Nestus Venter

Husband, Father, Broken God holder, According to a lovely lady on Twitter, I am a gorgeous concern-troll :-)

[katsu @katsuxbt]

Tom Brady says his doctor told him to cut the tendons in both legs. He refused, fixed it in 3 days with no surgery, and played till 45

“After the season, I tell the doctor, My groin’s just really sore all the time. Every time I move, I can feel it just grab”

“And the team doctor says, This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do an adductor release, we’re going in there and cut the adductor tendon in your groin. We’re also going to cut the other side, so it never becomes a problem”

“And I was like, Okay, that sounds not like what I want to do”

“I called Alex when I left the office. I said, Alex, the doctor told me to do this adductor release. What do you think? He said, Absolutely not. Fly out to LA with me for 3 days and I’ll fix it”

“So I fly out there and worked the adductors, lengthened and softened both muscles, my hips, all my glutes, basically relieved the tension on the tendon. And 3 days later, no more pain”

“The doctor said there was a 99% chance he’d have to cut my adductor tendon at some point. And to this day, nothing”

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In 1960, newly independent African leaders had a choice: capitalism or socialism.

Almost all of them picked socialism.

A Ghanaian economist named George Ayittey spent forty years documenting what happened next.

His findings are in print, and almost nobody outside Africa wants to hear them. 🧵

[Seamus (FreedomToons) @seamus_coughlin]

Libs: If Jesus was around you would call him "woke." The Bible is akshully liberal

Texas: Ok, lets have children read it

Libs: NO that'll make them fascist

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I just left the ARC conference, where so many speakers lamented the decline of the West and attributed it to spiritual causes. I agree the West has a spiritual malady. It's called ingratitude. It's feeling entitled to the miracle all around us and thus miserable and empty.

"Is this all there is?" he texts from a lie-flat seat in the front on a 787 taking him across the world in a few hours. The message gets there fast because the plane is in near-constant contact with satellites that provide high-speed Internet literally anywhere and that you can't even outrun at 0.90 Mach.

We complain about spiritual decline while absolutely nothing prevents us from pursuing whatever spiritual path we want, or inviting people to come participate in one with us. There are zero impediments except our own willingness to see that we're in a living miracle and our own ingratitude.

Not one of the overwhelming majority of us will ever face actual food insecurity. We've never wondered if we'll need to boil our shoes to feed our children. We blame a world that gives us everything instead of realizing we're so entitled we won't even look for depth. We don't even have to get off the couch to find it, though maybe we should. It's in our phones if we'd just look.

I agree that there are elements of decline in the West, and that perhaps there are spiritual causes, but I think those start with each of us being unwilling to accept and be grateful for our inheritance and our incredible bounty.

I disagree that with the diagnosis, though, ultimately. We're doing amazing things people refuse to recognize, and we've been attacked by Western Marxist darkness until we've learned only to be critical about everything we have. We're not declining. We're being poisoned, and in our cushy ingratitude, we can refuse the tainted cup.

[Nazi Hunters @HuntersOfNazis]

UNRWA: “Over 660,000 children in Gaza are getting back to school!”

So, let me get this straight...

Before the war, there were only 625,000¹ school-age kids in Gaza. And yet, after supposedly being wiped out so hard by an Israeli child-targeting genocide, it somehow resulted with additional tens of thousands more kids?!?

Truly fascinating shit! Gaza is the only place on earth where genocide always comes with perks like population growth. 🇵🇸

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@BlueNip @dailymaverick We really don't build for cold...

[Frank McCormick @CBHeresy]

A sane society would view this the way it views suicide resulting from schizophrenia: as evidence of profound psychological distress warranting treatment, not affirmation. Gender ideology is fundamentally at war with the Hippocratic Oath.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

What you think you know about King Leopold II and his Belgian Congo is wrong. You were told it was a horrid land of barbaric exploitation. That's a lie. In reality, Congo was a colonial jewel, those atrocities of which Leopold is accused largely didn't occur, and the Belgian years were the only good rule the blighted center of Africa has ever had

First, it's important to note what state of things existed in what became the Belgian Congo before King Leopold II became its ruler. That is a tale best told by Henry Stanley in his book, How I Found Livingstone, in which he describes a living hell on a nearly continent-sized scale. Arab slavers from Zanzibar pillaged the anarchic territory, taking gangs of fettered slaves back with them to be castrated and sold to the Arab slave market.

