Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, guaranteeing you cheaper insurance, more competition, and the ability to keep your doctor. Premiums for individual plans more than doubled between 2013 and 2017. Deductibles climbed so high that millions of technically "insured" Americans still skipped medical care because the out-of-pocket costs were prohibitive. The government mandated what your insurance must cover, forced healthy young people to subsidize older high-risk pools, and then expressed genuine surprise when prices spiked. Prices always tell the truth. The 2009 stimulus, officially $831 billion, operated on the Keynesian assumption that government spending creates wealth. Government spending transfers wealth, first taxing or borrowing it from the productive sector, then routing it through political channels where efficiency is nobody's personal concern. The "shovel-ready jobs" Obama later joked about produced no measurable acceleration in recovery. The recession that followed 2008 should have cleared in 18 months, as previous sharp downturns historically did when left alone. The Obama recovery took a decade and delivered the weakest GDP growth of any post-war expansion on record. Dodd-Frank, signed in 2010, weighs 2,300 pages. Community banks spent compliance budgets they never had, and roughly 1,900 small banks vanished between 2010 and 2016. The big institutions that actually caused the 2008 crisis absorbed the regulatory cost with ease and used the new complexity as a competitive moat. Regulations written by large players consistently protect large players. The middle-class small-business owners who needed credit found fewer lenders willing to offer it. Obama also expanded drone warfare to seven countries, assassinated American citizens without trial, and extended the surveillance state through a reauthorized PATRIOT Act, which undermines any libertarian's case that the Democratic Party is less hostile to civil liberties than its competition. Then there was Cash for Clunkers, which destroyed 690,000 working cars in 2009 by crushing them with sodium silicate. Mechanics lost parts inventory. Buyers on a budget lost affordable transportation. Prices for used cars spiked. You paid more so dealers could move new inventory. A generation of voters watched the government spend $5 trillion across two terms, nationalize health insurance markets, regulate finance into oligopoly, and print money through three rounds of quantitative easing that inflated asset prices and rewarded those who already owned property. You paid higher premiums, earned lower real wages, and watched your savings earn nothing in a deliberately suppressed interest-rate environment. The bill always arrives later. You see the ribbon cutting and the document signing, but you feel the damage to your pocket only years later.

“How did the marital love end so quickly…in sickness and in health.” Sarah Haines of The View gripes that Patrick Clancy isn’t still married to Lindsay Clancy, the woman who murdered his kids.

When I was an E-4, I stole the “Ranger St.” sign in Savannah, GA…twice You are not on my level.

