Fulham FC and Phillies obsessive. Somebody was a friend of mine. ⚫️⚪️
Delco PA/Buckinghamshire Eng'
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thecrueltruth retweeted
Earlier today I wrote that school destroys critical thinking. Many of you asked for proof.
The proof is Marx.
Marxism is probably the most tested theory in human history. Tested on paper by the best economists in the world. Tested at full scale on hundreds of millions of people, across several continents, for more than a century. And it failed every single test.
A free mind, one that checks its ideas against reality, cannot remain Marxist. If so many people still are, it's not a problem of intelligence. It's a problem of method. They were never taught to verify.
Let's start from the beginning.
In 1867, Marx publishes Das Kapital. Everything rests on one idea: the value of a good comes from the amount of labor it contains. The boss's profit is therefore labor stolen from the worker.
Four years later, in 1871, Menger and Jevons independently show that this is wrong. Value doesn't come from labor. It comes from the usefulness the buyer sees in the good. An hour spent digging a useless hole creates zero value. That's the marginal revolution, and all of modern economics is built on it.
In 1896, Böhm-Bawerk shows that Marx's system contradicts itself: real prices don't match labor values, and Marx knew it. The foundation collapses.
In 1920, Mises asks the question that kills it: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, how does a central planner know what to produce, how much, and with which resources? Answer: he can't. Hayek finishes the job in 1945: economic knowledge is scattered across millions of minds, and no central bureau can ever gather it.
That's the theory. Now the predictions.
Marx predicted the revolution would break out in the most industrialized countries, England and Germany. It happened in Russia, an agrarian country. Wrong.
He predicted workers would grow poorer and poorer under capitalism. They grew richer than at any point in history. Wrong.
He predicted the State would wither away. Everywhere his ideas were applied, the State became total. Wrong.
Now the experiments.
USSR: forced collectivization, famine in Ukraine, millions dead, the Gulag.
China: Mao's Great Leap Forward. Between 15 and 45 million dead depending on the historian. The largest famine in human history, produced by a plan.
Cambodia: the Khmer Rouge killed roughly a quarter of their own population in four years.
Then there are the natural experiments. The most brutal ones, because they eliminate every excuse.
Korea. Same people, same language, same culture, same history. In 1945, the North was richer than the South. Today, income per person in the South is about 29 times higher than in the North. Only one variable changed: the system.
Germany. One people cut in two. One side had to build a wall. Not to keep people out. To keep them in.
Venezuela. The largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people fled the country. 21st-century socialism ended with Maduro captured last January.
Meanwhile, the other system, the one you were taught to hate, did this: in 1820, about three quarters of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today, around 10%. And the biggest escape from poverty in history, China after 1978, happened at the exact moment the Communist Party brought markets back.
From Marx to Maduro, 150 years of data. All pointing the same way.
So how does anyone stay Marxist?
With the magic sentence: "that wasn't real communism."
Think about what that sentence means. A theory that fails every time it's tried, whose believers then declare that none of the attempts counted, is no longer a theory. It's a faith. Karl Popper saw it as early as 1945: Marxism survived its refutations by making itself irrefutable.
A mind trained to think for itself asks one question: how many failures does it take before you question the hypothesis? One, two, ten, forty?
That's exactly the question school never teaches you to ask.
Marx isn't taught as a hypothesis to test against the data. He's taught as a morality tale: there are oppressors and oppressed, and the right side is obvious. You learn the conclusion, never the method.
A four-year-old would ask: "Okay, but where did it work?" Fifteen years of schooling later, they've stopped asking.
A system that teaches you to obey has no interest in teaching you to verify. Because the day you start verifying is the day you start being free.
And that day, you stop being a Marxist.
A few years ago, Peter Thiel wrote to Mark Zuckerberg: 70% of Millennials say they're pro-socialist.
His conclusion: stop calling them stupid, and try to understand why.
His explanation was economic. Too much student debt, unaffordable housing, no capital. When you own nothing, you have no reason to defend the system.
He's right. But that's only half the story.
The other half is school.
School destroys critical thinking. Methodically. For fifteen years.
You learn to recite instead of question. To find the expected answer instead of the true one. To obey authority instead of reasoning for yourself.
When you've spent your youth outsourcing your thinking to an institution, it feels natural to outsource your life to an even bigger one: the State.
That's why so many end up Marxist. Not by conviction. By conditioning.
And that conditioning is about to become a handicap.
