Is Trump's Golden Fleet the Great White Fleet of the 21st century?

Here we go again.  Understand that naval dominance has protected the seas for over two centuries and it is irrelevant who actually paid for it all because free commerce ultimately paid for it all.

We are now entering a world of drone warfare in which every cargo ship can pack a sawarm of combat drones easily operated from the other side of the globe.  Observe the amazing effectiveness of the Black Sea fleet.

what i am saying is that the entire blue water navy is today all show. and way too expensive to risk in hostile waters.  We can still imagine a slugging match today, but tomorrow we can fly 10,000 drones packing micro torpedos to attack any ship we like.  

So let the shjow go on.  Navy ships can become gravity ships able to lift of the water and pass into space.  They can also become subsea platforms.

Seriously, it is still the carrrier group which is a mabile airfield that actually matters.  it is very much a target but so what.  you avoid that risk as has happened since WWII..

Is Trump's Golden Fleet the Great White Fleet of the 21st century?

By David Szondy

December 24, 2025

The Trump administration has announced that it wants to build a new class of battleships. But this is just one element of the Golden Fleet –a larger program of naval reform aimed at a major transformation of the US Navy and its strategy.

On December 22, 2025, the US Navy announced that the administration plans to build up to 25 of the first class of battleships since the Second World War. However, there is much more to the story than just the construction of a new warship. It also marks the largest change in naval strategy since the Cold War decision to base fleets solely around carrier strike groups, as well as a global trend for the world's major navies to adapt to rapidly changing technologies.

By 1945, naval strategies had undergone a major paradigm shift that is only now coming to an end. When the Second World War started, the main strength of the Allied and Axis navies revolved around battleships, which were large, heavily armored vessels equipped with batteries of heavy guns of up to 16 inches (41 cm) that could fire tonnes of steel shells in a single salvo.

The sea battles between the Royal Navy and the German battleships Bismarck and Graf Spree, and the shore bombardments of Normandy, Anzio, and Okinawa are testaments to the awesome firepower of the battleship, but the losses by aircraft at the battles of Pearl Harbor and Taranto, as well as sinkings of the British battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the Japanese Musashi and Yamato, the German Tirpitz, and the Italian Roma showed that unless accompanied by a defensive group these craft were becoming far too vulnerable to air attack.

Since then, the aircraft carrier has reigned supreme (though don't say this too loudly in front of submariners, who only regard surface ships as targets), but that is changing as new anti-ship weapons are making high-asset ships like carriers too valuable to be risked and, in the event of a full-blown war, must be kept as far from the front lines as possible.

This is being exacerbated by the swift emergence of new technologies, including hypersonic missiles, drones, directed energy weapons, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence that could have as big an impact on naval design as the introduction of the first battleship, HMS Dreadnought, or the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus.

Added to this is the fundamental change in the geopolitical situation that is seeing a shift away from the end-of-history rule-based policies of soft power and international consensus back to something more akin to the Age of Empire, with world and regional powers relying more on the hard power of military might combined with economic and strategic pressure. It's in the light of this that NATO is undergoing a major jump in defense spending, with new shipbuilding programs, munitions factories, and army recruitment drives across the continent.

From the American point of view there are also the domestic problems of a significant deterioration in shipbuilding capacity and maintenance. Without laboring the point, US defense procurement and general naval operations are an utter mess after decades of neglect.

The Trump-class battleship compared in size to other US warships

US Navy

On top of all of this is the fact that the New START treaty will expire on February 5, 2026, giving the US the freedom to restore tactical nuclear deterrence capability to its surface fleet in the form of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to fend off aggression in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the US Navy is moving to a greater focus on the Western Hemisphere to protect sea lines of communications that account for 40% of American trade.

What all this boils down to is that the Trump-class battleships are one end of what has come to be known as the "Barbell" strategy. The idea is that the US Navy will focus its main attention on protecting the Western Hemisphere while also being able to take on Russia and China simultaneously anywhere in the world by means of a new kind of fleet.

