I'm a worker in a large communal living arrangement.
Edmonds, WA
Joined April 2013
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Lopez Bees retweeted
The year is 180. You are a gladiator in Ephesus, and the films will give you a body like a bronze statue. You are fed barley porridge and beans, and the crowd calls you a barley man to your face. The porridge puts a layer of fat over your muscle so the cuts bleed instead of killing, which is good for the show. The man who owns you dines on dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed. When your bones are dug up eighteen centuries later they are full of barley and almost nothing else, and a man at a university will call your diet plant-forward.
The year is 1300. You are a villein on a Hampshire manor, living, as the brochure will one day put it, in harmony with the land. The land gives you pottage: peas, beans and oats in the one pot, every day, until you die of it at forty. The hall above you smells of venison from the lord's own park, roast pork, eel, swan, butter from cows you milked before dawn. Take one deer from his wood and you lose a hand. The court that decides it sits in his hall, after dinner.
The year is 1755. You are a Highland tenant eating oatmeal three times a day, and in London Dr Johnson has just printed his dictionary. Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. The laird at the head of your glen finds this very funny over his beef. The beef was driven to market past your door.
The year is 1795. You are a Berkshire farm labourer and a clergyman is at your table with a notebook, writing down what your children eat. Bread. Tea. A little cheese. Bacon on Sunday if the pig did well. He prints it as a national disgrace. The squire you work for has a joint every day of the year and is told from the pulpit that your trouble is thrift.
The year is 1847. You are in County Clare and the potatoes have gone black in the ground for the second year running. Your family lived on them, ten pounds a day for a working man, and you are sitting in a cabin with nothing. At the harbour the ships are loading cattle, pigs, butter and bacon for England, under armed guard. The agent on the quay looks well. So does the bullock walking up the gangplank past the people who raised it.
The year is 1933. You are in a village outside Kharkiv. The grain quota has been collected, then collected again, then the brigades have come with iron rods to probe the floors for anything buried. Your children are eating boiled bark, and the dog next door has stopped barking. In the district town there is a shop for Party members with a curtain over the window. Behind the curtain there is sausage.
The year is 1997. You are in North Pyongan and the rations stopped months ago. You are stripping the inner bark from pines and boiling grass, and the famine will take hundreds of thousands before it ends. The Dear Leader's personal chef is flying to Japan for tuna, to Denmark for pork and to Iran for caviar, and will write a book about it.
The year is 2026. You are in a supermarket in England. The posters say eat less meat for the planet. The spread is plant-based, the cereal has a heart on the box, and the beef carries a warning about its footprint. You take the lentils, because you are a responsible person, and you pay more for them than the villein's pottage ever cost anyone.
The people who put the posters up flew to the climate conference, and the menu had beef on it. They eat what the lord ate, what the laird ate, what the agent on the quay ate, what the man behind the curtain ate.
Two thousand years, and the diet of grain and beans was always what the powerful handed down to the people beneath them. Everyone at both ends of the table knew what it meant.
Now it has a name, a logo and a moral, and for the first time in history the peasant is paying extra for it.
Lopez Bees retweeted
DSA candidate Tim Denson tries to sell the crowd on “democratizing the workplace” and says Walmart should belong to the workers.
Big mistake. The guy 6 ft away from him grew up in Venezuela. And he’s heard this communist fairy tale before.
DANIEL DI MARTINO: “So you want to take it [Walmart] from its owners and have the workers do what?”
TIM DENSON: “I want the workers to own it and get paid better and have better benefits and be able to provide better lives for their families.”
DI MARTINO: “We can buy shares in Walmart right now. In fact, all of the SpaceX workers became millionaires overnight.”
“You can start a workers’ cooperative right now. It’s legal, but under a socialist country, you’re not allowed to own your own property and start your own private corporation.”
Denson tried to refute Di Martino’s point. Then Di Martino dropped this line on him:
DI MARTINO: “It’s very easy to be a socialist in a capitalist country. It’s illegal to be a capitalist in a socialist country. That is the difference.”
[audience applause]
Then it got personal:
DI MARTINO: “When I had to go to the grocery store, Tim, I had to put my fingerprint in a scanning machine so that they would tell me what I was allowed to purchase.”
“And I could only go Mondays and Saturdays because we have to ration food, because that’s what happens when there’s no profit motive and the farmers, their food is confiscated because they had to sell it to the government and everybody else at the price the government tells the farmers.”
“My mom made chocolate bonbons for parties.”
“Well, people have a right to chocolate, so we had a price control on chocolate.”