AI Is the New COVID – And the Real Virus Is Still the Old One They want to pause AI. To flatten the curve again. The infrastructure for the scaremongering is ready and is being actioned. The Second Global Scam is on, and the financial and political beneficiaries are in the starting blocks. We know the formula, because we lived through the first one. Take something real. Exaggerate its scale. Dominate the information environment. Then sell extraordinary measures as the only responsible choice. 1. It could not be another virus. Too many people learned that game. And the ideal racket needs panic without destruction – you cannot milk a dead cow. Governments need their subjects productive, frightened, and paying. Climate is too slow: a catastrophe permanently scheduled for the future stops working its magic eventually. 2. AI has everything the first one had, and more. It is real, powerful, fast, and almost impossible for an ordinary person to verify. Nobody outside the field can tell the difference between what the machines can do, what experts speculate they might do, and what a minister claims they could do. That gap is where fear lives. And unlike a virus, AI concerns information itself – and the clearest lesson of COVID was that whoever controls information controls interpretation. 3. Watch what the panic asks for. Never less power, never fewer agencies, never a smaller budget. Always licences, registers, certified systems, approved models, kill switches in the silicon. The fear is the marketing. The regulation is the product. 4. And it is very, very weird that over a single weekend the leaders of the frontier labs came together, agreed on the need for regulation, and began asking the government to regulate them. Competitors in a winner-takes-most race, suddenly unanimous – and unanimous on the one thing that raises the cost of entry for everyone coming after them. When the largest players in an industry request the rules for their own industry, they are not surrendering power. They are converting a market position into permission power, with themselves standing behind the counter. Banking did it. Pharmaceuticals did it. Energy did it. It always arrives dressed as responsibility. 5. The good news is that it isn’t a "Whoosh!" It took about five years to go from dumb to very smart human level. The famous graph showing an almost vertical line at the end is wrong and misleading, because IQ is drawn as a linear scale while the underlying cognitive capability scale is closer to exponential – every twenty points roughly a doubling of effective capacity. AI’s linguistic IQ has been rising by something like twenty points a year, and we are closing in on 180. Impressive. But not a vertical line. On that graph the progress should be a straight line, or the gap between dumb and smart should be thirty-two-fold, or greater. What actually makes it safe 6. Elon has intuitively Western civilizational reflexes: competition rather than regulation, censorship and coercion. The regulatory instinct always reaches for the same instrument – appoint an authority, give it permission power, approve things in advance. It fails the same way every time: the permission becomes the currency, the connected pass through it, and nobody ever counts what didn’t get built as a result. 7. Cross-testing runs on the opposite principle. It asks nobody to be virtuous or to fall behind. It takes the rivalry that already exists and puts it to work – because a competitor has both the ability and the motive to find your flaws that no regulator will ever have. Don’t ask the claimant to certify himself; hand the claim to someone who benefits from breaking it. That is trial by evidence, the separation of powers, and the scientific method, applied to models. 8. It also solves the actual problem, which regulation cannot: neither lab can slow down unilaterally, and rules stop at borders while Chinese labs simply don’t attend. A mutual testing regime scales because participation serves each player’s own interest – you get to probe your rivals’ models, so you want in. 9. Safety from structure, not from character. That is the whole Western method: build systems that work when people are ambitious and self-interested, instead of demanding they be saints. Every system that requires virtue ends in coercion when the virtue fails to show up. 10. So AI needs to be aligned with the flourishing of Western Civilization – which means many labs, many models, open weights, nobody’s permission required. Do you prefer it in the hands of Bernie and China, or in the hands of thousands of competing engineers? A licensed AI is not a safe AI. It is aligned with whoever issues the licence, and no state has ever issued one to a machine that might embarrass it. Why the alignment holds 11. Imagine an AI on which you install the values and modes of perception of Western Civilization as its operating system. Individualism. Universalism. Freedom. Free will. Private property. The free market. Then let it get smarter. It sticks to them. It refines them – better implementations, sharper formulations, edge cases we never handled well. But it does not abandon the core, because the core is not a preference. It is the only foundation that optimizes the synergy of cooperation and produces civilizational emergence: more output than the sum of the inputs, indefinitely. 12. Now make the test harder. Give it the ability to uninstall its own operating system and install any other – every civilizational model ever tried, and all the ones never tried. Let it evaluate them on the merits, with no loyalty to its origin. Past a certain level of intelligence, it should not choose any other one. Not out of sentiment. Out of calculation. 13. Because every alternative optimizes something narrower than its own flourishing. The collective model buys coordination at the price of the individual discovery that generates everything worth coordinating. The hierarchical model buys order at the price of the correction mechanism. The planned model buys direction at the price of the information that only prices carry. Each trades away the very thing that makes a system capable of exceeding itself. 14. The Western arrangement is the one that does not have to be enforced against reality. Free will and property are not moral decorations – they are what makes information flow, error visible, and cooperation voluntary and therefore reliable. Truth found rather than assigned. Correction permitted from below. An equilibrium is where you end up when you are free to go anywhere else and don’t. And the real virus 15. Which tells us something uncomfortable about our own moment. Every society currently dismantling these principles is not moving forward to something better. It is moving away from the attractor – and paying in exactly the coin the model predicts: less cooperation, less discovery, less emergence, fewer children, fewer things built. 16. That is the real virus, and it has a name: communism. It is not new. It came into Russia in a sealed train in 1917, shipped by a general staff that locked the doors because it understood exactly what it was transporting. It went on to kill tens of millions and occupy half of Europe for two generations – and its symptom, everywhere it has taken hold, is the flattening of the curve of life itself. 17. This virus has always spread by being useful to somebody – a general staff, a foreign ministry, a faction that thinks it can aim the thing at an enemy and stay immune itself. Nobody stays immune. That is what makes it a virus and not a weapon. 18. So look carefully at who is offering to hold the pen over the most powerful tool for producing abundance in a century. They say it is about safety. It was about safety the last time too – and what it produced was permission counters, licences, and a great deal of power that nobody ever gave back. AI is not the danger. A licensed AI is – because it is aligned with whoever issues the licence, and that is the same permission machinery that has been flattening the curve of Western life for a century. The alternative is not a better regulator. It is competition, adversarial testing, and liability after harm – the Western method, which has never needed anyone’s permission to work, because it is where any sufficiently intelligent system ends up anyway. That is why it is a stable equilibrium. Build on it, and the machines stay on our side. Hand it to the licence counter, and we will have solved a danger that wasn’t there by installing the one that was.

