Internet_dad

Loving grandfather and cyclist. CRT= creating racial tension. DEI = division exclusion indoctrination

[Internet_dad @DemanRobert]

Indeed and 🙏

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

This brave mom powerfully denounces gender ideology at the @DJUSD board of trustees hearing on Nov 17th.

"Asking our kids for their preferred pronouns...is not kind, it is not inclusive. What is kind about forcing our kids to wonder if they may have been born in the wrong body?"

[Internet_dad @DemanRobert]

The evil within

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Did you know that The Lord of the Rings was about communism?

(Maybe when you come from Poland, every evil looks like communism to you…:)

1. The Ring is not a weapon. It is the totalitarian temptation itself – the promise that this time, the right person wielding absolute power will finally produce the good outcome. Even heroes in the book are tempted by this argument. Gandalf refuses it, Aragorn refuses it, but it is the most seductive argument in politics. It is always wrong.

2. The Shire is where the story begins and where it must return. Hobbits grow their own food, smoke their own pipe-weed, own their gardens, and nobody tells them what a second breakfast should look like. This is not naivety – it is civilization at its most honest. Which is precisely why the system cannot leave it alone.

3. The Eye sees everything – not because it is omnipotent, but because enough servants are watching on its behalf. The Nazgûl are the secret police: former kings, once free and powerful, who accepted rings of power and became hollow enforcers. They did not fall suddenly. Each one made a reasonable accommodation, then another, until nothing remained inside the armor. The surveillance state does not need cameras everywhere. It needs people who have already sold themselves, and have nothing left to lose by selling others.

4. Saruman is the most sinister villain in the book – the brilliant intellectual who studied power so long and so closely that he decided he might as well have some. The collaborator. The man who convinced himself that managing the evil was smarter than opposing it, and ended up running a small franchise of it in the Shire.

5. The Shire gets collectivized. This is the chapter Western readers most want to skip – because it means that ignoring the darkness while it was distant did not protect the things that were close and dear. It came home anyway, wearing the face of bureaucratic administration: no private gardens, no excess, enforced sharing, small men with clipboards and new rules. Sharkey — the defeated Saruman — cannot create anything anymore. He can only administrate, regulate, and ruin. This is what the system looks like when it has already lost everywhere else.

6. Gollum is what the system produces when it finds someone useful. He serves the Ring completely, calls it his precious, and has long since forgotten what he was before it. He is not evil – he is consumed. The system doesn’t need to destroy you. It just needs you to need it more than you need yourself.

7. The Ring must be destroyed, not used. Not reformed, not redirected, not wielded by a better person for better ends. This is Tolkien’s most radical political statement: some instruments of total power cannot be turned to good purposes. They must be unmade. Every generation has to rediscover this, because the argument for just one more ring, in the right hands, for the right reasons, never stops sounding reasonable to some people…

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Did you know that The Lord of the Rings was about communism?

(Maybe when you come from Poland, every evil looks like communism to you…:)

1. The Ring is not a weapon. It is the totalitarian temptation itself – the promise that this time, the right person wielding absolute power will finally produce the good outcome. Even heroes in the book are tempted by this argument. Gandalf refuses it, Aragorn refuses it, but it is the most seductive argument in politics. It is always wrong.

2. The Shire is where the story begins and where it must return. Hobbits grow their own food, smoke their own pipe-weed, own their gardens, and nobody tells them what a second breakfast should look like. This is not naivety – it is civilization at its most honest. Which is precisely why the system cannot leave it alone.

3. The Eye sees everything – not because it is omnipotent, but because enough servants are watching on its behalf. The Nazgûl are the secret police: former kings, once free and powerful, who accepted rings of power and became hollow enforcers. They did not fall suddenly. Each one made a reasonable accommodation, then another, until nothing remained inside the armor. The surveillance state does not need cameras everywhere. It needs people who have already sold themselves, and have nothing left to lose by selling others.

