OrphanA retweeted
Socrates warned us 2400 years ago exactly how civilizations collapse — and the West is checking every single box:
When the stupid scream louder than the wise.
When the lazy get more than the people who actually work.
When the dishonest and corrupt are celebrated while the honest get crushed.
When people with no skin in the game lecture everyone else on morality.
When reputation and feelings matter more than actual character.
When kids are no longer allowed to just be kids.
When the criminals are protected and the victims are ignored.
When pure madness is forced on everyone as the new “normal.”
When politicians stop serving the people and start feeding off them.
This is not a coincidence.
This is the deliberate destruction of Western nations — open borders, soft-on-crime policies, broken schools, and elites who get rich while the rest of us pay the price.
History already showed us how this ends!!
OrphanA retweeted
I have a theory. The reason the vast voting public is not afraid of:
- socialism
- anti-Semitism
- identitarianism
- political use of "emergency"
- elected fraudsters
It's that people don't read. They don't know: We've done all this before. It's the road to a broken society.
OrphanA retweeted
🚨What happens if Trump loses the House and Senate?
Clinton & Obama already set precedent.
They weren't done at all in their last 2 years.
Victor Davis Hanson explains:
Clinton fell to 37% approval but left office at about 66%. In between, he was impeached but not convicted and bombed Serbia for 78 days without Congress.
Obama's approval fell to 38% and still left office near 60%. He bombed Libya in 2011 without Congress, ran hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and started bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014 without a new vote. He said "I've got a pen and I've got a phone," and skipped the Senate on the Iran deal and Paris.
Low approval and a hostile Congress didn't finish them. For both, it was the best thing that ever happened to them in some ways.
OrphanA retweeted
This is generally correct.
The US health insurance system bundles a few things that shouldn't be bundled, which makes the market highly inefficient and price insensitive:
1. actual catastrophic insurance (the only part that is really insurance)
2. prepaid health plan for routine care (highly inefficient as you note)
3. negotiated discounts (despite these negotiated prices being much higher than they would be in a competitive market, as per your leaky faucet analogy, the actual rack rates are even more insane than the insurance company negotiated prices, so even if you are a very wealthy person, it generally makes sense to go thru a health plan to avoid the rack rate)
A proper insurance system would offer only #1 (analogous to actual catastrophic house & car insurance). #2 shouldn't be offered; instead end users should directly bear the cost of routine care (as they do for their houses & cars) which would ensure price transparency and competition. And this in turn would obviate #3.
The US version of health insurance isn’t “insurance.”
It’s a prepaid health payment plan. Which simply makes it so routine care is paid for by third parties.
Imagine if you ran all your routine home maintenance through your homeowners insurance.
That leaky faucet would be five times more expensive than if you just paid cash.
Why? The plumber wouldn’t just be able to charge you at the point of sale. He’d need to employ a whole billing department. Since someone else was paying, he wouldn’t even bother showing you the price. You’d shop purely on non-price factors, like show nice his website is and how shiny his truck is. So his prices would gradually creep up. Why not? Someone else is paying.
Which means now you’d need prior authorization to get the faucet fixed. The plumber might try to say you need a fancy new faucet with touchless controls and a built in purifier. Insurance says you can only have one of those old turn handle ones where hot and cold have separate nozzles. They only care about cost and not quality (except it being good enough to avoid an other leaky faucet soon). You care about quality but not cost.
Just getting a leaky faucet repaired has now become an expensive, bureaucratic nightmare.
Of course, if you suggest people pay cash for leaky faucets there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. “Do you even know how much a plumber is these days? A leaky faucet costs $300,000!“
And, obviously, someone would bring up the fact that you can’t negotiate with a plumber if there is a burst pipe at 2am on christmas day and your house is being flooded. So how could you ever expect people to shop for plumbers. Thats just ridiculous.
Also, if you dont make someone else pay to have that leaky faucet fixed, there might be water damage in the future and it will cost MORE to fix.
So we should just fund all plumbers through the government. Running water is a right, after all. There certainly won’t be any difficulty getting a plumber once they all have to get government approval to do anything to fix your house, right? Anyone will be able to get a plumber at any time and they’ll do all the things necessary to keep your house working perfectly.
If it sounds stupid for plumbers it sounds stupid for doctors, too.
OrphanA retweeted
I can empathise with this take but it seems to me a very 1990s reading. Picard wouldn't really fit the progressive mould today.
Let's remember that he grew up on a family vineyard that had been in the Picard line for generations, run the old way by a family who saw replicators and other modern conveniences as a threat to something worth keeping. That same man later returned to the estate after leaving Starfleet. The tastes he carried with him - Shakespeare, archaeology, a clear preference for the deep past - don't sit easily with a politics that treats tradition as something to get past. His great leadership happened inside Starfleet's rank structure and chain of command.