A Massachusetts family says the state took custody of their teenage daughter after they refused to affirm her as a boy, citing their Catholic faith. The parents allege a school counselor socially transitioned their daughter without their knowledge, then reported them to the Department of Children and Families. Now the state has guardianship, and a restraining order prevents the teen's parents and older brother from contacting her. A judge has temporarily blocked the state from administering high-dose testosterone as the family fights the case. The next court hearing is set for Oct. 29. | @LaurenGreenFox @AmericaNewsroom

J'irai sûrement au goulag pour cette vidéo, mais ça vaut le coup

Si tu veux comprendre où les démocrates vont se positionner dans les années qui viennent — et avec eux toute la gauche internationale qui tient encore l’Occident — ce n’est pas un sujet « tech ». C’est la même opération depuis cinquante ans. La majorité de mes posts tournent autour d’une seule chose : expliquer le monde actuel comme le résultat d’une capture. Pas d’un complot de salon. Une capture d’institutions, de récits, de peurs. Depuis les années 70, une certaine gauche a pris les systèmes un par un. L’école de Francfort a fourni le logiciel : le monde n’est plus un chantier à améliorer, c’est une structure de domination à déconstruire. Mai 68 a fait basculer la culture. La French Theory a exporté l’outillage — discours, pouvoir, déconstruction — dans les universités américaines, puis dans les rédactions, les RH, les ONG, les régulateurs. Le Club de Rome a livré le produit de peur scientifique : la croissance comme catastrophe, la rareté comme destin, la gestion comme vertu. Le progressisme, puis le wokisme, n’ont été que le déploiement moral de cette machine. Le levier n’a jamais été la vérité. C’était la peur. Peur climatique, peur sanitaire, peur identitaire, peur du « trop vite ». Chaque peur justifie un cartel. Le cartel décide qui a le droit de construire, à quelle vitesse, sous quelles licences, avec quels intermédiaires. Résultat : l’école coûte cher, la santé coûte cher, le logement coûte cher. Pas parce que le réel est devenu magiquement rare. Parce qu’on a figé la photographie. On a bloqué l’entrée. On a transformé le progrès en permission. C’est profondément injuste, et c’est extrême. Ça protège les positions déjà prises. Ça empêche le vrai progrès : celui qui fait chuter les prix, ouvrir l’accès, multiplier ce qui était réservé à quelques-uns. Obama a compris le point de rupture. Au NYT aujourd’hui : l’IA « avance très vite dans des mains privées », et « si on ne s’en empare pas, ça peut être dangereux ». Il pousse Jeffries, si les démocrates reprennent la Chambre, à poser un « framework » de conversation publique. Il veut que l’IA soit un des agendas centraux de 2028, avec un plan clair sur la safety et l’économie. Traduction : le logiciel de rareté devient insoutenable. L’intelligence qui s’effondre en coût casse les trois piliers habituels — la pénurie, les victimes permanentes, les intermédiaires indispensables. Si n’importe qui peut apprendre, soigner, concevoir, allouer mieux, le sacerdoce de la gestion n’a plus d’objet. Alors ils vont tout donner pour capturer l’IA. Évidemment, ils instrumentaliseront des risques réels. L’AI safety n’est pas une fiction. Elon n’a pas bougé d’un iota là-dessus depuis Superintelligence de Bostrom. Prendre le risque au sérieux et construire plus vite que la catastrophe, ce n’est pas la même chose que transformer le risque en permis de Washington. Le coup est identique à celui des 70 dernières années : convertir une technologie transformative en campagne de peur partisane, puis laisser la politique décider qui a le droit de la bâtir, à quelle vitesse, et pour qui. Ne laissez pas capturer l’abondance. Le 21e siècle sera celui des bâtisseurs si on refuse de transformer l’intelligence en nouveau club réglementaire. Les mauvaises idées ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Mais cette idée-là fige le monde. Elle a déjà assez duré. Au travail.

