JR

Political Junkie & Arizona Cardinals Devotee. Free minds & Free Markets.

[JR @AZFederal]

CB XXVI BOS vs POR

[Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie]

'Why is a flat-screen TV affordable and a college education not?...Because Congress has spent 60 years trying to make college affordable and has spent zero years trying to make TVs affordable.' By @reason's Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, @CliffordAsness https://t.co/ffQC5XQmIy

[tetsuo @tetsuoai]

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet.

Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years.

And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor.

You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Il faut avoir l'honnêteté de reconnaître le coup de génie de la gauche, parce que c'en est un. Le plus grand hold-up rhétorique du siècle tient en un seul mot : raciste.

Voici le mécanisme.

Après 1945, après les droits civiques, l'Occident a fait du racisme le mal absolu. À juste titre : c'est une de ses plus grandes conquêtes morales. « Raciste » est devenu le mot le plus radioactif de la langue, l'excommunication moderne, la mort sociale instantanée.

Le coup de génie a été de détourner ce capital moral. Pas pour protéger des personnes : pour protéger une idéologie.

L'égalitarisme des résultats ne gagne jamais un débat sur les faits. Il produit l'inverse de ce qu'il promet, partout, à chaque fois. Alors plutôt que de gagner le débat, on a rendu le débat impayable. Tu questionnes les résultats de l'immigration sans assimilation ? Raciste. Tu défends le mérite ? Raciste. Les maths avancées ? Racistes. Les frontières ? Racistes. Le mot a cessé de décrire un comportement pour décrire une position sur l'échiquier.

Et regardez la beauté technique du dispositif. Pas besoin d'arguments : l'accusation suffit. Pas besoin de procès : la dénégation aggrave le cas (votre défensivité prouve votre culpabilité). Pas besoin de police : la peur fait le travail, chacun se surveille lui-même et surveille son voisin gratuitement. Il suffit d'exécuter publiquement quelques exemples par an pour tenir des millions de gens. Une idéologie irréfutable, protégée par un mot imprononçable. Les deux pare-feux du même système : la French Theory avait aboli la vérité, l'accusation a aboli le débat.

Est-ce qu'un comité s'est réuni pour concevoir ça ? Pas besoin. Les idées subissent une sélection darwinienne : celles qui survivent sont celles qui se défendent le mieux. Marcuse avait quand même déposé le brevet dès 1965, noir sur blanc : tolérance pour les mouvements de gauche, intolérance pour ceux de droite. Le reste a évolué tout seul. Il faut l'avouer : c'était génial.

Mais ce dispositif génial avait un coût, et le coût a un bilan. À Rotherham, le rapport officiel Jay a établi que des fonctionnaires britanniques ont laissé plus de 1 400 gamines se faire exploiter pendant seize ans, en partie par peur d'être traités de racistes s'ils nommaient les faits. Relisez cette phrase. Des enfants ont été sacrifiées à un mot. Voilà ce que veut dire idéologie mortifère : pas une métaphore, un bilan.

Et maintenant, regardez ce qui s'effondre sous nos yeux.

Une insulte ne fonctionne que si elle fait peur, et une monnaie ne fonctionne que si elle est rare. Ils ont imprimé le mot comme Weimar imprimait le mark. Quand tout est raciste, plus rien ne l'est. Résultat : des tweets qui commencent par « traitez-moi de raciste si vous voulez » récoltent des dizaines de milliers de likes et l'approbation de l'homme le plus riche du monde. Il y a dix ans, cette phrase était un suicide professionnel. Aujourd'hui, c'est un haussement d'épaules. L'hyperinflation a tué la monnaie.

Et voilà la vraie tragédie, que les faussaires devront porter : en imprimant le mot sans limite, ils l'ont brûlé pour tout le monde. Y compris pour nommer le vrai racisme quand il existe, car il existe. Les faux-monnayeurs ne détruisent pas que leur arme. Ils détruisent le mot dont une société honnête a besoin.

