lover of craft beer. Anti-insurrection pro-democracy. Conservative on environment, liberal on freedom. I write my own jokes... unless they write themselves.
Mike Rogers and Donald Trump think that their proximity to power is worth more than your ability to live your life.
It’s why we have to stand up to Bad Men…
The Cornell 7:
Matthew Ingalls
Johnathan Newell
Winston Lee
Gillio Lopes
Diego Sarabia
Scott Norris
Scott Kretzschmar
All 7 Chi Phi members are named as defendants in a civil lawsuit alleging they drugged a Cornell student with ketamine and sexually assaulted her for HOURS in 2024. The suit says a message advertising “free p***y” was sent to the frat group chat while she was incapacitated.
And "men" showed up to take him up on his offer.
And Cornell’s response? The lawsuit alleges some were given the opportunity to MITIGATE THEIR CONDUCT BY WRITING ESSAYS.
She left Cornell. 5 of them were ALLOWED TO CONTINUE THEIR EDUCATION AT CORNELL.
Remember their names and faces.
@aintscarylarry Beginnings of the Pretty Woman sequel right there! Except Julia Roberts has pumped out a litter of future delinquents and made it all the way to the People’s House.
The Buffett Paradox
I was 24 years old when Warren Buffett invited me to sit next to him at a minor league baseball game in Omaha, Nebraska.
It was the late 1990s and the Omaha Royals were playing at Rosenblatt Stadium during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting weekend.
Buffett sat to my right; people came up one after another. Autographs, pictures, handshakes.
In between, I peppered him with questions. Buffett was already one of the richest men in the world, however what interested me wasn’t his wealth. It was how he thought about capitalism.
Buffett believed the most important consideration was that capital should find good people.
Give trustworthy people control of good businesses and resources. Let them work. Let them create real value over long periods of time.
The product didn’t have to change the world, it could be Coca-Cola, it could be See’s Candy.
What mattered was whether the people running the company could be trusted to allocate capital intelligently.
Then we started talking about the estate tax. I thought I understood it. I didn’t.
Buffett didn’t describe the estate tax as a punishment for rich people. He didn’t even principally describe it as a way for the government to raise money.
He described it as critical part of the machinery of capitalism.
Capital must circulate to ensure society adapts and grows.
Europe had spent centuries building aristocracies in which enormous pools of wealth passed from one generation of a family to another and the continent had stagnated. America was built in direct rejection of this idea.
Buffett argued that America must be different. The people who created great fortunes had demonstrated an ability to allocate capital. (Monopoly and regulatory capture were not so prevalent at that time to make money.)
The children of the rich had demonstrated only that they had chosen their parents well.
He gave me an analogy I never forgot.
Imagine choosing the next Olympic team from the children of the current gold medalists. Maybe the fastest man’s son is fast, maybe his daughter is faster.
But there is no reason to believe either is the fastest person in America….so why would we assume that the child of a brilliant capital allocator is also the person best qualified to allocate billions of dollars? Especially when this allocation is a critical function?
Buffett’s argument was not against wealth. It was against an aristocracy that freezes the flow of capital to productive use.
Break up enough dynastic capital and the money has to compete again. (This also assumes a trustworthy government that doesn’t squander our tax money on war and fraudulent government contracts.)
The freed-up money finds the young entrepreneur, the engineer, the immigrant.
The kid nobody has heard of with an idea nobody understands yet. The hungry people.
That conversation changed how I understood the estate tax.
I stopped seeing it simply as a debate about taxation. I began seeing it as a debate about who gets the next chance.
Warren Buffett has spent his life arguing that capitalism works best when capital follows ability rather than bloodline.
He has also arranged for the overwhelming majority of his personal fortune to be given away rather than simply inherited by his children.
But now, at the end of one of the greatest careers in American capitalism, his son Howard is succeeding him as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.
There is an important distinction.
Howard Buffett isn’t taking over Warren’s job running the company. Greg Abel is CEO.
Howard’s role is different. Still, the symbolism is impossible to miss. The man who taught me that America should not choose its next economic leaders from the children of its previous winners—has chosen his son to guard the institution he built.
Maybe there is no contradiction, just something endearingly human.
But the larger principle he taught me that night remains more important than the irony. Healthy capitalism needs circulation, of money, of ownership, of opportunity, of power.
When capital stops circulating, capitalism begins hardening into something else. The people who inherit the money keep the money usually with limited productive use.
Children inherit the money, then they inherit the institutions and eventually they inherit the power.
That isn’t capitalism finding the best and brightest. That’s the very aristocracy America was created to reject.
I was 24 years old when Warren Buffett taught me the difference.
I never forgot it
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It's stunning when you realize exactly how many things trump f*cked up in less than 2 years.
HILARIOUS when a song nails it perfectly.
THIS IS BRILLIANT!!!🔥🔥🔥
Have y’all seen these AI deepfakes they’re making of me?
They don’t have any real attacks, so they’re firing up their data centers and making up fake ones.
I don’t need to use deepfakes. The truth about Ken Paxton is bad enough.
People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.
I took the UN's definition of corruption, turned it into eight criteria and 100 points, and scored the leaders history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin.
Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.
Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.
Trump's second term scored a 91, which ties him with Suharto and Mobutu and puts him above Marcos and Abacha.
So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.
PSA: don't come in my comments arguing about the results if you haven't read the full article, because ignorance is a choice.
Full article is up now on my Substack (link in bio) and it's free.
.@JamesTalarico: I wish our government would go after pedophiles like they go after brown men headed to work at 7 a.m.
I wish our government would close billionaire tax loopholes like they close our public schools.
I wish our government would fund healthcare like they fund forever wars in the Middle East.
We live in a country with broken politics and backwards priorities — but we can change that.
We can protect our immigrant neighbors and prosecute the Epstein class.
We can make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes, ensure every single child has access to a high-quality public education, and finally ensure that no American goes bankrupt just because they get sick.
WOW. Stephen Harper, a former Conservative prime minister of Canada and staunchly pro-American leader, is now calling for Canada to reduce its reliance on the United States
It will take decades to repair the damage Trump is doing to America’s alliances
For over 10 years, Trump has delegitimized elections through propaganda and lies. We must not fall for his antics as we get close to the midterms. The most important thing any of can do is reject his lies and turn out loudly and proudly.