Sandra L

patience, persuasion and humility are the goal. Defending our values. Sharing all kind of curious, edifying or alerting tweets

[Sandra L @sandyb2017]

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.” – Robert Louis Stevenson via @momentumdash

[Francis Fleming @FrncsFlmng]

Mark Steyn explains the stark demographic reality: a 90% population with 1.3 children per couple and a 10% population with 3.5 children will have roughly the same number of grandchildren in only two generations. The transformation is already underway.(2010)

[Handre @Handre]

The Cash for Clunkers program, which Congress passed in June 2009 and burned through its $3 billion budget in under two months, destroyed functional wealth on a national scale, and somehow they called it "stimulus."

The mechanics were simple: trade in a working car, receive up to $4,500 toward a new one, and watch government employees pour sodium silicate into the old engine to make it seize permanently. Around 700,000 vehicles got crushed. These were not rusted-out death traps. The eligibility rules required the trade-in to be drivable and insured. You were watching the state systematically annihilate usable capital because Keynesian demand theory told it that destruction generates recovery. Frederic Bastiat explained why this is wrong in 1850, in an essay short enough to read on your lunch break. Congress ignored it.

The ripple effect hit people the government never mentioned in its press releases. Mechanics lost repair work. Used-car dealers watched their inventory evaporate. Low-income buyers who depend on the sub-$5,000 market faced prices that jumped roughly 10% in the years after the program. Free market economists call this "seen versus unseen." Politicians only showed you the gleaming new Chevy Malibu driving off the lot. They never showed you the single mother in Akron who needed a $3,000 Corolla and found nothing affordable left on the lot.

Even the environmental justification collapsed under basic scrutiny. A 2009 study by Resources for the Future calculated that the program cost between $237 and $365 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The voluntary carbon credit market at the time priced a ton around $10 to $20. The government spent up to thirty times the market rate to achieve an environmental outcome the market was already pricing far more efficiently.

This is what central planning always does. It takes your money, destroys real assets, and transfers wealth from the poor to auto manufacturers and their financiers. The program's designers received awards. The Akron mother paid higher prices. The engines sat crushed in junkyards. Nobody in Washington answered for any of it.

[Diego Angulo @AmoaHamlet]

LAS VERDADES INCÓMODAS QUE JAVIER MILEI PUSO SOBRE LA MESA

➜ Los impuestos son un robo.
➜ La inflación es un impuesto encubierto que castiga a los más pobres.
➜ El Estado nunca crea riqueza, solo se la extrae a los demás.
➜ El déficit fiscal de hoy son los impuestos e inflación de mañana.
➜ El empresario no es un explotador, es quien detecta oportunidades, invierte y asume riesgos.
➜ El beneficio empresarial no es inmoral, es la recompensa por satisfacer mejor al consumidor.
➜ La competencia beneficia al consumidor, los privilegios estatales benefician a los amigos del poder.
➜ El proteccionismo no protege al consumidor, protege a empresas ineficientes.
➜ El libre comercio enriquece, el intervencionismo empobrece.
➜ El control de precios provoca escasez, desabastecimiento y mercados negros.
➜ Ningún burócrata posee la información necesaria para reemplazar al mercado.
➜ La pobreza no se combate repartiendo riqueza, sino creando condiciones para producir más riqueza.
➜ La libertad económica no es un privilegio de los ricos, es la principal herramienta de progreso para los pobres.
➜ Las ideas importan, cambiar las ideas precede a cambiar la realidad.
➜ Los políticos no gastan su dinero, gastan el tuyo.
➜ El empresario prebendario no es capitalista, es un socio del Estado.
➜ Ningún derecho puede existir si se obliga a otra persona a trabajar para financiarlo.

[Yero @Yerocode0]

🚨AHORA MISMO EN LA OFICINA OVAL:

Trump explotó.

Puño contra la mesa. Voz que retumba como trueno:

«¡Nos están invadiendo Europa!
¡Es una invasión completa, total, sin piedad!
Y el Reino Unido… es el sospechoso número uno.»
No se detuvo en la rabia.
Soltó la bomba que nadie esperaba:
«Voy a lanzar el Pacto de Supervivencia Occidental.
El que firme: cierra fronteras de golpe, deporta en masa y defiende su cultura hasta la muerte.
El que no firme… se queda solo frente a la ola.
Y el primero que tiene que firmar… es el Reino Unido.
O se hunde.»

Silencio sepulcral.
Nadie respiró.
La Civilización Occidental acaba de recibir su ultimátum.

[Jano García @janogarcia_]

Un país que pone más esfuerzo en perseguir al que se fuma un cigarro, al autónomo que debe 40€ de cuota o al bar que saca una mesa de más que en controlar sus fronteras para detener una invasión, es un país fallido.

[Joey Mannarino @JoeyMannarino]

The Meloni government in Italy is now calling for the nation of Spain to be removed from the Schengen Zone.

This would mean the freedom of movement that 29 different countries enjoy with one another would NO LONGER apply to Spaniards.

This would be a political earthquake but Spain has truly earned it. What a pity for the actual Spanish people who will now be excluded from this program.

