Category: Trump

Corcyra Again

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I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet.  But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while.  Well, patience is a virtue.

I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today.  It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.”  I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States.  It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.

And all of that was good stuff.  But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.”  And that always holds my interest.  It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines.  He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state.  All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia.  I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.

What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra.  Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra.  And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.

“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”

It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not.  The last time was October of 2017.  And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building.  It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”

But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor.  That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here.  I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living.  Well, that enough.

Wish Me Luck

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, Trump , ,

Tonight, I asked Camera Girl what she thought I should write my post about.  She said I should write about the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t have a pet dog.  I countered, “But he doesn’t like dogs.”  She said that was weak and that if he got a dog, he’d be much more likely to succeed as president.  Well, what can I say?  She’s got me there.  Of course, exactly what kind of dog would be compatible with Donald Trump seems like a very complicated question.  Well, he’s kind of tall.  Maybe a Great Dane.  I explained to her that it’s sort of a moot question because Trump’s not going to change his mind at this point in his life.  Well, she rejected this explanation and stood by the idea that this situation spelled disaster for his presidency.  Oh well, agree to disagree.

Yesterday I sent a proposal for my unfinished novel to Ark Press to see if they are interested in this soon to be blockbuster story.  It’s almost twenty-four hours since I hit the send button on the e-mail and I’ve heard nothing.  As you can imagine, I’m crushed and dejected by the interminable delay.  I now question my optimism and see all of life as a hollow husk of what my hopes and dreams were.  I was planning on tying a lead weight to my ankle and tossing it into the pond thus ending it all.  But I realized the water depth is currently about three feet so it could take a long while to perish.  I need a better plan.

Plan B is to start a new career.  Currently the top contender is bare-knuckle-boxer.  My plan is to begin an intensive physical conditioning program.  I’ll start with road work and then add on a raw egg diet and finally I’ll find a good manager someone named Mick or Apollo or something like that.  I figure if I play my cards right, I’ll be ready for a title fight sometime in 2026 which being the 250th birthday of the United States will be sorta like what happened for Rocky Balboa only without the turtles named Bert and Ernie.  I told Camera Girl about my plan and she punched me in the stomach really hard.  It was sort of a foul.  I wasn’t expecting it after all.  But it really has affected my confidence.  I complained that, “Adrian never punched Rocky or did anything to discourage him from becoming the boxing champion of the world and aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”  She countered that Adrain was a doofus and Rocky was too short to be an effective boxer.  I reminded her that we saw the movie back in 1976 and she never said anything about those things back then.  She replied that she was still attempting to trap me into matrimony at that point so she let it ride for then.  But she claimed that she always thought Adrian was a doofus.  And as her final point she opined that boxers need very strong neck muscles and I have a bad neck.  Her point was that modern boxers hit so hard that my head would fly off my body after one punch and that would be gross.  Well, that was food for thought.

So, I guess I need a Plan C.  I haven’t really worked out all the details but maybe, possibly, I’m going to go pro in pickle ball.  I’ve heard good things.  But I haven’t bounced it off her yet.  Wish me luck.

The Sesquarcentennial Man

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Today is my regular Wednesday zoom call with the boys and of course we were hooting about last night’s speech.  Everyone loved the hilarious jabs at Biden, the endless list of billion-dollar boondoggles cut from USAID and Trump’s droll braggadocio of his list of accomplishments.  But I think I had them laughing hardest when I reminded them of the three hundred- and fifty-year-old social security recipient.  I thought a couple of them were going to have a stroke or swallow their tongues.  I think everyone inherently senses how this absurdity just encapsulates what runaway bureaucracy looks like in its terminal stage.  As Trump said, “This guy is a hundred years older than the country but he’s still on the rolls!”  You have to have a kind of primal respect for someone defending a lie that big.  It’s epic.

