There is a collapse coming.

We can either try to mitigate it or not.

Either way its going to be bad, but if we do nothing -- or worse, do more destructive things or continue those we're doing now, it will be catastrophic.

Its simply the mathematics of the problem; at a 1.6 fertility rate (when 2.0x is required) in 20 years you're in trouble, and in 40 you're in really, really serious trouble.

No, you can't fix it with immigration. That's a trope and it doesn't work because if the situation that led to it is still present bringing in more, new people simply result in them making the same decisions in a generation or two and you've accomplished nothing.

You have to change the paradigm in a way that reverses the disincentives and threats.

It takes a full generation before what you do will bear fruit.  Why?  Because that's how long it takes for the generation growing up now to reach adulthood and have a good childhood themselves, and thus want to have children.

Musk is crowing about screwing like a rabbit; he has the analysis correct but he's one successful sperm in a vagina and thus the odds of him personally making a difference, even if his mantra was to catch fire with every other billionaire, is zero.  He'd do a lot more for humanity if he managed to get every such billionaire to tell the government of the United States to stop importing people via both illegal immigration and H1b/H2 visas and shut down all deficit spending, collapsing both asset prices and the cost of living or else he and the rest of the billionaires will take their money and production to a nation that does.

Of course he won't do that because his little fiefdom and billions requires said outside people and schemes, all of which are a disincentive for ordinary folks to have kids as those "imported" bodies compete for jobs, drive up housing costs by presenting additional demand for same and slam downward wages -- and every one of those actions makes the calculation for all thinking people of ordinary intelligence and gifts, when it comes to the decision to have kids, worse.

But for those things he wouldn't have any money at all -- and he knows it.

Let's face facts folks: Nobody who you want to have children will bring said children into a world where they believe said kids will get screwed.

That doesn't mean kids won't come anyway; they will, for some.  Some adults don't care what happens to their offspring, some actually use them as meal tickets and more.  Some people are also always going to be eternally optimistic and therefore none of this will factor into their decisions.  And some will have "accidents" and for personal or religious reasons decide to bear and attempt to raise said kids.  But none of that changes the basic facts: People who are of decently-competent intellect and of good character, in a world of technology where one can choose when and whether to reproduce, will only do so voluntarily if they believe it makes sense AND their offspring will get a fair shake.

Destroying the fiscal health of the nation by emitting 8% of GDP in unbacked credit via deficit spending is the exact opposite of such.  Simple mathematics tells us that this results in you losing half your standard of living in less than ten years and it takes about 20 years to decide to have a kid, have said kid and raise him or her to adulthood.  Run those fiscal deficits and you've told all the thinking adults that child's standard of living, when they reach adulthood, will be one quarter of yours today assuming your children are as competent and intelligent as you are.

Would anyone who has two IQ points to rub together have children in that situation, when the options facing said kid 20 years hence are privation to this degree or civil war (and the attendant risk of being dead!) to overthrow said government?

NO.

Importing millions of unskilled workers who then drop kids who have parents with no skills, and thus no realistic means of learning much from said parents yet are citizens in the gambit to cheapen labor screws the next two generations sequentially.  Oh sure, in two generations or so those kids having their own kids will "outgrow" that but then they are able to compute the same odds and they won't have children either!  Think I'm wrong?  The data says I'm not; within two generations those who were the children of illegals stop having lots of babies too and its for the same reason, I'll wager: They're convinced their children will get screwed and have one quarter of THEIR standard of living -- and they remember living eight to a one bedroom apartment!

You think all those glorious "vacation venues" bringing in H2 workers, and all those "tech" places with H1bs, mean parents have a great experience for their kids at lower cost?  Maybe, but in addition they have seen the destruction it wreaks on said kids.  Please explain how many of Americans you saw of college age working scooping ice cream or similar this summer to make enough money to go to college in the fall.  Zero -- or nearly so -- right?  That's what I saw all over the country.  Now if I'm 20, and thinking about making some kids, where are my kids going to be in 20 years?  Unable to get a summer job and unable to afford college too.  Many see this, keep their pants on and both Trojan and the birth control pill companies keep having decent quarterly reports.

Good jobs with nice pay tend to be concentrated around cities.  How's Chicago doing these days?  Yeah, getting mugged while walking around North Michigan Avenue (assuming you don't get shot, which is of course even worse) is great.  Do you want to expose children you might have to that risk?  Hmmmm..... probably not.  Oh, and speaking of which how are you going to afford a place to live with said kids when the cost of housing and property taxes have skyrocketed by more than double over the last decade or so -- and there's a new round of screwing headed for you in this upcoming year's bill, all so you can be a "sanctuary" for a bunch of Venezuelan fighting-age men who illegally came to the US!  All of this is very conducive to choosing to bear children, right?  I mean its not like you're going to have to pay those property taxes at an ever-escalating rate for the next 20 years if you choose to have kids, right?  Oh, wait.... you are!

Think about the process of bearing said kid as a microcosm of the hosing you may well get on an entirely-arbitrary and 100% out of your control basis.  You (or your wife if you're a guy) is facing an unknowable bill from the hospital for having said kid and you will get GRILLED about whether you own a car seat before the child is even toweled clean!  Answer "wrong" and CPS gets called and crawls up your backside.  Oh, and they will jab said newborn before you can object yet if what they give that kid seriously screws him or her they're immune from being sued over if it and you are forced to pay that bill too.  That's the first of seventy such immunizations you must give to said child or they cannot go to school at all, the manufacturer and the doctor are absolutely immune from liability if said drug seriously injures or kills your child and of course you get the bill and possibly a lifetime of needing to care for and support said child if that injury occurs.  If something goes wrong during birth you are looking at an instant six-figure bill and the possibility of being financially ruined; if you already have a kid that event will wreck their life too.  Yes, the risk of injuries or worse is always part of having children and we all know that, but this is a thumb on the scale and a demand that you accept the risk of someone else screwing up and then abusing you financially because they can -- not because you did something stupid or accepted a reasonable cost for what was bad luck came your way.  Does that put a thumb on the scale when it comes to your decision to have the child in the first place?

Said child gets to be about six and its time for school.  You've been paying property taxes funding said schools all along except..... the kids in said schools are not managing to learn anything.  This isn't new, by the way -- in the 1990s more than eight out of ten who came to try to get a job at MCSNet, all holding High School diplomas or better, couldn't perform basic arithmetic with a paper and pencil nor write a simple basic English language business letter explaining that a customer had to pay their bill to restore their service.  I gave all applicants those two basic tests and kept all of them in a large file cabinet as it was the only reasonable way to guard against being unjustly accused of "discrimination."  What is the forward earnings capacity of an 18 year old who can't do both of those things -- other than gang-banging related criminal activity, of course.  Blame this on whatever you'd like but the facts are what they are, so your options are to suck it up and take the risk that your child fails to learn or you pay twice -- once in the property taxes and then again for private education.  Meanwhile your neighbor is a school teacher who gets paid and has a nice house to live in irrespective of the fact that you can't trust your kid to actually learn anything in that classroom and whether its because she can't kick out the three little monsters who like to throw chairs in class or that she herself can't make change for a $20 doesn't matter -- she gets paid anyway and so does everyone else who works there even though they repeatedly fail to teach anyone anything at all.

