Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 9/14/26
"Alert! Saudi Oil Completely Offline!
US Admits Weapons In Space! Nukes In Finland!"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Monday, September 14, 2026
"Plunge Protection Team Couldn't Save Markets Today, No Way Out"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/14/26
"Plunge Protection Team Couldn't Save Markets Today,
No Way Out"
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"The Wrong War: Trump Blames Kyiv for a Diesel Crisis His Own Iran War Triggered"
by Larry C. Johnson
"On 14 September 2026, with American diesel having crossed six dollars a gallon for the first time in history, President Trump settled the question of blame in a single sentence posted to social media: “The World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” A day earlier, at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, he had told Zelensky to “stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia,” because the strikes were “hurting the world.”
It is a tidy story, and it has one great virtue for the man telling it: it points at a war with someone else’s name on it. It is also, in its central claim, backwards. Not wholly false - the part about Ukrainian strikes is real - but backwards in the one respect that matters, the ranking of causes. The market data that Trump is implicitly citing say the opposite of what he says they say.
The tell is in the crack spread If you want to know what is driving the price of diesel, you do not look at the price of diesel. You look at the crack spread - the margin between crude oil and the refined product made from it. That number tells you whether the problem is a shortage of oil or a shortage of the refining capacity to turn oil into fuel. And in 2026 the diesel crack did something it had never done in recorded history: it broke one hundred dollars a barrel, hitting a record of roughly $102 on 17 August and pushing past $107 in early September. In a normal, balanced market that spread runs twenty to forty dollars.
That single fact reorders the whole argument. As RBN Energy put it plainly, the world is “not terribly short of crude in the traditional sense” - it is struggling to refine enough crude into middle distillates. The refiners themselves are running flat out, above 97 percent utilization, and still cannot keep up; they are draining tanks to cover the gap. And the tanks are nearly empty. US distillate inventories in August sat at their lowest end-of-month level since 1951 - not a typo, 1951 - and near thirty-year seasonal lows. Global refinery runs had fallen by roughly 5.1 million barrels a day year-on-year in the second quarter. This is a refining crisis sitting on top of a decade of closed refineries and underinvestment. It is structural, it is global, and most of it has nothing to do with either Vladimir Putin or Volodymyr Zelensky.
Why “mostly Russia, not Iran” inverts the evidence: Three pieces of evidence, taken together, dismantle the ranking.
First, the timeline. The Ukrainian refinery campaign is not new; it has been grinding on for well over a year. If it were the primary driver of the price, diesel would have climbed with the strike tempo. It did not. The diesel crack spread exploded to its historic highs specifically in the weeks after the United States and Israel went to war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz - through which something like a fifth of the world’s oil and products move - was throttled. Crude tells the same story in Trump’s own timeframe: Brent ran from around $67 in January to $117 in April after the first strikes on Iran, eased to the low $80s during the ceasefire, and climbed back toward $108 as the fighting resumed this autumn. The price is indexed to the Iran war, phase by phase. It is not indexed to Kyiv’s drones.
Second, the nature of the shock. The Hormuz disruption is a dual shock in a way the Russian strikes are not: it constrains both the crude reaching refiners downstream and the enormous volume of refined product that Gulf refineries themselves export to the world. Add the drone strike that briefly shut Saudi Arabia’s East–West pipeline - the very line built to bypass Hormuz - and you have the Middle East, not Russia, sitting on the pressure point. Analysts across the refining trade have reached the same verdict: record product margins reflect acute supply tightness and lost refining output, with crude prices actually moderating from their wartime peaks even as diesel held firm. Geopolitical disruption is the catalyst, and the disruption doing the heavy lifting is in the Gulf.
Third, the American price specifically. The United States does not buy Russian diesel and has not for years, so $6 at a Miami truck stop is not the sound of Russian barrels failing to arrive here - they were never coming here. What reaches the US pump is global fungibility plus a set of domestic costs Trump did not mention, including roughly $15 a barrel of renewable-fuel compliance baked straight into the price. Even the size of the Russian hit is contested: Kyiv claims it has knocked out 42.7 percent of Russian refining capacity; Reuters put the figure closer to 17 percent in the spring. When the man blaming a shortage is quoting the most generous possible number for it, that is worth noticing.
Why the wrong answer is a convenient one: I try not to read minds, so let me stick to incentives, which are visible enough. Trump is heading into November midterms in which fuel prices have become a straightforward liability for his party. The energy crisis traces, more than to anything else, to a war with Iran that he prosecuted and escalated. “Mostly Russia, not Iran” performs a specific piece of work: it moves the blame from his war to someone else’s, and it hands him a lever to pressure Zelensky into halting the strikes - which, within a day, he claimed to have achieved, announcing a mutual energy-target ceasefire that Kyiv described more cautiously as a proposal. It is also worth recording, without overstating it, that his own energy holdings have appreciated as the Iran war moved the oil market. The framing is convenient on every axis at once. That does not make it false. The evidence makes it false. But it does explain why so implausible a ranking got asserted so confidently.
The honest limits: Two caveats, because the strongest version of Trump’s case deserves an answer rather than a caricature.
The refining diagnosis actually cuts slightly his way. Because this is a distillate-capacity crisis rather than a crude crisis, refinery outages carry unusual weight right now, and Russian outages are among them. In a market this tight, with tanks this empty, even a secondary contributor moves the price more than it would in a normal year - so the strikes are doing more damage at the margin than their raw share of world capacity suggests. Halting them, and lifting Russia’s export ban, would genuinely help. That is a real point, and it is the reason the claim is misleading rather than simply fabricated.
But “would help at the margin” is a very different statement from “mostly caused by,” and the distance between those two is exactly the distance between analysis and spin. A fair account puts the structural distillate shortage first, the Iran war and Hormuz as the acute trigger that tipped a fragile market into crisis, and the Russian refinery outages third - real, aggravating, but not the engine. Trump took the third item and called it the first, and deleted the second item entirely, even though the second item is the one flying his flag. He is not wrong that refineries are the story. He is wrong about which refineries, and which war. And the war he left out is the one that answers to him."
Musical Interlude: Gnomusy (David Caballero), “Dolmen Ridge”
Gnomusy (David Caballero), “Dolmen Ridge”
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Is our Milky Way Galaxy this thin? Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the spiral galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane.
An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Thought similar in shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy, NGC 4565 lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.”
o
"When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer"
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."
- Walt Whitman
"I'm Glad I Grew Old with You"
Full screen recommended.
