Opera Rocks retweeted
Kaylub Giamanco is an armed civilian who ran into lethal danger to save the lives of others. He didn't just react to what came at him, he recognized a general threat and went after it.
Many people want to call him a hero. I do not, because using that label is implicitly an excuse for cowardice by others.
Giamanco did his duty as a man, an American, and a member of what is still described in federal law as the unorganized militia. We will have a healthy culture again when every American man knows he is expected to do the same.
If you call this heroism, then every man must be a hero at need. Only in this way can civilization be maintained.
Replying to @AnEriksenWife
I pre-ordered the audiobook ages ago and then kept forgetting to listen once it finally came because at what point do I ever open BookFunnel? (Mediocre app, btw; doesn’t pause when Siri interrupts, which I would think is a basic API skill issue)
Christine, I finally started listening, and I’m having a great time. Reading Theft of Fire (Orbital Space book one) (am I doing this right)
Opera Rocks retweeted
If you are loving this Malfoid trend STOP what you are doing IMMEDIATELY and GO BUY THEFT OF FIRE: ORBITAL SPACE #1
I'm sorry I can't say any more I don't want to spoil anything but YOU NEED THEFT OF FIRE: ORBITAL SPACE #1
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
THIS IS NOT A JOKE
GO GO GO
I’ll tell you a secret. I dislike the Harry Potter series. I read them to my kids when they were younger and my only take away was an intense distaste for the British upperclass. So image how it feels to be sucked into a fanfic with a Malfoid. HP as it should have been. Read it. Then read his actual book Theft of Fire.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Anybody who's being honest about the Cornell rape accusations needs to confront a basic fact about the way many young women in American society behave.
We are constantly exhorted to believe that intoxicated women are incapable of giving consent, and booze-lubricated sex should be considered rape.
But young women not uncommonly get drunk in public to disinhibit themselves and signal sexual availability. This gives them the get-out-of-guilt card that they're nice girls, but the booze - or some guy - did it.
I'm not writing today to either approve or disapprove of that particular mating behavior. What I'm here to point out is that the no-drunken-consent scolds are being deeply dishonest.
This bullshit needs to stop. The pretense that intoxicated women don't routinely put themselves in that state to collect sexual rewards is - hypocritical is just not as strong enough word. It's corrosive.
It's corrosive of trust. Corrosive of good morals. How can we expect young men to have any respect for what older adults tell them about sexual right conduct when we start by laying this whopper of a lie on them?
It used to be we could sort of tolerate this nonsense. But the corruption of the term "rape", the removal of the assumption that physical coercion is involved, makes it much worse. A guy at a party has to deal with the possibility that the chick with booze on her breath who has obviously decided he's her stud for the night might turn around and hit him with a "rape" accusation that will ruin his life a week later. Even if he was objectively as kind and loving and willing to take no for an answer as anyone could ask for.
Is this fair to anybody? It's cruel to men, likely to make them angry and uncaring. It infantilizes women. I don't have to render any judgment about the morality of the situation to to notice that it's explosively unstable. We actually hear serious calls to repeal the 19th Amendment these days...
Because I'm not actually here to moralize about sexual choices or norms, I'm not going to try to offer a prescriptive solution to this problem. Except to say this:
We really really really need to stop lying to ourselves.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Not only I am tired of these wild AI speculations of impeding doom from self important people:
I resent them.
I actively resent people proposing to crash the economy or proposing authoritarian control over my life and other people's lives with idiotic and dangerous ideas like chip control or bans or tracking researchers.
Every idiot in history who's taken the approach of "the ends justify the means" to solve an imaginary future disaster created the very disaster they wanted to stop.
See Population Bomb leading to the one child policy and Communism leading to Mao's mass famines and Fascism leading to the death of tens of millions of people and war.
These solutions are evil and worse than any disease that they propose to solve.
It you believe you can actually predict the end of the world then you are as insane as the Heaven's Gate cult that killed themselves in the 90s thinking UFOs were coming to transcend them.
Not only should we not take your policies and fear mongering seriously, we should actively throw out any and all of your proposed solutions because they come from a place of delusion.
