Mike 🇺🇸

Taco Bell reveals a Butter Chicken Taco is coming to the U.S. soon 🙌

Manufacturing productivity has exploded over the past century, yet your groceries cost more every month. How is this possible? When manufacturers deploy robots and AI systems, they slash production costs dramatically. A Tesla factory produces cars with 90% fewer human hours than traditional automakers. Semiconductor fabs churn out chips that would have cost millions to produce in the 1970s for pennies today. Basic economic theory says falling costs should mean falling prices across the economy. The disconnect emerges from central bank money printing. The Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply by over 300% since 2008 alone. This freshly created money flows first to banks, government contractors, and asset holders—bidding up prices before productivity gains can reach consumers. You're caught in a tug-of-war between deflationary technology and inflationary monetary policy. Real-world evidence abounds. Computing power follows Moore's Law downward while housing, healthcare, and education (all heavily government-influenced sectors) skyrocket. Food prices climb despite agricultural automation. The Cantillon Effect strikes again—those closest to the money printer capture the benefits while working families face higher costs despite living in the most productive era in human history. Central bankers claim they're fighting deflation, but deflation from increased productivity represents genuine prosperity. When prices fall because you can produce more with less, everyone wins. When central banks counteract this natural process with monetary expansion, they're literally stealing the benefits of human ingenuity from ordinary people and redistributing them to the financial class.

The Trump Admin has successfully reduced the federal bureaucracy by 352,000! Returning taxpayer dollars to taxpayers and freeing the economy to prosper!

Until recently, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were green card holders living lavishly in the United States. Afshar is the niece of deceased Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. She is also an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime who celebrated attacks on Americans and referred to our country as the "Great Satan." This week, I terminated both Afshar and her daughter's legal status and they are now in ICE custody, pending removal from the United States. The Trump Administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes.

The search for our ship's Techie begins (The Sweet Sixteen+) Choose -

The Athenian Empire fell because politicians turned emergency war taxes into permanent wealth extraction. Sound familiar? When Pericles launched the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC, Athens controlled the largest treasury in Greek history. The Delian League had funneled tribute from 200+ city-states into Athenian coffers for decades. But war spending devoured this wealth faster than anyone expected. By 428 BC, just three years in, Athens faced its first fiscal crisis. The Athenian assembly's solution? The eisphora, a "temporary" emergency tax on the wealthy. Initially set at 1% of property value, it quickly escalated. By 425 BC, they doubled it. By 415 BC, they tripled it. The rich began liquidating assets to pay. Capital fled to Sparta, Corinth, anywhere beyond Athens' reach. Ship owners moved their fleets. Merchants relocated their operations. The very people who built Athens' commercial empire started abandoning it. But the politicians needed more revenue, not less. They expanded the eisphora to the middle class. They imposed liturgies—forced "donations" for warships and festivals. They debased the silver currency, mixing in copper and tin. Prices soared. Trade collapsed. The Piraeus, once the Mediterranean's busiest port, emptied as foreign merchants sought stabler markets. By 404 BC, Athens surrendered not because Spartan hoplites breached their walls, but because their economy imploded. The emergency taxes that were supposed to fund victory instead funded defeat. Every modern government facing fiscal crisis should study Athens carefully. They always choose the same path.

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

Austrian president says all women should wear a hijab to show solidarity with Muslims: “With increasing Islamophobia, we may have to ask ALL women to wear a headscarf to show solidarity with those who do so for religious reasons.” This is mental illness.