San Franciscan, by way of Montana. Board member @BrionesSociety.
San Francisco
Joined May 2009
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Tom Rapkoch retweeted
The only thing that would sway my vote this election is six text messages from an unidentified number during my work day.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
Hey Ro, Epstein wasn’t a billionaire and he’s dead (good riddance). How about talking how you want to confiscate the wealth of Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and Kim Kardassian? They’re part of the “billionaire class.” Funny how you never talk about them.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
They all hate him and always have. It’s refreshing to hear someone finally say it.
He’s just a bad person. It really is that simple.
"I AND ITALY NEVER BEG"
MELONI SLAYS TRUMP AFTER HE SAY: "Meloni? She begged me for a photo, I felt sorry for her"
Giorgia Meloni's rasping response: "Donald Trump's statements are completely made up, I'm frankly appalled. I don't know why the President of the United States behaves this way with his own allies; after all, it's not the first time it's happened. I can only say it's a shame that he doesn't show the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leaderships toward which he instead proves much more accommodating; however, one thing he must remember: I and Italy never beg."
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine.
> Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla.
> The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks.
> In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway.
Investors went wild.
> What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind.
> Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll.
> He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media.
> Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't.
> In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford.
> Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight.
> A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time.
> In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days.
> A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year.
> He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal.
> He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.
> In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders.
> Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing.
The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.
You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.
You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.
You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.
You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.
You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
“There are no maverick molecules in the universe.”
Haven’t seen a conversation like this—intellectual, philosophical, big picture—on tv in decades. It’s incredible.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
Imagine what @MattMahanSJ can do as Governor of California. 👇
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
America’s hopes for its first high-speed rail line were kindled in 2008, when California voters approved a ballot measure for a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nearly two decades later, that dream is yet to arrive. cbsn.ws/48jzMBx
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
For some reason, the @wapo editorial board decided to cover Bay Area county finances and absolutely nailed it: runaway spending despite a stagnant population.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
To all of you morons saying “I’m not dying for (insert country),” or “I didn’t vote for us to go to war for (insert country),” let me explain to you why you are stupid.
Isolationism sounds appealing if one has never stepped outside the comfort of their own homes (or if you have the IQ of a cockroach).
I have spent a decade and a half operating in the shadows of the world’s fault lines, where the reality is brutally clear: power vacuums do not remain empty.
They are always filled—and rarely by benevolent actors.
If the United States withdraws from the global stage, China, Russia, and every opportunistic authoritarian regime in existence will rush to occupy the ground we abandon.
They will shape trade routes, control supply chains, dictate technological standards, and dominate the security architecture of entire regions.
That is not speculation. It is how geopolitics has always worked.
The global order that allows Americans to live in relative prosperity and security is not an accident; it exists because the United States underwrites it.
Remove that foundation and the structure collapses.
The fantasy of isolation ignores the fact that our economy, our security, and our alliances are interwoven across the planet.
If we retreat, we do not become safer or freer. We become strategically blind while hostile powers consolidate influence over the very systems that sustain our way of life.
In other words, isolationism would not protect the United States.
It would guarantee that the future world order is written by nations that do not share our interests or values, and once that order solidifies, reclaiming it would cost far more than maintaining it ever did.
So, if you get your geopolitical knowledge from a former Vogue intern, a former pizza delivery guy, a closeted gay Nazi, or any other grifter with a live stream that is being paid to post their nonsense, please wake up and embrace reality with the rest of us.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
It's official! Today, I filed to run for Congress! Couldn't be more excited to represent my hometown!
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
No, I'm completely opposed to this tax. It is an ignorant, ill-conceived, idea born of jealousy.
I'd rather raise all boats than drain the ocean.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
Pretty crazy when you realize just how flagrant the scaremongering has been about data center water usage:
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
Hegseth is such a *stereotypical* fool beyond everything else, that's what kills me. He's always so predictably rockheaded and over-the-top, like he was scripted uncreatively by a workmanlike screenwriter.
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
For all those who asked, here is a clip of @havivrettiggur responding to masked protesters interrupting his lecture at Haverford College on February 1, 2026. Enjoy and learn.
At Haverford College, I didn’t encounter a great and powerful political movement. I met neglected children surrounded by adults who failed to challenge them, teach them or inculcate substance, grit and nuance.
My piece in @TheFP thefp.com/p/why-i-let-anti-i…
Tom Rapkoch retweeted
“Jeeves,” I said, “you look . . . pensive.”
“I confess to a slight concern, sir.”
That, from Jeeves, is rather like hearing that the Bank of England has “a slight concern” about the stability of the pound. It makes you sit up.
“Concern, Jeeves?”
“Concern, sir. I ran into Lady Flashcome this morning, who informed me that that, last night at the Drones, Viscount Clavicular was mid jestergooning, when a group of Foids came and spiked his Cortisol levels.”
“Well, I’m bound!” I said, nodding the old bean. “So that’s what it is, is it? Most interesting.”
I paused.
“Jeeves?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I confess I didn’t quite follow that.”
“Understandable, sir. The essential question, as I understand it, is whether ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids is more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club.”
“Come again, Jeeves,” I said, for though I had caught the words as they came out, the meaning had slipped past me like one of those greased eels making a dash for the open sea.
“In plain terms, sir, the speaker is asking whether it is more advantageous, in a social setting, to disregard women entirely while attempting to dominate or impress other men through vulgarity and competitive posturing, rather than attempting to attract women by means of artificially inflating one’s perceived desirability—particularly through the presentation of a false identity suggesting superior physical attractiveness and social value.”
I stared.
“In other words,” Jeeves continued smoothly, “it is a comparison between two strategies for attaining social status: one based upon humiliating rivals and cultivating masculine hierarchy, and the other based upon deceiving prospective romantic partners by misrepresenting one’s own attractiveness.”
He coughed politely.
“Neither approach, sir, would generally be considered conducive to the development of sincere human relationships.”
