Open Thread

August 20, 2026Mark Noonan

The Federal workforce is at its lowest level since 1966. Think about that – this was before the Welfare State was fully built. Some of this reduction is simply not replacing people who leave, some of it is firing people. The main thing is that each person reduced is one less person who can pester us…one less button for the Ruling Class to press to gain our compliance. Sure, if a Democrat gets in they can hire a lot…but that does take time, and the precedent has been set that the President has broad powers to fire Executive Branch employees.

Democrats made a huge mistake in taking Trump to court on a lot of issues, but taking him to Court on grounds that he’s not really the President has been the most bone-headed. Again and again, the Courts are forced to rule the obvious: Trump is, indeed, President and the President is the sole person vested with Executive power under the Constitution. We haven’t quite got to the ruling all the way. We won’t while Roberts is Chief Justice…but if you read the Constitution properly, the President cannot surrender Executive authority. It is vested in that office. Even if an Executive signs a law limiting Executive power, that law is completely unconstitutional. There is one person in the entirety of the USA who holds Executive power: the President. We will get there…and the Democrats will have made it happen.

Here’s the real kicker in all of this: had the Democrats told Hillary to go jump in a lake and simply let Trump be President then he would have sailed through eight years ending in 2025 – to be sure, making some lasting changes (most notably in immigration and trade) but no real fundamental shake up of the system. Trump is, after all, a moderate man – he’s a New Yorker, ya know? He’s no more far right than Ed Koch or Nelson Rockefeller. They could probably have got a lot of things they have long desired but no Democrat could ever get enacted into law. But, no; they decided to indulge Hillary’s temper tantrum and now its snowballed into opposing Trump 100% of the time. Resist!

Ok. But you just resisted your way into President Vance exercising power a President hasn’t used since FDR. Good luck, Democrats. You won’t be able to take him to court. The cases have all been decided. You’ll have no recourse at all – even if you take Congress there’s nothing you can do other than refuse to spend money (ha!). It is so very crucial that we win in 2026 and 2028…the stage is set, the ball is rolling…if we can just keep things going for another 5-10 years, we’ll have won for good. Personally, I think we will win – polls are not just mistaken, they are fabrications designed to warp the political system (mostly, this year, to get GOP money to flow into sure-things rather than being spent on good opportunities). Outside of polls, everything is coming up roses for Trump and the GOP…Trump will nationalize the election and then spend a billion dollars telling people what a great job he’s done and how it will all be lost if the Democrats get in…MAGA will show up.

I’ve heard about the lady who is alleged to have killed her kids but I haven’t paid remotely enough attention to render any sort of judgement. But it is bizarre there are women out there cheering the accused. Seriously? What if she really did it? What the heck are you cheering for? Has Moloch really captured that much of upper class white women? Geesh! It betrays a deep sickness in our society, even if the lady is acquitted. No matter what, children are dead. Someone murdered them. Even if she’s particularly innocent of this, she’s guilty of being part of a social dynamic that murdered children. This is an event to provoke a desire to confess our sins to God and amend our lives. Not to make some sort of social media sensation…and all of this before all the facts are presented in Court.

Trump is going to bankrupt Iran. It is an interesting strategy – and one that hasn’t been tried since the WWII blockades of Germany and Japan. But this will be much worse because Iran has only limited domestic capacity. For instance, in the USA we have about half a hectare of arable land for each one of us…in Iran, they’ve got less than a quarter of a hectare per person. Hard to feed 92 million people like that – especially as Iran is in a severe drought (Iran has floated some plans to move its capital from Tehran as there simply isn’t enough water to sustain the city). They don’t make much of anything. So, throttling their economy – already a basket case – is going to hurt. A lot. And very soon. My bet is this is a gambit to get the Iranian people off their cowardly butts and overthrow the regime. If a desire to be free won’t make you fight when you have IDF and American air cover, maybe running out of food will get you to move? We’ll see. I don’t see this going beyond November. The oil flows out of the Gulf. Iran’s military capacity is gone. Economic pressure is being applied…and in November there will be no political concerns to restrain Trump from turning Iran into a junk heap.

Retired Spook August 21, 2026 / 9:25 am

The Federal workforce is at its lowest level since 1966

Seriously, did you EVER imagine this happening? When Trump was first elected, this was on my wish list of things that I hoped he would accomplish.
Retired Spook August 21, 2026 / 9:57 am

Personally, I think we will win – polls are not just mistaken, they are fabrications designed to warp the political system (mostly, this year, to get GOP money to flow into sure-things rather than being spent on good opportunities). Outside of polls, everything is coming up roses for Trump and the GOP…Trump will nationalize the election and then spend a billion dollars telling people what a great job he’s done and how it will all be lost if the Democrats get in…MAGA will show up.

