Bill Shaw

Insurance Consultant; Small Government Libertarian

[Bill Mitchell @mitchellvii]

🇺🇸 ONLY EIGHT DEMOCRATS! - Bill Maher did the math on his own party last night and it did not go well.

Two Democrat congressmen, Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray, put out a pledge called Promise to America. Three lines. We are capitalist, not socialist. We want safety, not lawlessness. We are proud, not ashamed of America.

That's it. That's the whole ask.

Eight House Democrats signed it. Out of 212!

Maher's punchline was that, "there has to be an easier way to lose the swing states!"

Sit with that for a second. Two hundred and four members of Congress looked at "proud of America" and decided that was a bridge too far. Not a policy. Not a spending bill. A sentence.

These are people who put their hand on a Bible and swore an oath to the country. Apparently saying you like it is where they draw the line.

Maher also said his vote is in play. When you have lost the guy who has spent twenty years explaining Democrats to Democrats, the problem is not messaging.

Eight out of 212.

You cannot poll your way out of that.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher’s audience audibly gasps when he reads what the Democratic Socialists of America are actually saying out loud:

MAHER: “Trump has told 1 trillion lies, but when he says the DSA are actually COMMUNISTS, that’s not one of them.”

“And it’s not hard to prove it just by quoting the DSA and their candidates.”

“J.D. Vance was on the show, and I told him that if the Democratic Party keeps going in the direction of the DSA, my vote was in play. And all I heard all vacation was, ‘Oh, my God, you’re a Republican now.’ No, that's not what I said. I said in play, and here’s why.”

“Because not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen, exciting new face in the Democratic Party. And then when that face opens its mouth, the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy shit comes out! Again.”

“Let’s just read the quotes. The DSA platform says: ‘You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.’ If that was any closer to Karl Marx’s dictum, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, they’d be sued for plagiarism.”

“New York Mayor Mamdani once tweeted, Karl Marx’s words exactly. They’re not trying to hide it. Their most popular influencer, Hasan Piker, thinks communism is so groovy, he laments the fall of two of the most murderous regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao's China.”

“Mamdani's aide, his top aide, Cea Weaver, said, ‘If you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over.’ And ‘impoverish the white middle class.’ What? That's a goal? You know you're supposed to scare people into voting for you, right?”

“One of the new, soon-to-be Democratic congresspeople, Darlesia Chavalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords and said, ‘Seize the means of production.’ Mamdani has said ‘The end goal is seizing the means of production.’ I think they want to seize the means of production.”

“Now, maybe you missed that in school or missed school altogether, but THAT'S COMMUNISM.”

“Now the coalition within the DSA called the Marxist Unity Group is in ascendance. And I must take them at their word. When their words include, ‘Our commitment is to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated classless society. In a word, communism.’”

“What do they have to do, tweet out ‘Elect more communists’? Oh, yeah, Cea Weaver did that.”

[Shows tweet, audience audibly gasps]

“Yes, [she really did that]! ... People gotta realize this is going on.”

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk broke the media's most powerful weapon on live television.

With a speech from Barack Obama.

Take a speech from Obama or Hillary. Read it to someone on the left. Tell them it's Trump.

Musk: "What do you think of this speech by Trump? Oh wow, he's the worst person ever. Actually, that was a speech by Obama. Actually, that was a speech by Hillary."

Same words. Same positions. Opposite reaction.

The ideas were never the problem. The name attached to them was.

If the audience can't tell Obama's position from the one they're calling "far right," the label was never about policy.

It was about control.

The interviewer pressed him on his support for what she called the far right.

Musk: "No, I support the normal people. What you call the far right, falsely."

She kept pushing.

Musk: "I would like to just admonish you and the media for the absurd characterization of the far right, which is false and misleading and nonsense."

Then this.

Musk: "Please keep this part in."

Five words that say more about modern media than four years of journalism school.

He's not asking for fairness. He's preempting a cut he knows is coming.

That's how the machine works. The parts that expose the framing get cut to protect the frame.

Musk: "You could go back 10 or 15 years and these policies were completely normal."

The positions never moved. The window around them did.

The establishment didn't defeat these ideas. It reclassified the people who held them.

Took mainstream positions. Shifted the acceptable center. Then called everyone who didn't move extreme.

The most effective censorship isn't silencing a position. It's renaming it until it sounds dangerous.

Then the interviewer abandoned policy entirely.

Zanny Minton Beddoes: "It's why people loathe you."

That was the kill shot. On camera. Designed to make him flinch. Soften. Walk it back.

Musk: "Maybe some people do loathe me. I don't care."

Then he buried her.

Musk: "A quarter billion people follow me. I think a lot more people actually like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize."

She came with a label. She left with a mirror.

The spectrum didn't move right. The establishment moved left and relabeled everyone who stood still.

You don't need to win an argument if you control what the positions are called. You don't need to be right if you decide who gets called wrong.

The public was never asked to evaluate the idea. It was told who said it. That was enough.

That's not journalism. That's power wearing a press badge.

Elon Musk just showed a quarter billion people the mechanism.

