2026-11-14, Simply Saturday

kalbokalbs America, General, Uncategorized November 14, 2026 00:01November 13, 2026 18:58 10 Minutes

Administrivia.

Wheatie Wisdom. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. No running with scissors. No food fights. AI stuff posted, requires a link. Please use spoiler, for longer posts. Wolf Speak. No obnoxious behavior towards fellow QTreeper(s). Freedom of Speech is honored here QTree. But Do Know, every poster, IS personally responsible for what they post.

APMEX https://www.apmex.com Bitcoin https://www.bitcoin.com/

Prices pulled last evening. Gold $3,894.60 Silver $49.50 Bitcoin $68,082

Obvious solution.

Elon echoes the obvious…

Until we have a conservative majority…

Stuff…

—

~226 years ago, John Adams wrote…

^^^ Seems We Have A Problem. ^^^

—

Along those lines. A sobering read below.

Individual responsibility matters.

The Character Of Freedom

A free society cannot survive when its citizens surrender the responsibilities that make freedom possible.

Luis Gonzalez | November 8, 2026

Communism and the American constitutional tradition both depend on human character. The difference is what they expect from it.

Marx envisioned a classless society in which the state would eventually wither away. Once class distinctions disappeared, political authority would supposedly become unnecessary. It was an ambitious vision of human social organization. It is a magnificent theory, provided one ignores human nature.

History has been considerably less accommodating. Governments established in communism’s name have repeatedly produced powerful ruling elites, entrusted with the authority to distribute wealth, direct labor, and decide what is best for everyone else. The promised disappearance of privilege gave way to its institutionalization. The road to a classless society has a peculiar habit of passing through a very privileged neighborhood, where the ruling class enjoys privileges unavailable to everyone else.

The problem is not difficult to identify. Concentrate enough power in the hands of a political elite, and eventually that elite discovers reasons to keep it. The people who promised to abolish class distinctions have proved remarkably successful at establishing one of their own.

The American Founders approached the problem from an altogether different direction. James Madison captured their understanding of human nature in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

The Founders were not in the business of finding angels. They understood that ambition and self-interest were permanent features of human nature, particularly among those attracted to political power. Their answer was a constitutional republic, with divided authority, checks and balances, and institutional restraints designed to prevent any person or faction from acquiring unchecked power.

They did not assume that rulers would be virtuous. They assumed they would need watching.

That distinction matters. Democracy, in its broadest sense, means government by the people. But majority rule alone guarantees neither individual liberty nor limited government. A majority can be every bit as capable of abusing power as a monarch or political elite. The Founders understood that liberty required more than counting votes. They established a constitutional system designed to restrain power, including power exercised in the name of the majority.

Yet the Constitution cannot do the entire job. It can restrain the ambitions of those who govern, but it cannot manufacture responsibility among those who are governed. It can protect the conditions of liberty, but it cannot compel citizens to exercise their freedom wisely. That part of the undertaking depends on the character of the people themselves.

A republic requires citizens capable of governing themselves. Self-government means more than the right to cast a ballot. It requires personal responsibility, self-restraint, respect for the rights of others, and a willingness to accept the consequences of one’s decisions. It requires people who understand that freedom carries obligations, not merely opportunities.

This is where our political culture has begun to lose its footing.

The November 3 election offered another indication of the growing appeal of political promises built around government benefits and expanded public assistance. The Democratic Socialists of America have become a significant force in that conversation, advancing a vision in which government assumes a much larger role in the lives of its citizens. The appeal of such promises deserves attention, particularly when the responsibilities accompanying freedom receive considerably less political billing.

Freedom is not a government benefit. It is not a subscription service, a monthly entitlement, or something delivered to the doorstep by an elected official. It is the authority to make decisions, accept consequences, pursue opportunities, and build a life without asking permission from someone who considers himself your superior.

There is nothing wrong with helping people through genuine hardship. A decent society recognizes that circumstances sometimes overwhelm individual resources. But safeguards intended to help people regain their footing were never meant to become permanent arrangements. A safety net is supposed to catch people when they fall, not become their permanent address.

We want the security without the sacrifice, the benefits without the burden, and the rewards without the work. There is a profound difference between helping someone stand again and convincing him that standing on his own is no longer necessary. One preserves dignity. The other gradually replaces it with dependency.

And government is always happy to oblige. Every promised benefit creates another political obligation. Every obligation creates another constituency. Every constituency gives politicians another reason to retain the authority they acquired in the name of helping people. Meanwhile, citizens become increasingly accustomed to looking elsewhere for answers to problems they once understood were theirs to solve.

The danger is not simply that government grows. It is that citizens gradually surrender the habits of independence that make limited government possible. As responsibility moves from individuals to institutions, political authority expands to fill the space. Eventually, the machinery of the republic may remain intact while the character necessary to sustain it has deteriorated.

This brings us back to the fundamental difference between the two political traditions. Communism places its faith, in practice, in those who hold concentrated political power. The American constitutional tradition recognizes the dangers of concentrated power and attempts to restrain it. But constitutional restraints alone cannot preserve a republic. Its citizens must be willing and able to govern themselves.

Nobody is virtuous enough to rule everyone else. And no society remains free when its people no longer believe they are capable of ruling themselves.

We can elect better politicians, write better laws, change administrations, and rewrite policies. But we cannot legislate the character required to sustain a free society. The Constitution can establish the framework. It cannot supply the people who must make it work.

A nation that forgets how to govern itself will eventually find someone willing to govern it. And that someone will rarely be interested in giving the authority back.

Image created using AI.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/11/the-character-of-freedom

Abe nailed it…

Relax Frances. 🙂

Seems Lincoln did not say those exact words. Though he did speak words of similar intent.

