Category: Current Events

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 04APR2025 – Is Americans

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What makes America great is Americans, not some global economic think tank idea about “Cosmopolitanism.”

We’re not a group of backwoods rubes crouching in fear of the outside world. What we are, and should always be, are people who care more about the well-being of each other and not the stock portfolio of a multinational corporation that will pull the rug at the first chance of increasing profit shares. This nation’s initials are USA not GDP. The overly misused phrase of collectivism when describing Marxist-style ideologies has woefully made it a dirty word for those of us on the Right-wing to employ. It needs to be reclaimed and utilized often. It is the proper attitude to have for our fellow Americans’ living conditions. We are all in the same boat, whether some are in first-class cabins or third-class.

Are protectionist tariff policies the silver bullet solution that will restore American labor and wage loss woes? Will the Rust Belt be revitalized with a glut of new manufacturing jobs by next year? Of course not. But it’s a start. Prepare for pain and embrace the understanding that it is needed and long overdue. The medicine that cures does not always go down easily. To go down fighting is better than to simply accept the current state of affairs.

Legacy media reporting tries to lead one to believe that tariffs will be the only strategy Trump will use. That is folly and only propaganda for the low-information citizen as they like to call most of us. Stronger tariffs are only one piece of the equation that (might) correct the dismal path we are on.

Things are very wrong with how the game is set up. Many of us know this. The promised results of NAFTA, free trade (Ha!) and WTO platitudes were a siren song that mainly enriched a select few. Brave voices spoke out on this such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. They were right.

It is time for something different and if it takes burning my 401K to the ground so that my kids do not have to be serfs to the worship of an almighty GDP Excel spreadsheet God of Globohomo, then I say burn it to the ground.

Starting Trouble on X

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So, after performing all of my chores and watching another installment of “Lonesome Dove” with Camera Girl, I checked on my feed on X.  And Iowahawk was going on an anti-tariff rant.

About six rants down he posted:

 

David Burge (@iowahawkblog):

Sioux City used to have a Zenith TV assembly plant. Even if our patriotic trade war kills grain exports the farmers can get new jobs soldering Quasar circuits there after the revitalization of the American Console TV industry.

 

This was an ironical jab at our lost electronics manufacturing industry.

So, I replied:

 

Orionscoldfire:

You want to know something?  I’d trade the circa 1955 economy, technology and culture for what we’ve got now any day.  At least you could tell a man or a woman by sight.  I could do without the 80” television.

 

So, he replied:

 

David Burge @iowahawkblog:

If only I had the power to grant your wish I would give a personal time machine trip immediately

 

I thanked him for this wish.

Then there were several other opinions and replies by me.  See below:

 

 

Robert Longo @RobertL37046977

  1. a) Adjusted for inflation average household income in 1955 was $50,000, today it’s $80,000
  2. b) We live 10 years longer than in 1955.
  3. c) It’s easy to tell when a man is pretending to be a lady. A man has an Adam’s apple and a deep voice.

Orionscoldfire:

I’ve seen what those ten years look like.  A massive heart attack at eighty is my exit plan.

 

 

Econymous @EHPlimsoll1

You can do that already. No need to force everyone else to live your chosen lifestyle. Cut you income by 2/3, halve the size of your house, buy a crappy car, watch classic TV and movies, refuse any healthcare developed after 1960, and live in a conservative town.

Orionscoldfire:

Sounds promising.

 

 

RobustFeedback @FeedbackRobust

Wait until your kid was diagnosed with leukemia, and instead of a 90% chance of survival, your child had a 4% chance. Or you had no ac when it was 98 degeees, with 70% humidity.Or until you had to work substantially more hours to feed and clothe your kids.

Nostalgia is stupid.

Orionscoldfire:

“Nostalgia is stupid.”  Interesting statement.  I could think of some counterexamples but then we’d just argue.  I’ll just enjoy the thought of that console tv playing Bonanza on a Sunday evening with the family all watching together and roast beef sandwiches and pastries and coffee to come.

