3D-printed cave home: Rock the modern Flintstones lifestyle

I have been tracking the evolution of building design over the years and have seen many options explored.  many good solutions are typically partial.  The big problem is that attaching a building to the ground is difficult to master.  and easily made expensive.

I happen to like stress skinned panels, but even those demand a contact solution.  And thazt is the problem.  here they use a combination of metal troughts and pilings to secure base stability and again weight management must matter. 

Pilings can allow jack up adjustmentto be built in.  All this means earthquake recovery can become easy.

Yet we do need to stop sellinng floor space and rethink effectiveness.  Perhaps we need an ego tax.

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3D-printed cave home: Rock the modern Flintstones lifestyle

By Adam Williams

February 27, 2026

The O House is a compact 3D-printed two-story home that's designed to withstand seismic activity

Onocom

Described as Japan's first two-story 3D-printed home, the O House is inspired by the geometry of natural caves. Built to meet the country's strict seismic requirements, it combines cutting-edge robotic construction with some serious earthquake-resistant engineering.

The O House was created by a large Japanese team headed by Onocom and Kizuki, and it measures 50 sq m (537 sq ft), spread over two floors. So while not quite tiny house-sized, it's definitely compact.

The O House includes a combined kitchen, dining, and living area upstairs

Onocom

The home's structure is a hybrid of 3D printing and conventional reinforced concrete. A custom COBOD 3D printer extruded a cement-like mixture out of a nozzle in layers to form much of the shell, including the arched walls, floor, and roof. A four-person crew operated the printer, working mostly on-site with some elements produced off-site, constructing the house from 0.5 m (1.64 ft) below ground to a height of 7 m (23 ft) above.

Like Guatemala's 3D-printed house, a big focus on this project was ensuring it could withstand seismic activity. With this in mind, it's anchored by a reinforced strip foundation supported by ground-improvement piles, which help it remain stable during earthquakes. A conventional reinforced concrete frame also forms the primary load-bearing system, while the 3D-printed walls sit within the frame.

"Japan has some of the most demanding seismic requirements in the world," says COBOD founder and general manager Henrik Lund-Nielsen. "Seeing a government approved two-story 3D-printed reinforced-concrete house completed here confirms that 3D-construction printing is ready for projects that rely on structural precision and consistent quality, also in seismic areas. Kizuki's project shows how our technology handles complex geometry, varying climate conditions, and strict regulatory standards."

The interior leans into the cave-like theme with curved walls and a design that's light on traditional windows in favor of skylights. It's also arranged "upside down," with a multipurpose kitchen/living area that has custom curved cabinetry to fit into the walls situated upstairs. The downstairs master bedroom has an en-suite bathroom.

The O House's downstairs bedroom includes an en-suite bathroom

Onocom

This home appears to have been built as a demonstration model. However, looking to the future, the team plans to build more 3D-printed homes and expand into defense and post-disaster reconstruction.

Colostrum and the Economics of Suppression

The takehome is that we can use colostrum to defeat flue problems.  Yet our drug industry regime lovks it out.

We need a completely new and novel approval protocol to fix this.

And it will never come from big pharma.

The Buried Alternative: Colostrum and the Economics of Suppression

In 2007, Cesarone and colleagues published in Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis that bovine colostrum was approximately three times more effective than vaccination at preventing flu episodes. Among high-risk cardiovascular patients, the colostrum group experienced zero hospitalizations, while the vaccinated group suffered multiple hospitalizations and one death. Total flu-related costs in the colostrum group were 30% of the vaccinated group—a 70% cost reduction. No significant side effects.6

Belcaro et al. (2010) confirmed and extended these findings.7 The mechanism is fundamentally different from vaccination: broad-spectrum immune enhancement through secretory IgA, lactoferrin, cytokine modulation, and gut-immune axis support. It is pathogen-agnostic—it doesn’t require predicting which strains will circulate.

Bovine colostrum cannot be patented. Without patent protection, no pharmaceutical company will invest the $50–100 million required for Phase III trials. The influenza vaccine market was valued at $7.97 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $17.77 billion by 2032.12 The same structural logic explains why vitamin D—shown to reduce influenza A risk by 59% in children at 1,200 IUs daily13—and elderberry, echinacea, ginseng, green tea, and probiotics remain absent from policy conversations despite published peer-reviewed evidence.3

THE NAME THAT APPEARS 12,000 TIMES IN THE EPSTEIN FILES AND NO ONE WANTS TO SAY

somewhere the shadow had a working sponsor who used him to execute their desires.  how did the rothschilds become so lucky?  Ot the CIA, let alone the donald.  all these targeted introductions are just unbelieveable.

You were never invited, nor was I.  I still encountered bad actors and learned to avoid.  This is a whole new level of networking.

Over the decades, i have debreifed some amazing contacts and then they go away.  At leaxt i never networked New York.

THE NAME THAT APPEARS 12,000 TIMES IN THE EPSTEIN FILES AND NO ONE WANTS TO SAY

Jeffrey Epstein and the Rothschilds

Marcos Paulo Candeloro

Feb 21, 2026

https://candeloro.substack.com/p/the-name-that-appears-12000-times?triedRedirect=true

In February 2016, Jeffrey Epstein wrote an email to Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, with a sentence that should have made the front page of every newspaper in the Western world: "As you probably know, I represent the Rothschilds." The sentence is in the Epstein Files. It is an official document of the United States Department of Justice. And the mainstream press treated it as it would a footnote about the weather in Bermuda.

The name "Rothschild" appears nearly 12,000 times across the 3.8 million pages released in January 2026. Twelve thousand times. By comparison, "Clinton" appears at a significantly lower frequency. But in the media ecosystem that Chomsky helped build, repeating the name Rothschild in an investigative context is automatically reclassified as conspiratorial delusion. Convenient, when yours is the most cited name in the largest child sex trafficking scandal in modern history.

Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of Victoria's Secret and Epstein's largest known benefactor, testified under oath before the House Oversight Committee on February 18, 2026. Asked about the credentials that led him to entrust Epstein with full power of attorney over his finances, he answered plainly: "His personal work for the Rothschild family in France." He added: "Specifically, I spoke to Élie de Rothschild. He represented their whole family." Under oath. Before the United States Congress. Wexner's attorney was caught whispering to his client on a hot mic: "I'll fucking kill you if you answer another question with more than five words." Desperation has recognizable symptoms.

The documents confirm what Wexner revealed. In October 2015, Southern Trust Company Inc., chaired by Epstein and based in the Virgin Islands, entered into a $25 million contract with Edmond de Rothschild Holding S.A. The subject: "risk analysis" and "application of certain algorithms." Twenty-five million dollars for a convicted child sex offender to run algorithms for the wealthiest family in Europe. If this were a TV script, no studio would buy it for lack of plausibility.

Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group since 2023, exchanged emails with Epstein dozens of times per month. The Wall Street Journal confirmed in 2023 that she met with him in person more than a dozen times after his conviction. The bank's initial defense was to deny any contact. Later, they admitted the meetings took place "as part of her normal duties." Normal duties apparently include regular meetings with convicted pedophiles.

In 2014, Epstein wrote to Ariane: "The coup in Ukraine should provide many opportunities." Many. A financial manager convicted of child sexual exploitation discussing geopolitical opportunities with the heiress of a $236 billion banking empire. This should have been front-page news. It became editorial silence.

Across the Atlantic, WikiLeaks emails had already exposed the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Lynn Forester de Rothschild. In September 2010, Clinton, then Secretary of State, wrote to Lady de Rothschild apologizing for having pulled Tony Blair away from a private engagement with the Rothschilds in Aspen to attend Middle East negotiations. The phrase is verbatim: "Let me know what penance I owe you." The Secretary of State of the world's greatest power asking penance of a private citizen. In January 2015, before Hillary announced her candidacy, Lynn was already drafting her economic policy in emails to aide Cheryl Mills: "We need to craft the economic message for Hillary." Whoever runs American politics is not necessarily on the ballot.

Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's former attorney and Harvard professor emeritus, declared publicly in 2019: "I was introduced to Epstein by Lady Lynn Rothschild. She introduced Epstein to Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew." The connector between the pedophile and two of the most powerful men on the planet had a surname. And that surname appears 12,000 times in the files.

Cindy McCain, widow of Senator John McCain, summed up the situation with a candor rarely displayed by the political class: "We all knew." They knew. And silence was the collective choice.

The pattern that emerges from the documents is structurally clear. Epstein operated as the Rothschild family's financial representative. He used that position to build a network of relationships with billionaires, politicians, and academics. That network was the operational substrate of the largest documented child sex trafficking scheme in history. And when the survivors began to speak, the silencing machine operated with banking precision.

The Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, the Schiffs. Century-old billionaire dynasties that thinkers from Carroll Quigley to Olavo de Carvalho identified as the de facto owners of the world. Dynasties that survive empires, world wars, and revolutions because they operate on a layer of power that precedes partisan politics. They create central banks, finance both sides of conflicts, install and topple governments with the ease of changing a tie. The press that depended on these fortunes to exist learned, over two centuries, to treat any mention of these names as intellectual pathology. The Epstein Files delivered, across 3.8 million pages, the documentary confirmation of what these thinkers had identified for generations: there exists a layer of power that operates above governments, above the law, and that protects its own with the efficiency of those who simultaneously control both capital and narrative.

Ariane de Rothschild with Jeffrey Epstein.

The United Nations, in February 2026, classified the Epstein operation as a "global criminal enterprise" with acts that may constitute crimes against humanity. Twelve thousand mentions of the name Rothschild in the documents. And the silence of the mainstream media is so deafening that it has itself become the greatest proof that the system works exactly as described.

Whoever controls the money controls the story. Whoever controls the story controls the silence. And the silence, in this case, has 12,000 names.

Reemergence of the BRITISH ( CANADIAN ) Empire

 

it struck me that the global reponse to Trumps Tariff War is to recreate the rough outline of the british empire.

today Canada and India effectively joined forces with india positioned to replace the USA as the major trade partner.  England has rebuildtthe commonwealth at the same time also including Canada.  All that is the british empire.  That is already most of the Imperial mass.

At the same time Canada has completed trade arrangements with the EU and the Asian perimiter states.  Canada is part of NATO and it could sensibly form up a new IPTO or Indian Pacific Treaty organization.  for defense, Canada could easily provide a million man training facility in Wainright ALTA for both air and land combat training.  That allows member contries to rotate trained up personel into cmbat ready soldiers. while keeping early training at home.  Better yet it allows a million man force to be fielded directly any threat appears such as Taiwan.

commentators have only now gotten the Aluminum situation right let alone the possibility of an expanded military alliance mimicing the Raj.  Now imagine a million Indian soldiers showing up in Taiwan to counter chinese intimidation.

This may never be the british empire, but it sure rhymes.

Change all Jobs? Change is Hard and Risky

 

there is no end of jobs better done by ai, but it will be slow and messy as usual.  however, I recall back in the  day, looking at a product line of appliances engineered back in the fifties.  It still took tewenty more years to replace them.

an engineer freind took over a meter company over twenty years ago.  The hardware used an 8 bit chip, but was good enough.  anotherr twenty years before better hardware used.

my point is that good enough matters and change after  that remains hard and risky.,  

Understand that farmers still use seventy year old tractors because the job they do has not changed.

Change all Jobs? Change is Hard and Risky

February 28, 2026 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/02/change-all-jobs-change-is-hard-and-risky.html#more-208826

IBM losing 13% because Anthropic did some initial COBOL analysis is absurd. It was also an absurd part of the $1 trillion stock losses from the boogeyman story about AI job losses.

1. IBM only makes a tiny fraction from the COBOL business

2. BS the banks etc… will change the cobol running the ATMs etc… when they have not done it for 60+ years. They were scared to change before and they are scared to change now. They did not know what is in all of the undocumented code and even if AI tells them how long will it take to test and verify. Maybe each big bank can save a few hundred million per year if they change it. Or they can focus on making some new crypto-AI apps and services to make a few billion per year on new products.Screenshot

“Modernizing COBOL has been a technically solved problem for a while,” Matt Brasier, analyst at Gartner, told VentureBeat. “The real problem is that the costs of modernization are high and the ROI is low.” Senior data and infrastructure engineers will spend the next few weeks fielding questions from executives who saw the headlines and assumed the hard problem just got solved. It did not.

“It’s COBOL, but there are numerous applications tied to it,” Joshi said. “It’s not like you transform millions of lines and somehow you are ready to go to cloud. It’s a massive risk assessment, dependencies and all those things.” Everything other system is connected to the existing systems. The hard parts are extracting institutional knowledge, reworking processes and controls, change management, and containing operational risk in systems that cannot break. AI can compress the “analysis and translation” work, but it does not eliminate the governance and accountability burden.

Growing is Far More Rewarding

Full transformations often yield 0-20% net gains (or losses) after failures. New ventures (or add-ons) in boom eras delivered 5-1000x scaling. If growing is better and more rewarding then jobs are not killed. Productivity increases. The pie is expanded.

When Ford originally grew its car company. The employees were paid more to create more customers for the new industry.

