Monthly Archives: December 2025

The Generations

Generations

  • Silent Generation (or Traditionalists): Born 1928–1945

Shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and post-war economic growth.

  • Baby Boomers: Born 1946–1964

Named for the post-WWII “baby boom”; experienced civil rights movements, Vietnam War, and economic prosperity.

  • Generation X (Gen X): Born 1965–1980

Often called the “latchkey” or “MTV generation”; grew up during the end of the Cold War, rise of personal computers, and shifting family structures. 

  • Millennials (or Generation Y): Born 1981–1996

Came of age around the new millennium; influenced by the internet boom, 9/11, and the Great Recession.

  • Generation Z (Gen Z or Zoomers): Born 1997–2012

True digital natives; shaped by smartphones, social media, and events like the COVID-19 pandemic. (Note: see Jared Cooney Horvath’s comments below.)

  • Generation Alpha (Gen Alpha): Born 2013–2024

Children of Millennials; the first generation born entirely in the 21st century, growing up with advanced AI, tablets from infancy, and the pandemic.

  • Generation Beta (Gen Beta): Born 2025–2039 (starting now in 2025)

The newest cohort, primarily children of younger Millennials and Gen Z; expected to be deeply integrated with AI, automation, and global challenges like climate change.


USA: population distribution  

Silent Generation (born 1928–1945, ages 80–97): The smallest adult generation due to historical low births and aging. Approximate living population: ~18–20 million (about 5–6% of the population; many now in the 80+ category).

Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964, ages 61–79): Still a large group, though declining due to mortality. Approximate living population: ~68–70 million (about 20% of the population).

Generation X (born 1965–1980, ages 45–60): A relatively smaller “bridge” generation. Approximate living population: ~65 million (about 19% of the population).

Millennials (born 1981–1996, ages 29–44): The largest adult generation. Approximate living population: ~74 million (about 21–22% of the population).

Generation Z (born 1997–2012, ages 13–28): A sizable and diverse cohort entering adulthood. Approximate living population: ~69–70 million (about 20–21% of the population).

Generation Alpha (born 2013–2024, ages 1–12): Growing rapidly but still young; US birth rates are lower than global averages. Approximate living population: ~39–42 million (about 11–12% of the population).

Generation Beta (born 2025–2039, ages 0): Just beginning. Approximate living population: ~3–4 million (births from January to December 2025; annual US births are around 3.6–3.7 million).


GLOBAL: population distribution  

Silent Generation (born 1928–1945, ages 80–97): Combined with pre-Silent cohorts in the 80+ group. Approximate living population: ~165 million (about 2% of global population).

Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964, ages 61–79): Approximate living population: ~1.06 billion (about 12.8% of global population).

Generation X (born 1965–1980, ages 45–60): Approximate living population: ~1.2–1.4 billion (about 15–17% of global population; often grouped with working-age adults).

Millennials (born 1981–1996, ages 29–44): Approximate living population: ~1.7–1.8 billion (about 21–23% of global population).

Generation Z (born 1997–2012, ages 13–28): Approximate living population: ~1.9 billion (about 23% of global population; Gen Z + Millennials ~44%).

Generation Alpha (born 2013–2024, ages 1–12): Approximate living population: ~2.0 billion (about 24.4% of global population; the largest cohort, surpassing all others).

Generation Beta (born 2025–2039, starting in 2025, ages 0): Approximate living population: Very small (less than 1 million as of December 2025; only births from January to December 2025).


Gen Z

“Our kids are LESS cognitively capable than we were at their age.”

Every previous generation outperformed its parents since we began recording in the late 1800s.

So, what happened?

Screens.

Dr. Jared Horvath explained:

“Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have, from basic attention to memory, to literacy, to numeracy, to executive functioning, to EVEN GENERAL IQ, even though they go to more school than we did.”

“So why? … The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning (screens).”

“If you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly, to the point where kids who use computers about five hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over two-thirds of a standard deviation LESS than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school. And that’s across 80 countries.”

But screens aren’t just decimating learning and making new generations less intelligent than the ones before them. (Source: https://x.com/thehealthb0t/status/2019717847992443239?s=20)

Merz: “Pax Americana is over.”

