As someone who played in a band in college and has continued playing and writing music as a hobby since then, I am probably more aware than most people how difficult it is to become proficient at playing an instrument or writing songs. I never bought any Grateful Dead albums or gave them much thought but when I recently watched an old performance of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir on the Letterman show I came away impressed by what good musicians they were.

Rock musicians are often portrayed leading disorganized and self-indulgent lifestyles but in reality are often very self-disciplined. For example, when Mickey Dolenz sat in and watched the Sgt. Pepper recording sessions he was expecting it to be like a never ending party but it was the exact opposite with the workaholic Beatles along with their producer George Martin totally focused on the music while working twelve hour days.

So while the hippie followers of the Beatles, Stones, Dead etc. might have been extremely lazy and undisciplined, the bands we remember from that era mostly do not fall in that category. It is still the case that many top musicians spend long hours working. Billie Eilish has remarked how when she was growing up people in her age group would often express shock when they found out how much time she spent on music while her brother and musical partner Finneas said he set a goal of spending ten thousand hours getting good at music. The Beatles probably spent ten thousand hours on music going from their days playing in Hamburg up until they finally hit it big.

Thomas Carlyle was largely an opponent of the preceding 18th century Enlightenment era with its belief in material progress through the application of science and the adoption of a free market economy. The Counter-Enlightenment was centered in Germany so it is not surprising Carlyle was a Germanophile.

For centuries before the Enlightenment, average human life expectancy hovered in the low thirties, with more than half of everyone being born dying before the age of sixteen. According to the writer Angus Deaton, it was in late 18th century Enlightenment era Great Britain that you first saw the beginnings of a sustained rise in life expectancy.

Carlyle, even though he was British himself, was hostile to English classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. By opposing the Enlightenment, he joined the side of those who preferred the earlier era when life was nasty, brutish and short for almost the entire populace except for a small group of aristocrats at the top, who appeared to be the type of individuals he admired.

Worth adding that DoD is not the only defense-related account.
VA – over $430Bn budget for 2027.
Then there’s the “intelligence community”, NNSA, FMF, etc.

Overall, it is possible that the defense-related expenditures in FY2027 will top $2.2T.

The three main countries involved in WW II represented three variants of socialism: the national socialism of Hitler, the international socialism of Stalin and the democratic socialism of FDR. FDR and Stalin got together to eliminate Hitler and that was followed by an over forty year struggle between international socialism and democratic socialism until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union collapsed because socialism does not really work over the long term. The German government from 1933 to 1939 ran increasing large deficits, tripled the national debt and sold off most of its gold reserves. In January 1939 the head of the German Central Bank went to Hitler and told him government spending had to be cut because the alternative was money printing and eventual hyperinflation. Hitler fired him. We never saw the end result of national socialist economic policies because Hitler lost the war and the new German government went in another direction.

We did see the eventual failure of international socialism in the Soviet Union. We are now witnessing the eventual failure of democratic socialism here in the United States with increasingly high deficits and an expanding national debt along with slowing economic growth except for various bubbles that end up popping. We need to move away from our version of socialism but, as you say, there are plenty of naive, easily brainwashed, progressive recruits willing to vote for authoritarian leftists while at the same time also engaging in disruptive street protests of the type you see in Minneapolis.

JIE, buddy… you’re accidentally(?) missing that Commies and Nazis are mere variations of the same authoritarian ideology.

• You can’t have National Socialism with out socialism.
• And, you can’t have Communism without socialism.

You are correct that they do not like each other. National Socialists and Communist Socialists compete for the same naive, easily brainwashed, progressive recruits that can be readily exploited by authoritarian left elites.

Frank Herbert
Dune, Book 1, Chapter 16
 
“It was not an odd question,” Paul said, and Jessica noted the brittle riposte quality of her training exposed in his voice. “Most educated people know that the worst potential competition for any young organism can come from its own kind.” He deliberately forked a bite of food from his companion’s plate, ate it. “They are eating from the same bowl. They have the same basic requirements.”

PEACE 😇

In possibly related news, everybody should check out Joe Rogan’s talk with Rand Paul.

Vergissmeinnicht wrote:

Picture this:

The have-nots as, for instance, factory workers: no minimum wage, no Welfare, no child labour legislation so children can not just work but, say, be paid half of what an adult is (as, likewise, no anti-discrimination legislation is in place), in short, they’ve got nothing…just undiluted lack of the State i.e. so-called “Freedom”.

That is pretty much what we had in 1900, and we were then one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

An increase in the standard of living does not come from government legislation, or government could just makes us all billionaires by passing a law. Prosperity comes from economic growth driven by the free market.

Vergissmeinnicht also wrote::

I’m not arguing for anarcho-capitalists but for free-market minarchists, mind you: It is just safer to install into the system something – maybe, a simple UBI – which supresses revolting, thus, turning the process more effective and efficient in the end.

You are most assuredly not arguing for free-market minarchism!

UBI would mean a dramatic expansion of government and of dependency on the government. And how would it be paid for? By looting the productive members of society!

If we come to UBI, I strongly urge all productive citizens to down tools and go on UBI — bring the whole evil system crashing to the ground so that we can then rebuild a free country.

Écrasez l’Infame.

Dave Miller in Sacramento

Rothbard’s insight was that it was the politically connected elites who benefited the most from big government so, rather than adopting a Hayek type of strategy of winning over the elites, the focus needed to be on appealing to average Americans. This led him into supporting Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primaries. Rothbardian libertarians later supported Ron Paul in his two primary runs.

The mainstream Republican candidate in 2016 was Jeb Bush. Trump positioned himself as a populist by calling the Iraq war a mistake and advocating restricting immigration, ending what Steve Sailer called the “invade the world, invite the world” policy of both the mainstream neocon Republicans and liberal Democrats. He picked up enough White working class votes to flip some Rust Belt states that normally vote Democrat and won the election.

He lost some of these voters in 2020 and, combined with some election fraud in big Democrat run cities, failed to win a second term. After four years of the senile and inept Biden, these White working class voters returned to voting for him in 2024 along with him picking up some Hispanic and Black working class voters. He has reduced immigration since winning but his support of high government spending and massive deficits and promotion of inflationary Fed policies has failed to reduce prices for working class people struggling to pay their bills. That will probably be enough for the Republicans to do poorly in the midterms. He has also failed to deliver on abandoning the interventionist foreign policy of the neocons.

“the restoration of manufacturing”

Defense contractors would certainly benefit from more defense spending but the money to pay for it would be extracted from the taxpayers, either current ones or future ones if the money is borrowed now to pay for it. That type of unnecessary military spending is no more productive than the government hiring people to dig holes and then fill them up again.

This type of thing just makes this country poorer in the long run. Can people really not see this? Providing for national defense is a proper function of the federal government but we should spend only what is needed for that purpose.

Occasionally I will hear someone say something which makes me think “this can’t possibly be true”. Multiple news sources are reporting that Trump has proposed a 50 percent increase in defense spending for next year, which would take our bloated defense budget from the trillion dollars we are spending this year up to 1.5 trillion dollars next year.

Rather than a 500 billion dollar increase, we should be going in the other direction and working on a 500 billion dollar decrease down to half a trillion dollars a year. This would be more than enough to defend the country. In constant dollar terms, that is what Eisenhower was spending back in the fifties when we faced a hostile Soviet empire that controlled half of Europe plus also Mao’s China.

Our major need is a nuclear umbrella in case of a possible nuclear attack, which could be maintained for a couple hundred billion dollars a year. We are fortunate to have two large oceans on each side of us. The cost of transporting enough troops across the ocean to succesfully invade and conquer the US is unaffordable for any foreign power. There is no rational reason to be increasing defense spending by another 500 billion dollars a year when it is not needed and when the federal government is running two trillion dollar a year deficits and has a 38 trillion dollar national debt.

