John43 @TwoCatsCooking

Jeffrey Tucker founded an institute devoted to studying the COVID lockdowns and mandates. He just spent four days reading Fauci's private diary. He says nothing could have prepared him for the "cold terror" he felt trying to figure out what demonic force was possessing this man. TUCKER: "I've spent four days reading that diary… It's a massive treatise, but it's utterly fascinating and introducing me to a side of Fauci... I just… no matter how many bad thoughts I've had about Fauci in the past, nothing could have prepared me for what I read in that diary." "It's a little bit like if you read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and just take out the Dr. Jekyll part and just read the Mr. Hyde part. That's what it's like." "2020 is disgusting enough, but 2021 is where it gets really evil." "This is where you just can't… your disgust turns to something else. Actually, a kind of A terror. Cold heart. Cold terror. What is possessing this man? I mean, what demonic force has inhabited his spirit that would cause him to do this?" "I've never seen anything quite like it. And there's nothing that could have prepared me for that diary. Nothing."

Mao Zedong killed roughly 45 million people between 1958 and 1962, and the backyard steel furnace campaign sits at the center of that catastrophe as a textbook case of central planning consuming itself alive. The logic of the Great Leap Forward went like this: if the Soviet Union industrialized through state-directed production, China would do it faster and bigger. Mao ordered peasants across every province to smelt steel in small furnaces built on collective land. Party officials set output quotas with no reference to actual resources, actual skills, or actual demand. Farmers melted down their own plows, woks, and door hinges to hit the numbers. They stripped hillsides bare for fuel. What came out of those furnaces was overwhelmingly pig iron so brittle it had zero industrial use. The quotas got reported as fulfilled, the statistics traveled up the command chain, and Beijing celebrated a triumph that existed only on paper. You have to understand what those farmers were abandoning to stand at furnaces all day. The 1958 harvest was, by most estimates, actually decent. But with the rural labor force diverted to smelting operations, crops rotted in the fields unharvested. Free market economists call this opportunity cost: every hour a farmer spent producing worthless slag was an hour not spent producing food. The price system, had anyone been allowed to use it, would have made this tradeoff immediately visible. Prices signal scarcity. Planners just issue directives and wait for reality to disobey them. Local officials faced execution or labor camps for reporting shortfalls, so they reported surpluses. Beijing then exported grain abroad, partly to service debts to the Soviet Union, partly to project an image of socialist success, even as provinces like Anhui and Sichuan descended into mass starvation. The state had monopolized food distribution, so when the numbers were wrong, there was no private market, no informal trade network, no alternative channel to move grain to the dying. The apparatus designed to feed people became the mechanism that starved them. This is what the elimination of private property and price signals actually produces in practice: 45 million corpses and a generation of Chinese children who grew up stunted by famine.

Seventy-two. That is how many separate wounds John Cruickshank had in him, two of them through his lungs, while he lined up a burning flying boat for a second run at a U-boat that had just shot his aircraft to pieces. Most men have one of those wounds and they are finished. He had seventy-two and he pressed the attack. He was 24, a former bank clerk from Aberdeen, flying a Catalina flying boat out of the Shetland Islands with Coastal Command. The job was the long, freezing, mind-numbing patrol, fourteen hours over the grey Atlantic hunting the U-boats that were strangling Britain. On the 17th of July 1944, far out over empty water, they caught one on the surface, U-361, and Cruickshank took the big slow flying boat down to attack. The first run failed. The depth charges would not release. Any sane man makes a note and turns for home. Cruickshank swung the aircraft around and came back for a second pass, low and straight, and this time the submarine's gunners were waiting. Flak ripped through the Catalina. It killed the navigator, wounded half the crew, and tore into Cruickshank again and again, those seventy-two wounds, two punching into his lungs, ten into his legs. And he flew the attack home anyway. Bleeding everywhere, in agony, with the fuselage holed and on fire, he held the aircraft dead level, aimed, and released the depth charges himself. They straddled the U-boat perfectly. It broke apart and sank beneath him. Then came the part that should have killed him. He collapsed from blood loss, and the wounded co-pilot, who had never landed a Catalina, took the controls for the long flight back. Cruickshank refused the morphine that would have knocked him out, because he knew the man flying needed him. Drifting in and out, he had himself carried back up to the cockpit again and again through the night to help nurse the shot-up aircraft down, and at dawn they got it onto the water safely. He had lost so much blood the doctors said he had no business being alive. He lived. He took the Victoria Cross from the King, went quietly back to banking after the war, and rarely spoke of it. And he kept on living, and living, and living. John Cruickshank died in 2025 at the age of 105, the last man on earth wearing a Victoria Cross earned in the Second World War. Seventy-two wounds over the Atlantic, and he outlasted every other hero of that war by decades.

