This single tweet cost California hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, revenue, and jobs:

USA. September first. Overnight the entire country turned to pumpkin, so I turned to pumpkin too. I woke up one morning and the nation had changed its religion. The coffee was pumpkin. The donut was pumpkin. A man walked past drinking something orange and steaming, smiling like a saved man. By noon I had counted pumpkin bread, pumpkin candles, pumpkin soap, and a pumpkin air freshener shaped like, inexplicably, a pumpkin. I understood at once. This was the festival. Once a year the people honor the Gourd God, and every offering in the land must bear his scent. I would not be the one barbarian who failed to bow. So I committed. Fully. I ordered the largest pumpkin drink they had. The girl asked, "Whipped cream?" I said, "Whatever the god requires." I drank it in one breath, like sake at a shrine, eyes watering, and declared, "I feel him." Then I asked the question that broke me. "How much of this is true pumpkin?" She looked at the cup. "Oh, none of it. It's just the spice. There's no actual pumpkin in any of it." No pumpkin. In the pumpkin festival. A lesser man would have left. I ordered three more. If the god cannot be found, I reasoned, then the god must be summoned. So I escalated. I bought every pumpkin object in the store. I lit four pumpkin candles at once. I washed my hands with pumpkin soap between sips. I ate a pumpkin muffin in the shower for reasons I will not defend. By day three I smelled of cinnamon from the inside. By day five my sweat was a beverage. A dog followed me for nine blocks. I let him. He, too, was a believer. I bought a pumpkin costume. I wore the pumpkin costume. I drank a pumpkin drink inside the pumpkin costume, in line behind a man dressed as a normal person, who I quietly pitied. The barista now sees me coming and starts my order without a word. We have never spoken of it. There is nothing to say. She knows what I am. I am the most pumpkin man in America. Yesterday a child pointed at me and shouted, "Mommy, a pumpkin!" I knelt. I looked her in the eyes. I said, "Yes." It was the proudest moment of my life. So tell me, America. There is no pumpkin in the pumpkin. But there is, now, a great deal of pumpkin in me. Have I done it correctly? I cannot stop. The spice has won. I am orange now, and I am never going back.

Highly recommend Balcones Roofing. They did a great job on our home and even found a lurking issue that prevented a huge expense down the road. True professionals!!

My salary as an employee: Year 1: $54K (Big 4 accounting) Year 2: $60K (worked at startup) Year 3: $80K (startup) Year 4: $105K (software engineer) Year 5: $115K (software engineer) Then, I quit my job to build Starter Story. My revenue as an owner: Year 1: $0 Year 2: $12K Year 3: $67K Year 4: $186K Year 5: $497K Year 6: $752K Year 7: $1.6M Year 8: Sold the company. Bet on yourself.

A perfect visualization of the enshittification of Google search. linkedin.com/feed/update/urn…

People like to talk about Texas as a “pro-business state” — and at the state level, that’s true. But at the city level, it’s a mixed bag. In some cities, you can walk in asking for a permit to open a restaurant, build a home, or start a business, and you’re met with enthusiasm. They’re glad you chose their town. They want to help. They see growth, investment, and an expanding tax base. In other cities, it feels like the opposite. You’re met with a general sense of disdain. There’s an almost theatrical effort to delay, confuse, obstruct, or throw you off course. Sometimes it feels less like governance and more like hostility toward anyone trying to build something. It’s a tale of two cities. Ironically, a lot of money can be made navigating the second gauntlet. If you can survive the obstacle course, there’s often profitability on the other side. But many entrepreneurs never make it through. Their businesses go to the graveyard after years of struggling. Over time, that kind of tough environment slowly suffocates the very businesses that create jobs, tax revenue, and growth. As Texans, we need to work hard to make sure the anti- business culture doesn’t spread further. The future of our great state depends on it.

THOMAS PAINE: "I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace."

The NYT is a meme at this point… "Why doesn’t this summit between global superpowers look diverse like the movies?"

Ready for it? Rotten Tomatoes… The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan: Critics: 90% Audience: 10% You know it’s going to happen.

A guy I know lost both parents to a drunk driver. He got custody of his 3 siblings and had to drop out of uni to work and take care of them. He used to joke a lot, always outside, always laughing. After it happened, he barely talked. Just always looked tired. If this law had been in place it would have eased his burden a bit.

Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements. Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30 smaller airports lose service. JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes. The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%. For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%. Warren said no. She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024. Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year. Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug. 510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December. 14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight. And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms. Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back. 40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market. And the math ain’t mathing. Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%. That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.” So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money? Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years. Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do. Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.” A win. 14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight. And she’s taking credit. This is socialism in 2026. A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company. She saved you a billion on imaginary paper. She cost you ten times that in real life. She didn’t protect consumers from anything. 14,000 will go from working to welfare. She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed. Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything. She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.

I’m unfollowing anyone who accepted and posted under an #AnimalFarmPartner agreement.

Having kids = hard and tiring Being married = hard and tiring Running a business = hard and tiring Being a good citizen = hard and tiring Do hard things, be tired, that is what life is about.

Crazy story out of Qatar: A British couple honeymooned in Doha, where the wife was harassed at the Ritz-Carlton pool by two men who told her she'd "fall in love" after he slept with her. The hotel gaslit her, with management denying the CCTV backed her story despite their own WhatsApp messages saying the opposite. Her husband posted a TripAdvisor review calling the hotel "unsafe for women." The hotel got it pulled, then a hotel employee filed a defamation complaint against him under Qatar's cybercrime laws. Nearly a year later, when he returned to Qatar for work, he was detained, informed he'd been tried in absentia and fined, and then held for four nights in a deportation centre. The deportation order lasts five years, which severely hurts his career as a Middle East healthcare consultant. In other words, Marriott International, an American company, used Qatari law to silence a complaint about a woman being sexually harassed at their property.

The Road.

Once the numbers are available, it is possible to run an analysis to identify the fifty worst judges in America, meaning those who are putting the country and its citizens in severe danger. You go after those first fifty. You use whatever legal means are available to get them impeached. You investigate whether they have engaged in corruption. Whatever is within the scope of the law, you use to remove them from power. As people are removed from the list, you replace them with the next worst remaining, so the list always contains fifty. If you were to do this with a couple of wealthy sponsors, you would likely need a team of three or four people to handle the investigations and a lawyer to file suits. That effort would provide a significant service to America and Americans. Put the judiciary on notice.

I built CourtWatch.us — a free public database for American citizens who deserve safer communities. You can track which judges released defendants who then got rearrested, skipped court, or violated their release conditions. All public records. All free. I started with Orange County FL and will be expanding to all 67 Florida counties and eventually every state in the country. This first batch of info is from 2024 and since public reports are released in March/April for the previous year, data is behind. But I wanted to see if this is plausible. After adding 2024,I'll add 2025 and then figure out how to get real-time-data uploaded. It's in beta — would love to know what you think 👇 Numbers don't lie, but criminals do. courtwatch.us @bennyjohnson @jockowillink @GrantCardone @LauraLoomer @nickshirleyy @j_fishback

In Dire Need Of Toilet, Artemis Lands At Buc-ee’s buff.ly/WTtDXfO

Last year's Thanksgiving dinner was the cheapest since 1986 in terms of how many hours of work a blue collar worker would have had to do to buy it.

The American economy is such a Behemoth that we can somehow absorb hundreds of billions in fraud a year across state after state And barely notice it. Imagine what we could unlock if we cut this down by even 50%