You know the Dems are going to do everything they can to convince people that things suck, and I expect a few will believe that, but the vast majority are going to say, “if this sucks, give me more of it.” The only metric that works against Trump is the price of gas, and it’s going to be difficult for the Dems to capitalize on that given their polices under Biden were designed to make gas more expensive.

Regarding polls, I recall someone at Google saying prior to the 2020 election that they could, just through search results, manipulate people’s thinking to the extent that they could shift the vote by as much as 15%. Polls are just another way of doing that. We’ll see in 74 days if that dynamic still works.
- Mark Noonan August 21, 2026 / 11:13 am
  
  Fuel prices are a pain point…but, also, I think less and less of a pain point. They are higher than pre-Biden, but lower than Biden high…and after a while, you get used to anything. Personally, I think market manipulation is explaining their stubborn refusal to go down. There is no real problem with moving oil out of the Gulf and there are strong signs the market is actually getting glutted with oil and natural gas. I recently learned that the Dow futures crashing on Election Night, 2016, was primarily the work of Soros…he didn’t like the result and so he decided to crash the market. I would not be surprised if anti-Trump money is deliberately bidding the price of gasoline up…nor would I be surprised if the egg recalls are anti-Trump moles pushing the panic button over trivial risks just to get egg prices to go back up.
Retired Spook August 21, 2026 / 11:01 am

Compliments of Robert Malone:

The British Home Office has apparently concluded that asylum seekers arriving in the United Kingdom require a tutorial on what should be universal morality.

This week, the government released “Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK: A guide for asylum seekers,” accompanied by a series of illustrated posters explaining some of the finer points of British life.

Women are equal to men. Women may work, study and travel without a man’s permission. You may not hit or control your wife. Sex requires consent, including within marriage. Children under 16 cannot consent to sex. Do not follow strangers. Do not block their path. Do not make sexual comments. Do not whistle or make kissing noises at women. Do not photograph people in private situations without permission.

There are even separate government posters devoted to “Age of consent,” “Consent,” “Child abuse,” “Domestic abuse,” “Gender equality,” “Harassment,” and “Photography and filming.”

These are not memes created by some foreign bot account on X. They are official Home Office materials, published by His Majesty’s Government on August 19, 2026.

Which raises the rather obvious question that polite society will presumably regard as impolite:

Why did the British government believe these particular instructions needed to be written down?

Governments generally do not spend taxpayer money designing illustrated educational campaigns reminding newcomers not to rape women, abuse children, beat their wives or sexually harass strangers unless someone, somewhere, has concluded that there is a reason to do so.

Over the last decades, Britons have experienced very large migration flows from profoundly different cultures, which might produce “problems” of assimilation. These were routinely dismissed as xenophobic, racist or simply “far right.”

For years, organized groups of men, disproportionately British Pakistani in several of the towns at the center of the scandal, groomed, trafficked and raped vulnerable girls in places such as Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Telford. Authorities had repeated warnings, yet victims were ignored, blamed or treated as troublesome teenagers. Subsequent (conservative) official inquiries documented catastrophic failures by police, councils and social services, including reluctance in some institutions to confront the ethnicity of perpetrators for fear of being called racist or inflaming community tensions.

In Rotherham alone, the official inquiry estimated that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Britain learned, at an appalling cost to thousands of girls, that refusing to discuss cultural differences does not make those differences disappear.

Yet after decades of scandals across numerous English towns, the government’s own 2025 national audit concluded that the data were still so inadequate that Britain could not reliably say how many children had been victimized by grooming gangs nationwide.

So, guess what mainstream media and the liberal parliament had to say about that?

Apparently the Home Office, while not actually addressing the issue of rape gangs head on, has now decided that spelling out a few expectations might be prudent.

Progress, I suppose? Not!

How about actually arresting and deporting immigrants who break the law?

Real progress, as Britain’s Conservative Party and Reform UK have both campaigned on, would mean dramatically reducing the enormous influx of migrants into a country roughly the size of Alabama, but with about 11 times as many people packed into essentially the same land area.

One might imagine that population density, housing, infrastructure and assimilation would eventually enter the conversation. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for jolly old England.
- Mark Noonan August 21, 2026 / 11:09 am
  
  And then there’s the flip side of it – when the Home Office decides to pay for videos demonstrating poor public behavior, the offender is always a white man and the victims are always POC. There was recent a case of two Afghan men who raped a British woman in a public park (holding a knife to the throat of her date while they took turns doing it) and the MSMers reporting it had to go to court to get the right to publish the names of the perpetrators…it was seriously considered important to protect the perpetrators from public outrage (and, of course, to hide their nationality…it wasn’t Nigel doing the deed).
  
