1976 made a big impression on me. People were red, white and blue all year long. Left, right didn't matter. Life wasn't perfect, but your dollar went far, kids roamed free and you knew your neighbors. It was better than it is now.
In 2026, we get bread and circus slop.
Western Leaders Play Their Part in Our Charade Democracies. Can You Spot the Tell?
The super-rich and their vassals are deeply invested in the system because it richly rewards them. They’ll deploy everything they can – from the media to the ‘security’ forces – to prevent change
Two pronounced – and inverse – trends in western societies have long been observable, and yet they are rarely noticed or discussed.
These forces operate rather like laws of nature – though there is nothing natural about them. They are the very opposite of how most westerners imagine power works – that is, that it derives from the will of the people and is democratically accountable.
The first trend is this: the nearer to power a politician or official gets, the more their behaviour has to align with the structural interests of the billionaire class. Or put another way, the only route to power for any individual in our societies is by subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists.
The second trend illuminates the first. The further a former office holder moves away from the centre of power, the more room there is for their humanity to resurface – assuming they were not a hollow vessel for power to begin with, or turned permanently sociopathic through years of service to elite interests.
Your vote doesn’t mean shit. Not when the Rothschild gang has other plans.
Congress Quietly Moves To Intertwine US, Israeli Militaries On Formal Level
There are some stealth moves afoot by the Trump administration and Congress, which are poised to formalize the long-standing close US-Israel relationship, on the level of a formal defense pact.
A sweeping new legislative proposal in Congress is moving to more deeply intertwine and combine the two countries' military arsenals. The House of Representatives' version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) released this past week contains Section 224, devoted to military integration with the name "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative."
But this could sail through with little or nothing in the way of public debate, or even knowledge, at all. It means future generations of taxpayers could find themselves even more deeply on the hook for the permanent defense of a foreign nation.
1976 was a completely different world... Today, both left and right want even MORE of the beast destroying us. King George was a piker compared to modern Republicans and Democrats.
For the record, from bubbles to surveillance, libertarians were right.
Declaration of Indifference
Fifty years ago, the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence was a big deal. The celebration sparked a patriotic wave that saturated the culture.
Flags waved, bunting was everywhere, commemorative quarters were issued, and pop culture embraced the event. The theme of independence infused everything.
As we approach the 250th anniversary, the occasion has been much more subdued. Many seem unaware it’s happening. Some are almost hostile, as if the Declaration of Independence shouldn’t be celebrated.
The Constitution later maintained a confederation rather than create a “nation”. It didn’t reconfigure the states into a consolidated blob. The state ratifying conventions would’ve rejected the Constitution had they known it would produce the “United State” we have today, and Constitution’s advocates assured them such fear was unwarranted.
It wasn’t.
The ever growing Leviathan is sucking the economy dry.
Does Government Create Wealth or Consume It?
In our modern, Western world, many justify the state and its policies because of the presupposition that the state—and the state uniquely—is an indispensable service-provider of essential services that could not or would not be provided by the free market or which would be underprovided were it not for the state’s collective provision. This is the public goods argument.
It has become a cliche for defenders of the state to ask critics, especially libertarians, “But without the government, who would build the roads?” It is astounding that it has been easier to convince people to send their children to kill and die in wars, pay exorbitant taxes, see their purchasing power evaporate through inflation, and passively observe general criminal behavior from political elites than to convince people that roads could be built without the state.
The official counterfeiter.
The Federal Reserve is Why the People are Unhappy
According to the University of Michigan’s latest Index of Consumer Sentiment, a record number of Americans have negative views of the economy. This is yet more evidence that the American people are dissatisfied with their economic condition. Some commentators have claimed to be perplexed by the people’s negative views of the economy since government statistics show that most Americans have good jobs that pay them good salaries.
The main reason why even many Americans with above average incomes are dissatisfied with the economy is high prices. According to the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, which is known as the Federal Reserve’s favorite measure of inflation, prices have increased by an understated 3.8 percent over the past year. The culprit behind the price increases is the Federal Reserve. Today, prices are several times higher than they were when President Nixon in 1971 severed the last link between the US dollar and gold, thus removing any restraints on the Federal Reserve’s ability to inflate the currency.
With inflation rising more than incomes, many Americans have suffered a loss of purchasing power even though their nominal income increased. The erosion of Americans’ purchasing power has led to a debt-based economy. This has created a number of bubbles that likely will soon burst.
You've been sold a stupid idea, that spending is growth. You can't eat what's not prepared. You must produce to consume.
There Is No Reprieve in the Fed’s War on Savings
There is a particular kind of financial wisdom that used to be passed down at kitchen tables. A grandparent, someone who remembered harder times, would explain that the first obligation of a responsible person was to spend less than they earned, put something away, and let patience do its quiet work. The savings account was not a sophisticated instrument. It was a vessel for deferred consumption—a way of translating present discipline into future security. The interest it paid was modest, but it moved in the same direction over time.
That world has not merely changed. It has been, in a precise and largely unacknowledged sense, inverted.
The Patience Premium Has Been Abolished
In any functioning credit market, time has a price. The willingness to defer consumption commands a return. That return is not a gift from banks. It is the natural consequence of the fact that present goods are valued more highly than future goods, and that borrowers must compensate lenders for the sacrifice of immediacy. When central banks suppress this price through sustained intervention, they do not eliminate the underlying reality. They merely redistribute the costs.
In practice, this means that the traditional compact between saver and system has been quietly dissolved. Someone who spent their working life building a pension fund or a nest egg in conservative instruments found, somewhere in the 2010s, that the income those instruments generated had nearly vanished. The Fed kept rates near zero for the better part of a decade following the 2008 crisis, and returned to zero again in 2020. The response of financial advisors and pension managers was uniform: reach for yield. Accept more volatility to maintain the returns you were promised. In other words, the price of prudence became imprudence.
So, remember during the next "most impotantest election evah", you gitta vote harder!
Like Einstein said, eventually it works.
