Julie Rustyco

In 1991 eight people were sealed inside three acres of glass in the Arizona desert to prove that a carefully designed farm could feed humans without the outside world, and the design had almost no room in it for animals. Two years later the only thing inside that had reliably fed them was a handful of goats. Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. A rainforest, an ocean, a savannah and a farm under one roof, with the door welded shut for two years and nothing allowed in or out. The farm was the heart of it, and the farm was built on the modern idea: crops first, grown intensively, with livestock as an afterthought at the edges. A few African pygmy goats for milk, a flock of chickens, and four small feral pigs chosen because they could live on scraps. The pigs did not last the year. In a sealed box short of calories a pig is a competitor, and the crew killed and ate them. The chickens barely laid, because the glass cut the light and there was nothing to feed them that would make an egg. That left the goats, and for two years the goats were the only source of fat in a world designed around vegetables. The accounts the crew wrote afterwards return to them again and again. The half glass of milk a day was the thing people lived for. When a kid was born it was eaten and the meal was written up like a feast. The men lost nearly a fifth of their body weight, the women a tenth, and the food they dreamed of was never the sweet potatoes they had in abundance. It was the animal they had been given too few of. The plants were also taking the air. To make the crops grow the soil had been enriched with compost, and the microbes in that soil breathed oxygen faster than anyone had calculated. The level fell from twenty-one per cent to fourteen, the air of a high mountain, until the crew could not climb a staircase without resting and oxygen had to be trucked in from outside. The design that put plants first had removed the thing everyone needed most. Nobody has ever run the experiment the other way, with a herd at the centre and the crops at the edge. It would not have needed a doctor to explain the results. They were given three acres and told to feed themselves on plants. They ate the pigs, worshipped the goats, and suffocated.

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.

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Actor David Spade raising awareness that a bill was introduced in California to audit where the $20+ billion dollars in missing homeless money went, it passed but then Gavin Newsom VETOED the bill to block the investigation Yes, this really happened. He blocked bills for an audit MULTIPLE TIMES Bipartisan bill AB 2903 (unanimous passed 72-0 in the Assembly, 40-0 in the Senate) would’ve forced annual public reports on where the money went Newsom vetoed it. Gavin Newsom also vetoed similar bills AB 2570 and AB 2093 “The same broader problem with people paying taxes in California — The homeless, they lose $20 billion, but they want more money for it. That's why people get tired of paying taxes and going, what are you doing? Gavin Newsom just vetoed a bill asking for an audit of where the money for homeless goes. He said, not a chance. You're not gonna see that. That's the problem.”

These defendants terrorized the victim, and took hostage and executed his innocent dog as part of a calculated scheme to extort him. They conspired to intimidate and coerce the victim over a dispute involving a vehicle, and their actions culminated in the horrific execution of a defenseless Husky. Animal cruelty and violent extortion are serious federal crimes, and my office will pursue accountability to the fullest extent of the law.

🔥 TRUMP JUST REPOSTED JFK’S MOST TERRIFYING SPEECH — AND THE DEEP STATE IS PANICKING JFK saw it coming. In 1961. And now, Trump has just made sure 300 million Americans see it, too. The speech everyone’s talking about: Kennedy’s address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 27, 1961. The CIA had just botched the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy was livid. He’d been lied to by his own intelligence apparatus. And he walked onto that stage and said something no president has dared say since. “We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice.” Read that again. Monolithic. Ruthless. Conspiracy. This wasn’t some fringe radio host. This was the sitting President of the United States, on live television, telling the American people that a shadow network of power — operating through intelligence agencies, media complicity, and institutional capture — was working against the republic itself. And then he said the quiet part out loud: “Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” Sound familiar? Sixty-five years later, Trump drops this video on Truth Social. No commentary needed. The speech does all the work. And within hours, the same media outlets that spent four years calling Trump a conspiracy theorist are suddenly very quiet. Here’s what they don’t want you to connect: - Kennedy was assassinated 2.5 years after this speech - The Warren Commission was a joke — even the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 concluded Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” - The files are STILL classified - Trump has been pushing to release them, but the permanent national security state refuses, instead slow-walking the order The timing isn’t random. This isn’t just history. JFK described a permanent national security state that has only grown more entrenched — one that operates beyond elections, beyond accountability, beyond the reach of voters. Kennedy called it “a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, and political operations.” That machine didn’t disappear when he died. It got even stronger. Trump reposting this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a signal. The same forces JFK warned about are the same forces that tried to destroy Trump — Russiagate, two impeachments, lawfare, media blackout, assassination attempts. The playbook hasn’t changed. Only the names. And now the sitting president just reminded the country who the real enemy has always been. The speech that scared them then is the speech they’re terrified you’ll watch now. Sharing this because they’re counting on you not to watch it. Don’t let them win. 🎯