  It is an entirely insane world over there.
Retired Spook August 22, 2026 / 9:27 am

I got this in an email from a retired navy buddy, so there’s no link. It’s long, but spot on.

Bill Brindley

“Why Young Liberals Hate Capitalism—and Why They’re Wrong

Every generation eventually receives its first adult paycheck, studies the deductions, looks at the rent, looks back at the deductions, and briefly concludes that Karl Marx may have had a point.

For the average young American liberal, this revelation often occurs on a $1,300 phone while waiting for a stranger to deliver a twelve-dollar coffee from six blocks away.

She does not hate capitalism.

She hates invoices.

She hates that apartments cost money, jobs require attendance, attractive neighborhoods are already occupied, and nobody has yet created a government program that will pay her to make politically conscious ceramics in a sunlit Brooklyn loft.

What she wants is not socialism.

She wants capitalism with the consequences turned off.

1. She Thinks Socialism Means Denmark With DoorDash

When young Americans say they want socialism, they are rarely imagining the state owning farms, factories, banks, housing, newspapers, and most of the places where citizens might attempt to escape the state.

They are imagining Denmark.

More precisely, they are imagining an English-speaking Denmark where the taxes are paid by billionaires, everyone receives free therapy, the trains arrive on time, and DoorDash still brings Thai food during a blizzard.

They do not want socialism.

They want a wealthy capitalist country with better public services and no visible receipt.

That is a perfectly reasonable political argument. It is simply not the political argument they think they are making.

2. She Believes “Free” Means Nobody Paid

Free college.

Free healthcare.

Free housing.

Free childcare.

The modern socialist imagination is a magical kingdom where doctors, nurses, professors, builders, electricians, and daycare workers all report for duty because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling Instagram video.

Nothing is free.

“Government-funded” means the bill has been placed inside a larger envelope, decorated with an eagle, and mailed back to the public through taxes.

Sometimes that is an excellent bargain. A civilized society should have roads, schools, emergency rooms, police, courts, and a safety net sturdy enough to catch people before they hit concrete.

But it remains a bargain.

Not a spell.

3. She Does Not Hate Capitalism. She Hates Adulthood

Her landlord wants rent on the first.

Her employer expects her to arrive on time.

The electric company has shown absolutely no interest in her emotional journey.

Someone at work used the phrase “performance review,” and she is now reasonably certain she lives under fascism.

A great deal of modern anti-capitalism is simply the shock of discovering that adulthood is not college with fewer essays.

Food costs money. Talent is not always rewarded. Some people begin life with enormous advantages. You can work hard and still fail. You can do everything properly and remain unable to afford the apartment you want.

These are real frustrations.

But abolishing private property will not make Monday morning optional.

4. She Imagines Work Would Become Nicer Under Socialism

Capitalist employment is oppressive because her boss expects her to complete tasks during working hours.

Under socialism, she imagines work becoming a gentle cooperative activity involving communal lunches, meaningful discussions, and perhaps a little pottery.

Unfortunately, socialist countries also required people to work.

The difference was that there were fewer employers, fewer career choices, less possibility of opening your own business, and considerably less sympathy when you informed the factory manager that fluorescent lighting was interfering with your boundaries.

Capitalism gives you the freedom to leave your terrible boss.

Socialism may give you one boss.

And he is also in charge of your apartment, your healthcare, your newspaper, your passport, and the police station where you will be taken after complaining about him.

5. She Could Not Survive the Loss of Consumer Choice

The average young anti-capitalist considers consumer culture spiritually empty but requires seven varieties of oat milk.

She needs ethically sourced coffee, cruelty-free mascara, vegan leather boots, vintage furniture, a mattress delivered in a box, three streaming services, same-day shipping, and a small refrigerator reserved entirely for skincare.

Then she posts that capitalism has given us nothing.

Under central planning, the Ministry of Beverages may announce that oat milk will return in November.

Perhaps.

Until then, there is powdered milk in a bag labeled MILK PRODUCT NO. 4.

The revolution has been postponed due to lactose intolerance.

6. She Wants Housing Provided—But Not That Housing

Housing is a human right.

Absolutely.

But she does not want just any housing.

She wants a charming apartment with original floors, exposed brick, good natural light, a dishwasher, in-unit laundry, no roommates, a neighborhood coffee shop, and enough space for the rescued greyhound she intends to adopt after consulting her astrologer.

Under the system she romanticizes, the Housing Allocation Office may instead assign her a concrete apartment on the eighth floor of a building named after a tractor.
It has one bedroom.