I don't give a shit that you work in the industry or think you saw something or that you want to virtue signal on X. You are actively contributing to a horrible future based on baseless speculation that has no grounding in reality.
Don't confuse expertise in a domain with ability to predict impact of that domain or frankly to make predictions a decade out better than a dart throwing monkey.
They are orthagonal skills.
How's Hinton's "we don't need to train Radiologists anymore" working out? How did the Population Bomb work out? The global cooling second ice age? Peak oil?
Just because someone is a bridge engineer does not mean they can predict the impact of bridges on society or that they have any actually useful insight at all on the complex, ever changing system called life.
There are people dying in wars right now. Children starving. Homelessness. Dictatorships.
In short, real problems. And we're supposed to drop everything to stop a made up problem in your head?
Pound sand.
We don't care. And we are not going to remake society based on you scary monsters under the bed delusion.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Yesterday I was listening to a recent episode of @StevenBartlett’s The Diary of a CEO which neuroscientist (and fellow podcaster) @hubermanlab talked about how central faith and prayer are to his life, which included the podcast he was currently on. “I prayed before I came in here,” said Huberman. “I just said, please help me move my ego out of the room…I would hope that people could learn useful information that might help them and that they would propagate that information…I also said help Steven and I do something that we’re not predicting that would happen but you want to happen that we don’t understand. And maybe that’s this part of the conversation.”
Then, later in the day, I was listening to @ezraklein's re-run of an interview with the legendary music producer @RickRubin, which had an uncanny echo to Huberman’s. “Before we started this together,” said Rubin. “I did a ritual for us where I envisioned my higher self floating above me. And I envisioned you, and I envisioned your higher self floating above you. And then my higher self and your higher self embraced and agreed that we would work together to bring forth the best information that would be helpful to others.”
Who’d have known that an unintended consequence of the proliferation of podcasts would be a proliferation of prayer? And given the sheer number of podcasts (maybe listening to all of them can be a new use case for AI agents), that might mean prayer is on the upswing generally!
So if you’ve got a podcast — and it’s like jury duty so sooner or later you’re going to have one! — try a little pre-podcast prayer to get it to a higher level.
Opera Rocks retweeted
I’m the opposite of a flat earther. This planet is far rounder than we’ve been led to believe.
Opera Rocks retweeted
I am not going to lie. I have very complicated feelings about a reader extracting investment advice from my husband's science fiction novel 😅
@Devon_Eriksen_ I hope this guy becomes rich because of you and then becomes an even greater patron of the arts :)
Opera Rocks retweeted
La Scala streams go free: the @teatroallascala has changed its streaming platform from a paid to free service. LaScalaTV makes the switch today as part of a strategy to reach new audiences, and is now available to everyone upon registration.
(Pic: Jean-Christophe Benoist)
Opera Rocks retweeted
"So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it."
Have a good rest, Mr. Berry.
Opera Rocks retweeted

Raconteur Press, LLC@raconteur_pressAug 26
United States
United StatesConnected via United States App StoreAccount-level information, not a live location or per-post device.
What happens when a passion for storytelling turns into an independent publishing company?
On this episode of The Falls Home Front, Tim Lockhart sits down with Ian McMurtrie and Rita Beeman, co-founders and publishers of Raconteur Press in Iowa Park, Texas. They share how a passion for storytelling grew into a publishing company with more than 100 books.
The conversation explores independent publishing, self-publishing, publishing contracts, author rights, entrepreneurship, and why stories matter - including practical advice for writers looking to get published.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Opera Rocks retweeted
I happen to have a signed hardback copy of this book.
Something I did not anticipate having.
But Theft of Fire dropped during a time I needed to read a really good, masculine-but-not-pulp, sci-fi story that was fresh.
And while my review and opinion is just one among many, I feel that it’s not just a good story of very relatable characters in weird circumstances… but also goes back to classic sci-fi in the way of not replacing science with straight up space wizardry.
Does it deal with themes that might require an older teen to fully understand? Sure.
But Hyperion was way worse and that’s considered a huge sci-fi classic.