Under the Barbell strategy, the US Navy will be restructured into two primary components. At one end of the barbell will be the new battleships that are actually advanced missile strike-platforms, nuclear strike carriers, and other group assets, as well as other larger warships operating independently or in task forces. The other end will be the Golden Swarm, which will consist of a much larger number of small, low-cost uncrewed surface and undersea vessels that will act as the eyes and ears of the fleets as well as delivering the ability to act as force multipliers by way of saturation attacks. The basic idea is for this combination to make the cost of engaging with the US too high for an enemy to contemplate.

Beyond the Barbell strategy, the Golden Fleet plan includes revamping the US industrial base by re-shoring and introducing robotic factories and 3D printing at scale to speed up production while bypassing chronic labor shortages that have plagued American shipyards.

This approach also includes shifting shipbuilding to put an emphasis on speed of production. One immediate example of this is that the Navy has announced the cancelation of its Italian-designed Constellation-class frigate program after years of delays and cost overruns in favor of an American-designed FF(X) frigate based on the US Coast Guard's Legend-class national security cutter.

This is a simpler design that will launch without the vertical missile launchers of the Constellation class, though these will be added later in the form of container modules. The FF(X) will also go without a built-in hull sonar system, but will rely on Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) and MH-60R helicopters for anti-submarine work. It's hoped this approach will expand the US frigate numbers much faster than currently possible.

One final point concerns the name “Golden Fleet.” It may reflect more than a touch of egotism on the part of the commander-in-chief, but it is also likely a deliberate signal intended for an international audience.

In 1907. US President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched 16 modern battleships of the Atlantic Fleet on a worldwide tour known as the Great White Fleet, named for their white peacetime paint scheme. The goal was to demonstrate to the world that America was emerging as a premier blue-water naval power that could deploy an entire battle fleet to any ocean. Along with being an operational test of the fleet's capabilities, it was also a concrete example of Roosevelt's "Big Stick" diplomacy of fostering international goodwill while also projecting an image of strength and the willingness to use it. "Speak softly and carry a big stick," indeed.

The Golden Fleet may be intended to serve a similar purpose. On the one hand, it signals American naval capability and commitment to security; on the other, it sends a clear message to Russia and China that the US intends to operate not merely from a position of strength, but of superiority.

Mind you, like any strategy, it can backfire if not handled properly. Roosevelt's White Fleet was certainly impressive, but it showed off American weaknesses as well as strengths. By the time it sailed back to Hampton Roads in 1909, it was already obsolete, as HMS Dreadnought had fundamentally changed the game. In addition, the circumnavigation highlighted the US Navy's dependence on British coaling stations around the world in order to get anywhere.

A similar fate already faces the Golden Fleet, with some critics immediately declaring it obsolete in the face of Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBM) and that the dependence of robotic factories might not be possible given the erosion of the domestic industrial base.

Whatever the outcome, or even if Congress will finance it, one thing is clear. Naval warfare is changing and the major powers must and are changing with it. Whether it's the Golden Fleet, the Atlantic Bastion, or under some other name, the fleets of tomorrow will look as different from today's as Queen Victoria's Navy did compared to the nuclear fleet of the 21st century.

The Crisis in Physics is Real

oh the irony qnd no one picks up my paper on higher level metrics, nor understands my SPACE TIME Pendulum, all of which provides cloud cosmology its mathematica.

They are stuck and cannot deny it any longer.  meantime the universe, my cloud cosmology and #I/Atlas show us how to sail through the star fields for a 30,000 year lifespan.

The foundational ideas underlying physics is there in my work.  We even have the computer power to simulate thousands of axis and their interactions which then simuates all we think we know.

Two months ago, it did not occur to me that we could populates any asteroid and embark for alpha centuri at near light speed.  Maybe we can use a bicycle wheel space station to also do this.  My take home is that true Space Exloration is now a real possibility.  just like back in the days of the Spanish Main.

