The best captain. God bless you. May your Earl Grey ever be hot.
In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course.
He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later.
By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart.
He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother.
Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother.
An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform.
He never stopped and left school at 15.
By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that.
In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard.
Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth.
You’ve probably heard that part.
Here’s the part you haven’t:
He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence.
But he never stopped trying to understand his father.
He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock.
He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours.
He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him.
So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans.
In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence.
He asked, “My dear, are you okay?”
Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.”
At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him.
2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait.
He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.”
After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows.
He played every character himself and donated every cent.
In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers.
In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring.
She was his first dog in more than 50 years.
He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family.
Then he kept fostering more.
When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives.
So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time.
Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖
Brew Note retweeted
🚨 JUST IN: Nick Shirley just dropped this line in the Oval Office flanked by President Trump, and it's PURE GOLD
"I want people to think about what is happening right now...me as a 24-year-old, I went out and exposed the fraud. I just was concerned about the well-being of our tax dollars. And right now, I'm standing next to the President of the United States." 🔥
"There's never been an incentive for anyone to ever expose fraud [until now]...when you expose fraud, you help save America. People understand that these fraudsters take from the poor needy who actually need the services that we all work hard to pay for, and we take that, and they then buy Mercedes!" @nickshirleyy
WELL-DESERVED FOR NICK.
A year ago, legacy media mocked him as a right-wing propagandist
Today he walked into the Oval Office with the first check for exposing fraud that the media IGNORED!!
Camera, microphone and passion for saving America. Let's freaking go.
Brew Note retweeted
Evil detests beauty because beauty is proof of a transcendental order, of objective Goodness and Truth.
To attack beauty is to wage war against the possibility of transcendence.
Beauty is a great affront to nihilism. It testifies to that which is greater than the individual, because to create a beautiful thing is to acknowledge that you are answerable to standards higher than your own. Beauty is often called a great evangelist for this reason.
This is why they outright destroy beauty or try to subvert your perception of it by promoting ugliness or triviality. Beauty is neither neutral nor trivial — your ability to discern the beautiful from the ugly is intimately connected to your capacity to recognize the divine.
Dietrich von Hildebrand once declared that "beauty is the archenemy of mediocrity." Why?
Beauty elevates a person toward truth, goodness, and the divine. The antitheses to beauty drag the soul down into nihilism and worship of the self.
Brew Note retweeted
I wrote this description/warning of what is happening in the West. Please watch it and share it with others. @idicenter
Bingo.
This video is currently all over social media. Many are expressing sorrow for this woman and sadness at her outrage. My take on it is different. The look you see on her face is not outrage…it’s realisation. It is the look of a white, liberal lefty woman suddenly realising that her entire worldview is/was totally wrong. That what she had spent her life arrogantly portraying as her higher morality and understanding was in fact “suicidal empathy” as described by @GadSaad and that empathy was going to destroy her entire society.
Brew Note retweeted
J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.
Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.
Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.
La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.
Brew Note retweeted
You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for."
Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it."
I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.
The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.
Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.
Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.
Where does it come from? Four layers.
First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country.
Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else.
Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.
Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.
The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct.
Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say.
On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength.
But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.
This is where men have a responsibility.
Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.
Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.
That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women.
Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street.
A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.
Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.
Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.
She voted for it.
She welcomed them.
Faced with the encore, she begs them to stop. In her heart she knows they will not.
Everything she believed. That they were French like her, fighting for the same cause. That the ones who warned her were full of hate. That she would be safe.
It all falls apart in this moment. She is terrified of what comes next. In her heart she knows.
Only remigration can save her.
"If you play with having sex with people that you don’t love, you are damaging the very architecture you will need to form a healthy romantic partnership."
The normalization of casual sex destroyed our comprehension of what sex is, and what it has to do with healthy relationships.
Women have one reproductive strategy: high investment. Men have two strategies: high investment (which is collaborative, and has everything to do with love) and no investment (which is predatory, and is the antithesis of love).
That may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. The ‘no investment’ strategy of men attempts to stick a woman with a child to raise alone, or with a cuckolded partner. It has a consensual form, and a non-consensual form. Does any of that sound loving to you? I didn’t think so.
For men, producing a child with a trivial effort is the ultimate evolutionary bargain. It’s something like winning the lottery. For women, being stuck with a baby and no partner is the inverse, like being maimed in car wreck.
So men are predisposed to be on the lookout for fertile women who are gullible enough to go to bed with them without locking down a commitment. And women are predisposed to avoid such encounters at all costs. Or at least they were before birth control + abortion changed the stakes and the culture.
Women, who have always been the gatekeepers of sex, have been lured into embracing men at their worst. And they’ve started behaving and thinking like them too.
There is actually a lot of truth in the idea that “rape culture” has been normalized. Casual sex is not rape by any stretch, but it comes from the same predatory branch of the tree. And before you jump down my throat for saying that, notice just how commonplace “consensual con-consent” has become. That IS normalized rape culture. It comes from the idea that sex is a kind of play. Just like kids playing with toy tanks and soldiers, it’s harmless because the stakes are low and no one actually gets hurt.
But it turns out that’s not true. Casual sex is like playing with fire. Actually, it’s worse. Many who play with fire get away with it. They may even learn how to wield it to great effect. The exact opposite is true with sex. If you play with having sex with people that you don’t love, you are damaging the very architecture you will need to form a healthy romantic partnership. Even worse if they bring the same selfish mindset to the alter and the bedroom.
For young people participating in their generation’s culture, sex now IS antagonistic and predatory. Most of them don’t know there is any other kind. It’s just some story, like Santa Clause.
Not only has this shift in sexual culture obliterated the tools to forge and tend a healthy marriage, but it has also broken the motivational structure that built civilization.
—-
Exhibit A bellow. Please don’t jump on her. She is voicing a false sophistication of her era. And although I believe what she has said is wrong, exactly why it is wrong, and to what degree it is wrong, requires careful thought.
Brew Note retweeted
“I love Venn diagrams. I really do. I love Venn diagrams. It’s just something about those three circles and the analysis about where there is the intersection, right?”
—Kamala Harris, October 28, 2022
Brew Note retweeted
Thomas Aquinas on the nature of Islam from the beginning:
“The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men.
As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms [weapons]—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.
What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law.
It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.6
Brew Note retweeted
Women operate primarily from fear, not virtue.
They do what they perceive will keep them safe and at peace with other women, not what is right.
A “not guilty” verdict was a form of self-preservation.
This is why women must never be jurors.
Muslims have no concept of this: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
































