BS

[BS @GasForLess13]

@damien_dollaz @iAmJoeSokol That scared the shit outta me! 😂

[BS @GasForLess13]

Long read, but spot on. 👍🏼

[AJ Inapi (Allan) @aj_inapi]

Older Americans, you already lived through this.

You were told globalization would make goods CHEAPER.

And it did.

But nobody told you the full price.

In 1979, America had roughly 19.6 MILLION manufacturing jobs.

Then the model changed.

During the 1980s and 1990s, American companies increasingly moved production overseas because labor and manufacturing costs were lower.

Consumers benefited.

TVs got cheaper.

Clothes got cheaper.

Electronics got cheaper.

Household goods got cheaper.

But then something else happened.

The factories in American towns started closing.

Steel.

Textiles.

Furniture.

Machinery.

Electronics.

Auto parts.

Jobs that once allowed someone without a four-year degree to buy a house, raise a family and retire disappeared.

Then came the major policy decisions.

1994: NAFTA took effect after being negotiated under President George H. W. Bush and implemented under President Bill Clinton.

2000: President Clinton signed Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China.

December 2001: China entered the WTO.

The argument was simple:

Open global markets.

Move production where it is cheapest.

Give American consumers cheaper products.

And perhaps greater economic integration would eventually change China.

That was the BET.

Then came what economists later called:

THE CHINA SHOCK.

Between 2000 and 2010, America lost almost 6 MILLION manufacturing jobs.

Not all because of China.

Automation mattered.

Technology mattered.

Recessions mattered.

But researchers estimate Chinese import competition contributed to roughly 2–2.4 MILLION American job losses from 1999–2011.

And here is what Washington missed.

A worker who lost a factory job Monday did NOT magically find an equally good job Tuesday.

Some towns never recovered.

Wages fell.

Communities declined.

Families were disrupted.

The economist said:

“The economy will adjust.”

The worker discovered:

I AM the adjustment.

Then America sold the next generation another idea:

GO TO COLLEGE.

The factory job your father had was disappearing.

So get a degree.

Borrow money.

Enter the new economy.

Student debt went from roughly $340 BILLION in 2001 to about $1.65 TRILLION today.

Think about that generational progression.

Grandfather:

Factory → paycheck → house → family.

Father:

Factory closes → economy restructures.

Son or daughter:

Borrow tens of thousands of dollars because now you need a degree to compete.

Meanwhile politicians in BOTH parties kept the basic globalization model moving.

Then COVID hit in 2020.

Suddenly America discovered that the cheapest supply chain isn't necessarily the safest supply chain.

Pharmaceuticals.

Semiconductors.

Medical equipment.

Critical minerals.

Electronics.

Industrial components.

So much had become dependent on production thousands of miles away.

President Trump had already begun challenging that model.

In 2018, he imposed major tariffs on Chinese goods.

Washington screamed:

TRADE WAR.

And yes, tariffs can raise costs.

That criticism is legitimate.

But President Trump was asking a fundamentally different question.

For decades Washington asked:

Where can we make this CHEAPEST?

President Trump asked:

What does America NEED to be able to make itself?

Then something interesting happened.

President Biden came in…

…and kept many Trump-era China tariffs.

Industrial policy returned.

Semiconductors became a national-security issue.

Critical minerals became a national-security issue.

Domestic manufacturing became a national-security issue.

Why?

Because the argument had changed.

Now President Trump is back.

And Americans are understandably looking at:

Gas.

Groceries.

Rent.

Insurance.

Interest rates.

Mortgage payments.

Those bills matter TODAY.

But underneath that noise, America is attempting something much bigger:

Rebuilding domestic manufacturing.

Rebuilding supply chains.

Expanding semiconductor production.

Expanding pharmaceuticals.

Expanding steel.

Expanding energy.

Expanding advanced manufacturing.

Companies including TSMC, Micron, Apple, NVIDIA, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Eli Lilly, Roche and Johnson & Johnson have announced major U.S. investments.

But understand this:

An announcement is not a factory.

Factories take YEARS.

Semiconductor fabs take YEARS.

Mines take YEARS.

Supply chains take YEARS.

Workforces take YEARS to rebuild.

So here's the contradiction.

America spent roughly 40 YEARS building this economic model…

Then expects President Trump to reverse it in roughly 20 MONTHS.

Read that again.

FORTY YEARS IN.

TWENTY MONTHS OUT.

You should criticize President Trump when policies fail.

Demand lower prices.

Demand results.

Demand accountability.

But also understand what is happening beneath the daily headlines.

America spent decades telling capital:

GO WHERE PRODUCTION IS CHEAPEST.

Now America is trying to tell capital:

BUILD IT HERE.

That transition was never going to happen overnight.

The real question isn't whether every Trump policy works.

Some won't.

