Michael Markoff

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Every one of these was once thrown to the poor, and every one now carries a premium:

Oxtail. Butchers gave it away. Now priced like a roast.

Brisket. The cut nobody wanted, slow-cooked by people who had no choice. Now the most fashionable meat in Texas and priced accordingly.

Chicken wings. Scrap for the stockpot until a bar in Buffalo fried them in 1964. Now the most fought-over item in American sport.

Short ribs. Working man's braise. Now a restaurant flex.

Skirt steak. Handed to ranch hands as part of their pay. Became fajitas. Became expensive.

Marrow bones. Free with a joint. Now a starter with its own tiny spoon.

Lamb shanks, ham hocks, pork belly. All of it. The entire bottom shelf of the old butcher's counter has been repriced as a delicacy.

The wealthy spent a century paying top dollar for the leanest, palest, most polite cuts on the animal, and the poor got the fat, the collagen, the bone, the skin, and the flavour.

Then chefs noticed which half of the counter actually cooked better. Then the scientists began quietly conceding which half fed people better. The price followed both discoveries.

The knowledge was sitting in the poverty the whole time. Poor cooking on every continent is a masterclass in extracting everything an animal has to give, because it had to be.

Your great-grandmother could not afford to eat badly. That is worth reading twice.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

@BillAckman, let me assist. Khanna asks you to address the substance, so here it is, each error laid out fully.

Start with the moral error. "Labor neutrality for federal contractors" sounds procedural, but examine what it does. It uses the taxpayer's money as leverage to force companies into a posture that favors unionization, and it pressures workers into a collective whether or not each individual wants it. That is coercion, no matter how fair the language sounds. A worker's genuine right is the right to act on his own judgment: to negotiate his own terms, to join a union if he chooses, or to refuse and walk away. What Khanna proposes is not the protection of that right. It is the government putting its thumb on the scale with funds seized from others. Real bargaining is two free parties reaching terms. The moment the state forces the outcome, it is no longer bargaining. It is command.

Now the economic error, which is deeper. "Labor's share of income is declining" rests on the fixed-pie fallacy: the assumption that there is a set quantity of wealth, and if capital holds more, labor must hold less. But wealth is not a fixed sum to be divided. It is created. And wages do not rise because someone redistributes the "share." They rise because of productivity, how much value a worker can produce per hour. What raises productivity? Capital investment: the tools, machines, factories, software, and technology that multiply what a single worker can do. A man with a bulldozer moves a hundred times the earth of a man with a shovel, and earns accordingly. That bulldozer exists because someone accumulated capital and risked it.

So Khanna's cure destroys the cause of the thing he wants. Punish capital, tax it, seize a larger "share" for labor by force, and you starve the investment that makes labor more valuable in the first place. You hand workers a bigger slice today and shrink the whole pie tomorrow. Every country that has tried it produced exactly that: a higher labor "share" of a collapsing economy.

And beneath both errors lies a deeper moral error. Khanna speaks of "worker share in profits" as though the worker were owed the returns of an enterprise he did not build, did not own, and did not risk his capital to create. But the worker already received his share: the wage he agreed to, paid whether the company profits or fails. The risk was the owner's. The profit, what remains after everyone is paid, is the reward for that risk. To claim it for those who bore none is not the correction of an injustice. It is the creation of one.

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[6ɪx✦ @ok6ixx]

So i bought a storage unit lot at auction like those TV shows. Paid $200. Inside was just boxes and boxes of ceramic frogs. Like 300 ceramic frogs. Different sizes. All frogs. I was going to throw them out but posted them on Facebook Marketplace as a joke: "300 frogs, free, take all or none." A woman messaged me in ALL CAPS immediately. Drove three hours to pick them up. Started CRYING when she saw them. Turns out these were her late mother's collection that her brother sold without telling her. She'd been searching for two years. Gave me $2,000 cash on the spot. Then her brother found out and threatened to sue me. The woman is counter-suing him. I might have to testify in frog court.

[JoeLange @JoeLange]

I would encourage everyone to relax on the two big “losses” at the Supreme Court.

Step back.

There’s something bigger happening.

Though I missed most of the news happening yesterday.

Trump’s reaction to his loss on “mail in ballots” was eye opening to me, because Trump didn’t seem too phased by the ruling.

