Mark

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

“There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

[BitcoinSapiens ⚡️ @BitcoinSapiens]

Bill Maher fires back at Billie Eilish and leftist “kids” who “don’t know what the f*ck” America is about.

“I want to… say something about Western civilization. Kids, you don’t know what the f*ck it is.”

“They think Western means white—and white means bad. First of all, everything bad that white people did, people of color did it, too. The Japanese before World War II and during World War II. And Genghis Khan, and I could go on and on.”

“The left is very down on America, very down on the West. And it’s ironic because the West has also given us everything that makes your life good here. Don’t ask Billie Eilish or Chappell Roan about what the Western values are, because they’ll just say it’s about oppression.”

“But it’s not about oppression. It’s about rule of law. It’s about respect for minorities. It’s about democracy. It’s about scientific inquiry. These are all good things that came from the Western world. I wish that schools would teach that again.”

[Mark @MarkPortu]

@PNWConservative I know what you want…but what will you build?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Jared Isaacman dropped out of high school at 16 and started a company in his parents' basement with $10,000 his grandfather gave him. Tonight he's on the deck of a Navy ship, waiting to welcome four astronauts home from the moon.

That basement company is now Shift4 Payments. It processes over $200 billion a year in credit card transactions, about a third of all restaurants, hotels, and casinos in the U.S. Went public in 2020. He ran it as CEO from age 16 until he stepped down to take over NASA last year.

He also co-founded Draken International, which ran a fleet of over 100 retired fighter jets whose entire job was playing the enemy in combat training for U.S. Air Force and NATO pilots. He sold it to Blackstone for over $100 million.

He has over 8,000 hours in the cockpit and can fly more than a dozen types of military jets. He personally owns a MiG-29, a Russian fighter that tops 1,500 mph, which he bought from the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It's the only one in private American hands. In 2009, he flew around the entire planet in a small Cessna jet in 61 hours and 51 minutes, a world record, to raise money for Make-A-Wish.

In 2021, he paid for and commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian spaceflight. Four people with no astronaut training, three days orbiting Earth, $250 million raised for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Then in 2024, he went back up on Polaris Dawn and floated outside the spacecraft, held to it by a 12-foot cable, in the first spacewalk ever done by someone outside a government space agency. That same flight reached 870 miles above Earth, farther than any human had been since the last Apollo crew in 1972.

He took over as NASA's 15th administrator in December 2025. In his first three months, he redirected $20 billion away from a planned space station around the moon and toward building a permanent base on the moon's surface.

Right now he's aboard the USS John P. Murtha, about 50 miles off San Diego. The capsule carrying the Artemis II crew is going to hit the atmosphere tonight at around 25,000 mph. If the heat shield holds (it took damage on its last unmanned test), if the parachutes open, four astronauts splash down at 8:07 PM ET after a 694,000-mile trip around the moon. And the person waiting for them has been to space twice, walked outside a spacecraft, owns the only Russian fighter jet in private American hands, and started his first company as a teenager in his parents' basement. His call sign is "Rook."

[Mark @MarkPortu]

@JoshRaby Stunning!

[NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin]

The world stopped to watch Artemis II.

Moments like this remind us what is possible and inspire the next generation to dream bigger and take us even further.

We are just getting started on this grand adventure. It is time to start believing again.

[Arthur MacWaters @ArthurMacwaters]

Western civilization is awesome, actually

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

We all know what some feel uncomfortable saying:

Most taxes are WASTED.

They are leaked and grifted into all kinds of programs that sound good on the surface. But that’s the lie that is told so politicians can take more of your earnings and dole it out to win votes and stay in power.

But it also turns out that people aren’t stupid and know the game.

So the states that admit this by breaking away from the hamster wheel of increased taxation are winning. While those who continue to try and sell the lie are losing.

At the limit, those losing states are leaking so much revenue that they will eventually lose so much tax revenue as to be effectively insolvent.

Remember this data is just from 2023…we are in mid 2026 so another two years of this trend is already in the books.

[Mailyn Salabarria @MailynSpeaks]

Shocking.
Know what’s even more shocking?

Every Cuban, inside and outside the island, support President Trump actions against the regime in Havana.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Many people, even self-described conservatives, think socialism would work if human nature were different.

No. Socialism cannot work, even in a hypothetical society of selfless genius saints.

Why not?

Because socialism centralizes economic choices. How much lumber do we produce? How much wheat? What should the hourly wage of a garbage collector be? How much should insulin cost? How about bread?

Socialists think that if you elect the right people, they will make these decisions intelligently and altruistically, and everything will be great.

But it doesn't matter how smart and benevolent you are... you can't make a good decision without the right information. The Socialist Central Planning Committee, however wise or benevolent, doesn't know what's wanted, or what's available, because that information is conveyed in prices, and accurate pricing is the very thing that socialist governments wipe away with the bureaucratic pen.

Capitalist networks are decentralized. They distribute decision making to where the information is.

A man selling metal doesn't know anything about desks, or lumber. He doesn't know how many desks people want, or whether they should be made out of oak, or folded metal.

