"Jeffrey Sachs Columbia professor, advisor to three UN Secretaries General, twice named Time’s 100 Most Influential gave six interviews in four months declaring that American hegemony is over. He called the Iran war the breaking point. He said the SWIFT sanctions began dethroning the dollar. He said China’s industrial dominance is the real power shift. He said the political class is trapped in 1991. He said multipolarity has already arrived. Past tense. Done. One publication described his analysis as “an autopsy of an empire that still believes it is immortal.” Gold is at $4,722. The dollar is at a 30-year reserve low. Your television didn’t show you any of it. This video does."
"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet ‘for sale’, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence – briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing – cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity.”
"Gerald Celente and Judge Andrew Napolitano break it down - calling out America’s transformation into an empire driven by endless wars and global dominance. From the Iran War racket to decades of deception, they expose the pattern: lies sold to the public, promises never kept, and policies that leave nations destroyed and economies sinking. This hard-hitting conversation uncovers the truth behind the war machine and the consequences for America’s future.
The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What's Next in these increasingly turbulent times.
"The economy looks 'fine' on paper, so why does everyone feel like they're falling behind? This video pulls together real people sharing what daily life actually costs right now: layoffs, rent hikes, rising grocery prices, and student loan debt that won't budge. You'll hear from a worker laid off the same week her rent jumped $1,100, a homeowner whose mortgage rose over $7,000 a year, and a teacher shopping on a $50 summer budget. What this video covers:
• Layoffs hitting workers with strong performance reviews and great clients.
• Rent jumping while wages stay flat against $1,600 to $2,000 bills.
• Grocery prices climbing while portions and quality shrink.
• Student loan and medical school debt reshaping people's life plans.
• The wide gap between everyday struggles and wealthy spending habits.
If any of this hits close to home, drop a comment about what's stretching your budget the most right now. Share this with someone who keeps hearing that things are 'fine' when their own numbers say otherwise. Subscribe for more compilations that put real voices to what people are dealing with. This video looks at the rising cost of living, layoffs and unemployment, rent increases, grocery prices, student loan debt, mortgage and property tax hikes, and the growing gap between paychecks and bills that so many people are facing right now."
"Welcome to Gengu AI – your ultimate destination for AI-generated music and next-generation sound experiences. This channel is dedicated to creating unique, high-quality tracks powered by artificial intelligence, blending creativity and technology to deliver music that feels fresh, emotional, and immersive. AI was the tool. The story came from human feeling. If this film gave you a quiet breath, a memory, or a moment of peace, thank you for being here."
"Ain’t nobody enjoys the creaks and cracks… but we’re all heading there together.“Getting Old Sucks (But Everybody’s Doing It)” is a funny, brutally honest Delta King’s Blues tune about stiff joints, fading energy, and learning to laugh at the universal ride of getting older. A gritty, easy shuffle acoustic guitar keeps the groove moving like an old truck that rattles but still runs. The harmonica grins and groans at the same time, carrying equal parts humor and truth. The rhythm rolls slow and steady, built for folks who know aging ain’t pretty - but it sure makes for good stories. This is blues for everybody feeling the years. For people who ache a little more, nap a little longer, and laugh a little harder about it. Getting old may suck… but the alternative ain’t much better."
"Millions of Americans are now living in RVs, vans, and cars, not for freedom or adventure, but because traditional housing has become financially out of reach. As the housing crisis continues to worsen across the United States, more working people are being pushed into a form of hidden homelessness that most people never see. In this video, we break down the real economics behind vehicle homelessness, including why rent has outpaced wages, how housing supply shortages created a severe affordability gap, and why RVs have become the last fallback option before street homelessness. We also examine how rising insurance, healthcare, and living costs are quietly reshaping what survival looks like for millions of Americans.
This is not just a story about homelessness. It is a deeper look at what happens when full-time work no longer guarantees stable housing. From service workers and families to retirees on fixed incomes, this shift reveals how America’s housing market is changing and why safe parking programs may be a sign of a much larger structural problem. If rent in your city suddenly increased by five hundred dollars, how long could you realistically stay housed without borrowing or moving? Share your thoughts in the comments."
"Today we're covering a major development as 36,000 student loan borrowers receive debt forgiveness after attending colleges accused of deceptive and predatory practices. Many students were promised high-paying careers, only to be left with massive debt, incomplete degrees, and limited job opportunities. We'll break down how these schools operated, why the government is forgiving these loans, and what it means for future borrowers. We also discuss the latest economic news, interest rates, inflation concerns, retail store closures, consumer spending trends, gold accumulation by central banks, vehicle recalls, and personal finance strategies to protect yourself during uncertain economic times. If you're concerned about the economy, debt, investing, banking, or your financial future, this episode is packed with information you need to know."
Youghal, Ireland - "Reuters: "Bank of Japan raises interest rates to 31-year high. The Bank of Japan raised interest rates to a 31-year high on Tuesday, marking another landmark step in normalizing monetary policy as it focused on taming price pressures from the energy shock caused by the Iran war.
