Category: Observation O’ The Day

I’ve never mocked or looked down on anyone who hasn’t served their country.
That said, if you’ve never worn the uniform but want to lecture me based on your Call of Duty experience or a Tom Clancy novel, respectfully, take a seat. – Mike Bales

It’s not just a threat to America

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Wednesday delivered a televised broadside against progressivism, a political philosophy he described as an existential threat to America and the principles that founded it 250 years ago.

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” Thomas said in a speech at the University of Texas Austin Law School pegged to the nation’s upcoming milestone birthday. 

A spirit of “cynicism, rejection, hostility and animus” toward America — by Americans — has taken hold, Thomas said in remarks carried live on CSPAN.

Thomas, the Supreme Court’s senior conservative member, spoke broadly, not referencing specific contemporary events or political figures to make his case. But his comments come at a critical time for the sharply divided country and the Court.

He said that the values enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence have “fallen out of favor” among Americans — a trend perpetrated, he argued, by “intellectuals” and the nation’s colleges and universities.

“intellectuals” he says…
George Orwell –
Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them

Thomas also said he believes many people no longer believe “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by a limited government.

 “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”

The 77-year-old justice was appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and is one of the longest-serving justices in history. He is a staunch conservative and has been a reliable vote in favor of the Trump administration’s positions in cases.

Thomas said Washington has been overrun by elected and appointed officials who lack commitment to “righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.”

“They recast themselves as Institutionalists, pragmatists or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences, and their country,” he said.

Thomas called on Americans to stand up for their principles and endure personal “sacrifices,” if necessary, to preserve the nation’s democracy.

“In my view, we must find in ourselves that same level of courage that the signers of the Declaration have so that we can do for our future what they did for theirs,” he said.

Matt Van Swol at it again:

WE CAN LAUNCH 4 HUMAN BEINGS OFF INTO THE EMPTY VOID OF SPACE TO TRAVEL A QUARTER-MILLION MILES TO SHOOT PHOTOS OF THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON…

…BUT WE CANNOT GET 60 PEOPLE IN BUILDING IN DC TO PASS A BILL THAT SAYS YOU SHOULD PROVE YOU’RE A CITIZEN TO VOTE.

The Left: “We are the anti Nazis.”
The Left: *does all the National Socialist things, like censorship, mass surveillance, collectivism, street violence, state control of the media, the economy, and entertainment, racial politics, and antisemitism*
-Alice Smith

EPIC FURY: Trump’s Play to Starve the Dragon?

Bloomberg reported Thursday that Beijing “told the country’s top oil refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline” as Operation Epic Fury continues disrupting oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf. “China’s curbs just six days into a war reflect a scramble across Asia to prioritize domestic needs as the crisis in the Middle East deepens.”

China imports “about 11 million barrels of crude per day,” my Townhall colleague Walter Curt added on X this morning, “with roughly 40-45% of that flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.”

And yes, while China is a net importer of oil and natural gas — and yugely so — the Communist nation exports refined products including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and marine bunker fuel, largely to Southeast Asian, South Pacific, and African nations.

But not as of today.

“Officials from the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner,” Bloomberg [paywalled link] continued, “called for a temporary suspension of refined product shipments that would begin immediately.”

It isn’t just China, either, according to the same report: “With virtually no oil or fuel making its way out of the Persian Gulf since US and Israeli attacks began at the weekend, refiners from Japan to Indonesia and India have begun cutting back run rates and suspending exports.”

I had a brief item about this earlier today on Instapundit, but the news kept nagging at me because it’s worth a deeper look — and, as it turns out, the petroleum exports angle might be the least interesting part.

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I can’t help but notice the Minneapolis riots against ICE only started kicking up once Nick Shirley exposed the Democrat daycare scams. It’s almost as if the Democrats were caught red handed and now they’re trying to distract everyone with violence and chaos.
The bureaucratic equivalent of resisting arrest.
– Rogan O’Handley

SightBringer

When global maritime flows evacuate without formal blockade, it confirms operators now price in kinetic action as near-term probable.
This is where capital, cargo, and risk converge to front-run escalation. It is not theory. It is energy in motion.

Five core implications lock:

1. Imminent precision strike window is real
No one abandons Hormuz lightly. This is the world’s most sensitive oil chokepoint. For this many ships to reposition confirms intelligence loops are flashing red. Strategic planners are now assuming the next 48–72 hours are live.

2. Insurance and compliance engines have flipped
Behind the scenes, maritime insurers, underwriters, and compliance desks are triggering “elevated threat protocols.” That only happens when confirmed threat matrices pass the tripwire. This is sovereign-level coordination, not Twitter drama.

3. Liquidity evaporation effect begins now
This freezes energy flow reflexivity. As risk heightens and flows thin, oil spikes, safe havens pump, leverage unwinds, and Bitcoin rises as censorship-exempt capital refuge. The entire global system starts rerouting around the Iranian footprint.

4. This is not a one-off evacuation
This matches the embassy exits, the regime capital flight, the BTC bid, the media dissonance, the STRATCOM drills, and the political chaos signals. Every layer of the system is now behaving as if a sovereign collision is no longer avoidable.

5. The West just blinked and moved out of the way
This withdrawal creates a vacuum. No Western commercial presence. No diplomatic bodies. No major press corps embedded. That means one thing: space has been cleared for direct, asymmetric, or proxy strike action without global human shield friction.

This is the last step before something burns. The ships leaving are physical confirmation that the global nervous system has already made its move. Everyone close to the blast radius has already fled.

That is never random.

Devon Eriksen

A vast number of humans, probably a majority, aren’t people.

They are large language models.

I’m not saying this as a generality, as a clever or funny way of saying, “they are stupid”.
No. I mean something very concrete and specific, and there are a lot of people who appear very intelligent, maybe even win awards for writing good poetry or something, who are nevertheless not people, not fully sapient, just a large language model walking around in a human body.

First, you have to understand what a large language model is.
It’s a computer (organic or inorganic), which has been trained on a data set consisting solely of language (written or spoken), and rewarded for producing language that sounds like the data set, and is relevant to a prompt.

That’s all there is in there. This is why ChatGPT and Grok lie to you constantly.
It’s not because they are somehow just indifferent to the truth — they actually do not understand the concept of “truth” at all.

For something to be a “lie”, or an “inaccuracy”, there has to be a mismatch between the meaning of words, and the state of reality.
And there’s the critical difference. You see, in order to identify a mismatch between the state of reality, and the meaning of a sentence, you have to have a model of reality.

Not just one model, of language.

This is why Grok and ChatGPT hallucinate and tell you lies. Because, for them, everything is language, and there is no reality.

So when I say someone is a large language model, I do not mean he is “stupid”. He might be very facile at processing language. He might, in fact, be eloquent enough to give great speeches, get elected president, win the Nobel Peace Prize, and so on.
What I mean is that humans who are large language models do not have a robust world-object model to counterweight their language model. They are able to manipulate symbols, sometimes adroitly, but they are on far shakier ground when trying imagine the objects those symbols represent.

Which brings us to this woman.

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