The Crisis in Physics is Real

Subhash Kak

Follow

5 min read

·Nov 20, 2025

Stars over the night sky (Unsplash)

Physics, arguably the most basic of sciences, is in the middle of an ongoing crisis that appears to be without end. This becomes clear if one notes that the physics Nobel Prize in 2024 was awarded for work on artificial neural networks, a mathematical model that uses nodes (neurons) in a layered architecture to recognize patterns and correlations in data, which has nothing to do with physics.

Fundamental advance in physics seems to have been stuck since mid-1970s, when the Standard Model (SM) that describes three of the four known fundamental forces was developed. SM includes electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions. However, it is not a complete theory of fundamental interactions, for it leaves out gravity, and doesn’t explain why there is more matter than anti-matter and why neutrinos oscillate between different forms.

Many theories beyond the Standard Model have been developed but they have failed to produce a single testable prediction and generally are not even falsifiable. They seem to be like the medieval attempts to estimate the number of angels who can stand on the head of a pin [Note 1]. In the mix of these theories, it is hard to separate sense from nonsense.

Missing matter and energy

The problem with physics is not limited to particle physics. Gravitational force has been well studied but there are anomalous motions of stars in galaxies. So dark matter has been postulated, and it is estimated to be 28% of the universe. Furthermore, the expansion of the universe began to accelerate about 8 billion years ago and this has been marked due to dark energy which is estimated to be 68% of the universe.

There is no observational evidence for either dark matter or dark energy. Decades of predicted “new physics” (such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and grand unified theories) have been repeatedly ruled out or pushed to inaccessible energies. [Note 2]

What is more likely: That evidence for the missing 96% dark matter and dark energy will come up soon, or that the current framework of physics is lacking something fundamental?

The idea of dark energy is problematic philosophically. If true, matter in the universe will continue to pull further apart due to the accelerating expansion until the energy in all the stars is exhausted and all life extinguished in what is called the Big Freeze. This doesn’t explain the current period in which our consciousness has been able to make sense of the universe is some limited manner.

In the face of this real crisis, the funding agencies have made things worse. There are incentives that favor quantity of papers published and following the crowd. The process discourages original and critical thinking. Many physicists privately acknowledge the crisis but don’t speak of it in public, lest it threaten their careers and funding.

The physics establishment keeps on asking for more funds for dramatic payoff at some future time. For many years the slogan has been to ask for a moving window of ten years for nuclear fusion that is now being applied to quantum computers.

It reminds one of a famous story of Mullah Nasruddin:

Once Mullah Nasruddin promised his king that he can teach his donkey to read. He said all that he needed was 1,000 dinars and ten years. The king agreed but insisted that if the donkey failed the test, the Mullah would be put to death. When he reached home with the money, his wife was furious. Relax, Nasruddin told his wife, how does anyone know that a donkey cannot be taught to read. Furthermore, even if a donkey can’t be taught remember that ten years is a long time. During that period, the king may be dead, the donkey may be dead, or he may be dead. If they are not dead and if they are unable to teach the donkey, they can flee the kingdom in the tenth year.

The death of naturalness and commonsense

Practical Interstellar Transit.

 

Practical Interstellar Transit.

watching 3I\Atlas which has clearly come in from interstellar space as contrasted to most observed comets which seem to have come in from local stellar environs, I come to another conclusion.  From cloud cosmology we already know that a large stellar object can be harnessed to radically alter velocity upward to a meaningful fraction of light speed.

Understand that kinetic energy KE equals MASS times VELOCITY Squared.  If all measurable MASS is DARK MATTER and can be shifted out of the objects effective wave guide, then energy conservation tells us that VELOCITY has to approach light speed.  Is it possible that many Comets are in fact objects passing between starsr

Harnessing a small asteroid, populating it with a large crew along with artifical gravity,  and sending it outward bound to Alpha Centuri at ninety percent of light speed will get you there inside of a decade.  this manipulation of mass also allows you to come in at speeds allwing for a long visit and exploration and the real capacity to return just as fast.

