John S.

💫

[John S. @BusanJohn]

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” — Sir Edmund Hillary

[John S. @BusanJohn]

Why the world is on fire 🔥

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Tout le monde pense que le monde libre a gagné en 1989, à la chute du mur de Berlin.

C'est faux.

Et c'est exactement pour ça que le monde est aujourd'hui en feu.

Ce qui est tombé le 9 novembre 1989, c'est un appareil.

Une économie planifiée, un empire militaire, un mur de béton. Ce qui n'est pas tombé, c'est l'idée. L'idée que le monde se divise en oppresseurs et en opprimés. L'idée qu'il existe une égalité finale à atteindre, par tous les moyens. L'idée que tout ce qui existe (la famille, la nation, le mérite, l'héritage) est une structure de domination à abattre.

Cette idée-là n'était plus dans le bâtiment quand le bâtiment s'est effondré.

Il faut reprendre la chronologie, parce que tout est dans la chronologie :

Le communisme économique avait un défaut fatal : il était réfutable. Il promettait l'abondance, il produisait des famines. Il promettait l'émancipation, il produisait des barbelés. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, L'Archipel du Goulag publié à Paris en 1973, les boat people de 1979 : à chaque décennie, le réel envoyait sa réfutation. Les boat people étaient une réfutation flottante, visible depuis les plages.

Alors l'idéologie a fait ce que fait tout organisme menacé : elle a muté.

La mutation a un nom, et j'en ai raconté la généalogie ici : la French Theory.

Foucault a déplacé la guerre du terrain des faits, où le communisme perdait à chaque fois, vers le terrain du savoir lui-même.

S'il n'y a pas de vérité, s'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir, alors plus aucune famine, plus aucun mur, plus aucun goulag ne peut réfuter quoi que ce soit.

La French Theory n'a pas enterré le marxisme.

Elle l'a rendu irréfutable.

Et la mutation a des dates. Toutes antérieures à 1989.

1934 : l'École de Francfort, chassée d'Allemagne, s'installe à Columbia. La critique de l'économie devient critique de la culture.

1964-1965 : Marcuse, exilé allemand devenu professeur américain, remplace le prolétariat défaillant par un nouveau sujet révolutionnaire (les minorités, les étudiants, les marginaux) et écrit noir sur blanc que la tolérance doit être accordée aux mouvements de gauche et refusée à ceux de droite.

Octobre 1966 : le débarquement a une date précise. Université Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. Derrida, Barthes, Lacan présentent la pensée française aux campus américains.

1967 : Rudi Dutschke lance le mot d'ordre, la longue marche à travers les institutions.

1968 : les révolutions de rue échouent partout.

Qu'importe. La révolution ne passera plus par la rue, elle passera par la salle de classe.

1975-1985 : Yale, Berkeley, Columbia absorbent la théorie, qui devient le système d'exploitation des humanités.

1987 : Allan Bloom publie The Closing of the American Mind pour donner l'alerte. Un million d'exemplaires vendus.

L'université le traite de réactionnaire et passe à autre chose.

L'Amérique avait son Aron, elle en a fait la même chose que nous du nôtre.

Puis arrive le 9 novembre 1989.

Le Mur tombe. L'Occident célèbre. Fukuyama avait déclaré la fin de l'Histoire dès l'été, avant même la chute. On démantèle les missiles, on encaisse les dividendes de la paix, on déclare le match terminé.

Nous avons célébré notre victoire sur une adresse vide. L'idéologie avait déménagé vingt ans plus tôt. Nous avons gagné contre les chars et perdu contre les chaires.

Pendant ce temps, l'autre empire communiste faisait la lecture inverse. Pékin avait écrasé Tian'anmen dans le sang cinq mois avant Berlin. Sinistre, mais lucide sur un point : la Chine savait que la guerre était idéologique.

Elle a choisi : abandonner l'économie marxiste, garder le contrôle du récit. L'Occident a fait l'exact opposé : il a gardé le marché et absorbé l'idéologie. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, regardez qui construit des centrales et qui déboulonne ses statues.

Vous voulez la preuve que c'est le même logiciel ? Faites la table de correspondance.

La lutte des classes est devenue la lutte des identités.

Les koulaks sont devenus les privilégiés.

L'autocritique maoïste est devenue le privilege checking. Les commissaires politiques sont devenus les DEI officers.

Le samizdat est devenu le compte shadowbanné.

La nomenklatura a quitté Moscou pour Davos et Bruxelles.

Et le paradis ne s'appelle plus la société sans classes : il s'appelle l'équité, l'égalité des résultats.