Any modern commercial greenhouse will boost CO₂ levels artificially to between 1,000 ppm and 1,200 ppm—nearly triple outdoor conditions worldwide. In controlled glasshouse environments, this heightening of CO₂ supercharges crop yields by 20% to well over 40% for staples like tomatoes and peppers. This is why greenhouse operators spend millions pumping it into their enclosures—the biological return on investment is immediate. This biological miracle is not only found in greenhouses any more. It's happening in the open fields and arid regions throughout the world. CO₂ has climbed to roughly 426 ppm, powering a green revolution across desert margins and many formerly barren landscapes, such as the Sahal in Africa. This global greening wave is visible from space and has been measured by NASA satellites. It covers twice the area of two United States. The climate change bureaucracy declared that rising CO₂ would lead to droughts, floods and food scarcity. The ice caps would melt, flooding many coastal cities. Drought or rainfall would become the norm. These baseless fears were based almost entirely on worst-scenario computer models. That is not how it's turning out. NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites reveal an unexpected new dawn. Between 10% and 40% of all historical crop yield improvements since 1940 are directly due to rising CO₂. For wheat, soybeans and corn, the atmospheric fuel injection has driven a massive portion of the modern 'green revolution'. For C3 crops, like wheat, rice and potatoes, the extra CO₂ has been an instant stimulant, driving growth and expanding biomass. CO₂ allows leaf pores (stomata) to stay partially closed, reducing water loss by up to 40%. In dry broadacre zones, this creates unprecedented natural drought resilience. This data comes from a landmark study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which used satellite tracking to measure the exact impact of CO₂ fertilisation on broadacre field crops. CO₂ has been painted as an agent of crisis by the climate change bureaucracy, led by the United Nations. Yet science proves once again that this miracle molecule is the world's primary engine of green agricultural abundance.

@brivael Exactement. Macronie + médias + fact-checkers à la Pain-Rudy ont orchestré le narratif de la peur pendant des mois. Masques magiques, efficacité vaccinale surestimée, transmission asymptomatique, lab leak nié, PCR à 40 cycles, ivermectine diabolisée… tout a été instrumentalisé. Et derrière : obligation vaccinale pour certains, pass sanitaire puis pass vaccinal = pure coercition. Rappel des horreurs concrètes, sans filtre : •Salles de sport (comme la mienne) fermées des mois d’affilée, parfois près de deux ans d’impact cumulé entre confinements et protocoles : octobre 2020 → juin 2021 fermeture quasi totale, puis réouverture conditionnée au pass. Des entreprises ruinées, des emplois détruits. •Pass sanitaire exigé dès 12 ans (à partir de fin septembre 2021) pour faire du judo, du foot, n’importe quel sport en club ou salle. Des gosses exclus de leurs activités parce que leurs parents refusaient l’injection. •Pass obligatoire pour s’asseoir au resto ou au café (intérieur comme terrasse), puis pass vaccinal pur à partir de janvier 2022 : plus de test négatif accepté. Debout interdit, assis seulement, jauges absurdes. •« Plages dynamiques » : tu pouvais marcher ou courir, mais interdiction formelle de t’asseoir, de mettre une serviette ou de bronzer. •Rayon de 1 km (puis 10 km) autour de chez soi avec attestation de déplacement, interdiction pure et simple d’aller se promener librement dans la campagne, les bois ou les forêts hors du périmètre autorisé. •Couvre-feux à 18 h / 19 h / 21 h pendant des mois, attestations pour tout, interdiction des déplacements inter-régionaux hors motif impérieux… Tout ça imposé par un appareil qui savait (ou qui a choisi de ne pas questionner) que le récit était fragile, parfois mensonger. Conformité d’abord, vérité ensuite. Ni oubli, ni pardon.
Les bâtisseurs de science libre et de liberté individuelle finiront par gagner. Toujours.