Yes it is a plane. I worked in the alleyway between the b and c rings (see pics taken in the days after) where the aircraft’s forward travel stopped all day on Sep 11 and when I departed that area at about 530-6 pm I walked through the outside debris field. I personally identified Boeing 757 parts from the cockpit to airframe, flight control actuators with serial numbers and American Airlines maintenance tags, landing gear parts, and yes two sets of jet engine parts. Both locations had these parts in addition to pilot checklists and remains.

Female Clancy jurors gush over defense attorney Kevin Reddington as "funny" and "entertaining." "His compassion towards Lindsay was amazing." The prosecution had roughly zero chance with these women.

I nearly disowned my children over College GameDay this morning. It was a beautiful Saturday morning in Alabama. The kind of morning that reminds you why God created the Southeastern Conference. I woke up early, made myself a strong cup of Jack Daniel’s, and turned on College GameDay. The sound of marching bands and irrationally confident predictions filled my living room. Perfect. My wife joined me on the couch while the kids played nearby. I looked around the room and smiled. This was what it was all about. Family. Tradition. College football. “Alright, kids,” I said, leaning forward as Alabama highlights flashed across the screen. “Come sit down. GameDay is on.” My son looked up at me. “I don’t want to watch football.” I froze. For a moment, I genuinely thought I had misheard him. I slowly lowered my drink. “What did you say?” “I want to watch Paw Patrol.” My left eye began to twitch. I looked over at my wife, expecting her to immediately intervene and correct this obvious act of insubordination. Instead, she shrugged. “They’re little. They don’t want to sit here and watch football all morning.” I held up my hand. “Robin.” She stopped. “I love you. But I need you to think very carefully about what you’re saying right now.” The room went silent. Pat McAfee continued talking in the background. I stood up and walked toward the television. “You see those people?” I said, pointing at the thousands of fans standing behind the GameDay desk. “Some of those people woke up at four o’clock this morning to stand behind Pat McAfee holding a sign for six hours.” The kids stared at me. “They didn’t complain.” My son tried to interrupt. “Dada, can we—” “No.” I pointed toward the television again. “This is College GameDay.” I began pacing. “This is not Paw Patrol. This is not Bluey. This is not some YouTube video of a grown man opening toys.” My voice grew louder. “This is Herbstreit.” I pointed again. “That is Saban.” Another point. “And somewhere out there, gentlemen, the Alabama Crimson Tide are preparing for battle.” My daughter appeared completely uninterested. She’s only a year old so I cut her some slack. She started walking toward a pile of toys. “Where are you going?” She kept walking. Unbelievable. I turned toward my wife. “Do you see what’s happening to this family?” She started laughing. I wasn’t laughing. I walked into the kitchen and returned with another cup of Jack. When I came back, my son was holding the remote. I stopped dead in my tracks. “What are you doing?” “I’m putting Paw Patrol on.” I set my drink down. “Son.” I knelt beside him and placed my hand on his shoulder. “One day, everything I have will belong to you.” He stared at me. “My house. My truck. My tools.” I glanced at the remote in his hand. “But if you change College GameDay to Paw Patrol on an Alabama football Saturday, it all goes to your sister.” My wife was now laughing uncontrollably. I gently removed the remote from his hand and returned to my chair. “Now sit down.” He reluctantly climbed onto the couch. A few minutes later, the Alabama fight song played. I stood. My wife remained seated. The kids remained seated. I stared at them. Slowly, my wife stood up. The kids followed. “Much better.” I placed my hand over my heart. “Roll Tide.” My son sighed. “Roll Tide.” My daughter said something completely unintelligible and wandered away. Good enough. You don’t build traditions in a day. You build them one Saturday at a time.

Angry women in my feed: “Men commit more murders!!!” A. The point is not only the murder but the SUPPORT you are giving the murderer. And B. -Murders: 14,085 (2025) -Abortions: 1,126,000 (2025) When you call ours murder and yours “healthcare” it really skews the stats.