The question is:

Twenty years from now, will Americans look back at this period as the moment the country finally understood that the CHEAPEST economy isn't always the STRONGEST economy?

Because millions of Americans already lived through what happened the last time Washington made that gamble.

They watched the factory close.

They watched the jobs leave.

They sent their children to college.

They watched the debt pile up.

And now America is trying to build some of it back.

That is the story underneath the noise.

[AJ Inapi (Allan) @aj_inapi]

The American political cycle:

1. Elect a President.

2. Expect decades of problems to be fixed in 12–24 months.

3. Get frustrated when everything is not immediately cheaper, safer and better.

4. Blame the President for everything.

5. Flip Congress.

6. Spend the next two years blocking, investigating and fighting.

7. Elect the next President promising to “fix” what the last one failed to finish.

8. Reverse half the previous administration’s policies.

9. Start over.

10. Get frustrated again.

11. Repeat.

12. Repeat.

13. Repeat.

Then wonder why major problems never get solved.

Debt keeps growing.
Infrastructure keeps aging.
Manufacturing gets hollowed out.
Energy policy swings back and forth.
Border policy changes every election.
Foreign policy gets rewritten every four years.

And somehow Americans expect long-term results from a system they keep forcing into short-term thinking.

Then eventually you hit old age, complain that “the country isn’t what it used to be,” and pass the same political habits to the next generation.

Then they repeat the cycle.

Elect.
Expect miracles.
Get angry.
Reverse course.
Start over.

Until somebody finally understands this:

You cannot build a 50-year national future with a 2-year attention span.

Why not FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFETIME, change it up.

Vote consistently for Republicans just like you did when President Trump was on the ballot in 2024 and zee if anything changes.

If not, you can go back to your old ways.

Remember what Albert Einstein said about the definition of "INSANITY?"

[AJ Inapi (Allan) @aj_inapi]

President Trump is not trying to win the next news cycle.

He is trying to change the structure of America.

That distinction matters.

Americans are rightly worried about groceries, gas, rent, mortgages and everyday costs.

But there is a bigger question:

What is this President actually trying to build?

Energy independence.
Manufacturing.
Trade.
Border security.
Defense.
Supply chains.
Government efficiency.
Foreign policy realignment.

These things do not change overnight.

A refinery takes years.
A factory takes years.
A supply chain takes years.
Major trade and geopolitical shifts can take even longer.

That is the difference between chasing applause today and building a legacy for tomorrow.

You can criticize President Trump.

You SHOULD hold him accountable.

But understand the strategy, the timeline and the intended outcome before judging every decision through a 24-hour headline.

Because politics today is an information war.

Politicians spin.
Media chase clicks.
Algorithms reward outrage.
People read three lines and think they understand the whole issue.

That is dangerous.

Take a few minutes every day to understand how government actually works.

Learn how policy moves.
Learn how long implementation takes.
Learn how energy, trade, debt and foreign policy eventually hit your household.

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE THE DIRECTION THE COUNTRY IS GOING.

You do not need to worship politicians or go to school to understand everything.

You need to become harder to manipulate.

Read.
Question.
Think.

God gave you a brain.

Use it.

[BS @GasForLess13]

@farman4x 96

[BS @GasForLess13]

@the_austin_hull Dude. Awesome.

[BS @GasForLess13]

@touseonx2 @adamblake Or you can kiss my ass...

[BS @GasForLess13]

Wow! This is so spot on.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

St. Augustine – The Difference Between Power and Civilization.

St. Augustine understood something about political power that modern civilization routinely forgets: a state is not made legitimate by its size, its laws, its institutions, or its ability to enforce them. What separates government from organized predation is justice.
Remove justice, and power remains – but legitimacy disappears. His argument is ultimately not about kings or pirates. It is about the principle that makes authority worthy of obedience, and the thin line between a political order and organized coercion.

1. Power and legitimacy are not the same thing. Power is the ability to make people obey. Legitimacy is the right to command. A tyrant can possess enormous power and no legitimate authority. A government can control every institution in the country and still be fundamentally unjust. The existence of political authority does not prove its legitimacy. Government does not create justice. Justice sets the moral limits of government.

2. Justice is what transforms power into authority. Every functioning society needs coercion: laws must be enforced, criminals restrained, contracts protected. The question is not whether force exists, but what that force serves and what limits it. A just state uses coercion to defend an order in which people can live together. An unjust state increasingly uses the same machinery to protect the interests of those controlling it.

3. Legality cannot be the ultimate measure of justice. A government can make almost anything legal if it controls the lawmaking process. If something is legitimate simply because it is legal, then the state becomes the sole judge of its own legitimacy. That is circular. Law is supposed to constrain power, not merely formalize whatever power decides to do. A perfectly legal injustice remains an injustice.

