Conquering death would be humanity’s greatest achievement.

Musk, Milei and Macron – A Café in Paris Saint-Germain. Three coffees. One chainsaw. MACRON: Javier, you cannot bring that in here. MILEI: It is not switched on. MACRON: That is not the reassurance you think it is. MUSK: Let him keep it. It’s the only visual aid that ever worked. MACRON: Very well. So – you both wanted to explain the economy to me. I should say that I worked at Rothschild, I ran the finance ministry, and I have been President for nine years. MILEI: Yes. That is the problem we are here to discuss. MUSK: Let’s start simple. Where does money come from? MACRON: From the economy. Value created, taxed, redistributed. MUSK: Close. Where does value come from? MACRON: Labour. Capital. Innovation. The social contract that organizes them. MUSK: Someone makes a thing that didn’t exist. That’s it. Everything else is moving it around. A country gets rich in exactly one way – more people making more things. And it gets poor in exactly one way: making it harder to make things. MACRON: That is a caricature. There is regulation, protection, standards, a European framework… MILEI: In your country, to open a factory, you ask. To hire, you ask. To fire, you ask, and then you pay for three years. To build a reactor, you ask for seventeen years. What happens if nobody answers? MACRON: The procedure continues. MILEI: No. The answer is no. Silence is no. You have made no the default setting of an entire civilization. MACRON: We built Ariane. We built the TGV. We built the nuclear fleet. MUSK: In the seventies. Under rules that no longer exist. You could not build your own nuclear fleet today – you’d be in year nine of the consultation. MACRON: (pause) Flamanville took seventeen years. MUSK: There it is. MACRON: So what would you do? Abolish the state? MILEI: No. I am not an anarchist on Tuesdays. The state does four things. Courts. Police. Borders. Contracts. Everything else it touches, it makes worse and more expensive – and it charges you for the privilege in advance. MACRON: And the social model? The pensions, the healthcare, the… MUSK: You can only keep the social model if you produce enough to pay for it. You do not. So you are not defending the model. You are defending the speeches about the model, while the young people who would have funded it move to Austin. MACRON: Two hundred thousand a year. MUSK: You know the number. MACRON: Of course I know the number. I know all the numbers. (He stirs his coffee.) You must understand that I am not unsympathetic. I have read Bastiat. MUSK: Then what didn’t you understand? MACRON: I am French. Privately, I agree with a great deal of what you say. MILEI: Then why do you not say it? MACRON: Because it would not be useful. MILEI: To whom? MACRON: (pause) To the process. MUSK: To you. MACRON: These are not different things, at this level. That is something people outside government never grasp. MILEI: Then why? MACRON: Because the numbers are not the constraint. (He looks up.) The constraint is that every one of those regulations has a constituency, a ministry, and a union. The pension reform cost me the streets for six months. Six months, for two years of retirement age. You are asking me to do forty such reforms simultaneously, in a country that is the world champion of not moving. MILEI: No. I am asking why you find that constraint so comfortable. MACRON: I beg your pardon. MILEI: Every one of those constituencies is also a lever. The ministry that blocks the factory is a ministry you appoint. The subsidy that saves the failing firm is a subsidy you grant. You describe that as an obstacle to your power, while that is the substance of it – that is what you do. A president in a country where everything is permitted has almost nothing left to distribute. MACRON: That is a very cynical reading. MILEI: It is the only one that fits the evidence. Everything else requires you to be incompetent, and you are not incompetent. MACRON: (after a moment) No. I am not. MUSK: And here’s the part I don’t think you’ve considered. You keep asking how to make France competitive. Wrong question. Ask instead what happens if you do nothing. MACRON: We decline slowly. MUSK: No. You decline until the decline itself becomes the constituency – until more people depend on the managing of the problem than on solving it. Then it’s structural. You’re close. MILEI: Two hundred thousand young French people leave every year. MACRON: A European mobility question. And they are replaced. MUSK: Not by engineers. MACRON: We have programmes. MILEI: Emmanuel. I inherited two hundred percent inflation and nine defaults. Every economist in Buenos Aires told me it was politically impossible. I killed the rent control. The housing supply in Buenos Aires tripled. Prices fell. Because I stopped forbidding the supply. MACRON: Argentina is not France. MILEI: Correct. Argentina was worse. That was the advantage. When the patient is dying, even the doctors stop arguing. Your patient is merely declining, so everyone can keep their position while it happens. MACRON: You describe decline. I would call it stability. MUSK: Same thing at a different speed. MACRON: (lightly) Not to those of us who must be re-elected inside the timeframe. MILEI: There it is. You gave the whole answer and did not notice. MACRON: And suppose I did what you ask. Suppose tomorrow I abolish the permission – activity free, punishment after real harm, silence means yes. MILEI: Six months of war. The street, the press, your own administration. Then the electricity price starts falling, the first permits clear in thirty days, and somebody opens a factory. And then it is no longer an argument. It is a fact, and facts recruit faster than speeches. MACRON: And during those six months I lose everything I hold. MILEI: Yes. MACRON: You make it sound like a technical matter. MUSK: It is a technical matter. That’s what nobody wants to hear. There’s no mystery here. Cheap energy, fast permits, real consequences for actual harm, and freedom to hire. Every country that does those four things gets rich. Every country that doesn’t, doesn’t. It isn’t culture. It isn’t destiny. MACRON: It is arithmetic, and I have a Republic that has beheaded people for less. MILEI: They did not behead the ones who built things. They beheaded the ones who administered a system nobody could afford any more. You may want to check which chair you are sitting in. MACRON: (signalling for the bill) And what exactly did you two come here to achieve? MUSK: Nothing. We came to say it out loud, in front of you, so nobody can pretend later that you didn’t know. MACRON: (reaching for his wallet) Let me. The state can afford three coffees. MILEI: (stopping him) The state cannot afford three coffees. That is the entire conversation we have just had.

