Marozhna

80 year old granny. Politically conservative. I'm with Trump. Trump loves America. Democrats don’t.

[Marozhna @marozhna]

Austrian Economics

[Handre @Handre]

Learn Austrian Economics in one X post:

1. Humans act. Every choice a person makes traces back to an incentive, a trade-off, a cost weighed against a benefit. Remove the incentive and the action stops. Distort the incentive and the action warps.

Tax income at 90% and watch producers stop producing. Subsidize failure and watch failure multiply. The behavior follows the reward structure, always.

2. Value exists only in the mind of the person choosing. A glass of water is worth nothing to a drowning man and everything to a man dying of thirst. No central authority can calculate this, because it changes with every individual and every circumstance.

Nothing has value in itself, only the degree to which humans choose to value it. Diamonds and even gold only carry value because humans decided they do.

3. Money does not come from a government decree. It emerged spontaneously when traders needed something durable, divisible, and widely accepted to escape the limitations of direct barter. Gold won that competition across centuries and across dozens of independent civilizations because the market, not a ministry, chose it.

Fiat currency is the state hijacking that evolved institution and replacing it with paper backed by nothing but a legal threat. Every central bank on earth operates on this model right now.

4. Wealth does not fall from the sky. A farmer who eats his entire harvest produces nothing next season. The farmer who saves seed, plants it, and specializes in what he grows best accumulates a surplus. That surplus is capital. Capital funds everything that comes after.

Consumption without prior production is just burning down the furniture for warmth. Every welfare state eventually reaches this point.

5. Strip private property rights and production collapses. A farmer will work his own land until midnight. That same farmer, working collective land, stops at noon. The Soviet Union ran this experiment across seventy years and killed tens of millions, proving the point.

When you cannot own the outcome, you do not produce the outcome.

6. Voluntary trade generates wealth from nothing but mutual preference. When you pay twelve dollars for a meal, you value the meal above twelve dollars; the restaurant values twelve dollars above the meal. Both parties walk away wealthier in real terms. No politician, no regulator, no bureaucrat added anything.

Protectionism destroys this. The 2018 US steel tariffs raised steel prices for American manufacturers, killed more jobs in steel-consuming industries than existed in steel production itself, and transferred wealth from productive firms to a protected few.

7. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production dilutes every dollar you already hold. The new money flows first to the government and its contractors, who spend it at current prices. By the time it reaches you, prices have already risen.

The US M2 money supply grew from roughly 15 trillion dollars in January 2020 to over 21 trillion by early 2022. Consumer prices followed. Your savings took the loss.

8. Prices carry information. A price spike tells producers to produce more and tells consumers to use less. It coordinates millions of strangers without a single central command. Interfere with that signal and the coordination breaks.

Rent control in New York City is the cleanest example. Cap rents below market and landlords stop maintaining buildings, stop building new ones, and convert units to other uses. The people rent control was supposed to help pay the price through collapsing supply.

9. Interest rates are the price of capital over time. When the Federal Reserve pushed rates to near zero between 2008 and 2022, it told every investor that capital was nearly free. Businesses built projects that only made sense at zero percent. When rates normalized, the projects failed. The 2022 collapse of the US tech sector and the crypto market were not random events. They were the correction of a decade of artificially cheap capital.

The business cycle is not a mystery of capitalism. Central banks manufacture it.

10. Bureaucrats face no profit and loss. A businessman who misallocates capital goes bankrupt. A bureaucrat who misallocates capital writes a report requesting more funding. The feedback loop that disciplines markets simply does not exist inside a government agency.

The US Department of Education has spent over a trillion dollars since 1980. Literacy rates have not improved. No one at the department has been bankrupted by this outcome.

11. Every producer inside a local market holds knowledge that no bureaucrat in a capital city can replicate. A wheat farmer in Kansas tracks soil moisture, futures prices, local equipment costs, his specific buyer relationships, and a hundred other variables simultaneously. That knowledge lives in the price he sets.

