True. I think both parties are broken but the Dems have never acknowledged (other than Rahm) that Trump got elected because more taxes (negative sum game) and more government isn’t the answer. Republicans need to understand democracies die when 60% of citizen don’t participate and leaders shouldn’t bully.

And a #Northeestern grad! Great Chicago success story 🎉💪

On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history. The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet. Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention. He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette. He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents. A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

A bedroom in San Francisco. Around 1976. A six-year-old girl sat on her bed and wrote a book. She titled it The Book Worm. She wrote, by hand, one hundred and forty-two pages. She was a shy child. She would write elaborate stories for hours alone, the way other children watched television. A few years later, a flood swept through the house and destroyed the manuscript. She did not stop writing. She kept writing through middle school, through the Connecticut boarding school Hotchkiss, and through Princeton, where the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison taught her in a creative-writing workshop and called her one of the best students she had ever had. She graduated from Princeton in 1992 with a degree in English. She moved to New York. She worked at D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund, while she tried to finish her first novel. At the hedge fund, she sat near a vice president four years older than her, named Jeff Bezos. Her name was MacKenzie Scott. She and Bezos married in 1993. The next year, they drove together from New York to Seattle to start, in a converted garage, an online bookstore called Amazon. She was one of the company's first employees. She wrote its first business plan. She handled the accounts. She helped pack the first orders the company ever shipped to customers. It took her ten years, in between Amazon and the four children she and Bezos raised together, to finish her novel. She published The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005. It won the American Book Award the following year. Toni Morrison, asked to comment on it, called it "a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart." A second novel followed in 2013. Then, in January of 2019, after a long trial separation, MacKenzie and Jeff Bezos announced they were getting divorced. In the settlement, she received about four percent of Amazon. At the time it was worth around thirty-eight billion dollars. It was, by most accounts, the largest marital settlement in the history of the world. She dropped her married name. She took her own middle name, Scott, in its place. And then she started writing the cheques. In May of 2019, four months after announcing the divorce, MacKenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge. "I have a disproportionate amount of money to share," she wrote in the letter that accompanied it. She meant it. Now here is the part worth sitting with. Most billionaires set up large foundations with carefully branded names, staffs, grant applications, and quarterly progress reports. MacKenzie Scott did the opposite. She and a small team began quietly identifying nonprofit organisations doing strong work on racial equity, gender equality, economic mobility, education, public health, and LGBTQ rights. Many of these were small groups whose entire annual operating budgets were smaller than a single one of her cheques. When they decided to fund one, the organisation would typically learn about it by getting a phone call, out of nowhere, from an intermediary they had never heard of, asking how to wire several million dollars into their bank account. No application. No proposal. No restrictions on how the money could be spent. In 2022, after years of working in near-silence, Scott set up a website called Yield Giving to publish a record of her grants. In 2023, for the first time, she ran an open call, allowing small non-profits she might never have heard of otherwise to apply. Then the giving kept accelerating. By July of 2020, Scott had given out one point seven billion dollars in unrestricted grants to a hundred and sixteen nonprofits. By the end of 2022, she had passed fourteen billion. By the end of 2024, nineteen. By the end of 2025, MacKenzie Scott had given away twenty-six point three billion dollars to roughly two thousand seven hundred organisations across the United States and abroad. In 2025 alone, she gave seven point one billion. About seven hundred and eighty-three million of that went to historically Black colleges and universities — Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, and many others — more than doubling the round of HBCU gifts she had made five years earlier. Most of the time, the press did not know until the recipients announced it themselves. When she finally posted a year-end essay on Yield Giving in December of 2025, she wrote that the dollar totals would dominate the news coverage, but that the real story was happening inside the communities the money had reached. A six-year-old girl in San Francisco wrote a hundred-and-forty-two-page novel by hand, and lost it in a flood. She kept writing. She studied under Toni Morrison at Princeton. She wrote one of Amazon's first business plans. She published two literary novels. In 2019, she walked out of the largest divorce settlement in history, signed her own giving pledge, and started writing cheques to nonprofits she had picked herself. She did not put her name on a single building. She did not start a foundation called the MacKenzie Scott Foundation. She just kept finding good organisations and wiring them money. She had spent her life writing. Now her writing was, mostly, just the cheques.

Celebrity’s surprise their fans

With unprecedented investor demand for the largest IPO in history (SpaceX), it's worth remembering a simple lesson: A great company doesn't always make for a great investment at any price. The median major IPO lost 31% in its first year & suffered a 53% drawdown along the way.

If you want an early indication of how wild SpaceX IPO could be… ProShares issued press release *today* indicating it plans to launch 2x leveraged SpaceX ETF on *same day* as IPO. Will be other ETF issuers jumping in here as well.