What happened at the North Central animal shelter is unforgivable and a smear on the city. The fact that there is so much loitering going on at the shelter with unhinged people and there’s no security from the city is irresponsible and deadly. I demand that the city put security guards at this shelter and I promise I will make this go widely public until it happens. My heart goes out to the volunteers who had to endure this attack and my heart breaks for the dog that went through this nightmare.

I spent the day on Skid Row. I left horrified. @joey_tuccio and @SWOTNonprofit (SWOT) walk those blocks when the cameras leave. What they document is not simply poverty. It is torture. Dogs with eyes and genitals glued shut. Mouths tied. Paws mutilated. Legs so badly infected they have to be amputated. Cages in the sun, animals standing in their own waste. Puppies pulled from trash and traded for narcotics. Dogs used as testers so a human being does not have to risk a laced bag. Valor tested positive for six drugs, including fentanyl. A pug puppy named North Star fought for forty-eight hours after an overdose and died. Joey has pulled animals from abusers who beat them and left them for dead—and some of those same abusers simply get another dog. They took twelve dogs from one person. Weeks later, she had eight more. Seven were already dead. She told him while smiling. That is not a metaphor. It is a pipeline of breeding, fighting, trafficking, abuse, and overdose a short drive from City Hall. And some organizations are doing God’s work. Starts With One Today. SWOT. The volunteers who spend hours trying to get a terrified dog into a car. The fosters who take a shattered animal home. The people who feed human beings and animals every Sunday. The people who pay the emergency vet bill before breakfast. They are not the problem. The problem is a funding system that cannot tell a saint from a grift. California and Los Angeles write checks to contractors, “harm reduction” vendors, nonprofits, and shelter systems—while the people on their knees in an alley with a crate and a bottle of water fight for whatever resources are left. That is why I am running. Radical Transparency is how you find the programs of compassion and starve the criminal grifters. Audits do not hate mercy. They locate it. They show us who actually pulls the dog out of the heat—and who bills taxpayers without producing results. Cut the thieves, and you do not starve the animals or abandon the people who need help. You free the money for the people already doing the work. I saw it on Skid Row. I will not look away. Follow the dollar. Fund the people pulling animals out of hell and bringing them home alive. Defund the grift. #RadicalTransparency.

Thomas Sowell has a great way of reminding us that intelligence alone isn’t enough. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you never stop to think, question your assumptions, and consider the consequences of what you believe. Being smart and thinking clearly are two very different things.

Here is a question Why would anyone vote for a person tied in with Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and that whole tradition of Bay Area politicians who've taken control of the state from the LA center of power of the 1970s and 80s, when they gave us a huge government fraud program? Devastating wildfires due to their policies about not cleaning up the forests. The highest electricity rates in the continental United States. The highest gasoline rates in the continental United States The:: highest income tax, state income tax, 13.3%. The highest gas tax, the highest number of homeless people, almost the same as Appalachia, 21% below the poverty line, one out of every three welfare recipients, 50% of the births on Medi-Cal, welfare type of thing, 40% of everybody uses that health care system. And we've got high-speed rail not far from where I'm speaking that we've spent $20 billion on, and it hasn't laid, in 10 years -- 12 years -- one foot of track. And this group of people have overseen that." Is this what you want more of?

The party of science, after its historic discovery that stagnant water in sunlight turns green due to algae, has determined that Trump must be impeached.

Milton Friedman casually dismantles the “capitalism = greed & exploitation” narrative on national television: “Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. The only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise.”

Their abdominal muscles are so atrophied, they're so fat and out-of-shape, they started to drown in 3 inches of water... rescue personnel had to lift them out.