Backbone Radio

Backbone Radio with Matt Dunn. Politics, culture & controversy from Colorado and beyond. Extreme Skier. Film Buff. Daddio to 4. @ClaremontInst Lincoln Fellow.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

Søren Kierkegaard on the Importance of Walking

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

[TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2]

Police and Federal Govt use of Flock Cameras Under Scrutiny https://t.co/4Gtl5OEkE7

[ScienceInFocus @SciInFocus]

Planetary Aligment on August 12. Don't miss it!

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

Put August 12 in your phone now. Genuinely.

Before sunrise, six planets spread across the sky. Afternoon, the eclipse. After dark, the Perseids Meteor shower.

Four events on one day, NASA says, and the new moon that same date keeps the sky dark enough to actually see the meteors.

You don't need a telescope for most of it. A field, a coat, and twenty minutes for your eyes to adjust.

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

You can’t deliberately build economy in which an entire generation of Americans can’t afford to own anything and then act surprised when people with no capital have no stake in capitalism.

Open borders, forever wars, welfare, and Fed money printers are how you get socialism.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 JUST IN: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just dropped a truth nuke OF THE AGES

"People don't want to admit it: where ICE goes, RENTS GO DOWN."

"Was it 10, 15, 25 million illegals? There's NO new housing stock. So you saw rents go through the roof."

Mass deportations solve almost any problem you can think of in your head.

Every. Problem.

@AndrewKolvet

[Owen Shroyer @OwenShroyer1776]

Yikes

[Roger Kimball @rogerkimball]

Analysis: true.

[eburke @JamesWHankins1]

Yes, and both Machiavelli and Nietzsche completely ignore the history of the Crusades, the military successes of the Macedonian dynasty iin East Rome, the expansion of Latin Christendom under Charlemagne and the Ottonian empire, plus the growth of the Spanish global monarchy -- all driven by the Christian faith. Nietzsche was either historically illiterate or willfully blind (or both) to the moral strength imparted by Christianity to the peoples who embraced it.

[Petronella Wyatt @PetronellaWyatt]

One of Hollywood’s happiest and most enduring marriages: Gregory Peck and French journalist Veronique Passani shortly after their marriage in 1955. The remained married until Peck’s death in 2003.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Spot on 👇

Sec Bessent is saying what most of Wall Street already knows but won’t admit: the era of Fed whisperers masquerading as analysts has hollowed out real market thinking.

For years, asset prices weren’t driven by fundamentals, they were driven by interpretation of carefully leaked signals, trial balloons, and selective “guidance” fed to a handful of well-connected reporters. That isn’t price discovery; it’s narrative management.

When journalists become conduits for policy hints instead of interrogators of policy outcomes, markets stop analyzing and start front-running. Wall St stopped doing objective research, and relied on the Fed to spoon feed them. Wall St thus, never questioned the Keynesian dogma. Wall St became a lapdog for the Fed.

The result is a generation of participants trained to decode tone shifts rather than evaluate capital allocation, productivity, or inflation dynamics.

If the Warsh Fed is forcing that ecosystem to operate without a script, the discomfort you’re seeing isn’t dysfunction, it’s withdrawal.

Markets that can’t function without being spoon-fed aren’t efficient. They’re dependent. A new era has begun and some of the cool kids on Wall St are upset. Let them!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

There is still time, but not much time

[Heather Mac Donald @HMDatMI]

The Camp of the Saints played out in real time yesterday as nearly 50,000 Moroccans invaded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the North African coast. The immediate stimulus was likely Spain’s recent amnesties, both from the Spanish Supreme Court in June and from Pedro Sanchez’s government in April. Those amnesties are but an epiphenomenon of a deeper cause, however: Western elites’ belief that the West is the source of the world’s suffering.

The resulting demographic replacement will continue until we acknowledge and act on the truth: our civilization is the most successful in human history and must be defended.

From my address at the @svpolicyforum earlier this month.