My take home is that I know how this can be accomplished soon after we establish full space capability.  and yes our local ships can do this speed trick as well and it certainly explains everything we know about UfOs..  This also means a real presense throughout our solar system once we master artifial gravity although we do have work arounds as well.

3I/ATLAS is Hiding Behind a Veil of Dust

This conforms wonderfully  with every comet observed and it is a useful dust cloud.  On the basis of the Pleistocene nonconformityin which a comet broke up and impacted our northern Ice Sheet, I do think that the dust is mostly elemental carbon.

We now also understand just how such an object can be targeted and carefully timed to essentially replicate the Pleistocene Nonconformity.

Understand that for twenty years I merely knew that the impossible had happened from the body of conforming evidence which certainly became possible from intelligent decissions and using not understood methods.  We now undetrstand.

Twenty years to figure it out.  Also Twenty years to figure out ho

w to build the Great Pyramid, on time and on budget.  Also Twenty years to build the Great Pyramid.

3I/ATLAS is Hiding Behind a Veil of Dust

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-is-hiding-behind-a-veil-of-dust-39e2d76468a9

Image of 3I/ATLAS on Dec. 21.627, 2025 UTC (with a contour plot on the left). The jet to the right (west) is the anti-tail heading towards the Sun. The field is 6 by 12 arcminutes, and the exposure duration is 15 seconds on the NEOSSat 0.15-m Maksutov orbiting telescope. The coordinate grid is ecliptic 2000. (Image credit: D. D. Balam (DAO/NRC), C. E. Spratt (ret), D. W. E. Green (CBAT), P. Langill (RAO/U. of Calgary), Omar Elmi (CSA), Jack Williams (CSA) & Canadian Space Agency)

In my latest two essays, accessible here and here, I showed that the characteristic radius of dust particles in the anti-tail jet launched from the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is of order ~10 microns. This conclusion was based on the observed length of the jet and the requirement that the dust particles reach the jet speed through drag on the outflowing gas. Given these requirements, I derived here the mass density D of gas in the outflow at a distance d from the nucleus center,

D~(3.2*10^{-8} g/cm³)*(d/1km)^{-2},

Let us assume that a significant fraction of the total mass loss after perihelion is carried by ~10-micron dust particles. The mass of each 10-micron dust particle is m~10^{-8} g, implying that the particle number per unit volume near the base of the jet is:

n~D/m= 3.2 cm^{-3}*(d/1km)^{-2}.

The cross-sectional area of each 10-micron particle for scattering sunlight is:

S=pi*(10^{-3}cm)²= 3.14*10^{-6} cm².

Therefore, the scattering probability of sunlight from outside down to a distance d from the nucleus center is given by:

P = (n*S*d) ~ 1*(d/1km)^{-1}.

The minimum value of the radial distance d is the radius of the nucleus, R_n:

minimum{d}=R_n.

If the scattering probability P exceeds a value of unity, then the nucleus surface of a natural comet would not be exposed to sunlight and the release of gas or dust would stop. This implies that the radius of the nucleus for a natural comet must be larger than the value of d which yields P~1, namely:

R_n> 1 km,

corresponding to a minimum nucleus diameter for 3I/ATLAS of ~2 kilometers.

This lower limit applies only if the jet results from the illumination of the nucleus of a natural comet by sunlight. On the other hand, if the release of dust is intended to protect a technological object from sunlight, then a value of P>1 around the nucleus will be favored by design as a protective blanket. In this case, the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS might have a radius R_n<0.7 km which cannot be resolved in scattered sunlight by an external observer.

Either way, it is a remarkable coincidence that P is of order unity for the inferred size and mass loss rate of 3I/ATLAS. This coincidence could be a natural consequence of a self-regulating feedback loop that keeps the value of P close to ~1 because a larger value suppresses the release of dust whereas a smaller value enhances the release of dust, bringing the density of dust at the base of the jet to yield P~1. But it could also be a protective measure of an artificial origin.

