James Hass

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

“They talked… about abolishing the army and navy… about the abolition of inheritance, the family, children, and priests…”

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

Indiana was doing worse than 90% of states in providing a job fifteen years ago. The turnaround has been dramatic!

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

Avoid the opinions of grad students

[UBERSOY @UBERSOY1]

In 1932, 60% of German graduate students supported the Nazis vs. 18% of the general public. The "educated people are always liberal" thesis has a pretty ugly counterexample.

[Montserrat ⛰️ @portilla_montse]

El socialismo siempre culpa a la avaricia de los empresarios. Nunca a la ambición de los políticos.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

Mann loses again

[Steve Milloy @JunkScience]

LOL Politico @CorbinHiar:

"[Blah-blah-blah]," said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who successfully sued two conservative bloggers for defamation.

If Michael Mann "successfully sued", why is he the one who was sanctioned for false evidence [about the key issue in his case] and the one owing legal fees to the parties he sued?🤔

https://t.co/xjDslyJw5d via @politico

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

Absolutely true

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

"Degrowth Economics" is the exact type of policy regime that will lead to poverty, famine, malnutrition, disease, and an immiserating decline in worldwide living standards.

You know. All the stuff that the Degrowthers try to blame on capitalism and "neoliberalism."

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@crimsonace @mitchISPE @HicksCBER Sad

[Pedro Santa Clara @psantacl]

Six famous economists — @JosephEStiglitz , @PikettyWIL , @jasonhickel among them — published a manifesto in the @guardian last week: "growth is a doomed strategy." They say they've done the maths.

I checked the maths.

The claim that growth failed the poor is contradicted by the most uncontroversial dataset in economics: extreme poverty fell from 44% of humanity in 1981 to under 10% today — during the very decades they call a failure. China alone lifted 800 million people, not with a UN roadmap, but with growth.

The "92% of excess emissions" statistic? It's one of the authors citing his own paper, without saying so — and it's not a measurement, it's a moral allocation dressed up as data.

The policy toolkit — "public control of strategic assets," "credit guidance" — has a track record: Soviet collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban, which starved the poor it claimed to serve within eighteen months.

What worries me most: degrowth is being marketed to young people who feel locked out — telling them their stagnation is virtue. It's a swindle. The young aren't victims of too much growth. They are the first victims of its absence.

Growth is the only anti-poverty program that has ever worked.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

Colonialism is bad, right?

Wrong.

The Aztec Empire ran sacrifice at industrial scale. Excavations of the Huey Tzompantli, the skull rack next to the Templo Mayor, have uncovered hundreds of skulls of men, women, and children. Spanish eyewitnesses described tens of thousands. The Aztecs fought "Flower Wars" whose purpose was capturing live victims for the altar. Hearts were cut out of living people. Subject peoples hated Aztec rule so much that Tlaxcalans made up most of Cortes's army. The conquest was largely an indigenous uprising against an indigenous empire. The sacrifices ended under Spanish rule.

India: burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. British records from Bengal alone documented thousands of cases between 1815 and 1828. The British, with Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, banned it in 1829. When priests told General Napier it was sacred custom, he answered: my nation also has a custom, we hang men who burn women alive. You follow yours, we will follow ours.

India: Thuggee cults murdered travelers by the tens of thousands over centuries as offerings to Kali. It was a hereditary profession. William Sleeman's campaign in the 1830s wiped it out.

Slavery was a universal indigenous institution. Dahomey and Ashanti were built on slave raiding and sold captives for a thousand years to Arab traders before any European ship arrived. Pacific Northwest tribes held up to a quarter of some village populations as slaves and killed them ceremonially at potlatches. The Comanche ran a captive-raiding economy across the Southwest. What colonizers introduced after 1807 was the first attempt in history to abolish slavery globally. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron spent fifty years hunting slave ships and freed about 150,000 Africans. African kings protested. The King of Bonny complained that abolition was destroying a trade ordained by his gods and priests.

