USMC Vet. Retired. Hobbies are history, literature, tech, and hiking. I value intelligent, civil discourse, with a touch of humor and occasional sarcasm.
Joined November 2022
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Ken Cook retweeted
your dostoevsky reading guide, from beginner to final boss:
beginner
- white nights
- the gambler
- notes from underground
intermediate
- crime and punishment
- the idiot
- the eternal husband
advanced
- demons
- the house of the dead
- the adolescent
expert
- the brothers karamazov
- notes from a dead house
- poor folk
final boss
- the brothers karamazov (reread)
- demons (reread)
- trying to decide whether dostoevsky understood human nature or just understood suffering better than anyone else.
disclaimer: the levels are debatable. the idiot can humble you more than crime and punishment, and the brothers karamazov is a whole different commitment.
where would you place the idiot?
Ken Cook retweeted
I’m regularly amazed by the number of people I talk to that have very little knowledge, or even an inkling, of how the lives of billions will soon change with autonomous transportation, Robotaxis and robotics (namely Optimus).
Within 8-10 years, many..then most…will realize there’s no need to own a vehicle (though many will keep one for independence). Car payments, insurance payments and upkeep will largely disappear as household expenses. We’re talking massive monthly savings for most Americans.
With Optimus, households…most powerfully, the elderly…will have a friend, companion, cook, housekeeper and incredibly, the best doctor on the planet, right in their home with them.
GDP growth and productivity will absolutely skyrocket, which will allow for government debt totals to begin moving in the other direction. Slowly at first, and then, really really fast.
These are just a few examples of how the lives of average Americans will radically change for the better, inside of a decade.
When you extrapolate out the other unknown (but coming) advancements from this Innovation Revolution, I’ll just repeat what we’ve been saying for the last 4 years; we’re entering a time frame where there’s never been a better time to be an opportunistic optimist. The pessimists have this entirely wrong. Entirely.
It’s unbelievably exciting.
Ken Cook retweeted
Hopefully this post is understood and sheds light on the way I view the election landscape this year.
I don’t trust polling or media narratives and believe they are used to shape for desired outcomes. They demoralize you, you don’t vote, they win on the margins of a midterm year and its dynamics.
Midterms suck for the party in power, and they have for a century. Reagan lost seats in the House with a 63% approval rating. My skepticism doesn’t mean I see a “red wave” forming in a midterm Dems are supposed to win.
I do believe the GOP is favored to hold the Senate on the fundamentals of the races that will decide it, and believe there is a 1 in 3 shot Republicans hold the House - which is almost 3x better odds than history affords. This is due to redistricting and the fact that Dems have nominated DSA aligned candidates in seats they’d automatically win if not for that. The GOP is also short at least 6 seats they should hold this year for one reason or another.
My mind doesn’t read polling or formulas. It reads trends and sees each county as a unit on the battlefield. Every state has a blue map and red map - I only need to label a few bellwethers to give you a read on what is going on. There are simply races you CAN win (will certainly win, may win, could win in an upset) and then races you CANNOT win (take every House seat in Chicago, for example).
The Texas Senate seats falls into the fringes of that first group for Dems. In a few more years of transplants and Hispanics running right, perhaps more like Florida where there is zero shot. Dems get big vote margins from 4 counties, and modest vote margins in a few others. Those all have to be maxed out, and they need bad GOP county turnout and a full-on reversion of the Latino vote to 2016 splits.
It’s not that it CAN’T happen - it just takes a lot for it to happen and as such you should see a mind that views things at a granular level like an Army intelligence officer veteran.
There are 435 different House races, of which I think perhaps 35-40 are reasonably playable for either side, and 35 Senate seats, of which 12 are interesting this year. Everything else is noise and fluff.
Ken Cook retweeted
Map of The Journey of The Pequod from Herman Melville's epic Moby Dick.
The Pequod sails from Nantucket under Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale, working the Atlantic whaling grounds from the Azores to the Carrol Ground, round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, through the China seas to the Japan grounds and the Pacific Line, where the hunt comes to its ruin.
Here are the number locations:
1 - Nantucket
2- The North Atlantic Ground
3- The Azores Ground
4 - The Cape Verde Ground
5- Rio de la Plata
6 - The Carrol Ground
7- Cape of Good Hope
8 - The Crozet Grounds
9- Straits of Sunda
10 - Formosa and the Bashee Isles
11- The Japan Grounds
12 - The Line
Source: readingmaps.com/maps/moby-di…
Ken Cook retweeted
Higher ed is broken. Time to start over from scratch. It is irredeemable in its current form and it cannot be fixed....
