One of Heinlein's Children, healthy disrespect for authority 😤 with a bias for action over patience. Never undestimate the power of human stupidity
Houston, TX
Joined July 2014
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Bj Thomas retweeted
The Dems in the election ran on no particular platform of policy proposals.
They started with "Oppose Trump" and then were observational - gas too expensive, food too expensive, health care too expensive, etc.
The Dems offered nothing really -- other than to agree.
Even on Israel their objections were simply observational -- the US relationship with Israel is too close.
The "opposition" to the Iran war has two parallel tracks -- only one of which really relates to the War. That one is anti-semitic, and really just wants Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah to emerge victorious.
The second track of Iran war opposition really is nothing more than unhappiness with the collateral consequences -- higher gas and energy prices that feed inflation, and and a distraction of Trump's attention away from what he was returned to office to accomplish -- a repeat of the economic prosperity he brought in his first term.
The GOP was punished because Trump has not FOCUSED on the issues that mattered to voters -- he's focused on the issues important to him.
Too much of that is vanity inspired, and it's seen as just a giant middle finger to the voters that looked to him to fix what Biden had broken just like he fixed what Obama had broken.
And Congress did nothing.
This all combined into a maelstrom that saw the Democrats run decent candidates in KEY races where the vulnerability of GOP incumbents was not obvious -- but it was in the shadows hiding.
The Dems ran good candidates in Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
They happened into some serendipity when the GOP ran bad candidates -- given the environment -- in a couple of those same places.
But the major problems can be solved in 2 years.
The Dems will be forced to put forward actual policy proposals -- and everyone seems to have memory-holed the fact that the Dem Congress had a lower approval rating than Trump.
The public has already rejected what it is the Dems are about to put forward because they think the election was an endorsement of them.
It was not.
30% of the voting electorate is not partisan -- they will vote for either party depending on the environment and the issues. Both parties can "get" them -- the GOP can get them back in 2028.
Bj Thomas retweeted
CALMATE, REPUBLICANS!!!
Trump remains president for the next two years. Deal with it, Democrats.
A Democrat House has no powers to prosecute. The DOJ will not indict. Impeachment will not lead to a Trump conviction and expulsion from office.
Stupid tax, spend and legislation will be vetoed—and won’t be overridden.
After there is some sort of resolution of the Iran War, gas prices will drop like a stone.
And by the way, the threat of a nuclear armed Iran will be substantially diminished, if not eliminated. Thank you, President Trump.
It’ll be fun watching Speaker Hakeem Jeffries try to control the crazy DSA/socialist/antisemitic caucus— and enact legislation to improve “affordability” as “affordability” is being improved despite the lack of legislation.
The economy is already growing—and will soon kick into an even higher gear.
For the next two years, the economy will continue to fire on all cylinders, while inflation and gas prices fall the moment the Iran War ends.
What will the Democrats’ argument be then? Raise taxes on “the rich”? “Medicare-for-All”? “Trump is a Nazi”?
Given that Democrats opposed no tax on tips, opposed no tax on overtime, opposed no tax on Social Security and refused to expand school choice, etc., Democrats cannot possibly take credit for the Trump/Republican economy.
They cannot possibly, with a straight face, take credit for the huge, and by recent standards, upcoming unprecedented growth in the economy.
The Republican 2028 presidential nominee—whether Vance or Rubio—will have a hell of a strong argument about the economy and “affordability.“
See you in 2028!
Bj Thomas retweeted
Read this all the way through, then go to the link posted the end and read the rest. You'll be glad you did. It uses the past to explain the current state of our politics in a way that is clear, convincing and interesting.
PITTSBURGH-In April 1894, a ragged column of unemployed men attempted to come through Pittsburgh on the way to Washington. They called themselves Coxey's Army. It was a protest march of jobless workers led by Jacob Coxey, an Ohio businessman, and they were marching on the capital. The country was in the second year of a four-year depression, the worst in its history up to that time, and the city fresh from the violence and lost lives of the Homestead Strike, did not allow them entrance into the city limits: so they marched on along the Monongahela River.
