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Every viral video
has the same pattern.
One officer overreacts.
Two others stand there.
Nobody steps in.
Nobody corrects it.
That is not loyalty.
That is how public trust dies.
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Imagine if we had listened to Ron Paul after 9/11.
Just three days after the attacks, he proposed using the Letters of Marque and Reprisal Clause instead of passing a broad AUMF, which he correctly predicted would be used as a blank check to strike “six or eight or ten countries” instead of the individuals involved in the attacks.
Ron Paul was right. We should’ve listened. x.com/MLiamMcCollum/status/1…
Twenty-five years ago, in the immediate wake of 9/11, Ron Paul did not propose doing nothing. Instead, he proposed targeting Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda rather than launching a global War on Terror. | Joshua Mawhorter
mises.org/mises-wire/ron-pau…
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I love prequel memes. And I’ve been enjoying the sort of Zoomer take on the Star Wars prequels floating around X for the last couple of days.
A lot of these takes hinge on the idea of Anakin as representative of the white male experience in a progressive culture, where the good guys are actually the bad guys, and the bad guys are the good guys. And there is a good deal of truth to that.
But I think there’s something important being overlooked, something that is central to how I read the story.
I see the first six Star Wars movies as essentially being about fatherhood.
Anakin has no father. He comes from a single-parent home. Qui-Gon Jinn takes an interest in Anakin as a person. He is a benevolent fatherly presence who advocates for Anakin, sees his potential, and wants to protect and guide him. And part of that protection is even from the Jedi Order itself, since Qui-Gon disagrees with some of its ways.
The great tragedy of that first movie is that Qui-Gon, Anakin’s only true father figure, dies. Anakin is left to be raised by a cold Jedi Order and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who functions more like an older brother. Obi-Wan loves Anakin, but he is no father.
Without fatherly guidance and protection, Anakin struggles to enter the world of men and is used by two sides: a cold, detached Jedi Order and a manipulative false father in Palpatine.
And just as Anakin becomes the one thing he never had, a father, he loses much of his humanity, his wife, and his family.
That is the central tragedy of the prequels.
Now consider the original trilogy.
You have a son who is raised by a father figure in Uncle Owen and eventually finds himself under the care of a much older and more fatherly Obi-Wan. So, Luke was actually fathered, unlike Anakin. The series slowly turns into Luke’s quest to see his father redeemed.
In the end, Luke is unwilling to kill his father. And Anakin finds his redemption by killing his own false father to rescue his son.
That is the triumph of the original trilogy: a son pulling his father back from the darkness by becoming the man his father once desired to be.
And that father, even at the very end of his life, being awakened and doing what it takes to give his son a future.
That’s how I read Star Wars.
The tragedy of fatherlessness, and the triumph of sonship and fatherhood.
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“Somebody asked me before, when will the war in Iran end? I said, ‘Whenever I want it to end.’” - President Trump
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Trump won the election by saying neocons and war hawks were with Kamala.
Now that he started the war, the Democrats can pretend to be the party of peace.
The WWE cycle continues.
Obama on Iran:
Iran didn't have nuclear weapons. We had curbed their nuclear program.
I had put in place a deal. I didn't have to fire any missiles. I engaged in diplomacy.
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The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
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sk retweeted
Dude stuck with the labor theory of value through the marginal revolution. Greatly struggled with basic cause and effect, and didn’t even understand how the employment arrangement is mutually beneficial.
He clearly resonates with people, but his ideas don’t stand up to scrutiny.
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If you are in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district get out there and vote for Jeremy Todd @Jtodd601 !
Unfortunately we lost Thomas Massie in congress due to millions being spent against him by the Israel lobby & the Epstein class, but we can hold KY-4 with Jeremy Todd!
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George Lucas, from the 2005 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘵𝘩 DVD commentary:
“The thing that [Padme] says at the very end is, ‘I know there's still good in him.’ And that Luke says later on in 𝘙𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘦𝘥𝘪 is, ‘There's still good in you.’ It's sort of recurring.”
I think it was very intentional on George Lucas's part that he showed baby Luke silently bearing witness to Padme's last words, “There...is good in him. I know there is...still...”, only for Luke to immediately start crying the instant she passes--so that now Luke actually repeats his mother's last words, almost verbatim, while speaking to Leia in 𝘙𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘦𝘥𝘪, just a few lines after he laments that he has no memory of her: “There is good in him. I've felt it.”
So now there is an added layer of meaning to this scene in 𝘙𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘑𝘦𝘥𝘪. It is now actually a scene about 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 twins preserving a memory of their mother. Luke simply doesn't realize it consciously like Leia does.