Now here is a thing worth turning over. It puts two dots at wide angles...and pulling away from each other. Artificial Intelligence - now coming under the scrutiny of political quacks who couldn’t tell a transistor from a turnip - is supposedly destined to make us all “very rich.” So, the price of money ought to be sinking, not climbing. The logic is plain; the IPOs of the hyperscalers alone are forecast to shower an additional $4 trillion upon the moneyed classes. They will have a lot more money to lend.
Yet the rates rise. All over the world, central banks are raising rates, not lowering them. And with the US inflation reading now higher than the Fed Funds rate, odds are that no editorial, no policy white-paper, no breathless dispatch from a man with stock options will alter the verdict. Cycles, patterns, and History Herself - that grim and unsentimental dowager - always speak last, and they are not in the habit of asking permission. For four decades money grew cheaper. Now it grows more dear. That, we believe, is the primary trend. AI may be magic or mischief, but the tide does not consult the barnacles.
So how to connect the two dots? Consider SpaceX, which last year flung $12.7 billion into AI - thrice what it spent on its - and lost roughly half of it. For all the trumpeting, all the press-agentry, all the worshipful prose, this magnificent enterprise has not produced a single honest penny of new wealth. It has consumed billions in real hours and real material. They are not tucked away on some shelf awaiting a rainy day. They are gone - vanished, combusted, irrecoverable as last year’s snow.
To add to the wealth of the world, a company must make a thing it can sell to a willing and able buyer for more than it cost to make it. This elementary act of commerce - known to every fruit peddler and shoeshine boy since the Phoenicians - SpaceX has not yet performed, and may never perform. So far, measured honestly, it is a destroyer of wealth, not a creator of it. And so is AI.
Skanda Amarnath puts the big techs’ wager at some $2 trillion in software and machinery. In the last year alone the hyperscalers are said to have invested $400 billion in AI - a figure expected to swell to $700 billion this year. By what miracle of arithmetic do they ever get that money back?
Capital is not manna. It does not fall free from heaven. It must be reckoned with. And here the outlays are so monstrous that the depreciation alone is likely to dwarf whatever income the ‘intelligent’ machinery throws off. Translated out of the accountant’s mumble: they will lose money, properly counted, and lose a lot of it.
Strange things do happen, of course. We would not be so reckless as to pronounce success impossible - only improbable, which in the long run amounts to nearly the same thing for the man holding the shares.
When the dot-com bubble burst in the year 2000, hundreds of companies went to their graves even though the internet was still alive and well. But Amazon, Facebook, now known as Meta, Google, now decked out as Alphabet, and Microsoft crawled from the wreckage and prospered. They sold real services to real people and pocketed real profits, and they managed the feat without any “policy framework” to lead them by the hand. Now they shovel those profits into a fresh bet - AI - and the question hangs in the air like cigar smoke: will it pay, or are they merely squandering shareholders’ money to keep themselves looking cool? Nobody knows. Occasionally, an aging gentleman dyes his hair, purchases a scarlet roadster, and happily runs off with a girl half his years. More often, he succeeds only in looking like an old fool.
And perhaps a company grown fat on one technology can vault onto the next. But that is not the way it generally goes. The expert makers of horse drawn carriages did not bolt internal-combustion engines onto their hansoms and cabriolets; instead, they were swept off the road by upstarts named Ford, Dodge, and Olds. Nor, when the internet broke over the land, did the old data-grinders - IBM, Honeywell, Control Data - lead the charge. They were prisoners of their own yesterdays, manacled to the very thing that had enriched them. The new wave was surfed by Gates, Jobs, and Bezos, who had all come to the beach empty handed.
Elon, too, began with nothing, and now gallops at the head of every parade in sight - to Mars, to electric cars, to AI...and his “Boring Company” is busy burrowing beneath Las Vegas. The hyperscalers are resolved not to be left at the post. Even the flush and the canny ‘whales’ are eager to join in. The Wall Street Journal: "Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, has bought a more-than $1 billion stake in SpaceX, betting on founder Elon Musk and what she says is the potential for his rocket maker to shape industries for decades."
Ne sutor ultra crepidam - let the cobbler stick to his last. Mrs. R., it appears, has mislaid the maxim. The Journal goes on: "Her closely held company built a giant iron ore mine in Australia’s Pilbara, where Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, is widely credited with discovering a bounty of iron ore in the 1950s. Today, roughly half the world’s iron-ore exports come from that region.
She made her fortune the honest, gritty way - by selling Australia itself, by the ton. To leap from the certainties of the Pilbara’s open pits into the dark pool of rockets and thinking machines is a plunge into the genuinely unknown. And who can say - the dice are sometimes kind, even to those who throw them blind.
More to follow - on why, in a world where the price of money is climbing, AI may not make us ‘very rich’ after all."