"I'm Glad I Grew Old with You"
"Nobody warns you about this part. The way ordinary mornings become everything. The way you stop counting years and just live inside them. The way loving someone long enough turns into something that doesn't have a word yet. This one's for the person who's still there."
"AI doesn't always prove the Dead Internet Theory. I'm open about using AI - and genuinely glad to be. Not as a shortcut, but as a tool. The way a filmmaker uses a camera, or a composer uses a piano. A knife can cause harm or prepare a meal. It depends entirely on the hands holding it. Every idea on this channel begins in a human mind. The concepts, the imagery, the words - they come from me. And lately, more and more often, they begin with you - with stories you leave in the comments that stay with me long after I've read them. The lyrics are mine. The visual direction is mine. The subtle details and quiet references woven into each frame - I'm always quietly hoping someone will notice them, and every time you do and write about it, it means everything. Reading hundreds of your comments, I feel something I didn't expect: that this work reaches people in the way I hoped it would. That it makes you feel something real. That's the whole point. That's always been the whole point."
Native American Elder, "How Your TV and Phone Are Hurting Your Soul"
Full screen recommended.
Native American Elder,
"How Your TV and Phone Are Hurting Your Soul"
Comments here:
"A Good Dog Will Teach You More Than Some People"
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"A Good Dog Will Teach You More Than Some People"
“A Good Dog Will Teach You More Than Some People” is a warm, heartfelt blues about loyalty, patience, and the simple wisdom found in a faithful dog. The singer reflects on a lifetime of meeting people who made promises, changed their minds, or disappeared when things got difficult—while a good dog simply stayed by his side. Driven by warm blues guitar and the soulful cry of the harmonica, the song blends humor, gratitude, and old-fashioned Southern wisdom. The voice is weathered and sincere, celebrating a companion who never needed words to show what loyalty really means. A good dog doesn't ask for much… Just love, a little food, and a reason to stay close."
o
"How Could You? A Dog's Story"
by Jim Willis
"When I was a puppy I entertained you with my antics and made you laugh. You called me your child and despite a number of chewed shoes and a couple of murdered throw pillows, I became your best friend. Whenever I was "bad," you'd shake your finger at me and ask "How could you?" - but then you'd relent and roll me over for a bellyrub.
My house training took a little longer than expected, because you were terribly busy, but we worked on that together. I remember those nights of nuzzling you in bed, listening to your confidences and secret dreams, and I believed that life could not be any more perfect. We went for long walks and runs in the park, car rides, stops for ice cream (I only got the cone because "ice cream is bad for dogs," you said), and I took long naps in the sun waiting for you to come home at the end of the day.
Gradually, you began spending more time at work and on your career, and more time searching for a human mate. I waited for you patiently, comforted you through heartbreaks and disappointments, never chided you about bad decisions, and romped with glee at your homecomings, and when you fell in love.
She, now your wife, is not a "dog person" - still I welcomed her into our home, tried to show her affection, and obeyed her. I was happy because you were happy. Then the human babies came along and I shared your excitement. I was fascinated by their pinkness, how they smelled, and I wanted to mother them, too. Only she and you worried that I might hurt them, and I spent most of my time banished to another room, or to a dog crate. Oh, how I wanted to love them, but I became a "prisoner of love."
As they began to grow, I became their friend. They clung to my fur and pulled themselves up on wobbly legs, poked fingers in my eyes, investigated my ears and gave me kisses on my nose. I loved everything about them, especially their touch - because your touch was now so infrequent - and I would have defended them with my life if need be. I would sneak into their beds and listen to their worries and secret dreams. Together we waited for the sound of your car in the driveway. There had been a time, when others asked you if you had a dog, that you produced a photo of me from your wallet and told them stories about me. These past few years, you just answered "yes" and changed the subject. I had gone from being your dog to "just a dog," and you resented every expenditure on my behalf.
Now you have a new career opportunity in another city and you and they will be moving to an apartment that does not allow pets. You've made the right decision for your "family," but there was a time when I was your only family.
I was excited about the car ride until we arrived at the animal shelter. It smelled of dogs and cats, of fear, of hopelessness. You filled out the paperwork and said "I know you will find a good home for her." They shrugged and gave you a pained look. They understand the realities facing a middle-aged dog or cat, even one with "papers."
You had to pry your son's fingers loose from my collar as he screamed "No, Daddy! Please don't let them take my dog!" And I worried for him and what lessons you had just taught him about friendship and loyalty, about love and responsibility, and about respect for all life. You gave me a goodbye pat on the head, avoided my eyes, and politely refused to take my collar and leash with you. You had a deadline to meet and now I have one, too.
After you left, the two nice ladies said you probably knew about your upcoming move months ago and made no attempt to find me another good home. They shook their heads and asked "How could you?"
They are as attentive to us here in the shelter as their busy schedules allow. They feed us, of course, but I lost my appetite days ago. At first, whenever anyone passed my pen, I rushed to the front, hoping it was you - that you had changed your mind - that this was all a bad dream... or I hoped it would at least be someone who cared, anyone who might save me. When I realized I could not compete with the frolicking for attention of happy puppies, oblivious to their own fate, I retreated to a far corner and waited.
I heard her footsteps as she came for me at the end of the day and I padded along the aisle after her to a separate room. A blissfully quiet room. She placed me on the table, rubbed my ears and told me not to worry. My heart pounded in anticipation of what was to come, but there was also a sense of relief. The prisoner of love had run out of days. As is my nature, I was more concerned about her. The burden which she bears weighs heavily on her and I know that, the same way I knew your every mood.
She gently placed a tourniquet around my foreleg as a tear ran down her cheek. I licked her hand in the same way I used to comfort you so many years ago. She expertly slid the hypodermic needle into my vein. As I felt the sting and the cool liquid coursing through my body, I lay down sleepily, looked into her kind eyes and murmured "How could you?"
Perhaps because she understood my dogspeak, she said "I'm so sorry." She hugged me and hurriedly explained it was her job to make sure I went to a better place, where I wouldn't be ignored or abused or abandoned, or have to fend for myself - a place of love and light so very different from this earthly place. With my last bit of energy, I tried to convey to her with a thump of my tail that my "How could you?" was not meant for her. It was you, My Beloved Master, I was thinking of. I will think of you and wait for you forever. May everyone in your life continue to show you so much loyalty."
o
"If there are no dogs in Heaven,
then when I die I want to go where they went."
- Will Rogers
Dogs are better spirits than people will ever be...
Gerald Celente, "This Is Extremely Serious"
Full screen recommended.
