LIFTOFF OF ARTEMIS II Carrying the hopes and dreams of millions as four of humanity’s bravest ride a great pillar of fire destined for the Moon, carrying the pride of nations. 📸 - @NASASpaceflight

What he’s not saying is doing all the work. Here are the major omissions and sleights of hand, stripped of fluff. First, none of those things are free. “Free” education, healthcare, transit, welfare are paid for through higher taxes, lower take home pay, VATs, energy taxes, payroll taxes, and slower wealth accumulation. Freedom isn’t about whether you get services. It’s about whether you get to choose how your income is used. Second, he never mentions who pays. Europe’s systems rely on a narrower tax base squeezing the middle class far harder than in the US. Fewer people become rich, fewer people start large businesses, fewer people accumulate capital. That tradeoff is quietly ignored. Third, he ignores opportunity cost. Lower cost of living often coincides with lower wages, fewer high paying jobs, less upward mobility, and less innovation. Europe produces fewer world scale companies per capita and imports much of its tech dynamism. Fourth, life expectancy is not a clean policy metric. It’s heavily influenced by lifestyle choices, demographics, immigration patterns, obesity rates, drug use, and violence. It doesn’t isolate freedom, healthcare quality, or economic structure. It’s used because it sounds moral, not because it’s precise. Fifth, “quality of life” indexes smuggle values. They weight leisure, redistribution, and state provision as positives while discounting entrepreneurial upside, income growth, and choice. They measure comfort under administration, not freedom. Sixth, he conflates outcomes with rights. Freedom isn’t “the state gives me things and I’m comfortable.” Freedom is the right to earn, keep, trade, speak, move, build, and fail without needing permission. Europe regulates more, taxes more, licenses more, restricts more. That’s the trade. Seventh, he ignores exit and voice. Americans can move between states with radically different tax and regulatory regimes. Europe has far less internal competition. Centralization dulls accountability. Eighth, he never asks why America subsidizes Europe’s model. Defense spending, innovation, pharmaceuticals, tech platforms, and energy production disproportionately come from the US, lowering Europe’s costs while Europe criticizes the system producing them. Bottom line: He’s describing a managed lifestyle, not freedom. Comfort purchased with other people’s earnings and enforced by law isn’t liberty. It’s administration. Freedom is messier, riskier, and unequal. That’s because it treats adults as owners of their lives, not dependents of the state.

Since 1967, the share of US households with inflation-adjusted income over $200K grew from 2% to 14% while the share with under $35K shrunk from 31% to 21% Via @VisualCap

HOLY SHITBALLS THEY CAUGHT IT!

Go Artemis!

Kansas "gravel"

Tour de Force: New images from our #MarsHelicopter show the parachute & backshell that landed @NASAPersevere. More than eye-popping pictures, they inform the tech we'll need for safely landing future missions, including astronauts, on the Red Planet. go.nasa.gov/3rXxumF

There ARE people who are marginalized and powerless. But if you can impose orthodoxies on college campuses, stigmatize and even silence dissent, and punish dissenters, turning them into pariahs and ruining their careers, then don't pretend that YOU are marginalized or powerless.

Hey guys, wanna feel old? I'm 40. You're welcome.

The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superior

Nothing is more fraudulent than calls for a "dialogue on race." Those who issue such calls are usually quick to cry "racism" at any frank criticism. They are almost invariably seeking a monologue on race, to which others are supposed to listen.

“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’” George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four.

Yawn. The notion that Canada or the UK would have the rights regime they have were it not for the power of the US’s example — and the US’s power — is just silly. People are trying so hard to claim the American founding wasn’t a net good for humanity and that’s sad and ludicrous.

Not to be controversial, but I love America.

Imagine being so privileged to live in so great a country, where even the poorest are better off than 80% of the entire world and be so ignorant to tweet #FvckTheFourth Are there places to improve, things to change? Of course, but only a child doesn't recognize all they do have

Right. So let’s make shit up like they did with 1619 Project and pretend that’s not a bedtime story. Spare me.

People dunking on the founding should appreciate that they’re taking a sledgehammer to the very soapbox they’re standing on. No founding, no free speech, no right to assemble, no due process. If you think that’s all just “white supremacy,” try protesting and carping without it.

Take: When you declare an area free of all policing it will attract at least two kinds of people: 1) Naive idealists who think everyone can live in harmony without authority. 2) People who want to do the bad things that policing often deters. The 2 groups won't mix well.

إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ Surely we belong to God and to him shall we return. It is with tremendous sadness and pain to say goodbye to my father, Nur Omar Mohamed. No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew and loved him.