Anyway, put it on the radar.
Want to listen to @Devon_Eriksen_'s audiobook? Or to give other readers the opportunity?
Don't wish to spend a dime?
Well good news! You can request Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 be added to your library's catalog!
Opera Rocks retweeted
Replying to @nathancofnas
Rector Paul De Sutter, who goes by 'Petra' nowadays (shielding him from criticism), is an insult to science itself.
He hates real scientists and truth. Paul even denies the existence of binary biological sex. When I had a debate with him on national television about transgenderism, he lost badly and tried to get me kicked out of university out of spite.
Paul, leading member of the far-left Green Party, is also extremely incompetent. During his four year tenure as minister responsible for state companies, our two biggest state companies Bpost (postal services) and Proximus (telecom services) lost respectively 80% and 65% of their market value.
Paul did not only commit plagiarism himself, he is also is guilty of everything he accuses others of. In 2024, days before the election, he accused me of having stalked and threatened a minor 'trans boy' (= girl). This was a complete and utter lie, but in collaboration with the media, the lie ran for days, influencing the election outcome. After I filed a complaint with police for defamation, Paul quietly retracted his statements, but never corrected them. That's how much of a coward he is. In any case, he should go to jail for deliberately, wrongfully accusing a political opponent of a heinous crime.
Paul's university, Ghent University, illegally kicked me out as a student and as a member of the Board of Governors because I exposed their war on truth. I went to court and won, but as a response to my victory, they launched a barrage of lawfare suits on taxpayers money, and even though I won most, they forced me to pay endless legal fees in a battle of attrition.
This is only a small fraction of the criminal and despicable behaviour of the clique running Ghent University. This is the scum that is now kicking @nathancofnas out because he did what EVERY scientist should have done: expose lies and spread truth.
Opera Rocks retweeted
This is the real reason the Left is uniting with Islam, and how it’s going to end
“I keep wondering why the left is so obsessed with defending an ideology that would be the first to execute them. Democrats have spent decades fighting for things like women's rights, and yet they defend countries where women are banned from school, where honor killings happen, and where wives have no protection, or no legal protection from abuse.
They wave pride flags at every parade, and yet they defend countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. So what then exactly does the progressive left and these Islamists have in common?
Because on the surface, they agree on literally nothing, except for one thing: They share the same enemy, and that enemy is the West
And the thing is, neither of them can build what they want while the West still stands. So they're kind of working together to tear it down first, and figure the rest out later.
The Marxist thinks he's using the Islamists to do the heavy lifting. The useful idiots vote them in, platform them, defend them, and launder every atrocity as resistance. And what awaits them when the job is done is something history has already shown us.
Iran, 1977, the Marxists and Islamists united to overthrow the Shah. The moment they won, the Islamists executed every single leftist who helped bring them to power: jailed, tortured, or gone. The left handed them the revolution and got a bullet for it”
“But they can't do that here because nobody's starving. The thing about socialist revolutions is they need desperation, whether it's famine or disease, and that's not America, so they need a different strategy.
Because here's what the left has been doing in the meantime. They have become a laundering service, and what I mean by that is the West won't naturally accept an ideology that is openly intolerant. We're a tolerant society, which is our weakness and our strength.
So every time there's a terrorist attack, it becomes an act of resistance. Every massacre becomes a natural reaction to imperialism or colonialism or whatever. They don't defend the ideology directly, they just make the atrocity make sense to you over and over until your moral framework shifts without you noticing.
KGB defector, Yuri Bezmenov, called this demoralization. You don't need to win a revolution if you can get people to abandon their own values first.
It starts with murdering civilians is wrong. Then it becomes, were those civilians really innocent given the history of colonialism? You don't need an Islamic conquest by force when you can walk it in through the front door of compassion….
And the left will be the last to realize what they helped build right up until they're the first against the wall.”
There is literally no other way this ends except exactly how this describes. It’s the same story that’s played out again and again and again
And the crazy thing is, the Islamists don’t even hide this is what they’re doing, they openly say they’re using the Left until enough of them get into power
We have to stop it because if we let liberals bring America down and face an Islamic Revolution, they bring us down with them
Opera Rocks retweeted
Most atheists would probably prefer a God who explained quantum mechanics to them over a God who told them to love their enemies.
