RandomGenXGuy

Some politics, some religion, some amateur radio, but mostly just a bunch of random crap.

[Alyona @askaya]

For young men, the most important issue is the ability to get a job and make enough money to support a family.

For young women, the main issue is to be able to kill their baby.

How and when did women become so retarded?

[Ryan Ray 🦍 @ryanraysr]

@markbdelaney

[NateSharp @Sharp_On_Sats]

People who are terrified of conflict often call it maturity. Most of the time, it’s just passivity with better branding.

The willingness to take something to the mat is the same fire that drives men and women to build, endure, and finish.

Train yourself to "sit there and take it" long enough and eventually you’ll stop fighting for anything.

[RandomGenXGuy @JackKnightGenX]

According to Dante, the worst of the evil doers are the Betrayers.

The GOP continually betrays its constituents.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I'm so fucking sick of the GOP.

"We can't do anything."

Shut the fuck up. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

You have the House. The Senate. The White House. A Supreme Court majority.

The most unified government you've had in years, and you're telling me you CAN'T DO ANYTHING?????

You have RECONCILIATION.

You know, the filibuster-proof tool Democrats used to ram through trillions in spending with FIFTY votes?

It's sitting right there.

Do you morons understand what happens if Democrats take the midterms?

It's over.

Not "tough." Not "a setback."

FUCKING OVER.

Every DOGE cut? Gone. Did you forget you still need to CODIFY THOSE into law?!

Executive orders? Erased.
Regulation cuts? Reversed.
Border policy? Deleted.

Years of work, torched in one election cycle, because you kept saying "we'll get to it" like we gave a DAMN that you "tried".

Guess what happens when Democrats win, dumbasses?

They start passing bills.

They actually DO everything you won't do, for God knows what reason.

You're telling me if they win, they won't NUKE the filibuster ON DAY ONE?!

They've SAID it out loud, repeatedly, on camera!!!!!

Transgender plays in Uganda? Back.
Elmo in Afghanistan? Back.
NPR/PBS funding? Probably DOUBLED out of spite.
ICE? Defunded.
DC and Puerto Rico statehood? Yep.
Court packing? THEY SAID SO THIS WEEK!!!!!

Every single "crazy" thing you swore would never happen becomes a floor vote the second they hold the gavel.

Because THEY actually use power when they have it.

That's the difference between you and them, and it's fucking humiliating.

Meanwhile YOU can't even pass the SAVE Act.

Requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections is an 80/20 issue.

The easiest layup in American politics... and GOD FORBID YOU CHANGE SOME ARCHAIC SENATE RULES TO GET IT DONE because you'd rather have the ISSUE than the LAW.

You won't defund the fucking TALIBAN.

We're still watching taxpayer money leak into Afghanistan and your response is a strongly worded letter and a subcommittee hearing nobody watches.

WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?????

Don't tell me there's no time.

The House is scheduled for barely over 100 legislative days this year.

You work a THIRD of the year.

Teachers work more days than you.

AND SOMEHOW you STILL ARE FINDING ROOM FOR EVEN MORE VACATIONS!!!!!!!

GOD FORBID you actually put in some effort.

But no. Instead you give us tweets.

Fox News hits.
Cringe-ass TikToks.
Podcast appearances.

NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT YOUR CONTENT.

Not one of us. Zero.

You're not influencers. You're lawmakers.

So make some fucking laws.

That's the job It's all we've EVER asked you to do.

Trump won't be on the ballot next time to drag YOUR SORRY ASSES ACROSS THAT FINISH LINE.

You really think you can come home, look us in the eye, and recycle the same excuses?

After THIS?

No. Not this time.

The stakes are way too high and our patience is gone.

Completely gone.

Stop telling us what you'd do "if only you had the power."

YOU HAVE THE POWER. RIGHT NOW. TODAY.

If you're too cowardly to use it, then stop fucking asking us for more of it.

...and don't act all shocked when the people you keep taking for granted stop showing up to save you from yourselves.

[QuintusCurtius @QuintusCurtius]

It's interesting that no filmmaker today would dare touch the "Aeneid" in a serious way, despite its status as a foundational Western text. Why? Well, let us count the ways. If you thought the nerds were uncomfortable with Homer, they are absolutely terrified of Virgil.

