Friday, February 7, 2025

Can a Nation Built By Giants Survive the Disability Industrial Complex?

Vivek Ramaswamy got himself in some hot water a couple of weeks ago when he tweeted about American culture. He’s wrong on the big picture, but his comments about American workers hits a nerve… 

While the US Constitution and free market capitalism set the foundations for American prosperity, it took a rugged, passionate, free people to build it. From George Washington to George Washington Carver to millions of other Americans, the United States was carved out a continent of forests that seemed to go on forever, fertile plains, vast mountain ranges and scorching hot deserts.  Over time American frontiersmen, settlers and entrepreneurs forged a country that seemed to have all of God’s blessings in abundance.

Conditions were rarely easy for most Americans throughout most of our history. Coal miners spent 12 – 16 hour shifts in dangerous mines in which they sometimes couldn’t even stand up. Frontiersmen built a homestead and a farm out of a thick Appalachian forest while fighting brutal winters and a tenacious Indian population. Slaves toiled for years at backbreaking work during freezing winters and boiling summers. At the end of the 19th century over 50% of Americans still lived and worked as farmers, a far more dangerous job than most people understand. The industrial revolution brought sweatshops and drove a thirst for steel, trains and petroleum, industries that brought new dangers.

One sometimes has to marvel that the colonies survived long enough to coalesce and challenge the British for independence and then go on to grow and prosper (mostly) for over 200 years as it changed the world.

Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent somehow so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who crisscrossed a continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who won two world wars and sent a man to the moon so different than Americans today? Were the Americans who invented the mechanical reaper, air conditioning, vulcanized rubber and the microchip so different than Americans today? Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be.

Go back little more than one generation and it seems like Americans were something of another species. Compared to 2025, they appear to be relative supermen. In 1970 there were 79 million people working in the United States supporting 1.5 million workers on Disability Insurance (SSDI). That means that one person out of every 52 workers was on Disability… Fast forward 5 decades and it seems as if the country has turned on its side. By 2024 the number of Americans working had risen by 100% to 161 million people. During that same period however, workers receiving disability insurance skyrocketed up 380% to 7.2 million. Today, instead of one out of every 53 workers being on disability, it’s one in 22! That number is particularly interesting because the United States of 1970 was a far grittier place than the United States of 2025.

First off, the United States in 2025 is a much different workplace than the one that existed in 1970. In 1970 fully 25% of the American workforce worked in manufacturing while 50% worked in the service industry. Today, 8% of the American workforce works in manufacturing while over 70% of workers work in the service industry. Given that designing a website, taking an order at Chili’s or greeting a guest at Marriott is generally less dangerous than welding together various pieces of a Ford Ranger or operating a blast furnace at a US Steel plant, America should be a safer place to work. And indeed it is. The death rate for American workers in 1970 was 18 per every 100,000 workers. By 2023 that rate had dropped to 3.5, a decline of 80%.

But of course work is not the only place where one gets hurt. Today, virtually everywhere Americans go everything seems safer. Cars have seatbelts, antilock breaks and airbags. Houses have GFCI circuit breakers in bathrooms and kitchens and smoke detectors in almost every room. Lawn darts are but a distant memory and towns across the country require helmets for bicycle riding and virtually every appliance and medicine comes plastered with book length warning label. At the end of the day, America has become a far safer place to live and work than it has been at any time in its history.

But somehow in that much safer America, the total of people listed as disabled and receiving disability payments has skyrocketed:  The government spends more on disability than on food stamps and welfare combined.  American workers paid .5% of their paychecks for SSDI when it began 70 years ago, but in 2022 they paid 2%.  That means that $2 out of every $100 an American worker earns goes to support someone not working.

How is that even possible? Have Americans become weaklings, unable to stay healthy? Has some unknown affliction made us incapable of working? No. There is an affliction, but it’s not biological. It’s called the nanny state. From judges who rubberstamp virtually every claim they ever see to a quarter of applicants suffering from musculoskeletal injuries – which conveniently enough cannot be detected by doctors – to outright fraud (more)(more)(more) and states seeking to shift costs to the federal government, SSDI is a symbol of much of what is wrong in America today, where in 2022 fully 4.5% of working age Americans were on disability. The worst thing about this dysfunctional program is that the fraud keeps people who are in real need of help waiting in line, sometimes to die.

When government decides to play the role of caretaker and redistribute wealth from workers to everyone else, it should come as no surprise that many people will choose to jump from the working pool to the everyone else pool. For more proof just look at the food stamp program over the same 50 year period. While the population has increased by about 75% since 1970, workers by 100% and disability by 380%, food stamp recipients grew by over 1,000%!

