MindlessIndulgence

Lawfare was already dangerous when lawfare activists coopted allies in government agencies and regulatory bodies. But it becomes even more pernicious when TDS afflicted judges are drawn into the same machinery. This is not new, of course. Think Emmet Sullivan or Beryl Howell. But a federal judge weaponizing a frivolous bar discipline complaint against the acting Attorney General marks a new level of institutional abuse.

We've reached the point where Democrats are just admitting out loud that they rely on voter fraud and importing illegals to win every election Without foreigners and voter fraud the Dems would not exist, they are literally the party of non-Americans

@ThomBrady5 Wars in Middle East, at last Trump is fulfilling the platform he ran on.

Trump is essentially winning the war in Iraq, taking the oil, taking control of the region. Masterclass in empire.

Although I agree with much of Milanovic says about inequality, I disagree with him here. I think he is confusing "efficient" manufacturing with "competitive" manufacturing. China is not necessarily building things better and more cheaply than Germany or France, but it is certainly selling them far more cheaply, and the difference shows up both in the extremely low share households receive of what they produce and in the astonishing rise in China's debt-to-GDP ratio. This was the same strategy Japan followed in the 1980s, and not only was it unsustainable, but the high debt and low consumption share ultimately forced Japan into an extraordinarily difficult adjustment. If Germany and France were willing to suppress wages (or, which is the same thing, to eliminate social transfers), or if they were willing to borrow comparable amounts to subsidize the competitiveness of their manufacturers, it is pretty obvious that French and German manufacturers would also be able to sell much more cheaply in global markets. But while these policies would increase manufacturing competitiveness, they would not make manufacturing any more efficient. They would simply shift part of the economic costs of production onto the rest of the country. michaelpettis858496.substack.com/p/mckinsey-con…

@ScottMGreer There’s no real change

From Neocon to DSA: the Bill Kristol Story.

Good. Because... 1. Vance has alternate sources of fundraising and doesn't need to take $300M from Miriam Adelson and be beholden... like Trump. 2. Israel will be politically toxic and Democrats will easily win if the next nominee is another Adelson shill.

Factcheck on the Israel Lobbyist: @RealAlexJones wasn’t “held liable” for any of his claims. NONE. Not one. Because, ultimately, they couldn’t. Not only was their case total bullcrap and unconstitutional, it was almost entirely lies. It was never intended to be successful. The process was intended to be the punishment, not the verdict. The billion-dollar verdicts came after default judgments - courts found Jones in default for discovery violations on BS technicalities, which meant the defamation liability was established by sanction, not by a jury weighing the truth or falsity of his claims. This let plaintiffs (basically the FBI in proxy) skip the actual malice standard (NYT v. Sullivan) that it’s supposed to require. His case was nothing but Feds Vs Free Speech. We all knew that only 2 years ago. It was designed for the chilling effect. Any legitimate constitutional scholar would call that case a miscarriage of justice in which there was NO chance he would walk away with the shirt on his back. None. But again, conservatives all knew this in 2024. So what happened? Remember again in August 2018 when all the social media sites coordinated to ban him at the same time? I said at the time, “They will come for all of us.” They did. Within 18 months me and P&P had been banned from virtually everything, including MailChimp and other services you don’t think of as social media. Anything used to communicate - banned. Why? It was a necessary prerequisite to Covid, and we all endured the most invasive, draconian censorship regime in Western Civilization. Don’t you remember? You couldn’t sneeze politically incorrectly without being banned or put in time out. Anything related to J6? Banned! The 2020 election? Banned! Covid? Banned! Vaccines? Banned! By 2021, almost 40% of Americans had been banned, shadow banned, or in some way censored - including Babylon Bee (and Tucker stood up for Seth Dillon - the most prominent figure in media to do so). And not just in social media. It grew to real life. PTA meetings. School boards. Town halls. Heck, I was kicked off a United flight by a f^g flight attendant for a cap that read “Fauci Lied.” It was “health disinformation” at 30k feet. And ALL OF THAT started when the Feds used Alex Jones as a test case in censorship. First, the FBI lawsuit by proxy with a corrupt legal process, top-down. Then social anathema. Then, after strangling him, they came for all of us. Only God and @elonmusk pulled us out of that. America barely survived that attack on our free speech. It’s a miracle we came through. Seth Dillon has apparently forgotten what life was like 2018-2022 for people who had unapproved opinions. Have YOU forgotten? I won’t. Not ever. And THIS IS WHY we can’t let the Israel Lobby build back the censorship culture they desperately need to stop the slide of public opinion in the U.S. It’s apparently easier for them to re-implement the fascist thought-control regime pre-Elon than to just stop murdering babies in Gaza. THIS IS WHY no matter who it is - who they paint as evil, in need of being silenced this week - we have to oppose it. NEWSFLASH: Whoever is suggesting free speech lawsuits, formal or informal censorship, or social ostracization for opinions, is the Bad Guy. Whether it’s re-imagining Alex Jones as the devil again, to demanding Megyn Kelly be taken off the air for not criticizing Candace soon enough, or going after Shawn Ryan’s advertisers for interviewing her, trying to get Tucker charged with “sedition” for criticizing Mike Huckabee (like Rod Martin today) or investigated for the imaginary crime of interviewing Putin (like all journalists used to do at the height of the Cold War, because that’s NORMAL), the nonstop attempts to bring back the 2018-2022 speech gulag must be resisted at all costs. There is an enemy on the Left. But the Israel Lobby is the enemy of the Right. They only win if they stop speech. And mark my words: they will die trying.