The Dahomey kingdom's "Annual Customs" beheaded hundreds of captives and slaves every year to honor dead kings. Documented by European visitors for two centuries. It ended when France conquered Dahomey in 1894.

Sailors called Fiji the Cannibal Isles. Chief Ratu Udre Udre kept a stone for every victim he ate. His pile holds nearly 900. Shipwrecked sailors were killed and eaten. Within a generation of missionaries and British administration after 1874, the practice was gone.

Nigeria: In parts of Igboland, newborn twins were left in the bush to die and their mothers ostracized or killed. Missionary Mary Slessor spent decades in Calabar rescuing abandoned infants until the practice collapsed.

Indigenous genocide of indigenous people. In 1835, two Maori tribes invaded the Chatham Islands and slaughtered the Moriori, whose own law forbade them to fight back. They killed, enslaved, and ate them. The Moriori population fell from about 2,000 to barely 100. No European did this. British colonial law ended it.

Add headhunting in Borneo, the Philippines, and Nagaland. Female infanticide in India and Polynesia. Foot binding in China, dismantled partly by missionary campaigns. Every one of these ended under pressure from the colonial powers we are taught to treat as history's unique villains.

Colonialism was not charity. The Belgian Congo was a horror, conquest was for profit, and rule was without consent. But the ledger has two sides and one has been erased. Pre-colonial societies practiced slavery, human sacrifice, widow burning, infanticide, and genocide, because cruelty is not a European invention. The first civilization that tried to abolish these practices worldwide is the one you were taught to be ashamed of.

If "indigenous" means innocent and "colonizer" means guilty by definition, that is not history.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@Ric_RTP Reality is a conspiracy theory

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

The reality test is unpopular in certain circles

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Larry Ellison asked the one question no journalist on Earth can answer.

A Wall Street Journal writer told Ellison to his face that Elon Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Ellison didn’t argue. Didn’t get emotional. He just asked a question.

Ellison: “This guy is landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean, and you’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You ever land a rocket?”

One question. No recovery.

Ellison: “Who are you? Why should I believe you as opposed to my friend Elon?”

This is the question the entire media class has been dodging for a decade. Who are you to judge? What have you built? What have you shipped? What problem have you solved that didn’t involve a keyboard and a deadline?

Ellison: “You’re there in front of your Apple Macintosh typing up an article saying Elon’s an idiot.”

They sit behind a laptop they did not engineer. Using a network they did not build. Running on silicon they cannot explain. To tell the world that the man sending humans to space doesn’t know what he’s doing.

They have never built anything heavier than a Word document.

And they publish it with absolute certainty.

That’s the part that should disturb you. Not the criticism. The confidence behind it. The total absence of self-awareness it takes to judge disciplines you wouldn’t last a single semester in.

Musk does not operate in opinion. He operates in the physical layer of the universe where the math closes or the rocket does not come home.

His critics operate in a text editor.

He built the vehicle that carries NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. The satellite constellation delivering internet to active war zones. The EV that forced every automaker on Earth to abandon their combustion roadmap.

His loudest critics built a byline.

So why the coordinated hatred?

Because they lost the leash.

The attacks didn’t escalate because Musk got worse at engineering. They escalated because he bought X. He cracked open the algorithm. He handed the public square back to the people. And he shattered their ability to control what you’re allowed to think.

They don’t hate the engineer.

They hate that the engineer took their monopoly.

You cannot cancel a rocket. You cannot publish a hit piece on gravity. You cannot edit the laws of physics.

They own the syntax.

He owns the physics.

One of them is going to Mars.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@jeffreytucker A State of Siege

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@jmhorp @HicksCBER @JaredWalczak Jared is correct.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@LarrySabato @HicksCBER lol. Keep the hoax alive.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@GavinNewsom Shamefully dishonest tweet.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@CharlieKirk6666 @ConceptualJames @ProgressivZion lol. Name calling is all you folks do.

[James Hass @JamesHa04428409]

@PaddyTofu @ConceptualJames @ProgressivZion Hilariously stupid comment