The economics of the welfare state, including the “disability industrial complex” cannot be sustained. If the record of the last 50 years were to be repeated over the next 50, in 2075 the country would have 320 million workers supporting almost 30 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps. Those numbers are simply unsustainable, particularly if the goal is to Make America Great Again.

American workers and entrepreneurs have together created the greatest wealth and prosperity the world has ever seen, but eventually the numbers stop working.  The thing I think Ramaswamy misses is that it was inevitable that the spirit that helped forge a nation out of a continent and dot it with jewels like the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge would reemerge and shrug. That’s what happened in November. For it to make any difference however, the nanny state will have to be eviscerated, and not just the regulatory part of it. 
The redistribution apparatus will have to be dismantled too, and the disability industrial complex is a good place to start. 

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Jews, Jews & more Jews... Lessons to be learned

Jews seem to generate a lot of negative emotions among non-Jews. While it's become particularly intense since Israel began retaliating against Hamas, it's been going on for a long time.  

The Romans fought three wars against the Jews, who had been a civilization for over a millennium before the time the Romans touched the sands of the Middle East.  The first of those wars, the First Jewish – Roman War 66-73 AD, which ended with the deaths of defenders of Masada resulted in destruction of the Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, the death of 50,000 Jews and absolute Roman control of Jerusalem.

Over the course of the three wars the Jewish universe would change dramatically, with the adherents going from a powerful entity (although one subservient to the Romans) in the eastern Mediterranean, with semi-autonomous local control and nominal power over large swaths of land to a vilified people with virtually no power, no land and its surviving population either sold into slavery or kicked out of its traditional home and spread out across the region.

The reasons given for people hating Jews through the ages are numerous. They were a thorn in the side of the Romans.  They killed Christ.  They’re greedy bankers.  They’re insular, self-dealing and dislike non-Jews and their faith puts them above other 2nd tier peoples and religions. Then there’s people who say Jews stole the land from the Arabs, put Palestinians in camps and Israel was founded by men like like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who were actual terrorists. 

In America some of that hate exists.  Why? The answers are things like: Because Jews control everything.  Jews built and control Hollywood, think Loew, Meyer and Warner up to Weinstein, Geffen & Emanuel. Jews control the media, think Zucker, Iger, Bloomberg, Newhouse and others. Jews frequently use finance to perpetrate scams on others, think Boesky, Epstein and Madoff. They control Wall Street, think Bill Ackman, Larry Fink & Stephen A. Schwarzman, Steve Cohen, John Paulson and many others. They have a huge influence in technology & Silicon Valley, think Zuckerberg, Ellison, Page & Brin, Ballmer, Dell and Cuban.  In business in general they’re everywhere, founding Home Depot, Carnival Cruise Lines, Rocket Mortgage, Levis, Hyatt Hotels, Ben & Jerrys, Starbucks, Snapple and many more.

Then of course there is the place where power is most cancerous, government.  Here, particularly where Democrats are concerned, Jews play a dominant role.  This just fired administration is a great example:  Homeland Security was helmed by Alejandro Mayorkas, Treasury by Janet Yellin, State by Tony Blinken while the AG was Merrick Garland, and the Chief of Staff was Ron Klain, who followed Jeffrey Zients. Not to mention the bottom feeders in Congress from Jamie Raskin, Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff.  And the groups which push America to pour billions of dollars into Israel’s security like AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee). 

And lastly it was the Rosenbergs who gave the secrets of nuclear power to the Soviets, Marc Elias who helped Joe Biden steal the White House and George Soros who has funded the near collapse of the United States. 

All in all, for someone looking to hate, Jews make a good target. 

But here’s the thing… most of the names listed above – even the vermin Democrats – are relatively well known because they’ve been successful.  And most of them – except the vermin Democrats – have become successful because they created a business or a service that consumers – all consumers, not just Jews – were able and willing to exchange their hard earned money for in a free market, i.e. making people’s lives better.  That is very possibly the most noble way for a human being to make money.

When someone stops to think of all the Jewish names above, and other ones they know, one might think that Jews are a huge segment of the population.  But they’re not.  Here in America Jews number about 7 million, or about 2% of the population. Worldwide the 16 million Jews, represent just .2% of the population.

Do you ever wonder why when we think of Jews we think of banking and media and not construction or farming?  Is it because Jews can’t build or farm? No. They built Jerusalem long before the Romans arrived and created a vibrant farming industry out of what was essentially a 19th century desert in what would later become Israel.  The reason Jews are often associated with banking and media and other such pursuits has to do with the fact that historically, in much of the world they were prohibited from large swaths of the economy. In Europe, under both the Romans and their Christian successors Jews were often excluded from craft and merchant guilds.  In Islamic lands while not necessarily excluded, they faced Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims. 