4. Saruman is the most sinister villain in the book – the brilliant intellectual who studied power so long and so closely that he decided he might as well have some. The collaborator. The man who convinced himself that managing the evil was smarter than opposing it, and ended up running a small franchise of it in the Shire.

5. The Shire gets collectivized. This is the chapter Western readers most want to skip – because it means that ignoring the darkness while it was distant did not protect the things that were close and dear. It came home anyway, wearing the face of bureaucratic administration: no private gardens, no excess, enforced sharing, small men with clipboards and new rules. Sharkey — the defeated Saruman — cannot create anything anymore. He can only administrate, regulate, and ruin. This is what the system looks like when it has already lost everywhere else.

6. Gollum is what the system produces when it finds someone useful. He serves the Ring completely, calls it his precious, and has long since forgotten what he was before it. He is not evil – he is consumed. The system doesn’t need to destroy you. It just needs you to need it more than you need yourself.

7. The Ring must be destroyed, not used. Not reformed, not redirected, not wielded by a better person for better ends. This is Tolkien’s most radical political statement: some instruments of total power cannot be turned to good purposes. They must be unmade. Every generation has to rediscover this, because the argument for just one more ring, in the right hands, for the right reasons, never stops sounding reasonable to some people…

[Conrad Black @ConradMBlack]

The Canadian public has organized itself into two camps. The vast majority support Carney’s decision to end trade talks, more out of distrust and loathing for Trump than from any evidence that such an act was justified. A vocal minority sits in the opposing camp, driven by distrust and loathing for Carney. The rest of us moderate observers are prepared to give our PM the benefit of the doubt, but are waiting patiently for proof that this benefit has been well earned.

In the meantime, the government has chosen an unusually hostile course, focusing retaliatory measures on politically vulnerable American districts ahead of the November midterms and writing to certain Democratic governors. This is brinkmanship. If the tariffs fail to move votes in places such as Maine and Michigan, Carney will look like a devious blowhard. If they succeed in damaging Republican prospects, he will face a resentful Donald Trump for another two years, and the consequences could become very onerous.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Counter-March – What You Actually Do on Monday

Gramsci’s side won because ordinary people made ordinary career decisions with a fifty-year horizon. Not heroes. Teachers, editors, functionaries, each one making a choice that looked small. That is the whole secret, and it is entirely available to us. A Council can issue verdicts; it cannot fill ten thousand positions. That part is yours.

Here is the strategy, stated plainly.

1. Choose institutions by whether they still answer to results. Anything that must produce something real — engineering, medicine, energy, defense, construction, software, finance where the position is marked to market — is still governed by reality and cannot be captured for long, because reality audits it. Anything that produces only reports, assessments, and compliance answers to nobody. Enter the first kind. For the second kind, don’t spend a career fighting to retake it – build its replacement.

2. Become excellent first, and visibly so. Gramsci’s marchers were often mediocre, and it didn’t matter, because the institutions they entered had stopped measuring. Ours have not. Competence is the only tenure available to us: it is very hard to remove the best engineer in the building, and very easy to remove the second-best one with opinions. Earn the position before you use it.

3. Do not resign in disgust. That is the single most common mistake, and it is exactly what the system wants – every honest person who walks out has completed the selection process on the other side’s behalf. Stay, do the work, be useful, and refuse the small lies. Internal emigration keeps you sane; it does not keep the institution.

4. Build the parallel where entry is closed. Some institutions cannot be retaken – the accreditation is captured, the pipeline is closed, the mission is corrupted at the root. Fine. Start the school, the journal, the apprenticeship, the prize, the fund, the training program. Small and functioning beats large and theoretical. The other side needed the state’s permission to build; we need almost none, which is a historically unusual advantage and will not last forever.

5. Hire. This is the step almost everyone skips. Every founder, partner, and manager reading this controls positions – and positions are the actual currency of the long march. One person who hires on merit for twenty years moves more than a hundred who post. If you have hiring power and you use it for anything other than the best person available, you are running the other side’s program with your own money.