Now some would rightly point to the much greater financial impact of there being many millions of Americans claiming to be alive after 110, 120, 130 and even 140 years of age.  The benefits for millions of people are enormous.  They’re in the tens of billions of dollars.  They are an outrage and they should be crimes that are rooted out and punished.  Even the people just working in the social security department and ignoring the absurdity of these impossible ages should be punished.

And yet I can’t help but hearken back the Sesquarcentennial Man.  So that means he was born in 1675 AD.  Isaac Newton and Louis XIV of France were still alive back then.  In that year King Philip’s War broke out, as the Wampanoags attacked Swansea, Massachusetts.  Maybe Sesquarcentennial Man remembers the trauma of those frightening days.  Maybe he still requires medication to deal with the fear.  But whatever else we can say about him the most important characteristic he possesses is that we’re still paying for him.  And without Elon Musk we probably would continue to pay for him until the US Treasury finally closes its doors and goes out of business.

So yeah, we got a hoot out of it and thank you Donald Trump for your love of comedy.  But the real point is that the federal government is filled with people making six figure salaries while ignoring the apparently endless incompetence and corruption going on all around them with no concern for how it impacts their fellow Americans or the country as a whole.

Well, I think it just hardens our resolve to see DOGE fire as many of these useless and despicable individuals as is humanly possible.  We should want to see the number of federal employees reduced to the bare minimum possible through the use of automation and continuous improvement of the systems and processes needed to perform the critical functions of the government.  And by eliminating all non-essential functions of government.  No more research studies into fields that the government has no business funding.  If anyone has an unquenchable curiosity about the sex lives of any animal (including humans) let him pay for that voyeuristic pursuit out of his own pocket.  And likewise for every other pseudoscientific time sink.  Fund yourselves.

But more than anything else, I want to know about Sesquarcentennial Man.  Who is (or was) he?  How many descendants has he?  And most urgently, who’s cashing his social security checks.  Elon, can you help us out here?

Fat Tuesday

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Well, let’s see.  Today is Mardi Gras.  Interestingly, it is celebrated in Dunwich but with a local twist.  Because the Great Old Ones are devout Roman Catholics (go figure) they forego eating humans during the entirety of Lent so tonight they have a wild party where they make an enormous cauldron of jambalaya (5,000 gallons) and garnish it with any local elected officials they can find within the town limits.  So, for that reason I’m currently hiding in an abandoned fallout shelter with the Elder Sign emblazoned on the bolted hatch.  Above me I can hear the screams of the Dunwich Town Clerk, Treasurer and Tax Collector as they’re paraded down Bourbon Street on the way to dinner.  Well, nobody likes them anyway.  They voted to increase taxes and wouldn’t let us put up that Trump sign behind the Town Hall so boo hoo!

It’s kind of boring down here.  All I have is an internet connection, a dart board and ten thousand sugar cubes.  I’m trying to build a pyramid with them but it looks kind of crooked.  It really adds to my respect for those Egyptians.  First off, I now see why they didn’t use sugar as a building material.  After all, the slaves building the pyramid might be tempted to lick one of the blocks surreptitiously.  Multiply that by a billion licks and now you’re looking at real issues.  I’m guessing type 2 diabetes would have been rampant, so there’s that.  It really makes you think.

But now Donald Trump is starting his speech.  He’s speaking to a joint session of Congress and the Democrats are all holding what look like ping pong paddles with catchy slogans like “Trump Sucks” and “Pelosi is Still Hot” emblazoned on them.  After a particularly provocative anecdote about how ugly Chuck Schumer’s wife is up jumps Billy Dee Williams and threatens Trump with a golden handled cane.

Trump jumps down from the podium and joins Billy Dee in a spirited fencing match.  I believe he borrowed an umbrella from Speaker Johnson.  Luckily for everyone involved the Sergeant at Arms trips Billy Dee from behind and put him in a full nelson hold before giving him the bum’s rush.  After taking a few bows, Trump returned to the lectern and continues his remarks on his photos from his trip to Las Vegas with Mitch McConnell.  Riveting stuff.

