THE HORROR OF BEING LONELY AT SEVENTY. by Michael Whelan The cruelest part of growing old isn't knowing that life is getting shorter. It's wondering how much of it you'll have to spend without being loved the way you once were. At seventy, loneliness is not simply an empty house. It is a body that still remembers what it feels like to be loved. God, how I miss being held. I miss holding Rebecca's hand. The beautiful simplicity of our fingers finding each other without either of us giving it a thought. I miss cuddling in bed after a long day, feeling her warmth against me, knowing that whatever horrors the world had waiting, for that one precious moment, we were safe. I miss someone telling me I look handsome. I miss hearing those three ordinary, extraordinary words: "I love you." And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, I miss saying them to someone who could whisper them back. These are the little things we take for granted until death comes along and steals them. For years, I cared for Rebecca as Parkinson's and dementia slowly took possession of the woman I adored. Cancer had already ravaged my own body. I was exhausted, frightened, and sometimes so overwhelmed that I prayed for one afternoon when nobody needed me. Now I have more afternoons than I know what to do with. What a cruel joke. People think loneliness is about having nobody to talk to. They're wrong. I can talk to friends. I can laugh. I can attend a gathering and appear perfectly happy. Then I return home. Nobody asks how my day went. Nobody reaches across the couch to touch my arm. Nobody notices that I've put on a nice shirt or that I'm unusually quiet. And the bed. Dear God, the bed. There is something almost unbearable about having an entire side of a mattress available when you'd surrender everything you own to feel someone breathing beside you again. At seventy, society seems to assume our need for tenderness has somehow expired. It hasn't. My heart is seventy. My need to be loved is ageless. I still want affection, companionship, laughter, romance, and the glorious comfort of knowing someone is genuinely happy that I walked through the door. I don't want to spend my remaining years merely remembering what love felt like. I want to feel it again. And perhaps that is what makes loneliness at seventy so terrifying. I am not finished loving. I am simply living in a world where the person who knew how to love me best is gone. But love does not vanish just because the person who awakened it is gone. It remains in the hand that still reaches across the sheets, in the words that rise to my lips with nowhere to land, in the part of me that still believes tenderness is worth wanting. So every night, when I turn out the light, my hand finds the place where hers used to be. I always tell her how my day went. And for one aching moment, in the darkness, I am not only remembering what I lost. I am remembering that I am still capable of love. And perhaps that is not the loneliest truth of all. Perhaps it is a promise. The heart that can grieve this deeply has not gone empty. It is still open. It is still reaching. Somewhere beyond the silence of this house, there may be another hand waiting to find mine—not to replace Rebecca, because no one could, but to meet the love that remains. Until then, I will keep getting up. I will put on the nice shirt. I will answer the phone, accept the invitation, sit beside someone who needs company, help other caregivers how to get through another day and let the world surprise me when it can. I have lost the life I knew. But I have not lost my capacity to live. And as long as I can still love, still hope, still reach toward another human being, my story is not over. The bed may be empty tonight. But I am still here. And here, even at seventy, is not the end.

In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop? Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something. This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel. A. Where the book comes from. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee. She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize. B. The story. In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good. And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?" John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them. The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt. C. The core idea. The strike isn't about money. It's about consent. Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless. D. What Musk just did. This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many." Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse. Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle. Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore. E. The difference that changes everything. Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark. Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant. That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything. F. Why now, and not in 1957. In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes. In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave. G. The ending. For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done. In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it. That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child. The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.