(article length warning also sorta Twitter Law School) On diminished capacity as a defense to criminal charges being an example of the breakdown of the social contract. What is diminished capacity in a criminal context? Basically, it is a defense to a criminal charge that admits that the person did the act, however, the person lacks the capacity to form the specific intent to cause harm by that act. Get ready for some Lawyer Latin. In the US, criminal acts require two parts: actus reus and mens rea. Actus reus is guilty act - did this person commit this act. Mens rea is guilty mind - did this person have the specific intent to cause that specific harm. The easiest distinction for mens rea is the difference between manslaughter and murder. Manslaughter is when a person kills another, however, there was no specific intent to kill someone. Murder is when the person commits the act with the specific intent to kill the person. See re: Con Air and how Nicolas Cage was in on involuntary manslaughter while Steve Buscemi was in on murder. A defense of diminished capacity is a defense that the person who did the act was not capable of forming the necessary specific intent. The lack of capacity can be due to mental illness, alcohol or drug use, limited intelligence, or developmental disability. The argument for allowing diminished capacity as a defense is that a person should not be held criminally liable if that person is unable to form the specific intent to commit that crime. The issue is, of course, that the person did the act. There is a victim. Harm was done. And, importantly, if the person who did the act is not incarcerated, then there is nothing to prevent that person from committing the act again. If someone is so mentally ill or of such delayed development to not understand why not to do the act once, what is to stop the person from doing the act again? The social contract for diminished capacity was presented as this - the person who did the act will not be jailed for a crime since the person did not have mens rea. That peson will, however, be removed from society somehow, usually institutionalization. As a society, we do not want to jail people who lack the capacity to form specific intent, but we also recognize that those people are not safe to be around others. That's how it was presented. Everyone take a moment to laugh bitterly as to how it's played out over the last, say, half century. Diminished capacity is a prime example of the breakdown of the social contract. Only one side of the contract is being honored. People are no longer removed from society when found to have diminished capacity. Not only that, the categories of what counts for diminution of capacity seem to expand nigh infinitely while institutionalization contracts dramatically. People will say, very reluctantly, that someone who is severely mentally ill should be allowed to be institutionalized instead of jailed if, and only if, said institutionalization occurs for the same time period as the jail sentence would be. People will say, very reluctantly, that someone whose mental development stopped at late childhood should not be jailed if, and only if, that person is placed into some kind of facility where that person will not be allowed into adult society without intense supervision ever again. Again, I will pause to allow everyone's abs to recover from the work out from all the laughing. When the terms of only one side of a contract are met while the terms of the other side are openly violated, the contract is broken. The social contract on diminished capacity was protrayed to be that person cannot understand their actions are unsafe so that person will not go to jail but that person will be removed for society since that person lacks the capacity to comply with the rules of society. The removal of the consequences should result in the removal of the defense. That is the most generous outcome. /fin

Foreigners love to complain about Japanese "tatemae"—the polite facade we put on instead of telling the truth. You call it fake. You call it two-faced. You think we hide our real feelings to protect you. We do not hide our feelings to protect you. We hide them to protect ourselves from having to deal with your reaction. If I tell you the raw truth, you might cry. You might argue. You might demand an emotional resolution. That requires energy, time, and eye contact. I do not want to manage your feelings. I just want to go home. Tatemae is not a lie. It is a Kevlar vest. It keeps your emotional shrapnel off my clothes.

"She-Hulk" star Tatiana Maslany disses Tom Selleck (while mocking "Magnum, PI") & Michael Jordan for saying they avoid politics to keep their audience/customers happy: "Everything is political. All entertainment is political... It's such a bizarre mentality. It's so cowardly."

>Catholic bishop gets a TV show >Just a chalkboard and the Gospel >Pulls 30 million viewers a week >Outdraws the biggest secular entertainers in America >Wins an Emmy >Thanks “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John” >Decades later, he’s being beatified Mogged Hollywood with a chalkboard