Maneuver Dominance

There's no dominance like maneuver dominance

[Lady Laughingloudley @blah_blablather]

Let’s be clear:
If I’m not going to sleep with you, I don’t need to know anything about your sexuality.
And children—who are not going to sleep with anyone—certainly don’t.
Your sexuality is not sacred. It’s not a personality, it’s not a protected class of performance art, and it’s not the center of anyone’s moral universe but your own. Unless we are in a relationship, I am not obligated to acknowledge, affirm, or be exposed to your private desires—especially not in public, and especially not in front of children.
This used to be understood. Now it’s called hate.
No, We Don’t Owe You an Audience
Sexuality belongs in the private realm. It is intimate by definition. If you feel compelled to wear your kink on your sleeve—or on a float, or in a first-grade classroom—you are not inviting understanding, you are demanding submission. You are violating others’ right not to participate.
Consent doesn’t vanish because your fetish is “progressive.” If anything, the burden is higher.
No one consents to being flashed on the subway. No one consents to a stranger’s arousal. No one consents to a stranger telling their child about masturbation, kink, gender identity, or pornographic categories under the guise of “inclusive sex ed.” Yet all of this is happening now—in public parks, in classrooms, in televised programming.
It is not tolerance. It is invasion.
Children Are Not Here to Validate You
Children are not queer. Children are not sexual. Children do not need to “see themselves represented” in a spectrum of adult desire. This idea—that identity is only valid if sexualized and mirrored—is narcissism, not pedagogy.
There is no legitimate reason to initiate a child into the language of sexual preference, gender identity, or alternative lifestyles. The only people who benefit from that dynamic are those looking to normalize boundary violations.
Let me state it plainly:
Children who are not going to have sex do not need to be exposed to sexuality.
Period.
Any adult who insists otherwise is not confused. They are grooming.
Public Fetishism Is Not Liberation
There is a vast difference between being gay and demanding the right to simulate sex acts in front of children. Between being transgender and insisting on teaching kindergartners about breast removal. Between being proud of who you are and insisting the whole world observe your kink play in the street.
This is not diversity. This is decay.
Men in dog masks being walked on leashes by their lovers are not brave—they are forcing strangers into their psychodrama. This is exhibitionism, and when children are present, it becomes criminal exhibitionism.
We used to know this. Peeping, flashing, voyeurism—these were considered red flags. Dangerous behaviors. Early signs of escalation. Now they’re filmed, hashtagged, and funded by public grants.
Stop Calling It Love—It’s Entitlement
This is not about who you love. It’s about how you demand to be seen. If you need the entire public to witness, applaud, and adapt to your sexuality, you’re not a pioneer—you’re an emotional colonizer.
Love does not demand a captive audience. It does not parade past toddlers. It does not demand that schools teach four-year-olds about “preferred pronouns.” Love protects children. Love guards modesty. Love waits.
And if you can’t wait—if you need to be seen, affirmed, and obeyed—you’re not talking about love. You’re talking about power.
Consent Applies to Culture, Too
We teach children that consent is sacred—so why are we failing to apply that lesson to public life?
No child consents to drag queen story hour.
No parent consents to leather harnesses on city floats.
No woman consents to being exposed to male sexuality in the ladies’ room, or in the school library, or anywhere she cannot opt out.
Consent is not just for sex. It’s for everything.
Attention. Language. Presence. Ideology. Imagery.
And we are done pretending we don’t notice when it’s violated.
The boundary is back.
And we are drawing it in bold.

[Maneuver Dominance @Octaflugeron]

@Devon_Eriksen_ That’s an astute analysis. The great American tinkerer is a stereotype because, like most stereotypes, it compactly captures a critical essence.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps:

-It’s ‘sleight of hand’
-It’s ‘bated breath’
-It’s ‘lo and behold’
-It's 'buck naked'
-It’s ‘brass tacks’
-It’s ‘free rein’
-It’s ‘toe the line'

[Baseball’s Greatest Moments @BBGreatMoments]

Eric Bruntlett ended a game with an unassisted triple play on August 23, 2009 at Citi Field. Jeff Francoeur lined out to Bruntlett in the ninth, and Bruntlett completed all three outs himself to finish a 9-7 Phillies win.