Why would that be a great result? Chechnya is small and lacks resources. Why not spilt off the Muslims and let them have their own country? Why kill Christian men to keep them when Russia already has vast amounts of land?

Because if he had done that, Chechnya would now be in NATO with nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at Moscow. USA has been working on all of the former USSR republics to turn them against their ethnic Russian minorities and take a hostile position towards Russia. That was apparent to Russia by the time the Chechnya (USA-backed) terrorism began. USA sent in their best terrorists that they had trained in Afghanistan.

I would say all of us, including the elites, found the economy blowing up in the early 90s to be intensely embarrassing. What one might call classic Lutheran. So that eased the way for reforms.

Currently we use something more complex than what I described above. Basically the following.

1. The surplus goal, where the surplus has varied a bit over the years. Was replaced by a balance goal in 2024. This is counted over a business cycle, so individual years may differ.

2. A national debt anchor, should be around 35% and too large deviations have to be explained by the govt. Possibly because banks complained that the supply of risk free assets was running low.

3. Government spending limit, decided for 3 years ahead.

4. Balanced local spending. A negative budget must be regulated within 3 years.

(The following in Swedish but Chrome can probably translate it for you.)

https://www.ekonomifakta.se/sakomraden/offentlig-ekonomi/statsbudget/det-finanspolitiska-ramverket_1208626.html

As for Covid, we still spent a lot of money in ways similar to the US. I was offered the vaccine but didn’t take it. This was accepted without comment, though if you talked to health workers not on the clock, they seemed pretty gung-ho about taking your shot. Some cultural bleed from the US in this field too.

“Sweden has run a 1% budget surplus for like 30 years now”

What do you think Sweden does that we don’t but could adopt? I do know the US government had large deficits in 2020 and 2021 while spending lots of money to try and offset the negative economic effects of the Covid lockdowns. Sweden adopted a more sensible approach, not locking down to the same extent and focusing more on protecting the elderly and encouraging them to get vaccinated once the Covid vaccines became available. Their excess deaths ended up no higher than other countries in Europe that had much harsher lockdowns.

Sweden also obviously does not spend what we do on defense spending. We spend way too much there. It does not have quite as large of a welfare dependent non-White underclass, though it sounds like they let in too many Muslims. It also sounds like there may be some sort of lingering Protestant work ethic there among the natives.

We had this back on Threads 14 & 15.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/isteve-open-thread-14/#comment-7386045

Not complaining, just mentioning. More coverage of the UCSD farce is good.

I second Buzz’s comment that a lot of material here could be repackaged as a “Laugh or Cry; You Decide!”™ product. And as our most esteemed Cousin of Briscoe colleague, you may be the most qualified to market it.

I don’t know who Justin Skycak is, but he is—and most of the people covering this are—missing most of the story. They write as if the primary and secondary schools just somehow forgot to teach math to a bunch of their kids. And then the college(s) forgot to check if their students could do math before admitting them.

That’s not what happened at all. And presenting the story that way makes no sense anyhow.

What actually happened is the leaders, up to the highest level of government, conspired to replace the existing population (who usually can do math, with or without expensive training), with a new lower-IQ, darker-skinned population (who often cannot do math even with expensive training). The leaders warped, distorted, and corrupted every institution in the path of their maniacal and so far mostly successful quest, and now they are seeing ‘unforeseen’ consequences, like technical college students who can’t do fractions, while the young men who could do fractions languish in the family garret, or die on the streets of fentanyl.

But on the bright side, their DEI targets were hit!

Trump has largely given up trying to influence the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and refocused on Iran and Venezuela. In the case of Iran, this is him wanting to please his wealthy Jewish political donors.

His new “Donroe Doctrine” and intervention in Venezuela is mostly just him throwing his weight around and showing what a tough guy he is. Venezuela is not a major source of drugs and the type of oil reserves it has are costly to refine and not really profitable unless oil prices rise from where they are now. The problems of Venezuela in recent years comes as much from low profits from its oil industry due to low oil prices as from its adoption of socialism.

We are likely to continue this focus on our hemisphere since we are a declining power and will not be able to afford a huge military in the future to project power worldwide. We are running two trillion dollar a year government deficits, have an aging population that leads to increased costs for Social Security and Medicare, and large numbers of younger non-White immigrants who receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.

a slowly worsening situation that lasts over multiple decades.

That is a good way to manage decline, U.K./British style. Bad way to manage decline is U.S.S.R/Soviet style. We should aspire for U.K. style and do the darndest to avoid U.S.S.R style!

Another article on why it is a bad idea to hack interest rates:

Is This the End of American Capitalism?
If interest rates stop being market signals and become policy decisions, what survives may look less like capitalism—and more like permanent crisis management.

America’s budget deficit is approximately $1.8 trillion—about 6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This is a very high level of indebtedness, especially given that we are running these large deficits during an economic expansion.

Deficits usually grow during bad times, as the government engages in countercyclical spending, such as stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, and direct industry subsidies. If the deficit is already 6 percent of GDP in good times, where will it be when the next downturn arrives? Probably about 12 percent of GDP (or higher), which would be the highest since World War II.

There was a sharp but brief recession during the pandemic, and a near-recession in 2015, but the last full economic cycle occurred in 2008, during the financial crisis. That means roughly 18 years without a full recessionary cycle.

Rather than our large national debt leading to a sudden crisis, we may just have a slowly worsening situation that lasts over multiple decades. You could even argue we have already entered it, starting after the 2008 financial crisis or maybe even earlier, with things slowly getting worse for the average person.

One way to measure this might be to look at life expectancy measures. In the hundred year period from 1865 to 1965 average US life expectancy increased by 30 years, going from 40 years to 70 years. Over the last 60 years, increases in average life expectancy have greatly slowed, with it barely budging over the last fifteen years.

If you look at rankings of countries by life expectancy, you can see the US steadily dropping. In 1960 we ranked 18th in the world in average life expectancy. By 2010 we had dropped to 32nd. By 2020 we were down to 40th and we are now at 46th. The drop has been continuous, with the only exception being a period in the seventies when public health campaigns encouraging people to stop smoking and to get their blood pressure checked and get on recently developed drugs to treat high blood pressure if needed were successful in resulting in a temporary improvement.

While there were a number of reasons for this decline, the worsening economic situation of average people probably plays a major role. An increasing feeling that the future will be worse has led to increasing feelings of despair and hopelessness and a lack of long term planning. Average people don’t work as hard on getting an education, pursuing a career, starting a family, saving money to buy a house or fund a future retirement, or take care of their health under such conditions. Even though Trump talks about us entering a new Golden Age, most people do not believe that.

Remember Ashli Babbitt – summarily executed by the Federal government five years ago today. Trump should put her name on a building.

He could also put a plaque on a a toilet “The Micheal Leroy Byrd Commemorative Bathroom Stall – True excellence comes from within”

Russia: humiliated in Ukraine, every red-line crossed, truly “just a gas station with nukes.”
China: still strong.

The Axis of Resistance is now just China. BRICS is just China. SCO is just China.

Russia still standing after standing up to the combined weight of NATO behind their Ukrainian proxy. Only a fraction of Russian forces are committed in Ukraine. The bulk of its forces stand ready to meet NATO.
The real weapon USA thought would crumble Russia was economic collapse. But “Ruble is NOT YET Rubble”. On the contrary, the Russian economy is doing rather well.

Iran is still standing despite Israeli and USA attacks.
Their plucky little proxy Yemen is now a Naval Superpower after stalemate with the Mighty US Navy.

China still standing after Trump’s “Easy to Win Tradewars”.
Trump slinks away after “ceasefire” agreement in South Korea, to lick his wounds. He is noticeably much more respectful towards China now.
A few months later, the bully decides slap around someone much smaller (Venezuela) in order to show what a “strong macho man” he is.

