Mark Hortin

Husband, Dad, Grandpa, Farmer, Golfer, Illini & Texas A&M Aggie Fan, and all around nice guy!

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Citizen Legislators!!!

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Yeah, but wait till you see more government run grocery stores!

[Handre @Handre]

The Space Launch System costs $4.1 billion per launch. One launch.

NASA's own inspector general confirmed that number. Boeing builds the core stage. Northrop Grumman builds the solid rocket boosters. Aerojet Rocketdyne supplies the engines. Every one of those contracts flows to congressional districts where senators sit on the appropriations committees that fund NASA. Coincidence?

Congress mandated the SLS in 2010 because the cancellation of the Constellation program threatened to idle the same workforce and facilities that had built the Space Shuttle. Senators Richard Shelby and Bill Nelson wrote the requirement directly into the authorization bill. They protected Alabama and Florida jobs. The politics drove the rocket, not engineering logic.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy lifts comparable payload for roughly $90 million. The SLS costs forty-five times more per flight. That gap destroys you as a taxpayer; you fund the difference without consent and without choice. No competitive bid. No market test. Boeing received cost-plus contracts, meaning every overrun simply became next year's invoice to the Treasury.

Ludwig von Mises identified the central problem: when bureaucracies spend other people's money on other people's projects, waste is the predictable outcome, not the aberration. Congress spent $23 billion developing the SLS before its first launch in November 2022. It launched twice total by mid-2026, with the third mission schedule slipping repeatedly.

The SLS is a constituency management program wearing a rocket as a costume.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Hero in every sense! When my wife told me plane had hit north tower, I immediately thought about 1993.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

A Hero That Trusted His Intuition.

The problem wasn’t that Morgan Stanley didn’t believe him.

Rick Rescorla had already been right once. After the 1993 basement bombing of the World Trade Center, the firm’s security chief walked the towers, studied the site, and reached a conclusion most people preferred not to hear: the World Trade Center was still a target. Next time, he said, it would not be a truck. It would be an airplane.

An airplane. In a 1993 report.

Executives listened. Then they looked at the lease.

Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the complex—twenty-two floors of the South Tower, thousands of brokers, and a trading infrastructure that could not be packed into boxes and wheeled across the Hudson.

They literally made it a trading center.

The contract with the Port Authority ran until 2006. Walking away from premium Manhattan space of that scale would have meant penalties measured in the hundreds of millions, plus the operational chaos of relocating an entire downtown machine. So the company stayed.

Rescorla adjusted. If they could not leave the building, they would learn to escape it.

He built a protocol and treated it like doctrine. Unannounced drills. No exemptions. Brokers who billed by the minute were pulled off their desks and sent into the stairwells two by two, starting from the top floors, leaving a lane for firefighters coming the other way.

People complained. He did not care. Practice, he believed, was the only thing that would beat panic.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower. From the 44th floor of the South Tower, Rescorla could see the fire. Then the Port Authority came over the speakers: the South Tower was secure. Stay at your desks.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and ignored them.

He started the drill his people already knew by heart. Floor by floor, two by two, down the stairs. He sang as he moved—Cornish songs from childhood, then “God Bless America”—keeping the line moving, refusing to let the stairwell become a stampede. Seventeen minutes later, the second plane struck the South Tower.

By then, most of Morgan Stanley was already on the way out.

Of the 2,687 employees in the building that morning, all but 13 survived.

It was stunning.

Rescorla could have been outside with them. He went back up instead. Colleagues told him to leave. He said he would, as soon as he was sure no one was left behind.

He was last seen around the 10th floor, heading higher.

The South Tower fell at 9:59 a.m. They never found him.

He was one of the 13.

He was a hero in every sense of the word.

Remember Rick Rescorla, he remembered for us.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Great work Dims, but I think intentions were good, just misguided from ignorance of economics and history.

[Handre @Handre]

Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.

When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.

Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.

Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@BuzzPatterson 80's were morning in America awesome and I was just a poor college & 1st job kid. America was most obviously on the move upward!

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Bud Light Fox News! Going to miss Brian, Lawrence, and Jesse, but enough's enough and last straw for this long time viewer. Maria didn't deserve this treatment as she's a rock solid star!

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Bingo, bango, bongo and think about often. Captalism's victories so successful nobody notices. I do and am always thankful! Socialism pushing American fools don't!

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar.

Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million.

On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA.

Now look at their sons.

All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine.

One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different.

But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest.

The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes.

Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it.

The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much.

For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing.

This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water.

Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone.

Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else.

And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them.

Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children.

Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them.

What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood.

But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened.

Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous.

Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see.

Equality of income? Obviously not.

Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day?

Far more than we admit.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@Chicago1Ray Budlighting unless they have more riveting coverage on Nancy Gunthrie's disappearance.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@VinnysCorner1 Yep

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just delivered the most important defense of America First Nationalism and indictment of Globalism I've ever heard

“We made a terrible mistake in this country — many years ago… that the ability to make things no longer mattered… Now, we are involved in an endeavor across the board to try and reverse those mistakes.”

For decades, Washington embraced globalization while factories disappeared, industrial capacity moved overseas and America became increasingly dependent on its greatest competitors for things we NEED.

America won the Cold War — then made decisions that surrendered enormous pieces of the economic and industrial strength that helped us win it.

Borders matter, American workers matter, independence matters.

Now the mission is reversing those mistakes.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Oh Canada!

