When that sweet USAID money dries up….
Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication. It has been an extraordinary privilege. salon.com/2026/11/05/goodbye…
Incredible: if you don’t appease insane people’s demands they scream victim.
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It’s clear as day the entire world needs to address the bottom 1% of society. The super predators, repeat violent offenders, fraudsters, monsters. We must rid ourselves of them.
Of course this lying sack of shit turns off his comments.
Katie's gig before becoming the White House Press Secretary.
I shit you not.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The woman in the pink bikini is fitness influencer Katie Dunlop, not White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia.
tiktok.com/@lovesweatfitn…
instagram.com/lovesweatfitne…
5000x retweeted
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.
But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.
No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.
Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.
What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.
There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.
So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.
You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.
Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.
I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
5000x retweeted
The Attorney General is OBSESSED with national politics.
I’m focused on the safety of New Yorkers, and I always will be.
This guy is a must follow
Every American has driven past a strip mall with three mattress stores on the same block, empty parking lots at all of them, and assumed it had to be a front for money laundering. The stores exposed zero inventory on the floor, one employee sitting on a display bed scrolling their phone, and seemingly no customers at any hour of the day.
They are not laundering money. In fact, they are printing it.
A mattress that retails for $2,000 to $3,000 costs roughly $250 to $350 to manufacture. That is a 75% to 85% gross margin on every unit sold. No food spoilage, no shrinkage, and a simple supply chain. A mattress sits on the showroom floor for months and never depreciates in the eyes of the consumer.
A typical mattress store leases 3,500 square feet of strip mall space at $8,000 to $10,000 per month. The store needs one floor employee working on draw plus commission. There is no kitchen, no back of the house team, and no perishable inventory to manage. Total operating overhead is remarkably low relative to the margin and profit of every sale.
Because the margin per unit is so high, a mattress store breaks even selling 15 to 18 mattresses per month, which is only one mattress every other day. Every sale beyond that threshold drops almost entirely to the bottom line.
The parking lot does not need to be full. The store does not need foot traffic. A single couple walking in on a Saturday afternoon and financing a $2,800 king mattress represents more gross profit than most restaurants generate on the best dinner service of the week.
Private equity figured this out years ago and went on an acquisition spree. Mattress Firm acquired Sleepy's and Mattress Giant, rolling up thousands of locations across the country. Their strategy was not about selling more mattresses, it was about controlling lease covenants in retail corridors.
When Mattress Firm signed a lease in a strip mall, they negotiated exclusivity clauses preventing the landlord from leasing adjacent space to competing mattress retailers or direct to consumer mattress brands trying to open showrooms. By saturating a market with locations; they locked online first competitors out of physical retail entirely. A brand like Casper or Purple could not get a storefront on the same corridor because the lease covenants already prohibited it.
The stores looked redundant and unnecessary were actually defensive real estate positions. Three Mattress Firm locations within two miles of each other was not poor planning and instead a deliberate strategy to control the retail corridors and prevent competition from establishing a physical presence.
Mattress Firm filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2018. They emerged 60 days later after shedding 700 underperforming leases. The bankruptcy was a portfolio optimization exercise. They kept the highest performing locations with the strongest lease economics and walked away from the rest.
A company does not enter and exit bankruptcy in 60 days unless the underlying business model is healthy and the only problem was an oversized real estate footprint that needed pruning.
The mattress store with the empty parking lot and the single employee is one of the highest margin per square foot retail concepts in the country, and the real estate strategy behind the roll up was never about the mattresses at all.
Why is this kind of indoctrination buried in so many children’s books? Looks so planned. Sick of this