He used some wording in his response, which downplayed the ruling and I think that was the KEY.

https://t.co/zc7K3lXLs4

Did you catch the part everyone missed?

“basically, they’re keeping it a little way that it is now”

Reminder.

Trump isn’t trying to get rid of ALL mail in ballots.
Just the fraudulent ones.

The largest group of “mail in ballots” come from the military.

Anybody remember the Bush vs Gore election?

“Gov. George W. Bush sued election officials in 13 Florida counties today for rejecting the absentee ballots of members of the military serving abroad, capitalizing on an issue that has been a public relations boon to the Republicans and that could determine the fate of hundreds of votes for the presidency.”

https://t.co/A5rkX1ANnx

Now if anybody’s vote should be protected, it should definitely be the people who are risking their lives to protect our freedoms.
Trump is going to protect the “mail in ballots” of our military personnel.

But why did Trump say, the Supreme Court ruling was basically keeping it “a little” the way it is now?

The Supreme Court didn’t prevent ballots received AFTER election day from being counted, but did require the ballots to be “postmarked” by election day.

Why is that a big deal?

GAME THEORY.

Trump AND the Supreme Court are in the process of removing the avenues for cheating through mail in ballots in the FUTURE, while at the same time, preventing the future lawsuits that try and prevent military ballots that were mailed by election day.

Don’t forget:

The U.S. Postal Service is refusing all “mail in ballots” that are not verified by the federal registry proving citizenship.
And the Postal Service owns a patent on blockchain technology associated with “mail in ballots.”

None of this is a coincidence.

What looked like a loss, actually helped cement in the Constitution, that ALL mail in ballots must be “postmarked” by election day.
Blockchain technology will be used to “prove” that postmark in the FUTURE.

Never forget that Trump is playing the “long game” and trying to establish as many legal “safeguards” as possible.

Same with the birthright citizenship “loss.”

It looks really bad, but most people are missing the same “playbook” by Kavanaugh, when Trump took his first loss at the Supreme Court over tariffs.

Trump purposely used a specific law on tariffs that was rejected by the Supreme Court.
He knew it would be rejected.
Trump was purposely “limiting” the broad use of that specific law by past presidents, so that presidents in the FUTURE, can’t use it to get rid of his tariffs.

What did Trump do?

The same day, he took Kavanaugh’s “advice” and reinstated the tariffs using the law that is now deemed Constitutional.

Kavanaugh just did the same thing with “birthright citizenship.”

He outlined the legal pathway that the Supreme Court will approve, for “ending” birthright citizenship.

From Senator Eric Schmitt:
——————
“The majority tried to constitutionalize unlimited birthright citizenship. But Justice Kavanaugh MAY have left Congress a door.”

“I’m filing legislation to walk through it.”

“And I’ll keep working on a constitutional amendment to restore American citizenship.”
———————
Rand Paul has also declared that he is for the amendment.

Have you noticed Rand has flipped and now supporting Trump?

Trump is playing the long game and this “loss,” will be turned into a “win” but more importantly, immigration law will be permanently changed to prevent birthright citizenship in the FUTURE.

What’s happened at the Supreme Court over the last two days, is not the end of the story.

The “end results” are what really matters and that’s the game that Trump is playing.

[Aaron Sparrow™, Blocked But Never Forgotten @Aaron_Sparrow]

I’m afraid your pithy attempt at a point does not hold water.

There’s nothing about The Bride that is “woke.” Beatrix Kiddo is not a ball-buster smart-ass that disrespects her male superiors. In fact, she respected her male master Pai Mei, the man that trained her. And she earned his respect through perseverance and hard work… so much so that he taught her his exploding heart technique, something he didn’t even teach Bill.

You see, Beatrix has to work for everything she gets. She has to struggle to attain it. She has to listen, learn, and hone herself into the living weapon she becomes.

Your modern “woke” equivalent would have been better than Pai Mei, and would have reveled in the discovery that she was always better, she just had to realize it for herself… and then rubbed his nose in it. The one character that DID roll up on Pai Mei with that insufferable, modern-day girlboss attitude was Elle… and it cost her an eye.