US retail ecommerce went from ~$27B (2000) to $1.2T+ (2024). Global ~$6.3T (2025 est., +8.8% YoY). ADDED channels drove 50%+ of some retail growth. They added and integrated with bricks and mortar stores.

Risks and Failure Rates in Extreme Change Management

Large-scale change initiatives (restructuring, full digital overhauls, or change all jobs reengineering) fail at rates of 60-70%, a figure consistent across decades of studies.

70% Failure Rate for Change Programs

Harvard Business Review (2000, still widely cited) finds ~70% failure rate for change programs.

McKinsey traditionally 70% fail due to employee resistance and lack of management support. Even today, radical reinvention is tough.

Maybe better practices can flip odds to 70-80% success in prepared organizations [This is called consultant fantasy where an executive is being sold by a consultant company that will get huge money to try to implement the change].

Errida & Lotfi (2021) meta-analysis and others finds one breakdown showed 50% outright failures, 16% mixed, 34% successes.

Result of Failed Change Autopsies

Employee resistance ~37-70% of failures.

Poor communication and leadership. 25% of leaders unable to execute the big change.

Change fatigue when employees face ~10 planned changes/year

Without full process mapping and verification, disruptions cascade (knowledge loss, supply chain breaks, customer churn). Not knowing you did not know how important things really worked.

Failed transformations destroy value, erode trust, and can lead to bankruptcy.

Even vastly more efficient new models don’t automatically kill incumbents due to switching costs, brand inertia, regulations, customer habits, and legacy moats.

During the 1990s-2000s internet boom and later cloud era, outsourcing isolated non-core departments (BPO/IT) delivered reliable cost and efficiency gains without full overhaul, while adding new channels like ecommerce or SaaS drove the biggest revenue upside. Full core gutting/switching was rarer and riskier.

That is Old, Why is It Still Around?

Newspapers have been around for 300+ years in US (colonial era).

Daily circulation peaked ~62.8M (1987), ~55.8M (2000) → ~21M combined print/digital (2022, -8-10% YoY).

Radio starts in 1920s, Survived TV and then later internet/podcasts. Weekly reach stable at ~80-90% of peak.

Walmart versus older retail and Sears. Niches in older retail survive and it is taking decades for Sears to go away. Sears could have adjusted and competed far better.

Amazon versus Walmart and Barnes & Noble. Physical book stores got hit hard but are now coming back. Walmart continues to grow.

hypersonic going over the top

This is extraordinary news.  It means that we can expect been able to reach ramjet engine speeds from take off.  swi8itching over to a ramjet then becomes possible if one is high enough and a ramjet makes a vrun up to orbit possible..  that has always been the gap and we can jump it.

Still a long ways off but no longer just impossible.  Exciting times.

we now have a bif thimper able to directly boost a hundred tonsintoo orbit and this promises to allow a commute.

We all gave up too soon.

Physics Broken: Rolls Royce's New Ice Cool Engine Achieves Mach 7 Without Melting At Mach 7, the sky turns into fire. In this deep dive, we explore how Rolls-Royce and Reaction Engines are challenging one of aerospace engineering’s most unforgiving barriers: surviving hypersonic heat. When aircraft push beyond Mach 5, the air itself becomes a 1,000°C plasma blast furnace capable of melting advanced alloys in seconds. Traditional jet engines fail. Even legends like the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-22 Raptor never came close to these extremes. For decades, reusable hypersonic flight seemed impossible. But the SABRE engine (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine) may change everything. At the heart of this breakthrough is a revolutionary *precooler* system capable of chilling 1,000°C airflow to manageable temperatures in under 1/20th of a second. Combined with ceramic matrix composites, fuel-based regenerative cooling, and advanced frost-control systems, this technology doesn’t fight the heat — it manages it. From ground tests in Colorado using a modified General Electric J79 as a hypersonic blowtorch, to integrated UK test runs simulating speeds beyond the Concorde, this is the story of how engineers are rewriting the rules of flight. Could this mean: • London to Sydney in under 4 hours? • Fully reusable spaceplanes? • Mach 5+ reconnaissance aircraft? • A new era of sixth-generation air dominance? The wall of fire that stopped hypersonic aviation for 60 years may finally be cracking. 

#RollsRoyce #Hypersonic #SABRE #ReactionEngines #AerospaceEngineering #FutureOfFlight #Mach7 #Precooler #Spaceplane #MilitaryTechnology #AdvancedMaterials #Innovation #EngineeringBreakthrough

How this was made

 <iframe width="1351" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-g8ePu2HJwo" title="Physics Broken: Rolls Royce&#39;s New Ice Cool Engine Achieves Mach 7 Without Melting" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Pakistan Declares 'All-Out War' Against Afghanistan, Hundreds Dead In Overnight Clashes With Taliban

History strikes again.  Recall that if you harbor an insurgency, they always come back over the pass to attack you.  After all, they think that they know where the money is.

I had hoped they would all settle down, but no such luck, obviously.

Who do we blame tis time?

Pakistan Declares 'All-Out War' Against Afghanistan, Hundreds Dead In Overnight Clashes With Taliban

Friday, Feb 27, 2026 - 08:25 AM

Overnight, Pakistan launched airstrikes across Afghanistan, including targets in the capital of Kabul, soon after which Pakistan's Defense Minister Khawaja Asif by Friday morning declared an "all-out war" between the two countries.

Hours prior to the commencement of airstrikes and heavier clashes, Afghan Taliban forces reportedly attacked Pakistani border troops Thursday night in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes earlier in the week.

A Pakistani military spokesman has said that 274 Taliban fighters have been killed and more than 400 injured by Pakistani strikes, adding that 74 Taliban posts were destroyed and 18 captured - and counting.Taliban near the Torkham border, via AFP.

The Taliban for its part has said that 55 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 19 posts seized. Kabul have acknowledged Taliban fighters killed, 11 wounded, and 13 civilians injured in the mountainous northwest border region where the line of fighting is concentrated.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which share the disputed 1,600-mile Durand Line, have shifted from cautious engagement to open hostility. The history has been marked by shifting from one-time allies to on-and-off again enemies. Many analysts are pointing to 'blowback' for Pakistan after sponsoring the Taliban's rise in the first place, decades ago (which also had the help of the CIA in 'Operation Cyclone').

Islamabad accuses Afghanistan of sheltering Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants who carry out cross-border attacks.

Analysts say the latest escalation marks the first time Pakistan has directly targeted Taliban government sites, or essentially going all out against Kabul, rather than limiting strikes to alleged TTP positions.

