Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One

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Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One. Drug overdose deaths fell to pre-pandemic levels in 2025. The same crowd that blames a President for the weather can't seem to find the microphone today. The Lifeguard Pulled 30,000 People Out of the Water. Now Ask Who's Pushing Them In. America just had its third straight year of falling overdose deaths — and the real story isn't only who gets the credit. It's why the beach was ever this deadly to begin with. Rough Draft & Disclaimer There's a story making its way out this week, and it's the kind of story that ought to be on every front page in the country. Ought to be. Won't be. But ought to be. The Centers for Disease Control just put out their preliminary numbers for 2025. Drug overdose deaths in the United States — the thing that has been ripping families apart for over a decade, the thing that's the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 44 — drug overdose deaths dropped nearly 14% in 2025. An estimated 69,973 Americans lost. Still too many. Way too many. But here's the math: from over 100,000 deaths a year just a couple of years back, we're down to roughly 70,000. Synthetic opioid deaths — and we're talking fentanyl here, the stuff coming in from China through the cartels — those fatalities dropped from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025. That's more than ten thousand American mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who are still alive today. Cocaine deaths, down. Methamphetamine deaths, down. The drops have even pushed U.S. life expectancy to a record high, according to the federal government. Three years in a row of declines. Just the fifth time in over three decades the numbers have moved the right direction. Now. Pause. Take a breath. Because I want you to notice something. Where are they? Where are the cable news panels? Where are the late-night monologues? Where are the columnists who, for the last decade, have written every single overdose death as a national emergency? Funny thing. Real funny. The silence is just deafening, isn't it? For four years we heard the border didn't matter, that fentanyl was a complicated, multifactor problem, that nobody could really be held responsible for what comes across because, well, you know, it's just complicated. And now — what a coincidence — the President who said he was going to lean on China, who said he was going to slap tariffs on the precursors, who said he was going to treat the cartels like the terrorist organizations they are — that President takes office, and the numbers keep moving in the right direction. And the people who would have you believe Trump caused the sunrise to be late are suddenly very, very quiet. Imagine, just for a second, if these numbers had come out on a different administration's watch. Imagine the press conferences. Imagine the victory laps. Imagine the magazine covers. "He Saved a Generation." You'd be sick of hearing about it by Tuesday. I'll be fair, and unlike some folks, I'll actually do it. The decline started before this administration. State programs, naloxone access, telemedicine, mobile clinics — none of that is nothing. Credit where credit's due. But the trend continued, and it continued during a year when one man made fentanyl a centerpiece of his foreign policy and his border policy. You don't have to like him. You can hate his tie. But you don't get to memory-hole the numbers. And here's something that gives this weight. The President has been very open — painfully open — about losing his brother to alcoholism. He doesn't touch a drink. Never has. Tell me that doesn't matter when a man sets policy on addiction. Tell me that doesn't change how he hears the phone call from a parent in Ohio or West Virginia who just buried their kid. Now. Here's the rest of the story. Picture a lifeguard on a beach. And this lifeguard pulls thirty thousand people out of the water in a single summer. Saves them. Drags them onto the sand, gets them breathing. Thirty thousand souls. What do you do with that lifeguard? You give him the key to the city. You name the pier after him. You put him on every front page in the country. You absolutely do. But then a reasonable person stops and asks a second question. Wait a minute. Why are thirty thousand people drowning at my beach? That is the real question. That is where the attention has to go next. Because the lifeguard is doing the job. The lifeguard is doing the job. But somebody is pushing people into the water. Somebody is pouring fentanyl across the border. Somebody is profiting. Somebody is looking the other way. Somebody in Beijing is signing off on chemical exports. Somebody in a cartel is laughing all the way to the bank. So which is it, friends? Either the President of the United States gets credit for the lives saved, or he doesn't. You can't say a President owns every bad thing that happens on his watch — every storm, every market dip, every bad jobs report — and then turn around and say, well, this good thing, this seventy thousand instead of a hundred and ten thousand, that just happened. The wind blew. The tide came in. Nobody did anything. You don't get it both ways. You never did. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, Click Click, Later, I’m out of here. Xxx Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 Paul Grant Truesdell, The Elder J.D., AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC Founder