Gerald Celente, 9/14/26
"This Is Extremely Serious"
"Gerald Celente, American trend forecaster and publisher of the Trends Journal, discusses market manipulation, the Iran war, U.S. decline, deindustrialization, Gen Z anger, the AI bubble, dollar weakness, and the risk of wider war. He argues that America needs peace, antitrust laws, trades, culture, and a new renaissance to avoid deeper crisis."
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Jeffrey Sachs, "Be Ready For What's Ahead"
Full screen recommended.
Jeffrey Sachs, 9/14/26
"Be Ready For What's Ahead"
"Jeffrey Sachs delivers a powerful and controversial warning about U.S. foreign policy, the wars of the past 25 years, and the growing risks to the global economy. In this video, Sachs argues that the post-9/11 era ushered in a strategy of American military expansion that produced a series of costly wars and unintended consequences. He examines the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, the confrontation with Iran, and what he describes as the broader struggle for American global primacy. Sachs also warns that escalating geopolitical tensions could have serious economic consequences, particularly through oil prices, energy supplies, fertilizer, food costs, global trade, and financial markets. He questions whether military intervention and regime-change policies can achieve their stated objectives - and argues that continued escalation risks creating a much larger crisis for the world economy."
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"Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/14/26"
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 9/14/26
'LarryJohnson:
US Watches as Houthis Choke Saudis"
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"Walgreens Is Closing Stores Everywhere... And What's Left Is Locked Up"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 9/14/26
"Walgreens Is Closing Stores Everywhere...
And What's Left Is Locked Up"
"Walgreens is closing stores, and the ones still open are locked up. Walgreens plans to close about 1,200 locations, and inside the stores that remain, shoppers press a help button and wait while a speaker pages the whole store so someone can unlock a stick of deodorant. These are real Walgreens shoppers, pharmacy customers and employees, filmed on their own phones: a 30-minute drive-thru wait for a mother's post-surgery medication, a canceled prescription and another trip across town, a pharmacy manager doing two jobs without a raise, a 13-year employee watching even the drink cooler get locked, and a Chicago Walgreens with empty shelves and the same thief coming back until the store is on the edge of closing.
A pharmacy is not just a store. For millions of people it is the only place nearby where a medical professional will talk to them without an appointment. When the last pharmacy in a neighborhood closes, the prescriptions don't disappear. They move to a counter farther away, staffed by one pharmacist now serving two towns, and that lands hardest on the elderly, the disabled and anyone without a car. What this video covers: • The help button that pages the entire store for one locked-up item • Makeup, shampoo, toothbrushes and baby formula behind glass • Baskets stolen and half the store locked up • A 30-minute drive-thru line for post-surgery meds • Canceled prescriptions, a broken app and hour-long pharmacy hold lines • A pharmacy manager doing two jobs, and paid holidays cut for workers • An employee stepping in when a shoplifter threatens a pregnant coworker • Walgreens stores in Chicago shutting down over theft.
Every clip is a real person, filmed on their own phone, in their own words. Nothing here is staged. Two things that actually help. If your Walgreens is closing, ask the pharmacist today to transfer your prescriptions to a pharmacy you choose, before they get moved to one you didn't. If you rely on a refill every month, ask for a 90-day supply, so one closed counter or one canceled order doesn't leave you without your medication. Is your local Walgreens closing, or is everything behind glass now? Tell us the city below."
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"How It Really Is"
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Virtue Matters"
"Virtue Matters"
by J.B. Shurk
"The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is this: Virtue matters. You cannot hope to find happiness until you accept that there are good and bad ways to live. For most of America’s history, these statements would have been considered common sense.
The cultural revolutions of the ‘60s and ‘70s changed so much about the structure of society. Relations between men and women changed. As women pursued careers, office culture changed. Family life changed. Public expressions of shared Christian beliefs slowly disappeared. Adults stopped acting as adults. Society embraced infantilism.
Out of this cultural conflagration, society abandoned any commitment to moral commandments. In the past, people understood that there were moral and immoral ways to behave. Poor decisions engendered social stigmatization, which produced feelings of personal shame, which encouraged reflection, self-corrective behavior, and future temperance. After the twentieth century’s cultural revolutions, morality was mocked as an outdated system of social control. Our institutions - including our churches - increasingly embraced the deception that extolling virtue and condemning sin was an impermissible sin of its own.
The end result has been a sixty-year walk toward nihilism, self-gratification, cynicism, amorality, emptiness, listlessness, and existential dread. All these descriptive nouns evoke torments one might endure in Hell. By refusing to admit that there are good ways and bad ways to live, our society has invited the Devil to remake the world in his image. Then our civic leaders feign surprise when it turns out that this is not a happy place to call home.
I want to make two arguments here: First, Americans will not succeed in the decades to come if they do not recommit to the pursuit of virtuous lives. Second, the United States will not succeed in the decades to come if its leaders continue to embrace moral equivocation over righteous truth-telling.
As to the first point, one need not look very hard to witness the devastating consequences for a society that abandons virtue and embraces sin. By treating addictions as psychological conditions beyond the reach of moral judgment, we have absolved addicts of any moral agency. As a consequence, every American city now “tolerates” entire neighborhoods where vagrants publicly drink, shoot up, fornicate, and defecate in the streets. Not only is the recreational use of marijuana legal in much of the country but also it has become “politically incorrect” to judge people who depend upon cocaine, heroin, and other opiates to “function” in their daily lives.
Tens of millions of Americans are using a combination of prescription medicines, pot, alcohol, and illicit drugs that affect their states of mind. A steady decrease in Americans’ regular church attendance has been inversely proportional to Americans’ steady increase in mental health treatment. Because medical professionals have been taught that there are pharmacological therapies for every illness, patients now spend decades of their lives on pharmaceutical drugs. Social consciousness is hazy because members of society do not think clearly.
A natural repercussion of society’s “toleration” for drug addiction has been the normalization of broken families. Long gone are the days when an out-of-wedlock pregnancy would have brought a sense of shame and perhaps a hastily arranged marriage (at the shotgun-toting future father-in-law’s insistence). The Sexual Revolution of the ‘60s ushered in an era of libertinism, and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade to treat the killing of a baby as a woman’s constitutional right supercharged that libertinism. As sex was decoupled from procreation and promiscuity supplanted chastity, the ancient bonds of marriage lost much of their meaning. In a society that glorifies pleasure over sacrifice and self-gratification over commitment, marriage has become an object of derision, while divorce has become something to celebrate as an act of “liberation.”
