A Christmas Message 5,000 Years in the Making...

In 1991 two German tourists stumbled across a body buried in the ice of the Alps between Italy & Austria. Initially thought to be the body of an early 20^th century climber, it turned out to be the body of a man who had died 5,000 years ago. Given the name Ötzi, he died of an arrow wound and it was theorized he was a shepherd.    

The most fascinating thing about Ötzi wasn’t where he died or how he died, or even when he died, but rather, the condition of his health. If we listen to people today, we’d imagine that Ötzi would have been an ironman, having never tasted Spam or M&M’s or Hamburger Helper and having eaten only natural, by definition, organic, food. As such, he should have been in perfect shape. 

But, sadly, he wasn’t. He suffered from a parasite, had been sick three times in the six months before he died, his teeth were full of cavities, he was lactose intolerant and his lungs were blackened by smoke. Estimated to be aged 45 when he died, Ötzi was not the posterchild for health one might expect listening to those who decry pesticides or canned food or GMOs.

The thing is, Ötzi may may indeed be a posterchild, but for something completely different.  The reality is Ötzi was old when he died.  For almost all of recorded history the average lifespan of humans has been below 30 years. A number of factors went into that, including high infant mortality rates – sometimes reaching 35%, war, famine, disease, dangerous working conditions, etc.

The bottom line is that for most of history, life for humans has been characterized by scarcity, war, slavery, poor health and short lives. Across the spectrum, from when men were hunting and gathering to when they developed agriculture, from when they were nomads to when they developed great empires, life expectancy stood between 30 & 40 years for the most privileged and usually less than that for the average person.

Why is any of that important?  Because as Christmas season is upon us, it might be a good time to step back and look at what we actually have.  Far too many Americans take civilization for granted, assuming that the way things are is the way they have to be.  They think the things they call “rights” such as healthcare, housing, food, etc. are somehow elements of nature that developed independent of the hard work of innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs and blue-collar workers of every stripe.  They are not.  Everything we have was developed by someone, somewhere.

The reality is, beginning about 200 years ago advances of almost every kind began an upward trajectory that more than doubled the life expectancy in the west and significantly improved it virtually everywhere else. To understand the degree of impact that upward trajectory look at the people living in abject poverty.  In 1820 the percentage of people around the world living in abject poverty – defined in this case by less than $1 a day (or the then equivalent) was above 85%.  Today, a mere 200 years later in man’s 200,000 year plus journey, that number has dropped to below 10%. 

But it’s not just the level of poverty that has changed.  On practically every single other metric, from the basic to the frivolous, the world has improved.

Transportation: In 1820 it took 4-6 months to cross the continent in a Conestoga wagon. Today you could drive (respecting the speed limits) from New York to LA in as few as four days, but if you wanted to fly you could be there in 3 hours. 

Communication: Prior to the invention of the telegraph in 1844 the fastest way to communicate was with smoke signals and the horses and riders of the Pony Express. Today anyone with a smartphone can talk to someone on the other side of the world in real time. 

Information: For most of our history almost all humans were illiterate, and most never even had a written language. People learned news and stories through listening to others or looking at stained glass windows or reading books or newspapers.  Today we have endless news, movies, sports and every conceivable form of media available from around the world at our fingertips 24 hours a day.

Housing:  In 1790 the average size of a house in the United States was 831 square feet with almost 6 people living in it.  Today the average size of a house in the United States is 2,496 square feet with an average household of 2.5 people.  That means that today the average American has 998 square feet of living space at home, seven times the 138 they had when the country was founded. 

And the conveniences in that house are exponentially greater.  From indoor plumbing to refrigerators to non-wood burning stoves to lights to televisions to wi-fi, air conditioning and much more.  Nor is it just the new inventions:  Those homes are also filled with things like furniture and pots and pans and beds of a quality and quantity that most people in history if they owned at all, were of the barest nature unless a member of the elite.