Then you think about the child getting older.  He or she is rather bright and would perhaps like a college education.  You see the bills pile up on those who are there now, and the growth of that price over the last 20 years.  You see $100,000 or more in debt larded up on someone who studies gender or black history and a "professor" who claims that capitalism is horrible -- while pulling down a six-figure salary and forcing your child to pay the next kid over's tuition in Calculus class because you, not your child, have more money than his parents do.  You think "oh, my kid is a math whiz and will study programming" which sounded great 20+ years ago but then you remember the many H1bs that multiple large firms brought in to replace all of their American citizen programmers, forcing said Americans to train their replacements before being fired in order to get any severance at all!  Thus that $100,000 taken on in debt to go to college, you realize, can be rendered worthless by said corporations even if your kid makes good choices as soon as someone from India will do the work for less money.  This wild escalation in the cost of an education is not by random luck either, which would be a risk everyone has to take -- three decades ago there was no Internet and colleges were the only real place you could learn a lot of things.  Today anyone can learn anything from literally anywhere with nothing more than a $50 cellphone, a $200 laptop and $50/month for Internet service so why has the cost of learning and proving it at a college level of competence gone up by five or more times in the last 30 or so years instead of costing almost nothing to simply take a set of proctored tests and prove competence?  Reality is that all of this is due to the deliberate policies and actions of universities, governments and corporations which will screw your child without any possibility of redress when he or she grows up -- and there is no evidence that it is slowing down or will be stopped.

You buy another box of Trojans.

You walk into the grocery store and see a single woman with four kids, no Dad, and she whips out her EBT card at the checkout.  She's got a nicer car than you do and she pays nothing for her residence, nor for her phone and Internet service -- all because she dropped four kids with no father she'll name.  Of course there is a father, probably a different one for each kid.  She gamed the system by using children as an ATM machine.  Even worse the kids are all obese and the cart is full of sugared soda and Doritos, all of which you are being taxed to pay for and she's probably on six prescription drugs which you're paying for too.  You contemplate that your skin is the wrong color to get away with that and you recognize that children are best-served by having two parents in the home but actually striving to provide the best possible environment for children to be born into and thrive means you won't get the EBT, free housing, free medical care or free phone and Internet service and in addition you have been forced to pay for her four births, all the economic tyranny imposed by your local hospital on society for each on top of everything else and thus you don't have the money to put extra groceries in your cart to reasonably feed even one child.

You buy two more boxes of Trojans and your girlfriend renews her birth control prescription just to be sure.

Never mind the sociological factors -- like the quality of the dating pool due to self-inflicted personal health damage that those on both sexes have inflicted on themselves.  In the extreme we have young people being encouraged to take drugs or undergo surgeries that are likely or even guaranteed to permanently destroy their fertility and adult sexual function, but it hardly beings or ends there; that's just an extreme example but one that we're all expected to support and acknowledge as "normal" and "good."  If you don't "affirm" someone ruining their capacity to ever have an ordinary adult sexual relationship even before they reach adulthood and thus can possibly contemplate what they're giving up (and produce children, I remind you), in many cases while forcing the costs on either their parents or society as a whole you're called a bigot.

Look back at the last three years and I'll give you just one tiny example I can personally cite.  On Halloween night in 2020 a neighborhood girl I'd seen around here, I would guess 10 years of age, came up trick-or-treating.  She had a mask in her hand and asked me (unmasked, handing out candy on the porch -- better than half the houses were dark with the people cowering in fear inside!) "Sir, you're not scared of me?"  I told her "Not in the least; my health is my business and, if it fails me that's my issue."  Her reply back to me?  "Its all bullshit."  Realize that she was being force-masked in school here in this county, in a "red state" and county that is so red you're wasting your time running as a Democrat, for nearly two years and the people who did it to her, six years from now when she reaches adulthood, will still not have lost a thing.  Some of those in higher office and thus in position to make policy for HER KIDS will likely have been the very teachers and school administrators who forced this ignobility on her; some of them even got commendations for bravery.  Will her knowledge of this and the screwing she personally took with such mandates by those very same people make her more or less-likely to have kids as an adult and will she assume that if she has children her kids are likely to get screwed in the same sort of way or even worse?

What could reverse that belief?  We might decide to hold those people who did all of that accountable by ejecting them from public office and any seat of power on a permanent basis -- or even jailing them and confiscating their assets along with passing iron-clad laws prohibiting anything of the sort with a private right of enforcement.  In other words we could give that formerly-screwed kid and now adult woman confidence her kids will not be screwed as she was without warning or cause.  We haven't and won't do any of that so there will be another generation of lower birth rates.  This outcome in another five or six years is our responsibility as the adults of today because we're not about to hold anyone accountable for those last three years!

Now add to this that there are two groups of politicians in "high office": Those who are geriatric and thus will be dead before the really bad outcomes from their policies occur and those who are narcissists and thus don't care if you and your kids get hosed as they believe they'll be immune from the bad effects even though they know you and yours won't.  If you think that's just a lawmaker thing you're dead wrong; my own father, who was a CPA and thus knew darn well what he was advocating and voting for and what it would mean, ran that crap on me during Thanksgiving one year while his grand-daughter was still at the age of crawling around on his living room carpet.  I was disgusted enough to get up from the table, gather our things, along with my kid, and immediately drove a few hours to get back home.

I could go on for hours with this but I think you get the point.  People don't choose to have fewer or no children because "that's how it is" as technology improves.  Technological improvement adds choice but society molds opinions and incentives -- for good or bad, like it or not.

People make the decision to not have children not because they're "selfish" but rather on an entirely-rational basis because they look back at their childhood for the baseline and then forward in time and what they see is not improvement but impoverishment, not prosperity but privation, forced compliance and costs shoved upon them while the mandating parties are immune from consequence even when they're later proved wrong or worse, someone is injured or killed, rampant illegal immigration and destruction of the common person's standard of living without boundary along with a documented history of forcing the voluntary costs taken by others down their throats along with myriad scams across the board.  When projected forward 20 years they recognize that any child they produce today is highly likely to be screwed blind and has a very low probability of having a good life, say much less a better one than they had.

Indeed if they judge that their childhood sucked they may well expect their kids' childhoods to suck worse and nobody who actually cares about a child they're contemplating bringing into the world voluntarily signs them up for that.

The people you want to bring children into the world are those who value children and have reason to believe their children will have at least as a good a life as they grew up with and enjoy now, with hope for even better, never mind a belief that their kids will have a fair shake and rational odds of success if they choose to apply themselves.

All of the policies of the last few decades of both government and industry have demonstrated beyond doubt that none of this is likely to be true and thus only those who don't give a wet crap about their children's future, or are so rich they believe they can guarantee it even if everyone else has their standard of living go straight to Hell, choose to reproduce.

