Terry Schulz

Interests: #Bitcoin Cryptocurrency, Keto/Carnivore/IF, Strength training, Stock market, Economics, Finance, History, Evolutionary Psychology

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

JD Vance asks Israel, "What is your exact proposal? You're a country of 9 million people. You can't just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have."

This right here is the problem.

You see, if we take him at his word, JD assumes that every problem has a negotiated solution if only reasonable people work hard enough to find one.

Americans, but specifically Trump and his inner circle, tend to approach the world like businessmen. Everyone has interests, everyone wants prosperity, and if you're clever enough you can eventually structure a deal that gives everybody something they want.

But that simply isn't true.

What are the goals of the relevant countries?

Well, Israel does not want its citizens incinerated in a nuclear attack. That's pretty much it.

Iran's rulers on the other hand, view themselves as participants in a religious and ideological struggle that long predates the current conflict and extends far beyond Israel itself.

The Islamic Republic was founded as a revolutionary state. They speak openly about exporting the revolution, expelling Western influence from the Middle East, destroying the "Zionist entity," and leading what they see as a historic struggle against the American led world order.

Their answer to every obstacle over the last forty seven years has been Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Shiite militias, ballistic missiles, and nuclear enrichment. In other words, terror.

Which part of that is supposed to be negotiated away?

Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, normalized relations with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, withdrew from Sinai, withdrew from Gaza, accepted partition, pursued Oslo, and is still searching for ways to coexist with its neighbors.

At the end of the day, Americans enjoy the luxury of fighting wars far from home. Families in northern Israel are running to bomb shelters because drones are being launched from Lebanon as we speak. Should Israel just accept that?

Imagine Ariel Sharon telling George Bush in 2004, three years after 9/11, "You're a country of 300 million people. You can't just kill your way out of every terrorism problem you have."

Americans would have considered that outrageous. Rightfully so.

America was simply trying to destroy the people who murdered thousands of Americans and promised to do it again.

Washington keeps assuming Iran's rulers ultimately want the same things Americans want. Things like prosperity, stability, and economic growth. The chance to rejoin the international system.

Their behavior over nearly half a century suggests otherwise.

Any agreement they accept is accepted because they believe it serves their long term objectives. If they agree to pause, it is because they think pausing benefits them. If they compromise, it is because they believe compromise advances their ultimate goals. They think in decades, not election cycles.

The most one can hope for is not conversion. It is deterrence. It is convincing them that losing this round is preferable to continuing the fight, while understanding that they fully intend to continue pursuing the same objectives when circumstances become more favorable.

I think JD knows. Which makes his comments all the more disturbing.

[Andrew Kang @Rewkang]

RoboStrategy intends to continue raising capital through privately negotiated equity financing that are accretive to the Fund and its existing shareholders, as the Fund deploys capital into its target market of private, venture-capital-backed robotics and physical AI companies

[John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorter]

Folks, I'd like to get my two cents in on Karmelo Anthony. This is a long one -- pretend it's an editorial.

“He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” Why does a boy spontaneously justify stabbing someone on so thin a pretense? And why do so many Black Americans see his 35-year prison sentence as racist?

I think the answer to both questions takes us to Scotland, Ireland, and northern England.

At a track meet at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco, Texas in April of last year, Anthony sat down under a team’s tent. Anthony was neither on the team nor a student at its school, and an unwritten but widely known rule is that only team members are permitted under a team tent. Multiple student witnesses – and not just “whitenesses,” as several were Black -- testified about what happened next. Anthony was told several times to leave the tent but refused, including a profane epithet, culminating in warning “Touch me and see what happens.” Team member Austin Metcalf shoved Anthony, who pulled a knife out of his bag, stabbed him in the chest, threw the knife into the stands and ran away. Caught by the police, he immediately admitted to the stabbing, reportedly saying “He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” Metcalf died in his twin brother’s arms.

There is no reason to think Anthony was trying to kill Metcalf. He was trying to hurt him severely, putting him in the hospital, for shoving him, as he indicated in at first saying "He's not gonna die." Also, claims such as prosecutor Bill Wirskye’s that Anthony meant “Touch me and see what happens” as a provocation are based on a misreading of Black English. “Touch me and see what happens” is not a command to touch. It means “If you touch me, you will find out.”

