An aside, but this reminds me of one of my favorite Saki stories, the pertinent aspect of which is excerpted here for the pleasure of readers. The Storyteller, Saki ..."It's a very difficult thing to tell stories that children can both understand and appreciate," she said stiffly. "I don't agree with you," said the bachelor. "Perhaps you would like to tell them a story," was the aunt's retort. "Tell us a story," demanded the bigger of the small girls. "Once upon a time," began the bachelor, "there was a little girl called Bertha, who was extra-ordinarily good." The children's momentarily-aroused interest began at once to flicker; all stories seemed dreadfully alike, no matter who told them. "She did all that she was told, she was always truthful, she kept her clothes clean, ate milk puddings as though they were jam tarts, learned her lessons perfectly, and was polite in her manners." "Was she pretty?" asked the bigger of the small girls. "Not as pretty as any of you," said the bachelor, "but she was horribly good." There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt's tales of infant life. "She was so good," continued the bachelor, "that she won several medals for goodness, which she always wore, pinned on to her dress. There was a medal for obedience, another medal for punctuality, and a third for good behaviour. They were large metal medals and they clicked against one another as she walked. No other child in the town where she lived had as many as three medals, so everybody knew that she must be an extra good child." "Horribly good," quoted Cyril. "Everybody talked about her goodness, and the Prince of the country got to hear about it, and he said that as she was so very good she might be allowed once a week to walk in his park, which was just outside the town. It was a beautiful park, and no children were ever allowed in it, so it was a great honour for Bertha to be allowed to go there." "Were there any sheep in the park?" demanded Cyril. "No;" said the bachelor, "there were no sheep." "Why weren't there any sheep?" came the inevitable question arising out of that answer. The aunt permitted herself a smile, which might almost have been described as a grin. "There were no sheep in the park," said the bachelor, "because the Prince's mother had once had a dream that her son would either be killed by a sheep or else by a clock falling on him. For that reason the Prince never kept a sheep in his park or a clock in his palace." The aunt suppressed a gasp of admiration. "Was the Prince killed by a sheep or by a clock?" asked Cyril. "He is still alive, so we can't tell whether the dream will come true," said the bachelor unconcernedly; "anyway, there were no sheep in the park, but there were lots of little pigs running all over the place." "What colour were they?" "Black with white faces, white with black spots, black all over, grey with white patches, and some were white all over." The storyteller paused to let a full idea of the park's treasures sink into the children's imaginations; then he resumed: "Bertha was rather sorry to find that there were no flowers in the park. She had promised her aunts, with tears in her eyes, that she would not pick any of the kind Prince's flowers, and she had meant to keep her promise, so of course it made her feel silly to find that there were no flowers to pick." "Why weren't there any flowers?" "Because the pigs had eaten them all," said the bachelor promptly. "The gardeners had told the Prince that you couldn't have pigs and flowers, so he decided to have pigs and no flowers." There was a murmur of approval at the excellence of the Prince's decision; so many people would have decided the other way. ... classicshorts.com/stories/St… x.com/MurielBlaivePhD/status…

"If you defend criminals just because they happen to have the same skin color as you, then you’re helping create the very prejudice you complain about."

Rome's tax farmers extracted wealth on a scale that destroyed the economies of entire regions, but it still wasn't as much as you pay in taxes today. The Publicani operated under the Roman Republic as private contractors who bid on provincial tax collection rights. The Senate auctioned these rights in advance, pocketing a lump sum immediately. The Publicani then descended on provinces like Asia Minor and Sicily to collect whatever they could squeeze out. Roman law set nominal rates, typically around 10% (the decuma) on grain, with varying port duties near 2.5% (the portoria). The Publicani collected those rates plus their margin plus their enforcement costs plus their profit. Provinces frequently faced effective extraction rates of 20 to 30 percent of productive output, sometimes higher during aggressive collection cycles. Arthur Laffer drew a curve on a napkin in 1974, but the math behind it is ancient. Every rate above the revenue-maximizing point destroys the productive base you're taxing. The Publicani, operating on commission incentives rather than long-term fiscal stewardship, had no interest in maximizing sustainable yield. They maximized immediate extraction, which pushed collection rates well past any rational Laffer optimum. Farmers in Asia Minor couldn't reinvest. Capital fled or disappeared into subsistence farming. The tax base shrank, and the next auction cycle extracted from a smaller, poorer province. Cicero documented this in his Verrine orations, watching Sicily's agricultural output collapse under predatory collection. Farmers abandoned fields outright. They did a rational calculation: continued production simply meant continued confiscation. Julius Caesar eventually reformed the system in the provinces precisely because the Publicani had killed the goose. He shifted to direct collection at fixed rates, recognizing that sustained revenue requires leaving producers enough surplus to keep producing. This is the cold logic that any collector ignoring the Laffer curve eventually confronts. The institutional structure of the Publicani created a perfect misalignment of incentives. Private actors with short collection windows, no accountability for provincial economic health, and profit tied directly to gross extraction maximized extraction and destroyed capital formation. If this sounds familiar to you today, it's because exactly the same is happening all over the world as we speak. Elected politicians have limited time in power to extract as much as they can before their term ends. They have unlearned what Caesar already realized 2000 years ago.

