one minute I feel like that kid from Westbury…the next minute I’m bringing my own kids back to “Rihanna Drive” Trippy how life works! And the Glory STILL and WILL ALWAYS belong to the Almighty Creator!!!

24 hours after the worst massacre in Israel’s history, with Hamas gunmen still in Israel’s south, a former Knesset member thought it was the right time to declare in writing that the massacre was “an important historic event from a military, political and strategic perspective.” Three years later, Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh wants back into the Knesset. The law is clear cut. Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset bars any candidate whose actions or statements negate Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, incite racism, or support the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against Israel. Otzma Yehudit has petitioned the Central Elections Committee to disqualify Abu Shehadeh on the first and third grounds. The evidence isn’t exactly conjecture. His column hailed the attack, then drew a lesson from it. Israel and its intelligence services, he wrote, don’t know everything, and “if small and besieged Gaza was able to do this, and at this level, others can do it more effectively and simply.” Abu Shehadeh knows he can’t spin his words, so he isn’t trying. He’s pleading ignorance, claiming he did not know the extent of the massacre at the time of writing. An impressive feat for any person with a working internet connection, let alone a former member of the country’s parliament. Even if Shehadeh produces the rock he apparently spent those 24 hours under, he is caught in a trap of his own writing. Was the day historic at 200 dead but not at 1,200? The achievement he credits to “small and besieged Gaza” only grows with the body count. Nor was the column a lapse. In February 2022, as a sitting MK, he marked the killing of three members of a Nablus cell that had been carrying out shooting attacks on IDF troops by posting their photos with the words “Glory and eternity to the martyrs of our people, the innocent ones.” The committee will likely bar him. Balad has been disqualified four times, in 2003, 2009, 2019 and 2022, as have two of its MKs, Hanin Zoabi and Heba Yazbak. Every time, the Supreme Court, self-appointed guardian of democratic discourse, put them back on the ballot. The court has only ever chosen to read one of the three clauses, repeatedly citing the ban on racism to disqualify Jewish extremists. There are two objections worth answering. The first is that democracies should defeat bad ideas at the ballot box rather than keep them off it. That is right for bad ideas. It is not right for applauding a massacre while it is still under way. In one of the best-known rulings on the subject, Aharon Barak offered an example: a party running on a platform of planting a bomb under the prime minister’s car would not be allowed to run. A country, however democratic, does not have to seat someone opposed to its existence, let alone someone who greeted the massacre of its citizens as a historic achievement. The second objection, raised by Abu Shehadeh himself, is that the petition comes from Itamar Ben Gvir, a man once convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. But justice is blind to plaintiff and defendant alike. The case has to be judged on its merits. The trouble is that the court has always peeked at the defendant. The raison d’être of Balad’s founder, Azmi Bishara, was stripping Israel of its Jewish character. Even when he engaged in his hobby of terror support, praising Hezbollah and, on a visit to Syria, an enemy state, speaking up for “the resistance,” the court protected him. Better, the reasoning went, to keep political enemies inside the tent than drive them toward non-democratic means. Unsurprisingly, no consequences did not incentivize good behavior. In 2007 Bishara left for Qatar under suspicion of passing information to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War. Praising Hezbollah in the early 2000s was a puff of wind next to celebrating October 7. Not even a court blind to the law can salvage Abu Shehadeh. Balad, though, will likely emerge from the blast unscathed. Despite the party’s record of terror support and a platform built on rejecting Israel as a Jewish state, the party remains protected by the court’s blind spot for half of Section 7A. Its next leader will likely step far more carefully around supporting terror. One cannot help but wonder what moderation might be possible if the court read the clause in its entirety.