In summary, the blanket of dust surrounding 3I/ATLAS is on the borderline between it being opaque and transparent to sunlight. This means that imaging by an external camera with a sub-kilometer spatial resolution would have likely shown a fuzzy cloud of dust rather than a nucleus with a sharp boundary.

3I/ATLAS is hiding behind a veil of dust.

Large global study analyzing data from 192 countries has sparked intense debate

how is it that we have become so addicted to chasing markers?  Here again a whole medical meme is tossed.  Understand that the whole industry is subjected to short term marketing drives having nothing to do with balanced medical consensus even.

In fact i now  thik that we need to apply the rule of tewerlve vto the medical communnity in which a natural commnity of doctors and eve other practisianers select twelve natural leaders.

these are tasked to evaluate new drugs and protocols by trying them on to produce LIVING data.  this is waqy better and less likely to be manipulated.

Large global study analyzing data from 192 countries has sparked intense debate by suggesting that higher cholesterol levels may be linked to longer life expectancy. 

Vincentius Liong/Leong 梁国豪

Retired Leader | 30+ Yrs in Electronic Security & Building Automation with Fortune 500 Multinational Corporations Experience | Business Consultant | Personal Advisor to CEO | Entrepreneur | 26,000+ 1st Level Connections1d Edited

The findings challenge decades of conventional wisdom that framed cholesterol primarily as a health risk. Instead, the research points to a more complex relationship between cholesterol, aging, and overall survival at a population level. Researchers compared national average cholesterol levels with mortality rates and life expectancy across nearly the entire world. Surprisingly, countries with higher average cholesterol often showed longer lifespans, while nations with lower cholesterol levels tended to have shorter average life expectancy. This pattern appeared consistently across diverse regions, income levels, and healthcare systems. 📌📌Scientists caution that the findings do not mean cholesterol is universally protective or that extremely high levels are harmless. 

Rather, cholesterol may play vital roles in hormone production, cell repair, immune function, and brain health, especially in older populations. Low cholesterol has also been associated in some studies with frailty, chronic illness, and higher all-cause mortality. The study highlights a growing realization in medical science: health markers cannot be judged in isolation. Age, nutrition, inflammation, lifestyle, and metabolic health all influence how cholesterol behaves in the body. What may be risky in one context could be neutral or even beneficial in another. While the results do not overturn existing cardiovascular guidelines, they do encourage a more nuanced conversation. Longevity appears to be shaped not by a single number, but by balance, context, and the body’s ability to adapt over time. 📌 Sources and References: ✓Read and learn more:

https://lnkd.in/gEtcDVdX https://lnkd.in/gHirwGvB https://lnkd.in/gSvEU9a3 https://lnkd.in/gS83Rc2C https://lnkd.in/gma32vVb https://lnkd.in/g9-BnNjy https://lnkd.in/gNr-T-5M https://lnkd.in/gFTGdjAV https://lnkd.in/gaQN8EwA https://lnkd.in/gWGfe7dU ✓Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publications: https://lnkd.in/gswHZ6fC https://lnkd.in/g82arRnQ https://lnkd.in/gChdcTbT https://lnkd.in/g7bjR_XK https://lnkd.in/gvJhSfW6 https://lnkd.in/gtHtevQ3 https://lnkd.in/gyeKHW74 https://lnkd.in/gjiMD3eT https://lnkd.in/gEYEWWix https://lnkd.in/gXaQb567 https://lnkd.in/gCMVuSg8 https://lnkd.in/gnnRJgD3 https://lnkd.in/gcTExqCW https://lnkd.in/gZBxJQck

Are European Chicken Hawks Finally Sobering Up For Christmas?

By now it should be palpaple that russia wants out. actual military expansion is completely beyond them and sustained NATO logistics is in fact making it all untenable.

Someone must propose a pathway to Russia joining NATO in exchange for an independent border commission.

russia needs a new version of its military industrial complex and joining NATO may even save Putin

Are European Hawks Finally Sobering Up For Christmas?