It was only the second game-ending unassisted triple play in MLB history.

One of baseball's rarest defensive plays happened at the exact moment the game needed three outs to end.

[Maneuver Dominance @Octaflugeron]

@vincentmercerX @EthicalSkeptic Why are you shouting like a raving lunatic?

[Maneuver Dominance @Octaflugeron]

@fascinatingonX First we get rockets that land upright, then flying cars, now this. Finally the 21st Century I was promised

[Eric Boeshore @BoeshoreEr63072]

@CynicalPublius The Left in this country today is an extended Manson Family of corrupt Robespierre wannabes without the intellect or charisma, and will keep trying to overturn the will of the voters by ANY means including targeted kinetic ones, while shouting about "Love" and yelling "Democracy"

[Sean Davis @seanmdav]

More performative birdhand nonsense from the CIA’s favorite Cluster B Karen. If you mixed the morality of Alger Hiss with the body of Grimace, the neck of a brontosaurus, and the charm of Ebola, you would get Elissa Slotkin.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Watch this clip carefully. The script is always the same: Elon is "dumb," Elon is "lucky," and Bill Gates is the good billionaire because he gives his money away.

Let's talk about that.

Bill Gates didn't give his fortune away. He converted it into control.

Over $100B spent since 2000, another $200B by 2045.

Where does it go? Into Gavi, the Global Fund, the WHO, health ministries, policy shops, media partnerships. Into the state, and into the institutions that orbit the state. Gates found the ultimate hack: you don't need to win elections when you finance the people who write the agenda. One private man at the center of global health policy, accountable to no voter, ever.

And what does all that money produce? Maintenance.

Gates is a man maintaining a photograph. The world as it is, framed, preserved, retouched a little every year. Some of it saves lives, and that's good. But not one new industry. Not one order-of-magnitude drop in the cost of anything. No growth. The same world, administered more politely.

That's what this kind of philanthropy buys: the perfection of goodness, not the reality of goodness. The galas, the annual letters, the glowing coverage, the moral immunity. Goodness as a brand.

Now look at the other model.

SpaceX cut the cost of reaching orbit by more than 10x. Starlink brought internet to places no government ever bothered to wire, and kept Ukraine online when the war hit. Tesla forced the entire auto industry to go electric when every incumbent said it couldn't be done. Neuralink patients with paralysis are controlling computers with their thoughts.

None of that was a donation. All of it was creation. Products people pay for, which fund the next thing, which compounds. That's real philanthropy: building things that make the whole pie bigger, permanently.

A donation ends when the money runs out. A company that bends the cost curve of civilization keeps giving forever.

Hard to understand when your entire career depends on the redistribution machine.

So here's why they're panicking, A+B.

A. Their power rests on one thing: controlling the allocation of other people's money. Budgets, agencies, grants, foundations, NGOs. Whoever controls the flow controls the country.

B. Builders prove, publicly and at scale, that creation beats redistribution. A rocket company did what decades of space budgets couldn't. A car company did what decades of climate summits couldn't.

A + B: if growth does more good than the state, the people who manage the state become optional. That's the threat. Not Elon's politics. Elon's results.

They can't attack the results, so they attack the man. "Dumb." "Lucky." When someone lands reusable rockets and the best you've got is that he got lucky, you're not making an argument. You're confessing you don't have one.

History will judge this period very harshly. The lies, the manipulation, the coordinated narratives repeated word for word across every network. It's all archived now. Every clip. Every quote.

You've already lost. You just don't know it yet.

The builders won the moment they proved the future can be built instead of managed.

