History moving fast
One thing that is incredible is how fast events are moving, and how the world is changing day by day. The last time things started going this fast was in the late 1980s.
So just to let you know how much the world has changed, I can make the statement in July 2026, that China is now a peer of the United States with equal power to the US. I would not have made this statement in February 2026. The defeat that the US is suffering at the hands of Iran is going to be worse than anything that happened in Vietnam. Part of the situation in Vietnam is that Kissinger and Nixon did everything they could do soften the blow, so part of the diplomacy with Mao was so that the US could exit Vietnam without a general collapse of American power.
The fascinating thing is that China has done everything it can to make sure that the United States has a soft landing, since I think China is working from a Kissinger/Nixon view of things, but the people that are running the US are bat-crap insane, Also it’s amazing how much American soft power has collapsed. Back in February there were still people that accepted the US narrative of democracy fighting autocracy, but I don’t know of anyone outside of the US that believes this any more.
This has also affected my personal plans. A year ago, my plan was to make money with crypto then go off to Washington to become a self-funded lobbyist. At this point, Washington is so dysfunctional and irrational that there is no point. So right now, I am just watching events, waiting for the revolution to happen and for things to collapse and then figure out what the situation is once everything implodes.
One thing that worries me is that you can’t spend so much time burning down other people’s houses before you start burning your own. Once you get used to bombing and killing foreigners, then its only a matter of time before you label other Americans as “foreign” and start doing bad things to them. At that point you take a deep breath, read the Federalist Papers, and just hope that the systems that were created in Philadelphia in 1787 still work. And it might, one thing that makes you feel better is that the people who wrote the US Constitution had a very good idea of how people behave and so the current situation would not have surprised them.