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I commissioned artist MAIKEUL @MaikeulMaikeul to create for me a portrait of Julian Assange.
Assange symbolizes the fight for freedom against an unjust state. #FreeAssange
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
My mom was a hippie. My dad was a beatnik.
I was so poor that at one point I worked two jobs and shared a bed with a friend. I got home at 8 AM from a night shift at a bakery, got into his bed, and slept while he went to his day job.
I bought my first computer with my own credit card at age 20 and taught myself HTML. At the time, I worked nights in a giant, city block-sized printing plant in Queens, NY. I took the 7 train home at 2 AM most nights and was spit on and beaten up for being Irish on that train. Like GD Gangs of New York. I got up at 7 AM and coded websites until 11 AM and went to my printing plant job until the wee hours of the morning.
My first website was featured in a book from Japan in 1997 as one of the 100 best-designed websites in the world. That opened doors and eventually brought me to San Francisco in 2004. And you know the rest of the story. It's on my website.
I never begged for money, expected handouts, or called for government intervention in markets because of my difficult existence when I was young.
I worked so hard my eyeballs fell out. And then I worked even more.
And I succeeded well beyond anyone’s expectations because THIS IS AMERICA.
So yes, I have a problem with politicians looking at what someone earns today and deciding they deserve a bigger piece of it. They see a fattened pig ready for the slaughter. I see the decades of sacrifice it took to build it. Even if it's modest.
Calling it a so-called “millionaires tax” doesn't settle the argument. They already admitted it will apply to everyone. But I want the person cleaning the bakery at 4 AM to build something worth a fortune and keep the rewards. That is what America is about.
Besides, we all pay plenty of tax as it is.
I am voting YES on Initiative 645 to repeal Washington’s new income tax.
I will never apologize for believing everyone should keep more of what they worked for and earned
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
Malpractice case: lumbar spinal mass, $1M verdict.
Take a look at these MR images from a separate teaching case of the same pathology and site as the litigant.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
Imagine being a minor spanish businessman; maybe you have a small chain of successful auto repair centers, or inherited a small hotel in Mallorca that does bustling but inconsistent seasonal business with British tourists… sometime in the late 00s you have an brief affair with some girl, anonymous but beautiful, who discreetly and tastefully advertised online exactly what she was. You take her on a quiet vacation to get away from the monotony of your daily life, you use her for what she is, and she uses you; you get your money’s worth (and despite everything, you always felt she was worth it!), and you both develop an easy and comfortable relationship, an Understanding.
Afterwards you buy her some handbags and pay her rent for a couple months before it fizzles out; maybe your wife starts getting suspicious and you have to cut her off, or perhaps she just stops returning your calls.
Eight years later you see her on a billboard, for a huge American film… the shock! You’re older now, the years haven’t been kind, but your heart pumps away to exactly the same place it always did whenever you saw her, in the flesh… you have an aneurism right there on the street, you drop dead! Your kids clean up the messy detritus of your life, try to organize the badly run business, sort out the estate and bicker over the half planned out will… your daughter finds some saucy old polaroids stashed in a drawer of your desk at work; in fit of self righteous disgust, she throws them out without taking a second look, never recognizing what she’s found, totally uninterested in the majestic accomplishment you somehow achieved.
📸 | Ana de Armas com 21 anos em Ibiza ao lado de um homem bem mais velho, as fotos foram tiradas em julho de 2009.
Naquela época, Ana de Armas ainda não era uma estrela de Hollywood. Ela morava na Espanha e fazia sucesso na série de televisão 'El Internado'.
A identidade exata do homem e a natureza da relação nunca foram confirmadas.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. buff.ly/5cLtnha
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
🚨French locals prefer to keep dancing while watching their country being fully destroyed… ⬇️
meanwhile! French President Macron joins a Celine Dion concert ..
🚨FRANCE IS DONE !🚨#France #Macron #NotreDame
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
🇫🇷 Chers visiteurs, en raison d’un mouvement social étudiant, le musée est fermé pour le moment. Nous vous prions de nous excuser de la gêne occasionnée.
🌍Dear visitors, due to student strikes the museum is currently closed. We apologise for the inconvenience.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
As France is burning, I keep thinking of what the UAE Foreign Minister said a few years ago 👇
He accurately predicted this.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
Contre les émeutiers, j'ai un plan simple en 4 mesures.
1️⃣ Je rétablis la loi anti-casseurs, que François Mitterrand a abrogée.
2️⃣ Je rétablis les peines planchers, pour que les juges prononcent un minimum de sanctions.
3️⃣ Je fais payer les dégâts aux coupables et à leurs familles.
4️⃣ J'expulse d'emblée les étrangers et les sans-papiers arrêtés. Les binationaux condamnés seront déchus de la nationalité française et renvoyés dans le pays qu'ils disent aimer.