Oh wait, I made all that stuff up in my head.

Actually, Trump’s address was quite effective.  He gave a long list of the frivolous causes that DOGE discovered that have wasted literally billions of dollars of taxpayer money.  One of the funniest revelations was of the age of some of the social security recipients.  I guess the most egregious was a man who was reportedly 350 years old.  Now this was just one case.  There were also actual millions of social security beneficiaries that were over 120 years of age.  Think of that.

He described the atrocities that illegal aliens have caused to our people; the murders and rapes and the fact that he has now closed off the border and is deporting illegals at a record pace.  Trump reported that the military with the aid of the Pakistani government have recently apprehended the leader of the group responsible for the suicide bombing of American troops during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.  And he reiterated how incompetently Biden managed that withdrawal.

He announced his intent to end the Ukrainian war and revealed that Zelensky has sent him a message saying he is now ready to get involved in peace talks and also wants to sign the rare earth metals contract.

Trump highlighted the steps he’s taking to lower energy costs.  And he highlighted all of the failures of the Biden administration.  It was a very long list.

All in all, it was an entertaining talk.  The impression is of a President confident in his ability to make America great again.  The Democrats on the other hand appeared to be a bunch of petulant children.  Interesting.

Ukraine – Endless Death

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I’ve probably said too much already about the Ukraine War but it’s one of those horrible things that can’t just go away.  So, ignoring it is just denial.  At this point there are no longer any good options.  Both sides have lost so many men that they feel they must win in order not to appear to have sacrificed a generation of young men for nothing.  But one of them will have to.  And if I were to guess I’d say it’s the Ukrainians that will lose.  But I think it will take another year for them to get to the point of collapse.    By then, the Russians will have lost a million men and the Ukrainians will have lost two million.  At that point the Russians will be so enraged that they’ll inflict crippling conditions and may increase the ceded territory beyond the four provinces they’re currently claiming as theirs.

And most of the blame for this should be laid at the feet of the neo-cons who put together this whole war during the Obama and Biden administrations.  They organized and sponsored the color revolution and armed the Ukrainians and told them that with the aid of the United States and Europe they would not only beat Russia but they would become a part of NATO.  The neo-cons saw this as an opportunity to test out all of their weaponry on a battlefield against the Russians without having to risk many of their own troops or nuclear war.  And they figured it would bleed the Russians dry and then humiliate them in the eyes of their own people and thereby destroy Putin.

Well, they were half right.  We have managed to cause the Russians great harm.  But from where I stand what we’ve accomplished is making them our implacable foes for the next hundred years.  And we’ve thrown them into the arms of China and hastened the end of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.  Well done, neo-cons.

But now Donald Trump is stuck with this mess.  That sideshow he put on with Zelensky in the oval office is part of some plan to get the Ukrainians receptive to a peace treaty.  I assume what he’s setting up is a take it or leave it deal where he negotiates with Putin, and then Zelensky gets his side to accept.  Well, Trump likes to negotiate but I’m not sure how much give there is on the Russian side.  I think the things that are written in stone are:

  • No NATO membership ever.
  • Permanent Ukrainian neutrality.
  • Substantial reduction in Ukraine’s military.
  • Some proviso against the Azov leadership ever holding power again.
  • Complete protection of Russian ethnic institutions (language, religion, etc.) in Ukraine.
  • Substantial territorial transfers to Russia.

I think there is probably some give on exactly how much land will have to be ceded to Russia.  I think the Russians are very tired of the meat grinder that transfers Ukrainian territory to Russia at a rate that translates to just a few square feet per hour but also can be measured in hundreds of deaths per week on each side.  It’s a sickening spectacle.

