Bohemoth retweeted
There's yet another Westminster Hall debate later today on the UK applying to rejoin the EU.
We expect some or all of these 'zombie statistics' to reappear, all debunked below... 👇
“4% hit to productivity” / “4% hit to GDP”
“15% reduction in trade”
“£100 billion”
“2.2% of GDP” / “£25 billion”
“8% of GDP” (based on “doppelgängers”)
“6% of GDP” (based on micro-level modelling)
"£250m a day in lost tax revenues"
britain-unbound.org/explaine…
Bohemoth retweeted
“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”
Jews were first. Now it’s the Christians.
The Jews of the Arab world were driven out. Time is running out for the Christians.
A century ago, Christians were about 13% of the Middle East. Today, about 3%.
Iraq: 1.5 million before 2003, less than 250,000 now.
Syria: nearly 2 million before the war, a remnant after.
Bethlehem: 86% Christian in 1950, about 10% under the PA.
Gaza: 1,000 left under Hamas before the recent war.
Lebanon is emptying. In Egypt, Copts have been beaten and their churches burned. In Saudi Arabia, public Christian worship remains illegal.
Only one country in the region has a Christian population that is growing, free, and not fleeing.
Israel. 184,000 Christians living as equal citizens. Their numbers are rising. Their churches are open. Their holy sites are reachable. Arab Christians sit in the Knesset.
Western churches write papers on Jerusalem and stay quiet as their own people are erased from the map in the region where the faith began.
The Saturday people were expelled.
The Sunday people are next. Everywhere in the Middle East except the Jewish state where they can and do grow and thrive.
Bohemoth retweeted
The UK government recently concluded a public consultation period on proposals that could require social media platforms to give greater visibility to UK public service media like the BBC and other “trusted news” sources in users’ feeds.
This week, the U.S. government provided formal input to the consultation and asked that the UK withdraw any plans to mandate that platforms algorithmically amplify government-preferred media. We raise serious free-speech and economic concerns about such plans and the potential impacts on users, independent journalists, and businesses beyond the UK’s borders.
Bohemoth retweeted
At midnight on February 6th, earlier this year, the doorbell to our apartment rang. The doorbell was followed by a pounding on the door. I answered the door and a security person in our building handed me his phone. It was my oldest daughter Eloise. She had found my 26-year-old daughter unconscious on the floor of her apartment and had called 911. The EMT team was already there, but they did not know what was wrong with Lucy or to which hospital they would take her.
I threw on some clothes and jumped in an Uber heading east toward Brooklyn. (Lucy lived alone in Williamsburg.) On the way, I learned that they were taking her to Elmhurst, a City trauma hospital in Queens. I arrived about five minutes after the ambulance to join Eloise, Lucy’s mom, and a friend, and waited to learn what was wrong.
After about 15 minutes, I asked a nurse where she was. I looked over his shoulder to his computer. Next to her name, it said “non-responsive.” I walked into the emergency room and wandered around looking for her until I found her unconscious on a gurney surrounded by several doctors and nurses.
By about 2:30am with the results from a CAT scan, Lucy’s doctors had determined that she had a massive brain hemorrhage and would need an emergency hemicraniectomy to release the pressure on her brain and remove the blood from the hemorrhage. I called our wonderful friend and family doctor Eddie Fisher and explained what was going on. He woke up Josh Bederson, Chairman of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai, to find out more about Zach Hickman, the neurosurgeon on call that night. Dr. Bederson said Hickman was an excellent surgeon, which was comforting as we had no choice.
The surgery to save Lucy’s life began around 3:15am and finished around 5:30am. It was successful.
The following day, I joined Lucy in an ambulance while she was being transferred to Mount Sinai on Madison Avenue. Later that day, we determined from Lucy’s Oura ring that her hemorrhage had occurred around 9am, which meant that more than 19 hours had passed from the time of the hemorrhage to the completion of the surgery to release the pressure on her brain (I only wish @ouraring had an alert for this kind of a medical event. Imagine it could call a family member if the wearer doesn’t cancel the alert).
I later learned that the standard of care is not to do surgery to save a patient with a large brain bleed if more than five hours have passed since the hemorrhage. Even when the surgery is done, I was told that the likely outcome for the patient is a few months in a nursing home and death from pneumonia.
When I met Lucy’s doctors, I did my best to inspire them: “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” And I promised that whatever we learned we would make available to everyone.
Dr. Chris Kellner, her neurosurgeon, and Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System have led Lucy’s care team since that day. Words cannot describe the remarkable and compassionate care that she has received beginning with the EMT team and then from nurses, doctors, therapists, and the army of people who have worked to save her and return her to life. To this day, we have a daily Zoom where we discuss her progress and make adjustments to her care. While her care and oversight have been incredible, the learnings for the Mount Sinai team have also been elucidating and will assist in the care of many others.
