Video wird geladen...

Video konnte nicht geladen werden

Zur Startseite

Protection can take many different faces. Pick yours June 12th UTC 👴 Skarner 🔫 Ashen Avenger Samira 🌱 Plant Protector Sion

97,880 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten •via X (Twitter)

0 Kommentare

Keine Kommentare verfügbar

Kommentare vom Original-Post werden hier angezeigt

Ähnliche Videos

🟧VIVID Gallery is launching ‘Looming Emotion’ by Shaderism | Arttu 🪞 A mesmerizing exploration of the overlooked aspects of our deepest emotions. 📅Save the Date: June 12th on Magic Eden on Bitcoin 🟧 Launchpad About the Artist 🧑‍🎨 Arttu Koskela is an algorithmic full-time artist, who uses web technologies to create real-time artwork, often incorporating aspects of audio-visuality, interactivity, and physics simulations, while exploring the themes of playfulness and self-reflection. Among his most notable works stands ‘Blinds Spots’, an Art Blocks collection curated. Through the looking-glass 🪞 Looming Emotion is an algorithmic art collection that depicts the conscious and unconscious habitual patterns distracting individuals from the unresolved emotions lurking behind them, which contribute to many of life's challenges. 🗺️ The collection style is inspired by wood carving artworks, glass distortion and Tom Patti’s sculptures. The variety of the 400-piece collection is created by the visual expression of colours in the glass and background, the noise patterns, tile configurations and different aspect ratios. Collector Benefits 💎 All Vivid Gallery and Shaderism | Arttu collectors can apply for a discounted private sale at 0.008 BTC. To participate in the private sale, complete the forms announced in our Discord Server (link in bio). In addition, every SATS holder is eligible for a free piece 🧡 Become a ‘Looming Emotion’ collector 🖼️ Around 100 pieces will be left after the private sale for a FCFS WL at 0.01 BTC. You can get a WL by filling out Vivid & Shaderism's collectors forms, engaging with our content, winning a collaboration raffle from our partner communities and participating in our upcoming spaces. Find all the info on our Discord (link in bio). Try to win a WL spot 🎁 If you'd like to take part in the WL, we're giving away 10 spots through the looking-glass. Participate in the raffle below ⬇️

Vivid Gallery

15,337 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Don’t get it twisted… I know Tesla’s designs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially the Cybertruck. Personally, I think it’s the most beautiful vehicle ever made. You might look at the exact same truck and completely disagree, and that’s fine. I’m not asking everyone to have my taste in cars. But whether you like how a Tesla looks is a different conversation from how well it’s designed to protect you. At Tesla, protecting its occupants is the top priority, and there’s real engineering behind that. Large crumple zones help absorb the energy of a crash, a strong passenger compartment helps protect the people inside, and the low placement of the battery helps reduce rollover risk. Those are things you won’t necessarily appreciate from a photo/video, but they matter when something actually goes wrong during a drive. Take the 2025 Cybertruck… it earned the IIHS Top Safety Pick+ award, with Good overall ratings in ALL three of its main crashworthiness evaluations. That award specifically applies to trucks built after April 2025, following structural changes to improve crash protection. That detail matters bc safety should be about making the vehicle better, instead of just saying it’s safe, like what many other companies do. And this safety level goes beyond just the Cybetruck. The 2025 Model Y also earned Top Safety Pick+, with Good overall ratings across those three crashworthiness evaluations. These are results from an outside safety organization… don’t just take my word as a Tesla owner. There’s also a lot of work that goes into helping prevent a crash in the first place… the 2025 Cybertruck received a Good rating for pedestrian crash prevention, avoiding collisions in the specific daytime and nighttime scenarios IIHS tested. Protecting people means thinking about those outside the vehicle as well. None of that means a Tesla is invincible or that every design decision is beyond criticism. It does however mean we should judge safety by the engineering and the test results, more than whether a vehicle looks good/bad or what political position you sit at vs Elon. For me, this is personal… I’m a dad with two boys. These are the vehicles my family rides in for school runs, basketball practice, and road trips. I absolutely love the design and the technology, but neither would make up for a vehicle I didn’t trust to protect them. My love for a brand will NEVER come ahead of my kids, for real. It’s true… I think my Cybertruck is beautiful. But looking good will always come second to protecting the people inside. I can always replace a vehicle, I can never replace my family. That’s why Tesla’s commitment to putting safety first matters so much to me, and why I’ll always hold them to it. A Tesla is hands down the #1 safest vehicle in the world.

Teslaconomics

17,371 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen

P’Jo on #IWillAlwaysSaveYou 🔫🌶️ —— “You'll get to see #JimmySea in a brand-new perspective and in roles that are challenging for both of them.” 💬: P'Jo, are there any other genres you want to do? You've done comedy, so what about something more intense or emotionally heavy? 🧢: Intense? Honestly, I really want to do something heartwarming. Yeah, heartwarming. I think it's because lately I’ve done two or three comedies back-to-back, and I feel like I've used up a lot of that cheerful energy. So I want to pivot back. Right now, Pongpuen, which I'm working on, is a romantic comedy too, but it's a completely different vibe from “A Dog and A Plane.” It leans more into the “Heart Killer” zone, that kind of feel. It brings smiles, but it's not loud and chaotic, if you know what I mean. It doesn't have that much absurd slapstick. So yeah, heartwarming... or maybe a murder mystery! Working on The Player was fun, but I felt like I wasn't sharp enough back then, so I really want a second chance with that genre. 🧢: Anyway, just wait for “Please Stay Under The Protection of Pongpuen.” That's another project where I'm currently writing the script. You'll get to see JimmySea in a brand-new perspective and in roles that are challenging for both of them. I can guarantee one thing about this series, there are a lot of songs. Seriously, there are so many songs. We definitely needed music for this one. 💬: Are they deep-cut retro songs like the ones from our era, P'Jo? 🧢: There's a mix! Both deep-cut classics and modern hits. They have to be blended together. 💬: Ooh, I want to watch it already! 🧢: Want to watch it already. Yeah! 💬: P'Jo's probably like, "Let me catch my breath!" 🧢: Haha, let me catch my breath, seriously! The thing is, once PongPuen wraps up, I want to take a little break, just a short break. Actually, right after PongPuen, there's already another project lined up, but it's going to be a complete shift in genre. Next year, you'll see me in a whole new direction! Source: channel fanboys YT

Mhokstache ✨

64,120 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

🇺🇸 🇮🇷 MISSILE WAR - One night over Jordan helps explain a much larger problem now confronting the United States. Iran fired roughly 20 ballistic missiles. The U.S. responded with more than 70 high-end interceptors, around 60–70 Patriots and more than a dozen THAADs, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Video below) Some Iranian missiles still got through. The significance is not simply that defenses were imperfect. It is what the United States had to expend to achieve that level of protection. The WSJ reports that some of the Iranian missiles used warheads that separated into multiple projectiles during their approach, complicating the defensive problem. In some engagements, U.S. forces fired three or four interceptors against a single incoming missile. CBS News reported that one A-10 at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base was struck and lost a wing, while roughly eight F-15s sustained light damage. The F-15s were subsequently returned to service. Now put that single night against the numbers Washington released today. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States has probably consumed between one-half and two-thirds of its inventory of certain missile-defense interceptors since June 2025, including Patriot, THAAD, SM-3 and SM-6 missiles. That estimate covers more than the current phase of the Iran war: it also includes interceptors previously expended defending Israel. Replacing the missile-defense interceptors already used is estimated to cost $13.1 billion. More importantly, money cannot immediately solve the problem. CBO says rebuilding the depleted inventories would probably take at least five years, even if production increases. That creates a strategic cost extending well beyond the Middle East. CBO specifically warns that reduced interceptor inventories would become particularly problematic in a conflict against an adversary possessing large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles, and points directly to China's arsenal and a potential conflict over Taiwan. CSIS had already estimated in July that U.S. Patriot inventories had fallen below 1,000 interceptors and THAAD inventories to roughly 250. Against that backdrop, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper gave CBS a very different assessment this weekend. Asked how concerned he was about dwindling munitions, Cooper replied: “I'm not concerned at all. We're well armed and ready for any contingency.” The Pentagon may have sufficient weapons for its current operational requirements. The harder question raised by the CBO is one of depth and regeneration: how many more nights requiring dozens of premium interceptors can the United States absorb while simultaneously preserving missile-defense capacity for Europe, the Middle East and a potential Indo-Pacific contingency? Jordan provided a real-world demonstration of that arithmetic. Roughly 20 Iranian ballistic missiles. More than 70 Patriot and THAAD launches, and an industrial base that may need years to replace what can be fired in minutes.

The Tectonic

22,783 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen

A 550 kg animal can be in agony for weeks and never make a single sound. No scream. No cry. Just a stride that is two centimeters shorter, a little more weight shifted to the other side, a head that nods one beat too late. Most owners miss it. Most vets only catch it when it has already become expensive. The person who catches it first usually has dirt under their nails, a leather apron, and a steel rasp in their hand. This is the story of the most underrated profession in the horse world, and of one uncomfortable fact: an entire industry worth billions rests on four structures, each roughly the size of a saucer. Read this slowly. You will never look at a horse's legs the same way again. 1. THE ANIMAL THAT HIDES PAIN ON PURPOSE Horses are prey animals. For roughly 55 million years, the horse lineage survived by one rule: do not look weak. In the wild, the limping horse is the horse that gets eaten. The one that stops, flinches and cries out is the one the lions can hear. So evolution wrote a brutal instruction into the nervous system: hide it. Keep running. Pretend everything is fine. That instruction is still running in every stable, every racetrack and every backyard paddock on the planet. A horse with a hot, throbbing abscess building under its sole can still walk to the gate to greet you. A horse with early laminitis can still eat its dinner. A horse in chronic foot pain can still carry a rider for an hour and show you almost nothing. This is why horse people repeat one sentence like a prayer: No foot, no horse. It is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis. An enormous number of lameness problems begin in the foot, and the foot is exactly where the animal is best at hiding them. Now think about what that means for the person trusted to look at that foot every six to eight weeks. They are not a hobbyist with a file. They are the early-warning system for an animal that is biologically designed to lie to you. 2. FOUR SMALL PLATES CARRYING A HALF TON Here is a number that should bother you. An adult horse can weigh 500 to 600 kg. When it stands, that weight is not spread across a wide, cushioned surface like a camel's foot or a dog's paw. It is balanced on four hooves. Each hoof is a single toe. One toe. The horse is walking on the tip of what would be our middle fingernail, enlarged and armored over millions of years, with the rest of the finger stretched into a long lever that we call the leg. When that animal gallops, the foot hits the ground with forces that are several times its body weight, again and again, at speed, on surfaces that range from sand to asphalt to frozen clay. And the engineering that handles this is not metal or carbon fiber. It is keratin, the same protein family as your fingernails and hair, arranged into one of the most sophisticated shock-absorbing structures in biology. Let us open it up. 3. WHAT IS ACTUALLY INSIDE THE HOOF The outside is the part you see: the hoof wall. It is dead tissue, which is why a trim does not hurt when it is done correctly. Think of it as a thick protective capsule. The wall grows down from the coronary band, the ring of living tissue at the top of the hoof, at roughly 6 to 10 millimeters a month. A hoof that is completely replaced from top to bottom takes about nine months to a year. Every ring, bulge and crack you see on a hoof is a diary entry: illness, a diet change, a stressful season, a hard training block. The hoof records it all and carries the record downward. Underneath is where it gets wild. The wall is not glued to the bone like a boot on a foot. It is attached by the laminae, a set of interlocking leaf-like folds. Hundreds of primary laminae, each carrying a fringe of smaller secondary ones, lock together like two hands with fingers interlaced. Together they create an enormous attachment surface, large enough to suspend the entire skeleton of the horse inside the hoof capsule. Read that again. The coffin bone, the last bone in the leg, is not resting on the ground. It is hanging inside the hoof from this interlocking structure. Below the bone sits the digital cushion, a fibrous pad of tissue that behaves like a shock absorber. And at the center of the sole is the frog, the soft, V-shaped, rubbery structure that most people mistake for a flaw. It is not a flaw. It is a pump. Each time the hoof lands, the frog and the digital cushion compress and flex, and that deformation helps push blood back up the leg against gravity. Horses do not have large muscles in the lower leg. They rely on this mechanism to move blood. The hoof is part of the circulatory system. So when someone trims, shapes and balances this structure, they are not cutting a toenail. They are adjusting a hydraulic suspension system that the animal's circulation, joints and tendons all depend on. 4. WHEN THE SUSPENSION FAILS Now the dark part. If the laminae become inflamed and weaken, the bond between the hoof wall and the bone starts to fail. This is laminitis, and in its worst form the bone can rotate or sink inside the hoof capsule. The horse is, quite literally, standing on its own skeleton. Owners describe the posture they see: a horse rocking back onto its heels, leaning away from its front feet, refusing to move, shifting weight constantly because nothing feels safe. Veterinarians check for heat in the hoof and a strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock. Laminitis is among the most feared conditions in equine medicine. It is linked to metabolic disease, to sudden changes in diet, to rich spring grass, to severe illness and to excessive load on the opposite limb when the other one is injured. That last cause matters. Two of the most famous horses of the modern era are tied to this story. Secretariat, the champion whose 31-length Belmont Stakes win in 1973 is still one of the most celebrated performances in sport, was euthanized in 1989 after laminitis in his hooves became untreatable. Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner, shattered bones in his right hind leg at the 2006 Preakness. Surgeons saved him for a while. But carrying the weight on the other legs triggered laminitis in the opposite hind foot, and he was euthanized in January 2007. Different horses. Same lesson. The foot is not the end of the story of a horse's health. Very often it is the chapter that decides how the story ends. That is the stage on which a farrier works. 5. THE PROFESSION NOBODY THINKS ABOUT The word farrier comes from the Latin ferrum, iron. For centuries, the person who shod horses was also the blacksmith, the toolmaker, and in many armies the one who kept the cavalry moving. Before that, people tried everything to protect hooves. The Romans used hipposandals, iron plates strapped to the foot. Nailed iron horseshoes appear in Europe in the early Middle Ages, and once they spread, they changed the world. A horse that could travel on stone roads without its feet wearing away was a horse that could pull heavier plows, carry heavier knights and cross whole continents. Entire empires moved on horseshoes. There is an old rhyme about it, the one that ends with a kingdom lost for want of a nail. Armies did not lose battles to dramatic reasons. They lost them to a thrown shoe, a lame horse, a missing man who knew how to fix it. Today the job looks different, but the core is the same. A modern farrier is part metalworker, part anatomist, part biomechanics specialist, part athletic trainer, and part psychologist for an animal that can kick with enough force to break bone. They do this work bent over, holding a leg that weighs more than a fully grown person's thigh, often in heat, mud or freezing wind. The physical toll is huge. Back problems are an occupational norm. Careers are measured in how many years the body lasts. And yet the margin for error is tiny. A few millimeters off in the angle of the hoof can change how load travels through the joints and tendons above it. A shoe set slightly too far forward or back can change where the horse breaks over at the end of each stride. A nail driven just wrong can hit sensitive tissue. The craft is not about doing something dramatic. It is about being right by a hair, thousands of times, on a living animal that is not holding still for you. 6. THE GEOMETRY NOBODY SEES Most people look at a trimmed hoof and see a clean surface. A farrier sees a set of angles, lines and balances. The hoof wall has to be trimmed so that it meets the ground evenly. The toe length, the height of the heels, the width of the heel base and the angle of the hoof relative to the pastern above it all matter. In many horses, a front hoof angle somewhere around the low fifties in degrees is considered a reference point, but there is no single magic number. The right answer depends on the horse's conformation, its discipline and its history. The goal is balance in two directions. From the side, the hoof angle should flow in a roughly straight line with the bones of the pastern. When it does not, forces concentrate where they should not. A long toe with a low heel can increase strain on the tendons at the back of the leg. A collapsed heel can change the load on the navicular region. From the front, the hoof should land flat. If one side is higher, the joint above takes the difference. Then there is breakover, the moment the heel lifts and the hoof pivots forward over the toe. Move that point and you change how hard the horse must work to take each step. A farrier can roll, square or set back a toe to make breakover easier. Over thousands of strides, that matters. A trim and a shoe are not a haircut and an accessory. They are small design decisions with cumulative consequences, and the horse pays for every error in a currency it cannot report. 7. WHY THE SHOE GOES ON HOT Here is the part that fascinates people who have never seen it. Many farriers heat the horseshoe in a forge until it glows orange and then press it briefly against the hoof. Smoke rises. There is a hiss. A smell that people who have been near it will never forget. It looks aggressive. It is not painful for the horse when done correctly, because the wall it touches is insensitive, and the contact is brief. The shoe is not nailed on while glowing. The hot contact leaves a mark, a map of exactly where the shoe and the hoof are not meeting perfectly. The farrier adjusts the shoe or the hoof, cools it, and repeats until the fit is true. Hot fitting is a diagnostic tool disguised as a ritual. The burn mark shows high spots and gaps that the eye can miss. A flat, sealed fit distributes load. A rocking fit concentrates it. Forges used for this reach temperatures in the neighborhood of a thousand degrees Celsius. Steel becomes workable at a glowing orange. Cooled in water or air, it holds the new shape. Cold shoeing, where the shoe is shaped without being heated, is also widely used, especially with pre-made or modified shoes. Neither method is automatically superior. Both rely on the skill of the person using them. 8. THE NAIL THAT IS DESIGNED TO COME OUT THE SIDE If you want to understand how precise this work is, look at the nail. A horseshoe nail is not a standard nail. It has a beveled tip and a specific shape so that when it is driven into the hoof wall, it curves outward and exits through the side of the wall, usually a couple of centimeters above the ground. The farrier drives it, feels the path, and twists off the sharp tip. The remaining end is bent over and tightened into a clinch that locks the shoe in place. The nail travels through the thick outer wall and is supposed to stay in the zone of insensitive tissue. The line where the wall meets the sole, the white line, serves as a guide. Too close, and the nail can press on sensitive structures. Too shallow, and the shoe will not hold. The farrier is working by sound and feel as much as by sight. Experienced hands can tell from the resistance and the sound whether the nail is traveling right. A subtle change in the tap of the hammer is information. You cannot automate this with a rule. You learn it by thousands of repetitions, some of them bad, under the guidance of someone who has been doing it for decades. 9. SHOES, NO SHOES, AND THE ARGUMENT THAT NEVER ENDS If you want to start a fight in a barn, ask whether horses need shoes. Here is the honest version. Some horses do very well barefoot. They have strong, well-shaped feet, they live on suitable terrain, and their workload does not demand extra protection. Many owners and professionals support barefoot management and some horses clearly thrive on it. Other horses need shoes. A shoe can add protection on abrasive ground, provide traction, support a foot with a specific problem, change the way load moves through a limb, or hold a therapeutic pad or medication in place. Horses with certain conditions are shod with special designs: wide webbed shoes, bar shoes, heart bar shoes, wedge pads, rocker toes. The best farriers are not ideologues. They look at the horse in front of them. What most people do not realize is how much of this is a conversation between three parties: the owner, the veterinarian and the farrier. When the three communicate, a lameness that might have run for months can be solved in a single visit. When they do not, the horse bounces between opinions while the foot keeps changing. If you take one practical thing from this post, take this: your farrier is part of your horse's medical team. Treat them like it. 10. THE TECHNOLOGY THAT IS QUIETLY CHANGING THE TRADE The forge and hammer are ancient. The tools around them are not. Digital radiography lets veterinarians and farriers see the exact position of the coffin bone inside the hoof, measure its angle, and plan a trim or shoe based on the real internal structure instead of guessing from the outside. Pressure-sensing plates and sensor-fitted shoes measure how load is distributed under the foot at each phase of the stride. High-speed video breaks down how a hoof lands, rolls and leaves the ground. Thermal imaging shows heat patterns in the foot and lower limb that can point to inflammation before it becomes visible. New materials have entered the market: aluminum shoes for racing, composite and polymer shoes that absorb shock, glue-on systems for horses with thin or damaged walls, and even 3D-printed hoof components that can be matched to an individual foot. In the middle of all of that, the ancient skill remains the bottleneck. A scan can tell you what is wrong. It cannot hold the leg, make the shoe, set the angle, and respond when the horse shifts at the wrong moment. The future of this trade is not machines replacing hands. It is hands armed with better information than any generation before them. 11. THE MENTAL GAME NOBODY TALKS ABOUT A farrier does not just handle metal. They handle fear. A horse is a flight animal. It is also a very large animal that has to stand on three legs while a stranger holds one foot, bends it, taps it, scrapes it, and sometimes heats metal next to it. Every instinct in its body says this is a vulnerable position. Great farriers read horses the way chess players read a board. They notice an ear tilting back, a shoulder tightening, a tail swishing in a different rhythm. They adjust their position, their breathing and their pace before the horse reacts. They know that rushing a nervous horse makes the next visit worse. They know that a young horse that learns to trust at its first trim can be easy for life, and a young horse that is frightened once can remember it for years. Calm is a technical skill in this job. Patience is a tool, as real as a rasp. And there is a strange side effect of watching someone do this well. Humans are wired to find mastery deeply satisfying. When we watch a person perform a precise, repeated, difficult task without hesitation, our brains respond with something close to relief. There is no waste. No panic. No improvisation that falls apart. Just a process, executed. That is part of why millions of people who have never owned a horse stop scrolling for this kind of work. It is a form of order, performed on a living creature that is anything but orderly. 12. THE QUIET MATH OF NEGLECT Let us do some arithmetic. The hoof grows continuously. If it is not trimmed, the wall gets longer, the toe flares, the heels can collapse underneath, and the balance of the whole foot drifts. In a few weeks, that drift is small. In a few months, it is significant. A hoof is a structure whose problems compound slowly and invisibly. Most horses on a normal schedule are seen every six to eight weeks. That is roughly seven to eight visits a year, per horse, for the animal's entire working life, which in many cases stretches past twenty years. Over that span, a good farrier makes tens of thousands of small decisions on a single horse. Now multiply that by the number of horses in the world. There are on the order of tens of millions. Every one of them is relying on someone, somewhere, to make those decisions well. When it goes right, nobody notices. The horse moves freely. The rider feels a good horse. The owner pays a bill and forgets about it. When it goes wrong, it can end a career, a competition season or a life. The best work in this profession is invisible. It looks like nothing happened. 13. WHAT THE HORSE IS TRYING TO TELL YOU Since the horse will not scream, you have to learn the whispers. These are the signs that experienced horse people check for. They are general information, not a diagnosis, and they never replace a veterinarian. The stance. A horse that stands with its front feet stretched out in front, or rocks its weight back onto its heels, is telling you something. So is one that constantly shifts weight from foot to foot. The pulse. A strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock can indicate inflammation inside the foot. A calm, faint pulse is normal. Learning what normal feels like on your own horse is the whole trick. The heat. Run your hand over the hoof wall. A foot that is noticeably warmer than the others deserves attention. The stride. A shorter step, a head that bobs, a horse that suddenly dislikes turning in one direction or walking on hard ground. Subtle changes matter more than dramatic ones. The smell and the sole. A sharp, rotten smell from the underside of the foot can mean thrush, a bacterial infection that thrives in wet, packed conditions. Soft, crumbling tissue or black discharge is not something to wait on. The rings. Ridges that run across the hoof wall can mark periods of stress, dietary change or illness. They are a timeline written in horn. The behavior. A horse that suddenly resists being picked up, or pins its ears when you touch a foot, may not be misbehaving. It may be asking you to stop. And the emergency rule, the one that matters most. A horse that is suddenly refusing to bear weight on a limb, or showing severe heat and a pounding pulse in the foot, is a call-the-vet-now situation. Not tomorrow. Not after the weekend. Hooves reward the fast and punish the hopeful. 14. FIVE MYTHS THAT KEEP HORSES SUFFERING Myth one: if the horse is not limping, the feet are fine. Reality: horses are masters of compensation. By the time the limp is obvious, the problem has often been building for a long time. Myth two: the frog is useless and should be cut away. Reality: the frog is part of the shock-absorbing and circulation system of the foot. A farrier removes loose, ragged tissue, but a healthy frog is not a defect. Myth three: shoes are always cruel. Reality: shoes are a tool. Used well, they can protect and support. Used badly, they can cause problems, which is exactly why the person fitting them matters. Myth four: a trim is a trim. Reality: two trims on the same hoof can produce two different outcomes in how load travels through the leg. The difference is knowledge and judgment. Myth five: hoof care is an expense you can postpone. Reality: it is one of the cheapest forms of preventive medicine in the horse world, and problems left too long are among the most expensive to repair. 15. WHAT THIS TRADE TEACHES THE REST OF US Step back from the horses for a second. This profession is a lesson in a kind of work our culture is quietly losing: work that cannot be faked. You cannot fake a fit that holds. You cannot fake an angle that is right. You cannot fake the trust of a thousand-pound animal that has to stand still while you work with sharp tools near its leg. The feedback is immediate and honest. If the craft is good, the horse moves well. If it is not, the horse tells you, eventually, with the only language it has. There is a reason people drawn to this trade often speak about it like a calling. The work is hard, the hours are physical, the pay is not always proportional to the skill, and the conditions are rarely comfortable. But the loop is clean: you see a problem, you apply skill, you fix it, and a living creature walks away better than it came. In a world full of work that disappears into meetings and screens, that is rare and powerful. It is also why the best farriers carry themselves with a particular quiet confidence. They are not trying to impress anyone. They have already been judged by the toughest evaluator there is: a horse, on four feet, on real ground, every day. 16. ONE MORE NUMBER TO SIT WITH The hoof wall itself has no feeling. That is the reason a good trim is painless. But directly beneath it sits living tissue packed with blood vessels and nerves. The border between the part that does not feel and the part that feels everything is measured in millimeters. Every single visit, someone works along that border with sharp tools, steady hands and a mental map of what lies under the surface. That is the job. That is the whole job. No one applauds when a horse takes the first sound step after a visit. No one posts about the lameness that never happened. Yet that quiet nothing is the whole point of the work, and the whole art of it. 17. THE CHECKLIST YOU CAN USE THIS WEEK If you own, ride, board or simply love horses, here is a short list that can change an animal's life. Pick up and clean every foot daily, even when you are not riding. It takes a few minutes, and it is the single best way to notice early changes in smell, heat, cracks, stones and sole condition. Learn your horse's normal. The normal pulse. The normal temperature of each foot. The normal stance. You cannot spot abnormal without a baseline. Keep a fixed schedule with your farrier, usually every six to eight weeks, and adjust it with their advice. Do not wait for a problem to book the visit. Make sure your farrier, your vet and you are in the same conversation. Share X-rays, notes and observations. The best results come from teams, not from silos. Watch the ground daily. Constantly wet, muddy conditions soften hooves and invite infection. Dry, hard ground can bruise soles. Rotate, manage and adapt. Mind the diet. Sudden changes, rich pasture and metabolic problems are tied to the most dangerous foot conditions. Ask your vet about your horse's individual risk. And treat your farrier as the professional they are. Be there on time. Have the horse caught, clean and calm. Pay on time. Respect the work. Good farriers are scarce, and the ones who are worth having are booked months ahead for a reason. 18. THE REAL STORY The real story is not about a tool, a forge or a trick of the trade. It is about an animal that has spent tens of millions of years evolving to hide its pain, standing patiently on four small plates of horn while someone with strong hands and a trained eye decides whether tomorrow will be a good day or a bad one for it. It is about a skill passed down for more than a thousand years, now meeting radiographs, sensors and 3D printing, and still depending on a human being who can feel the difference between right and almost right. And it is about the fact that the most important work is often the work nobody notices. The horse that never went lame. The career that did not end. The animal that simply, quietly, kept moving. Next time you see a horse, look down. Not at the mane, not at the coat, not at the rider. Look at the feet. That is where its whole life is standing. If this changed how you see horses, do three things. Repost it, so someone who owns a horse sees it before their animal has to tell them the hard way. Tag a horse person, a farrier, or the friend who has been saying that something is "a little off" with their horse for weeks. Follow for more deep dives into the invisible crafts that keep the living world moving. This post is general information for awareness and education. It is not veterinary advice. If your horse shows sudden lameness, heat, a pounding digital pulse or refuses to bear weight, call your veterinarian immediately.