Friedrich Hayek called this tacit knowledge in 1945. The Soviet central planners ignored him and spent fifty years proving him correct, producing chronic shortages of goods that private markets coordinate effortlessly. No model, no algorithm, and no committee can compress what millions of independent actors know into a single plan.

12. Every government intervention produces effects you see and effects you don't. You see the road the state builds. You don't see the factory the tax dollars never funded, the job that never existed, the innovation that never happened because capital was extracted at gunpoint and redirected by bureaucrats with no skin in the game.

Take the 2009 Cash for Clunkers program. Congress destroyed 690,000 working cars, handed dealers a short-term spike, and you saw the sales numbers. The used car market was stripped of affordable inventory, pricing working-class buyers out for years afterward.

13. Prices, supply chains, and language itself coordinate millions of strangers without any central planner issuing a single command. That coordination is spontaneous order: complex, functional patterns that emerge from individuals pursuing their own goals under rules they did not collectively design. No committee holds the dispersed local knowledge required to replicate what voluntary exchange produces every second.

Watch how English evolved. No king designed its grammar. Millions of speakers across centuries adopted words and structures that worked, dropped ones that didn't, and produced a language richer than any bureaucrat could have engineered. Central planners who believe they can replicate that process with price controls or production quotas destroy the feedback mechanism that generates the order in the first place.

Thanks for reading this long post! What would you add to this list?

[Alain Nahle | אלן נחלה 🇮🇱🇱🇧🕎 @nnahle]

Error, Not Sin.

In Hebrew, the word usually translated as "sin" is chet — חֵטְא — and it comes from the language of archery. It doesn't describe a stain on the soul or a guilt inherited at birth.

It describes something far simpler: an arrow that missed its target.

That distinction completely changes how a person relates to their own failure. If sinning means being stained, then you need someone else to come clean it — an outside intervention, someone else's sacrifice, a forgiveness granted from above.

But if failing simply means missing the shot, then the solution was never out there to begin with. It was always in the hand holding the bow.

You reposition, adjust your aim, and shoot again.

In al-Andalus, Torah was studied alongside philosophy, Hebrew alongside Arabic, and the sacred text was never separated from its original language or its most literal sense. There was no need to soften the word, or to import a weight it never carried.

Chet remained, generation after generation, exactly what it had always been: a failure of aim, not a condemnation.

That's why when Rambam — physician, philosopher, son of that tradition — sat down to codify Jewish law, he didn't write a chapter on salvation.

He wrote Hilchot Teshuvá, the laws of return.

Teshuvá doesn't mean forgiveness. It means to return. It's the recognition that you drifted off course, followed by the physical, deliberate act of correcting direction with your own two hands.

The Torah never asked anyone to be perfect, it asked them to be willing to correct their aim, as many times as it takes. ✡️

חֵטְא — לְהַחְטִיא אֶת הַמַּטָּרָה

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

In recent days there has obviously been an aggressive, coordinated information campaign to move AI technologies under the regulatory yoke of the US federal government.

When I spot such obvious information warfare tactics, it concerns me.

So I wrote this article as a primer on the arguments for and against heavy regulation of AI.

It's about 1,500 words. Please read if so inclined.

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @BarnabyHistory]

🇺🇸 The Boatlift That Was Bigger Than Dunkirk

At 10:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a Coast Guard lieutenant named Mike Day keyed a radio in New York Harbor and said the only sentence that mattered.

“All available boats. This is the United States Coast Guard. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan, report to Governors Island.”

The boats were already coming.

The bridges were closed. The tunnels were closed. The subways were dead. South of the towers, hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere left to walk. Some jumped into the Hudson. Some stood on seawalls that were never meant to be docks and waited for anything that floated.

Dunkirk took nine days to pull 338,226 Allied soldiers off a beach in 1940.

On 9/11, roughly 800 mariners on about 150 vessels moved as many as 500,000 civilians off Manhattan in about nine hours. Ferries. Tugs. Dinner boats. Pilot boats. Yachts. A retired fireboat. Rubber dinghies that held two people. The largest water evacuation in history.

