Rod or Todd

Inventor of The Meat Lovers Pizza

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Dad, what was X like on the day when everyone thought the JPM levfin story was true?

[Neet @neet_sol]

When the group chat is talking geopolitics and the unemployed mf starts typing

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

How is a person supposed to tell if they are having a psychotic break or not these days?

Everyone else can see the big rabbit listening to Trump talk about bombing Iran, right?

[Punt Road @punt_rd]

Van Halen improves life…!😳😵‍💫🤪🤣

[Jono Barnes @JonoBarnes]

No seriously what did Bad Bunny do for people to be mad at?
He had fine women
He had a male and female gender wedding
He had the USA flag lead the way
He said God Bless America for goodness sake

If people still pretending to be mad at it, I’m sorry but..you might be racist 😅

[Jane Coaston 🏔️ @janecoaston]

Personally, I find it lightly entertaining that they've turned the National Prayer Breakfast into Trump attempting a tight five on how annoying he finds religious people.

[Zach Tratar @zachtratar]

As a centrist, let me explain why I hate both sides...

The left: they tax way too much. They are inefficient at actually helping people and get in the way of growth.

The right: they're murdering people, enabling tyranny, crushing alliances, and nuking our economy.

[Rod or Todd @MattureGenius]

Mendoza praying to the Virgin Mary while Beck is praying to the ghost of Paul Walker #CFBPlayoff #NationalChampionship

[CFB Kings @CFBKings]

Indiana just has to beat Miami by 81 to break 2013 Florida State’s record for scoring margin in the AP Poll era 😭

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The real reason the US is invading Venezuela goes back to a deal Henry Kissinger made with Saudi Arabia in 1974.

And I'm going to explain why this is actually about the SURVIVAL of the US dollar itself.

Not drugs. Not terrorism. Not "democracy."

This is about the petrodollar system that has kept America the dominant economic power for 50 years.

And Venezuela just threatened to end it.

Here's what really just happened:

Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

The largest on Earth.

More than Saudi Arabia.

20% of the entire world's oil.

But here's the part that matters:

Venezuela was actively selling that oil in Chinese yuan. Not dollars.

In 2018, Venezuela announced it would "free itself from the dollar."

They started accepting yuan, euros, rubles, anything BUT dollars for oil.

They were petitioning to join BRICS.

They were building direct payment channels with China that bypass SWIFT entirely.

And they were sitting on enough oil to fund de-dollarization for decades.

Why does this matter?

Because the entire American financial system is built on one thing:

The petrodollar.

In 1974, Henry Kissinger made a deal with Saudi Arabia:

All oil sold globally must be priced in US dollars.

In exchange, America provides military protection.

This single agreement created artificial demand for dollars worldwide.

Every country on Earth needs dollars to buy oil.

This lets America print unlimited money while other countries work for it.

It funds the military. The welfare state. The deficit spending.

The petrodollar is more important to US hegemony than aircraft carriers.

And there's a pattern of what happens to leaders who challenge it:

2000: Saddam Hussein announces Iraq will sell oil in euros instead of dollars.

2003: Invaded. Regime change. Iraq's oil immediately switched back to dollars. Saddam lynched.

The WMDs were never found because they never existed.

2009: Gaddafi proposes a gold-backed African currency called the "gold dinar" for oil trade.

Hillary Clinton's own leaked emails confirm this was the PRIMARY reason for intervention.

Email quote: "This gold was intended to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar."

2011: NATO bombs Libya. Gaddafi sodomized and murdered. Libya now has open slave markets.

"We came, we saw, he died!" Clinton laughed on camera.

The gold dinar died with him.

And now Maduro.

With FIVE TIMES more oil than Saddam and Gaddafi combined.

Actively selling in yuan.

Building payment systems outside dollar control.

Petitioning to join BRICS.

Partnered with China, Russia, and Iran.

The three countries leading global de-dollarization.

This isn't coincidence.

Challenge the petrodollar. Get regime changed.

Every. Single. Time.

Stephen Miller (US homeland security advisor) literally said it out loud two weeks ago:

"American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property."

He's not hiding it.

They're claiming Venezuelan oil BELONGS to America because US companies developed it 100 years ago.

By this logic, every nationalized resource in history was "theft."

But here's the DEEPER problem:

The petrodollar is already dying.

Russia sells oil in rubles and yuan since Ukraine.

Saudi Arabia is openly discussing yuan settlements.

Iran has been trading in non-dollar currencies for years.

China built CIPS, their own alternative to SWIFT with 4,800 banks in 185 countries.

BRICS is actively building payment systems that bypass the dollar entirely.

The mBridge project lets central banks settle trades instantly in local currencies.

Venezuela joining BRICS with 303 billion barrels of oil would accelerate this exponentially.