 

 

Alboalt @albo_alt

The post-war American economic dominance isn’t coming back unless you want to put huge chunks of the world back into communism and hoeing yam fields all day.

Orionscoldfire:

I don’t want us to dominate anyone.  I’ll settle for an economy that keeps men employed and families living comfortably.  I don’t need to drive a Mercedes I can drive a Ford.  It’s not as good but it gets you there.

 

 

Manny O’Kelly @harshm1stress:

ok so you’re a white male and you’re looking to die around 65 am I hearing you correctly?

Orionscoldfire:

Well, then I missed my mark!

Manny O’Kelly @harshm1stress

there’s a lot you missed

orionscoldfire

Nothing too important.  The important things keep you busy.  Everything else is just background.

 

 

sum_dude44 @sum_dude44

ah yes polio, nuclear annihilation, 10 hr flights to go 1000 miles, lead everywhere

orionscoldfire:

Ah, those were the days.

 

 

Totally_not_a_Bot:

sorry i used to be able to afford a time machine.. but these new tarrifs put it out of range

orionscoldfire:

I’m rooting for you.

 

 

WCB @Si3rraDrive:

That’s a pipe dream. Tariffs don’t get you there, nothing gets you there. You can choose to make that life for yourself, but society won’t be structured thusly.

orionscoldfire

Okay.

 

 

A @2006ImageMacro

You’ve posted 4000 times in 3 years.  You literally could not live in an environment that doesn’t support your internet addiction

orionscoldfire

Mercy sakes!  What can I do?

A  @2006ImageMacro

Hey I’m sorry for some reason I thought you were being snide to Dave but looking now I see that I was shitty to you for no reason, my bad!

Orionscoldfire:

I was just putting in my two cents.  No problems.  Dave’s got definite opinions.  If I get on his nerves, he can tell me to butt out.  Or ban me or something.

 

So, this is all very silly.  David Burge (@iowahawkblog) is a favorite of mine.  Back during the Iraq war, he was a humorist that poked fun at our enemies and even into the Obama years his satirical posts always made me laugh.  Now he likes to identify antique cars from old family album photos and he talks a bit about Iowa basketball.  He definitely isn’t a fan of tariffs.

But it was just the sight of this 1955 television set that made me react.  I was just thinking that if tariffs had kept American industry in this country, we’d be 1000% better off than we are now.  Apparently, most of Mr. Burge’s readers disagree with me but apparently, I couldn’t resist the urge to put in my two cents.

 

Well, it was kind of fun.

 

Update:

Neil Dunn commented:

I want the USA to be as totally self sufficient production wise as possible. No more of China producing most of our antibiotics is my #1 example = some Pharma corporate
executive(s) looking to increase profits, America be damned. Google “how many American car dealerships are in Japan?”. My Google answer = zero. And not one word about tariffs, but lots of other reasons. I say raise the tariffs on Japanese imports until Japan lets US cars into their market. And no more of the 80 year freebee Marshall Plan that taxes the US to make things easy for Europe and the UK. I think Trump was too kind with his Tariff plan.
All barriers to entry from one country toward another country should be equal both ways.

 

Wednesday, Wednesday 02APR2025

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Ah, the Spring Honey Do List.  The most fiendish accumulation of annoying indoor and outdoor chores imaginable to the fevered brains of wives.  I had just finished what I thought was my chores for the day and had taken a shower when I saw Camera Girl raking the leaves off of the edge of the woods and her flower beds.  Now there is no more useless pursuit than raking leaves out of a forest but what can I say?  Female fastidiousness is as powerful as it is inexplicable to the mind of man.  When I saw the piles of leaves she had raked I foresaw her stooping to pick up all those leaves and painstakingly haul them to the other side of the property to her mulch pile and knew it would take days and break her back.  So, I rushed out and told her to leave the leaves(!) to me and I’d chop them with my push mower.  Hearing that I would be doing this she then proceeded to finish off the other woods for the sake of completeness.  Ah Chihuahua!  Well, no good deed goes unpunished.

