Champion of Reason, Individual Rights and Capitalism.
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You made my own point for me. Weeks ago you posted that progressives are winning across the country despite being heavily outspent, because their ideas are popular. Now your posting that someone is trying to buy the midterms. Both of those posts can't be true. But of course @BernieSanders is not interested in what is true, he is only interested in power over you.
Money does not buy elections. Bloomberg spent roughly a billion dollars of his own money in 2020 and won American Samoa. Steyer spent over $340 million and won zero delegates. Amy McGrath raised close to $90 million and lost Kentucky by nearly 20 points. Jaime Harrison raised a record $130 million and lost South Carolina by 10. Voters are not for sale.
So look at what your bill does. It caps what a man may spend to be heard, and it taxes people to fund candidates they despise. That is not cleaning up elections. It is choosing who gets a microphone and charging those that did not choose to pay for it.
Speech costs money. Ads, staff, printing, airtime. Limit the money and you are limiting speech. That is the point, and everyone reading this knows it.
What we need to get Bernie out of politics.
Donald Trump's super PAC plans to spend up to $500 million to buy the midterm elections.
Megadonors from both parties — almost all billionaires — have spent another $1.8 billion.
ENOUGH. Get big money out of politics. End Citizens United. Move to public funding of elections.
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The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Since 2015, the UN has passed 188 resolutions condemning Israel.
That's more than twice as many as against the rest of the world combined—Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela included.
Yet diplomats sat politely through a speech from Iran, a regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens and still persecutes them.
It's not about human rights. It's blatant anti-Israel bias.
"If there are any other moral cowards who haven't yet left this hall, please do so now."
⠀
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opens his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York with a sharp rebuke as delegates walk out of the hall in protest of his speech.
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Complete nonsense. Almost nobody in coffee shops are discussing P(doom). It is rationalist forum slang out of LessWrong that most people have never encountered. You are describing a handful of engineers in your own district and presenting it as the national conversation.
And the number is a guess with a decimal point on it. No dataset, no base rate, no agreed definition of doom, no time frame. LeCun says under 0.01 percent. Andreessen says zero. Hinton says 10 to 20. Yudkowsky says above 95. A survey of 2,700 researchers came back with a median of 5. Six orders of magnitude apart, which tells you nobody is measuring anything.
So some engineers feel uneasy about their own work, they convert the unease into a percentage, and you convert the percentage into a federal agency with licensing power over an industry.
An agency built on a feeling cannot be argued out of existence, because no evidence would ever satisfy it.
You go to a local coffee shop in my district and they’re sitting around asking "What’s your P(doom) number from AI?"
Most Americans would think this is crazy, a bunch of sci-fi. But the reality is it’s an actual danger.
America needs an independent agency for AI.
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Bravo, Prime Minister. That is what moral certainty sounds like, and the West has forgotten the sound.
He did not apologize for winning. He named the eighth front of this war, the one fought in our classrooms. Qatar spent billions funding American universities and outlets like Al Jazeera to teach young minds to hate Israel and the West. It found willing partners in faculties that had been teaching the same thing for decades.
Then the line that ends the argument. Israel did not commit genocide. Israel prevented one. What genocidal regime sends a million polio vaccines to its enemy's children?
And he said the part our own leaders will not. Many in the free world are afraid to defend freedom. Western capitals see a civilization under attack and negotiate the terms of its surrender.
If only Washington spoke with this clarity instead of sending negotiators to men who chant death to America.
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Exactly right. Delegations that sit through speeches from regimes that hang dissidents and stone women get up and leave when the leader of the only free nation in the region defends his citizens. That is not protest. It is the refusal to hear a case they cannot refute, and it tells you everything about an institution that seats dictatorships as the moral equals of free nations.
Netanyahu is right to call out the delegates leaving the UN General Assembly to protest his speech. They are, as he said, "moral cowards," and hypocrites as well as he made clear in his speech.
