PoliticalScience42

@mattvanswol Great picture full of joy! Kids are a blessing

@JoeSquawk @NEWSMAX When they run out of jokes, they become the joke and turn political.

@NEWSMAX “Comedy” is supposed to be funny though, right? What am I missing here.

Stephen Colbert's decision to return to political comedy marked a sharp departure from his original plan for "The Late Show." MORE: bit.ly/4t9rQdQ

@LarrySchweikart @RepBobGood Debt has destroyed families. Families that continue to add more credit cards to the mix to continue buying stuff they can’t afford end in disaster. Nations that continue to deficit spend and print more money reduce purchasing power of current dollars. It’s a bad path.

Well, why hasn't it destroyed families for 50 years? I heard all my life that "we can't sustain this debt." But we did. Our debt to national assets ratio is pretty small (and hugely UNDERvalued in terms of assets). Both Jefferson & Harding/Coolidge paid off 1/3 of the debt in five years. So it's totally doable.

We are barreling towards $40 trillion in debt by the midterms. This should be the No. 1 thing we talk about.

I just spent 2 incredible weeks in Italy and it is so frustrating to come back to the U.S… How is it possible @RobertKennedyJr that the Italian food supply is so vastly superior. I literally ate bread at every meal, dessert multiple times per day, and generally ate way more than I do in the U.S. Not once did I have acid reflux. Not one headache, no digestive problems, and I didn’t gain any weight. If I ate the same way in the U.S. (I used to at times) I would have gone through a full bottle of Tums and Advil just to get through the day… WHY does the U.S. allow glyphosate in wheat, high fructose corn syrup in food and who knows what in our milk products? The difference in quality of life in Italy vs the U.S. is staggering from their common sense (anti corporate) food regulation. WHY aren’t more people upset about this? The U.S. is the richest country in the world and we eat like one of the poorest.

@LarrySchweikart @RepBobGood Larry, I’m a conservative that worries we are handing our kids and grandkids a less prosperous future because of our overspending today. Democrats and Republicans have both been spending without a care for debt levels for far too long. Debt destroys families & nations.

@RepBobGood No, it shouldn't. I have been in politics 50 years and all Rs ever talked about was how we "couldn't sustain" this level of debt. For 50 years. Nothing. Nothing happened. No, Americans are NOT concerned about a debt when DemoKKKrat Terrorists want to kill them.

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on. The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software. The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check. Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance. Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls. Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else. A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

@ewarren The US Congress is building a debt bubble with the same dangerous playbook we've experienced for decades. Spend radically on pet projects. Spend billions on non-citizens. Look the other way when fraud is brought to light. Working families are getting stuck bailing out the govt.

Big Tech is building an AI bubble with the same dangerous playbook we saw in 2008. No rules. No accountability. Plenty of risk for everyone else. I’m fighting to put guardrails in place—so working families don’t get stuck bailing out reckless CEOs again.

@TRHLofficial Pete’s wife is wise. The dress looked great btw.

They are millionaires, yet chooses to wear a $14 dress. I’m not going to hate on that.