There is not much difference between the actions of USA and Israel.
They are truly a perfect match.

While your logic is impeccable, if you see this data:

Year Inflation Unemployment 30 year bond yield
1976 5.7% 7.7% 8%
1986 1.9% 7% 7.5%
1996 2.9% 5.6% 6.2%
2006 3.2% 4.6% 5.1%
2016 1.3% 4.7% 1.8%
2026 2.8% 4.5% 4.9%

30-year bond market is saying we have better future than any time in the last 50 years, except 2016. That people are buying paper at less than 5% interest with hope of getting paid in 2056 in sound money is a miracle.

I was a child in the early sixties and, like you, remember most Blacks being treated much the same way we would treat mildly retarded Whites now. Whites were not cruel to those Blacks and gave them the types of jobs they could handle.

Blacks have always had a tendency to engage in irresponsible behavior but that was held in check by putting criminals in prison and, especially, by not having a welfare system that gave them lots of welfare benefits. This welfare system changed in the sixties and seventies as described in a book by Charles Murray, Losing Ground, that came out at the end of this period.

By the eighties most big cities had a large Black underclass resulting from the effects of this changed welfare system. This underclass was prone to crime, having children out of wedlock, and drug abuse. The crack epidemic took off, causing large numbers of Black inner city deaths. This was before the more recent drug epidemic, which centers more on opioids and fentanyl. Both Blacks and a lot of Whites have died from that epidemic, which is still continuing today.

‘What real chance did Venezuela and Cuba have of achieving success considering the economic wars waged against them by the United States?’ — Carroll Price

Nothing except doctrinaire socialism prevented these countries from trading with the rest of Latin America and achieving the same standard of living as Mexico and Chile.

Pre-Castro Cuba and pre-Chavez Venezuela were relatively well to do. As always when communists take over, the educated and talented fled.

They did this to themselves, quite apart from the US taking potshots at them from the sidelines.

“Majority of Americans favor more support for Ukraine”

For the third time here, this has not translated into continued large sums of American taxpayer money being sent to the Ukraine. Americans may say they support the Ukraine in a poll but are not willing to spend time pressuring their Congressional representatives into passing more large financial assistance packages for it.

“Pointing out US debt is a separate issue”

No, because one of the reasons why we have ended the multi-billion dollar financial assistance packages to the Ukraine is our deteriorating financial situation. American Whites are not having enough children to replace themselves and the workforce is increasingly made up of low IQ non-Whites who generate little wealth that can be taxed. The large Boomer generation is retiring, causing Social Security and Medicare costs to rise, and interest costs continue to rise as our national debt expands.

The US will come to focus increasingly on its internal problems rather than becoming involved in ethnic or religious feuds on the other side of the planet like the Israeli-Iranian or Russian-Ukrainan conflicts. Trump has found he can’t bully Russia or China into doing what he wants so, like all bullies, has started to look for someone smaller and weaker to bully, finding it in our own hemisphere. Regime change in Venezuela or taking over Greenland is about all we can do now as an empire on the decline.

All of our various foreign interventions will come to an end as we enter into a decline, just as various other empires of the past did. Social Security and Medicare costs are rising and those programs are headed for insolvency as the large Boomer generation retires. Interest costs are rising as the huge national debt continues to expand. The ability of the government to get new tax revenues decreases as native Whites do not have enough children to replace themselves and the workforce becomes increasingly made up of low IQ non-Whites who generate little wealth.

We will not be able to spend a trillion dollars a year on our military in order to project power around the world in the future. Sir John Glubb wrote a book about how empires last about 250 years, giving various historical examples. If you take the beginning of this country as 1776 and add 250 years you get 2026. The American Empire is coming to an end and we will either return to the old American Republic or go into a permanent decline.

“Polls show a majority of Americans support military aid to Ukraine.”

Members of Congress usually try to deliver on what their constituents want. There just is no demand for sending large sums of money over to the Ukraine. If there were, you would be seeing multi-billion dollar financial assistance packages to Ukraine passing in Congress.

“Just long enough to reduce Russia’s oil revenue”

The United States has been working to cut off oil China is getting from Venezuela. If it is successful, China will be buying more oil from Russia. The US pressured both China and India to stop buying Russian oil but failed and ended up pushing China and India towards an alliance with Russia.

When it comes to investors starting to panic, the panic appears to be involving getting out of US treasuries and the dollar. Foreign central banks dropped their holdings of US treasuries from forty percent of all treasuries down to fifteen percent. The last big holdout, Japan, is now doing the same thing, having sold a record sixty billion dollars in US treasuries in the third quarter of this year.

The US government, no longer able to sell treasuries to fund its excessive spending, will need to turn to money printing followed by the dollar becoming increasingly worthless. There has been big increases in gold and silver prices as awareness of this increases. Biden said we would turn the ruble to rubble but it appears our currency is headed that way.

the belligerent perpetrator, Russia

Lol

Russia is fighting a defensive war against a western encroachment which has steadily continued despite decades of promises and agreements to the contrary.

Ukraine is to Russia what Cuba is to America.

No Russian bases were permitted in Cuba. No US /Western bases will be permitted in Ukraine. It’s the Monroski Doctrine.

“The Trump admin is starting to talk about them”

I certainly hope that continues and leads to action. Trump is spending way too much time on foreign affairs, doing things like kidnapping the president of Venezuela. He should have completely walked away from the Russia-Ukraine conflict on his first day in office rather than spending months alternating between threatening Putin or trying to work out a peace deal between him and Zelensky. He shouldn’t be bombing Iran, Nigeria or anywhere else or talking about taking over Greenland. We have so many problems here at home we need to work on fixing that instead are not getting the attention they deserve.

“How much are they paying you”

If anyone has been getting paid to take a pro-Ukraine line here whoever has been paying them has been wasting their money. There is no longer any public support to provide large financial assistance packages to the Ukraine, which is why Congress is not passing them. The loan Europe just gave the Ukrainian government is not enough money to last very long and will probably not be followed by another one of the same size, since many European governments now have large national debts and are rapidly deindustrializing from their loss of Russian energy sources.

The United States is a declining empire which is no longer able to project its power worldwide and has to settle for things like kidnapping the Venezuelan president after bribing the appropriate military leaders in Venezuela to not put up any air defense.

“But however the Constitution is interpreted, just agreeing to follow it doesn’t mean that current American citizens should agree to include an immigrant in the citizens’ club.”

The point I was trying to make, though, was that was originally not the only requirement for becoming a citizen. There were two requirements, not one requirement, with the other requirement being that the immigrant desiring to be a citizen also be White.

That meant that not only were non-Whites excluded from becoming citizens but also Whites that did not believe in our system of government, as shown by the fact that they refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, were also not wanted as citizens.

While Steve might be vague on what the criteria should be for letting immigrants become citizens, for the majority of our history the criteria were not vague. That immigration system worked remarkably well, with the United States becoming the wealthiest country in history from being a majority White country under the political system designed by the Founders. It was a combination of us abandoning both a immigration system giving a preference to Whites and our original form of limited government with its emphasis on freedom and individual rights that is leading us into an era when we become poorer and life becomes harder for the average American.

“it’s totally agnostic as to whether diversity or ethnic unity is best”

The first immigration law in 1790 had two requirements in order to become a citizen. The first requirement was that the immigrant swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution and the second was that the immigrant be White. Apparently, Americans of that era thought that Whites were more likely to support the political system just created by the Founders.

There were no religious requirements to become a citizen. George Washington sent a letter to a Jewish synagogue affirming freedom of religion and John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797 which said the United States was not founded on Christianity and was not hostile to Muslims.

While most Americans were and are Christians, the United States is not a Christian nation in the same way Israel is a Jewish nation or many Arab countries are Muslim nations. When Jews and Muslims immigrate here and take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, that includes the Bill of Rights with its freedom of religion.