And a mechanism that depends on nobody seeing it can't survive exposure.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Dave Ramsey explains why the government stopped making you pay your taxes by hand, and what would happen if it started again.

RAMSEY: “If we brought this back, there would be a revolution. People would burn Washington, DC, down.

“If the tax person from the IRS had to stand in the lobby of your company, and you got paid in cash, and you had to take your cash and hand it to the tax collector and count it out every time you got paid, people would realize how big a tick on your butt the government is, how big a parasite the government is.

“And they would, I’m telling you, there’d be pitchforks and torches.

“If you actually saw and physically had to take possession of the money and then give it back in cash to the government when you got paid, people’s faces would melt off.”

KAMEL: “Just the amount of $100 bills you’re just giving to the IRS for doing nothing. That hurts. It would be a Tea Party round two.”

RAMSEY: “So it was a really brilliant idea to do income tax withholding.”

KAMEL: “Just make it all behind the scenes.”

RAMSEY: “Brilliant psychological trick.”

[Sam Mahmood @TheSammahmood_]

The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital.

I played soccer for 20+ years.

Grassroots.
Academy.
D1 college.
Pursued professionally after.

And I’ll say the quiet part out loud:

The US soccer infrastructure is broken.

In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement.

For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal:

Get recruited.
Get a scholarship.
Play college soccer.

But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path.

From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival.

Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France.

That player has likely been in a professional environment for years.

Training daily.
Playing meaningful matches year-round.
Competing against grown professionals.
Getting thousands more touches.
Learning how to solve the game under pressure.

The gap is massive.

And it shows.

American players are usually athletic.
They are usually fit.
They usually compete hard.

But at the highest levels, that is not enough.

The biggest difference is technical comfort.

We do not move the ball like Spain.
We do not combine like Argentina.
We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood.

That comes down to volume.

Volume of touches.
Volume of street soccer.
Volume of futsal.
Volume of unstructured play.
Volume of high-level training environments.
Volume of meaningful games.

In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23.

Parents spend thousands.
Clubs charge thousands.
Travel teams fly all over the country.
Showcases become the product.
Recruiting becomes the scoreboard.

But the return on invested capital is poor.

We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment.

That is a broken operating model.

And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer.

You inspect the system.

The US has talent.
The US has athletes.
The US has money.
The US has facilities.

But the foundation is wrong.

We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system.

Those are not the same thing.

Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources.

I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer.

I’m saying it because I lived it.

And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.

[Ante Kusurin @Ante_Kule]

A friend’s breakdown of the Croatia-Portugal VAR decision is worth reading, and I agree with it in full. If this pattern continues, it reinforces a growing perception that success at the top level of football is shaped less by merit than by money and influence. @FIFAcom does not appear sufficiently committed to transparency or fairness in how these decisions are made and reviewed. At the highest level, outcomes are often decided by the smallest of margins — which is why officiating in these moments matters so much. The officials in this match made a call that ended @HNS_CFF’s run, and the reasoning behind it does not hold up to scrutiny.

The Croatia Call Might Be the Worst in Sports History

I’ve had a full day to sit with the Croatia call. I’ve watched the replays, gone through the rules, and measured it against the worst officiating disasters in sports.

My conclusion: that disallowed goal may be the worst call ever made. Not the most famous. Not the most argued-about. The worst.

Here’s why it differs from the usual suspects.

It isn’t Maradona’s Hand of God, where a referee missed a handball in real time, before video review existed. It isn’t Jim Joyce robbing Galarraga of a perfect game — brutal, but a split-second human error. It isn’t the Saints-Rams no-call, where everyone watching knew a flag belonged on the field. It isn’t Don Denkinger in the ’85 World Series.

Those were humans missing something fast and hard to see. This was the opposite.

The call on the field was a goal. Croatia had equalized in the final minutes, 2-2, headed for extra time. Then VAR stepped in — and instead of clean visual proof of a touch, instead of the ball’s path or spin actually changing, officials leaned on a faint “blip” from the chip inside the ball. That was the entire basis for reversal.

Watch it back. The trajectory doesn’t shift. The spin doesn’t shift. It sails past the defender’s head with no visible contact. Yet that blip was enough to rule a touch, which made the next Croatian player offside, which erased the goal, which ended Croatia’s tournament.

It gets worse. Even granting the faintest touch, that shouldn’t have ended the analysis. Under offside law, a defender who deliberately plays the ball can reset the offside phase. So the real question wasn’t just “did he touch it?” — it was “did the Portuguese defender deliberately play it afterward?” If he moved toward it, attacked it, got a genuine piece of it before the attacker entered the play, there’s a real case the phase should’ve reset. A stray deflection doesn’t reset offside. A deliberate play does. VAR needed to examine that too, not stop at a sensor reading and call it settled.

So the failure stacked in layers: a correct goal on the field, an alleged touch the video doesn’t clearly support, a sensor blip treated as proof, and a deliberate-play question never addressed — wiping out a stoppage-time equalizer.

This is what makes it worse than an ordinary blown call. VAR exists so referees don’t have to live with missing something huge in real time, with bad angles and bodies flying everywhere. That’s forgivable. But here, the on-field call was right. Review had every advantage — multiple angles, unlimited time, total control — and still overturned a goal on a sensor reading the footage doesn’t back up. A different category of failure entirely.

