BJ_TKV

Don’t sacrifice long-term strategy for short-term gains; Military Supporter; Our Community Salutes; #StopTexasSucide; #StopSoldierSuicide; My views only

[Libertario 🟨⬛ @QuotesforGoal]

"Cuando te das cuenta que para producir necesitas autorización de quien no produce nada, sabes que tu sociedad está condenada"

Ayn Rand

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Karl Marx was wrong about everything, from his determinist view of history and understanding of human nature to his flawed theory of value and lack of understanding of how an economy works. His legacy is simply one of having inspired death and misery.

Historical materialism is deterministic and reductionist pseudo-science, treating the idea of an economic "base" (forces and relations of production) as the primary driver of history and all but ignoring all other factor - most obviously individual agency.

Marx saw human nature as defined by social relations and malleable, having been changed by capitalism, because communal activity, in particular through labour, is what distinguishes humans from animals. We have been alienated from our "species-being" by capitalism but socialism can return us to our true selves. He totally underestimated innate, universal human traits like self-interest, greed, ambition, competition and the desire for power.

His labour theory of value is empirically and theoretically flawed. Value is in fact subjective and determined by marginal utility, scarcity, demand, and consumer preferences, rather than by "socially necessary labour time". Austrian economists like Böhm-Bawerk argued this decisively in the late 19th century, showing why prices diverge from labour inputs.

His economic theory totally misses the coordinating role of prices (as show by Mises' economic calculation problem), markets and incentives in allocating resources efficiently. The exploitation theory (surplus value extracted from labour) overlooks voluntary exchange, mutual benefit in wage labour, and how workers' living standards rose dramatically under capitalism through productivity gains.

Karl Marx's theories and his call for proletarian revolution to overthrow capitalism profoundly inspired 20th-century revolutionaries. Figures like Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot adapted and radicalised his ideas into doctrines justifying violent seizure of power, centralised control and suppression of "class enemies" to build socialism. These regimes resulted in catastrophic human suffering. Estimates of deaths from executions, forced famines (Holodomor, Great Leap Forward), purges, gulags, and genocides range from 65–100 million or more across communist states. Millions were killed directly or died from engineered starvation and repression and generations were immiserated and trapped in authoritarian misery for decades. While Marx envisioned liberation, his ideas in fact enabled totalitarian horrors that devastated vast swathes of the world.

[Handre @Handre]

The 1921 depression was one of the sharpest economic contractions in American history, and the federal government let it burn itself out. Unemployment hit roughly 12 percent. Industrial production collapsed. Prices fell hard and fast. And within eighteen months, the economy roared back without a stimulus package, a bailout, or a federal jobs program.

The Federal Reserve, created only eight years earlier in 1913, had inflated the money supply aggressively to fund World War One. The inevitable correction arrived in 1920. Prices had doubled during the war years, and the credit bubble the Fed built had to deflate. Pain was unavoidable.

President Harding did something no modern politician would dare attempt. He cut federal spending from $6.3 billion in 1920 to $3.2 billion by 1922. He slashed tax rates. He let wages and prices fall without propping them up artificially. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon simply allowed the market to liquidate bad investments and reallocate capital toward productive uses.

Falling prices, which every mainstream economist treats as catastrophe, actually accelerated recovery. Businesses could hire at lower wages. Consumers could buy at lower prices. The adjustment was brutal and real and it worked.

Compare 1921 to 1929. Herbert Hoover intervened aggressively after the crash, pressuring employers to maintain wages, signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff, and expanding government programs. Franklin Roosevelt doubled down for a decade. The Depression lasted until 1945 by most honest accounting.

The lesson is straightforward. Government interference in a downturn protects the malinvestments that caused the crisis in the first place, extending suffering for years. Harding stepped back and the market cleared itself inside two years. Today, they call it "The forgotten depression," forgotten because it was over so quickly.

[GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE @GOP_is_Gutless]

If you think Trump renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America is dumb.....

you wanna know what is more stupid?

