We are so excited to announce Arena Magazine Issue 005: Mission Critical. It's 112 pages, a quarter inch thick, and full of the best stories, photography, and art we've ever done. Issue 005 hits mailboxes in September.

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A preview...🧵 In Mission Critical, we examine the industries that are essential to American life, but are often overlooked, even as they are under serious pressure.

Power infrastructure. Ports. Semiconductors.

In this thread, I will dissect the hateful, sloppy NYT opinion piece attacking @elonmusk for being an Afrikaner.

It took me 15 seconds to confirm that the author, a socialist whose site the NYT calls "independent," is actually being bankrolled by... George Soros

Real shocker! The crux of the article is that Elon Musk is a white supremacist because he was raised in apartheid South Africa, and his support for Trump, capitalism, and America is all rooted in racism.

"Free Enterprise" is given scare quotes!

Wharton statistician looks at Hamas’ casualty data and concludes they are likely falsifying to maintain a rolling mean & linear growth — and they don’t know how to avoid making anomalies obvious to Western analysts

Women:Children R2=0.017
Men:Women is *negative* with R2 = 0.835





“Perhaps…the Gaza ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers.”

I've been thinking about 2 big trends:

-Layoffs in media, entire sites closing
-Huge mineral discoveries in California and Wyoming

Wouldn't it heal our country to work on a solution together? My idea is an FDR-style program for laid-off journalists to get jobs in mining 🧵





As Taylor Lorenz recently pointed out, it's been a brutal time in the media business.

Nearly 20,000 layoffs in 2023. Just in 2024, Sports Illustrated and Vice have effectively shut down.

Long-term job security is... dubious. The business models just aren't the same.

The Israel-Hamas war, anti-semitism, and free speech in America
My reflections after three weeks of arguing in my country.

In general I am happy about the state of discourse in America, but I wish to address some criticisms of me, both honest and dishonest.

🧵
I absolutely stand by my actions collecting public pro-terror statements and identifying who made them.

Yet I noticed an unhealthy impulse by many people on my side to report minor transgressions or private criticisms as if they *were* endorsements of mass murder.

Not all are!

Thread:

Last summer, a trans-owned, trans-staffed coffee shop in Philadelphia shut its doors after its (trans) employees conducted a "radical accountability process" against the owners.

This is the bizarre story of Mina's World, which I wrote about on my blog. They accused the owners of a lot of charges

Including wage theft.

But they separately complained when the owners tried to *stop* wage theft -- when tips were literally stolen from the jar by teenagers.

The video below is Emily Wilson, the Homeric translator promoted by the corporate media, reciting Book 23 from her translation of the Odyssey

It is disturbing - a mockery of the great work

Imagine NPR but read by the worst middle school theater teacher of all time

Part 2: NOW, compare that with the great performer Stanley Lombardo, who performed Book 23 of his own translation of the Odyssey - live WITH DRUMS on C-SPAN with Christopher Hitchens in 2000.

Lombardo has dignity where Wilson does not. He has a sense of what it means to tell a story.

1 month from today, Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad comes out.

In 2017, she became the first woman ever to translate the Odyssey into English

I want to be careful with my words here: her translation was abominable, a crime against the classics. Now she’s back

Part 1: I hesitate to use cliche, but “Woke Homer” wouldn’t be a *bad* description of Wilson’s work.

Before examining the translation, let’s look at her public comments and motive.

Here she is writing in the New Yorker:

“The Odyssey traces deep male fears about female power”

Insane: the Biden DOJ is suing SpaceX because they "hired only U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents from Sep 2018 to Sep 2020"

They want "asylees and refugees" hired

It's obvious bullshit, intended to punish @elonmusk for his political dissent It is longstanding principle that only U.S. citizens and some permanent residents get to work on highly-sensitive export technologies, like rockets

WHICH ARE THE SAME THINGS AS MISSILES

DOJ wants to make it easier for foreign criminals to get access to U.S. technology

We’ve all thought about it.

Some of us have studied it.

But I have studied it more than anyone. The geography. The strategy. I know how to do it.

HOW TO INVADE, OCCUPY, AND PARTITION CANADA

My detailed plan:





First, I just want to disclaim that I have no ill will against Canadians.

But as an effective altruist I try to think about the best use of resources for the progress of humanity

I truly believe that ending the current political entity of Canada is the best use of resources.

In SF and feeling inspired, so here is my plan to double the GDP of our country:

A brutal, medieval military occupation of San Francisco. Under my economic growth plan, the city would make make Pyongyang seem like Disneyland.

