Mr chonk

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@zipjet #1 is such a good point. Always hard to see why they would support Socialism but it supports lazy and unproven ideas

[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

[The American Conservative @amconmag]

https://t.co/4j8f214LZi

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@ZacksJerryRig I believe if the reflectivity is high (a polished surface) the emissitivity will be low. Just like the back side of a radiant barrier. If it’s not polished it will radiate fine.

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@bowtiedmeathead @BigDadEnergyX Definitely heavy. Maybe 12 sets per body part at least 2x per week. Eat plenty of quality protein. Of those sets I typically do 10 reps with the exception of maybe the last set per exercise and typically get 5-8. GL

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@Chicago_History Parole officer?

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

We are nearly $40 trillion in debt. Working families are stretched thin. And Washington is still sending federal benefits to people who entered this country illegally. 

My End Welfare for Non-Citizens Act supports American citizens instead of rewarding those who came to the U.S. illegally. This is basic fiscal responsibility, and it is long overdue.

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@monaco_biotech Always appreciate a quality management team! 😂

[Jeremy Renz @JRenz0418]

$QURE APPROVE IT, HEAL US

@WhiteHouse @POTUS @RobertKennedyJr @FDA_KyleD @FDACBER @US_FDA @SenRonJohnson @SenRickScott

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

The DOJ's deadline to charge Fauci for lying under oath about funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan is in 6 days. We can’t allow the statute of limitations to run out. He MUST be charged!

Agree? RT.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Look, I get it, Dems.

You think buying Greenland is dumb.

You think trash-talking NATO is dumb.

You think Hegseth firing generals is dumb.

You think bombing Iran is dumb.

Fine. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re wrong. I’ll buy you a beer and we can argue about it.

But that’s not the point.

Every administration in American history has done dumb things.

Jefferson had an embargo that tanked his own economy.

LBJ had Vietnam.

Carter sold the Panama Canal for $1.

W. had “Mission Accomplished.”

Obama had…. where do I even begin?

Dumb is bipartisan. Dumb is American. Dumb is fine. DC runs on dumb decisions.

What NONE of them ever did, what is truly, mind-melting, pants-on-head, clown-car-fire, galaxy-brained, lead-paint-chip-eating, 50-IQ-Neanderthal-ripping-a-bong dumb, was pay NGOs by the busload to smuggle tens of millions of people, including actual convicted criminals, across a border we spent trillions pretending to defend, then hand them free four-star hotels, free cell phones, free ATM cards, and a court date in 2031 they were never going to show up for.

That is not a policy. That is a SNL cold open someone forgot to write a punchline for.

A five-year-old with a juice box could tell you that was Bozo-the-Clown-on-crack, Weekend-at-Bernie’s-running-DHS, “hold-my-beer-I’m-gonna-try-something” levels of stupid. My golden retriever could have run a tighter border. A Magic 8-Ball would have outperformed the entire Biden interagency.

That’s the new threshold, Democrats.
That’s the low-water mark. That’s the floor. That is the Mariana Trench of public policy and you personally rented the Titan submersible.

Argue all you want about the Strait of Hormuz. Write your op-eds. Go on cable TV with Tom Nichols. Clutch your pearls about Greenland.

But until Trump proposes something even half as mind-bendingly, bone-crushingly, civilization-forfeitingly brain-dead as what Biden and Kamala did with our borders, I genuinely do not care.

Zero F’s given by me.

[Peter Mantas @peter_mantas]

FDA approving dozens of questionable peptides with no legit scientific research while simultaneously stalling real rare disease drugs is chef's kiss incompetence.

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@CollinRugg @zipjet Terrible. The guy who shot wasn’t even close to the others. It looks like he just shot into the group. No self defense argument for him.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Please share if you agree that the Senate should not recess until it has (1) fully funded DHS, and (2) passed the SAVE America Act

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@A_May_MD @investseekers @ResearchPulse1 For fanden

Kind of like damn it! 😂

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@GalvinAlmanza @Varro_Analytics Not to mention all the companies laying off people will wonder why no one has $ to buy their products and the economy is in the dump. 😂

[Mr chonk @Mr_Chonkers]

@LasVegasFill @EnergyCredit1 It’s a restaurant at a nice hotel in Vegas !!$33 to $50 per person at a nice place. Can’t wait to hear the wails when they buy a $18 cocktail ffs 🤦

[canoebrookbl @canoebrookbl]

AV is everywhere. All VP, MM and their cousins and brothers!

[canoebrookbl @canoebrookbl]

$qure, it is getting way more uglier than many of us could imagine: Marty Makary got almost $700k grant and Vinay Prasad $2M from Arnold Ventures/foundation and CBER deputy director Katherine Szarama used to work at AV. Who else at FDA have financial ties with AV?

[Rod Wong, MD @docrodwong]

this is the first major mention i've seen of arnold venture's influence on this fda. arnold is said to be have been a major backer of prasad's research (i don't have proof of this, have just been told many times), and as wsj notes, szarama worked at arnold before prasad brought her in. most aren't aware arnold ventures was the major backer of ICER, the group that defines the value of medicines for the UK (which is set at a cap of roughly 30k pounds per human life year). it is also the reason the UK has dropped below basically all other developed countries when it comes to access to rare disease medicines. in short, arnold doesn't believe rare disease medicines are worth it, and it's natural to conclude prasad and others were bringing that philosophy to fda. now it's fine to have that view as a society (as the UK chooses to), but the trump administration represented the opposite, which is to accelerate access to rare disease medicines.

https://t.co/vLr0N3gMKo