On regarde Fauci invoquer le 5ème amendement une centaine de fois. Et la question revient, obsessionnelle, chez presque tout le monde qui a suivi ces années : Macron et tout l’appareil autour de lui savaient-ils ? Savaient-ils que les masques, l’efficacité vaccinale, la transmission asymptomatique, les 6 pieds, le lab leak, le gain de fonction, le PCR, l’ivermectine, le Paxlovid… étaient des constructions fragiles, parfois carrément fausses ? Ou étaient-ils simplement trop stupides pour questionner ? La réponse n’est ni l’un ni l’autre de façon pure. C’est plus intéressant, et plus froid. Dans un système où le pouvoir, la réputation et la carrière dépendent entièrement de l’alignement sur le récit officiel, la frontière entre corruption et incompréhension disparaît. Ceux qui voient clair ont un choix brutal : parler et être détruits socialement et professionnellement, ou se taire et continuer à monter. Ceux qui ne voient pas montent encore plus vite, parce qu’ils n’ont aucune dissonance à gérer. Ils appliquent avec zèle. Le résultat est le même. Un appareil entier qui pousse des politiques destructrices avec une conviction apparente. Ce n’est pas un complot de génies maléfiques réunis dans une pièce. C’est un système de sélection qui récompense la conformité narrative et punit le doute. Macron n’avait probablement pas besoin de « savoir » dans le détail scientifique. Il lui suffisait de faire confiance aux experts qui avaient exactement le même logiciel : protéger l’institution, le statut, le récit. Et une fois engagé, revenir en arrière devient politiquement impossible. Trop de capital investi. Trop de prestige en jeu. Les mauvaises idées n’ont pas besoin de mauvaises personnes. Elles ont juste besoin d’un environnement où le coût de dire la vérité est supérieur au coût de la propager. La bonne nouvelle, c’est que ce coût est en train de s’effondrer. Grâce à ceux qui ont tenu quand c’était coûteux. Grâce à X. Grâce à la réalité qui finit toujours par rattraper les modèles. Le 21e siècle n’appartiendra pas aux gardiens du récit. Il appartiendra à ceux qui préfèrent la vérité inconfortable au confort du mensonge partagé. Les bâtisseurs de science libre et de systèmes ouverts gagneront. Toujours.

Dr. Simon @goddek

2 days ago

Fauci lied about: - Masks - Vaccine efficacies - Asymptomatic transmission - Children killing their grandparents - Fatality rates - The 6 feet rule - The lab leak - Gain of function research - PCR testing - Ivermectin - Paxlovid So yes, he definitely belongs in prison!

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Why so much propaganda and lying over there in Democrat Wokeland? Especially with some of the absolutely incredible things we're seeing in Minnesota, where people seem very detached from reality? A key part of the answer is George Soros's concept of "reflexivity." You'll want to understand this. Reflexivity is a property of social circumstances, Soros tells us in his 1992 book The Alchemy of Finance, where he develops the concept. It's what sets the social sciences apart from the physical sciences and is based on the fact that in social situations, the objects (people) affected by circumstances are also subjects and participants in creating circumstances. Soros explains that this means that "social sciences" are a misnomer, in fact. He suggests instead that they should be recognized as "social alchemy." He goes on to explain the relevance of this difference: "Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, -- that of alchemy, operational success." Soros explains that reflexivity is a dialectic, like the dialectic of Hegel but less abstruse and like the dialectic of Marx but more open-ended. What that means is that it is "transformative" in its operation and goals. That is, it is designed to create specific, guided change, i.e., "operational success." Soros explains that reflexivity operates in a peculiar and specific space: in the gap between what people believe is true and what is actually true. That is, the reflexive dialectic refers to inducing and utilizing actionable beliefs that are wrong. Thus, all the propaganda. For his method to work, there must be a gap between what is actually true and what many, many people believe is true. For it to work, lots of people have to be dangerously wrong. He goes on to explain that reflexive campaigns propagate through something he calls "fertile fallacies," which are errors (or lies) that lead people to act upon them, including sharing and spreading their falsehoods with others (going viral). Thus, again, all the propaganda. Over time, people have to be primed to be this wrong, actionably. The way you get them there is by systematically misleading them about reality. Soros also explains that during normal situations, which he says are "near equilibrium" (or stable), significant or "historic" change is not possible. Big changes that fundamentally reorient the way a system works only occur in situations that are "far from equilibrium" (chaotic). During such times, people are desperate to regain stability and equilibrium, so, Soros says, they'll latch on to any "guideposts" that can lead them through the chaos. Thus, yet again, all the propaganda. The potential for chaos has to be arranged while getting a lot of people to believe something highly actionable that is mostly untrue, and then it has to be sparked, and then it has to be guided. That's how the "Soros Model" (reflexivity) works. In Minnesota right now, a huge reflexive campaign (direct action) has been launched, but it has also been building at least for many months (actually years, over a decade). The gap between what people believe and reality (or, the pertinent one among many) is that Trump is an illegitimate dictator (TDS) and his agencies, like ICE, are effectively a fascist Gestapo bringing something like Nazism to the United States, with lower officials either complicit or incapable of stopping it. That has been the tone and tenor of a lot of the propaganda for at least a decade, and certainly very specifically since Trump took office. (Trump's admin's comms team isn't helping itself here with a lot of its unnecessarily provocative shitpoasting from official accounts, btw.) Your average Leftist in Minnesota, agitators, organizers, provocateurs, etc., aside (with all of them playing their obvious roles) fully believes wildly untrue things about Trump, ICE, the law, what ICE is doing, why ICE is doing it, who ICE is removing from their communities, on what authority, and why, and more. They are extremely deranged and functionally psychotic. They're in a state that is far from equilibrium and loaded up with fertile fallacies, a state I refer to on the community-level as having high reflexive potential. Just a little propaganda of very specific types will set them off into mass (psychotic) direct action, as we see. Thus, so much of the propaganda, both chronically over the last year(s) and acutely, since ICE Floyd. What Democratic politicians and media apparatchiks are doing now in Minnesota, to say nothing of the agitators, provocateurs, organizers, etc., and their social media appendages, is putting down "guideposts" about how to deal with this far from equilibrium situation, pushing wildly deluded people into psychopathic action. THIS, guys, is the "Soros Model" in action (which has been widely adopted by institutional manipulators since the late 1980s when he taught it first to the CCP and then more widely). Fwiw, in The Alchemy of Finance, Soros explains that he likes to use this method because he "takes a certain malicious pleasure in shorting an institutional favorite." The United States and the American Experiment are the best bet in the world, though, a big, big, big "institutional favorite" I'm sure Soros and his acolytes would maliciously enjoy shorting this way. This is why so many Democratic politicians like Tim Walz and Jacob Frey and Ilhan Omar, and beyond Minnesota too, and their media and social media appendages all started screaming "ICE OUT" immediately after the triggering incident we can call ICE Floyd. They're shifting gears from building reflexive potential to releasing and guiding it. It's also why they put so much time and effort into steadily building the reflexive potential of raging TDS. You can see how immediately actionable it is (guided by opportunistic and evil politicians, media entities, and a highly coordinated network of professional organizers and social media personalities, many completely anonymous). They needed lots of people to have a wide gap between what they believe and what's true (reflexive gap) that they could take advantage of to suddenly create "historic change" under their guidance at the right moment. We need to understand that this is how Leftists work. All of this can be defused by targeting the building reflexive potential before the moment of explosion arrives, while they're building it. It can be dampened by increasing the number of people and voices who are savvy to the manipulations and lies and who are making the truth more visible to people who mostly haven't been paying attention until it has high immediacy. Reflexive campaigns can be dampened, fizzled, and stopped.