I need a cabal of high agency, low ego, ai-pilled interns. I know i'm late to the game, but we're hiring a shit ton of people at @tenex_labs in Q3, which requires a potpourri of tactics to hit our numbers. One tactic is an army of interns. Said army has one goal: reach out to 64,000 qualified engineers on linkedin over an 8 week period. Assuming 5 interns working 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, that's 320 DMs per day. This will not be fun or glorious, but: 1) It will drive a ton of value for our business. We are nothing without our people & acting as the frontlines for finding more great people is mission critical. 2) It will force you to get really good with AI tooling in order to efficiently hit your numbers without diminishing quality. On top of this, we'll be running weekly education sessions, where members of the Tenex team (from engineering to strategists and ops) teach you key AI concepts as well as how to become AI-native in your work. Why do I share all of this? Because most people are dishonest about internships. They promise professional paradise. A mini MBA. And most are digital janitorial services. I'd rather be honest about what this internship is & what it isn't, so we bring on people who are ready to fucking crush it. The job will be a grind. But it will also give you exposure to people living at the edges of AI & force you to get good with the technology yourself. If you're interested in joining (asap), apply here:

The Fed’s Housing Blindness As Jackson Hole unfolds, the Federal Reserve is again presenting a striking contradiction: officials insist policy is not restrictive even as the housing market operates in recessionary conditions. Housing is where Fed policy has its clearest and fastest effect. Higher rates raise mortgage costs, crush affordability, freeze transactions, cut construction, erase refinancing, and pressure the lenders, builders, brokers, suppliers, and municipalities that depend on residential activity. That is not a side effect, it is the central monetary policy transmission channel. Yet Fed officials have no apparent difficulty ignoring the basic facts. Home sales are tracking near their weakest annual pace since 2011, construction has softened, and mortgage activity remains severely depressed. Buyers are priced out by high rates and prices, owners with low rate mortgages are locked in place. The result is a housing recession defined by collapsed turnover and impaired building, even without a nationwide price crash. Jackson Hole is an illustration of the Keynesian mind rot that new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will need to confront. Basic monetary theory has been discarded. Policy acts with long and variable lags and hits interest sensitive sectors before backward looking aggregate statistics reveal the full damage. Add the fact that Supply Side economics is being reintroduced into policy, and the noise coming out of Jackson Hole should be epic. The mainstream media have largely acted as lap dogs, amplifying official language instead of asking the elementary question: If policy is not restrictive, why is the economy’s most rate sensitive sector already in recession? In addition, think about those pundits that advocate rate hikes. We what are observing is Progressive Left Keynesian technocrats in all their glory. For investors, the real risk is not simply that housing is in recession. It is that Fed officials at Jackson Hole can look directly at its wreckage collapsed turnover, strangled construction, and buyers shut out by policy-driven mortgage costs and still insist that policy is not restrictive. They have no trouble disregarding basic facts when those facts conflict with their models or institutional priors. Meanwhile, a compliant Wall Street acts as a lap dog, repeating the Fed’s abstractions rather than pressing the obvious contradiction: if the sector most exposed to interest rates is in recession, by what serious definition is monetary policy not tight?

During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s regime mobilized large numbers of teenagers as Basij volunteers and drove them into so-called human wave attacks — using young bodies to absorb fire, clear paths, and break through minefields and defensive obstacles. They were glorified as mujahideen, praised as martyrs, and handed plastic “Keys to Paradise” with the promise that if they died, heaven would be waiting. Today, the same regime is calling on women and children, through state television, to form a “Chain of the Bright Future” around military sites. A regime that treats its own people this way does not defend them. It consumes them to preserve itself.

A sweet-toothed heist, a furry mastermind, and a robot that wouldn't go along with it. Made with Seedance 2.5 × @Frameo_AI #MadeWithFrameo# How the Chaos Came Together 👇 STEP 1 — Designing the Character Say hello to Nibs, a tiny troublemaker with movie-star charisma, big amber eyes, and an ego far bigger than his 35cm frame. STEP 2 — Building the World A luxury kitchen bathed in moonlight, a lavish three-tier chocolate cake, and a self-driving cleaning robot that's about to become Nibs' least favorite household gadget. STEP 3 — Telling the Story in Four Shots Thirty seconds. Four cinematic scenes. One gloriously doomed dessert heist. 00:00–00:07 — The Great Cake Caper 00:07–00:15 — The Frosting Fiasco 00:15–00:23 — The Pantry Paradox 00:23–00:30 — The Icing on the Disaster STEP 4 — Consistency Is the Real Craft A fixed character identity, a coherent kitchen layout, props that stay put from shot to shot, expressive animation, and believable physical action all work together so every mishap feels deliberate. Our filmmaking philosophy? Don't just generate scenes. Build the story, choreograph the mayhem, and let character-driven comedy carry the weight. One raccoon. One relentless robot. One cake that never stood a chance.

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: