david evensky

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

“There is no greater indictment of judges than the fact that honest men are afraid to go into court, while criminals swagger out through its revolving doors.”

— Thomas Sowell

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

— Milton Friedman

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Thoughts?

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

A Palestinian Islamic preacher in Jerusalem sends a message to the ‘Queers for Palestine’ in the West:

“When Palestine is free, not a single homosexual will be allowed to live in our pure land.

Such perverted abominations will not be accepted among us!”

Happy Pride Month! 🇵🇸🏳️‍🌈

[David Harris @DavidHarrisNY]

My latest oped, in the venerable @Telegraph, on this consequential anniversary date in Middle East history.

“Fifty-nine years ago, Arab states sought to eliminate Israel. They’re still paying the price.” https://t.co/uxhzTgiY2l

[Natalie Ecanow @NatalieEcanow]

1/ I spent over a year documenting Qatar's financial footprint in the United States.

The number I found? $400 billion. That's roughly $1.2 million per Qatari citizen.

Here's what you should know. 🧵
https://t.co/0ho38eUx4t

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Be slow to judge. Some hidden talents may not be shown in the wrong places.

[Ayaan Hirsi Ali @Ayaan]

One of the oldest tricks in politics and media is to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator.

In my Saturday column for @RestoringWest, I argue that a civilization loses its moral bearings when it begins to sympathize more with abusers than with the innocent.

The defense of human dignity starts with the courage to name wrongdoing for what it is.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Victimhood has become a moral currency.

We’ve built a culture that ranks people by oppression, then mistakes that ranking for understanding. But people aren’t categories. They’re individuals.

And once you lose that, you stop seeing what actually drives success and better outcomes in the real world and instead promote mediocrity and grievance-mongering.

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

Thomas Sowell breaks down how most intellectuals think:

“The best definition I’ve heard is from Hayek—he says an intellectual is a ‘secondhand dealer in ideas.’”

“The vast majority of intellectuals don’t originate any ideas but they peddle ideas that other people have originated.”

“That gives them a great deal of freedom because ideas and words are so malleable. Reality is not malleable. So they can believe in all sorts of things which have no realistic possibility and which have failed time and again in history.”

“But because they know how to rephrase it and repackage it, they can just keep right on going.”

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

🚨 BREAKING: New report by UN Watch reveals UN “experts” accepted millions of dollars from China, Russia, and Qatar before attacking the U.S., Israel, and the West.

🧵 See the report’s most striking findings:

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Elon Musk: "Generally, whatever Milton Friedman said, people should do that thing."

[Dries Van Langenhove @DVanLangenhove]

These two paragraphs of my verdict are crucial for everyone to read and understand.

"Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” 1⃣

"For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law." 2⃣

This means you can go to jail for "inciting hatred" even if your statements were 100% factual (see 1⃣) and even if you did NOT incite concrete acts of hate (see 2⃣).

The benchmark of "inciting hatred" , a crime punishable by prison, is thus "saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group". This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.

The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn't care 1⃣. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter 2⃣, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone COULD be incited to "a general attitude of disapproval", this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.

I'm telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it's already too late. You will NEVER be able to beat these laws in court. You have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

💯

[Handre @Handre]

While Keynes blamed the Great Depression on market failures and demanded government intervention, Friedrich Hayek delivered the real explanation in his brilliant 1931 lectures "Prices and Production." The Austrian economist laid out precisely how central bank credit expansion creates unsustainable booms that must end in devastating busts.

Hayek explained that when central banks artificially lower interest rates below their natural market level, they distort the price signals that coordinate economic activity. Entrepreneurs receive false information about consumer preferences and available savings. They launch investment projects that appear profitable but consume resources that don't actually exist. The Fed had done exactly this throughout the 1920s, pumping credit into the economy and fueling the speculative mania that Keynes and his followers mistook for genuine prosperity.

The inevitable crash came in 1929 when reality reasserted itself. Malinvestments had to be liquidated. Workers had to move from unsustainable industries back to productive ones. Prices had to adjust to reflect actual supply and demand conditions. This painful but necessary correction process would have restored the economy to health relatively quickly.

Policymakers followed Keynesian logic instead. They propped up failing businesses, prevented wage adjustments, and launched massive government spending programs. President Hoover increased federal spending by 50% between 1929 and 1932. Roosevelt doubled down with the New Deal's alphabet soup of interventions. Each program delayed the natural healing process and prolonged the depression for over a decade.

Hayek's analysis stands vindicated by history while Keynesian demand management continues wreaking havoc through boom-bust cycles worldwide. The next time politicians promise to spend their way out of recession, remember who actually explained what went wrong in the 1930s.

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

Robert Nozick destroyed the intellectual case for the welfare state in a single book.
In 1974, he published Anarchy, State, and Utopia - one of the most powerful and philosophically rigorous defences of libertarianism ever written. It was a direct, devastating response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which had just provided the left with moral justification for massive redistribution.
Nozick argued that the only morally legitimate state is the minimal “night-watchman” state - limited exclusively to protecting individuals from force, fraud, and theft. Anything larger violates people’s fundamental rights.
He begins by showing why he believes pure anarchy is unsustainable: competing private protection agencies would naturally evolve into a single dominant agency that functions as a minimal state. He then proves, with merciless logic, why no more expansive state can ever be justified. Using his “entitlement theory” of justice, Nozick demonstrates that a distribution is just if it arises from voluntary exchanges and just initial acquisitions. Any attempt to impose a “patterned” outcome (like equality or Rawlsian fairness) requires constant coercive interference with peaceful, voluntary behaviour. His famous Wilt Chamberlain example makes the point crystal clear: if people freely pay to watch Chamberlain play basketball, the resulting inequality cannot be unjust - yet forcing “redistribution” to fix it clearly violates individual liberty.
Nearly fifty years later, Anarchy, State, and Utopia remains the sharpest challenge to every form of political paternalism. Individuals are not raw material for social engineers - they are ends in themselves.

[NOLLY @omoelerinjare1]

Eighty-year-old widow Eleanor Baker dined alone at Brad's Bar-B-Que in Oxford, Alabama.

Three young Black men—Jamario Howard, JaMychol Baker, and Tae Knight—noticed her and invited her to join them.

She accepted, and the four shared barbecue, fish, and friendly conversation. The men treated her like a grandmother.

Eleanor called it a “God thing,” especially as the next day marked what would have been her 60th wedding anniversary with her late husband.