In a knockout game. On a goal that would’ve forced extra time. When the standard for overturning a call should be sky-high.

If the video doesn’t clearly show the touch, and the ball doesn’t react like it was touched, how do you erase a country’s World Cup on a sensor blip? And even allowing the faintest contact, how do you not fully examine whether the deliberate play should have reset offside?

VAR isn’t supposed to manufacture microscopic, unverifiable infractions. It shouldn’t take a goal off unless the error is unmistakable. This wasn’t unmistakable. It wasn’t obvious. And it changed everything.

[Foundring 🇺🇸 @foundring1]

World Cup matches are probably one of the most filmed events of all time, from every angle imaginable. They haven't released a single image of the ball hitting the head of the Croatian player.

[Josip @l3d1c]

Some people don't seem to understand why everyone is so outraged about the 🇭🇷 Croatia vs. Portugal 🇵🇹 robbery, so let me explain.

It's precisely because multiple things that would have lifted the offside were ignored, multiple things were handled differently than usual, and several suspicious details are present on top of it all.

So it's both the factually false detection of a touch that wasn't there, AND the way it was handled, which raises even more suspicion:

1. Even if Matanović's head 🤯 touched the ball, it didn't change the trajectory -> no offside

2. Even if Matanović's hair 💇‍♂️ touched the ball, hair is excluded in the offside rulebook -> no offside

3. Even if he did touch it with force, Veiga still went for the ball deliberately -> no offside

4. Offside is normally never checked at the screen by the main ref. Normally the VAR sees Veiga's header on the first replay, says "ah, Portugal touched it, no offside," and that's the end of it.

5. No change of trajectory is visible on the ball. Instead of blindly trusting a questionable chip inside the ball, the ref could have trusted his own eyes -> goal stands

6. Letting a minuscule alleged touch that didn't affect the ball overturn one of the craziest goals in World Cup history is suspicious in and of itself. It hints at an agenda or bias by the refs and VAR.

7. The penalty given to Portugal was already a false decision.

8. FIFA using B-tier referees raises the suspicion that they're chosen deliberately: a ref without a big name is more likely to enforce the rules to the letter, out of fear that FIFA won't invite him (and pay him) at the next tournament. A big refereeing name would at least have the courage to decide by feel for the game.

9. Previous games where Ronaldo was already helped by the refereeing.

10. The observation that rules are applied far more strictly against small nations than against the big names.

11. Semi-automated offside tech was sold to us as eliminating human error. Instead, a sensor blip that nobody can see with their own eyes was used to overrule what everybody COULD see. If the technology can't be verified by the footage, the footage should win.

12.FIFA is visibly willing to trade away trust and raw emotion (nobody can celebrate a goal anymore before the check period is over, fans get fed up and stop watching because of this BS) in exchange for control over outcomes, because keeping the biggest names in the tournament as long as possible is what makes their commercial goals easily reachable.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Charlie Kirk left a tweet for everything

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

If a woman gives birth at the Supreme Court, is her baby entitled to automatic status as a justice?

[The Rubin Report @RubinReportShow]

🚨 JUST NOW: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis delivers a blunt message to the Supreme Court:

“Judicially mandating that foreigners are entitled to birth US citizens against the wishes of the people as reflected in law means we cease to be our own rulers.”

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

> Japan lost
> Germany lost
> Italy didn't show up
> Europe doesn’t have Air Conditioning

Welcome to 1945.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Well done, @erling!

[Mat Nuclear @MatNuclear]

Israel made peace with Egypt in 1979, and hasn’t attacked it since.

Israel made peace with Jordan in 1994, and hasn’t attacked it since.

Saudi Arabia never attacked Israel, and Israel hasn’t attacked Saudi.

Maybe Israel just defends itself against enemy belligerents.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

During the Iranian Revolution, leftist students, communists, and Muslims were all united in overthrowing the Shah.

The leftists celebrated when Khomeini returned in 1979. They thought they defeated capitalism and imperialism. It didn’t last long.

Around 30,000 leftists who helped the Islamic regime consolidate power were soon executed. That’s where the term “useful idiot” comes from.

They served their purpose and were no longer needed. Muslims had always despised their progressive ideals and couldn’t wait to get rid of them.

One of the women celebrating in the picture was killed, the other fled the country for her life.

It’s bizarre that almost 50 years later, Western leftists are making the exact same mistake and allying with Muslims. They will have the same fate.

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

I've never see Jews stringing up little girls because they wore lip gloss or jeans. I've never heard of Jewish rape gangs. I've never heard of Jews forcing their women to live every moment of their public life peering through a slit in a black sheet. Jews never blew up our buildings or beheaded Christians.

You have a problem with Israel. Fine, register your geopolitical opposition to our foreign policy with regards to Israel. But I've never been afraid of what a Jew would do to me or my daughters.

[Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess]

I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that 6,000 Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and proudly live-streamed themselves slaughtering Jewish families on October 7th, yet many around the world still believe they are the victims.

Has the world lost its sense of clarity?