This is a list of science/engineering achievements, but also a description of capital flows. The way to make big $ in the 2000s was through finance and tech, and too many of our best brains were wasted creating CDOs and dick pic apps.

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1753433550148206696

Add in that labor & regulatory arbitrage provided industry w/an easy way to drive up the bottom line without the risky business of innovation, and you get what we have now, secular stagnation or whatever.

In the most recent MartyrMade Substack essay on slavery and the leadup to the Civil War, I describe some of the bizarre practices of societies encountered by Europeans during the Age of Exploration, to try to put the European response in perspective.

Thread. J.G Frazer, in his book, The Golden Bough, summarizes an Aztec ritual dedicated to the Maize Goddess, Chicomecohuatl. A young girl was chosen to play the role of the goddess, and was paraded around town to be worshipped by the people. Then came the festival's climax:

How ethnic cleansing works in practice

After the ‘93 Oslo Accords made it increasingly difficult to legally establish settlements in the West Bank, settlers began to employ increasingly sophisticated means to work around Israeli law.

This is Antenna Hill in the West Bank: Settlements continued to expand, with right wing Israeli politicians helping to to skirt Israel’s own laws. Despite being there illegally, the govt decided it was necessary to construct a cell phone tower on a nearby hilltop to fill a blind spot at a bend on the highway.

GOP primary rant. RDS & other supporters of Not Trump, this is for you.

In 2004-12, Bush, McCain, and Romney each got ~60 million votes. That’s what the GOP was stuck at until Trump came along. In 2020, Trump got 14 MILLION more votes than any other GOP candidate in history. I’ve yet to hear the “Trump can’t win” crowd explain how their guy is going to beat every GOP candidate in history by more than 14 million votes.

I get the impression that they know their guy can’t match that number, and their argument is that they don’t need to beat it because RDS or whoever won’t drive Democrat turnout the way Trump does. It essentially boils down to their guy being more palatable to the enemy, which is not going to be an effective argument in a polarized environment. What drove turnout for Biden was Democrats using COVID to scam the mail-in ballot system. That’s a much more plausible explanation for Biden getting 16 million more votes than Hillary, despite not campaigning, than that Trump drove Biden’s turnout. Imo this is obviously true, and people claiming otherwise are either disingenuous or seeing what they want to see.

Personally, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell Biden would’ve even reached Hillary’s total in a regular election where people had to get off their asses on Election Day. After the pussy tape and all the rest of Trump’s antics before the 2016 election, everyone who was going to hate him already hated him. He didn’t have a swarm of new haters in 2020 - he added 11 million votes to his 2016 total. The idea that Trump gained 11 million votes, but then on top of that another 16 million people who didn’t hate him in 2016 had just seen enough in the intervening years to come out of the woodwork… seems patently absurd. I think the regime knows, or at least us afraid, that they can’t get Biden more than Trump’s 74 million 2020 votes without cheating, and that’s why they’re prosecuting him.

For RDS & co supporters, a real question: Why do you think your guy can do more than 14 million votes better than every non-Trump Republican in history? Especially when so many of you don’t seem to care about alienating Trump’s base? Saying that MAGA people are idiotic cultist low-class trash, but by the way please vote for my guy after we axe Trump is, I regret to inform you, not a winning strategy. Then what does it matter? If Biden gets 81 million votes again then it doesn’t matter who the GOP candidate is.

https://twitter.com/theblackhorse65/status/1698144023272100215

This, like Jen’s please clap moment, is something you couldn’t really imagine Trump doing. Trump is never self-evaluating when he speaks (sometimes to his detriment), never second-guesses himself. If he feels like smiling, he smiles, scowling, he scowls. It can be obnoxious, but… Jeb’s name is so retarded that autocorrect keeps changing it to Jen no matter how many times I try.

Let’s live tweet the GOP primary debate. THREAD.

