In the days before personal computers, people would write down in journal books their most intimate thoughts, with the TV teenagers going through epic dramas regarding little TV brothers getting a hold of this diary and embarrassing their TV sisters. There were a lot of middle class households with the same drama taking place back then.

Once we all acquired computers, all of that personal journaling moved from handwritten notebooks to digital notebooks, which is what I have here. Not that I'm going to share my most intimate thoughts here but I will share some personal anecdotes and thoughts with visitors.

We live in a changing world and I don't say that with optimism. Things are going from bad to worse everywhere and a lot of people are starting to check out. I have been corresponding online with a young woman in Latvia, who is an aspiring fiction writer. She manages pretty well with her English, despite it not being her native language. I have seen her come a long way since I found her on Substack a couple years ago. But she struggles with self-confidence and lately, the online trolls have gotten to her again so she is checking out for a while in order to get herself together. She has told her fans that she has a husband and four little children to take care of so that may have a little to do with her decision.

Then, one of my favourite financial podcasters from Singapore is also taking a break from the media to take a month long vacation. Checking out a little bit to get his head straight again.

I get it. People need to take vacations. I took a month long trip last year myself. I don't think we'll be doing anything like that again as the trip kind of traumatised my wife with some of the things that happened on the trip to the western part of the United States.

But there is a pattern emerging. People are starting to become overwhelmed with everything that's going on around the world and checking out.

Right now, today in the United States, we have a president who is actively working to subvert the next set of federal elections in the country to make sure that only the people he wants to get elected get to go to congress after next November.

Americans are losing their first amendment freedoms more and more every week. A lot of independent journalists and politicians in the opposing political party are all talking a lot about it in public, but little is actually being done to stop it. Meanwhile, the corruption is moving ahead like a steamroller. The president and his people are ignoring judges and congress to do whatever they want. Sometimes, they listen to a judge or the large enough protest marches, but by and large, they do what they want and flip off the world, daring them to try and stop them.

In the rest of the world, heads are rolling over associations with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Heads of state, and corporate leaders are resigning, and, in the case of England, they're even arresting former monarchy members. In the United State, these sexual predators and morbidly wealthy oligarchs who illegally profited off of the illegally obtained financial information that Epstein was selling to them, will probably all get off with little repercussions other than a stain on their reputations.

That's why I think the United States has reached the tipping point of moral bankruptcy. The citizens are all in an uproar about what the Trump government is doing everywhere around the world. They're protesting in the streets by thousands in some places. But the white house keeps right on grifting money from the federal coffers, and foreign governments, while daring anyone to stop them.

I truly don't think they will be stopped in time to save the country from failure. I don't mean a total collapse, as the economy is too big and too intertwined with the global economy to go completely bankrupt. But, the U.S. is headed for a major recession. The signs are all there. I suspect that by the elections in November, the economy will be near the negative in output unless the tariffs are adjusted way down.

As it is, the poverty levels in the country will increase dramatically over the next several months as the job losses from the tariffs and isolationist foreign policies bite hard into consumers wallets. The 2008 depression/recession will seem like a distant memory, another historical marker on the hallmarks of the United States. This new recession will hit the tech industry real hard, causing mass layoffs, much like all of the real estate jobs from the previous recession.

The rest of us will do our best to hang on as the U.S. goes through another economic reset. The last time, fuel prices went through the roof all across the country. Retail prices went way up because the price to deliver everything went through the roof. It took several years for the country to recover but things were never the same afterwards. It still isn't.

I have said this many times before. When the people of the United States recover from the next major recession, it will fundamentally change the fabric of the country again, only worse this time. The real estate bubble burst gave rise to the MAGA movement. I'm afraid that the U.S. will end up with something worse this time. We're seeing a preview of what might be coming right now in 2026.

There is about a third of the countries citizens who would welcome a fascist style government along the lines of Hungary or Russia. They think they stand to gain from it. Think again. Only the wealthiest oligarchs will gain anything from something like that while the rest move farther into poverty and oppression. Just like Hungary and Russia. Democracy will pass on into history.

