Michael A Davis

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it.

But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[@amuse @amuse]

https://t.co/E9HCA7JkUg

[Michael A Davis @mcmikedavis]

@iamnot_elon A

[Michael A Davis @mcmikedavis]

@IvankaNews_ A

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Most Americans do not know that the US census currently counts, for purposes of voting power, all people in a district, regardless of citizenship!

Senate Democrats just voted unanimously to defeat an amendment that would have stopped counting illegals for congressional seat apportionment and electoral college (presidential) votes.

Since illegals are mostly in Democrat states, both the House and the Presidential vote are shifted ~5% to the left, which is enough to change the entire balance of power!

This is a major reason why the Biden administration is ushering in record levels of illegals and doing so few deportations.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

During the 35 years that I’ve known Joe Biden, he’s always demonstrated his core decency. He has shown his affection and esteem for my family by displaying a bust of my father in the Oval Office.

I suspect that the White House decision to deny me Secret Service protection — and many other more important decisions — are being made, not by the President himself, but by the anonymous men in lanyards who now seem to be running our government.

[Bret Weinstein @BretWeinstein]

A free society is anti-fragile with respect to speech. It doesn’t need to censor.
False beliefs are self-correcting as the insightful outcompete the confused

Censorship and coercion are authoritarian partners. If censorship is required, it is to prevent freedom, not protect it.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world. The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon's short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence.

https://t.co/zNC41BzLkv

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Journalists rushed to report that Trump’s handling of classified documents was far worse than Biden’s. Now that that they have egg on their faces, they’re insisting that their reporting was nuanced. From knee-jerk partisan propaganda to gas-lighting without taking a breath.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States @RepAdamSchiff?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Should Congress approve the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill?

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

So,I was ̶d̶e̶r̶a̶n̶g̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶u̶d̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶u̶n̶h̶i̶n̶g̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶p̶a̶r̶a̶n̶o̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶s̶t̶u̶p̶i̶d̶,̶ ̶u̶n̶i̶n̶t̶e̶n̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶h̶i̶l̶a̶r̶i̶o̶u̶s̶,̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶n̶g̶e̶,̶ ̶p̶a̶t̶h̶e̶t̶i̶c̶,̶ ̶g̶r̶a̶n̶d̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶i̶n̶g̶,̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶r̶l̶a̶t̶a̶n̶,̶ ̶n̶u̶t̶t̶y̶,̶ right all along?

[Jeff Charles, Asker of Questions🏴 @jeffcharlesjr]

So just to get this straight.

As taxpayers we are paying for FBI agents to collaborate with Twitter to police jokes on the platform.

Y'all tired of the government yet?

[Alexandros Marinos 🏴‍☠️ @alexandrosM]

Seeing the formative years of the rationalist community and the very early days of the Effective Altruist movement, I will address a warning that I know will be ignored:

Beware Chesterton's fence. Everyone else is not as dumb as they seem. Sometimes there really be dragons.

[Michael A Davis @mcmikedavis]

Hilarious. And effective.

[Bret Weinstein @BretWeinstein]

One, it turns out, is a hilarious number❣️

[Bret Weinstein @BretWeinstein]

When the FDA said “You should not use Ivermectin” that was only a suggestion. And when they said “You are not a horse” that was only a hypothesis. 🔬

[gailtalk @gailtalk]

@RobertCooper58 Does this look like the work of MAGA Republicans?

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

I don’t tweet much about Gates/Schwab because I don’t understand what they’re doing. But what they do is SELF-EVIDENTLY creepy as hell. If you hate conspiracy theories, explain the right way to worry about such individuals having a special deal/role in our universe?🙏 in advance.

[Eric Weinstein @ericweinstein]

What’s the proper respectable way to be alarmed about Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, The Great Reset, loss of National/Individual Autonomy, etc?

I get that many don’t like conspiracy theories. So turn the tables. This *is* UNDENIABLY creepy: what’s the NON-conspiratorial explanation?