Ron DeSantis has a very tough job. After the 2020 election shenanigans and the unprecedented institutional abuse against Trump and his supporters, Trump voters see their guy as the incumbent, and they see RDS’s candidacy as a selfish outside disruptor trying to primary the incumbent before a tough election. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s how it is.

He has to do several things to be successful, and even if he does them all perfectly it may not be enough. His policies aren’t much in question, and he’d be wasting his time on the mic touting them. GOP primary debate watchers know he’s good on policy. It would be nice to see him firm up an anti-intervention stance on Ukraine, but otherwise his time will be better spent elsewhere.

I was just in a Space where @JackPosobiec made an important point: there is only one candidate the regime hates and fears enough to throw out every norm and standard to defeat, and that’s Trump. I’ve seen RDS supporters ask a good question: If Trump couldn’t stop them from rigging the election in 2020, when he was President, how’s he going to do it now? A fair question, but a good (if somewhat evasive) answer is that, at this late hour, what’s the point of nominating anyone the regime won’t pull out all the stops to defeat?

RDS has to thread a difficult needle. He has to condemn the unprecedented abuse of the system against Trump (Christie might be his best foil here), but every time the subject comes up it hardens support for Trump with his base. If he tries to frame himself as Not Trump, he has no chance; he has to make the make case that he’ll be a better Trump than Trump himself. GOP voters aren’t looking for a President, they’re looking for a war general, and RDS has to convince those people that he’s going to burn Washington DC to the ground. I don’t think his personality would allow for it, but Trump should say something like: “Look, I know a lot of you guys don’t like me. And to be honest, I get it. I know I can be obnoxious. I’m not a typical politician, and my style can be off-putting, and I get it. But this is bigger than me.” And go from there.

Samuel Whittemore was an American soldier. Gather ‘round to hear tell of his exploits.

Sam was born in Charlestown, MA in 1696 to an ordinary family. He wasn’t blooded until, as a 48-yr-old private, he helped capture the French Fortress of Louisbourg during King George’s War. /1 Sam returned from King George’s War at 52-yrs-old, and lived in peace for 12 years. Then, he signed up to serve in the French & Indian War, helping to capture the Fortress of Louisbourg yet again. He was 64-yrs-old. /2

One of the greatest tricks the devil ever pulled was killing tens of millions of Russians while driving them at gunpoint into combat against their neighbors, then fading into the background and making it taboo to say his name as people blame the Russian people for it all. Stalin was Georgian. Most of the early Soviets were run by Jews, and the secret police was mostly Jewish until the purges of the late ‘30s. Kruschev was born in Ukraine, and the USSR didn’t have a Russian-born General Secretary until Andropov in the 1980s.

I think: DeSantis cannot beat Trump in a primary, and there’s nothing that could happen in the next year that will change that. If he goes hard, he will lose and never recover, but it’s hard to back out now w/o looking like a beta. One way to back out w/o looking scared or deferential is to refuse to run and be the beneficiary of the Biden administration’s Gestapo tactics, and the Tammany tactics used against Trump in the 2020 election.

Civilized people are at a huge disadvantage in these situations. The Target customer is an unbalanced anti-social, waking up in jail w/a black eye is just another Monday. The seated man has a job, people who depend on him, and should simply avoid places where animal attacks are… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Who hasn’t been in a situation where you had to decide whether it was time to end your date to get into a drag-out brawl w/gutter trash, or if it would better to just wait it out for a few minutes so you don’t have to explain to your boss why you’re in jail and can’t make it in?