I don’t envy Trump’s job in trying to negotiate a peace treaty.  Not only does he have Putin and Zelensky to reckon with but he also has that pack of idiots in Europe.  The clown car filled with all the globalist “leaders” from Britain, France, Germany and all the rest of those useless countries will be howling and shrieking and demanding that we provide enough arms and money to continue the war until the last Ukrainian is dead.  If he does manage to negotiate an end to the war, he shouldn’t just get a Nobel Peace Prize they should also take back the one they gave to Obama.

But I’m not so certain anything but time will end this war.  If (when) the Ukrainians are forced to capitulate the outrage they will experience because of the brutal conditions of surrender will probably result in a witch hunt for the leaders who were responsible for this debacle.  I’m guessing that if Zelensky doesn’t have a bunker in a friendly nation that won’t extradite him he’s not going to live much beyond the end of the war.

And there will be other consequences of this brutal war.  What’s left of Ukraine will be destabilized and there are hints of Hungary, Poland and Romania looking to make territorial claims based on ethnic enclaves that were long ago added to Ukraine.  All in all, the fallout from this brilliant geopolitical catastrophe threatens to haunt the world long after we’re all dead.  Once again, well done, neo-cons.

Maybe They Can Work for Tyson Chicken

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Donald Trump is a very old man.  He’s seventy-eight or thereabouts.  And, sure, he’s wealthy so he doesn’t have to worry about his kids or grandkids starving.  So why is he doing all this?  Some people say it’s for pride.  He wants to be remembered as a great man.  Maybe.  But would he be going through everything he’s been through for the last ten years just for pride?  I tend to doubt it.  Now, I don’t doubt that part of it is associated with pride.  I think he felt disrespected by the Democratic elite that mocked at the idea of him running for president.  And I’m sure he wants revenge on the people who have made his life miserable since he became president in 2017.  I think he’d love to punish as many of them, as severely as he possibly can, for all the dirty tricks and harm they’ve caused him and his friends and family.

But I still don’t think that’s the whole reason.  I think it’s because he’s an American and it angers him to see this country lose the characteristics that made it a great country.  He doesn’t want his descendants to live in a banana republic.  He doesn’t want them to live in fear of the secret police.  Basically, he wants them to be free.

And I believe this because that’s the same thing that motivates me to rail against the Deep State and the Fake News and root for Donald Trump and his insane crusade to “Make America Great Again.”  I’m not blind.  I know Trump is a huckster.  He runs casinos, sells steaks or bibles or golden sneakers or whatever the rubes will buy.  He’s PT Barnum with a hair transplant and a permanent tan.  But I believe down to my feet that he is just as angry about what the people in charge have done to this country as I am.  I know that he sells snake oil to the suckers but I think it angers him to see these regular people getting shafted by the likes of Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney.  Maybe he feels that these people are his marks and he has the right to cheat them a little bit but in return they shouldn’t be impoverished, dispossessed and replaced by whoever can be loaded on a boat, marched across the border and put to work in a Tyson chicken processing plant.  In other words, he thinks the American dirt people are still Americans and deserve at least the right to exist.

Of course I can’t prove any of this.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe he’s just crazy and he’s just doing this to satisfy some megalomaniacal craving for the spotlight.

But it doesn’t matter.  Because for whatever reason Donald Trump is fulfilling the wishes of me and about a hundred million other Americans who’ve watched this country systematically degraded and reduced to an anarcho-tyrannical police state where criminals run amok and law-abiding people have to keep their mouths shut to avoid being sent to a gulag.  He’s figured out how the system works and he’s single-mindedly taking it apart piece by bloody piece.  And it’s beautiful.

So, I can’t prove what I think about Trump but along with everyone else on my side we’re watching this spectacle in the way I imagine the fundamentalist brethren would feel if the rapture suddenly came upon them; shocked but ecstatic.  When all of the things you’ve been hoping for years would happen suddenly do, it makes you giddy.  And that’s how it’s been since January 20th.  And if he can keep this up for a few more months I’m starting to believe he can actually beat the Deep State and fix this country permanently (or at least for the foreseeable future).  So, keep breaking stuff Mr. Trump.  Reduce Washington DC to rubble and send the managerial state to the unemployment line.  Maybe they can work for Tyson Chicken.