4. Institutions can make power harder to see. The ancient tyrant arrives with soldiers. The modern state often arrives with forms, procedures, regulations and administrative language. Nobody appears to be exercising arbitrary power because everyone is simply "following the rules." But procedure does not make an outcome just. And when responsibility is distributed across thousands of people, everyone can participate in injustice while nobody feels responsible for it. Power is most dangerous when it no longer looks like power.

5. This is why civilization needs principles above the state. If nothing stands above political power — no civilizational law, no fundamental rights, no moral order — then there is ultimately no principled limit to what government may do. Politics becomes a struggle for control of the machinery. Whoever captures the state gets to redefine the rules, the rights and eventually the meaning of justice itself. When power becomes the source of morality, politics becomes war by other means.

6. Civilization is therefore not the absence of force. It is the subordination of force to justice. It is not simply having government, but having government constrained by principles that government itself cannot casually rewrite. It is not stability at any price. A perfectly stable tyranny is still a tyranny. The real achievement is creating an order in which those who wield power are themselves subject to something higher than their own power.

7. And that is Augustine’s civilizational lesson. Every political order eventually faces the same choice: will power serve a moral order, or will the moral order be rewritten to serve power? The names change – kingdom, republic, empire, democracy. The institutions change. The technology changes. The principle does not.

Remove justice, and the state becomes merely a larger version of the gang.

Civilization begins where power accepts that there are things it may not do – even when it can.

[Pincel de Dios @Martin_Xito]

@AmoaHamlet Excelente análisis. Agregaría que hay solo dos tipos de zurdos. El líder que quiere llegar al poder por ambición, y el idiota útil que ayuda en el proceso a puro sentimiento.
El primero a base de dscurso y labia, el segundo sin cuestionamientos, a pura rebeldía hueca...

[Diego Angulo @AmoaHamlet]

Durante mi militancia en el marxismo asistí a muchísimas charlas. Y con el tiempo empecé a notar un patrón muy interesante:

Podíamos pasar diez horas hablando de cómo tomar el poder.

Diez horas hablando de revolución, de estrategia, de organización, de activismo, de cómo derrotar al enemigo de clase, de cómo transformar las relaciones de poder.

Pero había una pregunta que nunca aparecía:

¿Y después qué?

Es decir:

¿Cómo vamos a crear riqueza?

¿Cómo vamos a organizar los incentivos?

¿Cómo vamos a asignar recursos escasos?

Silencio.

Y fue ahí cuando lo entendí.

El marxismo tiene una obsesión patológica con conquistar el poder y una pobreza extraordinaria de respuestas sobre cómo utilizarlo para construir una sociedad funcional.

La revolución está perfectamente descrita.

La sociedad posterior, en absoluta oscuridad.

Porque decir que algún día llegará una sociedad sin explotación, sin clases y sin contradicciones es muy fácil.

Lo difícil es explicar cómo llegas hasta ahí sin destruir en el camino los mecanismos que permiten a una sociedad producir y prosperar.

Y cuanto más preguntaba, más evidente se volvía.

El marxista podía explicarte durante horas quién tenía la culpa.

Pero cuando preguntabas cómo funcionaría concretamente esa nueva sociedad, las respuestas se hacían más oscuras.

Y quizá por eso, cuando intentaba ahondar en estos temas, la conversación siempre volvía al mismo lugar: cómo tomar el poder. No pasaban de eso.

Por eso hoy, cuando escucho a alguien hablar durante horas sobre la explotación, destruir el sistema y construir una sociedad nueva, mi primera pregunta es:

¿Cómo vas a hacerla funcionar?

Nunca verás a un marxista responderte esto porque literalmente no puede, no sabe.

Entonces deduce que, al igual que como con cualquier otra estafa piramidal, cuando hagas preguntas directas y concretas al marxismo, este intentará evitar en todo momento darte respuestas claras.

Nunca lo olvides.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

They made a list. Everything on it had one thing in common: it worked.

What they set out to deconstruct (destroy):

Marriage – ridiculous.
The father – superfluous.
Motherhood – alienating.
The child – a political subject to liberate.
The family – a power structure.
Transmission – domination.
Inheritance – injustice.
Truth – just another narrative.
Reason – a Western construct.
Science – one story among many.
Beauty – violence disguised as proportions.
Merit – privilege in disguise.
Standards – oppression.
Discipline – trauma.
The nation – an invention.
Borders – wounds.
Faith – superstition.
Manhood – toxic.
Womanhood – undefinable.
Childhood – a territory to open.
The past – a crime scene.
Reality itself – only power, all the way down.

Read the list again. Not one failure on it. No one deconstructed famine, tyranny, or disease. They aimed exclusively at what held – the structures selected by centuries of trial, paid for in famines, wars, and extinct family lines. The load-bearing walls, every single one.

Fifty years later, the results: collapsing birth rates, men and women who can’t stand each other, children without a compass, institutions that can’t define a woman.

