Jorj X. Mckie

A guy who thinks maybe BUSAB is worth considering.
GenX w/ heavy Greatest Gen influence, amid the last vestiges of the Old South. Real history & science FTW 👍.

[Handre @Handre]

Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.

When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.

Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.

Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.

[Volunteer_Anon @AnonJourna96897]

💥 It’s Fact Friday! 💥

THE BATTLE OF ATHENS, TN:

On August 1, 1946, World War II veterans in Athens decided they were done watching McMinn County steal elections. Paul Cantrell had run the county since 1936. Pat Mansfield later held the sheriff’s office. Deputies lived off fines and scare tactics, and elections were not clean. The GIs formed their own ticket and ran Knox Henry for sheriff. That night, deputies grabbed the ballot boxes and locked themselves in the county jail to count the votes in private.

That’s when the town snapped.

Veterans smashed into the National Guard armory, loaded up on rifles, and closed in on the jail. A crowd packed the square, and the deputies would not come out. Then the shooting started. For hours the jail and the streets traded fire in the dark. After midnight the GIs brought dynamite. The blasts flipped the cars, tore up the jail porch, and blew the windows out.

That ended it. The deputies gave up, and the boxes came out. Knox Henry won sheriff 2,175 to 1,270. Nobody died, and by morning, the old crowd that ran the county was finished.

The lesson was not that Athens loved a fight. It was that a country goes rotten when nobody can trust the count. They fought all around the world to secure the right to vote. They were not going to lose it in a corrupt county jail.

Pictured below: GIs firing on the jail during the fight. Knox Henry(white shirt/striped tie) being sworn in after the count. The crowd outside McMinn jail and the overturned cars on the square the next morning.

(Tennessee State Library & Archives; McMinn County Historical Society and Archives; Bettmann Archive.)

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@Oilfield_Rando So, now you may have lost the plot.

Sad fact - integration and the civil rights movement overlapped with LBJ's Great Society - which was the biggest poison pill since the income tax was established.

Black America was bedrock solid until LBJ. Eisenhower was a good guy.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@TJMartinell1 Thank you @TJMartinell1

There were fine and decent people on both sides. It was a national tragedy. Americans paid the blood price for inherited corruption.

My home town in the deep South is one of the places that can make a claim to the origins of Memeorial Day.

[Rich Penkoski @WFCPreacher]

The world still cries, “Give us Barabbas.” Luke 23:18-25.

[David Marcus @BlueBoxDave]

This man, Hunter Holmes McGuire, was a surgeon in the Confederate army who saved countless lives, on both sides. He later served as president of the American Medical Association. This is madness.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@stevenbowling19 @Mr_Husky1 You beat me to it, I see.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@Mr_Husky1 Did anyone mention secretly picking up a second phone in the house to listen in on someone's conversation?

That was a thing every kid did at least once, I bet. Or had it done to them.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@DrClownPhD It sounds great, actually. 👍

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@brockpierson Yup. Never used on myself, but they were still around in certain places back in my day.

Also... "old farts", eh? Funny how ignornace in younger generations often manifests as butt-hurt towards older ones.

It seems to be one of the constants of teh human condition.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@solar_dragon24 Give him the double tap. Solve that problem for yourself and for other potential victims as well.

Collect thank you's and free drinks from rational people afterwards. 👍

[Sovey @SoveyX]

Ordering coffee in 2006 vs 2026.
A lot has changed in 20 years.

[Ooana Trien ~ Eric Arthur Blaire’s Mistress @ooana]

I always understood why the Second Amendment was constitutionally protected.

What I never really understood was why people called it a natural right.

Then I moved from New York to Florida.

I didn’t own a gun yet.

One afternoon I was loading things into the trunk of my car outside a HomeGoods when a man approached me.

“Excuse me.”

He must have thought he’d startled me, because he immediately added, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get close.”

I laughed.

“I’m a New Yorker. I’m used to close. How can I help you?”

He started telling me that he needed money for gas.

At some point while he was talking, I got into my car.

And sitting there, with the conversation still unfolding, I suddenly realized something:

He didn’t know whether I had a gun.

Not somewhere at home.

Not hypothetically.

For all he knew, I could have had one right there in the car, tucked under the steering wheel or within reach.

I didn’t.

But he couldn’t know that.

Schrödinger’s gun.

And in that instant, before I even knew whether his story was true, something changed in the space between us.

I thought about New York.

I thought about my friend who had been murdered in his own apartment during a burglary gone wrong.

Would those men have gone into his apartment if they had believed he might be armed?

I don’t know.

I thought about the time I was mugged at gunpoint, with a gun pressed against my temple.

Would that man have approached me with the same confidence if he had believed there was even a possibility that I could defend myself?

I don’t know that either.