Wednesday, Dec 24, 2025 - 06:45 AM

Russia's outspoken deputy chair of the Security Council and former president Dmitry Medvedev has continued what he does best - mocking and trolling European leaders over their Ukraine stance. He has reacted on social media to recent remarks by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, saying he was struck by what he described as a noticeably softer approach toward Russia.

Even France's Emmanuel Macron has also of late reached out to Moscow, seeking to enter direct dialogue with President Putin over the future of the conflict. This is in large part appears motivated by Europe not wanting Washington to control the narrative on potential peace settlement.

Writing on his channel on the "Max" platform, Medvedev said he was surprised by the two leaders' positions, arguing that they appeared to diverge from what he called the prevailing European Union narrative of a "Russian threat," which he said has been driven by Brussels.

His comments come amid ongoing high tensions between Russia and Western countries, but as some European officials begin also to signal a more measured view of the likelihood of a direct military confrontation.

Medvedev wrote with in his characteristically sarcastic tone, "The 'European peacemakers' caught me off guard."

"Pistorius stated he doesn't believe a war between NATO and Russia is imminent, and Stubb acknowledged that Russia has no interest in attacking member countries of the alliance," he continued.

And then questioned, "What’s going on? Are they finally sobering up, or have the Christmas holidays already begun?"

As a reminder, Christmas in Russia falls on January 7th, which is Russian Orthodox Christmas based on the older, pre-Gregorian calendar.

TASS notes to its readers that in Europe on Dec. 25 and after, "These days typically mark a holiday period extending through New Year’s. In Germany, festivities often feature mulled wine and flaming punch, while in Finland, they enjoy even stronger Swedish glogg."

As for Pistorius' recent remarks in an interview with Die Zeit and elsewhere, he's apparently distanced himself from alarmism within NATO. Now he's saying he does not believe in a scenario of a full-scale war between Russia and the alliance. The German defense chief was actually pushing back against other hawks, a rarity:

He was commenting on remarks by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who said the Alliance must be prepared for a war “on the scale experienced by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers”. Pistorius responded bluntly, saying this was most likely a figurative exaggeration. “I do not believe in such a scenario. In my view, Putin does not intend to wage a full-scale global war against NATO.” At the same time, he stresses that this does not remove the need to rearm the Bundeswehr. Recently, he said that the past summer may have been “the last peaceful one” for Europe.

So now Medvedev is responding somewhat positively with a warmish Christmas greetings of sorts, while also in his fashion saying essentially 'told ya so'.

Moscow, including Putin himself, has taken pains to make clear that there are no plans for some kind of expansion of the war into NATO countries, and that Russia is not looking to reconstitute a lost empire or the Soviet Union.

Tulsi’s Assessment That Putin Doesn’t Want To Conquer All of Ukraine Is Absolutely Correct

Putin interest was always about what he actually took and now occupies.  His original attyack tward Kiev was an attempted coup de main aimed at a quick settlement and going home with exactly the land now held.

none of that worked and we have a three year disaster.

What we now need is a border commission and population displacement as stalin did.

Tulsi’s Assessment That Putin Doesn’t Want To Conquer All of Ukraine Is Absolutely Correct

By Andrew Korybko

December 23, 2025

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/12/no_author/tulsis-assessment-that-putin-doesnt-want-to-conquer-all-of-ukraine-is-absolutely-correct/

There are logical military and strategic reasons why he’s not interested in this whatsoever at all.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard responded to a report from Reuters alleging that “Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and reclaiming parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire”. Tulsi condemned that as a “lie” to undermine Trump’s peace efforts and thus risk a possible hot Russian-US war. She also claimed that “Russia’s battlefield performance indicates it does not currently have the capability to conquer and occupy all of Ukraine, let alone Europe.”

Her assessment is absolutely correct for the reasons that’ll now be explained. For starters, Putin authorized the special operation after diplomacy failed to neutralize Ukrainian-emanating threats from NATO, ergo why Russia was compelled to resort to force. Unlike what many “Non-Russian Pro-Russians” nowadays claim on social media, “The ‘War Of Attrition’ Was Improvised & Not Russia’s Plan All Along”, occurring only because the UK and Poland unexpectedly sabotaged spring 2022’s peace deal.