Her aunt already lives in it.

The elevator has been awaiting a replacement part since 1987.

She may file a complaint with the Housing Allocation Office, which is conveniently located inside the Housing Allocation Office.

7. She Hates Billionaires but Loves Everything They Built

The billionaire class must be abolished.

She announces this on Instagram from an iPhone while listening to Spotify, sitting in an Uber, wearing something delivered by Amazon, and checking whether her food has left the restaurant.

This does not mean billionaires should be allowed to purchase Congress, swallow entire industries, or hunt the middle class for sport.

Tax them. Regulate monopolies. Enforce labor laws. Protect competition. Stop allowing corporations to behave like medieval duchies with human-resources departments.

But perhaps admit that large-scale private enterprise has occasionally produced something more useful than a government committee studying whether to establish another government committee.

8. She Thinks Scarcity Was Invented by Republicans

Capitalism gets blamed for scarcity because prices make scarcity visible.

The apartment is expensive. The concert ticket is expensive. The handbag is expensive. The organic strawberries flown across an ocean in February are mysteriously expensive.

Socialism does not abolish scarcity.

It merely changes the way scarce things are distributed.
Instead of prices, you may get waiting lists, rationing, political connections, bribery, or a cousin named Viktor who knows somebody at the warehouse.

Capitalism says, “You cannot afford this.”

Socialism may say, “This does not officially exist.”
The first answer is cruel.

The second answer is also cruel, but accompanied by a poster of a smiling factory worker.

9. She Trusts the Government Only When Her Side Controls It

The young socialist is deeply suspicious of corporations but strangely relaxed about government power, provided the correct people are currently in government.

She wants misinformation regulated, harmful opinions removed, offensive speakers banned, troublesome employers punished, and troublesome citizens professionally destroyed.

She assumes the censorship department will always share her politics.

This is adorable.

Governments change. Definitions change. Approved opinions change. Yesterday’s protected speech becomes tomorrow’s dangerous misinformation.

The machine built to silence your enemies does not disappear when your enemies win an election.

It simply receives new management.

10. She Wants Equality With Several Personal Exceptions
Everyone should earn approximately the same amount.

Except surgeons, obviously.

And perhaps writers.

And artists.

And people with advanced degrees.

And people living in expensive cities.

And people producing culturally significant content about why everyone should earn approximately the same amount.

She supports equality but has already identified several reasons why she personally deserves a larger apartment, more interesting work, better coffee, additional travel privileges, and exemption from agricultural labor.

The collective farm needs workers.

Unfortunately, she has a podcast.

She Wants a Refund, Not a Revolution

Capitalism is not kind.

It is not your mother. It does not care about your self-esteem, your childhood wounds, or whether your landlord is emotionally available.

It is a machine.

And machines require rules, limits, maintenance, inspections, and occasionally a violent kick.

Capitalism needs competition. It needs regulation. It needs functioning institutions, affordable housing, decent schools, healthcare people can actually access, and a serious safety net. It needs governments willing to stop corporations from merging into enormous faceless organisms that own your home, your job, your groceries, and possibly your toaster.

But the answer to a badly regulated machine is not handing the entire economy to the same government that cannot renew your driver’s license without losing three forms and sending you to the wrong building.

The average young liberal does not genuinely want socialism.

She wants affordable rent, excellent healthcare, meaningful work, high wages, unlimited consumer choice, free expression, beautiful public spaces, generous vacations, abundant goods, fast delivery, and the right to complain about every last bit of it online.
In other words, she wants an extraordinarily successful capitalist society.

She just wants someone else to pay for it.

Preferably a billionaire she plans to abolish after the wedding.
- Mark Noonan August 22, 2026 / 6:14 pm
  
  I nutshelled it as “the Communist is always certain that ‘from each’ always works out to Somebody Else putting food on the table”. It is an essentially childish ideology…created by very childish men and women in the 19th century who never did a lick of work but who nevertheless lived well.
  
  And while labor camps have a seriously negative connotation, I think we’re going to have to place these privileged, ignorant nitwits into labor camps. Oh, we will pay them! We’re the good guys. And the work will be useful. We’re not going to build a White Sea Canal at the cost of 25,000 lives (low estimate) which doesn’t even do anything because it was made too shallow for cargo vessels. We’ll do things like replace our rusting steel bridges with Roman quality stone bridges built to last 2,000 years. The kids will learn to build things – and things of both utility and beauty. And when their sentence is done and they receive their just wages for the work they did we’ll simply ask them: “Do you want to keep that, or have 50% of it taxed away?”.
Retired Spook August 23, 2026 / 11:57 am