Victor

Pilot | Father | Farmer | Nature lover & enthusiast | political student of the streets.

[Michael | Hypermarkets @itsmichaelluu]

Its 2027, you bought the $SPY dip last year.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Mbula Mutula @MbulaMutula]

The High Court yesterday made a very important decision. When you take a loan from any lending institution, the amount of interest accrued cannot exceed the amount you received from the institution (principal). Meaning if you borrow kshs. 100,000, you cannot pay more than kshs.200,000 in total. This is good news to many Kenyans. Tag that one lending institution wajionee habari kamili.

[Quantum Party @QuantumParty_]

The City of London is not London. It is a one-square-mile medieval enclave with its own laws, its own government, its own police force, and its own mayor — separate from the Mayor of London. It operates outside British law by design. It is the global capital of offshore banking, money laundering, and financial secrecy. Every corrupt oligarch, every rogue intelligence agency, every dark money operation on earth runs capital through it. It has operated this way since the medieval era. Pressure Britain to annex it. Force it to comply with modern banking regulations. And watch trillions in dark money get flushed out of the shadows and into legitimate markets.

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

🚨THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCAM OF THIS CENTURY

Last year, President Trump announced reciprocal tariffs.

The US government started collecting massive tariffs, amounting to over $160 billion.

Meanwhile, businesses who were paying tariffs passed on high costs to consumers.

This led to more households facing high inflation, even though the official number is around 3%.

Trump said these collected tariffs will be used to give a $1,200 dividend to every US household to make their finances better.

In Q1, the Supreme Court deemed that US tariffs are illegal and they should be returned.

Now, the US government is opening a claim portal to refund $166 billion in tariffs.

And guess who's getting all these refunds?

The businesses who passed all their costs to consumers.

So, the business passed all the tariff costs, and now they are the ones getting the refunds too.

Meanwhile, US consumers faced high inflation, and now they'll get absolutely NOTHING.

[Wimar.X @DefiWimar]

🚨 BREAKING

INSIDERS JUST STARTED MASSIVELY DUMPING EVERYTHING EXCEPT OIL RIGHT AHEAD OF THE U.S. MARKET OPEN ON MONDAY!

EVERY SINGLE INSIDER IS SELLING BILLIONS NONSTOP:

0 BUYS. 1,382 SELLS. $13.58 BILLION IN VOLUME.

THIS IS REALLY BAD FOR MARKETS...

[Charles Onyango-Obbo @cobbo3]

Say what?😳

[Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 @jacksonhinkle]

🚨🇨🇳BREAKING: China's Cross-Border Interbank Payments System (CIPS) now spread across 185 countries, allowing global trade in Chinese yuan without touching the U.S. dollar.

[Andrew Lokenauth @FluentInFinance]

Warren Buffett sold $6.1 billion worth of stock last quarter.

Buffett now holds a record high $382 Billion in CASH.

He's getting ready for a crash...

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

“Boy in School”
A boy clutches a chalkboard in an overheated and unfurnished classroom.

[The Verge @verge]

Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, according to leaked documents https://t.co/gR029d8Cww

[Abdikadir. M @Abdikadirmba008]

ODM has the right Back up. @HEBabuOwino is the Right one who can represent Baba.

[Zoom Afrika @zoomafrika1]

Morocco 🇲🇦 as seen from Spain 🇪🇸

[Logan Weaver @LogWeaver]

Brexit was meant to be a win.

Instead, the UK lost 330,000 jobs.
Exports tanked by 27%.
Imports collapsed by 32%.
London’s financial crown? Gone.

Brexit didn’t free Britain.
It broke it.

Here’s the brutal truth no one’s talking about:

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

Warren Buffett isn’t just the best investor in the world—he’s in a league of his own.

Imagine investing $10,000 in Berkshire Hathaway back in 1965…

Today, that would be worth over $2 billion (!)

Here are 100 of his most powerful investing quotes:

[Expert Car Reviews🚘 @CarReviewExpert]

The Land Rover Defender Octa,introduced by Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) in 2024,is the most powerful and capable variant of the Defender lineup ever produced.The name "Octa" is derived from "octahedron," a diamond shape,standing for its status as the toughest Defender.

[Dhaval (Investment Books) @InvestmentBook1]

China's Digital RMB Revolution

Links to 16 countries in ASEAN and Middle East.

Skips U.S. SWIFT system with blockchain tech.

Speeds up payments to 7 seconds.

[Balaji @balajis]

Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business.

So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch.

But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch.

With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to keep in America all these years has suddenly become unprofitable.

You post online about how bad this is but get shouted down by an angry mob, convinced that capitalists like you should die. You can’t tell nowadays if they’re on left or right.

Moreover, you don’t have the time, money, skills, or tools in house to build that $1M of parts yourself. You are being asked to do the equivalent of growing a maple tree when all you needed was a little maple syrup. So now you are faced with several tough choices.

(1) First, you may need to go into debt or fire people to quickly come up with the $300k in cash to pay for these surprise tariffs at customs. Even if the tariff might go away, it might not, so you have to get the cash somehow or risk having your shipment impounded.

(2) Next, you might need to reduce quality to stop losing $100k on each batch. You could order the lower quality $750k parts, grimace and pay 30% tariff at customs, and hope you can build and sell for the same price of $1.2M per batch despite the lower quality.

(3) Alternatively, you could keep the quality parts at $1M and instead raise prices to $1.5M per batch to get back your original margins of $200k per batch, which you need to pay employees after all. But that’s a big hike that your customer will probably not welcome, given that he’s likely dealing with his own tariff shock.

So: these tariffs don’t really give an incentive to build in the US. Because it’s far more expensive to build a screw factory than to pay even high tariffs on a foreign screw.

Instead what they likely mean is debt, layoffs, lower quality, and higher prices for any US company that buys parts abroad.

Just to understand how common that is:

[Gary Stone @GaryStoneSWS]

Elon's $44 BILLION Twitter purchase was never about social media:

It was about the "entire financial world".

After Musk just announced his partnership with Visa, a new economic reality is about to emerge.

Here's what it means for the future of finance: 🧵

[African @ali_naka]

Congo will NEVER find peace until this Sin is exorcised