Mark Simon Sapsford

Constitutional Libertarian
Should not have to say this but a RT means I think they have something to say. It isn't an endorsement or necessarily even agreement.

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

A large tree trunk has been uncovered beneath a glacier in the Alps, dated to around 6,000 years ago.

The species is Swiss stone pine. Today, trees of that type cannot grow at that altitude because it is far too cold.

6,000 years ago aligns with the Holocene climate optimum, a time when temperatures were far higher than now, even with far less atmospheric CO2.

Earth's climate is cyclical and Mother Nature self-regulates.

Narratives of doom serve political aims, not reality.

[Defender of the Republic 🇺🇸 @realdefender45]

⁉️Did you know⁉️

When the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, Americans were told the new federal income tax would primarily affect the wealthy.

The top tax rate was just 7%, and most working Americans paid little or nothing at all.

The argument was simple:

“Let the rich pay.”

But government has a habit of growing.

📈 Under Woodrow Wilson, the top rate jumped to 77% during World War I.

📉 It fell during the 1920s under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

📈 Franklin Roosevelt raised it again, eventually reaching 94% during World War II.

📈 Under Eisenhower, the top rate remained above 90% for much of the 1950s.

📉 John F. Kennedy pushed for significant tax cuts that were enacted after his death.

📉 Ronald Reagan reduced the top rate from 70% to 28%.

📈 George H.W. Bush raised taxes.

📈 Bill Clinton raised them again.

📉 George W. Bush lowered rates.

📈 Barack Obama expanded the federal government’s reach through the Affordable Care Act, adding new taxes, mandates, and regulations that affected individuals, businesses, and healthcare markets.

📉 Donald Trump reduced rates through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

But here’s what most Americans never stop to think about:

In 1913, there was no Social Security tax.
No Medicare tax.
No federal withholding from every paycheck.
No massive federal bureaucracy.

A worker in 1913 kept the overwhelming majority of what he earned.

Today, Americans pay federal income taxes, payroll taxes, state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, utility taxes, vehicle taxes, permit fees, and countless hidden taxes embedded in the cost of goods and services.

What started as a tax aimed at a small number of wealthy Americans eventually became a system that reaches into virtually every paycheck in the country.

The lesson isn’t about one party or one president.

It’s about a promise.

The income tax was sold as something that would only affect the wealthy. A century later, nearly every working American is paying into a system that never stops growing.

The most expensive words in government history may have been: “Don’t worry, it will only affect the rich.”

[Race @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk got rejected by Netscape. He walked into the lobby, was too shy to talk to anyone, and walked out. Never got the job.

At his first company Zip2, the board demoted him. Twice. They refused to let him be CEO.

He got fired from PayPal as CEO while flying to his own honeymoon. The board voted him out mid air.

He almost died of malaria in 2000. Ten days in intensive care. Lost 45 pounds. A day from death.

His first child died at 10 weeks old.

His first rocket exploded. Falcon 1, flight one. Burned on the pad.

His second rocket exploded.

His third rocket exploded. The last of his money was nearly gone.

Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The closest he ever came to a nervous breakdown.

Both companies almost died on the same Christmas Eve.

He was sued by investors. Mocked by the people who built cars before him.

His childhood heroes, the astronauts who inspired him, testified against his company to Congress.

The Cybertruck window shattered on live stage in front of the world.

He overpaid for Twitter by his own admission and watched its value collapse.

He was beaten unconscious as a child and thrown down a flight of stairs.

He has said he goes to sleep alone and it kills him.

He failed in public, over and over, for thirty years.

He is the richest man in the history of the world.

The difference was never the absence of failure. It was the refusal to stop after it.

[Darin Feinstein @DarinFeinstein]

Real-world example of private industry vs. government bureaucracy.

Compare:

SpaceX founded in 2002:
$12B in capital invested VOLUNTARILY to transport humans, satellites and rockets into SPACE.

California High-Speed-Rail started in 2008:
$15B+ FORCED from taxpayers to build a high-speed rail system to transport only humans across the EARTH.

Results:

SpaceX spent $12B:
Revolutionized rockets, satellites, and space travel. Over 15,000 payloads launched into space, over 12,000 Starlink satellites deployed, over 99% success rate across Falcon launches.