The fact left-wingers are triggered about this after they spent the last decade renaming sports teams, public schools and universities, streets and highways, food and condiment brands, and redefining half the dictionary altogether.

Here’s a list of some just in case you forgot:

• Washington Redskins ➡️ Commanders

• Cleveland Indians ➡️ Guardians

• Stanford Indians ➡️ Cardinals

• Loudoun County Raiders ➡️ Captains

• Edmonton Eskimos ➡️ Elks

• Columbus Day ➡️ Indigenous Peoples’ Day

• Lee–Jackson Day ➡️ eliminated

• Robert E. Lee High School ➡️ John Lewis High

• Jefferson Davis Highway ➡️ Richmond Highway

• Mount McKinley ➡️ Denali

• Fort Bragg ➡️ Fort Liberty

• Fort Hood ➡️ Fort Cavazos

• Boy Scouts of America ➡️ Scouting America

• Aunt Jemima ➡️ Pearl Milling Company

• Uncle Ben’s Rice ➡️ Ben’s Original

• Eskimo Pie ice cream bars ➡️ Edy’s Pie

• Land O’Lakes ➡️ removed the Indian, but kept the land

• Illegal alien ➡️ undocumented worker

• Hispanic ➡️ Latinx (a term Hispanics did not want and do not use)

• Mother ➡️ birthing person

• Anchor baby ➡️ child of noncitizens

• black ➡️ Black

• Breastfeeding ➡️ chest feeding

• Inmate / prisoner / convict / felon ➡️ justice-involved person

• Ex-con / ex-felon ➡️ returning citizen

• “Gender” as a biological fact interchangeable with “sex” to being a social construct

• Fat ➡️ plus-sized

• Master bedroom ➡️ primary bedroom

• Manhole ➡️ utility hole

Homeless ➡️ Unhoused

And let’s not forget all the they, them, their pronouns.

I love howTrump trolls you nitwits! 😂🤣

[BJ_TKV @BVsoapbox]

@OS26 Hahahhahaha! That would do it!!

[Saggezza Eterna @FinalTelegraph]

The Prophet of Other People’s Money

Bernie Sanders is a fraud.

For more than fifty years Bernie Sanders sold the country a costume. The rumpled suit, the wild hair, the clenched fists, the sermon about greed, all of it was product design. He did not wander into politics as a monk who happened to find a microphone. He built a marketable saint and restocked the inventory every election cycle. College kids got a grandfatherly radical. Burned-out workers got a man who sounded angry in their direction. Donors to the brand got a conscience they could rent for an evening. What none of them got was a legislator who could turn a slogan into a statute that survived contact with reality.

He spent his adult life telling other people that accumulated wealth was a moral crime. Then the checks cleared. Book royalties, speaking fees, the conversion of rage into inventory on a publishing schedule. The millionaire problem did not vanish because millionaires became virtuous. It vanished because the word now pointed at him. The stump speech received an edit. Millionaires were quietly escorted offstage. Billionaires were left behind to absorb a performance he had already outgrown. That is not growth. That is brand management. He did not transcend class politics. He graduated into the class and kept the old script because the old script still paid.

Look at the real estate and stop pretending it is a quirky footnote. A Washington house. A Burlington house. A waterfront summer place on the Champlain Islands, the postcard version of arrival. This is the man who taught audiences to hear property as predation. He did not socialize his comfort. He diversified it. He did not live like the people he claimed as a flock. He lived like the people he taught that flock to hate, then demanded applause for remaining spiritually poor while the deed stack grew. If greed is a system, he stopped being a critic the moment the system issued him a second shoreline.