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Credit to Baier for pressing the three broken commitments and the death toll. He held his feet to the fire there. But the harm was done before the first question. "Mr. President" and "thank you for the time" grant a terror state standing no propaganda ministry can buy, and the terrorism-victim lie went out unchallenged with Fox's credibility attached. You do not interview the spokesman for a murder regime, you indict him, and if you cannot do the second you have no business doing the first.
The dictator sees what Washington keeps refusing to see, that no agreement survives when one side cannot be trusted, and then our side keeps sending negotiators anyway.
Iran's president said it himself on Fox News: "If we are unable to trust one another within the framework of a dialogue, how can we hope that these issues will ever be resolved?"
Exactly. If only our own leaders had the sense and the principle to reach the same conclusion.
And his own interview proved the point. His foreign minister declared the Strait open in April and the Revolutionary Guard attacked ships the next day. He signed the Islamabad memorandum in June and weeks later the IRGC set a Qatari tanker on fire. In March his forces fired on neighboring countries and he apologized afterward. Three times his commitments were overridden, and asked who controls Iran, he could not say.
A deal requires a counterparty who can keep it. The man signing does not command the men with the guns, and he admitted it on camera.
The rest was lies. The Strait was not closed? It closed the day the war began. Iran is the victim of terrorism? Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror, a designation it has held since 1984, its crowds still chant death to America, and it has attacked and killed Americans and our allies for 47 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the three soldiers killed in Jordan this July.
The one true claim he made came from our own president, who announced arms shipments to Iranian protesters on camera and handed the regime its alibi. That the guns never reached the protesters does not matter to Tehran. It now cites our president to recast the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens, by its own admission, and tens of thousands by other counts, as self-defense against a foreign-armed coup.
A regime that rules by force keeps its word only when force requires it. No deal is possible with men like this, only terms imposed on them.
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The dictator sees what Washington keeps refusing to see, that no agreement survives when one side cannot be trusted, and then our side keeps sending negotiators anyway.
Iran's president said it himself on Fox News: "If we are unable to trust one another within the framework of a dialogue, how can we hope that these issues will ever be resolved?"
Exactly. If only our own leaders had the sense and the principle to reach the same conclusion.
And his own interview proved the point. His foreign minister declared the Strait open in April and the Revolutionary Guard attacked ships the next day. He signed the Islamabad memorandum in June and weeks later the IRGC set a Qatari tanker on fire. In March his forces fired on neighboring countries and he apologized afterward. Three times his commitments were overridden, and asked who controls Iran, he could not say.
A deal requires a counterparty who can keep it. The man signing does not command the men with the guns, and he admitted it on camera.
The rest was lies. The Strait was not closed? It closed the day the war began. Iran is the victim of terrorism? Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror, a designation it has held since 1984, its crowds still chant death to America, and it has attacked and killed Americans and our allies for 47 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the three soldiers killed in Jordan this July.
The one true claim he made came from our own president, who announced arms shipments to Iranian protesters on camera and handed the regime its alibi. That the guns never reached the protesters does not matter to Tehran. It now cites our president to recast the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens, by its own admission, and tens of thousands by other counts, as self-defense against a foreign-armed coup.
A regime that rules by force keeps its word only when force requires it. No deal is possible with men like this, only terms imposed on them.
SPECIAL REPORT EXCLUSIVE: Don’t miss the Iranian President TONIGHT 6pmET on @specialreport @foxnews #foxnews #specialreport #iran
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You need to keep these intellectually and economically incompetent power lusters as far away from AI as possible. Let's look at what they have already built.
Nuclear power. Every reactor ordered after 1973 was canceled, more than 100 of them. No new plant was ordered from 1978 until 2012. Watts Bar 1 was ordered in 1970 and licensed in 1996, twenty six years. Vogtle 3 and 4 finished at $35 billion against a $14 billion estimate, seven years late, and the overruns drove Westinghouse into bankruptcy. That is the regulatory model you are holding up as a success.