Communism and the Herostratos Instinct – They Couldn’t Build It. So They Burned It. In 356 BC, a man named Herostratos burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — because he could never build something that magnificent and needed the world to know his name. The Athenians made it a capital offense to speak it. We still know it. The first man to destroy a Wonder of the World. It is the same story as Cain and Abel. 1. Every civilization produces two types in permanent tension. Those who build – who create, who reach, who transmit excellence forward. And those consumed by the fact that others build better than they do. They cannot bear the height. Cannot match it. And eventually decide that if they cannot reach it, nobody should have it. The name for this is envy – the specific, corrosive pain caused not by your own suffering but by another’s excellence. Nietzsche called it ressentiment. Genesis called it Cain. Same wound, every century, different clothes. 2. The lie is the first weapon – not to win the argument but to poison it. Not merely strategic propaganda deployed to seize power, but deployed to corrupt, to stain, to contaminate. To make the great seem like thieves, the builder an exploiter, the cathedral oppression, the excellence privilege. The goal is not to defeat the excellent in open debate. It is to make admiring them shameful and transmitting them suspect – so the child who might have reached toward them never learns they existed. Zakłamanie aimed specifically at height (explained below). Not managing reality – poisoning the wells from which excellence drinks. 3. The targets are never accidental. Always the best – the cathedral, not the barn. The scholar, not the clerk. Colonel Ciepliński, not the collaborator who signed the confession (also below). Excellence is the specific offense. Height is the specific wound. The destruction is always aimed upward – which is how you know it is envy and not justice. 4. Communism is the Herostratos instinct given a five-year plan, a secret police, and a philosophy that makes destruction sound like justice. The most organized mobilization of ressentiment in human history. It gave envy a manifesto, an army, and the moral high ground – the most dangerous combination ever assembled. Previous destroyers burned one temple. Communism burned the concept of the temple. 5. The pattern is unbroken across centuries. The French Revolution scattered the bones of French kings – not military necessity, ideological purification. Mao’s Red Guards burned libraries and killed scholars because five thousand years of Chinese excellence was an implicit rebuke to the revolution’s mediocrity. Today’s version cancels Shakespeare, pulls down Newton, erases Jefferson – not despite their greatness but because of it. Same wound. Same response. Updated vocabulary. 6. The lie does not stop at winning. It keeps working before and after victory – corrupting memory, rewriting history, staining reputations across generations, demoralizing and poisoning the souls. A civilization that cannot point to its greatest achievements and say — this is what we are capable of — is a civilization that has been successfully poisoned. The envy wins not when it tears down the statue. It wins when the children no longer know what the statue was. 7. You cannot build from envy. Which is why every revolution driven by it produces the same result: the heights are not replaced by new heights but by the flat, the administered, the carefully mediocre – the Idiocracy, the Last Man blinking. Not a failure of implementation. The intended output of the Herostratos instinct at civilizational scale. The Temple of Artemis was rebuilt twice before the destroyers finally won. Western civilization has been rebuilt before. The question is whether enough people understand what is being burned — and why — before the last stones are gone.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

