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Some thoughts on Trump and Musk.

I believe that Musk thought that Trump would do something to reduce government debt. He also knew that if he helped Trump, a lot (and he did), that Trump would owe him some favors. And he could get into the government to help reduce its spending, which is an existential threat to the overall economy. Musk has more or less sucked up to every administration, of both parties. He was very chummy with Obama. He built his empire on the back of government subsidies and contracts and tax breaks, and he certainly wanted to control what happened to those. I don't think that he anticipated the backlash Tesla would receive as a consequence of his support of Trump. His current backlash may, in part, be due to his needing to distance himself from Trump.

Trump is not a fiscal conservative. Far from it. Neither is the Republican Congress (as a whole). The "big beautiful bill" is as full of pork as any federal budget in the last 65 years (that is, since JFK). The reality is that there is no hope of solving the government debt crisis, and it just gets worse every year, dragging the rest of the economy down with it.

Radical fiscal action is needed, and it can only be done by congress. Yet it is politically unfeasible. The general public does NOT understand that there is a limit to how much the government can borrow, and we are well past that point. Take the now notable town hall in Iowa where people were shouting at their Senator that any reduction in Medicaid would mean that "people will die" (to which she replied "we are all going to die"). The logic of limiting how much should the government spend on someone is lost on the vast majority. Should the government spend $50M to save the life of someone (who, by the way, did nothing to earn such a benefit)? What if everyone needed that? Where would these funds come from? Far too many think the government can just "wave a magic wand" and take care of it all.

We passed the point of "no return" fiscally as a nation in 2009.

Instead of "CCP members" I should have said "anyone with any connection to the CCP", which is basically any student from mainland China. They all need to go. These people are not our friends. They are the enemy. They are doing everything possible to weaken us from within.

When war does come, it won't just include a loss of the electrical grid. They are planning to attack any kind of infrastructure and industry. The fungus plot was just showing that they will go after agriculture as well.

So preparation is not just for loss of electricity, it will be for a temporary disruption of just about everything that we take for granted that is conveyed to us by any kind of distribution. Gasoline, food, water, heating fuels, medicine. They will go about disrupting all of this.

I don't think the vast majority of CCP members have anything to do with the party other than trying to move up the social ladder, because in China it's usually about the only way for anyone not entrepreneurial. Restricting all Communist Chinese from military and research would be the biggest impact.
Looking at the Ukraine drone attack on Russian air bases, we should look inwards and wonder how safe we really are to a comparable attack. They used local workers and had everything already in place. If MI6/CIA was capable enough of doing this kind of internal sabotage with the Ukrainians, then we can assume there's already attacks preplanned waiting for the right time in the US. We already know that they're deeply embedded in our electronics and telecommunications.
I hope everyone is/has thought about being without electricity for an extended time. We're a global society that has lost much of the resilience that helped people survive during the cyclical times of chaos and catastrophe in the past. As we rapidly descend into chaos and the world is turned upside down, we don't really have the ability to put it into context. Like a frog sitting in simmering water which slowly warmed and then boiled it. We're sitting in simmering water and waiting to see the big bubbles below. But we won't see them because at that moment, we'll be without the ability to see. The knockout punch might be small as a straw that breaks the back.

The most worrying thing I have seen in a while is the plot by two Chinese to smuggle a highly toxic fungus into the US.

The fungus would destroy main crops (wheat, corn, rice), and kill or gravely sicken livestock and humans that might come into contact with contaminated grain.

I am sure that we are not catching everything the Chinese are moving into the country. We can expect that these kinds of things are going to get dispersed on a non-trivial scale once the Chinese make a move.

In other areas, the Chinese continue to stoke internal conflict within the US. It is now becoming clear that a major sponsor of Pro-Palestinian and Antisemitic activism is China. Just like they were a major sponsor of BLM.

If there is any group of foreign nationals that the US needs to export as quickly as possible - it is CCP members living in this country.

7 Hard Questions That Everyone Should Be Asking About The “Pearl Harbor” Attack On Russia
June 2, 2025 by Michael Snyder
https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/7-h ... on-russia/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... rbour.html

Nato must brace to be attacked by Putin warns Germany's defence chief - as Zelensky celebrates 'brilliant, historic' drone strike that 'wiped out a third of Russia's strategic bombers in $7billion blitz'

Germany's defence chief has starkly warned that NATO should be prepared for a possible attack by Russia in the next four years.

General Carsten Breuer said Russia poses a 'very serious threat' to the Western defence bloc, the likes of which he has never seen in his 40-year military career.'

