Mark Ingram

Rock singer, Microsoft/Google/AWS IT evangelist / author, digital nomad

[Mollie @MZHemingway]

Wait, are you telling me that the NYT’s Jodi Kantor is a hack partisan activist and not a real journalist? I’m learning this for the first time.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

BRUTAL: Stephen A. Smith just told Democrats to “SHUT UP” and stop “bitching” about voter ID.

“You should have a damn ID [to vote]. You need an ID for every damn thing else.”

“And to the progressive left, shut the hell up!”

“You got a mayor in New York City that required TWO IDs for you to shovel snow.”

“You ain’t in no position to be bitching about how [Trump] wants IDs and the GOP wants IDs for votes. Shut up! Nobody wants to hear that.”

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The American Psych. Assoc. says therapy is “effective,” but Americans diagnosed with depression rose from 20% to 30% since 2015, while the number of Americans in therapy rose from 17 to 22 million. Victimhood ideology and the valuing of feelings over virtue are to blame.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

They attacked Elon nonstop for doing the same thing, and he didn’t even have a literal Nazi tattoo.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Here's one of the many segments CBS News put out before the 2020 election in which they claimed that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation campaign.

Did they ever apologize for misleading people? Of course not. They did though admit after the election that the laptop was most likely authentic.

CBS News also heavily spread the "Russian bounties" hoax before the 2020 election, only to report after the election that rumors of Russia putting bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan may have been untrue.

When the left cries that Bari Weiss is "destroying" CBS News, what they really mean is that she is messing with what used to be a functional arm of the DNC.

[Hosna ⚖️ בניטה @DOGEQEEN]

California turned proving you're a legitimate voter into a hate crime, but a gym membership card is rock-solid proof? This isn't democracy , it's an open invitation for fraud on an industrial scale. Even third-world countries have stricter rules. Time to audit the rolls and fix this clown show before it's too late.

[Planet Of Memes @PlanetOfMemes]

@elonmusk Accurate.
https://t.co/exhlS8YtiJ

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

20 years ago, An Inconvenient Truth put climate change at the center of global debate, shaping politics, influencing leaders, and inspiring a generation of activists.

Two decades later, we can assess not just its impact, but its accuracy. Many of the film’s most alarming predictions did not materialize, while many of the policies it inspired have proven costly and ineffective.

The lesson? Panic is a poor guide for public policy. Focusing on innovation, adaptation, and economic development can do far more to help both people and the climate—at a fraction of the cost.

https://t.co/EIJyuNeFU1

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains how data shows that the unhappiest and most mentally ill people are mostly on the political left while the happiest are on the right.

Liberal women 18-30 have a 60% chance of being diagnosed mentally ill. Discuss.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Same move. Same hand on the heart, same wave to the crowd. Musk did it and gets called a Nazi to this day. Mamdani does it and those same people have not said a word.

Well, not exactly. Once the side by side clips went viral, some of them did speak up. Not to apologize to Musk. To defend Mamdani.

Suddenly the gesture is not the gesture. Suddenly we need to talk about arm speed. Whether the fingers wiggled at the end. Whether he was smiling. Whether his grandparents were in the right party. A year ago none of that mattered. The hand went up, the verdict came down. Now we get a forensic seminar on millimeters and microseconds to prove Mamdani's arm moved slower.

Mamdani's own press office said "in no way was this a Nazi salute." Funny. Musk said the same thing. His did not count. Mamdani's did, instantly.

That tells you everything. The "Nazi salute" thing was never about the gesture. If it were, they would be screaming right now. They are not. It was about Musk. They hate him because he is the richest man in the world and he was attacking their ideological piggy bank with DOGE, so they smeared him.

Mamdani is on their team, so he gets a pass, plus a defense team running stopwatch analysis. Same hand, opposite verdict.

A wave is a wave. The rule does not change based on who is waving. When it does, you are not watching principle. You are watching a hit job.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

Funny

[Mark Ingram @markingram]

Sadly right on cue with the first day of the Audible release of Suicidal Empathy, the latest quality book by the inimitable @GadSaad https://t.co/7L5wbV2gGP

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Bill Maher asks how the government is “failing the poor so badly” when he pays “60 PERCENT” of his earnings in taxes.

“Last week was tax day… I paid the government probably almost 60% of what I earn. That’s a lot.”

“And I… wouldn’t mind if Bernie Sanders would stop saying the rich don’t pay taxes.”

“The top 10% pay 72% of all federal income taxes. And the bottom half, 3%.”

“The Democratic Socialists talk about socialism like we don’t already have a lot: Social Security, unemployment, Medicare, nutritional assistance, Medicaid, Obamacare, disability, housing subsidies.”

“How can you be soaking the rich and failing the poor so badly? How can it be that the federal government alone took in over 5 trillion in taxes last year, and we still need that?”

“Are we really this incompetent and corrupt?”

[Mark Ingram @markingram]

@nuggets Novi Sad, Serbia

[Mark Ingram @markingram]

@TheFP Irksome: I renewed yesterday yet you still treat me as a free subscriber. Why?

[JD Vance @JDVance]

This reminds me of when Margaret Brennan "fact checked" me at the VP debate.

If your position is that a person can claim asylum after traversing eight countries, and they are therefore "legal immigrants" because the president ignores the law and allows them to stay, then you're advocating for an open border.

The Biden-Harris administration literally created an app (CBPOne) to digitize the violation of federal immigration law and allow anyone who claimed asylum to stay indefinitely. This is illegitimate, illegal, and the American people rejected it.

[Sassafrass84 @Sassafrass_84]

Yes, correct.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Tim Walz Emerges From Den To Declare 6 More Weeks Of Rioting And Fraud https://t.co/E1mGUbA7vh

[Damani Felder @TheDamaniFelder]

I'm old enough to remember when a group of 50 illegals got shipped to Martha's Vineyard in 2022 and those rich white "no human is illegal" liberals wasted no time calling the authorities and getting every last one of them removed with zero due process in less than 48 hours.