Elon may have engineered the cleanest IPO support structure ever built Insiders cannot sell unless the stock is already 30% above the IPO price That means selling pressure only arrives at $175 or higher Then Nasdaq index funds step in as forced buyers Limited supply. Forced demand. Supply faucet controlled by one person This is not a normal lockup. It was designed Most people are debating whether SpaceX is overpriced at $135 Almost nobody is looking at the structure underneath it. Check the Claude article with the full IPO analysis.

That’s the hug you get from your dad when you become the 5th player since 1900 to hit a walk off homer in your MLB debut.

The Official Trump Meme Coin has now lost 98% of its value. Elected officials should not be issuing, promoting, and profiting from speculative financial assets. This should be illegal.

June 7, 1944. D-Day plus 1. 4,414 Allied soldiers lay dead after the longest day in history. 2,501 of them American. Bodies still washing in with the tide at Omaha. And yet in the French town of Bayeux, 10 miles from those cliffs, British soldiers were being handed wine and flowers in the street. The SS had fled Bayeux in the night. The French Resistance sent word to the Allies: do not bomb this town, the Germans are gone. So they weren't. At 4am, a lone British tank crept in to verify. By 1pm it was official. Bayeux was the first French city liberated from Nazi occupation. Citizens who hadn't seen a free soldier in four years ran into the streets weeping, kissing strangers, pressing bottles into soldiers' hands. The historical irony is almost impossible to believe. Inside Bayeux sits a 900-year-old tapestry depicting William the Conqueror, a Norman, crossing the English Channel to invade England in 1066. Now, 878 years later, the English had crossed back. And the French were screaming with joy to see them. Here is what was simultaneously happening across Normandy: 156,000 Allied troops had crossed the Channel in a single day. The French Resistance had cut the railway network in over 500 places overnight and destroyed 52 locomotives. German reinforcements were stranded, unable to move. Germany's most brilliant defensive commander, Erwin Rommel, was not in France. He had driven home to Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday. He had bought her a pair of shoes in Paris as a gift. He was handing them to her as the first landing craft hit the sand. Hitler was asleep. Not metaphorically. Literally. The Fuhrer had taken barbiturate sedatives before bed. When the invasion began at 4am, his staff received the call and stood outside his bedroom door. No one dared wake him. His two elite Panzer reserve divisions, the 12th SS Hitlerjugend and Panzer Lehr, some of the most powerful armored formations in the German army, sat completely idle waiting for a release order that could not come because the man who had to give it was unconscious. Hitler woke at noon. Eight hours after the first boots touched the sand. He released the Panzers at 4pm. But Allied fighter-bombers owned the sky by then. The armored columns could not move in daylight without being destroyed from above. They waited for dark, burning eight more hours. The only serious German armored counterattack on June 6 came from the 21st Panzer Division, which drove all the way to the coast, splitting the gap between Sword and Juno beaches, almost cutting the entire Allied beachhead in two. Then they looked up. 248 British gliders were passing overhead, landing troops directly behind German lines. They turned around and withdrew. By nightfall on June 7, the beachhead was 50 miles wide and the Allies were not going anywhere. In Bayeux, the wine was still flowing. The most consequential military operation in human history nearly collapsed because one general forgot to buy flowers in time, and the other one could not be woken up.

The Dividend Yield on the S&P 500 ETF moved below 1% this week and is fast approaching the all-time low yield of 0.94% in 2000. $SPY

On June 6, 1944, Martha Gellhorn was sitting in a London briefing room when the news broke: D-Day had begun. She had already been denied press credentials. The U.S. military had banned all female journalists from the front. Her editor at Collier's had quietly handed her D-Day assignment to someone else. That someone else was her husband, Ernest Hemingway. She got in a cab and went to the docks at Southampton anyway. She talked her way past a military policeman by claiming she wanted to interview nurses aboard a hospital ship. Then she found a bathroom, locked the door, and waited in silence until the HMHS Prague was too far out to sea to turn back. The Prague was the first Allied hospital ship to reach Normandy. In the dark water off Omaha Beach, Higgins boats ferried shattered men out to the ship. Gellhorn moved among them, helping carry stretchers, holding hands, recording everything. On June 8, she went ashore herself, one of the only civilians to set foot on that beach during the landing operation. When she got back to England, military police were waiting on the dock. They arrested her, revoked her accreditation, and sent her to a nurses training camp outside London as punishment. She went AWOL within 48 hours. She went on to cover the Battle of the Bulge. She was among the first journalists to enter Dachau after liberation. She reported conflicts on six continents over six decades, never once embedded, never once asking permission. Hemingway flew to Normandy on a press plane. Full military clearance. Official credentials. He watched the landings from the air and filed his dispatch. He won the Nobel Prize. You know his name. You probably didn't know hers until just now.

Milton Friedman's greatest regret. The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous. Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time. Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude. This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent. Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

RT @wmiddelkoop: When Money Dies #NBAfinal

What a great story. This is sports!