California High-Speed-Rail spent $15B:
After 17 years, still has not transported a single passenger to any destination anywhere on the planet.

Consequences:

SpaceX - Success ✅
Goes public over $2T increases shareholder valuation thousands of percent and humanity benefits.

California High-Speed-Rail - Failure ❌
Taxpayers zero recourse to recover wasted $15B+. No politician held liable. No contractor accountable. All money is simply RIP.

If you were wondering why so much hate for Elon, career politicians pushing big government continuously humiliated by successful entrepreneurs. Musk produces with private funds the most sophisticated engineering marvels in human history. Government boondoggles create nothing, with no recourse.

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

Don’t worry about Elon becoming rich with his own money.

Worry about politicians becoming rich with your money.

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

Much of the climate crisis is pure psychological manipulation.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/vLmiBKTtX3

[Old Salty Marine @BamaSaltyMarine]

These two short sentences tell you a lot about our government and our culture!

1. We are advised to not judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, But we are encouraged to judge All Gun Owners by the actions of a few lunatics.

Funny how that works….

And here is another one worth considering.
2. Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out of Money. How come we never hear about Welfare running out of money?

What's Interesting is the first group "worked for" their money, but the second didn't.

Profound isn't it... Think about it.....

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine.

In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted.

https://t.co/pLMD0krc69

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Within ~5 years, probably ~5 times as many satellites as rest of world

[MAZE @mazemoore]

This clip of Charles Payne during Obama's second term is really incredible. Well done Charles.

In 2010 Obama put the federal government directly in charge of lending money to students. Eliminating private lending made the loans much easier to get, but they were not less expensive.

Before Obama took office, outstanding student debt was less than $100 billion. By 2015, outstanding student debt was approximately $800 billion and almost a third of the borrowers were in default. Of course the price of college continued to soar the entire time.

This is the best part. Payne predicted that someday the politicians would be promising to forgive student debt as a way to buy votes. He was spot on.

There are people like Ro Khanna on this site right now arguing that Elon Musk should be paying down the student debt when it's a problem that politicians created.

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

If the socialists had their way, Elon would have had his paypal profits taken and redistributed for the greater good.

The world would never have seen Tesla, nor SpaceX.

And the world wouldn't know it, because they were uncreated, and thus unseen.

Imagine the companies that don't exist, because Washington destroyed them before they were born.

[US Oil & Gas Association @US_OGA]

Hello Senator....

This November it will be 50 years since you were first elected to Congress, so we want to be the first to say .

"Happy 50th Anniversary of drawing a taxpayer funded salary."

That is quite an achievement.

In fact - you are 2nd longest-still serving member in Congress.

It has been a long time since you held a private sector job.

AND yes 50 years ago - in 1976 (it was America's Bicentennial that year) - people still punched clocks back then. The world has changed a lot.

During your 50 years in Congress - you watched as the creators and inventors and producers changed the world, creating trillions in new wealth, millions of new jobs and dramatically raising living standards for everyone rich and poor alike.

And for 50 years you have voted to raise taxes and regulate and oversee every move of the private sector.

You have never created or invented or produced. Just taxed and regulated and outraged.

But thank you for using the platform the "TRILLIONAIRE class" has provided to the entire world for free to tell us all how disgusted you are.

We would never know otherwise.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

Some people suggest that while green is expensive, the benefits are much greater

Well, no:

The benefit of net-zero is $4.5 trillion/year, but the cost $27 trillion

(much larger costs and benefits, because we're currently only doing a bit of net-zero currently)

https://t.co/j4wG0vrxJB

You can see all the references in my Twitter thread:
https://t.co/HfBtBL2mlK

[Mark Simon Sapsford @SimonSapsford]

Not quite true as through graft, fraud and theft of our money they have made themselves and the co-conspirators wealthy.

[Natalie F Danelishen @Chesschick01]

Bernie Sanders and AOC haven't created a single millionaire.

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires.

Socialism vs. Capitalism

[Senator Rand Paul @SenRandPaul]

Printing money to fund government spending is a choice. Inflation is the consequence of that choice.

When inflation erodes the value of your paycheck and savings, the government is taking purchasing power from you.

It's theft.

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽

My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.

I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.

Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.

We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!

Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??

Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."

Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.

When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.

My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.

Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.

People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.

Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.

We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”