Zugzwang

Swamp draining is difficult. Persistence is the key. MAGA. MAHA. No DMs.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

After going through a similar experience, I came to regard public school systems as similar to a mafia. They’ll do anything to shut down competition. I have no romance regarding public education.

[MAGA Voice @MAGAVoice]

HOLY SH*T: In case you missed it: Nick Shirley just ENDED Tim Walz’s whole career in 26 seconds 🔥

KEEP EXPOSING EVERYTHING

[Michael. 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 @TexasMichael42]

@dandinohill We have got to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to selecting Senators by State Legislatures, subject to recall at any time. Don’t know how but that needs to go.

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

Muchos argumentan que la mayoría de los países que permiten la reelección indefinida de su jefe de Gobierno son “democracias parlamentarias”, y resulta interesante que presenten ese sistema como superior.

El simple hecho de agregarle la palabra “democracia” como adjetivo no lo convierte automáticamente en un sistema más democrático. De hecho, una de sus principales características es que el pueblo no elige directamente a su jefe de Gobierno; llámese Primer Ministro, como en el Reino Unido; Presidente, como en España; o Canciller, como en Alemania. Es el partido político, o la coalición de partidos, quien lo designa.

Ese mismo partido puede removerlo y sustituirlo por otra persona, incluso por alguien que la población apenas conozca o por quien jamás haya votado directamente.

Ese sistema puede funcionar bien o mal. Puede ser sumamente exitoso o no. Ese sería otro debate. Pero, por definición, no es más democrático que la elección directa del jefe de Gobierno por parte del pueblo, entendiendo la democracia en su sentido esencial: el poder del pueblo.

En segundo lugar, algunos alegan que la reelección indefinida viola la Constitución salvadoreña. Sin embargo, la Constitución fue reformada por una supermayoría legislativa, otorgada democráticamente por el pueblo salvadoreño en las urnas.

Además, nuestras elecciones han sido observadas por miles de representantes internacionales. Ningún organismo multilateral, ni un solo país del mundo, ni de izquierda ni de derecha, ha declarado que no hayan sido elecciones libres, transparentes y democráticas.

Al final, cada pueblo elige su propio camino.

Existen países con monarquías hereditarias, y nosotros no tendríamos por qué molestarnos por ello. Son sus países y ese es el sistema que han decidido tener. En otros hay emperadores, príncipes, sultanes, emires, presidentes, primeros ministros, etc.

Y prácticamente todos los países han modificado sus constituciones. En muchos casos, esos cambios ocurrieron mediante guerras, golpes de Estado o procesos violentos; no por medio de una fiesta cívica en las urnas, como lo hicimos los salvadoreños.

Todos tendrán su opinión. Al final, serán los resultados los que determinarán si los salvadoreños elegimos un buen camino y, sobre todo, si elegimos uno mejor que el que llevábamos antes.

Dios los bendiga y ojalá también encuentren su camino.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Anthropic says AI can become better than humans at “essentially everything” — except things like food prep and elder care, which reveals Anthropic’s view of service jobs as “essentially” nothing — the perspective of elites who look down on low-wage workers.

[Overton @overton_news]

Chamath Palihapitiya concedes that CNBC’s Joe Kernen was “100% right” about President Trump.

Palihapitiya went even further, calling Trump “very smart” and a “great president.”

KERNEN: “You said I was 100% right on climate change.”

PALIHAPITIYA: “You were 100% right on climate change.”

KERNEN: “What about Trump?”

PALIHAPITIYA: “You’re 100% right on Trump. He’s fantastic!”

KERNEN: “Great person?”

PALIHAPITIYA: “Unbelievable person. Very smart on top of it. Open minded. Debates with you.”

KERNEN: “Great president?”

PALIHAPITIYA: “Great president, so far.”

@chamath

[Dennis Kneale @denniskneale]

WTF @Apple and @Google? Shame on you both. .@TomFitton

[CONSTITUTION X 🇺🇸 @ConstitustionX]

🚨 BOOM! Stephen Miller just TORCHED CNN live 🔥
CNN: “This is an undocumented migrant…”
Miller: “Were they here ILLEGALLY?”
CNN: “I want this to be a good faith discussion…”
Miller: “When you use language designed to obscure the truth, that’s NOT good faith. An ILLEGAL ALIEN is an ILLEGAL ALIEN. They’re not an ‘undocumented migrant.’
Why is this so damn hard for the media to understand?
Call them what they are — ILLEGAL ALIENS — or stop pretending it’s a “good faith” conversation!
America is DONE with the word games.
🔥 RT if you’re sick of the lies! Tag a friend who needs to see this! 🇺🇸

[Zugzwang @everyoneknows45]

@BLS_gov Mostly plunging gas price. But that was June. Now is July, and the party in Hormuz is back on.

[BLS-Labor Statistics @BLS_gov]

CPI for all items falls 0.4% in June; gasoline down #BLSData https://t.co/mI1WBYOqMt

[Owen Gregorian @OwenGregorian]

It can’t be incompetence when we have Democrat governors trying to pass laws to stop the fraud from being investigated.

