Damned Architect

@Leslieoo7 @leonalioness6 Reminds me of the time in 2010 that a young black man in The Bronx had his hands on my iPhone and I gave him $20 for it. He was returning it to me after I lost it on the subway – I was sorry I didn’t have more of a reward for him! There are good people everywhere for sure 😊

Almost every Muslim majority country in the Middle East has killed more Muslims than Israel has.

@j33624 @NoCRTinSchools @DrJillStein And why are you on twitter? It’s made in America!

@NoCRTinSchools @DrJillStein America is responsible for most of the world's problems. You are not good people nor are you saviors. You're a violent, greedy, corrupt country full of brainwashed clowns who think America's anything to be proud of 🚮

Russia brings oil. China bring solar energy. The US brings starvation and darkness. Tells you all you need to know.

I'm running out of ways to say it, which will in no way keep me from repeating ad nauseam that hostility toward Israel, and the rise of antisemitism, among the Western youth is downstream from their rising hostility toward the Western, post-Enlightenment system as a whole.

These 14-year-old Chinese girls speak perfect California-dialect English. Even using the filler word "like" the way a real upper-class American girl from California would. They've been attending an American-language international school since kindergarten, where I presume there are students who are children of American expatriates who learned English in the United States, so this dialect gets passed on to the Chinese natives. This is the *only* way to learn a language like a native. After the age of approximately 7, the brain starts losing the ability to create the hearing and pronunciation patterns that allow this kind of fluency.

If I were a Persian Muslim I’d be considered “brown and oppressed” but since I’m a Persian Jew I’m considered “white and privileged.” Never mind that my parents are refugees who fled Islamic persecution. Who lost everything and had to rebuild from scratch. Who came to this country with nothing more than a suitcase and a Farsi-English dictionary.

The Democrats were the party of the working class five decades ago. They have long ago morphed into a class of functionaries within the Therapeutic State who derive their livings from servicing a range of victim classes.

Ukraine has started suggesting that a piece of land it needs help defending be called "Donnyland" so Trump will give them support. It's a combination of "Donald" and "Donbas." According to the New York Times, a Ukrainian negotiator brought this up as a half-joke, but now it's become part of talks because it does seem to help. A Ukrainian negotiator even used ChatGPT to create a flag for Donnyland and a national anthem. Look, it's all very funny that we are governed by a toddler. But as Americans we should all be deeply ashamed by what this man is. You should personally feel bad that you are a citizen of a country that could elect such a person to lead it.

@jacobkornbluh @ViralNewsNYC The policy should be consistent; either we don’t care about politics of any country when investing, or we have criteria that affects our investing on an equal basis.

NYC Comptroller Mark Levine defends Israel Bonds investments (Mayor Mamdani has urged him to end it): “This is not political. It shouldn't be political… Israel bonds have never missed a payment in 70 years, ever, not once.” “And by the way, we've had no protesting about our investments in Saudi Arabia, our investments in Pakistan or China — only this one little, tiny sliver.”

NYCHA is looking to tear down 2056 apartments in Chelsea Houses But what they’re really aiming to do is offer brand new public housing at the same affordability levels AND bring in new market rate housing to fund it all. Let’s dive into the private/public partnership that’s promising to bring much needed revenue to NYCHA.

Same goes for NYC too!

Predictable result: excluding fare jumpers also keeps out their crimes and mess. Importantly, it contradicts the narrative that these are people just struggling to get by, who need to save the few dollars because they work minimum wage jobs. No, they're mostly messy criminals.

NYC is facing a severe housing crisis, yet *6,200* city-run apartments sit empty. Another ~50,000 private market apartments sit empty due to the 2019 vacancy control laws. This is the result of "Progressive" housing policies. Blight. Decay. Empty units. Less housing.

The ones with Asian dads do have a point. Asian women have a much easier time on the dating market, so the Asian guys who do end up getting married and having kids tend to be a cut above, and that shows up in the kids.

Sadly truthful, not only a great tweet but follow worthy!

