Never Satisfied, Always Hustling, Never Quit

7x Super Bowl Champion 5x Super Bowl MVP 3x Most Valuable Player 2x Offensive Player of the Year Comeback Player of the Year 6x All-Pro 15x Pro Bowler 5x passing touchdowns leader 4x passing yards leader 2x passer rating leader Completion percentage leader 2000s All-Decade Team 2010s All-Decade Team 100th Anniversary All-Time Team New England #Patriots All-2000s Team Patriots All-2010s Team Patriots 50th Anniversary Team Patriots All-Dynasty Team Bert Bell Award (2007) AP Male Athlete of the Year (2007) 2x Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year (2005, 2021) #NFL records: • Most career quarterback wins: 251 • Most career passing attempts • Most career passing completions: 7,753 • Most career passing touchdowns: 649 • Most career passing yards: 89,214 • Most pass completions in a season: 490 (2022) • Most pass attempts in a season: 733 (2022) • Longest touchdown pass: 99 yards (tied) Regular season records: • Most games won by a player: 251 • Most games played by a non-kicker: 335 • Most games started by a skill position player: 333 • Most division titles: 19 (17 with New England, 2 with Tampa Bay) • Fourth quarterback to beat all 32 teams • Best touchdown to interception ratio in a season: 28:2 (2016) • Oldest quarterback to lead the league in passing yards: 44 (5,316 yards: 2021) • Oldest player to win NFL MVP: 40 • Most career passing yards: 89,214 • Most career pass completions: 7,753 • Most career passing attempts: 12,050 • Most career touchdown passes: 649 • Most career passing yards with one team: 74,571 • Most career pass completions with one team: 6,377 • Most career passing attempts with one team: 9,988 • Most career passing touchdowns with one team: 541 • Most Pro Bowl selections: 15 • Most seasons as passing touchdowns leader: 5 • Most 4th quarter comebacks: 46 • Most game-winning drives: 58 • Longest pass-play: 99 yards, tied (2011) Playoffs records: • Most consecutive seasons in the NFL playoffs by a team, player or head coach: 14 • Most games started: 48 • Most games won by a starting quarterback: 35 • Most consecutive wins by a starting quarterback: 10 (2001–2005) • Most consecutive wins to start a career by a starting quarterback: 10 (2001, 2003–2005) • Most touchdown passes: 88 • Most passing yards: 13,400 • Most passing yards in a single playoff game: 505 • Most passes completed: 1,200 • Most passes attempted: 1,921 • Most NFL conference championship appearances by a starting quarterback: 14 • Most NFL conference championship wins by a starting quarterback: 10 • Oldest quarterback to win an AFC title game: 41 years, 5 months, 17 days • Oldest quarterback to win an NFC title game: 43 years, 5 months, 21 days • Most career 300+ passing yard games: 19 • Most game-winning drives: 14 • Most fourth-quarter comebacks: 9 • Most multi-TD pass games: 29 Super Bowl records: • Most NFL championships by player: 7 • The only starting QB to win the Super Bowl for both the AFC and NFC • Most Super Bowl MVPs: 5 • One of only two starting QBs to win a Super Bowl for two separate teams • Most touchdown passes: 21 • Most passing yards: 3,039 • Most passes completed: 277 • Most passes attempted: 421 • Most passes completed in a single Super Bowl: 43 • Most passes attempted in a single Super Bowl: 62 • Most passing yards in a single Super Bowl: 505 • Most Super Bowl appearances: 10 • Most passing attempts without an INT in a single Super Bowl: 48 • Oldest QB to start a Super Bowl: 43 years, 6 months, and 4 days • Oldest QB to win a Super Bowl: 43 years, 6 months, and 4 days • Oldest player to win Super Bowl MVP: 43 years, 6 months, and 4 days • Most consecutive completions in a single Super Bowl: 16 • Most game-winning drives: 6

Biggest Scam on Earth

 

$37 Trillion is CHUMP CHANGE

One of the larger categories of unfunded liabilities is future federal employee and veterans benefits.

