David

Picture Ireland in 1987: unemployment at 17%, debt-to-GDP ratio pushing 120%, and young Irish workers fleeing to London and Boston faster than you could say "economic basket case." Finance Minister Ray MacSharry slashed government spending by 3% of GDP while dropping corporate tax rates to 10% for manufacturing (later extending it across sectors). Brussels bureaucrats screamed about "unfair competition," but MacSharry kept cutting. By 1994, something extraordinary happened. GDP growth hit 5.8% annually, then accelerated to over 10% by 1999 (try explaining that with Keynesian multipliers). Foreign direct investment poured in as companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Pfizer set up European headquarters in Dublin, creating actual productive jobs instead of government make-work programs. The Irish called it the Celtic Tiger, and suddenly emigration reversed into immigration. The formula was blindingly simple: slash bureaucracy, cut taxes, get out of entrepreneurs' way. Estonia used the same playbook after leaving the Soviet Union. Hong Kong became an economic powerhouse when it was still a British colony using the same principles. Yet today's politicians act like Ireland's transformation was some mystical accident rather than predictable market forces unleashed by government restraint. Of course, Ireland later screwed it up by joining the euro and letting banks leverage themselves into oblivion during the housing bubble (because politicians can never leave well enough alone). But for one glorious decade, they proved what happens when you stop trying to manage an economy and just let people create wealth.

Incredible that the government seeks to penalise the productive, simply because it lacks the appetite to curtail a disability scheme that has lost cost discipline. Meaningful NDIS reform would erode Labor's voter base, so the burden is shifted onto investors instead. Sad to see electoral self-interest take precedence over the national interest.

Business dinners in the city

Far-right social media posts about Ireland are predominantly by people outside the country. 75% are from users in the UK, US, Australia or elsewhere. X is the main amplifier of this content. They are also a tiny number - most harmful content is produced by only 3–7% of users.

He extended a helping hand when Ukraine was almost on its knees. Petr Pavel. A man who stood up for Ukraine’s right to defend itself. February 2024. Ukraine was facing a critical shortage of artillery ammunition. For every 20 Russian artillery shells fired, Ukraine could answer with only one. Twenty to one. And then he stepped forward — Petr Pavel. Right at the Munich Security Conference, he presented something that very few European leaders believed was even possible. He found a way to secure 800,000 artillery shells for Ukraine. Just think about that number — 800,000. At a time when many European countries were proudly announcing deliveries of 1,000 or 2,000 shells. At first, Pavel’s idea seemed unrealistic and populist to many. But Petr knew how to persuade people, and soon several countries joined his side. That was the beginning of the “Czech Initiative.” By June 2024, Ukraine received the first ammunition shipments under this program. It is hard to say where Russian forces would be today if not for those precious shells. But they undoubtedly played a key role in slowing the Russian offensives throughout 2024 and 2025. In total, since the launch of this initiative, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have received more than 4 million shells of various calibers. The scale is truly staggering. And it wasn’t only about ammunition. The Czech Republic also supported Ukraine in many other ways. By 2025, Czechia had completed the transfer of all of its operational Soviet-made T-72M1 tanks to Ukraine. Not one or two — all of them. And that’s still not all. A country of just 10.5 million people welcomed around 400,000 Ukrainian refugees. This became the highest per-capita figure among all EU countries and Ukraine’s allies. There are also even more remarkable things happening behind the scenes that cannot yet be discussed publicly. But today, we simply want to say thank you to all Czechs — and especially to Petr Pavel — for the help, for the humanity, and for truly helping save us at a critical moment. 🇨🇿🤝🇺🇦

The USSR sucked, but imagine Putin's empire building anything like this. Modern Russians are barbarians squatting in the ruins of their ancestors' achievements.

@BurnsideWasTosh @Proper_Memes @ZackPolanski Definitely not thick but deliberately misrepresenting. Possibly for good intentions or not. Who knows.

@Proper_Memes @ZackPolanski It's like trying to explain rocket science to a vole. He is thicker than Lammy's labia.

