Oregon John

Passionate about Technology, Space, Investing, Gardening, and Adorable Kitties.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

If I was Trump going into a big midterm loss, I would just go out with a bang:

Cut entitlements & close the budget deficit

It will crash the economy and he’ll be hated for 2 years—but history will remember him for saving the country.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The conventional explanation for Rome’s demographic collapse is wealth. People got comfortable. They stopped having children. It happens to every prosperous civilization. Nothing to be done.

This is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in the way that matters most.

Rome didn’t stop having children because it got wealthy. It stopped having children because it built a welfare state – and the welfare state did what welfare states always do: it replaced the incentives that make people build families with incentives that make people consume instead.

The grain dole began modestly. Around 40,000 recipients in 73 BC. By Caesar’s time: 320,000. That eightfold expansion in under three decades was not a plan – it was a political mechanism. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

The dole didn’t just feed people. It changed what people were for. A Roman citizen with guaranteed grain, free entertainment at the arena, and no frontier left to conquer has no pressing need to build anything – including a family. Children are a project. Projects require purpose. The welfare state had quietly removed the purpose while appearing to provide security.

Augustus saw the birth rate collapsing and did what statists always do: he legislated. The Lex Julia, the Lex Papia Poppaea – penalties for the unmarried, rewards for the fertile, the full power of the empire deployed to engineer a baby boom by decree. It didn’t work. It never works. You cannot legislate desire. You cannot fine people into wanting a future.

What Augustus didn’t have was Mises and Hayek. He didn’t understand that the system he was trying to fix with more intervention was being destroyed by the intervention he had already deployed. He saw the symptom — falling birth rates — and reached for the tool he knew: state power. He didn’t see the cause, because no one in his world had yet articulated it: when you replace personal purpose with state provision, you replace the human drive to build with the human tendency to consume. The dole didn’t just feed the hungry. It fed the purposeless.

We have Mises. We have Hayek. We have the complete theoretical account of what the welfare state does to human motivation, to family formation, to the incentive structures that make people want to build something that outlasts them. We know what Augustus didn’t know. We know why the laws failed. We know what produces the behavior he was trying to legislate into existence.

The answer is not more legislation. It is less welfare state. Not because cruelty is a virtue – but because purpose is. The person who must build to survive builds. The person who must form a family to transmit what they have built forms one. The person who receives guaranteed grain, guaranteed entertainment, and guaranteed security from the state has been given everything except the reason to do any of those things.

Scrap the socialism. Restore the purpose. The birth rate will follow – not because anyone ordered it, but because people who have something to build and something to transmit tend, given the choice, to build and transmit.

Rome didn’t know it had a choice. We do.

[Nuanced_Mouse @Pink_Meeces]

Stop asking for permission to live.
Dig the fucking sand out and make them point guns at you to stop.

We are scared of our own shadows. My God.

[Mason @webdevMason]

How normal well-adjusted people become libertarians

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

I have dealt with a lot of theft and fraud in my life. It comes with the job of being a ship captain.

The problem is never the theft. It’s the work the theft creates.

Someone once stole a $500 radio out of our lifeboat. Five hundred dollars is a rounding error on a rig burning a million a day. Everyone had a pretty good idea who took it, but he almost certainly dropped it over the side, so there was no evidence, and with no evidence there was no reprimand.

That $500 radio, a safety critical item, cost us hundreds of man hours. Paperwork. An investigation. New HR anti-theft training for every soul on board. Remedial steps to make sure it never happened again. Then a helicopter to fly the replacement out.

That is the real cost of fraud in any system. For every dollar stolen, hundreds go to the agencies and nonprofits that exist to “fix” the problem. The theft is the seed. The compliance apparatus is the tree.

The only real fix is to fire the people everyone already knows are stealing. HR will never allow it, because the entire anti-radio-theft ecosystem that grew up around the loss would collapse overnight. The ecosystem needs the thief more than the thief needs the radio.

And theft is spectacularly inefficient on its own terms. Even if he got that radio ashore, it was worth maybe two hundred used on ebay. We spent tens of thousands to replace three hundred dollars of value that no longer existed anywhere in the world. It would have been WAY cheaper to hand him the radio and a receipt.

That is the part nobody in the fraud-prevention business wants said out loud: the loss is almost never what breaks you. What breaks you is everything the institution builds to prove it responded.

The saddest truth is it would be far cheaper to just send every Somali home with a million dollars each. They would be happier. We would be happier. Everyone would be better off except the NGOs

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it...

His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side.

In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."

He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction.