The interior, when not raided by Arabs, was largely ruled by cannibalistic chieftains, if it was ruled at all: often, horrid anarchy and all its raids and slayings reigned. In short, life before the Belgians was like life in a hotter, more humid version the Stone Age: nasty, brutish, and short, with the only law being the law of the jungle.
Such is the state of things that Stanley and Livingstone did so much to expose with their adventures.

It was about a decade and a half later that, during the Berlin Conference, King Leopold II was granted control of the area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To control it and try and turn a profit, he established the Congo Free State (EIC - État indépendant du Congo).

His EIC then began to pour resources into the territory, particularly Belgian officers and administrators. It was they, alongside a bevy of monks, nuns, and traders, who would build schools, hospitals, and trading posts, who would bring order to the land stuck in the anarchy of the Stone Age, and out of that literally cannibalistic and slave-filled horror bring prosperity, stability, and good governance. To enforce order, the EIC established the Force Publique, which was mainly officered by Belgians but otherwise consisted of natives allied with the Congo Free State. Their main objectives were to protect the Belgian settlements/posts, suppress the Arab slavers, and generally enforce something approaching law and order

The mission was not wholly philanthropic, of course. Leopold II also wanted a profit, and it is Stanley who told him how to get it: rubber. Remember, these were the days when rubber was not synthetic, but came from trees. Stanley, who founded the famous Congolese city of Leopoldville, once a gem of the colonial world, told the king: "You can find [rubber] on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship."

To harvest the rubber without unduly burdening the natives, Leopold established a relatively minor corvée, or labor tax. About 15% of the territory was included in this, and the natives would harvest that abundant rubber for the EIC, rather than have to pay a monetary tax to support the EIC administration. As Bruce Gilley notes in The Case for Colonialism, this was a very mild way of doing things, and the labor tax was not severe

The British wanted the territory, so they lied about EIC rule, claiming it was unjust and cruel, with immense harshness being used to bludgeon the natives into paying extortionate wage taxes. That was just a lie. EIC stations and rule were not only just, but generally liked by the natives.

Generally EIC facilities could be described as Gilley notes: "The rubber station at Irengi, for instance, was known for its bulging stores and hospitable locals, whose women spent a lot of time making bracelets and where 'no one ever misses a meal' noted the EIC soldier Georges Bricusse in his memoirs."

Yet further, going along with it brought immense benefits to the natives. Gilley notes, "the preservation of the EIC meant the preservation of its life-saving interventions against disease, tribal war, slavery, and grinding poverty that had bedeviled the region since recorded time."

So in exchange for harvesting some of the region's abundant rubber, they got modern medicine, an escape from the Stone Age, an escape from slavers, and an escape from cannibalism. A fair deal, all considered, and much less harsh than, say, the British Raj.

Of course, some abuses did occur. Perhaps 10,000 Congolese natives died in clashes with Force Publique troops. It was out of those clashes that the great lie of hand chopping came: a native practice was to, after engaging rebels with gunfire, chop off a hand or foot of the dead enemies to show the bullets had not been wasted. This wasn't done to living enemies, much less corvée laborers. Mainly, it was the attendants of the slavers and cannibals who faced this fate.

That, of course, is not what Leopold's enemies claimed. They claimed, as author Hochschild did, that 10 million Congolese died in exceptionally cruel clashes with the EIC's thugs. That's also a lie. For one, there weren't 10 million people there to die. Somewhere between 8 and 12 million people total lived in the whole territory over the course of EIC rule, as the most sophisticated studies of life in the area found.

Furthermore, the main supposed evidence for the mass death claim is that the deaths are shown by population decline. In reality, what depopulation there was occurred in non-EIC-controlled zones, as life in the Belgian areas was so much better, and the Congolese fled to it.