Lucy began in a bad place. She was in a coma for several weeks and then awoke not being able to breathe on her own, unable to walk, see or speak.
Over the last six months, she has recovered her cognition – she understands everything including her circumstance – is able to walk a hundred or more steps at a time with assistance, is making progress with sounds, vowels and consonants and the beginnings of speech, but she remains unable to see.
Each day, she makes a little progress, and daily progress compounds. Every day I tell her that she just needs to make a little progress and it won’t be long before she is back.
We remain optimistic that Lucy will return to normal function. It will likely take years, but I believe it is only a matter of time, hard work, and technological progress, along with some, and perhaps a lot, of divine intervention.
Many people have been praying for Lucy and we are incredibly grateful for the prayers and remarkable support she has received. Lucy’s friends have been with her every day since the beginning, and their presence and friendship have saved her life and helped to rebuild and maintain her spirit. And on a very positive note, Lucy’s challenge has brought together our entire modern family who have all been incredibly devoted to her care and recovery.
Lucy's vision and other faculties may require some form of brain computer interface, work that is underway at Neuralink, Precision Neuroscience, Science, Synchron, Nudge, and other companies in the space.
If you are going to have a devastating brain injury, now is the best time in history for that to happen. We are living in a world when you can be confident that the blind will soon see again. We are going to do everything we can to help make that happen, including by assisting existing companies in the space.
With respect to our promise to make Lucy’s care available to others, we have made good progress. In May, a real estate colleague made me aware of a 93% vacant, brand new, 400,000 square foot Class A+ purpose-built biotech facility on West End Avenue between 65th and 66th Streets that missed the market and was available for sale. The Pershing Square Foundation acquired the building 60 days later.
We also put under contract an adjoining 130,000 square foot building at 320 West 66th Street that is currently being used by Saturday Night Live for studio space. The building has 35-foot ceilings with massive column-free spaces that can be converted into superb rehabilitation facilities. We will close on the SNL building in December.
We are also acquiring an adjoining vacant lot with additional air rights. With just the existing zoning rights, we can add a 150,000 square feet for a total of 680,000 square feet, a lab footprint larger than Rockefeller University, and that’s without including the potential for an upzoning that would allow for substantially more buildable area on the site’s 3.4 acres with spectacular views of the Hudson.
Our goal is to build the world’s greatest brain research, rehabilitation, recovery, human optimization, and longevity institute. We have named it The Ackman Oxman Institute or the AOI for lack of a better name, but also to reinforce the point that Neri and I and our family are all-in on the mission.
The AOI will be patient-centric. It will not be an academic research institute that produces lots of papers, a Nobel Prize winner or two, but little if any results for patients. We will be laser-focused on cures, treatments, devices, rehabilitation and exercise equipment, and targeted and basic research with a goal of massively accelerating the time from idea to innovation to production to helping a patient.
While the AOI will be a non-profit, it will have highly commercial instincts. The AOI will have its own venture funding and will work to develop innovations to create companies that we will seed, assist, and spinout to ensure technologies, treatments, techniques, and drugs get to patients as promptly as possible.
On one 3.4 acre campus in what is still the greatest city in the world, we will do neurosurgery, neuroscience, rehabilitation, nutrition, BCI and device development, human trials, hyperbaric oxygen treatments, and life extension programs, and we will mandate and incentivize collaboration among the teams with no silos, politics, bureaucracy, or any other constraint that is inconsistent with the mission.
Mount Sinai will be an important partner and deservedly so, but it won’t be our only hospital or medical school partner as we don’t believe any institution has a monopoly on the best ideas or the best talent. We don’t believe in exclusive relationships because that is not in the best interest of patients.
Five years ago, we considered launching a brain institute inspired by Neri’s mom who sadly died from Alzheimer’s. We couldn’t make the math work as the real estate was too expensive and we believed it would be too difficult to recruit the best talent from universities to our effort.
Since then, the real estate became available at a 70% discount, universities became a much less attractive place to work due to politics outweighing meritocracy, protests that disrupt learning, the curse of antisemitism, and a decline in funding. Fortunately, during the same time, I made sufficient personal economic progress to make the AOI possible.
The advance of AI in the last few years will also enable us to greatly accelerate our mission. AI still has a lot to learn about human intelligence and the brain, and the AOI should be at the forefront of the interplay between the brain and AI.
