👑

Colorado conservative, gardener, Go Broncos!

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.

He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.

Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.

The tax breaks are real. The money is not.

Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.

Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.

The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.

So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.

The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.

Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.

No money for investigations means no arrests.

Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.

But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.

👉What matters is the movement of money.

Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.

Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.

But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.

And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.

Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.

The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.

And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.

So why does red tape exist?

Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.

Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.

Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.

That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.

The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.

If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.

You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.

This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.

But there are a few residual problems. 1/2

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@prmade313raised

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@dobetterdnvr @MikeJohnstonCO Not surprised, whose great idea was it to put nothing but chain stores and restaurants on 16th?

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

Not debatable

[JY Jelly @JYJellypants_]

@retardmode This had me rolling

[Fletch17 @RealFletch17]

Both buildings cost
$847,000,000
Both are in Chicago
Trump built one
Obama built the other

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@dobetterdnvr @DenverPolice “Do not engage with civilians.”

I mean, if there’s enough of us, I don’t think they can ignore us.

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world.

And they are not handling it well.
In the best possible way.

Here is what they are discovering:

Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time.
Free water at every restaurant. Just appears.
Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited.
Free chips and salsa before you even order.
Free warm bread with dinner.
Ice in drinks like civilized people.
Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact.
Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going.
Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it.
Ranch dressing by the gallon.
Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced.
Dental care that actually works.
Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s.

Then they found the grocery stores.

Five of them within one mile.
Each one the size of an aircraft hangar.
Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes.
In silence.
Processing.

They finally understand why we do not have trains.

We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive.
Parking lots the size of small European countries.
Airports in every city worth visiting.

Why would we need trains.

The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle.
The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak.
The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre.
The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas.

Welcome to America.
Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined.

Write that down. 🦋

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@avidseries I love that you couldn’t even say one good thing about it, straight to name-calling and arrogance.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

What’s killing this country isn’t a lack of compassion on the left. It’s a lack of empathy. Let me explain the difference, because it matters more than anything else in this debate.

Ro Khanna isn’t wrong: it wouldn’t be expensive to lower the Medicaid age to 50.

Mark Cuban isn’t wrong: you could run a profitable Medicaid hospital.

But neither understands the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, which holds that roughly 80% of consequences flow from 20% of causes.

It CAN work for 80% of the population. The trouble is the rest. About 5% are truly ill and genuinely expensive to treat, which might still be worth it.

But another 15% are fraudsters, hypochondriacs, and complainers who drain the system without justification.

I have a relative who runs a Medicaid program in a blue state. Eighty percent of her patients aren’t a problem at all.

That’s exactly why Cuban’s idea is dangerous. A pilot program naturally screens out the fraud and the worst cases, then posts numbers that look like a resounding success.

Then you scale it.

You can no longer cherry-pick patients, and the model collapses the moment it has to serve everyone.

This is the number one problem I see with Democrat normies. They can’t think outside their own bubble. And the irony is they’d call that a failure of empathy, when it’s the opposite.

Here’s the distinction they miss.

Empathy is opening your mind to the thoughts and attitudes of others. It’s not a “good” word or a “bad” word. It’s neutral.

What most liberals actually run on is sympathy: experiencing another person’s situation through the lens of your own values, your own thoughts, your own attitudes.

Take a guy who loves drinking and driving. One day he kills someone.

The sympathetic approach turns inward. You flash back to the night you had one too many and got away with it, and you assume he just made a mistake. The empathetic approach asks a harder question: why did that guy actually drive drunk?

Many liberals reflexively assume the best. “Maybe he has chronic pain.” “Maybe he was abused as a kid.” “Maybe he was sober 20 years and had an accidental relapse.”

Those are all real stories behind some drunk drivers. But none of them address the inconvenient truth: some people just really enjoy driving drunk.

And if you don’t believe that some people really enjoy driving drunk, you didn’t attend college in the last century.

Real empathy means understanding the negative cultural attitudes of others, not just the sympathetic ones. And some people, some entire subcultures, genuinely enjoy scamming Medicaid.

Until you understand that motivation honestly, you’ll never design a solution that holds.