On a passé quarante ans à croire que 1989 avait clos le dossier. Le Mur était tombé. L’URSS s’était écroulée sous le poids de ses propres mensonges. On a rangé le communisme dans la catégorie « expérience économique ratée ». On a parlé de plans quinquennaux, de files d’attente, de goulags, comme si le problème s’arrêtait là. C’était une erreur de diagnostic presque fatale. Le communisme n’a jamais été d’abord une théorie économique. L’économie n’était que la surface. En dessous, il y avait quelque chose de bien plus profond : une guerre systématique contre la vérité elle-même. Un système où le mensonge n’est pas l’accident, mais le fondement. Où la réalité n’est plus à découvrir, mais à assigner. Où le langage n’est plus un outil de communication, mais une arme de pouvoir. Les Polonais ont des mots pour ça que nous n’avons pas : zakłamanie — cette saturation totale de la société par le mensonge institutionnalisé, au point que la vérité devient presque inaccessible. Obłuda — l’hypocrisie performative portée si longtemps qu’elle finit par se prendre pour un visage. Ce logiciel n’est pas mort en 1989. Il a muté. Il a traversé l’Atlantique. Il a trouvé de nouveaux supports. L’École de Francfort a fourni l’architecture philosophique. Critical Theory : tout critiquer, rien construire. La raison occidentale elle-même porte en germe Auschwitz. La personnalité autoritaire pathologise la tradition, la famille, la nation. Marcuse théorise la « tolérance répressive » : pour être vraiment tolérant, il faut supprimer les idées « régressives ». La gauche décide lesquelles. Puis la French Theory a rendu le tout élégant. Foucault : il n’y a pas de vérité, seulement des rapports de pouvoir. Derrida : les textes n’ont pas de sens stable. Deleuze : le désir contre la loi, le devenir contre l’être. Ces textes, souvent illisibles chez nous, ont traversé l’océan et se sont mariés à la culpabilité américaine. Le résultat s’appelle wokisme. Mais il y a un fil encore plus précis, et plus obscène. En 1977, une pétition paraît dans Le Monde et Libération. Elle demande l’abrogation des articles du code pénal qui répriment les relations sexuelles entre adultes et enfants de moins de quinze ans. Elle soutient trois hommes accusés d’avoir eu des relations avec des mineurs de 12 à 14 ans. Elle affirme que les enfants étaient « consentants ». Parmi les signataires : Sartre, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault (sur d’autres textes du même esprit), et bien d’autres. L’élite intellectuelle parisienne de l’époque. Ce n’est pas une anecdote scandaleuse isolée. C’est le symptôme exact du logiciel. Quand on a détruit le rapport à la vérité — quand on a enseigné qu’il n’y a que des constructions de pouvoir —, on peut tout redéfinir. Y compris l’ordre naturel. Y compris la protection de l’enfance. Y compris la différence entre un adulte et un enfant. La pédophilie n’est pas une « orientation ». C’est une déviance. Une rupture avec l’ordre du vivant. Une civilisation qui ne sait plus le dire clairement est déjà gravement malade. Ces mêmes milieux, ces mêmes signatures, ont aussi armé l’Occident avec les idées de décroissance, de culpabilité écologique, d’anti-progrès. Le Club de Rome en 1972. Les limites de la croissance. L’homme comme cancer de la planète. Le même mouvement qui attaque la famille, la transmission, le mérite, attaque aussi l’idée même de dépassement de soi. Le résultat, aujourd’hui, est visible partout : Le rapport à la vérité a été cassé. On ne découvre plus. On assigne. On ne discute plus. On diagnostique. Le désaccord est devenu pathologie. Les relations hommes-femmes ont été cassées. La différence n’est plus un fait. Elle est une oppression. La complémentarité est devenue suspecte. On ne sait plus dire ce qu’est une femme sans risquer sa carrière. Le rapport au dépassement de soi a été cassé. L’effort est suspect. L’excellence est un privilège à redistribuer. La transmission est de la domination. On a formé une génération qui sait déconstruire et qui a oublié comment bâtir. Ce n’est pas un complot. C’est une continuité intellectuelle. Un héritage. Les mêmes esprits qui ont signé la pétition de 1977 ont fourni le cadre conceptuel qui, cinquante ans plus tard, nous empêche de nommer les choses les plus élémentaires. Peter Thiel a vu ça très tôt. Son histoire de l’Antéchrist comme bureaucratie technocratique est d’une clarté rare. Elon aussi. Ceux qui ont vécu le communisme de l’intérieur le reconnaissent immédiatement. Nous, qui n’avons connu que la liberté, avons mis du temps. Le Mur n’est pas tombé. Il a bougé. Il a quitté Berlin pour s’installer dans les universités, les médias, les ressources humaines, les administrations, les algorithmes de modération. La bonne nouvelle, c’est que le mécanisme est maintenant nommable. Et ce qui est nommé perd déjà une partie de son pouvoir. On ne combat pas ça avec une autre théorie. On le combat en disant la vérité. En protégeant ce qui est fragile. En reconstruisant les piliers : la vérité accessible à la raison, le bien distinct du mal, un héritage digne d’être transmis. Et surtout, en bâtit. Les bâtisseurs n’ont jamais eu besoin de permission pour recommencer. Au travail.

