European security officials now regularly broadcast a message nearly unimaginable a decade ago: get ready for conflict with Russia.
Rarely a week goes by now without a European government, military or security chief making a grim speech warning the public that they are headed toward a potential war with Russia. It is a profound psychological shift for a continent that has rebuilt itself after two world wars by trumpeting a message of harmony and joint economic prosperity.
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European security chiefs say that Russia has begun a covert “gray zone” assault on Europe, to try to damage its economy and sow confusion. Russia is suspected of being behind a string of sabotage on critical European infrastructure and military facilities, cyberattacks on businesses, as well as arson attacks on warehouses and shopping centers. Russian drones have disrupted Polish airspace and jet fighters zipped over Estonia.
In America, we don’t need to look to our nation’s leader for an explanation of how it happened. We know it will happen again, likely too many times to count.
But America’s deep, stubborn will against any logical or sensible gun control is what keeps us stuck in this cycle. We must not become numb to the grief, loss and horror of gun violence.
Ms. Epley, we already have a very logical and sensible gun law on the books. And if it was enforced it would dramatically reduce the number of mass shootings. The problem is there is not enough political will to enforce it.
Maybe you have heard of this law. It is called the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It can and should be enforced via 18 USC 241 and 242.
To properly run an incredible sexual fantasy takes a ton of background skill and prep work. You need to be able to handle STI risk, which requires readign a bunch of boring papers. You have to process other people, which requires background checks. You have to be good at basic party design, which requires a very ‘cold’ view into incentives – if you put the furniture here, where do people congregate? You have to test messaging – what kind of opening phrasing sets up what kind of expectations for people? What kind of food selection is best? How do you communicate rules effectively?
And if you want to be truly good, like reach apex levels of hedonism, you need to deeply understand sexuality. Tracking sexual trends, learning stats, doing experiments – all of this helps develop more robust models of human sexual psychology that you can use to help fine-tune the choices you make when building sexual fantasies.
Really, from my perspective, your spontaneous natural little sexcursions are cute and amateur. Yall are like ‘oh we had sexual tension and then banged in the back seat of a car’ like this is the peak sexual heights a human can reach. I think this is perfectly wonderful if that’s what you like, but in the spectrum of possibility you are stuck in child’s play. You have never properly Tried to achieve any sexual greatness. Yall are held back by the shallow narrative that ‘trying is unsexy’
No, I think through a structure of cold analysis and unsexy practice, I have helped create some of the greatest sexual fantasy events currently running on earth (for people with this class of fetish).
Grok claims, and this is consistent with other of her writings, the type of fetish she specializes in is
Consensual Non-Consent (CNC)
Aella specializes in organizing events centered on consensual non-consent, a BDSM-oriented fetish involving carefully negotiated role-play of non-consensual scenarios (like “rape play”) in a safe, structured environment. This includes background checks, STI protocols, psychological aftercare, and data-driven event design to ensure participant safety and immersion.
In the post, she refers to this as the “class of fetish” for which she creates “some of the greatest sexual fantasy events currently running on earth,” responding to critiques that her analytical approach lacks “Dionysian energy.” She defends the prep work as essential for high-quality experiences, contrasting it with unplanned encounters. Her Substack details how these CNC orgies operate, emphasizing consent tools like safewords, debriefs, and invite-only applications.
This is an alternate reality. An orgy with “rape play” and BDSM? If I were to be exposed to this my impulse would be draw my gun, put a stop to the rape, then use my knife to cut the ropes and other bindings.
I get it that different people are wired differently. But why would it even be possible to route “wires” in this way? What evolutionary advantage did this have? Or is it that evolution found that if all routes were possible then more novel situations can be dealt with?
In the more general case, like all human activities, this phrase is rather profound:
Yall are held back by the shallow narrative.
Adams, Jefferson, Madison, et al. created a new nation with founding principles and documents that led it to become the greatest economic and military powerhouse the world has ever seen with people having the most freedom of any nation that has ever existed. Bill Gates became a millionaire at age 26 and a billionaire at 31. Elon Musk put a Tesla Roadster in orbit around the sun and is now forging a path to Mars.
