Von Ketteler

"Give me enough tobacco, whiskey, and Swedes, and I will build a railroad to hell." James J. Hill - Owner Great Northern Railroad

@ProfessorWerner One Central Bank vs 3 to 5 Big Banks, all colluding together. The end state will be similar. The people will be crushed. The bottom line: Total control in both situations.

Left vs. right is not helpful. When it comes to increased powers for the central planners, fascism and communism converge. It's centralisers and totalitarians vs. decentralisation, small firms and middle class people power.

@robbertleusink JFK made his entire cabinet read Machiavelli when he became President. The Decade of Livy is absolute gold.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 He is the most quoted political thinker in history, but the least read Everyone knows the name, everyone knows 'the ends justify the means,' and almost nobody knows he never wrote that sentence What he actually wrote was a manual for how power works in practice, not how moralists wish it worked He was not celebrating cruelty, only describing reality 500 years later, politicians who have never read him still govern exactly as he said they would

@GOPPollAnalyst Just stop with this. Tucker hasn't changed. Trump has.

How much money did Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens make off of MAGA before we found out who they really are? Any guesses?

@rightwingnutrs "Reifying" is the tell. It's a relatively obscure Marxist term, almost never used outside postgrad research papers.

Look, I’ve had “dissident” political opinions my entire life. I was raised to believe the South had the right to secede, that Europe became gay after the monarchies got overthrown or reduced to figureheads, that the federal bureaucracy wants to take your rights away. That maybe we shouldn’t have been involved in some of these wars. Maybe it’s because I had to deal with this in an environment where that wasn’t the consensus on the right, but you can believe these things without hating America. You don’t have to become a psycho where you believe America is the bad guy and Iran, China, and Russia are the good guys. Or that the solution is reifying the ideology of interwar Germany.

@jpodhoretz We won WWII and went to the Moon when WASPs that spoke, and acted, like Tucker, were in charge. Now that @jpodhoretz , and his friends, try to slither into power... the best we get is Drag Queen Story Hour at our local Elementary Schools. Seems like an epic downgrade.

Tucker spent 8 years on Fox reading written monologues off a teleprompter. The world is now learning just what a casual liar he is. Comes by it honestly. His father was one of the most astounding pathological liars I’ve ever known.

@SmackandNikes @jpodhoretz Pray tell.... What was the name of this book?

In a 2023 speech, Tucker told a story about the memoir of Russian general Pyotr Wrangel, claiming that when Wrangel visited the tsar, the Romanov women were wearing red ribbons in support of the Bolsheviks. He likened this to American liberal women supporting BLM. This interested me so I read the book. It's not in there at all. Tucker made it up

@cdrsalamander Ike said if we still had US troops in Europe in 1956 (ten years after the Occupation started) we will have failed in our mission. His vision was the Europeans would man & pay for EVERYTHING for their own defense. The US would stand ready with CONUS forces to REINFORCE them.

Correct. As I have proposed for over two decades "…withdraw all maneuver forces from Asia and Europe except for what is needed at Combined Training and Logistics Bases with our most important allies." Such a posture does not abandon NATO, it would make it stronger. The U.S. simply adjusts to modern reality...and more importantly...enables the US to shape its force structure around its comparative advantage as a maritime & aerospace power with its land component scalable, expeditionary, and supported with robust air and sea strategic lift to be able to respond to where the future calls its need to support its interests and allies in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere. We are a republic with friends and interests, not an empire that garrisons foreign nations. We need to be structured as such.

@Historycourses @6Voodoo @DFDvbya @PeterWrangel True. These are all distortions to break up the reconciliation we have enjoyed & treasured for 150 years. Tellingly, this has only become an issue once the Democrats finally & totally lost the Solid South around 2000.

@6Voodoo @DFDvbya @PeterWrangel The "union was an army of foreign hirelings, *real* americans fought for the south" thing always struck me as completely off, because in terms of absolute numbers too there were more native-born americans fighting for the union than the confederacy.

Because despite the fact that the Union imported 43% of it’s Army and conscripted soldiers to murder it’s fellow citizens, had nearly unlimited more resources in terms of raw materials and weapons, the Confederates were a slip of Gettysburg away from winning the war.

@streetlypaul @ChrisO_wiki Some of these inland locations, with access to these salt deposits, would boil the brine using long, iron pans over wood fires.

@ChrisO_wiki ‘“Wich" is primarily an archaic or dialectal term for a salt pit, brine spring, or an industrial settlement involved in salt production.’ - As in Droitwich.

Sorry, but that's not true. "Wick" or "wych" usually comes from the Anglo-Saxon wīċ (dwelling place or village), or in some cases from the unrelated Norse word vík (bay or inlet). Some places may have practiced salt production but that's not what the placenames mean. There's definitely no salt at Gatwick!

@Waggis_NO @ChrisO_wiki It is exactly where I got it from. Loved that book!

@ChrisO_wiki The source of the claim is probably from Kurlanski's 'Salt: A world history'

@JMesseg @Cernovich And yet….

@Cernovich Tucker has become really boring

Was like reading a deposition. nytimes.com/2026/05/02/mag…

@shagbark_hick Those endless pine forests used to power the furniture making capital of the nation, and enormous lumber & paper mills throughout the region. Now, mostly gone. Be kind. Like upstate New York, they have had a rough few decades since the 90s.

I find myself in Hickory, NC today, after arriving by train to Gastonia well before dawn. Very strange region here -- almost featureless. One drives for miles and sees nothing distinctive at all. It so far feels like Anywhere, USA. What do I need to know about this region?