a week ago

The Sistine Chapel ceiling is the most important artwork in Western civilization. Not the most beautiful – the most important. And it was painted by quite the character. Michelangelo didn’t want the commission. He was a sculptor. He said so, repeatedly, to a Pope who did not

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One gigawatt of wind capacity requires about 2,900 tons of copper. At a standard ore grade of 0.6%, 99.4% of the ore is not copper. Producing those 2,900 tons therefore requires processing roughly 480,000 tons of ore. That is about 1,200 full loads in a 400-ton-class mining truck. And it excludes the waste rock, overburden and processing losses. Count those and the total material moved can exceed 1 to 2 million tons. And that's before adding the steel, concrete, fiberglass and other materials required by the wind project. The "green" turbine does not begin with the wind. It begins with a mountain being blasted, hauled and crushed.

Xenia Fedorova reçoit un arrêté d’expulsion. Une journaliste russe, ancienne de RT France, chroniqueuse sur CNews, accusée d’être « un relais des campagnes de désinformation pilotées par les autorités russes » et de porter atteinte aux « intérêts fondamentaux de l’État ». Ok. Maintenant, regardons le reste du tableau. Sans filtre. Pendant ce temps, des influenceurs algériens publient des vidéos d’appels à la torture, au meurtre, à brûler vif des opposants… sur le sol français. Voici quelques nom : Doualemn (Boualem N.) : 168 000 abonnés TikTok. Vidéo d’appel à la torture et au meurtre d’un opposant. Expulsé → Alger refuse → renvoyé en France → OQTF annulée par le tribunal. Toujours là. Zazou Youcef : (Youcef A.). Appels à « commettre des attentats en France ».OQTF + détention provisoire pour apologie du terrorisme. Titre de séjour non renouvelé… et pourtant le feuilleton continue. Imad Tintin. : Vidéo : « brûler vif, tuer et violer sur le sol français ». Sous OQTF. Contrôle judiciaire. Toujours sur le territoire. Résultat ? Justice qui annule, pays d’origine qui refuse de les reprendre, et retour en rétention ou en liberté provisoire. Deux poids, deux mesures ? Non. C’est juste le droit qui s’applique… quand il veut bien. Des milliers d’étrangers multi-condamnés (vols, violences, menaces de mort, trafic) restent inexpulsables parce qu’ils sont arrivés mineurs, ont des enfants français ou 20 ans de présence. Casier judiciaire à faire pâlir un bandit de western. Mais Fedorova, elle, a trop parlé de l’Ukraine du mauvais côté. Priorités claires. On peut critiquer la France, le gouvernement, l’armée, l’Occident, Israël, le colonialisme, la laïcité… depuis des plateformes étrangères ou des comptes tenus par des non-Français. Tant que ça ne dit pas « Russie », ça passe. Dès que ça sent le narratif du Kremlin, boom : « menace particulièrement grave et actuelle pour l’ordre public ». La liberté d’expression est sacrée… jusqu’à ce qu’elle gêne la ligne officielle sur un conflit. Fedorova a le droit de se tromper, d’être pro-russe, d’être agaçante. Elle n’a pas le droit, apparemment, d’être trop visible dans les médias Bolloré. Curieux, non ? Pendant des mois on a laissé filer un titre de séjour de 10 ans à la même personne. Puis soudain, sous pression politique et médiatique, l’arrêté tombe. Ce n’est plus de l’administration. C’est du signal politique. Si le critère c’est vraiment « atteinte aux intérêts fondamentaux de l’État », alors il faudrait une liste beaucoup plus longue. Beaucoup plus longue. Et pas seulement les Russes. Le vrai deux poids deux mesures, c’est ça : • Discours qui dérange le consensus géopolitique → expulsion possible. • Discours qui appelle à la haine, à la violence, ou qui relaient d’autres puissances étrangères → souvent « on verra » ou « la justice a décidé ». On peut être contre Fedorova. On peut trouver ses analyses pourries. Mais si on commence à expulser les gens pour leurs opinions géopolitiques, il faut avoir le courage d’appliquer la même règle à tout le monde. Sinon ce n’est plus de l’ordre public. C’est de la sélection idéologique. À vous de juger si c’est de la protection de la République… ou du deux poids deux mesures en costume administratif.

