MJPfluger

[Classic Learning Test @CLT_Exam]

Go ask a normal American student why school matters and you will hear something about college, career, or money.

Go ask a classically educated student the same question and you will hear words like wisdom, virtue, truth, beauty, or God.

That is the difference between education as workforce preparation and education as human formation.

America has spent generations funding the first vision while wondering why the second kind of person disappeared.

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum]

Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.

This one quote sounded familiar.

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Wokeness is the most successful rebranding of evil in human history

It takes racism, division, and hatred, wraps them in the language of compassion and justice, and calls it moral progress

It made people cheer for the destruction of their own societies while feeling morally superior for doing it

[Mike Bales 🫡🇺🇸 @MikeBales]

He’s the President of the United States — not your ex, not your personal villain, and not the cause of your misery. You don’t have to support him. That’s America.

But if someone is simply backing the sitting President and it makes you rage, cut people off, attack families, or act like garbage — you are the problem.

You’ve turned politics into a personality disorder: nonstop outrage and toddler meltdowns online. Grow up. He won. The sky didn’t fall. Pay your bills, care for your family, touch grass, and move on.

[Jack @jackunheard]

Your church should not be celebrating pride.

If it is, leave.

[Divinely Designed @DivinelyDesined]

Even the secular scientists know that life from non-life is impossible.

But don't take my word for it!

Take the words of one of the top origin of life scientists:

“Chemistry on early Earth did not produce life. It produced asphalt.”

“We have not yet found a path by which life could arise from simple chemicals. All paths end in tar, not biology.”

“The problem is not making organic molecules—they form everywhere. The problem is getting them to organize into a system capable of Darwinian evolution. No environment on early Earth that we know of supports this.”

“Instead of making ribose, nature overwhelmingly makes tar. Chemistry does not lean toward life. It leans toward asphalt.”

“Life’s molecules are unstable in water, yet all the standard models place the origin of life in water. Water is the enemy of polymerization.”

“Water, essential for biology, is destructive to prebiotic chemistry.”

“The chemistry that we have learned over the past century tells us that the RNA world is not plausible based on known chemical principles.”

“The RNA world is impossible based on everything we know about chemistry.”

“The very conditions that would supposedly allow RNA to form on early Earth are precisely those that destroy it.”

“We do not know how to get nucleosides, nucleotides, or RNA by any prebiotic route. Every proposed pathway either requires modern enzymes or conditions incompatible with life’s chemistry.”

“RNA cannot replicate itself. The only systems we know that replicate RNA require proteins—and proteins come from RNA. We are caught in a vicious cycle.”

“You cannot get a genetic code by random chemistry. The code requires a highly specific set of interactions that we have no way to generate prebiotically.”

“Every experiment shows that prebiotic processes produce mixtures—racemic mixtures. Yet life requires single-handed molecules. No natural mechanism has been demonstrated to select one hand over the other.”

- Steve Benner, Origin of Life Scientist, various published sources

[Jum @JesterJum]

How do I know the media is brainwashing people?

Obama's ICE Chief received the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service for removing over 900,000 illegal aliens.

Trump's ICE Chief is called a Nazi.

It is the same person.....Tom Homan....

The only difference? The narrative.

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

"Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it."

— Leonardo da Vinci

[cutoffs.io @cutoffs_io]

🇮🇳🇺🇸 T-Mobile's Indian CEO Srini Gopalan fired 6,500 Americans.

He replaced them by bringing in 2,300 Indian H-1B visa workers at a total yearly salary cost of $81.5 million.

6,500 U.S. families lost their primary income while those roles went to H-1B hires.

$CUTOFFS

[🇯🇵SAIGOU🇯🇵郷田剛士🇯🇵 @oidonhagouda]

Bro, let’s stop pretending.

Muslims make up about 25% of the entire world’s population — over 2 billion people across 50+ countries.

Japanese people? About 1.4% of the world. One single country.

Shinto exists only in Japan.

So when people say “Japan should prioritize minorities and be more accommodating to Islam,” who exactly are we talking about?

The global majority is coming to one of the world’s smallest ethnic and religious groups and demanding that Japan change its culture, food, and traditions for them.

That’s not “protecting minorities.” That’s the majority trying to colonize a tiny minority.

Japan has every right to protect its own people and culture first.

If Muslims want to live under Islamic rules, they already have dozens of countries where they can do that. They don’t need to come to Japan and turn it into another one.

[Aesthetica @Anc_Aesthetics]

I found out an acquaintance of mine was planning to do a not insignificant layoff of American workers at his company, so I asked him why he was doing it. Asked him if he had thought about the American families he's going to devastate when he delivers the news. And all for such a small amount of money in the grand scheme of things.

