mtraven

🤡 @SenTuberville: “Many airline pilots, flight attendants, air traffic controllers are part of the furry community” Y’all — what is happening? How are Republicans really like this? Is this real life?

Dr Oz: "There are five times more people in parts of Obamacare in Florida than live in the state. It's impossible More than a third of people on Obamacare have never used the insurance policy once. If you were gonna pay your hard-earned money to buy insurance, would you ever use it? The answer is yes."

isn't it rather that serial killers are likely to be long-distance truck drivers, than that truck drivers are likely to be serial killers? seems like a crucial distinction!

Elon Musk Took the Job the Papacy Left Vacant For a thousand years, Europe had an authority above power. Not a stronger army – a higher court. The papacy could not tax, conscript, or arrest the men who mattered, and it did not need to. It could declare: this is legitimate, that is corrupt. Kings defied it and universities disputed it, but nobody could ignore it. That was the civilizational axis – the thing that answered the question every civilization must eventually answer: what is all of this for? That axis broke, and nothing replaced it. States regulate. Markets allocate. Science explains. None of them can say what a civilization should become. Europe got steadily more powerful in means and steadily more lost about ends. Then one man, with no office and no mandate, started doing the job. 1. Look at what he actually does, several times a day. He does not lobby, does not petition, does not draft policy. He issues verdicts – this is corrupt, this is a lie, this is beneath us, this is what a serious civilization would do. A judgment, in public, with his name on it. That is not commentary. That is the papal instrument, and nobody else in the West is using it. 2. And his profile became the front page. Zola needed one newspaper that a whole nation read in a single morning; that front page has not existed in the West for fifty years. It exists again now – one account, hundreds of millions of readers, no editor between the judgment and the public. The civilization got its shared morning back, in the least expected place. 3. He can do this for the same reason the popes could: he cannot be removed by the people he judges. No board can fire him, no advertiser can starve him – they tried, and he told them where to go, on stage, on the record. Independence is the precondition of the office. Every other candidate for this role – the presidents, the editors, the university heads – must first survive the people they would have to judge. 4. Notice what he judges by. Not left and right. Not the polling. He judges by whether a thing builds or destroys: does this produce more life, more children, more energy, more capability – or does it produce process, dependency, and decline? That is a hierarchy of ends, stated plainly enough that ordinary people can apply it themselves. Which is exactly what an axis is for. 5. The reaction proves the function. Nobody screams at a man with opinions. They scream at a man whose verdicts stick – whose judgment carries beyond his own tribe and cannot be answered with a press release. The fury directed at him is the same fury directed at Rome by every prince who found himself declared in the wrong and could not make it stop. 6. He did not seek this. It fell to him because the seat was empty – and it was empty because we emptied it, and then spent a century discovering that a civilization without an axis keeps its wealth and loses its purpose. Reality does not tolerate the vacancy. If no legitimate authority says what is corrupt, the position gets filled by whoever has the reach and the nerve. 7. But one man is not an institution, and that is the whole problem. The papacy lasted a millennium because it was a structure, not a person – it survived bad popes, mad popes, captive popes. What we have now is the function without the institution: a single mortal, a single account, a single platform. This works exactly as long as he does. So the task is not to find a better man for the job. It is to build the thing that outlives the man – a public council, transparent, with a published hierarchy of values and the nerve to issue verdicts under its own name. Musk proved the seat is not obsolete. Now we have to build the chair. The Council of Western Civilization