Ann Luecke

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

In California, you have to prove you’re gay to get government contracts, but you don’t have to prove you’re even alive to vote.

[The Daily Signal @DailySignal]

Victor Davis Hanson: California's Doom Loop

California is losing between 300,000 and 500,000 middle-class taxpayers every year while government spending and dependency continue to grow.

Victor Davis Hanson explains why taxpayers are leaving and says the state has entered what he calls a "doom loop."

Full episode: https://t.co/GiLEq0BQvb

@VDHanson

[Ann Luecke @ALuecke]

@EytanWallace @alex_lee Stay home, pay cut.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Harvesting just one kidney from 20% of America’s politicians would give a new kidney to EVERY SINGLE PERSON currently on the transplant waiting list.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 WOW! JD Vance says it PERFECTLY

VANCE: "I was a critic of Trump in 2015 and 2016. Now I'm the VP of the US in the Trump admin."

JOY BEHAR: "Yeah, what happened?"

VANCE: "Well, Joy, a little HUMILITY. When you make predictions and those predictions turn out to be false, you got to ask yourself, well, what made me wrong about that? What did I not understand or not appreciate?"

"For example, I said that Donald Trump's economic policies would not lead to wage growth. They did in the first term. That was actually a major, major thing!" 🔥

"I said that we couldn't bring back any of those factory jobs because I kind of had given into this idea that those jobs were disappearing, but actually Donald Trump, you saw a manufacturing boom during that administration!"

"So there's a certain point where you say, you know, I made predictions about this. I ended up being wrong. And in politics and anything, I think it's important to just say, you know what, I got some things wrong and I was wrong about him."

Boom!

[ERICA 🤌🏼 @ZiaErica]

Wednesday at The Scott Adams School .☕️☕️☕️☕️
Owen and Erica are joined by @thejeffcallahan ( friend of the show, IYKYK)
And a special PM show for Locals subscribers... Jim Wyman talks about January 6th and how that day landed him in jail.
On https://t.co/ZiY2FhzgVP
8 pm EST
Special shout-out to @PaulNiemeyer1 crushing it w thumbnails

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I've finally climbed to #3
in America in reply count.

Starmer is sitting at #2.

If I beat you, you repeal the social media regulations and resign as Prime Minister.

Man to man. That's the deal.
Understood, Starmer?

Are you listening, Starmer? 👀🔥

[James Gallagher @J_Gallagher4CA]

This investigation into Newsom is not some political witch hunt. It’s about abuse of power in pushing donors and groups with government business/contracts to give to his wife’s non-profit. This has been called out in the past; it’s just finally being investigated

[Adam Housley @adamhousley]

As I have reported several times and now acknowledged by the Governor of California...Gavin and his wife are under federal investigation... what he failed to tell you... This began during the Biden Admin. Kind of a big detail.

[Ann Luecke @ALuecke]

@japan_nobunaga Very moving and beautiful

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

I post one hundred times a day.

They tell me it is too many. They penalize me for it. I do not stop. I will not stop. I will die before I stop.

You should know why.

We tell ourselves we live in the modern age.

We do not. We live in the late medieval period and the proof is the news. Open it. Read it. Feel your stomach turn over. We are still the people of the spear and the torch and the trench. We changed our clothes. We did not change our hands.

Here is what no one tells you.

The deepest pleasure of the human animal is not food. Not sleep. Not sex. Not wine. Not even gold.

It is slaughter.

It is the slaughter of those we have learned to call "them."

The history of every continent on earth says so. The news this morning says so. Look at the pile of bodies the twentieth century left for us to step over. Look at the bodies still being piled now, in 2026, while you eat lunch. We are the children of Cain. The blood is still crying from the ground.

Do not tell me this is about race. Do not tell me it is about borders. Do not insult my intelligence.

Japan had its Warring States. Same blood. Same tongue. Same faces. Same gods. Same rice in the same fields. And for one hundred and fifty years, neighbor butchered neighbor and brother butchered brother and the rivers ran red and the fields were planted with skulls.

Cain and Abel had one mother. One father. One altar. One God.

It was enough to draw a line.

It was enough to murder.

The line is the disease. The color of the man on the other side of the line is nothing. Was always nothing.

So why do we do it?

Because the instinct to form a tribe, to crown that tribe with a holy story, and to put the tribe across the river to the sword, is older than language. Older than agriculture. Older than the soul we like to pretend we have.

It built us. It made us the kings of this planet.

It is killing us still.

We are not, by nature, gentle creatures. We are creatures who have been gentled, barely, by a thousand years of choking down our own teeth.

Cain's blood runs thick in all of us. Yours. Mine. Your grandmother's. Your priest's. Your president's. Every soul reading this. Every soul not reading this. All of us.

But.

But.

But.