A society that mocks marriage and condones the murder of children produces fewer stable, healthy families. That statement is obvious yet rarely articulated out loud. A child growing up in a home with a mother and father is significantly more likely to become a healthy and successful adult. Married moms and dads are absolutely the best “medical treatment” a child could be prescribed. Instead of recognizing the salubrious domino effect of healthy marriages and strong families on every subsequent generation, our society celebrates “hook-up” culture, single parenting, and the idea that lifetime commitments should be discarded whenever they get tough.
Fifty years of this destructive social philosophy has produced an epidemic of loneliness. Many women who chose to enjoy their sexual liberation sacrificed the support of a husband and the blessings of motherhood for a party that is much less fun after the age of forty. Many men who gave up on the institution of marriage sacrificed the support of a wife and the sense of purpose that a family provides. Many children who had no choice in the matter grew up to be dysfunctional - or even menaces to society - because they received too little discipline, direction, love, or some combination of all three. As a result, everybody is now in therapy. It turns out that life without family or God is detrimental to one’s mental health.
Whether seen through the prisms of inebriation, selfishness, or debauchery, living a life devoid of virtue invariably leads to hopelessness. The wages of sin is death.
Just as too many Americans will fail to find happiness unless they recommit themselves to living well, our country will fail to endure unless its leaders find the strength to promote virtue and condemn wickedness. That is another obvious statement rarely articulated publicly.
A society that demonizes hard work, skill, and merit as forms of “white supremacy” while giving special privileges to people because of their skin color replaces true virtue with fake virtue. Societies that celebrate “victimhood” manufacture victims. Nations filled with “victims” can never be victorious. Until America’s leaders stop obsessing over historical grievances, they will deprive each generation of the skills necessary for future success. “Political correctness” is not a virtue. Racial grievance is not a virtue. “Transgenderism” or sexual fetishization is not a virtue. Unlawful residence in the United States is not a virtue. Diligence, temperance, patience, and humility are virtues. America will not survive unless its leaders are willing to acknowledge these truths.
I know what you’re thinking: American leaders never tell the truth. High-ranking members of the FBI and CIA lied about President Trump colluding with the Russians. Fifty-one members of the so-called “Intelligence Community” lied about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop being a “Russian information operation.” Our federal government has been lying about the security of our borders for fifty years, while allowing tens of millions of foreign nationals to steal taxpayer dollars. Our election officials continue to lie about the prevalence of vote fraud in America, including a 2020 mail-in-ballot monstrosity that inexplicably made perennially unpopular Joe Biden the “most popular” politician in American history. Our public health officials lied about COVID’s origins, the efficacy of masks, the need for school and business closures, and the safety of the experimental “vaccines.” Trust in corporate news media has never been lower. Fake Christians celebrate “Pride Month,” “transgenderism,” and even political assassination. The lies never stop; they just pile up, which is why a record 89% of Americans say that government corruption is widespread.
American institutions will not survive this level of public distrust. The lies and systemic fraud will sink them. American leaders will never reclaim any semblance of moral authority until they at least outwardly behave as moral individuals. You cannot embrace sin and vice and expect people to follow you. You cannot inspire courage by being a coward. You cannot build a strong society atop a foundation of cultural weakness. For America to be great again, Americans must first remember how to be good. Virtue matters."
"9 Terrifying Truths About Long-Term Economic Crises"
"9 Terrifying Truths About Long-Term Economic Crises"
by Milan Adams
Excerpt: "My father kept his layoff notice from 1982 taped inside his toolbox until he died. The letterhead - blue, corporate, indifferent - arrived on a Tuesday in March, six months after his machine shop started losing contracts. By August, we were living in my aunt’s basement. By Christmas, he was driving a delivery truck for half his previous wage. He kept that letter as a reminder about velocity. How fast the ground moves when it finally shifts.
Most Americans have never experienced that kind of speed. They’ve known recessions, certainly - the technical kind, the temporary kind, the kind that ends with rebounding markets and analysts declaring victory. They’ve never known a genuine crisis, the sort that grinds forward for years, rewriting the social contract so gradually that each degradation feels like common sense by the time it arrives. The sort that leaves permanent scars.
We may be closer than we think. Not because of prophecy, but because of arithmetic. Debt structures, demographic shifts, and institutional fragilities have accumulated to levels that historical precedent suggests are difficult to sustain. The question is not whether stress will come, but whether those experiencing it will recognize the tremors before they’re already falling."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"The Kill Zone: Why Your Bunker’s Distance From the City Might Get You Killed"
"The Kill Zone: Why Your Bunker’s
Distance From the City Might Get You Killed"
by Madge Waggy
"Within eighteen months, the arithmetic of desperation will redraw the map of the American continent with a violence that cartographers cannot comprehend. The hinterlands will not merely empty; they will detonate. What we currently dismiss as “remote” - those skeletal towns gasping along county routes, the double-digit population clusters clinging to mountain ridges - will become the primary theaters of human predation. Distance, once the prepper’s sanctuary, mutates into a liability of catastrophic proportions. The cities will hemorrhage their inhabitants not in orderly columns but in ravenous streams, and these streams will not stop at the exurbs. They will penetrate deep into what you believed was sanctuary, driven not by hope but by the mathematics of last resorts. You stocked beans and bullets. You failed to account for the sheer kinetic energy of eighty million stomachs aching in unison. Is your retreat positioned within the kill zone of secondary collapse? That question now matters more than how many rifles you own or how deep your well runs.
The Mathematics of Hungry Men: Most people move through civilization without perceiving the buffer systems that keep them alive. Trucks move goods. Transactions move money. Infrastructure keeps shelves stocked and streets merely uncomfortable rather than murderous. Remove those systems, and the vacuum that follows does not produce noble cooperation. It produces hunting parties.
Cities facing systemic collapse do not simply suffer in place. They expel their most desperate and capable elements into surrounding countryside. These groups do not behave like refugees in sentimental historical dramas. They behave like organized predators who have realized that law enforcement no longer exists.
Preppers have spent decades treating distance as if miles alone conferred immunity. Thirty miles. Fifty miles. Two hundred miles. These numbers circulate through forums and manuals with religious certainty, as if asphalt accumulation erects magical barriers against human intent. Such thinking belongs to children, not survivors.
Linear distance matters less than topological vulnerability - how your location sits within webs of roads, rivers, rail lines, and landmarks that desperate humans follow when GPS fails and fuel becomes currency. A cabin forty miles from Denver along a major interstate faces greater danger than a homestead eighty miles from Chicago but accessible only via unmarked logging roads requiring local knowledge and four-wheel-drive capability.