But honestly chopping leaves with my trash mower is kind of fun.  After four to eight passes (depending on how wet they are) the leaves just about disappear into thin air.  It’s remarkable what steel and kinetic energy can achieve.  And I did get to see all the plants she uncovered along the woods.  The day lilies are about four inches tall.

The hostas near the woods haven’t appeared at all and some small woodland plants are already out and about.

After she left, I spent another half hour disintegrating the remaining leaves.  When I returned inside Camera Girl came running over and thanked me profusely for sparing her all that stoop labor of moving the leaves to her mulch pile.  And I thought to myself, “I am a good person, amn’t I?  Why else would she be so happy.  So, over the course of the evening several times I reminded her of how nice it was of me to come to her rescue and take care of the leaves.  But what I noticed was that after each iteration of my reminder her gratitude seemed to diminish.  And, in fact the decrease accelerated.  At the end I believe it tailed off sort of like the curve of y=1/Xn where n= the number of reminders and y= her enthusiasm for the reminders.  So, her enthusiasm approached zero as a limit but never quite reached it.

I brought up this observation to her.  She used some Italian hand gestures from her distant past and went back to the cooking tasks that she was busy with.  It’s a shame that her high school back in Sheepshead Bay didn’t do a better job of preparing her mathematically for her life ahead.  Being able to graph and recognize the various curves of common functions is a basic requirement of our technological age.  But we all have to be flexible and adapt ourselves to people as we find them.  And that is a tenet of my relationship with her and I remind her of it from time to time.

April Fool’s Day 2025

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No thirty inches of snow!  No ice storm!  No baseball sized hail stones!  April Fool’s Day didn’t punish us here in New England.  It’s a bloomin’ miracle.  It’s a pretty nice day so Camera Girl handed me her “Honey Do” list.  The one item I’m stalling on is walking the property with a garbage bag and a stick with a nail on it picking up all the trash that has blown into the wooded areas.  As Sergeant Snorkel told Beetle Bailey, “If it don’t walk, if it don’t talk, police it!”  But it’s annoying.  It makes me feel very uncharitably toward the whole human race when I see what kind of stuff they toss out the windows of their cars.

So, I was driving down the main east-west road in Dunwich in a section that is full of blind curves and rolling hills when up ahead about a quarter of a mile I see something in the road.  I see it’s moving but it’s too short to be an adult human so I slow down.  “Could it be a child or is someone sitting or kneeling on the road?  And then I can see.  It’s a huge tom turkey with his feathers and wings all puffed up.  He’s in the oncoming lane and he’s staring me down!  So, I creep past him looking for his harem.  But I couldn’t see them.  Either they were shielded by the trees or they were gone.  But Tom was sticking to his guns and wasn’t afraid of me.  So, I left him there and in my rearview I could see him still standing there like some blithering idiot trying to act as crossing guard to an invisible flock.

After cutting down the raspberry canes last week I’ve been hoping to see some leaves sprouting up from the dirt.  So far nothing.

But the hellebores are coming up.  More confidently in the sunnier areas and tentatively in the shade.

And likewise for the daffodils.  We have three different stages of development depending where they are on the property.

The hostas near the house have just broken ground.

And this little crocus is bravely showing its colors.

So winter is climatically over.  I will now stow the shoe spikes, snow shovels, ice scrapers, snow blower, snow boots and all the rest of the paraphernalia that litters the mud room and move forward into the growing season.  And now that the ground is completely thawed, I can begin things like fixing fences, gates, damaged wood and all the other weather-beaten components of my poor house and adjacencies.

And I will move the lawn mowers to the front of the shed and contemplate that fateful moment when I drive the mower over the grass for the first time this year.  Right now, it’s unimaginable.  Some of the grass is overly long and soaked with winter water in the soggier areas of the west field.  Some areas are worn away by snow, ice and rain.  Other areas are dead and brown.  Cementing the whole thing over sounds like a better solution.  But in just a very few days the darn thing will revive and life will return.