⚡️The real signal is that a city that produces a meaningful fraction of global financial output just elected someone running explicitly on taking property from the people who produce it. This is not a protest vote. This is the coalition stating its actual preferences. The preferences are incoherent with the city continuing to function as a financial center. One of those two things is going to give. The city is going to stop being a financial center, or the coalition is going to be politically defeated, or Mamdani is going to govern nothing like he campaigned. The third option is the most likely because it’s the standard pattern, but the first two are live. The actual structural situation in New York: the top 1% of filers pay roughly half the city’s income tax. The top 10% pay around 75%. The math is that a small number of high earners subsidize services for everyone else, and the subsidy is what makes the city livable for the people who aren’t high earners. When those earners leave, the subsidy leaves with them, and the services they were funding get cut or the taxes on the remaining population rise. There is no version where you tax the rich into staying. They have options. The options are better now than they were five years ago and will be better in five years than they are now. Every marginal tax increase moves the departure math. Mamdani’s voters believe the rich will pay more and stay. This is empirically false and has been for decades. The Laffer curve is a caricature but the underlying phenomenon is real at the state and city level because the substitution cost is low. You don’t need to emigrate. You need to move to Connecticut, Florida, Texas, or Tennessee. Millions of people have done this. The pattern is documented, measured, and predictable. Pretending otherwise is the policy equivalent of pretending gravity is optional. The deeper thing Mamdani’s election reveals: a substantial fraction of urban voters now hold a worldview in which productive activity is theft, wealth is evidence of extraction, and redistribution is the primary function of politics. This worldview has specific intellectual lineage running from certain strains of Marxism through the academic left through social media radicalization. It’s not a serious economic framework. It’s a moral framework dressed as an economic one. The moral intuition is that inequality is itself the injustice, regardless of how the inequality arose or what it produces. A serious economic framework would ask whether the inequality produces good outcomes for the median person, would note that high-productivity cities produce enormous surplus that funds services, and would balance extraction against the ecosystem that generates the wealth to be extracted. The Mamdani framework skips all of that and goes straight to: they have it, we want it, take it. This framework, when operationalized, destroys the thing it feeds on. Every case study confirms this. No case study contradicts it. The cases where redistribution worked, Scandinavia in the twentieth century, post-war West Germany, Singapore, involved redistributing from productive economies that were allowed to stay productive. The redistribution was moderate, rule-bound, and applied to a capital base that couldn’t easily flee because international capital mobility was constrained. None of those conditions hold in New York in 2026. Capital mobility is near-frictionless for the high end. Rule-bound redistribution is not what Mamdani campaigned on. The ideological content is much closer to expropriation than to Nordic social democracy. The broader United States pattern is that this dynamic is concentrated in the cities that already had it, and those cities are where the productive economy is also concentrated. The country has decoupled into two economic models. One model, roughly blue-state urban, runs on high-productivity services, high taxes, high housing costs, declining quality of services relative to what’s paid for them, and increasingly extractive politics. The other model, roughly red-state urban and suburban, runs on lower productivity but faster growth, lower taxes, lower housing costs, and more functional services. The sorting between the two is accelerating. People and capital are moving from the first to the second at historically significant rates. The first model is not reforming because its political coalition is locked in by the voters who benefit from the extractive politics in the short term. The second model is not free of problems but is currently winning the migration competition by large margins.

@FishelRobert @MarioNawfal These messages were heard in the 8 MHz band, which is part of the HF band. ULF is below 3 MHz en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely…

@MarioNawfal It's ultra-low frequency, not high frequency FYI. Low frequency radio waves can penetrate water, ultra-low can even go through the planet. Just sayin.....

🇺🇸 U.S. military just went radio crazy, nearly 100 secret Emergency Action Messages blasted out in the last 24h on their global high-frequency system. These coded alerts are how the Pentagon talks to nuclear subs, bombers & missile crews in a real crisis. An E-6B “doomsday plane” is still flying over the Atlantic, dropping one every 30 minutes... and it might keep going all night. Something’s got their full attention Source: @neetintel

I've just answered that, above. I'll repeat it: If an adult feels they can only exist comfortably and authentically in this world by dressing in the opposite sex's clothes, having surgeries and taking hormones, or in adopting one of the many gender labels, I wish them safety, happiness and health, as long as they're not harming anyone else. You, however, seem to think that for a trans-identified man to be 'comfortable' and 'authentic', everyone in the vicinity must abandon their freedom of speech and belief to accommodate his 'identity'. Women are not validation props, comfort blankets or support animals. We aren't a rest home for men who don't like being men. If a person's happiness and self-esteem resides entirely in whether or not they can compel everyone around them to lie, whether out of fear or pity, I would respectfully suggest they are unlikely to have a very comfortable life, and are about as far from being 'authentic' as it is possible to be.

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry. The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine. The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true. The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either. The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought. The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to. The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus. He is confident. He has always been confident. The confidence has never been the problem. The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

@Micro2Macr0 I was pc for 30+ years. Switched and love Mac. It was a few weeks of frustration learning MacOS. Now I love it.