Today, I am making a public filing disclosing a gift from Neri and me of ~$400 million or 10,000,000 shares of Pershing Square Inc. (PS) to the AOI. It is very early days for Pershing Square so these shares are intended to anchor the long-term work of the AOI as the shares compound over time while generating what we expect will be a growing stream of quarterly dividends to fund the Institute.
We will also be announcing an additional gift of similar and potentially greater size which won’t be in the form of Pershing Square stock to provide the AOI with the short- and intermediate-term runway necessary to enable it to achieve its goal of becoming a self-sustaining institute, which reinvests all of its revenues, royalties, and the economic rewards of company formation to advance the fields of brain health and human longevity.
Neri and I have chosen to anchor the funding of the AOI to maintain vision alignment and limit the need for the organization to focus on fundraising. We expect the AOI to be the best-resourced brain, rehab, recovery, and longevity institute in the world.
We are grateful to have been able to form a board which includes Dean Kamen (our generation’s Thomas Edison), George Yancopoulus (CEO of Regeneron), James Rothman (Nobel Laureate), Bernardo Sabatini (neuroscientist), Chris Kellner (neurosurgeon), Olivia Flatto (CEO Pershing Square Foundation), Neri Oxman, and myself.
We have recently identified a CEO who we expect to announce by October along with other key hires, and are beginning searches for a Chief Scientific Officer, a Chief AI/Technology Officer, a Chief Operating Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, and other key leadership roles.
If you find what we are building compelling and want to be part of the leadership team that creates and builds the AOI from a standing start, please send an email to: [email protected] with a short note as to why you believe you can help. Please include your best three ideas for the AOI along with a summary of your background and your most important accomplishments.
We promise strict confidentiality to those expressing interest in working with us.
We have learned from Lucy that the brain can recover from even catastrophic injury. There is so much more work to be done as the mind is a terrible thing to waste.
For details from my Pershing Square SEC filing see:
sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
Bohemoth retweeted
This is my favourite clip of Rod Liddle on the hypocrisy of Labour politicians.
We have lost an absolute legend.
Bohemoth retweeted
It is incredible how far the Democratic Party has moved politically. Just listen to @BarackObama on immigration 20 years ago. @HillaryClinton spoke similarly back then.
The question of course is why. The answer I believe is not a change in fundamental views, but rather a tactical one. At some point, the Democratic Party believed it had a higher likelihood of staying in power if our country had open borders.
When did this take place? What was the catalyst for this reversal of views?
This might be the most amazing one yet. More from Senator Obama on immigration.
Obama not only said that illegals must not be allowed to work here, he went one step further and said that employers should be forced to prove that they offered the job to American citizens before they are allowed to hire guest workers.
Democrats today would call this racist and xenophobic.
Bohemoth retweeted
Look at the nice fluffy left-wing people in the UK:
Physical violence is acceptable when ...
"Somebody is racist"
All voters 29%
Labour voters 33%
Green voters 45%
"Somebody holds fascist views"
All voters 27%
Labour 25%
Green 53%
"Somebody holds homophobic views"
All voters 18%
Labour 21%
Green 32%
"Somebody's sexist"
All voters 22%
Labour 29%
Green 29%
Time and time again, in surveys (like this one by More in Common) you find a large part of the Left (especially Labour and Green voters) justifying or excusing violence in the name of opposing racist/fascist/homophobic/sexist views.
This is the real problem we have in Western societies that lies upstream from Charlie Kirk, Trump's attempted assassinations, Quentin Deranque, and maybe Ann Widdecombe, too.
We need to talk about left-wing extremism and violence. If surveys found large numbers of right-wing people excusing violence it would be on the front-page of major newspapers. But there's nothing.
@SecRubio is right.
Bohemoth retweeted
If the rumours are correct and Ed Miliband is indeed Foreign Secretary it will be most nauseating political appointment of my lifetime.
In the summer of 2013, evidence emerged that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people – crossing what US President Barack Obama had set down as his ‘red line’.
David Cameron sought parliamentary approval for Britain to join limited military action alongside the United States in defence of what he called the longstanding ‘international taboo’ against the use of chemical weapons. Miliband chose instead to whip Labour MPs against the Government – and the motion failed.
Not only was it a day of shame for Britain, it had global impact. Obama feared a repeat in Congress and so backed away. Assad was thus sent a clear signal: butcher your own people with chemical weapons and the West will look the other way.
It also sent a signal to Putin that the West was weak, and he soon after invaded Crimea.
Miliband’s decision to do all he could to block action against Assad is one of the most disgraceful acts of any British politician in living memory.
I hope with all my will that Miliband is nowhere near the FCDO.
Bohemoth retweeted
Say you have £100M.
To pay the additional £1.8M each year (2% on £90M) you would need to pay a £4M dividend. Of that £4M dividend, you get zero ALL of it is tax.