Fixing Research With a Chainsaw

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A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.

Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences.  And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.

Now Sabine is far from a conservative.  She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas.  But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.

She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.

I agree with her.  Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science.  It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.

I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies.  It should be a mighty bloodbath.  And that will change the universities too, for the better.  They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.

The Trump Bump is Real

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So today was my scheduled zoom call with the guys.  It’s a group of eight former employees of the old firm who formerly used to take the (very) long walk every morning (and sometimes afternoon) down to the cafeteria and back to talk about “work.”  None of us was truly Left and most of was were decidedly Right but we tolerated a certain amount of centrism on some topics.  During the early years of the millennium, we were mostly hawkish and after Obama got in, we became increasingly angry over social issues like race and sexuality.

But one thing always seemed true.  We were disgruntled.  Now back in 2016 I famously championed Donald Trump and took a lot of grief because of this.  I made a small bet with one of my fellow coffee-walkers and when he had to pay up, he magnanimously framed the bill and hanged it on my wall for all to see.  Out of fear of the cleaning staff stealing the cash I replaced it with a Donald Trump million-dollar bill.  But the victory was very sweet.

Over the four years of Trump’s first presidency the tenor of our discussions varied but until 2020 they were generally on the optimistic side.  But once George Floyd and then COVID laid waste to the country we slid into disgust and the November fake election was the last straw.  Now whenever we got together (and after COVID it had to be remote) we uniformly despaired for the future of the country.  I guess you could say the Biden presidency was the term of our “resistance.”  Personally, we had our good and bad days.  And also, we one by one left the old firm.  But we valued the Wednesday zoom call and the solidarity it provided.  Interestingly the most left-winged of our number had a quasi-conversion and in 2024 voted for Trump!  Which we all considered a minor miracle.

But over the course of 2024 it was easy to see that our optimism for the political future was increasing drastically.  After the debate it was almost comical how excited everyone had become.  And after the election it was something like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when all the munchkins are dancing around singing about how “the wicked old witch at last is dead.”  And so as with everyone else on the Right we’re almost ecstatic with the activity and results we’re seeing in Washington as Trump and his merry band rip up all the floor boards in the deep state’s hideout and dig up the pots of gold they’ve stolen from the American people.

And now it’s gotten to the point where we’re so jaded that even revolutionary change is not enough and instead, we’re talking about ludicrous phantasmagorical things like eliminating the IRS and making the income tax a middle school math calculation like everyone pays 8% of their income or making it just a sales tax.  Next, we’ll be expecting Trump to announce that dunk tank with Democrats like Pelosi, Schumer and AOC in it that we can all get a chance at dunking.

So, yeah, it’s getting out of hand and that means we’re about to hit a wall and will have to come back down to Earth.  And that’s fine.  Life is mostly a serious matter and we shouldn’t be walking around laughing like idiots for more than a few weeks anyway.

But even if we calm down, let’s look at what we’ve gotten.  We’ve gotten back our hopes.  We’re looking at actual good news.  There is a way to course-correct and shrink down the federal bureaucracy and eliminate the deficit and defang the security state.  These are all wonderful things and way beyond what we expected from Trump just a scant few weeks ago.  Trump has gotten the upper hand on the establishment uni-party.  McConnell is a ghost of his former self and the Democrats have become a laughing stock without a path forward or a strategy for dealing with Trump other than hoping for some disaster to strike.  They’re probably praying to Gaia for COVID25 or something equally injurious.

