They are “othering” the right so they can justify what they are about to do. Look, my wife and I made a quarter million last year. They already took more than a quarter of what I made through taxes, and that isn’t enough. It’s coming, and things are going to get ugly as hell.
I’ve been warning my readers for 6 years that this is a communist takeover in the making. I’ve been telling you to prep. They are coming. Trump was only a speedbump.
Let me paraphrase:
People who own AR-15s think they are arming themselves against a possibly tyrannical government, and that’s just plain incorrect and makes them crazy to even think so. For that reason, I think we should send armed government agents to your house to confiscate them.
Of course, it is foolish to engage in an armed battle with the cops when they show up to your house to confiscate your guns. That’s letting the enemy dictate the time and place of the engagement.
Instead, fight them the way the left fought Charlie Kirk.
You know, with discussion and debate. What else did you think I meant?
Last rant for income taxes for the 2025 tax year. I finally filed my taxes this year. My wife and I made $17,000 more in 2025 than we did in 2024. Thanks to changes in our tax situation, we lost $28,000 in tax deductions and another $12,000 in credits thanks to changes in the tax law, with the result of us paying $20,900 more in taxes for 2025 than we did in 2024.
That’s right- we got a $17,000 raise, but wound up taking home $3,900 less. Thanks a lot to the government.
Meanwhile, there are millions here in the US who don’t work, don’t pay taxes, and still hate me for paying their bills…
At this point, we are 16 days into our 21 day vacation, but this is debarkation day from the cruise. As we go through customs, there is a new twist. I’ve been to Europe before, but this time, they both take a picture for facial ID and take everyone’s fingerprints. As we traveled about Spain, I noticed African “migrants” in each town, blatantly breaking the law by their mere presence, and selling black market goods by laying them out on the sidewalk.
It seems the world is full of police powers and restrictions for everyone except illegal immigrants, happening everywhere and in every country, almost as if it were an international conspiracy. It’s shit like this that make me understand where the “one world government” theories come from.
We were spending the night here in Barcelona, so we checked in to the hotel then proceeded to walk around and do some sightseeing. This was a charming little book and stationery store near our hotel.
I love writing letters on parchment paper using fountain pens, but that is something almost no one does any more, and I wanted to go in to see what they had. What did they have? Four stories of fine paper, expensive, high-quality pens, and interesting paper goods like these book sized models:
This pen was on sale for more than $2000 Euros- that’s about $2500. I like fine pens, but not this much. A pen costing this much should come with a membership to the blowjob of the month club. If you’re getting screwed, might as well get some foreplay.
We weren’t especially hungry, so we decided for a light dinner. This is what we had:
Along with a few glasses of Sangria:
Off to bed, so we can take the train to Paris in the morning.
Imagine Congress passes the “There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch Act” (TISFATLA). The law is simple and well-intentioned: No American should go hungry during the workday. Therefore, any restaurant that chooses to remain open between 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. must provide a nutritious lunch, defined as at least 500 calories of balanced food (protein, vegetables, whole grains, etc.) to anyone who walks in and requests it, without regard to their ability to pay, insurance status, or how many times they’ve eaten there that week.
Restaurants aren’t completely cornered. They can still raise prices on breakfast and dinner, seek government subsidies, reduce portion sizes, shorten hours, or even close during lunch. But they must serve first and ask questions later, or face steep fines (tens of thousands of dollars per violation) and possible loss of their operating license.
Immediate effects: Lines snake around the block. Demand surges because the price at the point of service is zero. Office workers, students, tourists, and predictably frequent diners treat the restaurant as their new daily cafeteria. A tiny fraction of “super-users” (maybe 1–2% of customers) begin consuming 10% or more of all free lunches. One motivated individual might rack up 20–30 meals a month. Why stop? It’s “free.”
Restaurants respond as any business would: they raise breakfast and dinner prices sharply to cover losses, cut quality, shrink portions, and reduce staff. Some simply stop serving lunch altogether, shrinking overall supply and making the remaining spots even more crowded. Wait times balloon to an hour or more. Working people who can’t stand in line during their short break go hungry—not because they lack money, but because the queue rations access.