You will destroy the country as we are seeing today with easy access to drugs.

Well then, let’s look at the U.S today. ie: one where there is no legal access to most drugs.
Outcome: Drugs usage is rampant, deaths from opioids and other hard drugs over the last decade or more is through the roof.
In addition the drug cartels have been enriched to the tune of billions.

Let’s compare that to the U.S at the beginning of the 20th century. ie: where you could get whatever drug you wanted and just about everything was legal to access.
Outcome: NO drug problem/epidemic of fatalities (to any major degree), and NO enrichment of drug cartels.

Summary: HT, I swatted you done before in relation to this matter.
Have you learnt nothing from the Prohibition period?
The rise of organised crime (in particular the REAL Mafia – the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate), occurred as a direct result of the Prohibition of alcohol.

When you outlaw a product that the vast majority of citizens are going to consume anyway, the market goes UNDERGROUND and you enrich the crime cartels.
This makes the product far more expensive, and thus junkies need to commit crimes to finance their habit.

And, because crime cartels rake in billions, they now have a ton of money with which to corrupt law enforcement officers.
This is the WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME.

It’s best you listen to the likes of Dr Ron Paul in relation to the matter of drug legalisation.
He’s infinitely wiser than you are.

While Trump may not want to see Putin dead, there are certainly plenty of neocons within the Republican party who would. Neocons are interventionist on foreign policy and support a large military. In order to justify high military spending you need to find some foreign leader you can turn into the next Hitler and Putin currently fills that role.

The neocons first made their appearance in the nineteen fifties with William F. Buckley and his National Review. Up to that point the Republican party was isolationist. Buckley and his magazine excommunicated isolationist right-wingers of that era like Murray Rothbard, John T. Flynn, Robert Welch and Ayn Rand who opposed our involvement in Vietnam. Of these figures, it is least well known that Rand opposed that war. She said it was not in our national self-interest and opposed the draft, saying only a draft made a a senseless war like that possible.

National Review has continued on with its interventionist tradition. It ran a David Frum article after 9/11 attacking what it called unpatriotic conservatives who opposed the Iraq war like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul and Joseph Sobran. It opposed Trump initially since he had said that war was a mistake and has only grudgingly accepted him as the leader of the Republican party. Its circulation has shrunk in recent years, though, since this particular brand of conservatism has become less popular.

I am a great believer that the USA empire and Israel expansion are nearing their respective ends, these twin ZOG demon states have all the signs of peaking. And I am not surprised that the assassination attempt of Putin has failed. I will not be surprised if Trump’s Venezuela oil grab also fails. I also think Israel’s next attack on Iran is doomed to catastrophic failure. A recent Unz article argues that Trump is Caligula, or maybe Trump is Nero, or maybe Trump is the Biblical Antichrist. But I thought Bibi had the antichrist title locked down, afterall he is Satan in the flesh, and is called Satanyahu.

When will Israel collapse? That is the question I will attempt to answer, basically the demise of Trump will be the demise of Israel. Trump has taken the presidency to an absurd new low, where the leader of the most powerful nation grovels to the most evil nasty middle east demon Talmudic shitstain Israhell.

Basically, the insane cucking of the USA to the Jew death cultists has reached a limit and thus trends will oscillate in the other direction. When Trump dies, is impeached, assassinated, or leaves office, no one will ever be as extreme as he was in defense of Jews and Israel. Trumpenstein is as crazy as it gets. The public will seek someone far less dramatic and more nation focused. The extreme shilling for Israel will end with Trump’s departure IMO.

One thing that seems sure to me, Zionist USA and Israhell are joined at the hip all the way up to the top of their horned Judeo-demonic supremacist heads. When Trump threatens Iran to not rearm I laugh, Iran has been re-arming since the end of the 12 day war. Trump has also threatened Hamas, and the last time I checked, the ragtag Hamas resistance was still standing. Israel did not and can not defeat Hamas even if Orange blowhard imagines so. Trump is just so full of shit, and I refuse to listen to Orange MIGA pig pontifications. I would rather listen to hogs feeding than those twin Zionist assholes Trumpenyahu. Golden Battleships? Says who? A delusional old man who dodged the draft.

Who are these supremacist assholes who think they have the right to dictate to Iran if it can have nuclear weapons? The more the USA-Israel axis of evil fucks with Iran, the more Iran will pursue nuclear weapons. FakeYahooJew and Trumpenstein are Tweedledemon and Tweedledumbass, they are creating the very thing they are trying to stop. Yet no one calls them out. Remember the WW2 Tehran Conference? Iran was a sleepy theocratic backwater. Now it is a regional superpower. Iran survived the Shah, the Reagan era attack by Iraq, and all the Zionist skullduggery thus far. My bet is on Iran, not Israel.

I found this 250 year empire cycle prediction most interesting. On the eve of 2026, have you heard of Sir John Bagot Glubb’s theory on the rise and fall of empires that lasts typically 250 years? Well if that is so, then Trump’s promise of “the best is yet to come” is just another failed campaign slogan. I think what is more likely is military empire shrinkage, civil war, riots, rising interest rates, economic depression, etc.

The best thing to come is when you get wise of the collapse of mongrel invaded USA and move far, far, away from the maddening welfare hoards. Everytime I see Kash Patel’s dark beady eyes I just stare in disbelief, how did a street shitter end up in charge of the FBI? What the hell happened to our nation? (Bushes – Clitons – Obongos – Bidenistas – Trumpensteins – all of them traitors)

USA empire collapse imminent, Sir John Glubb’s 250 year cycle updated for ZOGUSA collapse
(I updated the background chart from https://escapingthewest.net/glubbs-fate-of-empires-summary/)

Trump is being compared to Caligula and Nero. (When Nero offed himself, the empire went into chaos – a year of 4 emperors – and certainly if Trump dies, the nation is polarized for power grab from Left or Right) (Note: the recent welfare fraud in Minnesota makes it imperative the Left never takes the presidency ever again. I liken the Left to letting rats eat all the seed corn.) Clearly, the stage is set for a real civil war in the USA.

Is the USA world military empire failing? I say it is, here are some points:

USA failed in Vietnam, the biggest military on earth was defeated by rice paddy dwellers.

Israel is planning on a new Iran attack when they got the shit kicked out of them last time (12 day war) IMO Israel’s time is up, their days are numbered. Israel is completely dependent on Uncle Sam welfare, if the USA collapses, Israel is completely fucked.

the stage is set for ZOGUSA military empire and Israel fail:

utter failure to route out Hamas (superstate USA funding and arming Israhell has not ended Hamas)

utter military failure in Ukraine (Ukraine is destroyed, lost territory, the drone barrage on Putin residence is the last feeble attempt before Zelensky is ousted) last I heard, Ukraine has no gas and no electricity this winter

utter military failure in last Iran attack, will probably be catastrophic for Israel next attack

potential humiliation failure too oust Maduro and seize Venezuela oil fields – does Trump really think he can waltz right in and steal all their oil?

The 250 Year Death Clock Why Every Empire Collapses at the Same Age — And America Turns 250 in 2026

“One exception is Tom Massie”

It would be nice if someone like Massie was running in the Republican primary in 2028 on a less pro-Israel and more non-interventionist foreign policy. I voted for the non-interventionists Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul when they ran in the Republican primaries and thought Trump might be in that same category but that turned out not to be the case.

He does seem a little better than Biden by providing less money and free weapons for the corrupt Zelensky regime but he boosted defense spending so no money has been saved overall. With us running two trillion dollar a year deficits and Social Security and Medicare headed for insolvency now that the large Boomer generation has retired, we can no longer afford such high levels of military spending.

Also, the chaos that accompanied the new trade war/tariffs have frozen innumerable small businesses into fearful indecision. That guaranteed very little economic growth outside of huge AI speculative investments. This will continue going forward in 2026.