Understanding desperation requires understanding its timeline. Human bodies survive roughly three weeks without food, but minds fracture far sooner. After seventy-two hours without resupply expectation, urban populations exhibit what military strategists call “behavioral cascade” - rapid transition from civic compliance to tactical mobility. By day five, average households exhaust their pantries. By day seven, pharmacies lie looted, gas stations drained, police either barricaded in stations or departed for family compounds.
Day ten marks emergence of the “foraging radius” - maximum distance motorized, armed groups can travel from city centers with available fuel, operating on assumptions that they must return or find sustenance before vehicles become worthless metal.
This radius extends shockingly far. A standard SUV with full tank and twenty gallons in reserve covers six hundred highway miles. Accounting for degraded roads, checkpoints, and detours, groups operating from St. Louis can reach deep into rural Missouri, southern Iowa, and western Illinois within single days. They will not move in straight lines. They follow infrastructure veins - highways first, then state routes, finally county roads promising farmsteads and small-town groceries. They will not wander randomly into trackless wilderness. They hunt where hunting proves easiest, following paths that civilization already carved.
Seventy-five miles of separation provides no automatic safety. Cities expel organized, mobile groups when centralized authority evaporates. Strong individuals realize they can take what they need rather than starve with the weak. These groups do not riot. They operate like poorly disciplined special operations units with excellent motivation. They move fast, hit hard, consume everything. Distance does not deter them; isolation attracts them because isolation means no witnesses, no immediate response, and probable accumulated resources.
Evaluate location not in miles but in “friction” - the sum of obstacles that slow and deter such groups. Elevation changes matter more than distance. Water barriers matter more than elevation. Absent road signage, failed cell coverage preventing GPS function, terrain consuming fuel at catastrophic rates - these factors create buffer zones that mileage cannot.
Friction cuts both ways. Features deterring raiders also impede your escape, trade, or medical assistance. Perfect defensive positions become perfect traps if you cannot evacuate when fire approaches, or if appendicitis strikes requiring surgical intervention. Isolation protects until it becomes a death sentence, and transitions between those states occur with terrifying speed.
Historical records offer little comfort for distance believers. During Bosnia’s conflict, Sarajevo’s siege created predatory bands operating forty miles from city centers, hitting villages that considered themselves safe by rational metrics. Rwanda’s genocide demonstrated how quickly rural areas become killing fields when urban violence metastasizes along road networks. American experience - Dust Bowl migrations, Confederate raider penetration into Union territory - shows desperate populations move with shocking speed when survival demands it.
Modern American geography presents unique vulnerabilities. Interstate highway systems, designed for national defense and economic integration, function equally well as invasion corridors. Northeast, California, and Great Lakes “megaregions” create continuous urban fabrics where “rural” has become statistical fiction. Drive fifty miles from Manhattan in any direction and you remain within commuting distance of millions. Drive fifty miles from Los Angeles and you encounter not wilderness but exurban sprawl - Inland Empire, Antelope Valley, agricultural belts - areas that will not provide refuge but amplified chaos as millions of suburbanites simultaneously attempt rural survival.
True safe zones, if such concepts retain validity, lie not at arbitrary distances but in zones of negative attraction. Areas offering nothing to fleeing urbanites: no visible infrastructure, no apparent resources, difficult terrain, harsh climate. Nevada’s high desert. Southern Louisiana’s trackless swamps. Idaho’s mountain fastnesses where roads become suggestions and winter kills unprepared visitors with casual efficiency.
These areas punish entry. They demand specialized knowledge and equipment merely to survive, let alone thrive. They filter refugee populations down to those possessing skills and determination to penetrate them - demographics posing greatest threat, but also demographics arriving in small numbers, exhausted, without capacity for sustained operations.
Calculus changes fundamentally when considering not immediate collapse but secondary and tertiary waves. First waves consist of immediate exodus - those fleeing in first weeks, carrying what they can, burning personal fuel reserves. Second waves arrive weeks or months later, composed of those surviving initial urban die-off by consuming reserves, now moving with greater desperation and better organization. Third waves prove most dangerous: mobile predatory groups surviving by consuming countryside, now hardened, armed, possessing intimate rural vulnerability knowledge. By month six, these groups may operate hundreds of miles from origins, having followed paths of least resistance through rural landscapes.
Distance from population centers must be measured not in static miles but in dynamic time - time required for urban collapse generating mobile predation, and time required for that predation to reach your location given specific terrain friction. Sitting two hours from major cities by paved road means you are not two hours safe. You are two hours exposed. Sitting eight hours from cities by rough track requiring local knowledge may mean months of safety, or permanent overlooking, depending on whether your location appears on maps that desperate groups might possess.
Modern preppers face additional complications: digital visibility. Homesteads appear on satellite imagery. Driveways show from space, visible to anyone with smartphones and cached map data. Solar panels promising energy independence glint in infrared. Cleared fields allowing food growth create signatures visible from miles away. You cannot hide in plain sight because plain sight now includes orbital observation and drone overflight.
True concealment requires appearing not worth the effort - presenting target profiles suggesting poverty, danger, or emptiness while actually possessing resources and defensive capability. This requires camouflage sophistication beyond painting roofs green. You must understand sight lines from approach routes, manage smoke signatures from cooking fires, control noise discipline, maintain operational security impressing military units. Cabins in woods with visible chimneys and cleared yards are not refuges. They are beacons. Dugouts in hillsides with hidden entrances, exhaust scrubbers, and no visible infrastructure become refuges, provided you survive psychological tolls of such concealment.
Crisis nature also affects distance calculations. Pandemics create different migration patterns than economic collapse, which differs from grid failure, which differs from civil war. Biological threats push people away from density regardless of resource availability - contagion fear overrides supply logic. Economic collapse creates targeted migration toward perceived opportunity zones, possibly rural agricultural areas. Grid failure generates most dangerous patterns: simultaneous millions dispersing without destination, creating Brownian violence motion across landscapes. In such scenarios, distance provides no safety because threats are not directional but ambient.
Consider American West cases, where prepper mythology runs deepest. Wide open spaces, self-reliance cultures, lower population densities - all suggest safety. Yet West contains most fragile infrastructure, most extreme climates, longest supply lines. Montana homesteads may sit two hundred miles from nearest cities, but depend on supply chains stretching thousands of miles. When chains break, inhabitants face not merely raider threats but starvation certainties unless they achieve complete food sovereignty - goals eluding even dedicated agrarians. Raiders, when they come, find targets weakened by environmental stress, easier prey than urban counterparts despite distance traveled.