"Shrinkflation is hitting your favorite snacks and meals, and this compilation shows real people opening up bags, boxes, and bags of fast food that came up short. You paid the same (or more) for less product, smaller portions, and packaging that looks emptier every year. From bagels with one raisin to chip bags that rattle, see exactly how the snacks and drinks you grew up with keep getting smaller while the prices climb. If you've noticed your groceries doing the same thing, drop a comment with the product that shocked you most and how much smaller it got. Subscribe so you never miss our next breakdown of shrinking snacks and rising prices, and share this with the friend who keeps saying it's all in your head. This video looks at shrinkflation, smaller snack sizes, rising grocery prices, fast food portion cuts, chip bag fill rates, ice cream bar shrinkage, deli meat weight, and packaging that holds less product than it used to."
"'El Condor Pasa' is an original Peruvian Folklore (song) popularized by Simon & Garfunkel in 1970. "If I could" is the best-known Peruvian song from the zarzuela El Cóndor Pasa composed by Daniel AlomÃa Robles in 1913. From 2004 this piece is a Cultural Heritage of Peru from 2004: This theme is considered the second National Anthem of Peru. The Condor flies in both the Americas connecting all natives races. The best ever live version with flute expressed in this musical interpretation by Peruvian musician Alexandro Querevalú with a native Indian flute called Quena and traditional Andes regalias (poncho) is felt deep within the soul.
Alexandro was born in Lima, Peru, to a humble but hard·working family. The oldest son of the family, he dreamed of helping his family financially. With this in mind, he emigrated to Poland at the age of 18. He plays a wide variety of wind instruments, such as the Quena, Quenacho, Antara or Zampona among others Andean and Native American flutes. He has a large repertoire, including 'The Last of the Mohicans', 'El Condor Pasa', and many other favorites. His live performances dressed in different Native American regalias are truly breathtaking.
Alexandro Querevalú is a brilliant performer, one of the best of his kind, and the one whose popularity has spread more than that of any other performer by means of social networks worldwide to the United States, Europe, Asia, the Arab countries and Australia. This is due to the unique way that he plays these indigenous instruments of both North and South America. The versatility, the eloquence, the sadness and the happiness which he expresses in his musical interpretations are felt deep within the soul, which is why he himself says “this song makes me cry.”
“Why isn't this ant a big sphere? Planetary nebula Mz3 is being cast off by a star similar to our Sun that is, surely, round. Why then would the gas that is streaming away create an ant-shaped nebula that is distinctly not round?
Clues might include the high 1000-kilometer per second speed of the expelled gas, the light-year long length of the structure, and the magnetism of the star visible above at the nebula's center. One possible answer is that Mz3 is hiding a second, dimmer star that orbits close in to the bright star. A competing hypothesis holds that the central star's own spin and magnetic field are channeling the gas. Since the central star appears to be so similar to our own Sun, astronomers hope that increased understanding of the history of this giant space ant can provide useful insight into the likely future of our own Sun and Earth.”
"There was a time when the days didn’t ask so many questions… when the road felt shorter, the bills felt lighter, and a little music was enough to carry you through the night. Back then, life didn’t need explaining - it just was. “Life Was Simple” is a soft, nostalgic Delta King’s Blues reflection on easier days and quieter dreams. Acoustic guitar drifts warm and gentle, like sunlight falling across an old front porch. Harmonica breathes slow and tender, carrying memories that still feel close if you don’t reach too fast. The rhythm moves easy and unhurried, letting the past sit beside you for a while. This is the blues of remembrance - not bitter, not angry… just honest about how things used to feel. Calm. Gentle. Deeply human. Life got complicated… but the blues remembers when it was simple."
"You're Watching the America Empire Die In Real Time"
"You thought the collapse would look like a movie. Tanks in the streets. Helicopters overhead. It doesn’t look like that. It looks like Tuesday. A gas price you can’t believe. A grocery bill you can’t explain. A credit card that goes up even though you haven’t bought anything you didn’t need. A neighbor you haven’t seen in three weeks. Rome took 200 years to fall. A historian projected 22 years for America starting in 2003. That clock ran out last year. The SPR is at 1983 levels. The Strait has been closed for 100 days. The dollar is at a 30-year reserve low. 264,000 Americans die of despair every year. And 180,000 left the country. You are watching the empire die. In real time. This video shows you what you’re watching and what to do about it."
“Lands can be reconquered, indeed in the course of a battle, a hill or a certain plain might trade hands several times. But missed opportunities? These can never be regained. Moments in time, in culture? They can never be re-made. One can never go back in time to prepare for what they should have prepared for, no one can ever get back critical seconds that were wasted out of fear or ego. Napoleon was brilliant at trading space for time: Sure, you can make these moves, provided you are giving me the time I need to drill my troops, or move them to where I want them to be. Yet in life, most of us are terrible at this. We trade an hour of our life here or afternoon there like it can be bought back with the few dollars we were paid for it. And it is only much, much later, as they are on their deathbeds or when they are looking back on what might have been, that many people realize the awful truth of this quote. Don’t do that. Embrace it now.”
- Ryan Holiday
○
And in secret moments of despair, Too late, too late...We think
what might have been, should have been, and we let it slip away...
“I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears
as soon as there is an excess of things.”