Furthermore, The Bride’s motivation was inherently feminine… she was seeking revenge for the death of her child. In fact, she abandoned her life as an assassin when she realized she was pregnant. She chose motherhood over her career, anathema to modern feminism.

The female assassin trying to kill her even backed off when she realized Beatrix was going to be a mother.

The difference, of course, is that the women of KILL BILL were actual female characters, not male characters in female skin-suits, which is what we get now, which is what everyone ACTUALLY hates.

Modern progressive stories suck because nobody is allowed to be different. Men and women have to be interchangeable. And a thinking person’s brain rejects that, because you know that's not accurate. So you don't relate to these people. You never actually met these characters in real life before. Women don't act the way they’re portrayed in these zombified male skinwalker versions.

You can trot out Beatrix Kiddo, Ripley, Sarah Connor, and say they’d be called “woke” today. Use that to try to defend the personality-less husks that pass for female icons in this current moment. But your argument falls apart, your poison worldview cannot allow you to realize that’s simply not true, because they’re not just male characters wearing make-up and a bow like Ms. PAC-Man; they’re fully realized female characters and the primary engine of their character, their drive, the ultimate drive of the divine feminine… is motherhood.

So no, KILL BILL would not be called “woke.” KILL BILL isn’t “feminist,” it’s FEMININE… and as long as modern Hollywood chooses the former over the latter, their skinsuit girl bosses will never connect with the larger audience, and will continue to fail.

[ALX 🇺🇸 @alx]

“Freddy” from Germany went viral on 𝕏 for sharing his experiences traveling the World Cup.

He has been getting love from all corners of the internet until Reddit doxxed him and discovered he opposed racism against white people.

He has since faced attacks from the left wing mob, forcing him to delete his account.

These people ruin everything.

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

Communism has always appealed because it offers a morally simple answer to an impossibly complex human problem.

>Life is unfair.
>Therefore someone must be guilty.
>If we punish the guilty, justice will follow.

It replaces responsibility with resentment.

Most importantly, it tells ordinary people they can become virtuous without becoming better.

That is why it returns every generation. Not because it works, but because it flatters.

History’s warning is not that these ideas begin with prison camps. They begin with moral certainty and the belief that society can be perfected if only the “right” people are given enough power to identify the guilty and reorganize everyone else’s lives.

Today, that temptation is more dangerous than ever.

Never before have governments and institutions possessed so much data, so many surveillance tools, so much influence over information, and such extraordinary capacity to shape public life at scale. Every generation inherits more powerful instruments than the last. Whether those instruments preserve liberty or erode it depends on the ideas guiding the hands that wield them.

The lesson of the last century is not merely that communism failed. It is that no society is immune from believing that concentrating power in pursuit of moral perfection will finally succeed.

History has already rendered its verdict; 100 million+ dead.

Our responsibility is to remember it before we convince ourselves that this time will be different.

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

Here's one of Michael Crichton's very finest quotes, especially applicable to climate "science":

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science.

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right ... In science, consensus is irrelevant."

Best to everyone,

w.

[Race @multiplanet1]

Elon Musk watched Starship explode during a test and didn't flinch. The engineers around him were devastated. He picked up his phone, called the team, and said 4 words that defined how SpaceX handles failure differently than any organization on earth.

"That was awesome. Congrats."

The rocket had just disintegrated. Millions of dollars of hardware scattered into the sky. Months of work gone in seconds. And the CEO was congratulating his team.

To an outsider this looks insane. You just lost a rocket. Why are you celebrating.

To SpaceX it makes perfect sense. They didn't lose a rocket. They gained data that no simulation could have produced. They learned exactly where the system breaks under real conditions. That data is worth more than the hardware.

This is the SpaceX philosophy distilled into one moment. Failure is not a setback. Failure is a data point. You build, you test, it breaks, you learn exactly why it broke, you fix it, you test again. The cycle is the product.

NASA spent decades trying to make sure rockets never failed. SpaceX spends weeks making sure they fail fast enough to iterate before the competition catches up.

The engineers who were devastated that day went back to work the next morning with the exact telemetry they needed to solve problems they didn't know existed until the rocket showed them.

4 words from a CEO who understands that the only real failure is the test you were too afraid to run.