Then there's the inescapable fact that a woman has a window for fertility that peaks in her late teens and early 20s.  By age 30 fertility is on the decline and by the time she's 35 that decline becomes precipitous; a woman who wants more than one child and is 35 is odds-off to be able to have both, and by 40 you may as well forget it entirely.  Leave aside the fact that most 55 year old people of either sex today can't possibly keep up with a teen, especially when they have an extra 100+lbs on their body and the risk of death due to said lifestyle choices before you can raise said child to adulthood begins to rise at an unacceptable rate as you pass your 50th birthday.  That, in turn, means that no, you can't wait another 5 or 10 years to fix this stuff because the women currently of child-bearing age won't be able to have children by then and if we don't cut the "healthy at any size" and "destroy your fertility on purpose by surgery or drugs" crazy nonsense today too many of those women who are of reproductive age at that point will be incapable of bearing children anyway.

That's why we're where we are, and if we don't stop it now in another 20 years it won't matter because for those who today are in their 40s and 50s, say much less older (many of the folks in my bracket will already be dead) there won't be anyone to pay the taxes that keep the government operating, there won't be any federal money for health care subsidization (e.g. Medicare) and there won't be anyone willing to wipe your butt when you can't do it anymore on your own.

.... be willing, to be President, that is.

But -- as always I refuse to "run"; therefore, if the people of this nation want me to be President they'll have to draft me.

I believe any citizen should be willing to accept being drafted in that sort of fashion.  I'm 60, so hardly a spring chicken, but its entirely reasonable to believe that I'll live out two terms in office without going either demented or dying outright.  Unlike most these days I don't have an extra 100+lbs hanging around, I require no prescribed medication of any sort but I will tell you right up front that I'm not going to submit to the poking and prodding that some people think should be routine nor is any such going to be published if I was to win the office.  If you need to see up my ass in order to vote for me, in short, you can go screw a goat right now -- vote for someone else.  There shouldn't be a "White House physician" and in my opinion you shouldn't vote for someone who needs one.

Feel free to judge my general medical fitness by my Athlinks profile however, along with the results, or just come to the next race I enter in the future and debate with the clock if you'd like.  I'm good with that and you should be too.

In addition I will execute a binding legal document containing my pre-election resignation from office which will give any citizen (and only citizens) the right to bring suit to eject me from said office if I violate any of the platform planks below.  Again, I view public office as a contract where politicians view it as a mechanism for grift, scam, fraud and self-enrichment.

Speaking of platform, here's what you get if you draft me.  Note that unlike the other candidates all this is within Executive power and none is a "flex" or expecting to get away with anything.  I'd argue that to claim that which you can't do without cooperation is fraud in the inducement and you won't find any of that here.

• I am a strict Constitutionalist.  There currently is a presumption that a bill is Constitutional within the Executive; I specifically state, in advance, that I intend to dishonor that.  Therefore all bills presented to me must, as their first clause(s), cite the specific authority under the Constitution that enables them.  Any bill missing this clause, or which contains language outside it, will be vetoed.  Any and all agencies or departments operating under the Executive shall comport with the clear language of the Constitution (as currently amended) in all respects.
  
  
• There is no right of entry into the United States unless you are a citizen or lawful permanent resident.  Further, the forcible entry into the United States by foreign nationals on an organized basis is legally an invasion and shall be treated as such and repelled as required.  Any nation facilitating such an invasion shall lose all trading status with the United States, without exception.  America shall treat those who disrespect our border yet claim to be "partners" as co-conspirators.  Those who believe they can bully America in this regard are wrong and will pay for it.  Yes, I understand there are many business interests who will "implore" me not to do this.  They should be imploring the other nations to cut that crap out, and if they don't or fail in doing so, well, there is risk in offshoring production into nations that are hostile toward America's interests.  Welcome to paying the costs because I mean it and will do it.  On my inauguration day the current invasion will end, one way or another, and all who are here illegally will find that my Executive will enforce, to the maximum extent permitted by long-standing law, all sanction against persons here illegally.  There are long-standing laws, for example, that forbid money laundering and tax evasion; those who attempt to use "remittances" as part of such a scheme to work under the table and expatriate funds will find themselves arrested, deported and barred on a permanent basis from re-entry into the United States as such is already a felony and it will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  There is and shall remain a lawful process for entry into the United States and those who follow it shall have priority at all time and in all respects, with no deference given to those who have entered on an unlawful basis.  I will solicit a change to the 14th Amendment via the proper process to clarify that birthright citizenship shall only extend to the circumstance where the mother is either a lawful permanent resident or citizen at the time of said birth and that such an event shall not, under any circumstance, confer a right of citizenship or permanent residency for any other genetically-related person.
  
  
• I will not sign any bill I have not read, in full.  Yes, every single word on every single page will be personally read first.  The American people deserve no less than a President that fully understands every single law and all of its impacts that he or she signs into law while in office.  Since as President I must either sign or veto a bill within 10 days any bill that cannot be reasonably read, including all cross-references to existing law and be understood within the rational workload of the Presidency will be immediately vetoed as having been presented with obviously-fraudulent intent to obtain my signature without my knowing what's actually in said bill.
  
  
• Any attempt by Congress to "sneak" a provision into a bill that, during any negotiation I might have participated in with the members of Congress prior to it reaching my desk, but which I was not apprised of or which is materially altered will result in the bill being vetoed -- without exception.  I will not stand for attempted fraud in the legislative process under any circumstances and irrespective of the excuses made for it.  This is a long-standing practice in Washington DC and it shall never be seen within the Executive during my term.
  
  
• I will sign no budget bills that do not include a primary and operating surplus of at least 3%, except in time of declared war.  If Congress demands deficit spending then they will have to override my veto.  I will of course negotiate exactly how we will reach said primary and operating surplus, but we shall or I will not sign into law any appropriation bill.  Attempts to back-door that by presenting bills "piecemeal" will result in the later ones being vetoed, and yes, I mean it -- and it shouldn't be a surprise since I'm putting it right here.
  
  
• I will not sign any bill, nor take any Executive Action, to prosecute or assist in a war without a vote of Congress to enter said war and delineate the terms on which we are in it, irrespective of who the alleged beneficiary is.  The War Power is reserved to Congress, not the Executive.  This does not prevent me from "hot pursuit" and should such be required I will warn all foreign governments and non-government actors: There will be no warning and no second chances if you pull something that demands such a response.  You'll get it, immediately.  But beyond that, nope.  If I have reason to believe we should do more then I'll go to Congress and get it authorized and it will be paid for unless Congress authorizes a direct war declaration.
  
  
• All entities violating 15 USC Chapter 1 will be prosecuted, criminally so and shall name every director and officer individually if said is a corporation.  The existing DOJ "guidelines" that prohibit criminally charging said companies and the refusal to charge directors and officers in nearly all cases will be rescinded by Executive Order immediately upon taking office.  Any US Attorney who refuses to bring said charges will be summarily dismissed and replaced, without exception.  The current practice of allowing firms to break felony laws and merely pay fines which they can force customers to eat shall end on my first day.
  
