David Van Bortel

@elonmusk @GantertCynthia

If you don’t understand why the Electoral College exists, you are the reason the Electoral College exists.

I’m watching the Trump visit to China and I’m comparing notes. I’ve been on several presidential international trips. I’ve been a member of the entourage. Allow me a moment and a word. I’m watching the Trump visit to China and I’m comparing notes. What a difference strong, competent leadership makes! This isn’t the same America shuffling through scripted photo-ops and whispered apologies. This is a President who commands respect, surrounded by a Cabinet of proven executives, patriots, and deal-makers who actually put America First. Secretary of State Marco Rubio negotiating with the clarity of someone who understands both power and principle. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth projecting strength without bluster. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent outmaneuvering economic adversaries at the table. A team of battle-tested leaders—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS restoring trust in public health, Doug Burgum securing our energy dominance, and so many more—who were chosen for excellence, not loyalty to the swamp. No more cabinet filled with placeholders and ideologues. These are results-oriented Americans who show up prepared, speak plainly, and deliver for our country. Watching our delegation move with purpose in Beijing reminds me why elections matter. We went from weakness and drift to strength and strategy. God bless this President and this Cabinet. America is back—and the world knows it.

@BobLonsberry Didn't Gerrymandering start with the Constitution? The 3/5 rule for the first House of Representatives. and imposition of taxes? I need to read more....

Gerrymandering should be something to which we respond based on principle, not on partisanship. It's either right or it's wrong, it's not situational. The issue is do you support screwing over Americans, not whose party did it first or worst. It should be condemned by all, not embraced opportunistically.

A couple, 67 and 65. Buy a place in Florida. Spend about 5 months a year there. Keep the home up north. They tell everyone they're "basically Florida residents now." 3 years later, the audit letter arrives from their old state. Cell phone records. Credit cards. Doctor visits. Utility bills. The verdict: not Florida residents. Back taxes plus interest plus penalties. This isn't hypothetical. In October 2025, the New York Tax Appeals Tribunal ruled against John Hoff and Kathleen Ocorr-Hoff for tax years 2018 and 2019. About $60,000 in New York income taxes. They had done everything the checklists tell you to do. Florida driver's licenses. Florida voter registration. Declarations of domicile filed in Florida. Vehicles registered in Florida. Estate planning documents updated to Florida law. The Tribunal still ruled against them. Here's what actually beat them. Cell phone records showed they spent more days in New York than Florida both years. 186 days in NY in 2018. 164 in 2019. He still owned and ran a New York business and drew a significant salary from it. She still operated her own business out of Rochester, New York. They kept country club memberships in both states. The center of their actual life never left. The 183-day rule is the starting gun, not the finish line. You can be under 183 days in your old state and still lose if your business, your income, your doctors, and your daily life stayed behind. States are aggressive about this. New York alone collected more than $3 billion through residency audits from 2022 to 2023. A driver's license won't save you. Neither will a declaration of domicile.

Whoever made this video is creatively brilliant! Terrific lyrics, too

After 13 years in finance & helping 3,000+ families gain millions in net worth, here are the best money tips I wish I knew when I started: 1. Stop saving money. Start investing it 2. You only need 25x your annual expenses to never work again 3. 90% of investors can't beat a simple ETF, so don't try to beat them 4. You only need 1-5 ETFs for your entire portfolio. I like $VTI, $VWO, and $VXUS 5. Auto-invest on payday. Willpower isn't a financial strategy 6. Keep investment fees under 0.2% 7. IULs are a scam. Stay far away 8. Whole life insurance is a scam. Stay far away 9. Buy term life insurance and invest the difference 10. Add umbrella insurance once you're worth $500k+ 11. The tax code is 6,871 pages of loopholes 12. Hire a CPA before you think you need one 13. Adjust your W-4 to break even. Stop giving the IRS a 0% loan 14. Tax loss harvest when your stocks are down. Losses carry forward forever 15. Set "maximums" for monthly discretionary spending 16. Set "minimums" for monthly investing & debt payoff 17. Use Vanguard, Fidelity, or Schwab to invest 18. Audit your subscriptions every quarter. The average family finds $2k/mo of leaks 19. Max your HSA 20. Max your 401k 21. Max your Roth IRA 22. Use a Backdoor Roth IRA if you earn too much 23. Use a Mega Backdoor Roth if you want to invest more 24. $300/mo in the right accounts can make your kid a millionaire 25. Open a 529, Parent Taxable Brokerage, & Roth IRA as soon as they're born 26. Add them as an "authorized user" on your credit to boost their score & history 27. Don't pay more than 5x gross income for a home 28. Don't pay more than 25% of take-home on housing 29. Don't buy unless you're staying 5+ years 30. One extra "principal only" payment per month can save $150k & 7 years on a 30-year mortgage 31. Never carry a credit card balance 32. Never finance furniture 33. Never finance a wedding 34. Never lease a car 35. You will never out earn bad habits 36. It doesn't matter what you make. It matters what you keep 37. Choosing a great spouse is the highest-ROI decision you'll ever make 38. Boring investments pay for exciting lives Apply these 38 and you won't recognize your finances 12 months from now. Send it to someone who could use it... And follow me @budgetdog for more family finance content 🤝🏻