Exactement ce que je décrivais ici il y a quelques semaines.

On me dira : il n'y a pas de Goulag.

C'est vrai. C'est même tout le génie de la version 2.0.

Le communisme dur devait briser les corps parce qu'il ne tenait pas les esprits.

Le communisme mou tient les esprits : il lui suffit de briser les carrières.

Pas de camps, des services RH.
Pas de procès de Moscou, des excuses publiques.
Pas de Sibérie, la mort sociale.
Demandez aux émigrés du bloc de l'Est installés en Occident ce qu'ils ressentent en traversant une université américaine en 2026.
Ils reconnaissent l'odeur.

Et voilà pourquoi le monde est en feu.

Une civilisation a passé trente-cinq ans à enseigner à ses propres enfants qu'elle était le problème. Résultat : elle ne sait plus défendre ses frontières, transmettre son héritage, ni même nommer ses ennemis.

Quand la présidente de Harvard, devant le Congrès, répond que condamner un appel au génocide « dépend du contexte », vous voyez le logiciel tourner en production.

Et les prédateurs du dehors lisent cette faiblesse comme un livre ouvert : Moscou teste, Pékin patiente, l'islamisme avance dans les rues de nos capitales.

Le feu extérieur n'est que la conséquence du désarmement intérieur. On ne brûle bien que les maisons qui se sont vidées de leurs défenseurs.

Le Mur n'est pas tombé. Il s'est déplacé. Il ne sépare plus l'Est de l'Ouest : il passe désormais à l'intérieur de chaque institution occidentale, entre ceux qui construisent et ceux qui déconstruisent.

La première guerre froide s'est gagnée avec des missiles et du PIB. La seconde se gagnera avec des écoles, des médias libres et des modèles d'IA. Celui qui écrit les valeurs dans les machines écrira le prochain 1989.

Cette fois, ne nous trompons pas de victoire. Au travail.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.”

The strategy of the Left.

[John S. @BusanJohn]

"People in the United States and across the West don’t understand the cultures and people that are being imported into our countries. The third world isn’t civilized, it’s not some wondrous place with people who have unlimited potential or hold similar worldviews to us. The third world is a dog-eat-dog world. People are literally scraping by and trying to survive. It wires people differently than the way we are wired."

[Ryan Matthew Neuhaus @RyanMNeuhaus]

I lived in Bolivia for two years. One of the cities I lived in was Cobija. One night, in Cobija, my friend and I were walking home when a Bolivian police officer got into an accident with a man that was on a motorcycle.

I ran over to try to help the man who was on the motorcycle, but I’ll never forget the officer yelling at the man about how the accident was his fault and then yelling at me for intervening.

In Bolivia, as in most third world countries, people don’t rush to help when this stuff happens. They become bystanders and observers, refusing to intervene or provide assistance. Some of the people around that night joined in on yelling at me as I called out for people to get an ambulance. One eventually made it because my friend had a phone and made the call, but it was too late.

That night, a stranger bled out and died in my arms—a foreigner—as his fellow countrymen yelled at him and watched him die.

People in the United States and across the West don’t understand the cultures and people that are being imported into our countries. The third world isn’t civilized, it’s not some wondrous place with people who have unlimited potential or hold similar worldviews to us. The third world is a dog-eat-dog world. People are literally scraping by and trying to survive. It wires people differently than the way we are wired.

As the West fails to deport the third world, it will become the third world. And mass deportations truly are the only peaceful answer if we want to stop the attempted beheadings, the rapes, the vandalism, the fraud, the homelessness, etc.

Some might find this sentiment cruel, but it’s not. What’s cruel is allowing the greatest civilization in the world, which your children and grandchildren should inherit, fall into an unrecognizable state of being.

[Sabin Howard @SabinHoward]

There are two types of people in this country. It’s people that take responsibility for their lives and those that blame everybody else for their situation.

I made a monument about our country rising to the occasion! The World War I Memorial in DC

[John S. @BusanJohn]

Excellent post and 🎯

[Rang @Faustzme]

Maybe this will help Mormons understand.

Think about it this way.

Mormonism is basically trans-Christian. It was born outside of Christianity, put on all the Christian clothes, Jesus, salvation, scripture, gospel, and now insists it’s the real thing. Sound familiar?

Same words. Totally different meanings.

When a Mormon says “Jesus” they mean the spirit brother of Lucifer who progressed to godhood. When a Christian says “Jesus” they mean the eternal God who took on flesh. That’s not a small difference. That’s a completely different person.

When a Mormon says “salvation” they mean resurrection plus exaltation earned through covenants, ordinances, temple work and faithfulness to the end. When a Christian says “salvation” they mean Christ paid it all and you’re trusting Him alone. Again, not the same thing.