Instead of admitting the law created perverse incentives, policymakers declare the problem is “greedy restaurants” exploiting loopholes. So Congress and regulators respond with layer after layer of new rules to “fix” the distortions:
Complying with this exploding regulatory thicket isn’t cheap. Restaurants now have to hire entire new departments of billing specialists, compliance officers, nutrition auditors, and paperwork clerks just to navigate the rules and avoid ruinous fines. These added administrative costs get passed on through even higher dinner prices, smaller portions, or reduced service quality. Some smaller restaurants simply give up and close.
The result? The original promise of “free lunch” has morphed into a vast, expensive bureaucracy that employs more people pushing paper than actually cooking food. Meanwhile, lunch lines remain long, quality has declined, dinner prices have skyrocketed, and fewer restaurants are willing to stay open during the mandated hours. Everyone begins complaining that the nation’s “restaurant system” is broken. Why, in Europe, people just walk in and buy lunch without waiting!
This cycle is not hypothetical, it’s exactly how EMTALA and the broader healthcare regulatory regime have evolved. A hospital shows up with a possible emergency? Screen and stabilize first, payment questions later. When uncompensated care piles up and emergency departments become overcrowded with frequent flyers (a small group of patients driving a wildly disproportionate share of visits and ambulance runs), the response isn’t to revisit the zero-price mandate. Instead, we get more rules: ever-stricter documentation, quality metrics, electronic health record mandates, billing codes, prior authorizations, and compliance layers.
Hospitals and physician groups respond by hiring armies of coders, billers, compliance staff, and administrators. U.S. healthcare now spends roughly 25–30% of total dollars on administrative overhead — far more than in most other countries. That bureaucracy doesn’t deliver care; it manages the distortions created by mandates, price controls, and third-party payment systems. The original goal of helping people in genuine need gets buried under mountains of paperwork, while costs keep rising and access problems (long waits, boarded patients, specialist shortages) persist.
When someone tries to use jury duty, court-appointed lawyers, or judges as justification for forcing doctors and hospitals to provide “free” healthcare, they’re missing (or ignoring) this dynamic. The justice system obligations are narrow constitutional protections against government abuse of its own punitive power. EMTALA-style mandates in medicine are open-ended entitlements that conscript private resources and then breed ever-more-complex regulation to manage the inevitable shortages and abuses.
There is no free lunch, just as there is no free healthcare. Every attempt to create one through mandates simply shifts the costs (to paying customers, taxpayers, or future patients) and grows a parasitic administrative class that feeds on the resulting complexity. The compassionate impulse to help the needy is better served by increasing real supply: more doctors, fewer barriers to entry, price transparency, and targeted aid, rather than layering on rules that make the system slower, more expensive, and less responsive to actual human needs.
The problem is one of intelligence. How do you create more doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel without lowering standards? Medicine (and advanced nursing) is cognitively demanding. It requires high fluid intelligence, strong working memory, pattern recognition, and the ability to integrate massive amounts of complex information under pressure. Multiple studies put the average IQ of physicians around 120–130 (roughly the 90th–98th percentile of the population). That’s not an accident or a gatekeeping artifact; it’s what the work demands. You can’t mass-produce doctors the way you can produce more Uber drivers or retail workers without either lowering standards or hitting the natural limits of the talent pool.
There are ways to increase the number of health care workers, and we can discuss that in a later post.
In case you are wondering, this post was written because of this guy:
These were the most chilled out cops ever. I will certainly call out the cops when they are wrong. In this case, they handled this traffic stop in the most professional way.
This entire interaction was due to the US “the customer always gets their way” approach to customer service. These women have learned to just scream for a manager, who will come and kiss their ass, letting them have whatever they are demanding. That doesn’t work on police, and it shouldn’t. If you are on a traffic stop or are getting arrested, the only response people should get when demanding a supervisor is “No”
If you have a problem with your arrest or stop, fix it in court.