His congressional career is a monument to noise without construction. Decades in the House and Senate. Taxpayer salary without interruption. Seniority thick enough to choke on. And the primary-sponsor ledger still looks like the work of a man who treated lawmaking as an unpaid internship he never intended to finish. Ceremonial post office names. Commemorative gestures. Press conference fuel. The Senate became his soundstage. He showed up, found the nearest camera, and delivered the same sermon about the top sliver of the top sliver that he had been polishing since the Carter years. Colleagues learned the rhythm. He would not do the ugly arithmetic of votes. He would not draft text that could survive a parliamentarian, a committee, a governor, a court, a budget. He would accuse the room of corruption and then flee to a town hall where nobody could amend him.

That is not purity. That is absenteeism with better lighting. Governing is coalition math, statutory language, tradeoffs that make your fans sulk. Sanders specialized in the sulk. He turned inaction into proof of integrity. Every failure to pass a foundational bill became evidence that the country was too rotten to deserve his success. Convenient theology. If you never build the thing, you never have to live inside it.

Then came the Veterans Affairs Committee, where the costume met actual bodies. In 2014 whistleblowers dragged the Department of Veterans Affairs into the light. Secret waitlists. Cooked numbers. Wounded and chronically ill veterans waiting for care while administrators protected their bonuses and their myth of competence. Sanders was chairman. The job was oversight of a machine that was failing people who had already paid in blood. His first instinct was not fury at the machine. His first instinct was to protect the creed. Government care could not be allowed to look like a morgue with a waiting room. So the scandal became, in his telling, a right-wing caper against public medicine. Ideology first. Graves second. He did not discover urgency when veterans were dying. He discovered urgency when the headlines threatened the brand. Only then did he scramble toward bipartisan emergency legislation with John McCain and stand near the repair job as if proximity were the same thing as authorship. He denied the fire, then posed in front of the hose.

That episode is the whole man in miniature. When a public system fails, he does not audit it like a prosecutor. He defends it like a chaplain. The patient can die as long as the theory lives.

Immigration put the same habit on a larger stage. In 2007 and again in 2015 he said the quiet part in public. Mass inflows of cheap labor were a gift to employers and a pay cut to the people he claimed as his reason for existing. He said open borders were a Koch-style fantasy dressed up as compassion. He said the bargaining power of low-wage Americans was not a racist hallucination. It was arithmetic. Then the activist class and the donor class snapped their fingers and the arithmetic became hate speech. The blue-collar constituency he used as moral scenery lost the argument the moment it endangered a national primary. He did not refine the point. He junked it. He traded the waiter, the roofer, the meatpacker, and the cashier for faculty-lounge absolution. A labor champion who abandons labor supply as soon as the campus veto arrives is not a champion. He is a weather vane with a Brooklyn accent.

Guns followed the identical sale. Rural Vermont wanted a senator who would not treat every rifle as a morality play. In 1993 he voted against the Brady bill and its waiting periods. In 2005 he voted to shield firearm manufacturers from a lawsuit strategy designed to bankrupt an industry through the courthouse rather than the legislature. Those were not accidents. They were the price of his local survival. Then he wanted Iowa. He wanted Brooklyn. He wanted the urban primary voter who treats the Second Amendment as original sin. So the old votes became embarrassing relatives. Debate-stage remorse. Scripted evolution. Conviction as costume change. A man who will flip on constitutional rights to chase a nomination will flip on anything. The gun file is simply the one where he left fingerprints.

Defense spending completed the sermon-versus-district split. He filled gymnasiums with denunciations of contractors, empire, and the machinery of war. Then Lockheed Martin’s F-35 needed a home at the Burlington Air National Guard Base and the prophet became a lobbyist. Noise. Property values. Local protest. Environmental complaint. None of it outranked the political value of anchoring a multibillion-dollar weapons platform in Vermont. The military-industrial complex is an abomination when it is someone else’s earmark. It is economic development when it pads the kingdom. He did not resolve that contradiction because he does not have to. His audience is trained to hear the speech and ignore the hangar.