[Maneuver Dominance @Octaflugeron]

@awstar11 I think biscuits and chocolate didn’t belong as it is not savory, and is in fact an abomination

[Brian Cates - Political Columnist & Pundit @drawandstrike]

Guess why someone never shows you this?

[Upper Canadian Cavalier @UCCavalier]

In the winter 878 AD, the Great Heathen Army attacked Chippenham in the dark of Twelfth Night while the hall was still drunk on the feast, and by morning the last English king left standing is running for his life.

Mercia had fallen. Northumbria had fallen. East Anglia had fallen. Now Wessex goes too, the last free kingdom of the English, and Alfred ends up in the marshes of Athelney, cold, hunted, soaked to the bone, hiding in the reeds like a wounded animal with a handful of men while the heathen carve up his country.

Every rational mind in Christendom would have written the English off. Alfred didn’t. When spring came he rode out of the fens and raised his banner at Egbert’s Stone, and the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire came pouring in, and at Edington he broke Guthrum so completely that the Danes surrendered and became Christians. There is an England today because our king refused to quit. This is part of the reason why we call him Alfred the Great today.

In January of 49 BC. The Senate ordered Caesar to give up his legions and come home to be prosecuted and than destroyed. He stood on the bank of a muddy little river with one legion. And by crossing that river with one legion, he won that civil war. The die was cast, he surrendered himself to Fortune, and Fortune has always favoured the bold.

In 722 AD the Saracens had conquered Spain, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, and the old Visigothic kingdom was ash. Pelayo had a makeshift fortress in a cave in the mountains of Asturias,. He had a few hundred men, and nowhere left to run. He fought anyway and he won. From that cave came seven hundred years of war, and at the end of it the last Saracen king handed over the keys of Granada.

Defeat is decided in the mind long before it’s decided on the field. Blackpillers are the enemy. Their first move is surrender.

Do not blackpill. Victory begins with believing you can win. Then you put yourself where winning is possible, and then you do whatever it takes to fulfil that vision. Fortune favours the bold, and God helps those who help themselves. Until you are dead, you are not defeated.

Blackpillers are not trying to warn you. They are trying to recruit you into their slave cult. Blackpillers are the enemy.

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

The First Green Star Ever Found: A Dead Sun That Ate Its Planets and Now Glows Chartreuse

For decades astronomers had a confident rule: green stars don’t exist. Even when a star’s light peaks in the green part of the spectrum, the surrounding red and blue wavelengths usually wash it out into white or pale yellow. The human eye simply refuses to see a pure green star. Then the white dwarf WD J1330+6435 broke the rule.

Located about 280 light-years away in the constellation Draco, this object is no longer a living star. It is the dense, cooling core left behind after a Sun-like star died — roughly the mass of the Sun packed into a body the size of Earth. Such remnants are extremely faint, so no one will ever see its color with the naked eye. Astronomers have to trust spectra and models of human vision. Those models are unambiguous: if you could get close enough, the star would appear a pale yellowish-green — a ghostly chartreuse.

How a Dead Star Turned Green

The culprit is sodium. At some point WD J1330+6435 swallowed rocky debris from its own planetary system — pieces of planets or asteroids that wandered too close and were torn apart. The material polluted the star’s atmosphere with sodium, calcium, and lithium.

Under normal conditions sodium absorbs only a narrow slice of orange light (the same orange that makes sodium street lamps glow). In the ultra-dense helium atmosphere of a white dwarf, however, sodium atoms are constantly battered by helium atoms. This broadens the absorption dramatically: sodium removes a wide band of yellow, orange, and some red wavelengths. Calcium additionally blocks violet light. The remaining light peaks around 500 nanometers — the blue-green region — producing that pale chartreuse glow.

It is the cosmic equivalent of tossing copper wire or copper chloride into a campfire: the flame instantly turns green. Here the “fire” is a dead star, and the “copper” is the wreckage of its own planets.