I'm buying a Maci Mini and giving it a try. 😁

@adammocklerr Adam, perhaps you’re confused. Nick isn’t in the legislature or executive branch. He’s identified fraud. If nothing is done about it, makes you wonder why the fraud is being protected by those that could do something about it.

Money saved by Nick Shirley’s videos: $0 Money saved by Democrat Rob Sand: $29 million

@realrck @DrTeslaFSD For long road trips, savings may be negligible. At home charging is less than half the price of fuel for a gas vehicle for me.

@DrTeslaFSD 7 stops - nearly 2 hours total. Versus maybe 3 stops - at a maximum 5-10 minutes per stop - with a decently efficient modern ICE vehicle covering the same distance.🤔 And the cost savings are negligible despite the current geopolitical situation and soaring price of oil.🧐

Just completed my longest ever single day road trip in the Cybertruck. Here are the stats: • 946 miles driven from Fort Lauderdale FL to Richmond VA. • 17.5 hrs (slow due to Florida traffic) • 7 Supercharger stops - total time charging 1hr 53min (avg 16min, longest 23min) • $132.40 in Supercharger fees ($0.14 per mile) • 100% on FSD • WiFi courtesy of Starlink mini Cybertruck is the only vehicle I’d want to try this with. Super easy and comfortable. Kids enjoyed it and were able to watch movies and play computer games against each other thanks to Starlink and the entertainment system.

I built CourtWatch.us — a free public database for American citizens who deserve safer communities. You can track which judges released defendants who then got rearrested, skipped court, or violated their release conditions. All public records. All free. I started with Orange County FL and will be expanding to all 67 Florida counties and eventually every state in the country. This first batch of info is from 2024 and since public reports are released in March/April for the previous year, data is behind. But I wanted to see if this is plausible. After adding 2024,I'll add 2025 and then figure out how to get real-time-data uploaded. It's in beta — would love to know what you think 👇 Numbers don't lie, but criminals do. courtwatch.us @bennyjohnson @jockowillink @GrantCardone @LauraLoomer @nickshirleyy @j_fishback

@TimRunsHisMouth About four a day. All prerecorded and they fill up my voicemail

How many of you get regular calls from a scam group saying you’re pre-approved for a loan… and how many of those calls do you get a day?

@MrAndyNgo @Savsays Where are the strong men to protect her?

Minneapolis (April 11) — Far-left extremists surrounded, pursued and attacked @Savsays outside the Whipple building. The violent thugs believe that people who disagree with them on open borders should be injured or killed.

The scariest finding in this paper: the subjects couldn't tell it was happening. UPenn ran this study on 48 healthy adults. One group slept 8 hours. Another slept 6. Another slept 4. For 14 straight days. They tested cognitive performance every 2 hours from 7:30am to 11:30pm. The 6-hour group's reaction times, working memory, and sustained attention deteriorated on a near-linear curve. By day 14 they were performing at the same level as someone who hadn't slept at all in 48 hours. The 4-hour group hit that threshold by day 6. Here's the part that should unsettle everyone who thinks they "do fine" on 6 hours: the subjects' self-reported sleepiness flatlined after the first few days. Their brains kept getting worse. Their perception of how impaired they were stopped updating. The cognitive decline was invisible to the person experiencing it. The researchers found a hard threshold. Any wakefulness beyond 15.84 hours in a day produces cumulative neurobiological cost. That cost compounds every single day you exceed it and does not reset with a weekend of sleeping in. About 35% of American adults sleep less than 7 hours a night. 40% of those get 6 hours or less. In 1942 that number was 11%. We built an entire professional culture around a sleep schedule that this paper says is functionally equivalent to pulling consecutive all-nighters. "I'm fine on 6 hours" is the most common response to sleep research. The first thing chronic sleep debt destroys is your ability to notice chronic sleep debt.

@AndreasSteno We are thankful you will take care of yourselves now, this will release a significant amount of resources that will be better used inside the United States. Every country should do the same, take care of their own.

I get that many Americans don’t want to de facto pay for NATO anymore. I get it, I understand that the US paid more than others for a long time. It is all very well understood. We can take care of ourselves. It is ok. You don’t need to lecture us day in and day out about it.