Eastern Seaboard presents inverse problems. Density crushes, distances shorten, terrain often proves soft and penetrable. Yet East contains more redundancy - more water sources, more biomass, more concealment options in fractal complexities of Appalachian hollows and New England forests. Locations fifty miles from Boston face immediate threats, but locations twenty miles from Boston, positioned behind terrain obstacles within confusing micro-geography zones, may prove safer than Montana homesteads because they are harder to find and easier to defend despite population proximity.
Preppers must think not like homesteaders but like guerrillas. Successful guerrillas do not seek territory control but deny it to enemies, becoming everywhere and nowhere, striking and vanishing. Retreats are not fortresses held against sieges - such defenses always fall eventually, as history demonstrates with monotonous regularity. Retreats are hide sites, resupply points, temporary bases conducting survival business without becoming fixed in place. Becoming fixed targets means siege arithmetic begins working against you, and siege warfare favors attackers with time and numbers.
Optimal distances from population centers are not fixed numbers but zones of operational ambiguity - close enough accessing city resources (medical facilities, spare parts, information) when conditions permit, far enough avoiding initial panic and violence waves. These zones probably lie between eighty and one hundred fifty miles from major metropolitan areas, with crucial caveats: distance must be measured not by roads but by obstacles, and locations must possess features creating natural chokepoints and defensive terrain.
Eighty-mile radii deserve particular attention. They represent roughly two hours of travel at moderate speeds on degraded roads - far enough that casual looters will not venture there initially, close enough that organized groups can reach with planning. These are kill zones. Locations within these radii require not merely distance but active defense, community organization, and abilities detecting and deterring approach. Beyond one hundred fifty miles, you enter diminishing returns zones - logistical difficulties maintaining wider world contact, obtaining medical care, participating in eventual reconstruction begin outweighing security benefits unless you achieve complete autonomy.
Complete autonomy remains fantasy for all but most resourceful and lucky. Even mountain men required trade. Even homesteaders needed tools they could not forge. Questions are not whether you can sever all human network connections, but whether you can control timing and terms of those connections. You want visiting cities when they are merely depressed, not when they are apocalyptic. You want trading when trade is possible, not when trade means ambush.
Demographic kinetic energy of collapse follows predictable patterns. First to leave are wealthy and foresighted, those with second homes and stocked retreats. They move early, while fuel remains available and order persists, not threatening countryside because they merely relocate consumption. Second waves consist of connected and criminal - those with advance warning, those seeing writing on walls and possessing means to move. They may prove dangerous, but remain selective, seeking specific targets and opportunities. Third waves are tsunamis: urban masses moving only when staying becomes impossible, moving without plan or destination, consuming everything in paths like locusts.
Distance from population centers determines which waves wash over you. Within fifty miles, you face all three. Between fifty and one hundred miles, you likely face second and third. Beyond one hundred fifty miles, you may face only third, and then only if your location lies along natural migration corridors or appears offering resources. Third waves prove most dangerous not because of violence - though violence will occur - but because of persistence. They do not stop. They cannot be deterred by force displays because they have nowhere else to go. They can only be channeled, exhausted, or destroyed.
Defending fixed locations against such waves means planning to die in place. Realistic strategies are not defense but evasion - not being there when waves arrive, caching supplies in multiple locations, possessing mobility retreating before superior force, returning only when waves pass and survivors move on or die. This requires not homesteads but networks: multiple locations, multiple identities, abilities appearing as refugees when useful and disappearing into terrain when necessary.
Distance is not static condition but tactical resource to be expended. You use distance buying time, creating warning, exhausting enemies. Distance alone proves worthless without means exploiting it - observation posts detecting approach, cached supplies allowing primary location abandonment, local knowledge letting you navigate while enemies stumble. Best distances allow seeing them before they see you, and being gone before they arrive.
American landscapes offer few places where such conditions obtain naturally. Mountains provide concealment but limit mobility. Plains provide visibility but no cover. Deserts offer isolation but punish existence. Forests provide resources but limit agriculture. Each choice involves trade-offs, and preppers must make those trade-offs with clear eyes, not with hermit romanticism or bunker-builder machismo.
Specific threat vectors require consideration. Groups of twenty armed men with two vehicles and week’s worth of food move differently than families of four with single cars and full tanks. Former groups can afford scouting, probing, risk-taking. Latter groups become desperate, dangerous, unpredictable. Former groups can be deterred by force displays if those displays prove credible. Latter groups cannot be deterred because they have nothing left to lose. Distance from population centers determines which threat types you primarily face, and therefore which defensive postures prove appropriate.
Within collapse’s first month, primary threats are mobile, organized groups - criminal gangs, survivalist coalitions, authority fragments. These groups range far, scout carefully, hit hard. They can be deterred by prepared defenses, ambushes, risk-versus-reward calculus. Beyond three months, primary threats become starving individuals or small families, moving on foot, armed with scavenged weapons, willing killing for cans of beans. These threats cannot be deterred, only detected and neutralized, and they penetrate much farther into hinterlands because they move slowly, quietly, persistently.
Preppers must plan for both threats, implying defense in depth. Outer perimeters are distance itself, augmented by obstacles and concealment. Middle perimeters are detection—tripwires, observation, local intelligence networks. Inner perimeters are fighting positions, fallback points, last stands you hope never making. Beyond inner perimeters lie escape routes, cached supplies, alternative locations allowing survival even if primary locations become compromised.
Survival architectures cannot be built overnight, nor by individuals. Lone wolves die. Packs survive. Even most capable individuals require sleep, require backup, require someone watching while they rest. Distance questions from population centers are therefore also community questions. Are enough like-minded individuals in your chosen areas providing mutual defense? Or are you so isolated that you cannot call for help when help becomes needed?
Historical survival records in collapsed societies emphasize “defensible community” importance - not individual bunkers but organized villages, clans, tribes. Such communities control territory, provide watch rotations and labor specialization making sustained defense possible. But they also present larger signatures, more visible targets, and potential for internal conflict proving as deadly as external threats. Optimal community sizes probably fall between twelve and fifty adults - large enough providing security and labor specialization, small enough maintaining cohesion and operational security.
Distance from population centers affects community formation. Too close, and communities become overwhelmed by refugees. Too far, and communities cannot form because population density proves insufficient. Sweet spots lie in currently marginal areas - too remote for comfortable suburban commuting, too harsh for casual hobby farming, but accessible enough that serious practitioners can gather and organize. These areas exist in American map interstices: poor soil regions, flood zones, areas with difficult topography defeating development.
