Rio sector alone in Eagle Pass, Texas, the cartels are making an estimated $3.5 million dollars a day trafficking human beings into our country. Do the math. They are making billions of dollars a year trafficking undocumented children and victims into this country. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a taxi driver to just help traffickers complete the last few miles of their human smuggling operation, and they're making billions of dollars in the process. It's absolute madness, and it is dismantling the safety of our communities. More than half a million known criminals and illegal aliens are in the US in our communities, free to re-offend and victimize American people. When we were at Eagle Pass in the Del Rio sector earlier in January, they told us that 60 to 70% of the people coming across the border right there at that epicenter are single adult males. They're military-aged. These are not huddled masses of families seeking refuge and asylum. These are people coming into our country to do only God knows what. The Biden administration is allowing it, and we've noted that they are coming from adversarial nations and from terrorist regions. We have no idea what they're planning. But in fiscal year 2023, border patrol encountered illegals from 170 different countries, including hundreds from Iran and Syria, thousands from Russia, and tens of thousands have come in from China. Tell me that's not dangerous? Law enforcement and intelligence leaders are warning us that we may very well suffer a preventable terrorist attack here in the homeland if we don't immediately secure that border and remove these dangerous terrorists from inside our borders. I read the black letter law to the President of the United States on the phone about two and a half weeks ago. I said, Mr. President, it says very clearly that you have all the tools and the executive authority necessary to reverse the catastrophe that you have created. He has those tools right now, and he has since day one. We have to decide if we believe in the rule of law or not. We have to decide if we're a sovereign nation or we're not. I believe that border security is part of our solemn obligation to safeguard the well-being of our citizens and uphold the principles that define who we are as a nation. A weak border weakens America, and a strong border is good for America, and a stronger America is good for everybody around the world. And everybody in this chamber should acknowledge that. Just as we lock our doors at night to protect our homes, we secure our borders to protect our homeland. And my friends, that is our sacred obligation." Speaker Mike Johnson

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