Marcus retweeted
The farther I traveled from poverty, the more fashionable it became to romanticize the conditions I had escaped.
I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and was taken from my mother when I was three. She had immigrated from South Korea, but her life unraveled amid drug addiction. I never met my father and learned only as an adult, through a genetic ancestry test, that he was Mexican. I spent the next several years moving through foster homes and chaotic circumstances.
At seventeen, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. After some setbacks, I arrived at Yale at twenty-five and studied on the GI Bill.
Along the way, I climbed nearly every rung of the American class ladder. I moved from poverty through working-class and lower-middle-class homes. In the military, I encountered the middle class. At Yale, I was surrounded by the upper-middle class and the wealthy.
Moving through these worlds, I noticed that beliefs changed with social class. At Yale, I heard ideas I had never encountered before: abolish the police, empty the prisons, promote polyamory, dismantle traditional marriage, and decriminalize drugs.
These ideas were popular among elites, but their costs often fell on communities like the ones where I grew up. I had seen addiction, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and disorder up close. At Yale and later during my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I studied research on class and social status. It helped me understand what I had witnessed and led me to some startling statistics about social class.
He’s playing a totally different game and they have no idea
Scott Galloway is upset about being 'doxed' after he supported Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax:
"He's taken a legitimate source of tax revenue, and he's turning it into a wanted poster."
"What is the upside here? Why is he doing this?"
Incredible.
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🚨#BREAKING: Immigrant-led business coalition votes to sue NYC over Mamdani’s taxpayer-funded grocery-store, warning 30%-discounted groceries could put nearby stores out of business.
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Marcus retweeted
So this is a list of wealthy people and their addresses. As we’ve seen in France and Sweden this leads to crypto kidnappings torturings and murders. Yes real estate records are semi public but this is an easily searchable database and target list. That makes a difference - again as prior examples show us. This is early socialist revolution stuff.
Leave New York.
The city published a list of all properties -- and the names of the owners -- that *could be* subject to the new pied a terre tax in a very easy to search Excel sheet:
nyc.gov/site/finance/propert…
It’s just too perfect. Doxxing a major revenue stream while redistributing their contributions in perhaps the most impressively misguided manner imaginable.
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Looking forward to seeing which of his homies this will temporarily enrich.
A few very obvious points on Mamdani's grocery stores:
1. The supply of the discounted groceries will run out on day 1, and every day there is a new shipment. This is basic econ 101.
2. This means only the people who are lucky enough or fast enough will get these discounted groceries. Expect to see the city ration these groceries in some other way. By income, or neighborhood or some lottery system.
3. Grocery margins are notoriously low as it is (like 2-3%). These stores will lose a bunch of money selling 30% below market, or they'll sell so little it will be insignificant.
4. There is absolutely zero chance that government bureaucrats can source these products from global supply chains as efficiently as Walmart, or Meier, or Whole Foods, whose survival depends on it. Their costs will be far higher (unless they use government bludgeon to force distributors to sell to them at lower prices).
5. It's actually an incredible triumph of capitalism that you can get a pound of bananas that were shipped to your neighborhood from Equador for like 60 cents, or fresh grapes from Chile in the dead of Midwestern winter for 2 bucks a pound, and Norwegian salmon to cook in Italian olive oil for $15 -20 bucks or so. Truly stop and think about that for a minute. It's a miracle.
The median full time hourly wage is around $31 dollars. For ONE HOUR of work, the median working American can get all of the groceries listed below, which is about 22,000 calories. They can feed themselves for 10 days (or a family of 4 for around 2 and a half days), with an hour of labor.
This is the stupidest industry for socialists to go after.
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They want to demolish every structure that protects everything you have so that they can take it and claim it as their own (which they already believe to be the case).
Fox: "Abolish the Senate?"
DSA Chair: "True"
Fox: "Abolish ICE?"
DSA Chair: "Absolutely"
Fox: "Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone in the US illegally?"
