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Yes. Iran.

That makes news but is rare. Other countries have lunatics using knives.

The real killer here is Chinese fentanyl.

Prowl the world with Street View. Most places now look like a suburb of Dallas.

And the rim of the USA is a network of people-diodes all pointing in.

Any you speak English fairly well.

I was shopping for Japanese gifts in Ngoya. Everything was western. All the baseball caps were lettered in English, most from US teams. The clothes were all Levis and tee shirts. I did find one tiny part of one store that sold Japanese stuff, staffed by one very lonely old lady.

Tritium betalights are cool, but technically illegal in the USA. I buy them on ebay, shipped from England.

There are still some thorium lamp mantles around for sale.

This is why it's so important that the US gets Trump back in charge. He's the only one talking about ending all these foreign wars and the extreme cost of those adventures in blood and treasure has been close to runious. One day the bond markets will call time on this insane spending. The ramping up of US sovereign debt over the last few years has been off the scale. Trillion dollar deficits! It's madness and ultimately unsustainable.

I didn't know you were into fishing, John. Or are you buidling your own hydrogen bomb? ;-)

Several years ago my boss asked me if I could duplicate an electronics-drying apparatus he'd seen on Shark Tank. That was why my search history contained "pressure cooker" and "steel shot" back-to-back.

Fentanyl is only a problem because of the War On Drugs.

A hundred years ago Americans could buy opium and cocaine legally. Addiction rates per capita were similar to today. To re-quote a tired old saw, when blah is illegal only criminals will blah. Criminals care a lot less about quality and consistency and that's where the danger appears.

If aspirin were invented today the FDA would never approve it for over-the-counter sale because it's too dangerous. But it is legal; consequently I can buy a hundred generic aspirin for five bucks and be confident that each tablet will actually contain 325mg aspirin and no fentanyl or arsenic. If aspirin were illegal then 100 "street aspirin" would cost a lot more than $5 and might contain anything.

As a Libertarian myself it's become increasingly clear that any government 'intervention' is frequently a bad thing. Every time the government 'declares war' against something, someone or some country, it typically:

a) achieves nothing or makes things 10X worse, and b) costs a fortune for the taxpayer with nothing worthwhile to show for it.

And no lessons ever seem to get learned, either - despite this pattern recurring over and over and over and over again. :(

Or perhaps Jan Panteltje has.

Cursitor Doom does like his conspiracy theories to be truly fatuous, and Jan Panteltje can deliver the kind of total idiocy that makes Cursitor Doom happy.

Really? The US isn't actually fighting anybody at the moment, and subsidising Israel and the Ukraine is a lot cheaper than fighting a real war.

Trump doesn't want to spend even that much money where he can't get kickbacks from it - the Ukraine rejected his request that they prosecute Hunter Biden, and he still resents it (and the attempt to get him impeached for trying to do it).

Perhaps. Trump pushed up the US national debt when he was in power by giving tax cuts to the well off. Financially responsibility isn't his strong suite - his business history includes a lot of bankruptcies. Cursitor Doom hasn't noticed that.

Fentanyl will kill no matter where it was originally synthesised. What's killing US addicts is a society that leaves the poor vulnerable to that kind of temptation. Harm reduction works, but it costs more than the US is willing to spend on the less-well-off portion of the population.

American don't.

You found your way to a shopping area set up to suck in American tourists. The lonely little old lady was probably heavily subsidised window dressing.

The tourism industry does make sure that tourists get what they want.

The Australian branch delivers a lot of kangaroos and wallabies. Koala's are more difficult and platypuses pretty much impossible.

It is the necessary delusion that reliably sets you up to be a Libertarian.

Covid-19 didn't fit that pattern. We got a vaccine against it remarkably quickly, and it's not killing a lot of people any more. People like Cursitor Doom who swallowed the anti-vaccination myths are still vulnerable, but herd immunity mostly protects them from winning a Darwin award.

When you are very selective about the the patterns you will recognise, this can appear to be true.

Talk is cheap, he has a history of not delivering on his promises.

Really, what is close to ruin? US economy is now stronger that it ever was under Trump. GOP may be close to ruin, but it seems to be mostly filled with idiots and grifters.