This Gen-X guy spent a lot of time contemplating the universe. He concluded that Personal Freedom is baked into it, and that comes with ethical implications.
PA, USA
Joined April 2022
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I conclude that the academic differences between communism and socialism are irrelevant, to be categorically dismissed. They are interchangeable, parasitic systems masquerading as philanthropic symbiosis.
They thrive on minds unable to penetrate its morally rotten essence.
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John Lockeson retweeted
Here's what folks need to understand:
1) America has not been operating under it's Constitution of 1791, as originally understood since about 1913. It is a *partially collapsed* constitutional order.
2) Subverting this Constitution in favor of Federal power is primarily a Democratic party project, with the Republican party operating as complicit junior members.
3) Systems are what they do: our Federal government extracts ~35% of value from the most productive society that has ever existed, and converts that value into power, personal treasure, and votes.
This is the single largest coherent economic activity on the planet.
4) A system's first priority is always to ensure its continued existence. Therefore, the FIRST priority of the Democratic and Republican party is to ensure their Gravy Train remains stoked and on track.
I'm American.
I will *not* be ruled by the Left.
In this, elections do not matter, for there are topics that are beyond a legitimate government's power.
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"Tomorrow we'll circle the wagons and roll up our sleeves..." BULLSHIT.
THINK people. How many times have you heard that sentiment, and when did it make a difference?
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The polls are HOPPING, people are voting furiously, as if their lives and fortunes depended on it. Of course, both Red and Blue Faction believe this in their bones. It didn't have to be this way, and no amount of voting is gonna fix it.
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Folks who know who John Galt is are starting to wonder "Where is Ragnar Danneskjöld?"
🤖 Made with AI
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As a kid growing up in New England, I spent a childhood laughing at Canadians with their fake dollars worth about $0.75. Entering Italy to bop around for a few weeks, I traded dollars for Euros and thought, "Well, poop. Now >>I'M<< the Canadian." ;)
Honest accounting of history is not what they teach you in government school.
The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
John Lockeson retweeted
DM-out, in answer to an evidently nice and sincere young person who really wants to help with the propagation of rational ideas, and invited me.
I'm pretty sure that I am too radical for the project.
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"I am a bit nervous about who to invite."
You have nothing to fear from me.
I'll tell you this: I am almost, in my own constitution, viscerally averse to "organization" of any sort. I am so radical an individualist that I flinch at every collective of any sort that I see.
This is hard to describe.
My age has to do with it, too. I have watched this wretched disaster for fifty-two years of voting eligibility (and never, ever voted, for solid moral reasons). I now find it virtually impossible to impart to younger people that decades-long failure of electoral politics. It's all they know, however: "organize and vote!"
I'm not here to burn your groove, but mark my words: that is never going to work. It's fighting on the enemy's moral and political ground.
I hope you will not live as long as I have and get to that point realizing that I was right, but remember what I said and that I'm the one who told you.
This thing requires an entirely, radically, different outlook, and my big idea is massed, passive, civil disobedience. Flood the courts, and embrace the prisons.
That's what it's going to take: millions of individuals standing up and saying, "No."
Nobody is ready for that, though. Some people will talk about shooting wars all day long, but nothing like this, first, ever occurs to them.
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I don't know what to tell you in answer to your query. I don't know how to help.
This is coming full circle, and the French author probably isn't aware of some crucial bits.
Companies routinely ran their own management schools before the "disparate impacts" doctrine from the Griggs v Duke Power Co (1970) case made aptitude testing radioactive. It was those aptitude tests that were the gateway to management school and middle class life. Without any credible means of determining who had the aptitude for management level work, company schools shut down and used the bachelor's degree as a proxy. (This also had almost everything to do with the rise of the MBA.) Then came the subsidies of the bachelor's, and the reduction of standards to capture the subsidies, and the whole thing spiraled into the ground.
I directly saw it happen in my lifetime.
My sisters graduated suburban HS in 1975, and college 4 years later. I graduated HS a decade later, and even I could see that the standards had started to slip. I would argue that my late 80's BA was among the last that had any kind of serious rigor to it. A mere 5 years later, the bachelor's grads were sharply less capable and qualified. We see this everywhere, notably in the credential creep. Master's and sometimes even PhD level degrees are routinely required to do work that my sisters and I did straight out of school with our 1978 & 1989 Bachelor's.
