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The United States of America

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" There are no second acts in American lives " . When I lived there a long time ago , now , I often thought ....yeah ,alright but it's a bit more complicated than that . It was tough going even for a fit young fella like me but eventually I got to the realisation there are easier places on this planet to enjoy life without having to toil so very , very hard . Two weeks vacation . That's all you get ! It wore me out , in the end . Mr Value Collector knows the States as well as I do and put it best with this fact : " you don't want to be poor in America "

Nate's right about health insurance ...without it you're dead . In a fearful society like this one , it is a major concern for all of them .
He's off to dear old Deutschland now , apparently . ( My old stamping ground . ) Good luck with that Scheissloch , Nate .
It's cold , mate . Really cold . A german winter ain't nothing like a U. S . one . A big dump of snow overnight and you wake up to blue sky and sunshine and a fair bit of digging ! He'll miss that magic of nature .
 
JohnDe said:
Why do you think that?
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We tend to follow the US sooner or later in many aspects and if you follow the language used by many here at ASF a lot would fit neatly into many parts of the US culture the right side of politics here used US inspired strategy often as an example.

Politicians standing in front of a dozen flags (makes me want to throw up) another.
 
IFocus said:
We tend to follow the US sooner or later in many aspects and if you follow the language used by many here at ASF a lot would fit neatly into many parts of the US culture the right side of politics here used US inspired strategy often as an example.

Politicians standing in front of a dozen flags (makes me want to throw up) another.
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You say that as if it's a bad thing.

If we compare another country, specifically the UK, well, the trend is clear.

Following the US example will lead us to greatness whereas following the UK example we'll lead us into a cesspit...

... The socialists attempts to destroy America not withstanding.
 
IFocus said:
We tend to follow the US sooner or later in many aspects and if you follow the language used by many here at ASF a lot would fit neatly into many parts of the US culture the right side of politics here used US inspired strategy often as an example.

Politicians standing in front of a dozen flags (makes me want to throw up) another.
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We all vote, as long as they don't get rid of compulsory voting it can't happen. Great video. It always amazes me that people think the USA people pay less tax.
They get screwed from every direction at pleb level.
 
wayneL said:
You say that as if it's a bad thing.

If we compare another country, specifically the UK, well, the trend is clear.

Following the US example will lead us to greatness whereas following the UK example we'll lead us into a cesspit...

... The socialists attempts to destroy America not withstanding.
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The US is like us, they don't know what they want. We both keep changing governments when the last one doesn't come up to expectations. That will happen ad infinitum.
 
SirRumpole said:
The US is like us, they don't know what they want. We both keep changing governments when the last one doesn't come up to expectations. That will happen ad infinitum.
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That is true, but it is because people are confused by propaganda, then disappointed when promises don't live up to expectations.

Tick tock tick tock the pendulum swings.

The big problem is that the vast majority of voters are absolute f****** idiots and absolutely unqualified to be able to discern the actual policy arguments, or completely captured by self-interest, rather than the greater good... according to their own ability to generate income (swimming in deep water) or their reliance on the state (pathetically wading in the kiddies pool).

(All present company excepted of course)
 
SirRumpole said:
The decisions of UK courts are not his business.
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Yes it is.

The court decisions and the elections and the politics and the culture of the countries you operate in become your business as they generally impact your employees, your tax, your policies, your procedures, your products, your services....

Elon's business is none of your business.
 
Leftists like Gates and Soros have been bankrolling their weird ideas for decades. Musk is an absolute breath of breath of fresh air - now seeing him throw his weight behind more action on the festering wound of UK grooming gangs, I'm starting to like him more than Trump... which is rather hard.
 
Knobby22 said:
We all vote, as long as they don't get rid of compulsory voting it can't happen. Great video. It always amazes me that people think the USA people pay less tax.
They get screwed from every direction at pleb level.
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Kinda that way.



Some years ago I was chatting with an ex-pat and she said the middle class is voting themselves out of existence due to the tribal nature of US politics but don't fully realise it. That research paper I posted in another thread indicating the middle class in the US is drifting downwards not upwards probably has elements of that in it.

