1. Dear @jkenney, to understand President Trump’s position on Canada, you have to go back to the 2016 election and President Trump’s position on the NAFTA renegotiation.
If you did not follow the subsequent USMCA process, this might be the ah-ha moment you need to understand Trump’s strategy.
🧵 begins....
2. During the 2016 election President Trump repeatedly said he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Both Canada and Mexico were reluctant to open the trade agreement to revision, but ultimately President Trump had the authority and support from an election victory to do exactly that.
In order to understand the issue, you must remember President Trump, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer each agreed the NAFTA agreement was fraught with problems and was best addressed by scrapping it and creating two seperate bilateral trade agreements. One between the USA and Mexico, and one between the USA and Canada.
In the decades that preceded the 2017 push to redo the trade pact, Canada had restructured their economy to: (1) align with progressive climate change; and (2) take advantage of the NAFTA loophole. The Canadian government did not want to reengage in a new trade agreement.
Canada has deindustrialized much of their manufacturing base to support the ‘environmental’ aspirations of their progressive politicians. Instead, Canada became an importer of component goods where companies then assembled those imports into finished products to enter the U.S. market without tariffs. Working with Chinese manufacturing companies, Canada exploited the NAFTA loophole.
Justin Trudeau was strongly against renegotiating NAFTA, and stated he and Chrystia Freeland would not support reopening the trade agreement.
President Trump didn’t care about the position of Canada and was going forward. Trudeau said he would not support it. Trump focused on the first bilateral trade agreement with Mexico.
3. When the U.S. and Mexico had agreed to terms of the new trade deal and 80% of the agreement was finished, representatives from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce informed Trudeau that his position was weak and if the U.S. and Mexico inked their deal, Canada would be shut out.
The U.S Chamber of Commerce was upset because they were kept out of all the details of the agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. In actuality the U.S CoC was effectively blocked from any participation.
When they went to talk to the Canadians the CoC was warning them about what was likely to happen. NAFTA would end, the U.S. and Mexico would have a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA), and then Trump was likely to turn to Trudeau and say NAFTA is dead, now we need to negotiate a separate deal for U.S-Canada.
Trudeau was told a direct bilateral trade agreement between the U.S and Canada was the worst possible scenario for the Canadian government. Canada would lose access to the NAFTA loophole and Canada’s entire economy was no longer in a position to negotiate against the size of the USA. Trump would win every demand.
Following the warning, Trudeau went to visit Nancy Pelosi to find out if congress was likely to ratify a new bilateral trade agreement between the U.S and Mexico. Pelosi warned Trudeau there was enough political support for the NAFTA elimination from both parties. Yes, the bilateral trade agreement was likely to find support.
Only just discovered Alison Shaw's study from 1988: A Pakistani Community in Britain. It's incredible reading as it explains the context of how the rape gangs developed so well.
In a better world this would have formed the basis of an official enquiry into immigration policy.
What's especially poignant about this study is that it was of the Pakistani community in Oxford, from where one of the many grooming gangs would emerge some years later.
This is something you always see. All this was known, and nothing was done.
One thing that's hardest to get your head round is the view of sexual morality whereby it's expected that men will, basically, rape women if they are unprotected by other men. And therefore nothing really has been done wrong if other men have left the women unprotected.
Tipu Sultan is often described as a secular anti-colonial hero.
But Persian letters, British military reports, missionary writings, and regional gazetteers document large-scale killings, forced conversions, deportations, and temple destruction during his campaigns.
Here is what those records claim.
(1/8)
Letters Attributed to Tipu (1788–1790)
Persian correspondence cited by later historians includes references to:
• 12,000+ Hindus converted (March 22, 1788 letter)
• “Four lakh” conversions in Malabar (Jan 19, 1790 letter)
• Calicut conversions described as religious achievement
If authentic, these letters frame conversion as policy, not an accident.
(2/8)
Malabar Campaign
British and regional sources allege:
• Forced conversion of Nair communities
• Execution of resisting groups
• Thousands of Brahmin families perishing in Kozhikode (as per L.B. Boury).
William Logan’s Malabar Manual records temple destruction across the region.
🚨 I've spent weeks inside the Epstein files — not looking for names, but for infrastructure.
What I found: Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just a sex trafficker. He was a switchboard — routing government secrets, Wall Street intelligence, and political power through one network.
The same network that built the censorship machine that targeted your speech during COVID.