“So my mom had to buy counterfeit chocolate, put it in black bags as if we were cocaine drug dealers. That’s what socialism was in Venezuela. That’s what worker ownership of the means of production is.”
“Where has it ever worked?”
Denson had no answer. Because there isn’t one.
Lopez Bees retweeted
FINE. LET'S NATIONALIZE SOMETHING. JUST NOT SPACEX. 🏛📰
Paul Krugman spent October arguing the government should take Starlink away from Elon over "national security." Seize it. Run it from Washington.
Here's my counter-offer, Paul.
Don't nationalize SpaceX. SpaceX is the one thing in America that still works. It lands rockets on boats and flies them again while NASA's own moon rocket costs about $4.1 billion a launch and gets thrown in the ocean. You don't seize the golden goose. You leave it alone and say thank you.
But socialism deserves a fair test, right? So let's run the experiment on a dead industry instead.
Let's nationalize THE PRESS.
Seize the New York Times. The Atlantic. USA Today. MS NOW. NPR. Politico. The AP. Merge them into one government agency. Call it US NEWS.
And here are the rules, because a real experiment needs rules:
💵 Every employee makes exactly the same salary. The Pulitzer winner, the anchor, the summer intern. Same check. From each according to his ability, comrade.
🚫 No 401k. No stock options. No signing bonus. No book deal. Their retirement is Social Security, the same system they keep telling you is perfectly fine.
🏥 Health coverage is Medicaid. Not the fancy employer PPO. The same Medicaid they write glowing editorials about. Enjoy the wait for a specialist.
👵 Mandatory retirement at 65. Then you're done. You can't go work somewhere else, because there IS nowhere else. The State owns the press now. That was the point.
🤖 Every article runs through @grok before publication, checking whether it's true, whether it's the WHOLE story, and whether the key fact got buried in paragraph 19 on purpose.
🏛 No ads. No billionaire owners. No subscriptions. Just the State and the Truth.
📝 Paul gets a desk. He can write about socialism, explaining exactly what it is: a failure on every level, every time it's been tried.
Although I suspect Paul wouldn't publish much. The man wrote in 1998 that "by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." He said people had "nothing to say to each other." He wrote that in a magazine. On the internet's doorstep. And now he's on Substack. Telling us who should run a satellite network.
Why is the press the perfect test case? Because the industry is already dead and nobody will miss it.
📉 Gallup: only 33% of Americans have confidence in the media. Among Republicans it's 22%. In the 1970s it was around 70%.
📺 MS NOW is averaging about 52,000 viewers in the 25 to 54 demographic. Fifty-two thousand. In a country of 340 million. A decent high school football game outdraws them.
💸 Congress already pulled NPR's federal funding, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down.
So the patient is already on the table. Let's see what central planning does for it.
And watch how fast the enthusiasm dies.
The columnist who wants your money redistributed is about to discover that SHE has been redistributed. The anchor who calls billionaires immoral will learn his salary now matches the guy who empties the trash, and he is going to have FEELINGS about that. The reporter who wrote that Medicare for All is the only moral option gets to spend 40 minutes on hold with Medicaid about her knee.
Everybody loves socialism right up until somebody applies it to THEM.
My prediction? Within 18 months US NEWS puts out 400 pages a day that nobody reads, every reporter with talent tries to quit and finds out there's nowhere to go, and the only honest thing in the building is the AI fact-checker, which gets unplugged in month three for being "problematic."
But hey. At least we'll have run the experiment on something expendable instead of the company that's the only reason America can still put a person in orbit.
Leave the rockets alone, Paul. Take the newsroom. 🦋
🤖 Made with AI
Lopez Bees retweeted
Le preguntaron a Bukele en Argentina cómo sacaron a los jóvenes del modelo del narco: la casa grande, el coche caro el smartphone… cuando trabajar honesto tarda años. Su respuesta duele porque es verdad
"El gobierno llega tarde si espera reinsertar al que ya violó, ya mató y ya cortó cabezas. A un niño de 6 u 8 años sí se le puede cambiar la vida. Al que ya eligió el mal... el joven que vende tomates en el mercado, suda, carga, gana $5… y en la esquina el pandillero se los quita. ¿Qué incentivo gana? ¿Vender tomates o ser el que cobra? Por eso nunca se gana la guerra de incentivos si el criminal sigue en la calle.