And I never got a clue how a brand-new undeclared war on Venezuela was hatched from nothing like a modern-day Big Bang episode. Congress seems to be yet another idle spectator like rest of us.

2026 will see the high drama of a sycophant being appointed Fed chair and tasked to debase the dollar as fast as he can. If that happens, we can relive the glorious Carter years of the 70s.

At the end of this year, we can now see that this was a pretty disappointing year for conservatives. On the plus side, Trump was successful in slowing the influx of illegal immigrants. Against that over the negative side you had the failure of DOGE to cut enough spending, the mishandling of the Epstein files, and the excessively pro-Israel foreign policy resulting in the bombing of Iran and the inability to stop the mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza. The last resulted in a major split in Trump’s MAGA movement.

Next year is likely to get worse as inflation starts to rise, we bomb Iran once again, our Ukraine intervention turns out in the end about as well as our ones in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and the Republicans losing the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms. Trump will likely get little accomplished in his last two years and it will be up to some future Republican or third party president to turn things around and get this country on the right track again.

You cannot have free use of drugs in a welfare state. All the taxpayer is doing is subsidizing the drug addiction of losers. If you really want to do this, then you first have to return to personal accountability and make people responsible for their actions instead of government protecting them.

Regarding your second paragraph, there is this perplexing graph:

Total Assets of Federal Reserve:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm

Till 2008, it was at 1 Trillion dollars. Then, due to the Great Recession, it jumped to 2 Trillion and almost continuously, though not uniformly, rose to 4 Trillion by 2020. Then Covid pandemic happened and it jumped to $8 trillion. It has come down to about $7.4 trillion now. It is difficult to justify that we need 7 times more liquidity now than in 2008. I have a feeling that there is some systemic weakness that is getting papered over by excess liquidity. Somehow, I have never seen a good quality analysis or explanation for this.

I think maybe only people well versed in the Austrian school of economics really have a good understanding of what the Fed does and why it does it. I have some understanding but not quite good enough to completely make sense of what all is going on. I just bought a book by Murray Rothbard, the Case Against the Fed, that might be in the category of what I have been looking for.

The Austrians predicted the 2008 crisis. It is said now it was obvious that was coming but a whole bunch of people lost money so it was not obvious to them. We never really recovered from that. The whole decade of 2010-2019 saw almost no increase in average life expectancy as many people struggled to survive. Life expectancy saw a big jump over the last few years but that was mostly a case of old people in poor health who would have normally died being killed off by Covid a few years earlier instead. You saw big drops in US life expectancy in 2020 and 2021.

In the middle of December I posted a comment on this website talking about problems I have had with misbehaving Blacks here in Indianapolis and said we should not make the big city Black problem worse by doing things like importing Somalis. I was surprised when Ron Unz responded to my comment because he has ignored me in the past. Ron said his impression of Somalis is that they are “quiet and polite” and asked if anyone ever had personal interactions with a Somali.

We do not have them here in Indianapolis so I did not respond. Our big refugee group is twenty thousand refugees from Burma. The problem with them is that they formed an ethnic neighborhod where they interact with each other rather than assimilate. It has been expensive to get their children fluent in English in the school system so they can be taught the various school subjects.

“governments are loathe to acknowledge that, under honest accounting, they are bankrupt”

The German government in the thirties issued a type of bond called a “mefo bill” that was kept off the books and made the deficits look smaller than they really were, a type of creative accounting. The German national debt quadrupled between 1933 and 1939. They were short term bonds. The problem came in 1939 when they came due and there was no public demand to buy new bonds. The head of the central bank, Schact, went to Hitler and said spending had to be cut because the alternative was highly inflationary money printing. Hitler did not want to cut spending and fired Schact instead.

There are some similarities here with Trump wanting to fire Powell and replace him. The demand for our treasuries is declining. Foreign central banks held forty percent of our treasuries but dropped it down to fifteen percent and started buying gold instead, helping to drive up the gold price. The last holdout was Japan but Japan sold a record 62 billion dollars in US treasuries in the third quarter of 2025.

The party is now coming to an end for us. The Fed just announced it is going to create 40 billion dollars a month to buy short term treasuries. This type of QE will likely increase and will come to include long term treasuries. The money printing will be highly inflationary. Hitler never saw high inflation because, like Napoleon Bonaparte, he got involved in a disastrous war with Russia and ended up out of power. We haven’t gotten into a war with Russia but our European allies may start one and try to drag us into it.

The first federal marijuana law was not until the nineteenth thirties. When alcohol prohibition failed and was repealed, the type of people who like to go on crusades getting things banned switched their attention to marijuana.

Most drugs in this country were largely legal in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was combined, though, with zero tolerance for people who became so addicted to drugs that they could not work a job and resorted to camping out on public property and stealing to support their drug habit. These individuals were arrested.

Occasional recreational drug users who were able to work and live normal lives were largely left alone in that era. There is plenty of evidence that drugs are bad for you but like a lot of other things that are bad for you like alcohol, cigarettes, junk food etc. people should be allowed to make their own choices. The previous 19th century system of police just focusing on those who engaged in actual crimes resulting from their drug addiction worked better than what we have now.

Russia has had a hugely favourable kill ratio since the start of the war in February 2022. Though, of course, you can find estimates that Ukraine has a favourable kill ratio or that it’s about equal in the very-lying, mainstream, Western media.

Russia has had air superiority since Feb 2022 – how could it be possible that they are a) losing the war or the war is a stalemate, or b) have equal or higher casualties than the Ukrainians?

IIRC, the most accurate estimates say it’s now probably something around *2* million Ukrainian KIA, and around 150k-230k Russian KIA. They also say that the usual KIA ratio was generally around 10:1 in favour of the Russians, but in recent months as the Ukrainian forces have started to collapse, the KIA ratio has gone up considerably (maybe to 20:1 or even 30:1?).

My understanding is that the Ukrainian army will stop being able to offer effective resistance, outside of perhaps major cities and Western Ukraine, at some point in 2026. There have already been several instances of highly-fortified positions simply not being manned, and the Russians taking them without significant fighting.

More honest and accurate sources of information include the following channels:-
The Duran
The New Atlas
Patrick Lancaster
Judge Napolitano (ignore Gilbert Doctorow, though)
Eva Karene Bartlett

Only Whites and NE Asians are good at the science and technology that could sustain future high population levels yet these are the two groups with the lowest birthrates. We are likely to see eventual population declines from disease, starvation and low living standards, the same things that held population levels down throughout history until Whites started the scientific and industrial revolutions in the 18th and 19th centuries.

* Oh, sure, I remember “America did it!” That’s just more of all things anti-America, but the important part of the Covid story was NOT where the virus came from. It was how it was used to CONTROL people.

Also THAT it was used to control people and that certain people – many people as it turns out – had been planning for quite some time to use a pandemic to control people. One may characterize it as an experiment, but I think it was more. I don’t think it was a rehearsal. I think it was intended to be the Premiere. The COVID regime was the NWO making it’s move. They intended it to be permanent. It was to be the Great Global Reset for this century.

But too many people objected to it and, ultimately, even a majority of people – even the garden-variety mask-wearing Karens – grew leery of it. I have talked to a number of liberals who now sense, even if they won’t openly admit it, that there was something off about it. One thing I find odd – or perhaps not – is that it has already been almost completely memory-holed. There is virtually no mention of it in public media – this world-wide paroxysm of mass insanity. There were any number of movies and TV shows in the wake of 9/11 that absorbed and reflected the new “War on Terror” zeitgeist. But about COVID? Nothing.

Curious.