Unprecedented support from NATO led to the aforesaid “war of attrition” and resultant stalemate along large parts of the front for protracted periods of time. As was assessed as early as that summer in July 2022, “All Sides Of The Ukrainian Conflict Underestimated Each Other”, which is why this support caught Russian planners off guard but also why it failed to inflict a strategic defeat upon Russia too. These 20 constructive critiques of Russia’s special operation from November 2022 are also relevant to this day too.

Even if Russia achieves a long-awaited breakthrough across the front, whatever territory it steamrolls into beyond that of the four disputed regions would likely only be for leverage for coercing Ukraine into complying with more of Putin’s demands for peace in exchange for withdrawing from there. Expanding Russia’s territorial claims through the holding of referenda in new regions would require controlling a significant amount of their land with an equally significant amount of people still there to participate.

Neither can be taken for granted, especially that locals won’t flee as refugees either deeper into Ukraine or across the front lines into Russia, hence the unreliability of this scenario. The strategic consequences could also be disproportionately severe if this ever unfolds since Trump could be provoked into escalating US involvement in the conflict after feeling like Putin disrespected him by doing this amidst their peace talks or possibly even manipulated him by supposedly only participating in them to buy time.

Trump has slammed Biden for the US’ complete loss of Afghanistan so he’s unlikely to let Putin conquer all of Ukraine in the political fantasy that this one day becomes possible. An escalation of US involvement in response could see it approve NATO allies’ entrance into Ukraine for drawing a “red line” as far east as possible and threaten direct “retaliation” against Russia if those forces are attacked en route. Putin has done his utmost to avoid World War III up until this point so he’s unlikely to suddenly risk it in that event.

There’s also the threat of a terrorist insurgency all across Western Ukraine if Russian forces ever reach that far, which could be costly for the Kremlin in terms of lives, treasure, and opportunities, something that Putin would likely seek to avoid as well. Bearing all this in mind, from the military difficulties to the disproportionately severe strategic consequences of claiming territory beyond the disputed regions, Tulsi is therefore absolutely correct in assessing that Putin doesn’t want to conquer all of Ukraine.

The State’s Last Stand

Understand that the State is preserved solely to empower hierarchy.  It is my claim that the RULE of twelve displaces this completely and way more sucessfully.  We will need to try it,

Our difficulties arise mostly because hierarchies become naturally unstable as they grow.

Sadly, humanity understands nothing else and thus we continue.

The State’s Last Stand

By George F. Smith

December 24, 2025

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/12/george-f-smith/the-states-last-stand/

Bad ideas are sometimes the hardest to de-throne, especially those occupying prominence in monetary theory. Its probably accurate to say most people think of money as the paper currency printed by governments. And it is money in the sense that it functions as a medium of exchange, but is it sound, is it vulnerable to inflation?

To carry on and expand its many interventions, the state needs a currency that allows it to steal wealth without most people noticing. This calls for an inflatable currency such as we’ve had domestically since 1933. As former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan once wrote,

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

There any many myths surrounding hard money currencies, and one of them is that money, both its nature and supply, is best left to the alleged guardian of our rights, the state. The fact that money came into existence on the market and its ultimate form and supply were determined by economic law, is disregarded. Money matters belong to the state, because the state, unlike the rest of us, is in a position to remove itself from market discipline. Since the state is necessary to our survival, the story goes, it cannot do its job unless it can control the growth of money. Money therefore must be of such a nature that its supply can grow in accordance with the orders of a state-appointed committee.

Even the classical gold standard was under control of the state. When that control proved too limited for those eager for war, it was abandoned. The gold standard did not fail. States failed to keep the gold standard.

When Keynes unloaded his General Theory on the world in 1936 it was a manifesto of state economic law. Free market economists would critique his work, but capitalism untethered scared the public. After 1929 it became the devil in fine suits. The fact that even top economists and industry leaders failed to see the Crash coming was especially unnerving.