That's what this invasion is really about.

Not stopping drugs. Venezuela accounts for less than 1% of US cocaine.

Not terrorism. There's zero evidence Maduro runs a "terror organization."

Not democracy. The US supports Saudi Arabia, which has zero elections.

This is about maintaining a 50-year-old agreement that lets America print money while the world works for it.

And the consequences are terrifying:

Russia, China, and Iran are already denouncing this as "armed aggression."

China is Venezuela's biggest oil customer. They're losing billions.

BRICS nations are watching a country get invaded for trading outside the dollar.

Every nation considering de-dollarization just got the message:

Challenge the dollar and we will bomb you.

But here's the problem...

That message might accelerate de-dollarization, not stop it.

Because now every country in the Global South knows what happens if you threaten dollar hegemony.

And they're realizing the only protection is to move FASTER.

The timing is insane too:

January 3rd, 2026. Venezuela invaded. Maduro captured.

January 3rd, 1990. Panama invaded. Noriega captured.

36 years apart. Almost to the day.

Same playbook. Same "drug trafficking" excuse.

Same real reason: control of strategic resources and trade routes.

History doesn't repeat. But it rhymes.

What happens next:

Trump's press conference at Mar-a-Lago sets the narrative.

US oil companies are already lined up. Politico reported they've been approached about "returning to Venezuela."

The opposition will be installed. Oil will flow in dollars again.

Venezuela becomes another Iraq. Another Libya.

But here's what nobody's asking:

What happens when you can no longer bomb your way to dollar dominance?

When China has enough economic leverage to retaliate?

When BRICS controls 40% of global GDP and says "no more dollars"?

When the world realizes the petrodollar is maintained by violence?

America just showed its hand.

The question is whether the rest of the world folds or calls the bluff.

Because this invasion is an admission that the dollar can no longer compete on its own merits.

When you have to bomb countries to keep them using your currency, the currency is already dying.

Venezuela isn't the beginning.

It's the desperate end.

What do you think?

[John Ganz @lionel_trolling]

Totally outrageous that right-wingers ever had the temerity to lecture people about civility and respect when this is their guy

[NotMobNole (TROJAN) @mobnole2]

No allegations
No scandals
Just Dogshit football🔥🔥🔥

[CFB Kings @CFBKings]

Lose by 14 to 5-7 FSU in your first game of the season.

Struggle with 4-8 South Carolina.

Lose at home to the only ranked team you face in November.

Struggle with 5-7 Auburn.

Lose by 21 the day before the bracket’s made.

Get put in the CFP.

Pretty sweet deal Alabama has.

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

If you're currently receiving Social Security, or if you're under 55 and you expect to ever receive Social Security, please read and re-post this.

There are critical facts about the system and its returns, that you MUST understand.

This is not a screed that's for or against.

However, once you understand what SS actually is, how it's been mis-managed, and what it's costing all of us, I'm certain you'll want to see it deeply reformed.

Let's start here.

As you know, the SSA's Trusts are operating at substantial annual deficits and are forecast to run out of money by 2033 or 2034. But, if inflation is higher than expected, the Trusts could run out of funds by 2030.

That's nothing compared to real problem with SS. The real problem is: SSA never invested any of our contributions. Instead, all of the money went into the government's general fund -- and was spent. The SS Trust account at the Treasury was credited with non-marketable Treasury securities, which paid SSA an interest rate based on the average yield and duration of all outstanding Treasury debt.

In short, rather than investing on our behalf, the government took all of the money and gave our accounts a bunch of mostly worthless IOUs. The returns on these IOUs has been about 2% a year. Abysmal.

Let me show you how this feckless behavior has impacted our lives.

Let's assume that in 1971, when we left the gold standard, the SS Trustees realized (as they should have) that the government's IOUs were now only paper... paper that the government could (and surely would) print. So, instead of holding government IOUs, they put the existing reserve ($40B in 1971) and all additional net contributions into the S&P 500, matching the rebalances that have occurred since then. In other words, what if SSA had invested in stocks rather than into government debt?

If those changes were made in 1971, and nothing else about SS changed, (payout ratios remained the same) the Social Security Trust Funds would have $50 trillion in them today, not $2.7 trillion (18x more).

That's the difference between earning 11%+ a year from '71 until '25, instead of the meager 2% the Trusts actually earned. And so, you might say, so what? That didn't happen. Now we're screwed.

Yes, but you really still don't understand how screwed.

If you scaled the payouts proportionally to match the growing size of the fund (keeping the payout ratio the same as it was before) and you maintained the current 104%+ cost-to-revenue payout ratio that exists now, the value of the payouts would increase by 18X too.

