Wanna Know Why USA Often Means United Scams of America?

The USA was built on scams and ripoffs. The land that invented "marketing", the art of bullshitting people into buy something they don't need. The land that gave birth to "snake oil": deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. We are governed by snake oil salesmen/women posing as politicians or preachers, including most Republicans and some Democrats. And we are supposed to endure this birth-to-death hoax as the "American way of life" to achieving the "American Dream". With Donald Dumb at the helm constantly labeling everything a "hoax", the United Scammers of America have achieved their own American Dream, not ours.

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15 Completely Legal Scams In Society That We've Been Forced To Normalize
Conshea Brown
Wed, September 3, 2025



Coming to the realization that our lives are littered with legal scams that affect us in an unbelievable number of ways can be a hard pill to swallow...

Jacob Wackerhausen / Getty Images

But if you aren't quite sure what those scams you're falling for — or just want to find reassurance for what you've already been thinking — Reddit user u/odikuart asked the question, "What’s the biggest legal scam still operating today?" and a hefty amount of people gave some pretty infuriating examples:

1."Just went to Vegas. Why is there a resort fee on top of booking a hotel room? Why do we have to pay for parking, too? Someone learned they could add hidden fees and were successful, so now nearly all of Vegas does it also."

Dimensions / Getty Images
—u/FoolsballHomerun

2."Companies that change their terms of service to force you to pay an annual subscription to continue using a product you've had for years that didn't require a subscription to begin with."
—u/I_HaveSeenTheLight

3."College textbooks. New edition every year, barely any changes, and somehow still $300-plus a pop."

Jcomp / Getty Images
—u/DuskPrincessx

4."Ticketmaster 'convenience fees.' The price doubles at checkout, and there’s nothing convenient about it."
—u/Real-Spot-4217

5."Churches not being taxed like the big business they obviously are."

Pascal Deloche / Getty Images
—u/Key_Intern_2550

6."Subscriptions. To everything. Streaming kicked it off, and then everyone figured out they could bleed us dry, one 'feature' at a time. No ads on your music? Subscribe! Unlimited skips? Subscribe! Remote start and heated seats in winter? Subscribe! Want your toilet to spray water? Subscribe!"
—u/mindlesslobster014

7."Actively shutting down your product when it detects unofficial repairs. I can accept that owners may lose warranty over unofficial repairs, but going as far as completely making the device non-functional after the repair is just corporate speak for 'you no longer own the physical device you bought; you just have a license to use it. We still own it.'"

Mariia Siurtukova / Getty Images
—u/timchenw

8."TurboTax for 99% of us. The IRS knows our income and could just send us a bill/check...but that would kill the rent-seeking industry of tax prep."
—u/Franzmithanz

9."The insurance industry. Any kind. Health, auto, home, life, or any insurance. Insurance is the biggest legal scam that exists. You pay them money every month, 'just in case,' and when something happens and the time comes for payouts, they try their damnedest to not fork over anything but still expect that monthly premium."

Mputsylo / Getty Images
—u/Negative_Bat3572

10."Small town cops ticketing out-of-towners in speed traps as a means of revenue generation. Happened to me three times. And cops wonder why the public doesn't respect them. Public safety, my ass."
—u/_Chill_Winston_

11."Corporate money in politics. It hurts everyone, even the business eventually."

Opolja / Getty Images
—u/myutnybrtve

12."Bank overdraft fees. Instead of just denying the transaction, they charge like $40 to someone who doesn’t have the money to begin with."
—u/bettereverydamday

13."Paid parking…at the hospital."

Paddythegolfer / Getty Images
—u/vanessecity

14."Heads of government programs who give favorable deals to companies then magically get a seat/job at the company or board of directors they helped."
—u/420_69_Fake_Account

And finally, here's one that nearly 43 million (and counting) Americans can relate to:
 

15."The predatory nature of student loans. I’ve been out of school for almost 8 years. When I graduated, my student loan balance was almost $90,000. I have been paying faithfully since graduation. At times when I was on an income-based plan, I was even paying extra. Now, my income-based plan has gotten more expensive. Current loan balance after all this time and payments? $87,000."

Elisaveta Ivanova / Getty Images
—u/dxguy

Are there other legal scams you're hip to that are ridiculously affecting our lives and society? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Adulterer Womanizer Christian Divorcee AG Paxton Wants Prayers in Schools

The Message: I say what I say to cover up for what I do. The ridiculous bigotry of American conservatives, especially those from the backward southern states, cannot be matched.

The Question: Next time Paxton cheats on the woman he cheated his wife with, will he pray before or after? Will he say, "God made me do it"?

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Texas AG Ken Paxton calls for prayer time in schools

Zach Kaplan

Wed, September 3, 2025 at 6:22 AM GMT+3·1 min read

(NewsNation) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is encouraging schools in his state “to implement dedicated time for prayer and the reading of scripture,” according to a Sept. 2 press release.

The announcement follows the recent enactment of Senate Bill 11 in Texas on Sept. 1, allowing “school boards to adopt policies setting aside time for voluntary prayer and the reading of the Bible or other religious texts,” according to the release.

The bill directs the Attorney General’s office to “defend any school district or charter school that adopts such a policy,” according to the release.

Paxton is encouraging schools to commence the “legal process” of bringing prayer to the classroom.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a post on X.

Paxton is squaring off against Sen. John Cornyn in the upcoming Texas Senate primary race. The two have repeatedly traded shots on social media as the lead-up to the March primaries intensifies.