If Jesus had arrived explaining astrophysics instead of commanding repentance, forgiveness, and holiness, the modern world would have found Him far more compelling.
We do not seem to want a God who is holier than us. We want a God who is just smarter than us.
A God who is merely smarter is safe. He stays in the comfortable category of an intellectual superior. We could admire His mind, take His laboratory notes, and use His data to master the universe on our own terms.
A God of pure information gives us power without ever touching our pride.
The absence of a scientific manual in Scripture is not an oversight. It is an act of design.
In Genesis, God does not hand Adam a completed catalogue of creation. He brings the animals to him and lets him name them. God builds an intelligible world, gives humanity minds capable of interrogating it, and then leaves room for discovery.
The skeptic looks at that silence and calls it a deficiency. He demands that God should have handed us the finished physics.
But if God owes us the completed mechanics of the universe, why stop at science?
Why didn’t the Mona Lisa descend from heaven fully painted? Why didn’t Beethoven’s Ninth arrive fully scored? Why did God not pre-design the airplane, pre-discover penicillin, pre-build civilization and hand it to us at Eden?
He could have. The demand has no principled stopping point.
What you are actually asking for, worked out to its conclusion, is a world where humanity arrived to find everything already done. No discovery to make. No art to create. No problem left to solve. God would have been comprehensively generous. Humans would have been comprehensively useless.
The blank canvas is not God withholding. It is God protecting the only conditions under which making something actually means anything.
So why is Scripture so much more explicit about how we should live than about how God built the universe?
Look at the asymmetry of consequence.
Ignorance of astrophysics and the exact mechanics of creation is remarkably survivable. A civilization can flourish for centuries without knowing how the cosmos was physically assembled.
Moral disorder is different.
An abusive father does not need a better cosmology before his family suffers. A corrupt ruler does not need to understand thermodynamics before he destroys a nation. Societies can survive enormous intellectual ignorance. They cannot indefinitely survive the corruption of trust, justice, love, and leadership.
We treat technical mastery as if it were the summit of human purpose.
But knowledge is merely instrumental. It decorates our world, extends our reach and amplifies our power, yet it leaves the human soul entirely untouched.
We split the atom and did not become more virtuous. We simply acquired the capacity to industrialize our vices.
Science can tell us what we can do. It cannot tell us what we ought to do.
God never came primarily as our lab instructor.
He came as a Father to heal a terminal heart.
He gave us the cosmos to discover, our neighbour to love, and Himself to know.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Yeah that’s not how greatness works, Jeff. India has 2X more people than the entire earth did in Mozart’s time and they’ve produced precisely zero Mozarts. Numbers don’t produce greatness, cultures do.
It’s baffling how such smart people think and say the stupidest things.
Jeff Bezos on why he wants a trillion humans in the solar system
"I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a 1,000 Mozarts and a 1,000 Einsteins"
"Our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system"
Opera Rocks retweeted
Everybody loves @MarkKnopfler.
It's worth thinking about why. It only starts with the fact that he's an amazing guitarist and songwriter who's been pouring his soul into recordings for nearly 50 years.
I think it's because he's not fake, doesn't project a huge ego, and doesn't posture as anything he isn't. With Mark, what you see is what you get - closely observed slices of life through a lyrical and bluesy sensibility. There's an understated soulfulness about him that is deeply tasteful.
He's all about the music. And the music is beautiful.
Thank you, Mark, from all of us for whom your work has been an important part of the soundtrack of our lives. You're a good man, and it shows.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Even for pro-choice people (which I am, technically), the question has to be faced: At what point is abortion indistinguishable from infanticide?
You can argue that it is distinguishable up to some hard-to-define point in the pregnancy. But surely that point is not the ninth month of pregnancy. This law is evil.
foxnews.com/politics/dem-gov…
No words.


