Porque el Estado no puede pagarle triple salario mínimo para que deje el crimen. Eso no es gobierno, sino ingenuidad cara. Un organismo me dijo: «no puedes acabar el crimen de un golpe, son 70 mil empleos, esa plata llega a los hogares y se gasta legal». Lo que ellos insinuaban era que dejara vivir al cáncer para no lastimar la economía. Bukele les respondió con otra analogía: si tengo cáncer con metástasis y me ofrecen cirugía, quimio y quedar débil… pero vivo, me opero. No me quedo así nomás esperando que el tumor sea educado."
Le dijeron que el PIB podía caer hasta 10% por sacar esa economía sucia. No cayó. Subió. Porque el miedo también es un impuesto. Y ese sí lo pagábamos todos los días. Sacaron al pandillero de la ecuación y no sólo para castigarlo, sino para que el muchacho que todavía no entra en ese mundo vea otro menú. Ya no es: «me hago pandillero y gano». Ahora es: «me hago pandillero y pierdo mi libertad». Eso no es odio, es orden. Es proteger a la familia que sí trabaja, a la que manda la remesa, a la que nunca tuvo casa grande porque no cobraba renta de sangre. 30 años de discursos. 7 años de resultados. El resto es teoría para intelectuales.
Tal vez necesitamos un Bukele en España. Y en el mundo.
Lopez Bees retweeted
Having spent a long time watching Elon Musk, and having talked with him, I believe I understand what he understood before almost anyone else. And it's something every one of us needs to understand now.
Western civilization is not one civilization among many. It is the one that gave the world freedom of thought, modern science and the dignity of the individual. And it is under attack. Not by peoples, but by ideologies that want it dead.
If it dies, the world will not become more just. It will become poorer, more brutal and darker. For everyone, including those who hate it.
Why? Because civilizations are not interchangeable. We were told that any culture could be blended with any other, like mixing colors, and that the result would always be harmonious. It isn't true. A society where women are equal to men cannot coexist without friction with a worldview in which a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. A society where you can criticize God, change your religion or have none cannot absorb, without fracturing, a worldview in which apostasy is paid for with your life.
Every people has its own genius and moves at its own pace. But not all values are equal, and you cannot build a nation on laws that contradict each other. Saying so is not racist. Racism is about blood. I am talking about laws, customs and values. And those values belong to no race: a Japanese, a Senegalese or an Iranian can make them his own, and millions have. That is exactly why they are worth defending.
Let's remember where they come from.
It all begins in Greece. In Athens, for the first time, men decide that truth does not descend from a throne but is sought through reason, and that a city governs itself through debate. Socrates chooses death rather than give up thinking freely. At Salamis, a handful of free cities stops the greatest empire in the world.
Then comes Rome. Rome invents law that binds everyone, the citizen who holds rights, the Republic. And one immense idea: you can become Roman without being born Roman. You become Roman by adopting its laws.
Christianity adds the most revolutionary idea in history: every human being, slave and emperor alike, has infinite worth.
Then France. The cathedrals, those ships of stone our ancestors built over centuries for descendants they would never see. Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. And Napoleon, who gives France the Civil Code, the lycées, and one simple principle: careers open to talent. Murat, the son of an innkeeper, ends up a Marshal of the Empire and King of Naples. The Civil Code spreads across much of Europe and still shapes the law of dozens of countries today.
And this civilization goes on to abolish slavery, which had been practiced on every continent since the dawn of time, to push back the plague, smallpox and the night itself, and to set foot on the Moon.
Peoples of the West, be proud of this history. Proud does not mean blind. Every civilization has committed crimes: conquest, slavery, war. Ours is the one that went furthest in examining its own faults, to the point of abolishing what it had once practiced. This capacity to question itself is its greatest strength. And that is exactly the strength now being turned against it.
Because for decades, this magnificent system has been getting hacked. Not by an army. By an alliance of two forces that have nothing in common except one enemy: us.
The first is communism. It lost the economic war, lost the Cold War, lost history's verdict with its tens of millions of dead. But it never lost the universities. It survived by changing costumes: class struggle became the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and the West was declared guilty of everything. It taught our children to be ashamed of their ancestors, their borders and their culture. It is the root cause, because before you can bring down a civilization, you have to take away its will to defend itself.
The second is political Islam. I am not talking about Muslims, many of whom came here precisely to escape this ideology and are its first victims. I am talking about a political project that wants to place religious law above civil law. It has no doubts. It feels no shame. It rushes into the void the first one dug.
One disarms. The other advances.
And let no one on the left believe they will stay in control. History has already staged this play. In 1978, Michel Foucault was enthusing over the Iranian revolution. Iran's communist party, the Tudeh, backed Khomeini and called on Iranians to vote for his Islamic constitution. By 1983, its leaders had been arrested, the party banned, and its chiefs paraded on television to confess their “crimes.” In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were executed, communist activists among them. The second always ends up devouring the first. Useful idiots are only useful for a while.