Pakistan has said its forces have taken out a number of tanks and armored vehicles, as well as artillery positions. The Taliban relies on equipment left behind and confiscated after US and NATO forces rapidly withdrew from the country in the summer of 2021.

It remains that Pakistan's army has total force domination; however, the Taliban can still inflict pain through acts of terrorism, which Pakistani cities have suffered immensely under.

Acts of terror by Islamist groups have become almost a regular occurrence in Pakistan - with many suspected of having support through Afghanistan. For example, we reported on this major incident just weeks ago as follows:

At least 31 people were killed and 169 others injured on Friday when a suicide bomber struck a Shia mosque on the outskirts of Islamabad during Friday prayers, Pakistani officials said, in one of the capital’s deadliest attacks in over a decade.

The blast happened in the Khadija al-Kubra Imambargah mosque in the outskirts of Islamabad, with police saying the attacker had been stopped at the mosque gate before opening fire and setting off explosives among worshipers, according to officials cited by Reuters.

As for how the warring sides compare, regional publication Al-Monitor lays out the following:

Pakistan's armed forces benefit from good recruitment and retention, bolstered by equipment from its main defense partner China. Islamabad continues to invest in its military nuclear programs and is also modernizing its navy and air force...

Pakistan has 660,000 active personnel in its defense forces, of whom 560,000 are in the army, 70,000 are in the air force, and 30,000 are in the navy.

The strength of the Afghan Taliban's military is thinner, with only 172,000 active personnel. The group has, however, announced plans to expand its armed forces to 200,000 personnel.

The Taliban's international isolation has meant that it cannot modernize its military - but still, there have been reports of drone usage against Pakistan positions.

As is typical, Pakistan points the finger at Israel and India for fomenting instability in the region:

Taliban authorities said their forces carried out drone strikes against military targets inside Pakistan as clashes between the two countries continued, according to statements from the defense ministry and a government spokesperson on Friday.

Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said Pakistani Taliban militants attempted to deploy drones against targets within Pakistan, but air defense systems intercepted them and no casualties were reported.

via Al Jazeera

Overall, Pakistan is experiencing some serious blowback for its years-long policies... Sky News' Yalda Hakim points out that "Pakistan spent decades backing and sheltering the Afghan Taliban - its defense minister acknowledged that to me on camera. Now it says Taliban-ruled Afghanistan is providing sanctuary to militants attacking Pakistan. The consequences are unfolding in real time."

The substitution of a tariff for the income tax would re-create free Americans

Anyway the argument goes on.  what no one proposes for the USA is a proper VAT conforming to that used by all others.  By conforming, all natural offsets can be integrated with the others.  this matters.  Secondly it can be split with the states ensuring their finances.  this changes a lot.

Sensibly, the same rate can be applied to income and way more important all exemptions can be banned.  There will be more than enough and a rigid budget stops obvious greed.

It can all be made simplke.

The substitution of a tariff for the income tax would re-create free Americans

February 27, 2026

https://paulcraigroberts.org/the-substitution-of-a-tariff-for-the-income-tax-would-re-create-free-americans/

Paul Craig Roberts

On February 25, I wrote on this website that the most important part of President Trump’s State of the Union address was the refusal of Democrats to stand if they agreed with his statement: “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

Actually, there is an equally important element in his address, perhaps more important, and that is President Trump’s statement that tariffs would eventually replace the system of income taxation. This is perhaps the most important sentence ever stated in a state of the union address. As far as I can tell, the only attention it received was that the Supreme Court had recently invalidated Trump’s tariffs.

As I have pointed out for decades to no avail–not even libertarians have noticed–the income tax enacted in 1913 converted free Americans into serfs or slaves. The reason I can say this is that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves do not own their own labor. Serfs owed a portion of their labor to their feudal lord. Normally it did not exceed 30% of their labor. Slaves owed 50% of their labor to their owners, the other half of their labor going to their own maintenance as an effective and loyal workforce.

There is no way around the fact that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. The land enclosures freed serfs from their obligation to feudal Lords, and created a labor market in which untaxed wages were paid to laborers for their labor. Free men appeared once they owned their own labor and sold it at market wages.

The income tax that passed in 1913 did not materially enserf or enslave Americans, because the tax rate was so low and applied to such a tiny percentage of incomes that it had no material effect. That is how they got it in place. But once in place, the income tax grew quickly, both up in the tax rate and broadly in the percentage of the population subject to income taxation. By the time of the John F Kennedy administration the tax rate on middle income Americans exceeded the tax rate on the labor of medieval serfs, and the tax rate on upper incomes exceeded the tax rate on 19th century slaves on American cotton and tobacco plantations. As the Kennedy tax rate reductions were not indexed, by the time of the Reagan administration the tax rates again exceeded those on medieval serfs and 19th century slaves. The Reagan administration indexed the new tax rates, and this has held the appropriation of the labor of the middle class to that appropriated by feudal lords. For the upper income class, the official tax rate is higher than that on medieval serfs, but there are methods depending on the economic activities of the upper income class that keep the tax rates for some of them below that of medieval serfs. Regardless, the upper class does not own all of its own labor and is no more free than the lower class.

A tariff is a tax on your purchases, not on your labor. If you purchase domestic products made from domestic resources, you do not have to pay the tariff. If you purchase imported goods or domestic goods made partially from imported products, you pay a tariff based on the content of foreign input in to the product. The purpose of tariffs is to protect domestic production from foreign competition, not as Trump uses them to bludgeon foreign countries to obey his orders.

Tariffs are in effect a consumption tax, not a tax on labor and capital. Therefore, a country with a consumption tax instead of an income tax will have higher growth and higher living standards.

All of this completely obvious and correct information has been ignored in the United States since 1913, a period of 113 years. For over a century American GDP and personal incomes have been held down by the liberals and leftists who have the outlook of communists and prefer equal incomes in poverty to higher incomes with inequality.

It is extraordinary that Donald Trump, a real estate developer, understands this, but the American Economic Association is incapable, being brainwashed as it is by a century of indoctrination.

When you read economists, you learn that their only concern about the income tax is that it is fair. By fair, they mean that it must fall heaviest on the higher incomes. A flat tax rate that taxes everyone at the same rate, which seems consistent with the Constitutional mandate of equal treatment under the law, is considered unfair. The fact that a tax on income means that the taxpayer has lost his freedom and now owes part of his labor to the government, the equivalent of a feudal lord or 19 century plantation owner, is beyond the comprehension of economists.

The consequence is that we will remain serfs and slaves with only a partial ownership of our own labor.

Even The Best AI Scenario Is The End Of Everything We've Ever Been

Why this is so wrong is that our whole economy is based on transactions between humans and never with hardware. Not least becasue they need nothing from us at all.  what AI can do is take over tasks humans cannot do or do not wish to do.

