bourbon, politics, good history books, etc. #RationalGround
Joined April 2009
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Despite repeated & often hysterical public health warnings, COVID never overwhelmed our healthcare system. It's a claim now made in retrospect to justify the draconian response, but still a myth. The truth is we had ample hospital capacity available throughout the COVID era. 🧵
Don Wolt retweeted
If a ten year statute of limitations applies to Comey’s leaks, why only include the arguably time-barred leaks from October 2016 but not include the BIGGEST leaks from LESS than 10 years ago?!?
Brennan knew that the press had the dossier. It says so right in the addendum. Comey even wrote that CNN was looking for a “news” hook to report on the dossier.
AND somehow the press knew that it was summarized in a two-page addendum to the ICA. Not one page or three. Exactly two.
“Top Secret” my foot.
Don Wolt retweeted
i am coming to the conclusion that the reason that so many of these college students so rabidly hated charlie is not because of what he said when he was holding the mic but rather what he asked them to say when he handed the mic to them.
there's a stunning incoherence to their views. so angry, so confident, so entitled, and so completely, utterly unable to explain why or what they even believe.
never have so many known so little and yet felt so certain about so much.
there is no capacity for critical thinking or discourse, not even a basic semantic grasp of the concepts.
it's just an entitlement-flavored word salad spewed forth as some talismanic claim to deference and respect.
the greatest vulnerability of the marxist midwiped is being asked to explain what they are talking about.
ask what their magic words mean, why they use them, what they signify, how the problems and processes they posit work.
ask how they would do things.
ask what they are asking for.
the results are amazing.
Don Wolt retweeted
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar writes in her memoir, “I was eight years old when civil war broke out in Somalia. One day everything was okay, and the next, there were bullets piercing not only buildings but also people.” While Somalia has suffered several civil wars, the chapter is entitled, “War: 1989-1991, Mogadishu, Somalia.” Mogadishu experienced severe riots in July 1989, including a mass execution that became known as the “Jazeera beach massacre.”
If, in her own words in her own autobiography, Omar was eight when this occurred in 1989, then she was born in 1981, and was 19 years old in the year 2000, when her father purportedly obtained his citizenship, not 1982 as she currently claims.
Don Wolt retweeted
In her memoir, Ilhan Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, recounts feeling taken aback at the prospect of going to a church to receive charity in the US, given that she had never been near a church because of the severe persecution of Christians in Somalia by Muslims.
Don Wolt retweeted
If anyone believes this nonsense, here are the facts he is counting on you not knowing.
The deal did not end Iran's nuclear program. It rented a pause. Iran kept its centrifuges, kept Fordow buried in a mountain, kept enriching to 3.67%, and the key restrictions came with expiration dates. The sunset clauses began lifting in 2025. Obama's own answer at the time was that breakout time "would have shrunk almost down to zero" as the deal expired. His deal scheduled the problem for his successors.
The regime lied its way into the deal. The JCPOA was premised on Iran coming clean about past weapons work. In 2018 Israel pulled Iran's own nuclear archive out of a Tehran warehouse: tens of thousands of documents on the Amad Project, a crash program to build nuclear weapons, preserved and hidden while Iran certified it had no such program. The IAEA later found uranium traces at undeclared sites Iran never explained.
The deal paid for terror. Sanctions relief unfroze roughly $100 billion and the US delivered $1.7 billion in cash. That money flowed to the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Diplomacy with a regime at war with you is financing, not peace.
And the result? By 2025 Iran was enriching to 60%, a short technical step from weapons grade, with enough material for multiple bombs and the IAEA declaring it in violation of its obligations. That is what required military force this year. Iran marched to the threshold under the deal's cover and after it.
"I didn't have to fire a missile" is true. He handed the regime money, legitimacy, and a timetable, and left the missiles to be fired a decade later by someone else. Appeasing a dictatorship doesn't buy peace. It buys the dictatorship time.
Don Wolt retweeted
Flashback to when Obama went on Letterman a week after the Benghazi attack to lie to the American people.
Obama blamed the Benghazi attack on a video even though he had known for days that the video had nothing to do with the attack. It was terrorism.
The election was coming up and Obama wanted to make sure the Benghazi didn't hurt him, so he went on Letterman and lied.
Obama lying on TV before an election. Some things never change.
Don Wolt retweeted
By way of reminder: Elvis Chan was a primary liaison between the FBI’s FITF and social media companies. The obvious effect (and by inference, intent), was to silence unapproved political expression. m.youtube.com/watch?v=XbwgFl…
Don Wolt retweeted
WOW this exchange.
@BretBaier tried to give Abdul El-Sayed a chance to finally explain the 2012 letter in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Abdul awkwardly tries to speak over him.
This flailing defensiveness is why we’re on week 3 on this issue.
Don Wolt retweeted
By the way, fake-marrying a gay guy to give him immigration status while still filing joint tax returns with your real husband is super illegal even if he's not your brother!
The facts associated with Ilhan Omar's marriage/immigration scandal have been known or knowable for years. Yet they seem to have largely escaped notice of the strangely incurious press & authorities until recently. It's odd that those dogs didn't bark earlier.
When in doubt, deploy the "disinformation" boogeyman.
Hillary Clinton says "we've been very focused" on "disinformation" about the upcoming election that creates "distrust."
"We've been running scenarios about how best to deal with lies about the election."
Democrats have been accusing Republicans of cheating and rigging the midterms for months, but Hillary here is working really hard to combat distrust in the election.
Got it.
INTERVIEWER: Did you marry your brother?
OMAR: Doubt it, but who can be sure.
Imagine a world where we actually monitor fraud & prosecute officials who commit it.
Don Wolt retweeted
It is October 2026 and California government workers are on strike because they were ordered to return to office four days per week.
What do you hate the most, @karaswisher? Elon's making the world's most popular EV, protecting free speech by acquiring Twitter or turning science fiction into orbital reality?
On the Bulwak podcast, Kara Swisher says Elon might already be in jail under Kamala Harris, and "he knows what's coming for him."
Another one to put in the "what Democrats plan to do if they take power" file:
"If Donald Trump loses the House and the Senate, I would worry. I'd be worried if I were him."
"So they're going to start investigating again. You think he's not on the list? He's at the top of that list."
"He has a very big sense of fate. And I think it's coming for him. And real hard."
They're all just saying this stuff out loud now. There are no secrets about what they want to do.
Don Wolt retweeted
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…