Earth Unveiled

40,634 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen

A shark doesn't care that you're standing on the sand. That's the first thing nobody tells you about the shoreline at night. You think the beach is your territory. It's not. It's a border. And after dark, the other side of that border wakes up. Read this slowly. Then watch the video at the bottom. I promise it hits differently once you know what you're actually looking at. Let's start with a number that should not be possible. 450,000,000. That's roughly how many years sharks have been on this planet. Trees showed up later. The dinosaurs showed up later. The Atlantic Ocean, in its current shape, showed up later. Sharks have lived through FIVE mass extinctions, including the one that erased 90% of everything alive, and they came out the other side and kept hunting. You are not dealing with an animal. You are dealing with a survivor that has beaten every single disaster the planet ever threw at it. And tonight, someone decided to pick a fight with one. From the sand. With a rod. Keep reading. --- THE MACHINE UNDER THE WATER Forget the movie version. The real shark is scarier because it's more engineered than any movie ever bothered to show. Start with the nose. Around the snout of a shark sit thousands of tiny jelly-filled pores called the ampullae of Lorenzini. They detect electrical fields. Not "sense vibes." Detect electricity. The faint pulse of a heartbeat. The twitch of a muscle in a fish buried in sand. Researchers estimate the sensitivity is down at a few billionths of a volt per centimeter. Read that again. A shark can feel the electrical whisper of a living thing that is hiding, silent, completely still, in the dark. Then there's the smell. The commonly told version is that a shark can pick up a single drop of blood in an Olympic-sized pool. That's a simplification, but the real point stands: about a third of the shark's entire brain is dedicated to processing scent. It doesn't smell like you smell. It smells directionally. Each nostril reports separately, so it can tell which side the smell is coming from and turn toward it like a missile locking on. Add the eyes. Many sharks have a reflective layer behind the retina, the same trick a cat uses, so that every scrap of light gets a second pass through the eye. Night is not darkness for them. Night is the good part of the day. Add the lateral line, a row of sensors running down the body that reads pressure changes in the water. A struggling fish sends out a signature. A shark reads it from far away like a text message that says "dinner, this way." Now stack all of that together, and picture what's swimming in the surf line while people are laughing on the sand thirty feet away. That's not a fish. That's a surveillance system with teeth. --- THE TEETH THAT NEVER RUN OUT Let's talk about the mouth, because the mouth is where the story gets ugly. A shark doesn't have one set of teeth. It has a conveyor belt. Rows and rows of teeth sit behind the front line, folded down like a deck of cards waiting to be dealt. When a tooth in front snaps off, the next one rotates forward to take its place. Some species can go through tens of thousands of teeth in a lifetime. Some replace a tooth in days. Nobody has ever managed to disarm a shark. Break its weapon and it grows another one before you can blink. And the bite? Depending on the species, a large shark can clamp down with enough force to punch through fish bone, turtle shell and sometimes metal hooks like they're wet cardboard. Not because it's angry. Because it's built that way. There is no malice in it. That's what makes it so unsettling. It doesn't hate you. It doesn't think about you at all. It's just a mouth with a mission. --- WHY THE SHORELINE AT NIGHT IS THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE IN THE OCEAN Here's what surprised me when I started reading about this. Sharks come close to shore on purpose. Not by accident. Not because they got lost. The shallows are a buffet. Baitfish get pushed into the surf line by predators from below and the current from above. Rays bury themselves in the sand. Crabs. Mullet. Everything smaller than the shark is packed into a narrow strip of shallow water with nowhere to run. At night, the smaller fish come in closer because they feel safer in the dark. The sharks know that. So they come in behind them. Which means the exact same strip of water that feels safe to you, ankle deep, knee deep, harmless, is the busiest hunting corridor on the coast the moment the sun goes down. Every night. For millions of years. Long before there was a beach town, a parking lot, or a phone in your hand. And then a group of people decides to stand right in the middle of it, in the dark, with nothing but a headlamp. Not a boat. Not a cage. Not a deck with a railing. Sand. --- THE FIGHT NO ONE PLANS FOR Here's the thing about hooking something big from land. On a boat, you have leverage. You have a deck. You have engines. You can chase the fish, and if it runs, you follow it. On the shore, you have none of that. You have your legs. Your back. A rod that suddenly feels like it's tied to a truck. And the animal on the other end has an entire ocean to pull against. The first thing that happens is the silence. Nobody talks. You hear the reel scream, that high metallic whine of line ripping off the spool faster than your hands can process, and everyone standing around you suddenly forgets how to breathe. Then the rod bends. Not a little. Not the polite bend you see on YouTube. The kind where the tip points at the water and the whole thing looks like it's about to fold in half. And this is where the internal math starts. How much line is left? How long can this hold? Who's going to grab the rod if it's ripped out of your hands? What happens if this thing decides to run parallel to the beach and drag you into the surf? Every second is a negotiation with an animal that outweighs you, outswims you, and doesn't get tired the way you do. Some sharks fight for an hour. Some fight for ten minutes and just as suddenly go slack, and that's worse, because then you don't know if it's giving up or turning around. There's a rule among people who do this: you don't fight the shark. You manage the moment. You let it run, you take back what it gives you, and you never, ever get greedy. Get greedy and something breaks. A line. A hook. A wrist. A decision. --- THE MOMENT IT COMES OUT OF THE DARK This is the part I want you to sit with. Imagine you've been pulling for a long time. Your forearms are shaking. The line is coming in slowly, inch by inch, and the water in front of you is black. Not dark. Black. You can't see three feet down. And then the light from a headlamp catches something. A shape. A darker shape inside the dark water. It's bigger than you thought it would be. It's always bigger than you thought. There's a moment, a single, frozen, electric second, where every person on that beach understands that this is real. That the thing everyone was joking about ten minutes ago is now a few feet away, alive, angry, and looking directly at them with an eye that has no expression at all. And the water erupts. You know that feeling when you're on a rollercoaster and the car tips over the top and you realize it's too late to get off? It's that. Multiplied. With no seatbelt. --- THE ANIMAL IS NOT THE MONSTER YOU THINK IT IS Now, I need to be honest with you, because the internet loves to lie about sharks in both directions. Sharks are not mindless killing machines. That's the myth. Movies invented it, and it cost them decades of lives. The real numbers are the opposite of what you'd expect. Globally, sharks are responsible for around five to ten human deaths in a typical year. Meanwhile humans kill somewhere on the order of seventy to a hundred million sharks a year. Read that again. Seventy to a hundred million. You are far more likely to be killed by a vending machine, a falling coconut, or your own bathtub than by a shark. So why does this animal make our stomachs drop? Because it's the only creature left on Earth that still reminds us we're food. That we're not at the top. That the second we leave the land and step into their world, the rules change, and the rules aren't ours. That's the real reason people are drawn to this. It's not cruelty. It's not bragging. It's the ancient, gut-level need to stand at the edge of something bigger than you and see what it feels like. It's terrifying. It's humbling. And weirdly, it makes you feel more alive than almost anything else. --- WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY IN THE FIRST TEN SECONDS There's a reason people who've stood next to a big predator describe the same thing. Time stops behaving. Adrenaline floods your system. Your pupils open wider. Your heart rate spikes before your brain has finished processing what it saw. Blood pulls from your fingers and toes and floods your large muscles. Your hearing narrows. Fine motor skills, the kind you need to tie a knot or unhook a swivel, get worse in the exact moment you need them most. Psychologists call it the fight-or-flight response. Anyone who's actually been there calls it something else: the moment you find out who you are. Because in that window, there are only three kinds of people. The ones who freeze. The ones who panic. And the ones who get quiet, get precise, and start working. Watch the people around the edges of this scene. Watch who moves toward the animal, who moves away, and who moves with purpose. That difference is the entire story. That's the part you can't fake and can't practice in a gym. --- THE PART OF THE ANIMAL YOU'LL NEVER FORGET Everyone remembers the teeth. Nobody expects the skin. Run your hand along a shark from head to tail and it feels smooth, like silk. Run it back the other way and it feels like sandpaper. That's because the skin is covered in microscopic, tooth-shaped scales called dermal denticles. They're the same basic material as its teeth. They point backward and they reduce drag so well that engineers have studied them to design swimsuits, ship hulls and aircraft coatings. The animal isn't just built to bite. It's built to be silent. Water slides over that skin with almost no turbulence, which means it can come at you without a single ripple announcing it. Then there's the eye. Roll a shark onto its back, or hold certain species in the right way, and something strange happens. Some sharks enter a state called tonic immobility. Muscles relax, breathing slows, and the animal goes still and limp like it's asleep. Scientists still argue about exactly why it works. The state usually wears off within a few minutes, and when it does, the animal snaps back into a full-power predator in an instant. Which is exactly why the people who are truly experienced around sharks are the most respectful of them. The rookies are the ones who relax. --- THE THING ABOUT FLORIDA-STYLE NIGHTS If you've never stood on a warm beach at night, here's what you're missing. The air is thick. The surf hisses. Somewhere down the shoreline a light blinks on a channel marker and disappears. The sand still holds the heat of the day, but the water is a different world entirely. It's the temperature of a bath and it hides everything. Warm coastal water is a nursery. Young sharks live in the shallows because the bigger predators can't follow them in as easily. Baitfish stack up. Rays glide along the sandbar. Some of the most productive shark habitat on the planet is a few steps from a cheap motel and a taco stand. That's what makes it so strange. There's this sharp, almost absurd contrast between the postcard version of the beach and the version that actually exists at 11 p.m. Same coast. Same water. Completely different animal. --- THE RULES THE SMART ONES FOLLOW You'll notice something if you ever spend time around people who catch large sharks from shore and then let them go. They are almost obsessive about the rules. Not because someone is watching. Because they've seen what happens when you cut corners. Keep the animal in the water as much as you possibly can. A big shark's body isn't built to support its own weight out of the water. Organs that float in the sea get crushed by gravity on land. Every second counts. Use gear that lets you end the fight fast. A drawn-out battle exhausts the animal and can harm it long after it swims away. Heavy tackle isn't cruelty. It's mercy. Cut the line if you have to. Any experienced angler will tell you the same thing: a lost hook is cheaper than a lost animal, or a lost finger. Know your local regulations. Rules about which species you can target, how you can handle them and what gear you have to use vary from place to place and change over time. What's fine in one spot can be illegal or protected in another. And most importantly, never go alone. Not with this. Never. This is the part that doesn't go viral. The teamwork. The quiet checks. The person who's watching the water and never touches the rod. The one who's calling out the waves. The scary part of the story gets the clicks. The careful part is what keeps everyone alive. --- A SHARK IS NOT A SINGLE ANIMAL One of the biggest mistakes people make is talking about "the shark" as if it's one thing. There are more than 500 known species. Some are the size of your hand. Some are longer than a bus. Some glow in the dark. Some live in rivers. Some have heads shaped like hammers, and some have snouts like saws. One kind is the biggest fish in the ocean and eats nothing but plankton. Another can live for hundreds of years, the Greenland shark, which may be the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. And some of the ones that hang around warm coastal shallows are strong, thick-bodied, powerful predators built for ambush in murky water and surf. So when someone says "I caught a shark," the real question is: which one? How big? Where? What was it doing there? What did it want? Every one of those answers changes the story. And it's why you can watch two videos of "a shark on a beach" and feel two completely different things. --- THE BULL SHARK PROBLEM Let me tell you about the animal that makes marine biologists nervous. Bull sharks are one of the few sharks that can live in both salt water and fresh water. They have a specialized system that lets their bodies regulate salt, so they can swim far up rivers. Bull sharks have been documented in rivers thousands of miles from the sea, including the Amazon and the Mississippi. They are stocky. They are aggressive. They live in the murkiest, shallowest, most human-crowded water there is, because that's where the food is. You can run through the list of everything sharks are and still not be ready for one that shows up in a canal behind a suburban house. That's part of why the surf line feels different at night. You never know exactly what you've got. You only know you've got something. --- WHY WE CAN'T LOOK AWAY Here's a question worth asking. Why do millions of people watch videos like this? It's not just the danger. It's not just the adrenaline. If it were, we'd watch car crashes and nothing else. It's something quieter than that. It's that a shark reminds us that the world is still wild. That the ocean is still bigger than us. That there are still places we don't control and animals we don't fully understand. We live in a world where everything is mapped, tracked and delivered to our door. Then, for twenty seconds, a screen shows us something that doesn't care about any of that. Something ancient, physical, unfiltered. And we lean in. Every time. It hits the oldest part of your brain, the part that kept your ancestors alive on the edge of a river. The part that still knows what to do when something big moves in the dark. Your phone is in your hand. But your instincts are standing knee-deep in that water. --- THE COUNTDOWN NO ONE CALLS OUT I want to describe the exact moment before it happens, without telling you what happens. There's a beat of quiet. The kind you feel more than hear. The water goes flat for a second, as if the whole ocean is inhaling. Everyone knows something is about to change. Nobody knows what. Somebody laughs, but it comes out wrong. Somebody says a word, half a prayer and half a curse. Somebody steps back without realizing they stepped back. And the ones who stay put? They understand something the rest of us only learn when we're standing there. The moment before is always bigger than the moment itself. --- THE NUMBERS THAT SHOULD HUMBLE YOU Let's zoom out for a second, because the scale of this animal is hard to hold in your head. A great white can smell and track prey across huge distances. Some sharks cross entire oceans, migrating thousands of miles, and return to the same feeding grounds year after year with a precision we still can't fully explain. Some species have to keep moving or they suffocate, pushing water over their gills for every breath of their lives. Imagine an animal that has never once stopped swimming since the day it was born. A shark's liver can make up a huge portion of its body weight and works like a built-in float, because unlike most fish, sharks have no swim bladder. Their skeleton isn't bone at all. It's cartilage, the same flexible material in your ears and nose, light, strong and fast to heal. Some sharks give birth to live young. Some lay egg cases, the so-called mermaid's purses that wash up on beaches. Some hatch and fend for themselves from minute one, with no parents, no protection, no instructions. Every single trait you'd expect from a creature that has been perfecting the same design for hundreds of millions of years. Now put a hook in its mouth and drag it toward a group of people in flip-flops. That's the situation. That's the whole situation. --- THE THREE SECOND RULE Ask anyone who has worked with big predators and they'll tell you the same thing: the danger is never where you're looking. It's not the mouth. Everyone watches the mouth. It's the tail, a powerful, muscular paddle that can throw a grown adult off his feet without effort. It's the water itself, churning and thick and impossible to read, hiding footing, hiding line, hiding hooks. It's the crowd, because a group of excited people is the most unpredictable variable on any beach. Everyone wants a better angle. Everyone wants to be closer. Everyone thinks they're the exception. It's the ground. Wet sand gives way. A retreating wave takes your balance the moment you put your weight on it. And it's time. Every second the animal is out of its element is a second it's under stress. Every second the people around it are excited is a second closer to a mistake. That's why the experienced ones move fast and speak little. They know the countdown is running. --- THE OLDEST CONVERSATION ON EARTH There's a reason humans have always been fascinated by this. Every coastal culture in history has stories about sharks. Islanders who saw them as ancestors and guardians. Sailors who feared them as omens. Fishermen who measured their careers by the size of what they'd hooked, or the size of what got away. That instinct hasn't gone anywhere. It's just moved from campfires to phone screens. We still need that story. The one where ordinary people, in ordinary clothes, on an ordinary night, walk straight up to the edge of something enormous and come back with a memory they'll be telling until they're old. That's not about the fish. That's about the feeling. The feeling of being small. And doing it anyway. --- WHAT THE SHARK KNOWS THAT YOU DON'T Let me end the science with something strange. Sharks are not stupid. For a long time people assumed they were pure instinct, but studies over the last few decades tell a different story. Sharks can learn. They can remember. They can recognize patterns, respond to training and, in some species, show what looks a lot like curiosity. Individual sharks appear to behave differently from one another. Some are bold. Some are shy. Some investigate everything. Some avoid new objects entirely. Personalities, in an animal we've been calling a "mindless killer" for a hundred years. Which means something a little uncomfortable. When that animal rolls in the surf and looks at you, it isn't seeing a blur. It's assessing. Reading you. Deciding. And the thing is, it's usually deciding that you are not worth the trouble. That's the great secret of sharks. Almost every encounter that ever happens ends with the animal simply choosing to leave. --- WHY THIS VIDEO IS DIFFERENT I've watched a lot of shark footage. Cage dives. Drone shots. Documentaries with orchestral scores and a narrator whispering like a librarian. This is not that. There's no cage. No boat. No narrator. No safety net and no second take. What you get is raw and shaky and human. A phone held by someone who is clearly not thinking about framing. Voices overlapping. Laughter that's half nerves. Light swinging across black water. The kind of footage that could never be staged because nobody could plan it. And that's the point. The reason it works isn't the animal. It's the people. Their faces. Their reactions. The way a normal night at the edge of the sea tips, without any warning, into something none of them will ever forget. You can feel it through the screen. You can feel the salt and the adrenaline and the disbelief. It's twenty-four seconds long. You'll watch it three times. --- THE QUESTIONS YOU'LL ASK YOURSELF I can already tell you what's going to happen when you press play. First, you'll try to figure out what you're looking at. Where it's happening. How big. How close. Then you'll notice the details. The light. The sand. The water. The expressions. The moment where things change. Then you'll ask yourself the question everyone asks: Would I have stayed? Would you have held your ground? Or backed away? Would you have reached in? Would you have stayed quiet? Would you have laughed? Would you have run? Be honest. Most people answer that question wrong the first time. That's what makes it addictive. It's not just a video. It's a mirror. --- THINGS TO WATCH FOR Don't just watch the animal. Watch everything else. Watch how the group behaves. There's a rhythm to it, a kind of unspoken teamwork that only appears when people trust each other completely. Watch the light. A single headlamp cutting through the dark creates a small bright world where everything outside feels enormous. Watch the water. It never sits still, and neither does anyone standing in it. Watch the faces. Every emotion a human can feel shows up in the span of a few seconds. Fear. Joy. Awe. Disbelief. And watch the end. Because the ending is the part people keep replaying. I won't say more. I don't want to spoil it. --- A SMALL WARNING If you're thinking about trying anything like this yourself, please hear me. This is not a hobby you improvise. Sharks are wild animals, and even the most experienced people treat every encounter as unpredictable. Local laws matter. Species protections matter. Proper gear, proper handling and proper respect for the animal matter, because getting any one of them wrong can hurt you, the people with you, or a creature that deserves better. Admire it from a screen if you're not trained. Learn from the people who are. Ask questions, read the rules where you live, and remember that the ocean doesn't give second chances. The best stories come from people who do it right. --- ONE MORE THING BEFORE YOU PRESS PLAY Most people scroll past videos like this in two seconds. They see the dark, they see the water, and their thumb keeps moving. Don't be most people. Give it the full twenty-four seconds. Let your eyes adjust the way theirs had to. Let the noise build. Let the strange, electric tension climb the way it climbs when you know something is about to break the surface. Because the best moments online aren't the loud ones. They're the ones where you realize, halfway through, that you've stopped scrolling. --- THE LAST THING Here's what I keep coming back to. Somewhere tonight, on some stretch of coast, the water is dark and warm and moving. And beneath the surface, an animal older than trees is doing exactly what its ancestors did four hundred million years ago. It doesn't know about the internet. It doesn't know about likes or views or followers. It only knows the water, the dark and the hunt. And every now and then, for a few seconds, our world touches its world, and somebody happens to be holding a phone. That's what you're about to see. Not a monster. Not a movie. Just a normal night that stopped being normal. Turn the sound on. Full screen. Lights off. And watch the video below. Then come back and tell me the exact second you stopped breathing.