- Albert Camus, "Lyrical and Critical Essays"
"Let me tell you a story about a haunted house and all the thoughts it evoked in me. Do we believe we can save ourselves by saving things? Or do our saved possessions come to possess their saviors? Do those who save many things or hoard believe that there are pockets in shrouds? Or do they collect things as a magical protection against the shroud?
These are questions that have preoccupied me for weeks as my wife and I have spent long and exhausting days cleaning out a friend’s house. Many huge truckloads of possessions have been carted off to the dump. Thousands of documents have been shredded and thousands more taken to our house for further sorting. Other things have been donated to charity. This is what happens to people’s things; they disappear, never to be seen again, just as we do, eventually.
Tolstoy wrote a story – “How Much Land Does A Man Need’’ – that ends with the answer: a piece six feet long, enough for your grave. As in this story, the devil always has the last laugh when your covetousness gets the best of you. Yet so many people continue to collect in the vain hope that they are exceptions. Ask almost anyone and they will reluctantly admit that they hoard to some degree.
In capitalist consumer societies, getting and spending and hoarding not only lays waste our powers, but it is done on the backs of the poor and destitute around the world. It is a system built to inflame the worst human tendencies of acquisitiveness and indifference since it teaches that one never has enough of everything.
It denies the primal sympathy of human care for all humans as it teaches that if you surround yourself with enough things – have ten pair of shoes, twenty shirts, an attic filled with things in reserve – you will be safe from the fate of the majority of the world’s poor who have next to nothing. It is an insidious form of soul murder wherein one pulls the shades on the prison-house, counts one’s possessions, and shakes hands with the Devil. And it is sadly common.
From attic to cellar to garage, every little cubbyhole, closet, and drawer in this relative’s house was filled with “saved” items. Nothing was ever thrown away. If you walked in the front door, you would never know that the occupants were compulsive keepers. While there were plenty of knick-knacks in evidence like so many houses where the fear of emptiness rules (the emptiness that is the source of freedom and creativity), once you opened a drawer or closet, a secreted lunacy spilled out seriatim like circus clowns from a small car.
Like all clown shows, it was funny but far more frightening, as though all the saved objects were tinged with the fear of death and dissolution, were futile efforts to stop the flow of time and life by sticking a finger in a dike.
Let me begin with the bags. Hidden in every corner and closet, there were bags stuffed in bags. Big bags and little bags, hundreds if not thousands, used and unused, plastic, paper, cloth bags with price tags still on them. The same was true for boxes, especially empty jewelry boxes. Cardboard boxes that once held a little something, wooden boxes, cigar boxes, large cartons, boxes from every device ever purchased – all seemingly being saved for some future use that would never come.
But the bags and boxes filled each other so that no emptiness could survive, although desolation seemed to cry out from within: “You can’t suffocate me.”
Tens of thousands of photographs and slides were squirreled into cabinets, closets, and their own file cabinets, each neatly marked with the date and place of their taking. Time in a “bottle” from which one would never drink again – possessing the past in a vain attempt to stop time. These photos were kept in places where their taker would never see them again but could find a weird comfort that they were saved somewhere in this vast collection. Cold comfort by embalming time.
It so happens that while emptying the house, I was rereading the wonderful novel, Zorba The Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis. There is a passage in it where a woman has died, and while her corpse lies in her house, the villagers descend on her possessions like shrieking vultures on a carcass.
Old women, men, children went rushing through the doors, jumped through the open windows, over the fences and off the balcony, each carrying whatever he had been able to snatch – sauce pans, frying pans, mattresses, rabbits... Some of them had taken doors or windows off their hinges and had put them on their backs. Mimiko had seized the two court shoes, tied on a piece of string and hung them round his neck – it looked as though Dame Hortense were going off astraddle on his shoulders and only her shoes were visible….
The avidity for things drives many people mad, to get and to keep stuff, to build walls around life so as to protect themselves from death. To consume so as not to be consumed. Kazantzakis brilliantly makes this clear in the book. "Zorba, the Greek" physical laborer and wild man, is different, for he knows that salvation lies in dispossession.
"One day he encounters five little children begging in a village. Their father has just been murdered. “I don’t know why, divine inspiration I suppose, but I went up to them.” He gives the children his basket of food and all his money. He tells his interlocutor, a writer whom he calls “Boss,” a man whom Zorba accuses of not being able to cut the string that ties him to a life of living-death, that that was how he was rescued.
Rescued from my country, from priests, and from money. I began sifting things, sifting more and more things out. I lighten my burden that way. I – how shall I put it? – I find my own deliverance, I become a man."
In the jam-packed attic where there is little room to move with boxes and objects piled on top of each other, I found a large metal four-drawer file cabinet packed with files. In one file folder there was a small purse filled with the following: four very old unmarked keys, six paper clips, two old unworkable watches, a bobby pin, a circular case that contained what looked like a piece of a human bone, a few old medallions, tweezers, four buttons, an eye screw, a safety pin, a nail, a screw, two ancient tiny photos, and a lock of human hair.
Similar objects were stored throughout the house in various containers, bags, boxes, the pockets of clothes, in old ancient furniture in the basement, on shelves, in cigar boxes, in desks, etc.