Some people are not handicapped with shallow narratives.
We are supporting Ms. Gardner’s petition for certiorari because, as we state in the amicus, a general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense cannot coexist with each state having a requirement that visitors from other states first undergo a costly and time-consuming process. The fact she went through the permit procedure in Virginia should be ample proof she is not a criminal, and besides that, she was acting in self-defense from what she believed was road rage and an attempt to do her harm.
If the high court takes this case for review, it could result in a ruling which could mandate national concealed carry reciprocity. Such a ruling would definitely benefit our members and supporters nationwide.
That she is an adult, is not subject to involuntary confinement, and not a fugitive from justice should be ample proof of her fitness to exercise her right to keep and bear arms. But, bargaining for what you believe to be achievable and having a good chance of winning is better than demanding something you have a near zero chance of getting and losing.
Let normalcy bias do its thing then get more next time. That is what the anti-freedom people have been doing for a long time. More than one can play this game.
The Somali community has been engaged in massive, endemic, systematic fraud against the American taxpayer for years. We’re going to discover ultimately, and we are in the throes right now of a full-throated all-hands-on-deck federal investigation. Is that the scope, scale, size and sheer magnitude of the fraud eclipses anybody’s worst nightmare.
According to official government records, 90 percent of Somali households with children are on federal welfare. The real number is probably 100 percent, because federal records always under count. You’re talking about a population that has been imported into Minnesota in which virtually every single member of that population is receiving welfare from the federal government, this could very well end up, Laura, being the greatest financial fraud scandal in American history.
Even if we dial rhetoric back by 50%, to compensate for the likely political exaggeration, it is still a big deal. I wonder if we can get some prison time for a bunch of politicians out of this. I’m rather down on politicians. I think sending lots of them to prison will make the world a better place.
When Jon Richelieu-Booth boarded a plane home to England after a Florida vacation, he had no reason to believe a simple photo — a harmless picture of himself shooting a legally rented shotgun at a gun range — would soon turn his life upside down.
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The message is always the same: give up a little freedom now…we promise it’s for your own good. Richelieu-Booth’s arrest shows exactly where that road leads.
The truth is simple: freedom dies gradually… until it dies suddenly. That’s why the fight for the Second Amendment isn’t just about guns. It’s about the entire structure of American liberty. It’s about ensuring that no government — federal, state, local, or foreign — can do to an American what British authorities did to that IT consultant.
Our rights are exceptional. They are fragile. And they survive only when the people refuse to surrender them.
If we want our children and grandchildren to inherit a free nation — a nation where a photo of a gun is just a photo — then we must fight harder than ever to protect the liberties that make America the last stronghold of individual freedom. Because what happened in England must never become normal here.
In a surprising paper, scientists say they’ve nailed down a physical model for a warp drive, which flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy concept of warp speed travel: that it requires exotic, negative forces.
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Where the existing paradigm uses negative energy—exotic matter that doesn’t exist and can’t be generated within our current understanding of the universe—this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime rather than floating ships in spacetime.
The physical model uses almost none of the negative energy and capitalizes on the idea that spacetime bubbles can behave almost however they like. And, the APL scientists say, this isn’t even the only other way warp speed could work. Making a model that’s at least physically comprehensible is a big step.
Plus, Alcubierre himself has endorsed the new model, which is like having Albert Einstein show up to your introductory physics class.
Video by Sabine Hossenfelder explaining some things:
I really like this video. It helped me understand space time as well as warp drive theory better than anything other source.
I wish Eric Engstrom were alive to hear about this. One of the lures he used to get me to join his startup on January 1, 2000, was that we were going to become incredibly rich and be able to pay for his immortality project. Then we would be able to “hang around” until warp drive was available, then travel among the stars and maybe even the galaxies.
I was more than a little skeptical about the ending to that story. Did he really believe that? I don’t know. But I do know if you don’t think something is possible then you will never be able to do it. If you think it is possible, it might be something you can accomplish. Placing my bet on the fantastical outcome that might be possible, I went to work for Eric as his first employee. The company folded in about May of 2001 after the dot com bubble collapsed. I never have regretted placing that bet.