Your health care. Congress projected Medicare would cost somewhere around $9 to $12 billion by 1990. Actual benefit payments that year came to $108.9 billion. Health spending has gone from 5 percent of the economy in 1960 to more than 17 percent, in the most heavily regulated market in the country.
The FDA. Ten to twelve years and over a billion dollars per approved drug by the lowest credible estimate. Every year of that delay is people dying while waiting for a treatment that already exists.
Now your bill.
Item one already exists. If a model breaks into a system or commits theft, criminal and tort law cover it today. You do not need a new agency to prosecute fraud.
Item two is the FDA for software. Nothing ships until a federal office grants permission. See above for how that goes.
Item three bans a category of research. Not an act that injures anyone, the work itself. That is prior restraint applied to mathematics.
And notice what set all this off. Altman and Amodei spoke openly about risks they see in their own work. You treat their candor as a warrant to take the work. The lesson every builder draws from this is to stop talking.
Rand identified the pattern. The men who produce are treated as suspects, and the men who produce nothing appoint themselves judges. You did not build a model and you could not build one. You propose to decide which ones are permitted to exist.
Sam Altman is saying Sam Altman’s doing some really risky things, and Sam Altman can’t stop Sam Altman from doing these things.
Give me a break.
There has to be liability. We need an agency that regulates these models, just like we did for drugs, electricity, and nuclear.
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5 reasons you do not want these statists running the House:
1. Increase the minimum wage. A price floor on labor, which prices out the least skilled worker and calls it a raise.
2. Paid family leave. A benefit paid by employers under penalty of law, which shows up as lower wages and fewer hires.
3. End the war in Iran. The regime mined the Strait of Hormuz, attacked civilian shipping, and fired on Israeli towns. Leaving is not ending it.
4. A vote on Medicare for All. Abolish the private plans of 180 million people and put the whole thing under one federal budget.
5. Tax the billionaires. Every one of the four items above needs funding, so the men who produce most get billed first, and the bill grows with the promises.
Notice that four of the five require someone else's money and the fifth requires someone else's blood. Not one of them asks what an individual has the right to do with his own life and property.
Five things Democrats will do in January when we win back the House:
✅ Increase the minimum wage
✅ Pass paid family leave
✅ End the war in Iran
✅ Hold a vote on Medicare for All
✅ Tax the billionaires
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Why does it matter which stocks a politician holds?
Because government holds the power to move those stocks. Drilling permits, export licenses, sanctions, reserve releases, refinery rules. When a signature in Washington can swing a company's value, access to that signature becomes the most valuable asset in the market. That is the engine of crony capitalism.
Her answer strips the officeholder of his portfolio and leaves the power untouched. The pull stays for sale, only the buyers change. It happens under every administration for that reason.
The fix is to take the power away. A government with no authority to bless or bankrupt an industry gives nobody a reason to buy influence in it.
That limit stands on moral grounds before anyone mentions corruption. A man's oil well is his property, and the right to drill it is not Washington's to hand out.
Trump’s 9 largest oil and gas holdings gained an estimated $1.5M to $4.4M between the eve of the war in Iran and the end of August.
Meanwhile, Americans have been paying more at the pump.
We need to ban the president, vice president, and Congress from owning and trading stock.
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The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
There's something deeply unsafe about safetyism.
We wish people a safe flight—yet flying commercially is almost perfectly safe.
We don't wish people a safe drive—yet US roads are the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48h, killing everyone aboard.
But we scare people when they get in an airplane but not when they get in a car.
The biggest opportunity we have to improve road safety is self-driving, yet there's lots of anti-self-driving safety talk, and self-driving is held to a *dramatically* superhuman safety bar.
The din about AI safety has reached extreme tenor—yet there have been zero material safety incidents. And the positive benefits of AI could improve and save many lives. But the safetyists say we must slow down.