But he does know how much it costs him to smelt iron ore into steel, and roll it into sheets. So he sets a price, and others decide whether, and how much, to buy.

That price contains the information others need to decide whether steel is plentiful, and should be folded into anything you can make out of sheet metal, or is scarce, and should be saved for things that can only be done with steel, and furniture should be made out of oak, or pine, instead.

Socialism works, or rather doesn't, by using the threat of force to set the prices of things, or take money from one person and give it to another.

But every time this happens, critical data on supply or demand is erased... data that you need to make decisions.

Individual prices are a decision, a guess at where supply and demand cross paths. But since free markets reward those who guess correctly, or copy a correct guess, aggregate prices are data on supply and demand.

For a socialist central planning committee to order the manufacture of the correct number of cars, or to correctly set the price of a car, they need to know a thousand thousand thousand things about steel and aluminium, welders and assembly robots, rubber and glass and lithium batteries and copper wire, which they must gather, along with trillions of other pieces of data, from literally everyone in their entire civilization.

Tesla only needs to know how much people charge them for the stuff they need.

At every transaction in a captialist society, vital data is compressed into its most compact and useful form, then passed along to the adjacent step, where abundant brainpower is waiting to make decisions with it.

Any defective node in the web that fails to make good decisions receives swift and automatic feedback, and either heeds that feedback or goes out of business, to be replaced by someone who will.

Yes, in a capitalist system, there are many undesirable results. But capitalism doesn't create these results. It discovers them. They are inevitable consequences of the state of technology, and will persist until something is invented that changes the terrain.

In socialism, no such solution is possible, because all the inherent problems you need to solve with progress are hidden from view by the far worse problems you created for yourself by separating the place where decisions are made from the place where information is known.

[Gaudreau Family 5K @Gaudreau5K]

“When we were first invited to Milan for the Olympics, we said no. It felt like more than we could handle. But we kept thinking about what John and Matty would say if they knew we turned it down. We knew the answer.

John loved representing his country. From the time he was little, he dreamed of competing at the Olympics. In that final summer, he was working harder than ever, pushing himself with everything he had to earn a spot on that roster. He was going to be there.

Sitting with that knowledge while watching these Games was not easy — but being present for them, surrounded by people who truly cared about John and Matty, made it something we will always treasure.

Every person we encountered took the time to ask about the boys — who they were, what they meant to us, the kind of people they were away from the ice.

What struck us most was realizing that John and Matty's impact reaches so much further than we sometimes see in our own grief.

They are carried by so many people — in locker rooms, in conversations, in quiet moments we will never even know about. That means everything to us.

And then Team USA won gold. When Zach, Auston, and Matthew carried John's jersey around that ice, we were overwhelmed — they made sure he was there. And then to see Noa and Johnny — on Johnny's second birthday — carried out onto the ice to be part of that gold medal photo — there are no words for what that felt like.

John and Matty should have been there, and in that moment, they were.

Thank you to every member of that team for loving John & Matty - and for making sure they were part of something historic. And thank you to everyone at @NBCOlympics and @usahockey for your kindness, your generosity, and for bringing our family to Milan to witness it.

You gave us a gift we didn't know we needed.

With love and gratitude,
The Gaudreau Family"

[Frankly Frank @NoFrankingWay]

Were gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[Bruce Fenton @brucefenton]

Our Town Council keeps raising taxes.

So I showed up with an English Lord’s wig to speak in *favor* of taxes.

“If you can’t pay your taxes…don’t be poor.”

[𝐿𝒶𝒹𝓎 𝒱 🥀 @V_Lady2024]

Rock songs turning 50 years old in 2026 😳🎸🤘

[🇨🇦 Antonio Tweets @AntonioTweets2]

American Media
Pay attention.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

The "warmth of collectivism" is to freeze while those with heated dachas tell you how noble your sacrifice is.

[Kaizen D. Asiedu @thatsKAIZEN]

Humans are hardware.

Cultures are software.

We have fundamentally the same hardware, but adopt very different software.

Not all software is compatible.

America's software is built on universal principles and respect for law.

Developing countries often run software that prioritizes tribe, custom, and heritage.

That's okay. But it's incompatible.

When an immigrant comes to America, they need to choose America's software over the software of the place they're leaving.

Otherwise, America gets buggy and dysfunctional.

Some countries have software more similar to America - and immigrants from those places will likely have an easier time integrating.

That's pattern recognition, not prejudice.

But the promise of America is that anyone who adopts our software and adds value to the lives of people already here gets to be here.

You don't get to be here just because you want to be here.

You need to bring something to the table.

Millions of people want to come.

We can have empathy for all of them, but we can't accommodate all of them.

That's why merit-based immigration is the only rational path forward.

Don't let people scare you into silence by calling you racist for recognizing this.

This is how citizens of other countries approach their country.

Why should America be any different?

[NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin]

And that’s (almost) a wrap on Day One.

Today, President Trump signed a historic commitment to American leadership in space and @NASA along with our commercial and international partners will deliver. 🇺🇸🌖

The greatest adventure continues. 🚀

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.