But let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you – and why?
Our country has prospered by providing individuals with the opportunity to get ahead and to enjoy the fruits of their success. Consequently, we have out-performed and out-grown every developed country on earth.
We must not allow today’s socialist fever to wreck the American dream.
I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they’ve made the biggest financial mess that any government’s ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.
Margret Thatcher February 5, 1976
Bringing them down is easier said than done. The world has been struggling with them for over 125 years now. Even though socialists, and their ideological kin the communists, have murdered over 200,000,000 of their own citizens there are still 100s of millions of people clamoring for more. Then there is the tremendous economic and ecological damage these political systems add to the rivers of blood they create. No right-thinking person can defend this history. Yet this cancer is still gnawing away. It seems to never give up.
How much knowledge there is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined. When a social justice advocate like Professor John Rawls of Harvard referred to how ‘society’ should ‘arrange’ certain outcomes, he was clearly referring to collective decisions of a kind that government makes, using knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers, more so than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives. As an old saying expressed it: ‘A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.’
Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, expressed the same sentiment spending probably an entire chapter on it. He described it as an information problem. People close to the problem are in the best position to solve the problem. Free markets and free minds outperform highly regulated markets and constrained minds.
The correctness of this should be obvious to almost everyone. The implications are broad and damning against central planners and big government in general.
The proverb “A fool may put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him” (or close variants) is a traditional Dutch proverb, first recorded in the 16th–17th century.
The earliest known printed source is in the 1621 edition of Carolus Tuinman’s “De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden” (later editions more famous), but the saying already appears earlier in Dutch and Low German proverb collections.
The closest early attestation is in Jan Gruter’s “Florilegium ethicopoliticum” (1610–1612) and other 17th-century Dutch sources, where it is presented as an already established saying:
Original Dutch form (c. 1620s–1630s): “Een dwaas kan zijn jas beter aantrekken dan een wijs man hem die aantrekken kan.”
A very similar version also appears in German collections around the same time (e.g., Lehmann’s 1639 florilegium).
So, there is no single named individual who is the “first” to say it. It is an anonymous folk proverb that crystallized in the Netherlands/low German-speaking areas in the late 1500s or early 1600s, with the earliest surviving written records appearing around 1610–1630.
No evidence attributes it to any famous writer or philosopher before it appears in these printed proverb collections. Variants later spread into English in the 18th–19th centuries (sometimes misattributed to figures like Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain, but those attributions are false).
Copilot is adamant that Grok is wrong:
That claim is false. Let me break it down carefully:
Carolus Tuinman: Tuinman was a Dutch scholar who indeed published De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden (The Origin and Explanation of Daily Used Proverbs), but not in 1621. His works appeared in the early 18th century (1710s–1720s). So the date 1621 is anachronistic.
Jan Gruter’s Florilegium ethicopoliticum: Gruter (1560–1627) did publish collections of sayings and moral excerpts in the early 17th century, but no attestation of the “coat” proverb exists in his florilegium. Searches of digitized editions show many proverbial contrasts of fools and wise men, but not this wording.
German collections (Lehmann 1639): Lehmann’s Florilegium politicum (1639) is a real work, but again, the coat proverb does not appear in it. German proverb collections of the 17th century contain many fool/wise man contrasts, but not this specific imagery.
The inch was seemingly given, so it is not surprising to see pursuit of the mile. Gun ban advocates are emboldened by their perceived victories in firearm production changes, and Ruger is the latest target on a list that won’t end until the firearm prohibition lobby decides what guns are allowed to be sold or courts step in to enforce the law.
But, of course, eventually we will have to start prosecuting these criminals before they will stop infringing on our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
I do not know if Elon is correct or not. I suspect Elon knows that he doesn’t know that AI and robotics will actually work. I find the assertion plausible. But there will never be a proof. It may be that AI and robotics will do the job, but going down that path means we will not fully commit to any of the other paths, hence that the assertion of it being the only way cannot be tested.
I also find the assertion that is no way out plausible. We just don’t know. And don’t know how to figure it out prior to just trying it. The problem is that not only is our economic system a very complicated issue with many non-linear feedback loops, but it is also not repeatable.