6. Have children, and form them. The march succeeded across three generations because it captured formation. Nothing in this piece matters if the people who agree with it don’t reproduce, and nothing they inherit matters if they’re formed by institutions that despise it. Everything else on this list is a means. This is the end – the only item that is not a strategy but the thing the strategy is for.

7. Say true things in public, under your own name, at survivable cost. Not martyrdom – calibrated, repeated, unremarkable honesty from people who cannot easily be fired. The system’s power was never the punishment; it was the anticipation of punishment. Every person who speaks plainly and is still employed a year later lowers the price for everyone watching.

8. Play the fifty-year game. The march took from 1968 to roughly 2015 to complete. Anyone expecting a decisive victory in one electoral cycle will quit in disappointment, which is itself part of why the other side won. Choose things that compound: skills, institutions, children, reputations.

The other side’s advantage was never intelligence or funding. It was patience combined with direction – thousands of uncoordinated people pushing the same way for fifty years. We now have the direction, the vocabulary, and for the first time in a century, unblocked distribution. What remains is the boring part: the arriving, the staffing, and the staying.

Choose the institution. Be excellent in it. Hire well. Raise children. Say true things out loud. Then do it for thirty years. There is no shortcut, and looking for one is how the last fifty years were lost.

[Conrad Black @ConradMBlack]

Richard Nixon was one of America’s greatest political leaders, and probably its most controversial president.

He ended the draft, founded the EPA, opened relations with China, signed SALT I, extracted the United States from Vietnam without losing the war, and was re-elected by 49 states because the country acknowledged he had been an excellent president.

He belongs among the country’s ten or so most talented and successful presidents. In the Watergate debacle he was more sinned against than the sinner. An unjust war on history has been conducted against him by his enemies. And this event, hosted by The Spectator, seeks to set the record straight.

[Conrad Black @ConradMBlack]

Sánchez leads Spain away from the Western alliance
https://t.co/u6ruDScBDJ

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Hear, hear

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

En tant que Français,

Ayant grandi en France et vécu dans la Silicon Valley,

Je déclare @JMilei comme la personne la plus compatible idéologiquement et politiquement pour sauver la France de son mal.

Le socialisme et de la corruption (c’est la même chose).

Vive Javier Milei.

Les Français t’adorent et nous souhaitons appliquer tes méthodes en France.

Tu as ouvert la voie pour sauver l’Occident du cancer qui la ronge.

Merci 🙏

Partage ce post et signe la pétition pour envoyer de l’amour à Javier !

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Canada Needs an Economic Overton Window Reset

Canada’s economic debate has become strangely moralized. Raise a conventional question about investment, productivity, manufacturing, energy, deficits, or trade, and the response is too often not an argument but an accusation: un-Canadian, Trumpian, MAGA, anti-worker, anti-public service.

That is how the Overton Window closes.

The Overton Window describes the range of ideas considered respectable in public debate. In Canada, it increasingly excludes economic realism, not because the evidence is absent, but because the language of patriotism has been captured by the assumption that more government spending is synonymous with national strength.

It is not.

The private sector creates the wealth that finances the public sector. Businesses invest, hire, export, innovate, and pay the taxes that sustain health care, pensions, infrastructure, defence, and social programs. Government has an indispensable role, but it cannot indefinitely distribute wealth that the economy has failed to produce.
It is politically expedient to blame Canada’s current economic predicament on Donald Trump. Tariffs, trade threats, and American protectionism create real risks and deserve a serious response.

But Trump did not create the Canadian industrial-policy failures that weakened our competitive advantage. He did not create years of weak business investment, slow permitting, costly regulation, inadequate infrastructure, unaffordable housing, poor productivity growth, or the habit of responding to every structural weakness with another subsidy.

Nor did Trump hollow out Canadian manufacturing on his own. China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization reshaped global trade, and Canadian industry absorbed a significant adjustment shock. Research has found that rising Chinese import competition was associated with substantial Canadian manufacturing job losses between 2001 and 2011. Recognizing that fact is neither extremist nor xenophobic. It is an economic observation. The irony is missed by the economic elite in Canada!

