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@mtaibbi So many people make everything partisan. It's not... Both parties suck; they are both terrible and we as a country deserve so, so much better.

@JacobKinge We shall see what happens but I can't deny the logic.

I predict that in the coming weeks, pro-Bitcoin insiders like Eric Trump, Lutnick, and others in the White House will whisper in President Trump’s ear to post something “bullish” on Bitcoin to try to trigger a rebound and boost market confidence. The so‑called Bitcoin Strategic Reserve has lost roughly $5B in the past few months, and Democrats are already mocking them, creating strong incentive for him to play along. This won’t generate organic or lasting demand. It’s a cheap narrative push aimed at pumping the price short term and luring in fresh buyers as exit liquidity for insiders.

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world. Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime. Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it. Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine. This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely. There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues. As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises. Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically. This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language. Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape. That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored. So the silence continues.

Anyone who understands the Middle East knows this: the fall of the Iranian regime would be more consequential than the fall of the Berlin Wall, not because the Islamic Republic is a global power, but because it has been a central tool for China and Russia and a major engine of terrorism in the Middle East. Its collapse would rip out a core pillar of their influence and fundamentally change global power dynamics.

@merlinscapital @_The_Prophet__ You're talking like you have something against million dollar soap dispensers or something. popsci.com/technology/boe…

@_The_Prophet__ Oh shut up. As someone who is aware of the abuse that goes on in defense this is a cheered change by defense contractors not scamming the government

⚡️Trump is building a wartime command economy without declaring war. He’s not trying to reform the defense sector. He’s preparing to subsume it. Strip the optics. What he’s doing is establishing direct state control over strategic capital flow using loyalty pressure, populist framing, and fiscal levers. He’s not negotiating with defense executives. He’s declaring them subordinate. This is a test run. He is setting precedent to apply this model across sectors: •Energy will be next. •AI after that. •Healthcare eventually. The pattern is simple. Any industry touching sovereignty, logistics, or frontier technology will be absorbed under mission-state logic. Private firms will still hold the equity, but the state will dictate the capital structure, production cadence, and narrative frame. Buybacks are forbidden. Dividends are conditional. Salaries are capped. Output is mandatory. Time is compressed. It’s a shift from incentive alignment to compliance enforcement. From persuasion to control. From “make defense great again” to “you now work for me.” No modern president has dared cross this line because it exposes how thin the veil of corporate independence actually is when national purpose is invoked. Trump just crossed it. And the deeper layer: this only works if he’s confident the military, capital markets, and the public will comply. That’s the real signal. He knows they will. Or he knows enough of them will that the others won’t matter. This is how American Caesarism starts. Not with tanks in the streets. With cash flow commands.

My Venezuela experience as head of trading in the region for Cargill. Cargill was/is the leading producer of critical staple ingredients such as flour, pasta, vegetable oil, and rice in VZ. I am not saying I agree with grabbing the dictator, but I did have a front row seat to the damage a kleptocracy did to innocent people. 1. The government took over our "minute rice" facility at gunpoint because we were "gouging" the nation's poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside 2. There are 1000's of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime. 3. The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populous became ever more dependent on the government handouts. (PS this is the mayor of New York City's proposal. 4. Dollars- We needed dollars to go buy raw materials like wheat from places like the US and Canada. The government would periodically allocate us some dollars that could only be spent for raw materials and freight. Eventually only the local companies that can and would pay bribes got dollar allocations. We had several facilities closed for lack of raw material 5. My employees liked working for Cargill. The office was an armed compound with access to a gym, high speed internet, global communications, and a weekly box of basic staples. Cargill provided a safe and secure environment if only for the working hours. 6. Employees became very close to others inside the apartment building. Going out on the street with a desperate population was not advisable. 7. I needed wood pallets for feed. We tried to export wood pallets to swap for grain. We refused to pay the bribes it would take to export the pallets 8. I once tried to set up a closed loop wheat planting to flour mill supply chain. A. They came and stole all the seed wheat for food. When we tried to ship in seed wheat in containers via US donors there was no way to get it out of the port without it being stolen 9. Livestock- Our feed business completely collapsed. Even if you could raise a pig, you couldn't defend it from being stolen. People with guns were hungry. 10. Employees- In the end my highly skilled team alone with other highly educated people chose to leave. Cargill often found jobs for them in other Latin countries. The regime was more than happy to see the well-educated leave the country. Setting these employees up with high quality stable jobs after fleeing remains one of the best things I ever did in my career. No one remembers millions in trading earnings. This is a short list. In my opinion the first money spent needs to happen now and it needs to be food. The US is already on the clock. The current regime does not care if it starves the population. The orgy of theft will actually accelerate if they believe their days are numbered. VZ should be an outstanding customer of US grown ag products. Rice, bread wheat, veg oil ect. Feed the people first. Jeff Kazin Former head trading Cargill

@BTnewsroom just a casual observation, that dude is nice on that cow bell.

NOW: Massive march in NYC against Trump's war on Venezuela

You're not "free" yet. You're "under new management". But we hope it works out.