DSA Chair: "Yep"
Fox: "Defund the Pentagon?"
DSA Chair: "Absolutely"
Fox: "Abolish prisons?"
DSA Chair: "Yep"
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He wants all the things.
The problem is that when socialists hear that, they somehow imagine that he’s only going to take other people’s stuff, not theirs.
Hey there, Gary. Here’s a video of the currently sitting Mayor of New York City saying that “winning Socialism” is the most important purpose of this project, with the end goal being to “seize the means of production”. Can I get a comment from you on this?
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It might be easier to start looking for fraud that this woman /isn’t/ connected to
🚨Ilhan Omar’s sister founded a business which secured more than $20 million in govt funding for “health” projects
Guess where her company was registered?
The SAME address used by feeding our future fraudsters…
You cannot make this up
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For a generation that only knows how to be entertained:
One of my most enduring ideas for a message to convey that I've never figured out how to put out there is basically this one: the saturation of our professional and political life with actors reading lines from scripts.
You've probably heard the theater expression "breaking the fourth wall." What it means is that the actors directly acknowledge either the audience or that they're in a dramatic production. The stage has three sides ("walls"), and the "fourth wall" refers to the invisible and psychological wall on the front of the stage that separates the drama from the watching audience. The idea is that the drama is happening in a contained little world that doesn't acknowledge the fact of its own dramatization or the audience watching it, except when it does.
In some performances -- and maybe you've experienced some like this -- there's an even more profound way of breaking the fourth wall, which is to make the drama immersive within the audience. Actors are placed like plants among the audience and at various times shout out, heckle, or even join the performance, thus revealing themselves to be actors. Sometimes this is made explicit. Sometimes it isn't.
In this situation, the "fourth wall" isn't broken but dissolved. The audience becomes part of the drama, and the drama is happening from what appears to be, but isn't, the audience. I'm not talking about audience participation here. I'm talking about performers embedded in the audience without the audience realizing it, playing a scripted role while looking like part of the crowd.
Taking this another step is, in fact, indicative of the world we live in now. This part is the message I have thought about almost every day for years and never figured out how I wanted to say it. That step is that there's no theater at all, but the immersive act with a dissolved fourth wall goes on all around us.
Imagine a situation where a nontrivial proportion of people in public life around us are actually actors playing scripted roles. Maybe they're politicians. Maybe they're pundits and influencers. Maybe they're journalists. Maybe they're actors playing actors. They're all actors, though, pretending to be politicians, professionals, pundits, influencers, journalists, and who-knows-what else.
It's not just that the fourth wall has been dissolved but that the entire theater has been dissolved. "All the world's a stage," wrote the Bard, but now taken literally. Some percentage of our entire political, professional, and information universe becomes a scripted act, and the real professional bodies in which they are embedded are the audience unaware, as are we, except we're subject to the performance in the literal political sense.
I think this is the world we live in now.
I think many of our politicians and professionals, and most of our influencers and pundits, are not those things at all. They're actors playing those roles, but not on a stage or on a show, but in real life.
As in the "dissolved fourth wall" immersive situation, we, the audience, not watching but living this performance, might sometimes be dimly aware that some parts of what's happening around us are planted parts of the show, but we're not always sure, or maybe we're never sure.
The difference is, there's no theater. The show doesn't end but just rolls into another act after another act after another act. You cannot get up and leave the performance, should you get bored, tired, or disgusted with it, because the performance is actually real life itself. There's nowhere to go, not because you're trapped, but because there's literally nowhere to go, at all.
This is the world I think we live in today and have lived in for some time now.
Once you become even dimly aware of it, it makes you want to scream. It makes you want to escape. It makes you want to shake your neighbors and tell them, but you know you'll sound like you've gone mad. And you will sound that way.
For those just below that level of dim awareness, no such good fortune is available. They slowly do go mad. They wonder if they're going crazy, and they are. They're inside the spell of the drama around them but think it's real.
