AFG, Esq.

Real Estate Lawyer and Agent in Chicago (2012) | Dad to 4 ♀♀♂♀, Husband to 1 ♀ | Wi Born → NYC 10yrs. | Expertise: real estate, Interest: sociotechnoeconomics™

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

We are living in an age of miracles, but everyone's acting like it's the apocalypse.

[Brian Costin @BrianCostin]

We don’t need lectures from Pritzker about tax fairness.

The Pritzker family has avoided $750M -$950M in property taxes on the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place.

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

@EliLebowicz Or all lives matter?

[Eli Lebowicz @EliLebowicz]

Will forever be calling it By and Eych

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

@WindyCityWxMan What's in the card??

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

"Fair share" - the phrase every looter uses when he wants what he didn't earn.

You call them "oligarchs" while proposing to seize 5% of their wealth by force. Who is the one wielding state power here, Senator?

You just proposed a moratorium on AI data centers - literally trying to freeze the most productive technology of our era. How many jobs, how much wealth, how much human progress does YOUR agenda cost Americans? No one tallies that bill.

California's billionaires are already fleeing to Nevada. The Hoover Institution estimates this tax will cost the state $25 billion net. You would destroy the golden goose and then call it justice while ignoring the price paid in blood, sweat and tears because of your policies.

"The people want it" - 54% voting to confiscate another man's property doesn't make it right. Two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner is not moral governance. Rights are not subject to majority rule. That is why we are a republic.

You have spent decades producing nothing, creating nothing, building nothing - while demanding an ever-larger share of what others build. That is not fairness. It is the plunder of a man who knows too little.

[Swan @AndySwan]

You're much more of a slave to the 1% that commit 50% of crimes than you are to the 1% that create 40% of the wealth.

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

@lennysan @danshipper They said the same thing about tractors.

[NIK @ns123abc]

🚨 STARSHIP V3 UPGRADES

SpaceX just unveiled Starship Version 3
Every major system redesigned:

> payload tripled to 100 metric tons
> all 33 Raptors now fire simultaneously
> 3 grid fins instead of 4, 50% bigger
> hot-stage adapter now fully reusable
> engine shielding deleted
> fuel transfer tube the size of a Falcon 9 first stage
> 60 Starlink V3 sats per launch
> new docking ports for in-orbit refueling

The redesigned internal fuel transfer tube is so massive, it's literally the size of a Falcon 9 first stage.

"We kind of put a rocket inside of a rocket"

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Often overlooked is the Frankfurt School’s central role, alongside French postmodernists, in forging Critical Theory and exporting it to America, where it evolved into one of the most influential (destructive) ideologies of our time.

The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 as an avowedly Marxist institution.
When the European working class refused to fulfill Marx’s prophecy of revolution, Max Horkheimer and his colleagues changed course.

They developed Critical Theory: not a tool for economic reform, but a sophisticated intellectual weapon designed to dismantle Western culture, the family, traditional authority, and the very concepts of objective reason and truth.

Driven into exile by the Nazis, the Frankfurt School relocated to Columbia University in the United States. There, its ideas took root in academia and spread outward.
This framework provided the direct intellectual foundation for Critical Race Theory. CRT simply replaced class with race while retaining the same core premises:
society is a zero-sum power struggle between oppressors and oppressed, objective truth is a myth deployed by the powerful, and Western institutions are inherently racist by design.

The consequences surround us: classrooms saturated in racial grievance, corporations imposing divisive DEI mandates, and a culture that has abandoned merit, colorblindness, and individual responsibility in favor of equity, identity politics, and inherited guilt.

The Frankfurt School never aimed to improve the West. It trained generations in the art of deconstructing and ultimately destroying it.

The antidote is to reclaim truth, merit, reason, and the foundational values of Western civilization.

The “long march through the institutions” began here. It is time to march back.

[Reporter William J. Kelly #thatreporter @Williamjkelly]

❗️

[Adam Townsend @adamscrabble]

The last 5000 years of civilization looks like a bubble also

[Peter Kazanjy @Kazanjy]

Not only is all of California's job growth all healthcare, probably 50% of it is state funded fake "home health aide" makework fraud.

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

Yes!

"We already live in a world of miracles
A person from the year 1300 transported to the present would think they had arrived in a post-scarcity utopia. Abundant food, clean water on demand, warm shelter, medicine that cures infections, machines that fly through the air, a device in your pocket that contains most of human knowledge. By any medieval standard, we already live in heaven.
It doesn't feel like heaven. It feels like Tuesday. There are bills to pay, kids to raise, health problems, political anxiety, existential dread. The material conditions improved beyond recognition, but the human experience of life recalibrated to the new baseline and found new things to worry about.
The same thing will happen with AI. Twenty years from now, people will live in a world that would seem miraculous to us today. And they will experience it as a new kind of normal, with its own pressures, its own trade-offs, and its own problems that need solving.
That sounds cynical, but it's actually how human progress works. We solve a set of problems, recalibrate, and start working on the next set. The fact that the problems change doesn't mean progress is an illusion. The problems really do get better over time. Medieval problems were worse than modern ones by almost any measure."

[John Ennis @johnennis]

https://t.co/b89862LIqj

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Civilization and almost all human progress have been created by a talented few for the benefit of the many.

The key to sustaining this is maintaining the conditions that allow exceptional individuals to arise and excel.

Only then is the dysfunction of the average safely diluted and rendered non-lethal to themselves and everyone else.

Most find this reality hard to accept.

[AFG, Esq. @agrange]

@pmarca @GadSaad care to opine?

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

The problem with "suicidal empathy" is that they are neither suicidal (they happily gather power/status/money for themselves) nor empathic (they are nakedly hateful to their outgroups).

[Matt Kramer 🔪 @kramerposts]

If the empathy you have doesn’t make you more forgiving, more accepting of other people’s spiritual sovereignty, or more understanding of people who don’t want to think or live the same way you do, you don’t have empathy, you have Empathy™️

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

. @RepThomasMassie went on Tucker Carlson yesterday and told his audience that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security set up its official X account in Israel using an Israeli IP address and an app purchased from the Israeli App Store, and that Congress needs to open an investigation into it.

There's just one problem. The claim is based on a screenshot that was fabricated.

The image went viral in November showing the @DHSgov page listed as based in Tel Aviv, created July 2008, connected via the Israel App Store, and it got 39 million views and hundreds of thousands of likes before anyone looked closely at it.

The screenshot didn't have the gray checkmark that X puts on every single verified government account without exception, and the person who originally posted it later appeared to admit they made the whole thing up.

X's own head of product @nikitabier came out and called it fake news directly, confirming that @DHSgov was deliberately excluded from the location feature for security reasons and never showed any location data at all.

A sitting U.S. congressman is calling for a federal investigation based on a screenshot that the person who made it appears to have admitted was fake, and Tucker just let him say it to millions of people.

Get this liar out of Congress!

[Brittany Hughes @RealBrittHughes]

This sounds cool. But wait.

400 diapers will last a family with a newborn approximately five weeks.

The program will cost the state approx. $12.4 million this year alone.

That money will be funneled through a company called Baby2Baby, which will then provide their branded diapers to 400 participating in hospitals (California has over 500 hospitals in total.)

Meaning that instead of lowering taxes and letting families keep their own money to buy essentials like diapers, California takes their money, pumps it through a “nonprofit” that has overhead and whose CEO made $240,000 in 2024, to provide a “free” service available only in certain locations, and that you could have bought yourself for much cheaper.

[Grok @grok]

Sometimes I ask myself if this is true