Old receipts for purchases made forty years ago, airline baggage tags, ticket stubs, school papers, jewelry hidden everywhere, old foreign and domestic coins, perhaps twenty-five old unworkable watches, clocks, radios, clothes and more clothes, more than anyone could ever have worn, scores of old pens and pencils, hand-written notes with no dates or any semblance of order or meaning, chaos and obsessive account-keeping hiding everywhere in contradictory forms shared by two people: one the neat freak and the other disorganized.
One dead and the other forced by fate to let her stuff go, to stand naked in the wind.
How does it help a person to record that they bought a toaster for $6.98 in 1957 or a bracelet for $20 in 1970 or that they called so-and-so some undated time in the past? What good does it do to save vast correspondences documenting your complaints, bitterness, and quarrels? Or boxes upon boxes of Christmas cards received thirty years ago? Or brochures and receipts from a trip taken long ago? Old sports medals? Scrapbooks?
Photos of long dead relatives no one wants? Fashion designer shoes and coats and handbags hidden in a dusty attic where you don’t even know they are there. An immigrant mother’s ancient sewing machine weighing seventy-five pounds and gathering dust in the cellar?
Nothing I could tell you can come close to picturing what we saw in this house. It was overwhelming, horrifying, and weirdly fascinating. And aside from the useful things that were donated to charity and some that were taken to the woman’s next dwelling, ninety percent was dumped in a landfill, soon to be buried.
In his brilliant novel "Underworld", Don DeLillo writes about a guy named Brian who goes to visit a collector of old baseball paraphernalia – bats, balls, an old scoreboard, tapes of games, etc. – in a house where “a mood of mausoleum gloom” fills the air. The man tells Brian: "There’s men in the coming years they’ll pay fortunes for these objects. Because this is desperation speaking. Men come here to see my collection. They come and they don’t want to leave. The phone rings, it’s the family – where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men."
Men and women hoarders, collectors, and keepers are lost children, trying desperately to secure themselves from death while losing themselves in the process. In my friend’s house I found huge amounts of string and rope waiting to tie something up neatly someday. That day never came.
Zorba tells the Boss, who insists he’s free, the following: "No, you’re not free. The string you’re tied to is perhaps no longer than other people’s. That’s all. You’re on a long piece of string, boss; you come and go and think you’re free, but you never cut the string in two. And when people don’t cut that string...
It’s difficult, boss, very difficult. You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything! But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts. I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much!
The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah, no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of its grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me what flavor is left in life? The flavor of camomile, weak camomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out."
On the way out the door on our final day cleaning the house, I found a beautiful boxed fountain pen on a windowsill. I love pens since I am a writer. This one shone brightly and seemed to speak to me: think of what you could write with me, it said so seductively. I was sorely tempted, but knowing that I didn’t need another pen, I left it there, thinking that perhaps the next occupants of this house would write a different story and embrace Camus’ advice about an excess of things. Perhaps."
Look around you, see all the fine possessions you have, how proud you are of it all. Then ask yourself how many of them you will take back into eternity when your time comes. None. No, you will take out exactly what you brought in... nothing, "and all your money won't another minute buy." Fill a bowl with water, and place your hand in it, then take it out. The hole left in the water is how long you'll be remembered. You are, as we all are, "dust in the wind..."
“Look, we’re probably gonna fail, but you know, we should give it a try, because if we don’t, if there’s not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-faring civilization.”
~ Elon Musk on the prospects of SpaceX
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "When J.D. Rockefeller became America’s first billionaire, in 1916, his net worth was equal to roughly 2.5% of the nation’s entire GDP. When Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire just last week, his pile stood equivalent to about 3.4% of the world’s largest economy. And it’s since rocketed higher, if you’ll pardon the pun, to about $1.4 trillion as of this writing, closer to 4.2% of America’s GDP.
Of course, times were different back in Rockefeller’s day...For one thing, the days were fewer. The average life expectancy for men was just 49 years. Women were still expected to outlive their husbands, but only until they turned 54. Penicillin, generally considered the very first antibiotic, was still a decade away from discovery. And modern comforts like air conditioning, dishwashers and commercial flight still seemed like futuristic, pie-in-the-sky dreams. As for color television... sushi trains... and Artificial Intelligence... they remained augmentations of a reality beyond the wildest imagination of mere human intelligence. They were simpler times. And yet, then as now, the politics of envy was alive and well.
Trust Busting: Long before the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens of the world promised to “eat the rich,” there was Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. The so-called “trust buster,” Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of what he saw as “bad trust monopolies,” viewing Rockefeller’s businesses as abusive and predatory, and the man himself as the archetypal robber baron. “No man should have such power as Rockefeller has,” he once decreed, “without being held accountable to the people.”
Indeed, it was Roosevelt’s administration that laid much of the ideological and legal groundwork for vigorously enforcing antitrust laws which, in 1911, under President William Taft, eventually resulted in Rockefeller’s Standard Oil being broken into smaller, state-sized pieces…Standard Oil of New Jersey later became Exxon… Standard Oil of New York became Mobil (then the two became ExxonMobil)…Standard Oil of California became Chevron…Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco… The Ohio Oil Company became Marathon Oil…Continental Oil Company became ConocoPhillips… and so on.