Because of this no one on the planet can successfully defend a claim that an accurate model exists. Furthermore, I posit that no one will ever be able to accurately model the economy. I make this claim because the existence of an accurate model will itself be the addition of still another variable that the model must take into account. This addition of another variable disrupts the model.
Think of it this way, if people know the future, they will change their behavior to take advantage of that knowledge, which changes the future yet again. And it is not just one person who changes their behavior. It will be billions of people, millions of organizations, and thousands (including national, state, and local of the entire world) of governments. Each of these feedback channels, on their own, can cause the model to predict a different outcome. Each tweak of the model will require more tweaks once the output is known and feedback comes in. Only if the feedback has a lower amplitude for each tweak will the model reach equilibrium. And this is just for the design of the model. Running the model has the same type of problem. And the designers of the model have to do this for all practical situations.
In classical control system design this is described as the loop gain being less than one. This is requited to have a stable system*. To make the problem readily solvable the system model is generally limited to something no more complicated than linear differential equations. With the massive number of feedback channels in our economy, nearly all of which are nonlinear, you will have an incalculable number of opportunities in the N-dimensional space (with an extremely large N) for there to exist unstable situations. I assert such a model will not be possible in my lifetime and perhaps not ever.
We are going to have to take aim in a particular direction and roll the dice to find out if we chose a direction that has a solution.
* This is a necessary condition. It is not a sufficient condition. There also are requirements on the phase/time-delay of the feedback, but that is beyond to scope of this discussion.
While it is a matter of entrepreneurial judgment and not economic theory to affirm gold’s superiority as the ultimate “store of value” and potentially even as the preferred replacement for fiat monies (though silver has often been a strong competitor to gold for the latter role), I must agree with Lagarde’s assessment of the empirical facts concerning reserve asset competition, not with Powell’s dismissive attitude about gold—when the chips are down and the world is forced to turn to an unconditionally trustworthy reserve of purchasing power, the world will turn to gold. What soaring gold prices might indicate is that the world is now turning to gold.
The prices are certainly rising. This is just this year:
I see the stumbling of Bitcoin. I see Trump and Elon fail to get the U.S. deficit under control. I see the mounting U.S. debt becoming a huge, unstoppable monster. I wonder if the price of gold reflects a lack of confidence in the U.S. dollar. I think of the Zimbabwe dollar (I have trillions of them). Our country is not Zimbabwe, Argentina, or Venezuela so if someday we do have runaway inflation, it almost for certain will not be on the scale of those countries. But if it does happen, it could happen very rapidly. These events frequently have high emotional content. It is like someone shouted fire in a large room with not enough exits. A lot of people get trampled who would have survived had everyone remained calm.
And, of course, gold may not be the thing that saves people in a stampede. Maybe it will be guns and ammo to defend against the looters searching for food or even, as in the movie Doctor Zhivago, stealing the lumber from your home to burn for warmth.
If you do decide to buy gold, please remember my advice.
Published reports confirm that many Jewish New Yorkers have been arming themselves in worrisome anticipation of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—described by the New York Post as a “Muslim radical socialist”—taking office and opening a floodgate of hatred toward the city’s Jewish population.
Even The Times of Israel is reporting how Jewish gun owners, firearms instructors and security professionals in the Big Apple are witnessing a major surge in demand for firearms training, and applications for concealed carry permits. Anti-Semitic rhetoric has led to increased violence against Jews across the United States.
Deep down, I think most people know you can vote your way in, but you to shoot your way out. This is just another data point confirming that hypothesis.
I would like to welcome all the new gun owners Mamdani has created over to the right side of history. I think the NSSF should send Mamdani a thank you card on behalf of all the gun manufacturers.
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
If you have been following the comments here you will already know the context for this, but I include some snippets for those not reading the comments:
Words were given and hands shaken that NATO would not move one inch east if the soviets collapsed.
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all that in exchange for NATO not moving one inch east.
