TANSTAAFL. Spread freedom and liberty for the individual.
Morgantown, KY
Joined April 2013
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Steve Brown retweeted
Stephen A. Smith, A LIFELONG DEMOCRAT VOTER, reminds the Left that Obama was called the “Deporter in Chief.”
“Obama protected the borders better than Trump.”
“He deported 3.1 million people.”
“They called him the Deporter in Chief.”
“They did features on television about ICE.”
“Tom Homan, the Border Czar, was honored by Obama.”
Obama gave Tom Homan an award for the same work Democrats now call cruel. The policy didn’t change. The President did.
Democrats keep complaining about things the last Democrat president did first.
Steve Brown retweeted
I have a serious question.
Democrats are anti-oil & natural gas.
How does supporting the democrats bring down the prices of gas & electricity when they are against drilling?
Steve Brown retweeted
Dear Undecided Voters,
Imagine 10 people on a bus.
3 vote to drive off the cliff.
2 vote to stay on the road.
5 don’t vote at all.
The bus goes over the cliff.
Not voting isn’t neutral. It just lets the people who do vote decide for everyone — including you. In this case, the smaller group wins, and everybody loses.
Not voting is the dumbest choice.
Go vote this November.
Steve Brown retweeted
For everyone acting like we lost something with BioWare— it’s not even remotely the same people. It’s just a corporate brand name. Let it die.
Steve Brown retweeted
The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, on the grounds that the Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
Steve Brown retweeted
In June 1965 a 27-year-old Scot weighing 456lb stopped eating, didn't start again for 382 days, and the fat he was carrying kept him alive for every one of them.
Angus Barbieri worked in his father's fish and chip shop in Tayport, across the Tay from Dundee. He had eaten his way past 32 stone. He checked himself into Maryfield Hospital for what his doctors intended as a short fast.
It went well. He felt fine. He asked to carry on.
The doctors agreed, warily, and let him go home, provided he came back in regularly for blood and urine tests. He lived on tea, coffee, sparkling water and vitamins. No food. A week became a month. A month became a season. The weight came off at about three-quarters of a pound a day. Day 100 came and went, then 200, then 300, with the hospital checking his blood every step and waiting for something to break.
Nothing did.
For long stretches his blood sugar sat at around 30mg per 100ml, about a third of normal, the kind of reading that has junior doctors reaching for a drip. He went about his days perfectly lucid.
On 11 July 1966 he sat down to his first meal in over a year: a boiled egg and a slice of bread with butter. He weighed 180lb, under 13 stone. He had lost 276lb, very nearly 20 stone, and it went into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest fast in history. Five years on he was still around 14 stone, and he lived until 1990. His doctors wrote him up in 1973 under the driest title in medicine: Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration.
His brain kept working the whole year, which is the part the textbooks of the day had no answer for.
In 1967, in Boston, George Cahill's team supplied one. They ran fine tubes into the blood vessels draining the brains of three obese patients five weeks into a fast and measured what the brain was burning. It had switched to ketones, made in the liver from body fat, as its main fuel. The organ every textbook said ran only on glucose was running on fat, and running happily.
So every thought Barbieri had that year was powered by the fat around his middle.
A human body carries months of fuel and a brain built to use it. It was shaped by two million years of hunts that came good one week and failed the next, and it treats an empty plate as an ordinary Tuesday.
Angus Barbieri had 382 of them.
Steve Brown retweeted
On March 3, 1873, Congress gave itself a 50% raise, made it retroactive, and paid it out in cash to members who had just been voted out of office. The fallout took 119 years to fully play out.
It happened on the very last day of the session.
Congress was rushing to pass a big appropriations bill to keep the government running. Tucked inside was a provision pushed by Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler. It raised the salary of members of Congress from $5,000 a year to $7,500.
That alone would have been controversial. But the raise was also made retroactive, back to the start of the term two years earlier. That meant every member walked away with a $5,000 lump sum in back pay. At a time when most American workers made a few hundred dollars a year, that was a fortune.
And it went to everyone, including the lame ducks. Dozens of members who had lost their elections and were leaving office the next day collected their bonus on the way out the door.
The same bill doubled the president's salary from $25,000 to $50,000, and raised pay for Supreme Court justices and cabinet members. Because the raises were attached to a bill funding the government, President Grant signed it. His second term started the next day.
The public exploded.
Newspapers called it the Salary Grab and the Back Pay Steal. Editorial cartoons showed congressmen stuffing their pockets. Church groups, farm organizations, and town meetings denounced it. Some members got so much heat back home that they returned the money to the Treasury or gave it away to charity, trying to save their careers.
It didn't help much. The country was also reeling from the Crédit Mobilier railroad bribery scandal, and later that year the Panic of 1873 kicked off a brutal depression. Voters were in no mood.
When the new Congress met, one of the first things it did was repeal the raise, except for the president and the Supreme Court. In the 1874 elections, the Republicans lost control of the House in one of the biggest swings of the century.
But one state decided to go further.