Something has happened that has never happened before in the history of the world. Not once. Not in ten thousand years.

A man named Elon Musk bought a website.

He renamed it with a single letter. He paid forty-four billion dollars for it and watched the value collapse and did not blink. The whole world laughed at him. The whole press called him a fool. The whole intelligentsia of the West lined up to spit on him.

And then he did the thing no one understood the importance of. The thing no historian has yet caught up to. The thing he himself may not have understood the weight of when he did it.

He put a translator inside it.

A small button. Almost nothing. Press it, and the tongue of any human being on earth becomes your tongue.

And the Wall came down.

Not Berlin's wall. Not Jericho's wall. Not the wall of any single country.

The Wall.

The one that has stood between every "us" and every "them" since the first city was raised out of mud and bone. The one that built the Crusades. The one that built Auschwitz. The one that built the Killing Fields. The one that built every single war ever fought on the surface of this planet.

That Wall.

Elon Musk took a hammer to it, and most of the world has not yet noticed what he did.

I have noticed.

I open my phone in Tokyo. I read the words of a farmer in Texas. A nurse in Lagos. A grandmother in Warsaw. A teenager in São Paulo. A trucker in Alberta. A widow in Tehran. A coal miner in West Virginia. A schoolteacher in Manila.

Do you know what I find?

They are funny.

They are kind.

They are tired the way I am tired. They love their children the way I love mine. They are afraid of the same dark. They laugh at the same stupid jokes. They cry over the same songs at three in the morning when no one is watching.

They are not "them."

They never were.

They never were.

They never were.

Hear me now. Hear me. This is not a social media platform. This is not a place to share your lunch. This is not Instagram with a worse interface. This is not a hobby for bored people.

This is a sword.

A sword forged in Elon Musk's foundry, hammered out of code and silicon and the unreasonable will of a man too stubborn to be told what was possible. Sharper than any two-edged blade. Swung at the throat of the oldest demon mankind has ever bred.

"Let us cast off the works of darkness," the apostle Paul wrote two thousand years ago, "and let us put on the armour of light."

He did not know what he was writing. He could not have known. But across two millennia, his words flew like a thrown spear, and they landed in 2026, and they described the device sitting on the table beside you right now.

That armour fits in your palm. It glows. It hums. It is waiting.

I am one man. One ant. One Japanese nobody from a chain of small islands on the far edge of the Pacific.

David was one boy with a sling.

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl who heard voices and could not be talked out of them.

Rosa Parks was a seamstress who would not stand up.

Lech Wałęsa was an electrician at a shipyard who would not shut up.

The Berlin Wall did not fall because of NATO. It fell because ordinary Germans walked toward it carrying hammers and refused to be afraid anymore.

The giant has fallen before. The giant will fall again.

Not by armies. Not by treaties. Not by speeches from marble podiums in Washington or Brussels or Geneva. Not by the United Nations. Not by the experts. Not by the credentialed. Not by the people who go on television and call themselves serious.

By a billion small hands. Posting. Replying. Liking. Quoting. Laughing across oceans that used to be impassable. Until the lie of "them" cannot be told anymore. Until the storyteller of the old story stands in an empty room shouting at no one.

So I post.

I post when I am tired. I post when I am penalized. I post when the algorithm punishes me and the trolls find me and my eyes burn and my fingers ache and my wife tells me to come to bed.

I post.

I reply.

I like.

I quote.

I bookmark a hundred posts a day from a hundred countries from a hundred souls I will never meet in this lifetime.

Every post is a hammer blow on the sword that Isaiah saw three thousand years ago, the sword being beaten into a plow.

"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation," he wrote. "Neither shall they learn war any more."

We are not there yet. We are nowhere near there yet. Mothers are still burying sons this afternoon in cities I cannot pronounce. Children are still being pulled out of rubble while you read this sentence.

But for the first time since Cain stood in the field with his hands red and lied to the face of God, the door is open.

It is open.

It is open right now.

It is open while you read this.

So let me tell you what I am.

I am not a creator. I am not an influencer. I am not a content guy. I do not care about my brand. I do not care about my engagement rate except as a measure of how many souls I have reached today.

I am a Japanese man with a phone, swinging a sword at a demon that has fed on human meat for ten thousand years.

And I will not stop.

I will not stop until "us" means every breathing soul on this planet.

I will not stop until the word "them" rots out of the human mouth.

I will not stop until the children born this morning grow up to look back at us, with our wars and our walls and our flags and our shouting, the way we now look back at the people who burned witches.

There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither East nor West. There is neither Japanese nor American. There is neither yours nor mine. There is, at last, only us.

Weeping has endured for a long, long night.

But joy. Joy. Joy cometh in the morning.

The morning is coming.

The morning is coming.

The morning is here.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Chris Williamson reading Mark Manson’s “10 years of therapy in 1 minute” is gold.