[Nigel Farage @Nigel_Farage]

My response to viral footage from the Moroccan border.

It’s time to wake up everybody.

[AFP News Agency @AFP]

🇪🇸 Around 60,000 migrants have crossed into Spain's Ceuta enclave from Morocco in the recent surge, the local regional president Juan Jesus Vivas told reporters on Friday.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is extremely important to understand.

The birth rate you see in the West is the BLENDED number of ~90% who have a fertility rate half that of replacement and ~10% who have a birth rate double that of replacement.

Demographics is destiny.

[MAGA MomMom 1776 🇺🇸🌻 @magagrandmom]

I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same.

I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life--so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!

• If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.

• Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.

• Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.

• It was cool for Joe Biden to "blackmail" the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.

• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.

• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.

• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.

• Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.

• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.

• If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.

• People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.

• We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.

• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.

• Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it's a violation of THEIR rights.

• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us "racists"?!

Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.

We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast. The choice is yours to make. What will it be? Time is short, make your choice wisely!

Feel free to copy and paste. I did.

Time for our government to wake up you either work with and for America or get the hell out .. we're tired of paying taxes and you incredibly selfish people don't give a damn for the people you work for... you should all be ashamed of yourself !!!!

[TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2]

Bibi smiles and says, "well, you broke it - you own it"...

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

It is inarguable that the war in Iran is a massive drag on Trump’s numbers, as well as those of the Republican party heading into November. This is largely driven by consistently high gas prices, which also drive up the price of everything else.

Trump obviously knows this, which is why he’s been searching for an off ramp for months. He knows he was elected to get gas prices down and the economy in shape (which he did until the war jammed up the gears).

But a major problem for Trump’s presidency right now is that nearly everyone outside his inner pushing for this war—and this includes the entirety of so-called conservative pundits who never found a war they weren’t willing to make others fight and pay for—also hates Trump (and especially Vance) and sees the war’s negative effect on his popularity as a secondary benefit of the war they’ve been salivating over for decades. To them, his declining numbers are a feature, not a bug.

With the Iran war, the NeverTrump neocons have gotten everything they ever dreamed of—war (which they love), and a massive political quagmire for Trump which threatens to consume the rest of his presidency and destroy any future political chances of J.D. Vance and the entire MAGA/America First movement.

These people, and this includes most GOP senators, believe that Trump/MAGA is just a fever that will eventually break, and all they have to do is wait it out and then take over what’s left of the party after that. They don’t care if Republicans lose in the mid-terms in November. In fact, they’d welcome it. They would much rather rule over the wreckage than continue having to take a back seat to Trump or his successor.

This is why they refuse to pass the SAVE America Act. It’s why they’ve been blocking recess appointments and slow-walking the entire nominations process since the very first day of this presidency.

Washington Republicans very much prefer the minority, where they get all the perks of power but none of the obligations or accountability. They can go on their taxpayer-funded junkets and slip provisions into Democrat-written bills for their benefit of their K Street lobbyist donors without having to actually pass anything their voters demand. When you’re in the minority, you don’t have to spend all your time lying to your own voters about why you can’t do anything despite controlling the Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.

If November goes poorly, they’ll then leave Trump to fend for himself as a new Democrat Congress launches its latest series of hoaxes and investigations and impeachment circuses designed to make sure Trumpism as a movement in 2028 has no gas left in the tank. It will be the Russia hoax and the Ukraine impeachment hoax and the J6 hoax all over again.

The neocon war pimps and the RINO establishment would much rather Republicans lose in 2026 and 2028, allowing the establishment to rebuild the party in its own image heading into 2032, than watch the Trump/MAGA agenda succeed and lead to a third or maybe even a fourth term following victory in the presidential election in 2028.

This is the reality of the current political situation. The Iran war is a mess, it’s being pimped by people who are than happy to watch it destroy Trump’s presidency, and they are being completely dishonest about their own motivations as well as the political impact of the war going forward.