And in honor of this projected return of life I have put out ten preying mantis egg sacs.  I purchased them from an American company that said they are Chinese mantids.  Well, why not?  Apparently, they’re already outcompeting the Carolina mantis right here in New England.  Who am I to stand in the way of Darwinian selection?

The only thing left to cap off the beginning of spring is the reappearance of the pond turtles.  They have not made their reappearance but Camera Girl will keep me apprised of their status.

“O brave new world that has such people in it!”

Let Me See What’s Going on 31MAR2025

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Well, first of all, Europe has gone all in on lawfare to prevent their own people from electing candidates on the Right.  I guess I can paraphrase this as. “If you can’t beat them at the ballot box just round them up and jail them.”

“Monday’s court sentence declares Le Pen ineligible to stand for president in 2027 and gave her a four-year prison sentence – half of it suspended – for embezzlement of European parliament funds.

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League party Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels”.

“A bad film that we are also seeing in other countries like Romania,” wrote Salvini on social media.

“We don’t let ourselves be intimidated, we don’t stop: full speed ahead my friend!”

Romania’s electoral bureau in early March rejected the candidacy of far-right politician Calin Georgescu for the re-run of presidential elections in May.

The fierce EU and NATO critic shot to prominence last November, when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting before the constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion.

Georgescu, who denies any links to Moscow, has slammed the vote annulment as a “formalised coup d’état” and the subsequent banning as “a direct blow to the heart of democracy.”

So that’s interesting.  It’s kind of what they tried against Trump only their people are so cowed that it’s successful.  I guess the question I’ll ask is are their people such slaves that they’ll put up with that forever?  I guess we’ll find out.

The other big “international” development is that the New York Times admitted that the United States military has boots on the ground in Ukraine.  And in fact, the CIA is coordinating missile attacks on the Russian homeland.

Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.

The hardest red line was the Russian border. But in spring 2024, to protect the northern city of Kharkiv against a Russian assault, the administration authorized the creation of an “ops box” — a zone of Russian territory within which U.S. officers in Wiesbaden could provide the Ukrainians with precise coordinates. The box’s first iteration extended across a wide swath of Ukraine’s northern border. The box was expanded after North Korea sent troops to help fight the Ukrainians’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The U.S. military was later allowed to enable missile strikes in an area of southern Russia where the Russians staged forces and equipment for their offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. But the C.I.A. could request “variances,” carve-outs to support strikes for specific objectives. Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border. On Sept. 18, 2024, a swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Later, the C.I.A. was allowed to enable Ukrainian drone strikes in southern Russia to try to slow advances in eastern Ukraine.

So, we’ve been playing chicken with the Russians for several years in Ukraine.  Is this still going on?  Why?  Have we officially lost any personnel to the war officially?  Unofficially?  Is there any reason why we should?

From what I can see of Europe’s approach to “democracy” I don’t see any meaningful difference between Russia, Ukraine, France or Romania.  None of them are really democracies in any real sense.  So why are we choosing winners and losers there?  They’re supposed to be grown-ups.  Why can’t they sort out their own messes?  Why should American money and blood be involved in any way?

From what I can see we have no more place telling the Russians or the English how to run their lives than we do the Afghans or the Chinese.  They’re not us.  We’re not them.  If they don’t shoot at us, they can do whatever they damn please.  They can even say mean things about us.  Now as far as buying whatever crap they make in their country, as long as we have the same tariffs on them as they have on us, have at it.  The crap we get from China is no better or worse than the crap we get from Mexico or Canada.  It’s all still crap.  If they want to make their crap here and pay Americans to make it, well, that’s another story.  Now we’ve got something to talk about.  If Toyota builds a plant in Tennessee, then God bless Toyota.  They’re my kind of foreigners.  We can do business and we can even be friends!

I hope Donald Trump understands that blowing people up to “make the world safe for democracy” is just a globalist bumper sticker.  Minding our own business to make America safe for Americans is a policy that can help make America great again.

