S Cronk

[S Cronk @scronk67]

@BurtMaclin_FBI This is even better

[S Cronk @scronk67]

Horses (genus Equus) originated in N. American around 4 million years ago spread to Eurasia and then died out in N. America between 13,000-11,000 years ago. They were then reintroduced by the Spanish. So reintroducing them helps reestablish a more natural balance. Not sure your feral/wild distinction means much.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Whoever came up with the pronouns bs deserves a punch in the face.

It’s the dumbest thing ever.

[S Cronk @scronk67]

@MrDavidAngelo At least we still have Dolly Parton

[Vince Langman @LangmanVince]

Literally the only reason I watched Fox News on the weekends!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

While West Germany had VW, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and Audi

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

In her latest sciolistic letter to me, @SenWarren made it clear that she knows even less about foreign exchange markets than she does about banking.

What is equally shocking, but not surprising: not a single member of the media mob has a rudimentary-enough level of financial market literacy to spot her remedial error.

To reiterate: under @POTUS, the United States delivers for America’s trusted partners.

For a fuller explanation, I recommend Senator Warren take any entry level course in international finance for her and her staff, or I can personally give her a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies. Although I am not holding my breath, I hope her next letter will demonstrate that she has learned the difference between a currency purchase and a swap or a loan.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

I'd like to suggest that promoting child marriage, stoning, halal animal torture, wife beating, sharia courts, and other behaviour contrary to British values, should now be referred to as Anglophobia

[Handre @Handre]

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je vais prendre le temps de te répondre, parce que ce point est vraiment important à comprendre.

Oui, Hitler a persécuté les communistes dès 1933. Il les détestait. Exactement comme les islamistes de LFI persécuteront les blancs, les juifs et les « mécréants » le jour où ils auront le pouvoir.

Ce n’est pas une contradiction. C’est la logique interne de tout mouvement totalitaire.

À l’intérieur d’une même grappe d’extrême gauche, tu as plusieurs piranhas qui cohabitent tant qu’ils n’ont pas encore gagné :

- le piranha communiste
- le piranha socialiste
- le piranha national-socialiste
- le piranha islamiste

Ils se haïssent entre eux. Ils s’entre-tuent dès que l’un d’eux prend l’ascendant.
Mais ils partagent la même structure fondamentale : contrôle total de l’économie, culte de l’État, désignation d’un bouc émissaire, planification, et destruction de la liberté individuelle.

Quand l’un gagne, il bouffe les autres.
C’est exactement ce qui s’est passé en Allemagne en 1933-34.
C’est ce qui s’est passé en Russie avec les bolcheviks contre les socialistes-révolutionnaires.
C’est ce qui se passera demain avec le piranha islamiste contre le piranha gauchiste classique.

Ça ne change rien au fait que toute cette famille idéologique est du même côté du spectre : le côté du contrôle, de la collectivisation et de la haine de la liberté économique.

Le vrai clivage n’a jamais été « communiste vs nazi ».
C’est collectivisme vs liberté.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Hitler was a left-wing socialist

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[S Cronk @scronk67]

@crimpandclimbhq Wow

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🇺🇸🇺🇸 Hell yeah!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they’d be labeled far-right extremists.

[yannispappas @yannispappas]

America is the most powerful empire. Yet, it has not annexed another sovereign country since 1898. It’s arguably the most morally constrained in history. No previous hegemonic power with military superiority exercised so little direct annexation during its period of dominance.

[TMK @themagaking]

It is unbelievable to me that our Founding Fathers were able to defeat the British Empire, write the Constitution, and build the greatest nation on Earth, yet Republicans in Congress can't even muster the votes to pass a bill that would help secure our elections and preserve the very nation our Founding Fathers built.

[Megan Basham @megbasham]

This is what’s going to have to be done. I’m sorry, but Roberts and Barrett do not get to decide that we don’t have a country. There must be immediate mass deportations and the pregnancy status of migrants will have to be considered.

We can no longer issue visas to women from places like China without checking their pregnancy status. If they’re pregnant, they can’t come in.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

It’s a perversion of self-government.

Judicially mandating that foreigners are entitled to birth US citizens against the wishes of the people as reflected in law means we cease to be our own rulers.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

The actual “birthright” belongs to my children, and the children of all real Americans. They have a birthright to live in a country that resembles the one our ancestors established. And now that birthright, the only true birthright, has been destroyed in favor of the imagined “birthright” of children born to parents who don’t even belong in this country and who have no ancestral or cultural ties to it whatsoever. Total madness. Suicide. Words cannot describe how evil this is.