The Aeneid has everything an epic needs (doomed love, fast action, battles, destiny, etc.). But its main themes are about duty, responsibility, and the cost of empire. These concepts make the nerds squirm in fear today. Today's "critics" would denounce it as blatantly nationalistic and imperialistic, instead of seeing it as a opportunity to understand Rome and its foundational myths.

[BLACK DUMPLING™ @BlackDumpling]

What surprisingly few Right wingers know is that the Left inserted various candidates into the Republican Party to maintain control of it.

Worked like a charm, too.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

There's an old joke about a policeman stopping a drunk who is searching for his lost car keys under a streetlamp.

He dropped them somewhere two blocks away, but the light is better over here.

Fighting marxism with superpacs, NGOs, and social media is a great way to lose slowly.

Why?

Because the real war is upstream.

The real war is fought in the culture.

People show up to politics, show up to the voting booth, show up to social media, with their opinions already formed by the shows they grew up watching, and the books they grew up reading.

The culture war for the mind of young Elon Musk was not won by a hundred million dollar superpac — it was won by a twelve-dollar Heinlein novel.

Because of that victory, the tech right understands the value of rockets.

But it has yet to fully grasp the value of Heinleins.

Big Tech stood by silently while the "Big Five" Manhattan-based publishing industry withered on the vine and its corpse was skinsuited by marxists.

And now, decades later, they are trying to build AI and go to space, while scratching their heads wondering why no one outside El Segundo and the Bay Area seems to understand their vision of the future, and just wants to steal all their stuff to pay for more Pepsi and Doritos.

You can stare all day and the rock-bottom awful marxist DEI slop that emerges from Hollywood and Manhattan these days and think that there's no way the left can win with this garbage.

But armchair warriors discuss tactics, while professional soldiers study logistics and supply.

No matter how bad woke media becomes, creating an alternative still costs money.

If a right-wing author has to self-publish, pay for his own cover artist, and market his own novels, while some lefty MFA from Bryn Mawr can pen a novel about having a lesbian affair with her professor's wife, and get a six figure "fellowship" for selling a few copies, and I wish I was making that up, then what this means is that left wing art is effectively free, or negative cost, to make.

Currently, the culture war is being fought on behalf of the right by broke middle class writers and artists, who have to fund themselves, bootstrap style, while their enemies own all the institutions and distribution networks.

It doesn't matter how poor your enemies' tactics are, if your soldiers have to buy their own uniforms and rifles.

When they lose, and they will unless the Tech Right starts helping, then the marxists are going to throw you in prison and take all your shit.

Don't want that to happen?

Fine.

Then you have to actually become a conservative, instead of just playing one on social media because you don't wanna pay more taxes.

You have to actually believe in the cause and contribute to the fight.

And it starts with art, culture, and stories.

[RandomGenXGuy @JackKnightGenX]

"It's not the fault of the Boomers"

Then starts listing all the ways the Boomers created the problems we are seeing as if the causes just materialized on their own.

[Sovey @SoveyX]

“Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
– The Boxer

Boomers say: kids today are lazy, entitled, glued to a screen, allergic to sacrifice.

The 30-year-old says: you bought a house and a car for the price of my down payment, then pulled the ladder up behind you.

So who is right?

Neither. And there is one number that ends the argument.

THE NUMBER

In 1992, the median first-time homebuyer in America was 28.

NAR's latest survey puts that number at 40. The oldest ever recorded.

Twelve years added to the wait, in a single generation. That is not a personality flaw. You cannot budget your way out of twelve years.

The starter home did not get harder to earn. It quietly stopped existing.

THE WRONG VILLAIN

Ask anyone under 40 who took the house and you get one answer: BlackRock. Wall Street. The funds.

Here is the number nobody screenshots:

- Big institutional investors own less than 1 percent of America's single-family homes
- They own roughly 3 percent of single-family rentals
- The viral "Wall Street owns 20 percent" claim was made up

BlackRock is a decoy. You were handed a villain so you would stop asking the harder question.

And the harder question is not who is buying the houses. It is why there are not enough houses to buy.

THE REAL COMPETITION

The instinct is not crazy. You are bidding against investors. Just not the ones on TV.

- All investors combined bought about a third of single-family homes last quarter, the highest in five years
- Almost none of that is Wall Street giants
- It is small landlords. The guy with eight rentals. An LLC you have never heard of, paying cash, on your street

Ten thousand small buyers beat you to the house while everyone stared at one big name.

