"Liberation" Zimbabwe fed sub-Saharan Africa. White commercial farmers ran some of the continent's most productive land, exporting maize, tobacco, and beef across the region. Then Robert Mugabe decided the land belonged to the people, and the people he had in mind were his cronies. Beginning in 2000, Mugabe's government seized +-4,000 white-owned farms under the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, handing them to veterans and political allies who knew nothing about commercial agriculture. Output collapsed immediately. Maize production fell from 1.5 million tonnes in 2000 to under 500,000 tonnes by 2008. The government's response was to print money. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe printed money to cover fiscal deficits it refused to close through spending cuts, issuing progressively larger denominations until the $100 trillion note arrived in January 2009, barely enough to buy a loaf of bread. Destroy property rights, and farmers stop farming. Print currency to patch the wound, and you destroy the price signals that tell producers what to grow, buy, or sell. Mugabe's government chose hyperinflation through deliberate policy steps, no accident. Inflation robs you silently. Starvation is less subtle. From the breadbasket of Africa to the poorest shithole in the world within 10 years. Venezuela's socialist government looked at this disaster and said, "Hold my beer."

More than five centuries ago, the son of a wool weaver from Genoa sailed westward to widen the boundaries of the known world. Across a vast and punishing Atlantic, the voyage exhausted the patience of its crew, but never the conviction of its captain. Christopher Columbus kept going. Two hundred and fifty years after America’s founding, we still marvel at the restless spirit of discovery that revealed the New World to the Old. President Trump has defended Columbus against the radical left’s campaign to erase his legacy. Now, Columbus again stands where he belongs – within the great procession of figures who shaped our national story. Happy Columbus Day. Sail On.

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

🚨 IT'S OFFICIAL: President Trump just CONFIRMED the 2026 midterms Republican Party legislative platform, and it's PURE GOLD - Pass the No Invasion of Our Country Act, banning ANY future president from opening the border - Pass the SAVE America Act, with mandatory voter ID and proof of citizenship - A new health care plan that stops payments to big insurance companies and sends the money directly to the people - End NO-CASH bail immediately - Death penalty for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and anyone who kills a police officer - Make "no men in women's sports" permanent law - Make "no transgender mutilation of your children" permanent law We all need to vote. I love every aspect of that platform! These are all super popular. SAVE THE MAJORITY!

Oct 12, 1870: Robert E. Lee died in Lexington, Virginia, five and a half years after he surrendered at Appomattox. When the war ended, Lee was the most famous man in the South and he had nothing. His family home at Arlington had been seized by the federal government and turned into a cemetery for Union dead. He was 58, his health was failing, and he was under indictment for treason, though he was never tried. Offers came in. Businesses wanted to put his name on their letterhead for big salaries. He turned them down. Instead he took a job as president of Washington College, a tiny school in the Shenandoah Valley that had been looted by Union troops during the war. It had a few dozen students and a handful of professors. The salary was $1,500 a year. He threw himself into it. He knew most of the students by name. He added courses in engineering, business, and journalism, which were unusual for the time. He replaced a long list of rules with an honor system and told students the school had only one rule: every student must be a gentleman. He spent those years telling Southerners to accept the result of the war. He told former soldiers to go home and rebuild. According to an often-told story, when a widow complained bitterly to him about the Union, he told her not to raise her sons to hate the United States and to make them Americans. In 1869 he paid a short visit to President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House. His heart was giving out. In the spring of 1870 he took a long trip south, partly for his health. Crowds met him at every stop. On Cumberland Island in Georgia he visited the grave of his father, Revolutionary War hero Light-Horse Harry Lee. On Sept 28, a cold, rainy day, he went to a long meeting at his church about raising money for the minister's salary. When they came up short, Lee pledged the difference himself. He walked home in the rain and sat down to dinner with his family. When he tried to say grace, no words came out. He had suffered a stroke. They made a bed for him in the dining room. For two weeks he lay there, mostly silent, while one of the worst floods in Virginia history swept through the region outside. He died around 9:30 in the morning on Oct 12. He was 63. Accounts written later said his last words were "Strike the tent," along with an order for A.P. Hill to come up, as if he were back on the battlefield. Doctors who have studied the case think the stroke had taken his ability to speak, and many historians doubt those words were ever said. The flood had washed away the town undertaker's stock of coffins. Some were found downriver, and the only usable one was too short. Lee was buried in his suit without shoes. He was laid to rest in a crypt beneath the chapel on the college grounds. Within days the school's trustees voted to rename it Washington and Lee. His horse Traveller, who walked behind the funeral procession, is buried just outside. After the war Lee had signed an oath of allegiance and applied for a pardon. The oath was lost and never acted on. It was found in the National Archives a century later, and in 1975 Congress restored his citizenship. Americans still argue over how to remember him and the cause he fought for, and they probably always will. But in the last five years of his life, he chose to spend what he had left teaching young men, rebuilding a broken school, and telling a defeated people to put down their anger and become Americans again. 156 years ago today. Rest easy General.