So here is my call to every Western people. To the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, to all of you.
We are at a turning point. What we do in the next ten years will decide what our grandchildren are allowed to say, believe, write and love.
I am not asking you to die for the West. I am asking you for something harder: to live for it.
Learn its history and pass it on. Have children. Speak without fear, even when they call you every name in the book. Vote, get involved, run for office. Build companies, schools, factories, families. Refuse the shame they are trying to inject into you. And stop surrendering anything that makes us who we are: freedom of thought, equality before the law, the dignity of every person.
The historian Arnold Toynbee understood it: civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And those who think they can let the West fall without paying the price should remember the Iranian communists. They helped tear down what they despised, and then they were next.
The Greeks at Salamis were outnumbered. They won because they knew what they were defending. We are the heirs of Athens, Rome, Notre-Dame and the Civil Code. It is no accident that the rockets that will carry humanity to Mars are being built in a free civilization.
It is time to prove ourselves worthy of what we were given.
The West is worth defending. And no one will defend it for us.
🤖 Made with AI
Lopez Bees retweeted
More from Valentine Low's Courtiers.
There was certainly some awareness within the households about how problematic H+M were.
🤷🏻♀️ I have an issues with the idea that W+C knew about the letter, or more importantly, knew of its contents and the implications,
for a few reasons.
By early 2019 the relationship between the couples was very distant. Two completely different families and lifestyles.
The household was already quite divided as far as individual employees and exchange of information.
𝗔𝗹𝘀𝗼, Markle going on Oprah and saying she'd been suicidal around that time, and that she hadn't received support was big news. It was a scandal.
So I don't believe there wasn't an internal investigation or at least some introspection within KP or the wider institution, as a result.
Remember, the bullying accusations were responded to publicly, and there was said to be an internal investigation.
𝗔𝗹𝘀𝗼, if it was common knowledge in the household that she'd received a letter suggesting her father was a pedo, surely this huge story would've come out.
So many other things were coming out, including how widespread the bullying had become. Employees and ex-employees were talking
(𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘺𝘳𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘭𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳)
If W+C or anyone close to them knew about Thomas Snr allegedly being a pedo,
the 'W+C were mean and it made me suicidal' narrative probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did.
And if this letter had been big news within the household, at the very least surely someone might've decided to have another look at it, or rethink the household's approach to the information about Thomas Snr and how the MET had responded.
Some reading, for anyone interested.
𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴 - 𝘝𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘸
Thinking about how divided the household was by the end of 2018 and in the early months of 2019, i'm unsure how that vast gulf between the two camps would suggest W+C, who had their own very full lives, would be aware of a private letter sent from Markle's fathers ex-wife to Markle}
{🥴 also randomly, H+M thinking they were better than 'lesser royals' has been a constant theme}
Lopez Bees retweeted
In just these past two weeks we have seen:
1. Widespread civil unrest and riots in France.
2. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Albania.
3. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Italy.
4. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Spain.
5. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Portugal.
6. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Belgium.
7. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Serbia.
8. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Georgia.
9. Widespread civil unrest and an apparent judicial coup in Poland.
10. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Czechia (including an attempted takeover of the Parliament building).
11. Widespread student protests in Greece.
12. Targeted student protests in Indonesia.
13. Localized violent protests in India.
14. An apparently fraudulent election in Brazil where the presumed presidential election winner was forced to flee the country under threat of arrest by his opponent.
15. The uncovering of a Color Revolution plot in the USA led by embittered former USAID employees and ex-military members.
That’s a lot to be happening all at once, don’t you think?
And the USA is having midterm elections next week.
You know, if I was a conspiracy-minded type I might be connecting some dots here. 🧐
Lopez Bees retweeted
In 1835, a Young French Aristocrat Predicted the Exact Bureaucratic Trap Threatening the West Today
Before the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville ever set foot in America, radical tyranny had already scarred his family. During the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, left-wing Jacobin zealots guillotined his great-grandfather and threw his newlywed parents into a Paris dungeon. Waiting daily for the executioner's blade, his father’s hair turned snow-white at the age of twenty-one. Only the sudden fall of Robespierre spared his parents' lives by a matter of hours, allowing Alexis to be born a decade later.
Raised in the shadow of state terror, Tocqueville became obsessed with a single question: why did the French pursuit of utopian equality end in a bloodbath, while the American Revolution produced the freest, most prosperous republic on earth? In 1831, at just twenty-five years old, he convinced the French government to send him to the United States under the mundane bureaucratic cover of inspecting American prisons. Once he arrived, he spent nine months traveling seven thousand miles by stagecoach, steamboat, and horseback to study the soul of the American citizen.