Harvard hoards $55.7 billion while the top 10 college endowments hold $320 billion combined.
All of it tax exempt, all of them still charging six figure tuition, lobbying for more federal cash, and running as indoctrination centers.
These are wealth hoarding hedge funds that hand out degrees.
Strip the tax exemption and force them to spend it or lose it.
Ken Cook retweeted
Elon Musk believes that one of the most important abilities you can build is a commitment to lifelong learning and the courage to question what you hear.
Through companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has worked across various industries, from electric vehicles and space exploration to artificial intelligence and energy.
One notable aspect of his approach is the value he places on learning outside your main area of expertise. Rather than focusing on just one subject, he encourages exploring different fields, reading broadly, and strengthening your critical-thinking skills.
Expanding your knowledge can help you discover connections between ideas that others might miss and approach challenges from fresh perspectives.
However, learning new information is only one part of the process. You must also be willing to challenge assumptions, question traditional beliefs, and develop independent opinions.
In today's world, information is easier to access than ever before. The real advantage comes not from simply knowing more but from understanding how to apply what you learn effectively.
Continuous learning and independent thinking can help you adapt, solve problems creatively, and make better decisions in a constantly changing world.
Ken Cook retweeted
You know what's more expensive than $4 a gallon gas?
Paying student loans I never took out.
Paying for free food for someone that shouldn't even be here.
Paying healthcare for people that jumped the border.
Paying for infrastructure in a country I've never been to.
Paying for military protection for people that hate us.
Paying the salary of politicians trying to destroy this country.
Paying judge’s salary that no longer support justice.
These things are costing me a hell of a lot more than a gallon of gas…
Ken Cook retweeted
When the Falcon Heavy launched for the first time in February 2018, the payload was Elon Musk's personal midnight cherry Tesla Roadster with a mannequin in a SpaceX spacesuit sitting in the driver's seat. The car stereo was set to play David Bowie's "Space Oddity" on loop. The dashboard screen read "DON'T PANIC" in a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The car is currently orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars and will continue doing so for millions of years.
An engineer on the Falcon Heavy team described the payload decision meeting as the moment he realized his boss was fundamentally different from any CEO he had ever worked for. The standard payload for a test flight is a block of concrete or steel. Elon chose his car. When asked why, he said if the rocket blew up, "at least it would look cool." The engineer said nobody in the room laughed because nobody was sure he was joking.
The image of Starman (the mannequin) sitting in the Roadster with Earth visible through the car window became the most iconic space photograph since Earthrise (the Apollo 8 photo of Earth from the Moon). The image was not planned by a marketing team. It was planned by a man who reads Douglas Adams and listens to David Bowie and thought it would be funny to put his car in orbit around the sun.
The car carries a copy of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series on a storage device. Asimov's Foundation is about a man who foresees the collapse of civilization and builds a plan to shorten the dark age that follows. The book is Elon's favorite and the one he has cited most often as the intellectual foundation for his Mars colonization plan. The book is now orbiting the sun inside a car that is itself a piece of the plan the book describes.
There is a Tesla Roadster playing David Bowie, carrying Asimov's Foundation, floating past Mars every 557 days, and it will be there for millions of years after every person alive today is gone. The most expensive practical joke in human history is also a time capsule of the mind that launched it: a man who reads science fiction, listens to classic rock, drives electric cars, and builds rockets. Every object in the car is a piece of his personality launched into permanent orbit.
The Roadster will outlast every building, every company, and every human institution currently on Earth. In a million years, when everything Elon built has crumbled, a midnight cherry Tesla will still be circling the sun with David Bowie playing to no one. The longest lasting thing he ever made is a joke.
Ken Cook retweeted
Everyone needs to read this because @CynicalPublius carefully lays out how a coordinated color revolution playbook, using NGOs, narrative control, electoral triggers, and elite pressure is being run against our constitutional system right now.
Thank you for putting in the time and effort to connect the dots so clearly and educate Americans on the coup attempt unfolding in plain sight.
Ken Cook retweeted
Oct 20, 1964: Herbert Hoover died in New York at 90. He's remembered for the Depression, but before that he may have saved more lives than any American in history.
He was orphaned at 9 and raised by relatives in Iowa and Oregon. He went to Stanford in its first class, became a mining engineer, and was a millionaire by 40.
When World War I broke out, he organized food relief for German-occupied Belgium and northern France. His organization fed millions of people for years. After the war, he ran relief that fed millions more across Europe. During a famine in Soviet Russia in the early 1920s, he sent American aid that fed millions of Russians a day.