More importantly, it took place in a post-socialist society that had already solved material scarcity; a post-scarcity future that owed its abundance to earlier capitalist innovation, scientific discovery, and risk-taking. What remained was the work of self-improvement. That combination looks less like progressive politics and more like an older idea of ordered life sustained by inheritance, hierarchy, and the cultivation of character.
Even the milder progressive of the 1990s would have trouble claiming Picard now. A contemporary progressive would read his authority as white male privilege exercised inside a hierarchical military that expands under the name of exploration. Today's self-righteous Jacobins would treat the Federation itself as a form of soft imperialism that absorbs other cultures while calling the process enlightenment.
The family vineyard would be inherited wealth and settler privilege; Shakespeare and archaeology would be the Western canon and colonial grave-robbing. The defence of Lt. Data as a new sentient life form would be dismissed as individualist rights talk that ignores structural power. Add the absence of identity-based solidarity, the human-centred Prime Directive that still ranks other species, and the quiet Eurocentrism of a French captain quoting dead white men on the bridge, and Picard would not be celebrated. He would be cancelled.
This is why both old-school liberals and conservatives could still enjoy 1990s Star Trek. They disagreed about secularism and rationalist visions of society, yet they shared enough ground on duty, hierarchy, inheritance, and the cultivation of character to recognise something of themselves in Picard. The newer Jacobin progressives share almost none of that ground. The distance between the liberalism of that era and the progressivism of this one is, in the end, as wide as a galaxy.
OrphanA retweeted
Like many, I have my issues with the 47 administration. The corruption is indefensible. The greed is revolting. The war in Iran was a mistake. And? So what? We will get all of that and much worse under Democrats. There is no utopia. You get bad or you get worse. Fallen world.
This is the 2012 election map where Obama decisively beat Romney. Romney and Paul Ryan talked non-stop about "entrepreneurs" without really mentioning workers. They told you old factory jobs were gone and never coming back. They wanted more tax cuts, and an interventionist foreign policy. Look at this map, and peel away North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona - and that would be the losing future if people like Tillis regain control.
OrphanA retweeted
News flash for everyone: You know what they call a Rays-Brewers World Series? An outlier
It will be fun, but it's the first time since 1991 that two teams in the bottom half in payroll meet in the World Series
Spare me with the "this should end salary cap talk" conversations.
OrphanA retweeted
I still can’t believe the Guardians changed their name to that.
It’s quite possibly the worst name in sports.
OrphanA retweeted
We literally have the Braves' financial statements.
If the 2025 Braves spent exactly the same as the 2025 Dodgers, they would have operated at a $118m loss.
Add a hypothetical $187m luxury tax bill on top of that, and they would have lost $305m.
OrphanA retweeted
Nine of the last ten World Series champions were Top 10 in payroll. And six of them were Top 5.
Enjoy the small market World Series.
But don’t let it fool you into thinking MLB doesn’t need a major (i.e., cap & floor) overhaul.
OrphanA retweeted
“He could have solved world hunger instead of building a flying car”
My brother in Christ,
In 2021 the UN claimed they could solve world hunger with $6 Billion.
Elon offered them the $6 Billion if they were transparent with where the funds were going.
The UN never took his offer.
OrphanA retweeted
if you watched the NFL and thought something didn't feel right, you're not alone:
#1 most flags in over a decade
thru 4 weeks, refs are impacting the most CRITICAL moments of games most:
#1 most red zone penalties per game by offenses in history
#1 most penalties on 3rd/4th downs in the second half of games in history
and 17 touchdowns nullified by penalty! (vs only 5 in 2025 & 4 in 2024)
Refs are impacting the most important moments of games unlike we've ever seen before in the NFL, and even some of the coaches are speaking up
full analysis and historical data:
sharpfootballanalysis.com/an…
OrphanA retweeted
You know, Day has some audacity thinking back on chewing Bey’s ass for making the same mistake twice vs Ball State.
Just about every one of your 13 losses during your tenure is for the same shit. You had us all fooled in 2024, we thought you turned the corner. But nope, SSDD.
OrphanA retweeted
they are getting bodied in the comments. And rightly so. They had 4 years to make fun of Biden, they did fuck all, they only made fun of Obama ONCE. And their "attacK" was making him a cool jewel thief.
South Park has lived long enough to become the villain.
Following their Emmy win for Outstanding Animated Program, South Park is making a big change. Creators Trey Parker & Matt Stone announce:
“Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to SOUTH AMERICA. We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.”
The 29th Season of the award-winning series will premiere Wednesday, September 16th, at 10pm ET/PT on Comedy Central.
New episodes will be available to stream on Paramount+ around the world, with next-day availability in the U.S., Canada and Australia.
OrphanA retweeted
The MAC now says that “replay protocol was not properly followed” in the Western Michigan-Michigan game and the league has filed a formal appeal with the NCAA FBS Oversight Committee to be recognized as the winner.