Around him the money moved the way money always moves in a permanent campaign. Small-dollar romance on the front of the envelope. Professional harvest on the back. Tens of millions vacuumed out of people who believed they were funding a revolt, then routed into consulting shops, media buyers, and the familiar fog of insider vendors. He talks about dark networks as if they were a rival species. His operation learned the same language of retainers, relationships, and quiet markups. The revolution has payroll.

Jane Sanders is not a human-interest sidebar. Burlington College was driven into the ground through aggressive real estate appetite, debt that could not be serviced, and loan-file controversy that ended with an institution liquidated and students holding the bag of a closed campus. He lectures the country about predatory finance and ethical rot. His household orbit produced a case study in a small college that did not survive contact with ambition. He wants corporate boards treated as crime scenes. He wants his own circle treated as complicated and private. That double standard is the aristocracy he claims to oppose.

2016 and 2020 revealed the last trick. Hundreds of thousands of people built him an army. They slept on floors. They fought their friends. They believed the word rigged was a diagnosis rather than a marketing hook. Party operatives squeezed calendars, debate mechanics, endorsements, and institutional weight. Sanders answered the machine by handing it the keys. Voter lists surrendered. Endorsements delivered. The man who spent decades calling Clintonism and later Bidenism the smiling face of corporate capture put on the smiling face and told the kids to clap. He taught a generation that the establishment was illegitimate, then demanded they legitimize it with their labor. That is not strategy. That is extraction. He harvested alienation, billed it as a political revolution, and deposited the energy back into the same committee rooms he had used as a foil.

Call him what the record shows. Not a threat to the establishment. A pressure valve installed by it and maintained by people who need the young and the broke to feel represented without ever being represented. He is the official protestor of a system that pays him to protest it. He preaches centralized economic command while cashing the upside of private copyright, private real estate, and private brand equity. He condemns millionaires until the mirror gets involved. He mourns the working class until the working class wants a border, a wage floor protected from infinite labor supply, or a senator who will pick a fight that costs him a tote-bag audience. He condemns Washington and has been Washington since before many of his fans were born.

The followers received chants, posters, and the narcotic of borrowed righteousness. The party received a captive left that could be marched back into line every summer. Sanders received wealth, property, tenure, and the permanent right to scream that none of it counts because his heart is still on the picket line. It counts. The houses count. The edited vocabulary counts. The empty sponsor list counts. The veterans who waited while he defended a bureaucracy count. The workers whose leverage he explained and then orphaned count. The activists who built him a movement and watched him deliver it to the people he had named as the problem count.

He is not the last honest man in a crooked capital. He is the crooked capital’s favorite sermon, delivered in a voice hoarse enough to sound like sacrifice and empty enough to leave every institution standing exactly where he found it.

[Diego Angulo @AmoaHamlet]

Durante mi militancia en el marxismo asistí a muchísimas charlas. Y con el tiempo empecé a notar un patrón muy interesante:

Podíamos pasar diez horas hablando de cómo tomar el poder.

Diez horas hablando de revolución, de estrategia, de organización, de activismo, de cómo derrotar al enemigo de clase, de cómo transformar las relaciones de poder.

Pero había una pregunta que nunca aparecía:

¿Y después qué?

Es decir:

¿Cómo vamos a crear riqueza?

¿Cómo vamos a organizar los incentivos?

¿Cómo vamos a asignar recursos escasos?

Silencio.

Y fue ahí cuando lo entendí.

El marxismo tiene una obsesión patológica con conquistar el poder y una pobreza extraordinaria de respuestas sobre cómo utilizarlo para construir una sociedad funcional.

La revolución está perfectamente descrita.

La sociedad posterior, en absoluta oscuridad.

Porque decir que algún día llegará una sociedad sin explotación, sin clases y sin contradicciones es muy fácil.

Lo difícil es explicar cómo llegas hasta ahí sin destruir en el camino los mecanismos que permiten a una sociedad producir y prosperar.

Y cuanto más preguntaba, más evidente se volvía.

El marxista podía explicarte durante horas quién tenía la culpa.