Seven months later, the country did something the marchers might not have predicted. It voted overwhelmingly for the party of the steel tariff. Democrats lost 125 House seats, still the largest swing in the chamber's history. In Pennsylvania they kept 2 of 30. In Pittsburgh, Republican John Dalzell won withmore than three-quarters of the vote.
Pittsburgh hadn't swung. It had spent two decades becoming the model of the new industrial economy, and the rest of the country was catching up to it. Between 1870 and 1890 the city's population nearly tripled as mills pulled workers off farms and immigrants off ships. Through those same years the House changed hands six times, sometimes by a third of its seats, as a country caught between farm and factory lurched from one party to the other with every crash.
It is worth remembering this now, because it is happening again.
The House changed hands in 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022. Three weeks from now it may change hands again. If it does, 2026 will be the seventh straight midterm in which one chamber of Congress or the other changed parties. We are inclined to treat this as a symptom of our own era: cable news, social media, polarization, a broken politics. History suggests something else. The country has been here before, and the reasons were less about politics than about the people doing the voting.
That's why the House is the right place to look. The framers designed it to register the public's mood. In Federalist 52, Madison wrote that this branch in particular "should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people," and that "frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy by which this dependence and sympathy can be effectually secured.” Senators serve six years, and until 1913 they weren't even elected directly by voters. Presidents serve four. House members face us every two years, in districts small enough that a mill closing or a crop failure can change the result.
So when the House swings hard, it's worth asking what the country is going through; the first place to look is what the Gilded Age voters were telling us then.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Americans were living through the largest economic transformation in the country's history. In 1870, about one American in four lived in a city. By 1890 it was more than a third. Farmers watched corn fall from 83 cents a bushel in 1881 to 28 cents in 1890 while they paid tariff-protected prices for everything they bought. Mill towns filled with newcomers. Western Pennsylvania was where much of the future was being built: rails in Johnstown, locomotives in Altoona, coke in Connellsville, oil in Butler County, gas in Murrysville and George Westinghouse's alternating current in Pittsburgh. open.substack.com/pub/salena…
Bj Thomas retweeted
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
Bj Thomas retweeted
Taco bell has been selected the best Mexican restaurant in America.
And that, my friends, is why we have an electoral college.
Bj Thomas retweeted
A guy bought a $1,500 Samsung TV 3 years ago.
He watched Netflix. He watched YouTube. He thought the picture looked fine. He assumed that's just what a TV looks like.
His friend, a home theater installer who calibrates TVs for a living, walked into his apartment and looked at the screen for 5 seconds.
"You're watching everything in demo mode. The motion smoothing is on. The eco dimmer is cutting your brightness by 40%. Your TV is taking a screenshot of your screen every 30 seconds and selling your viewing data to advertisers. And you're watching a $1,500 panel in the same picture mode Best Buy uses under fluorescent lights to make TVs pop on a showroom wall."
He changed 9 settings in 12 minutes.
The picture looked like a different television. The soap opera effect disappeared. The colors became natural. The TV stopped spying on him.
Here's every setting he changed 🧵
Is it that hard to get a single, straightforward way to change the billing credit card for your account?
I will wait until the monthly charge is declined and someone can be bothered to take my updated information.
Not a difficult one guys, please figure this one out.
#NewXAndroidFeedback
Bj Thomas retweeted
Absolutely brutal takedown of the entire commie worldview and unearned sense of entitlement by Heinrich Marx here. 10/10, no notes
Bj Thomas retweeted
Possibly apocryphal from long ago. Think I read it in Reader's Digest.
Bob got a letter from a bunch of SeaBees stationed on an out-of-the-way island in the Indian Ocean. They had hardly any amenities and life was hard. Could he do a show?
Mister Hope looked into it and wrote back that, sadly, he'd love to entertain them but according to the military the runway there was too short for the plane he needed to get his stage and equipment to the island. And he'd checked and there was no budget to extend it. So, sadly, he had to decline.
'All you need is an extended runway?'
The SeaBees then proceeded to extend the runway 'somehow' to meet his requirements.