I am happy to hear you are still doing well. I agree some of the new medical advances are expensive so medical care will cost more but there are 45 other countries on the planet with longer life expectancies than the United States even though we spend the most on medical care of any country on the planet. This was not always the case since in 1950 we were twelfth in life expectancy. We dropped to 29th by the end of the sixties, went back up to 15th in 1980 after successful public health campaigns encouraging people to stop smoking and check their blood pressure and use newly developed drugs for high blood pressure if needed and then after that started dropping again.

So something is wrong here. You could write a book about it and people have. I hesitate to start listing things because if I leave something off the list it will look like I think it is not important. We spend too much trying to keep very old people alive a little longer, pass out bad government advice on diets, do not have safe walkable communities, raise doctor incomes by restricting supply, make patients indifferent to costs by not having them pay anything out of pocket, give illegal immigrants free health care, have too many highly paid specialists, have doctors practice defensive medicine and do too many tests to prevent lawsuits and so on.

One of the biggest problems that has a negative health impact, though, is something completely outside the medical system. The loss of good paying factory jobs for the working class have caused what is referred to by Angus Deaton as “deaths of despair” from drug and alcohol abuse along with suicides. I have known a number of people who never had a good paying job and died early from alcohol abuse, including both my brothers in law. When my niece broke her leg recently and could not work my sister and me both helped her financially because she had no father to go to for help. It is quite sad to see the struggles of many people out here in the Midwestern Rust Belt.

I apologize if my statement came across as vague. I would agree our ally Stalin in WW II was worse than Hitler and we should have stayed out of the war. I would also say Franco in Spain was better than the Marxist alternative, though I am not a Franco fanboy like Twinkie was.

There was a lot of isolationist sentiment here in the Midwest during both World Wars because of the large German population here, something that has continued up to this day. Indiana always goes Republican but rejected the hawkish John McCain for fear he might start a war. I am a quarter German from my mother’s side of the family. My mother still liked her German heritage. Some of the meals she fixed showed a German influence, her favorite movie musical was The Student Prince, she gave me Grimm’s fairy tales to read as a child and she had a German cuckoo clock.

“He’s most certainly not a science/ engineering type”

Ron Unz is not what I would call a scientific illiterate, though. He is somewhere in between. I come from a family of science types with a high school physics teacher father, a chemist uncle, a grandfather with a PhD in biology and a math professor great grandfather so I know the type and am a bit like that myself.

The commenter here that most qualifies as the science type, at least to me, is PhysicistDave. He can explain in scientific terms how global warming is probably not a danger, whether the singularity will happen, what is true about HBD, how Covid likely came from a Chinese lab rather than having natural origins, how it is perfectly possible that buildings were knocked down on 9/11 by planes and did not need internal bombs to cause them to fall and so on. Like a typical scientist type, he is slightly cautious when making claims and admits there are some things we do not know with our current levels of scientific knowledge. PD does not know music though, claiming there was nothing special about the Beatles. How can a Boomer say that?

“LNG exports to the EU have increased”

The loss of Russian energy sources have accelerated the deindustrialization of Europe. I do not consider our European allies to be deindustrializing a good thing. The war has also driven Russia, China, Iran and possibly India into an alliance with each other. I do not consider that a good thing either. We needed to pick an enemy rather than trying to make multiple countries our enemy.

A recent Poltico poll done this month shows more Germans and French now want to reduce financial assistance to the Ukraine than want to increase it. Opposition by the French, Italian, Hungarian and Belgium governments kept the EU bureaucrats from raiding frozen Russian assets to fund the Ukrainian government. Instead, a loan that is not large enough for the next two years was provided to them.

You are engaging in your usual dishonesty by saying I support a dictator. Not wanting US taxpayer funds or free weapons being sent over to the corrupt Zelensky regime is not the same thing as supporting a dictator. We have abandoned doing that, since there is really no support for that in this country any longer. The Europeans are tiring of funding the Ukraine war by themselves and are unlikely to send troops to fight the Russians so the Ukraine will lose. After that happens, John, you will need to find something else to obsess over. I have been focusing many of my recent comments on our growing national debt, out of control immigration, and inflationary Fed policies, which is a little more important than an ethnic feud on the other side of the planet.

Their economic policies tended to favor big businesses over small businesses and they often directed big businesses on what to do.

Yep. The Nazis and Marxist both wanted to control the means of production for collective, centrally controlled purposes. The Marxists were just more overt whereas the Fascists used their doctrine of “Corporatism” to achieve the same end.

Thus, the Fascists would have some industrial council of production (staffed with Party members in the key positions), negotiating with the workers union (also managed by key Party members), about wages and prices (further internally regulated by a corporatized council dominated by Party members). The whole “multilateral” process would get reported out to the public by a corporatized body representing all the Newspapers and Radio stations that agreed on what was news and how to report it.

None of the participants object much to the process because their “competitors” are all subject to the same system, and the system builds in profits for everyone who plays along. Everyone’s energies are better spent gaming the system under the Party rules rather than objecting to the game itself.

You could call it subcontracted socialism.

It’s likewise no coincidence that government industrial policy across the West seem rigged to support big, cartelized, regulated groups of actors that are easier to control. (E.g., Gov’t support for AI and social media cartels in return for “national security” access to data and algorithms, with maybe a side of ESG and CRT while you’re at it).

At least this is how a very cynical observer might see things.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote a book on the similarities between Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler. To some extent their philosophies had the same 19th century German intellectual roots as did Stalin via the German Marx.

Here in the U.S. the most socialist state was the state that had the most Germans, Wisconsin. It was the only state that did not go for Coolidge or the Jeffersonian Democrat Davis in the 1924 election, supporting the Progressive party of La Follette instead. FDR ran as a Jeffersonian Democrat in 1932, supporting cutting government spending and balancing the budget, but then governed as a Progressive. The remaining Jeffersonian Democrats then moved over to the Republican party. This shift involving a major American political party being taken over by the Progressives is not well known, with many people after that still thinking of the Democrats as the party of Jefferson and Jackson. The Republican party was later taken over by the neocons, leaving no major party supporting limited government.

Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is one of the best of the UK limited series. But then Patrick turned his back on narrative and decided to put the kibosh on the Secret Agent scenario. He turned theatre geek in the last two episodes and went absurdist.

If Hitler and his associates had been pro-capitalism wouldn’t they have called themselves the National Capitalist Party rather than the National Socialist party? Their economic policies tended to favor big businesses over small businesses and they often directed big businesses on what to do. I am most familiar with the German film industry. Goebbels not only told it what films to make but also ordered that his mistress be given good acting roles. Much of the film talent in Germany left and came here. The propaganda films he ordered to be made became unpopular when Germany started to lose the war so audiences then started skipping them and showing up for the main feature. Goebbels then ordered the theater doors be locked after the propaganda film before the main feature started, forcing audiences to show up early and sit through both of them.

The Nazis also engaged in bureaucratic meddling in the agricultural sector, including price controls, which led to food shortages. They stimulated the economy with high government spending but this high government spending was not sustainable in the long run. The German government sold off its gold reserves and started running increasingly large deficits.

We are in a similar situation, with government enforced cartelization of some industries and special favors given to politically connected big businesses along with too much spending on a large military and welfare state leading to the government running deficits. I do not consider the pro-White policies of the German government to be a problem and support immigration restrictions here in this country. It is more Hitler’s economic policies and his unwise decision to follow Napoleon in invading Russia that was the problem. Here too, on foreign policy the U.S. may be following down the same path of getting into a war with Russia, which would be a bad idea. This is especially so since they are allied with China, Iran and a number of other countries and could lead into World War III.

“We aren’t borrowing from the future. They aren’t sending us stuff via time machine.”

No, but the result of the exponentially increasing debt loads is a distortion of the capital structure. We have been eating our seed corn. Among those receiving the biggest streams from the current financial structure are the richest, most influential people. When the dollar blows up, they won’t go without a fight, although I assume many of them are positioning themselves into precious metals. Ordinary folks who cannot do so (no savings) will be plunged into hopeless poverty.

