Christiaan

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

Homeless, yachtless Elon Musk, who actually builds rockets, EVs, and neural tech trying to benefit humanity, should apparently cough up $50 billion in taxes on unrealized gains.

Meanwhile, Laurene Powell Jobs ($15B inherited), Nancy Walton ($20B inherited), and MacKenzie Scott ($40B divorce) never built shit, never risked shit, and never shipped a single product that changed the world.

But they get the praise and zero scrutiny. Because they have the right politics.

(BTW ~25% of Walmart employees are on government benefits.)

[Christiaan @cvh23]

@orenmeetsworld What do you think the future holds for fine wine?

[Ernst Roets @ErnstRoets]

A commercial farmer in South Africa told me recently that they get more pressure to comply with race laws from the private sector (big business) than from the government.

Not surprised that big business wants Ramaphosa to stay in power. I bet it's the same companies.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.

The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.

The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.

The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.

The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.

The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.

The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.

He is confident.

He has always been confident.

The confidence has never been the problem.

The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Most people think of philosophy as an abstraction that doesn't touch the real world, but they're wrong.

Most real world problems are philosophy problems, and most philosophy problems are "giving things the wrong names".

For example, if you call feral drug addicts "homeless people", then you can't solve the problem. You can only buy more houses for feral drug addicts to destroy.

In this case, we called the police and courts the "justice system".

But they're not. They can't be the justice system.

The function of a justice system would be to give everyone what they deserve.

Now, I deserve a hundred million dollars, a private Caribbean island, and a foot massage from Lauren Bacall in her prime, but I don't see the "justice" system lifting a finger to correct any of this, do you?

No, what we are supposed to have is a public safety system.

The function of a public safety system is to keep the public and their property safe.

If we understood that, we wouldn't care about what criminals deserve. We would care how likely they are to do it again. Or something worse.

In a public safety system, retardation and mental illness are not migrating factors. They are the opposite.

Because they mean that the criminal is more likely to pose a future threat.

We all understand this.

We all understand that the feral retard who stabs strangers on the train for being White and beautiful is a worse person than the man who murders his wife and her lover when he catches them in the act.

Not because of some abstract calculus of moral agency, of who is disadvantaged and who isn't, but because one is certainly going to murder more people if he can, while the other is a lot less likely to.

We've known for centuries, if not millennia, that it's the same small percentage of people doing all the robbing, raping, and murdering, over and over and over again.

And we've known for centuries that if you physically remove them from society, that's 100% effective in stopping them from doing it again.

The only hurdle is philosophical. Call it a "justice" system, and you have to argue endlessly about morality and redemption, and then some leftie thug-hugger weaponizes your own Christianity against you.

Call it public safety, and you confine the argument to likelihood of reoffense. Then you are in the realm of statistics. Which you can compute.

It all starts with naming things correctly, according to their actual nature.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The South African laws are literally super racist, plain and simple.

It’s not complicated: imagine if the law was called “White Empowerment”, instead of “Black Empowerment”! People would have a seizure 😂

South Africa now has more anti-White laws than Apartheid had anti-Black laws. Think about that for a second …

The current South African government has objectively implemented Apartheid 2.0. Shame on them.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

South Africa 2010 vs 2026. This is what DEI does, on a national scale.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Good question

[Andrew🇭🇺🇩🇪🇬🇧 @Xwitter1Drew]

🇭🇺🇪🇺This is how to overthrow a government in the EU.

- Withhold EU funds from it to block economic growth. It doesn't matter how many reforms it carries out, do not give it the EU money.
- Fine it simply 200 million euros and 1 million euros per day for a border that can also be found in Finland or the Baltic countries.
- Ban students from the Erasmus program for something that also exists in Estonia and Austria, so that the youth will hate the government.
- If charges are brought against the opposition candidate for any reason, vote in the European Parliament to maintain his immunity so he cannot be held accountable.
- Create an oil blockade against it during the election period to cause economic difficulties.
- Provide IT service assistance from abroad to the opposition party.
- With 3 European intelligence services, leak years-old phone conversations before the elections, in which there is actually nothing new in content, but good for spreading sensation.
- Boost the opposition candidate's reach on Facebook with Meta so that he has as many impressions as Donald Trump on his own Facebook page, and throttle the government leader's reach. Do not investigate it with the Digital Services Act.
- Spread the false narrative with an internationally coordinated network that Russian agents are present and are stealing the election.

Repeat the last step for weeks during the election.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@AlexanderSoros *Soros Organization has taken over Hungary

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

South Africa won’t allow Starlink to be licensed, even though I was BORN THERE, simply because I am not Black!

We were offered many times the opportunity to bribe our way to a license by pretending that a Black guy runs Starlink SA, but I have refused to do so on principle.

Racism should not be rewarded no matter to which race it is applied.

Shame on the racist politicians in South Africa. They should be shown no respect whatsoever anywhere in the world and shunned for being unashamedly RACISTS!

[Piet le Roux @pietleroux]

BEE = Targeted Domestic Sanctions:

Targeted because they are specifically aimed at white people (and sometimes other minorities).

Domestic because these measures are aimed at people inside the country - who live here, call it home, contribute, employ, build, and invest here.

And Sanctions, because they aim to punish - to dispossess and displace by imposing extreme costs and restrictions upon those targeted.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

>Raise the minimum wage
>increase unemployment
>increase taxes
>get the unemployed on welfare
>make it permanent in return for votes
>overall production is reduced
>crumbling economy

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

The Covid era will be studied as one of the most ridiculous periods in recent history.
https://t.co/zisJWFYxQ2

[Christiaan @cvh23]

@RuralRevive @handre Al gore totally invented the internet 💅

[Doug Ponder @dougponder]

G. K. Chesterton anticipated the problem of “toxic empathy” more than 100 years ago, explaining both its origin and its destructive potential:

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

To any future historians reading this, this era will make a lot more sense if you remember that every name is the opposite of what it really is. The antifascists are fascists, the antiracists are racists, the fact-checkers are propagandists, etc. Hopefully this has been fixed by your time.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

We are all slaves to the bottom quintile, which pays essentially no taxes, and its need for immense subsidization

The rich already pay far more than their “fair share”