Just random thoughts on my part. There are likely to be other explanations.
 
I have been lucky enough to have been influenced in world affairs and politics since I was about 8 years old, and one thing I have learned is to never believe the doomsayers.

History is an important source of information, and I believe so is science fiction. Read the Isaac Asimov books Foundation.

Change is constant.

The following article is interesting.

The vibe shift began when Trump was re-elected. It’s now global​

All over the world, from Romania to South Korea, the vibe shift reverberates. Yet the best example of the global vibe shift – by far – is surely in the Middle East.

I am a 60-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders, oolong tea and the novels of Walter Scott, so no one will ever accuse me of being an arbiter of cool. But to understand politics and even geopolitics you have to understand culture, which is sometimes – often – upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes.
Specifically, vibe shifts.

Pop culture commentator Sean Monahan identified three mini-epochs between 2003 and 2020: Hipster/Indie (c.2003-09), Post-Internet/Techno (c.2010-16) and Hypebeast/Woke (c.2016-20). Each was defined by a distinct aesthetic, and the vibe shift from one to the other was swift and palpable.

As the pandemic receded, New York magazine’s Allison P. Davis predicted that another vibe shift had to be approaching. (And indeed, Monahan has dubbed the new epoch Pilled/Scene.)

I confess none of this meant much to me. I couldn’t tell a hypebeast from a hipster if my life depended on it.

But the term finally clicked – and acquired a powerful significance – when it was imported to the world of tech.

In a clever Substack post in February 2024, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke – which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017 – to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.

“Fundamentally,” Pliego wrote, “the Vibe Shift is a return to – a championing of – Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.” To be precise:

“The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.

“The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.

“The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth – whatever the cost.

“The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.”

The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5, 2024. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too.

The crude way to think about this is just geopolitical physics.

The American electorate decisively re-elects Donald Trump. Ergo, the German government falls, the French government falls, the South Korean president declares martial law, Bashar al-Assad flees Syria. There’s an economic chain reaction, too. Bitcoin rallies, the dollar rallies, US stocks rally, Tesla rallies.

Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation and Iran’s economy reels. One catchphrase that sums it up: It’s like Trump’s already president.

If the vibe shift in culture is about founder mode versus diversity, equity and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through strength versus chaos through de-escalation. It’s Daddy’s Home – not the fraying liberal international order.

“It must be nice, it must be nice,” sang Lin-Manuel Miranda, “to have Washington on your side.” It must be nice to have Trump, too. Argentina’s President Javier Milei – a radical libertarian who has taken a chainsaw to the bloated bureaucracy of Buenos Aires – is one of the lucky few foreign leaders on whom Trump smiles. The global vibe shift is very good for Milei because in many ways he started it. In January 2024, at Davos, he was treated as a kind of Mad Hatter. Now he’s in the Palm Beach Rat Pack, right next to Don and Elon. If Milei needs more help from the International Monetary Fund, he’ll get it.

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Argentina’s President Javier Milei is one of the lucky few foreign leaders on whom Trump smiles. They two are pictured at a CPAC meeting in 2024, in Maryland, US. Picture: AFP
Canada, America’s nearest neighbour, certainly felt the vibe shift on November 25 when Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on both Canada and Mexico on his first day in powerunless fentanyl and illegal migrants stopped crossing into the US from their territories.

Four days later, Justin Trudeau was in Mar-a-Lago. The Canadian Prime Minister soon realised he’d bought a ticket to be trolled when Trump suggested over dinner that Canada become the 51st state.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum tried to hang tough, warning Trump that Mexico would “meet tariffs with tariffs”, according to The Economist. But when the two leaders spoke, her tone was emollient. Not long after that, the Mexican military seized more than a tonne of fentanyl pills – the largest hit against the opioid smugglers in the country’s history. Cause, meet effect.