Privée de son mot magique, l'idéologie va maintenant devoir faire ce qu'elle n'a jamais su faire : gagner un débat sur les faits.

Elle ne le gagnera pas. Au travail.

[Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* @EsotericCD]

I'll be writing about this for NR, but I will lay the Los Angeles situation out here flatly. Pratt didn't lose because of fraud. Pratt lost because, just like Chicago, it's an 80/20 Democratic city. In fact, he seems to have placed exactly where was in the final polls.

The real scandal is what's legal: with a 100% mail-in system, an endless window for ballot counting and legal mechanisms for unions and organizers to harvest (and later "cure") ballots, California's system is a purpose-built black box designed to fuel paranoia. And for no other purpose than that it allows Democratic intra-party battles to become a test of organizing strength for NGOs and unions.

People are right to be angry about the system. But even the way the votes are being counted now makes perfect (albeit disgusting) sense without recourse to claims of "fraud."

[J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 @JDHaltigan]

It is useful during this most recent period of progressive leftist shrieking & regime media petulance over the last week to revisit this masterful video short from @christopherrufo highlighting the cluster B society we are living through. This culture must be abolished.

[Steve Hilton @SteveHiltonx]

How much are diapers at Target compared to Gavin Newsom's government diapers paid for by YOUR taxes?

We went to take a look:

[Drew Holden @DrewHolden360]

🧵THREAD🧵

When I saw the news that the Southern Poverty Law Center funded the hate groups like the KKK & Unite the Right they relied on to claim that white supremacy, inspired by Trump, was on the rise, I just knew the legacy media helped make it possible.

Boy was I right ⤵️

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Il y a une phrase que j'adore : "Je suis communiste avec ma famille, socialiste avec mes amis, libéral avec mon pays, et capitaliste avec le reste du monde."

Cette phrase est brillante parce qu'elle résume l'erreur numéro un que font les gens quand ils réfléchissent aux systèmes économiques : appliquer ce qui marche à petite échelle à grande échelle sans comprendre que la complexité des systèmes change tout.

Le communisme avec ta famille ça marche. Tu partages tout, tu ne comptes pas, chacun donne selon ses capacités et reçoit selon ses besoins. Et ça fonctionne. Parce que tu es 4 ou 5 personnes, que tu connais tout le monde intimement, que la confiance est totale, que la tricherie est impossible à cacher, et que l'amour remplace les incitations économiques.

Le socialisme avec tes amis ça marche aussi. Un groupe de 20-30 personnes. Tu partages les restos, tu aides un pote à déménager, tu files un coup de main sans compter. La réciprocité est naturelle parce que tu connais chaque personne et que ta réputation est en jeu.

Mais dès que tu passes à l'échelle d'un pays, 68 millions de personnes, tout s'effondre. Pourquoi ? Parce que la complexité des systèmes est non linéaire. S'organiser à 5 c'est trivial. S'organiser à 50 c'est difficile. S'organiser à 50 millions c'est un problème d'une complexité fondamentalement différente. C'est pas juste "plus dur". C'est qualitativement un autre problème.

À grande échelle, tu ne connais plus les gens. La confiance disparaît. La tricherie devient invisible. Les passagers clandestins prolifèrent. L'information nécessaire pour coordonner 68 millions de personnes dépasse la capacité de n'importe quel planificateur central. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises (1920) et de l'information dispersée de Hayek (1945). Un cerveau central ne peut pas traiter l'information que des millions de prix de marché transmettent en temps réel.

C'est exactement pour ça que le communisme produit des familles heureuses et des pays morts. Le modèle ne scale pas. Pas parce que les gens sont méchants. Parce que la complexité des systèmes rend la coordination centralisée impossible au-delà d'un certain seuil.

Et c'est l'erreur de jugement fondamentale que font la plupart des gens qui adhèrent aux thèses marxistes. Ils prennent leur expérience du partage en famille ou entre amis, un modèle qui marche à 5-20 personnes, et ils l'extrapolent à 68 millions de personnes en ignorant complètement l'émergence de la complexité. "Si ça marche chez moi, ça devrait marcher pour le pays." Non. La physique des systèmes complexes dit exactement le contraire.