You could find many other such claims on the Internet that the U.S. and/or NATO agreed to no expansion of NATO toward Russia. The problem is, if you read the available documents (I have now spent several hours trying to figure out what happened) I cannot find anything than refutes the summations given by Copilot and Grok:
There was no formal, written treaty or agreement committing NATO to halt expansion eastward. The phrase “not one inch eastward” comes from verbal assurances given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 during talks on German reunification. These were informal diplomatic assurances, not binding agreements.
🧾 What actually happened
James Baker’s assurance (Feb 9, 1990): In a meeting with Gorbachev, Baker said NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if Germany remained in NATO. This was part of broader discussions about Soviet security concerns during German reunification.
Other Western leaders: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, British Prime Minister John Major, and others also gave similar verbal assurances about NATO’s jurisdiction not expanding eastward.
No treaty signed: Despite these assurances, no written agreement or binding treaty was ever concluded. NATO’s official position is that enlargement decisions are made collectively and were never legally restricted.
Russian perspective: Russian officials have long argued that these verbal promises were broken when NATO later admitted Eastern European countries. Gorbachev himself gave conflicting accounts—sometimes confirming he received assurances, other times saying no formal promise was made.
No, there was no legally binding commitment – neither written nor oral – by the United States, NATO, or any Western leader that NATO would never expand eastward beyond Germany in exchange for Russia’s consent to German reunification or anything else.
What actually happened in 1990 (the relevant negotiations)
During the “Two-Plus-Four” talks (1990) on German reunification, several Western leaders (especially U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and others) used informal, oral phrasing with Mikhail Gorbachev such as:
“NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position” (Baker to Gorbachev, 9 February 1990).
Similar wording from Kohl, Manfred Wörner (NATO Secretary General), and others.
These statements were explicitly about the territory of East Germany – i.e., NATO military structures (troops, bases, nuclear weapons) would not be extended into the former GDR after reunification. Gorbachev himself later confirmed in interviews (e.g., 2014) that the discussions were only about East Germany, not Poland, Hungary, or any other country.
No treaty, protocol, or written document from 1990 contains any promise about NATO’s future enlargement beyond Germany.
Aside, from the lack of a written agreement, it seems to me that a few representatives of NATO would not be in a position bind all of NATO, even temporarily, to not expand the organization. Baker could not bind the U.S. to such an agreement without the backing of at least an executive order, and, more likely, ratification by the Senate. And a similar thing would apply to all the other politicians from other countries.
I do not dispute that no expansion of NATO is in the interests of Russia. That they failed to get these assurances into a written agreement is on them. Not the U.S. of today or all of NATO. It is as if you were given assurances by a used car salesman of a never-ending warranty, paid for the car without getting it in writing, and then two years later complained when you find out you don’t have an infinite warranty on the car. If you were to take your compliant to a judge you would be laughed out of the court.
And I think laughter directed at Russia for claiming they had an agreement would be appropriate. They know better. They are just using that as propaganda to justify the violation of their written agreements.
It’s baffling that Americans are falling for such a dangerous ideology. But they are.
A recent poll of likely voters from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports showed that 51% of young Americans, ages 18-39, would like to see a democratic socialist in the White House.
Mamdani and Wilson have put a shiny bow on their socialist ideas, and voters bought it.
Perhaps she is unaware of the state of government schools. How else could she be baffled?
Everyone with half a functioning brain knows what comes next. Hence, I do not believe the “beware” warning is needed for the Second Amendment people. This is more appropriately a warning to the socialists.
You can vote your country into socialism. You have to shoot your way out.
I don’t think you and I were ever in the position of, you know, asking grandfather, what did you do in the war, right? But if someone asked me that question later, I don’t want to go, well, I watched on TV and it was pretty cool, man.
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The people at the Kev Independent were just like asking that question over and over was like, “Why? Why are you doing that? Why?” It’s like, “Because I hate bullies.”
Ry Jones November 2, 2025
If you don’t want to listen to the first 25 minutes to get the complete context the short story is Ry volunteers to drive “cars” (usually some sort of small truck or van) from Central Europe to Ukraine. They are configured as electronic warfare, command and control, medical transport, etc. You can participate via the fundraiser.
Ry was a huge technical and labor contributor to Boomershoot for many years.