This is why I refuse to register my car. We voted for $30 tabs.

A partial list of the drawbacks of mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa to Europe: • They cost very large amounts of money. On average, €500k–€1 million net of taxes each. This cost continues into the next generations. • They commit a lot of violent crime. The worse the crime, the more over-represented they are. We are not talking 40% more; we are talking 15x+ of the worst crimes. • Large numbers of them hold values that are incompatible with Western civilization, such as opposition to freedom of speech or support for Sharia law. • They commit terrorist attacks. • Mass immigration has caused most of the rise in housing costs over the last decades. A study from Denmark shows that 88% of the increase in housing costs since have been caused by immigration. • They form child rape gangs. This is especially widespread in the U.K., but also happens elsewhere. • They make it far less safe and comfortable for people to simply move around in their own cities, especially for women. • They vote for more mass immigration and even more redistribution towards themselves. • They make schools far worse for Danish children, both by being low-IQ and disrupting the education, and by physically assaulting and terrorising the Danish kids. • Over time, our native populations will become minorities, and our countries will not be the same. These are all very bad. If we had only one or two of these problems, that would still be enough to say that we should end immigration from the Middle East and Africa. But we have *all* of them.

When I was 14, I assisted at a daycare during summer break. The first thing I learned was that the children did not want to be there. I had never gone to daycare myself, so I was surprised. It looks like it would be fun when you’re older. Lots of toys and activities. But little children don’t like it. They may put up with it, might even have a little fun sometimes, but none of them preferred daycare over being home. Not a single one. They all wanted their mothers. They would stare at the door. We would try to distract them. Some would cry all day long. Some were constantly angry. I should add that this was a luxe newly built daycare in a small Nordic town where everyone knew each other way back. Not a bunch of random strangers. The nannies knew the families, but the children still didn’t wanna be there. That was irrelevant. The parents needed the daycare. Nobody asked the children what they wanted. But we could all see it. After working in a daycare, I could never enroll my children in one.

If I go to this page, nytimes.com/international/, the main page of the international section of New York Times: There is no mention of the riots in France. Even though nothing else is happening that is remotely as important and portentous for the future of the Western world. What is featured instead? A story about sexist shirt buttons. Among about 75 other stories.

Someone, somewhere, got paid money to write "Are Shirt Buttons Sexist?" Send the meteor, please.

I get why people ask if AI makes your brain lazy, but it depends on who's using it. I use it every single day to explore ideas and understand myself in ways I never could without it. If you're curious, it makes you smarter every single day. If you're lazy, it just helps you be lazy faster. The tool isn't the problem.

Why not raise it to 1 million dollars an hour so we can all become millionaires!!

It is absolutely insane that squatter's rights exist as a part of law, that you can just go and steal someone's property and that's legal.

Suppose that a dinner guest's religion dictates that they should never take off their shoes unless they are in their own home. Suppose that a dinner host has a rule that stipulates that whomever comes over for dinner must take off their shoes. We now have a set of perfectly conflicting positions on shoe etiquette. Is the host required to invite the guest? Is the host required to acquiesce to the guest's religious edict or can he decide as a free individual that he does not wish to host such people in his home?

Ok so imagine a new party, that took what was good from the Green movement - attention to physical matters such as energy production, pollution, food supply etc. - and approached them scientifically rather than ideologically. That tackled the big civilisational questions without getting compromised by the leftist omnicause of Gaza: * How can we construct a post-carbon industrial society? * How can we maximise our use of AI while avoiding dangers and excess inequality * What society will we leave for our descendants centuries from now? Where is our shiny solarpunk future?

I keep seeing some Muslims in Japan ask, “Why are we treated differently from Christians?” Honestly, I think the answer is pretty obvious. It’s not simply because you’re Muslim. It’s because of how some people behave. There are plenty of Christians living in Japan. Most of them just live their lives. They eat what they can eat, follow Japanese rules, respect local customs, and don’t expect Japan to reorganize itself around their religion. You don’t see them getting angry because a restaurant serves pork. You don’t see them constantly complaining that Japan doesn’t have enough churches. You don’t see them demanding that Japanese customs change to fit Christianity. They came to Japan, so they adjusted to Japan. That’s really the difference. Nobody is stopping you from being Muslim. Believe whatever you want. But if you move to Japan and then start telling Japanese people how their food, customs, public spaces, and society should change to accommodate your religion, don’t act surprised when people start pushing back. Respect goes both ways. You can practice your religion here. But Japan doesn’t have to become a Muslim country just because some Muslims chose to live here.

I just found the most brilliant bit by @JohnCleese He explains Leftism better in 90 seconds, than you could learn from any academic in 20 years.

