What also happened in the vacuum of Trump, is China telling all of it's AI engineers, that their travels outside of China would now be strictly regulated to prevent anyone from being tempted to stray over to the American side with lures of really big carrots on sticks. China is now aggressively protecting it's tech industry from the west.

Considering that these tech engineers probably have a lot better standard of living in China right now, better than anything the west can offer them, they're probably very happy to remain where they are. They might grumble a little bit, then realise just how good they have it there, compared to life in the U.S. right now.

And that is also making some tongues wag in Europe these days. The Europeans, and the rest of the world are all wondering why the Yanks are crying so hard about the price of petrol and diesel being more than four dollars a gallon, compared to the over eight dollars a imperial gallon everywhere else in the world. For you Americans who wonder what I'm talking about, everyone else in the world, well nearly everyone, uses the metric system to measure everything. So, they buy petrol and diesel by the litre, and it's averaging somewhere above the equivalent of two American dollars per litre in Europe right now. One U.S. imperial gallon equals about three and three quarter litres. So, if your paying roughly two dollars fifty per litre for petrol for example, multiply that by nearly four times. And they wonder why the Yanks are crying so loudly around the world. Ohh, woe is me, my gas is sooo expensive! How can I afford to live with such high prices?

It's more than that, obviously, but as I've been saying for years, Americans are so very spoiled compared to most of the rest of the world. And they think they deserve to be so special. I beg to differ. The Americans are only special in their own minds and they have no trouble telling everyone around the world just how special they are, and don't you forget it.

Years ago, the only other peoples I ran into during my travels around Europe who thought they were special, were the British. Until 2010, when they voted for Brexit. It didn't take long after that before they weren't special anymore. Within a few years, they just became another impoverished European nation who had done something stupid to kill their economies.

That seems to be a trend in western Europe these days, but I digress. We were talking about geopolitics and failing economies weren't we? Let's talk some more about the United States.

Right now, the wealth gap has become so vast, that the civil unrest is bubbling like hot magma just below the surface of a volcano. The new New York City Mayor has done wonderful things to try and alleviate his city's suffering poor and immigrant population with wonderful results so far, and he's just getting started. He's a model for where all of the other mayor's and state governors should look to, in order to bring a measure of stability and equality back to the people of the country. Instead, these morbidly wealthy oligarchs and established politicians are treating him like an aberration. Like they have treated Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont these last few years.

The new up and coming senate candidate from Maine, Graham Platner is cut from the same cloth as Zoran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, so I'm watching him closely. I hope he wins the general election this fall and joins the ranks of the social democrats to make some meaningful changes in the Washington establishment.

The American people are fed up with sending their hard earned money to Israel, only for them to use that money to commit war crimes. Which makes the U.S. complicit in the eyes of any court. But, the U.S. is not a signatory to the Rome Accords, so they get to thumb their noses at the rest of the world and do as they please. Which Trump is doing right out in plain sight. Only in his case, he's just walking into the federal treasury and helping himself to whatever he wants in broad daylight, daring anyone to stop him. Which few are doing out of some kind of fear of him and his people.

I mean, seriously, the only thing these politicians should be afraid of, is if Trump and his mafia familia were to come after them with serious intent to do bodily harm. Outside of that, there should be nothing else, even the threat of not being re-elected, that should stop them from standing up to him and his mafia empire. Maybe that's it. There are a lot of rumours flying about that a lot of these established politicians were involved with Jeffery Epstein back in the day. Maybe Trump has some serious dirt on them, which is why they ask how high when the Trump mobsters say jump. As for the politicians elected after Epstein was gone, maybe they're playing follow the leader with their older peers and going along for a piece of the grift pie. Whatever the case, they all need to be fired and replaced with more social democrats like Sanders, Platner and Momdani.

What I'm most concerned with, is the current recession that no one in government it talking about, that is about to become a major recession, maybe even a global depression soon. Every well known economist is predicting this, so I tend to believe them. I'm stocking up through the summer ahead of impending shortages. By the end of 2026, we may be seeing obvious food shortages in the local grocery stores. You know, empty shelves and coolers and such. It's supposed to be even worse in 2027.