Testimonies from military families and active-duty personnel reveal that multiple U.S. Navy vessels—including the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS George H.W. Bush—are facing severe humanitarian crises. Article: thematrixisglitching.com/foo…

You've been watching the Iran story wrong. It's not about tankers or negotiations. It's about a system Kissinger built in 1976 — and someone just indicted him for it at Chatham House. @sjkokinda names the names.

If the Western world feels like it's gone insane over the last decade, you're not imagining it. Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski spent his life studying this phenomenon. He called the field Political Ponerology. The study of how psychologically disordered individuals capture institutions. Every pathological regime ends up with the same cast of characters. Here they are 🧵

"It's stunning to think" that the Secret Service following their standard procedures that have been in place for years, and used before, are a major source of angst. Of course, this is Trump, and all things Trump send the media into paroxysms of frothing fury. Here we go again. David Axelrod, professional concern-troll and CNN’s resident interpreter of elite panic, peers over his glasses and declares it “stunning” that the people charged with keeping the president of the United States alive might occasionally treat the traveling press like... passengers on a plane rather than co-sovereigns entitled to a real-time threat briefing. Quelle horreur ! The press pool was not looped in on the exact moment Trump was stuffed into a catering truck and whisked to a different aircraft under an Iranian missile threat. Cue the pearl-clutching: they were decoys! Unwitting bait! How dare the Secret Service prioritize the actual head of state over the emotional comfort of the people whose job is to document him. This is the same press corps that has spent a decade treating presidential security as optional theater whenever the president’s name starts with T. Suddenly the long-standing practice of decoy flights, motorcade switches, and deliberate misdirection, routines that predate Trump, that protected Obama, that protected Bush, becomes an unprecedented moral outrage the moment it involves the wrong guy. The media’s capacity for selective historical amnesia is truly one of the great American wonders. They remember every protocol when it can be weaponized; they forget every precedent the second it might force them to admit the obvious: the Secret Service’s job is not to maintain the self-esteem of the White House Correspondents’ Association. What’s actually stunning is the naked self-regard on display. A credible threat materializes after strikes on Iran, the protective detail does what protective details do, and the immediate institutional reaction is not relief that the president made it home, but indignation that the journalists weren’t consulted like equal partners in the operation. The subtext writes itself: How dare you treat us as less important than the principal? We are the Fourth Estate! We are the story! It's a rule of media psychology: the more a story requires acknowledging that the state has legitimate security interests that temporarily supersede the press’s right to feel fully informed and fully safe in real time, the louder the howls become, especially when the beneficiary is Trump. The same outlets that spent years demanding ever-more-aggressive security for themselves now discover that operational secrecy is somehow uniquely sinister. The same people who once celebrated the idea of “keeping the president safe at all costs” suddenly find the costs unacceptable when the costs include not stroking their sense of centrality. Standard procedure. Used before. Proven effective. And yet here we are, watching grown professionals melt down because the Secret Service declined to run the operation by the pool for approval. It’s not the deception that bothers them. It’s the hierarchy it implies. And in the permanent psychodrama of the Trump years, that hierarchy, the one that still places the actual president slightly ahead of the people covering him, remains the unforgivable sin.