John Cleese — the Man with Common Sense Among the Madness. He has been saying the same thing for fifty years: that the emperor has no clothes. Life of Brian is the most conservative film the left ever celebrated – and the most honest film about the left ever made. They loved it for the wrong reasons and have been trying to cancel it ever since, for the right ones. 1. The film is not about Jesus. It is about the crowd – the human need for a messiah, the willingness to follow anyone who seems to have the answers, the transformation of an ordinary man into a symbol by people who need a symbol more than they need a man. Brian doesn’t claim to be the Messiah. He denies it, repeatedly, with increasing desperation. The crowd hears confirmation in every denial. This is not a theological point. It is a political one – about every revolutionary movement, every ideological project that has ever needed a face to follow more than an argument to evaluate. 2. "You’re all individuals!" Brian shouts at the crowd. "Yes, we’re all individuals!" they respond, in perfect unison. One voice at the back: "I’m not." The most precise image of progressive conformity ever produced. The anti-herd herd. The counterculture that became a culture. Still running, unchanged, in every progressive coalition that has tried to agree on anything since. 3. The People’s Front of Judea is the left eating itself – the meeting instead of the action, the motion instead of the movement, the ideological purity that makes the slightly differently named rival organization the real enemy. Not the Romans. The other liberation front. "Splitters." Fifty years later, every progressive coalition still runs this scene at least once per election cycle. 4. "What have the Romans ever done for us?" – Bastiat made funny. The revolutionary who cannot acknowledge that the system he opposes also produced everything he values. The aqueduct. The roads. The sanitation. The wine. "All right, but apart from that…” Every anti-capitalist who types his manifesto on an iPhone is running this scene without knowing it. 5. “He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy." Brian’s mother, against ten thousand people who need to believe. No ideology, no illusions, no patience for any of it. She is the only person in the film operating at full resolution – seeing what is actually there rather than what the crowd needs to see. Common sense as the last form of radicalism. 6. Then there is the scene. Stan announces he wants to be a woman and have babies. Cleese responds: “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can’t have babies?” The room falls silent. The most precise philosophical question about gender ideology ever asked – forty years before gender ideology existed as a political movement. Not cruel. Not dismissive. Just the question the ideology cannot answer – because the ideology’s central problem has always been its struggle with reality. Cleese noticed it, named it, waited for the silence. They cancelled him forty years later for doing the same thing in real life. He noticed that too. 7. Cleese is the most conservative comedian the left ever claimed. He has been saying the same thing for fifty years – with the calm of a man who finds the outrage neither surprising nor particularly interesting. Empirical, rational, anti-performative, genuinely funny precisely because he refuses to manage reality. Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – men being crucified, choosing to whistle. Marcus Aurelius with a ukulele. The one position that survives contact with reality: you are here, the situation is what it is, and the response is yours to choose. The man with common sense among the madness. Still standing. Still asking the question. Still waiting for an answer that isn’t coming.

stevenmarkryan @stevenmarkryan

3 days ago

@elonmusk There were signs:

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China emits as much CO2 in 16 days as Canada emits in an entire year. Australia's annual total takes China just 12 days to emit. Britain's takes barely 9 days. Combined, Canada, Australia and the UK emit about 1.23 billion tonnes a year. China emits that much in roughly 37 days. So, even if all three countries eliminated every tonne of CO2--closing every factory, power station and banning every gas vehicle--China would replace the entire annual reduction in little more than five weeks. Yet, Western governments are deliberately making energy scarcer and more expensive, by dismantling dependable sources, restricting oil and gas exploration and loading industry with carbon taxes and net zero mandates. Steel, chemicals, fertilizers, refining and manufacturing are driven overseas -- often to countries burning more coal. So the emissions do not disappear. Only the jobs, tax revenues and energy security do. The West impoverishes itself. China profits.

Sometimes one book is all it takes. In 1992, Mart Laar took power in Estonia as a 32 year old history teacher with zero economics training. He admitted the only economics book he’d ever read was Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose”, and he simply did what it said. So he ran the most radical free market experiment in Europe and turned a collapsed Soviet republic into one of the richest countries in the East. >ditched the ruble for a kroon pegged hard to the German mark >imposed a pure 26% flat tax with no loopholes while Western economists called it reckless >privatized state industry through open public tenders >wiped out nearly every tariff and subsidy in under 2 years 8 years after the flat tax, Estonia averaged 5.2% growth and peaked at 11.7%, climbing past most of its neighbors. The credentialed experts were wrong. The history teacher with one book was right. “Trust the experts!”