Just my two cents today.

Tom’s World – 30MAR2025 – Human Nature

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Even if we had a total rebirth, and somehow had a new constitutional convention attended by intelligent and principled patriots who would write a new constitution correcting the fault lines that allowed to corruption to enter and begin the rot, how long would it last before constitution 2 was also brought to the brink of collapse?

I’m pretty sure that the founders would have become violently ill at the thought of lifelong congressmen becoming fabulously wealthy and self important and totally divorced from the wishes, needs and physical and moral well being of their constituents.

It seems to me that any enduring political structure must be built around just how self serving and corruptible humans can be. But any system created by humans can and will be corrupted by humans. There has to be some robust self centering feedback system built at the absolute core where it will be hard to get to and corrupt. Maybe, that was supposed to have been the function of the Supreme Court but we all see the result that political appointment has had.

Elections can certainly and are easily subverted.

Andrew Klavan, You Magnificent Bastard, You Were Right!

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About four years ago I was watching a podcast by Andrew Klavan.  And this was at the height of bad things happening.  I guess I was as negative as I’d ever been.  I can’t remember the exact topic of this video but at a point in the exposition he addressed all the ground the Right had lost over the years to the Left and he seemed to know what I was thinking and said something like, “All of this stuff can be reversed.”

And at the time my mind rejected that statement.  So many things had been normalized by the Left and generations had grown up thinking of these things as the status quo that I just couldn’t see how it could be turned around.  Part of the reason was I knew that the Republican establishment had already adopted all of these changes into their worldview.  They’d even accepted giving citizenship to unlimited illegal aliens just so the Democrats wouldn’t call them mean names.  At that point the only half way measure I could think of to avoid the end of freedom in America was to move to a red state like Florida and hope that the governor would resist all of the communism for as long as it was possible.  I even contemplated moving to Hungary and learning to speak Magyar.  There at least they aren’t ashamed of being of European heritage.

Fast forward four years and we see that Trump has smashed all kinds of barriers.  He isn’t shy about saying that something that’s wrong or crazy is wrong or crazy.  What he’s doing to DEI and affirmative action in general is completely revolutionary from the perspective of the last sixty five years of progressive change.  He’s trashing everything that’s happened since the Johnson administration.  And he’s not asking permission.  He’s just doing it.  Sure the corrupt judges are fighting him tooth and nail but he’s doing it anyway.  Even if he fails at some things he’s pushing in all directions at once and he’s got the bastards on the run.

So, four years later and I finally learn that Andrew Klavan was kinda right.  Now, it took a trump to unleash the power of the executive branch under a strong, determined president but it does show you that hopelessness is in a sense weakness.  Trump is succeeding because he had the sense to see that the people running the show were doing the things they were doing despite what the majority of Americans wanted.  It was an illusion that we were outnumbered and that the Democrats were about to become the permanent majority.  Half of their “coalition” can’t stand their messaging.  All that was needed was someone talking sense and making a case for sanity and prosperity.  Even minority voters are starting to tire of the “all white people are racist” trope.  They’re more interested in someone restarting the economy and producing well-paying jobs where they live.

So all these years later, I just want to say, Andrew Klavan, you were right.  Crazy doesn’t have to be forever and we can begin winning the culture war if we have leaders who actually want to win.  And there’s a special bonus that comes along with this.  I get to enjoy the schadenfreude as RINO bums like Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell get kicked to the curb.  What a beautiful world.

Andrew Klavan, you magnificent bastard, you were right!