WHY THEY EVEN BOTHER

Here is the part that ends the generation war.

Investors are not the disease. They are the symptom.

They poured into houses starting in 2011 because a home became a guaranteed bet. And it became a guaranteed bet because for thirty years, nobody was allowed to build.

- Zoning boards
- Review processes
- Permit queues measured in years

This is not a hot take. Economists on the left and the right agree America is short millions of homes. Their only real argument is whether it is four million or seven.

Every project blocked added to the equity of people who already owned, and subtracted from the down payment of everyone who did not. Then Washington decided the fix for expensive homes was cheaper debt. Subsidize demand. Strangle supply. Act shocked when prices double.

THE VERDICT

This is not a story about a greedy generation. It is a story about a system that worked, then quietly got taken apart.

Boomers were not more responsible. They were handed a country that still built houses. The ladder got sawed off after them, not by them.

Both sides are angry at each other. Neither one wrote the zoning code.

The American dream did not die. It got zoned out of existence, and turned into a rental agreement.

How old were you when you got your first key or are you still waiting?

[Lee Roach @leevalueroach]

If I were Elon Musk, I'd roll up the entire steel industry.

Step 1: Buy Cleveland-Cliffs. Instantly control ~60% of US blast furnace capacity.

Step 2: Vertically integrate — feed cheap steel straight into Tesla.

Step 3: Use my bottomless bank account to sell steel below cost to everyone else. Nippon just paid $15B for US Steel? Bleed them dry. I can run at a loss forever. They can't.

Step 4: When they go bankrupt, buy the scraps. Now I'm Andrew Carnegie with a Twitter account.

Step 5: Jack prices 20x for Ford and GM while supplying myself at cost. Their cars get more expensive. Mine don't.

Endgame: 100% of steel. 100% of autos. One rollup, two monopolies.

[Richard “Beebo” Russell @proverbs_14_23]

Not a day goes by that I am not reminded of a famous study where men and women were forced to play a card game against an opponent.

Their opponent then either cheated and stole money from the subjects; or cooperated and played fairly.

Afterwards, the men and women were strapped into an FMRI, and watched as their prior opponent received a painful electric shock.

For men, the brain produced an empathic response when the honest opponent was shocked. But it produced no empathy, and in fact showed signs of a pleasure when the cheater was shocked. Their empathy was conditional on how the opponent behaved.

But for women… The brain produced an empathic response for both types of opponents. It didn’t matter if they had been cheated by them prior, they wanted to alleviate everyone’s suffering regardless.

This is their greatest asset, it is the feminine divine. It is the reason why a mother’s love is unconditional.

It’s also the reason why you will be stabbed to death in a Walmart parking lot by a borderline retarded Haitian with 73 prior convictions.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

New Republic: “Have you ever considered you deserve to be assassinated?”

There is no functioning country when half the population believes the other half deserves to die.

[Giorgia Meloni @GiorgiaMeloni]

Mi aggredisci. Mi difendo. E dovrei risarcirti io? Non è giusto.

Con l’ultimo DDL Sicurezza introduciamo una regola di puro buon senso: chi subisce un danno mentre sta commettendo un reato non può chiedere alcun risarcimento, né possono farlo i suoi familiari.

Chi viola la legge non può pretendere di essere risarcito da chi si è difeso.

Lo Stato sta dalla parte delle persone perbene. Non dei criminali.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it...

His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side.

In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."

He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction.

This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way.

The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned...

The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old.

Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found.

It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches...

It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun.

[Semichenko @semichenkko]

This guy from China is making $12,500 a month just by walking around major crypto conferences with a backpack. 🤯

He hooked up a Mac Mini running OpenClaw to a compact CUKTECH 10 Mini battery.

But why would anyone need a portable AI server?

At massive events, the Wi-Fi is always terrible and power outlets are nonexistent.

While other creators wait until the evening to reach their hotel and upload data to the cloud, his pocket AI works entirely locally.

It processes keynote audio on the go, extracts alpha insights, and instantly posts viral threads on X.

Total monopoly on speed and content generation without being tethered to a wall.