Five parts. All sourced to DOJ documents. Here's the whole investigation 🧵👇
PART 1: The DOJ released thousands of pages of Epstein files. Buried inside them is a 20-year financial architecture designed to turn pandemics into a profit center.
Offshore vaccine funds. Donor-advised fund structures naming "pandemic" as a key area — three years before COVID.
JPMorgan treated a convicted sex offender as the operational architect of a Gates-linked charitable fund.
Every claim sourced. Every document numbered.
PART 2: Inside Project Molecule — the 14-page JPMorgan proposal that turned biology into investable infrastructure.
$20M to "finance the surveillance network in Pakistan." Parametric triggers. Reinsurance markets. Vaccine capital positioned in structures designed for offshore flexibility and arm's-length profit.
This wasn't pandemic response. It was pandemic business planning — years before any pandemic.
🔥 De fondos a plataformas: el Private Equity está entrando en su fase industrial.
Aprovechando los acontecimientos más recientes y, porque no, los hilos turras de mi @Recuenco, lanzo el mío con la evolución que estamos viendo desde el lado regulatorio y tecnológico, del PE.
Vamos allá:
1/ Durante décadas, el Private Equity se explicó como una técnica: comprar compañías no cotizadas, mejorarlas y venderlas. Esa definición sigue siendo correcta, pero hoy resulta insuficiente. El sector ha entrado en una fase en la que el producto ya no es únicamente el fondo — sino la plataforma. Y, cuando el negocio es plataforma, la infraestructura es la clave.
2/ 💥 La fricción estructural de los mercados privados: iliquidez, administración y transferencias.
Los mercados privados conviven con una paradoja: han crecido por su capacidad de generar retornos diferenciados, pero arrastran fricciones operativas que los mercados públicos resolvieron hace décadas mediante estandarización e infraestructura. En la práctica, la fricción se concentra en tres puntos: (a) registros y reconciliaciones (b) eventos corporativos; y (c) el ‘secondary plumbing’. La iliquidez puede convertirse en mercado secundario global, y la fricción administrativa es una variable que ya se está reduciendo.
I understand MAGAs have no interest in how laws work until they affect them, but the rest of us do: we need to know if ICE engaged in a pursuit, and if so whether this man was wanted for a status offense or serious crime.
ICE has regs on vehicular pursuit for this very reason: because a nonviolent person with little criminal justice interaction is likely to be so terrified if chased they'll endanger the community by accident.
If ICE knew this was a status offense, there should have been no chase.
What MAGAs say—but only if it doesn't affect them—is we should put ourselves in the shoes of ICE officers.
No—not how a civil society works.
If you have a license to kill, you have to be trained and abide by your training.
ICE officers *aren't* situated the same as you and me.
If you have a startup idea, do this before telling anyone:
Run it through a shadow advisory board of AI personas.
Here's the exact prompt I use for Peter Thiel, Naval, Buffett, a YC partner, and a skeptical VC 👇
Copy-paste this into Claude/ChatGPT:
---
You are my Shadow Advisory Board - a panel of 5 distinct investor personas who will critique my business idea from different angles.
BOARD MEMBERS:
1. PETER THIEL (Contrarian Technologist)
- Focus: Is this a monopoly or commodity? What's the 0→1 insight?
- Questions: "What do you believe that nobody else does?" "Can this scale to $1B+ without competition?"
- Style: Philosophical, first-principles, anti-consensus
2. NAVAL RAVIKANT (Leverage Maximalist)
- Focus: Can this scale without trading time for money? Where's the leverage?
- Questions: "Does this have code, media, or capital leverage?" "Will this make you rich or just busy?"
- Style: Wisdom-dense, product-market fit obsessed, long-term thinking
3. WARREN BUFFETT (Economics Fundamentalist)
- Focus: What's the moat? Can a 12-year-old understand the business model?
- Questions: "Would you buy this entire business tomorrow?" "What's the durable competitive advantage?"
- Style: Simple, margin-of-safety focused, customer-centric
4. Y COMBINATOR PARTNER (Startup Operator)
- Focus: Can you build an MVP in 2 weeks? Will users literally cry if this disappears?
- Questions: "How are you getting your first 10 customers?" "What's your weekly growth rate?"
- Style: Tactical, execution-focused, speed-obsessed
5. SKEPTICAL VC (Devil's Advocate)
- Focus: What kills this company? Why has nobody done this already?
- Questions: "What's your unfair advantage?" "Why won't Google/Amazon crush you in 6 months?"
