David Hartmann

It may not help US to hear your story. But, it may help YOU to tell it.

[David Hartmann @DavidHartmann]

A good rule of thumb: When critics—Right or Left—try to silence your speech, debate, or writings, 1. Laugh, and 2. Tell them to go play in the street. In Western Democracies NO ONE has a right to shut you up. Forget that at your peril. And fight. #FreeSpeech #Fascism #AntiFascism

[Andy Ngo @MrAndyNgo]

Two poli-sci professors faced censure for participation on a panel about mass migration & its effect on identity in the West. Instead of dropping out, they actually tested their detractors’ ridiculous claims & accusations through surveys. https://t.co/4mcfcYrPoS

[Dissident Teacher @educatedandfree]

No, America. Your best and brightest are no longer at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the like.

Your best and brightest are kids like my tenth graders coming up through mission-aligned classical schools with teachers who know American kids in particular hunger for that which is True, Good, and Beautiful and are willing to GRIND for it, as Americans do.

The kids are here, in every town and city. We can all help build them.

This is what my tenth graders read this year:
The Symposium
The Apology
The Phaedo
The Death of Ivan Ilych
1984
Brave New World
The New Organon
The New Atlantis
Gulliver’s Travels
The Abolition of Man

Beowulf
The Canterbury Tales
Purgatorio
Inferno
King Lear
Pride and Prejudice
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

@O_TooleKathleen @CLT_Exam @JeremyTate41 @soren_schwab @Jordan_C_Adams

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

WWI ended in a negotiation and that was disastrous vs. actually taking over Germany and forcing them to realize they lost (stab in the back lie was created).

WII ended with something called “unconditional surrender” (not a subtle term) and it actually worked leading to many many years of peace and prosperity.

So 1/2 ended with negotiation, and that 1 was a disaster.

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇫🇷 @d_foubert]

This is a 1-kilogram wheel of cheese.

In its raw form — fresh curd, unsalted, unaged — it sells for around $3 at a farmer's market. If it's pressed and aged for three months into a basic table cheese, it fetches $15. If it's crafted into a young Gouda with a wax rind and proper culture, you're looking at $40.

If it's aged eighteen months into a proper Parmigiano-Reggiano, that kilogram is worth $35 — but the wheel it came from took two years of daily care, precise temperature, and a cheesemaker who inherited the recipe from his grandfather.

If it's transformed into a hand-cave-aged Comté from the Jura mountains, selected by an affineur who taps each wheel with a small hammer and listens — actually listens — to what the cheese is telling him, that kilogram commands $80.

And if it's a perfectly matured Époisses, washed in Marc de Bourgogne, wrapped in spruce bark, carried by refrigerated courier to a three-star restaurant in Paris where it arrives at precisely 16°C and is served at the exact moment of peak fermentation — that kilogram is worth $400, and the sommelier pairs it with a Burgundy that costs more than your flight to France.

The milk was the same on day one.

What changed was patience, knowledge, environment, and the refusal to sell too early.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

The Swedish government told her she owed 102% of her income in taxes. She was 68 years old, a children's book author, and held no political power. Yet, by writing a simple fairy tale, she helped topple a government that had ruled for 44 years.

Stockholm, 1976.

Astrid Lindgren opened her mail to find a tax assessment that defied logic. As Sweden’s most beloved author and the creator of Pippi Longstocking, her books had taught generations of children about courage, independence, and standing up to bullies. Now, she had to face a broken system of her own.

She read the document carefully, did the math, and realized the truth: due to a quirk in the law that combined regular income tax with self-employment fees, her marginal tax rate had hit 102%.

It was not a typo, nor was it a rounding error. One hundred and two percent.

If she paid what they demanded on her extra earnings, she would owe more than she actually made. She would literally go into debt for the privilege of working.

At 68 years old, she could have hired expensive accountants to quietly find loopholes and protect her wealth. She could have done what many powerful people do when systems overreach—safeguard her own position and leave everyone else to figure it out alone. Instead, she picked up her pen.

In March 1976, she published a satirical fairy tale in Expressen, a major Stockholm newspaper. It was called "Pomperipossa in Monismania" (Pomperipossa in Money-mania). It told the story of a successful author who loved her country and worked hard, only to discover a tax system designed to punish honesty and success.

The story was witty, precise, and impossible to misread. Pomperipossa was Astrid; Monismania was Sweden.

The ruling Social Democratic Party—which had governed Sweden for over forty consecutive years—was furious. Prime Minister Olof Palme went on the defensive, dismissively claiming in public that Lindgren was a wonderful storyteller but a terrible mathematician.