“There you go again. Ten Commandments for thee, but not for me, eh, Ken?” Cornyn said in response to Paxton, in a post on X.

So far, Cornyn is one of three sitting Republican senators running for reelection who have not received a presidential endorsement, according to the Texas Tribune.

Paxton’s announcement follows a broader push by Texas Republicans to integrate religion into public schools.

In May, Texas Senate Bill 10 was enacted, requiring schools to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The bill has faced legal scrutiny and is being challenged by families of students around the state.

Meanwhile, Christian ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is siphoning 100 million dollars to 600 so-called "Faith-based" organizations - ALL EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN CHURCHES with dubious operations - so they can improve their security. [https://www.newsnationnow.com/religion/noem-110-million-600-churches-nonprofits-security/] . Isn't "transparency" lovely?

 

Trump's Rising Inflation

Top economist Torsten Slok warns of an ‘inflation mountain’ in a potential repeat of the ’70s
Nick Lichtenberg
Updated Wed, September 3, 2025



Apollo charts the “inflation mountains.” (Courtesy of Apollo Global Management)

Torsten Slok has been turning heads on Wall Street with his charts for years, since he was at Deutsche Bank and continuing on into his current role at Apollo Global Management. His market analysis earned him a profile in Bloomberg, and he was one of the first prominent voices to warn of a potential AI bubble in stocks in the summer of 2025.

Now he sees an uncanny resemblance—almost an uncanny valley—between the inflation mountain range of the 1970s and ’80s and the inflation wave of 2021, plus what may lie ahead for the U.S. economy. In his Daily Spark newsletter on Aug. 31, Slok noted the upside pressure on inflation and inflation expectations from tariffs; dollar depreciation; and growing disagreement within the Federal Open Market Committee about how to balance rising inflation with slowing employment. (In a note titled “Ghosts of 2007,” Bank of America Research observed that the Fed has rarely cut rates against a backdrop of rising inflation.)

“The risks are rising,” Slok added, “that we could see another ‘inflation mountain’ emerge over the coming months.”

Warning signs emerge

The chart shared by Slok and Apollo juxtaposes the current path of U.S. core CPI with inflation periods from 1974 to 1982, illustrating a close similarity between the inflation wave of 1973–74 with that of 2021–22. As Slok’s arrows demonstrate, the first “inflation mountain” of the 1970s was followed by another, taking off around 1978. If the pattern holds, the economy would be due to scale another peak starting almost exactly in the fall of 2025.

Although Slok doesn’t say this in his note, the “first inflation mountain” refers to the initial spike, while the “second mountain” represents the even steeper climb that followed several years later, driven by external shocks and policy missteps.
Mounting inflation fears

These aren’t the first warnings on inflation from Slok. In late August, he argued that Jerome Powell’s choice of words at the Jackson Hole Symposium—saying the labor market is in a “curious kind of balance”—showed that the Fed sees structural distortions from tariffs and immigration policy. If those forces keep inflation sticky and Powell cuts rates, as he’s under pressure from the White House to do, Slok wrote that he could be vulnerable to a 1970s-style “stop-go” policy mistake—the backdrop for the second inflation mountain.

In such a scenario, reminiscent of the ‘70s, if the Fed loosens policy prematurely, inflation could spike, leading to the painful corrective measures seen under Powell’s predecessor Paul Volcker, who hiked rates aggressively and weathered severe, double-dip recessions.

The most recent inflation read, the personal consumption expenditures index, showed prices rising 2.6% in July compared with a year ago, the same annual increase as in June and in line with what economists expected. Excluding the more volatile food and energy categories, prices rose 2.9%, up from 2.8% in June and the highest since February, with Fortune’s Eva Roytburg reporting that there was a pullback in spending in discretionary categories. The broader consumer price index was flatter than expected at 2.7%, while the producer price index was higher than expected as wholesale prices rose 3.3%, both over the same period.

These warnings come as economists debate the shape of the back half of the 2020s, questioning whether a recession is ahead or the “stagflation” that accompanied the inflation mountains of Slok’s analysis. UBS sees an elevated recession risk in the U.S. economy’s hard data, coming in at 93% in July—although its average recession risk is much lower given its proprietary analysis of other conditions. Still, it forecasts a “soggy” economy ahead, much like Bank of America Research.

JPMorgan was alarmed by July’s shockingly soft jobs report, saying that a slide in labor demand of the magnitude shown “is a recession warning signal.” Meanwhile, Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, warned in early August the U.S. was on the precipice of a recession, citing much of the same hard data as UBS. More recently, Zandi has put the odds of a recession at 50-50, and he’s said that states representing almost one-third of GDP were either in recession already or at risk of it. Slok’s analysis poses the question: What happens if and when that slams into an inflation mountain?

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

MAGA's Neo-Prohibitionists: Morons who Don't Learn from their Own History

It took dumb American conservatives from the illiterate ignorant peasant backwoods of the 1920s to think they could "clean up" America and return it to God by banning alcohol. Humans have been making and drinking alcohol for some 10,000 years, and the dumb MAGA ancestors of a century ago thought they'd re-invent the wheel.

They always try to reinvent the wheel because they think they're special while all other peoples and civilizations before them were "primitive". Now these neanderthal obnoxious idiots think they're special because their colonization of north America was one giant act of God-mandated heroism, when in fact it was one of the most abysmal episodes of human history, stained with mass killings, racism, genocide and extermination.

