Professional Politicians pitch Liberty without Responsibility, Choices without Consequences. Like Inflation after the Great Suppression and Nancy Pelosi's credit card binge, with Medicaid Insolvency approaching in 2026, the immigration hawks' chickens are coming home to roost.

In her comedy sketch “Positive Racism,” comedian Arynne Wexler pitches a HILARIOUS spin on racial stereotypes, political correctness, and the absurdity of blurring the lines between prejudice and flattery. Her satirical (and TOTALLY genius) jab at DEI logic portrays backhanded compliments as as a nonconventional way to check the diversity box! ✅ Arynne will have you crying so hard from laughter within SECONDS! 😭 😂

Why SpaceX is now getting into the turbine business and other things. 📹:NowIllustrated

Europe is a Warning, not a Model to Emulate

Beirut was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. Paris is now becoming the Beirut of Europe. – Mike Slater

NEW: Maine closed the missing ballot envelope case without answers - records show. A detective recovered 498 blank absentee envelopes sent to a Soros-funded NGO in Maryland. UPS said it would need a subpoena; the AG's office determined there wasn't enough information to issue one. The case is closed. That's how seriously Maine takes election integrity...

Let's take a step back and look at what has been announced since October 1.

I am a Lean Practitioner - we evaluate Breakthrough Transformation events through factors such as Cost, Quality, Cycle Time, Safety, Morale and Value Creation. I asked Gemini to conduct an analysis of Healthcare System KPIs of the US, Canada and Europe - here are the outputs. I remind the reader that: ➡️ the US and Canada are Natural-Resource rich, with Canada having a comparatively small population ➡️Europe and Canada have populations like large US states, in Europe's case comparatively homogeneous (i.e. White European) - hence I created the 2nd table to consider what if the US shared similar demographics Economics is the study of tradeoffs. What's most interesting to me (providing Gemini's analysis was accurate): ➡️Our Federal, State and Local Governments already spend as much of GDP as European Countries, but we get poor Value, especially on Mortality KPIs ➡️The difference is the US spend 6% more of GDP via Private Spending, which IMO leads to more Innovation in Specialty Medicine, Treatments & Medical Equipment ➡️The US private & public systems have 3x the Administrative Bloat of European systems (think prior authorization, billing department and Medicare wait times and Medicaid Fraud non-prevention) ➡️The US triages its Doctor shortage known since Obamacare was debated) via an equal total # of PAs and NPs, driving down PCP Wait Times to comparable if not better than European systems (think US Urgent Care, de-Credentialism and Dr. long training times til full earnings) ➡️Gemini concurs with public health advocates that High co-pays/lack of price transparency inhibit access to US PCPs - we get what we are willing to pay for under the joint insurance/government subsidy model ➡️Gemini thinks the US is a high violence, high addition, unhealthy population leading to high "preventable mortality" - of course, I know from prior analysis what there is a strong demographic signal to US violent death statistics - hence the 2nd table, as if we shared comparable demographics, although I am not convinced Gemini captured this (or the known errors in US crime statistics). Peeling away a layer of the onion demonstrates correlation. This is meant to be Informative, not Prescriptive, but I'll end with this week's insight from Brivael Le Pogam on French Socialism: "When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in." To Americans, moribund Europe provides a Warning, not a Model to Emulate.

