Mike Pulliam

SFNative#wesleyanU #uchastings #giants #49ers #Dubs passionate about my City. Competence and empathy are powerful.

[Mike Pulliam @mikepulliam]

Dean Preston, Hillary Ronen, Connie Chan and Chesa Boudin all brag about speaking truth to power but the truth is they speak nonsense to reality. We need common sense and competence to make a comeback in SF

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Ayn Rand: "The moral code which is implicit in capitalism has never been formulated explicitly. The basic premise of that code is that man, is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others. That man must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others sacrificing themselves to himself.

This is the moral premise in which the United States of America was based.

The principle of man's right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness."

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

The idea was brilliant. The execution was catastrophic.

Allied planners knew that the men hitting the beaches of Normandy would be cut apart without armor support in those first critical minutes. The solution was the DD tank. The Duplex Drive Sherman. A standard 33-ton Sherman tank fitted with a collapsible canvas flotation screen and two small propellers bolted to the rear. Raise the screen, drop into the water, swim to shore, lower the screen, start shooting. Tanks arriving with the first wave, ahead of the infantry, suppressing German positions before the ramps even dropped.

The concept worked perfectly in testing. The designers had one requirement: waves no higher than one foot.

On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the waves off Omaha Beach were six feet high.

Nobody stopped the launch.

At 5:40 AM, the 741st Tank Battalion began dropping their DD tanks into the English Channel, six thousand yards from shore. More than three miles of open water, in seas that were six times rougher than the tanks were designed to handle. The first tank hit the water. The canvas screen, designed to hold the weight of a Sherman afloat, was immediately overwhelmed. Waves crashed over the top. Water flooded in. The tank went down.

Then another. Then another.

The canvas screens collapsed like paper bags in the swell. Tanks that had been designed to float became 33-ton anchors the moment they hit the water. Crews inside had seconds. Some got out through the hatches. Many did not. The tanks took them straight to the bottom of the English Channel.

Some crews managed to get a radio signal out as their tank went under, warning the following units not to launch. The warnings either did not get through or came too late.

29 DD tanks were launched by the 741st Tank Battalion that morning. 27 sank before reaching the beach. The entire left flank of Omaha Beach, where the 1st Infantry Division was assaulting, had five tanks to support it. Five. Against fortified German positions housing hundreds of machine guns, 88mm guns, and mortars zeroed on every inch of that sand.

The infantry arrived first. Alone.

What happened next at Omaha Beach, the 2,400 casualties, the slaughter in the first ten minutes, the near-total destruction of Company A, is inseparable from the loss of those tanks. They were supposed to be there. They were supposed to be firing at German positions while the ramps were still closed. Instead they were on the bottom of the Channel with their crews.

The story of the 743rd Tank Battalion makes it worse.

The 743rd was assigned to the western sector of Omaha Beach. Their LCT flotilla commander looked at the sea conditions that morning, looked at the waves, and made a different decision. He refused to launch his tanks into the water. Instead he drove his LCTs directly onto the beach and dropped the ramps in the shallows. The tanks rolled off onto sand.

Nine tanks were knocked out by German fire during the assault. But they were there. They were fighting. The infantry had armor.

At Utah Beach, the sea was calmer, protected from the prevailing winds. 28 of 32 DD tanks launched there made it ashore. The infantry had support. Utah Beach cost 197 casualties. Omaha cost 2,400.

The sunken tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion still lie on the bottom of the English Channel off Omaha Beach. They have never been raised. Divers have visited them. Inside some of the wrecks, they found what they expected.

They are still there today, 82 years later, three miles off the coast of Normandy, on the bottom of the sea.

Today is June 6th.

Remember them.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

Out of 16.4 million Americans who served in WWII, only about 40,000 are still alive.

They’re dying at a rate of ~100 per day.

These are the heroes who saved the world from tyranny.

Find one. Thank one. Listen to their stories.

While you still can.

[Dovi Safier @safier]

“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.”

-#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago.

Required watching for every young person today!

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Goodbye, socialist moment

[Mike Pulliam @mikepulliam]

@agarwal It’s almost like he’s totally out of touch with SF and reality and thinks we’re too dumb to notice his trying to buy the election - or is he simultaneously that dumb and vain that he didn’t notice he was trying to buy the election

[litquidity @litcapital]

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in Bernie’s three homes that were purchased from his taxpayer-funded income for over 35 years despite achieving absolutely nothing

[Mike Pulliam @mikepulliam]

@BernieSanders You literally want to take money from citizens who have created value and made money and give it to the government - aka you - who creates nothing of value

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.

Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.

Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.

It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.

Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.

That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.

Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.

The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

We just decided to stop teaching everyone math, in the hopes that this would make society equal because everyone would be equally incompetent

[Mike Pulliam @mikepulliam]

@BernieSanders @AOC Can we please put a moratorium on stupidity?

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

California is a failed state. The level of corruption and inefficiency in government there is unmatched. Nobody else in the world pays so much to get so little.

The criminal justice system does not control crime; the people who run it make it intentionally costly and ineffective because they do not want it to exist. Locking someone up in CA costs about $128k a year, and California’s murderers and rapists in prison get better health care than you do.

The state also refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and pays billions per year in tax-funded benefits to illegal aliens.

And while prisoners get better care and amenities than most college students, thousands of California residents live in tents on sidewalks and under overpasses. And instead of rounding up addicts and making them detox, California distributes needles to them, which they throw on the ground or scatter on children’s playgrounds when they are done with them.

The rich live behind walls and guards and razor wire fences to compensate for the failure of the state to provide basic security while normal folks learn not to leave anything in their cars and not to get too used to their windows.

The schools are so bad nobody wants to send their kids to them, but staffing levels are rising despite falling enrollment. The state universities are flooded with students who cannot do middle-school math.

California is a dystopia; a model of failed governance. The state enacted progressive values as public policy and it has failed spectacularly.

And yet Gavin Newsom, who proudly talks about being so stupid he can barely read, is considered a leading Democratic presidential candidate:

[Nate Silver @NateSilver538]

Like honestly "it's going to take us several weeks to tell you who won the election" is failed state shit and should be much more stigmatized.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

YIMBYism makes housing affordable

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

government unions are claiming that forcing them to go to work violates the state's environmental laws

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

Voltaire passed away today in 1778.

There are two quotes of his I always come back to:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

and

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

[@jason @Jason]

If you’re in/around the administration, you're obligated to keep up the narrative that AI is creating jobs.

If you're a Democrat or America First/America Only, you're obligated to spread the job destruction narrative.

That's how AOC and Steve Bannon find themselves on the same team.

If you're an independent thinker, you understand that we will have massive AI job *displacement* combined with profound abundance (lower prices, shorter work weeks and new jobs)

This means extreme winners AND losers, which will require thoughtful change management.

[Joe Rogan Podcast News @joeroganhq]

Bill Maher: "Did you know that a black fourth grader in Mississippi is two and a half times as likely to be proficient in math and reading as one in California? Mississippi is kicking our ass in education and for way less money."

[Mike Pulliam @mikepulliam]

@laurenlself A and E are the only legitimate options