He looked like I hit him with a sledgehammer. Clearly had not thought about it once. The board told him there would be a significant structural contraction in the VC market and he would need to get creative on the budget side of things. The indian VC recommended he outsource to india and lay off a decent chunk of his American coder base. He would get the CEO in touch with a firm he trusts. The CEO was going to follow that suggestion.

In order to understand the sheer level of cruelty of some of these CEOs you have to understand that they literally operate inside of a cult like environment. For every independent thinking Founder like Elon there is 100 NPC retards who are the worst people you will ever meet. The entire industry has been transformed into a weird third world scam culture in a lot of ways.

And when you're a first time CEO and a VC makes a suggestion like that, most of these people will follow it without thinking twice. You might as well be talking to a robot.

Luckily I had a good relationship with this guy and outlined the actual risk of outsourcing your team to india and he changed course.

But it got me thinking why would an indian VC meddle like this, it's not really common for VCs to get involved in hiring and firing decisions for lower level employees and the amount of money saved wasn't significant enough for a VC to care.

What I later found out was that there is significant overseas pressure from the indian government for these big indian names in Silicon Valley to push business away from America and into india. It's a racket. A racket designed to scam Americans out of jobs so that indian politicians can brag to their voters that they are putting indians first. If millions of American families suffer it's fine. No one has ever mentioned it from our government. Not Trump, not Biden, not Obama, not Bush. No one.

[cutoffs.io @cutoffs_io]

🇮🇳🇺🇸 Cisco’s Indian President Jeetu Patel fired 4,000 Americans

While 4,000 American families process Cisco's layoffs, Jeetu Patel is doubling down on 1,570 new Indian H-1B hires.

Cisco earns billions from American taxpayers, only to fire 4,000 hard working Americans.

$CUTOFFS

[Anna D. West 🇺🇸 @SlimWiggy]

What's happening in the west isn't a new strategy.

It was actually standard practice in the Ottoman Empire to transplant large numbers of people to cities to alter the demographics & undercut a native majority.

They'd forcibly move or invite tens of thousands of loyal supporters into cities they'd just conquered.

Thessaloniki is one example, resettled with enough Sephardim out of Spain to constitute a new majority and shift Christian Greeks to the minority on their own land.

What's happening now is very intentional and has a heck of a track record.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

When the BlackRock CEO says the quiet part out loud, it stops being a “conspiracy theory.”

How did this quote not break the internet?

[Lisa Britton @LisaBritton]

Could you imagine if there were notebooks that said “The future is male” at department stores? Mugs that say “I drink female tears.” Sweaters that say “Dump Her.” What would little girls think if they saw those?

I just don’t understand why it’s acceptable the other way around.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

The chaotic crowds at the Kaaba, in Mecca, with people in white robes shoving and climbing over each other just to kiss or touch that Black Stone, are straight out of pre-Islamic pagan Arabia.

But why are Muslims offended by pointing out these historical facts?

For centuries before Muhammad, the Kaaba was a pagan shrine packed with up to 360 idols, including the main god Hubal.

Arabian tribes already did the exact same Tawaf, circling the building seven times counterclockwise, kissing and rubbing that Black Stone which they treated as a sacred meteorite fallen from the sky.

They ran between Safa and Marwa, did animal sacrifices, the whole routine. These were standard pagan rituals in the region.

When Muhammad took Mecca in 630, he smashed the idols and called it purified. But he kept every major pagan practice in place of the circling, the stone kissing, the pilgrimage structure.

Islam just slapped a new story on top claiming Abraham and Ishmael built it originally for pure monotheism and that pagans had corrupted it. There’s zero real historical or archaeological proof outside later Islamic writings for that Abraham tale at the site.

It’s the same old pagan worship with a fresh coat of paint.

They constantly pump out lies attacking Judaism and Jewish history even though archaeological evidence proves the history, yet throw a fit and scream Islamophobia the second anyone points out these basic facts about their own Pagan ideology, which history proves is Pagan.

Fourteen hundred years of rebranding pagan customs while pretending it’s all brand new and perfect. The hypocrisy is wild.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This new Hindu statue in Sugar Land, Texas is so large it’s right behind the Statue of Liberty

It was made because the Indian population has SKYROCKETED in Sugar Land

- In the 2010 Census only 10.7% of the population was Indian American
- In the 2020 Census it jumped to 41%

There are now roughly 40–45 Hindu temples and cultural centers in the greater Houston metro area, including Sugar Land

We are giving away our country and culture to foreigners

We need mass deportations before America is unrecognizable

The Statue of Liberty is ranked in the top 1-2 tallest statues in America

This new statue is ranked 4th

Insane

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???