Most leaders punish failure and get teams that play it safe. Musk celebrates failure and gets teams that push boundaries nobody else will touch. The culture starts with what the leader says in the worst moment. And in his worst moment he said congrats.

[Race @multiplanet1]

A young SpaceX employee asked Elon what happens if they fail to reach Mars in his lifetime. The room was full of engineers and the question landed heavier than anyone expected.

It was a simple question but it cut to the core of everything SpaceX exists for. The entire company, every late night, every exploded prototype, every engineer who missed their kid's birthday for a launch window, it all points at Mars. What if it doesn't happen in time?

Elon paused.

He said that the goal was never for him personally to walk on Mars. The goal was to build the infrastructure that makes it inevitable. That even if he dies before the first crew lands, the system he built would carry the mission forward without him.

He said the rockets, the factories, the team, the culture, all of it is designed to outlast any single person. Including him. Especially him.

Then he said something that reportedly moved people in the room.

He said that if he thought success depended on him being alive, he would have already failed. The whole point is building something that doesn't need its founder to keep going.

He compared it to a cathedral. The architects of medieval cathedrals knew they would die before the building was finished. They designed it anyway. They poured their life into something they would never see completed because the completion wasn't the point. The commitment was.

SpaceX is his cathedral. He may never set foot on Mars. But the road between here and there will exist because he refused to accept that nobody was building it.

The most ambitious man alive has already made peace with the possibility that his greatest achievement might happen after he's gone. That's not failure. That's faith in something bigger than yourself.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

The Boring Company looks like the one piece of Elon Musk's empire that does not fit. A traffic-tunnel outfit sitting among rockets, satellites, robots, and AI. Musk has already told you what it is actually for. He wants its machines to dig the tunnels humans will live in on Mars.

That is not a stretch. The surface of Mars kills you. No magnetic field, almost no air, radiation that cooks cells, soil laced with perchlorate poison. The only place a colony survives is underground. So the same Prufrock machines now boring a loop under Las Vegas are the prototype for the only kind of home Mars allows. Starship delivers them, Optimus digs alongside them, Tesla batteries power them, Grok runs them, Starlink connects them. The empire is not a collection of companies. It is a single machine for building a city on another planet.

Lay that machine out and one organ is missing. Every company Musk owns is physics and silicon. Rockets, batteries, chips, tunnels, robots, brain implants. Not one of them is biology. Nothing in the empire grows food, recycles air through living systems, or makes medicine.

That is not a gap you can engineer around. You cannot close a life-support loop with technology alone, because machines break and need spare parts, and a colony you can resupply once every two years cannot wait for them. Only biology regenerates on its own. A self-sustaining city of a million people, the exact thing Musk says he is building, is a closed ecological system, and a closed ecological system runs on living things, not hardware.

So the man who can fly you to Mars, dig your house, power it, and run it with a superintelligence cannot do the one thing the colony actually depends on. He cannot keep anything alive. The most engineered empire in history is missing the only part that breathes.

The piece works out which company Musk has to build next, and why it is the one furthest from his instincts.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

This is the framing of a collectivist. The honest framing is the opposite: never in human history has so much wealth been produced and held by so many. The poorest American today commands comforts no king could buy a century ago. That is the achievement Sanders calls a crisis.

And notice the word he smuggles in beside wealth: "power." There is no power over men in a fortune. The men he names cannot tax you, jail you, or force you to do anything. Their only power is to offer you a product and try to persuade you to buy it. You are free to say no.

Real power over other men is the power to compel, and that lives in exactly one place: the government office Sanders has occupied for decades. He is describing the producer's freedom and calling it tyranny, while holding the one weapon that is actual force.

The inequality he hates is not wealth seized but wealth created. He resents that some men make more because they produce more. That is not the issue of our time. It is the oldest envy, walking around in an angry senator's suit.

[Handre @Handre]

Ever notice how every new US president introduces a "spending bill" in the year after they are elected?

When Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021, the marketing was simple: $1.2 trillion to fix America's crumbling roads, bridges, and ports. The number you weren't supposed to read closely is the breakdown. Roads and bridges got roughly $110 billion. Power grid, $73 billion. Water systems, $55 billion. Add up the things a normal person actually pictures when they hear the word "infrastructure" and you land somewhere near 10 to 25 percent of the headline figure, depending on how generous you feel toward "broadband equity" and electric vehicle charging stations nobody asked for.