@chasedownleads @unusual_whales en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba%E2%8…

@unusual_whales Just purchased Cuba from a country vending machine Guess who owns the vending machine

BREAKING: Trump confirms they are "looking at Cuba." Cuba is something that we'll end up talking about, because they're a badly failing nation.""

This is a no brainer. Here’s why. The “buy, borrow, die” strategy is the single biggest loophole in the American tax code, and Ackman just proposed the cleanest fix anyone has ever put forward. Let me walk through the mechanics. Step 1: You build $10B in company stock. You never sell it. No taxable event occurs because capital gains only trigger on realization. Step 2: You need $500M to buy a yacht, fund a foundation, or just live large. Instead of selling stock and paying 23.8% federal capital gains, you walk into Goldman Sachs and borrow $500M against your shares at 5-6% interest. Under federal tax code, loan proceeds are not income. You now have $500M in liquid cash and owe zero income tax. Step 3: You keep borrowing. Year after year. The interest payments are trivial compared to the tax savings. A 6% interest rate on $500M is $30M annually. The capital gains tax you avoided? $119M. You’re saving $89M per year by borrowing instead of selling. Step 4: You die. Here’s where the magic happens. Your heirs inherit the stock at “stepped-up basis,” meaning the cost basis resets to current market value. That $9.9B in appreciation that was never taxed? It vanishes from the IRS’s perspective forever. Your heirs sell a small slice to pay off your outstanding loans, keep the rest, and start the cycle again. This is generational tax avoidance at scale. Elon Musk had 238 million Tesla shares pledged as collateral in a 2024 SEC filing. That’s one-third of his total holdings. Larry Ellison has $24 billion in Oracle stock pledged. The research firm Audit Analytics found Musk’s pledged shares alone account for more than a third of all shares pledged across the entire NYSE and Nasdaq combined. These aren’t edge cases. This is standard operating procedure for anyone with nine or ten figures in appreciated stock. Now here’s what Ackman proposed: If you borrow against company stock in excess of your cost basis, treat the loan as a deemed sale for tax purposes. Example: You bought $100M in stock. It’s now worth $1B. You borrow $600M against it. Under current law, you owe nothing. Under Ackman’s proposal, you’d owe capital gains on $500M because that’s the amount exceeding your basis. The IRS would treat it as if you’d sold $500M worth of stock. You’d pay the 23.8% federal rate. You’d still have your shares. You’d still get future appreciation. But you couldn’t extract the economic value of gains while pretending no realization occurred. The elegance is in what this proposal avoids. Wealth taxes require annual valuation of every asset, including illiquid private companies, art, real estate. The compliance costs are enormous. The legal challenges are real. The constitutional questions around taxing unrealized gains haven’t been settled. Ackman’s approach sidesteps all of that. It doesn’t tax wealth. It doesn’t tax unrealized gains sitting quietly in a brokerage account. It only triggers when you borrow against those gains. The moment you access the economic value, you pay tax as if you’d sold. The counter-argument is that this would discourage leverage. Ackman addresses this directly: that’s a feature. Encouraging billionaires to take massive margin positions against their own companies creates systemic risk. When Tesla dropped 30% in 2022, Musk faced potential margin calls that could have forced selling into a falling market. The tax code shouldn’t subsidize that behavior. The political math works too. Wealth taxes poll well but die in Congress and courts. This targets only the people using a specific loophole. It doesn’t touch the doctor who borrowed against her house or the small business owner with a line of credit. It’s narrow, defensible, and hard to frame as class warfare. One shouldn’t be able to live and spend like a billionaire while paying no tax. If you’re extracting value from appreciation through borrowing, you’re realizing the economic benefit. The tax code should recognize that.

I’m back in the PG w/ a column arguing the leviathan nonprofits need to kick in more $$$ given that the rest of us property owners (and renters, by proxy) have to do so. A PILOT levy could close budget deficits (until the government mismanages that revenue, as governments do).

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@LordOfRestocks I WANT A #LuckyBox

Ground all private flights today and the government will reopen tomorrow

@DeItaone G

*DEMOCRATS READY TO ADVANCE BILLS THAT MAY END SHUTDOWN: AXIOS *AT LEAST 10 SENATE DEMOCRATS MAY SUPPORT ADVANCING BILLS: AXIOS

*SENATE MAJORITY LEADER THUNE: DEAL IS COMING TOGETHER

Pretty obvious the election is over, eh?

@REALCULTNEWS I support you habibi, but I added to my Dutch Bros position instead.

@Gamboleer @LauraLoomer @BrookeSingman Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag and I don't know how we could ever put it back.

@Gamboleer @LauraLoomer @BrookeSingman It's not just influencers, it's social media as a whole. I admit it, I'm the problem, you'retye problem...and so long as we willingly fall in line to advertisers with these services...they will continue to pump awful talking points to fuel engagement, rage and clicks.

EXCLUSIVE: Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson lived with his transgender partner, sources tell me. The individual, who is a male transitioning to a female, is fully cooperating with the FBI. Sources tell me the FBI had texts and other communications between Robinson and the individual that helped FBI authorities solidify that Robinson was indeed the shooter.