I am a Declaration American: To me, America consists mainly in the idea of individual liberty and found its most compelling political expression in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution was a counter-Revolutionary act, and Lysander Spooner was right.

Yes.

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

Never brake for communists.

The sheer scale of a trillion dollars can be hard to comprehend. Let me put it in perspective. You would be able to buy 42 miles of high speed rail in California with that much money.

The bloody nonsense of socialist "economists" goes all the way down to their metaphysics. They just can't conceive the fundamentally individual nature of the human being.

Workin' out on my 1952 Gibson L-47. A chorus of Steely Dan's "Rose Darling" --

I'd go 15:1 that almost none of the imbeciles complaining about it also have no serious idea who Chappie James really was. It's not as if they've read the Robin Olds biography.

"Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world." (Ayn Rand -- Howard Roark's courtroom address, "The Fountainhead", 1943)

A trillion dollars today inflation-adjusted to 1913 is a bit under thirty billion dollars. It's not that the trillionaires are getting richer. It's that the dollar is getting cheaper. Calm down, people.

"Of what value, to whom?" There's the key to the puzzle.

Believe it or not, a man I once worked with was beaten to death with his own Gibson Les Paul during a burglary.

Hey, @FreddyLA7 -- While you're in America, I wonder if you might find time to consider a baseball game?

"Maps Are Not Mapmakers" Most AI debates ask whether machines can think. The deeper question is whether they can explore. AI is brilliant at navigating inherited maps: summaries, translations, recombinations, arguments, code, archives. But map-reading is not mapmaking. The real source of knowledge is contact with reality: exploration, risk, error, discovery, classification, prediction, preservation. The danger is not that machines become explorers. The greater danger is that humans stop being explorers. Civilization survives by making maps from reality — not merely maps from maps. Before there are maps, there are explorers. The real problem with AI isn’t consciousness or “understanding”—it’s that we’ve reversed the capital structure of knowledge production. LLMs are extraordinary engines of semantic derivatives, but they don’t explore territory or create new predictive capital. They inherit the maps civilization already made. The danger isn’t that machines will become explorers. It’s that we’ll stop being ones. freemarketsandfirepower.subs…

"Just like you wouldn't walk into a tiger-cage and mess with a tiger, because it'll bite your head off." (1:48 of this) That's the point where he explicitly compared black people with animals. Nobody would ever to think of indicting a tiger on a murder charge, because of its essential predatory nature. There is every good reason in the world to understand that humans, in *their* nature as reasoning beings, should never sink to that. Bryan is too dumb to understand any of this.

x.com/Koestghost/status/1647… @_Billy_Beck_

"Play" It's relentless mockery of the power of ideas. That's what that really is.

The fundamental glue that holds society is violence." (Potmetalstein) It's amazing: what some people confess.

BTDT -- @thevivafrei is putting on a hell of a show with HotepBryanJesus, featuring an encyclopedia of practiced and very stylish non sequitur as dynamic as a ten year-old on meth and a TV remote. Constant cynical channel-changes. Viv's voice annotations of the scene are worth my while.

Holy shit.