Temporal distance dimensions also require consideration. Distance is not merely spatial but temporal - time required reaching you, extendable by obstacles, degradable by your preparation, or compressible by enemy capability. Locations one hundred miles away via interstate prove closer in time than locations fifty miles away via logging roads, if enemies control interstates and move in motorized columns. But if enemies move on foot, logging roads provide no advantage and interstates become barriers rather than corridors.
Soviet collapse provides instructive examples. Countryside survival depended not on isolation but connection - abilities trading with neighbors, accessing black markets, maintaining some economic activity forms. Those retreating too far, seeking complete autonomy, often starved or became victimized by criminal groups flourishing in state power’s absence. Those maintaining networks, balancing security with necessary commerce, fared better. Lessons are that distance must remain porous, not absolute - a filter rather than wall.
American contexts add complications: firearms prevalence, ethnic and political fragmentation, dependence on complex technology failing catastrophically rather than gradually. Preppers imagining slow declines, gentle returns to nineteenth-century agrarianism, misunderstand modern system brittleness. When grids fail, they will not fail gracefully. When supply chains break, they will snap like cables under tension. Resulting social reorganizations will be violent, rapid, and complete.
In such environments, distance questions become existential. Too close, and you are consumed in initial conflagrations. Too far, and you become irrelevant to reconstruction, medically vulnerable, psychologically isolated to breakdown points. Answers are not numbers but relationships - dynamic positionings balancing security against sustainability, accepting risks in measured quantities exchanging for necessary capabilities.
Ideal locations probably lie between one hundred and two hundred miles from major metropolitan areas, accessible only by routes requiring local knowledge, situated in terrain favoring defense, within like-minded individual communities, with multiple escape routes and cached supplies, with abilities generating food and energy independently, and with operational security avoiding detection by casual observation. Such locations exist, but they are not advertised, not cheap, and require years of preparation making them viable.
More importantly, ideal locations are not destinations but systems. They are relationship networks, skill accumulations, mental preparations for hardship that cannot be purchased or installed. Cabins are worthless without knowledge using them. Distances are meaningless without abilities exploiting them. Supplies are dangerous without communities protecting them.
Asking “how far” begins wrong inquiries. Correct questions are “how hidden, how prepared, how connected, and how mobile.” Distance is merely one variable in survival equations including timing, community, skill, and luck. Overemphasizing distance creates traps. Underestimating distance means being overrun before reactions can occur.
Coming collapses—whether arriving as pandemics, economic ruin, grid failures, or civil wars - will not respect preparations. They will test them against reality with rigor permitting no self-deception. Distance from population centers is not talisman. It is tactical condition requiring active management, constant reassessment, and ultimate sacrifice if survival demands movement rather than position.
Maps will be redrawn. Safe zones will shift. Only true preparations are capacities adapting, moving, surviving as mobile intelligences rather than fixed targets. Distance provides margins for that adaptation. It guarantees no survival. Nothing does. But in desperation’s arithmetic, miles of difficult terrain are worth ten of highway, and days of warning are worth years of supplies. Choose your ground. But be ready abandoning it. Predators are coming, and they do not respect fences.
When the Roads Become Rivers of Ash: Final calculations are not mathematical but biological. Human animals, stripped of civilization’s veneers, revert to patterns established over millennia of scarcity. We are not creatures of distance but of effort - we travel exactly as far as caloric expenditures promise returns, and not one step farther. Security lies not in miles placed between yourself and cities, but in appearances of those miles from hungry perspectives. Make journeys look fruitless. Make destinations look empty. Make paths look fatal. Do this, and fifty miles may become infinite. Fail, and two hundred miles become merely long days’ drives to slaughter. Distance is whatever you can convince desperate people it is. Nothing more. Nothing less."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material!
Jim Kustler, "A Theory of Everything"
"A Theory of Everything"
by Jim Kustler
“The thing that never happens keeps happening.”
- Kyle Becker on X
“Everyone is retarded and nothing Works.” Turns out that’s the key to unlock the mystery of this particular Fourth Turning, the one here and now, of our own time. It’s an excellent theory of everything happening these days, formulated by a close colleague of mine. And as far as I know, it’s the only theory that makes sense. It explains, for example how and why consulting US attorney Joe DiGenova quit the grand jury investigation, as conducted by the DOJ in the Southern District of Florida (SDFL), of the treasonous conspiracy against the people of the USA running since 2016.
The most amazing part is that apparently no one in the country seems to give a shit about it. No politician has issued a statement. The blog-o-sphere, Twitter-sphere are mute. The President himself - the main target of the coup - was busy in Ireland this weekend. But let’s face it: he has a duty to steer clear of interfering in juridical proceedings involving himself and his office.
The most diligent investigator of all, Dan Bongino, the podcaster who spent years documenting the serial turpitudes of RussiaGate, ImpeachmentGate, the 2020 election, the J-6 operation, and so on, who wrote several books about these crimes - and then became Deputy FBI director for a year, with access to the entire trove of evidence about all of it - says nothing now about the DiGenova affair. How is that possible? Instead, for months he’s just played an insipid cheerleader on his daily podcast. Just imagine what Bongino really knows. Months ago, when he resigned from the FBI job, he stated publicly that what he saw in the J. Edgar Hoover building shocked him to his core.
I say all this because it looks like the case (or cases) in the SDFL will now go nowhere with diGenova out of the picture. Altogether, it was the gravest set of treasonous crimes against the Republic in our history, and nobody will be held accountable for it, a monumental insult following a possibly fatal injury to the country.
A certain amount of informed scuttlebutt comes may way, and the story I hear is that Joe DiGenova was of a mind to indict former president Barack Obama for his role in many phases of the ongoing coup, and that Todd Blanche blanched at that, in fear of provoking an even hotter civil war than the Red/Blue one currently raging from sea to shining sea (and especially in the three branches of government). Not just a civil war but, in effect, a civil race war, for fear of painting America’s only black president a criminal.
Mr. Obama enjoys certain immunities against criminal prosecution for official actions he took as president - as determined in the SCOTUS decision Trump v. the United States, July, 2024 - but the parameters of what, exactly, official means remains squishy. The boundaries would have to be tested case-by-case in the lower courts. Which is what the grand juries sitting now in Florida might have done (or might yet somehow manage to do).
Was it an official act for Mr. Obama to turn Hillary Clinton’s Russian Collusion campaign stunt into a seditious operation to run Mr. Trump out of office? Once Mr. Obama was out of office in 2017, did he direct continuing seditions through FBI director Wray and CIA directors Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel? Does a record of correspondence exist, classified or otherwise? We know that the intel apparatus captures everything. Tulsi Gabbard might know what’s in there. Perhaps the same things that shocked Dan Bongino to his core.