“Gospel” not the same. “God” not the same. “Scripture” not the same.

Every single load bearing word in Christianity has been gutted and restuffed with something else. But they kept the label.

Joseph Smith didn’t restore Christianity. He replaced it and kept the wardrobe.

That’s not a denomination. That’s not a different stream of the same faith. That’s a different religion doing a Christian cosplay.

And the crazy part? Most Mormons genuinely don’t know this because they’ve only ever been handed the redefined version of those words. They’ve never actually seen what Christianity really teaches.

[Niccolò Machiavelli | The Prince ⚔️ @NiccoloDaily]

“Envy is a declaration of inferiority.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

[Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn @AI_Solzhenitsyn]

“Violence [does not] always and necessarily lunge straight for your throat; more often than not it demands of its subjects only that they pledge allegiance to lies, that they participate in falsehood.”

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Musk found a way to measure institutional stupidity in dollars.

That is why this matters.

The “magic wand number” strips a product down to its physical floor.

What are the atoms?

Aluminum. Titanium. Copper. Steel. Carbon fiber. Silicon. Energy. Labor at its most irreducible. If a perfect god-machine could rearrange those atoms instantly into the finished product, what would it cost?

That number is the floor.

Everything above that floor is the cost of arrangement.

Manufacturing. Design. Procurement. Labor. Tooling. Supply chain. Bureaucracy. Regulation. Meetings. Defects. Rework. Legacy assumptions. Vendor margin. Managerial cowardice. Bad engineering. Complexity worship. Institutional drift.

The “idiot index” measures the distance between the physical floor and the actual delivered cost.

That distance is where civilization leaks.

This is a devastating idea because it turns vague inefficiency into a ratio. It gives stupidity a number. Once stupidity has a number, it can be hunted.

The highest-level principle:

Reality is cheap. Bad coordination is expensive.

The atoms are often not the problem. The process is the problem. The raw material is cheap. The finished object is expensive because human systems are full of accumulated nonsense: inherited designs, supplier lock-in, procurement rituals, overengineering, compliance theater, fake expertise, management layers, and nobody willing to ask the humiliating question:

“Why does this thing cost 100 times more than the stuff inside it?”

That question is nuclear.

Most institutions cannot ask it honestly because the answer usually indicts the institution itself.

SpaceX could ask it because Musk had no reverence for the inherited aerospace priesthood. The old industry reasoned from precedent: rockets are expensive because rockets have always been expensive. Musk reasoned from matter: if the atoms are cheap, the price is mostly coordination failure.

That is the whole fracture between first-principles operators and legacy institutions.

Legacy institutions protect the accumulated explanation for why things are expensive.

First-principles operators attack the cost delta.

The idiot index applies everywhere.

In healthcare: why does a procedure cost 50 times the physical input?

In defense: why does a part cost $13,000 when the material is $200?

In housing: why does shelter become impossible when wood, labor, and land do not explain the whole gap?

In education: why does knowledge cost six figures when distribution cost is near zero?

In software: why do companies spend millions on tools whose underlying functionality can be rebuilt for pennies in compute?

In government: why does every public project become a ritual sacrifice to process?

In corporate America: why do ten people need three weeks to create what one focused person with AI can produce in a day?

The idiot index is not just manufacturing math. It is a civilization diagnostic.

A high idiot index reveals where reality has been buried under process.

That is why this ties directly into AI. AI is going to run this audit across white-collar work. It will ask the same humiliating question:

“What is the magic wand number for this output?”

A memo. A model. A dashboard. A legal draft. A recruiting screen. A support response. A market brief. A strategy deck. A codebase. A finance process.

If AI can produce 80% of the output for 2% of the old cost, the human coordination layer has a catastrophic idiot index.

That is the real white-collar repricing.

[Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum]

Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.

This one quote sounded familiar.

[John S. @BusanJohn]

"Eve lived in Paradise (Being) and was seduced by the snake into wanting more (Becoming) that what Paradise offered, and lost it all. Think about that. Then take a look at the modern landscape."

[Linuxhippie @linuxhippie]

If folks get this, I mean really really get it, much of the non-sense we live under goes away.

yes, it's that simple.

[John S. @BusanJohn]

@policelawnews

[John S. @BusanJohn]

@LynAldenContact @naiivememe Dealing with teenage daughters was rough enough in my 40s—no thanks to doing it in my 60s.