And here we are again, another generation of inbred white mongrels - MAGA morons - is trying to outsmart tens of thousands of years of human history with their 200-years of inbreeding in the swamps of Alabama and Louisiana and in the desolate mountains of Appalachia. They call it "Manifest Destiny". 

They, who want to deregulate for the purpose of stealing, want to regulate our lives by banning all kinds of stuff.  

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Opinion - MAGA: America’s new prohibitionists
Maxwell G. Burkey, opinion contributor
Mon, September 1, 2025


Opinion - MAGA: America’s new prohibitionists

As Americans gather for Labor Day celebrations, there’s reason to recall an era of our history when offering cheers at the barbeque was barred to American workers. While the second Trump administration has generated copious comparisons to the McCarthy era of American politics, there is a different historical period that should nurture our political consciousness: Prohibitionism.

For many Americans, Prohibition recalls a fleeting national embarrassment, an anachronism from which there is little to glean. Remembered as a quixotic aberration, the banning of the sale of alcohol by force of constitutional amendment, from 1920 to 1933, might strike one as having little to offer our history of the present. After all, who in America is getting fired up about eradicating the evil of booze? Isn’t cracking a cold one during the game on Sunday nearly a national ritual?

Well, they aren’t coming for your liquor cabinet exactly, but MAGA is America’s new Prohibitionists.

Prohibitionism was the largest and most successful reactionary culture war in American politics. It triumphed not via extra-legal and constitutionally dubious mechanisms like loyalty oaths, executive decrees and blacklists, but through populist politics that stirred moral panic, mobilizing large swaths of Americans to invert their relationship to political authority.

Today’s MAGA movement seeks an inversion in national self-understanding akin to that proffered by Prohibition, offering a vision of American democracy in which the moral cleanliness of culture — not democratic pluralism or self-realization — is our central commitment. Your drink may be safe, but MAGA mirrors the Prohibitionist distaste for liberal democracy.

Prohibitionists fretted about the degeneracy of city life in a rapidly urbanizing early 20th century America. U.S. cities were seedbeds of all sorts of sin, fueled by a demonic matrix of saloons. In associating urbanism with decay, Prohibitionists relied on a familiar moral geography: The heartland is home to hardworking, God-fearing Americans, overlooked by corrupt big-city politicians.

Writing in the 1950s, the historian Richard Hofstadter understood Prohibition as a “rural-evangelical virus” that had run its course. But MAGA’s disdain for urban life is evidence of a new strain. While the association of agrarian life with virtue is as old as the Republic, Trump’s incessant harangues of American cities as “cesspools” and “hellholes” owes much to Prohibition — the first mass upswelling to cast the metropolis as America’s infernal underbelly.

It wasn’t only sophisticated urbanites, leisurely imbibing over cosmopolitan conversation, that raised the hackles of Prohibitionists. As with MAGA, all the rhetoric about the decadence of cities was a red herring — the real target of Prohibitionist animus was working-class immigrants flocking to American cities in the 1910s, nudging Prohibition to a critical mass of resentment.

The most draconian law enforcement efforts of the era took aim at immigrant watering holes. Much as rebellion served as pretense for the Trump administration’s deployment of the military to Los Angeles to punish immigrant communities, the wickedness of alcohol served those purposes for Prohibitionists. Both movements packaged their nativism in appeals to security and safety.

Like MAGA, Prohibition made for fantastical politics, difficult to disentangle from conspiracy theories. Prohibitionists exploited public health concerns to foment a racial mythos. Before the Constitution was amended, Prohibition had already vaulted to victory in the old Confederacy, beginning with Georgia in 1907. Prohibition’s catalyst in the South was a racist trope of African American men as insatiable sexual predators under the influence. The racial anxiety underpinning Prohibition was so pervasive that the president of Harvard went so far as to claim that alcoholism threatened the survival of the white race. MAGA ideology is likewise envenomed by a frenzied morass of falsehoods such as the Great Replacement Theory and antisemitism.

The evangelists of Prohibition readily conflated the depravities of alcohol and sex — both flowed from the same carnal tap, demanding a policy of abstinence to facilitate national redemption. Temperance advocates opposed early efforts to expand access to birth control and sex education, and the vanguard of the movement, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, played a decisive role in the passage of the Mann Act in 1910, a federal statute used to prosecute interracial and extramarital sex.

MAGA likewise succeeded in rescinding federally protected reproductive rights, placing constitutional rights to birth control, same-sex marriage, consensual sexual activity and self-determination of medical treatment on shaky ground. Transgender people have been excised from military service, imputed an undisciplined lifestyle. And MAGA has its pitchforks set on quashing other proclaimed perversions by erasing gay and transgender people from school curricula, abolishing no-fault divorce, criminalizing pornography and banning books on sexuality.

The politics of mass paternalism that Prohibitionists pioneered and MAGA inherited is anathema to liberal democracy, but it cannot be wholly defeated by the liberals’ favorite recourse — court rooms and constitutional procedures. The problem is not merely a MAGA Supreme Court enamored with maximizing executive power.

The more vexing dilemma is that constitutional democracies require civil society underpinnings to sustain themselves. An overreliance on political institutions risks neglecting social action in the civil sphere capable of cultivating the liberal sensibilities presupposed by those institutions. America’s foremost theorist of democracy, John Dewey, wrote, “A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a form of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”

Prohibition was defeated not because it ran afoul of a constitutional precept; rather, Prohibition fell because it attacked associations that Americans held dear. There was dissonance between the political regime of Prohibition and the social experience of American democracy.