Once “Joe Biden” was installed in the Oval Office, did Barack Obama direct the cabal that actually ran the executive branch from Jan., 2021, to Jan., 2025 - did he act as a shadow president? What would the law say about that? And is he responsible for “Joe Biden’s” ruinous policies such as the wide-open border and all it has entailed. One of Mr. Obama’s closest insiders, John Podesta (also Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman), became “senior advisor for climate policy” in the final months of “Joe Biden’s” term. He was given $370-billion from the fraudulently-named “Inflation Reduction Act” to distribute as he saw fit, and an awful lot of it landed in Democratic Party adjacent NGOs. Was private citizen Obama involved in arranging any of that?
Is Barack Obama, the 44th President of the US, a true villain? He was a very slick performer during the eight years he was president. But now, the political faction he led - maybe still leads because, look around, who else is there? - has gone batshit crazy since his second term ended. His party beat a path straight into the overt advocacy of communism with a jihad cherry on top, and you don’t hear him complaining about any of it.
What I hear is that Joe DiGenova intended to subpoena Barack Obama to give testimony to that Florida federal grand jury and that Todd Blanche nixed it, so Joe quit. The next day, diGenova told the media that if the Florida team is “allowed to do their jobs” they will “succeed supremely” and that the U.S. Attorney’s office there was doing a “phenomenal job under the worst of circumstances.” He later added, there was “plenty of evidence” but it “just takes time.”
Whatever that means. Yet everybody knows what went down in our country the past ten years, that a vicious blob called the Deep State has been running a continuous coup, just as everybody with half-a-brain knows exactly what Covid-19 was about. The question that remains: does having half-a-brain mean you’re retarded, and does that explain why nothing works in the USA, including the ability to manage the nation’s justice apparatus?"
John Wilder, "Ceasing To Be America"
"Ceasing To Be America"
by John Wilder
“I am truly sensible of the high honor the Congress has done me. But I tell
you now, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.”
– John Adams
"George Washington. What a dude. Washington was called up to lead the Continental Army. Why? Everyone knew him, and most people liked him, and if they didn’t, they trusted him. He had also killed a lot of French, so that was another plus. George took up the sword. Then, after winning, and being the most popular guy in the 13 colonies?
He put the sword down. This wasn’t totally unprecedented in history, but the numbers of men with enough strength to put down power after having wielded it is a pretty small club. There is Washington, there is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, and you could make the case for Sulla and Diocletian, but it’s still a pretty small club.
He attended the Constitutional Convention and served as the leader. As the delegates wrote the Constitution, they looked to Washington and wrote the job with the questions WWGWD? firmly in mind. Why did Washington not take power? He believed more in being American than being the boss. Washington was later elected the first president, and that was after not campaigning, saying he’d rather someone else do the job, and wrote to a friend that his feelings on being elected were, “not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”
He didn’t like the job, and had to be convinced to not take his name out of contention for his second term. But when it was the third time to elect a president, he made it clear that he was done. It wasn’t a prize Washington sought, it was a duty he wasn’t keen on. Someone will mention the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington personally took the field during the rebellion, and did so to protect the country: without rules, there would be no future for the country. Of the two people sentenced to death, Washington pardoned both, and in fact pardoned every American who requested a pardon. Two terms became a precedent, and George Washington became the model for an American.
The next real crisis the Republic hit was Civil War 1.0. In this case, I’ll argue that both sides fought out of a shared conviction regarding what it meant to be an American. Robert E. Lee, for instance, was Revolutionary War Lt. Col. “Light Horse” Harry Lee’s son. Light Horse Harry was friends with Washington and idolized him.
What was clear, though, is that once Civil War 1.0 was over, it was over. The North and South reknitted the relationship. Was it sometimes ugly? Yes. But Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III was killed when his bomber crashed in 1943, and Stonewall Jackson’s great-grandson’s fighter was shot down in 1944. Oh, and Patton’s grandfather was a colonel in the 22nd Virginia.
We got over it. We were still Americans. We shared the same civic virtues, the same blood as the founding stock, and would pick up Washington’s sword when called. So American that when it came time for World War I mobilization, Americans signed up. World War I was an entirely unnecessary conflict from a strategic American standpoint, yet they learned to bayonet for a foreign king against a kaiser.
How American were Americans? Until Germany declared war on the United States, Charles Lindbergh had argued that entering the war in Europe was not in the interests of the United States. After declaration of war, however, he was turned down when he tried to sign up. Regardless, Lindbergh flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific. As a civilian. Because? Charles Lindbergh. Duh.
The whole thing started to fall apart in Vietnam. It was a war fought poorly by leadership that didn’t want to win on behalf of foreign governments that were only notable when they weren’t being amazingly corrupt. Lots of brave men bled there. Still, we could have “won”. But the media shifted away from national solidarity towards blatant GloboLeftism.
American idealism evaporated and was replaced by a constant drumbeat of American villainy started in the 1970s and continued through the 1990s. American soldiers being awful were shown in countless movies like "Platoon". The “grab a beer and a chick and let’s party” music of the 1980s was replaced by the “I need a new antidepressant because someone was mean” music of the 1990s and the “I’ma gonna killa white man” rap. The scene was set for the final betrayal.
9/11. The September 11 attacks and their aftermath represented the final era of “American” enlistment. Former NFL player Pat Tillman quit his NFL® job to enlist following 9/11, but ultimately grew disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. Despite a good start, it soon became clear that we weren’t serious about the war, at all.
A far lesser George, George W. Bush, said that “They hate us for our freedoms”, “Islam is peace” and “Acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith”. Did he ever hear about the stories actually in the Koran where their prophet ordered dozens of people assassinated? And also ordered the “peaceful beheading” of 600-900 men in Medina in one shot? Acts of violence are the fundamental tenets of that faith.
In a real nation, they would have been rounded up, and every non-European whose first language wasn’t English who was in America would have been shipped out on September 12. But no. We get W. telling everyone that if a person in the world will buy a Coke© then they’re just as American as you, bigot.
That was when we could see, finally, that America was no longer serious. We sent our troops out for a war on an abstract mass noun, terror. A twenty-year war that cost trillions and has (checks chart) only resulted in bringing in more foreigners who hate the horribly oppressive country that they fought to get in to. Washington put the sword down to forge the identity of what an American was. At some point, someone has to pick it up to protect America."
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