The question is why Anthony thought being pushed justified sinking a knife into Metcalf’s body. The answer is the culture of “disrespect” in young Black male culture, documented by many (including black sociologists). His calculus was "If he even touches me, I am disrespected, and will respond in destructive kind." The idea is that being dissed merits what we might phrase as cutting someone a new one.

There is no reason to suppose that this is due to Black people having some inborn propensity to violence. The Black economist Thomas Sowell has traced the “disrespect” culture to the whites from the “Celtic Fringe” – an area comprising parts of northern England, Scotland, and Ulster County in Ireland -- who migrated to the South starting in the 1700s and established plantations (or worked on them as indentured servants). Black people, often enslaved, worked alongside and around them and their American-born descendants. At this time (although certainly not now), whites from the Celtic Fringe area had the same tripwire response to being dissed – “touchy pride” -- as well as many other traits now commonly associated with “gangsta” Black culture.

In his classic study of early migrants to America “Albion’s Seed,” the historian David Hackett Fisher referred to the oppressed people of this northern borderland region, encompassing Scotland, northern England and Ulster County in Ireland, as “some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.” “Manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others – an advertisement of one’s willingness to fight and even to put one’s life on the line – were at least plausible means of gaining whatever level of security was possible in a lawless region and a violent time,” Sowell notes.

Hundreds of thousands of people from this region migrated to America starting in the early 1700s, eventually migrating to the South. Many establishedplantations and bought enslaved Black people to work on them. Referring often to the scholarly and sympathetic study of this “cracker” culture in America by the historian Grady McWhiney, Sowell notes that they manifested “a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it.”

The step is short between that and “He put his hands on me. I stabbed him.” It is hard not to see the parallel between the “cracker” culture and the sociologist Elijah Anderson’s study of late twentieth century Black culture of “the streets,” where “respect is viewed as almost an external entity that is hard-won but easily lost, and so must constantly be guarded. (...) Many of the forms that dissing can take might seem petty to middle-class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example), but to those invested in the street code, these actions become serious indications of the other person's intentions. Consequently, such people become very sensitive to advances and slights, which could well serve as warnings of imminent physical confrontation.”

Sowell argues that enslaved Blacks would have internalized these norms from the whites they worked with and lived around. It might seem hard to imagine whites and Blacks sharing a culture on the kind of plantation familiar from dramatic depictions, where legions of Black people worked in the fields while whites were their owners and overseers. However, in reality, relationships between whites and Blacks, while fraught and founded in pitiless domination, allowed for degrees of interchange and familiarity. Plantations varied massively in size, and white children and Black ones grew up playing together, even influencing one another’s speech.

Black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois’ survey of Black Philadelphia in the 1890s, as well as studies afterward, shows that until the 1960s, the “cracker” inheritance from whites was largely confined to the least advantaged and segregated Black people. However, for the past several decades, aspects of the “disrespect culture” have had influence even among middle-class Black people.

For one, the Black middle class vastly increased after the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, and therefore, for most middle class Black people, poverty remains only a few generations back. Culture does not always change in lockstep with income. Add to this that in the 1960s, many Black people rejected the old idea that our goal was to assimilate to mainstream (i.e. white) norms. Rather than engaging in what is often called respectability politics, many Black people embraced the idea of a separate Black identity – and one aspect of that was the chip-on-the-shoulder style.

This all meant that these days, a Black boy hardly needs to grow up in the ‘hood to internalize aspects of what Sowell calls “redneck” culture. This includes the tripwire sensitivity to being “disrespected.”

This informs how so many black commenters on the trial and sentence seem to not quite process the horror of Metcalf’s murder. Representative Jasmine Crockett thinks the length of the sentence is racist – as if a white boy shivving a Black boy to death would only get a slap on the hand -- focusing on the fact that the knife was not especially large and that Anthony only stabbed once. Martin Luther King’s daughter Berenice King opines that the main lesson from the episode is racial disparities in the justice system. Many online revile that none of the jurors were Black. But it is reasonable to think that they would have liked that a representative number of jurors would pardon Anthony as representing his “disrespect culture,” and thus less culpable than a teen of any other race in America? If so, they are less progressive than retrograde, if we are really to get past race. Dr. King didn’t die demanding that whites make excuses for us.