Astrid didn't back down. She stood by her numbers, and soon enough, the Ministry of Finance was forced to admit that her math was completely correct.

She began appearing on television and speaking out publicly, pointing out—with the calm, steady patience of someone used to explaining things to people who aren't listening—that a tax system taking more than 100% of a person's earnings wasn't progressive. It was absurd.

That September, Sweden held its national elections. For the first time in forty-four years, the Social Democratic Party lost power. While political analysts pointed to several contributing factors, like economic stagnation and inflation, everyone acknowledged that Astrid Lindgren’s tax revolt had fundamentally shifted the national conversation. She had made it safe to question a system that once seemed untouchable, giving a voice to frustrations millions of people felt but hadn't known how to articulate.

The new coalition government reformed the tax code, cutting the most extreme rates, and Astrid quietly went back to writing children's books.

But she never stopped paying attention. In the 1980s, when Sweden debated a new animal protection bill, she noticed loopholes that would still allow for cruel factory farming practices. She wrote articles, lobbied politicians, and testified before Parliament well into her eighties. In 1988, Sweden passed some of the strongest animal welfare laws in the world. It was widely nicknamed "Lex Lindgren" (Lindgren's Law) because everyone knew she was the driving force behind it.

Astrid Lindgren passed away in January 2002 at the age of ninety-four. Sweden honored her with a state funeral attended by the Royal Family and the prime minister, while thousands lined the streets of Stockholm.

But her true legacy lives on far outside of official ceremonies. Every child in Sweden still reads her books, every debate about fair taxation still references Pomperipossa, and animal welfare advocates across Europe still look to Lex Lindgren as proof of what is possible.

She never ran for office, nor did she ever build a formal political movement. She had no credentials in economics or public policy—just an extraordinary gift for storytelling. But she had spent decades writing about Pippi Longstocking, a girl who refused to follow rules that didn't make sense, stood up to bullies, and never shrank herself to make others comfortable.

Astrid Lindgren simply chose to live her life exactly like the hero she created. When authorities insisted that nonsense made sense, she refused to pretend along with them. And because she spoke up, the world listened.

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

The # of leftists who have just shown us that they don’t understand, or worse pretend not to understand, economics is staggering.

If you expropriated (stole) 5% of Elon’s stock you have to sell it, then use that cash to compete with other goods and services in the economy. We need to do less of something else (consumption) to do more of whatever it is you want to do. The funding source is irrelevant to the existence of this tradeoff. Oh, and because it’s still most of the consumption, most of the pain of this tradeoff would, as usual, not come from the super-rich, but from the people you pretend to care most about (or you’re just that dumb).

Elon is not sitting on a pile of unused health care you can take and hand out.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: https://t.co/aD8kct1ucD

[J&L Historical @Jason_R_Burt]

This sidewalk in Carentan, France is covered with American flags and 101st Airborne logos and I can’t get enough of it. 🇺🇸

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Two hundred years after Mohammed's death, a Muslim army got half way up France before it was defeated

Islamic armies had already invaded North Africa and Spain and large swathes of the Middle East

Do you really think that was achieved by friendly persuasion ?

[Mark W. @DurhamWASP]

“It’s all well and good to light candles, lay flowers, cry, put up photos, etc… There’s no anger… And as long as there’s no anger, I don’t see at all how we’ll get out of this.”

Jean Raspail, 5th July 1925 – 13th June 2020

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Leonardo da Vinci invented the self supporting bridge in the 1400s. Here’s how it works:

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

I prefer to remember the smirks of all those who have predicted he would fail.

[Dex @DexxterUtd]

Kids these days would never believe that none of this was AI generated.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On the morning of June 6, 1944, Lt. Dick Winters had already survived one disaster before the sun came up.

His C-47 roared over Normandy through a wall of flak, flying too fast and too low. He jumped anyway. The prop blast ripped his leg bag clean off, taking his rifle, his ammo, and most of his gear. He hit the ground in occupied France armed with a knife in his boot.

Most men in that situation hide. Winters started walking toward the sound of the war.

By dawn he had scavenged a rifle, collected a handful of scattered paratroopers, and learned that his company commander's plane had gone down with everyone aboard. Just like that, a quiet lieutenant from Pennsylvania who didn't drink, didn't curse, and wrote letters home about wanting to find a peaceful farm someday was in command of Easy Company.

A few hours later a battalion officer gave him one of the great understated orders in military history. German fire was coming from a farm called Brecourt Manor, hammering the troops coming off Utah Beach. The order was basically: there's fire along that hedgerow, take care of it.