Those exclusions and taxes dovetailed with usury bans on Christians and Muslims to open up a significant opportunity for Jews, which they were well equipped to take advantage of.  A key element of their being able to take advantage of that opportunity comes directly from the Jewish faith itself, which requires Jews read the Torah.  Literacy, and its companion numeracy, allowed Jews to be successful bankers. That expertise and success in turn provided them with the capital and connections with which to branch into other elements of what we would today call white collar businesses. 

One might ask, given this success, why are there still so few Jews relative to the rest of the population. A number of factors. In increasingly prosperous nations, success tends to reduce the number of children a family has. Additionally, successful Jews often intermarry, particularly into Christian families and seem to drift away from the faith. And lastly, as Gad Saad points out in The Parasitic Mind, Judaism demands a great deal of its adherents and even more from those who want to become members.  The result is that while Jewish civilization is one of the oldest in human history, its adherents remain a tiny fraction of mankind.

That tiny number hides much.  With their focus on education handed down over thousands of years, Jews have among the highest IQs in the world. Indeed, while representing just .2% of the world’s population, Jews represent more than 20% of Nobel Prize recipients across disciplines and fully 41% in Economics, 26% in Medicine and 25% in Physics.  Jews outperform virtually every other group on the planet in terms of success across a wide swath of culture and civilization.  Mark Twain observed:  [The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy… [Jewish] contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world… and has done it with his hands tied behind him.”

While like members of every other group on the planet, there are no doubt Jews who are avaricious, malicious and mendacious, but I would suggest they too are a minority.  I would further suggest that the hatred with which Jews are held by has little to do with anything other than envy.  People hate or dislike Jews because they are in aggregate so successful, and they focus on the key elements that made them so: family, community and education.  (I myself neither hate nor dislike Jews, but I am somewhat dumbfounded why so many ostensibly smart people vote for Democrats, who are against virtually everything Jews have harnessed to succeed…)

The fact that Jews make up such an incredible proportion of successful Americans should not be a reason to hate them, but rather should be taken as a roadmap.  Tony Robbins may have put it best:  If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.”

While I doubt I could ever become a chess master regardless of how much I practiced, the notion of strong families, strong communities and a focus on education is a proven 3,000 year old recipe for success.  America would be far better off if more people followed it. 

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

In the UK and the USA crime thrives and innocents suffer... empowered by communities and politicians

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week (or just living in the UK) you know about the sudden earthquake of activity surrounding the Asian Grooming Gangs (Rape Rings) that have been operating in Britain for more than 25 years.  Everyone is referring to them as Asian, but that’s a disservice to 47 out of 48 of the countries in Asia because most of these “Asian” rapists are from just one country, Pakistan

If you’re not familiar with the sordid story, basically for the last 25 years Pakistani men have been grooming and raping young white girls.  And when I say young, I don’t mean a 16 year old girl who puts on makeup and is purposely trying to pass herself off as 18.  No, while that happened, the vast majority of the victims are far younger 11, 13 and sometimes as young as 5 years old.  It's been recently suggested that the total number of victims over that period is more than 250,000.  And most of those victims were abused and raped by multiple men, sometimes dozens or more.

The fact that this abuse happened is both revolting and despicable and in a more rational world a punishment meted out by a machine popularized in 18th century France would be in their future.  But of course we don’t’ live in a rational world.

There is an element of this story that is possibly even more contemptable than the abuse itself… the government, the media and the police working together to keep the lid on the crimes, distract from who was committing the crimes, manipulating “investigations” and data to obscure the facts and giving unconscionably light sentences to perpetrators. 

Here are just a few of the anger inducing stories that have gone on over the last few years:

·         A victim who had been abused for years beginning when she was five was asked by police if she had “consented” to the sex at any time. 

·         Victims, who had gone to the police were sometimes left by officers to be "harassed and intimidated by the men who had previously abused them".


A father went to try and rescue his daughter and was arrested by the police.

·         The police were called to a home where seven naked Pakistani men were with two naked & drunk 13 year olds and subsequently arrested the girls for drunkenness and let the men go.  

·         Tommy Robinson the self made journalist (which is something of a badge of honor in recent times) was arrested and jailed for reporting on the rape cases.

And of course over the entire period of this crime spree, anyone who stood up and spoke out about it was accused of Islamophobia or being a racist. 