What’s missing in these opinions is thoughts that would occur readily to the outside observer. How about if Anthony hadn’t been carrying a knife at all? How about Anthony just getting up and leaving, or just shoving back rather than hauling out a weapon? But under the “disrespect” culture, even in the background as a tacit sentiment, the idea that Anthony could simply have done what he was told seems an almost unreasonable expectation based on respectability politics. And frankly, I venture that there another resonance in the air: that on a certain level we are supposed to see Anthony’s deed in the light of slavery, Jim Crow and George Floyd, and other disrepectings upon us as a group.

Karmelo Anthony drank in this way of thinking subconsciously in the way that we all grow into the culture we are born into. He doubtless incorporated countless elements of Black culture that are positive or even just neutral. But one of them was this notion of what it is to be a man, which made sense in some upper reaches of what we now know as the United Kingdom centuries ago, but doesn’t work in modern American society.

The sports journalist Jemele Hill advises “We need to be having conversations with our young black boys about emotional regulation and decision making and discernment and wisdom.” Black women often give their boys “The Talk” about obeying what cops demand. But that talk needs to come with a second one – there need to be “The Talks.” Young Black men need to be told not to fall for the idea that being dissed justifies physical violence. That, and not the persistence of racism, is what Karmelo Anthony’s fate should teach us.

If you did, thanks for staying with me until the end!

[Jeff Dorman @jdorman81]

MSTR pickle continues: What I laid out 2 weeks ago is still the only viable path to save $BTC and $MSTR in the short-run.

Either sell an enormous amount of BTC and MSTR to help bring $STRC back up near par, and at least buy yourself some time, or continue to watch every part of your cap structure melt because of the uncertainty you've created.

My base case right now:

-70% odds they just keep doing what they're doing, selling small amounts of MSTR every month at non-accretive levels, crushing the stock til it falls to .70 mNAV. This would give STRC holders at least a glimmer of hope, and BTC would be fine, but MSTR would get hammered.

- 25% chance he does the right thing, admits he messed up when he bought back the debt, sells $3-4 bn of BTC, buys a ton of time (marginally good for MSTR, good for STRC, bad for BTC short-term but good long-term)

-5% chance he does the nuclear option -- kills the dividends, letting the prefs fall to 30-40 cents on the dollar, which will close the capital markets to him, but at least shuts off the $1.7 bn per year cash outlay problem, and gives BTC a chance to recover over several years.

FWIW -- MSTR is still trading at 1.15 mNAV using the correct calculation:

$54 bn BTC on balance sheet
+ $1 bn USD cash
- Less $5.2 bn debt
- Less $14.6 bn prefs (including STRC)
= $35.2 bn of unencumbered BTC

$40.4 bn MSTR equity market cap

$40.4 bn / $35.2 bn BTC = 1.15 mNAV

Which means -- MSTR still going a lot lower (should trade at a discount to NAV now).

[nikshep @nikshepsvn]

seeing a lot of $XPL fud on the TL after the recent outperformance so here's my honest take on all of it:

1. "unlocks = dump" — no. tokens become transferable, not auto-sold. yes there are unlocks coming up for team/investors (who are locked 3yrs with a 1yr cliff), but none have sold on record, and dumping a book this thin wrecks their own exit of the remaining 75%+ right when the tech is actually rolling out (plasma one cards).

2. some X folks are saying they sent "150m to binance = insiders selling" — transfers aren't sales. show me a realized sell, not a wallet move. nobody has. likely this is for MMing or some other reason (treasury management etc).

3. "ex-blast farm team" — team says ~3 of 50 had ties. that's really not a reunion. i'm sure blast had a lot of smart folk and farms don't ship a regulated visa card live in 180+ countries with tether's wallet + hadron plugged in.