Pero cuando preguntabas cómo funcionaría concretamente esa nueva sociedad, las respuestas se hacían más oscuras.

Y quizá por eso, cuando intentaba ahondar en estos temas, la conversación siempre volvía al mismo lugar: cómo tomar el poder. No pasaban de eso.

Por eso hoy, cuando escucho a alguien hablar durante horas sobre la explotación, destruir el sistema y construir una sociedad nueva, mi primera pregunta es:

¿Cómo vas a hacerla funcionar?

Nunca verás a un marxista responderte esto porque literalmente no puede, no sabe.

Entonces deduce que, al igual que como con cualquier otra estafa piramidal, cuando hagas preguntas directas y concretas al marxismo, este intentará evitar en todo momento darte respuestas claras.

Nunca lo olvides.

[Chuck Ross @ChuckRossDC]

Say his name -- Hasan Piker https://t.co/Rws5HHiz52

[Hector Resendez - Trade School Secrets @TS_Secrets]

One of my buddy’s sons skipped college and became an electrician at 18.

He was told either college or military were his only two options.

His parents weren’t exactly excited when he went to trade school. Actually they were a little embarrassed.

Most of their friends’ kids were going off to universities. Their son was showing up to job sites at 6am.

By 21 he was making $90k

By 24 he had his master electrician license making over $120k

At 27 he started taking his own jobs on the side for a total of $200k

Last year at 29 his little “electrician business” did $1.8M with 4 vans.

Funny how that works.

His parents used to explain why he didn’t go to college.

Now they tell everyone he owns an electrical company.

We need more 18-year-olds to know this path exists.

Day 229 tagging @mikeroweworks until more parents start bragging about trade school too.

Consider to RT if you agree.

[Handre @Handre]

Socialism destroys wealth before it even builds it, because it severs the link between effort and reward at the root.

Consider the Soviet collective farms. When the Bolsheviks forced peasants onto kolkhozy after 1929, grain output collapsed almost immediately. Why would a farmer work sixteen-hour days when the state claims the harvest? He wouldn't. He didn't. Soviet agricultural output remained so depressed that the USSR imported American grain through the 1970s and 1980s, paying in hard currency its own system couldn't generate. The incentive to produce disappears the moment production stops belonging to the producer.

You see this everywhere socialism touches. Venezuela's Chávez nationalized over 1,200 private companies between 1999 and 2012. Output in those sectors didn't rise; it cratered. PDVSA, the state oil company, produced 3.2 million barrels per day in 1998. By 2020 it produced under 400,000. Managers stopped caring because the profit signal, the one mechanism that communicates what people actually want, got switched off.

The incentive problem is only half the indictment. The other half is the destruction of choice.

When the British National Health Service controls your healthcare, you don't negotiate price, quality, or timing. You wait. In August 2026, NHS England carries a waiting list of roughly 7.5 million people. You get what the committee decided you deserve, when they get around to it. A market lets you trade your own resources for the care you value most. A bureaucrat's judgment replaces yours, permanently.

Central planners cannot possess the dispersed, local, constantly changing knowledge that prices carry automatically. Destroying price signals evaporates wealth.

[BJ_TKV @BVsoapbox]

@MiltonFriedmanW Well it’s been corrupted now!!!

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

WOAH 🚨 Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge reviewed the documents just released by the Trump Admin on election integrity and finds CIA emails showing they were working against Donald Trump to aid China and the Democrats in the 2020 election

“I've been digging into the documents already and I found this November 2020 email, and it specifically states, it's a conversation among intelligence officials, it specifically states that they have, quote, deliberately massaged one of our pending PDBs. That's the president's daily brief. To avoid any direct links to the election”

“This was a massive effort, what they call a multi-domain operation. That means trade, it means diplomacy, it means open-source information, it means social media. So all the levers of power China had to influence the US election”

And our own CIA worked to make sure the r President wasn’t aware of any of this information, they literally removed it from his daily briefing