“What we consume today is for the most part produced today.”

It is produced in places like China. We have been running average 500 billion dollar yearly trade deficits for the past thirty years.

Foreign countries were also buying up our treasuries, with forty percent of US treasuries being owned by them at one time. Foreign central banks have now dropped this down to fifteen percent. They have been buying gold instead and now own more gold than US treasuries. The government will have increasing trouble finding buyers for its treasuries. The Fed just started creating forty billion dollars a month to buy treasuries and monetize the debt and that amount is likely to increase. This new money creation will be highly inflationary and will result in higher prices and lower consumption for anyone not getting some of that new Fed created money.

Rather than acknowledge that and make needed changes I fully expect those who benefit from our current policies to engage in feeble attempts at obfuscation and gaslighting. It is not going to work. It didn’t work when the Biden administration tried it and it is not going to work when the Trump administration tries it. Political control will keep flipping back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans, since they are both unwilling to fix things. In reality we have been under a Uniparty since Buchanan lost in the 1992 primaries and the Gingrich Congress gave up on big budget cuts after running into opposition from special interests. We are headed for eventual radicalization of the voters and even possible political violence if those in power try to keep their privileged positions. This may lead to something good like the American Revolution but also something bad like the Russian or French Revolutions. I will pick the side of those who believe in the principles of the American Revolution and the Founders.

“The right thing will crash the economy hard”

The Fed could try for a soft landing but, even if they were successful, you would still have an extended bad recession. The voters will not like that much more than a rip the band-aid off approach.

They aren’t going to like the alternative of rising inflation causing prices to continue to go up faster than wages either. I like to drink and people watch in bars, strip clubs and places offering live music and have noticed big weekend crowds when I do that. Like twenties Weimar Germany where high inflation caused people to adopt a live for today mentality and head for the Cabaret, our young people may be giving up engaging in long term thinking where they save for a house, get college degrees for jobs that might not exist, or have children that would help take care of them in their old age.

If we go from being like twenties Weimar Germany and enter a Great Depression like thirties Germany, you will likely see attempts to blame capitalism, rather than the government policies that will actually be the cause. In thirties Germany, things went in the wrong direction just as they went in the wrong direction when Lenin took over in Russia or Robespierre in France. You just have to hope that Americans decide to return to the policies that made this the wealthiest country in history instead.

“karate girls who beat up men”

When it comes to females using martial arts to beat up men, my favorite was Diana Rigg on the Avengers TV show. That show and my other favorite show of that period, the Prisoner, were produced by the same British network.

I really liked the old fifties and sixties sitcoms but stopped watching television sitcoms frequently after that due to not enjoying them as much. I did like the comedic banter on one show, Moonlighting, which was slightly reminiscent of thirties screwball comedies. In the nineties I watched News Radio with Dave Foley, Phil Hartman and a young Joe Rogan. The Dave Foley character shared my liking for old fifties and sixties sitcoms and also my coffee addiction.

“pulled the German economy out of the Depression”

For the third time here, high levels of government spending stimulated the German economy temporarily. These high levels of spending were not sustainable, though, over the long term. The German government ran through all its gold reserves, selling them off, and started running deficits. Running deficits is not sustainable over the long term. If Hitler had not made the same mistake that Napoleon Bonaparte made and invaded Russia, Nazi Germany would have undergone an economic collapse eventually, just as Marxist Russia later did and the United States is now in the process of doing.

Our demographic problems and the overspending and inflationary policies of our government have to be dealt with simultaneously. Inflation is causing prices to rise faster than wages, leaving most prople worse off. Just reducing immigration is not enough because voters will vote out anyone if they see their lives becoming worse. The Republicans are headed for big losses in Congress in the midterms and after that it will be impossible to get any bills through Congress fixing the immigration problem. It is also possible we will see a Democrat president in 2028.

You may wish voters only cared about immigration but they also care about rising prices causing them to be unable to afford to pay their bills so the Republicans need to work on more than the immigration issue when they hold power. They also need to be the party of limited government and balanced budgets. They need to stop supporting the inflationary policies of the Fed, as Trump is currently doing. They need to adopt an America First foreign policy, stop the endless foreign wars and focus on problems here at home.

Yes, Ron Paul, our defense budgets are the payoffs to the war machine, except they’re not “gifts” as you say they are in the title. The war budget is a theft, perpetrated by the magic of democracy.

Democracy allows a plurality of citizens to vote themselves cash incomes, to commit murder on the innocent, to steal from their neighbors and friends and to force young people into wars far away from our shores.

It’s a crime perpetrated by our form of government.

While WW1 and consequent WW2 led to the ‘suicide of the West’, it is almost impossible to imagine what the world would have been in 20th Century without them. More than half the world living in colonies of empires? No technology (electronics, computer, nuclear, aviation. . .)?

Those things would still exist, even without the wars. Wars may stimulate and speed-up technological advancement but they are not absolutely necessary for it. Steam power, electric power, the telegraph, telephone, radio, the airplane………….all invented and developed for non-war-related purposes.

All that is required for technological advancement (up to any limits imposed by physics) is for people to be intelligent, curious, and ambitious. They don’t necessarily have to have a desire to kill one another.

“Inflation is likely to increase? Well, that’s just an opinion”

No, the Fed just announced it is creating forty billion dollars a month to buy treasuries. Inflation is expansion of the money supply and the Fed is expanding the money supply with its creation of more dollars. This inflation will lead to an increasingly worthless dollar and higher prices. People around the world know the dollar is headed towards becoming worthless as shown by the fact that gold has risen from 2600 dollars an ounce to 4500 dollars an ounce just over the last year.

Tax cuts without spending cuts just increases the deficit. That will require more government borrowing and diverts funds needed for private investment over to nonproductive government spending on welfare programs, a massive military and more foreign wars. The higher the debt goes, the more reluctant people will be to invest in treasuries for fear of a government default, thus requiring the government offering higher interest rates or further monetizing the debt.

We are headed either for a government default or, more likely, the government inflating away the debt and paying back lenders with worthless dollars. This high inflation will impoverish large segments of the population, a process that has already begun. There will be no mass deportations of immigrants because the Republicans will lose in the midterms. While inflation preceded Trump, it has continued under him and people are continuing to get poorer. Trump is likely to spend the last two years of his presidency facing a hostile Democrat Congress and another possible impeachment attempt.

“it’s actually improved”

Inflation is still officially 2.7%. According to Bank of America deposit data, in November paychecks only increased faster than prices for high income households. Middle income households saw a 2.3% rise in paychecks while for lower income households it was only 1.4%. We are assuming here that official government inflation statistics are accurate but the government has an incentive to understate inflation to make things look better than they really are. It is likely prices have been outpacing wages for years and the cumulative effect has been to leave most people worse off.

House prices have gone from three times family income to five times family income and the average person now does not buy their first house until their late thirties. Buying a house is out of reach for many people now so they do not even attempt to save money for it. They have adopted a Weimar type of culture where they live for today but rather than heading down to the Cabaret they order from grubhub and look at onlyfans.

Inflation is likely to worsen since Trump is pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates to keep the stock market and crypto-currency bubbles from popping and the Fed is now creating money to buy treasuries and monetize the debt. Interest rates need to be increased and government spending cut but voters do not vote for politicians who will do that so things are likely to get worse. We will see control of the government flipping back and forth between the Democrats and Republicans with neither party improving our situation.

“there is no solution to the problem other than voting in better Congressmen”

This requires shifting the Overton window so that ideas that are currently considered unacceptable become acceptable. It helps that there are now alternatives to the mainstream media and younger people get much of their information from these alternatives. The shift in recent years away from being pro-Israel has taken place largely among voters under fifty. As us aging Boomers die off, you will likely see a change in who is getting elected.