The verdict is in. 🗳️ Gary like so many people is voting Green. 💚

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek's life. She was born in 1898 into a Shanghai that still had a Qing magistrate, in the International Settlement where Sikh policemen directed traffic past gunboats moored in the Huangpu. The Empress Dowager Cixi was on the Dragon Throne. Her father Charlie Soong - a Methodist convert who'd been educated by tobacco-state missionaries - put her on a steamer at ten and sent her to Macon, Georgia. She grew up 80 miles south of Atlanta. So a daughter of late-imperial Qing China spent her formative years among Confederate veterans, learning to speak English with a soft Southern drawl she would carry to her grave. By the time she returned home, a Wellesley graduate in 1917, the Qing was gone, Sun Yat-sen had founded the Republic, and her older sister had married him. Then she married a soldier. In December 1936 she boarded a plane to the Communist base area in Xi'an, where her husband Chiang Kai-Shek had been kidnapped by his own generals. She walked into the rebel camp with a Bible and enough personal authority to negotiate his release. In February 1943 she stood before a joint session of the United States Congress in a black silk qipao with frog buttons, the first Chinese national ever to address that chamber. She spoke in front of Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, Senator Tom Connally of Texas. A junior senator from Missouri named Harry Truman was sitting somewhere in the chamber. Lyndon Johnson was in the House gallery as a young Congressman from the Hill Country, twenty-five years from his own presidency. Hardened Senators rose to their feet, wet eyed. She took cocktails with Roosevelt, sparred with Churchill. Time put her on the cover with her husband as Man and Wife of the Year. She watched her country fall to Mao in 1949 and fled with Chiang to Taiwan, where she spent two decades as the public face of a government in exile - painting orchids in the classical literati style and lobbying Washington for an island the world forgot. After Chiang's death in 1975 she retired quietly to a Gracie Square apartment on the Upper East Side, where she lived for nearly thirty more years with a Mandarin-speaking staff and views of the East River. She outlived her husband by twenty-eight years. She outlived Mao by twenty-seven. She outlived Sun Yat-sen by seventy-eight, the Qing dynasty itself by ninety-one. She outlived her sister Ai-ling, who had loved money, and her sister Ching-ling, who had stayed in Beijing as a Communist vice-chairwoman. When she died in 2003 at one hundred and five, the world she had been born into - sedan chairs and queues and bound feet, missionary salons and mahjong on lacquered tables, an empire that still believed in itself - had been gone almost a century. She had been alive for every minute of its replacement. George W. Bush was in the White House. The Twin Towers had fallen two years before her funeral. Somewhere in that Manhattan apartment, presumably, were the Wellesley dorm letters of an eighteen-year-old girl who could still remember when the Empress Dowager ruled All Under Heaven. What a life. A girl who learned her English from Methodist ladies in Reconstruction-era Georgia ended up lecturing the United States Senate on grand strategy in the middle of the Second World War

Because this is not bread for us.

This seems really bad and I don't know what to do about it: not so much the differences in political attitudes, that's fine, but there's a strong gender divide in belief on straightforward factual questions like "is nuclear energy low-carbon?" yougov.com/en-gb/articles…

I feel terrible for anyone who loses their job. I’m not trying to kick anyone while they’re down. But these USAID and NGO workers are the least sympathetic unemployed people I’ve ever seen. EVERY person in this story was making well into six figures: USAID employee: $175,000 USAID contractor: $127,000 USAID-funded NGO employee: $272,000(!) USAID advisor at the DOD: $195,000 USAID contractor: $200,000 There were 16,000 employees at USAID, and the New York Times was only able to interview one making less than $175k. Worldwide, there were an estimated 280,000 contractors. ALL of these people were getting paid from our tax dollars. Many were making 2-4x the wage of the average American taxpayer ($65-70k per year). Yes, USAID did some good work, especially during the Cold War. And, yes, many of the agency’s employees were hard-working Americans, with good intentions and love for their country. Again, we should take no joy in seeing thousands of people lose their livelihoods—this is not a case of justifiable schadenfreude. But it’s not sustainable for an agency with so little accountability to manage tens of billions of dollars per year, enriching tens of thousands of NGO-industrial-complex managers living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia metroplex in the process. Even the NYT acknowledges that “there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion [USAID] managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.” Every last dollar that went to these highly paid employees was funded by an American taxpayer, the vast majority of whom make far less money than the people laid off from USAID. We have the right to demand accountability, and we have the right to expect that these funds will be spent in our interest, not theirs. USAID and its thousands of employees, contractors, and NGO beneficiaries ignored that principle, and they eventually paid the price with their careers. I wish them all nothing but the best, but I won’t mourn that they will no longer be making $200k per year on the backs of American workers.

Stanley Druckenmiller on investing in China: "We exited China in 2018. We haven’t made a single trade in security there other than their currency once in a while. I will never invest in China as long as the current leader is there. The reason I’ll never say never is if they had a change in leadership, I’d at least consider the situation. I didn’t invest in Russia, and I’m not investing in China."

"The evils of capitalism:"

Sweden has intelligence that Russia is systematically manipulating data to fool Ukraine’s western allies into believing its economy withstood the strain of its lavish war spending and western sanctions, head of Swedish military intelligence Nilsson said. ft.com/content/04a9d0…

In 1976, Iran’s GDP was $76B and Israel’s was $16B — Iran’s economy nearly 5x larger. In 2026, Israel’s GDP about $700B while Iran’s closer to $300B — Israel’s economy 2x+ larger — despite 90 million Iranians and just 10 million Israelis. The Islamic Republic is a disaster.

Lee Kuan Yew on avoiding the mistakes of socialist Britain:

After folks laughed at AOC for not knowing vaquero history, I knew Wikipedia would alter their meaning to fit hers, so I took a screenshot, and they finally did rewrite it. Wiki removed vaquero from 'The origins of the vaquero tradition come from Spain...'

Really dumb commentary, absolutely nothing to do with left or right. It's about truth. This comment is from people who were cheerleading a deeply corrupt and authoritarian former Hungarian regime and then try to claim the honest one as there own after the fact.

@RitaPanahi Really dumb commentary, absolutely nothing to do with left or right. It's about truth. This comment from people who were cheerleading a deeply corrupt and authoritarian former Hungarian regime.

The Left thought they won in Hungary, instead they got a younger, bolder centre-Right leader.