What’s terrifying about this clip isn’t their ideals…these sweet gals’ hearts are certainly in the right place. What’s terrifying is they have the civic, political, and economic literacy of a 9 year old. When a charlatan like Abdul comes along with the Jr High class president schtick of “no more homework and the vending machines are all free!”, they fall for it. I don’t know how you get to that age with ZERO understanding of supply chains, manufacturing, labor costs…but a lot of folks think that medicine and MRIs and hospitals just materialize out of thin air like unicorn farts. They’ve never built anything in their lives, so they have no concept of how things function…things are just…there. They think milk comes from the store. They think rich people don’t pay taxes, even though the top 1% fund 40% of government with their taxes already, and yet 40% of all Americans contribute ZERO federal income tax at all. These people don’t understand that you could tax the wealthy at 100% and it would only fund the government for 120 days. Then you’re screwed. Too many Americans simply have zero understanding of how anything works, and even though they’re living in the easiest times in human history, they think things are “terrible out there”. These commie scammers roll through and promise them things that sound great, but aren’t possible in reality, and have devastating consequences if tried…but because they don’t know anything, they fall for it. Sadly, so many of our politicians and their advisors are such atrocious communicators, there’s like zero countervailing narrative to push back on the commie gobbledygook, so we are gonna have to learn the hard way. Guys…we just had a sample of socialism: Covid. We all got universal basic income, and it ended up tripling our costs and they’ll never go down. Ever. That one brief little experiment in command and control government will haunt us the rest of our lives. Bleak stuff, man.

NEW BORN INFANTS CAN BE TERMINATED (INFANTICIDE) AFTER A LIVE BIRTH IN MINNESOTA MN Governor Tim Walz signing to REPEAL the Minnesota “Born Alive Infants Protection Act.” Now a botched abortion (an infant born alive after a botched abortion) or a healthy new born infant, Can Now Be LEGALLY TERMINATED after a live birth. This is defined as INFANTICIDE. Keeping the new born drugged until it's death is been labled as " COMFORT CARE" Look how elated the women around Waltz are behaving…

🚨 Stephen Miller just DROPPED this truth nuke: "The Democratic Party has only two kinds of people in it in Washington today." "Democrat socialist extremists who support JIHAD, open borders, abolished jails, abolished prisons, abolished ICE, abolished border patrol, abolished free markets, abolished fossil fuels, abolished capitalism..." "...And you have the COWARDS like Schumer, like former Senator Brown, who will do whatever they are told to do, they are ordered to do by AOC and Jayapal and El Sayed, and every other person in that crazy dangerous clown car that is the Democrat Party!" 🎯 Name ONE Democrat leader who's stood up to the far left this year Schumer got attacked by his own base and folded. Now he's out raising money for El Sayed! He is captivated by socialists. We cannot hand Congress over to Chuck and Hakeem Jeffries There are no moderates left. THEY ARE NOT PRO-AMERICA. Rush the polls and vote against every Democrat in November!

Parkinson’s Law – Why the State Bureaucracy Grows When the Work Shrinks In 1955, a British naval historian wrote a joke for The Economist. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the modern state ever written. Everyone knows the slogan: work expands to fill the time available. Almost no one knows the mechanism underneath it. That mechanism explains Europe. 1. The evidence. Between 1914 and 1928, the Royal Navy lost two thirds of its largest warships. Over the same years the Admiralty – the office that ran the ships – grew by three quarters. There were fewer ships and more men behind desks. Then there was the Colonial Office, which kept growing while the colonies left one by one. It was hiring while the empire was shrinking. 2. The first mechanism. An official who feels overworked has three choices. He can resign, he can share the work with a colleague, or he can ask for two subordinates. He never chooses the colleague, because a colleague is a rival. Two subordinates are a rank. So one tired man becomes three. Then each of the two subordinates feels tired. 3. The second mechanism. Seven people now do what one did, and they keep each other busy with drafts, approvals, and comments on the approvals. Everyone works hard, and nothing is produced. You have been in this meeting. You have been copied on this email. You have watched three people sign the form that one person filled in. 4. The law of triviality. Parkinson noticed that a committee will approve a nuclear reactor in minutes, because nobody understands it. The same committee will debate the bicycle shed for an hour, because everybody does. Bureaucracy does not avoid the important question by accident. It avoids it by design – the small question carries no risk, and on the big one, someone’s name goes on the decision. 5. The ratchet. A business that fails closes. A department that fails gets a bigger budget, because the problem is now bigger. Failure is the bureaucracy’s best argument for itself. This is why the state never shrinks on its own: every problem it does not solve becomes a new office for solving it. 6. The civilizational lesson. Burnham described the managers taking over. Parkinson showed how they breed. Put the two together and you get Brussels. You get France, where the state spends more than half of everything the country produces and still cannot fix a hospital. This is not because the people inside are wicked. It is because the machine works exactly as Parkinson said it would. 7. The vindication. Parkinson was dismissed as a humorist. Then Milei cut Argentina’s ministries in half – and the country did not collapse. It barely noticed, except on the bill. The lesson is simple: you cannot reform a bureaucracy by asking it what to cut. It will always propose to cut the ships – and hire someone to manage the cut.

At La Cabaña prison in 1959, Che Guevara presided over tribunals that executed somewhere between 156 and 550 men, many after trials lasting minutes. Appeals were theater. "Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail," he wrote, which is a convenient position when you are the one holding the rifle. The man despised markets with the same enthusiasm he despised due process. As head of Cuba's National Bank, he destroyed the peso, printing money and signing the new bills simply "Che" to show his contempt for the whole institution of sound currency. Cubans paid for this in bread lines. He built labor camps too. The UMAP camps, opened in 1965, held homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and anyone the regime labeled counter-revolutionary. Forced labor under armed guard. These people needed "moral correction". Leftists wear his face on a T-shirt, advertising a man who wanted to abolish the very commerce that printed the shirt. He called money a bourgeois disease. He loved the firing squad and hated the price system, which makes sense, because both let strangers coordinate without a commissar's permission. A killer. Economically illiterate. Incapable of reason. No wonder the left idolizes him.