Benjamin Franklin invented himself before he invented anything else. Born the 15th of seventeen children of a Boston candle-maker, no inheritance, no connections, no university – he ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen with a Dutch dollar and the clothes on his back. By forty he had made enough money from his printing business to retire. He spent the rest of his life doing everything else. The inventor first, because that is where the mind showed itself most honestly. The lightning rod. The bifocals. The flexible urinary catheter. The Franklin stove. Each one a direct response to a problem he personally found irritating – he was cold, he needed glasses, lightning kept burning things down. He never patented any of it. When asked why, he said the innovations of others had benefited him freely, and he was happy to repay the debt. This is the entrepreneur’s paradox resolved: the man who understood value creation better than almost anyone in his century and refused to extract it for himself. The entrepreneur second. The printing business was the foundation – but the method was the point. Franklin understood systems, incentives, and the compounding of small advantages before any of those words existed as concepts. He franchised his print shops across the colonies decades before franchising was a business model. He built the Pennsylvania Gazette into the most influential paper in America through a simple principle: be more useful and more honest than the competition, and the audience will find you. He understood that reputation was the only currency that compounded without limit. The postmaster general transformed the colonial mail system from a patronage sinecure into a functioning communications network – effectively building the information infrastructure of a nation that didn’t yet exist. He did it by actually riding the routes himself, measuring distances, timing deliveries, optimizing from observation rather than assumption. First principles, two centuries before the term. The scientist was the one the world noticed first. The kite, the key, the storm. What the kite experiment actually proved was not that lightning was electricity — that was already suspected — but that the terrifying and the mundane were the same thing, that the force killing people on hilltops was the same force jumping between a comb and a piece of paper. The universe was unified and legible. This was the Enlightenment’s deepest claim, made physical by a man flying a kite in a thunderstorm. The statesman last, and perhaps the most consequential. Ambassador to France – the role that made the American Revolution possible. Franklin understood something no other founder quite grasped: that France would not fund the revolution out of idealism, but out of self-interest, and that his job was to make American success appear inevitable to people who needed to believe they were backing a winner. He played the role of the philosopher-sage from the wilderness — the fur cap, the simplicity, the wit — with the precision of a man who had been studying human nature since he was seventeen. It was performance in the service of a genuine cause, which made it the only performance worth giving. He negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution – without informing the French, in violation of his instructions, because he had calculated that the French interest and the American interest had diverged, and America mattered more than diplomatic protocol. He was right. He was eighty years old. He died at eighty-four, the most famous American in the world, having started with nothing and built everything through the application of a mind that never stopped being curious, a character that never stopped being honest, and an understanding of human nature precise enough to found a republic on. Jefferson wrote the Declaration. Washington won the war. Franklin made both possible – and then went home and invented bifocals because he was tired of switching glasses.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

2 weeks ago

Meet Thomas Jefferson – the person. He was six foot two, red-haired, and spoke five languages. He played the violin almost every day. Read six hours a day. Designed his own house. Invented practical devices. Filled his gardens with more than 300 varieties of vegetables.

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Summer has failed to arrive in the High Arctic. Danish Meteorological Institute data show June 2026 averaged -2.2C (28F), by far the coldest June in record books extending back to 1958. And the cold continued through July. By July 27, the monthly mean stood at just 0.01C, effectively freezing. Temperatures repeatedly fell below 0C during what should be the warmest part of the Arctic year, when readings normally climb to 2C or higher. A review of the DMI archive reveals no colder summer run, with 2026 tracking at the bottom of the entire 69-year series. While headlines warn of an overheating Arctic, the region north of 80N has been the coldest we've ever known it in archives dating back to 1958.