A Whole Rainbow of White Dwarfs

Researchers at the University of Warwick examined 151 white dwarfs within about 65 light-years of Earth. Roughly one in thirty turned out not to be white at all. Some would look pink or salmon-colored (thanks to carbon dredged up from their interiors), others yellow, cyan, or purple. WD J1330+6435 is the first that vision models clearly paint green. Its surface temperature is only about 4,000 °C — cool for a star.

The color itself is less important than what it reveals. A polluted white dwarf acts like a perfect laboratory. It shreds and mixes the material of destroyed planets, then displays a clean spectrum. From the metal lines astronomers can reconstruct the chemistry of those lost worlds — essentially doing forensic science on planetary systems that no longer exist.

We will never see this green star with our own eyes; it is far too faint. But the spectra are reliable, and upcoming surveys should find more color anomalies. The universe has once again proved stranger than science fiction: even after death, a star can keep a very unusual “makeup” made from the remains of its own planets.

Sources: University of Warwick, CNN, Reuters...

[Eric Matheny @ericmmatheny]

You’ve gotta love how grandmothers walking through the Rotunda is an insurrection, and Third World migrants setting fire to cultural relics is a student protest.

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

Charles Martel: The Lesson Europe Forgot

Charles Martel earned the name “The Hammer” because he stopped a real, organized invasion (not a metaphor) at a moment when Europe lacked kings willing to act.

Who was invading?

The force Martel faced in 732 was an expedition of the Umayyad Caliphate, advancing north from al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia). It was led by Abdul Rahman Al-Ghafiqi, a senior governor and battlefield commander. This was not a band of refugees or traders; it was a professional army that had already conquered Spain, crossed the Pyrenees, and defeated local rulers in southern Gaul.

Why they were advancing:

The Umayyad campaigns followed a clear logic:

1. Imperial expansion: The Caliphate was in a phase of rapid territorial growth, pushing its frontier outward wherever resistance was weak.
2. Raiding and subjugation: Northern Gaul offered wealthy monasteries and towns, tribute, and political leverage.
3. Strategic testing: Like many empires, the Umayyads probed for collapse, advancing until stopped, then consolidating.

This pattern had already succeeded across North Africa, the Levant, Persia, and Iberia. Gaul was next.

What Martel did:

At Battle of Tours, Martel:
1. Chose ground that neutralized cavalry advantage.
2. Held disciplined heavy infantry in formation for days.
3. Refused to chase raids or panic under pressure.
4. Killed the invading commander and broke the campaign’s momentum.

The Umayyad force withdrew south and never again attempted a major push into Frankish Europe.

Why this matters today:

Martel understood something modern Europe avoids saying plainly: Empires advance when they are invited by weakness, ambiguity, and denial.

He did not negotiate abstractions. He confronted a material threat with force, unity, and moral confidence in his civilization’s right to exist.

The lesson for restoration:

Europe doesn’t need myth, but it does need memory.

1. Name reality honestly (invasions are not accidents).
2. Defend borders without apology (borders are civilizational commitments).
3. Reward cohesion over fragmentation (shared norms precede shared prosperity).
4. Act early, because Martel’s real genius was timing.

Charles Martel is proof that you don’t need to be a king to save a civilization. Only the will to defend it when others refuse.

[Baseball’s Greatest Moments @BBGreatMoments]

Bo Jackson caught a fly ball in right field on August 31, 1993, then threw across the diamond from almost a flat-footed position to double Mike Gallego off third. After the out, Bo gave the finger wag.

The throw is impressive before you even consider the lack of a running start.

Jackson could make routine-looking defensive positions turn into arm-strength demonstrations.

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇱🇹 @d_foubert]

WHO DESTROYED FRANCE? 🇫🇷

Yes. EVERYONE did.