We destroyed the nuclear power industry in this country nominally out of safety concerns, yet joule for joule nuclear power is *by far* the safest form of energy, even accounting for Chernobyl (a genuine disaster) and Three Mile Island (generally a non-event).
Building and fire codes are supposedly there to protect us from unsafe buildings. But actually the red tape makes development slow and sometimes impossible. So the safetyism protects us from jobs, innovation, and reindustrialization.
TSA was there nominally to protect us from terrorist threats—yet to the extent it pushes passengers at the margins from safe airplanes to dangerous roads, it actually kills not just time and money but actual humans.
Safetyism is deeply unsafe.
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Soon to New York: “Crises as delivery costs go through the roof.”
Then
“Mamdani announces price ceilings on delivery costs.”
And finally
“Crises in New York as delivery comes to a standstill; thousands of workers out of jobs.”
Predictable and sad.
DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers. We’re making them pay $131.5 million — the largest worker settlement in City history.
This is New York, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.
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Warren is intentionally deceiving you, like all looters do.
She knows why the number is $184,500. It is the tax cap and the benefit cap at once. Earnings above that line are not taxed and are not counted toward your check. Cap the benefit, cap the tax. She omits the half that explains it.
The most anyone can collect at full retirement age in 2026 is $4,152 a month, no matter how large the paycheck was.
Then read her own bill. On S.770, the Chief Actuary's description states the earnings taxed above $250,000 are not credited for benefit purposes. Tax the money, pay nothing back for it.
That is a wealth transfer, not a contribution, and she knows the difference.
What she calls a fair share means the money a man earned belongs to whoever needs it more.
She and the rest of those like her should be ashamed of themselves.
A teacher earning $60,000 pays Social Security taxes on every dollar she earns.
A worker earning $184,500 does too.
But someone earning $10 million pays tax on just the first $184,500.
That doesn’t make sense. We can protect Social Security if everyone paid their fair share.
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2026 maximum monthly benefits, per SSA, for someone who earned the taxable maximum for 35 years.
- Age 62: $2,969
- Age 67 (full retirement age): $4,152
- Age 70: $5,181
Annualized, that's $35,628, $49,824, and $62,172.
Claiming at 62 cuts the check 30% below the full retirement amount, and waiting to 70 adds about 24%.
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The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
You can see this blatantly in governments everywhere and it’s getting worse by the minute…
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This power-luster accuses a company of ripping off the 260,000 New Yorkers earning on its platform. Ripping off requires intent. The city reviewed 152 million payments and found a broken calculation, and DoorDash said as much: bugs, deliveries crossing city lines, orders with multiple pickups. They conceded it and they are paying workers double what was owed.
Intent is his department. His stated end goal is seizing the means of production, announced in advance.
Then look at what the $16 million buys. The city set a minimum pay rate for delivery work, now $22.13 an hour, and collected penalties for falling under a number it invented.
He built none of this. The platform paying those 260,000 people came from other men. He arrived, set the price, and posed in front of the sign with the number on it.
DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers. We’re making them pay $131.5 million — the largest worker settlement in City history.
This is New York, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.
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The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
ALT There is a clear difference between Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk: one divides what already exists, and the other creates what does not exist.
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How is it that Vivek Ramaswamy is trailing in the polling average in a reliably Republican state with a weak opponent?
RCP average: Acton +1. Latest BGSU poll: Acton 48, Ramaswamy 45. His favorability: 36 favorable, 47 unfavorable. Ohio has not elected a Democratic governor since 2006.
The answer is his pragmatism and to the pragmatist the ends justify the means and their changing unprincipled positions.
Earlier this year, a 90-day gas tax cut went nowhere at the Statehouse. On Monday, Acton called for a gas tax holiday. That night, Vivek had one too. Six weeks before an election, his position is whatever the news cycle demands.
Vivek says: "Suspend the full state tax for 90 days."