We're entering a world where AI does everything conformist, predictable and standardized better than we do. The only value left is thinking differently.
To create value tomorrow, you'll need to be neurodivergent.
And someone who thinks differently and reasons from first principles almost always ends up seeing the same thing: the State, as it works today, destroys more value than it creates.
It's no accident that Alex Karp created a fellowship at Palantir dedicated to neurodivergent talent. To him, in the age of AI, there are only two ways to have a future: master a real trade, or be neurodivergent.
But I'll go further than Karp.
I believe neurodivergence isn't the exception. It's the natural state of the human mind.
Look at a four-year-old. They ask hundreds of questions a day. They take everything apart. They refuse any rule they don't understand. They think from first principles without even knowing it's a thing.
Then they go to school. And we spend fifteen years normalizing them.
School doesn't shape minds. It sands them down.
The future belongs to those who survived the sanding.
thecrueltruth retweeted
Now imagine water is nationalised.
🚨 NEW: Labour MPs have summoned c2c rail bosses to explain the worsening train delays following nationalisation
Since being nationalised, the proportion of trains arriving on time has plummeted from 94% to just 71.5%
[@thetimes]
thecrueltruth retweeted
Back in 2009 English singer song writing legend Morrissey offered a stark warning and look into the future for young Russell Brand. Russell looks on trying to take it all in.
thecrueltruth retweeted
The worst-performing Democrats in competitive Senate races were the candidates Bernie endorsed. (link in next tweet, no paywall)
thecrueltruth retweeted
I'll be honest, it was another night of me just being in awe at times of LeBron James' impact. It was felt on both ends of the floor tonight, but his command of the offense is just something to behold.
13 PTS, 10 REB, 8 AST, 1 STL, 1 BLK
Here's his best plays of the night ⬇️
thecrueltruth retweeted
Long post worth the read. I have a close friend who flies private jets. He flew Lear 60 for over 15 years and now flies a Gulfstream. This is a copy and paste of his response to me asking him if I thought Ice was the issue.
“We always fly in ridiculous cold temperatures.”
“Usually you get the bad ice when the temperatures are like 0 to negative 20. Believe it or not, there's a point where it gets too cold for ice. At negative 40, you pretty much can't get ice. Besides that, the airplane is equipped with hot wings and hot tail.”
“I flew the Lear 60 for like 15 years. It's a no joke airplane and probably the most dangerous airplane I've ever flown. It has a super critical wing. The airflow has to be perfect. When it gets into rough air and turbulence, it will easily stall. It has stalled on me at 41,000 feet just because we got into some turbulence. (On the way to Palm Beach as a matter of fact. ) we recovered and got her flying again around 30,000 ft. Scary
But here's the problem. This airplane has a terrible coffin corner. (At high altitudes) what that means is, you fly in a really narrow window where if you lose 20 knots, it stalls. And if you gain 20 knots, it goes into overspeed. The air goes supersonic over the wing and it goes into a high speed stall, or worse, a Mach tuck.
So if you stall, the normal recovery is to push the yoke forward to lower the nose and gain air speed again. At low altitude, you can push really hard and recover quickly. But in the 60... if you push hard, it will gain air speed and go into a high speed stall, it doesn't take much. It's very sensitive. The 60 has super short wings that don't make much lift. So then you high speed stall, and the computer is yelling at you... OVERSPEED! So then you pull back and enter a low speed stall. And you go back and forth trying to keep it in the air speed window.
This whole thing is pretty scary. And you should recover basically by using your finger tips using super small corrections. You can't over do it. If you try to muscle the recovery, she gets mad and will become unrecoverable. If she enters a mach tuck. You're done.”
“I taught the Lear 60 to other pilots and mentored them. I told them... this airplane has a soul and it's trying to kill you. Do not ever try to top the weather. Don't go over a thunderstorm. Go around it. If it means a half hour longer, then do it. Going over the thunderstorm will go into turbulence that you might not recover from.
These pilots went right over a thunderstorm. I think it stalled which caused them to drop down into the thunderstorm and ended up in mach tuck. They picked up so much speed that it ripped off the horizontal stabilizer. At that point... chuck Yeager can't fix it.
These same pilots did something similar a couple months ago. ATC got mad at them. They poked the bear one too many times.
This is not a beginner airplane. The Gulfstream would never do this. It has HUGE margins of error and won't stall like that. But then again... it's got HUGE wings. It's a pussy cat.
