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Downsizing to Starve the Beast
Darrell Castle talks about debt and the Trump administration's effort to control it.
Transcription / Notes
DOWNSIZING TO STARVE THE BEAST
Hello, this is Darell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday, the 10th day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. I will be talking about debt and the potential for disaster if it isn’t somehow tamed. Donald Trump is at least paying lip service to it with his creation of DOGE or the Department of Government Efficiency.
Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a new department of government which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency. That is an attractive name but if flies in the face of the political trend that has existed for at least 50 years. Before that time, the government had some accountability since its wars, its tax cuts, etc. had to be paid for and it had to have enough gold deposits to cover all of it.
Once the dollar’s ties to gold were removed in 1971, the government no longer had any restraints on its spending. A government of the people and by the people needs some restraints because without them human nature will control the politicians elected to serve the people. When a politician discovers that he can achieve reelection thus retaining power by spending the resources of others or promising to do so he will do it or at least that has been the trend since 1971.
A responsible government recognizes its limits and it spends only what it can raise in taxes. If the federal government were responsible the United States would not have the 36 trillion of debt that it has today. People are alarmed at the size of the debt but not many want their pet projects or their own largesse to be reduced so I wonder if DOGE will have an opportunity to succeed. It seems that the goals of Elon Musk and Donald Trump are headed on a collision course.
If Musk gets his way, at least the way as he has described it, then we should get some positive results. There could be lower deficits which should bring lower inflation, lower interest rates and a far less expensive and less powerful government. We might even expect a business revival with the return of manufacturing to the U.S. Mr. Homan’s efforts on the border would ensure the departure of many murderers, rapists, torturers, child molesters, terrorists and assorted lunatics who now reside here illegally at government expense.
The Republican elite, and now that includes Donald Trump, may just have a different agenda. Trump has just spent 9 years and a lot of money to gain power including a Republican majority in both houses. Those majorities will not want to become less powerful but instead they will want to use that power to take more power and wealth from the American people who are supposed to hold it. That is human nature and the prevailing political trend. The hearts of mankind are black and desperately wicked the bible tells us and when power and money are unrestrained the humans who have it will use and abuse it.
Right now, Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. My guess is that he will not want to share the power with a billionaire from South Africa for very long, but I could easily be wrong and if so it wouldn’t be the first time. The President-Elect seems to enjoy conducting foreign policy even before he is inaugurated, but I suppose power abhors a vacuum and so somebody will execute foreign policy or at least that is the way he seems to see it.
He is a businessman and a negotiator and right now he has the power and he is trying to establish with friend and foe alike that business will be conducted differently in the future. Bloomberg tells us that he warned the European Union that its exports will get hit with US tariffs if European Union countries don’t buy more American oil and gas. He posted on Truth Social about that statement:
“I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous defici...
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Biden’s Legacy
Darrell Castle discusses what the legacy of Joe Biden looks like.
Transcription / Notes
BIDEN’S LEGACY
Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 3rd day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. The first Friday of a new year and only three weeks from the end of the administration of Joe Biden. What is the legacy of Joe Biden?
Is his legacy the obvious and now admitted years long coverup of his declining mental ability. Is it the debate with Donald Trump which the Democrats finally allowed to expose his status to the whole world, or could it be his empowering the Department of Justice to conduct warfare attacks against his political opponent while pretending he had nothing to do with it. Perhaps his legacy was his repeated assurances that he would not pardon his son Hunter then finally doing so while in an act of supreme hypocrisy pretending it was because Hunter was the victim of political persecution considering he, Joe Biden, was the worst political persecutor in American presidential history. Surely one or all of these things will be his legacy. If not, then it must be his policy of inviting millions of unvetted illegals into the country many of whom were murderers, rapists, torturers, killers of children and of course terrorists and agents of adversarial foreign powers.
The legacy of Joe Biden as president of the United States is one of cognitive decline which it now seems was present when he was elected and it also seems true that those close to him knew it. His famous campaign from the basement was supposed to be a new sort of campaign whereby the candidate just holed up in his home and had very little interaction with the people who were supposed to vote for him.
His close advisors, the ranking members of the Democratic Party, told us that he was sharp as a tack and hardly anyone could keep up with him. What we saw instead were videos of him sleeping on the beach in Delaware where he spent 40% of the time he was president. Forty per cent of his time spent on vacation is the figure announced by the campaign, so it might be a little more than that especially when the number of days of LID are considered. That term means light intensity day and President Biden had many of those.