The United States is confronting two long-running vulnerabilities: its massive debt burden and the erosion of parts of its manufacturing base. That is what lies behind the renewed American emphasis on tariffs, procurement rules, reshoring incentives, subsidies, strategic supply chains, and national-security industrial policy. Canada may object to particular measures and should defend its interests firmly. But retaliation against this modern Hamiltonian turn is not a long-term dominant strategy.

The United States retains the world’s deepest capital markets, the reserve currency, enormous energy resources, global technology leaders, a vast domestic market, and military power.

Betting Canada’s economic strategy on Trump losing the Mid-terms is wishful thinking. This is a generational economic pivot.

Canada needs a modern Hamiltonian agenda of its own: not blanket protectionism, but national capacity.

That means competitive taxes, faster permits, reliable energy, infrastructure that gets products to markets, deeper capital markets, selective strategic procurement, and a country open to productive foreign investment.

Economic sovereignty is not achieved by announcing more programs in Ottawa. It is achieved when Canada can attract capital, build things, develop its advantages, and finance its own ambitions.

Our relationship with the United States remains central. Canada should not seek economic detachment from its largest market; it should seek to become indispensable to North America, as a supplier of energy, critical minerals, food, electricity, advanced manufacturing, and trusted technology.

Calling these arguments un-Canadian is not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to place them outside the Overton Window before Canadians can judge them on their merits.

[Conrad Black @ConradMBlack]

I never imagined I would live to see Spain, once so carefully restored to democratic respectability after Franco, reduced to this sorry spectacle.

An erratic demagogue whose entire family is under investigation or indictment for corruption now occupies the Moncloa. Pedro Sánchez, the spiritual heir of Zapatero’s disastrous experiment, did not win power at the ballot box; he engineered it through a parliamentary coup and now governs with a motley collection of communists, regional separatists and political adventurers.

He has perfected the art of appearing Europe’s great humanitarian while relying on underpaid migrants to staff the tourism industry that props up his economic growth numbers.

His foreign policy is equally grotesque: warmer relations with Iran, China and Venezuela than with Spain’s actual allies, a laughable defence budget, and a permanent posture of dissent inside NATO.

President Trump’s recent observation that the Spanish are a "great people governed by idiots" was accurate.

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

This is insane. A Toronto university teaching assistant publicly prayed for Jews to be slain “one by one” and for none to be spared.

The university fired him. The Muslim teaching assistant took the university to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, claiming that he was the victim of discrimination.

The tribunal awarded him $7,000 for injury to his “dignity, feelings and self-respect.” The adjudicator even characterized his prayer as a “human moment.”

To summarize Canada in 2026: calling for Jews to be murdered is a regrettable “human moment.” Being held accountable for those threats is a human rights violation.
https://t.co/7Ogofv2lRc

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

🤣🤣🤣

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

You miserable grifters. It was a landslide. There is zero evidence climate change played any role whatsoever. And Nepal could have used the billions USAID & the UN gave it to install cheap sensors and sirens but held “gender inclusion” workshops instead.

https://t.co/wEKFdxFSan

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

Tell this to the fairytale believers in Europe.

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

The „car of the people“ is now turning into the car of the past due to Volkswagen‘s struggle with reality. Volkswagen’s downsizing isn’t just about job cuts, it’s a long-overdue correction to a business model built for a different era. VW is losing its Chinese profit engine, as it loses its technological edge and pricing advantages. At home, sluggish European demand and overcapacity are compounded by stubbornly high German costs and trade barriers in the US. As EV and software investments demand heavy spending and premium brands fail to perform, the pressure becomes unbearable. Slow decision-making only amplified the cost of catching up, making these layoffs a delayed reckoning with an outdated business model.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

J’accuse – Why Nobody Writes It Anymore

In January 1898, a novelist accused the French state of framing an innocent officer. He put it on the front page of a Paris daily, four thousand words, names included – the general staff, the war ministry, the courts. Three hundred thousand copies sold that day: the first viral post in history, signed, with prison as the likely price. That was the point. He wanted the prosecution, because a trial would force the evidence into open court. It worked. He was convicted, fled to England, and the Republic eventually broke and reopened the case.