Look at how we actually beat drunk driving. If we’d tried to solve it by curing alcoholism and PTSD alone, the guys who get drunk a few times a year to go tear around corners would still be killing people today. What worked was a penalty system blind to sympathy. A cop doesn’t care why you’re drunk behind the wheel.

Because Democrats lead with sympathy, they let patients who want more care simply ask for more care, and assume the request is always honest.

That’s how you end up with learning centers billing for autistic children who aren’t there. The overwhelming majority of Medicaid patients don’t need that service. A tiny fraction truly do.

Sympathy can’t tell the two apart. Empathy can.

And this is the real problem with what Mark proposes. You can absolutely run a single hospital on commie values.

One building, hand-picked patients, a closed system. It works beautifully right up until it has to scale. Without an empathetic filter, one that accounts for the good AND bad actors doesn’t survive contact with the full population.

Bleeding-heart idealists are sympathetic, not empathetic. That’s exactly why their model always looks perfect in the pilot and collapses in the real world

Communists don’t account for the empathetic, walk a mile in his shoes, fact Stalin enjoyed murdering dissidents

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@bonchieredstate They’re pretty damn good at organizing and getting people to do crazy stuff, I wouldn’t be surprised.

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

The Covid origins cover up is the biggest scandal in history, as well as the greatest institutional deception ever perpetrated. Not even Russiagate comes close to the sheer breadth and depth of the deception, involving countless people across governments, intelligence agencies, academia, the media and public health institutions over the course of many years.

The two scandals are, of course, intimately connected. The only reason the Covid lies were able to endure for so long was the same all consuming hatred of Trump that fueled Russiagate. That was the glue that held the entire conspiracy together.

The fact that Tulsi had to wait until her final day in office to make this statement, together with the fact that no one has been held to account, and the establishment’s desperate effort from blocking Bill Pulte from succeeding her, only reinforces the conclusion that the people who orchestrated this cover up remain firmly in charge and that this battle is far from over.

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, on my final day as Director of National Intelligence, I’m releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Dr. Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, worked with politicized elements within the Intelligence Community to suppress the truth about his actions and hide the virus’ lab-leak origins, and lied to Congress while under oath in 2024. It’s time you know the truth.

https://t.co/3YJSstB7d4

[Michael Lucci @Michael7ucci]

“If a country was a movie, it’s the US.”

America is profoundly amazing. It’s impossible to fully appreciate unless you can experience it for the first time.

The greatest experiment in world history is Western Civilization, and USA is its crown jewel.

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@CalebBonham @JesseKellyDC @JesseKellyD There’s no shortage of hypochristians

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

If white Christian men had systematically raped 250,000 brown children for a decade, it would be the biggest scandal of half a century.

But because brown Muslim men did it to white children, the authorities continue covering it up, and media continues refusing to talk about it.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Renewables carry an endless price tag to replace the entire fleet every 10 to 25 years in an endlessly repeating loop.

The cost is incalculable, and it will no longer involve the same opportune subsidies to maintain this perpetual wagon train on the trail to a landfill near you. Every turbine standing today will need to be decommissioned and replaced at least once before 2050. Without a cost-effective way to recycle fibre-reinforced polymers, the majority of these massive blades are destined for eternity—buried forever in graveyards.

China, Europe, and the US account for the vast majority of this waste, creating a mountainous industrial heartache that many Net Zero models simply haven't priced in.

Research modeling the waste stream indicates that the burden will not be distributed evenly. The three largest contributors account for the vast majority of decommissioned blade material: China (40% of global blade waste), Europe (25%) and the US (16%).

A study led by Professor Peter Majewski from the University of South Australia confirms that tens of thousands of wind turbine blades could end up in landfill by the end of the decade.

In his findings published in AIMS Energy, Professor Majewski argues that a self-regulated market will not solve the issue fast enough. He suggests forcing manufacturers to take responsibility for the blades at their end-of-life stage, and wind farm operators should provide pre-funded disposal solutions during the initial planning approval process.

The green energy 'miracle' is a massive unfolding crisis.

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@CoinDesk Priorities https://t.co/PSHqaSr0qI

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@WesternLensman POS

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@denverpost irrevocably harming children is insane https://t.co/Y2OPBJyjrE

[👑 @Kingcorperated]

@CynicalPublius Helen Joyce on the insanity of transitioning children, worth a watch