As Gilley notes, "[In] the rubber-producing Bolobo area in the lower reaches of the Congo river, population decline was a result of the brutalities of freelance native chiefs and ended with the arrival of an EIC officer. More generally, the stability and enforced peace of the EIC caused birth rates to rise near EIC centers, such as at the Catholic mission under EIC protection at Baudouinville (today’s Kirungu). Population declines were in areas outside of effective EIC control."

So, rather than showing the horrible nature of Belgian rule...this shows how just and beneficial, on the whole, it was to the natives. They preferred it to the state of anarchy that otherwise existed.

The other big myth is the hand-chopping claim. Other than the Force Publique practice, which was quickly stamped out, much of the supposed evidence for this comes from the 1890 visit of American missionary George Washington Williams.
Hochschild, in particular, relies on him. What Williams actually said was, “Human hands and feet and limbs, smoked and dried, are offered and exposed for sale in many of the native village markets. From the mouth of the Lomami-River to Stanley-Falls there are thirteen armed Arab camps; and in them I have seen many skulls of murdered slaves pendant from poles and over these camps floating their blood-red flag.”

Notably, he doesn't say the Belgians were doing that. He says the Arabs were. It was the slavers and barbaric chiefs (along with their soldiers) who did the extremity chopping, and the Belgians put an end to it as their authority solidified.

Then, in 1908, EIC rule ended. Rubber prices crashed in 1906, and the king couldn't afford to keep up the colony out of his own pocket, so the Belgian state took it over. Leopold, by all accounts, remained proud of what he accomplished, not ashamed at the supposed sins of his rule. He just couldn't afford it any longer.

The Belgian state then did what the EIC already had, but more so. 1908-60, half a century of intentional effort and dedicated investment, transformed the territory. What had been hell on Earth for European and native alike became a prosperous colonial gem, one of the jewels of Africa.

Europeans even went there on vacation! It was civilized, increasingly developed, safe in a way it never was before or has been since, and the decades of investment made it prosperous, particularly in the resource-rich Katanga region, but also across the country. Gone were the slavers, the cannibals, the hand-chopping, and all the rest. What replaced it was civilization in what had been the heart of Darkness. Below, for example, is what Leopoldville used to look like.

Sadly, Belgian rule was, despite being "the only period of good governance that this benighted region has ever known," as Gilley put it, ended in 1960. What replaced it was not just and efficient native administration, but a return to anarchy and horrors. The Simba Rebellion was one of the most sickening episodes of the whole decolonization experience. Hence why even today, as Gilley notes, the Congolese will ask Westerners, in a "widely heard lament," "When are the Belgians coming back?"

[nduka omeife @ndukaomeife]

When I watched the Ecuador coach celebrate so passionately after his team's victory over Germany yesterday, I was reminded of a profound truth often associated with Napoleon Hill:

"The most powerful mastermind alliance a man will ever form is in his marriage. A woman, rightly chosen, aligned in vision, and honored in spirit, can make a man unbreakable. But a woman wrongly chosen or unaligned in purpose will drain him of vision, strip him of confidence, and sentence him to spiritual poverty.

Many men fall not because of failure in business, but because of conflict in the home. They rise with vision only to have it mocked. They speak with clarity only to have it questioned. They act with courage only to be met with resistance. This is not partnership. This is war. And a man at war with his household cannot build peace outside of it.

But when a woman supports a man's purpose, when she believes in his destiny, when she reflects his greatness before the world sees it, that woman becomes the mastermind in motion. Her energy fuels him. Her intuition sharpens him. Her peace steadies him. Her presence becomes a sanctuary. And the man with that kind of partner is dangerous to every limitation.

You must choose this alliance with wisdom. And if you are already in one, you must train it, not ignore it. Share your aim. Speak your plan. Invite her insight. Draw strength from her spirit. This is not weakness. This is wisdom. This is law."

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

What happened to my bank account? Absolutely nothing.

You believed a lie.

You believed a lie that was told to you by your political class, and your news media, to keep you from asking uncomfortable questions about how much you are paying in tax, where that money is going, and what quality of care you actually receive for the portion of it they didn't steal.

