Very interesting article...
The same outlets that will not print the method of a single suicide will tell you how many times a mother stabbed her children, what song a mother sang after hanging her son, and what the influencer posted before she killed her family. Every rule newsrooms adopted to hold back the Werther Effect gets thrown out when the victims are children and the killer is a parent. I cannot prove that any one of these parents read about the last one. Phillips could not prove that any single young man had been inspired by prior suicides. But the pattern was his evidence. The pattern is plain here. If coverage of a suicide can inspire the next suicide, coverage of a mother killing her children can inspire the next mother.
The press should change how it covers these stories, but better coverage only slows the spread. It does not explain why so many parents are standing at the edge to begin with.
ewerickson.substack.com/p/th…
Phil Knut retweeted
You punish bad Republicans in the primaries.
You vote to save the country from leftists in the general.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Phil Knut retweeted
Why is it that boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to stockholders but members of Congress have no fiduciary duty to the American people?
Truth👇
home depot has fallen off...
bunch of disinterested people walking around with scanners and no expertise
that place used to rule. you’d have a project and a 67 year old ex-foreman named Big Jim would walk you through your entire project. no more...
my local Ace Hardware is where it’s at now. that’s where Big Jim and Joe and Old Ed, the guy who owned a plumbing business for 30 years, work now...
happy to help and talk your ear off about washers and polyurethane deck sealant for twenty minutes... you know, the good stuff.
😂🤣Amen!
being married is funny because you'll be chilling, having a bowl of cereal, and your wife will say
i hate these bowls, don't you?
and you'll shrug becuase you don't care and she'll say
i do, they've bothered me for a while now. we need new bowls.
and you'll shrug again because you have honestly, not once, ever considered the bowls at all
then a few days later there will be all new bowls in the kitchen.
and you'll be eating the same cereal in a different bowl, chilling, and she'll say
i love these new bowls
and you'll shrug again because you still don't care but she's happier and the cereal is still good and you didn't do anything at all
HERO ❤️🇺🇲
I reread this every year.
I cry like a baby every year.
Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero.
Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked.
Lisa: I understand. Can they see you?
Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake.
Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor.
Lisa: Are you okay?
Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again.
Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true?
Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan.
Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call.
Lisa: I promise.
Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy.
Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.)
Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol.
Todd: I understand. I’ll be back.
Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot.
Lisa: What are you going to do?
Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out.
Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.
Phil Knut retweeted
Sixty-two years and $22 trillion later, the U.S. poverty rate sits at roughly 11 percent, almost identical to where Lyndon Johnson found it in 1964. The government ran the most expensive social experiment in human history and produced nothing measurable. Bureaucracies perpetuate themselves, and this policy worked exactly as designed.
When Washington transfers purchasing power to the poor through SNAP, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and 126 other overlapping programs, it doesn't eliminate scarcity; it relocates decision-making from individuals to administrators. Those administrators develop career interests in perpetuating dependency, because a solved problem eliminates their department.
Free market thinkers identified this perverse incentive structure before Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act. Every dollar taxed from productive activity carries a deadweight cost before it reaches anyone's dinner table.
Capital formation lifts people out of poverty. You build wealth through savings, property rights, and voluntary exchange, none of which $22 trillion in redistributed spending actually produced.
Phil Knut retweeted
🚨 Hear me out…
I’m sick of pretending this is a functioning country with a functioning government.
Congress is not “divided.” It’s not “gridlocked.” It’s not “just politics.” It is a criminal class of 535 people who have spent decades selling this country piece by piece while lecturing the rest of us about democracy, values, and the rule of law.
They pass spending bills they don’t read. They pile debt on people who weren’t even born yet. They take money from foreign interests, lobbyists, PACs, and industries they regulate, then act shocked when anyone calls it what it is: influence-peddling.
They protect their own. They investigate their enemies. They never investigate themselves with the same hunger.
The worst part isn’t even the money. It’s the moral rot. A government that can lecture parents, churches, and working people about morality while shielding predators, burying files, redacting names, and treating elite sex-crime networks like a scheduling inconvenience has no moral authority left. If the same evidence, the same flight logs, the same sealed names, and the same “we can’t comment” stonewalling applied to anyone outside their class, those people would already be in prison. For this crowd, it becomes “complicated,” “ongoing,” or “not the right time.”
Foreign interference isn’t some abstract threat they discovered last week. It’s a business model. They take the money, take the trips, take the talking points, then wrap themselves in the flag and tell you anyone who notices is a conspiracy theorist.
They will fight harder to protect their donors and their secrets than they will fight to protect the border, the budget, or the people who actually pay for all of it.
I don’t hate “government” as an idea. I hate this government, the one that treats citizens like a revenue stream, treats accountability like an attack, and treats the most disgusting crimes as a club you only get punished for if you’re not connected.
No more polite language.
No more “both sides” anesthesia. If Congress had a shred of honor left, they would open every sealed file, name every protector, cut the foreign cash pipelines, and submit themselves to the same laws they impose on everyone else. They won’t. That’s the point.
They are not public servants. They are a protected class. And the country is rotting under them.
- B
Phil Knut retweeted
For a country that fought a Revolutionary War over taxation without representation…
We sure have a lot of people in Congress claiming to represent us while spending our taxes on things we never supported.
Phil Knut retweeted
Two people. One starts investing at 20 with $500 a month. One starts at 30 with $1,000 a month, twice as much.
At an assumed 10% annual return (an illustration, not a promise): the early starter reaches $2,655,555 by 60. The double investor: $1,973,928.
10 extra years of compounding beat twice the money. Start now!
Putting a mouth guard, just pulled from boiling water, into your mouth & biting down... were you worthy of playing youth football?
Phil Knut retweeted
A man making $500,000 a year went on vacation and met a guy sitting by the water in the middle of a Tuesday.
No laptop. No emails. No meetings.
He asked him, “What do you do for work?”
The guy told him he did odd jobs when he needed money. His house was paid for. He didn’t owe anybody anything. Most days, he spent time with his family, fished, cooked, and sat right where he was sitting.
The wealthy man laughed.
“You could be doing so much more.”
He started telling him how he could build a business. Work harder. Make more money. Hire workers, and eventually build something big enough that he wouldn’t have to work anymore.
The guy asked, “And then what?”
“Well, eventually you could retire.”
“And do what?”
“Whatever you want. Spend time with your family. Go fishing. Sit by the water. You wouldn’t have to answer to anybody.”
The guy looked around for a second.
Then said,
“Isn’t that what I’m doing now?”
Whenever you find yourself chasing more, come back to this story and remember what you’re chasing it for.