The vibe shift has already had effects in Europe, too. Within days of the US election, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Europe should buy more liquefied natural gas from America to ward off new tariffs on European exports to the US. It’s a little embarrassing, to say the least, that Europe continues to buy natural gas from Russia, which it otherwise excoriates for having invaded Ukraine.

“Why not replace it (with) American LNG,” asked von der Leyen, “which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?” That’s a pretty good question. It’s funny she never asked it until after November 5.

Here’s another consequence of the global vibe shift. Before the US election, European leaders were unable to agree on any collective action to increase their defence capabilities. “Strategic autonomy” was an empty slogan.

Now, suddenly, there is serious discussion of a €500bn ($834bn) EU defence fund.

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Within days of the US election, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Europe should buy more liquefied natural gas from America instead of from Russia. Picture: AFP
There is more at work here than mere coincidence. This time four years ago, liberals could tell themselves the Trump presidency had been a one-term populist aberration and the adults were in charge again. Those adults went ahead and restored much of Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

American allies in Europe and Asia were supposed to give all this a standing ovation. Some did. But now the vibe shift is sweeping those suckers aside.

In December, in France, an alliance of the far right and the left in the National Assembly voted down the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, appointed by President Emmanuel Macron after disastrous legislative elections last northern summer destroyed his domestic power base. The decision to pull the plug on Barnier was primarily taken by the leader of the far-right National Rally, Marine Le Pen, long seen as the French Trump.

In Berlin, Olaf Scholz’s “traffic-light” coalition – of red Social Democrats, amber Free Democrats and green Greens – fell in the same week as Trump’s election.

Friedrich Merz, who was for years the Christian Democrats’ genuinely conservative alternative to centrist Angela “Mutti” Merkel, now seems likely to be the next German chancellor. (Indeed, the vibe shift has abruptly turned Merkel from hero to zero. “The indispensable European” was what The Economist called her in November 2015. “Angela who?” the same magazine asked on October 24.)

All over the world, from Romania to South Korea, the vibe shift reverberates. Yet the best example of the global vibe shift – by far – is surely in the Middle East.

Joe Biden wants you to believe that it’s his doing. “For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, but over the last (month) their support collapsed, all three of them, because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” he said in the aftermath of the Syrian tyrant’s flight from Damascus to Moscow.

But who deserves the credit here? Surely not Biden. If anyone has weakened Iran and Hezbollah, it must be Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has refused to yield to sustained American pressure to de-escalate Israel’s war against Iran’s proxies. The credit for weakening Russia belongs mainly to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who declined Biden’s offer of a plane to escape Kyiv following the Russian invasion of his country.

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We are witnessing the complete and total unravelling of the disastrous foreign policy that began under Barack Obama and was picked up again by Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

The usual purveyors of banal commentary want to hail Assad’s fall as a victory for democracy over tyranny. But no one should delude themselves about what has happened in Syria.

It’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus because, as is so often the case in the Arab world, the people who overthrew Assad are radical Islamists. Op-eds that were written about a new morning in Damascus seem like they were written in 2011. They completely miss the vibe shift.

The reality is that we are witnessing the complete and total unravelling of the disastrous foreign policy that began under Obama and was picked up again by Biden, the perverse effect of which was to strengthen both Iran and Russia. The series of blunders that consigned Syria to a hideous and protracted civil war and opened the door to Russia in Syria and Ukraine began between July 2012 and August 2013, when the White House said if Assad used chemical weapons he would be deemed to have “crossed a red line”. The regime used chemical weapons anyway.

And the White House’s threat was empty; in August 2013, Obama decided to call off the planned retaliatory air strikes.

Worse, Obama then allowed the Russian government to broker a deal under which Assad handed over (some of) his chemical weapons. On September 10, 2013, Obama announced that the US was no longer the “world’s policeman”. Five months later, Russian troops occupied Crimea, the annexation of which followed on March 18.

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US president-elect Donald Trump, France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, pictured before a meeting in Paris on December 7, 2024. Picture: AFP

In September 2015, President Vladimir Putin sent not only three dozen aircraft but also 1500 troops to Latakia, Syria, and warships to the Caspian Sea.