This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way.

The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned...

The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old.

Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found.

It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches...

It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating.

There is nothing new under the sun.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

[Old Salty Marine @BamaSaltyMarine]

If MREs are good enough for our troops, why not for welfare?

What if EBT was replaced with monthly MRE deliveries,

8 cases per person. No misuse. No luxury. Just food.

Needs met. Problem solved!

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

“I am so old that I can remember when other people’s achievements were considered to be an inspiration, rather than a grievance.”

— Thomas Sowell

[Sal the Agorist @SallyMayweather]

22 yrs ago today, after a long zoning dispute with local officials that ruined his business, welder Marvin Heemeyer had enough & created the Killdozer.

He destroyed the mayor’s house, the judge’s house, town hall, the police station, & the bank - while avoiding hurting civilians or their property.

Happy Killdozer Day to those who celebrate 🎊

[Inevitable West @Inevitablewest]

The police have released the footage of the arrest of Henry Nowak.

It's as horrific as you'd expect.

There must be a reckoning.

[HeritageBulwark @hbulwark1]

Stop waiting for the governments decision on how to throw the America250 party. We’re Americans. Go throw your own celebration.

America 250

[Green Beret Nap Time @GBNT1952]

Most prominent terrorist attacks since 1970 and their religion:

1. Munich Olympics massacre (1972) - Islam
2. Beirut barracks bombing (1983) - Islam
3. TWA Flight 847 (1985) - Islam
4. Rome & Vienna airport attacks (1985) - Islam
5. Pan Am Flight 103 (1988) - Islam
6. World Trade Center bombing (1993) - Islam
7. Paris Metro bombings (1998) - Islam
8. US Embassy bombings Kenya & Tanzania (1998) - Islam
9. USS Cole bombing (2000) - Islam
10. 9/11 attacks (2001) - Islam
11. Bali bombings (2002) - Islam
12. Istanbul bombings (2003) - Islam
13. Madrid train bombings (2004) - Islam
14. London 7/7 bombings (2005) - Islam
15. Fort Hood shooting (2009) - Islam
16. Toulouse/Montauban shootings (2012) - Islam
17. Boston Marathon bombing (2013) - Islam
18. Brussels Jewish Museum shooting (2014) - Islam
19. Ottawa Parliament attack (2014) - Islam
20. Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher attacks (2015) - Islam
21. Paris November attacks (2015) - Islam
22. San Bernardino shooting (2015) - Islam
23. Brussels airport/metro bombings (2016) - Islam
24. Nice truck attack (2016) - Islam
25. Berlin Christmas Market attack (2016) - Islam
26. Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting (2016) - Islam
27. Westminster Bridge attack (2017) - Islam
28. Manchester Arena bombing (2017) - Islam
29. London Bridge/Borough Market attack (2017) - Islam
30. Barcelona/Cambrils attacks (2017) - Islam
31. Strasbourg Christmas market attack (2018) - Islam
32. London Bridge stabbing (2019) - Islam
33. Samuel apart beheading (2020) - Islam
34. Vienna shooting (2020) - Islam
35. October 7 Hamas-led attacks (2023) - Islam
36. Arras school stabbing (2023) - Islam
37. Solingen knife attack (2024) - Islam
38. New Orleans Bourbon Street attack (2025) - Islam
39. Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack (2025) - Islam
40. Winterthur train-station stabbing (2026) - Islam

I couldn’t list them all, obviously, but let’s put it into perspective.

Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide since 1979:

1979–April 2024: 66,872 attacks

By period:

1979–2000: 2,194 attacks
2001–2012: 8,265 attacks
2013–April 2024: 56,413 attacks

Total Deaths: at least 249,941

Now, who is the biggest threat to the world, again?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@SciGuySpace Maybe we should make a “Hungry Hippo” version of Starship one day to collect and de-orbit spent rocket stages and other space junk

[Roger Seheult, MD @RogerSeheult]

My wife discovered this years ago.

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

Watch Starship's twelfth flight test https://t.co/caRB1thMlg

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

If legislators always vote with the President, we have a king.

If legislators always vote with the prevailing wind, we have mob rule.

If legislators always vote with the Constitution, we have a Republic.

[Joshua A. Streeter; ὃς μάλα πολλὰ/πλάγχθη @PlaidBarbarian]

Christopher Nolan asked the Oracle of Delphi, "Will audiences love my adaptation of the Odyssey?"

And the Pythia replied, "They will discuss it non-stop for months before it even premieres."

And away he went, glad in this heart, poor fool.