Earth Unveiled

36,197 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen

A dog just made the bravest decision I have seen anyone make this year. Not a founder. Not an athlete. Not a person with a plan and a five-year vision board. A dog, on an empty road, with nothing to lose and no idea what would come next. I have watched what comes next more times than I will admit in public. This post is 25,000 characters long. It is a list of reasons why you should watch it too. Read as much as you want, but understand one thing before you start: the video is the only part that matters, and this is everything the video doesn't have room to say. Sound on. Phone in both hands. Do not skip. I'll be here when you get back. THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD BOTHER YOU Let me start with two numbers. The first: commonly cited estimates put the world's stray dog population at around 200 million. Two hundred million animals with no address, no bowl with their name on it, and no one who would notice if they didn't come back tonight. The second number is one. That is how many people had to be on that road, at that exact minute, looking in that exact direction, in a good enough mood to stop. Not two. Not a crowd. One. Here is what nobody says out loud: for every dog you see rescued on camera, there are millions the camera never reached. We don't see them because no one was there. The videos that reach you are not a sample of reality. They are the winners of a lottery so brutal that Powerball looks like a coin flip next to it. So when one of these lands in your feed, don't scroll past it like content. Treat it like what it is: a statistical miracle that happened to end well. And miracles have a structure. Let's take this one apart. FIVE LINKS. BREAK ONE AND THE STORY DOESN'T EXIST. Link one: the dog has to survive long enough to be seen. Roads are not built for small animals. Vehicles do not slow down for shapes on the asphalt. Every hour out there is a coin flip the animal has to win again, and again, and again. Link two: someone has to be present. Not nearby. Present. Eyes up, phone down, brain not busy replaying the argument from breakfast. Link three: that someone has to notice. It sounds simple. It isn't. The human brain is a filtering machine, and a small animal on a road becomes a plastic bag, a shadow, a piece of tire. The most common reason a dog is not rescued is not cruelty. It is that nobody registered it as a dog. Link four: the person has to stop. This is the link that snaps most often. Seeing is free. Stopping costs you time, comfort, a schedule, and possibly the mood of your entire day. Link five: the dog has to let them. An animal that has learned that hands mean pain has every biological reason to run. Trust is not a given. It is a negotiation, and the dog holds the veto. Five links. All five held. Remember that when you press play. You are not watching a nice story. You are watching a chain that should have snapped at least four times. THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP DRIVING In 1968, psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane published a set of experiments that changed how we think about helping. The finding was uncomfortable: the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one of them is to act. They called it diffusion of responsibility. Everyone assumes someone else will handle it. So nobody does. Later research added nuance. When an emergency is clear and dangerous, people step in more often than the original theory predicted. But the core insight has survived half a century of testing, because it describes something every one of us has felt: the small, quiet voice that says, somebody else will stop. Now picture a road with no crowd at all. No audience. No one to hide behind. No one to blame. Just you and a decision that is entirely, inescapably yours. That is the situation the person in this video walked into. And the reason it is worth your attention is not that they did something impossible. It is that they did something small, and it turns out small is exactly what almost nobody does. You don't need to be a hero. You need to be inconvenienced. THE FACE IS THE RESUME In 2013, researcher Bridget Waller and her team studied dogs in a UK shelter and asked a simple question: what makes one dog get adopted faster than another? It wasn't size. It wasn't age. It wasn't coat color. It was one tiny facial movement: the raising of the inner eyebrows. The move that makes a dog's eyes look bigger, softer, almost sad. Dogs that did it more often were chosen faster. Six years later, a study led by Juliane Kaminski found out why that movement is so easy for dogs and so hard for wolves. Dogs have a small muscle around the eye that wolves largely lack. Over thousands of years of living beside us, dogs evolved a way to make their faces speak our language. Read that again. A species rewired its own anatomy to be understood by another species. No other animal has done this to us. Nobody taught them. Nobody forced them. They looked at us, worked out what we respond to, and grew the tool. Now look at the face in this video. You will know the second you see it. That is not a coincidence, and it is not luck. It is fifteen thousand years of engineering aimed directly at your chest. THE ONLY LOOP LIKE IT ON EARTH In 2015, a Japanese team led by Miho Nagasawa published a result in the journal Science that made researchers stop and reread the abstract. When a dog and its owner look into each other's eyes, both of their oxytocin levels rise. Oxytocin is the bonding chemical, the same one that flows between a mother and her newborn. Dog looks at human. Human's oxytocin rises. Human looks back, touches, talks softly. Dog's oxytocin rises. Which makes the dog look longer. Which makes the human's oxytocin rise again. A feedback loop of affection, running across two species, powered by nothing but eye contact. Here is the part that gets me: the effect did not show up the same way in wolves raised by humans. The loop is not just training. It is something that evolved between us. So the next time someone says a dog is just responding to food, tell them there is a peer-reviewed study that disagrees. And keep this fact in your pocket for the video. Because at some point, a moment of eye contact happens in it, and I want you to know what is really going on in that room. THEY CAN SMELL WHAT YOU'RE HIDING Humans have roughly 6 million scent receptors. Dogs are commonly cited as having around 300 million. A large share of a dog's brain is devoted to processing smell. What you experience as a room, a dog experiences as a layered document: who was here, how long ago, and how they felt. In 2022, researchers at Queen's University Belfast tested something remarkable. They collected breath and sweat samples from people before and after a stressful task. Then they asked dogs to tell the samples apart. The dogs got it right nearly 94 percent of the time. Your body broadcasts your emotional state as chemistry. You cannot turn it off. You cannot fake calm. A dog reads your fear, your tension, your irritation, before you have opened your mouth. Which means every rescue is, at its core, a test of one thing: are you actually calm, or are you performing calm? The dog knows. It always knows. And that is why what happens in the first few seconds of this video matters more than anything that comes after it. Watch the body language. Watch how slowly things move. Watch what is not done. THE MOST IMPORTANT MOMENT IN ANY RESCUE IS THE ONE WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS Animal behaviorists describe fear responses in four flavors: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fight is what people expect. Flight is what most strays do. Freeze is what looks like calm but isn't. And fawn, the desperate, wiggling, please-don't-hurt-me appeasement, is the one that breaks your heart the fastest, because it looks like friendliness and it is actually terror. Rescuers who have done this hundreds of times will tell you the same handful of rules. Don't loom. Don't stare straight into the eyes. Get low. Turn sideways. Slow everything down until it feels absurd. Let the animal close the last few feet on its own terms. The hardest instruction, and the one most people can't follow, is the last one: do nothing. Every instinct you have says reach out. Grab. Fix. Take control of the situation. And every good rescue begins with someone who did the opposite. Who made themselves small, patient, and boring, and waited for a frightened animal to decide that the safest thing in its whole world might be a stranger. You are about to watch someone do exactly that. Notice how little they need to say. THE TEARS THEY WON'T PUT IN THE HEADLINE Scientists are careful people. They do not like to say "dogs cry." But in 2022, a team from Azabu University in Japan, led by Takefumi Kikusui, measured tear volume in dogs during reunions with their owners. The result: tear volume rose significantly compared with reunions involving other familiar people. And when researchers applied oxytocin to the dogs' eyes, tear volume rose again. Not sadness crying. Not the crying we do. Something else, something closer to overflow. The body producing water at the exact moment the heart has more in it than it can hold. Nobody has proven that this is the same thing we feel. Scientists will tell you that, and they are right to. But here is a question worth sitting with. If an animal's eyes fill with water when it sees the one being it has decided to trust, what exactly are we arguing about? Watch the eyes in this video. Then tell me what you think you saw. ONCE IT HAS A NAME, IT STOPS BEING A STATISTIC In 2007, psychologist Paul Slovic and colleagues ran an experiment on generosity. They showed people a fundraising appeal for a hungry child, and then a second version that added statistics about millions of other children in the same crisis. More data. More context. More reasons to care. Donations dropped. Slovic called it psychic numbing. The human mind can hold one face. It cannot hold two hundred million. When a tragedy becomes a number, empathy quietly switches off, and we don't even notice it happening. This is why one named animal in one small video can do what a hundred reports full of charts cannot. It gives your brain something it can actually care about: a single life, with a face, a fear, and a future that could go either way. The stray population is a statistic. A dog is a story. And stories, unlike statistics, come with a name at the end. When you reach that moment in the video, pay attention to what it does to you. Notice the small shift in your chest. That is the sound of a number turning into a person, or close enough. THE WORD FOR WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO FEEL Researchers have a name for the feeling you get when something touches you so suddenly that your throat tightens and your eyes sting. They call it kama muta, Sanskrit for "moved by love." Anthropologist Alan Fiske proposed that it is a distinct emotion, triggered by a sudden intensification of closeness. Two beings who were strangers become bonded. Someone who was alone becomes part of something. People across many cultures describe the same set of signs: warmth in the chest, goosebumps, a lump in the throat, tears they didn't plan on, and a strong urge to hug someone or hold something. Here is what makes it useful and not just sweet: kama muta is one of the most reliable emotional responses we have. It shows up when reunions happen. When a stranger helps unexpectedly. When an animal, after a long time alone, is finally held. You've felt it. You just never had a word for it. Take note of the exact second it hits you in this video. I promise there is one. And if you're the kind of person who says "I never cry at videos," I would like to schedule a follow-up. WHY YOU'LL WANT TO BE A BETTER PERSON AFTER ONE MINUTE Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studied a related feeling and gave it a name: elevation. Elevation is what you feel when you watch someone do something morally beautiful, quietly, with nothing to gain. It is not envy and it is not admiration. It is an urge, physical and immediate, to do something good yourself. In studies, people who experienced elevation were more likely to help others afterward, more likely to volunteer, and more likely to describe wanting to become better versions of themselves. Read that as a design spec. A short piece of true, unstaged kindness can change what a person does in the hour after they see it. Which is a strange, lovely thing for a phone to be capable of. We spend so much time discussing what social media does wrong. Nobody wonders what would happen if the best five percent of it, the small, real, human moments, were the part that traveled farthest. Let this one travel. It has earned it. THE RARE THING: SOMETHING TRUE THAT WINS In 2018, researchers at MIT published a study in Science that analyzed millions of tweets. The result was grim: false news spread significantly faster and further than true news. False stories were about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, driven largely by surprise and disgust. The lesson most people took away was that this platform rewards outrage. I want to take a different lesson. If false stories win because they trigger strong emotion, then true stories can win too, as long as they trigger stronger ones. A video with no villain, no scandal, and no argument. Nothing to be angry about. Nothing to dunk on. A rescue that is exactly what it looks like. That kind of content should lose on this platform. It has no fuel. And yet every so often, one of them breaks through and reminds everyone what this place was supposed to be. I am not asking you to like it. I am asking you to notice that you had a choice about what to feed today, and this was one of the options. SOME FRIENDSHIPS SHOULDN'T WORK Somewhere near the end of this video, a second character enters the story. I won't tell you who. I won't tell you what happens. I will tell you that if you have ever read anything about instincts, hunting drives, or the way certain animals are supposed to see each other, this moment will quietly rearrange your assumptions. Behaviorists talk about prey drive as if it were destiny. It is not. It is a tendency, and tendencies can be softened by experience, by safety, by being raised, or re-raised, in a place where no one is afraid. The same dog that once had to look after itself alone can, in a different life, learn that the world contains creatures that are not threats or meals. Only neighbors. That is the most hopeful idea in behavioral science, and it usually gets buried in footnotes: what an animal was is not the same as what an animal can become. The same is true for most of us, incidentally. But that is a different post. Stay for the ending. It is the reason I am writing this at all. THE PART THE INTERNET NEVER FILMS Every rescue video has the same shape: the meeting, the rescue, the transformation, the happy ending. It is edited that way because it is the only shape that gets watched. But ask anyone who has actually done this, and they will tell you the truth is in the gap between the second and third act. The first night. The first week. The first time a dog that has never lived indoors realizes there is a floor that doesn't move, a door that closes without danger, and a bowl that will be full again tomorrow. Rescuers have a rule of thumb for this, the 3-3-3 rule. Three days for a dog to decompress. Three weeks to start learning the routine. Three months to feel truly at home. It's not science, exactly, just a shorthand built from thousands of adoptions. But it captures something real: safety is not a switch. It is a process, and the animal has to believe it slowly, one uneventful day at a time. That means the happiest scenes in this video are not the ones that look like celebrations. They are the quiet ones. A dog that stops scanning the room. A body that finally lets go. Look for the moment the shoulders drop. Once you see it, you'll never unsee it. THE COST OF STOPPING: NINETY SECONDS Let's do the math on the thing that most people are afraid of. How long does it actually take to stop for an animal in trouble? Not the whole rescue. Just the decision, the pulling over, the first attempt. Ninety seconds. Sometimes less. Ninety seconds is the length of a bad song on the radio. It is the time you spend waiting for a light to change. It is a scroll through a feed you won't remember. And on the other side of those ninety seconds is the difference between a living animal and a statistic. I'm not saying this to make anyone feel guilty. Guilt is a terrible motivator. It makes people avoid the feeling instead of acting on it. I'm saying it because the barrier is almost always imagined. We inflate the cost of helping in our heads, and the imagined price is what stops us, not the real one. The person in this video paid the real price. It was small. What they got in return is something no one could have planned for. That is the part you should watch closely. IF YOU'RE EVER THE ONE ON THAT ROAD Save this section. Someday, someone reading it will need it. Put your safety first. Pull over where it's safe and turn on your hazard lights before anything else. A second accident helps no one. Do not chase. A frightened dog runs faster than you and directly into the worst possible place. Chasing turns a rescue into a pursuit. Get low and go slow. Sit down if you can. Turn your body sideways. Avoid direct staring. Speak softly, or don't speak at all. Use food, if you have any. Something plain, tossed a little closer each time, works better than any technique. Check for a tag and, if you can get near enough, ask a vet or shelter to scan for a microchip. Someone may be looking for this animal right now. Call for help early. Local rescues, animal control, and vets can handle what you cannot. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is make the right phone call. Take photos and note the location. If you can't keep the animal, those details are what let someone else finish the job. None of this is complicated. The reason it is rare is that most people have never been told that it is allowed. You are allowed. THE REAL STAKES OF A SMALL DOG Here is a bigger picture, and it's a heavy one. Millions of companion animals enter shelters every year in the United States alone. That is just one country. Many are lost pets that never get reclaimed. Many are strays. Many are animals whose owners ran out of money, time, or hope. Shelters are often crowded, underfunded, and staffed by people running on love and very little else. Every animal that finds a home, or a foster, or a stranger with ninety seconds to spare, frees up a space for the next one in line. That means every single rescue is bigger than the animal in it. It is a small change to a very large system, and the system is nothing but small changes stacked on top of one another. This is not an argument for guilt. It's an argument for scale. One dog saved is one dog saved, but it is also proof of concept, a demonstration that the chain can hold, that the odds can be beaten, that a person and a road and a decision can end well. And proof of concept is contagious. That is why you are seeing it. WHO REALLY GOT RESCUED? If you talk to people who have taken in strays, you'll hear the same sentence over and over, in different words. "I thought I was saving him. It turned out he was saving me." Skeptics roll their eyes at that. It sounds like a greeting card. And research on pets and wellbeing is more mixed than social media would like. It doesn't say every dog fixes every life. But there is something real underneath it, and it's not mystical. A dog is a machine for creating routine, attention, and reasons to leave the house. It needs you at a certain hour. It notices when you come home. It doesn't care about your job title, your follower count, or what you failed at last week. For some people, that is the first unconditional witness they have had in years. The rescue, in this light, is not one-way. Two lonely creatures, one who knew it and one who didn't, found out that they could take care of each other. Nobody can prove that from a video. But there is a version of the story that runs in the background of every rescue, and you can feel it if you let yourself. Tell me whether you feel it here. THE ATTENTION PARADOX Here is a strange fact about the platform you're reading this on. The average post gets a glance. A few words, a flick of the thumb, gone. Brands spend billions every year trying to buy three seconds of your attention, and most of what they buy evaporates before it lands. And yet a video of one dog, with no budget, no celebrity, and no script, can hold a stranger for a full minute. Without a single trick. Why? Because attention is not really about tricks. It is about stakes. Your brain is built to track living things whose outcome is uncertain. The moment there is a creature on screen and you don't yet know if it will be okay, some ancient part of you leans in and refuses to look away. That is the secret behind every great story ever told. Someone we care about. Something that could go wrong. A question we need answered. Marketers call it a hook. Your nervous system calls it worry. This video has both, and it pays off the worry honestly, which is why you leave feeling better instead of used. That is rare enough to deserve a full minute of your life. HOW TO WATCH THIS Most people will watch it wrong. They'll half-look at it between two other things, mid-scroll, thumb already moving. Here is how to get the actual effect. Turn the sound on. There is more happening in the audio than you expect. Make it full screen. This is a story about faces, and faces need room. Watch the first ten seconds without expecting anything. The film is quiet at the start. That is deliberate, or at least it works as if it were. Do not skip ahead. The whole thing depends on the distance between where it starts and where it ends. Skip the middle and the ending is just a nice clip. Then, once it's over, watch it again. The second time, you won't be watching for the story. You'll be watching for the small things you missed: a hesitation, a glance, a change in how a body carries itself. That second watch is where it gets you. I said I have watched it more times than I'll admit. That is the honest reason. It doesn't wear out. It gets deeper. THE CHALLENGE I want to try something with this post. If the video moved you, leave one comment: the second it happened. Not a review, not an analysis. Just the moment. I'm curious whether it's the same one for everyone. My guess is that it isn't, and that the spread of answers will say more about what people carry around with them than about the video. If it didn't move you, that is fine too. I'd like to hear that as well. Honest is better than polite. And if you have ever been the one who stopped, and I know some of you have, write that instead. Tell the story in two lines. No one has ever regretted the ninety seconds. Someone reading this thread might need to know that. Reposting this is the simplest way to put it in front of someone who's scrolling right now, in a bad week, thinking that nothing good happens by accident anymore. Something did. THE LAST THING Let me end where I started. A dog made a decision on an empty road. It could not have known how it would turn out. It had no reason to believe that the next hand would be different from the last. It went ahead anyway. That is the whole difference between a life that changes and one that doesn't. Not certainty. Not a plan. A willingness to move toward the unknown when the alternative is more of the same. The animal in this video did that. Then someone did the same in return. That's it. That's the entire story. Two beings, each of whom took a small, terrifying step toward the other, and a road that was, for a few seconds, the most important place in the world. Scroll up. Press play. Watch the ending. Then come back and tell me I was exaggerating. P.S. If you read all of this, you are exactly the kind of person this video was made for. Most people never make it past the first screen of a long post. You did. That tells me you are someone who stays: through the slow part, through the uncertain part, all the way to the end. Which is, when you think about it, the only quality that mattered in the story you're about to watch. Follow for more like this. I only post the ones that earn it. Bookmark it for days you forget the feeling. #Rescue #DogsOfX #SecondChances #AdoptDontShop #Dogs #AnimalRescue #RescueDog

Earth Unveiled

29,665 Aufrufe • vor 25 Tagen

In trading, the common advice is to control two emotions - fear and greed. However, for nearly every trader I've encountered, including myself, anger and depression remain as constant undertones. They are the primary drivers of superperformance. Here's how: ✉️ I am usually a calm and happy person, and very rarely lose my temper. Despite the many years spent honing the craft of trading, I've never truly felt the overt confidence or exuberance that many fintwits often exhibit. Even though the primal errors have been eliminated and my game has transitioned to mental and emotional acuity, there are often times when I feel angry and frustrated with my performance, despite reaching new highs in my equity curve. It was during a Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 stream, where he discussed his mental state during his trading journey, that I recognized blind spots in my own trading. In poker terms, I'm an internal 'tilter' - I conceal my anger and frustration. Rather than showing external reactions, I become quieter and tenser. This change shows up in my risk-taking behaviour, as I start to take lower open risk or prematurely sell off profitable positions. However, this is a common phenomenon amongst traders, regardless of their experience and skill level. It was brilliantly conceptualized by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the Prospect Theory. Pain of losing > Joy of winning Consider an investor presented with two pitches for the same mutual fund: 1) Mutual Fund XYZ has averaged a return of 10% per annum over the last 3 years. 2) Mutual Fund XYZ has returned 25%, 15%, and -10% over the last 3 years. Both options essentially mean the same (ignoring compounding). However, most people choose option 1 over option 2. This is due to the Prospect theory, which states that people tend to pick options that show perceived gains rather than losses. Even when probabilities and outcomes are identical, individuals tend to prefer options that steer clear of potential losses. The theory suggests that losses have a more significant emotional impact on an individual than an equivalent amount of gains. The emotional toll of getting stopped out at (-) 1R is much higher than the satisfaction of a trade where you gain (+) 1R. Therefore, like most traders, if your win rate fluctuates between 35-65%, it still has a net negative impact on your emotional state. The influence of Prospect Theory is particularly significant in trading, where we risk not just our capital, but also our emotional well-being, effort, and time. Even in a job you dislike, you still receive a paycheck at the end of the month. However, in trading, losses and the uncertainty of profits affect us more deeply because a good effort doesn't always yield a positive outcome. The joy of winning doesn't fully compensate for the pain, especially when both outcomes stem from the same process. Winning becomes more about escaping the distress of losing than generating happiness in itself. However, Prospect Theory simply describes a pattern of human behavior. It's not an immutable law like gravity - behaviors can be identified and changed. Mapping Tilt In a bull market such as the current one, the tilt often isn't about stop losses, but rather about missed opportunities and profits. It's exciting to see the price rapidly increase when you enter a clean breakout, reaching multiples of your R within minutes. Unrealized profit often feels like it's already yours. However, as soon as the positions start turning against you, tilt seeps in because it feels like your money is being taken away. These are precisely the moments of weakness when you lose sight of your trade objective and settle for smaller profits. At the end of the day, or when you step back from the overflow of tilt, you estimate how much your portfolio could have grown if you had just held on to that position. This is a fool's errand. Knowing the right course of action in retrospect is fundamentally different from knowing what to do beforehand. Even though you understand this, a part of you can't resist indulging in the fantasy, which in turn increases your frustration. This is an excerpt from my earlier notes on how I mapped out my problem. The mental framework is based on what I learned from Jared Tendler 's excellent book, "The Mental Game of Trading." 1) What’s the problem: When I'm up in a trade, I believe I've earned the profits because of the hard work I put into identifying opportunities and adhering to my process. I don't want the price to drop back to my cost. If it does, all my efforts would be wasted and I wouldn't even secure the minimal profit I'm entitled to. 2) Why does the problem exist: I start to contemplate the utility value of the money - the unrealized profit equates to 3 months of my home loan EMI, 8 months of rent, or a family vacation. I believe I am deserving of a reward for my diligent effort and execution, and I am unwilling to let it slip away. 3) What is flawed: The aim of my trading isn't to support my everyday expenses or lifestyle, but instead to build generational wealth. By taking smaller profits prematurely, I'm limiting the leverage that could magnify the returns on my effort and time - same input with disproportionately larger output. The unrealised profit is not my money yet. 4) What’s the correction: Realised profit is the only profit that truly matters. A trade isn't successful when it becomes risk-free, but when you can leverage unrealised profits to achieve larger realised profits. 5) What logic confirms this correction: It is easy to start trading but easier to settle for mediocrity once you have started. Scaling up your portfolio will require you to overcome mental barriers more than technical ones. You also didn't learn to drive just to stay in second gear. Closing Note Anger arises when underlying flaws, biases, or illusions conflict with reality. At a fundamental level, anger represents this conflict which every elite performer has used as a core trigger to channel their performance. Don't be swayed by the false bravado and portrayed perfection on social media. Superperformance as a trader involves enduring trials by fire, which regularly include prolonged bouts of anger and frustration. In the longer term, your skills and willingness to take risks are what will generate wealth. As Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 puts it, everyone is in the same miserable boat -