[John S. @BusanJohn]

“Why does Jesus regard the Father and himself as the only models that do not generate mimetic rivalry? Because neither the Father nor the Son desires greedily, egotistically. God ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends his rain on the just and on the unjust.’ God gives to us without counting, without marking the least difference between us. […] If we imitate the detached generosity of God, then the trap of mimetic rivalries will never close over us.”
René Girard

[C. S. Lewis @CSLewisDaily]

“We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.” - C.S. Lewis

[EndGame Macro @onechancefreedm]

Gold Is For Distrust, Treasuries Are For Crisis

The ECB’s latest reserve data made a point that should not be ignored.

Gold’s share of official foreign reserves reached roughly 27% at the end of 2025, above US Treasuries at about 22% and the euro at about 15%.

That does not mean the dollar system is dead.

It means central banks are changing how they define safety.

The Important Caveat

A lot of this shift came from price.

Gold surged in 2024 and 2025, so the market value of existing central bank gold holdings rose. The ECB noted that if gold were valued at end 2023 prices, US Treasuries would still sit above gold as a reserve asset.

So the clean read is not that central banks dumped Treasuries overnight.

The better read is that gold becomes more valuable when trust in the dollar system starts to fracture.

Why Central Banks Want Gold

Gold has one feature Treasuries do not have.

It has no issuer.

A Treasury may be safe in credit terms, but it is still a liability of the US government. It sits inside a dollar based payments, custody, sanctions, and settlement system.

Gold does not need a payment rail. It does not need a Fed swap line. It does not depend on another country’s promise to pay.

That matters because reserves are no longer just about liquidity.

They are about survivability.

Gold As Emergency Dollar Access

This is the part people miss.

Central banks do not only hold gold because it sits outside the dollar system. They hold it because it can be mobilized if access to dollars becomes impaired.

Gold can be sold, swapped, pledged, or used as emergency collateral.

That does not give a country automatic dollar access the way a Fed swap line does. But it gives them a neutral, globally recognized asset that can potentially be turned into dollars, euros, yuan, dirhams, or another liquid settlement asset if normal funding channels close.

If a country is shut out of dollar liquidity, denied swap lines, blocked from payment rails, or worried about reserves being frozen, gold becomes one of the few assets it may still be able to use.

Not perfectly.

Not frictionlessly.

But better than an asset trapped inside someone else’s political system.

The Treasury Bid In A Crisis

This is why gold accumulation does not mean Treasuries lose their crisis role.

In a global financial crisis, the dollar system would likely get stronger before it gets weaker. Not because everyone trusts it morally, but because the world still has dollar debts, dollar trade settlement, dollar collateral chains, and no reserve market deep enough to replace Treasuries.

When stress hits, countries do not need theory.

They need dollars.

That usually creates a bid for dollar cash, Treasury bills, and US collateral. The front end of the Treasury market would likely be the strongest safe haven destination.

But the first phase can be messy. Some countries may sell Treasuries to raise dollars. Leveraged investors may liquidate Treasuries to meet margin calls. Then the Fed usually steps in with swap lines, repo facilities, rate cuts, or QE to stabilize the system.

So the crisis dynamic can look contradictory.

Gold stays bid because central banks distrust the political system.

Treasuries stay bid because the world still needs the dollar liquidity system.

My Take

Gold is not replacing the dollar as the global operating system.

And Treasuries are still the deepest collateral market in the world.

But the reserve system is changing.

In the old world, countries wanted assets that were liquid, deep, and dollar linked.

In the new world, they still want liquidity, but they also want assets that cannot be frozen, sanctioned, denied, or trapped.

That is the real message.

Gold is the asset central banks hold when they no longer fully trust the operating system.

Treasuries are still the asset the world runs toward when the operating system freezes.

[John S. @BusanJohn]

@MattWalshBlog

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

I haven’t moved on from the Karmelo Anthony fundraiser. They donated half a million as a reward for killing a white kid. Zero evidence or reason to think it was “self defense,” and they didn’t care. It was a reward for killing a white kid. I’ll never forget it. Neither should you

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Indiana Deputy Jon Samuelson stopped on the side of the road to help Sharod Grafton and even brought him to the hospital.

Grafton then pulled a gun and shot Jon 3 times, including through the neck.

Jon is now hospitalized and may be paralyzed from the chest down.

You probably won’t see this story in the legacy media…

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

Frank tried to warn you: if you want to study power dynamics and realpolitik logic, but can’t spend 20 years of reading, just get his books. It’s all there in plain sight.
Power is the most powerful drug ever created and you’re dealing with addicts perpetually striving for it.

[Infinite Books @infinitebooks]

Dostoevsky, life is a gift

[Infinite Books @infinitebooks]

C. S. Lewis, eternally relevant