American families scramble for groceries, but Trump throws a blowout at Mar-a-Lago. The theme? “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” It’s straight-up in-your-face provocation.
Maybe Trump’s not lying. The American Dream—he’s just exposing the ugly truth. In America, only the moguls get to dream. Everyone else? Forget it. That party at Mar-a-Lago? Luxury everywhere, feathered hairpieces sparkling, and champagne flooding the room. Dancers in flapper dresses swirling through the crowd, acrobats splashing inside giant golden martini glasses. It's pure Gatsby—vintage 1920s glitz.
Haruki Murakami, the famed writer did the Japanese version of “The Great Gatsby”, nailed it: 1920s was America’s “Jazz Age”. It was Fitzgerald’s playground, his prime. The book and a string of ten iconic short stories put him in the American classics club. Missed the Mar-a-Lago bash? Catch Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby flick of 2013 and get swept up in that old-school dream.
The point is, Fitzgerald’s classic dropped in 1925. Back then, nobody saw the storm brewing, but the bubbles were stacking up beneath the surface, waiting to explode.
The Great Depression and the New Deal
“From 1929 to 1933, America took a nosedive. Factory output tanked by a third. Prices dropped twenty percent, and debt got even harder to pay off. Unemployment spiked from 4% to a whopping 25%. One-third of workers got shoved into low-wage, temp jobs. By the end, half the country was sitting idle.” Wikipedia spells it out. Sound familiar?
However, Fitzgerald was never there to see the brutality of life himself. After 1930, his writing days faded fast, and he died at the age of 44. “The great American writer” spent his final stretch trapped by booze, anxiety, and heartbreak.
But oh did God bless the United States. Roosevelt steps in during ’32, rolls out the “New Deal” a year later. Let’s call it what it is—Roosevelt gave the USA its first taste of socialism. If you think about it, Deng Xiaoping wasn’t the pioneer of mixing systems after all.
The New Deal rewires finance to block another meltdown like the Great Depression. Social Security comes online, labor standards get locked in, minimum wage, max hours. The SEC and FDIC show up to police Wall Street and protect bank deposits. America goes full “big government,” especially in the economy. Then war breaks out, and the New Deal taps out. That’s when American capitalism catches its second wind.
America and the never-ending War
Eisenhower holds the White House for eight years. Before leaving in ’61, he warns: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience… In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” But look what happened next?
According to Xinhua, between WWII’s end and 2001, there were 248 armed conflicts in 153 regions worldwide. America started 201 of them. Since 2000, the US has unleashed its military everywhere—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—selling the world “freedom, democracy, and human rights.” The result? The American war machine sets countries aflame, leaving over 900,000 dead, millions wounded, tens of millions running for their lives.
“A Little Party Never Killed Nobody.” That’s rich—while moguls and celebrities toast behind the velvet ropes of Mar-a-Lago, the rest choke on the fumes of old mistakes. Eisenhower warned about the war machine, but America’s elite ignored the alarm.
So here we are: the evil mist rolls in again, thick with class arrogance and broken dreams. The champions of decadence pick Halloween for their masquerade, parading shamelessly through the wreckage—then call it destiny.
Deep Blue
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
Zhuque has silenced America. SpaceX's repeated successes in rocket recovery drove home one point: American business works. And China? How could a feat achieved by marshaling the strength of an entire nation possibly compare with a private outfit pulling off a mission impossible?
Cast your mind back. The Clinton boom, built on the information superhighway, delivered four consecutive fiscal years of budget surplus. From 2015 onwards, SpaceX achieved rocket recovery, putting American commercial spaceflight at least a decade ahead of China. What more could anyone say? Behold the splendor of America's overall national power!
At 7:35 this morning, the reusable Zhuque-3 Y2 carrier rocket lifted off smoothly. Its builder is LandSpace, a Chinese commercial space company founded, coincidentally, in that very same year of 2015. The mission report reads: "About 137 seconds after liftoff, the first and second stages separated. The first stage then began its return sequence. After key maneuvers including high-altitude attitude adjustment, deceleration and aerodynamic gliding, it made a successful soft landing at the Gansu landing pad at 7:43. The flight test was a complete success."
A few points are worth adding. First, the Zhuque-3 Y1 made its maiden flight on December 3, 2025. It successfully delivered a satellite into its designated orbit, though its first-stage vertical recovery test failed.
Second, eight months on, Zhuque-3 has delivered on its mission, a task of major significance. Zhuque becomes our country's second reusable rocket after the Long March 10B.
Third, mind you, the Long March rockets belong to the "national team."
Fourth, China's state and commercial space programs are setting sail like "twin dragons out to sea." America is feeling the competitive pressure.
SpaceX has made a blockbuster stock market debut. The world is counting on America, following the internet, to lead the globe once more through space technology. The hope is a replay of the Clinton-era golden age. SpaceX pulled off the first successful recovery of a Falcon 9 rocket, then industrialized the technology. Today it launches the Falcon 9 around 150 times a year, roughly three times a week. A single booster can be reused dozens of times.
Yet even before the successful recovery of the Zhuque-3 Y2, American think tanks were already worried. China, doing things the Chinese way, has achieved recovery in both state-run and commercial spaceflight, with equally precise touchdown points. China's "catch-up" is no longer out of reach.
What deserves attention is this: China's state and commercial sectors are advancing in tandem, while NASA has widely adopted the commercial model. In return-to-the-Moon programs such as Artemis, NASA has contracted out uncrewed lunar landers, precursor satellite launches and even rocket servicing and replenishment support to multiple private space companies. Commercial players such as SpaceX, Firefly Aerospace and Rocket Lab are the mainstays.
Two years ago, analyses weighed the relative strengths of the Chinese and American space programs. Commentators argued that NASA's shift from "designing and building in-house" to "commercial contracting" would push national scientific talent out of front-line positions. Over the long run, that would weaken the state's "deep control and independent assessment capability" over space technology.
And if complex spaceflight life-support systems or new space station designs were left entirely to private leadership, NASA would face the twin hazards of technology and risk. Boeing's Starliner saga, which stranded two American astronauts on the International Space Station for a full nine months, is in its own way the same tune as today's USS Abraham Lincoln incident. Go figure.
The pair finally left the station "smoothly" aboard a SpaceX Dragon on March 18, 2025. They landed safely back on Earth the next day. Trump sang Musk's praises for a job well done.
A quick explainer: history has seen a so-called "Sputnik moment." In truth, it was a "Sputnik" crisis for America. In 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, humanity's first artificial satellite. The phrase has since come to describe the turning point when a nation suddenly realizes it is lagging a rival in technology or a critical field. That realization triggers an acute sense of crisis and an urgent drive to catch up.
President Kennedy led America out of the Sputnik crisis with the Apollo lunar landing program. Today, can America build a crewed Mars program to overtake its rival? Musk, this round is all on you. Stop firing off low-orbit satellites like crazy to rake in cash. The day a crewed Mars landing succeeds will be the ultimate MAGA moment. Let's keep at it, together.