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

Canada won the lottery of geography and somehow turned the ticket into a government permit application.

The country sits on the fifth-largest oil and natural-gas reserves on Earth. It has timber, metals, minerals, educated workers, a peaceful border, access to the richest consumer market in history, and the American military guarding the continent.

That is an absurd starting hand.

Ottawa still found a way to play it like shit.

Justin Trudeau spent years wrapping energy development in green tape while Canada leaned harder on American markets. Defense spending lagged. Immigration exploded. Roughly 45 percent of Canadian residents are now foreign-born or the children of immigrants, while elites seriously entertained a “Century Initiative” to shove the population toward 100 million.

More people. More welfare demands. More pressure on housing and services. Meanwhile, the country quietly dropped the old expectation that newcomers should melt into a common national culture.

Then America started pulling away.

America became the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. American technology dominates entire industries. U.S. GDP now sits roughly $10 trillion above either China or the European Union. Washington started rebuilding its military and asking allies to carry their own damn weight.

Enter Mark Carney.

He can pick fights with Trump, complain about American pressure, and wave the maple leaf while Canadians cheer the resistance.

Fine.

The arithmetic still sits there.

Canada has resources most countries would kill for, the safest neighborhood on the planet, and a gigantic wealthy customer living next door. Its political class spent years treating those advantages like problems requiring regulation.

That kind of decline takes effort.

Canada chose it.

Now it gets to watch America leave it behind and bitch about the view.
(article below)

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Genius vs. Fools. So thankful every day that Elon bought Twitter criminal censorship enterprise. Best source for honest news now.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Here’s just a few of the “geniuses” who declared that “Elon destroyed Twitter” after he purchased this site.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@GuntherEagleman True media talent will be greatly missed.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@lunadreaamy 81

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

Nailed to cousin!

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

n 1919, days before he died, Theodore Roosevelt wrote:

“If the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else… But this is predicated upon the person becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all.

We have room for but one flag, the American flag

We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…

and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

Equal rights. Undivided loyalty.
Did Teddy nail it?

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@FarmGirlCarrie City filled with foreign born and those with suicidal empathy?

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@farman4x 96?

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@atensnut Reading about the Barbary Pirates in history started it for me.

[Mark Hortin @IlliniAggie]

@ConservativeTht @AOC @KathyHochul Now add a Covid mask and she'll look even more attractive. Guys and women for Islam! Can't make it up.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Satellite images reveal the colossal scale of our water planet and its endless oceans.

All the oceans, lakes, rivers, and glacial ice combined occupy 75% of the Earth's surface. It is the brooding inertia of the oceans that forms the ancient engine room of global climate—a massive fluid flywheel that dwarfed human industrial activity long before our first chimneys began to smoke.

The oceans have an average depth of 2.3 miles and weigh 1,000 times more than the atmosphere. Deep ocean currents dictate levels of water vapor and cloud cover across 68% of the skies at any given moment, while the interplay of seas, landforms, and latitude drives the trade winds and storm tracks.

Crucially, the oceans hold 86% of the world's carbon reservoir and 91% of its mobile heat energy, which currents transport toward the frigid poles to temper the planet’s cold extremes. The thin envelope of atmosphere above holds only a fraction of a percent of each.

Because of this tremendous thermal capacity, the oceans don't react on political timelines; they absorb, smooth and delay thermal changes over centuries, acting as a planetary buffer against rapid atmospheric shocks.

We live in an ocean-dominated, ice-age world. Earth is still technically in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, which began 34 million years ago with the glaciation of Antarctica. Roughly 10% of the world's total land area remains permanently capped by glacial ice—spanning 15 million square kilometres.

Antarctica alone holds roughly 90% of global ice volume and stands as the largest single source of freshwater on Earth. Spanning 14 million square kilometers—8.3% of the world's land surface—its ice sheet extends up to 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) deep.

All human civilisation, agriculture and technological progress—every written word, every skyscraper—unfolded within the past 11,700 years of the warm Holocene interglacial period. This brief warm period is merely one episode among more than 30 glacial and interglacial cycles over the broader Quaternary Glaciation of the last 2.58 million years.

Today's modest warming of 1.1°–1.4°C over 250 years is an incremental drift within a vast geological system. The world is not enduring stifling heat reminiscent of past hothouse peaks; instead, we inhabit a benign global average temperature of 15°C—well below the 18°C to 26°C baselines that characterised most of Earth’s biological history. Deep time puts modern atmospheric alarm out of sync with physical reality.

Yet, ignoring this vast planetary flywheel, global policy over the last four decades shifted from managing tangible conservation to attempting economic micro-management of the atmosphere itself. Led by an alignment of unelected powerbrokers, financial institutions, and corporate leaders, the narrative demanded an immediate, total restructuring of human infrastructure.

Nations were urged to replace energy-dense coal, oil, and gas with intermittent wind turbines and solar collectors. Yet after 40 years of heavy subsidies and mandates, hydrocarbon fuels still supply 81% of all global primary energy, while wind and solar account for just 6.5%.

Attempting to engineer a complete retreat from high-density fuels while ignoring the sheer physical scale of the earth system carries a staggering cost. The predicted price tag to transform the global grid and force this transition stands at $275 trillion (McKinsey, 2022)—roughly 2.5 times total global annual GDP.

It represents an unprecedented financial commitment to re-engineer civilisation, driven by an economic plan that continuously underestimates the vast physical realities of the planet it seeks to control.