Eén foto, duizend woorden. Jeanne d'Arc met hijab en Palestijnse vlag. #Frankrijk #Frankrijk #Frankrijk #Frankrijk

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.

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

The @USNavy and Shield AI have committed $400 million to advance X-BAT toward flight testing. The Navy’s latest $150 million modification supports Defense Exportability Features, building exportability and technology protection into X-BAT early in its development. Shield AI is matching that amount. Along with a separate $50 million Navy and @DIU_x action announced in August, the two funding actions total $200 million in government support and $200 million in Shield AI investment. Shield AI and key suppliers now have 500 engineers building the flight-test aircraft. Flight testing begins this year. Autonomy for the world. The greatest victory requires no war.

Snowpoint Ventures Co-Founder and General Partner @DougPhilippone discusses defense tech investment, reindustrialization, advanced manufacturing, government demand and risks of a sector bubble with @MorganLBrennan. $PLTR $LMT $RTX $NOC $GD $BA cnbc.com/video/2026/10/07/do…

This is why Peter Thiel was so successful. One of his biggest inspirations was the French philosopher René Girard for his work on mimetic desire (and it's consequences) - here's how it links to @shaunmmaguire's points: "I left Silicon Valley... Because it's a monoculture... The most extreme group think of any place on the planet." Girard's central thesis was basically: humans don't desire things autonomously, they copy the desire of others. People fiercely defend the belief that their desires are individual/authentic (according to Girard "romantic illusion") when in reality they subtly train each other to want the exact same thing (in this particular monoculture it would be status associated with being a tech founder - ARR metrics, raise sizes, valuations, "frontier" ideas etc). "So what do they do? They start stack-ranking each other... founder of co $100B market cap > founder of co with $50B market cap..." Girard believed that when actors are in close status, they become mimetic rivals. Everyone is competing for the same narrow definition of success within the same tight ecosystem. They end up trapped in an ordered hierarchy where minute differences in status ($100B vs. $50B drive some sort of psychological rivalry). "Pure toxicity that nerfs creativity... Reject this nonsense. Stay weird. Think independently." Girard believes that intense mimetic competition creates homogeneity, sheep like or heard like behaviour. Instead of thinking about how can I create novel technology (a Facebook, a SpaceX, an AirBnB) new entrants focus on "how do i beet my peers at the game?" This was probably the most dangerous part of a monoculture made up of mimetic rivals (from an investors point of view) - because theres no real alpha left - the competition just competes it all away. Everyones fighting over the same piece of the pie. Where do you think he got his "competition is for losers" line from? He got it from Girard. Founders Fund was basically Thiel's vehicle to invest in anti-memetic ideas that Silicon Valley actively ignored. 1. Palantir - defence was taboo + governments were the anti-thesis of any start-ups philosophy 2. SapceX: Manufacturing and CapEx intense businesses were to be avoided - light scalable software was better 3. FB: Literally a real world social graph built around mimetic cultures (here i guess he was like ok we can profit of mimetic cultures lol). Everyone should go study René Girard and then go look at all of Thiel's conference talks - it's the same lines over and over again. pretty cool! p.s. this is not exclusive to SF - it's exclusive to humans