Everyday citizens enhanced that dissonance, creating a counterculture of speakeasies, bringing Americans of all backgrounds — immigrants, African Americans, women — together to drink, dance and play jazz. The pluralism that Prohibitionists aimed to avert was already in bloom.

And laborers reclaimed the prerogatives of leisure and frivolity, turning the Prohibitionists’ favored caricature of immigrant workers as drunkards and sloths on its head by taking pause from the workbench to march boisterously through city streets with signs that read, “WE WANT BEER.”

Prohibitionists feared big city bacchanalia, and that is precisely what a coalition of immigrant workers gave them in 1933 when FDR signed legislation legalizing the sale of beer.

The reasons to wish to live in a liberal democracy exceed well-crafted constitutional arguments. As we make those arguments, we also need to remind Americans why they should care. The answers anti-Prohibitionists offered a century ago remain relevant: the joy of self-rule in our associations, and the experience of revelry with others.

As you raise your glass this Labor Day, offer a libation for liberal democracy.

Maxwell G. Burkey, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Kean University.

US-Born White Criminals Strike Again

Several non-migrant, non-immigrant White Americans are accomplices in a shooting that left one person dead and several injured. Should Donald Dumb and his ICE Bimbo descend on Minneapolis with the National Guard?
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Accomplices charged in mass shooting near Cristo Rey Jesuit High School
BringMeTheNews
Sun, August 31, 2025

Two accomplices in a Minneapolis shooting that left one person dead and six more injured last week now face charges.

Tiffany Lynn Marie Martindale, 30, and Ryan Timothy Quinn, 33, have each been charged with one count of aiding an offender to avoid arrest in connection with the Tuesday shooting.

The shooting, which occurred near East 29th Street and Clinton Avenue — directly behind Cristo Rey Jesuit High School — in Minneapolis’ Phillips neighborhood, killed 35-year-old Gregory Doyle Sweeten and left six others injured.

Minneapolis Police Department Chief Brian O’Hara said at least one person in the group was targeted.

Hennepin County jail

According to the criminal complaint, Minneapolis police found Sweeten dead at the scene as well as multiple discharged bullet casings.

Dash cam footage provided by a witness showed a suspect's vehicle, which was registered to Quinn. Surveillance near Quinn’s Inver Grove Heights address showed the vehicle arrive shortly after the shooting. Martindale could also be seen in the vehicle’s passenger seat.

Quinn told police that he and Martindale had picked up a man identified as “Bino,” who directed them to drive him to the area near East 29th Street and Clinton Avenue.

There, Quinn allegedly circled the block before Bino got out wearing a mask and holding a rifle. He then proceeded to shoot into a crowd standing on the sidewalk before getting back into the vehicle, according to the complaint.

Quinn and Martindale dropped Bino off in north Minneapolis following the shooting.

A preliminary investigation also shows multiple calls between Bino and Martindale on the day of the shooting.

Court records do not identify Bino further, and no charges have been announced for the gunman in the shooting.

Note: The details provided in this story are based on law enforcement’s latest version of events, and may be subject to change.

The Internal Incoherence of Donald Dumb's Concept of Free Markets

The USA is considered a bastion of raw, unfettered capitalism. Any attempt at regulating the market is deemed by the dinosaur republicans and other backward conservatives as a a socialist communist marxist crime aiming at destroying the fallacy of the American dream.

If such is the case, then you'd expect that these conservatives dumbasses will allow the market to operate on its own and decide who is a winner and who is a loser, because in their world as barbarian primates hailing from the Jurassic it's a dog-eat-dog world, a constant Darwinian battle between the fit (i.e. the greedy colonial thieves of other peoples' resources) and the unfit (non-white, non-anglo-saxon, non-protestant dark and brown people from around the world). 

Which is ironic because they reject Charles Darwin's established sccientific fact of evolution by natural selection - which by the way is NOT a battle between fit and unfit, but rather a constant quest to adapt and adjust to a constantly changing environment - because it clashes with their barbarian (fake and bigoted) faith in garbage religions and texts written in the desert some 3,000 years ago. They are cryptic atheists of the worst kind who do not believe in the claims of their own religion (forgiveness, kindness...) because if they did, they'd lose the battle of greed and cruelty in the capitalist free market.

If you believe in a free market, you believe in winning and losing. Therefore, if there are trade deficits between countries A and B, it means that country A is buying more stuff from country B than the latter is buying from country A.  In an ideal world, or in the stupid mind of Donald Dumb, they should be buying equal amounts of stuff from each other. But the world is not ideal for conservative brutes: It is as mentioned earlier, a Darwinian dog-eat-dog world where there are losers and winners.

But what could be the reasons for the imbalance of trade. There are many possible reasons, and I am no economist expert:

For example, Country A products are poor quality and/or are expensive. So country B buys less from country A.

Country B makes stuff that country A does not make, so it is normal that country A buys more from country B. 

One can imagine all sorts of reasons like that that make country A a loser and country B a winner in the balance of trade between them. And that is how the fucking free market of capitalists works. If country A wants to sell more to country B, it should improve the quality and/or reduce the cost of its products, or make the stuff it needs on its home soil and stop buying and nagging.

In sum, Donald Dumb's tariffs are a violation of the fundamental tenets of capitalist free markets. Donald Dumb is therefore a socialist marxist because he wants to impede the operartions of a free market with taxes and tariffs.

How Donald Dumb is Destroying the American Dream for Many...