NY Waterway did not wait for the official call. After the second plane hit, the whole fleet moved. Captain Rick Thornton nosed his ferry against a seawall that was not a slip and started taking people off. Some of them he pulled out of the river. His company alone carried about 158,000 people to Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, Brooklyn, and Queens.

On a normal Tuesday they carried 34,000.

The Staten Island Ferry moved more than 50,000 people and came back the other way with water, bandages, and men who still had work to do in the dust.

The old fireboat John J. Harvey, already retired, tied up near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, took civilians off the seawall, then pumped water when the hydrants downtown died.

Lt. Day later admitted what the day required. “I broke more rules that day than probably I’ve enforced in my whole Coast Guard career.”

In raw numbers it was bigger than Dunkirk. No boat went down. By nightfall the southern tip of Manhattan had been emptied by people who were not on anyone’s list of heroes when the morning started.

They were tug captains. Ferry deckhands. Pilots. A lieutenant with a microphone. Ordinary boats answering one sentence.

All available boats.

[ד״ר עינת וילף Dr. Einat Wilf @EinatWilf]

“So do not dare propose that ‘Israel Never Truly Wanted Peace with Palestine’. If anything, we wanted it too much. So now, it is your turn to answer the question: When did you ever truly want peace with the one Jewish state?”
(my 10 min speech with English captions from the Oxford Union Debate):

[King David @KingDavid9y]

Yaron Avraham grew up in a religious Muslim Arab family in Lod in the 1980s. He said he was exposed to crime and violence from a young age. As a seven-year-old, he was sent to distribute drugs to his family’s customers in the neighborhood.

At age 9, Yaron’s 16-year-old sister was murdered by her older brothers in a “family honor” killing. Yaron began asking questions, so his family decided to send him far away from home, to a mosque that doubled as a boarding school in Gaza.

“I found myself in a mosque — one of the most extreme in Gaza.” The education he received there can only be termed child abuse.

The mosque’s explicit objective was to turn its students into shahids — martyrs ready to sacrifice their lives for Islam’s religious war, Jihad. Students were even forced to sleep in open graves “to evoke the feeling of the moment of ascension, when the soul rises to Heaven…. Personally, it took me almost 15 years to get over that experience.”

At age 16, Yaron managed to escape. He met a Jewish man who offered to help him, and later was taken in by a Jewish family. “I discovered something that was completely new to me,” Yaron says, “something that in Judaism, and in general in the western world, is taught from a young age — the sanctity of life. I discovered that I am allowed to live, I am allowed to dream.”

Yaron later enlisted in the IDF and witnessed that Israeli soldiers were nothing like the bloodthirsty monsters portrayed by his teachers. Just the opposite — they were ethical and principled. They would share food and drink with Gazan families. They didn’t kill anyone for no reason.

Yaron’s long journey led him to convert to Judaism. Today, he is married and the father of three daughters. He is a popular speaker.🙏

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about a woman I'll call Lisa. She was 50. She may be you.

Never smoked. Normal weight. Exercised regularly. Ate fish, vegetables, olive oil. No diabetes. No high blood pressure. Total cholesterol 221, HDL 68 — numbers that make a physician smile and say everything looks great.

Her 10-year risk calculator said 2.5%. Low risk. No statin recommended. See you next year.

Then she got a calcium scan.

Her score was 204.

Most women her age score zero. A score above 200 places her far above the 95th percentile — with roughly seven to eight times the event risk of a peer with the same "excellent" risk factors and a clean scan.

She had significant coronary artery disease at 50. The calculator had no idea. Her only conventional clue was buried in her family history: her mother had a heart attack and a stent at 62.

Here is what almost everyone gets wrong.

Cardiovascular disease kills more women than breast cancer, lung cancer, and chronic lung disease combined. It is the leading cause of death in women, and we screen relentlessly for the cancers while largely ignoring the thing most likely to kill us.