Friedrich Merz – Chancellor of Germany

(Dec 13, 2025 from the ISLANDER) Merz stood before his CDSU party and did two things in the same speech that should have stopped Europe cold.

He declared that “Pax Americana is over.” And he reached for Europe’s darkest memory… Munich, the Sudetenland, Hitler, to argue that Russia “won’t stop,” projecting expansionist intent onto Moscow while erasing the long trail of Western promises broken and red lines ignored.

Together, the lines function as one device: announce the old security arrangement is fading, then slam the door on compromise by turning diplomacy into a moral crime.

Of course it isn’t leadership. It’s a choreographed script, and everyone is expected to follow it.

“Pax Americana is over” is marketed as emancipation, Europe stepping out from under American guardianship, finally standing on its own feet. But the second half of Merz’s message tells you what this really is, not independence being offered to the public, but discipline demanded from it.

Because once Hitler is invoked, the field of legitimate diplomacy shrinks to a pinhole. Negotiation becomes appeasement. Restraint becomes cowardice. Doubt becomes disloyalty. History stops being a teacher and becomes a weapon, the kind you swing at your own citizens.

The Munich analogy is the most reusable instrument in European politics precisely because it abolishes alternatives. It does not illuminate the present, it pre-bans future choices. It declares in advance that off-ramps are immoral and escalation is virtue. This isn’t historical memory, but rather coercion by myth.

If Pax Americana were truly ending in a mature way, Europe’s response would look very different. It would begin with realism instead of hysteria, diplomacy instead of demonology, rebuilding industry, securing energy, restoring social consent, and cooling the temperature of a continent already exhausted by crisis.

Instead, Merz reaches for the most radioactive symbol available, because he does not trust the public to accept the costs of confrontation if those costs are explained honestly as tradeoffs rather than destiny.

That tells you everything.

For decades, Western Europe made a choice. It dissolved sovereignty into bureaucracy and outsourced strategic hard power to Washington. American protection became a political convenience, it allowed a managerial class to sermonize while someone else absorbed escalation risk, strategic liability, and blowback. Pax Americana was not just a shield, it was branded as a restraint on Europe’s own worst historical reflexes.

Now the umbrella is thinning and what’s being revealed underneath is not leadership, but dependency. A political class so long insulated from consequence that the moment protection fades, it reaches not for strategy, but for myth, coercion, and panic.

Merz doesn’t pivot to restraint. He pivots to moral absolutism.

This is where projection enters.

By invoking Hitler and the Sudetenland, Merz is not describing Russia so much as advertising elite panic, panic at the return of responsibility, panic at publics who might choose peace, panic at the dawning reality that American power is no longer an inexhaustible insurance policy.

Panic always produces the same politics: narrow the debate, raise the stakes, demand unity, punish dissent.

Germany is already entrenching long-term military posture on NATO’s eastern flank. At the same time, talk of mandatory service reappears when voluntary enthusiasm fails. These are not metaphors. They are signals. When persuasion runs dry, compulsion is prepared, and wrapped in moral language so it looks like virtue.

This is not fate. This is choice.

Germany is not being dragged into inevitability by history. It is choosing inevitability language because inevitability language disciplines the public. It converts policy into destiny. It turns citizens into assets. And it allows leaders to say “there was no alternative” after they have deliberately scorched every alternative.

That is why the Munich analogy is so dangerous. The real lesson of 1938 was never that compromise is evil. It was that moral panic and great-power games locked societies into trajectories they could no longer escape, while ordinary people paid the bill in blood, debt, and ruin. It was a warning about leaders who frame war as inevitability because they lack the courage, or the permission to negotiate peace.

Yet Merz flips that lesson backward. He turns “never again” into fuel for the very logic it was meant to restrain.

And here lies the central deception: the “end of Pax Americana” is being used not to reduce confrontation, but to internalize its costs. The Atlantic architecture remains. The sanctions machinery remains. The command habits remain. What changes is who pays, who bears the risk, and who is asked to sacrifice, while being told this is sovereignty.

That is not sovereignty. It is a higher subscription fee for a failing order, with penalties for cancellation.