So, at the call today we all acknowledged that the morale boost from all this winning is an enormous positive result above and beyond any and all of the actual policy changes that we enjoy.  Joy has a value.  Emotionally, psychologically and maybe even spiritually it enhances our lives and makes every part of our lives better.  I go to sleep easier.  I wake up more rested and I look at the world as a much better place.  Even the bad things are better because I feel more in control of the world and more confident that I can repair whatever needs fixing.

The Trump bump is real.

We All Better Hope He Can

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“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”

This to me seems to be a wise policy.  Based on the fairly frequent bubbles and panics occurring in our economic environment I’m fairly convinced that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing.  So, I’ll assume that’s what the problem is.  The people running the economy just don’t know what they’re doing.  And maybe, all things considered, they’re doing as good a job as is possible.  After all, human society is a dynamic system with an enormous number of factors contributing to the output of goods and services and a big random universe throwing everything from hurricanes and droughts to wars and plagues at us in an almost completely random manner.  Alright, I’ll grant that too.  It’s a maelstrom of causes and effects.  So then, what’s a leader of the United States to do?

I believe there is some guidance that can be used.  All the way back to Aristotle and all the way up to our own nation it has been observed that the most successful, stable and the most pleasant nations to live in are the ones with the largest middle class.  Not the one with the most billionaires and certainly not the one with the most poor people, but the one with the largest number of people who work for a living and live well enough to keep their families well-fed, well-clothed and with enough money to do something for fun every now and then.  When the majority of the country can be described in that way you are living in as close as life on Earth can come to a paradise.

And up until about the 1970’s that was a reasonable description of post-WWII America.  People thought they were well off and that their children would be even more prosperous in the future.  But since the 1970’s the proportion of Americans who felt this way has been steadily shrinking until now only the elites feel this is true.  The working class has slipped out of the middle class and the white-collar jobs that were the hallmark of the upper middle class are disappearing from the United States through automation and through off-shoring of the manufacturing industries that used to provide both blue-collar and white-collar jobs for the majority of the nation.

Well, all of this is old news.  We all know all about it.  Now we see Donald Trump trying to use tariffs to get American (and foreign) corporations to manufacture their products here and thereby provide Americans with relatively high value employment.  I applaud Trump for doing this.  He needs to do as much of this as possible.  In fact, this will need to be the policy of the United States government for the foreseeable future.

But this is just a band-aid.  Forcing these companies to bring some part of their manufacturing capacity back here is a small part of what’s needed.  America needs a “Marshall Plan” to identify the industries and infrastructure that will produce a re-invigorated middle class.  All the super-geniuses who have created artificial intelligence and advanced automated systems need to put their supposedly infallible business acumen to the problem of how to engineer an economic order where the maximum percentage of Americans are prosperous and usefully employed.  Call it a Marshall Plan or a Manhattan Project or just a survival plan.

The free-traders or the globalists or whatever you want to call the people who deindustrialized America from the 1970’s on have demonstrated how to destroy the middle class.  Now it’s the federal government’s job to undo that process using the levers of power they control; taxation, tariffs and the anti-trust laws.  But as I said it’s not enough to just bring back the old industries.  Innovation will always drive prosperity.  Silicon Valley currently represents that innovation.  What must be done though is to force the innovators to reckon with the dislocation that their innovation can cause to the lives of regular people and come up with a way to make change work for all of us.

A hopeful sign is that Donald Trump has enlisted Elon Musk into his administration.  Granted, right now Musk is entirely a disruptor of the established order.  But he is also capable of building up new constructs.  The challenge is to see if Trump and Musk can produce a vision that includes the restoration of the American middle class.  I hope he can.  We all better hope he can.

Super Power Relations

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Glenn W sent an email with a link to a podcast where Jeff Nyquist and Alex Benesch discuss how Donald Trump’s election impacts the global power struggle between the United States, Russia and China (link below).

https://youtu.be/OOiVNxt9I0M?si=bUOHY_mfan-wEOGu

It’s an analysis of the Chinese strategy to undermine Trump’s domestic political coalition.  There is also discussion of how Trump’s handling of the Ukraine war will impact Chinese/Russian relations.