And the risk calculators systematically underperform in women. They were built around age, blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, and diabetes — and they badly underweight the factors that actually drive risk in a female body.

Let me walk you through the ones nobody counts.

𝟭. PREGNANCY WAS YOUR FIRST CARDIAC STRESS TEST

This is the single most underused piece of information in women's cardiology, and if you take one thing from this post, take this.

Pregnancy places extraordinary demands on the cardiovascular system. Blood volume rises by 40-50%. Cardiac output climbs. The vascular system is pushed harder than at almost any other point in life.

Some women pass that test. Some don't. And the ones who don't are showing you something about their vasculature decades before anything else will.

Preeclampsia — the diagnosis is high blood pressure and organ stress in pregnancy, but the underlying biology is endothelial dysfunction, the exact process that begins atherosclerosis. Women who experience it carry roughly double to quadruple the lifetime cardiovascular risk. Their risk of chronic hypertension afterward is dramatically elevated, and events occur meaningfully earlier.

Gestational diabetes — this is insulin resistance revealing itself under metabolic load. Up to half of these women develop type 2 diabetes within a decade, and cardiovascular risk climbs with it. It was never "just a pregnancy thing that resolved."

Preterm delivery, placental abruption, and delivering a growth-restricted baby all carry independent cardiovascular risk signals — likely because they reflect abnormal placental vasculature, and the placenta is a vascular organ.

Here is the failure, and it is systemic: most women are discharged after a preeclamptic pregnancy with no cardiovascular follow-up plan whatsoever. Their blood pressure normalizes, everyone exhales, and nobody mentions it again for thirty years.

If you had any of these complications, your cardiac surveillance should begin in your thirties and forties — not at 65. Blood pressure monitored. ApoB, Lp(a), hs-CRP, and fasting insulin checked. That history belongs in your chart as a permanent risk factor, and you may have to be the one who puts it there.

𝟮. PERIMENOPAUSE IS A CARDIOVASCULAR EVENT, NOT JUST A HORMONAL ONE

We talk about menopause as hot flashes and mood. What we rarely explain is that it is one of the most consequential vascular transitions of your life.

Estrogen is not merely a reproductive hormone. It is vasculoprotective, and it does specific measurable things:

It promotes nitric oxide production, which keeps your arteries dilated and the endothelium healthy. It favorably shapes lipids — supporting HDL and helping clear LDL. It has anti-inflammatory effects on the vessel wall. It helps maintain insulin sensitivity and influences where your body stores fat.

Then it withdraws.

And the changes that follow are not gradual background aging — they cluster tightly around the menopausal transition itself:

LDL and ApoB rise. Triglycerides rise. HDL becomes less functional even when the number looks unchanged.

Body fat redistributes from hips and thighs to the abdomen — and visceral fat is metabolically active, inflammatory tissue, not passive storage.

Insulin resistance increases, sometimes markedly.

Blood pressure rises, and hypertension becomes more common in women than men after this transition.

Arterial stiffness increases measurably.

And here is the part I want every woman in her forties to understand: these shifts begin in perimenopause — potentially years before your last period, while your cycles are still occurring and everyone including your doctor still thinks of you as premenopausal.

That is precisely the window when this is most modifiable, and precisely when nobody is looking.

Two specific things worth knowing: women who go through premature or early menopause — before 40, or before 45 — carry meaningfully higher cardiovascular risk and warrant earlier, more aggressive evaluation. And emerging data suggests that frequent or severe hot flashes may themselves correlate with worse vascular measures, meaning the symptom may be a signal rather than merely an inconvenience.

On hormone therapy: in November 2025 the FDA began removing the black box warnings, and the FDA Commissioner called the original decision one of the greatest errors in modern medicine. Roughly 50 million women were frightened away from treatment based on a misread of the WHI — in whose estrogen-only arm breast cancer risk was actually lower. For most healthy women starting within 10 years of menopause or before 60, the risk-benefit calculation looks very different than we were told. It is not a cardiovascular preventive therapy, and it must be individualized — but it deserves a real conversation rather than a reflexive no.