Clothing:  Through most of history people would typically have 2 or 3 sets of clothes which would include 2 for work and 1 for Sunday – at least in the Christian tradition. And those clothes would often be used until they fell apart and were rarely washed.  Today open the closet and or dresser in almost any American bedroom and you’ll find suitcases of cloths, many that go without wearing for months or years.  The same holds true for shoes, and like the clothes, the selection of the shoes worn by Americans today is lightyears ahead in quality and style choice of those worn by people of most history.

Work: Prior to the middle of the 19^th century, 90% + of the world’s population worked in farming or food harvesting of one sort of another. Today, in the US that number is below 5%, which essentially means that almost every job that any American has today didn’t exist for most of human history, and the resulting workplaces are dramatically safer as well. 

Democratic government:  Today, depending on how you count them, between 25% and 45% of the world’s population live in nations with some form of democratic government. That compares to essentially 0% when the United States was founded. 

There is of course, much more, from the selection of and accessibility to food, the quality of healthcare, the existence of leisure time and the variety of activities with which to fill it.

Of course things aren’t perfect and people still want to fix them.  Sometimes life’s unfair, people can be jerks and our government takes our money to give to grifters and the healthcare system is a clusterfark.  All of those things and many more are true.  But at the end of the day, for as much as things suck, in the big picture most of us have lives kings would have salivated over throughout history. Most certainly would think I think the pre-arrow Ötzi would have traded places with any of us.  I think that gets lost on too many people, particularly on the left.

The point of all of this is not to suggest that we hold hands and sing Kumbaya over the dinner table this Christmas season. Not at all. But sometimes, particularly around family in the tight environs of the holiday, it makes sense to step back and focus on what we have in common and what we’re grateful for rather than what divides us. There’s more than enough time for the latter once the new year rolls around. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA 

Will Trump Be Julius Caesar or Augustus? 2026 Is His Last Chance to Crush the Deep State and Save America

It's not often life gives nations real second chances when it comes to the big things, but in America’s case it did. My only hope is that we don’t squander it… or to be more precise, I hope Donald Trump doesn’t squander it. The 2026 midterms are less than a year away, that makes what he does in the next six to eight months monumentally important. 

The bottom line is, does he want to be consequential or just well known?  Julius Caesar is easily one of the most well-known men in history, but was he really that consequential? The truth is, no. We know more about Caesar than any other Roman not because he changed the world, but because he was a genius of propaganda and wrote prodigiously – and well – about his exploits. The reality is, Caesar was just another Roman general – albeit a great one – caught up in a century of internecine wars between men seeking to control the Republic. Augustus, his adopted son – who is far less well known in history – was far more consequential, having transformed the Republic into an Empire that would arguably last another 1500 years. 

Is Donald Trump going to be Caesar or Augustus? Is he going to be a president who rearranges the deckchairs on the USS Titanic and simply slows down her eventual collision with the iceberg or is he going to steer her through the treacherous waters and bring her out safely on the other side?

When he won re-election last November I was certain that after enduring 8 years of what is easily the most vitriolic abuse any American politician had ever endured, he was going to return to Washington and metaphorical heads were going to roll.  Indeed, he ran on the idea of destroying the deep state.    

Now, a year after the election, I’m not so sure. While I applaud most of his moves on immigration, particularly his recent move to temporarily cease all immigration from 3^rd world countries, there are two elements that cause concern.  One is his support for the H1B visa program. If there are jobs that can’t be filled by Americans, then bringing in foreign workers who have the necessary skills makes sense for keeping American industry productive.  But that’s not what’s happening. Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, primarily Indians, are being brought in to supplant American workers companies would generally have to pay more to keep or hire.  There is no shortage of American STEM workers, there are merely trillion dollar tech, consulting and other companies who simply want to bolster the bottom line by paying foreign workers lower wages. Sadly, Trump defends the program virtually every chance he gets.  Add to that his allowing half a million students / spies from Communist China to remain at American universities and one begins to wonder whose payrolls Trump’s advisors are on. 