Partial Social Security privatization makes sense for Gen Z—and the math is clear. Social Security’s retirement trust fund runs dry in late 2032. After that, benefits are automatically cut ~22% (worse later). Combined funds last until 2034 with a ~17% cut that grows over time. A typical Gen Z worker needs to save roughly one-third of the total employee + employer payroll tax (3.4 out of 12.4%) in an IRA every year just to replace those coming cuts—assuming modest returns. Market returns historically beat Social Security’s implicit returns for younger workers by a wide margin. Meanwhile, the program’s annual cash shortfall is already ~$200 billion and headed toward $400 billion by the early 2030s, adding directly to federal deficits as the Treasury borrows to redeem trust-fund bonds. Letting workers divert a portion of their own payroll taxes into personal accounts: ➡️Gives them real ownership instead of a political promise ➡️Lets compound returns work for decades ➡️Reduces the unfunded liability and the pressure for across-the-board cuts or tax hikes ➡️Protects those already near retirement while giving younger workers a better deal We’ve known the demographic math for decades. Doing nothing guarantees smaller checks. Partial privatization is one of the few options that actually improves the outcome for the people paying in. Close the Budget Gap with Bipartisan DOGE Cuts & Reduction in Waste, Fraud & Abuse: ➡️Net Neutral on the Budget Deficits that have caused Monetary Inflation (the "Unaffordability Tax") ➡️Limiting Investments to US Private Sector & Government Securities would increase Domestic Economic & Wage Growth, then Tax Revenue, without increasing Tax Rates. To Turbocharge Mid/Long-Term Economic & Wage Growth, further attack Monetary Inflation by requiring Congress implement and transition to a Swiss Debt Brake—close the Deficit's ~5–6% of GDP gap at 0.5% a year over 10 years. Within a decade, Government will no longer grow Faster than Private Sector & Household Income...and EVERY AMERICAN will be a Capitalist, even if Reluctantly.

In 1957, a Russian immigrant published a novel of more than a thousand pages built around one question: what happens if the people who make the world run simply stop? Its title is Atlas Shrugged. In France it's called La Grève, The Strike. It wasn't even translated into French until 2011. That tells you something. This morning, I think Elon Musk wrote the sequel. A. Where the book comes from. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. As a teenager, she watched Bolshevik soldiers walk into her father's pharmacy and seize it in the name of the people. Her family lost everything. Not to a competitor. To a committee. She fled to America in 1926 and spent the rest of her life writing about one distinction: those who create, and those who seize. B. The story. In Atlas Shrugged, America is sliding into decline. Not because of war. Because of rules. Year after year, a growing class of bureaucrats, regulators and planners decides that production must be controlled, shared "fairly," frozen. They never build anything. They issue directives. The worst one freezes every worker in his job and forces every inventor to hand over his patents for the public good. And one by one, the people who make the country run start disappearing. The best engineers. The industrialists. The inventors. An oil man sets his own wells on fire before vanishing. The whole country keeps repeating a question it doesn't understand: "Who is John Galt?" John Galt is the man behind the disappearances. He has convinced the creators to go on strike. They withdraw to a hidden valley in the Colorado mountains, where everyone keeps what they make and trades freely. And they let the world find out what it looks like without them. The lights go out in New York. The grey men are left alone with their directives, and discover that a directive has never produced a single kilowatt. C. The core idea. The strike isn't about money. It's about consent. Rand's insight is that the system that captures the creators runs on their cooperation. It needs them to keep producing so it has something to redistribute. The bureaucrat is a parasite who needs a host. Remove the host, and he's exposed as what he always was: useless. D. What Musk just did. This morning, Musk announced that next year he will give one of his own SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "The first of many." Here's what's fascinating. It's the strike, run in reverse. Rand's creators withdrew. Musk stays. He keeps building rockets, satellites, AI. But instead of walking away from the system, he walks around it. The value goes straight from the builder to the citizen. No ministry, no agency, no committee in the middle. Rand had to make the creators disappear to prove the bureaucrats were useless. Musk doesn't need to disappear. He just needs to stop routing value through them. Same result. The grey men are left standing in the middle of a pipe nobody uses anymore. E. The difference that changes everything. Rand's strike has a flaw her critics never stopped pointing out: ordinary people are left behind. The creators retreat to their valley. The rest of the country sits in the dark. Musk's version fixes that. He isn't taking the creators out of the world. He's bringing the world into the valley. Every kid in America becomes a shareholder in the machine. Not a spectator of the strike. A participant. That's the alliance being formed right now: builders and citizens, directly, with nothing in between. And the only people who lose that deal are the ones who never built anything. F. Why now, and not in 1957. In Rand's time, the strike was a fantasy. You couldn't produce at scale without the state's permission, and you couldn't reach every citizen without its pipes. In 2026, one founder can build rockets, run a global network from orbit, and pledge equity to 73 million children in a single post. AI will soon do in seconds what a ministry does in years. The tools of the strike finally exist. And they don't require anyone to leave. G. The ending. For seventy years, "Who is John Galt?" was a shrug. A way of saying nothing can be done. In the book, the strike ends when the creators decide the road is clear and walk back into the world to rebuild it. That's the scene we're watching. Not a man leaving. A man coming back, with a gift for every child. The grey men are about to discover what Rand promised them seventy years ago: a world that no longer needs them.

