Andrew Steele

Hail to the Victors! #GOBLUE @umichbball Natty!! 💙💛🏀

@johnkonrad Since we lived off base, my best friends became the German kids in the neighborhood vs. the American kids who lived on base. I can't recall a single time we didn't feel welcome & part of the community. I suspect that's different now.

Feels like we are at the precipice of a generational #FAFO moment. When I was a kid in the late 70s, my dad was an Air Force pilot & stationed in Germany. The vibe was very different then. Locals very supportive of & grateful for our presence. The wall was still up & the locals were only one generation removed from WWII at that point so still a clear memory of the impact of the war & USA's role in the win.

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets. The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural. Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them. That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble. The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon. American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life. Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake. Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs. We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating. So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy. And it worked. The Wall came down. But here’s what no one accounted for. When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs. And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle. An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas. And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized. So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening. Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude. Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated. Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass. Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar. Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity. What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle. For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked. Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.” We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries. Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit. You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators. What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization. It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine. That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report. Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us” Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

Example - my family rented a carriage house in town next to the base from a woman named Frau Taubenreuther. Whenever she was baking, she shared with us and we were always invited to holiday dinners & celebrations with her family. Even then as a kid, I was sad to leave that behind when my dad got stationed back in the States.

@VinGuptaMD Why do you insist on continuing to complain about Biden?

Erratic. Can’t finish sentences. Often confused. Illogical train of thought. Word finding difficulties. Developing and worsening gradually over time. The President is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.

@CynicalPublius @clusterbitch_ behold the pronouns...

@clusterbitch_ Wow. The depths of your delusion are disturbing to behold. How is it possible that a sentient being could be so utterly disconnected from objective reality?

i root for america, which is why i despise the russian owned trump administration and republican party

@BillAckman @X Double down. Scorched earth meets scorched earth.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@TomCottonAR @venetian33

The New York Times just confirmed what we've long suspected: ActBlue knowingly let in fraudulent foreign donations to help Democrats win. Yet another example of the left's embrace of fraud. Everyone involved must face the full weight of the law.

@AmericanDebunk The Art of the Deal

This post by Trump is pre-framing what's to come. Read along and you'll start to see it too. When Trump tells the UK to "go to the Strait and just TAKE IT," the surface read is that he's venting at allies who didn't show up. But the deeper move is priming the the public (and world) with a new mental frame: the Strait of Hormuz is not Iranian sovereign territory anymore. It's available real estate. It's takeable. Anyone with courage can have it. That's a massive Overton Window shift delivered, in a tweet, as an insult to the UK. A year ago "America controls the Strait of Hormuz" sounded like some twisted fantasy. Today Trump is telling Britain to go grab it themselves like it's a parking spot. In a few weeks, Trump has normalized the concept of Western control over the Strait so thoroughly that full US seizure now looks like the modest option compared to what he's suggesting allies do on their own. This is intentional. The persuasion mechanics here are priming plus pre-selling. Whatever the eventual deal includes (US Navy permanent presence, joint patrols, Iranian withdrawal from mining infrastructure) the public will accept it because Trump already told them the Strait is there for the taking. Your subconscious mind has already been primed to accept it. This "psychological baseline" is going to influence Trump-Iran negotiations. Best believe it. "The hard part is done" works the same way. He's managing public fatigue. It translates to "we won, relax, this is cleanup". This keeps approval from eroding while the Pakistan talks drag through April. Trump isn't describing reality. He's installing it. Say the Strait is takeable enough times and it becomes takeable in the public mind. It's been 10 years of Trump and he still leaves me in awe with his persuasion.

@TreVeyonH4 @lsferguson Amen, thank you. keep speaking truth 🙏🏻

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:10

@Dbacks Beautiful!

Joe Giacinto, a blind and autistic clarinet phenom, performed tonight's National Anthem.

When @F1 was racing, not a video game.

To quote the wise @ScottPresler - "I’m going to say this as respectfully, peacefully, and professionally as possible:" @BasedMikeLee you have been saying all the right things on X for weeks. Maybe months. You help many of us outside the halls of power believe there is hope. That someone is actually not just listening to, but HEARING We the People. But so far, action has been completely lacking. @LeaderThune has betrayed the people that gave him the majority and nobody in the @SenateGOP - unfortunately including you, Sir - appears to have the wherewithal to put action behind the words. So, with all due respect - either lead a coalition to do something or please stop it with the false hope & just stop posting. Your words are beginning to ring hollow. I pray you'll choose the former, Sir. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

To quote the wise @ScottPresler - "I’m going to say this as respectfully, peacefully, and professionally as possible:" @BasedMikeLee you have been saying all the right things on X for weeks. Maybe months. You give many of us outside the halls of power that there is hope. That someone is actually not just listening to, but HEARING We the People. But so far, action has been completely lacking. @LeaderThune has betrayed the people that gave him the majority and nobody in the @SenateGOP - unfortunately including you, Sir - appears to have the wherewithal to put action behind the words. So, with all due respect - either lead a coalition to do something or please stop it with the false hope & just stop posting. Your words are beginning to ring hollow. I pray you'll choose the former, Sir. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

The Senate just completed a pro forma session No attempt was made to pass DHS funding by unanimous consent The Senate must convene now

@RepJohnRose @LeaderJohnThune I would like to hope you’re wrong about that Congresssman, but sure is telling that, AFAIK, not a single member of the @SenateGOP has come out in criticism of the trickery.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking the Senate’s dirty DHS deal was just @LeaderJohnThune — rank-and-file Republican senators were in on it too. Any single Republican senator could have stopped the Thune/Schumer DHS deal, but not one did. Not a single one. Republican senators knew leadership’s plan ahead of time, and they still left town knowing exactly what was coming at 3 a.m., while Americans were sleeping.

That’s not strategy, those are excuses. Nuke the filibuster and pass the SAVE act, or you and the rest of the useless @SenateGOP will be irrelevant in the mid terms. We the People have you a bigger majority than @SpeakerJohnson has and yet the house has accomplished 10X with less. Do your job.

Democrats weren’t even negotiating until last week. Their lack of good faith left this as the only agreement @LeaderJohnThune could reach. Democrats can obstruct with impunity because they’re aided and abetted by the legacy media that NEVER holds them accountable. We need to rapidly move to a Reconciliation Appropriations Process to fund @DHSgov through FY2029, rendering Democrats irrelevant.

@GuntherEagleman And I am here for it 😆

The Japanese just say stuff.