Americans are already crying about the cost of living skyrocketing under Trump. If the grocery shelves start emptying out like they did during the Covid lockdowns of 2020, the anger may become too much for even the newly elected democrats to quell. What a great way to start the 250th year of the United States as a nation. I wonder how that MMA fight is going to go over on July fourth this year, that's taking place on the White House lawn? They're in the process of putting that all together right now and it looks pretty ugly. Much like all of that construction chaos where the east wing of the white house used to be. And the taxpayers are footing the bill for all of this? No wonder they're mad. I know I would be. Maybe I am on some level.

I'm more depressed I think, than angry. At my age, I've seen how far along the United States has come over the years since I grew up on that poor farm in County Aroostook, Maine. Some of it good, but now that I've been looking back at it all from my new perspective, I realised about twenty five years ago, that the U.S. is a seriously flawed country. It's always been full of greedy capitalists since day one.

Take a look a the much vaunted constitution for starters. The founders who created it, wrote it just for the white landowners of the time. Negroes, as they were called back then, were only considered three fifths of a human, and as such, were only fit to be slaves or at the most, only part civilised and therefore not allowed to own property or vote. The native Americans who have inhabited the lands long before the first Europeans even knew the Americas where here, are still treated as lesser humans, and at most, just a conquered peoples and therefore deserve whatever handouts their conquerors deem to give them out of kindness. Otherwise, stay out of sight, out of mind.

As for the descendants of the slaves still living in the U.S., which includes the Latinos (yeah, the Spaniards kept a lot of them as slaves out west and in Mexico), they now makeup a ethnic electorate that is nearly greater than their white counterparts. Which scares a lot of these Caucasian descendants of the Europeans who stole everything from the native Americans, Latinos and the Africans who were brought here in chains. The poorest among the white people are realising that maybe they're not so special after all. They're finally waking up to the fact that it's all about how much money you have that makes you feel like your special. Of course, all of those morbidly wealthy billionaires flaunting their mansions and yachts on social media isn't helping with that image either.

That image is splitting the people in two. Those on one side of the economic line, strive at nearly any cost, to be like their idols. Those on the other side have realised that they have more in common with their poorer neighbours in the African American, Latino and other immigrant communities who work hard just to survive everyday. There are a lot more of them than the wannabe rich group now, which is driving a lot of this angst from the rich and wannabe rich folks towards those on the other side of the economic line. Which includes a lot of these current politicians, not to include the social democrats.

Lest we forget that ICE is still running rampant across the country, picking up anyone who fits the profile of what they think an immigrant looks like. Granted, there are a few who are here illegally, and did not apply for asylum or other form of status. But by and large, the majority of them are here with documented asylum claims and applications for green cards. Now, they're being locked up in concentration camps and enduring some of the most inhumane conditions not seen since the camps in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia over eighty years ago. This is what the United States has become. A rogue nation with a wannabe mafia mobster in charge, with their version of Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, by the name of Stephen Miller, in charge of the U.S. final solution program.

After the fiasco in Minneapolis last winter, ICE is operating with a much less public profile now, but make no mistake, the quota system is still very much in place and, as we're seeing in the Delaney detention centre in Newark, NJ right now, the final solution is still very much underway across the country. But, because this is happening in the United States, most of the humane rights groups around the world are turning a blind eye to that out of fear of Trump and the United States reputation for retribution.

That's a lot to think about this week. Now it's time for me to help with supper so I'm going to leave off until next week, unless something major breaks out that I think I want to write about. Looking forward a bit, I'm working on some future podcast episodes about book reviews. I just finished reading a non-fiction book (which I rarely read non-fiction) about last years chaos over the start of the immigration purge. It was advertised during a main stream news segment as the next best seller of the year, if you can believe the hype. All I'll say about it for now, is that I was sadly disappointed with the book, for the price the author and publisher charges for it. I'll have a lot more to say about it in next week's podcast.

Take care and have a good weekend while you can. I'll be back next week, if not sooner, with more thoughts on the chaos around the world. Sláinte