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 28MAR2025 – Logic of Empire

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As noted regarding the internal collapse of the Roman empire, when taxes became burdensome, expansion was required to maintain population growth to support the original areas, farming and manual labor became scorned, and there was no longer a tradition of service either military or political by the upper echelons the rot had become total, and it was just waiting for a small disturbance to drop the whole structure.
We are doing the same glide path and have been for most of my life. Farming, self sufficient people, manual or blue collar labor are flat out despised, military service is considered an option for the lower classes, but not the elites, fly over or red state country is spoken of as if it was a forgiegn enemy, and if it doesn’t be legit the “elites” it isn’t worthy of any attention or effort. This will come to a bitter and difficult fruition eventually if we don’t step back from the edge. Defunding the people who hate us more than our actual enemies, put us below the invaders and economic migrate who drain our coffers and the self serving politicians who are only concerned with their own plunder is a good start, highlighting the hypocrisy in burning swasticars in protest of a movement you don’t support us putting it all out there for everyone to see.

They’re Good Company

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Today was a tough day.  Very sad things going on for some friends of mine.  But, let’s see what we can talk about that’s not too sad.

Penny is our basset hound.  She’s one and a half years old so Camera Girl considers her a “puppy.”  Really, a psycho is what she is.  She attacks our German shorthaired pointer relentlessly.  I attribute most of this insanity to Camera Girl’s criminally lax dog training.  But I don’t rule out congenital brain abnormality as part of the answer.  Anyway, this dog dotes on me.  If she had her way, I’d spend twenty-three hours a day scratching her enormous ears and the voluminous folds of skin on her throat.  Suffice it to say she follows me around the house hoping for an ear rub.

But today I had to get into a suit.  White shirt, tie, suit jacket and pants, black leather shoes.  The whole thing.  I come down the stairs and she takes one look at me and goes berserk; barking and growling at me.  She doesn’t recognize me!  She’s dancing back and forth looking like she either wants to bite me or run away.  I’m yelling at her at the top of my lungs trying to get her to recognize my voice and calm down.  I’m also worried she’ll shake her jowls and splatter my suit with basset drool.  Finally, she runs into the living room while I go out through the kitchen door.

I came home four hours later and almost the same thing happens.  She’s barking and howling and carrying on.  So, I go upstairs and get changed and come down in my regular clothes and she stops and looks at me and acts confused.  She won’t come near me but she isn’t barking.  Slowly she shuffles closer, sniffing at my feet and looking hesitant.  Then finally she snaps out of it and accepts that it’s me.

Bassett hounds are supposed to be second only to blood hounds in their ability to recognize scents.  So, what the hell is wrong with this dog?  Now, sure I wear pretty much the same shirts, pants, shoes and socks every day.  But if I put on another suit of clothes, I’m unrecognizable?

What goes on in the tiny brain of this dog?  Apparently, I’ve become a very stable pattern in her mind and any small change to the details of my sensory image, whether scent, sight or sound immediately convinces her that it’s not really me.  Maybe she’s been watching one of the various versions of that classic of cold war paranoia, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”  Apparently today I became one of the pod people walking the streets, disguised as her favorite ear scratcher.

Well, all is forgiven again.  I spent the requisite five minutes scratching her gigantic heavy ears and telling he she isn’t a psychopath.  It’s all lies of course but we somehow have to get through the day as a family.  So, I’ll make believe she’s a good dog.

But I will say she helped me get out of the funk I was in.  Dogs are useful, even crazy ones.  They take your mind off of big problems at least for a few minutes and from what I’ve heard petting them even lowers your blood pressure.  Well, all the yelling I did probably had the opposite effect but either way she was good company.

Update

 

Ed Brault In reply to photog.

I’m the same way. My “Wedding and Funeral” Suit and my “Military Funerals” Class-A uniform hang in a zip-storage bag in the back of the closet.

As for the Basset, well, it must vary by the dog. I visited my folks after a tour overseas, and their St. Bernard, who hadn’t seen me in nearly four years, shot straight to my car, expecting me to take her to the beach, just like my last visit.Brault0000001A

reply by photog

Yes, i think you’re right. It varies by the dog and this particular canine is a little high strung. Or just plain crazy, depending on your literary style.