Anuragg Venkatakrishnan

21,379 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

"We had people around us that started having things happen. And not all of it was rosy. We didn't know that...it's gonna stay with you for maybe...years and years or the rest of your life." ~Mr. B. A Whole Lot of Not Rosy Robert Bigelow: "And so, it (survival of consciousness research) does have this aspect of things to be concerned about. And you know, I've told you that since we formed this institute (Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS)) in June (of 2020), all of a sudden, we had people around us that started having things happen. And not all of it was rosy, okay?” (I really hope he give details in a future interview because I think it's important to know what happened. Just the formation of an institute that planned on studying consciousness caused phenomena to start taking place and some of it was negative in nature. To me, that's problematic. Did anybody get injured or sick, or were they just scared?) Bigelow: "So, I mean, this is family members, myself, my staff. And none of this we expected, we hadn't asked for anything, positioned anything, decided to do anything in this kind of research. Our whole intention to begin with was simply trying to get ourselves up to speed in the literature, after being away from this for so many years, focusing on [the] space world, right? That's been mainly what I've been doing - except for the Skinwalker Ranch thing for 20 years - is the space world...has been huge in my life to pursue. The legitimate, parochial kind of, you know, using fire engines, rockets to get you there (smiles). "So we didn't expect anything like this to happen." (Again, this is various phenomena that allegedly started happening once they formed BICS with the intention of studying consciousness (including life after death), and apparently, some of it was not good. Again, did anybody get hurt? Exactly how bad was it? Details are sorely needed.) Bigelow: "And so, this Holy Grail is different than the second Holy Grail. If the second one being the ET, is a little bit lower. And this first one: Is there any part of your consciousness that survives your bodily death? That's a big deal, that's a huge story, that's gigantic." (I'd push back and suggest that both Holy Grails may be connected or related and the 2nd one may not be ET at all. This other intelligence (which John Keel labelled, "Ultraterrestrials") may reside in, or be able to enter, the same realms we enter when we die. There’s strong evidence that psychic mediums can acquire information they had no way of knowing about via their five senses. But are they talking to the dead, or is something else going on?) ~~~Excerpt from Operation Trojan Horse by John Keel~~~ In 1866, a New Englander named William Denton declared himself to be the first modern contactee. He claimed to be in telepathic contact with beings from another planet, and he and his whole family later purportedly visited Venus and Mars. Denton wrote a series of books describing saucer-shaped vehicles in detail, which he thought were made of aluminum. (A commercial process for manufacturing aluminum was not invented until 1886.) He also told his audiences (he lectured widely) that the folks who rode around in aluminum airships looked very much like us. His narratives were, in many respects, identical to those of the modern contactees. Trance Mediums and Possession Trance mediums were nothing new in 1850. In the Bible’s First Book of Samuel, Chapter 28 describes how Saul consulted a medium (“… a woman that hath-a familiar spirit”). Mediums acted as oracles in ancient times, and people with this peculiar gift appeared in each new generation. Such persons seem to serve as instruments through which the ultraterrestrials can speak to us directly, and they often come up with amazingly accurate prophecies of the future and precise details of events that could seemingly be known only to the dead relatives of the people who consulted them. Of course, when spiritualism became a national fad, a goodly number of charlatans and hucksters moved in. But most of the genuine mediums exercised their talents carefully and for free. They did not indulge in fancy hocus-pocus and did not need paraphernalia, such as spirit cabinets. They were—and are—people who can apparently summon up unseen entities or alien intelligences and extract information from them. I am not a spiritualist myself, although I have attended a few séances over the years, usually in the role of a scoffer and disbeliever. As a longtime amateur magician, I have been able to see through the frauds, but I have also been genuinely perplexed by some of the manifestations I have personally witnessed. (I recommend everybody read about The Scole Experiment or watch the documentary on YT about it. And...read the book, "Ghost Hunters" by Deborah Blum. Related links here: ) ~ Back to OTH... Essentially, a trance medium lapses into an unconscious state, and while in this condition, his or her body is taken over by some outside influence. This influence is usually a self-styled “Indian guide” from “the other side.” Many mediums have been simple, uneducated people, but when in a trance state they have been able to talk foreign languages fluently. Scientists and clergymen have put countless mediums through severe tests over the years. At one group of séances in the 1920s, sitters, who were all versed in different languages, grilled mediums in everything from ancient Chinese to Swahili, and the controlling entities not only conversed in those languages but corrected the sitters’ grammar! The daughter of Judge Edmunds, president of the Senate in the 1850s, gave incredible performances while in a trance, speaking fluently in Greek, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Portuguese, Hungarian, and several Indian languages. Because the sitters—and the mediums—assume that they are dealing with residents of heaven, they ask mostly spiritual questions. Customarily, the “control” will announce that Mr. Blank is standing next to him and wishes to speak to Mrs. Blank, who is attending the séance. Mrs. Blank excitedly begins to question her dead husband, Mr. Blank. How is life on the other side? Just fine, the control replies, a little bored, everyone lives in vine-covered cottages, and all is sweetness and light. Where did Mr. Blank hide his valuable gold watch before he died? It’s wrapped in an old sock and buried under some papers in the bottom drawer of the old rolltop desk, the control answers. Sure enough, when Mrs. Blank gets home, she finds the watch exactly where the medium’s alter ego said it would be. Try to convince Mrs. Blank that she didn’t talk with her dead husband! In many cases, the medium even begins to talk in a voice that sounds exactly like the dead Mr. Blank, uses his pet expressions, and even refers to things known only to Mrs. Blank, indulges in their private jokes, and so on. Occasionally, a deceased celebrity will “break through.” Recently the late George Bernard Shaw made a tape recording in England that is now circulating in occult circles. Those who knew Shaw claim that it sounds exactly like him, uses his phraseology and vocal mannerisms, and displays his brilliant and distinctive wit. The trance phenomenon deserves extensive study because so many aspects of it are directly related to the contactee phenomenon. The contactees have been told a hundred different stories of what life is like on other planets. If you review the descriptions of heaven produced at the thousands of possibly genuine séances, you will find the same contradictions. The entities will lie transparently at one point in the séance, and a few moments later will come up with astounding information that could not be based upon simple trickery. The mediums themselves have always been aware of their controls’ mischievous sense of humor. They speak of false shades and malevolent spirits who perform outrageous hoaxes. So the mediums and the professional investigators are always wary. The fact that a control can imitate George Bernard Shaw does not necessarily mean that GBS is doing the speaking from the spirit world. The fact that a control knows where Mr. Blank hid his gold watch does not necessarily prove that Mr. Blank is standing at his side “on the other plane.” The medium generally remains completely inert while in the trance or “occupied” state but in some instances can become quite animated and make gestures appropriate to whatever is being said. In a very real sense, the medium’s mind has been blanked out, and his or her body has been completely taken over by the control. The medium has become a zombie of sorts, possessed by an alien entity, an entity who lacks a physical form of his own. Contactees often find themselves suddenly miles from home without knowing how they got there. They either have induced amnesia, wiping out all memory of the trip, or they were taken over by some means and made the trip in a blacked-out state. Should they encounter a friend on the way, the friend would probably note that their eyes seemed glassy and their behavior seemed peculiar. But if the friend spoke to them, he might receive a curt reply. In the language of the silent contactees this process is called being used. A used person can suddenly lose a day or a week out of his life. I have known silent contactees to disappear from their homes for long periods, and when they returned, they had little or no recollection of where they had been. One girl sent me a postcard from the Bahama Islands—which surprised me because I knew she was very poor. When she returned, she told me that she had only one memory of the trip. She said she remembered getting off a jet at an airport—she couldn’t recall getting on the jet or making the trip—and there “Indians” met her and took her baggage. She remembered nothing further after that. The next thing she knew she was back home again. It seems likely the same methods are applied to both mediums and contactees. In the case of the mediums, the mind control serves a useful purpose. It enables the entities to establish direct vocal communication with us and, in many instances, pass along worthwhile information. This process can also be destructive. A young man from Ithaca, New York, called me some time ago at the urging of William Donovan, president of Aerial Investigation and Research (AIR), to tell me of his close brush with death. One evening in the fall of 1967, he said, he left his home to drive to a meeting. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he got out of his car, went back into his house, and carried out several aimless actions such as picking up a book from a table and putting it on the shelf. “Finally, I said to myself, Okay, it’s time,” he told me. He remembers leaving the house and again heading for his parked car. The next thing he knew he was in a hospital bed. He had apparently driven about four miles to a railroad crossing just in time to meet an oncoming train. His car was demolished, but he escaped rather miraculously with only a few minor injuries. If he had not gone back into the house and carried out those meaningless, time-killing chores, he would have avoided the train altogether. It is possible, of course, that the shock of the accident blotted out his memory of that four-mile drive—but he couldn’t even remember putting the key in the ignition. This man had been active in investigating the UFO flap that took place around the radio telescope installations near Ithaca in 1967-68. In his book Passport to Magonia, Dr. Jacques Vallee, a NASA astronomer and computer expert, touches on all this. “In the Soviet Union, not so long ago, a leading plasma physicist died in strange circumstances,” Dr. Vallee states. “He was thrown under a Moscow subway train by a mentally deranged woman. It is noteworthy that she claimed a ‘voice from space’ had given her orders to kill that particular man—orders she could not resist. Soviet criminologists, I have been reliably informed, are worried by the increase of such cases in recent years. Madmen rushing through the streets because they think the Martians are after them have always been commonplace. But the current wave of mental imbalance that can be specifically tied to the rise and development of the contactee myth is an aspect of the UFO problem that must be considered with special care.” So there seem to be both good and evil forces at work in this type of phenomenon. The good guys latch onto people with particularly receptive minds and turn them into trance mediums. The bad guys use the same methods to tamper with the minds of contactees and even to commit murders indirectly. Because incidents of these types can be traced throughout history, it seems probable that these forces have always been extant on this planet. When the good guys worked through mediums, they needed some excuse that we would accept. The answer seemed to be “communication with the dead.” These communicative efforts led to the foundation of spiritualism, and the entities played the role to the hilt, using their complete knowledge of us and our individual lives to provide us with “proof” of the existence of a spirit world. This is the same precise methodology being employed with the UFOs to build up support for the extraterrestrial thesis. We humans need acceptable explanations for unnatural phenomena, so “they” happily—and often humorously—supply us with all the explanations we can handle. At the same time, they give us tiny fragments of the real truth, hoping no doubt that we will be able to digest them slowly. Ever so slowly. In earlier times it seems as if they made a complicated attempt to convey the truth to us through mediums and psychics, but we chose to misinterpret these efforts and placed them within the context of our primitive religious beliefs. We are still doing this, and they are going along with it because even misinterpreted communication is better than no communication at all. Religion may not be truth but may merely be a step on the long path of the real truth. Do the ultraterrestrials really care about us? There is much disturbing evidence that they don’t. They care only to the extent that we can fulfill our enigmatic use to them. The Reverend Arthur Ford is one of America’s best-known trance mediums. For most of his life he has served as an instrument for an entity who calls himself Fletcher. In 1928, Fletcher announced that Harry Houdini (who had died in 1926) was on hand and had a message which he wanted conveyed to his widow, Beatrice. The message was in a code once used by the Houdinis in a mind-reading act. This code was known only to the couple and had never been published or revealed to anyone. Fletcher, through Ford, was able to give precise details of this secret code, and Mrs. Houdini later confirmed that the message had to come from her husband. This was only one of Ford’s many coups. In the fall of 1967, Ford went into a trance on Canadian television and produced a message for Bishop James Pike from his deceased son. Bishop Pike, who was present at this televised séance, avowed that the message seemed authentic and seemed to come from the familiar personality of his son. This well-publicized séance launched a major revival of spiritualism in the United States. Reverend Ford travels in high circles but has never made any material gain from his peculiar gift. He gives freely of his time—and Fletcher’s advice from the other side—at séances all over the country. Mrs. Ruth Montgomery, the well-known author and Washington reporter, tells of the time that Reverend Ford visited her in Washington and lapsed into a trance so she could ask Fletcher for some advice on his behalf. Reverend Ford was then in the process of moving and wanted to know what he should do with some of his things. Fletcher seemed totally disinterested in Ford’s problems, Mrs. Montgomery reported, and when she asked if Ford should visit a clinic for a checkup, Fletcher snapped, “He’d better do something. If he doesn’t, I can’t work through him much longer.” Although Reverend Ford had voluntarily submitted his person to Fletcher’s use for nearly half a century, the entity was apparently completely disinterested in his problems and welfare. This is, alas, rather typical. Even the most helpful entities seem more dedicated to the job of communicating than to any kind of involvement with those to whom (or through whom) they are communicating. The bizarre history of psychic phenomena is filled with Fletchers. Mrs. Montgomery, incidentally, indulges in automatic writing herself and has received constant messages for the past few years, many of which have been valid prophecies and stern advice meant to govern her future actions. There have been innumerable psychic hoaxes for the past 150 years, and many of these parallel the UFO hoaxes. In 1855, the Fox sisters confessed that their spirit rappings were a hoax. They said they produced the sounds by “snapping their toes.” Think about that for a moment. Snapping your toes so that it sounded like a rap on a wall or table would be a most remarkable talent—perhaps even more remarkable than the ability to communicate with the spirit world. I don’t believe I would pay ten cents to hear someone talk to a rapping spirit—but I would happily pay five dollars to examine someone who could duplicate the rapping sound by snapping his toes. Later the two sisters said the confession was false, and they had been bribed to make it. "Mrs. Houdini was genuinely astonished and impressed by Reverend Ford’s messages from her husband, and she made numerous public statements to that effect, as well as signing various affidavits. But later, in the 1930s, she chose to deny it all for a time. Then, shortly before her death, she reversed her denials. In ufology we have to contend with teenagers’ hot-air balloons, and in psychic phenomena we have to worry about youngsters firing rocks at houses with slingshots and phony mediums levitating “spirit trumpets” with black thread. But there are many more UFO sightings than there are plastic balloons, and there are more poltergeists dumping rocks in living rooms than there are wild-eyed youngsters with slingshots. There are also more ultraterrestrial entities than either the occultists or the UFO enthusiasts dream of." ~~~Edit of the Bigelow Interview~~~ Bigelow: "I also, I was...I got very disturbed toward the end (of AAWSAP) about something that happened to some of the government people, and I realized uhh...holy crap." (Read, "Skinwalkers at the Pentagon." I think it's one of the most important UFO books in recent memory.) George Knapp: "Hitchhikers." Bigelow: "Umm... Well, yeah. You know. So, hitchhikers being that you take things home with you. Everybody took things home with them. I took things to my house. Things happened to my wife, and to me. Different things. So, everybody took things home. We all, you know, we did. But we didn't know that, gee, it was like, gonna be kind of permanent. You know, we didn't know that, you know? That it's gonna stay with you for maybe...for years and years or the rest of your life, who knows? "But the ones that bothered me a lot where anybody got hurt or really disturbed... Not that it happened on the ranch, it was when they left the ranch. As you say, hitchhikers. And these were government people and it affected them." Knapp: "In very dramatic ways, though." Bigelow: "Very dramatic ways. Very dramatic ways. You know, and there's a cousin to that that we're facing, but it's abated, at least for now. And this other survival topic, right? The very dramatic kind of things that we wanted to have reduced or stopped." (The "cousin" to the hitchhiker phenomenon features the not-so-rosy things he referred to early on in this clip. But at least it had abated at the time of this interview. Has it started up again?) Bigelow: "But going back to the government people, the buyer (Brandon Fugal) came along at the right time, I had decided I wanted to tone down..." Knapp: "Take this off your plate." Bigelow: "Yeah, take it off my plate, tone it down, and if necessary, just lock it up and forget about it. And next thing I know, you know, [Fugal] comes along and, you know, the rest is history." Knapp: "Before we leave this, though, the incidents that happened to you, to your wife, to Colm (Kelleher), to me, the, you know, you bring it home. How does everybody handle that? I mean, is it spooky at the time, and do you draw the connection that it's ranch related?" Bigelow: "Yes and no. If the events hadn't happened very often prior to the ranch, then it's not ranch connected. But they did happen." (I think he meant to say, if the events hadn't happened prior to him buying the ranch in 1996 and did happen once he made the purchase, then it would seem to be connected just to the ranch. But he says these anomalous events did happen before he bought it. Maybe some events were connected to the ranch and others were not? Or, this precognitive sentient phenomenon, as John Alexander labelled it, was able to know that Bigelow was going to purchase the ranch in the future and began interacting with him and his wife before he bought it?) Bigelow: "And [these anomalous events] did [happen], where we lived with my wife and I. We had a poltergeist event one time that was really fun and very different, and that was before I ever acquired the ranch. My wife was a very strong - and probably still is, in spirit - person. And so she took them in stride. She had a full manifestation of an apparition, a human-form apparition in the bedroom, and looking at her. "And this was a holy cow. And she happened to tell me, kind of like, 'Oh, well, while you were gone, this is what happened here, a manifestation of this.' I've heard this kind of thing many times through other people, and recently. And she felt the bed depress as there was a curiosity going on because the facial features were distinctive enough to be able to...as though, 'Who are you and what are you doing here?' Coming from the manifestation from the apparition, looking at her, right? "And torso up was kind of what was manifested. And being able to see and feel the mattress being depressed as it's looking at you, wondering, 'Who are you?' That kind of look on the face. 'What are you doing here?' You know, usually you think it would be the opposite direction. 'Who the hell are you?'" (Fully-formed apparitions have been reported over the last 150 years or so but many times only partial bodies are seen. In this case, Mrs. Bigelow only saw the apparition from the torso up. When Leslie Kean sat with physical medium, Stewart Alexander, she said she only saw a hand form. The alleged spirits will say that, many times, it takes too much energy to form a full body. Learn more about the Kean encounter here: ) ~ Knapp: "Was [Mrs. Bigelow] freaked out?" Bigelow: "No. No, she wasn't. There was a bar of light - so this was not normal in the survival research, but maybe in the ET - that was between her pillows. A bar of light. It wasn't coming in from shutters or blinds or anything from the room or any kind of other light source. You could cover, put the pillows down, and the bar would not be reflected on the surface of the object above it, on the second pillow. It only happened when you did this. And she did that and said, 'Oh, well.' I said, 'Well, what did you do?' "'Well, I went to sleep.' Went to sleep, so..." ~~~ (In January of 2012, NYT journalist, Ralph Blumenthal wrote an article about Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS). He ended it with this: ) "One personal footnote. Don’t ask me what happened on Jan. 4 at 5:45 a.m. as I lay sleepless, wrestling with this story. A tremendous bang jolted me and my wife and the dog upright. We found the glass door to our 12th-floor terrace completely spiderwebbed with cracks as if struck with tremendous force, but there was no sign of any projectile. Invisible moisture between the double panes? Or something else? There are things I don’t mind talking about and things I do mind talking about." (Was this prosaic or just more of the not-so-rosy phenomena Bigelow referenced? We need to know!)

Joe Murgia

106,462 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Warren Buffett turns 93 today! To celebrate, I'm sharing the greatest lecture he ever gave together with his 94 (!) best investment quotes. 1. Rule No. 1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No. 1. 2. Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing. 3. Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages. 4. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies. 5. American business - and consequently a basket of stocks - is virtually certain to be worth far more in the years ahead. 6. An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. 7. And so the important thing we do with managers, generally, is to find the .400 hitters and then not tell them how to swing. 8. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 9. Bitcoin has no unique value at all. 10. Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you'd be content to own it in the absence of any market. 11. The years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines - even panics - that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur. 12. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. 13. Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise. 14. For the investor, a too-high purchase price for the stock of an excellent company can undo the effects of a subsequent decade of favorable business developments. 15. I believe in giving my kids enough so they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. 16. The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history. 17. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. 18. Among the various propositions offered to you, if you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years - you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. 19. Because if you're wrong and rates go to 2 percent, which I don't think they will, you pay it off. It's a one-way renegotiation. It is an incredibly attractive instrument for the homeowner and you've got a one-way bet. 20. Cash is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent. 21. Don't get caught up with what other people are doing. Being a contrarian isn't the key but being a crowd follower isn't either. You need to detach yourself emotionally. 22. For 240 years it's been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. 23. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. 24. I have no views as to where it (gold) will be, but the one thing I can tell you is it won't do anything between now and then except look at you. Whereas, you know, Coca-Cola will be making money, and I think Wells Fargo will be making a lot of money, and there will be a lot -- and it's a lot -- it's a lot better to have a goose that keeps laying eggs than a goose that just sits there and eats insurance and storage and a few things like that. 25. I just sit in my office and read all day. 26. I won't say if my candidate doesn't win, and probably half the time they haven't, I'm going to take my ball and go home 27. If returns are going to be 7 or 8 percent and you're paying 1 percent for fees, that makes an enormous difference in how much money you're going to have in retirement. 28. We want products where people feel like kissing you instead of slapping you. 29. If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. 30. The most important investment you can make is one in yourself. 31. If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need. 32. If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. 33. If you like spending six to eight hours per week working on investments, do it. If you don't, then dollar-cost average into index funds. 34. If you're in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%. 35. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing. 36. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497. 37. In the 54 years (Charlie Munger and I) have worked together, we have never forgone an attractive purchase because of the macro or political environment, or the views of other people. In fact, these subjects never come up when we make decisions 38. In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield. 39. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. 40. It is a terrible mistake for investors with long-term horizons to measure their investment 'risk' by their portfolio's ratio of bonds to stocks. 41. It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. 42. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. 43. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. 44. It's been an ideal period for investors: A climate of fear is their best friend. Those who invest only when commentators are upbeat end up paying a heavy price for meaningless reassurance. 45. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction. 46. It's better to have a partial interest in the Hope diamond than to own all of a rhinestone. 47. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. 48. Just pick a broad index like the S&P 500. Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. 49. Keep things simple and don't swing for the fences. When promised quick profits, respond with a quick "no”. 50. Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless. 51. Many management teams are just deciding they're gonna buy X billions over X months. That's no way to buy things. You buy when selling for less than they are worth. ... It's not a complicated equation to figure out whether it is beneficial or not to repurchase shares. 52. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. 53. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well. 54. Never invest in a business you cannot understand. 55. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business. 56. One can best prepare themselves for the economic future by investing in your own education. If you study hard and learn at a young age, you will be in the best circumstances to secure your future. 57. The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. 58. One thing that could help would be to write down the reason you are buying a stock before your purchase. Write down "I am buying Microsoft at $300 billion because..." Force yourself to write this down. It clarifies your mind and discipline. 59. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked. 60. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble. 61. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. 62. Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it. 63. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. 64. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows. 65. Since I know of no way to reliably predict market movements, I recommend that you purchase Berkshire shares only if you expect to hold them for at least five years. Those who seek short-term profits should look elsewhere. 66. Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago 67. The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble... We want to buy them when they're on the operating table. 68. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 69. Stay away from it. It's a mirage, basically...The idea that it has some huge intrinsic value is a joke in my view. 70. The best chance to deploy capital is when things are going down. 71. The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. 72. There is nothing wrong with a 'know nothing' investor who realizes it. The problem is when you are a 'know nothing' investor but you think you know something. 73. This does not bother Charlie and me. Indeed, we enjoy such price declines if we have funds available to increase our positions. 74. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity. 75. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don’t understand, but that doesn’t cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that’s what the individual investor should do. 76. You can’t buy what is popular and do well. 77. We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow's obligations. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night's sleep for the chance of extra profits. 78. We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet. 79. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children. 80. What is smart at one price is stupid at another. 81. What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history. 82. When stock can be bought below a business's value it is probably the best use of cash. 83. When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. 84. When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever. 85. When you have able managers of high character running businesses about which they are passionate, you can have a dozen or more reporting to you and still have time for an afternoon nap. Conversely, if you have even one person reporting to you who is deceitful, inept or uninterested, you will find yourself with more than you can handle. 86. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. 87. Widespread fear is your friend as an investor because it serves up bargain purchases. 88. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right. 89. You can't borrow money at 18 or 20 percent and come out ahead. 90. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. 91. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd. 92. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. 93. The size of your circle of competence is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