Thank you, Glenn for passing this along.  It’s interesting to know how much the Chinese think about and plan to undermine the American domestic political situation.  And if the CIA were any good at their job, they’d have all of this intel available for Trump in a useful and convenient form as soon as it is available.  But, of course, they’re so busy trying to undermine him themselves that they can’t get around to something like that.

Watching the video made me think about how American domestic politics is viewed in such different places as Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China.

But it didn’t change my belief that almost all the problem in our country and most of the problems in the world are a result of the dysfunctional and even destructive system and culture that has taken hold of our country and by extension is being imposed on the rest of the world.  The adoption of a culture that celebrates above all else aberrant sexual identities and practices, but also emphasizes the vilification of European peoples and cultures and the need to eliminate their identity from their own countries, is singlehandedly bringing about the destruction of Western civilization.

I believe that most of the problems in this country stem from these two cultural projects of the Left.  And I think if these programs are eliminated it will cure most of the social dysfunction, we see around us today.

And that is why I believe that if Trump continues on with his program to eliminate things like the recognition of multiple “genders” and DEI and other affirmative action programs from the US federal government he will single-handedly solve the majority of societal ills that we find ourselves engulfed by.

Now as far as foreign policy goes, I see a clear linkage between the war in Ukraine and these same cultural dysfunctions.  Russia is a pariah for the Left because it eschews the LGBTQ movement absolutely and refuses to accept the “white shame” culture within its borders.  Whereas Ukraine was willing to accept the rainbow flag as the price it paid to get CIA and State Department funding for its color revolution.  And you can see a similar dynamic in Hungary where Orban refused to bend the knee to the homosexual mandate and so he also became an enemy of the left.  They tried to overthrow him in a recent election, pouring in all kinds of USAID money into the effort.  But he won and now he’ll benefit from Trump’s reform of the State Department and foreign relations in general.

It was heartening to see JD Vance meet with the AfD candidates for parliament in Germany and confront the government there with their refusal to stem immigration and their anti-free speech polices and attitudes.  It’s this kind of confidence in the advantages of a free and populist society that will advance our point of view in many places.

And that brings me to the question of what I think American policy should be toward the powerful countries like China and Russia.  We should be neither fearful of nor bellicose toward them.  The United States has ample enough stockpiles of nuclear tipped ICBMs to ensure that neither Russia nor China will attack us or our allies.  But by the same token, what business have we rattling sabers at Putin or Xi?  Our neocons in the State Department initiated the color revolution in Ukraine and then provided massive military aid and convinced the Ukrainians that the Russians would just capitulate to Ukraine joining NATO.  Up until Obama’s administration it was understood that attempting to bring Ukraine into NATO would be crossing a glowing red line that Putin would retaliate against.  So, they did it anyway and he invaded.  Now he’s been bloodied by our Ukrainian proxies using our most sophisticated weapons systems and so we’ve turned this into a war of attrition where Russia will lose a million men and Ukraine will lose two million men and a third of their country and we’ve possibly made the Russians our bitterest enemies for generations to come.  And they’ve embraced China because of it.

If Trump can figure out a way to blunt some of this damage, he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for sure.  But in general, I hope Trump’s foreign policy is guided by the precept that our foreign policy should be primarily concerned with improving the security and prosperity of the American people.  That’s it.  We’re not out to spread democracy and we’re not trying to save the world.  Climate Change and Ending World Hunger are not our priorities.  Evicting the illegal aliens and bringing the price of a dozen eggs down are.  So that explains my myopic vision of foreign policy.  If the Chinese try to get involved in undermining the Trump voter coalition, I’m guessing they’ll be a lot less effective than the Democrats are.  The Left knows the American lingo better and they’re much better liars than the Chinese are.

So, Donald Trump, just keep pummeling the Left and everything else will follow along like a master plan.