Iran is an evil force that has caused more violence and death around the world than any other nation-state in our time. It exports terrorism, arms proxies, destabilizes the region, and is still trying to build nuclear weapons. That has to be ended. We tried the softer approaches. We gave them money, eased economic penalties, and chased diplomatic off-ramps. It did not work. It got worse. The regime pocketed the relief, rebuilt capacity, and kept advancing its program and its regional war machine. We are now down the road of the last remaining option: kinetic war. Kinetic pressure has a real chance to succeed, but only if you see it through. You cannot stop short. Yet here we are, stopping way short. That partial campaign has left us in a trickier position than when we started. A regime that has absorbed the first blow, adapted, and retained residual strike and maritime capacity is more dangerous than the one we faced at the outset. The only coherent path is to continue until the residual capacity is driven low enough that they are the ones asking to stop—and then to lock in the terms while the pressure is still on. Fifty press outlets and a small army of “experts” will tell you that air power cannot win a war. They repeat the line as if it were settled doctrine. What they almost never mention is Japan. Curtis LeMay’s campaign did not rely on perfect intelligence or modern precision munitions. It relied on relentless weight: firebombing, then the atomic strikes, combined with naval blockade and the Soviet entry into the war. Japanese leadership confronted the reality that continued resistance meant national extinction and chose survival over ideology. That is the historical standard. The claim that “air power cannot win” simply erases the case that proved otherwise. Iran is different from 1945 Japan in ways that should make the job more efficient, not less. We possess exquisite intelligence LeMay never had. We know where the remaining launchers, production nodes, command facilities, and underground sites are. We have already degraded the majority of Iran’s defense-industrial base. Economic isolation is further advanced than anything Japan faced: oil revenue is constrained, the currency is under pressure, and the regime’s ability to reconstitute is limited by sanctions and physical destruction. Precision weapons let us apply pressure with far less waste than area bombing. The intelligence advantage and the economic chokehold are force multipliers. DIME is the actual operating system of strategy: Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic instruments of national power. They only work together when the military instrument is used with enough weight and duration to change the other three. Diplomatic talks without sustained military degradation produce temporary pauses that Iran uses to reload. Information operations without visible cost to the regime are noise. Economic isolation without continuous strikes on residual military and industrial capacity allows the regime to adapt and endure. Precision air power is the tool that ties the other three together. When we attack hard, we force the regime to choose between its external projection and its internal survival. That is the only choice that has ever produced results against ideologically committed authoritarian systems. Yes, smart weapons have logistic constraints. Stocks of certain precision munitions are finite. That is real. But the deeper truth is the one almost no one wants to state plainly: offensive attrition is cheaper, in blood and treasure, than indefinite high-end missile defense and continuous escort operations in the Strait. Every launcher we destroy, every production hall we collapse, every command node we sever reduces the volume of missiles and drones that our forces and partners must later intercept. Every day we pause, that residual capacity regenerates or simply remains available, forcing us to keep expensive defensive systems on high alert, to keep ships and aircraft tied down on escort duty, and to absorb the cumulative cost of reacting instead of deciding. Degrade them harder now and the defensive burden shrinks. Pause and the defensive burden grows—week after week, month after month—until the cost of managing an unfinished war exceeds the cost of finishing it. That is the real trade-off. It is not primarily about munitions inventories. It is about which side of the equation we choose to live on: the side that imposes costs, or the side that indefinitely absorbs them. None of us outside a very small circle around the President can see the full picture. Everyone involved is working inside a thicket of real constraints—allies’ opinions across the region, the timing of the election, energy prices, the stock market, a press that often seems determined to work against us, and more. Those constraints are real. They do not change the central fact: the one major element we have not finished is the kinetic side of this conflict. Decisive military effects still require sustained pressure measured in weeks and months, not days. Political space for an unfinished war shrinks as the calendar advances. If residual Iranian capability is still able to threaten shipping, launch intermittent strikes, and force expensive defensive postures into the fall, the political and strategic cost will be higher than finishing the job in the present window. The window is open. Completing the kinetic campaign is the piece that remains. The situation is already worse than when we started if we do not finish. We have killed senior leaders, destroyed large portions of the industrial base, and demonstrated the ability to strike at will. Yet the regime still fields residual missiles and drones, still contests the Strait, and still calculates that American patience is limited. A partially degraded Iran that retains the capacity to impose costs is more dangerous than the Iran we faced at the beginning, because it has now absorbed the first blow and adapted. The only coherent path is to continue the offensive until the residual capacity collapses under the combined weight of precision strikes, economic strangulation, and the demonstrated reality that there is no sanctuary. That is how air power finishes wars. Anything less leaves the problem larger than we found it.