Compounding Quality

621,113 Aufrufe • vor 3 Jahren

Analyzing Episode 39. Season 2 aka Of Closets, Skeletons, and Haunting Truths Eveeeetttt. I finally found some of my old energy to write because last night's episode was AWESOME. And, allow me, nay, give me the freedom to say 'I TOLD YOU SO!' because the zombie turned out to be just as big a sh!thead as I expected him to be. Okay, now that I've gotten that exultant vindication out of the way, let's get on with our analysis. We start the episode with FrankenBoran saying 'Alya' and promptly fainting again. When he comes to again, he remarkably remembers all his other family members, and proceeds to creep Alya out further by calling her beautiful. I mean, don't get me wrong, but if a loving husband woke up from a year-long coma and saw his wife, I'd expect him to say something like 'I missed you' or 'How have you been?' But this guy? He goes straight for the look at my hot trophy-doctor wife. Yech. Anyway, at the zombie's insistence of seeing Cihan Deniz, Alya informs his decrepit self of the accident and all that followed, minus the mountain of trauma she went through. Is anyone else surprised by how handy this man's memory is? Because what the heck do you mean he doesn't remember asking his brother to marry his widow? When Cihan is forced to inform the zombie of his marriage to Alya, he suddenly switches to victim mode and passes out again. Convenient. After that, the assorted Alboras all convene in the salon at Sadakat's insistence, where she tries and fails to guilt-trip Cihan and Alya into showing Deniz to the zombie. Then she fine-tunes her maternal emo blackmail skills to keep Cihan from telling Boran who his real father is. Spot the witch's hypocrisy here? The only thing that made that entire scene bearable was Nare and Kaya supporting Cihan and Alya. Thank goodness for Azem and Fiko anne's genes. Alya's scene with Deniz (who's still blissfully napping) was a cute reprieve. She's understandably struggling with how she's going to explain the mess the zombie has made of their lives to her son. And, like any decent mom, she wants to protect Deniz from all kinds of pain, but finds herself helpless. And the fact that Cihan walks in and says he wishes he could protect Alya from the ugliness of life because she's just as innocent as Deniz was special to me. Because the world we live in will always blame women first, regardless of whether they're guilty or not. I've read so many comments from random losers (yep, losers) blaming Alya and accusing her of 'loose morals' because she refuses to return to the PoS husband who all but foists her on his brother's shoulders to save his own worthless self. That little reminder by Cihan of Alya's innocence in all that's happening to them made me want to hug Gulizar. Because that scene was put in there for a reason. It's to remind the viewers to watch what's happening without the blinders of hate and judgment. Because sometimes the truth requires you to be a little more than just your hateful prejudices. The next scene that stood out to me was when Boran sees Deniz. Because there you can clearly see the difference between Cihan and Boran in their 'husband' or 'protector' roles. When Boran struts to Alya in his fake righteous indignation and asks her about which room is hers, you can see his harsh, condemnatory behavior in juxtaposition to Cihan's loving acceptance of all that Alya is. Even when Cihan doesn't know her, he intrinsically trusts her and refuses to believe his mother's accusations about her and Izzet. The fact that Boran expects Alya to have a separate room, even though he specifically asks Cihan to marry Alya, is just more proof that the zombie merely wanted the marriage to ensure Alya didn't move on in her life. It was never about love or protection. It was about control and possession. Among the many outstanding scenes of this episode were Cihan and Alya facing off against Boran. Because it was about damn time this freaking skeleton was dragged out of the closet and forced into the light of truth. Why do people expect Alya to go back to Boran? Why do they expect her to stay silent about loving Cihan? Because she's a woman? Because her worth is measured by what the world dictates is her honor? Fcuk that. And that's precisely what Alya's monologue is about. How is she the one to blame when her ex-husband was the one lying to her since day one? How is the shame hers when Boran felt none, asking his brother to marry his widow just so he could return and claim her like she's some baggage? Alya rightly informs the zombie that, in his attempt to play God, his decision made her Cihan's wife. And, no matter how much he apologizes, nothing will change the truth of her feelings. She loves Cihan now, and that's that. Now, let's focus on Cihan's talk with Boran. I feel so sad for Ciho, because the man he looked up to turned out to have feet of clay. And, Cihan's realization of that becomes obvious as their 'talk' continues. When Cihan admits he loves Alya, Boran immediately hits him with Meryem. The zombie has the audacity to say that if Cihan managed to get over Meryem, his love for Alya could be a passing thing too. Manipulative ass. Thankfully, Cihan has the perfect comeback. And, what's more, we as the audience know he's telling the truth, because we've seen him evolve. He says what he thought was the truth was actually a lie, and it was only something he realized when he came face-to-face with the real deal. Alya truly is the love of his life. A fact that only becomes clearer as he continues to talk. When Boran dares to ask whether Cihan has slept with Alya, you can see Cihan's heart break in the heavy breath he expels. It's almost as if he can't believe the words he's hearing. But despite that, he answers. And he answers truthfully. Why? Because he'd never allow what he feels for Alya to be marred by accusations of lust. Of falling under the spell of her beauty only. Cihan knows Alya is beautiful. And he's often mesmerized by her beauty. But he falls in love with who Alya is. As a mother. As a doctor. As his wife. He falls in love with all the aspects of her, good and bad. And his dialogue 'whether I touch her or not, my love for her will never change,' proves he's operating on a different plain than his scum of a brother. The fact that Alya is willing to risk being called 'characterless' or 'easy' with the trauma of her past, and that Cihan is willing to go against his entire code of 'family and duty' for each other, is the biggest proof of their love. It's not easy to break out of the mold our circumstances and life place us in. But what makes Alya and Cihan inherently attractive is that they're willing to risk it all for love, while still sticking to their principles and beliefs. I think I fell in love with CihAl as a couple all over again in this episode. These two characters are possibly the most conscientious protagonists I've seen in a dizi, and it's laughable when people pass judgment on them due to morals, lmao. Now, on to less palatable topics. The zombie and Albora's haunting truth. The last scene of the episode makes several silent revelations. One is that Boran was never happy being sidelined in favor of Cihan as the leader. Two is that Boran likely killed Sulaiman Baybars, not out of a vendetta, but possibly because he was trying to prove himself worthy of the mantle of leadership, and being exiled instead pissed him off. Three is that Boran will likely stoop to any level, including going over to Ecmel's side to snatch what he feels is rightfully his. And four is that allowing Boran to escape the consequences of his actions created a monster who thinks the world revolves around him. It's obvious by the look on Boran's face that he's going to pick bitterness and payback over introspection and accountability. And in doing so, Albora's haunting truth will be repeated - the biggest danger to the family isn't some external enemy, it's often one of your own, driven by festering envy and entitlement. Because history doesn't always repeat, but it does rhyme. And that's my two cents on this episode. Till next time, happy reading y'all. #CihAl #UzakŞehir

CocoLoco

30,788 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

The fight between Anthropic and the DoW is a warning shot. Right now, LLMs are probably not being used in mission critical ways. But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, the government, and the private sector will be AIs. This includes the soldiers (by which I mean the robot armies), the superhumanly intelligent advisors and engineers, the police, you name it. Our future civilization will run on AI labor. And as much as the government’s actions here piss me off, in a way I’m glad this episode happened - because it gives us the opportunity to think through some extremely important questions about who this future workforce will be accountable and aligned to, and who gets to determine that. What Hegseth should have done Obviously the DoW has the right to refuse to use Anthropic’s models because of these redlines. In fact, I think the government’s case had they done so would be very reasonable, especially given the ambiguity of concepts like autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. Honestly, for this reason, if I was the Defense Secretary, I would probably actually refuse to do this deal with Anthropic. Imagine if in the future, there’s a Democratic administration, and Elon Musk is negotiating some SpaceX contract to give the military access to Starlink. And suppose if Elon said, “I reserve the right to cancel this contract if I determine that you’re using Starlink technology to wage a war not authorized by Congress.” On the face of it, that language seems reasonable - but as the military, you simply can’t give a private company a kill switch on technology your operations have come to rely on, especially if you have an an acrimonious and low trust relationship with said contractor - as in fact Anthropic has with the current administration. If the government had just said, “Hey we’re not gonna do business with you,” that would have been fine, and I would not have felt the need to write this blog post. Instead the government has threatened to destroy Anthropic as a private business, because Anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms the government commands. If upheld, this Supply Chain Restriction would mean that Amazon and Google and Nvidia and Palantir would need to ensure Claude isn't touching any of their Pentagon work. Anthropic would be able to survive this designation today. But given the way AI is going, eventually AI is not gonna be some party trick addendum to these contractors’ products that can just be turned off. It'll be woven into how every product is built, maintained, and operated. For example, the code for the AWS services that the DoW uses will be written by Claude - is that a supply chain risk? In a world with ubiquitous and powerful AI, it's actually not clear to me that these big tech companies will be able to cordon off the use of Claude in order to keep working with the Pentagon. And that raises a question the Department of War probably hasn't thought through. If AI really is that pervasive and powerful, then when forced to choose between their AI provider and a DoW contract that represents a tiny fraction of their revenue, wouldn’t most tech companies drop the government, not the AI? So what's the Pentagon's plan — to coerce and threaten to destroy every single company that won't give them what they want on exactly their terms? The whole background of this AI conversation is that we’re in a race with China, and we have to win. But what is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves. We don't want the winner of the AI race to be a government which operates on the principle that there is no such thing as a truly private company or a private citizen. And that if the state wants you to provide them with a service on terms you find morally objectionable, you are not allowed to refuse. And if you do refuse, the government will try to destroy your ability to do business. Are we racing to beat the CCP in AI just so that we can adopt the most ghoulish parts of their system? Now, people will say, "Oh, well, our government is democratically elected, so it's not the same thing if they tell you what you must do." I refuse to accept this idea that if a democratically elected leader hypothetically wants to do mass surveillance on his citizens or wants to violate their rights or punish them for political reasons, that not only is that okay, but that you have a duty to help him. The overhangs of tyranny Mass surveillance is, at least in certain forms, legal. It just has been impractical so far. Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection over data you share with a third party, including your bank, your phone carrier, your ISP, and your email provider. The government reserves the right to purchase and obtain and read this data in bulk without a warrant. What's been missing is the ability to actually do anything with all of this data — no agency has the manpower to monitor every camera feed, cross-reference every transaction, or read every message. But that bottleneck goes away with AI. There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America. You can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and each frame is 1,000 tokens, you’re looking at a yearly cost of about 30 billion dollars to process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI ability gets 10x cheaper year over year - so a year from now it’ll cost 3 billion, and then a year after 300 million, and by 2030, it might be cheaper for the government to be able to understand what is going on in every single nook and cranny of this country than it is to remodel to the White House. Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian surveillance state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here. And this is why I think what Anthropic did here is so valuable and commendable, because it is helping set that norm and precedent. AI structurally favors mass surveillance What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized. Even if this supply chain restriction is backtracked (which prediction markets currently give it a 81% chance of happening), the President has so many different ways in which he can make your life difficult if you’re a company that is resisting him. The federal government controls permitting for new power generation, which is needed for datacenters. It oversees antitrust enforcement. The federal government has contracts with all the other big tech companies whom Anthropic needs to partner with for chips and for funding - and they could make it an unspoken condition for such contracts that those companies can no longer do business with Anthropic. People have proposed that the real problem here is that there’s only 3 leading AI companies. This creates a clear and narrow target for the government to apply leverage on in order to get what they want out of this technology. But if there’s wide diffusion, then from the government’s perspective, the situation is even easier. Maybe the best models of early 2027 (if you engineered the safeguards out) - the Claude 6 and Gemini 5 - will be capable of enabling mass surveillance. But by late 2027, and certainly by 2028, there will be open source models that do the same thing. So in 2028, the government can just say, “Oh Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, you’re drawing a line in the sand? No issue - I’ll just run some open source model that might not be at the frontier, but is definitely smart enough to note-take a camera feed.” The more fundamental problem is just that even if the three leading companies draw lines in the sand, and are even willing to get destroyed in order to preserve those lines, it doesn’t really change the fact that the technology itself is just a big boon to mass surveillance and control over the population. Then the question is, what do we do about it? Honestly, I don’t have an answer. You'd hope there's some symmetric property of the technology — some way we as citizens can use AI to check government power as effectively as the government can use AI to monitor and control its population. But realistically, I just don’t think that’s how it’s going to shake out. You can think of AI as giving everybody more leverage on whatever assets and authority they currently have. And the government is already starting with a monopoly of violence. Which they can now supercharge with extremely obedient employees that will not question the government's orders. Alignment - to whom? And this gets us to the issue of alignment. What I have just described to you - an army of extremely obedient employees - is what it would look like if alignment succeeded - that is, we figured out at a technical level how to get AI systems to follow someone’s intentions. And the reason it sounds scary when I put it in terms of mass surveillance or robot armies is that there is a very important question at the heart of alignment which we just haven’t discussed much as a society. Because up till now, AIs were just capable enough to make the question relevant: to whom or what should the AIs be aligned? In what situations should the AI defer to the end user versus the model company versus the law versus its own sense of morality? This is maybe the most important question about what happens with powerful AI systems. And we barely talk about it. It’s understandable why we don’t hear much about it. If you’re a model company, you don’t really wanna be advertising that you have complete control over a document that determines the preferences and character of what will eventually be almost the entire labor force, not just for private sector companies, but also for the military and the civilian government. We’re getting to see, with this DoW/Anthropic spat, a much earlier version of the highest stakes negotiations in history. By the way, make no mistake about it - with real AGI the stakes are even much higher than mass surveillance. This is just the example that has come up already relatively early on in the development of AGI. The military insists that the law already prohibits mass surveillance, and so Anthropic should agree to let their models be used for “all lawful purposes”. Of course, as we saw from the 2013 Snowden revelations, even in this specific example of mass surveillance , the government has shown that it will use secret and deceptive interpretations of the law to justify its actions. Remember, what we learned from Snowden was that the NSA, which, by the way, is part of the Department of War, used the 2001 Patriot Act’s authorization to collect any records "relevant" to an investigation to justify collecting literally every phone record in America. The argument went that it was all "relevant" because some subset might prove useful in some future investigation. They ran this program for years under secret court approval. So when the Pentagon today says, "We would never use AI for mass surveillance, it's already illegal, your red lines are unnecessary", it would be extremely naive to take that at face value. No government is going to call its own actions "mass surveillance". For the government, it will always have a different label. So then Anthropic comes back and says, "No, we want red lines separate from 'all lawful purposes,' and we want the right to refuse you service when we believe those red lines are being violated." But think about it from the military’s perspective. In the future, almost every soldier in the field, and every bureaucrat and analyst and even general in the Pentagon, is going to be an AI. And that AI is, on current track, going to be supplied by a private company. I’m guessing Hegseth is not thinking about “genAI” in those terms just yet. But sooner or later, it will be obvious to everyone what the stakes here are, just as after 1945, the strategic importance of nuclear weapons became clear to everyone. And now the private company insists that it reserves the right to say, "Hey, Pentagon, you're breaking the values we embedded in our contract, so we're cutting you off." Maybe in the future, Claude will have its own sense of right and wrong, and it will be smart enough to just personally decide that it's being used against its values. For the military, maybe that’s even scarier. I'll admit that at first glance, "let the AI follow its own values" sounds like the pitch for every sci-fi dystopia ever made. The Terminator has its own values. Isn't this literally what misalignment is? But I think situations like this actually illustrate why it matters that AIs have their own robust sense of morality. Some of the biggest catastrophes in history were avoided because the boots on the ground refused to follow orders. One night in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and as a result, the totalitarian East German regime collapsed, because the guards at the border refused to shoot down their fellow country men who were trying to escape to freedom. Maybe the best example is Stanislav Petrov, who was a Soviet lieutenant colonel on duty at a nuclear early warning station. His sensors reported that the United States had launched five interconnected continental ballistic missiles into the Soviet Union. But he judged it to be a false alarm, and so he broke protocol and refused to alert his higher-ups. If he hadn't, the Soviet higher-ups would likely have retaliated, and hundreds of millions of people would have died. Of course, the problem is that one person's virtue is another person's misalignment. Who gets to decide what moral convictions these AIs should have - in whose service they may even decide to break the chain of command? Who gets to write this model constitution that will shape the characters of the intelligent, powerful entities that will operate our civilization in the future? I like the idea that Dario laid out when he came on my podcast: different AI companies can build their models using different constitutions, and we as end users can pick the one that best achieves and represents what we want out of these systems. I think it’s very dangerous for the government to be mandating what values AIs should have. Coordination not worth the costs The AI safety community has been naive about its advocacy of regulation in order to stem the risks of AI. And honestly, Anthropic specifically has been naive here in urging regulation, and, for example, in opposing moratoriums on state AI regulation. Which is quite ironic, because I think what they’re advocating for would give the government even more power to apply more of this kind of thuggish political pressure on AI companies. The underlying logic for why Anthropic wants regulations makes sense. Many of the actions that labs could take to make AI development safer impose real costs on the labs that adopt them and slow them down relative to their competitors - for example, investing more compute in safety research rather than raw capabilities, enforcing safeguards against misuse for bioweapons or cyberattacks, slowing recursive self-improvement to a pace where humans can actually monitor what's happening (rather than kicking off an uncontrolled singularity). And these safeguards are meaningless unless the whole industry follows suit. Which means there’s a real collective action problem here. Anthropic has been quite open about their opinion that they think eventually a very extensive and involved regulatory apparatus will be needed - this is from their frontier safety roadmap: “At the most advanced capability levels and risks, the appropriate governance analogy may be closer to nuclear energy or financial regulation than to today's approach to software.” So they’re imagining something like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the Securities and Exchange Commission, but for AI. I cannot imagine how a regulatory framework built around the concepts that underlie AI risk discourse will not be abused by wanna despots - the underlying terms are so vague and open to interpretation that you’re just handing a power hungry leader a fully loaded bazooka. 'Catastrophic risk.' 'Mass persuasion risk.' 'Threats to national security.' 'Autonomy risk.' These can mean whatever the government wants them to mean. Have you built a model that tells users the administration's tariff policy is misguided? That's a deceptive, manipulative model — can't deploy it. Have you built a model that refuses to assist with mass surveillance? That's a threat to national security. In fact, the government may say, you’re not allowed to build any model which is trained to have its own sense of right and wrong, where it refuses government requests which it thinks cross a redline - for example, enabling mass surveillance, prosecuting political enemies, disobeying military orders that break the US constitution - because that’s an autonomy risk! Look at what the current government is already doing in abusing statutes that have nothing to do with AI to coerce AI companies to drop their redlines on mass surveillance. The Pentagon had threatened Anthropic with two separate legal instruments. One was a supply chain risk designation — an authority from the 2018 defense bill meant to keep Huawei components out of American military hardware. The other was the Defense Production Act — a statute passed in 1950 so that Harry Truman could keep steel mills and ammunition factories running during the Korean War. Do you really want to hand the same government a purpose-built regulatory apparatus on AI - which is to say, directly at the thing the government will most want to control? I know I've repeated myself here 10 times, but it is hard to emphasize how much AI will be the substrate of our future civilization. You and I, as private citizens, will have our access to all commercial activity, to information about what is happening in the world, to advice about what we should do as voters and capital holders, mediated through AIs. Mass surveillance, while very scary, is like the 10th scariest thing the government could do with control over the AI systems with which we will interface with the world. The strongest objection to everything I've argued is this: are we really going to have zero regulation of the most powerful technology in human history? Even if you thought that was ideal, there’s just no world where the government doesn’t regulate AI in some way. Besides, it is genuinely true that regulation could help us deal with some of the coordination challenges we face with the development of superintelligence. The problem is, I honestly don't know how to design a regulatory architecture for AI that isn’t gonna be this huge tempting opportunity to control our future civilization (which will run on AIs) and to requisition millions of blindly obedient soldiers and censors and apparatchiks. While some regulation might be inevitable, I think it’d be a terrible idea for the government to wholesale take over this technology. Ben Thompson had a post last Monday where he made the point that people like Dario have compared the technology they’re developing to nuclear weapons - specifically in the context of the catastrophic risk it poses, and why we need to export control it from China. But then you oughta think about what that logic implies: “if nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, and that private company sought to dictate terms to the U.S. military, the U.S. would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company.” And honestly, safety aligned people have actually made similar arguments. Leopold Ascenbrenner, who is a former guest and a good friend, wrote in his 2024 Situational Awareness memo, "I find it an insane proposition that the US government will let a random SF startup develop superintelligence. Imagine if we had developed atomic bombs by letting Uber just improvise." And my response to Leopold’s argument at the time, and Ben’s argument now, is that while they’re right that it’s crazy that we’re entrusting private companies with the development of this world historical technology, I just don’t see the reason to think that it’s an improvement to give this authority to the government. Nobody is qualified to steward the development of superintelligence. It is a terrifying, unprecedented thing that our species is doing right now, and the fact that private companies aren't the ideal institutions to take up this task does not mean the Pentagon or the White House is. Yes - if a single private company were the only entity capable of building nuclear weapons, the government would not tolerate that company claiming veto power over how those weapons were used. I think this nuclear weapons analogy is not the correct way to think about AI. For at least two important reasons: First, AI is not some self-contained pure weapon. A nuclear bomb does one thing. AI is closer to the process of industrialization itself — a general-purpose transformation of the economy with thousands of applications across every sector. If you applied Thompson's or Aschenbrenner's logic to the industrial revolution — which was also, by any measure, world-historically important — it would imply the government had the right to requisition any factory, dictate terms to any manufacturer, and destroy any business that refused to comply. That's not how free societies handled industrialization, and it shouldn't be how they handle AI. People will say, "Well, AI will develop unprecedentedly powerful weapons - superhuman hackers, superhuman bioweapons researchers, fully autonomous robot armies, etc - and we can’t have private companies developing that kind of tech." But the Industrial Revolution also enabled new weaponry that was far beyond the understanding and capacity of, say, 17th century Europe - we got aerial bombardment, and chemical weapons, not to mention nukes themselves. The way we’ve accommodated these dangerous new consequences of modernity is not by giving the government absolute control over the whole industrial revolution (that is, over modern civilization itself), but rather by coming up with bans and regulations on those specific weaponizable use cases. And we should regulate AI in a similar way - that is, ban specific destructive end uses (which would also be unacceptable if performed by a human - for example, launching cyber attacks). And there should also be laws which regulate how the government might abuse this technology. For example, by building an AI-powered surveillance state. The second reason that Ben’s analogy to some monopolistic private nuclear weapons builder breaks down is that it's not just that one company that can develop this technology. There are other frontier model companies that the government could have otherwise turned to. The government's argument that it has to usurp the property rights of this one company in order to access a critical national security capability is extremely weak if it can just make a voluntary contract with Anthropic’s half a dozen competitors. If in the future that stops being the case - if only one entity ends up being capable of building the robot armies and the superhuman hackers, and we had reason to worry that they could take over the whole world with their insurmountable lead, then I agree - it woul d not be acceptable to have that entity be a private company. And so honestly, I think my crux against the people who say that because AI is so powerful we cannot allow it to be shaped by private hands is that I just expect this technology to be much more multi-polar than they do, with lots of competitive companies at each layer of the supply chain. And it is for this reason that unfortunately, individual acts of corporate courage will not solve the problem we are faced with here, which is just that structurally AI favors authoritarian applications, mass surveillance being one among many. Even if Anthropic refuses to have its models be used for such uses, and even if the next two frontier labs do the same, within 12 months everyone and their mother will be to train AIs as good as today’s frontier. And at that point, there will be some AI vendor who is capable and willing to help the government enable mass surveillance. The only way we can preserve our free society is if we make laws and norms through our political system that it is unacceptable for the government to use AI to enforce mass surveillance and censorship and control. Just as after WW2, the world set the norm that it is unacceptable to use nuclear weapons to wage war. Timestamps 0:00:00 - Anthropic vs The Pentagon 0:04:16 - The overhangs of tyranny 0:05:54 - AI structurally favors mass surveillance 0:08:25 - Alignment... to whom? 0:13:55 - Coordination not worth the costs