Ce sont les seules solutions pour ramener la paix dans les rues de France.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
Pour moi, c'est l'image la plus horrible de ce 17 octobre:
Un couple d'octogénaire dépouillé de tout, en pleine rue, laissé à moitié nu.
Comme si les Rolex, les Vuiton, les Hermès, les Dior, les Sephora pillés n'étaient pas suffisants pour la revente.
L'image qui devrait être un signal d'alarme pour tout l'occident.
L'image d'un pseudo président qui a perdu le contrôle. Qui a totalement échoué envers son peuple.
L'image d'une gauche radicale qui a sacrifié votre propre identité pour faire de votre pays une zone de guerre, aux arrières-plans culturels qui n'ont rien à voir avec les vôtres.
Cette image est effrayante!
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
En France, on a inventé le Concorde.
En 1969, il décollait et atteignait Mach 2 symbole de la grandeur gaullienne, conçu pour défier les Américains.
En 1972, le TGV 001 battait le record mondial à turbine (318 km/h).
En 1981, le TGV électrique reliait Paris à Lyon à 260 km/h. En 2007, il pulvérisait encore le record mondial sur rail : 574,8 km/h.
Dans les années 70, le plan Messmer lançait le plus grand programme nucléaire civil de l’Histoire : 58 réacteurs, jusqu’à 70-80 % de notre électricité, une indépendance énergétique que le monde entier nous enviait.
Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, la SNCF : nos ingénieurs étaient les meilleurs. On avait dix à vingt ans d’avance sur presque tout le monde.
Puis 1981, Mitterrand. Nationalisations massives (banques, acier, chimie, électronique, aéronautique). Semaine de 39 heures. Lois Auroux. Charges sociales qui explosent. Syndicats tout-puissants. Fiscalité punitive. Droit du travail rigidifié.
En moins de cinquante ans, le socialisme a transformé un pays d’ingénieurs conquérants en un pays de grèves, de délocalisations et de stagnation relative.
L’industrie est passée d’environ 28 % du PIB à 11 %.
Le Concorde a été abandonné. Notre nucléaire a été presque démantelé pendant des décennies faute de choix politique mortifère.
Ce n’est pas le destin, c’est le prix d’une idéologie qui a préféré redistribuer et réglementer plutôt que construire et innover.
A bon entendeur.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket.
After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders.
Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry.
Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector.
Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system.
But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away.
At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets.
Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it.
No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%.
Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are.
What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything.
There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us.
So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next.
Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong.
You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now.
Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians.
I come from your future. Don't make it yours.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
So I was home last night making dinner. Just as I was pulling the delectable frozen pizza from the oven my daughter called. She said she and her boyfriend were at Bryant Lake Bowl (a local bowling alley here in Minneapolis). They were 90% certain that Robert Plant was there bowling.
At first I scoffed. But she insisted and as we talked her boyfriend chimed in that he was positive that indeed it was Mr Robert Plant.
My heart raced. Led Zeppelin was the first band I obsessed over. The first vinyl I bought was Led Zeppelin III. A couple years later it was the same album I chose as my first CD purchase in 1989. They were foundational in my life and inspired my love of great music.
So I abandoned my dinner and took off in my truck to get there and possibly *fingers crossed* snag a picture with Mr Plant.
Along the way my daughter called, warning me to hurry as it looked like Mr Plant and his entourage were getting ready to leave.
I floored it.
I scored a parking spot right on Lake Street in front of Bryant Lake Bowl. Yes!
I calmly raced into the bowling alley and found that my daughter and her boyfriend with 2 lanes down from Mr Plant. They warned me that Plant's manager was preventing anyone from approaching Mr Plant.
But I knew I had to try. This was Robert friggin Plant, after all. How could I find myself so close to someone so foundational to my life and not try to at least express my gratitude for him and the music he created?
So I calmly approached Mr Plant. His manager obstructed me, shaking his head, "No, mate". I pleaded, "I just need to tell him how much his music has meant to me." "No, mate" his manager said again while shaking his head. I could tell I wasn't going to get anywhere and ultimately I chose to respect his boundaries and move on. I bowled a few rounds with my daughter (with Mr Plant a couple lanes over - and bowling better than me, I might add!), downed my beer and headed home.
I woke up this morning to this picture. It turns out my daughter's boyfriend (who plays in a bluegrass band here in the Twin Cities) struck up a conversation with Mr Plant's bandmates. They spoke for over an hour. Just as Mr Plant and his entourage were getting up to leave my daughter's boyfriend tried to ask for a picture. The manager re-buffed him. But, Mr Plant shrugged him off and motioned them over for a photo.
So this is them, with Mr Plant posing with their leftover nachos.
I wish I was there but it warms my heart that my daughter got to meet a living musical legend. – at Richfield, MN
GavinNewsom’s Dad retweeted
I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.
France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.
In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.
It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.
Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."
We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.
At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.
And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.
Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.
Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.
The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.
In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.
Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.
We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.
But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.
Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.
Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.