Mark S. Harris

My dear American friends, I've shown you where the disease came from and who sells it. Now I want you to look at this email. January 5, 2020, 2:44 in the morning. Peter Thiel writes to Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen. It became public years later, in a lawsuit between the state of Tennessee and Meta. The subject line is one word: Millennials. Thiel starts from a number: 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist. Read that again. Seven out of ten young adults in the richest, freest, most innovative country in human history say they want the system that ruined every country that tried it. And Thiel, one of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley, says something important. Don't just dismiss them as stupid or brainwashed. Understand why. His answer: when you're crushed by student debt and housing is unaffordable, you have no capital and no way to build any. And if you have no stake in capitalism, you turn against it. He's right. But follow the thread one step further, because that's where it gets interesting. Who made college unaffordable? Washington flooded universities with easy federal loans, and universities raised their prices year after year, because they could. The same universities that then taught those students, for four years, that capitalism is the problem. Who made housing unaffordable? Zoning rules, permits, environmental reviews, endless regulation that makes it nearly illegal to build. Remember Piketty's famous rise of capital? It was mostly housing. Scarcity created by the state. So here's the full picture. The state creates the scarcity. The universities teach that capitalism caused it. The politicians sell socialism as the cure. The arsonist is selling fire insurance. That's why 70% is not a natural opinion. No generation wakes up one morning wanting central planning. It takes decades of teaching, a captured culture, and an economy rigged to give young people no stake in it. In a healthy country, that number would trigger a serious public investigation into what American universities have been teaching for fifty years. This is not a debate. It's the result of a long, patient operation, exactly the war of position Gramsci described from his prison cell. Now let me tell you what history says happens when an ideology captures a generation and turns it against everything that came before. China, 1966. Mao unleashes the Cultural Revolution and hands it to the youth. Students become Red Guards. Their mission: destroy the "Four Olds," old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples, books, art, centuries of history, smashed. In August 1966, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. She was one of the first. Teachers across the country were humiliated, tortured, killed by the children they had taught. In 1970, a 16-year-old boy named Zhang Hongbing denounced his own mother for criticizing Mao. She was executed. He spent the rest of his life trying to apologize for it. Children were taught that loyalty to the Party came before loyalty to their parents. Historians estimate the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people. The Soviet Union did it first. It turned a boy named Pavlik Morozov into a national hero for denouncing his father. Generations of Soviet children were raised on his story. Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge declare Year Zero. Teenagers with rifles empty the cities. Wearing glasses was enough to mark you as an intellectual. In four years, roughly a quarter of the population was dead. Every time, the same pattern. Take the young. Teach them that the past is guilty. Teach them that their parents, their teachers, their history are the enemy. Then give them power. So when you see statues pulled down, words banned, books rewritten, and parents treated as obstacles in their own children's schools, understand what you're looking at. It's not the end of the story. It's the opening act. It always starts with the young, and it always starts with good intentions. If the West ever gets its Marxist youth revolution, it won't end in Scandinavia. It will end the way it has ended every single time it was tried for real. And we will have learned nothing. Thiel saw the number. I'm telling you where it leads. The answer is not to hate the young. It's to give them back a stake in the system. Let them build. Let them buy a home. Make college worth its price or skip it. Let them start companies instead of drowning in debt. A generation that owns something defends it. A generation that owns nothing will burn it down. I come from your future. Don't let your children write the next chapter of this story.

At some point, baseball has to get back to valuing ballplayers and not just numbers on a screen. Give me the Freddie Freemans, the Buster Poseys, Hunter Pences, Pablo Sandovals, Michael Youngs, Ian Kinslers of the world. Guys who just flat out know how to play the game. Everyone wants to talk launch angle and exit velo, but what happened to valuing a quality at bat?” The 9-pitch battle that might end in an out, but forces a pitcher to show everything he’s got. The guy who hits behind the runner, takes what’s given, or just refuses to give a pitcher an easy inning. Those at-bats might not look sexy in the box score, but they show up in the 7th, 8th, and 9th. Some of these dudes could absolutely leave the yard too. That’s the point. They weren’t one-dimensional. Somewhere along the way, we confused measurable tools with knowing how to win baseball games. I’m not against analytics or hitting the ball hard, but there is an art to winning that you can’t fully measure. We need more guys who know how to play baseball, not just hitters, not just athletes, ballplayers. And I promise you, those dudes never go out of style

Good stuff….

What a great idea, and really well made!

The next-gen Roadster is finally heading for the factory floor in Texas. The wildest thing about this Roadster? Nearly a decade later, the specs still sound fake. 620 miles of range. 250+ mph. 0–60 in under 2 seconds. Even reading these numbers feels excessive. The Roadster still feels like a car from the future waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up. @Tesla