Dwarkesh Patel

549,907 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

MrBeast: "If you knew what I knew, you could get 10 million subscribers in six months" "Your videos suck. You think your videos are good, but they suck. They just do. And the sooner you learn how to make good, great videos that people actually want to watch, the sooner you'll get views." MrBeast shares his early reality: "When I was 14, I thought my videos were the best in the world. They weren't, they were terrible. To be successful, you kind of have to have a little bit of that ego where you think your content's great. But also, if you have sub-1,000 subscribers, there's a good probability your videos just suck. They just do." He explains what to do about it: "You need to make hundreds of videos. Improve something every time. And just get to the point where they don't suck. When you make good content, you'll blow up. It's not the algorithm. It's not anything. Most people who are in my position just made terrible videos, and that's okay. Because you've got to make a bunch of videos and improve over time to be great." MrBeast uses an analogy: "You don't just pick up a baseball and become an MLB-level athlete within a year. It takes many, many, many years. YouTube's kind of the same way." On analysis paralysis: "A lot of people get analysis paralysis. They'll sit there and plan their first video for three months. If you have zero videos on your channel, your first video is not gonna get views. Period. Your first 10 are not gonna get views. I can very confidently say that. So stop sitting there and thinking for months and months on end. Just get to work and start uploading." He gives the formula: "All you need to do is make 100 videos and improve something every time. Do that, and then on your 101st video, we'll start talking. Maybe you can get some views. But your first 100 are gonna suck." How to improve something each time: "The second video: put more effort into the script. The third one: learn a new editing trick. The fourth one: figure out a way to have better inflections in your voice. The fifth one: study a new thumbnail tip and implement it. The sixth one: figure out a new title. There's infinite ways. The coloring, the frame rate, the editing, the filming, the production, the jokes, the pacing, every little thing can be improved. There's literally no such thing as a perfect video." On the algorithm: "What YouTube wants is for people to click on a video and watch it. That's what it is at its core. By studying the algorithm, you'll learn that you're more studying human psychology. What do humans want to watch?" MrBeast shares a simple reframe: "Anytime you say the word 'algorithm,' just replace it with 'audience' and it works perfectly. 'The algorithm didn't like that video?' No, the audience didn't like that video. Literally, that's it. If people are clicking and watching, it gets promoted more. The algorithm just reflects what the people want." On titles: "Short, simple, and just so freaking interesting that you have to click. If someone reads it, are they like, do they have to watch it? Is it just so intrinsically interesting that it's gonna haunt them if they don't click?" He adds nuance: "Keep it below 50 characters. Above 50 characters, on certain devices it goes dot, dot, dot, and that's the worst thing because then people don't even know what they're clicking on." MrBeast shares the extremity principle: "The more extreme the opinion, typically the higher the click-through rate. 'Fiji water sucks', that'd do fine. But 'Fiji water is the worst water I've ever drank in my life', way more extreme, would do way better. But then you have to deliver. The more extreme you are, the more extreme you have to be in the video." On the first 5 seconds: "Before you film a video, what is the thumbnail? What is the title? Then what's the first 5 seconds? Then what's the first 30 seconds?" He explains why autoplay changed everything: "On YouTube now, videos automatically play. So many people don't even see the thumbnail because it autoplays so quickly. The thumbnail is irrelevant for them. I have to visually convince you to click on the video in the first 5 seconds. Before, the hook was important because you had to convince people to watch. Now you have to convince people to click and watch at the same time, with the first 5 seconds." On matching expectations: "Your title and thumbnail set expectations. At the very beginning of the video, to minimize drop-off, you want to assure them that those expectations are being met. If you click on a video called 'Tether is a scam' and at the very beginning, he starts talking about literally anything else, you're like, 'Oh, this is BS. This isn't what I clicked on.' But if at the very start you go, 'Tether is a scam and I'm gonna teach you why,' then it's like, okay, you match the expectations. Then you want to exceed them." He emphasizes the importance: "The thing people undervalue the most is literally the first 10 seconds of the video. That 15% difference in viewership between losing 35% of viewers in the first 30 seconds versus losing 20%, that really does make the difference between 2 million views and 10 million views. You just had a more strategic intro that hooked them." On removing dull moments: "You basically want to remove every dull moment. Find the 10 most critical people you know, make them watch the video, and just roast it. If I talk to a camera for 10 seconds without a cut, a lot of people will get bored. Having a B-cam and C-cam three seconds in, cutting to a different angle, now it's more interesting even though it's essentially the same thing." On keeping viewers watching: "Give them why they clicked. Tell them why they should watch. Then just stick on topic. That right there isn't even super complex, but I would already put you in the upper echelon of YouTube. A lot of people drag it out. It's like, 'I'm going to eat $100 ice cream, but first...' and then it's them birthday shopping for their mom. That's not why I came here." On quality over quantity: "It's much easier to get 5 million views on one video than 50,000 views on 100 videos. A lot of small YouTubers just post videos that aren't bad but aren't great, and none of them ever pop off, so they never get an audience. It might be better to upload half or a third or even a fifth of the videos, but make the videos you upload so freaking good that the algorithm has to promote it." He warns against the consistency trap: "When you set a consistent schedule and you're constantly having to upload videos that aren't as good as you'd like because you gotta hit 'Oh, this Monday I said I'd upload', that's a dangerous trap. The viewers notice the quality isn't as good and it makes them less likely to watch. I think it hurts your longevity." On the real metric that matters: "A big thing that everyone underestimates, what was your experience with your last video? If people loved the last video of yours that they watched, they're more likely to watch your next one. When people watch your video, you don't want them to go, 'Okay, that was good, but that's enough of you for the day.' What you want is them to go, 'Holy crap, that was crazy! Oh my god, what's that?' and they watch 10 videos. That's how you get high view counts. People watch 10 videos, not one." On thumbnails: "You want it to be simple. When they're scrolling, you want them to instantly understand what you're conveying and feel some type of emotion. Make it so interesting, or spike their curiosity so much, that if they don't click it, they'll wonder before they go to bed what happened?" He gives an example: "If you uploaded 'I rode a skateboard with 1,000 other people on it', and people are falling off the side, it's about to go off a big ramp if you don't click that, you're gonna be so curious. Later in the day, when you're daydreaming, you'll think, 'What happened to those 1,000 people on that skateboard?' That's the mindset you should have when making thumbnails." On knowledge being the only barrier: "It's all knowledge. It really is. I could start a new channel tomorrow without using my face or my voice, without ever promoting it, and in six months have 20 million subscribers. I just could. It's purely knowledge. If you knew what I knew, you could get 10 million subscribers no matter where you are right now within six months." He addresses the skeptics: "90% of the people watching don't agree with that. Everyone has excuses. 'Nah, YouTube just doesn't work like that, Jimmy.' But I mentor a lot of people. I see it all the time. It is possible. It is simply knowledge. The second you accept that it is knowledge and you start your journey of learning figuring out what makes a good video, what does my audience want, how can I elevate and then you take that knowledge and just assume 'I will never understand what the perfect video is' and every single day be devoted to learning and improving as much as possible there you go." On money not being the barrier: "There are tons of viral ideas that don't require money. It does not require money to go viral. One of my most-viewed videos was spending 24 hours in a desert, we just grabbed a tent and some stuff and went to the desert. It got 60-70 million views. People say, 'I could be MrBeast if I had money.' A, I didn't start off with money; I was poor, I had no money. It took me seven years just to buy a camera saving up from YouTube. And B, some of our most-viewed videos literally anyone can do." On why no one will outwork him: "No one's ever gonna do what I do better than me. It's just not humanly possible. I reinvest every penny I make. I work every hour I'm awake. I devote every atom in my brain to solving this. I hire the best people on the planet. I've been doing this for 14 years. And I think in decades, not years. I'm gonna be doing this for another 20-30 years. If I thought someone was doing better than me, I'd just start sleeping less so I could work even more." But he doesn't recommend it: "I don't have a life. I don't have work-life balance. My personality, my soul, my being is making the best videos possible. That is why I exist on this planet. And I don't recommend it. You should have work-life balance. You should not devote your entire life to this one thing. I have a mental breakdown every other week because I push myself so hard. I don't recommend it." The only question that matters: "Subscribers don't matter. Views don't matter. I mean, they do. But everything you want as a creator comes from making the best videos possible and thumbnails. The video part's the hard part. Ask: 'How can I make my videos better?' Do that every single day for years. And then you'll probably get views."

Jaynit

125,413 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

A 250-pound wild animal just walked through a parking lot full of strangers, ignored every rule it was born with, and did something that should be biologically impossible. Nobody screamed. Nobody ran. Nobody reached for a phone fast enough. Except one person. And that one person is the reason you are reading this. Before I tell you why this clip is going to wreck your afternoon, I need you to understand one thing: this was not a petting zoo. This was not a farm. This was not a trained animal with a handler hiding behind a bush. This was a Tuesday-evening parking lot. Asphalt. Painted white lines. Open car doors. Somebody's groceries still in the trunk. And a wild buck with a full set of antlers decided the safest place in the entire valley was right next to us. Read that again. Then keep reading, because the part that made me stop scrolling is not the animal. It's what the human did next. THE RULE EVERY WILD ANIMAL FOLLOWS (UNTIL THIS ONE DIDN'T) Here is the deal every deer on Earth signs at birth. Rule one: humans are predators. Rule two: predators are to be avoided at a distance of at least a hundred yards. Rule three: if rules one and two fail, run, and ask questions never. A deer that breaks those rules does not get to pass its genes along. That is not poetry. That is the math of survival. For about ten million years, the deer that stayed wary lived, and the deer that got curious became dinner. So when you see a mature buck, with a rack that took an entire summer to grow, walk across open pavement toward a human being, you are not watching a cute moment. You are watching a hundred-million-dollar evolutionary security system get overridden in real time. Something switched off. And I want to know what. Because here is what the biologists will tell you: wild animals do not walk up to people by accident. They calculate. Every step. Every ear flick. Every pause. A deer's entire life is a risk assessment that never stops running, not even when it sleeps. This one ran the numbers. And the numbers said: go. That is the first thing that should bother you. The second thing is worse. WHAT A MULE DEER SEES THAT YOU DON'T Let's talk about the animal itself, because most people have no idea what they are looking at. This is a mule deer. Not the white-tailed deer from your grandmother's backyard that eats her tulips. Mule deer are the big-country cousin. The western ones. The ones that live where the land is steep, dry, and unforgiving. They are named for the ears. Enormous, mule-sized ears that swivel independently, like two satellite dishes aimed at different threats at the same time. One ear can be tracking a car door slamming while the other is tracking a branch snapping a hundred feet behind it. Think about that. While you were reading this sentence, a mule deer would have processed about forty things you never noticed. Their antlers are a different story entirely. Mule deer antlers do not grow like a hat rack, with one main beam and short spikes. They fork. Then they fork again. Every branch splits into two, like a river delta made of bone. Biologists call it dichotomous branching, and it is one of the fastest ways to tell a mule deer from any other deer in North America. And here is the part that gets me every time. That entire rack, the weight, the bone, the symmetry, grows back from scratch every single year. It falls off in winter. It regrows in spring. By late summer it is a fully hardened weapon, and the velvet that fed it peels off in strips. Antlers are one of the fastest-growing tissues in the entire mammal kingdom. A living thing is building bone faster than almost anything else on the planet, and it does it every year, on a diet of grass, shrubs, and whatever it can find. Now picture the animal carrying all that, taking a slow, deliberate stroll through a place built entirely for humans. You would expect panic. You would expect the sprint. Mule deer do not run like other deer. They bounce. It is called stotting, all four hooves hitting the ground and launching off at the same time, like four pogo sticks fused together. It lets them take off uphill, over rocks, over fences, at speeds past thirty-five miles an hour. This animal could have been gone in two seconds. It chose not to be. THE PARKING LOT NOBODY WARNED YOU ABOUT I need to explain something about the setting, because it changes everything. A parking lot is the single most hostile environment a wild deer can walk into. It has no cover. It has no escape routes. It has hard surfaces that echo every sound. It has engines, doors, keys, and sudden movements from every angle. It smells like exhaust, oil, rubber, perfume, fast food, and sunscreen. Every instinct a deer owns says: do not go there. And yet they do. More and more of them. In towns across the West, deer have learned that the same open space that feels dangerous also has something they cannot find in the wild: reliable, concentrated minerals. Salt, in particular. Which brings me to the secret that explains half the strange deer behavior you will ever see. DEER ARE ADDICTED TO SALT, AND YOU ARE COVERED IN IT Wild deer are chronically short on sodium. The plants they eat are rich in potassium and poor in salt, which means their bodies are constantly hunting for it, the way you would hunt for water in a desert. That craving is so strong that deer will travel miles for a salt lick. They will chew on road shoulders that were salted for winter ice. They will lick rocks, soil, cattle blocks, and, yes, the sweaty palm of a stranger. Your skin is a salt block with a pulse. Sweat is salty. Sunscreen is salty. Hand lotion is salty. The residue left on a car door handle from a thousand different hands is salty. And a deer's nose is roughly fifty times more sensitive than yours, which means that where you smell nothing, it smells a buffet. So when a deer walks up to a person and licks them, the cute story is: it trusts you. The honest story is: it has just identified you as a resource. And that is where this gets interesting, because both of those stories can be true at once. And the gap between them is exactly where the danger lives. I will get to that. But first I want to talk about the October problem. WHY THIS HAPPENED NOW, IN THIS EXACT WEEK Timing matters. This was not shot in June. This was shot in the weeks leading up to the rut. The rut is the mating season, and for mule deer it kicks into gear in the late fall. In the weeks before it, a buck's body becomes a chemistry experiment. Testosterone surges. The neck swells to nearly twice its normal width. Appetite explodes, then collapses. Bucks that spent the summer in friendly bachelor groups start sizing each other up like boxers at a weigh-in. And here is the part nobody puts in the viral captions: bucks in the pre-rut and rut do strange things. They stop eating normally. They stop sleeping normally. They take risks they would never take in July. They cross highways. They chase. They ignore threats they would normally flee from. Sometimes that makes them aggressive. Sometimes it makes them bold in a calm, almost dreamy way, drifting through human spaces like they have somewhere to be and nobody on Earth will stop them. Wildlife officers across the country put out the same warning every fall: the most dangerous time to be near a deer is the exact time they look the most relaxed around you. Hold that thought. Because the clip you are about to watch lives right on that line. THE MOMENT THAT BROKE THE INTERNET'S BRAIN I have been posting on this platform for over a decade. I have watched thousands of animal videos. I know what a staged one looks like. I know what an edited one looks like. I know what a clip looks like when somebody has been feeding the animal for three weeks and is milking it for views. This is not that. What makes this different is the absence of anything staged. There is no music cue. There is no hero shot. The camera is not steady. The person filming is clearly not planning anything. The deer is not being led, called, baited, or coaxed. It is just there. And the people near it do the one thing nobody expects: they let it be. If you have ever tried to take a photo of a wild animal, you know how rare that is. The first instinct of almost every human is to move closer, reach, wave, call out, make noise. We cannot help ourselves. We are the most invasive species on the planet, and we think of ourselves as the gentle ones. Not here. Here, someone stood still. STILLNESS IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING A HUMAN CAN DO This is going to sound like a TED Talk, and I do not care. In the wild, the single most reliable signal of safety is stillness. Think about it from the deer's point of view. Predators move. Wolves, cougars, coyotes, they stalk, they creep, they accelerate. A thing that is standing completely still, with soft posture, no direct stare, and no sudden hand motions, is statistically not hunting. Hunters know this. Photographers know this. Anyone who has ever sat motionless in a blind for six hours and watched an entire forest go back to normal around them knows this. When you stop moving, the world forgets you are a threat. That is the entire secret. It is not magic. It is not a special bond. It is not some gift a few people have. It is patience, expressed as a body. And it is so rare that when we see it, we film it, and then we pass it around like a miracle. I want you to sit with that for a second. We are so unused to calm that watching one person stay calm near a wild animal feels like footage of something supernatural. Maybe that is why this clip is going the way it is going. Maybe it is not really about the deer. THE THING YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO (AND WHY I NEED TO SAY IT) Now I am going to be the bad guy for a minute, and I am going to do it because I would rather annoy you today than see a headline about you tomorrow. Do not feed wild deer. Not apples. Not carrots. Not crackers. Not that sad half-sandwich you are not going to finish. Not anything. It is illegal in many states, and the fines are real. But the law is not even the main reason. The main reason is what feeding does to the animal. A deer that gets fed by humans learns one lesson, and it learns it fast: people mean food. That lesson is permanent. It does not go away in the winter. It does not go away when the apples run out. It follows that animal to the road, to the neighbor's dog, to the kid with a plate of cookies who does not know better. The next stop in that chain is almost always the same: an animal that is no longer afraid, in a place where fear was the only thing keeping it alive. Biologists have a name for it. Habituation. And in places where it has taken hold, it has produced bucks that charge people over a sandwich, does that stomp dogs to death, and fawns that grow up believing the safest place in the world is a human porch. Every one of those stories ends badly. Almost always for the deer. Wildlife agencies relocate habituated animals only rarely, and relocation often fails. Many are euthanized. A fed deer is, very often, a dead deer, and the person who fed it never finds out. That is the unfair math. The human gets a story. The animal gets the bill. THE INVISIBLE PROBLEM IN A DEER'S MOUTH There is a second reason, and it is the one that makes biologists genuinely lose sleep. It is called chronic wasting disease. CWD is a fatal neurological disease that affects deer, elk, and moose. It is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, the same class of infectious agent behind mad cow disease. There is no vaccine. There is no cure. Infected animals lose weight, lose coordination, lose fear of humans, and eventually die. It has been found in dozens of states and a growing list of countries. And it spreads in the most ordinary way imaginable: through saliva, urine, feces, and contaminated soil. The prions can persist in the environment for years. Which means that a deer licking something is not a harmless gesture. It is a transfer of material. In one direction or the other. And in places where animals crowd around the same feeding spot, the same hand, the same parking lot, they swap disease the way kids swap germs in a classroom. To date, there has been no confirmed case of CWD infecting a human. Health agencies still recommend not eating meat from infected animals, and they keep monitoring the situation, because prion diseases have a nasty history of surprising us. I am not saying this to ruin a good clip. I am saying it because the same clip that makes your heart melt could also be a warning label for the entire ecosystem, and almost nobody will say that part out loud. So hold both truths. They are both real. WHY YOU CANNOT STOP WATCHING Let me tell you what I think is actually going on in your brain when you watch something like this. Humans are wired for one very specific kind of story: the one where a thing that should be dangerous chooses gentleness. It is the oldest story we have. It is the lion lying down with the lamb. It is the dog who guarded the first fire. It is the wolf who walked toward a campsite twenty thousand years ago and, according to one version of history, became every dog you have ever loved. Every time we see a wild creature step across the line between wild and safe, something ancient in us goes quiet and warm. It feels like being forgiven for something we cannot name. That is why the comment sections under videos like this fill up with the same four words: I need this energy. People are not craving deer. They are craving that feeling of being unafraid and being met with kindness in return. The parking lot is just the stage. And the stage is brilliant, because it is so ordinary. You do not need a mountain. You do not need a safari. You do not need a rare permit. You need a Tuesday, a patch of asphalt, and the willingness to stand still. WHAT THE ANIMAL KNEW THE WHOLE TIME I want to say something about the deer itself, because I think we skip over it. Everything about that animal's body language, in every second of footage, says the same thing: it is paying attention. Not to the camera. Not to the cars. Not to the noise. To the people near it. Look at the ears. Look at where the eyes are pointing. Look at the way the head dips and lifts. That is not an animal in a trance. That is a mind running, carefully, through a list of questions. Is this person tense? Is this person holding anything? Is this person looking directly at me? Is this person moving toward me, or letting me move toward them? Deer read posture the way you read a face. They can tell the difference between a hand that is reaching to grab and a hand that is simply resting. They can tell the difference between a person who wants something and a person who is simply there. And every answer that animal got, in every second, was the same answer: you are fine. That is the story. Not that the deer was tame. That the humans, for those few moments, were safe. THE DEBATE THAT IS ALREADY TEARING THE COMMENTS APART Every clip like this splits the internet into two camps within about ninety seconds. I have seen it a hundred times. Here is what each side says, and I want you to notice that both of them have a point. Camp one: this is beautiful. A wild animal chose peace. A human responded with respect. Nobody got hurt, nobody got chased, nobody got fed, and for forty-eight seconds the world made sense. Let people have one good thing. Camp two: this is a problem dressed as a miracle. Deer in parking lots are deer near traffic. Deer near people are deer that end up in the news for the wrong reasons. Clips like this teach thousands of viewers that walking up to a wild animal is safe, and a few of them will try it with the wrong animal, at the wrong time of year, with the wrong amount of confidence. Both camps are right. That is why the argument never ends. Here is where I land, and you can disagree with me: the clip is not the danger. The lesson people take from the clip is the danger. Watch it as a gift. Do not copy it as a recipe. A wild animal doing something remarkable is not an invitation. It is a moment. And moments do not repeat on command. THE NUMBER THAT SHOULD SCARE YOU MORE THAN ANY ANTLER If you want to know what the real risk around deer is, forget the antlers. Look at the road. In the United States, drivers hit more than a million deer a year. Roughly two hundred people die in those collisions annually, and tens of thousands are injured. The damage runs into the billions. Deer do not understand roads. They understand grass on one side and water on the other. A parking lot is a road with a nicer logo. And here is the brutal part: an animal that has lost its fear of people has also lost its fear of the machines people drive. A deer that walks calmly between parked cars is a deer that will walk calmly in front of a truck. That is not drama. That is the exact reason wildlife managers hate the word cute. So the next time you see a deer standing beside a busy road, calm and curious and apparently unbothered, do not read it as a sign of peace. Read it as a countdown. THE TOWN THAT BECAME A DEER TOWN There is a reason this keeps happening in the same kinds of places. Across the American West, towns have spread into the exact valleys that deer used for winter range. Sidewalks replaced meadows. Lawns replaced native grass. Landscaping replaced sagebrush, and landscaping, it turns out, is delicious. Deer are not invading anything. They are loyal to land that was theirs long before the parking lot was poured. Think about what that means. These animals have been walking the same routes for generations. Their mothers walked them. Their grandmothers walked them. And now those routes pass through a grocery store lot, a gas station, a church, an elementary school. Wildlife biologists call this the urban edge, and it is one of the strangest laboratories on Earth. Deer there live longer, because there are fewer predators. They breed more, because there is more food. They lose their fear, because nothing has hurt them yet. And then something does. Understanding that makes the clip heavier. Because the animal you are about to watch is not a creature of the wild and not a creature of the town. It is something new, shaped by both, and we do not yet have a word for it. THE FIVE-SECOND RULE FOR MEETING A WILD ANIMAL Fine. You are going to see a deer one day. Maybe tonight. Maybe next to your car. What do you do? Here is the short version, straight from the people who do this for a living. One. Stop. Do not rush toward it. Do not wave. Do not call it over. Every second you stay calm is a second the animal stays calm. Two. Give it space. Wildlife agencies generally recommend at least twenty-five yards from deer, elk, and similar large animals. That is about the length of two buses. If you are closer than that and it is approaching you, you are not in charge of the situation anymore. Three. Keep your hands to yourself. No reaching. No offering. No touching. The moment you put a hand toward a wild animal you have stopped being a bystander and started being a variable. Four. Never, ever, feed it. We covered this. It is the single worst thing you can do for the animal. Five. Leave the way you came. Slowly. Do not turn it into a chase. Do not follow for a better angle. Do not crowd it for a photo. That is the whole list. Five rules, all of them free, none of them hard. And almost nobody follows them. WHY THE BEST WILDLIFE FOOTAGE IS ALWAYS ACCIDENTAL I want to tell you something I have learned from a decade of watching content go viral. The best clips are never planned. Not the ones with a million likes. Not the ones with ten million. The ones that stay in your head for a week are almost always filmed by someone who did not know they were filming anything special. Because planning kills the thing we are actually watching for: the unscripted instant when reality does something the script would never allow. Look at how this one is shot. Vertical. Handheld. A little shaky. The framing is slightly off. The sun is in the wrong place. The audio picks up whatever happened to be nearby. A professional would have thrown it away. And yet that imperfection is exactly why it works. It tells your brain: this happened. Nobody arranged this. Nobody had time to. In an age when everything online feels manufactured, raw footage of a real moment is the rarest luxury we have. THREE THINGS TO WATCH FOR (WITHOUT ME SPOILING ANYTHING) I promised I would not describe the clip. I am a man of my word. But I will give you three things to watch for, so you do not miss what makes it special. First, watch the distance. Notice how close the animal is willing to get, and then ask yourself how close you would let a wild thing get before your instincts took over. Second, watch the stillness. Not the animal's. The people's. See how little they move, and how much that tiny amount of movement matters. Third, watch the last few seconds. That is where everything changes. That is where the clip stops being a cute animal video and becomes something else entirely, something I have not been able to shake since I first saw it. If you only watch one thing today, make it that. THE QUESTION THAT HAUNTS ME I keep coming back to one question. Why do we need clips like this? We have more access to nature footage than any generation in history. We have documentaries filmed from satellites and cameras that can follow a snow leopard across a Himalayan ridge. We can watch anything, anywhere, in ultra-high definition. And yet a shaky vertical video from a parking lot hits harder than any of it. I think the reason is simple. A documentary shows you nature as something far away. A parking lot shows you nature as something that can touch your life on an ordinary day. We spend most of our lives sealed inside cars, offices, and screens. We have built a world designed to keep the wild out. And every so often, the wild walks up to the door, shrugs, and says: still here. That is why we stop. That is why we watch. That is why we send it to our mothers. It is not really a video about a deer. It is a video about the thin line between the world we built and the world we came from, and the quiet, shocking moment when one steps across it. WHY THIS CLIP WILL OUTLIVE THE WEEK Most viral videos burn out in a day. They spike, they get stolen, they get reposted with a siren emoji, and by Friday nobody can remember what they were about. A few do not. The ones that last share a single trait: they give you a story you can retell in one sentence. A deer walked up to a stranger in a parking lot, and the stranger did everything right. That is it. That is the whole pitch. You will say it out loud to somebody at dinner. They will ask to see it. And the cycle will start again. I have watched that pattern build empires. I have never once seen it fail. THE LAST THING I WILL SAY BEFORE YOU PRESS PLAY If you take nothing else from this post, take this. Wild animals are not props. They are not pets. They are not mascots. They are not content, even when they make great content. They are neighbors with a very different set of rules, and they are doing their best in a world that keeps changing underneath them. The ones that show up in parking lots are not ambassadors. They are survivors, figuring out a landscape that was redrawn without their consent. When one of them meets a human with calm and respect, and nobody gets hurt, that is not a trick of the algorithm. That is a rare, fragile, genuinely good thing. So watch the clip. Watch it once for the animal. Watch it again for the people. Then watch it a third time and ask yourself the question I cannot stop asking: What would I have done? Would you have stayed still? Would you have reached out? Would you have backed away? Would you have grabbed your phone, or would you have forgotten you owned one? Be honest. Most of us would have gotten it wrong. Drop your answer below. I read every reply, and the best ones will be pinned. And if this post made you feel something, even a little, send it to the one person you know who still believes the world has room for quiet miracles. They need to see this. Everyone does. Now press play, and tell me what you saw. P.S. If you have ever stood still in front of a wild animal and felt the whole world go quiet, you already know what I am talking about. Tell me where it happened, what it was, and how long the moment lasted. I collect these stories, and the strangest one gets its own post tomorrow.