Don't believe me? Look at the pictures.

Look.

At.

Them.

That's my wife, @acrobatichobbit. Before and after.

That's a five centimeter mass. Stage 4 metastatic melanoma. The worst kind of cancer, the most vicious form of assassin your own body can betray you with. That bright area? Blood.

Ten years ago, anywhere in the world, the scan on the left is a death sentence... an endless gauntlet of painful surgeries, followed by chemotherapy, hair loss, uncontrolled vomiting, wasting away to nothing, death.

In America, today, it's not.

We have things here. Genetic therapies. Tailored viruses that attack tumor cells. Drugs that highlight cancers for your immune system, drag them kicking and screaming into the spotlight to be killed.

I won't tell you about her exact course of treatment, because that's none of your goddamned business, but I will tell you that it cost American drug companies and medical researchers a fortune to discover.

A fortune that your nation cannot afford because you chose socialism instead of progress. And socialism, however fine-sounding in theory, simply does not work.

Were she and I British, living in Britain, relying on the National Health Service, I would be a widower now.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes. This technology was expensive to create, and the people who did so deserve to pay their mortgages and feed their kids. So do the oncologists and surgeons.

Many of the men who cared for her were old men, experienced men, long past retirement age, still working because when your profession is clawing souls back from the void, sitting on a beach with a pina colada instead just doesn't hit the same.

They deserve every cent.

Did saving her cost a ruinous amount of money?

Yes.

Did I pay it?

No.

Because believe it or not, when things are ruinously expensive, but vitally necessary, we here in America come up with ways to deal with that.

Ways that don't involve creating a big pot of money and entrusting it to corrupt slimeballs.

We have insurance. And sometimes insurance isn't cheap, but the bite it takes is a hell of a lot less of what we have than the tax man takes from you.

And insurance companies sometimes have to make hard decisions about which spending choices will save the most people. I know about this in detail, because that is my wife's profession. She creates the mathematical models that pay for all this stuff.

The insurance that saved her is the exact same plan that she provides to others.

And at the end of an awful year and a half of treatment, awful because cancer medicines make you far sicker than the cancer itself...

We were left whole.

Battered and wounded in spirit, but financially whole, at least.

The only loss we took was the blow to my career as a novelist, because it turns out you can't write stories while your wife is dying, and you don't automatically recover that ability afterwards. Not right away.

I wondered every day if she was going to live or die. I wondered every day what the hell I was going to with myself without her.

But I never wondered, not for a moment, how the hell we were going to pay for all this.

Your government doesn't solve the problem. It is the problem.

They lie to you.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

Islam's moral ceiling is fixed. It was set 1,400 years ago, by Muhammad and the Qur’an.

You can’t go higher than Muhammad. He’s the limit. The ceiling.

Muhammad married a child, took slaves, ordered executions, waged wars, lied, raped, hated, and stole.

So how can anyone say those things are wrong if the man who did them is still your highest example?

That’s why Islam doesn’t change, not because Muslims don’t want it to, but because they’re not allowed to imagine anything better than what’s already been given.

The West, shaped by centuries of Judeo-Christian moral struggle, leaves space to climb. It admits mistakes. It reforms. It questions. It separates power from holiness.

Islam doesn’t.

That’s why it doesn’t evolve, and why, when it enters a modern society, it doesn’t integrate. It collides.

Because a faith that locks morality in the 7th century can’t live peacefully in a world that keeps growing.

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

People look at this and they think it can be fixed by the people that made it like this.

[mark 🇿🇦 @markmywords]

🚨 South Africa’s municipalities are in freefall.

Auditor-General’s latest report:

👉 Over half the country’s municipal authorities are in severe financial distress (many effectively bankrupt - unable to pay creditors or confirm they can keep operating).

👉 45% passed unfunded budgets.

👉 Fewer than 20% (just 15%) achieved clean audits.

No metro got a clean audit.

This is not bad luck or “legacy issues.” It is the predictable result of an ideological system that put political loyalty, race-based gatekeeping, and cadre deployment ahead of competence and delivery.