𝟯. THE OTHER FACTORS THAT DON'T APPEAR ON ANY CALCULATOR

Autoimmune disease — lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis. Far more common in women, and chronic inflammation accelerates atherosclerosis at any age. A woman with lupus deserves the vigilance we'd give a diabetic.

PCOS — insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, and elevated risk that starts in the twenties.

Migraine with aura, associated with higher stroke risk.

Breast cancer treatment — certain chemotherapies and chest radiation carry cardiac consequences that surface years later.

And elevated Lp(a) — the one to act on this week.

𝟰. Lp(a): TEST IT ONCE. THEN TELL YOUR FAMILY.

A genetically determined particle that drives plaque, clotting, and aortic valve calcification simultaneously. Set at birth. Essentially unchanged by diet, exercise, or weight loss. Roughly 1 in 5 people carry elevated levels.

The 2026 ACC/AHA guidelines now give a Class I recommendation to measure it once in every adult. Most people never have been.

Ask for it in nmol/L. Under 75 is lower risk. 125+ carries roughly 1.4x increased risk. 250+ doubles it.

And in women specifically: midlife levels above the 75th percentile predict higher event rates over the following thirty years. A blood draw at 45 forecasting your seventies.

If yours is elevated, get your parents, siblings, and children tested. It's inherited — your result is partly theirs.

𝟱. THE REST OF THE PANEL TO DEMAND

ApoB — counts every atherogenic particle rather than the cholesterol they carry. One analysis found 54% of patients had dangerous levels that standard LDL testing missed entirely.

hs-CRP — and here's a striking finding: in healthy women, a single midlife measurement of hs-CRP + LDL + Lp(a) together predicts 30-year risk more powerfully than any one alone.

Fasting insulin — under 5. It rises 10-15 years before glucose does, and almost nobody checks it. This is where perimenopausal metabolic change shows up first.

Plus HbA1c, kidney function, and urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio.

𝟲. THEN ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOUR ARTERIES

A calcium score is the usual first step — cheap, ten minutes, low radiation, highly predictive.

But here is the trap for younger women, and it is critical: calcium is a LATE finding. Soft, non-calcified plaque — the kind that ruptures — is invisible to a calcium scan. And women calcify later than men, which means a woman's disease is disproportionately the type a calcium score cannot see.

CT angiography solves that. It visualizes the entire coronary tree, quantifies soft plaque volume, and identifies high-risk features that predict events.

And the detail that matters most for us: women have events at lower absolute plaque burdens than men, partly because our coronary arteries are smaller. Less plaque, same danger.

The SCAPIS study found silent atherosclerosis in over 40% of middle-aged adults with no known disease.

One more thing every woman should know: a normal stress test is not a clean bill of arterial health. It detects flow-limiting narrowing over roughly 70% — and women more often have microvascular disease, plaque in vessels too small for standard imaging to see. A woman can be having a heart attack with "clean" coronary arteries on catheterization. If symptoms persist despite normal testing, push for cardiac MRI, PET, or coronary function testing.

AND THE NEWS THAT'S GENUINELY EXCITING

For forty years, Lp(a) was the risk factor we could measure and could not treat.

That's ending. Five drugs in advanced development achieve 70-95%+ reductions. Two Phase 3 outcome trials — pelacarsen with 8,323 patients and olpasiran with about 7,300 — are reading out in the second half of 2026.

If positive, they'll be the first proof that lowering Lp(a) prevents heart attacks. That changes everything for one in five people.

WHAT TO DO THIS MONTH

Write down your full pregnancy history — every complication, by name. Write down your family history — which relative, which event, what age.

Get Lp(a) tested once. Add ApoB, hs-CRP, and fasting insulin.

If you're in perimenopause, this is your window. Get the baseline now, while the changes are still early and still reversible.

If anything is elevated — or you had preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, early menopause, or a family history of premature disease — ask about imaging. And if your calcium score is zero but your risk factors aren't, ask specifically about CT angiography.