Grok tells me Lincoln did say this…

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Standing by for calibration. 🙂

—

At first blush, below article smacked of Debbie Downer. Scrolled on. Scrolled back up. Read the article. Listened to both videos.

Worth considering. It’s an awareness thing.

How Empires End – and we are not different

Posted on 8 November 2026byE.M.Smith

Things get better until they get worse and then they fail

The below video is a nice simplified listing of things that happen when Empires Fail, and it also applies to other forms of government in End Times. IMHO we can see a lot of it happening now. Stronger in Europe than in the USA, but also underway in the USA.

We are on the cusp of two things. We could become the first society to move into space, conquer aging and disease, and bring a world of prosperity to everyone. Or we could decay back into a collapse into feudalism and oppression of the masses by a few. As of now, we’re headed for the second of those outcomes.

Here’s the problem:

As a sidebar: What kind of idiot puts massive freezers on line… and lets remote actors turn on the defrost cycle.

So, as of now, we’ve built a fragile system with lots of failure modes. The USA is finally looking at redundancy and persistence of our force structure and government. So is something up, or just realized the stupidity and risks we’ve built?

Finally telling people to “be prepared”. My POV is that we need to be prepared, but not afraid. Rational preparation.

So here’s the video (with which I agree):

I would argue that their #10 ought to be the #1 of importance. “Shrinking Silver”, i.e. inflation and the debasement of the money supply. That is now happening globally by policy. ALL Central banks have a target debasement rate (inflation rate) usually around 2% per year… year after year… until monetary collapse.

#9 price controls. Never works for long. Nixon tried it, and failed. Socialism loves the idea, and it fails for them too. The simple economic fact is that supply & demand will balance, the only question is how. By price adjustment, or by “rationing” where supply is reduced (by fiat or by producers choosing not to produce when price is fixed too low), or by simply “running out” so someone gets none.

#8 is called “The hired army”, I’d note that these were outsiders who immigrated. It wasn’t just a hired army, it was a replacement of native citizens by imported migrants without a history of fealty to the nation. One could just as correctly say “the hired workforce” or “outsourcing”.

#7 The Monument Race. Building ever more grand commemorations to yourself as leadership. While the video looks at pyramids and such; I’d assert that this extends to “monumental laws” and other structures. Such as the EU attempting to bring in every possible country, and building giant edifices of law – so much that it stops all function. Similarly, I’d assert the Maya cutting down forests for lime production is not significantly different from our clearing the land for solar farms or roads to “Green Conferences”.

#6 The silver flood. It does not matter how much money you have coming in, the Political Class will spend more than that, by a lot, and debt will destroy the nation. Spain with a mountain of South American silver, the USA with $30 Trillion+ in debt, China with massively overbuilt real estate sector funded by debt, EU Nations & Japan with massive Debt / GDP ratios. Debt is always a destructive force and governments can not resist using it to excess.

#5 This one is a bit off, IMHO. They make the case that Russian Oil being traded for grain had them reliant too much on oil and that Saudi pumping a lot more led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a LOT more nuanced than that… but the lesson I do see in it is NOT to assume your revenue stream is secure forever and to work for self sufficiency in food and other essentials. To be frugal and prepared.

#4 Soil degradation. Farming and irrigation raising salt levels in soil until crops fail. I would generalize this to include soil erosion, contamination with other things like glyphosate (Roundup), and ground water overdrafts. All happening now. It is the tendency to treat cropland as a consumable while thinking of it as a permanent resource. We ought to be treating it as a permanent resource to be protected, not mined. Conditions vary,but civilizations tend to grow to the limit of capacity in good times, then collapse when crop failures return.

#3 IMHO, can be folded into #4, just the water equivalent of soil. Be prepared for variations of supply and be ready to adapt, do not expand to the very limit during a period of good times, since bad times and smaller limits will return.

#2 Globalization leads to fragility (regardless of the size of your particular “world”). Interdependency is fine until the system locks up. Now it is called “global supply chain problems”; but it is the same effect be it from “Sanctions” (on Russia), “Trumps Tariffs”, Chinese export restrictions, or EU Mandates. Once you have lots of dependencies, when things block those functions then trade and economies go sideways or down. That eventually ends in wars and systems collapse.

#1 The complexity trap. Governments especially just LOVE to add more complexity and “paperwork” to every possible function and transaction. Eventually “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze” and the system grinds to a halt. The desire to “fix everything” ends up breaking everything. A current example of this is making so many rules, laws, and penalties around dating, marriage, divorce and more ALL of which punish men for anything any woman doesn’t like, so the men just stopped dealing with women. Now birth rates are plunging and we have a large cohort of middle aged women with cats.

That’s not the only example. Cars with systems to make them NOT work (my truck has had an interlock removed since it failed into the locked position and no replacement parts are made anymore), car companies building large inventories of trucks that could not be finished due to a shortage of computer chips – dependency on one small part from Asia during the pandemic and ports clogged. Brittle failure of complex systems when minor things happen. Electric utilities thrown into bankruptcy from a “finding” of fault because a down wire started a fire. The list goes on.

In Conclusion

Any way to prevent that? I don’t think so… you can fight against it, try to delay it; but it looks to be a fundamental result of human nature. My solution is “do my best to build resilience into my life and supply chain”. Try to “vote the idiots in charge out of office” – but that has not worked well. Flee areas where the most destructive Idiots In Charge have taken over (NYC, California) for places that still function. Basically, expect it to come and prepare for it.

https://chiefio.wordpress.com

—

BTW. 2028 can be salvaged. IF, the Senate gets very productive passing necessary legislation, the House has already passed. Confirm Trump’s nominations. Give Trump a surprise Thanksgiving present. Senate recess over Thanksgiving. Then get back to work. And PASS SAVE America Act.