All of this has been playing out on the backdrop of a rapidly evolving nation where British whites have gone from 96% of the population in 1980 to less than 74% in less than 40 years.  In major cities the disparity is far greater.  In London, where only 36% of the population are white British, fully 41% of the population are immigrants.  In Birmingham white Brits make up less than 50% while Pakistanis make up 20%.  In Luton, one of the Grooming Gang hotspots and the home of Tommy Robinson, white Brits make up just 32% while Pakistanis make up 18%.

And why does any of this demographic data matter?  Because it’s at the core of this travesty.  The government (both Tories & Labour) and media have been twisting like pretzels trying to sell the country the fiction of successful multicultural integration. That is, and has been for decades, an absolute fiction. One needs merely to observe the staggeringly large pro Hamas demonstrations that took place across the UK after terrorist group started a war with Israel to recognize that Britain today is a far cry from the Britain of Maggie Thatcher. 

Of course the reason that the issue is getting any significant traction at all is because the freedom of a (largely) uncensored X has given Brits the ability to access and share information previously not easily done. Combined with the voice of Elon Musk and one of the largest megaphones in the world the issue is just now starting to become a major story in the UK.  Indeed, Musk has called on the King to dissolve Parliament so that Brits can vote on a new government in the wake of the scandal.  I have little confidence that the climate change cultist King will actually do so, but there is always a sparkle of hope.

The thing about this travesty is that it largely mirrors one that has been happening in the United States, albeit in a different form. In Britain you have a government and the elites actively seeking to distract the citizens from what’s right in front of them. They’re seeking to pretend there is no correlation between a demographic and the crimes and most of the community from which those criminals come aren’t seeking to hold them accountable but are instead crying racism.

Sound familiar?  Here in the United States the problem isn’t rape, it’s violence and murder. The criminals aren’t predominantly Pakistani, they’re black and it isn’t Islamophobia that’s being used to deflect responsibility, but rather cries of racism.  And lastly, while in Britain most of the victims aren’t from the same demographic as the criminals, here in America, most are.

In both cases you’d think that those leading the charge against these crimes would be the far more numerable members of those communities who are not engaging in the crimes, but that’s not what’s happening. While there are a few voices calling out from within, the vast majority of the members of the Pakistani Brits and black Americans do just the opposite.  They blame right wing hate and institutional racism.

That makes no sense.  Most Pakistanis aren’t committing crimes in Britain and most blacks aren’t committing crimes in America. Given the negative consequences these crimes bring to their communities, it would make sense for the “leaders” of those communities to rally the members of said community to identify and hold accountable the criminals in their midst?  One would think so, but that’s not happening to any significant degree.

While elements of the current firestorm about the rapes going on in Britain suggest hope, and here in America the election of Donald Trump does the same, the reality is, these problems can not be solved externally. Although the politicians and jurists must be held accountable for their abetting of the crimes, it won’t be enough. If Pakistanis in Britain don’t take the lead in identifying and holding accountable the criminals in their midst, their communities will suffer in the long run as an even greater divide develops with the larger population. Similarly, in America if black leaders don’t abandon the victimization grift and focus their communities on exposing, marginalizing and defeating the criminal elements within, the long-term consequences will be brutal, from vanishing economic opportunities to increasing food deserts to continued black on black blood in the streets.

Whether it’s X’s coverage of the Grooming Gang scandals or Donald Trump promising to eviscerate DEI in America, hopefully 2025 will be the beginning of a long overdue return to something resembling sanity. 

Follow me on X at ImperfectUSA

Monday, January 6, 2025

As Christianity Dies In The West, The West Itself Dies...

 Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

Since that quote was first published in 2017 by G. Michael Hopf in Those Who Remain, it has become one of the most oft-quoted phrases in the conservative universe. (I’ve quoted it a number of times.) That’s because it perfectly captures the current state of Western civilization.

I’ve experienced a good bit of that Western civilization. I’ve had the good fortune to have lived over a quarter of my life outside of the United States. I’ve lived in Cuba—albeit on a rather well-known American base rather than in the Communist part—Italy, Germany, and France. I do not say good fortune because I think living in America is bad. On the contrary, living outside of the United States has given me a perspective on America that I’m most certain I wouldn’t have had I not lived outside her borders for as long as I did.

I spent most of my time outside of America in Europe. The thing that most attracted and attracts me to Europe is the history, or, more accurately, the physical manifestations of history. From the Colosseum and the Vatican in Rome to the Louvre and Mont-Saint-Michel in France to the Heidelberg Castle and the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, I simply can’t get enough. Europe is covered with countless such monuments, most of which long predate the United States.