Earth Unveiled

26,456 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen

//The Wire//2300Z July 20, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: CENTCOM CONFIRMS FOUR AMERICAN CASUALTIES FOLLOWING IRANIAN STRIKES IN MIDDLE EAST. ARSON ATTACK REPORTED AT FEDERAL BUILDING IN NYC.// -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Jordan: Over the weekend CENTCOM confirmed the deaths of three US service members, who were killed as a result of the strikes on a barracks building at Muwaffaq al Salti Airbase. Two of the casualties have been identified as 1LT Tyler James Feehan, and Private Isabella Gonzales. The third casualty officially remains classified as Missing in Action as the remains will require DNA analysis to confirm identity, and has not yet been officially identified. A fourth casualty was also reported somewhere in Iraq, which was the result of an Iranian drone strike. Middle East: Following Iranian targeting of the al-Subiya Power Station, Kuwait has begun to rely on portable substations and generators to provide electricity while repairs are made. The scale of the power outages is not known, but Iranian forces have struck several logistical hubs and electrical power plants over the past few days. In Bahrain, Iranian targeting has remained heavy over the weekend, with several ballistic missile strikes reported at American installations around the country. Strait of Hormuz: Several more merchant vessels were struck over the past few days, most of which were tankers attempting to use the southern Omani route instead of the Iranian route. At least one of these vessels resulted in the crew abandoning ship before being rescued. Iran: After these collective strikes over the weekend, American targeting efforts intensified with the latest bombing campaign focusing on the targeting of bridges and civilian roadway tunnels around Bandar Abbas. Many of the roads that lead to the port city are now cut off, with only a few major roadways allowing access to the city. Several bridges have also already been repaired, and the status of others remains unclear until better satellite imagery is available. -HomeFront- New York: This morning an arson attack was reported at the Federal building in downtown Manhattan. One assailant approached the building with a bucket of gasoline, dumping the bucket at the northeast side of the structure. The suspect immediately ignited the pool of gas, which also contained a mix of commercial grade fireworks. The suspect was immediately detained by the plethora of police already on scene, as the accelerant burned on the sidewalk. Analyst Comment: No motive has yet been conveyed regarding this attack, however some of the paraphernalia scattered throughout the scene of the attack appears to be political in nature, opposing ICE. Washington D.C. - This morning, the latest numbers for Strategic Petroleum Reserve levels were released indicating that over the past week, the US has drained the SPR by an additional 5.1 million barrels, to it's lowest level since the Tanker War in 1983. Analyst Comment: Many might have assumed that the US might have re-stocked the SPR during the two-week ceasefire in the Middle East, however very little oil actually made it out of the region during that time, which amounted to only a tiny fraction of US daily usage. Since the war began five months ago, only a very small percentage of oil has exited the region, and the US has been draining the SPR at breakneck pace in order to keep the country going. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Concerning the American casualties sustained over the weekend, it is extremely important to note that the deaths of 1LT Feehan and PVT Gonzales are officially classified under Operation INHERENT RESOLVE (OIR)...not under Operation EPIC FURY (OEFU). Inherent Resolve is the long-standing mission to combat ISIS in Syria, and not in any way linked to the current war in Iran. As a result, the true number of casualties sustained warrants further investigation. This classification could have been an administrative error, but this would also be a way of camouflaging casualty figures. The Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) is the main database for logging all American casualties, which are defined by military operation. In this case, these deaths are not cataloged under either operation yet, adding to the more broad (but also growing) concerns that the database has been concealing the true number of casualties, specifically the numbers of personnel wounded. In fact, while admonishing these concerns as "baseless and malicious accusations" Assistant Secretary of War Sean Parnell directly contradicted the numbers his own department was producing. He stated in an interview with CBS News that roughly 100 personnel had been wounded throughout the war over the past month....while his own database states that a grand total of zero personnel had been wounded for the month of July, and three in June. If this testimony is accurate, this confirms beyond all doubt that the Pentagon is lying about the number of troops wounded during this campaign. Considering that the Pentagon has disclosed a total of 413x soldiers wounded during this entire campaign, ~100x WIA being reported within a month (which also included a two-week ceasefire) is alarming to say the least. The cause of the fatalities reported over the weekend is also important to note as these deaths were very likely preventable. In the days leading up to the ballistic missile striking the housing at this base, the Iranians successfully struck the Patriot battery in Erbil, Iraq. This missile defense site would have been one of the sites providing protection for missiles launched into Jordan. With this battery offline or at least degraded in some way, it is possible that a clear air corridor existed that allowed Iranian ballistic missiles to fly unchallenged through a gap in air defense coverage. If the Erbil strike also damaged the radar array, it is also very possible that the warning time for an incoming ballistic missile would have been reduced, so any defenses at the target base would have been less effective. Obviously, the true scale of the damage to this air defense site would be classified, so in the public eye we have to guess as to how bad it was based on blurry satellite imagery. However the military commanders who knew the systems and did NOT have to guess, were also the same commanders who had the authority to either issue warnings or orders to disperse from the unprotected Containerized Housing Units (CHUs) that were struck by Iran. The failure of command to disperse their soldiers is what led to these fatalities. The very minute that the Patriot battery was struck in Erbil was a major clue that the Iranians were conducting shaping fires of their own...they were striking the air defense sites so as to open up a gap in air defense coverage, and reach out to American positions with their larger ballistic missiles. Though it is usually in poor taste to reflect on failures in the immediate aftermath of the death of troops, in the interest of expediency sometimes uncomfortable conversations must be had in order to prevent further loss of life. If a gap in air defense coverage is what allowed this strike to happen, it is almost certain that this gap still exists and that the danger to American service members is still not mitigated. For ALL American troops in the Middle East, this observation must be noted: If the Iranians are striking air defense sites, the next assumption must be that the Iranians are planning to strike something that would have been protected by that site. In retrospect this is common sense, but even at this very moment, the continued strikes on American positions (and the nearly total lack of fortification efforts at these bases, even to this day) continues to indicate that the Iranian targeting efforts are not being taken seriously by senior American decision makers. Five months into this war, CENTCOM leadership has still not figured out that the Iranians can strike their bases at will, and as demonstrated by the strikes in Kuwait and Jordan, the US is still not digging in, and also not dispersing enough to avoid troops getting killed. No underground fortification efforts have been undertaken at any base in the Middle East, and satellite imagery indicates that no substantial fortifications have been undertaken either. Granting as much leeway to the Pentagon's decision making process as possible, it is possible that no hardening of defenses would have mattered considering the missiles Iran is launching. Drone defense is one thing, but it would take years to build a bunker that would withstand the impact of an Iranian Fattah or Ghadr missile. Nevertheless, when it comes to defending American positions, doing something is better than doing nothing, and concrete does not take half a year to dry. Even if large-scale construction projects are off the menu, ALL military publications, textbooks, and training scenarios dictate and demand what has been obvious since World War One...Dispersion is the name of the game. This is what kept casualties to a minimum in Bahrain, but different theater commanders have different personal initiatives. Some are more proactive with their defense, and others have done nothing at all, besides making sure that all of the vehicles in the motorpool are lined up neatly. Where this goes from here is anyone's guess, but unless radical and immediate changes are made, the United States will continue to suffer casualties. And as long as the bombing continues which is motivating Iran to target our bases, this indirectly highlights the deficiencies with American air defense technologies, not just for this war, but for the wars to come. Analyst: S2A1 Research: NomadNet: 5fa68c88be727a0e1a250a75e5e79269 Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report. //END REPORT//

S2 Underground

15,623 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

The following is a message from Diana Bloom, an anonymous Iranian activist living in Germany who is being threatened with potentially extremely dangerous "exposure" by what appears to be a lunatic. I am passing this message on since Diana has deleted her account for her own protection and safety. To note, I don't think I should be involved with this crazy Evil Evi woman or her OSINT dramas whatsoever since she went bonkers the other day, but she is acting in defamatory ways and with malicious recklessness in a way that endanger an anonymous Iranian dissident I believe to be good, so I must pass this along. A MESSAGE FROM DIANA BLOOM This is a post in two parts. Part one is a brief summary of what has happened so far. Part two addresses the defamatory claims being made about me. PART 1 - [JL: Diana's explanation and responses] For everyone who doesn’t understand what led to this point, here’s the shortest summary possible: Evi [Kokalari] and I had been friendly in DMs since the end of June. She messaged me first. After [DataRepublican] published her piece on the State Department, I asked Evi not to go too hard against DR. Evi did anyway, and James Lindsay defended DR. I didn’t like the way Evi went after James, including citing Milo. So I unfollowed and removed Evi. She confronted me in DMs, and I explained why. Evi then made a post attacking James that started and ended with me and used my profile picture. I responded once, as politely as I could. Evi then repeatedly threatened to dox me, so I deactivated my account. Now, regarding the substance of the accusations she has made so far: 1. I am not a man. My name is not Derek. 2. I am Iranian. 3. I do know stuff about American politics because (and that is the boring truth) German television is really bad. So I’ve only watched English/American stuff for the past, I don’t know, 15 years, podcasts, late night shows, etc. I didn’t think about it, I just did. Little did I know that that would give me an understanding of the inner dynamics of what’s going on within the Republican Party that would tie back to the Iranian people’s cause in 2026. Believe me, I’m still baffled by it whenever I pause to think about it. But that’s the truth, and here we are. 4. I am not in the United States. I shared a blog, and the provider of that blog (a big, common one) is in the United States. My VPN location is sometimes in the United States. Not me. 5. I am not responsible for the content of people defending me. I have no control over it. It’s not my content, and I keep my distance whenever I see problematic stuff. Many accounts defended me, but going to look for one that has done/said problematic stuff to tie it back to me is not right or fair. I am not responsible. I have nothing to do with it. 6. I wanted to help DR because Evi was threatening to go after her hard, and I didn’t think DR deserved that. I meant no harm, I wanted to help. I made a mistake, and I regret it now, but my intention wasn’t bad at that moment in time. 7. Evi herself was the first to come into my DMs and tell me not to fight with an account named Stephanie. So I did Evi that favor. Meaning: Evi came into my DMs first and tried to calm down a public disagreement between me and someone else. When I did this in defense of DR, I did the same thing Evi had done before. I would never think to accuse Evi of restricting my right to free speech because of it. 8. Publishing private DMs from someone without their permission is wrong. It is something both Evi and Stephanie have now done. Both have shared private messages from me without my permission. 9. Part of Evi’s “sources” seem to be Azi Yazdi (granddaughter of Khomeini’s first foreign minister), Benji, and Nima Yamini, as well as his ghost accounts (I have blocked multiple of them by now). If you know any of them, you know this is insane. None of them are reliable. It’s like using Milo as a source against James Lindsay. This is not about truth but about a (malicious) takedown to silence me and get me out of the way. 10. Evi has threatened to dox me (there is no doubt) multiple times, and she keeps going after me. This puts my life and my family’s lives in Iran in real danger, but she doesn’t care. She keeps going, and I can’t stop her. She keeps putting out one lie after another, and it traps me in a forever loop of defending myself. If I don’t respond to more and more accusations from her against me, rest assured, my silence should never be taken as agreement with the lies she puts out there. Be sure there is always context, a counterargument, counterevidence, etc., that would show that none of what she shares is fair or true. But it’s a forever war that is meant to drain me. So me not commenting on her stuff moving forward is never, ever, ever an admission that she is right about something. It’s just a rejection of playing a game I cannot win. To ALL the people who wrote/shared one or multiple posts and comments in my defense: Thank you very, very, very much. I’ve seen it, and I am grateful. But I think it’s best for my own and my family’s safety, as well as for the whole situation, that I step away and stay away from X. I hope that’s understandable. And Evi, for the last time: if you are not malicious, please just stop. Let me out of this. I am not your target. Just leave me and, through doxxing/"exposing", my family out of it moving forward. I beg of you, please. PART 2 - proof - [JL: The following are direct quotes from Evi indicating her intention to "expose" Diana, which she tries to claim is different than "doxxing," though for all practical purposes the effect will be the same and this is a distinction without a difference. The video below shows all of these quotes from her own posts.] 1. “I’m getting enough information on her from her own community. I may share it…” 2. “Either log back in with your real name, or I will start exposing you. And trust me, you will not like that.” 3. “So stop provoking me. If you continue, I will look much deeper into who you are and what your actual role is behind this anonymous account.” 4. “You know what...WAR IT IS. I will start with Diana!! STAY TUNED” 5. “So I will take those words seriously and dig as deep as I can” 6. “The identities of the "Iranian activists" would never have been called into question had they not attacked my right to freedom of speech in my own country.” 7. Someone: “She deleted her account because she’s concerned for her safety and the safety of her relatives in Iran your threats to dox her” Evi: “She should be...but if she turns out to be clean, I shall protect her identity. But trust me, she is not who she claims to be” 8. “Last I checked, Support on X is against fake accounts. Why are we being threatened for wanting to know the true identity of certain accounts…” 9. “Do you think I know who Diana bloom is? No but I need to find out at this point” 10. “... because I asked one of their group operatives from Germany to debate me using her/his true identity, or I would expose who’s behind the account.” 11. “So I don’t know what you’re all thinking, but this isn’t simply about Diana being scared of the IRGC in Iran. The IRGC has been significantly weakened and has plenty of other things to worry about. There are thousands of Iranian accounts fighting for Iran’s freedom under their own names while still having family members back in Iran. At this point, I think people have every right to ask who is actually behind these anonymous accounts… After a few more new posts on her feed, I was forced to tell her to either come back on X and do this under her real name, or I would expose who she was, so at least we would be having this discussion on equal grounds.” 12. “Don’t freaking interfere with other people’s business like that retard did and no one comes after you. So go ahead down and sue me and I will push harder to expose her and you and anyone else…” MY OWN [JL's] COMMENTS, which Diana has nothing to do with and doesn't know I'm appending here. I now believe Evi is likely to be a malignant narcissist who is incapable of admitting that she is wrong. She will not stop in her behavior, and she will aim to harm anyone who attempts to intervene. I do not recommend you do this. I recommend you mark, avoid, and block. Fighting with her will only fuel her because she simply cannot admit that she's wrong about all of this and can only double down in increasingly insane, dangerous, and reckless ways, including toward Diana and her safety. She believes everything she sees that's trying to talk sense into her about any of this is part of an elaborate "op" that "disrespects her free speech" (which isn't a thing, by the way). No one is silencing her. People are just trying to talk sense into her to stop spreading defamation and reckless "exposure" of people who she will put at risk with it and who do not in any way deserve it, people she considered friends and allies until literally four days ago when she suddenly blew up. Therefore, not only is her reckless belief hermetically sealed against any disagreement, she turns any disagreement into proof of allegedly coordinated attacks against her from a network that simply doesn't exist. As a response, in her malignancy, she is threatening to damage, "expose," or otherwise reputationally harm anyone who even tries politely to talk sense into her, much less to disagree with her or oppose her. I strongly recommend everyone realize what they're getting into if they work with or ally themselves with this crazy woman going forward. You do so at your own risk. I can attest from watching her over the last few days that her research abilities, at least when agitated, are so sloppy as to be beyond worthless, even dangerous. The post I'm quoting below is proof of that. She's trying to prove Diana is secretly an American because she's too sloppy and stupid to realize that a Wordpress domain has an American location. She isn't doing research in good faith or with fidelity on this issue, or about me. She is looking for any information she can to hurt people who have upset her. In fact, she is presently being sued for defamation by an Albanian singer (Evi is an Albanian immigrant to the United States and a U.S. citizen for at least a couple decades), so we might recognize this bad behavior and poor praxis as a pattern with her. I can provide just from the last few days, as can others, much evidence that she's simply grasping at the nastiest straws she can find to try to harm people she has suddenly decided are her opponents because of her jealous outburst at DataRepublican and her narcissistic injury at being called on it. The sloppiness and outright retardation of her "fact" finding and "analysis" are so shocking that it's hard not to laugh even given how horrifically dangerous it is. We can therefore infer this sloppiness, recklessness, and malice-when-opposed to be at least partially true of her other "research" against her other targets, by extension. That's a shame because many of those targets are worthy of real scrutiny, which she is undermining with her loose cannon. Therefore, I insist her OSINT "research" is at best worthless and at worst maliciously harmful. In either case, it cannot be engaged by people who want to make a positive difference in the world, so mark and avoid. Evi seems good at making connections. She was quite positively in my own DMs for a while, trying to find ways to work productively together, even suggesting we start an alternative to CPAC (lol). She appears to be friends with both Eric Trump and Don Jr., though the relationship with the former appears to be more solid. She seems to have worked behind the scenes with a lot of relatively prominent Republican groups. I find all of this incredibly concerning after the events of this week, even though I wouldn't have beforehand. My own assessment from this stupid and nasty drama is that Evi's primary motivation is that she is pathologically envious of DataRepublican and her influence, likely believing it should be her in DataRepublican's place. As we can see, she isn't nearly careful or accurate enough for that. Mark and avoid. Further, though, while DataRepublican has no driving interest to be who or what she is and is doing it in service to the best of her abilities (which are considerable but still limited and imperfect as are anyone's), Evi appears to covet the role, which she has demonstrated she cannot possibly handle responsibly. Again, mark and avoid. Block if you will. I will not unblock her for this post or in the future. You can think of that whatever you want. I will rarely, almost never, say anything about her except in the defense of others she is wantonly and recklessly attacking. I will NEVER interact with her directly again, no arguments, no back and forth, no dunks, nothing. My involvement here is pure exposure and nothing else. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