The Gulfstream is like driving a 4 wheeler. The Lear 60 is like riding a uni cycle.”
The left never learns: ever.
There is one category where the UK is clearly the global champion by a large margin, the number of millionaires leaving per 100k inhabitants. Do you blame them, though? They are told every day how bad they are and that they need to pay even more taxes. They simply prefer to move to countries that welcome, respect and reward hard work, entrepreneurship, innovation and job creation for others, instead of punishing them.
At the same time, about 3,000 new welfare recipients are added in Britain every day. Yep, you read that right. One doesn’t need to be a maths genius to understand what will happen in a country losing its best performers and their taxes, but having millions of people on unconditional welfare benefits.
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thecrueltruth retweeted
Forget all the huge supermarkets and their mawkish Christmas adverts, this was the best Christmas advert - Enniskillen pub Charlie's put out this advert back in 2023. It’s brilliant.
thecrueltruth retweeted
“I’m a top 1% income earner”
In the USA that means you earn over $748K and pay 33% effective rate of tax.
In the UK you earn over £216k ($289k) and pay 41.5% effective rate of tax.
The UK punishes success and therefore it gets less of it.
thecrueltruth retweeted
On behalf of the British people, I would like to apologise for the slave trade. I am sorry we were the first great power in history to turn its guns on it. I am sorry it cost us around 2,000 sailors to free 150,000 people they would never meet. I am sorry the rest of the world took so long to follow.
Slavery did not begin with Britain. It is as old as civilisation. Babylon wrote it into law. Rome built an empire on it. The Vikings sold Englishmen through the slave market at Dublin. In 1625 Barbary corsairs took 60 men, women and children out of a Cornish church; by 1640 Parliament was told 3,000 to 5,000 English people were held in Algiers alone.
Every great power of the age took part in the Atlantic trade. Portugal and Spain for a century before an English ship did. Then the Dutch, the French — and the British, who in the eighteenth century carried more than anyone. That is the record. It is not disputed here.
Then a nation turned on the trade that had made it rich.
Wilberforce's bill was beaten year after year. On 25 March 1807 it passed. Then Britain did the part the critics never mention — it sent the Royal Navy to enforce it. The West Africa Squadron sailed in 1808, two ships for 3,000 miles of coast, and hunted slavers for nearly sixty years. Britain paid Spain and Portugal to open their ships to search. HMS Black Joke ran down the slaver El Almirante in 1829 and found 466 people in her hold.
Around 2,000 British sailors died doing it — most of fever, to free people they would never meet. 1,600 slave ships seized. 150,000 Africans set free.
In 1833 Parliament borrowed £20 million to end slavery across the Empire. The debt was not finally redeemed until 2015. The United States needed a civil war. Cuba held slaves until 1886. Brazil until 1888 — eighty-one years after Westminster voted.
Yes, we took part in the trade. Every power of the age did. None of them fought it like we did.
So yes. I will apologise. I am sorry it cost us so much. I am sorry the rest of the world took so long to follow.
That is not something you apologise for. That is something you teach.
#history #britishhistory #royalnavy #westafricasquadron
thecrueltruth retweeted
Okay, let’s tackle the $45 trillion LIE properly. British India:
Growth deposits within the Imperial banking system sat at 1.19 (Rs billion) in 1870. This increased to 7.88 in 1939.
Between 1896-1913 annually, financial savings were 2-3 % GNI. By 1940-46, this increased to 3.3%.
When Britain arrived to the subcontinent, formal education was virtually 0%. In 1891-92 primary school education was 8.1%. By 1947, this rose to 43%. Secondary schools & colleges were 2,133 in 1881, rising to 4,904 by 1921-1922.
Interest rates for peasant loans were 30-40% in the early 1770s. This decreased to 10-37% for 1930-35.
In 1886, irrigation in British India was 23,098,822 acres. This increased to 51,317,373 acres in 1936. Cultivated agricultural areas were 237,249 square miles in 1870 & 401,368 square miles by 1939.
Irrigated & cultivated land sat at 12.4% in 1885-86, rising to 22.1% in 1938-39.
Railway route miles totalled 838 miles in 1860. By 1940, it was 41,852 miles.
The population was 170 million in 1750; it was 425 million by 1950.
Death rates in 1881-91 sat at 40-42 per 1000. By 1931-41 this dropped to 30-32 per 1000. From 1941-51, another drop to 25 per 1000.