Pedro Sanchez will be remembered as the worst leader in Spanish history!

BOLD LEADERSHIP, PM MELONI! THANK YOU!

[Nate Friedman @NateFriedman97]

Spain just got invaded and these videos you’ve been seeing, they don’t tell the full story.

I went to investigate Spain’s migrant crisis just 2 months before this happened, and you’ll see why many people there are not only tolerating this invasion but that they happily voted for it.

[Fox News @FoxNews]

FLASHBACK: Dr. Fauci's 2022 CNN interview isn't aging well.

He said he would "cooperate fully" with Congress, that he has "nothing to hide," and that he could "explain and validate everything" he's done.

Four years later, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during his Senate testimony.

[Doctor Tricornio @Doct_Tricornio]

🔴 Dice esta reportera de Antena 3 que en Ceuta están entrando “mujeres y niños exhaustos”, mientras la rodean cientos de hombres adultos gritando y celebrando el asalto a la frontera

JAMÁS olvides el papel que la escoria mediática está jugando: ASCO

[Sandra L @sandyb2017]

Indeed

[Western Lensman @WesternLensman]

Now that our border is locked down, it's easy for people to forget what the chaos under Democrats actually looked like.

Republicans should run comparison videos with the Spain invasion on a loop until November.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

From @WSJFreeEx via @WSJOpinion: When a virus began killing thousands, Fauci and other public-health leaders gaslit reporters, stonewalled congressional inquiries and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests, writes @jamesbmeigs
https://t.co/IGXwpzKIGu

[Agustín Antonetti @agusantonetti]

Los inmigrantes marroquíes están tomando las casas de los españoles a estas horas de la noche en Ceuta.

Parece una invasión militar. Están tomando la ciudad y ahora van casa por casa.

Piden a la población local atrincherarse esta noche por seguridad.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Magneto Jr

[Cristian Campos @crpandemonium]

50.000 tíos en una ciudad de 80.000.

Pero no es una invasión.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

🇲🇦 Thousands of migrants are being transported in the backs of trucks straight to the Spanish border.

The video is from Moroccan Ain Lahcen, about an hour’s drive from Ceuta.

[Handre @Handre]

$17 billion for 3.4 miles of subway tunnel. That works out to roughly $5 billion per mile, making the Second Avenue Subway the most expensive transit construction project in human history, per mile, by a significant margin. Madrid built its entire metro expansion in the early 2000s at under $100 million per mile. You are not misreading those numbers.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent 86 years planning Phase 1 (the stretch from 96th Street to 63rd Street, opened in January 2017) before finally breaking ground in 2007. Decades of studies, committees, environmental reviews, and public hearings. Nobody personally paid for those delays. Nobody got fired. No executive absorbed the cost of a decade's worth of inflation, redesigns, and contractor overruns. When you insulate decision-makers from financial consequences, you get exactly this: paralysis followed by extravagance.

Free market economists have a term for what drives this: the calculation problem. Without real prices generated by voluntary exchange, planners cannot rationally allocate resources. The MTA doesn't discover the most efficient tunnel route through competition. It negotiates with unions whose contracts prohibit obvious efficiencies, hires consultants paid by the hour with zero incentive to finish, and answers to politicians who measure success in ribbon-cutting photos rather than cost per passenger mile.

The deeper issue is who pays. New York State taxpayers, federal taxpayers, and future riders through fare revenue all absorb the tab. The people who made the decisions that produced $5 billion-per-mile costs face no personal liability. A private developer whose budget overruns sees his equity evaporate. He has skin in the game. The MTA's leadership has a salary and a pension.

Phase 2 (96th Street to 125th Street, 1.5 miles) carries a projected price tag above $7.7 billion and has just broken ground. The political class will tell you this is what world-class infrastructure costs. What they won't tell you is that Tokyo, a city with arguably the most sophisticated rail network on earth, builds subway lines at roughly $250 million per mile, using private operators who survive only if they perform.

[Commentary - Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell on diversity and balkanization:

India has 180 languages and 500 dialects — the most diverse country in the world. Is it a melting pot?

“Good heavens no. They don’t melt in the slightest. They’re polarized.”

Sowell says one of the tragedies of our time is that organized groups in the United States are deliberately trying to create the same handicaps that have burdened India and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

America was blessed with one language and one culture across a vast territory. Now some want to throw that advantage away and pursue balkanization — without understanding what happens when people with different languages and radically different beliefs are forced into the same society.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Muslim Invaders Are Now Yelling "ALLAH AKBAR" While CONQUERING Spain

-Thousands of military age men storm the border.
-Break into homes.
-Start fires.
-Terrorize innocent citizens.

This is what an invasion looks like.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Thousands of military-age men were brought in trucks to the Moroccan-Spanish border in Ceuta. Most of them freed criminals pardoned by the king yesterday!

Notice the Moroccan officer assisting them. This was all coordinated by the Moroccan government.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Spain’s entire budget will be destroyed by illegal migrants.

It’s basic math: if Spain offers free stuff to migrants that is above 90% of the living standard of Earth, they create a forcing function for 90% of Earth to move to Spain, which is around 7 billion people!