He was elected president in 1929 as a brilliant problem solver. Seven months later the stock market crashed. His efforts didn't stop the Great Depression, and the shantytowns of the homeless were named Hoovervilles after him. He lost the 1932 election in a landslide.
He lived another 31 years after leaving office. In 1946 Harry Truman asked him to organize famine relief for postwar Europe, and the two became friends. He gave away his salary throughout his public career.
Ken Cook retweeted
In the 1950s, a typical American home cost the modern equivalent of just $95,000.
But putting a new color television inside it cost over $11,000.
The mid-century economy was an inverse of today's: technology and communication were true luxuries, while the foundations of life—housing and education—were highly affordable.
While the new RCA CT-100 color television retailed for $1,000 in 1954, even a standard black-and-white set cost around $250, or roughly $3,100 in modern money.
Buying a TV was a major financial milestone that often required financing and months of savings, which is why the appliance was treated as the prized centerpiece of the living room.
It is one reason TV content from this epoch was a higher caliber and depth. Simply put the ability to even see the programming was a financial barrier.

Communication was just as costly. A three-minute long-distance phone call from New York to Los Angeles in the early 1950s cost about $2.50. Factoring in inflation, that is over $30 for three minutes of voice chat.
Families routinely used kitchen timers to ensure calls ended before the next expensive minute ticked over, and "long distance" was reserved for emergencies or major announcements.
Yet, while consumer electronics drained savings, the actual cost of living was remarkably low in real terms.
These were the old lines of prosperity.
The median American home value in 1950 was just $7,354.
With the median home price in the United States now exceeding $400,000, mid-century housing was objectively cheap.
A sole breadwinner could often purchase a brand-new house in the expanding suburbs for less than twice the median household income, a ratio rarely seen in modern real estate.
Higher education was similarly accessible. Public university tuition in the 1950s was almost negligible, with many state schools charging under $100 a year in fees. Even elite private institutions were bargains.
In 1950, a year of tuition at Harvard University cost $600. Adjusted for inflation, that is about $7,500 today—roughly one-eighth of Harvard’s current tuition rate. A student could realistically pay for an Ivy League education by working a summer job.
Ken Cook retweeted
📚🚨 The book UNELECTED is finally out - order it today if you haven't! 🇺🇸
There'll be more Democracy Files drops today - but as it happens, today is launch day for my book UNELECTED. It is a coincidence that I stumbled into an archive of these ex-USAID officials less than a week before the book's release. The UNELECTED is about how and why a massive global network of NGOs came to dominate our everyday American policies.
And crucially, UNELECTED ends in a whitepill that shows us the way out of this mess.
UNELECTED is a joint collaboration between @JoshuaLisec and myself. I started this effort because my own doxxing happened during the Tesla Takedown protests, while I was in the process of being recruited by DOGE. DOGE employees were having their life made miserable, and I had to take my own children and flee out of state.
While researching who organized and financed the protests, I noticed all the backers were all about democracy. Democratic resilence, strengthening democracy, protecting democracy. I was like ... "wait, why are democracy groups behind this?" DOGE was cutting silly DEI foreign aid awards, it wasn't overturning any elections.
What I came to find was shocking - these silly USAID awards added up to a global regime change machine. "Democracy" has nothing to do with elections. "Democracy," to them, means diffused governance outside of the three branches of our Constitutional Republic via private citizens in the form of NGOs. The network started assembling over a hundred years ago with the founding of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and has snowballed into a machinery worth trillions of dollars that has sucked taxpayer money, philanthropic money, union dues.
That became UNELECTED.
You've been reading about the coup the past couple of days. UNELECTED shows how and why the coup came to be.
I'm so lucky to have met wonderful people throughout this journey - @petermarocco, "Big Balls" @as400495 , and countless others who sacrificed so much more to right our country.
Vote straight Republican on November 3rd, and buy UNELECTED.
Ken Cook retweeted
Absolutely, and this is what we should focus on. It’s simple
I lost 80lbs by not eating Oreos or any sugar and few carbs
Meat, eggs, dairy, seafood - all satiating , so I naturally eat less calories
No counting or weighing , and not waking around hungry all of the time
Ken Cook retweeted
Cynical Publius nails it right here. 2020 was just a warm up. We just watched a pre show in France of what they can and will do here if you give the democrats control back.
Go to @DataRepublican’s page. There are zoom calls being discovered with their plans. This is very steady and coordinated effort against the American people. Do you want somebody to control your life? Making decisions for you? Not me.
This is not fear mongering. This is truth.
You must vote Republican like your life depends on it. Because it does.
Just a reminder: the riots and arson of the summer of 2020 were merely the pre-season for Democrat activists.