He should say: Your earnings are yours. Cut it permanently and cut spending to match.
Vivek says: "Lost revenue would be replaced by an upfront appropriation from ODOT's ending cash balance, then the General Revenue Fund, and, if needed, the Rainy Day Fund."
He should say: Drivers should pay for their roads. Income and sales taxpayers who never fill up should not cover the discount at the pump.
Vivek says: "Replenish the Rainy Day Fund with verified Medicaid fraud savings."
He should say: Stopping fraud is the state's job. Recovered theft is not tax relief.
Vivek says: "Supplier invoices must show the tax change."
He should say: Stations are businesses, not suspects.
Vivek says: "real affordability relief"
He should say: Ohio sits on the Utica shale. Protect the right to drill, pipe, and refine.
The same pattern runs through his campaign. He launched promising to take property taxes to zero, then settled for a rollback.
Acton proposed the same holiday first. Any politician can copy a promise of affordability. She cannot copy a defense of individual rights, because she does not hold one.
That is the ground Vivek should stand on, but a pragmatist does not hold ground. He stands wherever the last poll put him.
Gas is over $4.50 in Ohio today, diesel just hit a record $6.76, and if you fill up a 15-gallon tank once a week, you're paying about $300/year in state gas taxes alone. Truckers are paying thousands. Families badly need a real leader who takes action and delivers real relief, not just empty tweets. That’s why I have worked with Ohio lawmakers, including House Speaker Matt Huffman & Senate President Rob McColley, to create an Ohio Gas Tax Relief Plan that we’ll enact into law by no later than next week. Here's how it works (we’ll hold a joint press conference on Wednesday to discuss the details):
1. Suspend the full state tax for 90 days. Ohio's 38.5-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline and 47-cent-per-gallon tax on diesel and other fuels.
2. Protect state and local road funding. Lost revenue would be replaced by an upfront appropriation from ODOT's ending cash balance, then the General Revenue Fund, and, if needed, the Rainy Day Fund. Actual payments will follow the complete existing formulas to protect federal matching funds, construction commitments, and winter maintenance.
3. Replenish the Rainy Day Fund with verified Medicaid fraud savings. In May, I laid out a detailed plan to combat Medicaid fraud. New funds from a federal agreement allowing Ohio to retain more of those savings can restore any funding drawn from the Budget Stabilization Fund and ODOT's cash balance. All dollars will be pre-appropriated to ensure no project interruptions.
4. Make the relief visible and accountable. Supplier invoices must show the tax change. The Ohio Department of Taxation may offer credits for previously-taxed station inventory only when entirely passed through to customers, and will publish weekly pump-price comparisons and monthly reports on replacement road funding.
If the legislature doesn’t act this year, I will present a bill during the transition and push for passage when I take office on January 11, 2027. I'm prepared to call a special session if needed.
While Amy Acton continues to issue hollow statements without offering an iota of policy detail (and continues to hide from the debate stage), I’m working with our legislature to take action & provide real affordability relief to Ohioans.
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The obscene part is that men who built this technology must spend a single dollar defending their right to keep building it. They are buying back something that is already theirs.
Name them. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz put in $50 million. Greg and Anna Brockman put in $25 million. Men spending money they earned building companies.
Now the comparison.
They spend their own money. You want to spend theirs.
They buy ads people are free to ignore. You want an agency whose rules are backed by force.
They ask to keep building. You ask for the authority to decide what ships.
They fund candidates openly. You would ban that, while finishing the 2024 cycle as the second highest raising House candidate in California. And in 2014, while you were pressing Mike Honda to sign a pledge keeping outside money out of your race, one of your own donors filed to create a super PAC to back you.
AI super PACs spent over $127 million in 2026 primaries. They won 90% of the races.
Tech billionaires are buying our politicians because they want to write the rules that maximize their profits.
It's time to ban super PACs. The people need to write the rules.
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