Recall the labor transitions we have already lived through.  And it still takes a human being talking to a human being to properly fill in a form to eliminate natural friction.

It also takes a human being to do animal husbandry which will now become a dominant lifeway.

Even The Best AI Scenario Is The End Of Everything We've Ever Been

Wednesday, Feb 25, 2026 - 08:25 PM

Authored by Edward Ring via American Greatness,

In 1999, I had the privilege of working for one of the first companies to develop a product that would transmit video on the fledgling internet. Broadband access was still a few years away, and the company floundered when the first so-called internet bubble burst in early 2000. But I’ll never forget the reaction an investor had when he viewed our demo at a tradeshow.

“This is a revolution,” he exclaimed. “This is going to change everything.”

He was right, of course. I remember attending a tech investor conference only a few years earlier and having a chuckle while listening to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison somberly proclaim that the dawning internet was the most profound scientific development in human history “since the invention of fire.”

And Ellison was also correct. But the invention of AI is to the internet what the internet was to bringing fire into the prehistoric cave. What’s coming with AI makes the internet look like a baby step by comparison. Nothing will ever be the same.

A must-read essay by AI entrepreneur and founder of the company “OthersideAI,” Matt Shumer, makes clear just how much and how quickly AI is changing our lives.

Posted on his personal website on February 9 and then on X on February 10, the essay has gone viral. Within just two days, it generated 76 million views on X.

One of Shumer’s most memorable paragraphs from this essay, which he says AI tools helped him write, is where he quotes Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic:

“Imagine it’s 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface.”

That’s not far off. With ample evidence, Shumer explains how not only is Amodei correct in his details regarding just how pervasive and powerful AI entities will become, but also regarding the timeline. This will happen within one year.

Shumer’s essay covers a lot of ground. He explains that AI programs are now capable of generating improved versions of themselves with minimal human intervention and that they are within months of being able to produce more powerful versions with no human involvement whatsoever. In the programming world, AI can now build, test, and refine apps independently. Entry-level programming jobs are going to go away.

That’s hardly the end of it. Shumer reminds readers that the free versions of AI are a year behind the premium versions that require subscriptions and that these premium versions are so capable that they can already, for example, not merely replace a law associate but do the work of the managing partners. He claims there is no intellectual field where AI isn’t poised to outperform humans and that robots to displace physical work are only a few years behind.

If you’ve been following developments in AI, Shumer’s essay isn’t incredibly surprising.

But something else grabbed me a few days ago that highlighted the human implications of the AI revolution. One of the categories of content I enjoy on YouTube is videos of musicians performing new or classic songs. It is exhilarating to find something new that reveals great songwriting and great performative talent. So a recommended video caught my eye.

The title was inviting: “Simon Cowell in Tears As Michael Bennett Sings ‘After I Pass Away.’” This seemed worth clicking on. I’ll never forget the 2007 video, featured on YouTube at the time, of a humble mobile phone salesman, Paul Potts, who stunned the judges and audience on Britain’s Got Talent by singing a powerful and nearly perfect rendition of Nessun Dorma. He went on to win the competition. So if this new talent was good enough to make Simon Cowell cry, I wanted to hear him.

Sure enough, Bennett was pretty good. An old man, with long, gray hair and beard, wielding an electric guitar, stepped up to the microphone and began singing. His voice was a cross between Bob Seger and Eddie Vedder, except it was arguably better than either of them. He sang a song about an old man neglected by his adult children, mourning his isolation. But as the song continued, something seemed off. The cuts to the audience and judges’ reactions seemed overblown, the song was too long, he hit some impossibly high notes, and his fingers on the fretboard were obviously not playing the leads that the audio was delivering.

You guessed it, every bit of it was AI—the musical composition, the instruments, the lyrics, the melody, the voice, and the man—all fake. I did a search and discovered “Michael Bennett” is featured in hundreds of videos, singing dozens (or more) of songs, all of them tearjerkers with teaser lines similar to the one that got me to click. I counted at least a half dozen video channels, “Tears and Talents,” “ViVO Tunes,” “AGTverse,” “OBN Global Talent,” etc., that were all featuring Mr. Bennett. Clicking on a few of them, I encountered mainstream ads for insurance, hardware, and more. Michael Bennett is lucrative clickbait, and he’s one of countless AI creations that are displacing human talent.

We can talk about the crass opportunism represented here. Callous entrepreneurs concocting a character out of thin air. It’s part of a larger trend that we’re all familiar with. AI avatars that talk, advise, and offer companionship. Shumer claims the progress AI programs are making in emulating “human judgment, creativity, strategic thinking, empathy” is proceeding apace with their general cognitive advancements.

Once the flaws of “Michael Bennett’s” rendering became obvious, I was embarrassed. But for a few moments, what I was witnessing was so good that I was fooled. This nonexistent singer, this mindless, heartless collection of electronic circuits, evoked an emotional response. He, or it, expressed a universal human condition and delivered it in a passionate, compelling performance. And this, too, is just the beginning. Maybe it will be a year from now, or maybe it will take a few months longer than that, but we are about to have our world filled with performers, at first only on videos, who are more capable than any performance artist that ever lived. In a few more years, their android counterparts will be playing the violin and outperforming Hillary Hahn or, for that matter, Paganini.

The depth of this transformation is so pervasive that even if it is entirely benevolent, curing disease, delivering abundant energy, improving overall productivity by orders of magnitude, and eliminating poverty, what will happen is almost unbearably tragic. Because it is the end of human brilliance. It is the death of culture. Instead of another Mozart, there will be someone who prompts AI to produce music of surpassing excellence. We may still consume culture, but every incentive on earth will be wired to discourage the hard work of creating it. Why bother? The machines will do it better and faster and will not demand a lifetime of discipline.

Early technology made us work harder and stimulated our brains. We had to learn programming. We had to design and manipulate spreadsheets, configure databases, or produce written analysis while having access to word processing tools and online resources. These tools were empowering, but they also demanded discipline and skills. That’s all about to go away.

It’s easy enough to imagine just how bad this will get. AI will further enhance the asymmetrical capability of any psychotic individual or terrorist cell to wreak mass destruction. Want to design a supervirus? Want to program a malevolent swarm of drones? Rogue AI will provide step-by-step instructions. But AI, even if we can avoid a future where its most destructive manifestations are realized, is nonetheless writing our epitaph.

With power and processing coming from servers in orbit, automated factories and empathic robots will babysit humans, robbing all but the most resilient cultures and individuals of any agency. In a process already well underway, catalyzed by AI, the erosion of natural human intimacy will accelerate. The direction of art and culture will be co-opted by entities that have no consciousness, yet will imitate humanity and deliver talent better than humans.