Another area where Trump has not met expectations is taking on the leftist cabal that brought the nation to the brink of disaster over the last decade.  From Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton and the army of anti-American traitors who worked against Trump, his allies, and the American people, Trump should establish a task force with the specific purpose of investigating every single member of the government or NGO and every financier who had anything to do with Russiagate as well as the coup / coverup of 2020 and the resulting J6 persecutions.  Americans know what happened, we watched it in real time. Molly Ball crowed about it in TIME magazine, we read about it in Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged, and later we followed as Emerald Robinson pulled string after string… but what we don’t have, and need, is the entire case of the treachery laid out in black and white, and then see the guilty tried and punished.  As we all learned in the OJ trial, juries can’t always be trusted, but at a minimum the information should be laid out for the American people to see so that they can vote accordingly. The recent arrest of the DC pipe-bomb suspect and Kash Patel’s announcement that it was based on information the FBI sat on for 4 years tells us that the information is there, it just takes an administration with sufficient courage to expose it. 

Hand in hand with allowing that treachery to go unpunished is the fact that Trump has not put his shoulder into ensuring the passage of the SAVE act. Indeed, New England, which is about 40% Republican, has 21 House seats and 100% of them are Democrat. That’s not good.  Democrats win by cheating.  Period. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would require Voter ID, proof of U.S. citizenship and outlaw most mail-in voting. Strong-arming Congress, which the GOP theoretically controls, into passing SAVE would do more for saving the Republic than almost any other thing he could do. If Trump wants to maintain GOP control over Congress and have any chance of fixing the country, he needs to fix the voting system now, because we know the second the SAVE act is passed there’s an army of treacherous federal judges who will seek to derail it.

Which brings us to the last critical issue, the Judiciary. Since 2015 federal judges across the country have acted as the rear guard for the Obama plan of “Fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into a leftist nirvana. From nationwide injunctions to throwing out cases to seeking to exercise Executive power, the federal judiciary has become untethered to the Constitution. The traditional way such overreach is addressed is that cases make their way through the appellate process where SCOTUS may or may not eventually rectify the problem. But that system breaks down as a viable solution when fast approaching elections that decide the direction of the government are concerned. Congress must act to address this judicial overreach. 

As such, Trump should work with Congress to utilize their Article III powers to fix this.  I’d suggest two possible avenues: 

1) Congress abolishes the entire judiciary below SCOTUS and remakes it with a far more limited and constitutional judiciary.

2) Congress sets up a separate parallel federal court channel that would deal exclusively with election and Executive power related issues so that they can be argued in a timely fashion and be resolved long before they become moot.

Decades from now Donald Trump is going to be remembered.  The question is, will he be remembered as a celebrity president who attracted a great deal of attention and simply slowed the collapse as the nation calcified into a failed dystopia driven by big government and big spending, or is he going to be remembered as an heroic, mythic figure who fought back the leftist tide and put America back on firm, limited government, Constitutional footing, giving her a real opportunity to survive another 250 years?  I guess we’ll see…

Worse Health, Higher Costs, Endless Repeal: The ACA Is Working—For Health Insurers and Republicans, But Not So Much For You

I started writing my blog in 2009, largely in response to America electing an anti-American president.  During those first few years I talked a lot about Obamacare.  The thing was a disaster from day one, indeed, in an omen of things to come, Obama’s team spent 4X more building a website that didn’t work than Apple did developing the iPhone.

The worst part about Obamacare?  The fact that it was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist.

In 2013 I wrote the following:  

“Obamacare was passed in 2009 (sic) in reaction to anecdotal examples of Americans who couldn’t get healthcare. According to Gallop, in 2009 there were 50 million Americans who did not have health insurance. That represented approximately 16% of the population. Gallop also reported that of those without health insurance, fully 50% were satisfied with their healthcare. That means that fully 92% of the American population either had health insurance – 80% of whom were satisfied with that insurance – or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have insurance.