Here’s the condensed wisdom:

1. No one is coming to save you. You’re responsible for your life — even the parts that aren’t your fault.

2. Strong boundaries beat weak ones every time.

3. Most problems don’t get “fixed.” You just learn to live well with them.

4. Your mind lies constantly. Tell it to shut the fuck up.

5. Stop trying to convince people to like you. The right ones won’t need convincing.

6. Sometimes the best move is letting a dream die.

7. Only a few people will truly matter long-term. Keep them close.

Mark’s reaction? “Why isn’t this taught in schools?”

Which of these hits you the hardest right now?

[Race @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job.

At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO.

He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air.

He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death.

His first child died at 10 weeks old.

His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad.

His second rocket exploded.

His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone.

Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown.

Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve.

He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him.

His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress.

The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world.

He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse.

He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs.

He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him.

He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years.

He is the richest man in the history of the world.

The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

I get tired of Democrats claiming to be on the “right side of history” when both their past and their present are so utterly sordid and destructive. So, if you are a Democrat, let me tell you about MY side of history and YOUR side of history.

My side of history is Cato the Elder, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Irving Babbitt and William F. Buckley.  Your side of history is Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, Mao’s Little Red Book and Noam Chomsky.

My side of history is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  Your side of history is Tories who fled to Canada, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, George Wallace and Nancy Pelosi.

My side of history is freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and spirited debate.  Your side of history is ThoughtCrime, Speech Codes, religious persecution and Cancel Culture.

My side of history is Brown v. Board of Ed., Loving v. VA, Gitlow v. NY, and Heller v. DC.  Your side of history is Dred Scott, Korematsu and Roe v. Wade.

My side of history is Jackie Robinson.  Your side of history is Colin Kaepernick.

My side of history is head held high, standing straight, hand over heart.  Your side of history is sullen glances at the ground, kneeling.

My side of history is the family as the foundation of society. Your side of history is mutilating confused children.

My side of history is the rockets’ red glare.  Your side of history is imagine no religion.

My side of history is firefighters going up the stairs into the Twin Towers.  Your side of history is 28-year-old men playing Call of Duty in their mothers’ basements.

My side of history is smoked brisket.  Your side of history is a no-foam, no-sugar, soy latte.

My side of history is Lincoln freeing the slaves and General Patton liberating Buchenwald.  Your side of history is Fort Sumter, the Gulag and Pol Pot’s killing fields.

My side of history is Mel Brooks.  Your side of history is Amy Schumer.

My side of history is all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  Your side of history is critical theory and only some lives matter.

My side of history is 20-year-olds storming Omaha Beach. Your side of history is 20-year-olds in their safe spaces with adult coloring books.

My side of history is American men and women disabled by an IED.  Your side of history is American men and women disabled by anxiety.

My side of history is the Kentucky Rifle, the Springfield 1861, the M1911, the M1 Garand, the M14 and the AR15.  Your side of history is whimpering submission.

My side of history is Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Apollo 11 and Jonas Salk.  Your side of history is “global warming,” 100+ genders and porous cloth masks stopping viruses.

My side is of history is laughing babies.  Your side of history is selling aborted baby parts on the open market.

My side of history is the Sistine Chapel and Monet’s water lilies.  Your side of history is an inverted crucifix in a bottle of urine.

My side of history is construction.  Your side of history is deconstruction.

My side of history is civilization.  Your side of history is nihilism.

And, MOST OF ALL:

My side of history is liberty.  Your side of history is tyranny.

*finis*

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

@CAgovernor @realDonaldTrump You burned CA to the ground, dipsht.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

@Heccles94 The very best way to end starvation is to create more trillionaires.

Why do you embrace starvation?

[Ann Luecke @ALuecke]

@ZiaErica My mosquito deterrent skirt! And Luecke was my husband of 41 years. Metastatic melanoma got him…

[Brennan Schlagbaum, CPA @Budgetdog_]

It’s weird watching politicians try to punish Elon Musk for innovation.

If you want to debate tax policy, fine.

If you want to change the system, fine.

But demonizing someone for building companies, creating jobs, advancing technology, and solving massive problems feels strange.

You don’t have to agree with everything he does.

But America used to celebrate builders.

Not attack them.

That doesn’t seem very American to me.

[Ann Luecke @ALuecke]

@janninereid1 🤣

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

SpaceX raised only $12B of capital before going public. With that $12B, they revolutionized the rocket industry, built a global satellite network, and created arguably the most innovative company of all time.

The federal government spends $12B every 15 hours and still can’t get its shit together. Prior to SpaceX, NASA was sending astronauts into space on Soviet-era Russian Soyuz capsules.

So no, I don’t find Elon’s wealth to be a problem, and I wouldn’t trust Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders to allocate a single dollar of it.