Le marché libre c'est le seul système qui scale. Parce qu'il ne dépend pas de la confiance personnelle, ni de la bonne volonté, ni d'un planificateur omniscient. Il dépend de prix qui transmettent l'information, d'incitations qui alignent les comportements, et de la concurrence qui corrige les erreurs. C'est un système conçu pour fonctionner avec des inconnus, à n'importe quelle échelle.

Sois communiste avec ta famille. Socialiste avec tes amis. Et libéral avec tout le reste. Parce que la taille du système détermine le modèle qui fonctionne. Pas tes bonnes intentions.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Pourquoi le socialisme ne marche pas, expliqué pour un enfant de 10 ans.

T'es dans une classe de 30 élèves. Un élève bosse comme un fou et a 18 de moyenne. Un autre fait rien et a 4. Le prof décide que c'est injuste et donne à tout le monde la moyenne de la classe : 11.

Celui qui avait 18 arrête de bosser. Pourquoi se fatiguer si ça change rien ? Celui qui avait 4 continue de rien faire. Pourquoi bosser si on te donne 11 gratuitement ?

L'année suivante la moyenne de la classe est à 7. Puis 5. Puis 3.

Le prof ne comprend pas. Il pense que le problème c'est que les élèves ne sont pas assez solidaires. Alors il met en place des punitions pour ceux qui ne font pas assez d'efforts. Il surveille tout le monde. Il décide qui étudie quoi. Il interdit de changer de classe.

C'est exactement ce qui s'est passé. À chaque fois. Dans chaque pays. Sans exception.

URSS, Chine, Cuba, Venezuela, Corée du Nord, Cambodge, Éthiopie, Allemagne de l'Est. 40 tentatives. Même résultat. À chaque fois.

Le socialisme punit ceux qui produisent et récompense ceux qui ne produisent pas. Tout le monde finit par ne plus produire. Et quand plus personne ne produit, le gouvernement utilise la force pour obliger les gens à travailler.

C'est pas un accident. C'est le design.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Claude knows! —>

The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate
Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite.

I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is
The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie.
The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization.
Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself.
The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level.

II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy
To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously:
Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified)
When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either:
∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or
∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or
∙Both.
Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs.
This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

https://t.co/h7GuBNepcy

[kache @yacineMTB]

It was the celebration of his murder from leftists everywhere, not the murder itself. People that you knew were openly just saying "I am glad that fucker died". Like, sheepish women that you knew irl would say this shit. Bloodthirsty

Changed my perspective on a lot of things

[nkemjika (Kemi) @kemindolo]

Not my video but it is the fanbase

[Kaizen D. Asiedu @thatsKAIZEN]

See! I told you he's racist!

^ Is exactly what people are rushing to conclude from the Trump post depicting the Obamas as monkeys.

But if you actually watch the video you'll see something different.

Rushing to conclusions is killing this country.

[JR @AZFederal]

@NFL_DovKleiman Crap content Dov

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

All people had to do was to be fully against murdering someone for their political opinions. That was the moral test. Shocking how many seem to have failed it.

[Molly Pitcher @AmericanMama]

@w_terrence This lady is defending Charlie too. Y’all are both telling the truth.

[Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives @dom_lucre]

🔥🚨BREAKING: Disturbing footage of liberal children wishing death on prominent conservatives Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk when their mom told them that she had ‘the best news ever’ only to be surprised with news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married.

Dear God it is far worse than I ever imagined…

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

(Warning: long rant)

My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.

I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.

Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.

And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.

Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.

I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.

Here are the facts:

Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.

Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.

Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.

These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.

Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:

These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.

These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.

When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.

They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.

And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.

When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”

They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.

And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.

When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.

And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.

For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.

In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.

In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.

> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)

> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)

> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)

> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)

In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.

> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)

> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)

All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.

You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.

Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.

If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.