The largest planned commercial solar complex for the Adirondack Park was paused this morning. It's time to talk about the logistics behind tying these complexes into the Upstate New York grid, and how the developer behind this complex, Boralex, wants to spin the sudden "hold" on Foothills Solar. Boralex is the same foreign corporation (out of Canada) that wants to build Fort Edward Solar on one of the last grasslands of its kind throughout the Northeast. Here is the obvious: before a solar project can operate, it has to physically connect into the electric grid (run by New York Independent System Operator (NYISO). That connection requires studies, approvals, and sometimes major upgrades to nearby power lines or substations. Rural areas, like Mayfield, New York, which enjoy idyllic, untouched, and remote beauty inside the largest park in all of the US, the Adirondack Park, don’t have huge transmission capacity. When a new solar project wants to connect, engineers check whether the grid can handle that extra power. The important part to note here: if the grid can't handle the extra power, upgrades are required. Who has to pay for those upgrades? In this case, the developer does. If the system needs new lines, substation upgrades, or other infrastructure, the cost falls on the project developer. Those costs can suddenly jump into the millions (or tens of millions). Boralex does not intend to pay for those millions in upgrades. They want New York State to pay for those millions instead. That's why Boralex wants to rebid with @NYSERDA so they can lock the project into a higher Renewable Energy Credit (REC) price. Boralex and the other foreign developers want NYSERDA, funded by YOUR taxpayer dollars and delivery charges on your electric bills, to pay for these grid updates. If New York can't provide that kind of financial insulation, the developer isn't interested. This has always been about money, and never been about modernizing our grid, lowering electric bills, or developing "clean" energy with panels manufactured and shipped halfway around the world using fossil fuels. Commercial solar generates such a pathetic amount of energy in Upstate NY that without these RECs and subsidies, the industry collapses. It's very precariously run on the back of money taken from the citizens of this state while they circumvent our local zoning laws and home rule. It must come to an end.

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

This photo was taken TWO WEEKS AGO. The Amish, who YES are WHITE, are STILL in Western North Carolina rebuilding after Helene. Hundreds of bridges. Hundreds of homes. By hand. FOR FREE. With NO cameras. Zero mainstream media coverage. GOD BLESS THE AMISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Democrats whining about Democracy: please explain to America how, out of 21 Congressional seats representing the 6 New England states, there are ZERO Republican Representatives, even though 40% of the electorate are registered Republicans, 48% in New Hampshire alone?

Listen to how @SenSchumer talks about Black people, like we're his fucking pets. I dunno about you, but creating TWO majority-Black districts to entrench Democrat power in perpetuity seems a LOT like a 250mile-long plantation. These Democrat fuckers went ALL THE WAY BACK to their slaver roots, and have the GALL to call SOMETHING ELSE "Jim Crow." Go FUCK yourself, Chuck.

Amen

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

DRIVE-BY MEDIA: The same press corps that has breathlessly attacked Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Dir Kash Patel for drinking alcohol were seen pilfering and chugging bottles of wine and champagne after the would-be assassin was arrested at the WHCD. Double standard?

The NAACP are buddies with SPLC. Both of them stoke hatred relentlessly.

Really, think a little deeper...Oh I get it! the SS and most of Homeland Security is not funded, so no tax payer dollars, what a clever take...

🚨 Welcome All Election Deniers! Secret Memo Dated January 15, 2020 Declassified March 16, 2026 Public Release April 20, 2026 Everything you've been told was impossible, is possible. Someone needs to be shot for this. justthenews.com/sites/default/…

This is among the scripture pull on frequently. I started leaning into it in the very tough days of USAF pilot training. And then, again and again, when flying into harm’s way, whether combat or special operations. I encourage you to lean on it when times are challenging: Philippians 4:6 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Amen.

BREAKING NEWS: Seventy-Two Killed Resisting Gun Confiscation In Massachusetts. A National Guard task-force detailed to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault-style weapons, was ambushed by elements of an anti-Government, para-military extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw. Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices. The governor, who described the group’s organizers as “treasonous criminals,” issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government’s efforts to secure law and order. The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed wide-spread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault-style weapons. Gage issued a ban on military-style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting in early this month between government and military leaders at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms. One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that “none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned over their weapons voluntarily.” Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition. However, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily-armed extremists who had been tipped off regarding the government’s plans. During a tense standoff in the Lexington town park, National Guard Colonel Francis Smith, commander of the government operation, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the right-wing extremists. Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange. Ironically, the local citizenry blamed the government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the National Guard units. Colonel Smith, finding his forces over matched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat. Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/national joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as “ringleaders” of the extremist faction, remain at large. And this fellow Americans, is exactly how the American Revolution began, April 19, 1775. History. Learn it, or repeat it.