And telling their staff not to look into it when the fraud is brought to their attention.

[Vincent Horatio Tortelli 🇬🇱 🇵🇼 🇳🇷 @TortelliVinnie]

@RazorFist Software is only as good as the people who wrote it.

AI is only as good as the data it's fed.

Why has there been such a push to eliminate "disinformation" from the internet?

It's to ensure we're feeding AI core data that aligns with the beliefs of lunatics.

[Stefan Schubert @StefanFSchubert]

Both follow a model that’s shockingly easy to summarise: full-blown socialism leading to low GDP, which gives room for a lot of catch-up growth as soon as you start becoming a bit less socialist

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau

He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease.

1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible.

2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build.

3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy.

4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won.

5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine.

6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg.

7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s.
Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan.

[Overton @overton_news]

This is the moment President Trump was referring to.

Here are four and a half minutes of Senator Lindsey Graham delivering a scorching defense of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

At the end of a particularly thrilling and rollicking meeting in the Oval Office, Lindsey Graham turned to the room and said: “I’ve never had this much fun in my life.”

I cannot describe to you how much joy President Trump’s leadership and friendship brought to Lindsey. Meetings with Graham at the White House were filled with camaraderie, kinship and uproarious laughter.

As heartbreaking as his sudden passing is, I hope it will bring some measure of comfort to those who cherished him to know just how much he was living his dream every day. Very rarely in life do you get to be exactly where you want to be, when you want to be there, with who you want to be with, doing precisely what you want to do — that was every moment for Lindsey.

When President Trump won in Nov 2024, Lindsey was exultant. Elated. And determined. He couldn’t wait to spearhead work, as the Budget Chairman, on the reconciliation bill that would cement President Trump’s most important campaign promises. I’ll never forget the senate lunch, when a couple Senators were a tad off the program, and Lindsey — in his inimitable way — made sure everyone was onside by the time we left. It was a glorious thing to witness. He knew how to move a room.

Lindsey was a senator’s senator. The job was everything to him. Truly did he believe in the splendor of the office and the noble lineage behind it, of which he was the worthy heir.

He was a senator in the mold of those who fashioned the institution, someone who still had the ability, in a heated exchange, to use rhetorical power to change the course of events.

Which is why we will never forget his legendary Kavanaugh moment. We rarely think that we are out of time with our friends, so while there is a lot more I wish I could have said to Lindsey, I am glad that more than once I told him what that moment meant to the whole nation and why he was the only Senator who could have done it with such utter perfection.

Most importantly, I had the chance to tell him on many occasions what his friendship meant to me and to us all. There was never once a time he didn’t answer a phone call and lend whatever assistance was required. It was never a question with Lindsey. He believed deeply in the code of friendship and loyalty.

The fact that Lindsey started out as a political opponent only to become one the President’s most steadfast and faithful supporters underscores that Lindsey believed emphatically in the voice of the people.

There is a lot more I would like to say. His passing, at a time when he had never been more dynamic, is as unexpected as it is shocking. In many respects, Lindsey was the last of a breed of American Senator whose like we may not yet see again for a long time.

He lived every minute in the arena, a political gladiator to the very last.

More than anything now, our thoughts are with his Sister, nieces and loved ones.

We pray that God will ease their sorrow and heal their pain.

Lindsey can never be replaced and will never be forgotten.

Godspeed, my friend.

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

The only reason why nuclear power is expensive is because of compliance regulations, which you and the rest of your colleagues in Congress have the power to change.

Nuclear fission reactors / power plants are incredibly cheap in to build China, where they’re building reactors for $2.50 USD / watt. Wind is a loser that cannot power industrialized societies.

[Tony Jacob | FindaClip.com @tonjkb]

Rupert Lowe explains what happened to Lebanon when the Muslim population went over 15%

"When Lebanon got its independence in 1948. They were a Christian country and they were a very confident country. They had the best universities. They had a very open society. I never went to Beirut. I don't know if you went to Beirut, but Beirut in the 60s was meant to be the best place on earth to be. Great wine, freedom, very enlightened. It was a great place; lots of people were there.

The minute that the Muslim population went over about 15%, you started to get a problem with a civil war. You got the Druze and Maronite Christians in a civil war with the Muslims. And now Lebanon is a Muslim country, and Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is effectively running the show."

[Mi-Nerva @RenaF214]

Wisst ihr, ich war mit 18 auch links. Hab „Free Nelson Mandela“ mitgesungen und fest daran geglaubt, die Linke wäre die gute Seite....

Die meisten von uns, die heute konservativ oder rechts sind, waren früher keine Rechten mit Glatzen und Bomberjacken....

Wir waren ganz normale junge Menschen, die idealistisch waren...

Irgendwann wird man allerdings erwachsen. Man sieht, wie die Welt wirklich funktioniert , wie sie wirklich funktioniert....

Und man erkennt, dass das, was heute als „rückständig“ verschrien wird – eine intakte Familie, gemeinsame Mahlzeiten am Tisch, echte Zeit miteinander – eigentlich das Wertvollste ist, was es gibt...

Einen schönen Tag euch allen ❤️💙