LJW

I previously reported that the growth rate and composition of Trump's wealth gain in office are unprecedented in recent history. Upon request, here is the data on the relative size of Trump's presidential windfall. The extent of his self-enrichment is even more striking.

There is no sin quite as exquisite— as a black cup of coffee. Dark. Hot. Waiting. I know you can be so bad to me. open.substack.com/pub/leotheelem…

Trump promised a manufacturing boom. Instead, we've lost 75,000 jobs and $60 billion in annual factory construction since he took office. 📸: @MSNOWNews @Morning_Joe

Block Blanche because he negotiated self-dealing IRS gift for Trump, fired court appointed US attorneys, bragged about cleaning house of 200 DOJ employees who worked on cases involving Trump & J6, botched the Epstein case, oversaw cases targeting Trump’s perceived enemies, welcomes Trump’s control.

Trump’s draconian cuts to health care, education, and foreign aid were rationalized on balancing the budget. Yet thanks to his tax cuts for the rich, the deficit is on track to hit almost 7% of GDP by 2036. My @Morning_Joe Chart

Musk and Trump took a hatchet to the federal government, claiming they would save $2 trillion in taxpayer money. Thousands lost jobs. Even more lost essential services. But the cuts only saved 2% of their original claims. My @Morning_Joe Chart

Trump claimed his tariffs would bring about a golden age of American manufacturing. Yet since his re-election, we've lost 75,000 manufacturing jobs. Over the same period, Biden had created 625,000.

This dandy from the WSJ Editorial Board: "Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” it says. “The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” Achieving it across many jurisdictions “would be difficult” and “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort." ... "Unfortunately, the message from Mr. Trump and others has been that America’s elections can’t be trusted, and the only hope is the SAVE America Act. Aside from being untrue, this is a political backfire for the GOP. If Republican voters believe it, and the bill falls short, then why waste time going to the polls in November? Has the GOP already forgotten how Mr. Trump’s fraud outbursts cost them two Senate seats in the 2021 Georgia runoffs?" wsj.com/opinion/donald…

Trump's $4 billion Presidential windfall is unprecedented in scale & source. Obama's wealth grew from royalties on books written before office — and Bush's mostly from a sports‑team stake from over a decade prior. Most of Trump's new billions are from deals made in office.

One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.

Under Trump, U.S. federal debt has surpassed 100% of GDP for the first time since WWII. And it's on track to beat that all-time record by 2030.

An initial startup idea can't usually be both grand and precise. In practice they're usually either grand and vague or precise and small. Precise and small is better. You know who your initial users are, and you expand outward. With grand and vague you can't even get started.

"The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects," says @davidmccraw nytimes.com/2026/07/11/bus…

Lyzr, a three-year-old, Jersey City, New Jersey, startup that helps enterprises build AI agents, used its own AI agent to raise its own round. @TechCrunch @ArchitectByLyzr techcrunch.com/2026/07/09/an-….

Reports that the White House has dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — all of whom were unanimously confirmed by the Senate, including a commissioner appointed by President Trump himself — should concern every American, regardless of party, because the EAC was established by Congress as an independent, bipartisan body to help states administer secure and credible elections. If these reports are accurate, removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections.

Trump is a decrepit, senile old man who is being brutally exploited by cold and cynical manipulators. It’s pitiful and disgusting to watch. He doesn’t understand anything at all and is falling asleep on his feet. The author of this vile play should be hanged.

We always seem to have billions for war, bombs, and endless militarization. But when it comes to healthcare, Social Security, housing, or feeding kids, suddenly we're told there's no money. That's a political choice.

Reuters analysis found that the Trumps have raked in $2.3 billion from 4 different crypto ventures. Through the same schemes, their investors lost $2.3 billion. My @Morning_Joe Chart

A 33-year-old woman at MIT wrote the code that ran inside the Apollo 11 lunar lander, and 20 seconds before Neil Armstrong touched the moon, her program made a decision the astronauts didn't know was happening that was the only reason the mission didn't crash. Her name was Margaret Hamilton. She led the team writing every line of code that would fly humans to the moon and back. The part almost nobody knows is that she had to fight to be allowed to do the work at all. Code in 1965 was not treated as real work. Rockets were serious. Circuits were serious. Writing code was something the men at NASA thought secretaries could do on the side. Hamilton was told this to her face more than once. So she started calling what her team did "software engineering." She used the phrase on purpose. In meetings. In memos. To force people to treat it as a discipline instead of a chore. Colleagues laughed at her the first few times she said it out loud. That phrase is now the name of the biggest engineering profession on earth. The story of what her code did on July 20, 1969 is the one every kid should be taught. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 3 minutes from touching down when the computer inside the lunar module started flashing an alarm. 1202. Then again. Then 1201. Five alarms in four minutes. The computer was telling the astronauts it could not finish everything it had been asked to do. The computer they were flying with had less memory than a modern microwave. Someone on the checklist had left a switch in the wrong position, and a radar the astronauts did not even need right then was flooding the computer with data. It was eating around 13% of the machine's brain at the exact moment every second mattered. In almost any other system, that overload would have frozen the machine. A frozen machine 30,000 feet above the moon means a crash. It means two dead astronauts and a third one orbiting alone above them, waiting for a signal that would never come. Hamilton's code did something else. She had built the software with a rule almost nobody in her field was using at the time. When the machine ran out of room, it would not treat every task as equally important. It would look at the list of jobs it had been asked to do, throw out the ones that could wait, and keep running only the ones keeping the crew alive. The radar was the low priority job. The landing was the highest. So the computer did what she had told it to do. It dumped the radar. It kept flying. The alarm was not a failure. It was the machine reporting that it was handling the overload exactly the way she had designed it to. Down in Houston, a 24-year-old engineer named Jack Garman recognized the alarm from a test his team had run months earlier. He shouted "Go" to the flight controller. The controller shouted it up to the crew. The landing kept going. Armstrong touched the surface with 25 seconds of fuel left. The part that gets lost in every retelling is why Hamilton had built that safety net in the first place. NASA had not asked for it. She had added it on her own, years earlier, because her 4-year-old daughter Lauren had once crashed the simulator by pressing a button during a test. The button was one the astronauts had been told they would never press. Hamilton wanted the code to survive that button press anyway. Her bosses told her it was a waste of time. Astronauts do not make mistakes. She insisted. The safety net went in. Two years later, on the way to the moon, an astronaut left a switch in the wrong position. The exact class of mistake she had been told would never happen. There is a photograph of her from that period. She is standing next to a stack of paper as tall as she is. Every page in that stack is the code her team wrote for the mission. She is smiling at the camera like she knows something the rest of the aerospace industry has not figured out yet. In 2016, Barack Obama put the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck and said the astronauts did not have much time, but thankfully, they had Margaret Hamilton. Every autopilot in every plane you have ever flown on uses a version of what she invented. Every pacemaker. Every self driving car. Every satellite in orbit. The idea that a machine should know which job matters most and drop the rest when it runs out of room is now the foundation of almost every safety system on the planet. She wrote it because a 4 year old crashed a simulator and nobody else thought it was worth fixing. The men in the room laughed at her for calling it engineering. Then her code was the only thing in the sky that did not fail.

I didn't realize this till recently, but the math section of the SAT is a de facto second English section. For whatever reason they can't give you problems that are mathematically difficult, so the only way to add difficulty is to make the problems hard to read.