Once that happens, the northern and southern borders will be shutdown by Mexico and Canada, open only to political refugees and asylum seekers. Those that can afford to do so, will flee the country, taking their wealth with them, further impoverishing the country. We've been watching that happen in Israel since October of 2023. It will happen to the U.S. once the democratic republic completes its turn into a authoritarian oligarchy.

The latest executive branch attempts to jail journalists for doing their jobs, coercing corporate news media to censor people they object to, and arresting peaceful protesters, is just the beginning, unless the people can find a way to put a stop to it before the next elections in November. If they wait until November to see the results of the elections, it may be too late. Trump may very well have all of the mechanisms in place to intimidate thousands of voters into not voting, purging voter rolls in enough states to affect the outcome of the election results, and other voter suppression methods in order for his loyalists to win.

There is a way to stop most of this but it depends on the active participation of the citizens. Right now, there are nowhere near enough of angry people to stand up to what's happening. All of these bits and pieces in the media, aren't taken as part of a whole war campaign. Trump's corrupted corporate media is doing all it can to persuade the public that these are all separate, unrelated events and everyone should just go about their daily lives as if there's nothing to see.

When you step back and put them all together from across the country, it's obvious what they're trying to do. This is leading up to a government by the wealthy few over the many. As one writer called it this morning, neofeudalism. A new word that has been coined to describe what we're seeing.

The fear of seeing all of these new Gulags being built all across the country to house thousands of people is starting to wake people up. People are starting to realise that once all of the undocumented immigrants and other undesirables are all deported, those empty beds may very well be filled with citizens who dare speak up against the new rulers.

I have a friend up in New Brunswick, Canada, who recently married an American citizen. In her latest article, she described his trip up to Canada from Connecticut where he currently lives when they got married in Canada last fall.

When the young man reached whatever border crossing he used to travel into Canada, he said that Customs and Border Patrol have now set up an additional check point on the exits from the United States in order to grill people about their reasons for leaving the U.S. to go to Canada, and they maybe even doing this in the international airports. He described questions such as why he was going, where he was going, and other aggressively pointed and detailed questions, as if intimating that it may be a crime to leave the United States for any reason now.

I don't know about you but I would have told them I was just going to visit for a bit and anything else they wanted to know was none of their business. My business would be between myself and the Canadian customs agents. Is CBP now stopping people they don't like the looks of from leaving the U.S.? As I jokingly told my friend, I know a couple of places up in Northern Maine that I knew of years ago that I could have just stepped across the border through the woods and walk into Canada.

After all of these years, the Americans may have discovered these places and closed them off, but you never know. They may still be there. I found them by accident when I went out in the backwoods with my snowmobile years ago before Trump's first term.

If I didn't have a foreign born wife to look after, I have thought more than a few times in the last year, that I probably would have sold my house here in Virginia and moved back to Aroostook County, Maine after Trump got reelected in 2024. As close to the border as I could get. I would still write and post online, despite the limited rural internet service, always with the thought of maybe having to bug out across the border in the middle of the night someday one step ahead of Homeland Security.

We find ourselves living in changing times. Things are changing so fast, it's hard to keep up with it all at times. Between climate change, and political change, everything is collapsing around us.

I have another online friend living in northern California, who recently unsubscribed to my Substack page. It hurt me a bit but I respect his decision.Then I asked myself why he he did it. When I read his article today, I realised why. I discovered that I've been inadvertently following lots of other journalists and podcasters by repeating content from the news that everyone else is spouting about for attention over the last couple of weeks. After thinking about it, I decided I needed to make a change.

Starting next week, I'm going to start focusing on climate change and global warming going forward. It's something that people are writing about but its having a hard time getting attention due to Trump and company hogging the media air waves. I'm getting burnt out from talking about Trump and what he's doing to the world at large.

Pretty soon, the world will have a new big thing to talk about as Trump goes to war with Iran. There is little doubt that he won't. You don't send that many planes and ships to a place just to posture and intimidate. So, while the world is focused on the dead and dying from Iran, I will be focused on climate change and global warming and its effects on people around the world. How many people have been paying attention to the extreme weather in Canada and western Europe this winter? If that sounds interesting, tune into next week's, The Village Oak Tree podcast. Sláinte