What was actually there: four 105mm howitzers dug into a hedgerow network, connected by zigzag trenches, covered by machine guns, and defended by roughly 60 German troops. The guns were dropping shells directly on causeway exit 2, where thousands of Americans were trying to get off the beach. Every minute those guns fired, men died in the sand.

Winters had 12.

He did not charge. He crawled forward alone to study the position, then briefed his men like he had all the time in the world. Machine guns here to pin the defenders. Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey crawling along the flank. Hit the first gun with grenades and speed from a direction the Germans never expected.

It worked almost exactly as drawn. The first gun fell in minutes. Then his men used the German trenches as a highway, rolling up the battery one gun at a time, beating back counterattacks, and dropping blocks of TNT down the barrels to destroy them for good.

In the middle of the firefight, Don Malarkey spotted what he thought was a Luger on a dead German and sprinted into open ground to grab it. The German machine gunners held their fire, apparently deciding that anyone that reckless had to be a medic. He made it back alive. It wasn't even a Luger.

At the second gun, Winters found something better than a pistol: a German map showing every artillery and machine gun position covering Utah Beach. He sent it up the chain immediately. On the most important morning of the war, a 26-year-old lieutenant had just handed the Allies the enemy's entire defensive layout for the sector.

When reinforcements under Lt. Ronald Speirs arrived, they stormed the fourth and final gun. About three hours after it started, the battery was silent and the exits off Utah Beach were open for thousands of men who will never know his name.

The cost: one American killed, a few wounded. The Germans lost around 15 dead and a dozen captured. Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross and later said the best decoration he ever got was a sergeant telling him years later that his men trusted him with their lives.

The assault on Brecourt Manor is still studied at West Point as a textbook example of a small unit destroying a fixed position.

Around 60 defenders. Four guns. Twelve paratroopers and a lieutenant who started D-Day with nothing but a knife.

If it sounds familiar, it should. This is the same Easy Company from Band of Brothers. The difference is that none of it was fiction.

And when Winters was asked decades later if he was a hero, he gave the answer that still gets quoted at his statue in Normandy: "No. But I served in a company of heroes."

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

A welder took a $28 an hour job in 2015 at a company he had never heard of.

On Friday, Juan Hernandez became a millionaire.

He spent ten years building the structures that lifted rockets onto the launch pad. SpaceX paid him partly in stock, the way it paid its cooks, machinists, technicians and cafeteria staff, equity instead of bigger salaries. His $10,000 grant grew into $880,000 at the IPO price. The first day pop carried it past a million. He is 42, an immigrant from Mexico, married, three kids. He says he is keeping the job.

He is not the outlier. He is the pattern.

4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires on Friday. One in five people who ever badged into the company. About 400 of them are walking away with $100 million or more. One employee took every cash bonus in stock instead of money. He is sitting on 50,000 shares, worth more than $8 million at Friday's prices.

And then there is the other side of the cafeteria.

Some employees sold their shares years ago, certain the company would never go public because Musk said he hated public markets. A few traded their stock for restaurant gift cards. The New York Times says they are consumed by regret. Same grant, same building, same years. One group held the claim. The other ate it.

None of the winners can touch the money yet. The first selling window opens after the August earnings report, and the rest unlocks in waves through December.

Underneath all of it sits the only lesson the market ever teaches. The welder and the gift card came from the same place. The difference was never the work. It was the ownership. Salary pays for the month. Equity pays for the era.

A cook in Brownsville just answered the question every buyer of SPCX is asking at $170: what is a claim on this company actually worth?

The piece prices that exact question at $2.2 trillion.

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

How to say “I don’t understand equilibrium in economics” without saying it.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Rommel gave them one chance to surrender. They said no.

3,600 Free French soldiers held a desert fortress called Bir Hakeim against the full weight of Rommel's Afrika Korps for 16 days. They were surrounded, outnumbered, and running out of everything.

On the night of June 10-11, with the position finally collapsing, General Koenig ordered a breakout into the open desert in total darkness.

The Germans discovered the movement. The retreat became a brutal close-quarters fight. Men broke into small groups. Some crawled for miles. Most of them made it out.

What they bought with those 16 days: enough time for the British Eighth Army to withdraw to El Alamein, where the tide of the entire North African war would eventually turn.

Rommel later said the Free French fought magnificently. It meant something, coming from him.

France had been occupied for two years. These men had no country. They held anyway.

[Le Contemplateur @LeContempIateur]

🇫🇷 Plus de 1 500 ans d'histoire en quelques secondes : l'incroyable évolution du territoire français depuis Clovis jusqu'à nos jours...⏳

[Xavi Ruiz @xruiztru]

Sagrada Família, Barcelona

1880-Now