He conducted only 9 full cabinet meetings during his entire 4 years in office. I’m guessing here, but I’m going to guess that 9 is the fewest in history. Trump, by comparison, conducted 26 during his 4-year term. Testimony from elected officials in his own party was that he was almost impossible to reach even for his own national security briefings which his wife often attended. The question on my mind is who has been running the country for the last 4 years but especially last year.
The answer to that question is not completely known and that is an understatement. Apparently, it was simply his staff making decisions that affected the nation and the world. The American people elected a man who because of declining health went on vacation and left the running of the most powerful country in world history to unelected staff members. That, I submit, is the legacy of Joe Biden in a nutshell. Such a disaster would not have been possible without the complete cooperation of the American media who did not just underreport his decline, but actively covered it up.
The videos of Biden wondering helplessly on stage, shaking hands with ghosts, wondering off from the group when meeting with G-7 leaders were all just deep fakes. His slurring of words and inability to speak a coherent sentence were evidence of a slight stutter that had existed throughout his life. Normally, the explanations went back to Trump, after all he was an older man with aging issues of his own wasn’t he. Since the election of Trump with an almost landslide majority including the popular vote some in the media are starting to admit what they did.
The Wall Street Journal, in a post-election expose,
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The Neo-Ottoman Empire
Darrell Castle tries to make sense of the Syrian Civil War which has been raging sometimes hot and sometimes cold for many years.
Transcription / Notes:
THE NEO-OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 13th day of December in the year of our Lord 2024. I will be talking about the Syrian Civil War which has been raging sometimes hot and sometimes cold for many years. It’s very difficult to make sense out of something that makes no sense, but I will try to do so.
This is the Christmas season here in the Castle household and therefore it is the last Friday that I will be able to bring the Castle Report this year. I will join you again, God willing, on Friday, January 3, 2025. Enjoy the holidays with those you love and by all means celebrate Christmas.
The title of this report indicates that I am taking the position that Turkey won the Syrian Civil War because the fall and removal of strong man Bashar al Assad paves the way for strong man Recep Tayyip Erdogan to emerge and reap the benefits of the demise of the Assad family’s hold over Syria which has lasted for some 60 years. Erdogan came to power in Turkey in 2014 and my position is that he imagines himself to be the return of Suleiman the Magnificent who ruled the Ottoman Empire in the 1500’s when it was at the peak of its power. The Ottoman Empire served as the connection between the Middle east and Europe for some 600 years.
The Ottoman Empire, sometimes referred to as the Turkish Empire, ruled the Middle East until it was defeated and dissolved with the British and American victory in World War l. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire led to the power vacuum that has existed, at least to some degree, until today. Great Britain created the nations of the Middle east after its victory by simply drawing lines on the sand and making a map with those lines as separate countries which were really just a collection of Nomadic Tribes. I believe Erdogan came to power in Turkey with a dream of returning his country to the greatness it once had and he is currently going about the business of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire under Turkish control.
His rebuilding uses overt war as we have recently seen, but it also operates through diplomacy and even subterfuge which he used to gain acceptance into NATO. Yes, that’s right, this Muslim country of Turkey, whose culture, religion, and way of life is completely averse to those of the West is a full-fledged NATO member. A close member of Erdogan’s inner circle of advisors recently said in a public interview that the goal of the Erdogan administration is the destruction of Western Civilization. The NATO alliance should remove Turkey because of that, but the problem is that the NATO charter has no provision for involuntarily removing a member or kicking someone out.
A majority of NATO members may want Turkey out but the alliance is pretty woke right now and must think this is a woke world, so they try to read the tea leaves and apparently that requires more fear of being labeled Islamophobic than it does having an enemy nation in its midst. Erdogan, in the meantime, apparently seeks to Islamize Europe through Muslim immigration. He has, in essence, held Europe hostage and demanded money to prevent refugees from traveling upward from Syria through Turkey into Europe. The Europeans have paid the ransom in the past but right now one out of every 20 Syrians in the world resides in Germany thanks to Erdogan and the policies of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
I could go on with this Neo-Ottoman story all day but to sum it up a little he is putting together a collection of Sunni nations in opposition to the Shiites that have ruled Syria in the past by way of Iran and to some extent Iraq. This is a coalition against Iran in other words, which brings me to how this played out in the war. I imagine that right now the leaders in Iran are feeling regret that they allowed the...