...otherwise friendly people culturally close to the US. This story is about a well-integrated - and potentially useful - immigrant from the UK who is bailing out on her American dream because of the moron criminal that the American people elected who is destroying America. 

Only yesterday, some 25 economically important nations gathered to tell Donald Dumb that the world doesn't respect him and doesn't respect America because of what he is doing. They are planning a world that bypasses the US and its dollar, which would transform the moron's America First into America Alone and sorry.
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I moved to the US for the American dream, then decided to leave it behind. It's too painful to stay.
Insider Inc.
Mon, September 1, 2025


The Moron-in-Chief

Alice Lassman dreamed of studying in the US and moved to New York to attend graduate school in 2022.

110 years earlier, her grandfather had arrived at Ellis Island for his own American dream.

In June 2025, Lassman decided to cut her dream short, leave the US, and return to London.

My great-grandfather and I were both 24 when we arrived in America.

He landed at Ellis Island in 1912 with nothing but a suitcase, his savings, and the belief that America would offer a better life.

I touched down at JFK airport in 2022, ready for the adventure I'd waited most of my life for.

We know little about my great-grandfather's time in America, but we know he brought his fortunes back to Ireland after 20 years doing industrial work in Philadelphia. His version of the American dream earned him enough money to buy a small business, later giving my grandmother the chance to leave Ireland for the UK. It was her grit — inherited by my mother — that permitted me to even dream about one day moving to the US.

In June 2025, after three years in the US, I decided to cut my American dream short and leave the US. Seeing how it treated its most vulnerable had hurt me too much, and I couldn't watch it get worse.

I was drawn by the allure of the US education system

I always dreamed of attending grad school in America, the electric soft power of names like "Harvard" and "Columbia" emanating with the promise of the US education system.

I've spent my career trying to work out how to make the economy serve every one of its citizens better. But every pathway to get there — from non-profits to the UN — seemed to require an MPA.

In 2021, I came home from work one day and decided I would give it a go.

I was at my desk at work one March afternoon when the email from Columbia arrived. I clicked the link to an acceptance letter, virtual confetti exploding across the screen as Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" blared into my earphones.

At Columbia, I was lucky enough to spend two years learning what it meant to serve the most vulnerable in society. I met people who had suffered at the hands of injustice and for whom America had a whole new meaning: one friend fighting for women's rights in Afghanistan, another learning about gender equity to bring reform to the US Army.

Things have felt precarious for my peers and me for a while

When I graduated in 2024, everyone I knew had plans to stay. I thought I'd be working at USAID as an economist. But after my verbal offer unexpectedly fell through, I began to panic.

I'd moved the start date for my OPT — the visa international students rely on to work after graduation — forward to start the job, which gave me just 60 days to find and start a job in the US. The real possibility of being forced to leave gripped me.

A year after getting our MPAs, many of my peers are still unemployed, and most are from abroad, making them vulnerable to the struggles of staying. Things have felt precarious for us for a while. I've watched friends accept jobs four or more pay grades below what they were doing before grad school or get stuck in temporary jobs just to hold onto their visas. Any position, any pay — just to keep the dream alive.

Our struggle scratches only the surface of what so many have to go through just to get by in America — to make a living, cover medical bills, and feed their loved ones.

For Gen Z, these struggles feel particularly real. Four in 10 18- to 29-year-olds say they're "barely getting by" financially, and only 39% believe the American dream is still attainable, the lowest of any generation.

From housing to costs of living, everything has become entangled in economic strain. By the time my generation reached adolescence, what constituted a stable and happy life had been redefined by what we can afford.

Everything changed in the last seven months

The US education system — once a magnet for the "best and the brightest" across the world — is under strain. Schools like Harvard and Columbia face the threat of restrictions on their ability to attract talent from around the world, as international students applying for student visas encounter increased barriers to fulfilling their dreams.

When my great-grandfather arrived in the US, he found work quickly. It was a time when America needed migrants to build.

Migrants are now the intimate subjects of news alerts: social media surveillance, peaking deportation flights, and overnight orders to leave. After a while, the fear of being told to leave becomes exhausting.
I want to believe in the promise of America

In June, I decided to leave. After my USAID job offer fell through, I'd managed to find a role at a non-profit in D.C., and planned to apply for an extension on my OPT.

Instead, I chose to give up my life in the US, leaving behind my closest friends and a job I loved.

"All these dreams we had died," my friend Claire told me as we hugged goodbye. I was pretty sure she'd be the last to go. My first friend in grad school, she had been resolute about staying in New York after graduation. Now, she's left too.

I really want to believe in the promise of America, and what it could look like; when the first bag of grain is delivered by USAID to a conflict zone, that is who America — the wealthiest country on earth — should be.

I can't imagine that version of America not being a part of my future. But everything I held dear in the US was hurting. I left to escape the news alerts, and back home in London, I am free from them.

I feel like I left a part of myself in the US

I've found a job, and spend my spare time writing a book on how AI's influence on gender and emotions is reshaping economic life. I love the eclectic familiarity of London.

But I think of America too often — of my time in the Vermont valleys in the first snow of the season, our hike in the Smokies, and sheltering from tornadoes in Savannah. Being back home, it feels like something is missing. I must have left a part of me there.

I think of my friends: one who can't leave without fear of detainment on re-entry, another whose asylum application was voided, leaving him stateless. The century of the American dream is over.

Now, not a single friend without a US citizenship remains in America by choice, all leaving quietly, with no fanfare.