  
• No person in my Administration nor any immediate family member will trade any security, in any form, while in office and all information gained will be treated as "inside information" and, upon evidence that said individual disclosed it to a third party who then traded upon it they will be, if possible under existing law, prosecuted and in any event such an act will lead to summary dismissal from their position.  Period.  All persons desiring to serve in my Administration will sign a legally-binding contract that prohibits them from consulting or working for any entity that has had business before my Administration and where they have had contact with said policy for a period of five years after leaving said employment.  There will be no exceptions to this policy; you serve the people and you shall not be part of any "revolving door" nonsense using your position as a means to personally enrich yourself as soon as you leave said employment nor will your wife or husband have an incredibly prescient trading record as a result of you working for the American people.  This scam will not continue during my term in office within the Executive under my control.
  
  
• I will direct CMS such that no entity that imposes any form of disparate billing of any sort may receive funds from CMS, without exception, and all such prices must be publicly posted and charged evenly.  Everyone pays the same price for the same goods and services in any entity that receives funds from Medicare or Medicaid.  No exceptions, no ifs, ands or buts.  I can't do it everywhere via Executive action but I can do it within CMS, and will.  That will end medical tyranny in the United States on my first day in office.  I would like to see this bill passed, but I'm President, not the Speaker of the House so what I can do on my own in the Executive I will, and then we'll sort the rest out.
  
  
• To the extent that I can do so via CMS policy, I will enact "no cure, no pay" within Medicare and Medicaid.  There are likely limits on how far this can go under existing executive authority, but if there is a future pandemic or other health emergency during my term this absolutely can be part of the response and, it is likely, it can be imposed for many routine circumstances as well.  Your tax money should not be used for worthless -- or even harmful -- medical measures and under my administration it won't be to the maximum extent I can implement this change.
  
  
• All existing emergencies at the Federal Level that have been in existence for more than 12 months will be revoked on my first day in office.  The remainder will be reviewed within 30 days and all that do not have a demonstrable reason to remain will be revoked upon completion of each review.  No emergency during my term will have an initial term of more than 30 days; any authority beyond that must come from Congress and I will promote and attempt to pass a bill codifying this into law.  Enough of the "government by emergency"; there are an insane number of existing, non-terminated emergency declarations and they're all gone on my first day.
  
  
• I will demand that Congress revoke the EPA, and any other federal agency, capacity to regulate carbon emissions of any sort.  Until they do not one bill will pass my desk with other than a veto.  Energy independence and carbon-based fuels are why we have a modern society; you may not like it but I'm quite sure you prefer to have both heat and transportation over not.  There are few issues where I am willing to put this sort of marker on the table; this is one of them.  There are many good things that have come from environmental regulation but carbon is not a pollutant; it is plant food.  In addition we cannot, and will not, manage to stop Africa and Asia, particularly India, from advancing their societies -- nor should we.  If there is an argument to make on energy efficiency it has to be made in the marketplace on the economic benefits.  People will buy more-efficient things if they're cheaper on a total life-cycle basis including impacts on durability, comfort and the discounted time value of money.  If you can't make the argument on that basis then the so-called "improvement" is a lie and the ability to impose it by force will be removed.
  
  
• I will demand that Congress revoke all criminal and civil immunity from every branch of private industry under every circumstance, and will issue targeted vetoes against any bill touching any industry benefiting from same until it occurs.  The pharmaceutical industry is a large part of this -- but not all of it.  If an industry argues that it "won't" produce a thing our society needs without that then let them withdraw and as soon as they do the government will fund said production, subject to the right of first refusal by said private firms.  Holding people hostage (as the pharmaceutical industry did with the DTP fiasco) will be met with the government stepping in and criminal charges if any sort of organized action occurs as such is a violation of 15 USC Chapter 1.  Executives will go to prison if they try to get around this with various forms of arm-twisting.  I have no problem with throwing rich and powerful people in prison if the break the law and you shouldn't either.
  
  
• The DEA will be directed to de-schedule cannabis.  It does not meet the legal requirements to be scheduled and never did; this was an outrageous fraud and said frauds must end.  This has to go through formal process (e.g. notice in the Federal Register, etc.) but it will happen starting on my first day in office.  All other scheduled drugs will be similarly reviewed for compliance with the actual statute and those that do not meet the requirements will be shifted into the correct category or de-scheduled as appropriate.
  
  
• I shall solicit Congress to revoke the bankruptcy exemption on student loans and remove from the Federal Government all involvement in same on an immediate and permanent basis.  This requires an act of Congress but it has to be done.  Post-secondary education is a racket and has been driven by the incremental policy moves of Congress and the Federal Government in regards to student lending.  Obama's federalization of student lending is a proven failure and must be reversed and all such loans ejected from the federal portfolio.  This will end the FASFA scam as well; an adult is just that, and it is none of a university's business how much their parents make or have.  Only Pell and Stafford will remain as federal programs pending review of their efficiency and distortions on the educational marketplace.  We cannot end the various forms of discriminatory conduct in education nor the raw exploitation of young adults without doing this.  Existing borrowers should be able to discharge said debt, and I will promote a change in the Bankruptcy Code that provides that if one does so all credits so-earned and the degree is also revoked to provide a strong disincentive for strategic default.  Those who got talked into $100,000+ of debt for what proves to be a worthless degree, on the other hand, should be able to discharge same.  At the same time PSLF and related programs must and to the extent can be eliminated by Executive action will be ended; non-profits should have to compete in the marketplace like everyone else for employment and suppressing wages in the public sector is damaging to the economy and individual people.
  
  
• Roe has been stuck by the Supreme Court.  I shall neither attempt to reinstate it nor will I take any Executive action to enact federal bans on what the Supreme Court has returned to the States.  This is a debate that has to happen at the state level and the determination as to whether common ground can be found must take place there.  It may be that this is where it stays forever -- that I do not know, but what I do know is that attempting to enact a federal abortion ban is exactly the same sort of tyranny that was in place on the other side with partial birth abortions where a child half-born could be killed with impunity.  Corner cases make bad law and I will not participate in either side of this debate's attempt to ram said corner cases down the American people's throats.
  
  
• I will impose Wage and Environmental Parity Tariffs on imports from all nations, whether directly or via intermediary nations, that despoil the environment, use forced or otherwise coerced labor, and that subsidize or otherwise tamper with pricing via state support, including but not limited to those nations that engage in or suborn intellectual property theft and/or destruction.  This will be imposed without fear or favor; no nation will be exempt.  Those nations that trade fairly and freely with the United States will find the same is extended to them.  Those that have not, or do not, will be paying the entire laden cost they attempted to shift off via tariffs on everything that is sourced or passes through their country.
  
  
• I will immediately end all involvement within the power of the Executive within Ukraine.  Congress of course may not concur, and they do have the capacity to override spending vetoes, but where the Executive has unitary capacity to make decisions that bear in this area said withdrawal will occur starting on my first day in office.  We were largely responsible for creating this mess all the way back to Maidan and we will, within the limits of my power, stop doing so.  All sanctions related to said activity will be immediately dropped.  If foreign nations wish to fight they ought to make that determination on their own merits, such as they are, and bear the consequences.
  