The deconstruction worked. Everything it touched stopped working.

They had their fifty years. Now we compile again.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Dear socialist friend,

Nothing is stopping you.

If collective ownership works so much better, you can prove it by next Tuesday. Pool your savings with your comrades. Elect a planning committee. Run a bakery, a farm, a repair shop – shared ownership, equal pay, decisions by vote. All of it is fully legal, today, everywhere in the West. No revolution needed.

And yet.

You want the workers to seize the factories – but you won’t open a food truck with three people from your group chat. You demand collective housing – but you won’t sign a joint lease with people who agree with you about everything.

People have tried voluntary socialism for two hundred years. The communes keep dissolving – the members simply walk out. The only socialist countries that lasted were the ones that locked the borders.

That’s the whole story. Where leaving is allowed, everyone leaves. Socialism only survives where leaving is banned. The people voted – on foot.

Just do it. Or admit that "collective" was always just a word for other people’s property.

[BS @GasForLess13]

@DrHalPHD @BNODesk Must not be a PhD in the sciences...🤡

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

https://t.co/RlF9Lno0ZU

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Markets penalize and eliminate failures, while government preserves and expands them. Milton Friedman explains:

“The problem with government is the absence of any mechanism for recognizing errors. What the private system abounds in is survival of the fittest.”

“What the governmental system abounds in is expansion of the mistakes. There is no mechanism for eliminating governmental agencies which are no longer needed or have behaved perversely.”

[BS @GasForLess13]

@AnneErickson TOOL

[Handre @Handre]

Hayek and Keynes met in person, debated in print, and disagreed on nearly everything that matters in economics, and the consequences of that disagreement are still bleeding out of your tax bill today.

The clash crystallized in 1931. Hayek arrived at the London School of Economics from Vienna, the University of London had just given him a visiting position, and his four-part review of Keynes's Treatise on Money appeared in Economica. Keynes fired back. Both men were brilliant, both were prolific, and both understood that they were fighting over something fundamental: whether market prices carry real information, or whether a wise technocrat with a budget deficit can simply override them. Hayek said prices are signals produced by millions of individual decisions that no single mind can replicate. Keynes said the economy is a machine and the state can tune the throttle. One of these positions respects human knowledge. The other assumes the government knows your business better than you do.

The irony Keynes fans never want to confront: Keynes himself, by 1946, was alarmed at where Keynesian policy was heading. He told Henry Clay at the Bank of England that he hoped markets would reassert themselves before his own ideas "did too much damage." He died that April. His followers immediately ignored the warning and spent the next three decades engineering the stagflation of the 1970s, the Nixon wage-price controls of 1971, and the general wreckage that Hayek had predicted with embarrassing precision in 1931.

Hayek won the Nobel in 1974. The prize committee gave it to him alongside Gunnar Myrdal, a committed social democrat, because they lacked the nerve to award a free market thinker alone. Even in Stockholm, the state needs a security blanket.

The deeper issue is moral, not just technical. Every time a government "stimulates" the economy, it does so by extracting resources from producers through taxation or debasing the currency through credit expansion. The state is not a benevolent engineer: it is an institution that compels compliance at gunpoint, then calls the wealth they exctacted "revenue." The pretense of knowledge is not merely an intellectual error, but the philosophical license for coercion. Every stimulus package passed since 2008 proves the lesson is still being refused.

[Handre @Handre]

You require a photo ID to board a plane, open a bank account, buy a firearm, or collect a prescription. Yet in dozens of American states, you walk into a polling booth and simply declare your name. The state trusts you completely there, and nowhere else.

State actors designed this system deliberately. An unverifiable voter roll serves political machines extraordinarily well. Lyndon Johnson stole his 1948 Texas Senate primary through ballot stuffing so brazen that county clerks submitted votes in alphabetical order. The mechanism was identical: no verification, total trust in the party apparatus counting the votes.

Institutions without accountability corrode. Elections without identity verification are a property rights problem: your legitimate vote gets diluted by fraudulent ones, and you have no legal recourse. Your individual political stake gets stolen quietly.

The state calls voter ID "suppression" while simultaneously mandating ID for food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing. The coercion apparatus protects itself first.

[BS @GasForLess13]

@phertret @DabblerLtd @jeffreytucker @grok @naomirwolf Lol

[Daniel Lacalle Official Account @dlacalle_IA]

Most of what young people blame on “capitalism” is actually the result of statism: big government; monetary debasement; regulation that blocks housing supply; taxes that punish work and investment; and political privilege that protects insiders.

Young people are not victims of free markets. They are victims of a big government system in which political spending rules, central banks subsidize debt instead of promoting price stability, savings, and prudent investment, and bureaucrats decide who gets opportunities.

More government will not solve any of it.

https://t.co/FD5eABY8Yl