In 1873, Ohio dug up a constitutional amendment that had been sitting around since 1789. James Madison had proposed it as part of the original Bill of Rights. It said that any pay raise Congress votes for itself can't take effect until after the next election. It hadn't gotten enough states back then, and it had been basically forgotten. Ohio ratified it as a protest.
It still didn't get enough states. It went back to collecting dust.
Then in 1982, a sophomore at the University of Texas named Gregory Watson wrote a paper about it for a government class. He argued it was technically still alive because it had no deadline. His professor gave him a C.
Watson was so annoyed that he started a one-man letter-writing campaign to state legislatures. It worked. State after state ratified it. In 1992, more than 200 years after Madison wrote it, it became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.
In 2017, the University of Texas officially changed Watson's grade to an A.
It's called the Salary Grab of 1873, and almost nobody learns about it.
Steve Brown retweeted
My coworker's mother passed away last November.
She left her modest $190,000 house to him clear and free, no mortgage, completely paid off after thirty years of factory work.
He moved into the home in January to finally settle the estate.
Two weeks ago, a letter arrived from the state Medicaid estate recovery office.
Because his mother spent four months in a rehabilitation facility before she passed, the state quietly slapped a retroactive $114,000 lien against the property title.
He called the state health department, frantic, asking how a hospital stay could bankrupt an inherited home that had no mortgage balance.
The caseworker sighed and told him:
"Federal law requires state programs to claw back healthcare costs from deceased estates. The house cannot be sold or transferred until the balance is cleared in full."
He offered to pay a monthly settlement.
They said no. The full $114,000 is due in 60 days, or they foreclose on the property at a public auction.
A lifetime of working-class savings, wiped out overnight by a retroactive healthcare lien.
You don't own generational wealth.
You're just holding a property title until the state finds a legal mechanism to repossess it the moment you die.
Steve Brown retweeted
I honestly do not understand how any American who is not already a literal Communist or a literal Jihadist could vote Democrat after hearing what Slotkin said below.
This is LITERALLY totalitarianism. It's not the fake "fascism" the Left likes to accuse the Right of, it is the REAL THING.
Undeniably.
Irrefutably.
This is a sitting member of Congress who was in the CIA saying that dissent from what she believes will result in imprisonment.
This is straight out of Solzhenitsyn. Straight out of Orwell. This is something an early Nazi would have said in 1932 under the Weimar Republic.
Please please PLEASE share her words with everyone you know. The Democrat/Media Complex will try to bury this. It is up to us on social media, on blogs and via texts and emails to get the word out.
The only way to stop these monsters is to make sure that voters who don't really keep up on politics understand the actual threat, see it with their own eyes and hear it with their own ears.
Please. Spread the word to anyone who will listen. And even those who won't listen.
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
@ElissaSlotkin
Steve Brown retweeted
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Steve Brown retweeted
Starlink slowed down for a couple days in Ukraine so a bunch of Europeans and a bunch of Democrats have declared that Elon Musk is the most evil person to ever live.
"Elon is the worst human being ever."
"As soon as our technology catches up to Elon's, we will boycott his products!"
"SpaceX and Starlink are dead!"
Look at you fools go. All because Elon allegedly didn't do everything in his power to help Ukraine.
Wait until you dumb f*cks hear about your hero, Barack Obama.
After Putin annexed Crimea and moved 30,000 troops to the Ukrainian border, Obama refused to give Ukraine weapons to defend itself. And he refused for years.
Surely you Ukraine fans remember that right?
Surely you remember the President of Ukraine standing before Congress, begging for weapons to defend Ukraine. You must because you all love Ukraine.
Surely you remember Obama's speech in 2014 at the NATO summit. If you don't, you should watch Fox News because they are currently playing my video of his speech.
During his speech Obama said that Russia was a regional power that posed no threat to America, even after Putin invaded part of Ukraine.
How could that be? We are told now that if Putin takes Ukraine, he could take the entire world. Was Obama lying back then? Impossible, Obama is incapable of that.
During that same speech Obama also said that Ukraine should work out its own future and that many Ukrainians in fact had allegiance to Russia. Obama said that countries regularly break international law and that it wasn't our problem. How could he say that?
Obama sounded like "Putin's Puppet" right? You fans of Ukraine must be so angry at Obama.
Here's a video of the Ukrainian President begging before Congress for weapons after Putin took Crimea.
Say it you Ukraine lovers. Say that Obama is worse than Elon Musk. Will you? Nah. You all are frauds.
Also included in the video is Biden in 2018 being asked about the fact that Trump gave Ukraine the weapons to defend itself that Obama would not. Biden said that he agreed with Trump and that he had spent years arguing to Obama to supply Ukraine those same weapons.
Come on Ukraine fans. Speak out about Obama like you do about Elon and Trump. 😜
Steve Brown retweeted
Dumb A$$ @EmmanuelMacron these are not youth students! 👇🏾
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
この写真は2021年にスウェーデンで撮影されたギャング抗争のもので、フランスの抗議活動とは全く関係がありません。
samnytt.se/se-hela-klankr…