At the end of the 2024 fiscal year, this alone represented a $15 trillion obligation. However, by leaps and bounds, the largest unfunded liabilities spring from America’s social insurance obligations — primarily Social Security and Medicare. At fiscal-year end, these liabilities totaled a towering $105.8 trillion.

Stacking these and other unfunded liabilities on top of the publicly-held national debt and other obligations, you arrive at a grand total of $151.3 trillion at the end of the 2024 fiscal year. Offsetting that by an estimated $7.9 trillion in US government commercial assets — including property, plant, equipment and purported gold holdings — a Just Facts analysis puts Uncle Sam at an overall net-negative $143 trillion.

Writing at the Heartland Institute, Just Facts president James Agresti put that nearly-incomprehensible total in perspective: “$143 trillion amounts to 85% of the net wealth Americans have accumulated since the nation’s founding, estimated by the Federal Reserve to be $169 trillion. This includes all of their assets in savings, real estate, corporate stocks, private businesses, and even consumer durable goods like automobiles and furniture.”

Those numbers reflected the government’s position on Sept 30, 2024. They’ve not only grown significantly worse in the intervening months, they’re deteriorating at a blistering pace even as you read this: Not even counting the unfunded liabilities that represent the biggest part of the problem, the national debt alone is increasing at something like $156 million per hour.

Wrangling over the budget isn’t going to save us. Congressional debates tend to center on discretionary spending — outlays that require a vote by Congress during the appropriations process. However, America’s steady march to insolvency is driven by so-called mandatory spending, which is hardwired by previously-enacted laws.

In what may be the most ominous indication that the government is on an autopilot-course for catastrophe, the proportion of total federal outlays driven by mandatory spending has more than doubled since 1965 — from 34% to 73% in 2024. It was at 71% just two years earlier, in 2022.

From Manhattan Institute’s Spending, Taxes & Deficits: A Book of Charts

The two largest examples of mandatory spending are Social Security and Medicare. Those old-age programs are now well within sight of a crisis that’s been warned about for a generation: According to the latest report from their program trustees, Social Security and Medicare trust funds are now just seven years from insolvency.

While the federal government requires private-sector pension plans to maintain assets equal to the present value of future obligations, the federal government exempts itself from providing the same security to the citizens that it forces into the Social Security program. Contrary to the mythology that payroll taxes are placed in individual “accounts” held for our future benefit, that money is immediately being dished out to other people who’ve already reached the benefit-receiving phase — which is why Social Security can be reasonably compared to a Ponzi scheme.

Because the ratio of taxpaying-workers to beneficiaries is in steady decline — from 5.1 in 1960 to 2.7 in 2023 — Social Security payouts have exceeded revenues for the last 15 years. As a result, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are set to run out in 2033. Under the law governing Social Security, payouts that year will be limited to program incomes — which will translate to a sudden 23% cut in payouts.

While that represents a political time bomb, don’t expect any urgency in defusing it. The eight-year countdown is short, but it’s still outside the next-election framing that drives elected officials’ actions. Those politicians know that anyone proposing a long-overdue rethinking of Social Security and Medicare will be opportunistically accused of “attacking” the programs. However, when the crisis is finally in their laps, don’t be surprised if part of their solution is to borrow money to prop up the payouts.

There’s another key component of mandatory spending that isn’t counted in the national debt: interest payments on debt issued to cover past and current spending. “In total, social programs and interest on the national debt—which mainly stems from social programs—account for 75% of all federal spending,” notes Agresti.

Interest payments also represent a steadily growing share of total outlays, and will total almost $1 trillion this year. Within 10 years, interest is projected to reach $2 trillion, roughly equal to the entire 2025 deficit. Last year saw a grim milestone, as interest expense surpassed spending on both defense and Medicare.

From Manhattan Institute’s Spending, Taxes & Deficits: A Book of Charts

Current projections have interest surpassing Social Security to become the largest single expenditure by 2042, but don’t be surprised if that milestone doesn’t come sooner. The government is already descending into a vicious cycle in which mounting US debt has the buyers of that debt demanding higher interest rates in compensation for the growing risk of inflation and/or default — with those higher rates creating larger interest payouts and even more debt.