Now look around. The material for a dozen J’accuse letters is lying in the open, documented, uncontested. Nobody writes one. That absence is the subject – and it is not an absence of courage. It is a structural fact about what our societies have become.

1. First, the mechanics of why it worked. Zola needed three things: a name big enough that the accusation could not be ignored, a single publication that reached the whole nation in one morning, and a state that would prosecute him – thereby staging the trial he wanted. All three existed in 1898. None of the three exists now, and the third matters most.

2. Because today the system does not prosecute you. It ignores you – and if ignoring fails, it demonetizes, deplatforms, and lets the mob handle the rest. A trial is a stage; a shadowban is a hole in the ground. The modern accuser is not martyred. He is made irrelevant, which is the one fate no accusation survives. They learned the lesson of 1898: never give the man his courtroom.

3. Second, there is no front page left. Zola’s letter reached a nation in one morning because a nation still shared a morning. Now every accusation lands in a channel where half the readers already agree and the other half never see it. The J’accuse of 2026 was probably published last Tuesday, went viral inside one tribe, and changed nothing. Fragmentation does what censorship could never do: it lets you speak freely, in a room where speech has no consequences.

4. Third — and this is the deeper issue — Zola accused a system that still believed in innocence and guilt. The general staff lied because the truth would have destroyed them; that is a compliment to truth. Accuse a modern institution and it does not deny the facts. It contextualizes them. When there is no shared standard to violate, an accusation is just one narrative among others – and the systemic lie is not a system that fears exposure, but one that has made exposure ineffective.

5. Now the structural point, which is bigger than any scandal. Every society accumulates layers – networks, immunities, protected interests, positions that no longer answer to results. Left alone, the layers thicken until the society is administered by people it cannot remove, and merit is locked out by definition.

6. Which is why the accusation is not an accident of history but a maintenance function. Every few generations, the layers must be named, opened, and cleared – the elite rotated, the arrangement broken by someone willing to pay for saying it out loud. Pareto called it the circulation of elites. The J’accuse is how a civilization performs the rotation on purpose, in public, at the cost of one man’s career instead of a revolution’s corpses.

7. So the real news is not that we lack a Zola. It is that we have gone unusually long without a rotation, while the layers kept compounding – and the mechanism designed to clear them has been quietly disabled: no shared front page, no courtroom, no agreed standard of truth to violate. The West did not become less corrupt than 1898. It became better at absorbing the accusation.

The letter still needs writing. It will not run on a front page, and no one will prosecute the author – so it must be written knowing it earns nothing, which is a harder thing than Zola faced. He risked prison. We risk silence. And silence is worse, because prison at least admits that something was said.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

❤️🦉⚡️
https://t.co/Qn8oZKBuu5

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Voici le « miracle » argentin.

Tout économiste sérieux sait que ce n’est pas un miracle.

C’est ce qui se produit quand on arrête de mal allouer. Point.

En novembre 2023, 108 économistes — Piketty en tête — signent une lettre. Ils annoncent la dévastation, le chaos social, plus de pauvreté, plus d’inégalités. Des solutions « simplistes ». Un recul de l’espace politique. Le peuple allait payer.

Les faits, deux ans et demi plus tard :

Pauvreté : pic à 52,9 % au premier semestre 2024. 28,2 % au second semestre 2025. Plus bas depuis 2018.

Inflation : 211 % à environ 32 %.

Premier excédent budgétaire depuis des décennies. Deux années de suite.

Croissance de retour après la récession d’ajustement.

Ce n’était pas une prévision. C’était un réflexe.

La majorité de ceux qui crient encore à la catastrophe ne sont pas des savants trahis par un tableau Excel. Ils sont le produit d’un système académique qui, depuis longtemps, a cessé d’essayer de raconter le réel.

Il subventionne une structure morale. Le bien commun passe par le budget. Aider les pauvres, c’est dépenser plus. Couper, c’est haïr. La taille de l’État devient une preuve de vertu. Les données qui contredisent ça ne sont pas des données. Ce sont des hérésies.