At an individual level, it is important to financially support media figures who promote limited government and an America First foreign policy and to give political donations to and vote for more politicians like Thomas Massie or Rand Paul. I am inclined to agree with deep anonymous, though, that we will have to go through a lengthy period of really bad economic conditions before the majority of voters are ready to support radical changes. To make a comparison, look at how many decades it took the Chinese and Russians to accept the idea that Marxism was unworkable before they abandoned their support of it.

You have to wait until the right time before radical changes can be made. As someone nearing seventy, I may not see that happen in my lifetime but I hope things eventually get better for the younger generation.

“No one cared about affordability when inflation was over 9% under Biden.”

Yes they did. Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, was saying in response to that the economy was great and prices were coming down right before the election. That type of gaslighting did not work for the Biden administration and is not going to work for the Trump administration either. People can see their lives are getting worse. Credit card and household debt levels are rising as average people are not able to live on wages that are increasing slower than prices.

I voted for Trump over Harris but I think it is important to criticize him if he deserves it. His support for the Fed lowering interest rates and monetizing the debt by creating money to buy treasuries will lead to worsening inflation. He has made almost no cuts in overall government spending, just shifting some spending to the military from other programs. The national debt reached thirty eight trillion dollars in October, the fastest we added a trillion dollars in our history outside the Covid epidemic. This was with a Republican president and a Republican Congress.

“that helped pull Germany out of the Depression”

Once again, did you not read what I said? The German government temporarily boosted economic growth with high levels of government spending but these high levels of government spending were not sustainable in the long term. Economic growth slowed after a few years. The German government sold off most of its gold reserves and was running increasingly large yearly deficits. You can’t run large government deficits permanently without getting into trouble. Hitler, with his poor judgement and megalomania, took Germany into a war it could not win so we did not see the end result of Nazi economic policies. Hitler won Time Man of the Year but so did Stalin and FDR. All three followed economic policies that were harmful to their countries.

Except for a few situations where a country is extremely rich in natural resources, having a high IQ population is a necessary condition to become a prosperous country so obviously letting in large numbers of low IQ non-Whites into the United States is a bad idea. While maintaining a White majority may be a necessary condition for our prosperity, having a free market economy and limiting government spending and balancing the budget, as the founders wanted, are also necessary conditions for our prosperity too.

Trump received 57% of the votes of the Whites who voted and 78% of his overall vote came from Whites. His first budget cut almost no spending, with the failure of DOGE causing Elon Musk to give up and walk away. In October the national debt reached 38 trillion dollars, the fastest we added a trillion dollars to the debt in history outside the Covid epidemic. Trump boosted military spending to record levels, something supported by pro-Israel Jewish neocons but also by people in the military-industrial complex, who are getting wealthy from high military spending and are mostly not Jewish. Trump is also supporting the Fed in its inflationary policies that is making the dollar worthless, as shown by gold going from 2600 to 4500 dollars per ounce just in the last year. Harris would have been worse but Trump is following bad economic policies and, since he got elected by White voters, the majority of White voters in this country are supporting bad economic policies that are leading this country towards an economic decline.

Jews made a serious mistake with the creation of Israel. They’ve already permanently stained their reputation as a people because of their actions in Palestine, but when Israel implodes due to American support not being available (we saw a small case of this happening with resupply issues during the Twelve-Day War) the hatred is going to only increase.
People all over the world, from China, to Japan, to Kenya, to the Netherlands, to Brazil, and of course, here in America, are going to demand penance from the now-stateless Israelis as well as from Jews for their broad and uncompromising support, barring real men like Norman Finkelstein and Alon Mizrahi. Nobody is going to want them as a neighbor, not after we know what they want to do to their neighbors.

“Unlike the Marxists, who indeed supported an unworkable socialist economic system”

Did you not read what I said? No, Nazi Getmany had not adopted an economic system that was workable in the long run since it was running increasingly large government deficits after the initial growth caused by the stimulus of high government spending started to wear off. Bureaucratic meddling and price controls in the agricultural sector was leading to food shortages and rationing. Businesses were increasingly cartelized and their operations meddled with by government officials in the same way, The German government had to sell off most of its gold reserves to help fill the gap between taxes collected and high levels of government spending. The average German had a standard of living equivalent to half that of the average American of that era. We did not see the final economic collapse caused by Nazi economic policies only because Hitler stupidly got himself involved in a two front war he could not win and died in a bunker.

The winners of that war, Russia and America, had also abandoned free market economic policies. Marxist Russia lasted another 45 years before its empire disintegrated. We are headed down the same road as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia but it is taking longer in our case because of past accumulated wealth. We have the same unaffordable welfare state, supported by the liberals, and the same unaffordable military spending and extensive empire, supported by the neocons.

While uncontrolled non-White immigration is certainly a big problem, even if we were still a mostly White country it would not save us from an economic collapse due to the policies we are following. Nazi Germany and Marxist Russia had mostly White populations but the first was heading for an economic collapse and the second actually underwent one. Just having a White majority by itself is not enough to achieve prosperity. After all, Europe was mostly White for thousands of years while average life expectancy stayed in the thirties. It was the 18th century Enlightenment and the scientific and political revolutions that came with it that caused a rise in living standards for the average person.

“a white person of good character was good enough for the founding fathers”

Actually, it wasn’t good enough since there was also a requirement that to become a citizen you had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. The founding fathers wanted immigrants to support the political system they had created. This has continued to be a requirement. That means a White person in Europe in the nineteen thirties who wanted a Nazi or Marxist dictatorship could not move here and become a citizen.

In addition to being authoritarian types, Nazis and Marxists supported unworkable socialist economic systems. The Nazi German government initially stimulated the economy with high levels of government spending but by the end of the thirties growth was slowing and the government was running increasingly high deficits from spending on welfare programs and the military. We never saw the ultimate bad results of this because Hitler lost his war.

We did see the ultimate bad results of Russia adopting their version of socialism, Marxist international socialism. They eventually had to move away from it. Here in the United States, we adopted democratic socialism under FDR. This version of socialism is now failing, with us running increasingly large deficits and the dollar to become worthless from inflation due to monetizing the debt. The three versions of socialism all had the same intellectual roots going back to Rousseau and the 19th century counter-Enlightenment. Only by returning to the Enlightenment era principles of the founders can we avoid our continued decline.

People should probably be thinking about what they should be doing at a personal level as the situation deteriorates. You will want to get out of the dollar and into gold or silver, while making sure your precious metal holdings are in a safe place. More importantly, you will want to learn practical skills involving providing basic necessities for others rather than spending money on a worthless college degree. Being in a red state surrounded by like minded people will also be a good idea.

Our current medical system based primarily on expensive drugs and surgery has to end. We went from twelfth in the world in average life expectancy in nineteen fifty to forty sixth now as medical spending went from six percent of GDP to almost triple that. Becoming knowledgeable about good dietary and exercise practices along with lower cost nutritional supplements as replacements for expensive drugs is something that will likely become increasingly popular.

As things get worse there will be a temptation to abuse alcohol and drugs leading to more of what Angus Deaton calls “deaths of despair”. People will need to find ways to psychologically deal with a worsening economic situation. My parents said during the Great Depression people spent more time with family and friends and learned to enjoy inexpensive hobbies.

“This will lead to increasingly high levels of inflation. The only way to stop this is to end deficit spending so the Fed does [not] need to monetize the debt. This will mean the end of the American empire as the trillion dollars we spend yearly on the military shrinks along with much lower levels of government spending overall.”

I do not think it will happen in a deliberate, orderly fashion. The Fed will not willingly stop money creation because Congress and the President will not suddenly stop deficit spending. It is a sort of tragedy of the commons writ large, and any politician who tries to end deficit spending will be voted out of office by the gib-me-dats class and the Beltway parasites. I think there will be a financial catastrophe and then the consequences you mention (e.g., the end of the global American Empire) will follow.