Alice Lassman is a policy expert with a focus on the global economy and gender. Her forthcoming book explores how AI's influence on gender and emotions is reshaping economic life.

Critical Week Ahead in Lebanon: Hezbollah War or Israeli War?

After getting beaten down to a pulp in its latest stupid war against Israel, despite its hollering for decades that its missiles could reach, destroy and eliminate the Zionist state, Iran's militia Hezbollah in Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire. 

Before last fall's war, Israel had kept its occupation of the Shebaa Farms and part of the village of Ghajar following its withdrawal in 2000. Now after Big-Balls Hassan Nasrallah's war, defeat and death, Israel has increased its occupation. It now occupies five additional hills along its border with Lebanon, which goes to show that, in Iranian logic, you resist occupation of land by losing more land. Like George Costanza's "negotiating" with NBC for less money than originally offered.

But now that the smell of burning flesh and destroyed buildings has vanished, the loser Hezbollah is refusing to lay down its weapons as it promised it will do when it joined the latest government. The government, it must be given credit for it, has been generous and patient with the lawless unlawful militia of Iran in Lebanon: It has integrated five Hezbollah ministers and has refused to engage in retribution against the militia that has brought misery, wars, corruption, drug smuggling and overall corruption and lawlessness along the Lebanese-Syrian, and Lebanese-Israeli borders. 

The government and the vast majority of the Lebanese people want Hezbollah to disarm. Not out love for Israel as the US does, but out of the rational conclusion that Israel has much more firepower than anyone in the region. For decades, ever since the Palestinians tried the 'Big Balls' strategy against Israeli firepower and lost, then after Hezbollah borrowed the PLO's 'Big balls' and attempted to erase Israel from the map, the tiny and vulnerable country of Lebanon kept telling these maniacs that diplomacy and progress are the best option to combating Zionist expansionism. But to no avail. 

In fact, for a while it was Western treacherous diplomacy that served and helped Hezbollah grow: From Reagan's cowardly flight from Beirut in 1983 after 243 US marines were murdered by tiny one-year old Hezbollah, to the Bush Sr.'s license to the Assad regime, a sponsor of Hezbollah, to occupy and brutalize Lebanon for 30 years in exchange for Assad's rallying the anti-Saddam front in the 1991 Gulf war and also to get Assad to release the US hostages held by Hezbollah in 1980s Beirut, to the Bushes' special oil-stained friendship with the corrupt Saudi-puppet prime minister Rafik Hariri who kept defending the illegal retention by Hezbollah of its weapons after all other militias had deposed theirs....

After weeks of negotiations, and after the self-labeled irrevocable decision by the Lebanese government of Joseph Aoun and Nawwaf Salam to disarm Hezbollah, Hezbollah is reneging on all that it agreed to after its defeat and decimation. It refuses to disarm. The Lebanese government will receive today or tomorrow a detailed plan by the Lebanese Army on how to collect Hezbollah's weapons. By week's end, the Lebanese government is expected to approve the Army's plan, and then the big question: Will there be a confrontation between a reluctant Hezbollah and the Army?

Hezbollah has openly threatened to wage a civil war if the Army tries to disarm it by force. Tensions are rising and Hezbollah's pathetic pocket-bikes brigades have been running the streets, taunting citizens and the army, and otherwise challenging the will of the majority of the Lebanese people. 

Now, please note that Hezbollah's reluctance to disarm is not its own. Hezbollah is Iran's militia, and Iran is in a wait-and-see mode with respect to potential negotiations with the US despite massive sanctions imposed by the US and the EU. As long as Iran has any hope of securing a deal, it is keeping Hezbollah as a card with which to pressure the West. But the Lebanese government has established a timeline ending with year's end - a timeline that will be more concrete when the Army's plan is unveeile - and there is nothing in sight to suggest that Iran and the US will reach an agreement by that deadline.

This week and the next will make or break the government's decision to disarm Hezbollah. If this decision fails to materialize, then Israel would get the green light from the Trump administration to forcibly disarm Hezbollah, which means a new more devastating war by Israel against Lebanon, supposedly intended to eliminate Hezbollah. But just as the elimination of Hamas in Gaza remains more of a fantasy than a realizable goal, the elimination of Hezbollah might take months and years, during which Lebanon will, again, be reduced to rubble. 

If the Lebanese government decides to act on its own and confront Hezbollah on the ground, a full-fledged civil war would break out, and if the 1975 war is any precedent, then the Lebanese whould generally break into two camps, a pro-government one and a pro-Hezbollah one. In 1975, the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon were the seditious party fighting alongside the Palestinians against their own government and army. The Army broke apart into sectarians brigades, most notably the Saudi-backed, Syrian-armed, Palestinian-allied sedition of the Sunni Muslim Lieutenant Ahmad Khatib who created his own Arab Army of Lebanon. Nowadays it is the Shiite Muslims who are the traitors. It is enough for Hezbollah's leadership to call on the Shiite soldiers of the Army to secede and join Hezbollah with their weapons for the army to break apart, for other sects (Maronites, Druze, etc.) to form their own militias, and the whole episode of 1975-1990 to repeat itself. Not to mention the inescapable lust of the terrorist Jewish fundamentalist Zionists of the Israeli government and the Al-Qaeda barbarian Muslim fundamentalists now running Syria to join the bloody fiesta.

And so we wait: Will it be a Hezbollah civil war? Or will it be an Israeli Zionist war?