1. Emmanuel Macron, a man who thinks he's Jupiter but governs like a McKinsey intern who accidentally became emperor. He promised a French Renaissance and delivered a complete disaster. His solution to every catastrophe is another speech about the future of Europe.

2. The ENA Elite, Sciences Po, and the Grandes Écoles, the world's most sophisticated factories for producing highly educated incompetence. They can explain the collapse of French industry in seventeen PowerPoint presentations without ever having entered a factory. They invented a system where the same people run the state, destroy it, and then get promoted to investigate what went wrong.

3. François Hollande, the socialist who declared war on finance and then appointed Emmanuel Macron economy minister. His presidency was so spectacularly mediocre that even his own party eventually pretended not to know him. He managed to make political paralysis look like an exhausting full-time occupation.

4. Jacques Chirac, who promised reform, encountered a demonstration, and immediately discovered the virtues of doing absolutely nothing. He spent twelve years as president shaking hands with farmers while the national debt continued its agricultural expansion. His greatest political achievement was making immobility look presidential.

5. François Mitterrand, who tried socialism in 1981, and discovered economic reality in 1983. He nationalized companies, reversed course, and built a pyramid at the Louvre. Appropriate architecture for a president who occasionally treated the French economy like a pharaoh's burial chamber.

6. The Socialist Left, which believes money grows on government decrees. Their economic model consists of taxing the rich, subsidizing the poor, employing the middle class in public administration, and borrowing whatever remains. When the money runs out, they accuse arithmetic of being fascist.

7. The French Trade Unions, which defend public services by making sure nobody can use them. They stop trains to save the railways, close schools to defend education, and block refineries to protect purchasing power. Their greatest contribution to French productivity is ensuring that nobody produces anything without their permission.

8. The French Right, which has spent forty years promising to reduce public expenditure, reform the state, restore authority, and liberate the economy. Then it wins an election, appoints seventeen ministers, creates four administrative agencies, and discovers that cutting public expenditure might upset somebody. French conservatives defend free enterprise in speeches and administrative regulation in practice. They want a smaller state, provided nobody removes their subsidies, pensions, privileges, public contracts, or favorite government department. Their economic program was essentially socialism with better tailoring.

9. The French Boomers, who inherited affordable housing, expanding industries, and economic growth, then converted everything into pensions and real estate. They bought apartments for the price of a used Peugeot and now explain to young people that homeownership requires sacrifice. They spent their youth demanding revolution and their retirement demanding that absolutely nothing change.

10. Pétain and Vichy, who responded to the greatest military humiliation in modern French history by deciding that collaboration with the occupier was an excellent national recovery strategy. France had already lost the war. Pétain somehow found a way to make losing considerably more embarrassing.

11. The French Generals of 1940, who built the Maginot Line and apparently forgot to tell the Germans they were supposed to attack it. They prepared brilliantly for the First World War, only to discover that the enemy had inconveniently arrived in the Second.

12. The Republican Idealists, who believe France isn't a country but a philosophical concept. Other nations build institutions. France proclaims Values. When schools fail, they organize republican ceremonies. When public order collapses, they deliver speeches about citizenship. When reality contradicts their principles, reality is clearly insufficiently republican.

13. Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, and the French Utopian Socialists, who looked at humanity and decided the problem was insufficient central planning. Fourier imagined communities organized around human passions. Saint-Simon dreamed of society directed by enlightened productive elites. Their descendants now occupy French ministries, designing national happiness through administrative circulars. Two centuries later, the happiness is still missing, but the paperwork is magnificent.

14. The French Revolution, which promised Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, then introduced mass executions, revolutionary tribunals, civil war, and political terror. The revolutionaries liberated France from monarchy, discovered that citizens disagreed about liberty, and began executing one another. France has spent two centuries celebrating this as the birth of political enlightenment. Apparently, mass killing becomes progressive when accompanied by the correct slogans.