The most revealing part is not what Merz says about Russia. It is what his rhetoric prepares at home, that of permanent emergency logic, narrowed speech, moralized obedience, and the normalization of coercion in the name of security.

This is how war cultures are built, sentence by sentence, until the public wakes up inside a cage and is told it’s a fortress.

Pax Americana may indeed be fading. Empires do not last forever.

But replacing it with historical hysteria, existential myth-making, and inevitability politics is not emancipation. It is Europe sleepwalking back toward its oldest nightmare, armed not with humility, but with borrowed myths and outsourced courage.

Real sovereignty would look like restraint. Real leadership would trust citizens with the truth. Real strength would refuse to turn memory into a weapon.

Merz’s speech was not a warning about the world.

It was a confession about Europe’s ruling class, what it fears, what it no longer knows how to do, and how readily it reaches for history when it has run out of truth.

The signal fire has been lit.

The only question left is whether Europeans recognize it for what it is — not a call to safety, but an invitation back into the machinery of fear, where history is no longer remembered to prevent catastrophe, but rewritten into a weapon.

Source: https://x.com/IslanderWORLD/status/2000071342117245168?s=20

THE ISLANDER | @IslanderWORLD
Geopolitics & Justice: Unveiling the untold, advocating for a Just Peace in the World.
@jarednolan – Support our work: http://ko-fi.com/theislandernews


Trump Just Declared War on the British Empire | Tom Luongo

Mel K w/ Matt Ehret |The International Intelligence Deception Post WW2

Uncommon Knowledge

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | December 13th, 2025

City of London boundary marker on approach to London Bridge

Uncommon knowledge: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was aided and funded by the Anglo-American Establishment. This Revolution ushered in the soul-crushing godless Soviet Union. The Soviet Union died in 1991. Since that time over 30,000 churches have been built or restored. The Soviet Union is not Russia. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia helped America during the American Revolution and during the US Civil War. Without Russia’s help, America wouldn’t exist today. The Anglo-American establishment are still butt-hurt over this. America’s most potent enemy is the City of London. Remember kids, “All roads lead to the City of London”. – ClearNFO

Russian Churches during the Soviet era vs. Putin:

During the Soviet era (1917–1991), the number of active Russian Orthodox churches plummeted due to widespread anti-religious campaigns, closures, demolitions, and repurposing. Pre-revolution figures indicate around 55,000 churches in 1917, which fell to fewer than 500 by 1940 in the Russian Republic alone, with many thousands destroyed or converted into secular facilities like warehouses or clubs.

Overall, estimates suggest over 47,000 churches were closed or destroyed across the era, reducing the total to about 7,000 functioning ones by 1991.

Some fluctuations occurred, such as partial reopenings during World War II (reaching around 22,000 by 1959) followed by further closures under Khrushchev, but the net impact was a massive suppression.

Since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church has experienced a significant revival, with state support facilitating construction and restoration. By around 2000, there were approximately 15,000–20,000 active churches or parishes.

From then until recent years, over 25,000 churches have been built or restored, often at a rate of 1,000 per year or more, bringing the total to more than 40,000 by the mid-2020s.


Related:

Crypto Rich ft Matt Ehret: How the British Empire Still Secretly Owns the World

Global Britain and King Charles’ Great Reset

The EU’s ‘Theater of the Absurd’

“This is why the censorship regime a la DSA exists”

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Look closely at that Politico map.

It is not a chart of “loan guarantees.”

It is a crime scene diagram, a heat map of who gets strapped to the nuclear debt bomb for a war already lost. The darker the red, the deeper the betrayal.

Germany drenched in crimson. France glowing like a warning flare. Italy bleeding down the spine of the continent. This is not burden-sharing.bIt is victim selection.

The EU calls it a €210B “reparations loan” backed by frozen Russian assets. A triumph of morality, they say. A historic precedent, they insist.

But read the fine print, the part Eurocrats pray the public never will:

EU countries must guarantee the entire €210B themselves. Germany alone absorbs €52B in liability. Belgium, sitting on €185B of Russian sovereign reserves via Euroclear, risks being legally obligated to repay Moscow when this financial fiction collapses. The remaining €25B in private EU accounts only adds complexity.