How many times will the international community abandon a small country like Lebanon to the savagery of its neighbors?  The international community came together to rescue East Timor from Indonesia's barbarity. It came together to rescue Bosnia from Serbian barbarity. Why is Lebanon, with all that it represents in diversity, democracy (albeit a mediocre one), communal living and attempt to reach accommodations between various religions, so immune to feasible concrete international assistance?

Unlike in the S---Show US, There's a Freedom of Self Here

The experiences of Americans moving out of the US to Canada or England or any other place resonate well with the feelings of anxiety and a sudden fall from grace into a cesspool of hate, cruelty, and racism that the US has become.

How could the land of the free become like a concentration camp, with the military on the streets arresting people because of how they look or speak, with customs police searching into your most intimate vehicle of free speech - your cell phone - to find out if you're loyal to a demented senile dictator?

In many countries around the world, less fortunate and less wealthy than the US, the individual feels genuine unadulterated freedom from

1- a totalitarian government in cahoots with big corporations. Americans have no idea how conformists and compliant they are to the dictates of their government, how much their personal life is programmed by giant entities, and how unfree they really are. They just don't see it, until they leave and look at it from the outside.

2- a culture that tells them what to think, how to think, and a culture of a herd in which each beast is branded and cast. A culture of extreme individualism and the mad obsessive pursuit of money.

The notion of freedom in the US is a made-up fantasy destined to blind the average American to the fact that he/she is a guinea pig in the giant laboratory - known as the US - of big corporations . They tell Americans that the American "way of life" (which condenses into religion, consumption, debt, and the sport of rugby that is ignorantly dubbed 'American football') is the best there is and that all the other cultures are inferior, socialistic, and such other qualifiers destined to instill xenophobia and fear of others.

Many Americans discover the truth of the superficiality of their lives when they travel overseas and discover how genuine and "natural" human relationships are in most other cultures. People are kind because they are kind and can put themselves in other people's shoes. Somehow, Americans are incapable of such compassion. They are told and trained to "smile" and "be positive" regardless of whether they want to smile or whether they feel positive about their lives. We live in a made-up cosmetically fixed "beautiful weather" facade when the reality is that many of us are unhappy and frustrated.

Living in the US always makes people constantly fear sickness and death. The barrage of commercials on television and in the media about the hundreds of new diseases and drugs to combat them is such a gigantic scam whose intent is to drill fear of disease and death, and of course steal people's money. Americans are told to constantly search for "their" disease because we all should have one or two, and then when they find it, to "fight" it and prove their American toughness by winning the battle. Losing to the disease brings shame and guilt on the person.

In other cultures, death is accepted as part of life, and diseases are handled like a simple setback whose outcome could go either way and that's OK. Americans are ultra-religious because they must be immortal in the eyes of their culture. Religion offers the fallacy of immortality after death, but in America we are brainwashed to fight for immortality on this earth and to reject death.

Similarly with money and the insurance industry scams. Americans spend their lives doing acrobatics about their health plans (that change every year), their mortgages (a lifelong debt from which they exit as they near death), and their 401Ks. I used to spend long hours every fall reading the hundreds of pages of my new health insurance plan because the insurer keeps changing them based on the profit or loss it incured the previous year. As a hypothetical example, whereas last year they covered breaks in both the tibia and the femur, this year they cover only breaks in the tibia but not the femur because they made less money covering the latter. So you have to decide each year whether you plan to break both tibia and femur or just one of them, and then which one? Covering both adds to your premium. It's like you are buying your health from a black market snake-oil dealer.

I still love the idea of America but I discovered over the years that it is just an idea, a fantasy. "Il n'y a plus d'Amérique" said the Belgian singer Jacques Brel. Donald Trump has stripped the fake facade of the American Dream and revealed the reality behind it. Maybe it is the silver lining behind his disgusting way of running the country. Maybe after Trump, America will come down from its cheap haughtiness and become a genuinely human society. 
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Robin Wright Says Leaving the U.S. for England Has Been 'Liberating': 'America Is a S---show'

"There's a freedom of self here," Wright said of England. "People are so kind. They're living"
Charlotte Phillipp
Mon, September 1, 2025



VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Robin Wright on June 16, 2025.

Robin Wright is opening up about her choice to leave the U.S. and rent a house on the English seaside

"America is a s---show," she said in a new interview with The Times. "There's a freedom of self here. People are so kind. They're living"

The actress also opened up about her new relationship with architect Henry Smith, saying: "He is a sweetheart and just a good, decent adult"

Robin Wright has a new country to call home — and she isn't regretting her decision to move in the slightest.

In a new interview with The Times, published on Sunday, Aug. 31, the actress, 59, shared that she and her boyfriend, architect Henry Smith, are renting a home on the English seaside.

"It’s liberating to be done," Wright told the outlet. "Be done with searching, looking and getting 60 percent of what you wanted."

The House of Cards alum, who was born in Texas and raised in California, was candid about wanting to get out of the U.S., telling the newspaper: "America is a s---show."

"I love being in this country," she added of England. "There's a freedom of self here. People are so kind. They're living. They're not in the car in traffic, panicked on a phone call, eating a sandwich. That's most of America. Everything's rush, competition and speed."

Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Henry Smith and Robin Wright.

According to the Forrest Gump star, her decision to move was partially influenced by the noise of Los Angeles.

"Everyone's building a huge house, and I'm just done with all that — I love the quiet. And I've met my person. Finally," she added, referring to 52-year-old Smith.

Wright recalled meeting her now-boyfriend — and joked that they had some choice words for each other the first time they crossed paths.