They were just warming up--working out the kinks and getting their game planning straight.
The summers before the 2028 election will be the regular season with their first team starting.
For these midterms, you really need to vote like your life depends on it, because for many of us it actually does.
Ken Cook retweeted
Elon Musk just laid out the next thousand years of the economy in four sentences.
Buried in a reply. Just after midnight in Texas. Between memes.
Here it is:
"Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla's value.
The only things that will scale to incredible size (K2 and beyond) economically are super intelligence, robots, solar power and mass to space.
And, of course, if you have the first two, the rest will follow.
But Roadster is super cool, so we're doing it anyway."
Most people read that and saw a car company talking about robots.
Read it again.
K2 means Kardashev Type II. A civilization that harnesses the energy of its entire star.
Not a country. Not a planet. A star.
Humanity isn't even Type I yet. We still fight over oil fields.
And the guy running a car company is telling investors: that's the scoreboard.
Not deliveries. Not margins. Not who sold more SUVs last quarter.
The Kardashev scale.
Wall Street counts cars.
Elon counts stars.
Now look at the list again.
Super intelligence. Robots. Solar power. Mass to space.
Grok. Optimus. Tesla Energy. Starship.
That's not a portfolio.
That's a recipe.
And the real twist is hiding in the third sentence: "if you have the first two, the rest will follow."
Think about what that means.
For all of history, every civilization hit the same wall. Not enough minds. Not enough hands.
Every cathedral, every railroad, every moon landing was limited by how many smart people and how many workers you could gather in one place.
Now imagine intelligence is abundant. Imagine labor is abundant.
Building a solar farm becomes a task.
Building a rocket becomes a task.
Building the factory that builds the robots becomes a task.
Remove those two bottlenecks and everything else is downstream.
Everything.
This week analysts will grill Tesla about deliveries and margins. Fine. That's their job.
But the man has already told you what the game is. Most people just scrolled past it.
And then, right after sketching the path to a star-powered civilization, he adds one more line:
"But Roadster is super cool, so we're doing it anyway."
That's my favorite part.
Because it's the whole philosophy in a single sentence.
You can plan for the Kardashev scale and still build a car with SpaceX thrusters just because it's awesome.
Serious about the future. Never too serious to have fun building it.
The pessimists are busy asking what Tesla is worth this quarter.
The better question: what is humanity worth when thinking and building stop being scarce?
My bet: a lot more than one planet.
Optimus and Cybercab will be the vast majority of Tesla’s value.
The only things that will scale to incredible size (K2 and beyond) economically are super intelligence, robots, solar power and mass to space.
And, of course, if you have the first two, the rest will follow.
But Roadster is super cool, so we’re doing it anyway.
Ken Cook retweeted
I hope people will take the time to listen to this woman. I hope you will hear this with your own ears so you can understand what these people are doing. This past week they resurrected the USAID flag - what does that tell you? Firstly, they never give up. Not even in defeat. They fight back as if it is a God given right to give away millions & millions of your tax dollars to foreign nations to further their ideology globally. They act as if the election of someone who opposes DEI is a war crime & they marshall their resources & move to private groups where they continue to organize & plan how to subvert the will of the people who just defeated them. They do not whine about their own side - they stick together & they do not stop.
Let that be a lesson to all those who do nothing but bitch about this Administration. Whatever your grips, legitimate or not, don’t be so foolish that you let these people take back the power they lost. Don’t give up. Don’t surrender this hard-won ground. Because these people have not gone away. They are waiting, subverting, planning & most especially preparing. They were royally obliterated in the last election so what did they do? They started planning for the midterms. Instead of giving four years to Pres Donald Trump, their plan is to give him two.
Stay home in the midterms and you let that happen. Shrug your shoulders, and this is on you. Ignore the threat, and you only have yourself to blame.
@dararepublican the answer to your question about when this becomes treason is very simple: it is when they collude/conspire with an enemy of our country. An enemy is someone who is declared, like a foreign nation during a war. Or a domestic enemy like Antifa, as they have been declared a domestic terrorist organization.
Both treason & sedition are efforts to undermine our government and destroy our country. And your work here is evidence of a crime. This hurts all Americans and we have seen this before in 2020, when reporter, Millie Weaver, exposed a call just like this among federal employees who were still employed and planning how to subvert Pres Donald Trump after the 2020 election.
So far these people have gotten away with their crimes. But they are still crimes. People really need to pay attention to what you are exposing because this is an enemy like none we have ever faced: those who gain power again this way have no intention of ever ceding any of it to their adversaries ever again.
Thank you to all three of you for exposing these people. Please God someone in power will actually hold them accountable.