4. "no xpl demand / chain earns nothing" — correct by design. zero-fee is the product. demand comes from staking + card-tier locking (the same cro playbook that locked billions) and being the value layer for tether's whole ecosystem. tens of millions of xpl locked in plasma one's first day, with the rate only increasing w/ time -- as ecosystem grows we should see more use of $XPL.

none of this are things to be ignored, but there is no reason to make them seem worse than they are just for the sake of it. imo this is still the best play to get stablecoin narrative/adoption upside (which will likely become the dominant TVL in crypto) -- will also drop another post on some math modelling of where this can go under different future scenarios.

[Yano 🟪 @JasonYanowitz]

Crypto is about to get very exciting.

A few crazy mainstream moments that are 3-6 months out from becoming public.

Optimists will be rewarded.

[Bonchie @bonchieredstate]

How do they not feel embarrassment, constantly claiming they can end all the world's problems with some small fraction of the amount of money they spend every single year?

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

.@FIFAWorldCup removes the Israeli flag, but refuses to remove Palestinian flag 👇

Pure antisemitism on display by corrupt @FIFAcom on US soil 👇

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

The deal with Iran will go down as one of the most incompetent ever made. The U.S. lost on virtually every point. We just don't win anymore!

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Concerning.

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

I have just finished reading The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

It is, without a doubt, the most horrifying document I've ever read in my life.

There is no close second... and it's worse than you could ever imagine.

Here's everything you need to know 🧵

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

We started as a place to buy Bitcoin, now we power your entire financial life.

Here’s everything we announced today ↓

→ Tokenized Stocks
→ Pre-IPO Perps
→ Stock options
→ Crypto options
→ Perpetual-style equity indices
→ Crypto derivatives, back in America
→ Time-based prediction markets + Combos
→ Launches: access millions of tokens, the moment they go onchain
→ Coinbase Advisor: an AI investment advisor, built into the app
→ Coinbase for Agents: connect any AI agent to your account
→ Base MCP + x402: give your agents their own wallet
→ The new Coinbase Advanced - fully modular
→ One unified global liquidity pool
→ Coinbase One Card, now more accessible secured by USDC
→ 5% Bitcoin back on travel
→ Crypto-backed mortgages
→ Borrow against your staked ETH & SOL with new liquidation protection
→ Transfer Protections
→ New Coinbase Developer Platform
→ Full stack Coinbase Payment solution
→ B20: a Base native token standard for any asset
→ Base App on web + multichain support + all assets
→ Private transactions for enterprises on Base

See you next time.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report.

https://t.co/EuKgGWBRhS

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

(1) What

https://t.co/MGUQSG1N4t

[BMNR Bullz @BMNRBullz]

COINBASE IS BECOMING THE EVERYTHING EXCHANGE.

This is no longer just a crypto app.

Coinbase just laid out the AI native finance stack:

🔹 Tokenized stocks
🔹 Thematic RWA index perps
🔹 Prediction markets
🔹 Prediction combos
🔹 Pre IPO perps
🔹 AI powered advisor
🔹 AI agents trading with set limits

Stocks, crypto, predictions, private markets and AI agents.

All moving into one platform.

The everything exchange is here.

$COIN $ETH

[Composability Kyle.hl 🧪 @0xamericanspiri]

Coinbase introducing 1:1 backed tokenized stocks is a big win for Base, which is quickly becoming a quasi-DEX as a chain. Will see instant composability with Coinbase and native dapps.

Great for TVL metrics, usage, and value as demand for actual equity grows > altcoins/memes.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Fascinating report. Among other things:

Prime Minister @Keir_Starmer let off 13,000 gang rapists and pedophiles.

Mayor of London @MayorofLondon denied the existence of rape gangs he was personally aware of.

[Leor Sapir @LeorSapir]

Another Major Transgender Suicide Study Crumbles

A widely cited study published in the prestigious @NatureHumBehav claimed that “anti-transgender laws” encouraged teen suicide attempts.

A new methodological review dismantles that finding.

New from me in @cityjournal

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

For the first time, these are real 1:1 backed tokenized stocks you can trust. You own an actual chunk of the company onchain.

Other current solutions are some form of derivative or IOU - not real ownership.

Our product will give all the benefits of true ownership, with all the benefits of tokenized assets. This is a great step towards unlocking global access to U.S. markets