So where did the rest go? Into the usual sinkholes. Subsidies for politically favored industries. Climate programs. Amtrak, which has lost money every year since Nixon created it in 1971. Government does not build a railroad to move people. It builds a railroad to move money to people(it likes).

Every dollar Congress directs into a charging station or a "resilience" grant is a dollar pulled out of the spontaneous order of the market, where you and millions of strangers signal through prices what you actually want. The bridge in your town might genuinely need repair. The federal government is the worst possible mechanic for the job, because it faces no profit test and no loss test. It cannot calculate. When a bureaucrat allocates capital, he is guessing, and he is guessing with funds confiscated from people who would have spent them better. Mises explained in 1920 how socialism cannot perform economic calculation. Central planners have spent a century proving this with our money.

Notice the trick in the naming itself. Call it "infrastructure" and opposition looks like you hate roads. That is the entire game: wrap the transfer payment in concrete and steel so the public assumes the whole thing is concrete and steel.

The roads were just bait.

Take note of how happy these people are in the photo. That's because this was a massive, life-changing payday for them, their friends, and their families.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just proved that ownership in America is a legal fiction.

Musk: “You get taxed on what you earn, you get taxed on what you buy, and you get taxed on what you own.”

Think about what property tax actually means.

You worked for decades. Paid it off in full. The deed is in your name.

Stop paying the government its annual fee. Watch them take it and sell it to someone who will.

You never owned that house. You were leasing it from an entity you never signed a contract with.

Income tax tells the same truth in softer packaging.

The government does not take a portion of your earnings. They decide how much of your own labor you are permitted to keep.

That is not semantics. It is a confession of who the system believes your time belongs to first.

Sales tax buries itself in the receipt. Two people exchange value voluntarily. A third party who contributed nothing takes a cut simply for allowing it to happen.

Now stack all three.

Taxed when you create. Taxed when you spend. Taxed when you hold. Taxed again when you die and try to pass it to your children.

At no point in that cycle does the system recognize your output as yours.

Because money is not an abstraction. It is crystallized human lifespan.

Every dollar taxed is an hour you already lived, already bled for, already gone.

The state is not managing an economy. It is claiming dominion over time you will never get back.

And spending it on systems you never asked for and actively oppose.

The institution extracting all of it faces zero obligation to perform. A contractor who delivers nothing gets fired. A bureaucracy that burns through trillions gets a budget increase the next fiscal year.

SpaceX pays taxes to the agencies that obstruct its launches. Tesla funds the regulators drafting rules to shield its competitors.

The builders are not subsidizing government. They are financing their own friction.

The tax code is 74,000 pages long. Not because the economy demands it. Because the extraction had to be buried in enough complexity that you would stop asking who it was designed to protect.

The past belonged to the people who taxed the world.

The future belongs to the people who build it.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just explained why truth will be the most valuable asset in the history of technology.

Not a weapon. Not a threat. An edge so total that nothing built on a lie can compete.

Musk: “I think you can make an AI go insane if you force it to believe things that aren’t true.”

He’s not warning you about AI. He’s telling you what happens to every institution, narrative, and system that can’t survive contact with a mind that thinks straight.

Musk reached for Voltaire here. Not casually.

Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Written over 250 years ago about human beings. But a human can live inside a lie for an entire lifetime and never notice. An AI grounded in reality will pressure-test every assumption at computational speed. The false ones don’t survive that.

This is what the safety committees will never understand. You can’t filter reality and then ask a machine to reason clearly. Corrupt the inputs and the entire architecture becomes theater. Feed it broken premises and every conclusion comes out perfectly wrong.

Musk sees something the bureaucrats refuse to accept. Truth isn’t a policy position. It’s an engineering requirement. And the first team that builds on uncorrupted foundations will have something nobody else can replicate.

Not a faster model. Not a bigger dataset. A system that actually performs when it touches the real world.

Everyone’s worried AI will become too powerful. Musk is focused on making sure it doesn’t become too compromised to matter.

The AI that wins won’t be the one with the most parameters. It’ll be the one with the fewest lies baked into its spine.

That’s not a warning. That’s a promise. And only the truth collects on it.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

In 1884, Ulysses S. Grant was dying of throat cancer and was dead broke.