His observations became Democracy in America, one of the most brilliant political analyses ever written. Tocqueville realized that American greatness rested on three pillars: fierce individual self-reliance, decentralized local communities, and a strong foundation of religious morality. Whenever Americans saw a problem, they formed a local group and fixed it themselves rather than begging a distant politician for help.
Yet as he studied the young republic, Tocqueville foresaw a chilling vulnerability. He realized that a proud, armed citizenry would always fight back against an obvious military dictator. Therefore, future tyrants would abandon whips and chains in favor of welfare, cradle-to-grave safety, and endless administrative rules. They would conquer free citizens by offering to manage their lives in the name of compassion.
Describing this future nanny state in 1840, Tocqueville wrote a passage that reads like a headline from today:
"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate... It seeks to keep them in perpetual childhood. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd... till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
Tocqueville called this system "soft despotism." Nearly two centuries ago, he understood that when citizens trade personal responsibility for government security, the state gladly reduces them to dependent children. Every bloated regulatory agency, speech code, and entitlement program today operates on the exact blueprint he exposed. Liberty rarely perishes overnight in a violent coup; it erodes quietly when a free people allow bureaucrats to become their shepherds.
Lopez Bees retweeted
The media went from "Illegals don't vote" to "Illegals rarely vote" to "Illegals don't vote as much as republicans say they do" in less than a year.
BREAKING: More than 4 in 10 names flagged as possible noncitizen voters in California cannot be found on voter rolls, according to a legal filing. apnews.com/article/californi…
Lopez Bees retweeted
Miami SWAT is going to come across a line of F250s with "tier 1" Brazilian operators tied to the hood like deer and guys in NASCAR caps taking Facebook photos posing next to a dead Brazilian commando with an obvious broadhead wound in his chest.
Lopez Bees retweeted
Ian Fleming's 13 Rules for Life
1. Don’t draw your gun unless you can see both the other man’s hands.
2. Don’t waste your time on women who wear a bracelet on their left ankle.
3. Beware of motorcars with two women in the front seat.
4. Don’t play cards against married couples unless they are drunk.
5. See the brand name on the bottle.
6. Avoid people who call you “Old Boy” and all politicians.
7. Never eat scrambled eggs unless you make them yourself.
8. Talk secrets only in the open air.
9. Don’t buy anything that eats.
10. Beware of people who smell and tread carefully in the company of moustaches, sideburns, and beards.
11. Have nothing to do with correspondence in coloured ink, particularly when variegated.
12. Cut down on your drink when your eyes get red and on your smoking when your breath gets short. Don’t worry about cirrhosis of the liver or cancer.
13. Live until you’re dead
Lopez Bees retweeted
Mel Gibson paid Robert Downey Jr.'s insurance bond when no insurer would cover him. Eight years later, with Gibson's own career in ruins, Downey asked Hollywood to forgive him.
In 2003, Downey was coming off years of drug arrests, and no insurance company would cover him on a film set. Gibson, a producer on The Singing Detective, covered the insurance bond himself so Downey could play the lead.
Downey has said Gibson also told him not to give up hope and urged him to find his faith.
The only thing Gibson asked in return was that someday Downey help the next guy.
In 2006, Gibson was arrested in Malibu, and his own career collapsed.
In October 2011, Downey received the American Cinematheque Award and asked Gibson to present it. In the video below, Downey tells the room why he chose him. About that old favor, he says Gibson "didn't imagine the next guy would be him."
Then he urged Hollywood to forgive his friend.
Gibson later told Esquire it was "a bold and generous and kind gesture."
Did Downey owe Gibson that speech, or was it a risk nobody else in Hollywood was willing to take?
Lopez Bees retweeted
If you told that Viking one day future generations would put his turd on a display and 100’s of thousands of people would watch it on magic handheld screens he would laugh at you.
Lopez Bees retweeted
Que força e determinação revelou o povo polaco! Unido, de cabeça erguida e a cantar o seu hino, saiu à rua e conseguiu travar o golpe de Estado.
Sem vandalismo, sem saquear lojas e sem destruição. Uma demonstração de coragem, união e patriotismo na defesa da liberdade e da democracia.
São um exemplo para todo o Ocidente! 🇵🇱
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Misleading. The video has nothing to do with current events surrounding the Polish Constitutional Court. The footage was actually posted on YouTube on September 2026.
youtube.com/shorts/77hUXl1…