The warning comes amid one of Ukraine's most audacious attacks, in which it used a swarm of kamikaze drones unleashed from the backs of trucks to devastate $7billion worth of equipment at two of Russia's most critical airfields.

Ukraine's security service, the SBU, claimed to have destroyed '34% of strategic cruise missile carriers at the main airfields of the Russian Federation'.

President Volodymyr Zelensky described the attack as one for the 'history books', revealing it took 18 months to plan the top-secret mission dubbed 'Operation Spiderweb'.

spottybrowncow wrote: Sun May 25, 2025 9:54 pm News makes it look like Trump has finally realized that Putin is a madman - driven by ideology, not governed by reason, not interested in negotiation.

I can't help but wonder how much control Putin has over his own actions. Sometimes when a persons choices seem insane it was the situation, not the person, that made the decision. Powerful men always have rivals seeking to take that power for themselves. That's why a purge and rebuild phase always follows a revolution. When the war with Ukraine started, I seem to remember multiple old guard officers being taken out. Most were derided as old, fat, ex-war horses that should have been in the pasture and not a combat zone. How much of Putin's power base with the military died with those old men? When he first came to power he took heat for shaping the upper military echelons to include more of his supporters to the detriment of military readiness. That was a long time ago. Between natural deaths, assassinations, and recently, war casualties, how many hard line allies does he have left to enforce any "unsanctioned" decisions?

Unfortunately, there is little to no room for negotiating with Putin, Xi, Kim in N Korea, or the Ayatolla's in Iran. These four are welded together in a new Central Powers that is bent on dethroning the US and dominating the world. Hopefully Trump is starting to figure this out.

The Chinese continue to make steady progress in preparations for war. The following video gives some good insight into Chinese preparation for invading Taiwan, and on their project to build a command and control complex that dwarfs the pentagon. (You will have to rewind to the beginning of the video - sorry, can't get the link to reset to the beginning)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GJJVAQNOWM

As Trevor pointed out, it is in Europe's, and everyone's interest (outside of the 4 megalomaniacs mentioned at the beginning of this post) to prop up Ukraine as long as possible. This may include a NATO sourced "force of volunteers". But, as I have pointed out before, Europe has never done a good job of doing what is in its collective interest.

Meanwhile, in the latest India/Pakistan aerial skirmish, the Pakistani's did ok with Chinese tech (that which was not given to them by the Russians was stolen from us).

News makes it look like Trump has finally realized that Putin is a madman - driven by ideology, not governed by reason, not interested in negotiation. For all we know, Putin has a terminal cancer diagnosis, and cares only about cementing his legacy as the restorer of Russia's former glory.
How will Trump deal with this? Negotiation has always been his strong point, is this new territory for him? Can Trump contain a madman with access to nuclear weapons and nothing to lose? That may be where we find ourselves now.

From the beginning, Trump's wanted to focus on China. He thought he'd be able to get a peace deal and be worshipped as a great leader, but it hasn't worked out that way. He offered Putin 90% of what he wanted, only for him to change the terms and demand even more.

We've been slow to wake up to this threat. Putin isn't interested in a way out. He is on the path that he wants to be on and there's no realistic prospect of him being removed from power. His terms amount to unconditional surrender of Ukraine and no matter how many Russians have been killed, this hasn't budged in the slightest. Even Trump's become critical of him.

The number of Russian losses we can confirm by name around 110,000 soldiers, more than what we sustained in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined; the actual number is likely far higher. Around one in thirty Russian military aged men have either died or are too badly wounded for further military service. While Ukraine's losses are lower in raw numbers, in terms of population, it's at least one in twenty Ukrainian men who have died or been badly injured. I've rooted for Ukraine since the beginning, but I don't think they're going to win. Russia's not nearly the juggernaut we thought, but they're likely to push through just through sheer weight. A lot of soldiers on both sides are in their 30s and 40s.

Cynical as this policy is, Europe would be best off using Ukraine as a meat shield to buy them time to strengthen their own forces so the same doesn't happen to them. Save for nations who share a border with Russia, it's mostly been talk. The public likes the idea of being able to defend themselves without American support in the abstract, but if it comes with the caveat of "What if you have to make small cuts to your social programs?", the answer is an overwhelming "NO". If they're serious about their own defense, it'd require a multi-year commitment with raising spending to 3% of GDP to repair 35 years of atrophy and I don't think most in Europe are at that point yet.

I haven't forgotten John's words: that in a crisis war, all thoughts of rationality are tossed aside.