On Obama’s watch, Putin established himself not only as the proud owner-occupier of the Crimean peninsula and a powerbroker in the Middle East but also as a troublemaker in Africa, hiring out the mercenaries of the Wagner Group to the nastiest regimes he could find south of the Sahara.

The signature achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to be his much-vaunted Iran deal. But the upshot of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was that the Iranians took the money they made from sanctions relief and diverted it to the likes of Assad, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, China – under its new leader Xi Jinping – embarked on an arms build up unlike anything since the Cold War. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, who also came to power on Obama’s watch, was another who understood the importance of acquiring weapons of mass destruction while Obama was in the White House.

The overall effect of Obama’s second term was to tilt the balance of geopolitical advantage in favour of our enemies: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Trump’s election in 2016 temporarily halted this tilt, but it merely resumed and accelerated after Trump lost to Biden.

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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Beijing in May, 2024. The overall effect of Obama’s second term was to tilt the balance of geopolitical advantage in favour of our enemies. Picture: AFP

In Afghanistan, eastern Europe and the Middle East, Biden explicitly signalled the replacement of deterrence with “de-escalation”. The result was increasing co-operation between what began to look like a new Eurasian Axis.

The vibe shift is, in essence, escalation versus de-escalation. Trump made that perfectly clear when he posted on December 2:

“Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East,” Trump wrote.

“But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”

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The best example of the global vibe shift – by far – is surely in the Middle East. A congratulatory billboard is pictured on November 7, 2024 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Picture: Getty

This is exactly the kind of language the Biden administration has refused to use for the past 14 months. Even better was this gem, which Trump put out as soon as it became clear that Assad had fled to Russia:

“Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success … There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin … I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!”

I think it is fair to say that this is not quite what Putin was expecting to hear from Trump after November 5. Nor can he have expected Trump to make a 25-minute call to Zelensky the day after his election victory, with Musk also on the line.

According to three sources with knowledge of Zelensky’s meeting with Trump in September, “Trump told Zelensky he would not abandon Ukraine but wants to give diplomacy a chance.”

And before Christmas the two men were together again for the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, smiling and shaking hands.

Slowly, Putin is realising that Trump is not going to hand Ukraine to him on a plate, which explains the increased intensity of Russia’s assaults on Ukraine in recent weeks. Putin is desperate to grab whatever he can before the negotiation over ending the war begins, as it surely will, soon after January 20.

Note, too, the phrase “China can help”. The People’s Republic is the only other superpower in the world in terms of economic scale, technological sophistication and military capability. It would prefer to ignore the vibe shift. In May 2024, when I was last in Beijing, Chinese officials assured me they were indifferent to who would win the US presidential election, as Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris were “two bowls of poison” as far as China was concerned.

But this was surely a lie. Not only would Trump’s threatened 60 per cent tariffs on all Chinese imports be a much bigger shock to the Chinese economy than anything Harris might plausibly have done – in Trump’s nominees for key national security positions, the Chinese can also see that he intends to approach the People’s Republic much more hawkishly than in 2017.

This is good news for Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, who has a plan to deter China from attacking Taiwan he calls “hellscape”. All he needs to make it credible is a vast supply of drones – and the vibe shift.

“A Vibe Shift Is Coming,” wrote Davis in 2022. “Will Any of Us Survive It?” It is a good question. The vibe shift has gone from the world of the fashionistas to the world of four-star admirals by way of the tech bros and the Trump-Musk campaign. It began as a revulsion against pronouns and piercings; it is culminating in a global repudiation of the liberal international order that inspired two generations of Democrats.

Yale Law School is out. The world is going to look a lot more like Gotham City from here on.

This article originally appeared in The Free Press. Niall Ferguson’s latest book is Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe.
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StockyGuy said:
Leftists like Gates and Soros have been bankrolling their weird ideas for decades. Musk is an absolute breath of breath of fresh air - now seeing him throw his weight behind more action on the festering wound of UK grooming gangs, I'm starting to like him more than Trump... which is rather hard.
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