Many of what I call monuments to history aren’t actual monuments at all. Most are structures built for a function, and most of them were created to either celebrate Christ or were created by men impelled by Christianity. Of course, Christianity is, like everything crafted by man, imperfect. Still, overall, the civilizations grounded in Christianity have created more freedom, technological advances, and prosperity than any civilization in human history.


As it relates to America, as much as leftists want to argue that America was not founded as a Christian country, they’re simply wrong. Christianity infused virtually every element of life in what became the United States and the Europe from which its founders came. While one can make the argument that men like Franklin or Madison may have been “deists,” the reality is that they were very much part of the penumbra of Christianity that infused the colonies.

240 years on from America’s founding is where Hopf’s good times / hard times construct comes in. As Western civilization gets farther away from Christianity, the worse it becomes.

To repurpose a Winston Churchill line, Christianity is the worst form of religion except for all the others which have been tried. At its zenith, Christianity accomplished much. The Christian world ended slavery around the world. It brought us functional manifestations of individual liberty and democratic institutions. It freed men from the farm and sent us to the moon. It’s done much more, from the mundane to the magnificent, and driven prosperity across the globe.

At the same time, whether it’s Al Sharpton, televangelists, or the anti-western Communist currently running the Catholic Church, Christianity has, and has had, its share of charlatans, hypocrites, and grifters. But so, too, has every aspect of human life.

This is where Hopf meets Voltaire. Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” That is exactly what has happened to Western civilization. As a Christian-powered prosperity has flourished in the West, the belief in Christ has collapsed, and many of those weak men of whom Hopf writes have invented their own gods.

In this case, the gods they’ve created are communism, environmentalism, and victimization, usually in concert with one another. Of course, the only reason the adherents of those philosophies have had the luxury to pursue them in the first place is because of that very prosperity Christianity and its world created.

Just as the Communist Manifesto was written by a despicable grifter who lived off the labor of others, today’s leftists argue that everyone has a “right” to healthcare, housing, and food, among other things. Unlike the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, however, every one of those things requires someone else to work with pay for others to provide those “rights.”

Today’s environmentalists have the luxury of pushing for “green” energy only because actual, functional sources of energy exist to allow the grift to continue. They can pretend their preferred energy sources are “green” only because leftist governments and media ignore reality. Like leaders of other cults, they command their followers to ignore what’s right in front of them. Whether it be child slaves in the Congotrillions of wasted dollars, “green” equipment that can’t be recycled, or infrastructure that doesn’t provide the promised energy, nothing can move them from their green mantras.

At the same time, the victim mindset that has taken hold because leftists have no more understanding of human nature than communist philosophers do. Life is unfair. There always was and always will be inequality. It doesn’t matter if it was the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Soviet Union, or America today; inequality has always existed, and different groups were/are disproportionately represented in the various classes.

Unlike most civilizations, Western civilization, in general, and America, in particular, offers everyone the opportunity to succeed and improve their lot. However, creating a victim narrative/grift is far easier than recognizing that reality and doing the hard work necessary to overcome challenges and succeed.

These three ideologies can generally be encapsulated in the larger anti-Western, anti-white religion that has infected the left. That is why the borders have been open, and tens of millions of invaders from third-world countries have flooded into America and Europe.

While the Hispanics who are flooding across American borders are said to be more Christian than Americans, they have almost zero connection with or adherence to the mores and values that Christianity infused America with. In Europe, the invaders are almost all Muslims. In both cases, at the same time that Christian culture evaporates, the people whose forebearers created Western are overwhelmed by invaders who don’t appreciate or share the culture in the first place.

That’s a recipe for disaster. Even famed atheist Richard Dawkins, who calls himself a “Cultural Christian“ recognizes that. “I call myself a cultural Christian, and I think it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion.” Christianity built the modern world, and for all its imperfections, its successes far outweigh its failures.

There is simply no other religion, political philosophy, or human framework that has brought more freedom and more prosperity to more people than Christianity. As Christianity collapses throughout the West, civilization will necessarily follow. We already see it. From economic freedom to freedom of speech and much in between, the religious fictions embodied in the anti-western and anti-white philosophy are sowing social and economic ruin across the West.

As we celebrate this Christmas season with a glimmer of hope on the horizon, we would do well to remember that while a Christian West may not be perfect, it’s far superior to anything else yet created. If the West does not resurrect and respect Christianity and the society it produced, it will find itself reverting to the mean of human history, one characterized by scarcity, violence, and tyranny. Weak men rarely thrive in such a world.