To give those numbers a bit of perspective, compare them the rest of the developed world. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development publishes the Better Life Index which ranks developed nations by a wide variety of criteria, one of which is health. According to the 2011 Better Life Index survey, in 2009 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health. Of the 34 countries covered in the data, in only two – New Zealand (89.7%) and Canada (88.1%) did citizens report a higher level of satisfaction with their health. Not the United Kingdom (76%). Not France (72.4%). Not Sweden (79.1%). Now, of course health is not healthcare, but the goal of healthcare is to improve or sustain a person’s health.

So, in 2009, when 92% of Americans had health insurance or were satisfied enough with their healthcare not to have it, and 88% of Americans were satisfied with their health, we got Obamacare, a 2,000 page bill that needed to be passed before it could be read..”

Of course, the only reason we actually have this is because that treacherous snake leading the Supreme Court deemed it a tax and therefore allowed it to go into force.  Since then, healthcare has become more expensive and satisfaction has plummeted. 

Today, Americans recognize Obamacare for the utter disaster that it is. We hear horror stories regularly of people who pay thousands of dollars a month in insurance only to be told they can’t have a procedure or the procedure is going to cost an arm and a leg. Often, if they simply choose not to get Obamacare insurance and pay the fine, they actually pay less for their treatments!   But not only have prices for care exceeded inflation virtually every year since then – something it’s done for decades as utilization rates increased – but satisfaction has plummeted.  In every aspect of healthcare other than nurses, American’s satisfaction has declined by double digits. Health insurance companies’ satisfaction rates are down 11% since 2010, while hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies are down by 14%, 15% and 21% respectively. 

So what we’ve seen since Obamacare was implemented is that healthcare costs have increased dramatically and satisfaction has declined.  But hey, sometimes you have to break some eggs in order to make an omelet, and that’s the price we pay to live longer and healthier… Except, we’re not. 

According to the American Journal of Public Health, American life expectancy, after having increased almost every single year between 1950 and 2010, flatlined after Obamacare and actually began to decline around 2014. Plus, Americans’ life expectancy has fallen even further behind that of our European peers under Obamacare.  And the icing on the cake? Our health, the basic issue upon all of this is supposed to be based… has gotten worse! 

So Obamacare has been a complete disaster on every single front.  At least for the average American. For health insurance companies however, it’s been a boon. Since Obamacare was implemented, their stocks have grown on average 708% while the general market, which has been pumped up by trillion dollar superstars like Amazon, Tesla and Facebook, has increased by only 525%.  And their CEOs do pretty well too… . 

But it’s not just been insurance company stockholders and CEOs who have been benefiting from Obamacare.  There is one group for which it has been a godsend: Republicans. 

Perhaps no one has taken advantage of Obamacare as much as the Republicans. It’s an issue that is red meat to GOP voters and they know it.  They have been campaigning against it from before it was even passed.  Every two years we here the drumbeat of “We’re going to repeal Obamacare”.  But a funny thing happens on the way to the repeal, every time… it never happens.  Of course they did get close once, but with TDS addled John McCain’s help, no cigar. But we’re not in power they say… but Republicans held both houses of Congress from 2015 – 2019, with two of those years with a GOP president. Repeal?  Nope.  Nor have they done it this year, despite President Trump saying he was going to replace it if re-elected and the Republicans controlling both chambers on Capitol Hill. 

Democrats are trying to maintain the travesty with a band aid made of money, and thus far the GOP has stymied them. But we all know that the GOP is full of grifters, so who knows what the future holds. Indeed, one wonders if the Republicans will take this opportunity to look at actually doing something for their constituents, now that they’ve created another perk for lining their own pockets.  Having watched them lie to us for the last 15 years, I’m not holding my breath…