QT a sunrise 🌅 My place 🫶

יש כאן שאלה טובה מאוד שאני רוצה להפוך לציוץ נפרד - ״למה בחלק מהרחובות יש בלגן אטומי וברחובות ליד (שבהן יש חנויות טובות לביזה) אין כלום?״ התשובה די פשוטה: הפאטרן הזה של איזורים שבהם יש ביזה נרחבת ואיזורים ממש ליד שאין בהם כלום הוא סימפטום של העובדה שעבודת הונדליזם והביזה היא עבודה מקצועית, מתוכננת ומתוזמרת מראש. ואני אסביר: מה שמאפיין את כל ההתפרעויות בצרפת עד כה, כמו ניצחון סן ז׳רמן, ״חג המוזיקה״ וכו׳ הוא ה״הרסנות הספונטנית״ שנוצרת על ידי הגעה של המונים של אנשים מהפרוורים הקשים אל תוך הערים הגדולות בעיקר בשעות הערב - בחסות העלטה ובחסות המון גדול שזורם ברחובות - קל מאוד לבצע מעשי ונדליזם ושוד שלמשטרה קשה להבחין בהם עד שכבר ״מאוחר מדי״ או לפחות, זה מאפשר מספיק זמן פעולה קריטי לפני שכוחות משטרה יכולים להגיע למקום. בגלל זה, הצורה של איזורי השוד במקרים האלה תמיד היתה חופפת לצירי ההתקדמות של ההמון. אתמול קרה דבר שונה בתכלית. היו צירי תנועה של הפגנות שאושרו על ידי רשויות המשטרה, היו מעט התפרעויות שבוצעו גם לאורך צירים אלה אבל אלו היו בעיקר התפרעויות ספונטניות רגילות ולא מאורגנות. **רוב הנזק** בוצע באיזורים **רחוקים יחסית** מההפגנות והוא בוצע בצורה מאורגנת בשיטה חכמה מאוד - קודם כל, צוותים מיומנים ערמו בריקדות סביב סקטור מסויים. בריקדות שלא נתקלו בשום התנגדות משטרתית כי פשוט המשטרה לא היתה שם כי היא היתה עסוקה באיבטוח הציר של ההפגנות המורשות. אחרי שהבריקדות הוקמו, בדרך כלל הן גם הוצתו. אבל לא רק הבריקדות הוצתו אלא גם הוצתו מספר מוקדים בסמוך כמו מכוניות או חזיתות של בתי עסק, דלתות עץ וכו׳. המטרה היתה שתושבים יתקשרו למכבי האש שישלחו ניידות כיבוי אש שתאלצנה למשוך מים מברזי ההסנקה ולכוון את מאמצי הכיבוי למספר מוקדים [בד״כ בצומת] מה שמייצר דה-פקטו - חסימה יעילה של צירי התנועה - מעבר לבריקדות הבוערות עצמן. מהרגע הזה, הבוזזים היו חופשיים בעצם לשבור באין מפריע את חזיתות החנויות שעיניינו אותם. העניין הוא שהם גם ״עמדו בזמנים״ לפי הדיווחים, שעת ה-ש׳ היתה 16:30. - כשאתה בוזז בתוך סקטור ״מאובטח״ ע״י בריקדות בוערות וניידות כיבוי שמתחילות לזרום *רחוק* מצירי ההפגנות וכשכל הביזה מתרחשת סימולטנית - גם כוח משטרה של מאות אלפי שוטרים - לא יצליח להגיע במהירות (על ידי סיורים רכובים או טרנזטים - כי הצירים סגורים) או לזרום בזמן בריצה לכל אתרי הביזה כדי לעצור אותה. זה מה שבעצם מוכיח שמדובר היה בהתארגנות מקצועית עם יד מכוונת וצוותים ממושמעים. על מי נופל החשד? על הצוותים המיומנים של אנטיפה ואירגוני שמאל רדיקליים אחרים, כולל ״מוחים מקצועיים״ שמגיעים מחו״ל. על אנשי ״צרפת הבלתי נכנעת״ של מלנשון ועל סוכנים של רוסיה הפוטינסקית. [זוכרים את מגיני הדוד הכחולים שצוירו על בתים של יהודים מיד אחרי ה-7 בספטמבר? את בית הכנסת שנצבע בירוק? את סימני הידיים האדומות על האנדרטה לזכר השואה? את החבלה במערכות הכוונת הרכבות לפני המשחקים האולימפיים? - כל אלו הוכחו כפעולות חבלה רוסיות]. המודוס אופרנדי הזה הוא גם מה שמסביר את ה״פליאה״ בקרב אנשי בובו [השמאל הבורגני הצרפתי] שמצייצים ציוצים בסגנון ״על איזה מהומות מדברים אני גר פה בפריז והרחוב שלי מלא חנויות ושקט״. כן כפרה. אתה לא באיזור שטורגט מראש על ידי מארגני ה״מחאה״. ולכן ״לא הבחנת בכלום״.

"We take back what they took, institution by institution, exactly the way they did it." We can't do that. They were able to insinuate themselves into the institutions because the rest of us believe in fair play, in tolerating differences, live and let live. The institutions they control are now quick to identify and cast out heretics. They know how to identify infidels, and they will not permit their own tactics to be used against them. We'd have to seize the institutions by force, simultaneously, and eject them all. Or build parallel institutions and nuke theirs from orbit. Our ability to grab the levers of power might already be lost, or if it isn't, the window is narrowing. Yes, a handful of determined psychopaths can imprison a nation even when the majority objects. The Bolsheviks and the Maoists did it. These people may also have done it.

Boomers with $4 million in assets Paying $200/month for Medicare Collecting $5k/month social security All funded by millennials who can’t afford to buy a house or get sick 😳