Lisa's numbers looked perfect at 50. Her arteries did not.

The difference between those two facts is the difference between finding out in a scanner and finding out in an ambulance.

Stop accepting "your numbers look fine."

Ask them to look.

[Enes Kanter FREEDOM @EnesFreedom]

After careful consideration and reviewing the current eligibility guidelines,
I’m officially declaring myself a @WNBA prospect.

If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.

My team and I have carefully examined the WNBA’s eligibility criteria and governing framework surrounding self-identification and inclusion. Based on the current guidelines, I can and am officially declaring my eligibility for the upcoming WNBA draft in April 2027.

I know my presence on the court will stir up strong opinions.
I am definitely not here to mock, make fun of, or disrespect any community or personal choices.
I’m simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone — the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.
My team and I are prepared to ensure these guidelines are applied equally, consistently, and without exception, and I look forward to the #WNBA honoring its stated principles.

See you at training camp.

https://t.co/zlwWpVF0Ou

[Marozhna @marozhna]

We Will Dance Again

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Well this is a brave move from Boy George. He will be attacked for doing this. I will be attacked just for posting it!

[Marozhna @marozhna]

@waitmaya 31

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Here’s the story of the Jews who supported Hitler.

Tragically, it ends exactly as you’d imagine.

[Marozhna @marozhna]

@BriannaWu I’m a conservative Jewish grandmother and I welcome your support for the Jewish people. I also support trans people because of all that you @BriannaWu have taught me. God bless you! 💝

[Marozhna @marozhna]

@BriannaWu Good luck and have quick and easy recovery!

[Chabad.org @Chabad]

🔥 THE REBBE ON HOW (NOT) TO FIGHT ANTISEMITISM

"Could the Holocaust happen again?" He was asked that question in 1964.
The Rebbe's answer: "Tomorrow morning."

[Matthew Feinberg @thewebbie]

https://t.co/0HALfsLgB7

[Matthew Feinberg @thewebbie]

Do you like Benjamin Netanyahu?

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

They didn’t sub Michael in. 🤣🤣🤣

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

Coincidence? I don't think so.

For nearly 500 years, hundreds of millions of people looked at the most famous painting of God ever made, and none of them noticed what was hiding in plain sight.

Then, in 1990, a doctor looked up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and realized that God is wrapped inside a human brain...

The painting is Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, finished around 1512. You know the image even if you don't know its name: God reaching out from the heavens, His finger almost touching Adam's, the spark of life about to leap across the gap.

But look at the shape around God, the swirling red cloak that holds Him and the angels aloft. For five centuries it was seen as just a billowing robe... but in 1990, a physician named Frank Lynn Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that the red shroud is something else entirely: an anatomically precise cross-section of the human brain.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The outline of the cloak traces the outer curve of the brain. A fold in the fabric forms the Sylvian fissure, the deep groove that separates the brain's major lobes. The angel curled beneath God is positioned exactly where the brainstem would be, and the green scarf trailing down becomes the vertebral artery. Even the pituitary gland and the optic chiasm, where the nerves from the eyes cross, fall precisely into place.

This was not a man likely to invent such a thing by accident. Michelangelo had spent his youth secretly dissecting human corpses in a monastery in Florence, studying the body from the inside with an obsessiveness that, by one early account, exceeded that of professional anatomists...

So what did he mean by it?

Meshberger argued that the painting has been misnamed. He suggested it should be called not the Creation of Adam, but the Endowment of Adam. In the Bible, God gives Adam life. But in Michelangelo's fresco, Adam is already alive, his eyes open, his body lifted. What God is reaching across that famous gap to give him is not life. It is intellect. The divine spark of human thought itself, delivered, fittingly, from inside the very organ that produces it.

One of the most looked-at images in the history of the world may contain a message that took half a millennium to be read, hidden by a man who understood both the human body and the human soul better than almost anyone who has ever lived, and who seems to have decided to bury his deepest idea about us where only the most careful eye would ever find it...

[Marozhna @marozhna]

@farman4x 25.5