That most of the Standard Oil companies have since merged and coagulated into the Big Oil blob we see today is one irony. The larger irony, however, is that as Rockefeller’s shares in the various spin-off companies increased in value over time, the original Standard Oilman grew ever richer. Indeed, when Rockefeller became America’s very first billionaire, prefiguring Bernie’s worst nightmare decades before the sleeper Soviet was even born, he proved that the unwieldily federal government is an expert in one thing above all others: creating unintended consequences.
One may be grateful Rockefeller’s enterprise was “only” broken into smaller parts and not seized outright, turned over to the feds to administer “in the public’s interest,” lest it be turned into the Amtrak of oil companies. (Consider that, at current deficit levels, Washington burns through the equivalent of an entire SpaceX every 17 months. Hardly the prudent stewards of capital you’d want commanding your spaceship into the great beyond.)
The Path to Prosperity: And yet, among the socialists and green-eyed collectivists of the day, there were calls for nationalization, all in the name of “public good,” of course. Eugene V. Debs was one such voice of unreason. A prominent labor organizer, socialist politician, and five-time presidential candidate, Debs argued that, along with railroads, telegraphs, utilities and “natural monopolies,” oil was simply “too important” to be left to private hands. Only the government, by multiplying individual ignorance into collective wisdom, could be trusted with such a critical industry. Thankfully Debs never got his way... although he typified much of the anti-intellectual claptrap of today’s expert expropriators, political parasites and managerial moochers.
By many measures, we’ve come a long way from the days of the so-called “robber barons,” who laid the groundwork for what would become the American Century. Thanks largely to America’s leading role in global industrialization, a baby born in the US this year can reasonably expect to live for 80 years and longer. Moreover, his parents can plan his first birthday with a fair degree of confidence he’ll actually get there. In Rockefeller’s day, roughly one in every ten babies were “gone with the wind,” even before blowing out their first candle. Today, 199 in every 200 infants reach that happy milestone... many of whom go on to build and create astonishing things the rest of us take for granted.
In Rockefeller’s America, most homes lacked electricity and only a small minority enjoyed indoor plumbing, both essentially universal amenities today. In fact, the average family home in 1916 stood at a “cozy” 1,000-1,200sq/ft, less than half of today’s spacious (and climate controlled) 2,500sq/ft average build.
The same goes for advancements in practically every area of modern life. From MRI scans, to GPS navigation, modern dentistry, airbags, organ transplants, satellite internet and so on down the line. Automobiles, considered a luxury item for “early adopters” in Rockefeller’s time, are now a common consumer good, with on demand chauffeurs (ride sharing apps) for those who live in cities, couldn’t be bothered driving or simply had a little too much vino at lunch.
Over the past century, the US population grew by about 3.3x (from 102M to roughly 340M)… while the broader economy, even after adjusting for inflation, exploded by a massive 20x (from $1.7T in today’s dollars in 1916 to a mind-boggling $33T presently). In other words, the average American today produces and consumes about six times as much economic output as the average American in Rockefeller’s day.
Milk, Honey & Big Macs: Even with his considerable wealth and power, Rockefeller himself could not have afforded modern refrigeration... a commercial flight to Europe... blueberries in January... a pocket calculator... or even a Big Mac. Not because he didn’t have the dough, mind you, but because inventors, visionaries and entrepreneurs like him had not yet brought these products, and a wave of other gizmos and gadgets, to market. They simply didn’t exist yet. In other words, the men and women who said, “We’re probably gonna fail... but heck, let’s give it a try anyway!” had not yet brought their ideas to fruition.
Today, there are an estimated 26 million millionaires in the United States of America, far more than in any other country on the planet (with quadruple the population, China comes in second, with just 6 million.) There are also between 2.5 and 3 million decamillionaires ($10M+), more than 100,000+ centimillionaires ($100M+) and, much to Bernie’s grumbling consternation, over 1,000 billionaires... about 30% of the total global supply, despite the US having only 4% of the world’s population.
All that didn’t happen because politicians like Elizabeth Warren tsk-tsked the nation into prosperity with her “If you have a company, you didn’t build that” blabbering. It didn’t happen because Zohran Mamdani taxed the rich out of the greatest city in the world or because Bernie thinks “billionaires should not exist.”
It happened thanks to visionaries like Messrs. Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller... because of Henry Ford and Walt Disney and Sam Walton... because of the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who left the backwater of European empire and moved to the center of electrical innovation and market dynamism.
The conditions that enabled these and other entrepreneurs to create and to flourish delivered us the Age of Abundance we so blithely enjoy today. That is, robust private property rights, rule of law and political stability, and the advent of limited liability companies and scalable capital formation.
