This paper answers why confident idiots run the world. Cornell University published a psychological paper that explains every terrible boss, every loud influencer, and every broken corporate hierarchy. It’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” they tested participants across logic, grammar, and humor to measure the gap between actual performance and self-perception. And the results are wild. participants scoring in the bottom 12th percentile consistently believed they were operating in the 62nd percentile. they were not lying. they were literally incapable of recognizing their own incompetence. the paper revealed a brutal paradox: the exact skills required to master a domain are the exact same skills required to accurately evaluate your own competence in that domain. if you lack the skill, you inherently lack the cognitive capacity to realize you are failing. this creates a dangerous systemic loop. the incompetent are blessed with absolute, blinding certainty. their brain protects them from their own ignorance, allowing them to speak first, demand authority, and never second-guess their decisions. meanwhile, the actual experts suffer the exact inverse. top performers in the study consistently underestimated their rank. because a task was easy for them, they falsely assumed it was easy for everyone else. they hesitate. they obsess over nuance. they assume they have nothing unique to add. we are biologically wired to confuse confidence with competence. the loudest person in the room gets promoted, gets funded, and gets the microphone, not because they know what they are doing, but because they are physically incapable of seeing what they don't. the only defense mechanism is building systems that stop rewarding absolute certainty and start demanding proof of work.

How and why the nuclear demon vanished. If mutually-assured destruction kept peace then, why not now? MAD's fading wasn't the end of superpower rivalry but its re-emergence. Moneycircus: 2023 moneycircus.substack.com/p/e…

Trotsky – The Myth. Ask a Western leftist which communist he admires, and you often get the same answer: Trotsky. The intellectual. The orator. The true revolutionary, betrayed by Stalin. If only he had won… Look at the young Trotsky in the picture: round glasses, wild hair, burning eyes. Many young leftists today would recognize themselves in him. The look hasn’t changed. Neither has the certainty. So let’s look at what he did when he had power. Born in 1879 in what is now southern Ukraine, Trotsky was a brilliant writer and a spellbinding speaker. In October 1917, he played a central role in organizing the Bolshevik seizure of power. Then Lenin made him Commissar for War, and he built the Red Army, directing it from an armoured train that rushed from front to front. Deserters were shot. Military discipline was enforced through executions. Blocking detachments were deployed to stop retreating soldiers, and former tsarist officers recruited into the Red Army were kept under surveillance by political commissars. Their families were sometimes held hostage to guarantee their loyalty. Cruelty knows no limits when you have no doubts. In 1920, the Red Army marched on Warsaw. It was stopped on the Vistula. That same year, Trotsky published an entire book, Terrorism and Communism, explaining why revolutionary terror was necessary. He wanted labour militarized too: workers organized like soldiers, subjected to military discipline and compelled to serve the needs of the state. In 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt – once hailed as the pride of the revolution – demanded free elections to the soviets. Trotsky supported the suppression of the revolt. Thousands were killed in the assault or executed afterwards. Then he lost the power struggle to Stalin. Expelled, exiled, forced abroad. From there, he wrote that the revolution had been betrayed – by Stalin, never by himself. He ended up in Mexico City, where he stayed for a time with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And so the Western romance took shape: the exiled prophet, the revolutionary betrayed, the road not taken. In August 1940, a Soviet agent who had gained his confidence entered his study and struck him with an ice axe. The machine Trotsky had helped build had come for him too. His killer later received the Soviet Union’s highest honour. Trotsky was not the alternative to Stalin. He was the same machine – only with better prose. He never rejected the terror. He rejected losing control of it. The "good communist" is always the one who lost. Next: Stalin.

'Parliament, the BBC and almost all the print media are deserts of conformity on this topic. Even apparently independent minds, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg, join in the general Ukraine worship. The question of how Britain benefits from stoking war with Russia is never debated.' spectator.com/article/genera…

Men, children and teens in 🇨🇩 Congo risking their lives for Cobalt. So we can fuel our phones and electric vehicles — many of the Congolese workers will die. Many have already plunged to their death.