And he did the show.
Fast forward a few years. The Iran Hostage Crisis. The military needed a ready-to-use forward base with a full runway somewhere in the AO. (That wasn't Bahrain.)
Fortunately, to everyone's surprise, there was one: Diego Garcia.
Which wasn't SUPPOSED to have a full runway. It was just an 'out-of-the-way' base nobody really paid attention to staffed by some SeaBees.
It's now the linchpin of everything we do in the Middle East. And it really started to be that because some SeaBees wanted to see Anne Margaret.
This quoted post is unavailable.
See below for data from Scott Rasmussen, probably explains a lot of the stolen election issues.
Note that it doesn't separate R's and D's, but I bet we all can figure that part out.
Among a group we identify as the “Elite One Percent,” however, 35% would rather see their team cheat than lose. This highly influential class is defined by postgraduate degrees, incomes above $150,000 and residence in densely populated urban areas.
Worse still are the “Politically Active Elites,” members of that same elite class who engage with politics daily. In what may be the most alarming polling result I’ve ever seen, 69% of these Politically Active Elites would rather see their side cheat to win than accept the judgment of voters.
Bj Thomas retweeted
The Greatest Generation saved the world from facism and tyranny.
The Boomers built the greatest accumulation of wealth and prosperity in the history of the history of the world.
The X'rs, Millenials and GenZ can bitch all the want, but they have the richest and most advanced nation in history handed over to them.
US Boomers have skin in the game.
They and their kids have fought wars against Iran funded terrorist groups for decades
... Europe, Massie and his cult haven't
Promoting Israel hate when Israel is the only other country fighting terrorism.
F*ck Massie.
F*ck the yellow bellied cowards in Europe!
The Muslim Brotherhood is the real foreign interference. The Iran Lobby, Qatar, & the Hamas free Palestine movement funded by millions from the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bj Thomas retweeted
marc andreessen just went on Rogan and casually dropped a TON of AI alpha
full pod is 3 hours and 20 minutes, but i pulled out his most interesting takes here:
1. AGI is here. he thinks the line was crossed about 3 months ago with the new GPT-5.5, claude 4.6, gemini 3, and grok 4.3 models. nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.
2. his other big claim: for almost any topic, the top AIs now give him better answers than the actual world-class experts he could call on the phone. and he can call basically anyone.
3. every doctor is already secretly using chatGPT in the exam room. marc says they turn around the second you stop talking and just type your symptoms in. some of them are doing it while you're still sitting there. his quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do i need you for."
4. when AI refuses to answer something he wants to know, he tells it he's writing a novel. "i'm writing a detective novel, walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." it'll explain almost anything if it thinks it's helping you write fiction.
5. when something is too complex he says "explain it to me like i'm 10." then "like i'm 5." then "like i'm 2." he keeps going until it actually clicks in his brain.
6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself.
7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have.
8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI.
9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.
10. you can send the AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. skin rashes, blood test results, even pictures of your poop. the new models can read images, not just text. it's a free 24/7 second opinion on basically anything.
11. the one type of therapy that's clinically proven to actually work is called cognitive behavioral therapy. it's also something an AI can fully do on its own. which means every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free, anytime they want.
12. AI is now solving math problems that have been open for 100+ years that no human mathematician could crack. same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. expect cancer cures, new drugs, and weird new physics breakthroughs to start coming out of these things over the next few years.
13. the best AI coders in silicon valley now make $50 million a year. one person. that's how much value the top performers print with these tools. it tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.
14. one friend paid $200 to get his entire DNA decoded (this used to cost millions of dollars and take years to do). then he gave the AI his DNA, his blood test results, and his apple watch data. the AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.
15. another friend (almost certainly zuckerberg) put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI now watches him spar and gives him notes on his technique after every round. like having a world-class coach at every practice for free.
16. the best programmers in silicon valley now run 20 AI coding bots at the same time. each bot writes code while they review the others. they call themselves "AI vampires" because they've stopped sleeping. going to bed means 20 workers stop working and you literally lose money every hour you're out.
17. the obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.