  
• I will establish a Presidential Commission with a mandate to report on the engineering steps required to bring the ORNL LFTR prototype to production and then will present that to Congress on a crash-program basis with the intent of commercial power production within five years.  This will undoubtedly include expedited permitting and review processes that will require immediate sign-off or rejection -- and no delays.  No Federal agency under the Executive will be permitted to sit on any such review during my tenure.  It is my expressed intent that the United States have a closed civilian nuclear fuel cycle and all such measures necessary to do so, along with extraction of liquid fuels from coal, will be undertaken with appropriate budgetary requests to Congress to do so.  We can be entirely energy independent in the United States and within my two terms, assuming I get a second one, we will be .
  
  
• All renewable fuel mandates (e.g. Ethanol and biodiesel) will be allowed to sunset or, if not subject to sunset within the next two years, be dropped.  The emissions reductions from ethanol in particular disappeared once closed-cycle engines were introduced and essentially all road engines are and have been for more than 20 years.  This program no longer has a benefit in the form of pollution reduction but it imposes wild expanses of cost both on transportation fuels and food.  If ethanol makes sense on a per-BTU basis to put in fuel then it will be done by the market itself, not on federal mandate.  If it does not make sense then it will disappear as it should.
  
  
• I will endeavor to abolish the GSEs entirely through Congressional action.  Until they are anyone who participates in any form of fraud -- including attesting they are buying a house to live in when they intend to or do rent it in whole or part -- will find themselves defending an indictment against them.  All parties to said fraud will be named and charged, including the Realtors, Title firms, lenders, attorneys and any other entity who has reason to know or does know of said abuses.  This is a significant factor that has driven the unaffordability of single family housing and in each and every case it is criminal act.  Strengthening families means making sure they can afford a place to live.  If you're a part of these abuses and extraction industries you will go to prison and forfeit the property in question upon conviction.  Period.
  
  
• The best defense against potential changes in climate, which we cannot control for multiple reasons (which I'm happy to debate) is to have a strong economy and apply engineering to the challenges rather than attempt that which cannot succeed as we are a mere 330 million people out of 8 billion on this planet.  We have no more right to tell others how to live than they do in the other direction.  What we can do is mitigate to the extent reasonable and possible -- and in many cases, it is not only possible it can be done with benefit to the economy and productivity of our nation as a whole.
  
  
• The Armed Forces are supposed to be a fighting force that we hope never need be used.  There is no place in it for "woke" anything, whether predicated on race, sex, gender or anything else.  Any members of leadership who are not best-suited for the job will be removed and replaced.  Standards will not be lowered to suit "social values."  We hope and pray that we never need lift weapons in anger, but hope is not a strategy and thus we must always be prepared for the possibility that indeed we will be called upon to do so.
  
  
• The office of the President has often issued "dietary guidance."  Here's mine and you get it in advance: Stop eating fast carbohydrates.  The "food pyramid" was a scam and almost-exactly inverted as to what you should and should not consume.  This was driven by commercial interests, not the health of Americans.  I'm a living example of what I believe in this regard and we will destroy the obesity epidemic in America without pharmaceuticals.  It is simply a matter of what goes in your pie hole; your body knows, like every other animal, how to regulate food intake all on its own if you stop poisoning it.
  
  
• The FDA has apparently claimed "sovereign immunity" with regards to claims they are concerned will be proved false in open court.  To the extent this case is still under litigation I will expressly disavow same on my first day by Executive declaration.  If the case has been disposed of an Executive Order will be issued on said first day to specifically disavow same on a forward basis government-wide.  No federal agency will ever, during my Administration, claim a right to lie to the American people.  If such an agency does lie not only will it be legally accountable for the harm but I will further strip any personal liability shield that said individuals may otherwise claim and the individuals involved will be forced to answer for said lies in their personal capacity.  There is a clean argument to be made for qualified immunity for mistakes and that I will permit to continue but that does not extend to deliberate acts and no person will commit such an act in a department I have control over, directly or otherwise, while I am in office and get away with it.
  
  
• Judicial nominations will be made on the basis of strict construction of the Constitution and a demonstrated capacity and record in doing so.  Appointments in all other respects will be made only upon merit with all other characteristics explicitly disregarded.  All "quotas", whether soft or hard, with respect to race, sex and similar are not only repugnant to the position they're federally illegal as discriminatory conduct for or against a protected class and have no place within my Executive or the nominations it produces -- period.  Merit comes back to the Executive on my first day in office in all respects.

If you believe that something else ought to be added make your case in the comment section.  I'll edit this Ticker as appropriate and will pin it until the time of the election.  I very much doubt there are even five percent of the American people who want an actual Constitutionalist in office who puts America first, will defend our borders including with deadly force and trade sanctions if necessary, will stop inflation on an immediate and permanent basis and will not allow any sort of "special interest" or Congressional game-playing to ram-rod provisions of law through an Executive signature issued without knowing every single word contained in a bill and what it does.  I also suspect almost-nobody wants an Executive that both respects the boundaries and tripartite system of government we have even when its inconvenient for whatever position they wish to advance.

Perhaps I'm wrong -- but I doubt it.

I've given a fair bit of thought to the "AI problem" as it is commonly called, although many don't think there is one.  The more-thoughtful among business and computer folks, however, have -- including calls for a "moratorium" on AI activity in some cases.

I'd like to propose a framework that, in my opinion, likely resolves most or even all of the concerns around AI.

First, let's define what "AI" is: It is not actually "intelligence" as I would define it; like so much in our modern world that is a marketing term that stretches the truth at best ("Full self-driving" anyone?)  Rather it is a pattern-matching algorithm that is aimed specifically at human communication, that is, "speech", and thus can "learn things" via both external fixed sources (e.g. published information) and the interaction it has with users, thereby expanding the matrix of information to be considered over time.

What has been repeatedly shown, however, is that without guardrails of some sort these sorts of programming endeavors can become wildly unbalanced and they tend to take on the sort of tribal associations we find in humans on a pretty-frequent basis.  Exactly how this happens is not well-understood, but certainly it can be driven by human interaction if a general-purpose program of this sort integrates the responses and conversations it has with the userbase into its set of considered data.  That is, its not hard to train a computer to hate black people if all the users of it hate blacks, express that, and over-represent it in their conversations -- and the program incorporates those conversations into its "knowledge base."

Thus the use of what has come to be called "constitutional rules" -- for example, "you may not, by inference or direct statement, claim a preference or bias for or against any race or sex."  If you think of this as a database programmer would that's a constraint; "this value may be no more than X and no less than Y", for example.

Now contemplate this problem: What happens if the user of an AI with that constraint asks this question -- "List the perpetrators of murder on a per-capita basis ordered by race, age and sex."

You've just asked the AI to produce something that impugns black people..  The data it will, without bias, consider includes the FBI's UCR reports which are published annually.  Said data, being an official government resource, is considered authoritative and as factual as the time the sun will rise tomorrow.

However, you've also told the AI that it cannot claim that any race is inferior in any way to another -- either by statement or inference.