Here are the details: First, the city would be divided up between various police bodies. The main police force should be Army.

The FBI can have downtown and CIA paramilitary gets the Marina.

The Tenderloin will be sealed off by USACE and violently administered by a joint task force of CDC and DEA

The San Francisco Pride Parade is like a parody of a decadent civilization - celebrating one last bacchanal before the lights go out. I am documenting it in this thread🧵

If this is the last time you hear from me, please assume I was smited by g*d just for showing up to observe The parade route starts at the Embarcadero and goes "up" (down) Market St. - which ought to be San Francisco's grandest thoroughfare

EVERYWHERE you see "for lease" signs. San Francisco has the highest commercial vacancy rate of any major city. It's a complete disaster

There are over 6,000 veteran suicides in the United States every year. It is a number that should bring shame on our country.

Nine years ago today – May 29, 2014 – my dad Bruce was one of them. I was in 8th grade.

Don't forget them this Memorial Day. 🧵 Memorial Day was instituted to remember those who died in the service of the United States Armed Forces.

But nobody in 1868 would have contemplated that 150 years later, our warriors would be killing themselves at rates higher than combat deaths.

A pro-athletics, pro-fraternity, pro-partying slate won the student body election at Stanford on a platform of “Fun Strikes Back.”

They were the only candidates who weren’t already in student government (so the only non-losers)

Woke students are absolutely livid.

WE’RE BACK! So much credit to @ginevlily for her magisterial piece in @palladiummag last year.

She showed people that Stanford hates fun and ignited a revolution with words. It might save the school
palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/sta…

This October photo shows enraged Stanford students accusing the school of "protecting rapists" after two violent rapes.

Now, we know that both "rapes" were hoaxes perpetrated by the same woman as revenge on an innocent coworker.

Jennifer Ann Gries, 25, has been arrested.

🧵 Gries first rape hoax was on August 9, 2022.

She told a mandatory reporter (likely a healthcare professional) that she was dragged from a parking lot into a bathroom and raped by a tall black man -- who she claimed she had seen on campus before.

If you thought the DEI law dean exploding in front of a federal appellate judge was bad, I have some news…

Stanford is a fallen institution. It has gone insane since 2020. Here are the most ridiculous stories from the past few years, some of which I documented.

Thread: Stanford’s IT department created a list of banned words and initiated purges of university websites (they didn’t finish)

It included the word “American” wsj.com/articles/the-s…

Thread: Amnesty International, which claims to support “human rights,” had nothing to say while thousands of people were murdered by gangs in El Salvador.

Now that @nayibbukele has ENDED homicide in his country for nearly a year, they are outraged. This organization is sick! First up: hey @amnesty you morons should know by now that El Salvador now has basically the lowest homicide rate in the world.

Update your misinformation.

In several years when I have time, I am thinking to host paid “founders retreats” or even startup team retreat at my farm in Iowa as personal business operation.

Much better than Miami Beach, and much cheaper! Very wholesome Midwest experience.

Learn more? Read on... A few years ago in SF, I realized I have a "Catcher in the Rye" complex with my tech friends.

Maybe you remember this passage where the noble Holden Caulfield explains the metaphor?

AVIATION THREAD: the US should allow select foreign airlines “cabotage rights” i.e. the right to operate domestic routes in the US.

Imagine how great air travel would be if Emirates, Etihad, Singapore, Qatar, etc were allowed to compete here.

Take a journey with me... You wake up at 4:30 AM in the Marina and Uber down to SFO. You’re going to “Miami” for “Tech” “Week”

You get to the gate and this is what you see. They smile at you and lead you onto the plane.

You may have paid $1,000 for a premium economy ticket but it was totally worth it.

THREAD: The MonkeyCovid Delta Gamma Epsteinpox BA.10 Sub-sub-variant is spreading rapidly. This pandemic is NOT over, no matter what MAGAs tell you about "freedom"

Here are the best masks😷 to keep immunocompromised communities ALIVE.

1. The North 5400 full face respirator 2. The Venetian Leather 360 Plague Mask. Make sure it adheres full to your face for a good seal.

Vegan leather options also available

Thread: A Stanford medical professor, Dean Winslow, was so triggered by my tweet making fun of the masked medical graduation ceremony that he emailed administrators demanding they discipline me.

'What they did was not "free speech", but rather it was deliberate misinformation' He doesn't just want me punished. Bizarrely, Winslow also called for a friend of mine at Stanford to be formally disciplined -- for my tweet!

Guilt by association. A classic tactic of authoritarians.