According to the model, she was sitting in a pub at the time, and asked a man if she could feed his dog when the man directed his attention to her now-boyfriend.

"He goes, 'No, it’s not my dog, it’s his dog,' " she recalled of their first meeting.


Darren Gerrish/WireImage Getty Robin Wright at Wimbledon on July 13, 2025.

"Henry was standing at the bar, 6'2", and he put his pint down, came over to me and grabbed my shoulders," the Here actress recalled. "He goes, 'Who the f--- are you?' And I said, 'Who the f--- are you?' And that was it."

"He is a sweetheart and just a good, decent adult. He's a man," she continued of Smith.

According to The Times, Wright said it was "so relaxing" to be "seen and loved for who I am" after she began her relationship with Smith.

"That's exactly what I wanted," she shared. "I'm turning 60 and I'm, like, 'Is this it?' I love being alone and I've done that many times. But I'm, like, 'I want to grow old with somebody, and travel and see the world.' "

The Princess Bride actress was previously married to Sean Penn from 1996 to 2010. The former couple share two children: daughter Dylan, 34, and son Hopper, 32.

Wright later wed Clement Giraudet in 2018, before filing for divorce from the fashion executive in the summer of 2022, citing irreconcilable differences. She also had a brief marriage to the late Santa Barbara actor Dane Witherspoon from 1986 until their divorce two years later.

Caesar Non Supra Grammaticos

"The Emperor is not above the grammarians", says the Latin proverb. Long before the illiterate moron Donald Trump's illiteracy splashed the screens, people knew the importance of speech in political office.

One of the first Trumpian grammatical pearl that I remember was when he tweeted about something which he described as "unpresidented", obviously an error since he meant "unprecedented". Now that is not a mere spelling error, in which case his finger would have slipped on the keyboard nor is it an automatic spell-check error because the word "unpresidented" does not exist. The error is engrained in his uneducated, unlettered, ignorant mind: He always thought that when people spoke the word "unprecedented", his brain flashed "unpresidented". In other words, the president of the United States, as the English usedto say, does not know his letters. He doesn't understand the basics of the language.

Maybe he was obsessed with becoming president and only hears what his moronic mind wants him to hear. 

Many Americans are embarassed by having an ignoramus for president. Bravado, machismo, and deceptively amplified big balls, may serve well in one of these assembly chain stupid Hollywood movies that makes heroes out of criminals and elevates violence to the level of a religion - no wonder the daily mass shootings in the US - but not for an official in charge of millions of people.

It may very well be that Trump doesn't really understand what other leaders are telling him. He doesn't even know his own language, how can he understand foreign leaders who often speak English in accented syllables or through an interpreter. That is why, as seems to be the case with his meeting in Alaska with his fellow criminal buddy Vladimr Putin, Trump comes out of these meetings with propositions and statements that do not reflect the reality. Maybe he's not that stupid, maybe it's his defective language skills.

"Caesar non supra grammaticos" means that going forward, after history defecates the Trump disaster into the toilet where it belongs, candidates for public office should be made to take a test. Having a college degree from the many medicore institutions of higher learning that the US harbors is not a sufficient marker of an official's fluency in their own language or their capability at making themselves understood or understand others.

The test would be like a giant geopolitical SAT test covering language, mathematical logic, history, geography and the like. Candidates who put down money to run should immediately take the test before they are allowed to run. Unfortunately, a majority of dumb Americans continue to think that wealth and money are the only criteria for successful candidacies to public office. Billionaires are not necessarily smart, they could be crooks who cheat and steal which does, admittedly, require a certain type of intelligence. But this sort of intelligence reflects the "ugly" component of the "dumb and ugly" pair of qualifiers by which Americans are perceived around the world. 

We see what happens when both "ugly" and "dumb" come together so well in such criminal (ugly) morons (dumb) as Donald Trump. I still prefer "dumb and nice" or "smart and ugly" to the textbook example of dumb and ugly that Trump is.

Finally, it is taken for granted in the US that the more money a candidate raises and spends in a campaign somehow increases his/her chances at succeeding. What this implies is that Americans in general are so dumb that throwing a silly campaign advertisement in the media and bombarding Americans with it will somehow change their minds. Really? Do you decide who to vote for based on a commercial? Are you so stupid to wait for two competing commercials of two rival candidates to make up your mind. Really? Have you no principles? Have you no idea beyond a commercial about the candidates? Don't you examine their history and background, their writings (if any) or interviews, their statements and past achievements, or their criminality and corruption? 

When the Supreme Court decided in 2010 to allow the free flow of money into campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), by which the Court found that laws should not restrict the political spending of corporations and unions, it granted immeasurable power to wealthy individuals and corporations. On the surface, it seems like a bad decision since the average individual could not possibly compete with large powerful groups, corporations, lobbies and the like. But again, this implies that Americans are so politically dumb that their voting pattern are dictated by advertisements and commercials, which in turn reflect how much money the candidates spend.

If this is true, then American democracy sucks. It is not the informed, enlightened will of the people that decide, but a brainwashed, misinformed and disinformed herd of morons that elect someone to public office.

It may be that the ultimate moron Trump's ascent into politics was driven by the money he spent on his campaigns, which means that the 2010 Supreme Court decision to allow the unfettered "sale" of political office to the wealthier of candidates brought us the fantastic Emperor who doesn't speak, read and write with precision - hence who doesn't think. You see, the entire edifice of human evolution rested upon language. Language gave us intelligence. Those with poor language are dumb. Hence, Donald Trump.