MacBoar @MacBoar

One of the tricks of populism is that it complains about elite corruption — and then sets records for corruption. We see this in society after society, in era after era.

The Wall Street Journal @WSJ

a day ago

Exclusive: World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s flagship crypto venture, says its trust company has received preliminary approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a bank. on.wsj.com/3SA9lTt

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Ro, I like you. You know that. But you need to read the state of the state. The number of Deca Unicorns in Cali is growing by the day as investors chase amazing startups. A unique feature of these 10b startups is that even if they raise a billion, little, if any of that money goes to the founders, who are now worth billions of dollars over night. They are the definition of cash poor, stock rich How are you going to tax them ? Make them borrow money against their shares, if they can? They just raised money to grow their company and a bank will come along and loan them money ? A company that has been in business maybe less than a year ? lol Will you take their stock if they can’t ? Do you really think each of multiple founders, who started an amazing company in Cali and is now a billionaire, can each just pull out $250m per billion of net worth from their raise ? You know they can’t. If this passes , and it doesn’t directly impact me at all, I won’t be a cali resident, but you can bet if I’m investing in a multi billion dollar startup, I’m asking them to move from California first. IMO, if this passes, only idiot startup founders stay in Cali. I’ve done it before and will do it again. Dallas. Pittsburgh. Indiana. I will make NOT being in California a pre requisite for an investment Ideology is not a strategy Ro.

Ro Khanna @RoKhanna

9 hours ago

The California Democratic Party and the California labor movement just stood with @BernieSanders and me in supporting 5% wealth tax on 250 California billionaires. California voters want a Democratic Party that will stand up for the working class over the billionaire class.

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The IPCC’s general circulation models have never been able to replicate past changes in climate using the real data thought to have caused them. But if they can’t “predict” past changes with real data, how can they predict future changes with theoretical data?

@konstructivizm

BREAKING | A King County judge dismissed murder charges against a Seattle man accused of killing 2 people with an ax in separate attacks after finding him mentally incompetent to stand trial. The hearing lasted less than three minutes. komonews.com/news/local/sea…

THIS Is What a Solar Eclipse Looks Like From Space 🌑

Cal Raleigh in 2025: 60 HRs Cal Raleigh in 2026: 51 Hits

I foresee the Law of Unintended Consequences rearing its ugly head, again.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal @RepJayapal

3 days ago

Starting July 1, 2027, landlords in Seattle will be prohibited from charging tenants junk fees, including pet rent, mail fees, and common area charges. This is an important step towards making our city more affordable for renters. kuow.org/governing/2026…

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It has to be painful to pretend to be this stupid. ⬇️

“Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.” — Thomas Sowell

A meteor seen from a plane By eurobeat0

Periodic reminder that virtually every major elected official claims, or tries to claim, that they are an outsider, a rebel, a maverick taking on “the establishment.” The President, Vice President, and speaker of the House talk that way. So did Barack Obama. Ted Cruz. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Jim Jordan do it, when their party is in power and out. When they are committee chairs or ranking members etc. Even partisan media does it. Everyone wants to be “the resistance” to some nebulous establishment no one claims membership in. You can’t run a stable, serious, government when the people in power refuse to accept responsibility for being in power. None of them are “outsiders” taking on “elites.” They are all insiders and elites blaming other elites for their collective failure to do their jobs.

Even for pro-choice people (which I am, technically), the question has to be faced: At what point is abortion indistinguishable from infanticide? You can argue that it is distinguishable up to some hard-to-define point in the pregnancy. But surely that point is not the ninth month of pregnancy. This law is evil.

Byrd Martin @Byrdsmanse

5 days ago

foxnews.com/politics/dem-g… No words.

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Edmund Burke predicted the French Revolution would end in a military dictatorship in 1790 before the Reign of Terror even began. Unlike the American Revolution in which he supported the colonists, the French Revolution faded custom and inherited law for abstract theory. In his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” he described society as a partnership between generations: the dead, the living, and the unborn. A revolution that destroys the institutional inheritance of the church, the nobility, and the Ancien Régime on the altar of an abstraction with nothing stable to replace it will inevitably lead to chaos. The power vacuum created will be filled by the rule of he who commands the most force. The rise of Napoléon was entirely predictable as every attempt to redesign society from first principles ignores the long historical tradition that necessitated the formation of these institutions in the first place.

Woke 1: Racism causes capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and the Constitution (The 1619 Project) Woke 2: Capitalism causes racism, imperialism, colonialism, and the Constitution (Lenin)