Fictional “Reparations” do not come from Russia. They come from European taxpayers, underwriting a colossal IOU they never approved.

This isn’t legality. This isn’t morality. This is a financial hallucination held together by prayer and censorship.

And the panic is unmistakable.

De Wever, the Belgian PM, is one of a few adults in the room. He understands that if courts one day rule these assets were unlawfully pledged, Belgium, as custodian, would likely be forced to pay billions to Russia. So he refuses to sign. Brussels panics. Germany rushes in as guarantor-in-chief, pledging to assume 25% of the backstop to keep the illusion intact.

And France? France turns the knife fight into an art form.

On the map, it burns an angry red, enormous obligations, moral posturing, loud demands that “Russia must pay.” But behind the theatrics, Paris keeps roughly €18B in Russian reserves held within French private banking structures not under Euroclear oversight. Not in the common vault. Not in the shared risk pool. France shields its exposure behind domestic legal veils while urging everyone else to step forward.

Germany is the shock absorber. Belgium sits on the live grenade. France moralizes from a safe distance, quietly armoring its vaults.

If this is solidarity, then a vulture circling a dying animal is a humanitarian gesture.

And what exactly does this €210B fantasy fund?

€115B to militarize Ukraine for five more years. €50B to plug Kyiv’s collapsing budget. €45B, and this is the punchline, not for reconstruction, not for peace, but simply to repay an old G7 loan. The grand Ponzi caravan moves along.

A “reparations loan” that repays the West.

A hall of mirrors with a credit line nuke attached.

And all of it is being hustled through at the exact moment Ukraine faces a €71.7B budget crater, Hungary vetoes new EU borrowing, and Washington quietly negotiates a separate peace framework with Moscow, without Europe.

Europe won’t win the war. Europe won’t write the peace, but Europe will pay the bill.

This is why the censorship regime a la DSA exists. This is why every criticism becomes “Russian disinformation” and every dissenting voice becomes a target of state pressure. Because no political system could survive the admission that its citizens are being strapped to a €210B debt bomb to underwrite a war their own leaders no longer believe in.

The map tells the truth cold honesty. It reveals a continent where Germany is the financial buffer, Belgium holds the powder keg, France plays a double game, and everyone else is forcibly conscripted.

History will not remember this as moral courage. It will remember a Europe cornered by its own delusions, choosing between detonating the global trust in sovereign reserves that underpins its currency, or detonating its own societies with a nuclear debt bomb and calling either choice solidarity.

For this is how Powers fall, not when their enemies strike, but when their architects begin mortgaging the future to preserve the illusions of the past.

THE ISLANDER @IslanderWORLD | Geopolitics & Justice: Unveiling the untold, Advocating for a Just Peace in the World.  @jarednolan– Support our work: ko-fi.com/theislandernews


Starmer, Macron, Merz, Zelensky stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street in a tableau of choreographed solidarity.

Radical: USA changes course!! by Alex Krainer

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Alex (Sasha) Krainer @NakedHedgie Founder, KRAINER ANALYTICS, I-System Trend Following Author of: “Alex Krainer’s Trend Following Bible,” “Mastering Uncertainty,” “Grand Deception” (banned)

Key Markets report for Monday, 8 December 2025 Alex Krainer Dec 08, 2025

The Long Defeat: The West Lost This Era’s Eighty Years War, Now the Sack

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EM Burlingame: Father | Author | Green Beret | Fin. & Intel. Analyst | Elec. & Comp. Eng. | The Eternal War | Modern Knight’s Guidebook | The Art of Being a Man

The Long Defeat: The West Lost This Era’s Eighty Years War, Now the Sack by EM Burlingame

The year 1945 is memorialized as the dawn of a new era of peace. The colossal effort of World War II, the story goes, culminated in the triumph of the free world and the establishment of a lasting order built on democratic ideals and international cooperation. This narrative is a profound and dangerous illusion.

