Trump’s American System.

How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support — and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?

There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.

The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory).

They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.

So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade.

Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.

Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action…

This story doesn't quite feature the gut-punch immediacy of Mexico's drug war escalating into a virtual civil war last week in and around Puerto Vallarta, but as a glimpse into the future, maybe it ought to send a chill or three down your spine.

According to a new Bloomberg story (paywalled, sorry), a weeks-long hacker campaign against the Mexican government culminated in January with a massive data theft of some of the federal government's most sensitive information.

"By the time it was over," Let's Data Science reported on Wednesday, "the attacker had stolen 150 gigabytes of sensitive data — including 195 million taxpayer records, voter registration files, government employee credentials, and civil registry data."

If you're thinking such a massive theft involved a team of hackers, years of planning involving a Stuxnet-like virus, or even physical access to Mexican government computer systems — think again.

The almost unprecedented hack was done by just one guy. Using Anthropic's Claude AI, despite all of Anthropic's safeguards against something exactly like this.

Summing up a report published Wednesday by Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security, Bloomberg wrote that some "unknown Claude user" simply made up "Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft."

[TTP:  Mike will be covering the SOTU in the HFR, so we won’t steal his thunder today. This news, ignored by the Legacy Media, should brighten your day. Please take a good look at this picture. As Beege would say, “Dawg!” Isn’t that a hoot?!]

The last time I wrote anything at length about the Panama Canal specifically was last April, so almost a year ago.

The new Trump administration had moved swiftly to reassert American influence in the region and engineered a pretty impressive about-face as far as the Panamanian government went, which had been in the middle of a Belt and Road Initiative build-up with the Chinese Communists.

All that came to a screeching halt.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth went down there with a couple of US Navy ships for some collaborative maneuvers, managed to back the Panamanians out of a recently extended port management agreement with Hong Kong-based firm CK Hutchinson subsidiary Panama Ports Company (PPC) , and into a multinational deal to sell the rights (among others) for the Panamanian Canal ports to Blackrock.

Heads exploded in Beijing…

Sometimes, major historical shifts are virtually invisible.

That’s what just happened in India, and it upends 80 years of geopolitical calculus.

80 years is a very, very long time.

So here’s what happened. The Indian Ministry of Defense posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Indian Navy has been carrying out raids and capturing Shadow Fleet vessels in India's Exclusive Economic Zone, starting on February 5th. About an hour later, someone deleted the post.

Hardly anyone noticed: Peter Zeihan, me, a handful of others.

But then Reuters and the Wall Street Journal (neither of which gave it serious coverage) confirmed the key details. It’s really happening, in the plural.

Why should you care? A little background will help.

India, Our Old Frenemy

India’s mythology is independence. Its identity since independence has been that it bows to no one. It has been reinforced for decades by a justifiable civilizational confidence: poor though it may be, India is not Belgium. India is a continental-sized power. It doesn’t “join blocs.” Blocs join it.

India founded the “Non-Aligned Movement” at the beginning of the Cold War, a mostly anti-American, mostly pro-Soviet group led through the years by such paragons of freedom and democracy as Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, both Fidel and Raül Castro, Robert Mugabe, and perhaps my current favorite, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It’s also a founding member of BRICS (it’s the “I”), the transparently anti-U.S. alliance that will surely displace us, replace the dollar, blah blah blah.

And that’s the thing: for all its talk of “nonalignment,” India has always been all too aligned.

When my autistic son, Hunter, was very young, he sometimes had explosive public meltdowns.

Like many bright children, he also learned quickly that those meltdowns got him attention and could be used as leverage.

One afternoon, we were leaving a shopping center after a long day. Hunter wanted to go into a toy store he spotted. I said no. There was no money, and everyone was worn out. So he threw himself onto the sidewalk.

I turned away, deliberately cutting off the attention that fed the behavior. But behind me, I heard his stepfather say, calmly but firmly, "You know what? You have a cool name — Hunter. When you act like this, you don’t deserve that cool name. Until you calm down and behave, your name is Zelbert.”

Hunter stopped immediately. He stood up, sniffed, and reached for his stepdad’s hand.

No force. No indulgence. No shaming. Just a withdrawal of unearned status. From that point forward, all it took was a look, and Hunter shaped up rather than risk being called Zelbert.

The lesson was simple and profound: Identity comes with expectations. A name is not a costume you wear while refusing the obligations it implies.

That principle applies far beyond parenting.