Fun Times to Witness Firsthand

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The United States started out as a group of small settlements along the Atlantic coast of North America.  Within 150 years these seedlings had spread to become the basis of the most powerful, most productive nation ever to exist.  By 1900 it had become a continental power that had harnessed great scientific and technological innovations to become a world power.  By 2000 it was the global hegemon, with no other nation even daring to pretend parity with the United States of America.

Twenty-five years later this country is much diminished.  And almost none of the change has to do with military might or technological capability.  We still have wonder weapons and a nuclear arsenal.  We have the most advanced information technology systems including the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and data acquisition.

What we have lost is our identity.  The Left has been on a campaign to destroy the myth of America for the last seventy years and I think they’ve been almost wholly successful.  Because it is this myth that provided us with the power that allowed us to perform all the miracles we have seen over the last century and more of our civilizational highpoint.  I’ll arbitrarily assign 1900 as the zenith of American civilization.  This convenient date, more or less, starts the “American Century” and the first decade was Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.  I would say this was when American morale was at its highest point.  We were respected and envied around the world and our self-regard was very high.  And at the same time, we were still a very self-reliant place.  People were expected to support themselves and government had no place in micro-managing our lives and finances.  From our point of view there was no government safety net and poverty was only one economic panic away.  But Americans depended on themselves to survive.

And this was doable.  America truly was the land of opportunity.  Everywhere you looked there were great ventures building bridges, railroads, telephone systems, electrical infrastructure; all the systems needed for a modern civilization.  There was work to do for anyone willing to do it.  And we considered ourselves a moral people.  We had police and courts that made sure that everyone lived according to the laws that each state enforced.  And every man could be judged by a jury of his peers.  It wasn’t perfect but it seemed like a reasonably fair system.  And we had representative government.  We got to vote for our presidents and congressional representatives.  Well, not women.  We were still sane back then and kept them in the home.  That madness was still twenty years in the future.  Funny how that innovation seems to track with the end of American greatness.  Oh well.

And most importantly, we hadn’t gotten involved in a European War at all up to that point.  Sure we slapped their hands if they interfered in the Western Hemisphere; Monroe Doctrine and all that.  But we were smart enough not to stick our noses into European quagmires.  We left that to the British.

But now?  Well, we’re mired in conflicts all over the Middle East and even Ukraine.  We rattle our sabers at China, Russia and Iran constantly.  We meddle in the elections of half the planet, spending clandestine money to rig elections and decide what cultural values we will permit “democracies” to have.

And we’ve allowed the education of our children to undermine the belief in the fairness and morality of American laws and institutions that have stood us in good stead for over two hundred years.  These educators and politicians have labeled our society racist, sexist, bigoted and immoral.  And worse still, a whole generation has been brainwashed into believing it’s true.

They’ve also empowered the leading corporations to outsource almost all the manufacturing jobs that formerly supported a thriving middle class to foreign shores where labor prices are impossibly low.  This has single-handedly dropped the United States into the second tier of nations economically.  And it has devastated the morale of the whole country.  And now the Left has tried to finish off the middle class by flooding the country with tens of millions of third-world refugees to compete for the few jobs that are left at the lowest wage imaginable.

So where do we go from here?  If we looked for examples we have Rome.  A great and proud people expanded under the leadership of wise rulers but then allowed foreign wars to turn their Republic into an Empire.  And that Empire turned its back on the small farmers who had been the backbone of the Republic and turned to slave labor to enrich the senatorial class and changed the army into a profession with  no pretense of an end to the forever wars.

That looks very much like what we are seeing planned by the Left, only on a global scale.  Now Trump is trying to reverse the picture.  He is taking steps to deal with each of the problems; wars, outsourced manufacturing, global corporations, hordes of illegal immigrants and culture war.  And we’re even seeing some small progress from his efforts.

But can he turn it around?  When the Gracchi Brothers or Julius Caesar took the side of the plebians in Rome they were assassinated and the Empire rolled on.  So we’ve never seen this trend from Republic to Empire reversed.  Of course I’d like it to be so.  The ends of Republics aren’t fun times to witness firsthand.