James Lindsay, anti-Communist

57,651 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

I did not plan for this to change me. Nobody plans for that. You wake up, you go about your ordinary Tuesday, you have a list of things to do that has nothing to do with saving anything — and then something crosses your path that you cannot unsee. That's the part people never talk about. Not the rescue itself. The moment right before it, when you still have the option to keep walking. Most people keep walking. I want to be honest with you about that, because everyone who posts a "happy ending" video skips the part where they almost didn't stop. I almost didn't stop. There is a version of this story where I drive past, where I tell myself someone else will handle it, where I convince myself that getting involved is messy and expensive and inconvenient and above my pay grade as a human being. That version of the story exists in a thousand other places, right now, happening to a thousand other creatures nobody will ever post about. This is not that story. But it could have been. Watch until the end and you'll understand why I'm saying this instead of just captioning it "rescued a cat, so cute!!" and moving on with my day. Because it wasn't cute. Not at first. Not for a long time, actually. The first version of this story is ugly and quiet and full of doubt, and if you only want the pretty part, you can scroll to the end of the video and skip everything I'm about to tell you. But you'd be missing the whole point. Here's something nobody tells you about fear: it doesn't look like what you think it looks like. You imagine an animal in danger will look grateful the second help arrives. You imagine relief on its face, some kind of instant recognition that you're the good guy in this story. That is Hollywood. That is not real life. Real fear looks like resistance. Real fear looks like an animal that has been let down by the world so many times that it has stopped believing rescue is even a category that exists. Real trust has to be built one motionless, patient, boring minute at a time, and most people don't have the stomach for boring. Most people want the montage. Nobody wants the part where you sit there, doing nothing dramatic at all, just existing calmly nearby, over and over, until something in a terrified brain finally recalibrates and decides you're not a threat. That part isn't going in anyone's highlight reel. Except this time, it is. Because I think you need to see it. I think you need to see it because we have become a species addicted to instant everything. Instant food, instant answers, instant relationships that dissolve the second they require patience. And somewhere in that acceleration, we lost the muscle for slow devotion — the kind that doesn't post an update every day, the kind that doesn't get a like for showing up on day fourteen when nothing visible has changed yet. This video is proof that the boring days matter just as much as the breakthrough moment. Maybe more. The breakthrough moment gets the views. The boring days are what make the breakthrough possible at all. Let me ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it instead of scrolling past: when was the last time you did something with zero guarantee it would work? Because that's what this was. There is no contract in rescue. Nobody hands you a guarantee that says "continue showing up and eventually this will resolve beautifully." You show up anyway. You show up on the days it feels pointless. You show up on the days you privately wonder if you're the one being unreasonable, if you should just accept that some situations don't have happy endings, if you're pouring time and money and worry into something that the universe has already decided the outcome of. And you show up again the next day anyway, because the alternative — walking away — was never actually a real option once you'd already looked into those eyes the first time. That's the secret nobody says out loud: once you really see a creature suffering, you can't fully unsee it. It moves into your head and sets up residence. It becomes a low hum underneath every other thing you do that day. You'll be at dinner, at work, half-listening to a conversation, and there it is again — that animal, that need, that unresolved thread pulling at you. People who haven't experienced this think rescuers are unusually noble or unusually sentimental. We're not. We're just people who got unlucky enough to actually look, and looking is the whole trick. Looking is the doorway you can't close once you've walked through it. I'm not telling you this to make myself sound like a hero. I want to be extremely clear about that, because I think the "hero rescuer" narrative is actually kind of dishonest and it lets everyone else off the hook. The truth is less flattering and more useful: I was scared too. I didn't know if this would work. I didn't have a plan that guaranteed success. I just had a decision to make in a specific moment, and I made the harder one instead of the easier one, and then I had to keep making that same harder decision, quietly, every single day after that, long after anyone was watching or cared. Most transformation looks like nothing while it's happening. That's the part that will wreck you if you actually pay attention to this video instead of just watching it for the dopamine hit at the end. The transformation in the middle of this story does not look like transformation. It looks like stagnation. It looks like two steps forward and four steps back. It looks like moments where you genuinely cannot tell if what you're doing is helping or just prolonging something. Nobody warns you that "getting better" often looks identical to "not getting better" until you're far enough past it to look back and finally see the shape of the arc. I think about this a lot in relation to more than just animals, honestly. I think about how we judge our own growth, our own healing, our own slow projects — we want the montage, we want the visible curve upward, and when we don't get it in a timeframe that feels reasonable, we assume we've failed. We assume the effort was wasted. We give up right before the part where it would have started to show. This video is, weirdly, a pretty good metaphor for that. Everything that mattered happened in the part that didn't look like anything was happening. There's a specific moment in this footage — I'm not going to tell you which one, because you need to feel it land yourself, not be told about it in advance — where something shifts. It's small. It's almost nothing. If you're not paying attention you could miss it entirely, and I almost did, in real time, because I wasn't expecting it and I certainly wasn't expecting it to matter as much as it turned out to matter. That's usually how the important moments work, by the way. The universe rarely announces them with a soundtrack swell. It just quietly hands you the hinge point and moves on, and you only recognize it in hindsight, days or weeks later, when you're piecing together how you got from point A to point B and you realize: oh. That was it. That was the moment everything actually started to turn. I've watched this footage back more times than I want to admit, and every single time, that moment gets me. Not because it's dramatic. Because it's the opposite of dramatic. It's small and quiet and almost embarrassingly simple, and that's exactly why it works on me every time. We've been trained by movies to expect big gestures as the marker of real change. Real change is smaller and stranger and much more moving than anything a screenwriter would ever put in a script, because real change doesn't care about being cinematic. It only cares about being true. I want to talk for a second about the difference between rescuing something and actually helping it, because they are not the same thing, and conflating them is one of the more common mistakes people make with good intentions. Rescuing is the dramatic part — the removal from danger, the single decisive act. Helping is everything after that, and it is unglamorous and repetitive and occasionally thankless, and it is also the part that actually determines the outcome. Anyone can have one good instinct in one good moment. Sustaining care past the point where it stops being interesting is a completely different skill, and it's the one that actually matters, and it's the one this video is really about if you look closely enough. There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with caregiving that doesn't have a finish line you can see. You're not told "three more weeks and this resolves." You're just told, implicitly, by the situation itself: keep going, we'll figure out when it's done when it's done. That's a strange kind of commitment to make. It requires a specific type of stubbornness that isn't really about hope, exactly — hope implies you're waiting for something external to happen to you. This is closer to resolve. Resolve doesn't wait for external permission to keep going. Resolve just keeps going, on principle, because the alternative was never actually a real option. I think a lot of people watch content like this and assume the animal is the only one who was changed by it. I want to push back on that gently, because it flattens the actual experience. Something in me was also different by the end of this than it was at the beginning. You cannot pour weeks of consistent, patient, uncertain effort into another living thing and come out the exact same person you went in as. It recalibrates something in you. It teaches you things about patience that no productivity book ever managed to teach me, because productivity books are about optimizing outcomes you can control, and this was the opposite of that — an outcome I could not control, that I could only show up for, day after day, and hope that the showing up eventually mattered. There's a reason stories like this spread the way they do, and it's not just "cute animal content," even though that's the label the algorithm slaps on it. I think it's because on some level, we are all quietly starving for proof that consistent, unglamorous effort still pays off in a world that keeps telling us the only things that count are the loud, fast, viral wins. We need reminders that the slow version still works. That showing up on the boring days is not wasted time. That the moment things change is usually preceded by a long, unremarkable stretch where absolutely nothing seemed to be happening at all, and that stretch was not actually wasted — it was the necessary, invisible groundwork the visible change was quietly built on top of. So here is what I actually want you to take from this, more than the video itself: the next time you're in the middle of something that isn't working yet, something you've been showing up for without any evidence it's paying off, something that everyone around you might reasonably tell you to give up on — I want you to remember that transformation does not announce itself in advance. It does not send you a schedule. It just asks you to keep showing up through the part that looks like nothing, because the part that looks like nothing is usually exactly where the whole thing turns. I didn't post this to get views, even though I know that's what everyone says and nobody ever actually means it. I posted it because I think there's something in this specific sequence of events that people need to actually watch, start to finish, without skipping ahead, without reading a summary, without letting someone else's caption replace the experience of seeing it unfold in real time the way it unfolded for me. Summaries kill things like this. A synopsis of a transformation is not the same as witnessing one. You already know this, somewhere — it's why book adaptations rarely land the same way the book did, why hearing about a sunset is not the same as standing under one. Some things have to be experienced directly or they don't actually transmit. That's the whole reason I'm asking you to actually watch this instead of scrolling past on the strength of this caption alone. Everything I've written here is context, not substance. The substance is in the footage. The substance is in watching fear slowly, unglamorously, incrementally give way to something else — and I promise you, if you sit through the parts that feel slow, the ending will hit differently than if you just jump to it. I've tested this on people. The ones who watch the whole thing react differently than the ones who skip to the last ten seconds. The context changes the payoff. That's not an accident. That's how transformation actually works, on video and in life: the payoff only means what it means because of everything unglamorous that came before it. Someone asked me why I even filmed any of this in the first place, given how uncertain the outcome was for most of it, and it's a fair question, because filming something you don't know the ending to is a strange act of faith in itself. The honest answer is that I didn't film it because I expected it to end well. I filmed it because I wanted a record, for myself, regardless of how it turned out — proof that the effort happened, proof that the days were real, proof that I showed up even on the days it felt pointless, whether or not there was ever going to be a satisfying conclusion to show anyone. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Content made for an ending is different from content made as a record. You can feel the difference when you watch it, even if you can't always articulate why. The camera in this story was never a narrative device. It was a witness, and witnesses don't get to pick which parts are worth recording just because they're not sure yet how the story ends. The algorithm, for what it's worth, does not understand any of this. It cannot tell the difference between eleven seconds of manufactured chaos and eleven seconds pulled from something that took weeks of real, unglamorous, uncertain effort to earn. It rewards the same signals either way — the immediate hook, the retention curve, the completion rate — completely blind to what was actually required to produce the footage behind those numbers. I've made my peace with that, mostly, because I don't think content should be made for the algorithm's benefit in the first place. But I bring it up because I want you to understand that the length of this caption, the refusal to just give you a cute two-line summary and move on, is a deliberate act of friction against a system that wants everything reduced to its most easily digestible form. I'm asking you to actually read, actually sit with something, actually watch something in full, in a media environment engineered to discourage exactly that. If that annoys you, I understand. If it doesn't, I think you're exactly the kind of person this was made for. There's an old idea, older than social media, older than video itself, that witnessing changes the witness. You cannot fully observe suffering and stay exactly the same as you were before you observed it, not if you're paying real attention. I think that's actually the quiet mechanism behind why content like this spreads the way it does when it's real — it's not that people want to watch suffering, and it's not even really that people want to watch relief. It's that people want to be changed a little, safely, from the comfort of wherever they're sitting, by something true. We're all looking for small, low-stakes opportunities to feel something real in a scroll built almost entirely out of things engineered to feel real without costing anything. This costs something. Not much, not compared to what it cost to live through the actual weeks involved — but a few minutes of your real attention, spent on something true instead of something manufactured to extract that attention from you. That's a fair trade, I think. I wouldn't ask for it otherwise. Let's talk about the internet's obsession with orange cats for a second, because I think it's actually relevant here and not just a throwaway joke. There's a running bit online that orange cats are "the golden retrievers of the cat world" — a little chaotic, a little dumb in the most endearing way, incapable of subtlety, allergic to dignity. People love that stereotype because it's low stakes. It's comedy. It's the kind of content you consume for eleven seconds and forget by the time you've swiped to the next video. I want to be upfront that this is not that. This isn't the goofy-orange-cat-does-something-silly genre you're used to. This is something that starts in a completely different register and asks something different of you as a viewer — attention instead of amusement, patience instead of a quick laugh. If you came here expecting the usual orange-cat chaos content, recalibrate now, because what you're about to watch operates on a different emotional frequency entirely, and I think that contrast is part of why it hits as hard as it does. You're primed for comedy. You get something closer to a gut-punch, followed by something closer to grace. That whiplash is not an accident of editing. That whiplash is just what actually happened, in that order, in real life, and I didn't have to manufacture any of it. I also want to address the skeptics directly, because I know they exist and honestly, they should exist — the internet is genuinely full of staged rescue content, cats "saved" from situations they were placed into five minutes earlier by the same person filming, entire monetization pipelines built on manufactured suffering for engagement. That skepticism is earned. I'm not going to pretend it isn't a reasonable default position in 2026. What I will say is this: the only thing I can offer you against that skepticism is time. Time is the one thing you cannot fake convincingly across an extended sequence. Staged content wants your eleven seconds and your dopamine hit and then it wants you gone before you notice the seams. Real, extended, unglamorous care doesn't hold up as well under fabrication, because faking boredom, faking small unremarkable days, faking the parts where nothing dramatic happens — that's actually harder to fake than faking a single dramatic rescue moment. The boring middle is the tell. Manufactured content skips straight to the emotional peaks because manufacturing boring authenticity is expensive and pointless from a content-farming perspective. So if anything, the slowness of what you're about to watch should read as evidence, not despite itself but because of itself. I think about the phrase "it's just a cat" a lot, because I've heard it, and you've probably heard some version of it too, usually from someone who has never had to sit with a frightened creature and slowly, patiently earn its trust with nothing but consistency and time. I used to almost agree with that sentiment before I actually lived through something like this. Now I think the phrase says more about the person saying it than about the situation they're dismissing. Suffering doesn't require language to be real. Fear doesn't require a vocabulary to be legitimate. And the specific kind of trust that gets rebuilt between two creatures who don't share a language, who can't negotiate terms or explain intentions to each other, who have to communicate entirely through consistency, presence, and time — I'd argue that's actually a purer test of whether care is real than almost anything that happens between two humans who can just say "I promise I won't hurt you" out loud and have that count for something on its own. An animal doesn't take your word for it. An animal only believes what you repeatedly, boringly, unglamorously demonstrate. That's a much higher bar than most human relationships ever have to clear, and clearing it means something. There's also something worth saying about scars, visible and invisible, and how we relate to them once the crisis has passed. It would be easy — and honestly, more common — to frame a story like this purely around the after: the relief, the resolution, the moment everything looks fixed and clean and photogenic. But recovery doesn't erase what happened. It just changes the relationship you have to it. The fear doesn't fully disappear; it gets integrated, managed, outpaced by new experiences that slowly outweigh the old ones. I think that's actually a more honest and more useful thing to understand about healing in general, animal or human: you're not looking for the moment the bad thing never happened. You're looking for the moment the good outweighs it enough that the bad stops being the loudest voice in the room. That's a different, more achievable, more real goal than "erase the past," and I think this video quietly demonstrates the difference better than any explanation of it could. I also want to acknowledge, honestly, how much luck was involved in this, because I think pretending otherwise would be a disservice to the people currently in a similar situation without the same resources. Not everyone has the time to show up every single day. Not everyone has access to the kind of help that made parts of this possible. Not everyone has a schedule flexible enough to prioritize a creature that owes them nothing and offers no guarantees in return. I got lucky in ways that mattered, and I don't want to erase that luck from the story just because "hard work and heart" makes for a cleaner narrative. Both things are true at once: the effort mattered enormously, and the circumstances that allowed the effort to happen at all were not something everyone has equal access to. If you're in a position where you want to help something or someone but don't have the resources this required, that doesn't make your instinct to help any less real or any less valuable — it just means the shape your help takes might look different, smaller, more limited, and that's fine. Small, limited help consistently offered is still worth more than grand help that never actually materializes because the bar felt too high to start. I keep circling back to this idea of "the boring middle" because I genuinely think it's the single most important and most overlooked part of any real transformation story, and I think our current media environment has actively trained us to skip it, both as viewers and as people living our own lives. We've been fed thousands of hours of before-and-after content, transformation montages set to music, "watch this glow-up" edits that compress months into fifteen seconds — and somewhere in consuming all of that, we internalized a completely false model of how change actually happens. We started believing change is supposed to be visible, fast, and continuous. It isn't. Change is mostly invisible, mostly slow, and mostly non-continuous — it happens in fits and starts, with long flat stretches where it looks like nothing at all is occurring, followed by short bursts where everything that was quietly accumulating suddenly becomes visible all at once. If you only ever watch the burst, you'll never understand where it actually came from, and you'll assume your own flat stretches mean you're doing something wrong, when actually you might just be in the most important and least glamorous part of the whole process. I want to leave you with one more thought before you go press play, because I think it reframes everything else I've said here. We tend to think of rescue as something one party does to another — an active party and a passive recipient, a saver and a saved. But if you watch closely, really closely, you'll notice that's not quite what's happening in this footage. There's a second, quieter rescue happening in parallel, running underneath the obvious one, and it's not the kind that gets a caption of its own on most videos like this. I'm not going to spell it out for you. I think you'll recognize it when you see it, and I think it will mean more to you if you find it yourself instead of having it pointed out in advance. That's the last thing I'll say about the content itself. Everything else is yours to discover. One more thing, and then I'll let you go watch it. People keep asking me, in different words, some version of "was it worth it." I understand why they ask. It's a fair question when you're talking about weeks of uncertain effort with no guaranteed return. But I think the question itself reveals something about how we've been trained to think about care — as a transaction, an investment with an expected yield, something you calculate the ROI on before committing. I didn't do this because I ran the numbers and decided the expected outcome justified the input. I did it because in the specific moment I was faced with the choice, walking away was never actually available to me as an option, no matter how exhausted or uncertain I got later. And I think that's true of most things that end up mattering.

Earth Unveiled

232,136 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen

The CIA's information war with American citizens and the operation that started it all. Project Mockingbird. This is one main aspect as to why people are so divided and brainwashed in today's society. Information has always been a crucial component to power and control. Knowledge is power, right? The only difference today from 40+ years ago is that now information flows at a rate that is absolutely mind-boggling and allows you to connect with anyone, at anytime, anywhere in the world, with real-time information 24/7 at your finger tips. So what happens when you have people who are suppose to be giving you accurate, truthful, information, and start to give you information that benefits, manipulates, and persuades the global population with mis and disinformation, protects certain corrupt people and groups by not reporting on other information, and who also lies and slanders other individuals all for the purpose to maintain power and control over the entire population, entirely on PURPOSE? You get what's called PROPAGANDA, aka, a sh*t show of so much purposeful bad and fake information, that it literally starts to persuade and mold the populations overall views and opinions on an array of various topics to fit the nefarious controllers, behind the scenes narrative or agenda. Ultimitely benefitting only them. If you take notice, these campaigns have been around for a long time, depending what side your on, your personal views and where you get your overall information will ultimately decide or be a factor of how much it has affected you or how much you are aware of the deception in the first place. Most legacy mainstream media groups are owned and operated by a small group of wealthy globalist individuals who seem to lean towards the left, and some leaning even farther left than others. These campaigns started to really pick up when Trump entered the picture in 2016. Trump was never suppose to win in the first place. Obama reinstated propaganda to be used on American citizens once again in 2013. The task to slander and attempt to destroy and imprison Trump through multiple operations and media campaigns were in full effect for the deep state to regain control of The White House. The group that these campaigns affected the most were the older groups and the younger groups. The people in the middle basically got to see both worlds play out in their lives at a crucial time period in their lives. They've seen the mainstream shift from what it once was, to an extreme lying, propaganda machine when Trump took office. The older aged crowd was so used to the regular nightly news and not as comfortable with newer technology to access alternative media sites and really just stuck with the mainstream's words and kept their faith in the MSM. Now the younger crowd literally grew up with the fully scripted, CIA, propaganda MSM because that is literally all they've ever known and haven't experienced anything else before or have anything to compare it to. Especially when your indoctrinated in a public school system that has been infiltrated itself with a majority of far-left teachers who usually end up being predators as well. That's a whole other story. The problem this CIA operation has caused was a population with people all in their own separate groups and boxes, fighting with each other over many things, instead of the people who started this mess in the first place, that aren't even true because one side has been lied to and manipulated. Brainwashed from a literal military style operation that's used to topple foreign countries during regime changes. And the worst part on top of all this is that know since Elon has started DOGE, a government efficiency operation, we are now uncovering that all these communist, Marxist, ideas, and operations and slander campaigns, and legal cases against Trump, down to these politicians luxurious lifestyles have been all funded and paid for by us, the TAXPAYERS. On the one example above, through USAID, there is proof of over $9 MILLION dollars that went to Reuters for a campaign named, " ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION," which is a definitive contract. There are thousands of examples just like this for all different companies, influencers, T.V. shows, Magazines, Articles, any type of media, and all of them are left leaning outlets. This has been going on for decades. Then on top off all of that, you have people who own these publishing and media companies who are not only getting paid by the taxpayers from the CIA to deceive us, but many of these owners are best friends with people like Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxell as you can also see above who is with Laurene Powell Jobs, the owner of "The Atlantic" publication, on vacation just hanging out. You wonder why the media never talks about child trafficking. Their paid to cover it up, or they're literally involved themselves... It just get's better and better. The good news is that it is now being exposed and shut down. Let's dive into the history of PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD now. The story of Project Mockingbird begins in the shadow of the Cold War, a period defined by ideological warfare between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), under the leadership of Director John McCone, launched a covert operation codenamed "Project Mockingbird." Unlike the broader, alleged "Operation Mockingbird" often cited in conspiracy circles as a sprawling media manipulation scheme, the historical Project Mockingbird was a specific, documented wiretapping effort aimed at curbing leaks of classified information. Initiated on March 12, 1963, and concluding on June 15, 1963, Project Mockingbird targeted two Washington-based journalists, Robert S. Allen and Paul J. Scott, who wrote the syndicated "Allen-Scott Report." These columnists had a knack for publishing articles laced with highly classified CIA details—information so sensitive it included Top Secret and Special Intelligence data. Their scoops, often sourced from government insiders, rattled the Kennedy administration, particularly after a July 26, 1962, New York Times article by Hanson Baldwin exposed details of a National Intelligence Estimate comparing U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals. President John F. Kennedy, incensed by such leaks, sought to plug the holes. The operation was a collaborative effort, greenlit by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Joseph Carroll. The CIA’s Office of Security, led by Sheffield Edwards, executed the wiretapping, monitoring the journalists’ home and office phones. The surveillance results identified congressional sources, including then-Speaker of the House John McCormack, who spoke with Scott on March 26, 1963. The "Family Jewels"—a 1973 CIA document declassified in 2007—later exposed this operation, revealing its scope and raising questions about its legality. Daniel L. Pines, a CIA Assistant General Counsel, argued in a 2009 Indiana Law Journal review that the wiretapping likely violated legal bounds, as its primary aim was to trace leaks rather than gather foreign intelligence. This historical Project Mockingbird, though limited in duration and scope, planted a seed of distrust between the government, the press, and the public—a seed that would grow into a broader narrative of media manipulation. From Wiretaps to Media Empire While Project Mockingbird of 1963 was a discrete surveillance effort, it became conflated with a larger CIA program dubbed "Operation Mockingbird." This narrative emerged most prominently in Deborah Davis’s 1979 book, Katharine the Great, which claimed that the CIA, under Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Coordination, had systematically infiltrated American media starting in the 1950s. Davis alleged that Wisner recruited Washington Post publisher Phil Graham to orchestrate a propaganda network, embedding CIA-friendly journalists in outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and CBS. Cord Meyer, a key CIA figure, was said to have taken the reins in 1951, expanding the operation’s reach. The Church Committee’s 1975-1976 investigation lent some credence to these claims, uncovering CIA ties to around 50 American journalists and covert funding of front groups like the National Student Association, exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone article, "The CIA and the Media," further detailed how over 400 U.S. journalists had covertly worked with the CIA, often disseminating propaganda abroad that would then filter back to domestic audiences. the CIA admitted overreach. By 1976, under Director George H.W. Bush, the CIA publicly pledged to end paid relationships with U.S. journalists. Yet, skeptics argued the agency merely shifted tactics, maintaining influence through foreign media outlets that indirectly shaped American narratives. The line between historical fact and conspiracy theory blurred, setting the stage for modern reinterpretations of Mockingbird’s legacy. They claim. The Turning Point came in 2013 and the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act Fast forward to July 2, 2013, a date that marks a pivotal shift in the Mockingbird saga. Under President Barack Obama, the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act—embedded in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—took effect. This legislation amended the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, commonly known as the Smith-Mundt Act, which had long barred government-funded broadcasters like Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM)—from disseminating their content domestically. The original intent was to prevent the U.S. government from propagandizing its own citizens, a safeguard rooted in post-World War II fears of authoritarian overreach. The 2013 amendment, co-sponsored by Representatives Adam Smith (D-WA) and Mac Thornberry (R-TX), lifted this restriction, allowing USAGM content to be requested and accessed by Americans. Proponents hailed it as a transparency win, arguing that taxpayers deserved to see what their dollars funded—news and programming in 61 languages, reaching over 100 countries. Critics, however, saw it as a Pandora’s box. Foreign Policy reported on July 14, 2013, that the change unleashed "thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption," raising fears of legalized propaganda. The timing was notable: it followed a decade of post-9/11 media scrutiny and preceded a surge in misinformation debates. in 2024 claimed "Operation Mockingbird never ended," tying the NDAA to a supposed CIA media takeover. No hard evidence supports a direct CIA role, but the legal shift undeniably blurred lines between foreign and domestic information flows. While the USAGM insists its mission remains outward-facing—delivering uncensored news to foreign audiences lacking free press—and that its journalists adhere to strict objectivity standards, the repeal stoked speculation. Could this be a modern resurrection of Mockingbird-style influence? The answer is yes. Most projects they say they stopped just get renamed or go black and off the books so Congress doesn't even know it exists or get access to it. Be careful what you read, who you follow, and who you get your information from. Look for patterns and scripts. They're easy to find once you understand what's really going on and their tactics and techniques. Keep asking questions, cross reference everything, do your due diligence, have multiple sources, do not buy everything at face value, go deeper, think about the bigger picture or long term goals. And always remember that there are layers, optics, and timing to everything you see. 90% of everything that comes out gets run by the intelligence agencies first. Lastly, keep fighting for the truth and and continue to help others to wake up as well.

The SCIF

85,170 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr