The Hollow Men American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider. By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants. These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition. In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken. Today, we have severed that link. We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses. If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived. This looting starts in the boardroom. We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year. Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor. And for what? Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love. They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders. And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk? We get the Delegation Economy. When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know. This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering. They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake. While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us. If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag. The time for polite governance is over. If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

the end of the trance

This and never seeing pajama pants in public again.

CALEB WILLIAMS YOU ARE RIDICULOUS 📺: NBC

100% justified.

We brainwashed hundreds of thousands of unstable young people to believe that chemically castrating and dismembering themselves is their only way to become their true selves and avoid suicide and that anyone preventing them from inflicting the ultimate sexual violence on themselves is a Nazi who wants to kill the children he’s protecting from the ultimate sexual violence. Of course they will threaten and commit violence.

Soldado americano atacando a la soberanía de Francia en 1944

Qué hizo el derecho internacional con esto? Nada.

Leveraged buyout of Venezuela, but instead of paying cash or equity, we simply take it over

Sent undercover journalists to Minnesota to investigate and expose Somalian fraud… AP: No PBS: No FOX: No NPR: No WSJ: No CNN: No WAPO: No Reuters: No MSNBC: No Etc Independent journalist @nickshirleyy had to go do their job. The Legacy Media is the enemy of the people.

$MSOS cannabis rescheduling A source close to Trump tells The Marijuana Herald that the fentanyl executive order was strategically issued prior to cannabis rescheduling to counter potential claims that Trump isn’t tough enough on drugs. The source says the order “clears the way for action on cannabis." MH

Vince Gilligan’s "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and now "Pluribus" constitute one of the most sustained cultural critiques of postwar American urban form in contemporary television. He could have glamorized Albuquerque or chosen a nicer (and less representative) part of the country as a setting. But, no, he tells his tales of moral decay within a distinctly American spatial order: strip malls, arterial roads, parking lots, cul-de-sacs, and isolated single-use zones. and I love it

Supreme Court Justices will hold a closed door meeting on December 12 to discuss case seeking to challenge the Federal Government’s prohibition on cannabis in reliance on Commerce Clause.

Lehman Brothers?

"Trump plans to direct agencies to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug as soon as Monday," per Reuters

Budget.

If you invested $100 into GOLD in 1833 (191 years ago) and held it, you would now how $128 after inflation and taxes.

“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.” — Abraham Lincoln

Da Vinci, one of his best

Thomas Sowell 🔥 🔥