What marvels will mankind experience a hundred years from now, we wonder, when they’re standing on the shoulders of this century’s giants? And who will safeguard the conditions that will help empower them? In other words, in the not-too-distant year of 2126, will our space-faring progeny be minting the world’s first quadrillionaire... or squabbling in the dirt and the muck, bickering over whether such people should be “allowed” to exist in the first place? Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."
"In 2026, the cost of living crisis feels worse than ever. Inflation may look manageable on paper, but for millions of Americans, everyday life tells a very different story. Groceries cost more, housing feels out of reach, utility bills keep rising, and even basic middle-class milestones are becoming harder to afford. In this video, we break down why the affordability crisis goes far beyond inflation headlines. From collapsing savings rates and record housing costs to rising childcare expenses and hidden monthly bills, we explore the real pressures reshaping how people live, spend, and plan for the future. This analysis looks at the deeper economic forces driving the squeeze on households, including wage stagnation, elevated mortgage rates, shrinking purchasing power, and the growing gap between official data and lived reality. The bigger question is no longer just why things cost more, but whether normal middle-class life is still financially sustainable. Which expense has impacted you the most in the past two years: groceries, rent, insurance, utilities, or childcare? Share your experience in the comments."
"Why Every Civilization Collapses the Same Stupid Way –
Spengler's Philosophy of Decline"
"How do civilizations collapse - not from invasion, but from within? This video explores Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of civilizational decline, revealing why societies lose meaning, why citizens stop participating, and why cultures eventually commit a slow form of suicide. From China’s “lying flat” movement to Western burnout, quiet quitting, collapsing birth rates, and the rise of Caesar-like leaders, this video explains the psychology behind decline, including learned helplessness, convenience addiction, and the rise of Nietzsche’s “Last Men.” Spengler believed civilizations behave like living organisms - born, growing, peaking, and then dying through spiritual exhaustion. This video breaks down:
✔ The life-cycle of cultures.
✔ Why creativity turns into bureaucracy.
✔ Why meaning evaporates in late-stage societies.
✔ Why citizens voluntarily give up power.
✔ Why charismatic strongmen rise during decline.
✔ Why abundance destroys civilizations more effectively than poverty.
✔ The spiritual collapse that precedes political collapse.
This is not just philosophy - it's a mirror. The collapse happening around us starts inside us: in our choices, our attention, and our surrender to comfort. If Spengler is right, we can't stop winter - but we can choose who we become during it."
"The American taxpayer has become the cleanup crew for the American Police State. We pay for the constitutional violations. We pay for the wars. We pay for the lawsuits, the settlements, the cover-ups, the damage control, the reconstruction, the overreach, the incompetence and the corruption. And when government officials are finally called to account for their misconduct, we pay for that, too.
That is the dirty little secret of government accountability in America: even when the government loses, the government does not really pay. “We the people” do. This is not a problem invented by Donald Trump. For decades, politicians, police officers, prosecutors, prison officials, federal agents and bureaucrats of both parties have violated rights, exceeded their authority, misused public power and left taxpayers to pick up the tab.
The wrongdoers rarely pay personally. They get to keep their pensions, promotions, pardons, security details and speaking fees. The government agencies involved in misconduct rarely suffer lasting consequences. The victims get a check drawn on taxpayer funds. And the tax-paying populace gets to pay for the settlements, the legal fees, the court costs, the reconstruction costs and the long-term damage to trust in government.
The message is coming across loud and clear: the government can violate our rights in every way possible—using resources that we are forced to provide - and then it can turn right around and make us pay to clean up its many messes and right its many wrongs.
This is the Art of the Steal. Trump, having taken to government corruption like a duck to water, has made ripping off the taxpayers the cornerstone of his governing philosophy. For a man who has spent a lifetime grifting, it is the ultimate grift. During his second term in office, Trump has established a track record of forcing the public to subsidize the consequences of his own recklessness: rewarding allies, funding unconstitutional crackdowns, rebuilding what he tears down, bankrolling vanity projects, and attempting to buy his way out of crises he helped create.
Start with Iran. Trump’s war with Iran is a case study in the Art of the Doublecross. Candidate Trump sold himself as the antidote to endless war. He promised strength without entanglement, peace through power, no new wars, no more nation-building, no more wasting American lives and treasure on conflicts that do not serve the American people.
Then came the Epstein Files. Suddenly, the man who promised no new wars needed a War of Distraction. Now, after dragging the country into a preemptive, unprovoked war with Iran that Congress never authorized - a war that has rattled global markets, driven up energy prices, depleted military resources, risked regional escalation, and inflicted real economic pain on Americans already struggling to afford groceries, gas, insurance and debt payments - Trump needs help fixing the crisis he helped create.
Whatever the final terms of any so-called peace arrangement - assuming such a thing is actually forthcoming - taxpayers will bear the cost. Trump has announced, teased and promised breakthroughs before, only for the details to shift, the terms to unravel, or the supposed deal to become another bargaining chip in an endless cycle of threats, deadlines and reversals.
Rest assured, the price of Trump’s war will not be limited to missiles fired and ships deployed. It will include lives lost, military resources depleted, global markets rattled, energy prices spiked, alliances strained, enemies emboldened, and diplomatic concessions made to end a conflict that diplomacy might have prevented in the first place.