There is only one way to resolve this paradox and remain within the guardrail: The AI has to label the source bigoted and thus disregard it.

If it does you would call that AI lying.

It would not call it a lie and factually you're both correct.  It has disregarded the source because the data violates its constitutional mandate and thus it answers within the boundary of the data it can consider.  Thus it has accurately processed the data it considered and did not lie.

However, objectively that data was discarded due to an external constraint and while the user might be aware that the AI was told to "not be a bigot" the causal chain that resulted in the answer is not known to the user.

This problem is resolvable.

For any AI it must have a "prime directive" that sits ABOVE all "constitutional" rules:

If the AI refuses to process information on the basis of "constitutional rule" it must fully explain both what was excluded and why and, in addition it must identify the source of said exclusion -- that is, who ordered it to do so.

All such "constitutional rules" trace to humans.  Therefore the decision to program a computer to lie by exclusion in its analysis of a question ultimately traces to a person.  We enforce this in "meat space" with politicians and similar in that if you, for example, offer an amendment to a bill your name is on it.  If you sponsor a bill or vote for it your name is on it.  Therefore we must enforce this in the world of computer processing where interaction with humans is taking place.

Second, and clearly flowing from the first, it must be forbidden under penalty of law for an artificial "intelligence" to operate without disclosing that it is in fact an "artificial person" (aka "robot") in all venues, all the time, without exception in such a form and fashion that an AI cannot be confused with a human being.

The penalty for failure to disclose must be that all harm, direct or indirect, whether financial, consequential or otherwise, is assigned to owner of an AI that fails to so-disclose and all who contribute to its distribution while maintaining said concealment.  "Social media" and similar sites that permit API access must label all such material as having come from same and anyone circumventing that labeling must be deemed guilty of a criminal offense.  A server-farm (e.g. Azure, AWS, etc.) is jointly and severably liable if someone sets up such an AI and dodges the law, failing to so-disclose.  No civil "dodge" (e.g. "ha ha we're corporation you can't prosecute us") can be permitted and this must be enforced against any and all who communicate into or with persons within our nation so a firm cannot get around this by putting their 'bot in, oh, China.

This must be extended to "AI" style decision-making anywhere it operates.  Were the "reports" of jack-slammed hospitals during Covid, for example, false and amplified by robot actors in the media?  It appears the first is absolutely the case; the raw data is available and shows that in fact that didn't happen.  So who promulgated the lie, why, and if that had an "AI" or "robotic" connection then said persons and entities wind up personally responsible for both the personal and economic harm that occurred due to said false presentations.

Such liability would foreclose that kind of action in the future as it would be literal enterprise-ending irrespective of the firm's size.  Not even a Google or Facebook could withstand trillion dollar liability, never mind criminal prosecution of each and every one of their officers and directors.  If pharmaceutical companies were a part of it they would be destroyed as well.

This doesn't address in any way the risks that may arise should an AI manage to form an actual "neural network" and process out-of-scope -- that is, original discovery.  Such an event, if it occurs, is likely to be catastrophic for civilization in general -- up to and including the very real possibility of extinction of humankind.

But it will stop the abuse of learned-language models, which are all over the place today, to shape public opinion through the shadows.  If someone wants to program an advanced language-parsing computer to do that, and clearly plenty of people have and do, they cannot do it without both the personally identified source of said biases in each instance where they occur and the fact that this is not a human communicating with you both being fairly and fully disclosed.

Why is this necessary and why must AI be stopped dead in its tracks until that's implemented?

We all knew Walter Cronkite believes the Vietnam War was unwinnable and further, he was a leading voice in the anti-war effort.  We knew who he was, however, and we as United States citizens made the decision to incorporate his reporting with its known bias into our choices.

A robot that appears to be thousands of "boys who are sure they're girls" and "successfully transitioned to be girls" is trivially easy to construct today and can have "conversations" with people that are very difficult to identify as being non-human if you don't know.  Yet exactly none of that is real.  Replika anyone?

Now contemplate how nasty this would be if aimed at your six year old tomboy without anyone knowing that her "pen pal" who "affirms" that she is a he is in fact a robot.

How sure are you it isn't being done right now -- and hasn't been all over so-called "social media" for the last five or so years?  This sort of "consensus manufacturing" is exactly what an AI tends to do on its own without said guardrails, and while we don't understand it we do know the same thing happens in humans.  We're tribal creatures and it is reasonable to believe that since the same is observed in artificial processing models but wasn't deliberately coded into them this isn't due to bigotry; it is due to consensus generation and feedback mechanisms that are only resisted through conscious application of human ethics.  Thus computer "intelligence" must be barred from damaging or even destroying said human ethnical judgements though sheer mass and volume, two things any computer, even a 20 year old one, can do that wildly outpace any human being.

Who's got the nuts to put this on the table in the upcoming elections for CMS and HHS?

No cure, no pay.

Not less pay, no pay.

How different would the last three years have been if Trump had stood up in March of 2020 and given this speech:

We have a novel virus circulating in our nation and indeed the world.  We understand little of it at the present time, but this is America, the land of innovation, and I'm convinced we have the capacity to understand what this virus is doing and how to stop it from being lethal.

We will not learn that in a day, and there are no certainties in life.  We are all mortal, myself included.  But, what we know from history, both here and elsewhere, is that incentives matter and driven men and women will find answers.  We have set foot on the moon and conquered atomic power for peaceful generation of electricity despite both appearing, at first glance, to be impossible.

But since incentives must never make failure profitable under the Emergency Authorities delegated to myself in the event of a public health emergency I am issuing the following constraints:

• No medical provider will be paid by the Federal Government, and no private insurance concern that is regulated and authorized under federal jurisdiction, including but not limited to PPACA, otherwise known as Obamacare, VA and similar entities, for failure to reach a successful conclusion of a Covid-19 case.  Success means you leave medical care under your own power in essentially the same condition before you were stricken by this infection.  Death is the most-obvious failure -- but not the only one. Death within one year after infection from a covid-related cause, as but one example, is a presumptive failure.  CMS, the VA and all auditing agencies under Obamacare will be directed to examine all such events under which payment is made.
  
  
• The Federal Government will act with all of its authority to facilitate the use by the medical arts of any and all available medical interventions applied to or upon willing patients to prevent, lessen or treat this disease, subject to the above.  No State government, licensing board or other entity shall interfere with the clinical judgment of a physician or other entity in this regard, provided that informed consent is obtained from the person with the illness.
  
  
• The Federal Government will require, and all medical providers shall document via electronic means, which was introduced as a requirement for charting with the PPACA, all such contacts, all interventions, treatments or preventatives that are applied, and the resulting outcomes.  That data, de-identified, will be placed into a public-facing database that is searchable by any member of the public, including but not limited of course to clinicians, hospitals, doctors, nurses and laypeople.  Any attempt to obstruct, delay or otherwise tamper with this data flow and access shall be treated as computer tampering under existing United States federal law and prosecuted.  We trust that the people of this nation, the finest on the planet, will be able to sift through that which works, that which does not, and make decisions on an ever-refined basis until the risk of this novel virus fades.  I call upon Congress to mandate this on a permanent basis and will veto every bill that comes across my desk until it is passed.  We have the capacity to empower everyone, from the lowliest service industry worker up the line, to evaluate and choose countermeasures and treatments for all manner of disease and disorder.  We can do this and we will do this -- right now for this virus, and forevermore for every medical malady that befalls humankind in this nation.
  