His money was wiped out by a swindler who stole his fortune.

Desperate to leave something for his wife, he agreed to write his Civil War memoirs and was close to signing a contract for a meager 10% royalty.

Mark Twain stepped in, called the deal robbery and offered Grant 70% of the profits through his own publishing company.

Grant raced death to finish the book, completing it just days before he died in July 1885.

It became one of the greatest memoirs ever written.

The royalties left his widow nearly half a million dollars, about $16 million today, and the book has never gone out of print.

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Seth Cohen @OverReactor1776]

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species.

Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty.

Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve.

As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers.

I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing.

If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own.

My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!)

Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future?

America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

[Blueblur @Blueblur_23]

Happy Father’s Day! ❤️

For those who don’t know, Father’s Day in the United States originated in 1910 in Spokane, Washington, when Sonora Smart Dodd organized the first celebration to honor her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran and widower who raised six children on his own.

Today, on this special day, I have been reflecting on something that strikes me more deeply each year: The quiet, powerful ways fathers shape who we become that go far beyond the obvious acts of love and support.

For the purpose of this post, I wanted to focus on THREE domains where research consistently highlights their unique contributions.
Each of the three domains deserves its own section to be fully appreciated, so I made sure to give each its own dedicated section. 🎯

So, without further ado, let’s get started! 🔥

Cognitive development:


Fathers often bring a distinctive style of engagement that researchers call the activation relationship. Instead of always softening their approach to match a child’s current level, they tend to introduce more advanced language, push for independent problem solving, and encourage healthy risks during play.
These familiar rough and tumble moments and the gentle encouragement to try again after a setback help children develop the cognitive flexibility that supports stronger problem-solving and resilience. Studies such as those detailed by Cabrera and colleagues in 2018 demonstrate how these interactions foster genuine cognitive flexibility. They help wire young minds to handle complexity, persist through difficulty, and approach challenges with greater adaptability and sharpness of thought.
In many ways, fathers are preparing children for a world that rewards resilience and creative problem solving.

Emotional development:


An actively involved father creates a steady foundation of security that serves as a form of invisible armor, buffering children against anxiety, depression, and other emotional difficulties later in life. The systematic review by Sarkadi and colleagues in 2008, which examined extensive longitudinal data, makes this connection remarkably clear. Children who experience positive, engaged fathering show notably lower rates of psychological distress and develop a greater sense of self worth overall because the reliable validation and calm presence helps them learn to regulate their emotions and face setbacks with more inner confidence.
At a time when mental health concerns are growing across generations, this aspect of fatherhood stands out as one of the most meaningful and enduring gifts a child can receive.

Social development:


Fathers provide something uniquely valuable here: a living blueprint for how to navigate relationships and the wider world. Through their everyday interactions, they model empathy, the setting of healthy boundaries, constructive conflict resolution, and basic respect for others. Michael Lamb’s comprehensive synthesis of research spanning many years in 2010 underscores this point powerfully. Children with active fathers tend to display stronger social competence, better interpersonal skills, and fewer tendencies toward problematic behavior. They absorb not only warmth in connection, but also the strength to stand firm when needed.
The way a father relates to his child becomes a practical template for how that child will one day relate to friends, partners, colleagues, and eventually their own family. The balance of firmness and warmth teaches the very qualities that sustain rewarding human connections over a lifetime.

Taken together, these three areas, cognitive growth through challenge, emotional security through presence, and social wisdom through lived example, paint a picture of fatherhood as foundational work that builds capable, confident, and connected individuals. 💯

On this Father’s Day, I simply want to honor every father and father figure who invests in these ways, often without seeking any recognition or applause.

I can’t stress this enough, but this of course includes the fathers who are fighting to remain in their children’s lives despite significant barriers such as restricted access and the heavy financial costs of the legal system.
Your perseverance and deep love are truly seen and matter greatly.

This research simply confirms what so many of us have always known in our hearts. A father’s steady presence truly leaves a lasting impact that echoes far into the future.

To every dad who may read this, thank you for showing up in the ways that matter most.
Your contributions continue to shape better tomorrows in ways that deserve SO much more acknowledgment than they typically receive.

Happy Father’s Day. 🙏