Bacon, Guns & Whiskey

And Iran war that has turned into a defeat more embarrassing than Vietnam, the central government’s opening moves to take over elections, China’s growing naval presence around Taiwan, and an economy on the brink. Holy cow.

A quick recap of the war’s events:

• Trump starts war to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, after previously “obliterating” their nuclear infrastructure
• ‘Active combat’ stops just short of the War Powers deadline
• Skirmishing continues, but Trump claims it doesn’t count as combat
• US and Iran agree to a ceasefire while they negotiate a real agreement
• Iran continues to claim the Strait or Hormuz
• Iran continues to launch attacks

So Iran has won a war and is on track to win the negotiations, too. And Congress has still not authorized this war.

And last week, we started to see the details of Trump’s push to change elections… just in time to impact midterms. And, at the same time, ballots across the US are being seized. The Constitution clearly sets elections as a state responsibility, but there is little hope the Supreme Court will do its job to stop it.

Meanwhile, China is quietly expanding its military deployments around Taiwan, setting up yet another US shooting target for its military to practice on — clearly demonstrating that we (America) are their primary enemy. But we’re so desperate for cheap stuff that we’re willingly ignoring the fact that we’re funding the military that is eventually going to try and defeat us.

And let’s not forget that, while all this is happening, a bunch of macroeconomic indicators are starting to flash warning signs, the central government has more debt on the books (almost $40,000,000,000,000) than our entire economy generates in a single year (121% debt-to-GDP, as of the time of this post) with no end in sight. But hey, people have been saying a recession is coming since the last one ended, right? Then consider this; countries are selling US treasuries (aka reducing the amounts they are willing to lend to the US in the form of bonds) and China has been offloading US debt in exchange for gold for years. China now has the third largest stockpile of gold on earth — likely a major part of its efforts to de-dollarize and convince others to do the same (or at least to rely on their currency as a more stable alternative to the dollar).

That’s a lot of words to say that, once again, Congress has abdicated its responsibility, the Supreme Court is little more than a rubber stamp, and we have truly become an authoritarian kleptocracy — at the precise moment that the rest of the world has grown tired of us and our government’s nonsense and we’re at real risk of becoming an isolated third-world country when everyone else abandons our economy and our money is worthless.