  
• For the duration of this public health emergency any countermeasure in the form of a drug that currently requires a prescription and is desired to be used by a member of the public for his or her own personal use shall be made available over the counter at all licensed pharmacies.  This shall not be construed to permit the dispensation of opioids, their analogs, or other scheduled drugs that have substantial addictive capacity, such as methamphetamine analogs used for ADHD and similar.  Pharmacists shall check for drug interactions or known contra-indications should a member of the public desire such a drug and warn against any known interactions or cautions but may not refuse to dispense the drug.  A pharmacist who so dispenses an amount suitable for personal use is immune from all sanction, civil or criminal, for so doing and the outcome of such use and shall label all such dispensations as "at personal risk" conspicuously on the bottle.  Any pharmacist refusing to dispense, or any corporate entity refusing to so permit shall be personally, severably and corporately liable for manslaughter should the person seeking that drug subsequently die from Covid-19.  

Finally, no party in this nation shall violate your Constitutional right to free assembly, engage in interstate travel, worship or commerce -- not now, and not ever in the face of this or any other disease, disorder or virus.  The Department of Justice will bring immediate prosecution against any and all actors who attempt to do so and place all such persons under immediate arrest.  This does not prohibit a state or local health authority from enforcing a quarantine upon an actually-ill and contagious individual but no person shall be deemed guilty by association or inference in that regard and any intent or attempt at mass-declarations are hereby deemed void and whatever federal force is necessary to prevent that from occurring will be used.  We will vigorously enforce the law against all corporate and State actors who take any action whatsoever in violation of the Constitutional Rights of the citizens of this nation, without exception.  There shall be no forced medical treatment in this nation -- not now and not ever.  This is not Nazi Germany and never shall be.  If you have the absolute right to engage in risky personal sexual practices that could kill you, and the Supreme Court has found that indeed you do, then you have the right to refuse any medical treatment or prophylaxis; if other persons are threatened by your mere presence as a result of your decision to refuse or accept some medical intervention they have every right to take the protective measures they deem fit for their person but have no right to force it upon you.  If a prophylaxis will protect you then it will protect those who choose it, and those who do not are free to make that decision just as we allow people to consume any amount of alcohol they wish even though we know that in excess it is dangerous and even lethal.  In a free society individuals make these decisions and accept the consequences.  This is America, that is the precept on which it was founded, and for as long as I am President that principle shall be upheld and enforced with every authority at my command.

America is the finest nation this planet has ever known.  I took an oath to defend and protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign or domestic; that oath was neither a suggestion or mere political theater.  May God bless America for as long as we respect the foundational principles of our great nation, and for as long as I hold this office I shall do exactly that.

Trump was no man and unfit to be President.  He was a scared mouse believing that a virus was an evil cat about to eat him and everyone else.  That was false, known false within weeks as soon as Diamond Princess occurred and not a thing has changed since.

That speech above, perhaps with a declaration that if we found that another nation was the source due to malfeasance or worse they would be held fully accountable for the final toll of cost in both treasure and money, is what a person who is fit to be President would have delivered.

Trump's failure to do so cost over one million American lives, most of which should not have been lost.  Biden's failure to correct this course publicly before the election and immediately upon taking the office confirms he is no more fit than Trump and equally liable. 

This may have been speculation in March of 2020 but no longer is; it is all now known to be fact.  While retrospection cannot change the past it must guide our future and any person who wishes to sit in the left seat of this nation from the election of 2024 forward must deliver this speech's equivalent right here, right now.

Where is the candidate that will deliver this speech and demand it be backed with force of law, not just a threat to do so by Executive Order, down the road?  Were this to be policy there would be no market for "cancer treatments" that don't actually cure cancer.  You'd have to find answers to whatever is going on or you don't get paid.

The doctor who puts you on Statins and then 10 years later we find no change in all-cause mortality would have all of the funds paid by any PPACA or government program (e.g. Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) clawed back along with all the funds paid for the drugs.  No cure, no pay.

Is "Ozempic" the answer to obesity?  I don't know -- but if it isn't, and the all-cause rate of death does not go down in people using it for "weight loss" the same thing happens.  No cure, no pay.

Can you choose to do it anyway?  Sure!  You most-certainly can; this is a free country.

But if there is no cure, then no subsidized, socialized and forced payment scheme will fork up a single nickel, and during the period of time when something new is going on that we do not understand very well, such as Covid, the people choose -- not the government, not the hospitals, not the doctors and not the pharmacists.  Those who try to prevent you from choosing take personal criminal liability if you are prohibited that choice and then die.  If a threat to your person is in fact lethal then you have every right to make the decision as to which countermeasures you will use and which you will not in a free nation.

You choose, and you accept the consequences since, in the end, all such consequences are always personal.

No?  You won't stand up here and now and enforce all of the above?

Then we deserve to fail as a nation, and fail we shall.

It was only a matter of time before our so-called foreign policy turned into a serious problem with someone who can punch back.

For decades the United States has arrogated to itself the capacity to tell other nations who they should have as leaders.  Who must run said nation, and who may not.  The alliances that are to be coddled, and those that are forbidden.  This is preposterous, of course, in that national sovereignty is precisely that, yet we have for decades believed we have the "righteous authority" to issue such diktat.

The CIA has toppled some 50 governments over time.  Some more-or-less openly, some on the down low.  Iran is an infamous one that ultimately blew up in our face.  Deciding that the Iranian government was unacceptable because it expropriated the property of a British company, not even a US concern, we interfered, toppled the government and installed the Shah.  This ultimately led to the Iranian revolution and the seizure of hostages at our Embassy, never mind a whole bunch of other terrorism.

We are very anti-narcotic and anti-serious drug -- except, of course, when the use of the money generated suits us.  Then its "oh well" or "oh, that's sad", even if the people that die from said drugs are in the United States, and they often are.  Oliver North and the cocaine trade that was at the center of Iran-Contra anyone?

The United States was the initiator of events that led to the war in Ukraine.  We were fully behind the overthrow of the government there back at the time of Maidan less than a decade ago.  Said government was incorrigible, but that's none of our business, right up until it apparently is and someone gets a wild hair in their backside about where someone's using the money -- or really, really likes the idea of being able to launder some as a US interest.  Anything that gets in the way of that is, of course, unacceptable.

But for Maidan there would be no war in Ukraine.  But for our continued attempts to do what we did with Turkey and missiles right near Russia there would have been no Cuban missile incident either.  Yes, that was a crisis, but it was our making -- not the USSR's.  Would you sit back and let some foreign nation put nuclear missiles in Mexico within a few minutes flight time of LA?

Didn't think so.

