Plant Your Flag with Trey Taylor
Plant Your Flag with Trey Taylor
Act like no one is telling you no.
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Act like no one is telling you no.

Krispy Kreme, Chinese corruption, The Second Amendment, King Charles III


Heat your air fryer to 350 degrees. Put your day-old Krispy Kreme in for 1 minute. Take it out, enjoy and rejoice in a God that loves you so much he gives you Krispy Kreme and Trey Taylor to help you along in life.


“The whole process of mental adjustment and atonement can be summed up in one word, gratitude.”

— William Wattles


In 2017, China setup a Sovereign Debt fund designed to lend to countries that even the IMF deemed too risky. Since that time, China has deployed $33B to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Kenya, Venezuela, Ecuador, Angola, Laos, Suriname, Belarus, Egypt, Mongolia and Ukraine on seemingly advantageous terms. Some loans have deferred repayments, some are very low interest, some are structured with very little oversight.

They all have 2 things in common: resources and corruption.

Each of these countries has a strategic resource that China has a hard time procuring through typical international trade channels. Commodities like Oil, Lithium, Manganese, Natural Gas and Urea, or foodstuffs like Wheat and Beef are the public front of trade deals that follow soon after the loans are in place.

Each of these countries also has a political elite who realized long ago that the way to make it in this world is to sell your country’s people and resources out to the highest bidder. It’s even better if that bidder says they will probably never collect on the debt so long as other political favors can be redeemed at the right time. It’s much better if some of those loan proceeds go into consulting agreements with companies employing the children of the decision-makers and end up in tax-haven secret bank accounts in Switzerland, Jersey and the Caymans.

China plays the long game. It doesn’t matter if their government is imperial or communist, it’s still Chinese. Culturally, the Chinese don’t look at history the way we do in the West, as a series of storied vignettes. History to them is a single storyline of China’s favor and destiny and they know that history takes a long time to play out.

So what if we take billions earned from the global consumer economy and trade it for bad trade deals that have political kickers we might not use for 60 years. While it’s good to have friends in politics, it’s better to have those who owe you favors, and that’s what this is: favor farming.

Let’s say, in an exercise of idle fantasy, that China made moves to invade Taiwan in a reclamation project because they view the sovereign nation as a breakaway province. Doing so throws the United Nations into high gear and all sorts of committees are convened to discuss and plan around the crisis. Those committees are composed of exactly the nations indebted to China in such a way that if the real terms of the deal were exposed, political problems at home would be catastrophic for the corrupt recipients of the deals. So which way do they vote? Which way is influence directed? Toward the general good, or the specific evil.

That’s the playbook … and the play looks different when you know why it’s being run.


“Joy = Love - Fear”

— Chip Conley


Today, Visa, Mastercard and American Express have instituted new purchase codes for firearms manufacturers, retailers and purchasers. Without any shadow of a doubt, this information will be shared with governmental entities who are barred from the creation of a national firearms ownership data list by political realities and the Second Amendment.

There is only one reason that the government wants to know who owns what firearms, and that isn’t the preservation and expansion of liberty and freedom. It’s the exact opposite.

Cowards do things indirectly that they could never accomplish directly. Fools help them to do it because of “safety,” and “necessity.” Republics don’t explode, they whither.


Queen Elizabeth II is now the “late Sovereign of happy memory,” for her subjects as she passed away last week at her 50,000 acre Scottish estate, Balmoral, originally purchased by Queen Victoria as a Highlands retreat. She was the only Queen that most people ever knew, and she was a good one, behaving Constitutionally at all times, changing the monarchy with the times, and navigating the poor decisions of her sex-craved children with a stiff upper lip.

Now comes Charles, the longest-serving Prince of Wales in history. There was some speculation as to whether he would choose Charles as his regnal name since Charles I was executed and Charles II left no legitimate offspring (but 12 illegitimate Children from whom almost every Duke descends from today), but Charles III we shall have. There was also intense speculation that his wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles Windsor, would not be named Queen Consort, but some lesser, morganatic title. He decided against that and she will be Queen, but whether she will be crowned or not is yet to be determined. Feelings for Diana still run deep, but most people shrugged and said they’d been married for 17 years, so who really cares anymore.

Interestingly, because of the advanced ages of the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth and Charles, Parliament exempted the crown estate from inheritance duties in 1993. The fear was that if they all died in rapid succession to one another, they’d no longer be so very wealthy. This saved just shy of $1B in “death duties” that the UK Treasury would otherwise have collected. The Left paints this as a gift to the already too-rich, the Right as some sort of political duty. Without even entering into a debate on why a country would want to tax the estates of people who pass away to the tune of 40%, let’s just acknowledge that the truth is different, though.

The Crown estate is owned by the King, but administered by the country. It’s profits fund the government and the royal family receives a Sovereign Grant of about $100m on profits of $450 per year. It isn’t a cut-and-dried, easy to determine who owns what, situation. The King isn’t allowed to sell any assets in the Crown Estate, for example, a constituent part of what owning something means.

The Crown Estate came into being in the 1700s when the Crown surrendered the proceeds from the Duchy of Lancaster to the nation in exchange for an annual payment. The nation gets the better end of that deal, as we see above. Should it be decided that the deal no longer serves national interests, Parliament would have to surrender the Duchy in its entirety to Charles and his family who would then draw the $450m a year. Even if that was taxed at standard rate the nation loses and the Windsors win.

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Plant Your Flag with Trey Taylor
Plant Your Flag with Trey Taylor
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