Literally treason

“In the summer of 2020, as we're heading into the election, in the intelligence community there were indicators of this Chinese influence operation. Influence operations means that you're trying to affect the outcome of how people vote or their sentiment about a presidential candidate.
It's different than an interference operation, which is penetrating voting rolls and voter systems. And this whistleblower was raising the alarm about the influence operation, and then suddenly it all was suppressed”

“In some of their reports, there were in officials' own handwriting that they wanted everything out that could help President Trump in his reelection. So there was clear evidence of political and personal bias”

They wanted to remove EVERYTHING that could possibly help Trump win reelection

Again, literally treason

Also if you remember awhile back, a former CIA officer named Pedro Israel Orta who worked at the CIA during the Trump Administration said the CIA didn’t even recognize him as the President, they wouldn’t even put his picture up on the wall which was customary for all Presidents

They were actively working against him

[Richard Grenell @RichardGrenell]

This is why @GavinNewsom doesn’t want IDs to vote.

Just look what he did with China during Covid.

[BJ_TKV @BVsoapbox]

@GadSaad Move on. Nothing to see here 🤬🤬

[Henshi @HenshiG]

Heartbroken and furious.

The president of PEN America — an organization founded to defend freedom of expression for writers everywhere — just resigned in protest… because PEN dared to publish an article documenting the real pain, isolation, and blacklisting of Jewish and Israeli writers since October 7.

Dinaw Mengestu couldn’t stomach PEN shining a light on the silent moratorium: the agents who can’t place Israeli novels anymore, the editors who ghost longtime collaborators, the loyalty tests, the spreadsheets hunting “Zionist” writers, the pressure to downplay Jewish identity just to be published.
Instead of defending the very principle PEN claims to uphold — free expression for all — he walked away, framing the documentation of antisemitic exclusion as somehow “unethical.”

This is where we are. A premier literary freedom organization publishes a mournful, fact-based piece about Jewish writers being erased from the conversation… and its own president resigns in outrage.

Not over the erasure. Over naming it.
As a Jewish writer, myself I know every voice matters.

We’ve seen this before — the slow, polite marginalization that always starts with “just criticism,” then boycotts, then silence, then worse.

But we will not be silenced.

Jewish voices, Israeli stories, our truth — they belong. They will be written. They will be read. They will endure. Because light always pushes back against the darkness, and words have always been our most powerful weapon against hate.

To every Jewish writer feeling this exclusion right now: Your existence matters. Keep writing. The Jewish people have outlasted every attempt to erase us — and we will outlast this one too.

Am Yisrael Chai. Never again means never again — not even in the world of literature. 💔✍️🇮🇱

[Richard Grenell @RichardGrenell]

What changed?

The media must answer this question.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

In 2018 Obama gave a long speech on "saving democracy," during which he talked about Russia "hacking" elections and accused Republicans of not doing enough to secure our elections.

All the major news channels covered it of course.

BTW, two years earlier Obama had received intel that Russia did not hack our election. He spent two years pushing that lie.

[U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM]

At 2 p.m. ET today, U.S. forces began conducting a new wave of strikes against Iran for the sixth consecutive night to further degrade Iranian military capabilities.

[U.S. Central Command @CENTCOM]

At 3 p.m. ET, U.S. forces launched operations for a second wave of strikes today against Iran. The strikes are targeting Iranian military capabilities used to threaten vessels freely transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway vital to global commerce. The U.S. military is holding Iran accountable at the Commander in Chief's direction.

[🇮🇷👑Mozhooo👑🇮🇷 @Mozho_M]

47 years this regime more time to expand terrorism, kill its own people, and build nuclear weapons. Enough is enough.
The complete overthrow of this regime is in the interest of Iran and the entire world.

Stand with the Iranian people and crown prince @PahlaviReza.finish the job.
@POTUS @netanyahu #KingRezaPahlaviForlran
#FinishThelslamicRepublic