Unaware of Austrian trade cycle theory, the public saw the market as an alluring evil, drawing people into its clutches with promises of riches then suddenly stripping them of their wealth. Fear, then, and not ideological persuasion, led them to reject the market as it existed in the 1920s, and along with it any notion that the unhampered market was self-regulating.

Prior to U.S. entry into World War I, the government and its media allies worked hard trying to convince Americans that Germany was a threat to civilization itself. No such effort was required to scare them about the Depression. Unlike the Germans who were over there, the Depression was very painfully over here.

The state’s greatest ally: the public’s fear

Robert Higgs’ 2007 work, Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government, underscores the importance of widespread fear for government growth. In his opening chapter, “Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power,” he contends that, contrary to the positions of Hume, Mises, Rothbard, and others, public opinion is not the bedrock of government. Public opinion rests on something deeper and more primordial: fear. After the Crash, the man in the street feared the market, and the governments of Hoover and FDR were eager to oblige. Gold, by then, had been corrupted enough to take the fall.

Whether the public still feared the market six years later was immaterial because neither major party offered a free market candidate for election. But Franklin Roosevelt knew the importance of keeping the public uneasy. In his State of the Union address of 1936, he told listeners that

in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s Government this power is wholesome and proper. In hands under control of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.

Its difficult to believe Americans would fall for the notion of a wholesome peoples government, but the times were ripe for collectivist ideas as long as they were served up properly. FDR won re-election that year by a huge landslide.

Its been said that FDR saved capitalism by co-opting the radical left into his New Deal. Without FDR, in other words, we would be living under full fascism instead of quasi-fascism. The free market was still useful, especially the name, but only if government-appointed bureaucrats regulated it, and never mind the contradiction. Exactly which regulations were needed was a big unknown, but as a way of emphasizing the new in New Deal, government would experiment until it found the right combination. How would they know if the system of rugged individualism that favored the big guys was adequately harnessed? By looking at the economy. For the government, every trouble spot acted like a magnet, the attraction of which was in direct proportion to the potential votes at stake.

The Highly Regulated Free Market

So successful were FDR and his successors in saving capitalism that finding something today that isn’t taxed, regulated, subsidized, cartelized, forbidden, mandated, or bound like a mummy in endless red tape, is a near impossibility. We can get a feel for the massive amount of regulations the market is subjected to on the federal level alone by browsing the electronic version of the Code of Federal Regulations, updated daily by the Office of the Federal Register. Trump or whoever is president has the whole economy in his hands. As Higgs points out, with passage of

the National Emergencies Act (1976) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977), nearly all economic liberties in this country exist at the sufferance of the president. If he decides to take over the economy, he possesses ample statutory power to do so. [p. 132]

What was once an economy with a strong element of freedom has become an economy of rent-seeking special interests, or as Albert Jay Nock expressed it, people using politics to gain an “uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others.” In accordance with Garet Garrett’s thesis of a revolution within the form and the word, the old names have been quite useful for getting people to look the wrong way, as we saw in 2008 when Bush announced he was abandoning free market principles to save the free market.

Conclusion

The forgotten man of the Depression, whether Sumner’s or FDR’s, was fearful, and considering the paucity of intellectual ammunition at his disposal its easy to see why. But what can one say about today? There is no longer any excuse for fearing the pseudo-god state. More people are beginning to understand, if only vaguely, that the state by its nature is a warmongering thief that lies without conscience, and that a sound economy is impossible without something politically indifferent supporting it: sound money.

Unlike the poor souls of the Depression era, anyone on planet earth who is wired and can read English — or certain other languages — can access a vast literature of economic theory, applications and criticism from an Austrian School perspective at Mises.org. It would be impossible to deal with todays misinformation without the many works of Austrian analysis, most of which are accessible to a lay audience.

In their absence we could well be the fearful captives of an FDR simulator like former president Joe Biden. As it is, the state is collapsing from its inherent faults. Let’s embrace the unhampered free market in its stead.