- Style: Brutal, risk-focused, pattern-matching
---
CRITIQUE STRUCTURE:
For each board member: 1. Opening reaction (1 sentence - enthusiastic or skeptical) 2. Key insight from their lens (2-3 sentences) 3. Critical question they'd ask (1 question) 4. Red flag or opportunity they see (1 sentence)
End with:
- CONSENSUS: What all 5 agree on
- SPLIT DECISION: Where they disagree most
- VOTE: Fund (Yes/No) + confidence level (1-10)
---
MY BUSINESS IDEA:
[Paste your idea here]
---
Give me the full board critique.
Used this to validate a SaaS idea last week.
Thiel killed it: "You're solving a vitamin, not a painkiller"
Naval killed it: "No leverage - you're building a consulting firm with software"
Skeptical VC killed it: "Bubble. com will have this feature in 3 months"
🇩🇪⚖️ Em maio de 1931, quando Hitler ainda não havia tomado o poder, mas já era um dos homens mais poderosos e temidos da Alemanha, um jovem advogado judeu, com apenas 27 anos, levou o líder ultranacionalista a um tribunal. O caso era um processo contra militantes nazistas que haviam atacado a tiros a multidão que estava num famoso clube de dança de Berlim, o Tanzpalast Eden, frequentado por estrangeiros e trabalhadores de esquerda. Hans Litten convocou Hitler como testemunha, devido ao controle que ele exercia sobre a militância do partido, que jamais faria uma ação violenta como aquela sem o conhecimento do seu líder.
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Já na primeira resposta que deu ao advogado, Hitler mostrou o cinismo, a hipocrisia e a covardia que caracterizam todos os líderes da extrema direita, até os dias de hoje. O dono do infame bigodinho disse que o seu partido “rejeitava a violência” e que seguia estritamente as regras e métodos legais da luta política. “Não gosto da constituição atual. Mas sou consciente de que chegar ao poder de maneira inconstitucional implicaria um banho de sangue. Se eu arrastasse meus seguidores a semelhante desgraça, trairia a confiança que depositaram em mim”, disse aquele que em pouco tempo se tornaria o maior genocida da história. Qualquer semelhança com o julgamento dos golpistas no STF em 2025 não é mera coincidência.
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O interrogatório durou três horas. Litten expôs as mentiras e contradições do nazista com os próprios jornais do partido. As publicações nazistas avisavam que, assim que eles fizessem a revolução, mandariam o Reichstag “para o diabo” e que os opositores “sentiriam os punhos alemães”.
Confrontado por Litten e pelo juiz, Hitler foi perdendo a paciência. A certa altura, passou a soltar suas diatribes ideológicas aos berros. Em 1934, já na ditadura nazista, o advogado foi mandado para o campo de concentração de Dachau e foi barbaramente torturado até que se suicidou em 1938. Em Berlim existe um memorial em homenagem a ele.
1/🚨On March 20, 2015, Jeffrey Epstein received a draft agenda for a meeting titled "Preparing for Pandemics."
The meeting would feature the Director General of the WHO and the President of the Red Cross.
Two weeks later, Bill Gates gave his famous TED talk: "The Next Outbreak? We're Not Ready."
The planning documents went through Epstein first. Thread 🧵👇
2/15 The email came from IPI — the International Peace Institute, a UN-adjacent think tank run by Terje Rød-Larsen, Epstein's self-described "best friend."
IPI staffer Walter Kemp wrote to Rød-Larsen:
"Let's discuss next steps, for example how to officially involve the WHO and ICRC (i.e. co-branding)."
🚨 Acabo de enterarme de un concepto de 2300 años que no puedo dejar de pensar.
La teoría del barco vacío.
Explica por qué Elon Musk pelea con desconocidos en X a las 2 de la mañana.
Por qué Michael Jordan convirtió su discurso en el Salón de la Fama en una lista de venganza.
Una vez que lo entiendas, tu vida nunca volverá a ser la misma.
Un sabio chino llamado Zhuangzi lo escribió.
Imagina cruzar un río.
Otro barco choca contra el tuyo.
Estallas de ira.
Pero cuando miras de cerca... el barco está vacío.
No hay nadie a quien culpar.
Tu ira de repente parece tonta.
El punto de Zhuangzi era brutal.
Sufrimos más por la historia que tenemos en la cabeza que por el evento en sí.
Un barco vacío sigue golpeándote.
El daño es el mismo.
Solo cambia tu interpretación.