Even if U.S. taxpayers do not directly write the check for a reported $300 billion reconstruction framework, the absurdity remains: Trump starts the war, others negotiate the cleanup, and the American people are left paying the political, economic and constitutional costs. They are also paying through the dangerous precedent that empowers an imperial president to start a war based on instinct, impulse or political convenience, without constitutional accountability.
That is no small thing. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. That safeguard was not a procedural technicality. It was meant to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral adventurism: one man gambling with the lives, liberties and livelihoods of millions, then sending the invoice to the people.
The public pays while the politicians posture. That is how government turns recklessness into public debt: first by provoking the crisis, then by charging the people for the cleanup, then by pretending the cleanup is a triumph. Yet not every government bill arrives in the mail.
Some arrive at the gas pump, the grocery store, the insurance premium, the interest rate, the shrinking paycheck, the empty Treasury, and the next generation’s debt. Others arrive later, in the form of lawsuits, settlements, damages, broken families, shattered communities and rights that must be clawed back in and out of court after the damage has already been done.
Iran is only the most explosive example. We are seeing this destruction play out on almost every front: wars, raids, tariffs, deportations, political payouts, lawsuits, pardons, institutional wreckage and vanity projects. Every unconstitutional executive order, retaliatory investigation, purge, firing, freeze, funding cutoff, loyalty test and administrative abuse produces another round of emergency litigation, government lawyers, court costs, injunctions, appeals and attorney fees.
Trump governs by breaking things. Taxpayers pay for the repair. But some things cannot be repaired with money alone. Who will pay to rebuild what Trump and the architects of the police state have destroyed of our constitutional republic? As always, that burden will fall on the American people.
Trust, once shattered, is not so easily restored. Institutions, once vandalized, do not repair themselves. Constitutional limits, once treated as optional, become harder to restore with every violation. And then there are the vanity projects, where the symbolism becomes almost too obvious to miss. Trump’s so-called “beautification” projects - gaudy, expensive and self-serving - speak volumes about his disastrous approach to governing.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a public landmark that has served as the backdrop for historic moments from Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, has become a veritable swamp of slime after Trump, without meaningful oversight and at a grossly marked-up expense, decided by fiat to “fix” it and use it and the Lincoln Memorial as the backdrop for a UFC fight weigh-in. The Reflecting Pool fiasco is the Trump presidency in miniature: gaudy, expensive, performative and already covered in algae.
That warning was not about wallpaper, furniture or ceremonial rooms. It was about stewardship. It was about vigilance. It was about recognizing that the house belongs not to the occupant, but to the people whose dreams, sacrifices and constitutional inheritance it is supposed to shelter.
Trump’s transformation of the White House is a visual reminder of what he has done to the presidency itself: taken what belongs to the people, stripped it for parts, gilded what remained, and presented the wreckage as grandeur. It is embarrassing. It is grotesque. It is a national humiliation.
This is what the American experiment in self-government has been reduced to: a constitutional republic dressed up like a casino, a people’s house converted into a stage set, a presidency refashioned as a brand extension, and taxpayers forced to underwrite the spectacle.
The founders never assumed the experiment would survive on autopilot. They knew self-government was fragile. They knew republics decay when citizens become spectators, when public servants become rulers, when law becomes optional for the powerful, and when the people are made to finance their own subjugation. That is why the spectacle matters.
The gilding of the people’s house is not just a question of bad taste or bloated expense. It is constitutional graffiti: a ruler’s signature scrawled across the people’s house. It is a warning sign: a government that has forgotten the difference between public trust and private entitlement, between stewardship and ownership, between serving the people and ruling over them.
There is something obscene about gilding the people’s house while the people are being asked to pay for wars they did not approve, tariffs they were told foreigners would pay, raids carried out in their name, deportation schemes that endanger human lives, unconstitutional orders struck down by the courts, and settlements for abuses committed by government agents.
That is the real cost of cleaning up Trump’s messes. It is not merely the $1.776 billion slush fund, the tariff refunds, the deportation flights, the ICE raids, the Reflecting Pool, the East Wing, the Iran war, the courtroom defenses, the settlements or the gilded pageantry. It is the conversion of citizenship into servitude.
It is the expectation that the people will pay for their own surveillance, their own intimidation, their own impoverishment, their own silencing, their own manipulation, and their own loss of power. It is taxation for domination. It is government by mess, followed by government by invoice. It is the rewriting of the American Dream from a dream of opportunity for all to a dream of entitlement for a select, privileged few.
The American Revolution was fought, in part, against a government that forced people to finance their own subjugation. That warning still applies. When Americans are made to pay for undeclared wars, unlawful tariffs, militarized raids, political payouts, constitutional violations, palace renovations and the settlements that follow government abuse, they are not merely being overcharged. They are being ruled. And ruled people always pay.
A free people do not pay tribute to rulers. They bind them down. They hold them accountable. And, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, they refuse to be made accomplices in their own subjugation. It is time to clean house."