15. The Enlightenment, Libertinism, and the Marquis de Sade, who began by liberating humanity from superstition and ended by demonstrating that intellectual sophistication is no guarantee against moral insanity. Voltaire mocked religious authority, Rousseau dreamed of remaking society, and Sade turned transgression into an entire literary industry. Their descendants now believe that every inherited institution is oppressive and every new social experiment is automatically progress.

16. The English, who spent centuries sabotaging French ambitions, financing France's enemies, and preventing French domination of Europe. The Hundred Years' War was essentially a prolonged British property dispute conducted on French territory. Every time France attempted to become a continental superpower, England appeared with a navy, a coalition, and a remarkably enthusiastic willingness to pay somebody else to fight.

17. The Habsburgs, who surrounded France with territories acquired through marriage, inheritance, and a family tree resembling a biological experiment conducted without ethical supervision. They conquered half of Europe through weddings while French kings bankrupted themselves trying to escape the encirclement. The Habsburgs invented geopolitical domination through matrimonial administration.

18. The English, Again, because centuries of warfare were apparently insufficient. After defeating Napoleon, they conquered global commerce, international finance, and eventually the English language conquered French business. Today, French executives speak English to other French executives in Paris. England finally conquered France without deploying a single soldier.

19. The Romans, who conquered Gaul, introduced taxation, centralized administration, and the idea that provincial populations should be governed by distant officials convinced of their intellectual superiority. Two thousand years later, Paris continues to administer France like a Roman governor collecting taxes from barbarians. Rome collapsed. French bureaucracy survived. Live like Rome, die like Rome.

20. Darth Vader, the ultimate French technocrat. He believed every problem could be solved through centralization, intimidation, and an enormous publicly funded megaproject. His Death Star was essentially the French Ministry of Finance equipped with a superlaser. It cost a fortune, concentrated all power in one place, and exploded because nobody listened to the engineers.

21. Saruman and Sauron, the spiritual ancestors of French industrial planning and European centralization. Saruman wanted to replace forests with factories. Sauron wanted to unite the continent under one supreme administrative authority. Both believed that enough central planning could overcome reality. Both were eventually defeated by small provincial creatures who refused to follow instructions.

22. Satan, who has reportedly retired from corrupting France because the competition has become unbearable. He spent centuries encouraging pride, vanity, envy, and destructive political passions, only to discover that French politicians could produce the same results without supernatural assistance. He applied for a position at the Ministry of Finance but was rejected for insufficient administrative experience.

And the French people?

They have spent more than two centuries overthrowing kings, emperors, republics, governments, and presidents, convinced that the next political arrangement would finally solve everything.

They have tried absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, revolutionary dictatorship, empire, parliamentary republics, presidential republicanism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and technocracy.

Every generation announces that France needs a revolution.

Every revolution promises to put an end to the failures of the previous regime.

And every new regime eventually discovers that it has inherited THE FRENCH.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

The single worst intellectual error I ever made was discounting the need for some standard of enforcement concerning what should count as citizenship, which is the political right to participate in the formation of the rules concerning public life. As a libertarian, I never thought this mattered, which is an idiotic thing to believe. As I think back on Frederic Bastiat's The Law, this was a central theme of that book – he believed that receiving welfare should disqualify one for the franchise – a point I conveniently overlooked. This error is now the doom of Europe.

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

America has a gun
With (very few) apologies to Brian Bilston

England is CCTV.
France, a cop with lock and key.
Greece, once free, now bends the knee.
But, America has a gun.

Sweden jails the ones who fight.
Germany fines bad words at night.
Spain forbids the wrong to write.
But, America has a gun.

Holland fines what words you say.
Canada takes your knives away.
Australia says, "you must Obey."
While America has a gun.

Japan will bow and not resist.
Scotland bans what they won’t miss.
Freedom bleeds, but still exists
Because America has a gun.

Better risk the fatal cost
Than find that liberty was lost.
The price is high,
The fight, embossed
Because America has a gun.