The last day of our cruise has arrived. We arrived at Palma, a city on the island of Mallorca, just off the Spanish coast for our last port visit. I have been here ten times from my time with the US Navy, and my wife and I have been here before, back in 2017. This time, we decided not to go ashore, and weather was poor- temperatures in the 40’s (Fahrenheit), winds of 40 miles per hour, and rain were making conditions outside miserable. Combined with the fact that out pier was a long walk to anything we would want to visit, we made the decision to stay on the ship.
It was a good choice. The ship has a glass enclosed pool deck called the solarium, and we spend the majority of the day lounging next to an indoor pool and hot tub. Once the ship got underway, we went to dinner before heading to the sports bar to watch some sports and have a few cocktails. We also enjoyed some jazz musicians before heading back to our cabin to pack our things for an early morning departure.
The next morning, our plan was to begin the land based portion of the vacation, and I knew I would not want to risk connecting to this blog through the Internet, as I am well aware of the European idea of free speech- or lack thereof. More on that tomorrow.
As a side note, I don’t usually post a lot of self-information like this, but to be quite honest, all of the disaster porn of the fall of the US, although my most popular posts, is getting difficult to write. It’s a challenge finding fresh content, and it’s a bit depressing as well. So these posts are a way of escaping the ever expanding list of bad news, reminds me that there are still plenty of upbeat topics out there, and disproves the leftist trope of those on the right being uneducated and untraveled morons.
The last of our room charge was wiped out by this little guy.
There was a lot of angst coming from the left about The Secretary of War firing the Army Chief of Staff. The left is screaming about it. Why is that?
Don’t forget that James O’Keefe exposed a plan by US military Generals who were planning on refusing orders from President Trump and overthrowing the government. I believe we are still seeing the fallout from that.
James O’Keefe released a report just before the inauguration, where a former FBI agent was bragging to an undercover reporter about how he had been in the Tank (that is the Pentagon underground command post) meeting with a number of senior military Generals, and they were planning to resist the legitimate orders of the President upon his inauguration. This wasn’t a one time conversation- this FBI agent was a senior advisor to the Pentagon, and also a key player in the efforts to torpedo Trump’s 2016 campaign for the Clinton campaign.
During these meetings, according to the interview, high-level Pentagon officials were discussing in secret meetings defying and potentially overthrowing Trump if he issued orders deemed controversial by military leadership. If that sentence doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, you don’t understand the US military.
I believe that Biden knew about all of this, which is why Milley got a Presidential pardon. After all, we already knew that Milley had staged a coup back in 2021.
They are lucky they aren’t getting the death penalty under Article 94. You can read my post on that from a year ago.
A Youtuber who calls his account Flat Circle History has been producing a series called “The Next World War” for the past year. As of now, there are 22 episodes of 10 to 20 minutes each, with one being released every few weeks. For the past 3 days, I have watched all 22 of them and I am waiting for the next one. Check it out- the first episode is below.
We arrived in Cartagena the next morning. That city is the main Mediterranean navy base for Spain. Just down the street from our dock was the main gate for the base.
This was the port where fatigue finally set in. We didn’t take a tour in this town. We decided to just walk around the area for a bit before returning to the ship. The architecture was the same as the other ports, the weather was nice, but we were just a bit tired of all of the walking. We had been walking ten miles or so a day, and this day we just walked out, got some lunch, and returned to the ship. To be honest, we have been eating so much gourmet food and good wine that I was ready for just a regular hamburger and a coke at this point.
I’m not faulting the lunch we had. I love the little restaurants and shops, but sometimes you miss the food from home, and at this point we have been on the move for over two weeks. I did see a cigarette machine in a store. I haven’t seen one of those in years.
There were some Roman ruins that I briefly looked at:
We went back to the ship and took a nap. We were tired and needed it. Dinner was amazing as always. We hit the casino and won big. When you play in the casino, you earn slot machine comps. I decided to use up all of them, as this was the second to last night. I picked a random machine, and the damned thing hit for $1200. My wife then hit on her machine for another $1400. So we walked out of the casino that night with more than $2600. Combined with our winnings from previous nights, we decided to pay our onboard expense account. That way, when we left the ship at the end of the cruise, we wouldn’t be traveling around with so much cash. After 2 weeks on the cruise our tab came to over $4000, so we paid it and still had some cash left over.