NominalTrajectory

Catching a giant rocket falling from space

Best description I've heard of Labour's tax on private schools: "A tax that raises less than it costs isn’t a tax. It’s spite with a spreadsheet. Aimed at the parents who sacrificed, and dressed up as fairness." Businessman Alex Lovén in Times interview.

Starship flight maneuvers

They want Britain to apologise for the slave trade. Here is the apology. #history

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 Britain sent warships into a friendly country's harbours. 🔥 And burned its ships at anchor. ⚓ That country was Brazil 🇧🇷 More enslaved Africans were taken to Brazil than to any other country on earth. ⛓️ Not America 🇺🇸 Brazil 🇧🇷 Nearly half of everyone shipped across the Atlantic went there. Ten times more than the United States. 🌍 In 1826 Britain made Brazil sign a treaty. The trade would end by 1830. 📜 Brazil signed. Then ignored it. They even had a phrase for laws like that: "para inglês ver". For the English to see. 👀 Tens of thousands of people kept arriving every year. 😔 So Britain changed the law. Brazilian slave ships could now be tried in British courts as pirates. ⚖️ In 1850 the Royal Navy sailed into Brazil's ports, under the guns of the forts. They cut out the slave ships and burned them. 🚢 Emperor Pedro II's government had a choice. War with Britain. Or end the trade. ⚔️ That September, Brazil banned it. Within two years the trade was dead. 🕊️ Yet today only one country is asked to feel ashamed. 🤔 The one that stopped it. 🇬🇧 Be part of us. 🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Actualmente viven en Europa 50 millones de musulmanes. Había menos de 500.000 en 2000, hace sólo 26 años. No es teoría del reemplazo, es reemplazo. Es la conquista de un continente sin disparar una sola bala. Es un colapso de la civilización.

There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years. Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816. Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857. Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873. Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854. It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧 It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today. Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪

I was arrested, interviewed under caution for 2 hours by two sturdy lllllllesbians and my case sent to the @CPSUK for the crime of… ‘causing offence to myself’.

If we want the world to get better, we'll have to accept one thing: some people really are exceptional, and they really do create value. I've explained how the system works. Now I'm going to tell you why Elon Musk is under attack. It isn't because of his tweets or his positions. It runs deeper than that. Elon Musk is under attack because he exists. In a world built on egalitarianism, the exceptional individual is an anomaly. Worse, he's a threat. Left free, he creates gaps: he produces more value, he moves faster, he climbs higher. Every gap he creates proves that the egalitarian project rests on a lie, the lie that we're all interchangeable. Kurt Vonnegut saw it back in 1961 in a chilling short story, Harrison Bergeron. In an America made perfectly equal, the strong are weighed down, the beautiful are masked, and the most intelligent have their thoughts scrambled by piercing noises so that nobody rises above anybody. That isn't some distant dystopia. It's the ultimate logic of this system. If equality of outcome is the goal, then excellence is the enemy. Here's a truth almost nobody dares to say: humanity moves forward through geniuses. Look across the centuries. Aristotle founds logic. Gutenberg prints and sets knowledge free. Copernicus and Galileo move the Earth. Descartes and Pascal give reason its method. Newton writes the laws of the universe. Pasteur defeats microbes. Darwin explains life. Turing invents computing. Every time, one mind, a single one, tips history over. In 1905, special relativity was in the air, and others were getting close. But general relativity, without Einstein, we might still be waiting for. And the digital revolution as we lived it, from the personal computer to a phone in every pocket, wouldn't look the way it does without Steve Jobs. We almost always admire these geniuses once they're dead. Galileo had to recant on his knees. Semmelweis, who understood that washing hands was enough to save mothers, died in an asylum, mocked by his peers. Turing, who helped win the war, was convicted and then chemically castrated. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime. And then there's Nikola Tesla. The man who invented the electric world we still live in: the alternating current that powers our homes, the induction motor, the foundations of wireless transmission. He dreamed of sending energy freely across the planet. When J.P. Morgan stopped funding him, his Wardenclyffe tower was abandoned, then demolished. He ended his life alone, buried in debt, in a New York hotel room, feeding pigeons. He was found dead in January 1943, at 86. The man who electrified the world died with almost nothing. The irony of history: his name is now written on millions of cars, the cars of the company Elon Musk took to the top. As if history wanted to pay its debt. The system has always hated those who surpassed it, and it only celebrates them once they can no longer bother it. It's hard to accept, but it's reality. It doesn't mean geniuses have more rights than anyone else. Before the law, before justice, and in their dignity, all people are equal, and they must stay that way. It means that some individuals, through their talent, their courage, and their risk-taking, create a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more value than ordinary people. And they don't keep that value for themselves. All of humanity benefits from it. Elon Musk is one of those men. He revived space exploration when governments had turned away from it. He forced the entire auto industry into a new century. With Starlink, he brought the internet to the most isolated corners of the planet. Every time, he was told it was impossible. Every time, he risked everything, and every time, he won. He is the first person in history to cross a trillion dollars. People want him to apologize for it. I say the opposite: he deserves it, and he deserves much more. The value he's creating for humanity, with reusable rockets, the electrification of the world, and the road to Mars, is beyond any comparison with what he owns. His fortune wasn't taken from anyone. It was created where there was nothing. That's exactly what the system can't forgive him for. In their worldview, nobody should be above anybody. Success is suspect, wealth is theft, excellence is an injustice to be corrected. Elon Musk is living, dazzling, unbearable proof that their model is wrong: a free man with talent and courage can create more value than all their administrations combined. As long as he exists, their story doesn't hold. So he has to be destroyed. The lawsuits, the investigations, the press campaigns, and the regulatory threats all come from there. But here's what makes me deeply optimistic. The system is cracking. It bet that people would end up preferring equality in mediocrity to freedom in excellence, and it lost. People saw the rockets come back and land. They saw what a single man could accomplish when nobody stopped him from acting. And they understood they had been lied to. What's coming is a new world, built on real meritocracy. Not a world where the same people inherit the same seats, but a world where everyone gets to play. The child of a factory worker, a farmer, or an immigrant can get in the game, and if he's good, he rises fast. Very fast. As high as his talent takes him. The equality worth defending is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. The first sets geniuses free. The second smothers them. We think it's normal for a soccer player to earn a fortune because he's exceptional with a ball. We think it's suspicious for an engineer to get rich by bringing rockets back from space. The world will be better the day kids have Elon Musk posters on their bedroom walls, the way they have posters of Messi and Ronaldo. Humanity never moved forward thanks to people who wanted nobody to stand out. It moved forward thanks to those who dared to outrun everyone. Elon Musk is one of them. And this time, history won't wait until he's dead to recognize it.