Child labour employment in factories was 6% in 1891, dropping to 0.6% by 1938. In 1850, factory employment was near zero, rising to 2 million by 1940.
Now, on the matter of the wretched slave trade. Two articles I previously wrote:
The fact that collapses the case for slavery reparations
spectator.com/article/the-fa…
Britain’s remarkable fight to end the slave trade
spectator.com/article/britai…
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Sources regarding India:
Basu, Aparna. 1974. The Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 1898-1920. Bombay: Oxford University Press.
Chaudhary, Latika, Bishnupriya Gupta, Tirthankar Roy, and Anand V Swamy. 2015. A New Economic History of Colonial India. Routledge.
Lalvani, Kartar. 2016. The Making of India : The Untold Story of British Enterprise. London, England: Bloomsbury.
Masani, Zareer. 2022. “The British Raj: An Assessment.” In Ethics of Empire. Oxford.
Roy, Tirthankar. 2011. The Economic History of India, 1857-1947. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.
thecrueltruth retweeted
Rent freeze, we have a problem: affordable housing can’t get financing. thecityreporter.nyc/2026/11/…
thecrueltruth retweeted
All it would take is two minutes of online research to discover that rent control has never improved access to rental properties.
🤖 Made with AI
thecrueltruth retweeted
Britons now spend more out of pocket on healthcare than Americans, while satisfaction with the NHS has collapsed from 70 per cent to 26 per cent since 2010.
Is the post-war bargain – in which everyone pays in and everyone has a stake – beginning to break down? And would charging to see a GP really be so outrageous?
Watch in full | youtu.be/gX7EcVjnr2Q @simonjenkins4 @Simmons__
thecrueltruth retweeted
I spent quite a lot of time in government trying to think through how to revive the Commonwealth but all of this thinking was depending on Botchwey taking a different line from Scotland on the organisation’s purpose: that it should not essentially be a biannual summit for the Caribbean to pressure Britain to pay reparations.
That, as CHOGM in Antigua approaches, has not come to pass. The summit attendance is barren with none of the major middle power leaders who have no interest in such a media fracas. Seen from Delhi in particular the whole things seems eccentric and self harming. However, Britain still needs a plan. Our objective should be as follows.
First, the organisation itself should be left to the Palace to steer into a kind of Royal super NGO and convening platform. But the organisation itself is so badly run and dysfunctional even this however is a challenge. It is not a British organisation of course but belongs to the member states equally. Yet if the Palace wishes to have conversation about post-colonial legacy, an NGO-like civil society gathering, not an inter-governmental summit with a communique is the appropriate venue to do good cultural work.
Second, the UK should wind down political investment and encourage others to do the same. Realistically this should involve the UK delaying summits, ending funding and slowly ending Prime Ministerial attendance. Efforts should be invested instead to develop a CANZUK summit as the key summit where with those leaders we engage allies through a non-hijacked platform and secretariat. That is the kind of format, G7-like, an Indian-leader might wish to attend and where work could be achieved. The King’s desire for CHOGM to continue as before is not a good enough reason for the foreign policy damage and time wasting.
Third, the brand Commonwealth should be salvaged by the UK working with India and CANZUK states to host a major investment summit open to all member states. Building something functional, in this new format without a broken secretariat in charge, will do vastly more for our reach and prestige than clinging to something that is essentially just a poorly attended summit that actually harms our reputation and post-colonial relationships by providing the premier venue for the Caribbean reparations campaign.
Needless to say the King’s presence can be integrated into all this new summitry. But this, not His Majesty is the essential. In an important way, the Commonwealth’s early evolution post-war was a way for Attlee and Churchill to engage with Nehru. We need to build totally new summit with this brand around investment that can work again with India, not be hostage to what is an old, broken and counterproductive format. Investment, of course, not manufactured dead end rows are ultimately what the Global South needs too.
It is time to admit that the Commonwealth does not only not serve its purpose, but works against its premise of post-imperial comity.
This is because it has become a little more than a poorly attended biannual summit whose only purpose seems to be to for Caribbean countries to lobby Britain for reparations. This does nothing but worsen these relationships.
My view was Botchwey was the last chance to try and pull the organisation back from this dead end but this had clearly failed. CHOGM is going ahead without any major reforms to its structure or meaningful agenda, resented by those in government involved in it as a result.
It is now only a matter of time before Prime Ministers stop attending our next King cuts the cord and eventually a new CANZUK-type summit or body is pursued.