Leur panique n’est pas technique.

Elle est existentielle.

Leur système de gabegie tient debout sur une croyance unique : « nous aidons les pauvres ». Sans cette phrase, plus de liturgie. Plus de légitimité à l’allocation par le haut. Plus de justification au train de vie des intermédiaires.

La réalité est plus sèche.

Ils maintiennent le système dans son état actuel.

Et ils endettent le pays pour financer ce train de vie — postes, cabinets, normes, récits, commissions, « services publics » qui allouent mal.

Quand quelqu’un coupe vraiment, que l’inflation cesse de manger les bas revenus, et que la pauvreté recule quand même, le décor tombe.

Il ne reste plus le bien commun.

Il reste le fromage.

Ce n’est pas Milei le scandale.

C’est l’équation. Compassion = points de PIB publics. Cette équation a fait plus de dégâts ici en quarante-cinq ans que la tronçonneuse n’en a fait là-bas en trois.

Les gens qui y croient ne sont pas des monstres. Ils ont un logiciel. Les mauvaises idées tuent d’abord ceux qui les portent.

Les bâtisseurs, eux, regardent les courbes. Ils n’ont pas besoin qu’on déclare persona non grata celui qui a arrêté de mentir sur le mécanisme.

Allez construire.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

I turn 50 today. This is a message to my kids but I offer it to you in case any of it rings useful.

I was born in Sri Lanka in 1976 in a country that, at the time, was about to enter a decades long civil war. My father was able to get stationed at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada for four years in the early 80s - when some of the fighting was most severe - and which from our vantage point in Canada gave us some respite from an otherwise omnipresent conflict.

He came as a diplomat but then my father filed for refugee status after four years when his life was threatened by militants. We stayed in Canada as refugees. My dad never really landed on his feet and we grew up on welfare.

My mom stepped up. She did an incredible thing and put our family on her back and kept marching forward. Sometimes the steps were very small but she always tried to keep moving forward.

I worked at Burger King starting at 14, giving my paycheck to my mom and dad to support our family in the role that I was assigned - earn enough to pay for our bus passes because we couldn’t afford a car.

I was a loser growing up. Some friends, some good memories but mostly forgettable and lonely. I wasn’t very studious but did get my act together in my final year and got into a great university.

I immigrated to the US soon after graduating and found an opportunity. Things clicked and I have been traveling a path to find myself ever since. Only in America is this possible…

I worked hard, followed the rules, paid my taxes and stayed in California out of loyalty for the opportunities it has given me despite its dysfunction.

I found my wife here. Had my kids here. Found my tribe here.

There have been some very hard times as well - deaths, divorce, financial pain, mistakes of omission and mistakes of commission. You can’t dwell on these things - they are weights that will pull you down if you’re not careful. Learn from them. Respect them. BUT MOVE ON.

To think 50 years ago I could have ever gotten a chance to meet the people I’ve met and have had the experiences I’ve had would have been mind boggling to my parents. It’s mind boggling to me now.

We forget often and try to convince others it’s not true but America truly is the best country in the world. Everything and anything is possible here. I can testify. Be grateful to be here.

This is the only place that gives EVERYONE a chance to live a great adventure. The first 50 years have been that for me - an incredible adventure.

Notice there is nothing here about accomplishments or money. Because it doesn’t matter and it won’t matter.

You will be dust in less than 100 years from now and the decision to be remembered won’t be yours so stop sweating it. It’s not in your control.

So what is in your control?

Be kind. Have fun. Work on something meaningful to you. Find your tribe. Try to find perspective. Find an incredible partner. Have a bunch of kids. Live an adventure. Forgive your parents - they were doing the best they could even if that wasn’t what you deserved.

I will do what I can to make my next 50 years a wild ride.

You should too.

I love you and thank you. ❤️

🙏🏽🙏🏽

[Internet_dad @DemanRobert]

@chamath Happy birthday 🎂