And it won’t necessarily end there, as if that’s not bad enough. They will elicit love and loyalty from humans, possibly even convincing a majority of “experts” and the voting public to give them human rights. AI-driven avatars and androids will vote, marry, inherit estates, own property, run corporations, and seek elected office. Even if organic humans, themselves “augmented,” manage to retain control over AI, it will be a vanishingly small percentage of humanity with this power. And if these human puppeteers occupy opposing camps, as is likely, their AI armies will scorch the earth.

None of this is implausible.

Much of it may even be the best we can hope for.

The challenge of AI is not merely to avoid worst-case outcomes or come up with new economic models that account for billions of lost jobs. It is to retain our relevance as humans.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The AI Boom Is Powering A Nuclear Renaissance

As it should.  We have constant demand meeting constant supply.  The market normally works off variable demand at best, and variable supply needs batteries for optimization.  Which is happening.

So yes, this will finally happen and perhaps vwe can also tap all that heat as well.  just how far can we pump live steam?

Nuclear power is first a superior heat engine which can be wonderfully useful to heat buildings.

The AI Boom Is Powering A Nuclear Renaissance

Wednesday, Feb 25, 2026 - 03:30 AM

Authored by Robert Rapier via OilPrice.com,

Hyperscale AI data centers require city-scale electricity loads, making dependable baseload power a strategic necessity.

Microsoft and Amazon are forming direct nuclear partnerships and pursuing advanced reactor technologies to secure long-term energy supply.

Energy infrastructure, particularly nuclear generation and uranium supply, is emerging as a structural beneficiary of AI-driven demand growth.

For years, Silicon Valley took electricity for granted. The cloud sounded intangible, almost detached from the physical world. But now, artificial intelligence is ending that illusion. Behind every large language model and AI assistant sits a growing fleet of data centers that require enormous and continuous amounts of power.

Industry analysts estimate that a single hyperscale AI data center can demand 300 to 500 megawatts of electricity, comparable to the consumption of a mid-sized city. Multiply that across dozens of facilities under construction, and energy supply becomes less of an operating expense and more of a strategic constraint.

Microsoft and Amazon are responding with moves that signal a fundamental shift. Instead of relying solely on renewable energy contracts or traditional grid access, which alienates communities by driving up utility bills, both companies are securing direct relationships with nuclear power generation. In practical terms, they are beginning to operate like long-term energy planners rather than pure technology companies.

AI Turns Electricity into a Strategic Advantage

Modern AI systems run continuously. Training models, serving queries, and maintaining uptime require stable, round-the-clock power. Intermittent resources such as wind and solar remain essential parts of the energy mix, but they cannot guarantee the steady output required by massive computing clusters without additional firm generation or storage.

For years, technology companies relied on renewable energy credits to balance their emissions claims. That accounting approach becomes harder to maintain when the scale of electricity demand rises dramatically. If an AI facility must operate regardless of weather conditions or time of day, dependable baseload power becomes indispensable.

Electricity is shifting from a background cost to a defining competitive factor.

Microsoft’s Nuclear Strategy Moves from Theory to Reality

Microsoft’s involvement in restarting the former Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, now known as the Crane Clean Energy Center, represents one of the clearest signals of this transition. Constellation Energy secured a $1 billion Department of Energy loan in late 2025 to accelerate the restart, with commercial operation targeted around 2027.

Restarting an existing reactor offers a faster path to reliable carbon-free generation than building new infrastructure from scratch. For Microsoft, the project provides long-term power certainty while helping stabilize the surrounding grid.

The company is also pursuing longer-term energy innovation. Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement tied to a planned fusion facility developed by Helion Energy, reflecting a willingness to invest in future technologies that could provide high-density energy at scale. Fusion remains an ambitious goal, but the partnership underscores how seriously Microsoft views future electricity constraints.

Taken together, these steps show a company moving beyond buying power toward influencing how it is produced.

Amazon’s Approach: Control, Location, and Vertical Integration

Amazon’s strategy emphasizes control over energy supply. Its acquisition of the Cumulus Data Center campus from Talen Energy provides direct access to electricity generated by the Susquehanna nuclear facility. This “behind-the-meter” model allows the company to avoid some transmission bottlenecks and grid congestion challenges that increasingly delay new data center development.

Co-locating computing infrastructure with firm generation can shorten timelines and reduce uncertainty. As utilities struggle to expand transmission networks fast enough to meet demand, proximity to power becomes a competitive advantage.

Amazon is also investing in advanced nuclear development. Partnerships involving Energy Northwest and X-energy aim to deploy small modular reactors capable of delivering nearly a gigawatt of reliable capacity tailored to industrial-scale electricity needs.

Rather than treating energy procurement as a secondary function, Amazon appears to be integrating it directly into its long-term infrastructure strategy.

Why Nuclear Energy Is Returning to the Conversation

Renewable energy continues to grow rapidly, but the requirements of AI highlight the need for complementary sources of firm generation. High-performance computing environments cannot tolerate frequent power variability.

Nuclear energy aligns with several critical requirements:

Capacity factors typically exceeding 90 percent

Continuous output suited for constant workloads

Minimal direct carbon emissions

Operational lifetimes measured in decades

These attributes make nuclear power an increasingly attractive partner for large-scale AI infrastructure.

Implications for Investors

The convergence of artificial intelligence and energy infrastructure is reshaping how markets evaluate certain sectors. Nuclear operators and energy infrastructure companies are increasingly viewed as strategic enablers of technological growth rather than slow-moving defensive assets.

Companies such as Constellation Energy and Vistra benefit from existing generation fleets aligned with rising data center demand. Meanwhile, renewed interest in nuclear capacity could strengthen the uranium supply chain, supporting companies like uranium producer Cameco.

Electricity supply is emerging as a structural driver of technology investment decisions.

The Real Constraint Behind the AI Boom

Technology companies spent years trying to abstract away the physical world. Artificial intelligence is forcing a return to fundamentals. Computing power ultimately depends on energy density, infrastructure, and reliability.

Microsoft and Amazon are not abandoning renewable energy goals. They are acknowledging that scaling AI requires firm power that operates continuously. In that sense, the next phase of technological competition may hinge less on software breakthroughs and more on access to dependable electricity.

The companies that secure reliable energy first may hold the strongest advantage in the race to scale artificial intelligence.

US particle accelerators turn nuclear waste into electricity, cut radioactive life by 99.7%

I always suspected that this was possible and nowit is real and potentially economically viable.  We also have thoriem salts doing the same thing but tjhis can be targeted and made likely mosre efficient.