In 1942, the Japanese rounded up all Chinese men in Singapore. They were filtering out the healthy young ones to execute. Lee Kuan Yew was 18. A guard pointed at him and said: "Go to that lorry." He knew what that meant. The lorry went to the beaches. The beaches meant machine guns. He asked: "Can I collect my other things?" They said yes. He walked away, found his family's gardener, and hid in his quarters for two days. When they changed the screening inspectors, he tried again. This time, he got through. The ones sent to that lorry were taken to the beaches and shot. Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 didn't survive. 60 years later, he sat down at Harvard to explain how he built Singapore from a tiny island into one of the wealthiest nations on Earth: On what the war did to him: "We lived in happy, placid colonial Singapore in the 1920s and 30s. The British Empire would have lasted another thousand years, so we thought." Then the Japanese came. In less than one and a half months, the British collapsed. "Three and a half years of hell. Butchery. Brutality. Many didn't survive. I was fortunate. I did." "But it changed us." "What right did they have to do this to us? Why did the British let us down so badly?" When the war ended, Lee went to Cambridge to study law. But he was watching with different eyes. "Can they govern me better than I can govern myself? Because they scooted when the Japanese came in. And why shouldn't I be running the place?" On learning languages to lead: Lee was the best speaker in English. But only 20% of Singapore spoke English. The masses spoke Hokkien, Mandarin, and Malay. "So every day at lunchtime, instead of having lunch, I would sit down with a Hokkien teacher and laboriously and painfully learn to convert my Mandarin into Hokkien." "Had I not mastered that, the battle would be lost by default." His first speech in Hokkien, the kids laughed at him. "I said, please don't laugh. Help me. I'm trying to get you to understanding." By 6 months, he could get his ideas across. By 2 years, he was fluent. "Believe it or not, at the end of two years I could speak better than most of them." "That came respect." It showed two things: how determined he was, and how sincere. Here was a man doing all these other things and still learning their language just to talk to them. On fighting the Communists: The Communists had been organizing since 1923. The year Lee was born. "Here we were in the 1950s trying to beat them. And they are professionals at organization." They had elimination squads. Guerrillas in the jungle. Killer squads in the towns. Lee stood up and said no. "They denied that they were Communists. 'We're just left-wing socialists.' So I did a series of 12 broadcasts to set the scene. And I made it in three languages." English. Malay. Mandarin. 20 minutes each. "When I finished each broadcast, the director of the station couldn't see me. Went into the room and found me lying on the floor trying to recover my breath." "But it was a fight for survival. Life or death." On where trust comes from: "It's difficult to establish trust in times of calm. You just say, 'Well, it's an argument, therefore I'm a better guy than you.'" "But when the chips are down and you can get eliminated in a very unpleasant way and you show that you're prepared for it and you'll fight for them, it makes a difference." "Without that trust, we could not have built Singapore." On IQ vs EQ: Harvard asked him: would you prefer high IQ or high EQ in a leader? "IQ, you can get beautiful paper done. Complex formulas worked out. Elegant solutions." "But when you've got to get a team to work and put that formula into practice, you're dealing with human beings." "If you're not good at EQ, you can't sense that A doesn't get on with B, and you put them in the same team. It's no good." He rated his own EQ as 7 or 8 out of 10. His IQ as "maybe 120." But he had colleagues who could sense a person instantly. "He shook hands with the man and said, 'I recoiled when I felt his palm. Evil man.' And he was. How does he know? I don't know." "So I learned whenever I had to do interviews to choose people, I would get people who are very good at seeing through a candidate." On corruption: Singapore in the 1950s was full of deals, bribes, and organized crime. "When we took over, we decided that this was the critical factor. If we did not make it so that every dollar put in at the top reaches the ground as one dollar, we're not going to succeed." "We came in and made a symbolic act. We dressed in white shirts, white trousers, and said we will be what we represent." He put the anti-corruption bureau under his personal portfolio. "I gave the director the authority to investigate everybody and everything. All ministers. Including myself." One of his own colleagues took half a million in bribes. When the investigation started, he asked to see Lee. "I said, if I see you then I'll be a witness in court. So best not see me. Better see your lawyer." The