Vegan wool is acrylic, and acrylic starts life as propylene, which is a fraction of crude oil. The propylene gets reacted with ammonia and oxygen to make acrylonitrile, a process that throws off hydrogen cyanide as a by-product. The acrylonitrile is polymerised into polyacrylonitrile, spun into fibre, dyed, knitted, and shipped several thousand miles into a shop with a green leaf on the label. That is the jumper. That is the whole story of the jumper. Then you wash it. A synthetic fleece garment can shed as many as 250,000 microplastic fibres in a single wash, around 1.7 grams of it, and a full domestic load of synthetics has been measured releasing over 700,000. Wastewater treatment catches somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent on a good day, so the rest goes into the river. Somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 tonnes of microplastic fibre reaches the world's oceans every year from laundry alone. It is one of the largest single sources of ocean plastic on earth and it arrives by washing machine. Those fibres are in tap water. In fish. In blood. In lung tissue. In placentas. Now the sheep. Her fleece is keratin, the same protein as your hair. Put it in the ground and soil bacteria take it apart within months, releasing nitrogen as it goes, which is to say the jumper feeds the field. Put the acrylic one in the ground and it will still be recognisably a jumper when the person who buried it has been dead four centuries. There is a further indignity in the naming. Acrylic was sold for forty years as the cheap imitation of wool, the thing in the bargain bin that made you itch and went bobbly at the elbows by February. Nobody was fooled. Then somebody in a marketing department worked out that the same fibre, unchanged in any particular, could be relabelled vegan wool and sold at a premium to a customer who believed she was making a sacrifice. Same jumper. Same crude oil. Twice the price and a clear conscience thrown in. One of these fibres is grown annually, on rain, on land too steep to plough, by an animal that has to be relieved of it anyway. The other is drilled. They gave the drilled one the leaf on the label and the word compassionate on the swing tag, and they have been selling it to people who genuinely, sincerely want to do the right thing. Reject the petroleum. Wear the fleece that grew. Save the planet.

🚨 JEREMY CLARKSON BLASTS ANDY BURNHAM FOR APPOINTING ANGELA EAGLE TO RUN THE COUNTRYSIDE. Jeremy Clarkson has just hit the nail on the head regarding the absolute state of Labour's approach to British farming. Growing food in Britain is becoming financially impossible. Clarkson was forced to leave 200 acres of his own farm completely empty this year because planting wheat or barley guarantees a heavy loss! And how does Andy Burnham respond to struggling British farmers? He appoints Angela Eagle as Environment Secretary! 🤡 A career politician who has never worked on a farm and has never run a business in her entire life. As Clarkson rightly said, putting Angela Eagle in charge of the countryside is like putting Alan Carr in charge of the British Army! Our Westminster elite are actively crushing British agriculture with Net Zero red tape, insane energy bills, and family farm taxes. They would rather import cheap foreign produce than protect the hardworking British families who keep this country fed. How can a politician with zero real world farming or business experience dictate the future of our rural economy? SHARE this everywhere to stand with British farmers! 🇬🇧🔥

On est en train de fabriquer un délit d’hérésie moderne. Le gouvernement veut jusqu’à 3 ans de prison pour « fausse information » en période électorale. Traduction : l’État décide ce qui est vrai, et si tu contredis la version officielle, tu risques la cage. L’histoire est un cimetière de « vérités » officielles qui se sont effondrées. Dreyfus était coupable. Le labo de Wuhan était un complot. Demain ce sera autre chose. Le vrai danger n’est pas la fausse info. C’est le silence forcé de ceux qui ont raison trop tôt. Signez. Partagez. Le débat public n’est pas un luxe. C’est la seule infrastructure qui empêche une société de pourrir. petitions.assemblee-nationale.fr/initiatives/i-…

The rarest thing on Clarkson's Farm is not the Lamborghini tractor. It is Kaleb Cooper. A young man, genuinely young, who wanted to farm and does. Who runs the place, knows the ground, drives the machinery he was raised around, and has built an entire working life on a farm before the age most people have chosen a career. On screen he is comic relief, the exasperated professional rolling his eyes at Clarkson. Step back and he is the single most valuable and most endangered thing in British agriculture, and the show never quite says so. Because here is what Kaleb actually represents. The average British farmer is past sixty. In America it is 58 and climbing, with the over-65s now the largest group by far. Right across the developed world the story is identical: the people who grow the food are ageing out, and almost nobody young is coming in behind them. Not because the young do not want to. Because the door has been bricked up. Work out what it takes for a young person to farm today. You need land, and farmland costs a fortune precisely because it is a tax shelter rather than a business, so it is priced out of reach of anyone who actually intends to earn from it. You need capital for machinery that runs to six figures a unit. You need to survive years of thin or negative margins with no cushion. And you need to accept that the reward for clearing all three hurdles is the £144 profit the whole country watched Clarkson find. So the miracle is not that farming is short of young people. The miracle is that Kaleb exists at all. He came into it, stuck at it, and made it work, and the reason a few million people know his name is that a television programme happened to point a camera at him. For every Kaleb on screen there are a thousand villages that no longer have one, where the young left because the maths told them to, and the farm went to the retiring neighbour who was already too big, and the land got a little more consolidated, and the countryside got a little older. Kaleb barely wants to leave the county, let alone the country. When the show finally took him abroad it was an event. And that rootedness, the sheer unfashionable determination to stay put and do one hard thing well, is precisely the trait the entire food system depends on and has spent fifty years making financially irrational. The old farmers are retiring. The young ones were priced out before they started. We are down to hoping enough Kalebs turn up by accident, because we built a country where choosing to feed people on purpose is the wrong financial decision.