The Dirty Little Secret of Wildfire How America Traded Logging Jobs for a Perpetual Firefighting Economy For much of the 20th century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were managed as working landscapes. Private timber companies and federal land managers cut, planted, thinned, and tended the land with the understanding that the trees were an asset to be sustained across generations. Clearcuts functioned as firebreaks. Small crews routinely extinguished ignitions before they became news. The result was a regional economy built on living-wage jobs, steady tax revenue for schools and public safety, and forests that, for the most part, stayed green. Occasional fires occurred. What did not occur were the annual, multi-hundred-thousand-acre, smoke-choked seasons that have become the new normal. That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The northern spotted owl was elevated into the most consequential bird in modern American policy. Scientists and environmental organizations argued that the species required large tracts of old-growth habitat. Petitions, lawsuits, and court orders followed. In June 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened. Federal Judge William Dwyer’s rulings and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan locked up roughly 24 million acres of federal forest across Oregon, Washington, and northern California. Federal timber harvests collapsed—often by 80 to 90 percent from 1980s levels in the key regions. Mills closed by the dozens. Supporting businesses disappeared. Unemployment surged. Some communities never fully recovered. Private industrial landowners continued managing their own ground because they still had direct financial skin in the game. Federal and state lands largely stopped being managed for timber production or for systematic fuel reduction at anything approaching the previous scale. The forests kept growing. Fuels kept accumulating. An ignition that once would have been contained by a small crew with shovels and a radio now found denser, more continuous fuel beds. Large fires (5,000 acres and up) went from relatively rare events in the 1970s to routine occurrences in the 2000s and 2010s. In multiple recent seasons, more timber has burned than the industry harvested in its heyday. The irony is difficult to miss: forests “saved” from chainsaws have been delivered to ash in far greater volume. Meanwhile, the northern spotted owl’s population has continued to decline across much of its range. Logging was never the primary driver. Competition from the invasive barred owl has proven far more significant, and habitat loss from high-severity fire now ranks high among the threats. The original crisis was urgent enough to trigger listing and sweeping land-use restrictions. The promised recovery under the Northwest Forest Plan has been, at best, incomplete. The economic and ecological bill arrived in the form of unmanaged fuels and repeated megafires. And that is where the dirty little secret begins. Once the timber economy on public land was kneecapped, a new industry rose to replace it. Wildland firefighting—suppression, logistics, aviation, camps, contracts, and the supporting apparatus—became a multi-billion-dollar annual enterprise. Agencies and contractors employ thousands. Budgets are large and sticky. In government, “use it or lose it” is not a slogan; it is an operating principle. A quiet fire season is a budgeting risk. Early, aggressive attack on every ignition that could still be handled by a small crew is expensive in the short term and reduces the later need for the full apparatus. Allowing fires to grow until they justify emergency declarations, large incident management teams, and federal cost-share arrangements is, from a certain bureaucratic perspective, rational and financially advantageous. Local structural firefighters and many ground-level wildland crews do not share this incentive structure. They want the fire out. Once a fire reaches a certain size or complexity, however, control shifts upward to state and federal incident management teams whose metrics, funding streams, and political realities are different. Neither major political party has shown a strong appetite for fixing the underlying problem. One side treats any expansion of active management or commercial thinning as an assault on old growth and the owl. The other side speaks frequently about forest health but rarely forces the structural changes in litigation risk, planning timelines, and budget incentives that would actually move the needle at scale. Campaign contributions and jobs flow from the existing system. Admitting that the original policy overcorrected and produced a more dangerous landscape remains politically costly. Climate change and longer fire seasons are real factors. Drier fuels and hotter summers make everything worse. But denser, less-managed forests on the public estate are the accelerant that policy deliberately chose. Private industrial lands are managed more intensively and still burn, yet the severity is generally lower. Young plantations and certain silvicultural choices create their own risks, but private owners retain a direct financial reason to keep fuels in check and respond quickly. Public lands under the post-owl regime largely do not. Oregon and the broader region now hold more trees than they did in the 1920s, largely because private landowners continued to replant. They also experience more catastrophic fire. The government did not “save” the forest. It changed who controlled the management decisions and, in the process, swapped a productive industry for a perpetual emergency-response industry. The owl was the symbol. The lasting result is a landscape that burns bigger, rural economies that never fully healed, and a political class with limited incentive to alter the arrangement. Instead of market-driven capital allocation, the new system runs on taxpayer subsidies. Households and businesses understand that money spent inefficiently is money gone. Government tends to treat the same dollars as an everlasting well. Until the incentives change—until early detection, aggressive initial attack, mechanical thinning where appropriate, and genuine long-term forest management are rewarded more than the sheer size of the suppression effort—the same pattern will continue every summer: more smoke, more lost timber, more money spent, and the same speeches about how hard everyone is fighting the fires that policy helped create.

@disclosetv

Everybody knows that historically socialism has not only never worked, but has consistently made life worse. The excuse, even from socialists, is always that it just wasn’t done right. What’s wild is that while admitting every previous attempt was supposedly done wrong, they’re still trying to do it the same way all over again. Apparently the definition of “real socialism” is doing the same thing again and expecting history to apologize.

U.S. acceptance of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz is an extraordinary outcome only made conceivable by an administration that squandered legitimacy, alienated allies, attempted regime change in a war it had not adequately prepared for and that is being forced to accept a catastrophic outcome without viable alternatives. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove but in other circumstances Iran's closure of Strait by brazenly attacking maritime traffic and neighbors' civilian infrastructure would likely have justified and led to a united, global response--like the U.S.-led naval escort mission during the Iran-Iraq war, the global coalition that reversed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the multinational naval force enforcing UN sanctions in the Gulf in the 1990s, or the UN Security Council sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program in the 2010s--that led to the JCPOA. Instead US and other countries are now being forced to accept an outcome that would have been unthinkable before the war but seems to have become unavoidable because of it.