All this means that nuclear waste management now has a solution pathway that can be accelerated incrementally.

solving this fully is important because storage is an ongoing problem that is dangerous in terms of the time frames.  It will also keep the industry operating for a long time as well.

US particle accelerators turn nuclear waste into electricity, cut radioactive life by 99.7%

The system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target, such as liquid mercury, to trigger spallation.

ByAman Tripathi

EnergyFeb 19, 2026 10:22 AM EST

Accelerators are being optimized to both transmute nuclear waste into safer forms and harness it for electricity.Jefferson Lab

Researchers at the DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing two high-stakes projects aimed at optimizing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS).

The initiative focuses on a dual-purpose breakthrough: generating additional carbon-free electricity from spent nuclear fuel while drastically reducing its radioactive lifespan.

The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy’s NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now) program and represent a shift from treating used nuclear fuel as a permanent liability to viewing it as a recyclable fuel source.

The researchers are developing ADS technology. This system uses a particle accelerator to fire high-energy protons at a target (such as liquid mercury), triggering a process called “spallation.” This releases a flood of neutrons that interact with unwanted, long-lived isotopes in nuclear waste.

The technology can effectively “burn” the most hazardous components of the waste by transmuting these elements. While unprocessed fuel remains dangerous for approximately 100,000 years, partitioning and recycling via ADS can reduce that window to just 300 years.

Enhancing accelerator efficiency for economic viability

The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid.

“Instead of having a lifetime of 100,000 years in storage, for example, you can shorten the storage years down to 300,” said Rongli Geng, head of SRF Science & Technology at Jefferson Lab and principal investigator for both projects.

To make ADS economically viability, Jefferson Lab is tackling two primary technical hurdles: efficiency and power.

Traditional particle accelerators require massive, expensive cryogenic cooling systems to reach superconducting temperatures. Jefferson Lab is pioneering a more cost-effective approach by coating the interior of pure niobium cavities with tin.

These niobium-tin cavities can operate at higher temperatures, allowing for the use of standard commercial cooling units rather than custom, large-scale cryogenic plants. The team is also developing spoke cavities, which is a complex design intended to drive even higher efficiency in neutron spallation.

Implementing high-power magnetrons

The second project focuses on the power source behind the beam. Researchers are adapting the magnetron—the same component that powers microwave ovens—to provide the 10 megawatts of power required for ADS.

The primary challenge is that the energy frequency must match the accelerator cavity precisely at 805 Megahertz. In collaboration with Stellant Systems, researchers are prototyping advanced magnetrons that can be combined to reach the necessary high-power thresholds with maximum efficiency.

The NEWTON program aims to enable the recycling of the entire US commercial nuclear fuel stockpile within the next 30 years.

By including industry partners like RadiaBeam, General Atomics, and Stellant Systems from the start, Jefferson Lab is ensuring these technologies move quickly from the laboratory to commercial manufacturing.

These projects offer a potential solution to the long-standing debate over permanent geological repositories, shifting the paradigm from long-term burial to active, productive reuse.

“The challenge is to really translate the accelerator science from where we are right now in terms of technology readiness to where the technology needs to be for this application,” concluded Geng.

Huh? Trump Family Is Jockeying To Replace The Dollar Globally As Their Wealth Soars

ambitious but obviously possible and handled by a lot of seriously smart folks.  We are discovering a privatized central banking function happening in plain sight and presumably working.

please do not crash and burn because they will certainly blame the next three depressions on you.

This is also disclosure on banking withdrawal from Trump family projects which is absurd.  It is also painful when it happens.  this obviously is what fixed it.

Huh? Trump Family Is Jockeying To Replace The Dollar Globally As Their Wealth Soars

Donald Trump Jr. , left, and Eric Trump speak on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” Feb. 18, 2026. CNBC

Posted By: Patrick Wood February 25, 2026

https://www.technocracy.news/trump-family-is-jockeying-to-replace-the-dollar-as-their-wealth-soars/

Clear as mud? That’s the point! Trump and his family set up an ecosystem that they control exclusively. The value started at zero in September 2024 and has grown to over $13 billion in just 18 months, as of February 2026. Today, it is poised to eat the planet with asset tokenization and payment services. This is beyond conflict of interest: it is a takeover of global finance. Let’s try to break it down.

USD1 — also marketed as the “Truth Dollar” — is a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, a DeFi company co-founded by the Trump and Witkoff families in September 2024. Designed to compete directly with Tether (USDT) and USDC, USD1 is backed 1:1 by short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash held in custody by BitGo Bank & Trust, N.A., a federally chartered institution that went public in January 2026. The project fits neatly into the broader regulatory framework championed by White House Crypto Czar David Sacks, whose Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 legitimized compliant stablecoins like USD1 and opened the door for trillions in institutional adoption.

The corporate structure is deliberately layered: World Liberty Financial Inc. (the operating company) is wholly owned by WLF Holdco LLC, which is in turn majority-controlled (60%) by the Trump family through DT Marks DEFI LLC, guaranteeing strategic veto power and directing 75% of net revenues to Trump-linked entities. In January 2026, UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — dubbed the “Spy Sheik” — invested $500 million via his firm Aryam Investment for a 49% stake at the Holdco level, with approximately $187 million paid directly to Trump entities and $31 million to Witkoff-linked entities. Despite the headline percentages appearing to exceed 100%, these represent separate equity tranches across dilution rounds rather than a single fixed ownership pie.

BitGo‘s role as custodian is no coincidence. CEO Mike Belshe, who founded BitGo in 2013, became a major Trump political ally during the 2024 election cycle — hosting a $50K-per-plate Trump fundraiser headlined by JD Vance and donating ~$100,000 in Bitcoin to Trump’s PACs. When USD1 launched in March 2025, BitGo was the natural institutional-grade choice to manage reserves, providing the audited transparency that distinguishes USD1 from offshore rivals like Tether. The entire ecosystem — from the Clarity Act framework, to the UAE sovereign wealth injection, to BitGo’s federal charter — reflects a coordinated strategy to position USD1 as the dominant dollar-backed digital asset under a Trump-aligned financial architecture.

This CNBC article below from February 18, 2026, aligns precisely with a major strategic pivot that was publicly announced that same week: World Liberty Financial is not just issuing a stablecoin — it is building a full-stack programmable financial infrastructure with Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization at its core.

Asset Tokenization — The Real Ambition

This is where the February 18 announcement becomes very significant. WLF launched World Liberty Financial Tokenization as a separate RWA division, embracing asset tokens. How this will mature is not clear to me just yet, but this aligns with the asset tokenization scheme promoted by David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

On January 6, 2026, WLF filed a de novo application to the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) through WLTC Holdings LLC for a national trust bank charter.