Given that most scalable assets pay less than 4% yield as it is, there is no point in owning UK assets. All serious investment dries up and the economy becomes a backwater, stagnant economic wasteland.
Bohemoth retweeted
How about you tell us about that time you were Post Office Minister during the Horizon Scandal then coined £275,000 helping the law firm representing the Post Office?
People f*cking committed suicide over it, you utter scumbag
Which is why you avoid the press by goofing around on jet skis like a giant pr1ck
Bohemoth retweeted
To the Americans:
I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.
And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:
You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.
This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.
Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.
This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.
But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.
This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.
And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:
Thank God for the United States.
Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.
Long may your admirable country dominate the world.
Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.
May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.
Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.
Thank God for the USA.
Happy 250th.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Bohemoth retweeted
FYI, I'm going to be posting plenty of charts over the next few days to challenge some of the usual narratives about the economic impact of Brexit... 🤓
1⃣ "the vote to leave caused a collapse in the pound"
Sterling did fall sharply in June 2016, but it had already started to weaken in 2015 as a consensus emerged that the currency was overvalued.
This was reflected in the UK’s large current account deficit, which bottomed out at 5.2% of GDP in 2016 but has since roughly halved.
The strong pound had also contributed to three years where inflation was below the official target of 2%, averaging 1.5% in 2014, zero in 2015, and still just 0.7% in 2016. The fall in the pound did then lift inflation, but only to a peak of around 3% in 2017.
Moreover, the dollar-sterling exchange is not necessarily the best measure, because the US currency has been strong across the board.
In trade-weighted terms the fall in the pound between 2015 and 2016 did little more than reverse the rise since 2012. This is even clearer in this alternative chart, which shows the pound against the euro.
In short, at most the leave vote accelerated a fall which was already underway - and this correction was not necessarily a bad thing.
Bohemoth retweeted
In September 1990, my village in Valencia hit 46°C.
It was the exact kind of natural climate volatility this ancient planet has unleashed for billions of years.
Today, Valencia, Rome, and Athens are actually sitting well below their seasonal averages. Yet, the media is in a coordinated meltdown over a standard two-week warm patch in the UK, France, and Belgium.
As a geospatial engineer who wrote a thesis on climatology, I’m positioned better than many to talk about the topic, the entire narrative relies on a broken view of data systems.
The formula is simple: zoom in on a tiny slice of geography, filter out the cool regions that ruin the story, and label a hot afternoon a global catastrophe.
The funniest part is the sheer hubris of the solution.
We are told the Earth's massive climate system operates like a living room thermostat, that if humans just stop CO2 emissions, we can magically freeze the weather at our preferred temperature.
Pretending we can micromanage global macro-cycles with carbon taxes.
But as long as panic funds the machine, and people don’t think by themselves, they’ll keep selling the front-row tickets.
Bohemoth retweeted
Democrats never quit being the party of horrific systemic racism. They just rebranded.
“Colored” switched to “People of Color” 🙄
Violence on black bodies switched to violence on millions in the womb.
They still call black people racial slurs if they don’t OBEY the party.
CA and NY have the most segregated schools.
They still have their slave catchers, like Kamala Harris, who would lock up black parents for letting their kids miss a day of government school.
Yep, Democrats never changed!
Bohemoth retweeted
A lot of people are still blaming this surge in net migration to the UK on Brexit (even many of those who think "freedom of movement" is a good thing)... 🤷♂️
1⃣ in reality, non-EU migration was always in the control of member states. UK policy here may have changed after Brexit, but this was not due to Brexit.
2⃣ the surge partly reflected the return of students after Covid and the targeted schemes for people from Hong Kong and Ukraine (again, not Brexit itself)
3⃣ this chart makes it even harder to argue that Brexit inevitably means labour shortages (another gripe of the EU rejoiners!)
Bohemoth retweeted
While Mad Ed still tries to pretend that renewables are going to bring power prices down, the Ofgem data show that even with gas prices hit by the war in the Middle East, the long-term increase is still mostly due to Net Zero policies.
Bohemoth retweeted
Honestly I’m very amused people think Andy Burnham is the great reformer from outside the system.
He’s been THE SYSTEM for over 25 years right inside the machine…. Researcher, special adviser, MP, cabinet minister, Health Secretary, Shadow Home Secretary and Mayor.
He aligns perfectly with the global governance consensus, it’s all there…
Net Zero on acid, regional technocratic governance, green energy nonsense economics, managed migration, anti-fracking, “inclusive growth” and pro EU, all from the same worldview promoted by the UN, WEF, NGOs and corporate ESG structures.
He doesn’t want to change the system. He IS the system 🤡