Below that level of awareness, this is just business as usual, and everyone seems to be losing their minds over histrionic nothing.
And the situation presents an evil dilemma to those aware: play the game and become part of the scripted drama yourself, because it's the game and it can be played, or slowly boil in your own frustration at being unable to articulate with proof what you realize is going on all around you.
Most of these latter kinds do the most sensible thing they can. They scream for a while, realize the futility, and withdraw, which is the closest thing anyone can do to leaving the theater. They willfully submerge themselves to the level of the unwitting rubes, except they aren't unwitting; they've ceased caring. It is what it is.
I don't know what to call this state of affairs except to say it's "there is no fourth wall" like The Matrix or "where we're going, we don't need theater walls" like Back to the Future. I also don't know what to do about it.
I do think it's our reality, though.
I don't think we're ruled primarily by fools. I think we're ruled primarily by actors, all our world's a stage, and the production, frankly, SUCKS.
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Remember Snopes?
No one admitted it at the time but this type of thing was the last stand of "fact checking"
Memes of "mostly false" verdicts on things that were obviously true burned out everyone on the idea of "fact checking"
[that and the fact that the effort only existed to build towards the creation of a Ministry of Truth staffed by crazy, evil women]
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Everyone hates on the billionaires but nobody complains about the money spent on this because it’s art.
And before you whatabout me, this is worth the time & money because its good art.
Star Axis is complete. Fifty years in the making, land artist Charles Ross has finished his monumental observatory on a mesa in New Mexico. A staircase, aligned with Earth's axis, climbs to a open lens that tracks Polaris and the 26,000-year cycle of Earth's gravitational wobble.
Read the beautiful feature in the NYT: na2.hubs.ly/H06Q16C0
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Catchy song, awful philosophy
(Leftism summarized)
Timon and Pumbaa are TLK's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Their function in the story is to turn Simba (Hamlet) into an effeminate wastrel and lead him into spiritual death (or in the case of the source material, physical death).
Simba doesn't self-actualize until he realizes that his purpose is to embody the Father/Warrior-King archetype, and he abandons the duo's philosophy of comfort and degeneration, embracing struggle and hardship for the sake of others.
"Hakuna Matata" isn't the key to happiness, but the chains by which Simba is enslaved to perpetual childhood. It's a blindfold that prevents Simba from confronting and processing the death of his father, which prevents him from ever becoming a ma-... lion.
Holding up Timon and Pumbaa as positive role-models is about the most egregious sin against media literacy you can commit.
Marcus retweeted
- You: "My stocks went up 10%."
- Government: "Congratulations! That's taxable."
- You: "But inflation was 8%. I only really gained 2%."
- Government: "We tax the full 10%."
- You: "You tax the inflation you created?"
- Government: "Capital gains are capital gains."
- You: "So you profit from debasing my money twice?"
- Government: "You're not an economist."
Marcus retweeted
reminder that there is a well coordinated campaign to oppose data centers financed by communists
no amount of data or reasoning will change brainwashed people's minds
Marcus retweeted
We think of this evil as Marxism. In reality, Marxism is nothing more or less than the current instantiation of a much more ancient evil: possession by the envious and hateful spirit that drove Cain to murder his brother Abel.
The great book of Genesis thus portrays mankind as riven by an eternal fratricidal conflict.
Those who reject genuine sacrifice become embittered by their subsequent failure ("rejection by God").
Instead of repenting and changing, they turn to revenge.
And who do they target? Those who strive to do well and offer what is best.
I can't believe how much wisdom the author of Genesis 4 compressed into that story's few sentences. You might even come to believe that God Himself had a hand in it.
Truly: it's uncanny. The first two human beings born into history are, respectively, a good, honest productive man and his brother, who allows himself to be consumed by resentment and the desire to destroy.
Communism, in a nutshell.