Western Australia accidentally conducted one of the world's largest real-world vaccine safety experiments. From April 2020 until March 2022, Western Australian was isolated from the rest of Australia and the world. Its borders were closed, and for almost two years there was virtually no community transmission of COVID-19. That makes Western Australia's data unique. Across 2020 and 2021, a population of around 2.7 million people recorded just 1,223 COVID-19 cases. Some of which were classified as ‘historical cases’, and only around 11% were acquired locally. Most cases were linked to international arrivals, known contacts, or existing cases/clusters. By the end of 2021, almost 4.1 million COVID-19 vaccine doses had been administered in the state. According to the Western Australian Vaccine Safety Surveillance Annual Report 2021, the reported adverse event rate for all non-COVID vaccines was 11.1 per 100,000 doses. For COVID-19 vaccines, it was 264.1 per 100,000 doses. That is a reported adverse event rate per dose approximately 23.8 times higher than for all other vaccines combined. Those figures deserve attention. Western Australia's experience was unlike almost anywhere else on Earth. Millions of vaccine doses administered in a population with very limited exposure to the virus and a material spike in adverse events. If we are to learn from history, this data deserves our attention.

Two local residents were abducted and executed because their motorcycles were disturbing the sleep of the wife of the commander of Ukraine’s 155th Separate Mechanized Brigade, Luchanov. Ukrainian servicemen arrived in the village with a list of people who were to be punished. The list also included a minor. In the end, two of them were tied up, balaclavas were put over their heads, they were taken into the forest, and executed. You’ve read and watched a lot about this in the European media, haven’t you? Every TV channel reported it, and every newspaper covered it. If you’ve forgotten, let me remind you: the creation of the 155th Brigade was first announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in June 2024 during the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy. The brigade was formed in France and was named after Anne of Kyiv, the 11th-century Kyivan princess who later became Queen of France.

Very good piece by Joshua Busby on China's EV production. I only have one quibble. Busby says: "Xiaomi’s attempt to take on Apple and Tesla seems like one of those only-in-China stories. China’s scale of manufacturing — and the vast supplier ecosystems this sustains — make China arguably the only country where a mobile phone maker can try to become an EV maker as well." I would argue that the real reason a mobile phone maker in China can quickly pivot to becoming a major EV maker is because of near-unlimited financing at very accommodative terms. Anyone in China interested in expanding production capabilities in sectors deemed strategic by the government can raise enormous amounts of financing very easily, with little concern about eventually hitting hard budget constraints. But China's ability to do this wasn't an only-in-China story. It was also the story of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. Every time Tokyo deemed a manufacturing sector to be of strategic importance, Japanese manufacturers quickly dominated that sector globally. For a while Japanese manufacturers in one sector after another seemed unassailable, but ultimately a country's debt capacity is always the constraint. No country can maintain global competitiveness forever if this competitiveness requires permanent increases in debt to fund the sources of its competitiveness (i.e., direct and indirect subsidies). The cost to Japan was a surge in overall debt that ultimate caused the whole strategy to reverse after 1990-91 in the form of an extremely difficult adjustment. China already has one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world (second only to Japan's), and it is rising at perhaps the fastest rate in history. Like Japan's, in other words, China's manufacturing success depends ultimately on an unsustainable increase in the country's debt burden. But while this cannot go on forever, Busby is right to say that EV producers in the US (and Europe) should nonetheless be very concerned. As the history of the US chemical industries demonstrates, a county's productive capacity in a particular sector can be undermined in a very short period, but it is extremely difficult to rebuild. thewirechina.com/2026/07/12/ame…

This week the Senate will vote to merge our military’s most sensitive & secretive capabilities with Israel. This merger is buried within the massive NDAA and they’re hoping you won’t notice. Merging our military with a foreign country is a treasonous betrayal of our sovereignty. Call your senators & tell them to vote no on the NDAA until the merger w/ Israel (section 219) is taken out. Tell them that we will never support merging our military with a foreign nation. The senate switchboard number is: (202) 224-3121.