How do you build this exact pocket-sized money printer? Breakdown below 👇

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

Almost half the copper the United States mines never touches a smelter. It comes out of the Arizona desert through piles of crushed rock, some of it barely half a percent copper, with sulfuric acid dripping through the top while gravity pulls the metal down over weeks. The acid dissolves it straight out of the stone into a blue solution that pools in a lined pond, and solvent extraction and electrowinning turn it into pure cathode right on site. One new Arizona project pencils out at a cash cost of $1.34 a pound, working 513 million tons of ore that averages 0.52% copper. I manufacture chemicals. The economics still catch me off guard. Ore this poor was worthless before solvent extraction scaled up in the 1980s, too lean to smelt without burning money. A lot of it just sat in waste dumps. America is down to two primary copper smelters from sixteen in 1976. Every GPU rack, motor, and transformer in the AI buildout runs on copper. The country now covers a real share of that demand by running acid through the rock it used to ignore.

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

We weren’t raised. We were released into the neighborhood with a bike, a questionable helmet, and a “be home before dark.

Tell me I’m wrong 😂

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

How the FIFA tournament matters more than you realize:

Earlier this week I spoke with someone close to senior European defense officials.

He tried lecturing me. My response?

The greatest gift FIFA gave America is not soccer. We don’t care about soccer. It’s sharing pints with Europeans. I did so myself.

The general consensus among the Europeans I met was awe: awe at how large and wealthy and well run America truly is, and at how kind and helpful the average American is.

One match I attended was Guyana versus the UK. I never entered the stadium. I worked the restaurant, the pub, and the Bass Pro next door, which is where the real tournament was happening anyway.

“We were worried about racism turning violent,” one Brit told me. The Americans laughed out loud.

The consensus among the Americans was also surprise. Lots of questions about the death of free speech and the migrant crisis. Not one Brit defended Keir Starmer. Not one.

These were UK patriots who paid serious money to cross an ocean and cheer their team. They told us about the beauty of the English countryside, the pub culture after work, and, after some prodding from me, their proud maritime tradition.

By the end of the night everyone wanted to invite a British family over for a barbecue, and the Brits were eager for us to visit their homes.

And it wasn’t just the English. I met other Europeans and had the same conversations. Friends of mine had many more.

The bottom line: absolutely nobody on either side of the Atlantic cares about the utter bullshit like this.

Some were supportive of Trump, some weren’t, but everyone agreed on one thing: he’s the only politician and commander in chief willing to say things out loud that others only whisper.

The conclusion we all reached is that the media, the academics, and the euro-lib elite are frothing at the mouth about nothing. America is not evil.

The other conclusion: Europe isn’t evil either. But Europe is governed by anti-American ideologues who have dug in their heels on the most unpopular positions their own voters can name.

So I told that someone close to European defense officials: nobody gives two craps about your concerns.
FIFA let us see past your lies. It gave us a clear view straight into the souls of your people.

We’ve got Russia probing, Iran burning, and China knocking at the door. You can join up with us or you can take a hike, but you no longer have the power to lecture us, to call us arrogant, to call us evil.

You lost that power because now we know, unequivocally, that your views do not represent the people you claim to represent.

And your people know it too. The more you lecture us, the more your own citizens roll their eyes and tune you out.

You are sovereign nations and I don’t have any more influence over your anti-American leaders than you so it’s your choice:

Join team America or wither away on your own.

That’s your choice but we won’t apologize anymore if you pick the latter.

“Senior European defense officials” have ruled as emperors of the moral high ground for decades, the media bowed to your wisdom and insight. No longer.

The emperor has no clothes, and the whole pub saw it.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

The same happened in Rhodesia

Because it was a British colony, it maintained records of gun ownership, everything from self-defense weaponry like submachine guns to hunting rifles used for pest control

When Mugabe took over, he soon used those lists to confiscate every firearm held by whites or his political enemies. Even former Prime Minister Ian Smith, who had bravely stayed on in the country after its defeat in an attempt to help guide it, had a little plinking rifle he used for pest control on his ranch confiscated

With all the weaponry confiscated, Mugabe's reign of terror began. He began systematically abusing, expropriating, and otherwise tyrannizing the now un-armed whites, sending his thugs to rough them up, take their things, drag dissidents off to prison, and so on. Full expropriation of white-owned property soon followed. Meanwhile, he also carried out the Gukurahundi, during which time his thugs tried to wipe out the Ndebele, killing tens upon tens of thousands

[RandomGenXGuy @JackKnightGenX]

@ShamashAran If it is the vaccinations, we'll never know. That info will be suppressed and blame transferred.

The reason for the knee-jerk "it's the vax" is that the official story is always "it's never the vax".