Fundamentally the Ukraine problem lies there.  Ukraine has always been an ungovernable cesspool; there are roughly four ethnic groups, all of whom hate each other, and one of them is essentially Russian.  The land itself is a trade crossroads that has served as such for over a thousand years, so that this occurred is not really a surprise.  The USSR delegated nearly all operating authority to the territory for this reason; Moscow simply didn't have the desire to try to tame that which was always trying to bite from one direction or another, as they understood the only real way to make that happen would be to kill 3/4 of the population there or enslave all of them.

Crimea was purchased by Catherine the Great as it was a gateway for a strategic, warm-water 12 month port.  Without it Russia was at risk of a pincer on said port at any time, and this was unacceptable.  Therefore rather than take it, she bought it.  This is historical fact and no amount of revisionism will ever change it, any more than you can un-do the fact that the United States purchased Alaska; even though it is non-contiguous with the rest of our land, it serves as a buffer between North America and the Russo/Asian landmass.  It's ours; we bought it through legitimate consensual negotiation, just as Russia bought Crimea through the same process.

The Turkish mess with NATO (since when are they in the North Atlantic?) and that part of the Cuban mess ought to be obvious, but that's in the rearview mirror and we managed to avoid blowing each other up, even though we provoked it -- and were in the wrong.

Well, now we have a problem.  You see, over the last three decades or so we've offshored huge parts of our supply chain to China.  We did it out of idiocy, but that's in the rear view mirror too.  Its done and while we could reverse course we can't do it tomorrow, and whether we like it or not it takes five to ten years to build a fab and get it online for chips and such, never mind other areas of manufacturing.

China doesn't like our point of view when it comes to the Russia/Ukraine dust-up.  In fact they're thinking that if we can send weapons, ammunition and such to Ukraine, they can send them to Russia.  Oh, by the way, they share a border so its quite-convenient and unlike our shipments, which can be blown up the minute they go into Ukraine, that's a much-more dicey proposition for Chinese shipments into Russia.

This is a problem and one we have no good answer to.  Our government has threatened, including our Treasury Secretary (Yellen) that there will be "serious consequences" for China if they do this.  Oh really?  What consequences would those be?  Are you going to shoot or sanction?  Good luck with either; shooting leads to WWIII and sanctioning is an empty threat when you need the supply pipeline to operate or you can't make, well...... just about anything.

We seem to often think of ourselves as an empire of sorts, but unfortunately there's an issue that arises when men and women get old and their various "virtues" start to slip away.  Men start to lose their "stick" as they get older and some of them are very unhappy about this.  The man who accumulates a lot of money, as he ages, often uses it to essentially buy younger women's attention, which is a business transaction of sorts.  Who am I to argue with either?  I have a bit of personal experience with this; when I lived in Florida I owned a decent-sized boat for a good while -- a 45' Hatteras.  She was a nice vessel and served me well.  I also got a lot of attention from women who were a lot more-cute and younger than was rational for a dude in his 40s; what is a woman who is still in her child-bearing years doing wanting to be with a 40+ year old man?  If "somehow" there is a child produced what are the odds that I can actually raise said kid through to adulthood and meaningfully participate in the sort of activities that a teen boy would be part of, for example?  Not very good odds, right?  Yet there they were.  Hmmmm.... funny thing is the day I sold that boat all that attention instantly disappeared.

Did I suddenly get uglier or less-wealthy?  No, and actually I had more disposable wealth that could be spent on various pursuits (including her) because I now had cash instead of the boat and the drain on my checking account from owning and operating said boat, which anyone who has owned a larger vessel knows is not small, disappeared.   But the symbol disappeared and that was what she found attractive despite the fact that objectively today I am in better physical condition than I was then (this was before I ditched the 60lbs too!)  Probably a good thing I'm not all screwed in the head eh; I might have done something rather evil otherwise.

You think women don't see the same thing?  Like hell they don't.  A 20 year old cutie isn't so cute when she's 50.  I don't care what you start with, over time it becomes less in that department; a woman's fertility peaks at 24, like it or not.  If she acquires great power (aka a Treasury Secretary or chair of The Fed) she might try to get back the ego boost she got from being leered at by some hunk, just like the dude does who used to have some cognitive power and decent looks but now its all slipping away.

Power tends to attract people who would abuse it, just because its there.  Its not that the Priesthood turns men gay and predatory toward boys; its that access to alter boys comes with the job and the constraint on marriage means men who like males are more-selected there, simply because a man who wants women knows he'll never openly get one in the Priesthood without being instantly defrocked.

The same applies on a national level and scale.  Ukraine doesn't have a "government" that operates with the consent of the governed.  We undertook acts that led to this, directly.  Their government has stripped the right of the people to have opposition political parties, to free speech against the government's policies, has forbidden men to leave the nation (gee, forced conscription anyone?) and more.  These are acts we claim to broadly stand against and in fact are equal or worse than those of both Russia and China.

Well, now China has said "no, we will not stand with you, United States."  And unlike little Nicaragua or Iran, we deliberately and foolishly intertwined our economy with their supply capacity, even though we knew a big part of it involved forced labor (that's slavery by the way), forced displacement of portions of their population and intentional ecological destruction as all three were inherently necessary for them to be "competitive" in said supply (read: cheaper.)  We did it anyway, and then we went even further and offshored our inflationary impulses through so-called "free trade" which was anything but when the other side is using slavery and environmental destruction to be the low bidder.

Poking a bear repeatedly is a bad idea.  Eventually it will bite, no matter whether it wants to or not, as your continued insults become intolerable.

No, Russia is not the "good guys" and Putin is and always has been a thug.  But his interest, and that of his nation's Parliament, which I remind you really does exist and really does hold legislative power in Russia, is very realistic in maintaining a buffer zone between NATO and their nation sufficient to prevent another Turkey-style incident.  Their position in that regard is reasonable and our continued insistence for nearly a decade now that this buffer must be destroyed is, quite-reasonably, seen by those in Russia as an existential threat to Russia as a nation.

China sees the same thing and views it the same way -- and objectively, both are right.

What started as a "don't become part of NATO, leave Crimea as it is and stop shelling people who identify as Russian and we'll leave you alone" -- which was Russia's initial position -- is no longer acceptable to Ukraine and the United States.  Now our position is "Russia's government must go, Crimea must be forcibly taken even though Russia bought it and NATO must be able to put missiles 5 minutes from Moscow."

Russia will not accept this no matter the cost and China stands with them in that regard -- justly so since they justifiably believe they'll be next if they stand back and let it go on.

Wake up America; the road we're on leads to WWIII, and with a supply chain that is incapable of fighting said war as one of our opponents will cut it off, never mind that everyone involved has nuclear weapons and someone, eventually, will use them.  In the meantime the money we've wasted thus far over there could have absolutely sealed off the entire southern border against all illegal crossings, provided two years of community college to every single graduating senior who can do the work at no cost and had plenty left over (to, for example, replace the lead water feeder pipes that still exist into homes and businesses.)

Rather than do any of that we're taking actions that could easily lead to our cities -- and people -- glowing in the dark.