But sitting there in that Florida parking lot, listening to this stranger talk, I suddenly understood deterrence in a way I never had before.

Not as military theory.

Not as constitutional law.

As something intimate.

My body. My life. The few feet between one person and another.

For years I had thought about guns primarily as objects: who had one, who shouldn’t have one, what laws should govern them.

Suddenly I understood the question from the other direction.

What changes when another person cannot simply assume that I am defenseless?

I felt taller.

Not because I had a gun.

I didn’t.

But because, for the first time, I understood that someone approaching me could not automatically assume that being physically stronger meant having power over me.

There was uncertainty.

There was a boundary around my body that had to be taken seriously.

Then his story began to fall apart.

I told him I didn’t have cash, but offered to help another way. I could put some gas in his car.

He took off.

So apparently, yes, it was a scam.

But by then I had already understood something much larger than the scam.

The phrase natural right finally made sense to me.

The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body.

It had not given me my life.

It had not invented my right to protect either one.

Those things came first.

What I understood that afternoon was the thing underneath them.

I had once been completely helpless while another human being held a gun against my temple.

Years later, without a gun in my possession at all, I understood what it meant for the person approaching me not to know whether I was helpless.

That uncertainty changed the space between us.

And that was the moment I finally understood the natural right behind the Second Amendment:

My life is mine, and
the right to defend it has to exist before anyone gives me permission to do so.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Kale became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist.

Before all that, the biggest kale buyer in America was Pizza Hut. Not for the menu. They bought it by the ton, fourteen thousand pounds of it in 2012, and laid it round the salad bar to hide the ice. Nobody was meant to eat it. It was the doily.

Then a PR firm called My Young Auntie went to work. Hermès on the client list, Givenchy, and kale. She chalked it onto boards around Manhattan. Got it onto the menu of a restaurant she already represented. Had T-shirts printed, because obviously. And she set up the American Kale Association, website, Facebook page, thousands of followers, and then rang journalists to tell them she had been hired by the American Kale Association. Actual farming bodies said they had never heard of it. They had never heard of it because it was her, at a desk, in New York. She owned up in 2015 and called it the proudest campaign of her career, which is fair enough.

It went off like a rocket. Bon Appétit declared 2012 the Year of Kale. Dr Oz got hold of it. Paltrow made the chips on television. Beyoncé wore the word on a sweatshirt in a video, Michelle Obama ate the chips on Fallon, and Whole Foods was shifting twenty two thousand bunches a day.

A leaf that was hiding ice in 2011 was a moral position by 2014.

And the noble heritage everyone assumes it has is fodder. Kale is Brassica oleracea, same as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and sprouts, all of them the same wild cliff cabbage bent into different shapes over centuries. Kale is the one nobody bothered improving, because it was never for people. Britain grew it by the acre and called it cow cabbage. Fed it to stock to get them through winter. In Scotland it was so profoundly unremarkable that kail just meant dinner and the vegetable patch was the kailyard.

Then the nutrition, which is where it falls apart completely. A hundred grams is thirty five calories. You could eat a kilo of the stuff, which would take you most of an afternoon and do something permanent to your jaw, and still not catch up with two eggs. The iron is the non-haem sort your gut mostly turns away at the door. And the whole superfood case runs on nutrients per calorie, a ratio that automatically flatters anything containing no calories, so the winner is always going to be something nobody could live on. Congratulations to the kale.

The word means nothing, incidentally. Banned off packaging across Europe since 2007 unless you can back it with an authorised health claim, and nobody can, so it lives on menus and in headlines where the rules cannot reach.

It is also so unpleasant raw that somebody had to invent a technique. You massage it. Grown adults stand at a worktop giving a hand rub to a leaf until it is theoretically chewable, then eat it anyway, because a woman with a fashion client list decided in 2012 that they should.

Pizza Hut had it right the first time. It was decoration.

[Lara Logan @laralogan]

Posting again because it just has to be said and resend until people realize we are murdering babies.

[Christy 💕 @Christy4Change]

What has happened to Feminism?

Kill your babies in the womb, they are nothing.

Sleep around, your body isn’t special.

Postpartum is an acceptable excuse to kill your children, it’s everyone else’s fault.

Women are superior unless you’re a man wanting to be called a woman to take over their sports and private spaces and if biological women speak up they are “Transphobic”.

In all honestly feminists hate women more than misogynists do at this point.

Satanic.

[Knights Templar International @KnightsTempOrg]

Is this true?

[alyssa @alyssamariiee11]

One woman (Erika Kirk) loses her husband and people put her on trial and judge her actions.

Another woman (Lindsay Clancy) strangles her 3 children and people are working overtime to justify her actions.

We have lost all perspective.

[Jorj X. Mckie @omg_eabod]

@JemmingKristin You are wrong.