Robert

Laid back cyber security practitioner | funny | weirdo | nice guy, not neckbeard | praxeologist who listens all perspectives | goal: “warm heart, cool head”

[Mr. Nobody @MmisterNobody]

If you’re fine with mass surveillance because you’re “not doing anything wrong,” just wait until they redefine what “wrong” means.

[Handre @Handre]

Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.

The argument was precise. Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree.

This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it. Oskar Lange tried in 1936, proposing that socialist planners could simulate prices by trial and error. Mises read this and was unimpressed (charitably put). Lange assumed you could reproduce the function of market prices without the institution that generates them: private property, genuine exchange, real skin in the game. You cannot fake the signal and expect accurate information.

The Soviet Union spent seventy years proving Mises right. Chronic shortages, misallocated steel, surplus winter boots in Georgia in July, famine engineered by committees convinced they understood grain supply better than the price system. The USSR collapsed in 1991 under the weight of precisely the inefficiencies Mises predicted in Vienna in 1920.

You are watching this play out again today, every time a government sets energy prices, rent ceilings, or pharmaceutical price caps, and then expresses shock at the resulting shortages. The calculation problem did not expire with the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats who override price signals recreate the same blindness Mises identified. Mises told you exactly what would happen.

[Libertarian Party @LPNational]

True story 😂

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

Tucker Carlson preaches that debt is slavery, that lending at interest is the sin of usury, and that a society organized around debt "enslaves people."

He then reads an ad for a mortgage lender and personally endorses it: "We recommend American Financing. They're called America's home for home loans for a reason."

[Frank J. Fleming @IMAO_]

“This is the fifth time we’ve negotiated a peace with Iran during this war and we’ve become exceedingly efficient at it.”

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at...

The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power.

Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually.

That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made...

Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept.

There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it:

"Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

[Joey Swoll @TheJoeySwoll]

10 signs you're doing well in life:

1. You have a roof over your head.
2. You ate today.
3. You have a good heart.
4. You care for others.
5. You have clean water.
6. Someone loves you.
7. You try to do better.
8. You have clean clothes.
9. You have dreams.
10. You’re breathing.

[Robert @cowmanrobert]

@BlastingThrough I read a book by an FBI agent detailing his first assignment (in the 70’s I think) where they had to arrest draft-dodgers. Some of the men he encountered showed him their prosthetic leg (from combat). It was such a shame.

[Robert @cowmanrobert]

@GadSaad I think you have exposure already.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

I hate to say this but please hear me out. For decades, I have made a daily Herculean effort to warn people about the dangers facing the West. My goal was to ensure that any auto-corrective process meant to address the problems would be a peaceful one. I fear that this window has closed. Prepare for astounding violence. It may not come tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. But it is coming. Save this post.

[Robert @cowmanrobert]

@GadSaad 0.0% - the guiding principle is that taxation is theft.

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

Happy Fathers Day in advance to all the wonderful dads out there! You are appreciated. God bless you. 🙌🏾

[Robert @cowmanrobert]

@GadSaad Man, you should have published your latest book after leaving Canada.

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In July 1985, over a billion people watched Live Aid.

Months earlier, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had written "We Are the World." All of it was a response to a famine in Ethiopia.

Almost nobody remembers who actually caused the famine. 🧵

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

To be very clear: reality is very different from the rhetoric. The IDF takes extraordinary measures to mitigate civilian harm in Lebanon. In fact, as in Gaza, it employs more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in past or current operations.

The IDF issues evacuation warnings through multiple channels including text messages, phone calls, voicemails, flyers, radio, television, and social media. It operates dedicated civilian harm mitigation cells, tracks civilian presence through drones, cell phone data, and other ISR capabilities, and uses rigorous targeting processes that include legal reviews and proportionality assessments for any planned strikes. Legal reviews at lowest tactical level, and with the ability (which happens often as well as command decisions not to strike based on all context) to override commander decisions, unlike any other military.

In southern Lebanon, these measures are particularly effective because civilians can move away from military objectives and active combat areas.

Even in Beirut, the IDF has repeatedly provided warnings identifying specific buildings that will be struck and when. The warnings have proven so reliable that Lebanese citizens and journalists have set up cameras in advance to record the strikes. When targeting Hezbollah senior leaders, command meetings, or other military objectives in densely populated areas such as Dahiyeh (the Hezbollah controlled neighborhood of Beirut), the IDF relies on precision-guided munitions, small diameter munition (warheads with less explosives), and other low collateral damage munitions, detailed intelligence, and other methods designed to limit collateral damage while achieving the legitimate military objective.

There is also no equivalency. Israel does not intentionally target civilians. Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose strategy includes deliberately attacking civilians. Hezbollah launches rockets, missiles, and drones at civilian communities in northern Israel (daily, despite any cease fires), targeting homes, schools, businesses, and civilian infrastructure.

One side conducts legal reviews, proportionality assessments, civilian warnings, and precision strikes against military objectives. The other is a international designated terrorist group that intentionally places military assets among civilians while deliberately targeting civilians.

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

Having a son is so freaking cool. The number of laughs per minute is very high.

[Bari Weiss @bariweiss]

I couldn't be happier to welcome the singular @DouglasKMurray to @TheFP as a weekly columnist.

https://t.co/RREFtqoOjw

[Open Source Intel @Osint613]

If you want the regime at the table, hit them until they beg for deal.

Half measures won’t weaken their position. They strengthen it.

[S∆IN✞  @The_Big_Chifa_]

One of Netflix’s biggest fumbles. Two seasons just wasn’t enough for a show like this. It really could’ve been one of the greatest shows ever made.