A fart in a stiff wind. Proud deplorable. Not R. Jenkins
Joined May 2022
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God bless this man
Bend, Oregon man who shot and killed a shooter at his daughters' school speaks out, praises female teacher for fighting the shooter, allowing him to have a clear shot.
Kaylub Giamanco says he is haunted by the sound of children pleading for their lives.
He also praised the teacher for grabbing the gunman's weapon, allowing him to take a shot at the shooter.
"I want to recognize [the teacher]. She gave me the opportunity to make my shot without losing my life..."
"I swung the door open, and I stepped in, and I fired, and they dropped to the ground... I looked down at the gunman, and he was scrambling for his weapon. And I looked at him, and I shot him 2 more times..."
Freddy Bender retweeted
Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.
Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it.
It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.
Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.
Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.
Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."
First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.
Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.
Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.
Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.
Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.
That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.
The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.
Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.
That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.
And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.
So why do so many people hate capitalism?
Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.
They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.
Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.
People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.
The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.
Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.
This f*ckin guy
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Freddy Bender retweeted
On a scale of “Trump conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election” to “Respected nominee to Supreme Court is secretly a serial gang rape cartel leader roaming the streets of suburban Maryland,” where would “it’s weird that this guy in the middle of a hot Senate race hasn’t been on the trail for weeks” rank?
The replies to this lying asshole are too funny
I just met Jason and Keri on my walk across the state. They lost their food stamps bc of Trump’s cuts.
They are taking a bus back and forth to New Haven today for a meal from a soup kitchen there.
A 6 hour commute for a meal.
And Elon Musk just became a trillionaire.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Bus travel from Waterbury to New Haven takes about 1 hour one way on CT Transit 229, not 6 hours round-trip. Local soup kitchens serve free meals in Waterbury with no ID required, including at 327 Baldwin Street and 770 East Main Street.
rome2rio.com/s/Waterbury/Ne…
svdpmission.org/soup-kitchen
gwimwaterbury.org/soup-kitchen/
Freddy Bender retweeted
I always understood why the Second Amendment was constitutionally protected.
What I never really understood was why people called it a natural right.
Then I moved from New York to Florida.
I didn’t own a gun yet.
One afternoon I was loading things into the trunk of my car outside a HomeGoods when a man approached me.
“Excuse me.”
He must have thought he’d startled me, because he immediately added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get close.”
I laughed.
“I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to close. How can I help you?”
He started telling me that he needed money for gas.
At some point while he was talking, I got into my car.
And sitting there, with the conversation still unfolding, I suddenly realized something:
He didn’t know whether I had a gun.
Not somewhere at home.
Not hypothetically.
For all he knew, I could have had one right there in the car, tucked under the steering wheel or within reach.
I didn’t.
But he couldn’t know that.
Schrödinger’s gun.
And in that instant, before I even knew whether his story was true, something changed in the space between us.
I thought about New York.
I thought about my friend who had been murdered in his own apartment during a burglary gone wrong.
Would those men have gone into his apartment if they had believed he might be armed?
I don’t know.
I thought about the time I was mugged at gunpoint, with a gun pressed against my temple.
Would that man have approached me with the same confidence if he had believed there was even a possibility that I could defend myself?
I don’t know that either.
But sitting there in that Florida parking lot, listening to this stranger talk, I suddenly understood deterrence in a way I never had before.
Not as military theory.
Not as constitutional law.
As something intimate.
My body. My life. The few feet between one person and another.
For years I had thought about guns primarily as objects: who had one, who shouldn’t have one, what laws should govern them.
Suddenly I understood the question from the other direction.
What changes when another person cannot simply assume that I am defenseless?
I felt taller.
Not because I had a gun.
I didn’t.
But because, for the first time, I understood that someone approaching me could not automatically assume that being physically stronger meant having power over me.
There was uncertainty.
There was a boundary around my body that had to be taken seriously.
Then his story began to fall apart.
I told him I didn’t have cash, but offered to help another way. I could put some gas in his car.
He took off.
So apparently, yes, it was a scam.
But by then I had already understood something much larger than the scam.
The phrase natural right finally made sense to me.
The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body.
It had not given me my life.
It had not invented my right to protect either one.
Those things came first.
What I understood that afternoon was the thing underneath them.
I had once been completely helpless while another human being held a gun against my temple.
Years later, without a gun in my possession at all, I understood what it meant for the person approaching me not to know whether I was helpless.
That uncertainty changed the space between us.
And that was the moment I finally understood the natural right behind the Second Amendment:
My life is mine, and
the right to defend it has to exist before anyone gives me permission to do so.
Freddy Bender retweeted
Dan Helmer is the diarrhea lettuce of Virginia politics.
Freddy Bender retweeted
“A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.”
-Thomas Jefferson literally telling us what to do to save our country in 2026
Freddy Bender retweeted
Holy shit, this is about as brutal as I've ever seen SCOTUS be on one of their own.
Translated: "you are so stupid that you aren't even worth responding to."
Freddy Bender retweeted
We are living through a massive information crisis in which at least half the population is being systematically misinformed, making any sane national debate increasingly difficult. Without a shared factual foundation, there is nothing to discuss. People are not merely drawing different conclusions from the same evidence. They are living in entirely different realities.
That is what makes the Fauci story so tragic. He caused untold harm, yet millions of people know almost nothing about it. We can debate precisely how large a role Fauci played in the creation of Covid, but half the country does not even know that Covid came from a lab. We are therefore several steps removed from the basic conditions required to have an intelligent discussion.
Other facts are even more black and white. Fauci’s private diary contradicts what he told the public. His own words reveal a man of almost limitless narcissism. These are not matters of interpretation. They are documented facts. Yet we still cannot have a national conversation about them because the media either refuses to report them or actively lies about them. Anyone who is not on Twitter, which is most people, may never encounter the underlying evidence at all.
The result is that I increasingly find it almost impossible to discuss any of this with ordinary people, whether family members, acquaintances, or people at events or birthday parties. Unless someone has followed the evidence closely, there is no common starting point. Before you can debate what happened, you first have to dismantle at least ten years of falsehoods and omissions.
I do not know how this ends, but it is not sustainable. A country cannot function indefinitely when its people are no longer capable of discussing almost anything beyond sports on the basis of shared factual knowledge.
Freddy Bender retweeted
🚨How Democrats register illegals to vote through the DMV:
In 19 states and the District of Columbia, illegals are able to get a driver’s licenses.
The same DMV where the National Voter Registration Act requires that all driver’s license applications and renewals also “serve as a simultaneous voter registration application unless the applicant fails to sign the voter registration.”
This means that in at least 19 states, illegals could easily be registered to vote in federal elections as long as they check the U.S. citizen box. That’s all it takes. Or if there’s a “software error” they can automatically be registered.
Saying you are a citizen when you’re not is illegal but there’s nothing actually stopping them from doing that. They don’t have to provide evidence. These people *illegally* came to our country. Their first act here is illegal. They do not care about our rule of law.
Democrats planned this. First they pass laws allowing illegals to get driver’s licenses and then they block laws which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
This is the entire voter fraud scheme.
Looks guilty
Canadian woman slaps teen over Trump clothing on Jersey Shore boardwalk; now charged and in ICE custody trib.al/oKrp8sf
Freddy Bender retweeted
I’m not crying - you’re crying
The last verse+chorus of this is 10/10 the best USA World Cup song yet.