The truth is that the peace of 1945 was not an end, but a transformation. It marked the beginning of a modern Eighty Years’ War, a protracted global conflict fought not just economically and ideologically, but with real bullets, coups, and endless proxy battles. For eight decades, the world has been a battlefield for Western hegemony, a period of non-stop wars, orchestrated conflicts, targeted assassinations, and sponsored violence spanning every continent.

This war, waged under the deceptive banner of a “rules-based international order,” has now concluded. The West, having systematically hollowed out its own spiritual, economic, and demographic foundations through this relentless imperial overstretch, has suffered a decisive and total defeat. The victors are clear: a resurgent China, a defiant Russia, and an ascendant Persian bloc, each having successfully resisted and outmaneuvered Western coercion.

In its decadent final state, reminiscent of the late Roman Empire, the West’s ruling class has chosen a final, desperate strategy: the replacement of its own exhausted native populations. This policy doesn’t seek victory; it merely invites the sack, orchestrated by modern Vandals, not this time white but brown, who arrive in both rags and suits, and who’ve already openly claimed the spoils of a civilization that’s nearly lost the will to survive.

The Cold War was not a mere standoff but the bloody opening phase of the West’s Long Defeat. While outwardly confronting Soviet communism, the Western elite engineered a perpetual state of low-intensity global conflict to enforce its will. From the coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s to the brutal counter-insurgencies in Vietnam and Latin America, from the deliberate destabilization of the Middle East to the orchestrated chaos of the Arab Spring and the color revolutions, the eight decades since 1945 have been a single, continuous, eighty years, war for dominance.

This external aggression was matched by an internal cultural and economic revolution that proved more destructive than any foreign army. The establishment of a globalist financial system prioritized the fluid movement of capital over the health of national industries, gutting the Western middle class. Concurrently, a cultural vanguard promoted a corrosive hyper-individualism, attacking the pillars of traditional life—faith, family, and national identity. This dual assault, at home and abroad, severed the population from its historical continuity and drained its vital energies.

The most telling metric of this civilizational sickness is the demographic collapse. Native birth rates across the Western world have fallen catastrophically below replacement level, the ultimate biological signal of a people exhausted by endless foreign entanglements and a loss of purpose at home. The “rules-based order” was never designed for peace; it was the rhetorical cover for eighty years of war that ultimately broke the West’s spirit and its body.

While the West bled itself dry in its global imperial project, the nations of the East endured, adapted, and ultimately triumphed. They absorbed the pressure of Western aggression and subversion, learning to defend their sovereignty and civilizational coherence. China, the primary victor, transformed from a battered agrarian society into a peer superpower, maintaining an unapologetic emphasis on ethno-national solidarity. It harnessed state power to pursue long-term strategic goals, thinking in terms of centuries, not news cycles.

Russia, after the catastrophic experiment with Western-style liberalism in the 1990s, resurrected itself as a sovereign traditional power, decisively halting NATO’s eastward expansion and breaking the spell of Western unipolarity. Culminating in the outright final and total defeat of NATO in the trenches of Ukraine. Demonstrating psyops and lies don’t conquer a determined people, a people with a willingness to kill millions of young men to defend their lands and ways of life.

Persia (Iran), despite being subjected to decades of sanctions, assassination campaigns, and proxy wars, confidently expanded its influence across the Middle East, forming a strategic arc of resistance that effectively expelled Western power from the region. These powers observed the West’s technological prowess but wisely rejected its suicidal social prescriptions and its addiction to foreign intervention. They accepted globalization as a tool for their own ascendancy but insulated their people from its disintegrating effects. The result was inevitable.

A hollowed-out, deracinated West, addicted to foreign wars and domestic decadence, could not compete with disciplined, cohesive Eastern powers that believed in their own destiny. The era of Western-led regime change is over. The victors of our modern eighty-year war are Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

In its senescence, the contemporary West bears a chilling resemblance to the late Roman Empire. It is militarily exhausted from its endless campaigns, culturally decadent, and governed by an elite that’s alienated from the native population it purportedly leads. Faced with the economic stagnation and demographic winter caused by its own policies, this ruling class has settled on a desperate and cynical solution: demographic replacement. Mass immigration from the developing world is framed in the language of humanitarianism, but its true motives are starkly pragmatic. It’s a means to import a cheap, compliant labor force to suppress wages and prop up Ponzi-scheme social security systems.

