Robert Brawner

By all indications we are embarking on a multi decadal inflationary environment to accommodate galactic and unprecedented government spending and debt. Please keep in mind that already now, we are not only spending our future income and taxes, we are also spending our children’s income and taxes. Also keep in mind that inflation hits those with less money the hardest, as food and housing and transportation are a high% of their income relative to those with more discretionary income. We can inflate our way out of this mess, but we must show restraint. As the dollar transitions away from being the primary reserve currency, things may get ugly for a while.

@SenWarren You drove that lawsuit Elizabeth

Spiking fuel prices from Trump’s war was the nail in the coffin for twice-bankrupted Spirit airline. FWIW, JetBlue merger failed because a judge, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher costs hitting families.

@SenWarren @JetBlue @SpiritAirlines @JusticeATR @USDOT Elizabeth you destroyed over 10,000 jobs by fighting this merger.

I've warned for months that a @JetBlue-@SpiritAirlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares. @JusticeATR and @USDOT were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for flyers! apnews.com/article/jetblu…

The last time debt hit these levels, America had just helped win a World War. What's our excuse today? Runaway spending. Bloated budgets. A uniparty that refuses to say no. I've said no. I'll keep saying no. But I need Americans to demand better from their representatives. wsj.com/economy/u-s-de…

He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died. Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today. His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing. He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it. He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages. In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted. As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan. His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century. After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23. The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president. Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

Good stuff

We're living in the upside down when a U.S. Senator is working with the CCP to regulate AI in the U.S.

Would you believe 57 Republicans and 211 Democrats recently voted in favor of this Orwellian automobile kill-switch? Here’s the roll call for the vote I forced to defund the mandate: clerk.house.gov/evs/2026/roll0…

For the millionth time San Francisco county budget is $16B for <900k people. We are better funded than Copenhagen. If you halved SF budget we’d still be almost 200% per capita budget of Denver county. Services are bad bc of corruption and incompetence. There is no austerity.

@aakashgupta The simplest explanation, and the most likely, is that these deaths are covert assassinations on both sides. Or yes maybe time travelers.

Nine Chinese scientists. Eleven American scientists. All worked in hypersonics, military AI, or space defense. All died or disappeared in the last three years. Feng Yanghe was the cleanest case on the Chinese side. 38 years old, professor at the National University of Defense Technology, the mastermind behind China's "War Skull" AI platform wargaming Taiwan invasion scenarios. He died in a car crash at 2:35am leaving a work meeting in Beijing. His state obituary said he was "sacrificed while performing official duties," a phrase reserved for soldiers killed in action. He was buried in Babaoshan, the cemetery Beijing reserves for revolutionary martyrs and Party elites. Nobody describes a car accident victim this way. He is one of nine. Fang Daining, 68, died from a medical episode in South Africa in February while researching superstrong materials for hypersonic spacecraft at Beijing Institute of Technology. Yan Hong, 56, a hypersonics researcher who had returned from Wright State University to a US-sanctioned lab in Xi'an, died in March from an undisclosed illness. Zhang Daibing, 47, China's top drone expert and former deputy director of the National University of Defense Technology's Unmanned Systems Research Institute, died last year in Hunan. No cause given. The US pattern started in 2022. Monica Reza, who patented a nickel super-alloy used in reusable rocket manufacturing, vanished from a hiking trail in June 2025 and was never found. Retired Air Force Major General William McCasland, who had commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, left his Albuquerque home in February without his phone or glasses and hasn't been seen since. Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was shot on his doorstep in December. The FBI is now running the coordinated probe. The field overlap is what closes the case on coincidence. Hypersonics. Military AI. Space defense. Fusion. Advanced materials. The global bench of elite hypersonics researchers is perhaps a few hundred people. Take out a dozen across the right programs and you buy time measured in quarters. This is the narrow strip of dual-use research where a single breakthrough compresses years of adversary R&D. Neither government can point fingers without inviting scrutiny of its own casualty list. That is the new equilibrium. The arms race quietly moved from the weapons to the people who design them, and "coincidence" is the only framing either side can afford to use.

mandatory Ursula K. Le Guin quote

Think about how crazy you’d sound a decade ago if you said, “There’s a secret pedophile island where the global elite go to abuse underage kids, the government is funding research of a virus that will kill millions, and anti-hate nonprofits are funding the KKK.” You’d be right.

If true, egregious. If false, even more egregious(from the govt side). If we don’t strive for integrity in our institutions, private or govt, we are lost.

The Straight of Hormuz is closed.. again

The stats here are kind of remarkable. BART's new fare gates have led to a 1,000-hour decline in clean up time; 41% drop in crime; and $10 million increase in projected revenue. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/…

Surprising but true: The bottom 90% have seen their wealth grow at a faster pace than the top 10% this decade Obviously it's coming off a smaller base but I'm not sure how many ppl would believe this if you told them awealthofcommonsense.com/2026/04/how-ar…

Please bro just one more tax will fix it trust me bro

Everywhere you look, signs that the kids are going to be just fine.

Next week the San Diego County Board of Supervisors will vote to give themselves more time in office. In 2010, the voters of this county passed term limits for Supervisors with 68% of the vote. Two terms. Eight years. The people spoke clearly. The Board majority doesn't like the answer. So they're voting to change the rule. Three terms. Twelve years. 50% more time in power. Every one of them ran for office under the current limit. Now they want to overrule the voters who put them there. That's not reform. That's self-dealing.

We bring in $5 trillion. We spend $7 trillion. We borrow the difference. The Fed prints money to cover it. That's inflation. And inflation is making you poorer.

@MostlyMonkey Some fire in that dude

This video is fucking incredible. No plan, no athleticism, just pure gumption.