What’s the funniest thing any President has ever said? I’ll start w/Obama: Another entry:

About half of all a Union soldiers were either immigrants or the children of recent immigrants. That is, half of the army Lincoln sent to attack the grandsons of the American Revolution weren’t even here when it happened, and had no stake in the long-running North-South conflict. The South voted to withdraw from the Union and fired on Fort Sumter after the Union refused several formal requests to remove that military base from their sovereign territory. Then Lincoln raised an army to invade and subjugate the South.

https://twitter.com/free_jeremiads/status/1637852701445992448

One of the uglier aspects of the Civil War was that men of means in the North were able to purchase an exemption while the Union imported armies of foreigners to fight their Southern countrymen for them, signing up recent and new immigrants en masse, often right off the docks. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Yes, as some have pointed out, the South had service referrals for prominent citizens as well, but that wasn’t really my point, which was that it strikes me as mercenary and dishonorable to import legions of foreigners to fight a civil war you started.

Some frogs took umbrage at this post, but the desperate tone of their responses tells me they know I’m right. If immigration is a settled issue, they say, then it’s over, there’s nothing left to fight for. I disagree. 🧵

https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1636744295570083840

First, the reality: non-white kids are already a majority in US schools, and their number grows every day. Several states like CA have already shown willingness to defy the federal government as sanctuary states, and they are backed up by federal courts.
/1

They’re about to charge an additional 1,000 people for being in the Capitol on January 6th to send a message to the people contemplating what should be done about the most serious political abuse of the criminal justice system in American history.

https://twitter.com/maggienyt/status/1636814044777644032

I am well past tired of Trump and frankly find much if his recent behavior embarrassing, but a thousand January 6ths is absolutely the appropriate response if he is indicted. I’m not advising anyone to break the law, but the Founders would.

Media, police, govt knowingly lied for a month+ about Officer Sicknick’s “murder.” The police/coroner could’ve corrected the blaring nationwide headlines anytime. But color revolutions need their martyrs. The story only had to hold up long enough for the emotional cement to set.

https://twitter.com/cernovich/status/1632927821348864001

Meanwhile the GOP and conservative media are so corrupted and useless that they can’t even manage to make a martyr out of an unarmed woman executed on camera by a Capitol police gunman.

When I was working on my Jonestown series, it occurred to me that the internet might facilitate cults of unprecedented proportions, that rather than 1,000 people committing mass suicide, it could be millions. It’s increasingly clear that that’s exactly what the trans movement is. It bears every hallmark of a cult: isolates from former relationships, demands total identity transformation, irreversible acts to display one’s commitment, intolerance of heresy, severe penalties for leaving the group… It’s not suicide, but removal of genitals is one step away.

The Nuremberg trials were a scapegoating/human sacrifice ritual to inaugurate a new social order. As Girard says, the initial sacrifice must be reenacted periodically to maintain its force. This woman was age 8 in 1933, 14 when WW2 started. She was a *typist*. This is obscene.

https://twitter.com/Jerusalem_Post/status/1605141973156896769

I am not speaking figuratively, just to be clear, that is exactly what this is.

Democrats changed the way we do elections in 2020, giving themselves weeks/months to canvas ghettos, nursing homes, etc squeezing ballots out of extreme low-propensity voters who don't even know who's on the ballot. It's a fundamentally different political decision-making system. People are calling for the GOP to get with the program, but it's a system that fundamentally favors urban party machines because it's easier to ballot harvest from an apartment block than it is driving country roads.

Let's review:
1. Election rule changes rammed through using emergency COVID powers
2. Many changes had nothing to do w/COVID (eg, lowering signature matching standards)
3. Votes suddenly take weeks to count and show unprecedented statistical anomalies
4. Changes made permanent

https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1588191409068195855

After a summer of the worst riots in decades, they had mobs ready to activate via text message in 400 cities if Trump won the election. That's reported by Time Magazine. So you're naive if you think they wouldn't tweak rules to "legally" rig the election to "stop fascism."

How strange that the FBI would want to wait 66 years to release information totally unrelated to anything, since Seth Rich was definitely killed in a random robbery where the robbers simply forgot to take anything. zerohedge.com/political/fbi-… How strange that after Seth Rich was randomly murdered by random people for no reason, the FBI is afraid that releasing his laptop data would "reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source."