Beyond mandatory-vs-discretionary, and funded-vs-unfunded, there’s an even more important but far-less-discussed classification of spending that goes to the very heart of America’s march toward financial disaster: constitutional vs unconstitutional. As I noted in the most-read article at Stark Realities, “Americans Are Fighting For Control Of Federal Powers That Shouldn’t Exist”:

Today’s sprawling federal government, which involves itself in almost every aspect of daily American life, is almost entirely unconstitutional.

To rattle off just a random fistful of the federal government’s unauthorized undertakings and entities — brace yourself — there is zero constitutional authority for the Social Security, Medicare, federal drug prohibitions, the Small Business Administration, crop subsidies, the Department of Labor, automotive fuel efficiency standards, climate regulations, the Federal Reserve, union regulation, housing subsidies, the Department of Agriculture, workplace regulations, the Department of Education, federal student loans, the Food and Drug Administration, food stamps, unemployment insurance or light bulb regulations. Even that sampling doesn’t begin to fully account for the scope of the unsanctioned activity.

This Pandora’s box of unconstitutional endeavors was opened wide by unconscionably expansive Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution in the 1930s. It’s no coincidence that federal spending represented a mere 3% of GDP in 1930 but soared to an economy-warping 23% by 2024.

Now we find the federal government in a $143 trillion hole, a burden that comes out to $1,085,022 per US household. History suggests this will end with a government default. In the United States, that will likely occur not via an explicit repudiation of the debt, but through rampant price inflation as the Treasury and the Federal Reserve conspire to create new money out of thin air to make debt payments.

From Manhattan Institute’s Spending, Taxes & Deficits: A Book of Charts

“They can’t pay the debt, so they have to liquidate the debt,” said Ron Paul in a June conversation with David Lin. “They [won’t] default — they’re always going to pay something for the Treasury bills. What they’re going to do is liquidate the debt by paying it off with counterfeit money.”

While the Fed-Treasury money creation scheme has been with us for a long time, the alarming trajectory of federal debt and spending point to future money-printing on a scale that will trigger hyperinflation and economic collapse. At that point, Americans will stand at a crossroads. Desperation and fear will make them susceptible to the siren song of even more authoritarianism and unconstitutional, centralized command of the economy and society than what put them in such dire straits to begin with.

“People will want to be taken care of,” Paul said. “I see it as an opportunity. If people are promoting the cause of liberty and there’s chaos in the streets, we better get out there and lead the charge and say you don’t need more of what caused this. You don’t need more authoritarianism. What you need is more liberty and more peace, and that means you ought to obey the Constitution.”

It was the Best of Times

 

Truth for a Lifetime

There's two kinds of people in this world, those who pay interest and those who collect interest.

Asking for a Friend

Does anyone know which wine pairs well with societal collapse?

$62,000,000 STADIUM @ BUFORD

 Hope Milton goes into that new stadium and beats their ass.

RULES FOR FUCKING SUCCESS

 RULES FOR SUCCESS

Do the fucking work.  Don't be lazy.

Stop fucking waiting.  It's time.

Fucking rely on yourself.  Democrats aren't sending $ to help.

The universe frankly doesn't give a fuck. Believe it.

Be productive early.  Don't fuck around all day.

Don't fucking waste energy on shit you can't control.

Stop bullshitting.  It's fucking embarrassing.

Stop being a fucking pleaser.  It's sad.  Live your own life.

Stop putting toxic shit in your body. It's fucking dumb.

Stop doing the same fucking thing; that is insanity.

Don't hang out with fuckwits.

Stop fucking wasting your potential.

Stop having the same fucking conversations with yourself.

Many people are fucked up.  You can't unfuck a person.

Stop fucking overthinking.  Hard fucking work cures most ills. 

Failure is not fucking giving life your absolute best.

Stop complaining.  It fucking wastes your time and theirs.

If you want to be a winner, go out and make some fucking mistakes.

Exercise, good nutrition, and mental health are fucking nonnegotiable.

Don't fucking judge people on what is said, judge them on what they do.