man committed suicide. Left a note saying: "As an oriental gentleman who believes in honor, I have to pay the supreme price." "It's a heavy price. But it reminds every minister that there are no exceptions." On consistency: Lee had three journalists analyze 40 years of his speeches. He asked them: what was the dominant theme? All three said the same thing: consistency. "What I said at the beginning, throughout all that period, the theme stayed loud and clear." "That made it simple. Because you know where you stand with me. And you know what I want to do." On delivering results: "We deliver the homes, the schools, the jobs, the hospitals." "Today, 98% of our people own their own homes. The smallest would be about $100,000 US. The biggest about $300,000." "Once you own that amount of assets, you are not in favor of risking it with a crazy government. Your assets will go down in value." "But that was planned." Why? Because Singapore is small. Everyone does national service. If you're going to fight, you better be fighting for something you own. "So we give everybody a stake." On changing culture slowly: Lee wanted Singapore to speak English. But he couldn't force it. "Had I passed a law and said you will all learn English, we would have had mayhem. Riots." Instead, he let parents watch who got the best jobs. The jobs were already there, from the multinationals and banks. They all used English. "They watched and saw who got the best jobs. And they switched." It took 16 years. "I did not want to have said 16 years. Because in those 16 years I lost 20,000 Chinese graduates who had poor jobs. I wanted to make it shorter. I couldn't. I would have run into flack." On whether leadership can be taught: Lee quoted Isaac Singer, the Nobel Prize winner for Yiddish literature. Someone asked Singer: "Can you make a writer write great literature?" He paused. Then said: "If he has the writer in him, I will make him a good writer in a shorter time." Lee's version: "Can you make a leader of anybody? I don't think so." "He must have some of the ingredients. He must have that high energy level. He must have the ability to project himself, his ideas. He must have the desire, almost instinctively, to say 'let's do something better.' Of wanting to do something for his fellow men and not just for himself and his family." "You can't teach those things. He's either got it or he hasn't got it." "But if he's got that, then you can save him a lot of trouble." On sustaining yourself: Harvard asked how he managed despair over decades of leadership. "If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope." "But there are moments when you feel very down. Either because you're physically down, or emotionally down, or because the world has turned adverse against you." "When you are in that condition, the first thing you do is get a good night's sleep. Then get a swim or chase a ball. Get the cobwebs out of your mind." "If you're not fit, you're going to make mistakes. Physically fit. You must stay physically and mentally fit." In his later years, he learned to meditate. "At the end of 20 minutes to half an hour, my pulse rate can go down from 100 to about 60. You can feel yourself subside. You still your mind. You empty your mind." "Then when you are rested, you resume quietly. You still got the same problems. Maybe you sleep on it. Come back. Look at it for a few days. Then decide." This 2 hour Harvard interview will teach you more about leadership than every business book you've read combined. Bookmark & give it 2 hours this weekend, no matter what.

The answer feels pretty clear in which the presence of Black Americans as a distinct, established group has shaped the space in ways that give other Black communities more room to move and express themselves here than in parts of Europe.

I'm digging into New York City financials, and it is NOT looking good. Between 2019 and 2023, New Yorkers who moved out made $68 billion more than those who moved to New York City. $14B to Florida, $2 billion to Texas, $23 billion to NY State.. These ppl aren't coming back.

Pretty much the case with anything “progressive”!

@NewGuyFloyde69 @aziz0nomics @Noahpinion And what state isn’t at some point in history?

@darianfernando @aziz0nomics @Noahpinion Exactly my point. But that doesn't change the fact that Israel is a pariah state founded on violence and maintained by genocidal apartheid.

I'm not a fan of Israel, and I think America should significantly dial back our alliance with them if not end it entirely, and yet I think most of the Westerners who spend all day hating on Israel are absolute ghouls and fans of genocide and totalitarianism.

@NewGuyFloyde69 @aziz0nomics @Noahpinion You know this hate isn’t stopping with “zionists”, stop pretending otherwise!

@darianfernando @aziz0nomics @Noahpinion This has nothing do with Jewish people and everything to do with murderous Zionists who are a threat to the world. You have dirt clods in your head where your brain should be.