@SaysSimulation Eisenhower said if we still had US troops in Europe after 1956, our mission will have failed.

increased support capacity, or will they just continue to talk about over wine & dinner conversations, that seems to be the norm so far for European "rearmament"? Here's the link: wsj.com/world/europe/t…

In response to harsh criticism by Merz of the US involvement in Iran, an Army brigade of about 5k troops is being brought home from Germany (link later). This was unexpected and shows that the "divorce" between the US & Europe is moving from talk to reality. This is ~13% of 1/

@cynthiamckinney Hitler wanted to create Greater Germany

Most families are now in their third generation of class dysmorphia. Upward mobility stopped being the norm in the early 70's. Indeed, many high-level trends in striver signaling grew out of the decline: - Foreign travel and "Experiences" generally are things rich people do which can be had on a modest credit card limit. Your steel worker great-grandpa could buy a summer home for cash even if he never set foot on an airplane. - "Urbanism" grows out of the fact that gentrifying a slum was, for 40 years, the most cost-efficient way to obtain housing in a city you couldn't afford. - Ethnic food makes you seem worldly, and it's cheap compared to traditionally high class Western cuisine which revolves around intrinsically expensive ingredients. "I discovered this little Bomalian hole-in-the-wall with $5 spicy slop bowls" hits the twin targets of claiming cultural capital and feeding yourself/your date on a budget. - Biking is an urban striver obsession, it's classier than driving a beater. They like trains and trolleys because you can't flex on a bus. Actual rich people have a car with a driver on staff. Every generation of young people since the 80's has faced this conundrum of how to signal a higher class than they can afford and our UMC folkways are themselves an outgrowth of this.

@anishmoonka His enemies called it "Fordism". The great railroad builders: Thomas Brassey and James J. Hill had the same idea. Paying people crap wages actually INCREASED labor costs. All 3 men paid excellent wages and took care of their men. All three were wildly successful.

Every modern HR department is built to prevent what Henry Ford did in 1914. He doubled his factory workers' pay overnight. The Wall Street Journal called it "an economic crime." Two years later, his profits had doubled too. Ford was solving a math problem. His car factory had a 370% turnover rate. He was replacing his entire workforce nearly four times a year. Training new people was eating his profits alive. So he cut the workday from 9 hours to 8, paid the bigger wage, and bet his whole company on it. Turnover collapsed from 370% to 16% in two years. People missing work dropped to 0.4%. Production rose 40% in the first year. By 1915, Ford was selling 500,000 Model Ts a year. Annual profits hit $60 million by 1916. He had turned his own workers into customers who could finally afford the cars they were building. 112 years later, the math is the same. Replacing an employee today costs 50% to 200% of their annual salary, according to HR industry research. For someone making $80,000, that's $40,000 to $160,000 to lose them and train someone new. Payroll records from 15 million American workers show that in December 2025, the person who quit got a 6.6% raise. The person who stayed loyal got 4.4%. Companies know this. They have entire HR teams that calculate the exact tradeoff. Your raise still arrives at 3.2%, the average across 1,000 US employers in a 2025 survey. Your promotion takes 30.4 months on average, about two and a half years, based on a study of 19,000 employees at major UK and US companies. The money is there. Companies just make more profit paying you less than they'd have to pay a new hire, as long as you don't quit. The whole system runs on the bet that you won't. Henry Ford ran the opposite bet. Pay people enough that they don't want to leave, and they'll build you the most profitable car company in the world. His competitors thought he was insane. They were the ones doing the worse math.

@MartinSkold2 Cost cutting is finite. You can cut maybe 10%, and even then, you'll end up, sloppily, cutting into bone. High growth, led by manufacturing, is basically infinite. The only limit to growth is human ingenuity. Cutting spending is "root canal" politics that gets the GOP nowhere

On the one hand, yes: This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans - as with Obamacare, the Democrats are willing to take electoral casualties and the Republicans aren’t. And on the other hand, there is a reason for this: The Democrats can replace their losses more easily and rebound more readily. In particular, where this issue is concerned: Dismantling the welfare state creates a recession (until the resources the welfare state used to distribute are repurposed, and some are lost in the process); recessions create demand for government handouts. You know which party wants those. This is the whole challenge here. It’s just how culture and structure work: The country defaults to the left right now, not the right. It will until something changes. In fact, while it won’t benefit the libertarian right, one thing the right probably -can- do is just route subsidies toward its cultural base, rather than try to end them outright. But not everyone in the coalition is on board with that. Meantime: Come at the king, you’d best not miss.

@DabberThoughts @cdrsalamander We've gone from disagreeing with geopolitical support for one nation over another to committing criminal acts. No. A diplomat is not required to commit crimes. This is an absurd question.

@IbnKhaldune @cdrsalamander So if the President enacted a policy of say, murdering Jews, you should represent that policy with absolutely no issue?

It never ceases to amaze me that so many people in the diplomatic arena, especially ambassadors, forget that as the U.S. ambassador to another nation, you are there to represent the interests of the U.S. government, not the nation your embassy is located in. This is a common problem to that speaks to me as a dysfunction of how our diplomatic corps recruits, trains, develops, and promotes their cadre. Our system of incentives and disincentives are unbalanced. …and I state that as someone who has a long, constant, and public record supporting the Ukrainian people well before 2014. The two subjects are very different.

@DabberThoughts @cdrsalamander It is in the job description. You are the personal representative of the President. You speak & act for him. Your opinions, your principles, etc... are irrelevant. Admittedly, the job is not for everyone. You have to have a little ice in your veins to do it well.

@IbnKhaldune @cdrsalamander So you want weak-willed individuals who will do and say what their Govt tells them to, whether it's right or wrong ...

@DabberThoughts @cdrsalamander If you have strong principles, don't be a diplomat.

@cdrsalamander So what you're saying is, you wouldn't stand up for your principles, if they were at odds with what the US Govt were doing ...