Follow the 🧵 1/4

[Michael McGill 🏛 @mcgillmd921]

I feel a sense of awe and wonder knowing I am among the first human beings in 2,000 years to read the contents of a scroll charred in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

For centuries, its contents were unreadable. The scrolls were damaged beyond repair. Ancient wisdom was in our hands, but cruelly inaccessible.

Until now.

Thanks to modern science and the brilliant work of the Vesuvius Challenge team, the contents of one of these ancient scrolls are available for us to read.

The text is fragmentary, partly due to previous attempts to open the scroll by hand. But enough has been recovered to identify it as a philosophical treatise, most likely Stoic.

Modern technology is allowing us to recover ancient wisdom for the first time in two millennia.

What a time to be alive.

One recovered fragment seems to capture the wonder of the accomplishment itself:

“Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect.”

You can read about the Vesuvius Challenge and download the recovered contents at the link below.

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@verashni Both these pics come Uganda...

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@shannasparkleof @amnesty It should be banned...

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

To the outside world, late 19th Century London was the glittering heart of a global empire, fueled by rapid industrialization and unprecedented wealth. Yet, just beneath this prosperous veneer lay an urban underbelly defined by staggering overcrowding, destitution, and a desperate struggle for daily survival.

For the thousands of homeless individuals navigating the brutal English winters, the line between life and death often came down to a few spare coins. This stark divide gave rise to one of the era's most notorious institutions: the "four-penny coffin" house.

Operated predominantly by charitable organizations like the Salvation Army, these ultra-cheap lodging houses offered a grim but necessary alternative to freezing on the streets or facing arrest for vagrancy. For the price of four pennies, a client was permitted to spend the night indoors, provided with a small, rectangular wooden box reminiscent of a coffin.

The meager fare included a leather tarp or canvas blanket for warmth and a hard pillow. While the sight of rows of men sleeping tightly packed in wooden crates presents a deeply unsettling image today, at the time, it represented a coveted luxury, a dry space, a modicum of security, and protection from the elements.

These coffin houses were part of a strictly tiered, commodified system of poverty management designed for the city's destitute. Those who could not scrape together four pennies were forced to choose even more precarious options. For two pennies, a person could purchase the "two-penny hangover," where clients sat side-by-side on a bench, sleeping slumped over a long rope slung beneath their armpits. In the morning, shelter attendants would simply cut or untie the rope to wake the occupants.

The absolute bottom of the scale was the "penny sit-up," which bought nothing more than the right to sit on a bare bench for the night without any physical support. Ultimately, these tiered levels of survival serve as a powerful historical testament to the stark inequalities of the Victorian era, highlighting the bare-minimum social safety nets provided to the working poor.

While the imagery of sleeping in a wooden crate is bleak enough, a lesser-known operational detail reveals just how systematically industrial these shelters were: the beds were completely stripped of traditional linens and instead equipped with stiff oilcloth or leather tarpaulins. This design choice was driven entirely by a ruthless need for efficiency and sanitation. Because the shelters hosted a rotating population suffering from severe outbreaks of lice, fleas, and bedbugs, fabric bedding would have quickly become a public health disaster. Instead, the waterproof oilskin allowed attendants to swiftly hose down the empty crates with water and disinfectant each morning, resetting the grim inventory for the next night’s influx of destitute souls.

© The Historian's Den

#archaeohistories

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@BlueNip @dailymaverick The ANC is in charge of Joburg and where they are in charge, things fall apart...

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@CathyYoung63 @GrnCharlie Many times your only choice is between something bad and something worse. Politics especially.

[Nestus Venter @nestus]

@mclovenxoxo Being on time is evolution to be dependable and trustworthy...

[Humble Flow @HumbleFlow]

Every civilization falls the moment it decides it knows better than human nature:

“We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world. The great marches of civilization have not come from the clever, the adaptable, or the fashionable. They have come from men who stood still while the rest of the world rushed past them, and who held fast to certain moral truths as to a rock. Progress itself depends upon the retention of permanent things. A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.”

— G. K. Chesterton