This is important because the subtext of the climactic scene where Darth Vader makes his choice in the throne room, according to Lucas in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘵𝘩, now has much to do with Luke's unconditional love for his father allowing Vader to overcome the all-consuming self-hatred he feels for breaking Padme's heart:
“The end of the Saga is simply Anakin saying, ‘I care about this person, regardless of what it means to me. I will throw away everything that I have, everything that I have grown to love--primarily the Emperor--and throw away my life, to save this person. And I’m doing this because he has faith in me, loves me despite all the horrible things I’ve done. I broke his mother’s heart, but he still cares about me, and I can’t let that die.’”
Luke becomes the vessel who transmits the unconditional love Padme expressed for Anakin in her final moments, which breaks the spell and allows Vader to finally feel unconditional love for his son.
This is what George Lucas "retconned" about Padme, btw. For anyone wondering.
Is it a retcon? By definition, yes.
Is it a massive, improbable, or haphazard retcon? No, not really. Fits incredibly cleanly and is only noticeable if you forget that the rest of her family sees "images and feelings" of people they're close to throughout the two trilogies, right before confirmation that she has those same abilities too.
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sk retweeted
There’s not a war on this planet that the United States should be involved in right now, monetarily or militarily.
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It will only get better -- unless the AI mega-corportations get the AI legislation they are lobbying for and get the be in charge of a new AI cartel where competition is legislated away.
This is better content than anything HBO has put out in the last decade. A non-anime take on female Malfoy in Harry Potter. Obviously it has AI artifacts and isn't perfect but this is not slop at all. People can finally tell the stories they actually want without being gatekept. It's only going to get better from here. x.com/schmede_AI/status/2109…
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You may think you want to live in a country that televises executions but I'm confident you do not.
A pall fell over this nation after 9/11 and we can't seem to escape it.
Increasingly barbaric and militaristic. Becoming the monsters we set out to slay.
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Only two or three people on this list want to release the Epstein files and prosecute the coconspirators. What a shame.
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Nobody my age ever expected to get social security. We know this 20 years ago at least.
Who’s ready for some real talk on Social Security?
Here it is: you didn’t “pay in” to Social Security, there’s no deposit account with “your” money in it, and every single dime of Social Security taxes you’ve paid in your entire life went directly to someone else or was frittered away by Congress.
For many decades after the program was created, there was more money collected in Social Security taxes paid in than money spent on benefits. This was due to the demographics of the country at the time: in 1950 there were 16 workers paying Social Security taxes for every 1 recipient of benefits, whereas today there are fewer than 3 workers per beneficiary.
So obviously, all that extra money collected for decades when there were more taxes collected than benefits paid was set aside and invested, right? LOL. If only.
Instead of setting all that extra money aside and protecting it for future beneficiaries, Congress spent it. Every last penny. Every dollar that has been collected in Social Security taxes has been spent. What Congress did instead of saving money was create a massive IOU which it dishonestly called the Social Security Trust Fund. Except there’s no trust and there’s no fund. It’s just a gigantic IOU, like in Dumb and Dumber. There’s no numbered account with money in it waiting to be withdrawn.
Where does this leave us? Beginning around 2020, payroll taxes collected were no longer sufficient to pay for current Social Security benefits, so money had to printed or borrowed from elsewhere. As more and more money has to be borrowed to pay current benefits, the Social Security Trust Fund balance is reduced.
Once it reaches zero—and right now that is expected to happen within the next 10 years—the government is legally prohibited from paying out more in benefits than it collects in Social Security payroll taxes each year. And that will mean an instant cut in Social Security benefits of around 20 percent. By the year 2100, expected benefits will be just 65 percent of promised benefits.
As of today, a 75-year-old who worked for 50 years and earned the median salary will have paid close to $100,000 in Social Security payroll taxes over his life. Based on average life expectancy of another 12 years, he will collected more than $500,000 in Social Security benefits, and those payments will come not from a savings account somewhere, but from taxes paid by his children and grandchildren. But when it comes time for the people paying directly for his Social Security checks to receive their benefits, they won’t get nearly as much as he gets, because the Trust Fund will be bankrupt.
The people paying for the Social Security benefits of Baby Boomers today will pay significantly more into the system than the Boomers ever did, but will receive a fraction of the eventual payout.
Does that seem fair? In light of those facts, is it really accurate to say you “earned” that Social Security payment? Of course it isn’t. Social Security is welfare for American retirees. And it’s a welfare system that is not only a total waste of money designed to give Congress an even bigger budget to fritter away (if you invested your Social Security taxes, your lump sum at retirement would be 5x higher than your expected lifetime benefits from Social Security), it’s also deeply immoral.
Because of the current demographics in the country, Social Security takes money from workers today so it can give retirees 3-5x more than they ever paid in AND will pay out significantly less when it’s time for the people currently paying into the system to collect their own benefits.
Boomers receive 3-5x more than they paid in, while their grandchildren will receive 35 percent less than what they were promised. They originally called this the New Deal when it was created, but it’s a raw deal for everyone currently being forced to pay into it.
So let’s stop with the pretense that Social Security is anything other than a poorly designed welfare scheme for retirees.
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