When the Cost of Policy Reaches the Street I live in Milan. It is not a city accustomed to riots. This weekend, the center of the city filled with smoke, shattered glass and police in riot gear. The images looked sudden. The crisis was not. What happened in Milan was the moment when years of distant political decisions finally arrived in the street. And it is a cocktail that is mixed and ready to explode in cities across the US and Europe. The demonstration began around legitimate concerns about wages, housing, public services and the rising cost of living. Most of the people participated peacefully. But then, masked groups broke away, attacked police and damaged property and looted stores. The violence does not explain the pressure that produced it. That pressure begins outside Italy and applies across the western world. War, corruption and economic failure have displaced people across North Africa and the Middle East. (And South America) Many travel north because they cannot find security or economic opportunity at home. Europe has mistakenly allowed large numbers of people to enter without building the institutions required to integrate them. Governments rarely establish or enforce clear expectations for employment, legal conduct and civic participation. The immigrant is admitted but not incorporated. The host community is ordered to absorb the consequences without being permitted to discuss the cost. This is often defended as compassion. It is not. Immigration without integration is abandonment twice over. It abandons the immigrant to the margins of society, and it abandons the host community to absorb social and economic costs its government refuses to acknowledge. Those costs are not distributed equally. The wealthy experience immigration as a source of inexpensive labor. The professional class often experiences it as an abstract political question. Immigrants and working-class citizens experience it in the same housing market, the same schools, the same public services and the same competition for low-wage work. They are then encouraged to blame one another. The people who designed the policy remain insulated from its consequences. The same transfer has occurred through monetary policy. Since the financial crisis, I have watched governments and central banks respond to instability by creating money, supporting financial assets and protecting large institutions from losses. The losses did not disappear. They were transferred. People who owned stocks, property and businesses benefited as asset values rose. People who depended primarily on wages confronted higher prices for housing, food and energy. Inflation is not just an economic statistic. It is a system for distributing the cost of government policy. For people with substantial assets, inflation can be profitable. For the upper middle class, it is an inconvenience. For people living on wages, pensions or public assistance, it is destructive to the point it will send people to riot. It is a stealth currency collapse that targets the most vulnerable. The war with Iran increased the pressure. Energy and fertilizer prices rose. Those increases moved through transportation, agriculture and food production until they reached the household. The officials making those decisions did not have to choose between paying an energy bill and buying groceries. Other people did. Each policy has been considered separately. Immigration is discussed as a humanitarian and cultural issue. Monetary policy is discussed as a technical financial matter. War is discussed as national security. Housing is treated as a local problem. Actual people experience all of them at the same time. That is the convergence we saw in Milan this weekend. Social order depends on more than policing. It depends on the belief that the rules are fair, that work will be rewarded and that government can respond when conditions deteriorate. When those beliefs disappear, public order becomes harder to maintain. None of this justifies attacking police, burning property or looting stores. Those acts usually damage the same communities already carrying the greatest burden. The people responsible should be held accountable. But accountability cannot stop with the people in the street. It must extend to the political leaders who accepted immigration without integration or respect for the existing community, financed prosperity through monetary expansion, pursued wars without accounting for their domestic cost and protected concentrated wealth while the price of basic life increased. The people who make policy must no longer be insulated from its consequences. Milan will repair the damage. The broken glass will be replaced and the streets will reopen. The underlying pressure remains. A society cannot displace people through war, admit them without a plan, inflate the cost of essential goods, protect concentrated wealth and then demand social peace from the people required to absorb the consequences. The violence arrived in Milan this weekend. The policies arrived years ago. Subscribe to Dylan Ratigan at dylanratigan.substack.com/

Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this." Fine. Now ask yourself a better question. Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values." When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost. They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier. But don't celebrate too early. The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate. If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe. So understand that this fight has two levels. There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio. And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first. The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war. And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness. Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us. Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers. And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years. Now add the money. A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized. And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them. This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in. And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington. The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office. Covid showed it in real time. Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation. The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire. Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted. That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding. That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party. Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not. So let's not fall into the trap. The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it." I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change. But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn. When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you. The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales. A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization. We lose it separately, or we win it together.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

Europeans blame the Trump administration for the usual things—a lack of cordiality and bombastic threats. But two truths, rarely spoken, characterize all these spats. One is hypocrisy; the other is insecurity. victorhanson.com/the-same-ol…

Biden and Pelosi’s Monetary Inflation…

Here's how food stamp fraud works: - Gov funds EBT cards with $ - Fraudster offers to buy the card for cash - Local business partners with the fraudster to adjust food price to the EBT card's balance - Everyone gets paid with your tax dollars END THE FRAUD.

Rubio Urges Defense Of Western Civilization At Acropolis: "We Choose The Unapologetic Pursuit Of National Power" realclearpolitics.com/video/…

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” Marcus Tullius Cicero

🚨DEMO-CRATER: Maine Faces a Catastrophic $1.3 BILLION budget shortfall in 2027. The state projects a $1.085 billion gap in the General Fund, which pays for schools, health care and most state operations. Roads face another $256.7 million gap. The largest drivers of the massive shortfall are predictable: Medicaid, a program rife with unchecked fraud — largely committed by foreign nationals, migrants, and so-called asylum seekers — and rising school budgets. Augusta now faces a choice: raising taxes (again) or cutting spending — which would be anathema to the Portland-area Democrats who currently control the State House. The budget catastrophe is a sharp contrast from the tight fiscal ship Gov. Mills and the Democratic majority inherited from former Governor Paul LePage.

The world is running out of easily accessible high-grade ores. For copper alone, average global ore grades have dropped by roughly 40% since the early 1990s. Mining companies now have to crush, move and process vastly more rock just to extract the same tonnage of pure metal. This trend extends across most industrial metals and rare earths, driving up energy consumption and water usage at the mine face. Bringing a major new copper or lithium mine from initial discovery through to environmental permits, community consultation and construction now takes 12 to 17 years on average. Political net-zero mandates operate on 5- to 10-year timelines, creating a massive structural mismatch with geological reality. Smelting fees for copper hit historical lows in 2025–2026, signaling that raw mine output is lagging far behind processing capacity. Analysts at S&P Global and the International Energy Agency project a 25% to 30% structural deficit in refined copper over the coming decade. Power grid overhauls and EV expansion—compounded by the rapid buildout of campus-scale AI data centers—are all competing for the same supply of critical metals and local water resources. While lithium prices have dropped following its initial boom, capital investment in new lithium projects has fallen sharply alongside it, setting up the next structural shortage once existing inventories clear. Meanwhile, processing for key elements like neodymium and dysprosium—essential for permanent magnets in wind turbines and EV motors—remains heavily concentrated in single geographic regions, adding acute geopolitical friction to physical scarcity. Geology itself is now setting sheer physical limits on how much energy it is physically plausible to harvest from wind and sunlight.

Reminder: We can NEVER trust the Federal Reserve.