Today the average payout is $24,100, with an estimated total payout (over 20 years) of $482k. but, if the SSA had invested in stocks (S&P 500) instead of government bonds and if payout ratios were maintained as they are now, the average payout would be $442,300 per year, with an estimated lifetime value of $8.84 million.

Obviously, this is hypothetical. But is based strictly on the actual math of the current system. Payout ratios should be vastly larger. And the reserves of the system should be too.

The problem with SS isn't merely the law surrounding it. Flemming v. Nestor (1960) makes it clear that your 'contributions' don't belong to you; Social Security's payroll taxes are just that -- taxes. You have no legal right, whatsoever, to any return or any payout at all. You can argue all you want that you paid 'contributions' not taxes, but that entire idea was merely a lie the government told to sell you on paying the taxes without complaint.

Additionally, like all government programs, the Social Security Administration is vastly too expensive ($14.2 billion a year in overhead) to administer). That's as much as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America spend on their IB staffs. I hope it's obvious to you that the SSA staff are not the same caliber of people Goldman hires. You could easily gut 95% of SSA's overhead using off-the-shelf technology and simply investing in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund.

Finally, there's real problem we all face. SSA uses the government's CPI-U (consumer price index, urban consumer) to increase SS's payouts each year, supposedly to keep pace with the impact of inflation. These numbers are farcical. Or fraudulent, depending on how cynical you are about the government.

Real world price indexes (like the Chapwood Index or the Case Schiller Housing Index), which measure the exact same item (the same house) or the same bottle of ketchup show that inflation has been over 10% for more than a decade, on average. More or less, since the financial crisis of 2008, the government has been printing money to pay its bills, including the SSA, and then lying about the inevitable resulting inflation.

How do I know for sure? Simple, just measure the value of the average SS payout in gold eagle coins (1 troy ounce of pure gold, 31.1035 grams).

In 2001, the value of the average SS payout ($10,493) was worth 38 gold eagles. But 2011 (just after the financial crisis) the average payout had risen ~40% to $14,743. That sounds pretty good... except by then, SS's average payout had fallen dramatically in the real world. That year's payout would only buy 10 gold eagles, a decline in real terms of nearly 75%.

Surely, it couldn't get worse... but yes... after the Covid bailouts, it did. Much worse.

By 2025, the average payout was $24k, up 63% in dollar terms. But, that amount only bought 6 gold eagles, a decline in real terms of 40%.

Whether you want to believe it or not, the CPI is fake. That's most obvious when you study the real world value of the SS payouts. If you do, you'll soon discover the real return of the SSA's "investment strategy" since 1971 was actually negative.

Every dollar you're paying into the current system is, like all taxes, being destroyed and wasted by the government. That might be necessary or worth it when comes to national security, highways, and other critical shared resources.

But it absolutely not necessary or worth it when it comes to our retirement accounts.

If we don't fix Social Security in the next five years, it is going to wipe out an entire generation of Americans -- Gen X. And there will be nothing left for Millennials or Gen Z either.

The solution is utterly simple: take the SSA out of the government's hands. Pay a private sector institution, with legal fiduciary obligations, 95% less to administer a SS system that is privately owned (your actual property) and governed by a familiar set of rules. You and your employer would both be required to contribute (tax free) at a minimum rate of 6.5% a year. And you'd have to invest, for the long term, into one of a few high quality, broadly diversified index funds (S&P 500, QQQ, etc.) Or, if you prefer, you could also own short-dated corporate investment grade bonds. Employers could compete for talent by offer higher matching contribution rates (ie, employee pays 10%, employer pays 10%).

Folks with more than 20 years remaining until retirement age (which really should be at least 68) would have the option of keeping the current system (bad idea) or opting into the new system. And, to ease the risk of the transition, the government could guarantee 80% of the value of the current system, so you wouldn't have to bear the full burden of the risks.

It's win-win for everyone, but most especially for people under 40 who would see a massive increase in the value of their contributions.

Would love to hear from anyone who thinks this is a bad idea.

Would also love to hear from anyone who thinks they know how to get this accomplished with the current Administration.

[G-MA & G-PA @GPAIndiana]

When you wake up in a bad mood and it gradually gets worse!! 🤣🤣

[Rod or Todd @MattureGenius]

@TheCinesthetic

[Rod or Todd @MattureGenius]

@thebeltwayagent @SpencerHakimian Yeah this graph shows normalization…not cooked. The convergence is good. Most buyers are sellers, meaning they are unlocking their inventory and absorbing existing inventory. We may continue to see sluggish transaction volume but prices are going to stay stable.

[Rod or Todd @MattureGenius]

@NewsLambert Increasing demand via falling rates will not necesarily correlate to house prices spiraling higher again. Supply was extremely constrained from 2020-2022. There are enough pent up sellers from the past three years that there will be plenty of competition to keep a lid on things.