Politics is entwined in economics. Strip away the speeches and the ceremony, and every political decision is a decision about who gets resources, who produces them, and who carries the costs. The state cannot give without first taking. When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, allocating $369 billion toward energy subsidies, that capital did not materialize from goodwill. It came from your purchasing power, diluted through borrowing and monetary expansion. Every subsidy is a transfer. Every regulation is a barrier protecting someone already inside the gate from someone trying to compete. Politicians understand this perfectly, which is why industries spend billions on lobbying. The American pharmaceutical lobby spent $457 million in 2025 alone. They are buying legislation that raises your drug costs by throttling competition. This is the system operating exactly as incentives predict it will. The expansion of state power is inherently self-perpetuating. Each intervention creates a distortion, and that distortion produces a crisis, and the crisis generates demand for another intervention. The welfare state, the regulatory state, and the warfare state all feed from the same mechanism. Separate economics from politics and you get a market. Merge them, and you get a cartel. Respect property, enforce contracts, keep the currency sound, and capital flows toward you. Let politicians price-set, inflate, and redistribute, and watch the capital disappear into politically favored hands instead.

Elon is openly going after Delta’s CEO over Starlink. The issue is bigger than whether one executive personally likes Musk. His argument is simple: Delta belongs to its shareholders, and a CEO shouldn’t let a personal grudge decide whether the airline adopts better technology if that decision could hurt the company. And this is exactly why I never bought the rumor that Elon was deliberately slowing Tesla’s Robotaxi rollout just to wait for some future Tesla–SpaceX merger. Watch how he talks about shareholder responsibility here. He clearly doesn’t believe a CEO gets to treat a public company like personal property.

This did not happen quickly - it was a war of attrition that happened over time. In 1988, I moved to France from South Africa. I was 17-years-old and went to see the world & work as an “au pair”. In truth, I was a slightly glorified servant who spent some of my time on my hands & knees cleaning up the pee of a spoiled French child who preferred to piss all over the bathroom floor & walls rather than use the toilet. At the time, French people would often bemoan the influx of Arabs to their country, mostly from Algeria. I thought they were racist & felt very uncomfortable. Fast forward to today & you see that over the last 48 years since I was living in Paris, the city has been partially conquered, parallel Muslim societies have been allowed to fester & proliferate & these are no go areas for the law where police officers dare not go for risk of being murdered like colleagues that have gone before them. What I did not see then was what we are witnessing today: the leftist-Islamist alliance. These are both proxy forces for the globalists who are pulling the puppet strings & funding the invasion & conquest of western civilization. The thing about being older is that you’ve been around long enough to know things. It is harder to deceive those who have witnessed first hand. That’s one of the many reasons they target the young - newly indoctrinated, no life experience to speak of & all the enthusiasm of a young puppy with none of the wisdom of an old dog. When you’ve been around long enough to watch immigration turn from a humanitarian gesture to a weapon of invasion & conquest, you know the truth. No one can con you or shame you into going along becaue you know what matters & you no longer care what they say about you. I’m not going down with the ship. And I’m not sending my children to drown in the depths of oblivion either. We’re here, we are true, we are lawful and we are strong. But above all…we are faithful. We get it one life to live. Make it count.

Explain this to a Japanese person, because we are utterly baffled. If a foreign network systematically drugged and raped tens of thousands of schoolgirls in Tokyo and Osaka... If the police covered it up to avoid being called racist... And if our government then handed citizenship to a foreign militant while letting rape ringleaders walk free... Our cabinet would fall by midnight. Every police chief involved would be in prison attire within a week. The entire country would stand united in unstoppable outrage. Yet in Britain, you are told to stay polite. You are told to watch your tone. You are told that anger makes you "far-right." At what point did not offending the political elite become more important than the physical bodies of your daughters? Politeness is a virtue. Politeness in the face of child sacrifice is complicity.

HYPOTHETICALLY… IF I BOUGHT MY HOUSE FOR $125,000 IN 2002 AND THE COUNTY NOW SAYS IT’S WORTH $487,000, WHERE DID I ACTUALLY MAKE $362,000? Did I sell it? No. Did I receive $362,000? No. Did somebody hand me a check for the new assessed value? Obviously not. But my property taxes still go up because, on paper, my house is suddenly worth hundreds of thousands more. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. This isn’t income. It isn’t cash sitting in my bank account. It’s a number someone assigned to my property, and now I’m being billed based on that number. If my stock portfolio doubles but I don’t sell, I haven’t turned that gain into cash. If my salary stays the same, I don’t suddenly owe more income tax because someone thinks I’m worth more. So why does owning a home work differently? WHY AM I PAYING TAX ON A GAIN I NEVER REALIZED? A house isn’t just an investment. It’s where people live. You can pay off the mortgage, own the property outright, and still face a bigger bill every year because the value of the house went up on paper. At some point, you have to ask what “owning” something actually means if the cost of keeping it can keep rising because of money you never received. THIS ISN’T ABOUT WHETHER THE HOUSE IS “WORTH” MORE. IT’S ABOUT BEING CHARGED FOR VALUE YOU NEVER TURNED INTO CASH. And people are starting to notice.