Politically, it’s a tool to gerrymander the electorate, creating a dependent constituency that will vote for the very elites who engineered the nation’s decline. Who sacrifice the lower status boys and girls to the unwanted replacements in the form of murders and mass rapes that are above any rule of law. While, any expression of concern from the native population about this existential transformation is vilified as the height of bigotry, a final testament to an elite that would rather see its historic civilization disappear than share power with its own common people. This is the behavior of a hospice caretaker, not a guardian of a future.

This policy of replacement is not a renewal; it’s an invitation to the sack. The incoming populations function as the modern equivalent of the Vandals at the gates of Rome. They arrive in two distinct waves. The first are the Vandals in rags: the masses from failed states, often bearing incompatible cultural and religious values, who strain social services to the breaking point and create enclaves of societal disorder. They’re the foot soldiers of the collapse, exploiting the West’s surrendered borders and enfeebled will to defend itself.

The second, more insidious wave are the Vandals in suits: the foreign managers, oligarchs and sovereign wealth funds from the former British Imperial populations that systematically purchase strategic assets—real estate, energy infrastructure, technology firms, and agricultural land. Who are placed into every position of wealth creation and management through elites’ control of boards and executive teams. All to pillage the last remaining wealth of the people, the Boomers vast hard-earned fortune.

These actors, along with their collaborating Western bankers and lawyers, conduct a silent, legalistic asset-strip of the remaining national wealth. The defining characteristic of this final chapter is its racial and civilizational dimension. This isn’t a fratricidal war between European powers. It’s the colonization of the historic homelands of White Western peoples by non-White populations, facilitated by a traitorous leadership. The transfer of wealth and territory is absolute, and it is near permanent.

The Eighty Years’ War is over. The conflict waged since 1945 through overt violence and covert subversion has ended in the unequivocal victory of the Eastern powers and the utter defeat of the West. The corridors of power in Brussels, London, and Washington are now occupied by a managerial class presiding over a managed decline, their final act being the engineering of their own people’s dispossession. The sack is already underway, visible in the sprawling no-go zones of our cities, the political disenfranchisement of natives, and the firesale of national heritage to foreign interests.

The only remaining question is whether the historic peoples of the West can awaken from their long slumber. Their survival depends on a radical rediscovery of their own identity, a violent rejection of the globalist cabal that betrayed them, and a fierce, uncompromising commitment to their own biological and cultural future. A demonstration equal to the Russians, that we will stand and fight and kill in vast numbers to sustain our lands and assets and peoples to ourselves. To fail in this final awakening is to accept the fate of a civilization that chose suicide, vanishing into history as yet another tragic cautionary tale for ages to come.

Source: https://x.com/EMBurlingame/status/1996590819193827764


About EM Burlingame

Graduated with honors from Norwich University where I studied Strategic Studies and Defense Analysis with an emphasis on Special Forces and Special Operations supports for entrepreneurship and investing and the impact on threat reduction in violence repressed communities. Completed two years of my PhD research and academic work at UAB in Interdisciplinary Engineering | Computational Science and Engineering emphasizing data brokerage and multivariate sentiment analysis but have yet to finish my dissertation. Spent several years in the study of the law to understand the War, Game, Resentfuls, Responsibles and Adoptables in the practice of the law.

Currently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Foundation for Integrative Medicine where I founded and lead the Jason Dawson and Stewart McGurk Brain Health Research Fellowship; and where I am the co-founder of the 3rd Generation Medicine Lab. Prior to this I founded two Silicon Valley tech startups before going on as a tech analyst in investment banking and private equity in China, the US and the EU. Then in my early forties, I had a mid-life crisis and went on to serve for eleven years with 1st and 20th Special Forces Groups, with emphasis on working with and understanding humanity out in the real world, well outside and beyond the comforts of the global North.

Authored The Eternal War, The Art of Being a Man, The Way of the Team and Starving for Leadership. Now writing a serialized novel As Rome Burns which is being released a chapter at a time at https://emburlingame.substack.com/s/as-rome-burns