Odysseus sails home in a Viking ship. The vessel in Nolan’s Odyssey is Draken Harald Hårfagre, the largest Viking ship built in modern times. Built in Haugesund, Norway. Named after Harald Fairhair, our first king. The Odyssey is set around 1200 BC. Ships like this appeared around 800 AD. The Viking Age is closer to us today than to Odysseus. Homer’s ships were black, low, open galleys, light enough to be dragged onto the beach at night. Not a 35-meter dragon ship built for the North Atlantic. A sailing reconstruction of a Mycenaean warship already exists: the Argo, 50 oars, built in Volos, Greece. Nolan filmed in Greece. He still picked the Viking ship. This week Draken sails down the Norwegian coast to the Oslo premiere. She will be the most authentic thing on screen. She is 2,000 years off.

@MarioNawfal His love for foreign countries trumped everything else

🇺🇸 Lindsey Graham spent 31 years at the center of American power and left behind a net worth of just under $1.5 million. That put him 294th of 535 members of Congress, closer to the bottom half than the top. For contrast, the Senate's richest member, James Justice, is worth an estimated $664 million. Lindsey owned a townhouse near the Capitol valued around $890,000 and a home back in South Carolina, most of his money sitting in mutual funds and bond funds. Say what you like about his politics, at least he wasn't abusing his position for insider trading Source: New York Post / Writer: Julie

To clarify, @TuckerCarlson is popular in Ohio, as the admin should know from polling. Israel and the Israel First agenda, are not. Trump's prior antiwar platform is central to how/why he won these Midwest States. Honestly can't believe after TEN years, I have to repeat myself.

If you believed that chemically castrating children, dosing them with steroids, and destroying their fertility and sexual function was a way to affirm their authentic selves, it's because you are a lemming devoid of any independent capacity for judgment. Unfortunately, the governing institutions of the Western world all joined the mad scramble off the cliff.

Hanania chose the exact moment of the total corruption of academia to become a worshipful sycophant of "elite human capital" because flattery of the credentialed and battening on their contempt for the benighted rabble was a way to scrub off the taint of his Neo-Nazi past. Yes, populists can be retarded, but they don't have the imprimatur of the academic disciplines. They don't speak with authority that then becomes embedded into the institutional architecture of the Smithsonian and taught to millions of schoolchildren as the only truth. The existence of retards on podcasts means little apart from a minor grift -- the enshrinement of desperate delusion laundered as academic consensus has already corrupted our truth-seeking apparatus beyond redemption. Hanania profits by telling the accessories of the latter consequential corruption that at least they are better than those indulging the former corruption, which doesn't matter at all.

@matthewstoller Kids use Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg is spending a quarter of a trillion dollars on just one data center so he can further addict kids to his surveillance services. Where did he get the money in the first place? By addicting kids to his surveillance services! Yay!

People wanting to say Lindsey Graham was BASED because of his support for OBBB and the SAVE Act are way off the mark. Besides his extreme war mongering, his chief domestic goal was trying to pass amnesty. He was heavily involved in this issue for over 20 years and didn't give up on it in the Trump years. Every Republican besides Massie supported OBBB and nearly all of them support the SAVE Act. It's the bare minimum. If your chief priorities were amnesty and foreign adventurism, you didn't set a good standard for the Right.

This is the impossible Catch-22 that every social media app struggles with You can't make women feel "welcome" and also have a free speech app Women hate free speech. Women want consensus and agreeableness. If something is true but mean-sounding that needs to be censored so women feel "welcome" Elon, for his part tried to find the balance of letting 70% of opinions flow while banning the ones that give women the most "ick" Nikita here, spiritual female that he is, wants women to feel "safe", which is tantamount to censoring the majority of truthful opinions Elon needs to fire him before this place becomes unrecognizable from Facebook

@Anc_Aesthetics @AuronMacintyre Lindsay converted Trump to sacrifice his,presidency for Israel.

@AuronMacintyre Converted enemies can become your best allies, JD Vance being the best example.