William Love

Trump: "I said, 'Why don't we just capture the ship? We could use it. Why did we sink them?' He said, 'It's more fun to sink them.' They like sinking them better."

Her parents legally immigrated from India when she was 4 years old. She graduated from Boston University, calls New Jersey home, and is now a Senior Business Analyst at Franklin Templeton. She’s dancing in front of the Washington Monument because she’s a proud American.

PAT RYAN: 'Does the US want to be the policeman of the Middle East getting nothing but spending precious lives and trillions.' Does that ring a bell? COLBY: Defer to you RYAN: That was President Trump. How about this -- 'we simply cannot afford to get enmeshed in a large Middle East war.' That one? COLBY: Defer to you RYAN: That was actually you

I think you misunderstand my citing of Tom Nichols in my argument. He is not a foil but a well known stand-in for stock ideas. In fact, he contributes to the public's growing distrust because the words he says don't match what people see with their own eyes. After reading the Preface of his book, I dismissed its premise as a strawman argument that hinges on misrepresentation of facts by critical omissions. An alleged strength of this book is that it is non-political. He presents expertise as neutral and self-correcting, but if those systems are ideological, then distrust isn't mere ignorance-worship, as he likes to say, but rational skepticism. That is precisely the case and he has a conflict of interest being an academic/expert and leftist. Whereas he claims virtue in making the book non-political, this hides the key fact that academia, experts, education, mainstream media, law, medicine, the administrative state, and more are all Democrat-aligned. Prominent academics like Larry Summers have admitted universities have been retreating from Enlightenment values. Today I saw Provost Schnell of Dartmouth said, “The Ivies have served as a role model in a very negative way on how higher education should be moving forward. And the time for reform has arrived.” According to Nichols, incompetent and nefarious experts are a couple of bad apples. We know there's vastly more rotten apples than that and that the cart's wheels have come off. Everyone knows university reform is critically needed but there is total resistance to that. Given these and my other comments on this thread, I don't see the need for a point by point falsification of Nichols' book but I could comfortably do that. As far as I'm aware, everything I cited his book for is a correct representation. Let me know if I missed something.

Andrew Tate explaining why he doesn't read books is the funniest video I've watched all week 🤣

I regret to inform you the American ambassador to Poland is now replying to tweets.

The Jeff Epstein saga isn't a scandal about pedophilia, it's about a Russian word called 'blat,' a Soviet-era word meaning 'the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.' It's about a kind of government. As with the large number of 'blatniks' in the Soviet era who made sure their factories got what they needed outside the formal state procurement process, Epstein greased the wheels for the neoliberal state. His job was governance. What does that mean? Well it's clear that Epstein was an entrepreneurial broker across multiple public and private bureaucracies, helping organize 'under-the-table' deals among the legal, business, intelligence, and political elites to allow them to escape the rule of law and traditional conflict of interest restrictions. It's statecraft to allow a superclass to systemically escape the formalized rules. The pedophilia and prostitution were part of it - that is obviously violating the rule of law - but so are the random favors Epstein bestowed. Like Epstein sending Senator Joe Manchin's request for a yacht, a request which came from the First lady of the Virginia Islands, to a random NY financier who might have one. Or working with Joi Ito at MIT and billionaire Reid Hoffman to restructure the Bitcoin Foundation. It's all about matching capital and talent and inputs outside of the restrictions ordinary people are subject to. This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system. Epstein and his affiliates thrived because of the weakened institutions of the United States, institutions enfeebled in many cases by the men in his network, like Larry Summers. These men adopted multiple roles - advisor, businessman, academic, board member, regulator - and put on the hat that best maximized their self-interest and the self-interest of their narrow network at that moment. The old world, where handing someone your business card meant you represented that institution, disappeared in the 1980s. Over the course of the 1990s, neoconservatives, neoliberals, bankers - ultimately Epstein's network - built this new social order. It was one where you couldn't succeed through the formal rules, but if you were let into the networks of trust by blatniks, you could do anything you wanted. While all the specifics of Epstein's network are not known, and while conspiracy theorists often have crazy views, they have correctly fingered that the world of meritocracy and formalized systems is increasingly a fraud. And that the real government lies elsewhere. In short, when formal democratic institutions like Congress stop governing, the networks of men like Epstein fill the power vacuum. Epstein built what Roy Cohn always wanted to have, but never achieved, because the then-institutions were too strong for him to break. Here's a passage from sociologist Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite on how this form of governance works.

“Civil disobedience” is a made-up term, meaning harassment and intimidation (but only by the good guys). TV audiences in the 60s had a childlike susceptibility to this kind of manipulation