So these days, when I read resumes, I do check for the year the degree was issued, the more recent the provenance, the less seriously I take it. (Frankly, achieving Eagle Scout carries more weight with me than any BA issued since 1995.)
The stats tell me that we're pushing to almost 40% of our society attaining bachelor's or higher. This is entirely inconsistent with the bell curve distribution of traits that higher degrees once represented.
Je ne sais pas si vous mesurez ce qui est en train de se passer.
Alex Karp, le patron de Palantir, ne va plus chercher ses talents à Harvard. Il les forme lui-même. Des jeunes de 18 ans, sans diplôme, choisis sur leur seul talent, qui codent sur de vrais projets et lisent de la philosophie politique entre deux sprints. Il appelle ça « le diplôme Palantir ». Et aujourd'hui le New York Post titre que les boîtes tech lancent leurs propres programmes parce qu'elles ne peuvent plus compter sur l'Ivy League.
Ce n'est pas une anecdote RH. C'est un basculement de civilisation.
Pendant des décennies, les entrepreneurs ont confié à l'université la mission la plus sacrée qui soit : former les esprits. Ils comprennent aujourd'hui que cette mission a été trahie. Les institutions censées produire des penseurs libres produisent des conformistes. Le mérite a été remplacé par des critères opaques. L'enseignement est devenu catéchisme. Paul Graham l'avait vu avant tout le monde.
Alors ils font ce que font les bâtisseurs quand un système les trahit. Ils ne le réforment pas. Ils en construisent un autre, à côté.
Elon n'a pas attendu que la NASA se réveille, il a fait SpaceX. Il n'a pas réformé les médias, il a racheté la place publique. Les entrepreneurs ne cherchent plus à convaincre l'État. Ils font l'État, partout où l'État a abdiqué.
Relisez La Grève d'Ayn Rand. Nous y sommes. Les bureaucrates gardent les titres, les budgets, les bâtiments. Mais ils perdent la seule chose qui compte : la confiance. Aux États-Unis, à peine 28 % des gens font encore confiance aux médias. Un plus bas historique. Plus personne ne croit ceux qui prétendent nous dire quoi penser.
On entend partout que l'école est finie. Je pense exactement l'inverse.
Ce n'est pas l'école qui est morte. Ce sont les institutions qui l'ont confisquée. L'école, la vraie, celle de l'Académie d'Athènes, des ateliers de la Renaissance, du maître et de l'apprenti, va renaître. Plus exigeante. Plus juste. Sans dette, sans dogme, sans diplôme comme rente à vie.
Une école qui ne fabriquera plus des diplômés, mais des polymathes. Des esprits libres, capables de coder, de penser, de construire et de douter. Ce sont eux qui créeront la valeur des cinquante prochaines années.
J'ai appris à coder seul à 12 ans. Aucun amphi ne m'a appris ce que j'ai appris en construisant. Je sais ce que devient un talent quand on le laisse respirer.
L'université a eu des siècles pour former les meilleurs esprits. Les entrepreneurs vont le faire en une décennie.
La grande reconstruction a commencé.
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Executing people by close range gunfire to the back of the head is instant, and 99.9% effective.
Communists and Nazis bring the receipts on the long proven the practical track record of this.
We in the West don't do this because it violates our sensibilities of what "humane" looks like. It leaves behind trauma for all participants and witnesses, and an ugly, bloody, brain splattery mess.
So instead, we do just about anything else, and often botch it.
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Having said all that, while I'm not against the death penalty per se, I have seen too many botched verdicts and sentences to believe that our process is sufficiently accurate to deal out irreversible consequences.
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Tennessee really needs to consult with Canada.
They've had more successful MAID executions than gun murders in America.
BREAKING: Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike is still alive after 2 lethal injections, according to her lawyer.
At 8:26 p.m. local time, witnesses said executioners had "injected both syringes of lethal injection chemicals and Pike is still alive and snoring," her lawyers said.
Authorities appeared to give Pike two doses of pentobarbital, but she was still alive more than 40 minutes after the last dose. Officials then escorted media witnesses out of the area, and the Tennessee Department of Corrections said it was unable to immediately provide information about what happened.
The attempted execution comes after the Supreme Court vacated a last-minute stay that had temporarily spared Pike from becoming the first woman executed in Tennessee since the early 1800s.
Read what unfolded inside and the legal battle that preceded the execution attempt: foxnews.com/us/supreme-court…
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I'll say it again:
The bold will inherit the stars.
The meek can inherit the earth when we're done with it.
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