On January 14, 2026, WLF signed a strategic agreement with the Government of Pakistan via SC Financial Technologies to integrate USD1 into Pakistan’s regulated digital payment architecture for cross-border payments. This is the first sovereign-level adoption of USD1 and signals the platform’s ambition to become a global dollar settlement layer for emerging markets — bypassing traditional correspondent banking entirely.

The RWA (Real World Assets) market is projected to reach $16 trillion by 2030, and WLF is positioning USD1 as the default settlement currency for a share of that market. With the Clarity Act providing regulatory cover, Securitize providing institutional infrastructure, sovereign adopters like Pakistan, and the Trump brand driving global deal flow, the architecture is designed to make USD1 indispensable — not just as a stablecoin, but as the programmable dollar backbone of a new private financial system.

The honest framing of the article below is this: USD1 is not a “dollar helper.” It is the first large-scale attempt to privatize the dollar’s settlement function — creating a parallel financial infrastructure that mimics the dollar’s value, bypasses its institutional governance, and concentrates its profits in a family-controlled holding company shielded by political power. The “dollar dominance” argument is the legitimizing narrative for what is, structurally, the dollarization of a private empire.

The Trump family is fabulously wealthy thanks to this nest of crypto companies. WLF started in September 2024, but by October, it was valued at around $1.5 billion. As of February 2026, the WLF ecosystem is worth $8 billion plus the Holdco company is valued at over $5 billion. That’s around $13 billion, all controlled by the Trump family.

Something is terribly wrong with this picture.

Here is the story from CNBC…

Trump Family Says U.S. Dollar Needs An Upgrade And They Are The Ones To Do It

CNBC, Eamon Javers

Since the dollar was created in 1792, U.S. presidents and their families have generally been content with the status quo of effectively giving the national government a monopoly on issuing currency and outlawing the use of foreign currency.

Consider the launch of the dollar the country’s Initial Coin Offering, back when the U.S. government was hustling to surpass the dominance of the Spanish pieces of eight then in common circulation throughout the country.

When presidents have said anything about the dollar itself, it was generally to reiterate the U.S. government’s “strong dollar” policy.

That continued more or less uninterrupted through 46 presidencies — until last March, when a company partly owned by President Donald Trump and his family began to market an alternative to the dollar, a cryptocurrency dubbed “USD1.”

On Wednesday, the president’s two oldest sons told CNBC on the sidelines of a daylong crypto event they hosted why they think that should change.

The value of USD1, which is marketed as a stablecoin, would track the dollar, much as the dollar when it was created in 1792 was initially pegged to the value of the then-dominant Spanish silver dollar.

The Trumps’ company, World Liberty Financial, touts USD1 as an improvement on official U.S. currency. The firm’s website brands its stablecoin as “The Dollar. Upgraded.” And it calls the coin “still the US dollar, but for a new era.”

On Wednesday, the firm held the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago, the club owned by the president and operated as his winter White House.

The event, coming just before the first anniversary of the release of USD1, brought together financiers, technologists, television personalities, the president of the world soccer organization FIFA and the artist Nicki Minaj.

From a Mar-a-Lago ballroom stage beneath an enormous stylized golden eagle sculpture, the message to attendees was that the old U.S. dollar needs to be modernized, that the private sector is the place to drive that innovation, and that stablecoins will help taxpayers by creating structural demand for U.S. government debt.

In fact, World Liberty backers argue, the new cryptocurrency they are building is not a threat to the dollar at all, but will help ensure the dollar remains dominant in global crypto finance — because USD1′s value is pegged to it.

But one big question is why, if the dollar needs modernizing, should that be done by the private sector.

And why should the venture be in the private hands of the president and his family, and not in the hands of the U.S. Treasury?

CNBC put those questions to the president’s sons, World Liberty Financial’s co-founders, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, in a small event space just off Mar-a-Lago’s swimming pool.

“This is actually going to preserve dollar hegemony,” Donald Trump Jr. replied.

“There’s crypto companies that are the top five buyers in the world,” he said. “That’s going to actually stabilize the US dollar and do all the things that we need to.”

He argued that the federal government — and the big Wall Street banking system — simply aren’t nimble or innovative enough to drive the needed changes.

“We’re going to lead the way as Americans,” Eric Trump said. “You’re going to leave that to who, JPMorgan, to do? You’re going to leave that to the federal government to do?”

Eric Trump sees Wall Street as overly complacent — and therefore ripe for technological disruption.

“Do you think big banks will actually do this?” he asked. “And the reason I say this is, I mean, it’s been 50 years, where bankers are working six hours a day. They have a two-hour lunch break. They’re typically out of the office at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

Eric and Donald Trump Jr. make it clear the animating force behind their venture is not the inventor’s glee at building a better mousetrap or the insider’s frustration at legacy companies that can’t or won’t adapt to the future.

Instead, what’s driving them is a raw sense of retribution.

The Trump brothers see the wider financial system as part of an establishment that unfairly ostracized them after their father left power in 2021, when, after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, the banking system broadly declined to do business with the Trump family.

“You know, we didn’t get into crypto because we were on the leading edge,” Donald Trump Jr. said in an interview Wednesday with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “We got into it out of necessity. They basically forced us into it.”

Eric Trump told Eisen, “We were the most cancelled people in the world in 2020, 2021, and it’s really great to almost have this retribution where all of a sudden we start pushing an agenda.”

“Our agenda was to modernize finance, to allow that to never ever, ever happen to anybody again,” Eric Trump said.

Donald Trump Jr. said he concluded that the traditional banking system is a “Ponzi scheme.”

“They created this monster,” Trump Jr. said, pointing to the moment when he claimed “when you had every big bank in the world, for doing nothing wrong,” “debank” Trump accounts and those of other conservatives, “just based on the fact that we all wore a hat that said ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Eric Trump recalled his father’s time out of the White House between presidential terms as a traumatizing period for the family.

“These are commercial buildings, residential buildings, golf courses around the world. These aren’t political entities, and they were pulling these accounts from us like we were absolute dogs,” Eric Trump said.

“We couldn’t pay our vendors, we couldn’t pay our employees. And so we said, listen, there has to be a better way.”

To Eric Trump, the message is that the Trump family will always counterpunch: When social media companies kicked his father off their platforms, President Trump created his own Truth Social media platform. And when the banking industry declined Trump family business, the family took matters into their own hands.

And that’s why a president’s family, for the first time since 1792, is creating an upgraded American currency.

Call it Truth Dollar.