David Selko

Father, husband, small business owner, proud AMERICAN.
Follow my rantings on substack - RANTINGSOFANIDIOT

The carbon they want to eliminate is YOU.

[Bill Maher @billmaher]

I'm not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it's the World Cup.

[Handre @Handre]

Mao Zedong killed roughly 45 million people between 1958 and 1962, and the backyard steel furnace campaign sits at the center of that catastrophe as a textbook case of central planning consuming itself alive.

The logic of the Great Leap Forward went like this: if the Soviet Union industrialized through state-directed production, China would do it faster and bigger. Mao ordered peasants across every province to smelt steel in small furnaces built on collective land. Party officials set output quotas with no reference to actual resources, actual skills, or actual demand. Farmers melted down their own plows, woks, and door hinges to hit the numbers. They stripped hillsides bare for fuel. What came out of those furnaces was overwhelmingly pig iron so brittle it had zero industrial use. The quotas got reported as fulfilled, the statistics traveled up the command chain, and Beijing celebrated a triumph that existed only on paper.

You have to understand what those farmers were abandoning to stand at furnaces all day. The 1958 harvest was, by most estimates, actually decent. But with the rural labor force diverted to smelting operations, crops rotted in the fields unharvested. Free market economists call this opportunity cost: every hour a farmer spent producing worthless slag was an hour not spent producing food. The price system, had anyone been allowed to use it, would have made this tradeoff immediately visible. Prices signal scarcity. Planners just issue directives and wait for reality to disobey them.

Local officials faced execution or labor camps for reporting shortfalls, so they reported surpluses. Beijing then exported grain abroad, partly to service debts to the Soviet Union, partly to project an image of socialist success, even as provinces like Anhui and Sichuan descended into mass starvation. The state had monopolized food distribution, so when the numbers were wrong, there was no private market, no informal trade network, no alternative channel to move grain to the dying. The apparatus designed to feed people became the mechanism that starved them.

This is what the elimination of private property and price signals actually produces in practice: 45 million corpses and a generation of Chinese children who grew up stunted by famine.

[David Selko @davidselko]

@TechCharts Whose candle do we care about though? Japan's close or ours/USA close?

[David Selko @davidselko]

@JayCostaUSA @BillAckman It won’t matter. They will likely run out of the super discounted items right away.

[The Free Press @TheFP]

New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has accused Israel’s leader of genocide and the maiming of children and has called on the federal government to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in NYC.

@DouglasKMurray writes on Mamdani’s “disinterest in the truth.”

Read his full piece: https://t.co/hOWIwOroCv

[David Selko @davidselko]

@SaltyCracker9 Well as long as they didn’t mean it …

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Dear @ZohranKMamdani, thank you for improving the lives of New Yorkers by spending your days either explaining to the Americans that Islam should rule the US, and/or why Israel is an evil entity. The United States failed its citizens when they allowed your family to become Americans. You are as American as a man who sleeps in a stable becoming a horse.

[David Selko @davidselko]

@UrbanKaoboy I found my watch from when I was 10 a couple months ago. It was also from Montgomery Wards. Wound it up changed the strap and wear it frequently.

[David Selko @davidselko]

@baldassarreted I wonder how long they had to wait for their Daytonas.

[No Moore @NoMooreMD]

BILLIONS in deficits mean one thing: Moore taxes coming. We've seen this before. @GovWesmoore burned through a $5.5 billion surplus, passed the largest tax and fee hike in state history, called it relief, and still left billions more in deficits on the books. Same governor. Same playbook. Your wallet knows what comes next.

[David Selko @davidselko]

@catturd2 Mostly because he is a commie loser.

[David Selko @davidselko]

Quote of the day -

Most of the third world is precisely what Western leftists say they hate: racist, sexist, homophobic, militaristic, anti-democratic, kleptocratic, dogmatically religious police states, characterized by staggering inequality and oppression. Yet they inexplicably love it more than anything.

Derek Wallis

[David Selko @davidselko]

@PeterLBrandt Actually, HO looks a little cleaner.

[David Selko @davidselko]

@PeterLBrandt Similar in HO as well as RBOB

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

He is quite literally a Hamas commander.

[Av Michal אביגיל מיכל @avygal]

NYC was built by the Dutch, the English, Irish, Italians, Germans, and Jews.

NYC was NOT built by pretty much any of the immigrant communities listed here.

Mamdani is pushing the ideology that immigrants with less melanin in their skin are oppressors and their achievements should be erased, which is racist and ahistorical.

[David Selko @davidselko]

"The first flat-screen television cost as much as the factory that made it, but now you can buy one for $80 at Walmart. The only cost wealth inequality imposes on the general public is having to watch rich people get cool stuff before them." Derek Wallis

[Tracy Shuchart (𝒞𝒽𝒾 ) @chigrl]

Notice "climate change" quietly dropped out of the Davos script right when winning the AI race started requiring gigawatts. Turns out the crisis was negotiable all along....just sayin

[Tracy Shuchart (𝒞𝒽𝒾 ) @chigrl]

The original Declaration of Independence

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.