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS, AI, AND MORE

THE FUTURE OF DRONE TECH: NAVAL LAUNCH PLATFORMS You have known the aircraft carrier all your life. It is the floating city of steel — a thousand feet of runway riding the open ocean, home to thousands of sailors and scores of fighter jets. For three generations, it has been the proudest symbol of American reach. When trouble flared anywhere on the globe, a president had only to ask one question: where are the carriers? And the answer, more often than not, settled the matter. That great ship is not going away. But the story of the carrier is changing — quietly, and faster than most folks realize. And in a moment, I'll tell you the rest of the story. Here is the trouble, told plainly. The very thing that makes a supercarrier so mighty — its size, its cost, the sheer value packed into one hull — has also made it a tempting target. Today an enemy does not need a battleship to threaten one. He needs only cheap, fast missiles and small unmanned boats and aircraft. We saw the lesson written large in the Black Sea, where Ukraine, a nation with almost no navy to speak of, used inexpensive remote-controlled sea drones to bloody Russia's proud fleet. We saw it again in the Red Sea, where small bands fired waves of low-cost drones at some of the finest warships afloat. The point was made for all the world to read: a swarm of cheap, expendable machines can rattle even a sophisticated fleet. Now, a wise old hand on the frontier never tied his whole fortune to a single horse, no matter how fine that horse might be. He kept a string of them. And that, in essence, is what the United States Navy and its allies are now learning to do at sea. Enter the "mini" carrier. These are smaller, cheaper ships built not to launch heavy, manned fighter jets, but to launch drones — unmanned aircraft and vessels guided by remote control or by their own onboard intelligence. Because a drone weighs a fraction of a piloted fighter, the ship that carries it can shed much of the heavy machinery a supercarrier requires. No giant catapults. No reinforced steel decks built to absorb a thirty-ton landing. The result is a vessel that can be built smaller, fielded faster, and bought in far greater numbers. They go by many names — light carriers, drone carriers, unmanned surface vessels — but the idea behind all of them is the same. Trade a little exquisite capability for a great deal of useful mass. And mass, in this new arithmetic of the sea, matters more than ever. The plan is not to retire the great carriers, but to surround them with these smaller companions. Picture the formation: one supercarrier at the center, the seasoned trail boss, providing command, manned air superiority, and heavy striking power. Riding alongside it, a handful of mini carriers — the outriders and scouts — each carrying its own herd of drones. Together they form what the Navy calls a battle group, only now it is a hybrid one, part manned and part machine. What do these smaller ships actually do? Several jobs, and each a valuable one. First, they serve as the eyes of the fleet. Their drones fly long, patient circles over the horizon, watching, listening, and feeding a steady stream of information back to the flagship. This work goes by the cumbersome name of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance — but you may simply think of it as keeping watch, the way a good lookout once kept watch from the high ground while the wagons made camp below. Second, they confuse and protect. Some drones are sent up not to strike, but to jam an enemy's radar or to play the decoy — drawing fire away from the precious carrier at the center. Let the enemy waste his expensive missiles on cheap and empty bait. Third, and most striking, they attack in numbers. From racks and rails, a mini carrier can loose dozens, even hundreds, of small, low-cost attack drones at once — a swarm meant to overwhelm an enemy's defenses by sheer saturation. And here lies the heart of the matter, the cold arithmetic that has admirals rethinking everything. A single attack drone may cost a few thousand dollars. The missile required to shoot it down may cost a few million. When the cheap can exhaust the expensive, the old math no longer holds. Now, who is building these things? The answer reaches around the globe, and that is part of the rest of the story. Turkey moved first, taking a ship originally meant for fighter jets and repurposing it to launch drones from a curved, ski-jump deck — and flying them successfully in NATO exercises just this year. South Korea, once set on a traditional light carrier, changed course and aimed its new ship squarely at commanding swarms of drones. Portugal is bringing into service Europe's first vessel built from the keel up for unmanned systems in the air, on the surface, and beneath the waves. And China — let no one mistake this — is racing ahead with stealthy drone-carrier prototypes and converted cargo ships, rehearsing the very kind of mass drone launches that would accompany a missile strike. The United States has chosen a somewhat different road. Rather than build a fleet of standalone drone carriers, the Navy is weaving unmanned systems into the force it already has. Through an effort fittingly named Replicator, it aims to field thousands of inexpensive, expendable machines in a hurry. It is fitting unmanned surface vessels — robot ships — to act as floating drone trucks. It is bringing aboard a new unmanned aircraft that can refuel jets in midair, easing the burden on the carrier's pilots. And it is adapting its big amphibious assault ships, the workhorses that already carry jump-jets and helicopters, to launch drone swarms of their own. The aim, spoken openly, is a larger and more distributed fleet — one that does not place every egg in one very expensive basket. There are honest difficulties yet to be conquered, and any straight-talking man will name them. Launching a drone is one thing; catching it again on a pitching deck at sea is another, and engineers are still perfecting the nets, the guidance, and the artificial intelligence to do it. A determined enemy will try to jam the signals that guide these machines, so the Navy must build communication links that bend but do not break. Batteries and small engines still limit how far and how long these drones can range. None of these are small problems. But none of them, judging by the progress of the past two years, appears beyond the reach of American industry and ingenuity. What does it all add up to? A fleet that is harder to find, harder to cripple, and far harder to bankrupt. The optimal Navy now taking shape would keep a modest number of mighty supercarriers — perhaps ten or twelve — and ring them with dozens of smaller drone-launching companions and hundreds of robot vessels besides. In the wide and contested waters of the Pacific, near the island chains that have shaped naval strategy for a century, such a force could keep a persistent, patient watch that no single missile could erase. The frontier of the sea, like every frontier before it, rewards the side that adapts — the one that learns the new country fastest and rides it best. The lone, magnificent gunfighter has his place still. But the smart money, out where the trails are dangerous, has always been on the well-led outfit that travels in numbers and watches every approach. So let me tell you, now, the rest of the story. The supercarrier — that floating city of steel — is not being put out to pasture. It is being given a posse. Cheap, plentiful, unmanned machines, launched from smaller and humbler ships, are becoming the eyes, the decoys, and the swarming spear-point of the modern fleet. The lesson, hard-learned from recent wars, is a simple and almost old-fashioned one: that mass matters, that distribution protects, and that it is wiser to risk ...

2 de jun de 202615 min

Ocalawood

Oh Cala Wood. Due to our extensive holdings and our clients, you should assume that we have a position in all companies discussed and that a conflict of interest exists. The information presented is provided for informational purposes only. The future performance of a security is not guaranteed. This conversation does not involve securities. Truesdell Wealth, Inc. A Registered Investment Advisor The Truesdell Professional Building 200 NW 52nd Avenue Ocala, Florida 34481 352-612-1000 or 212-433-2525 If you've ever driven north out of Orlando on Interstate 75, somewhere around the time the suburbs thin out and the land starts to roll, you begin to notice that you've crossed into a different Florida. The flat coastal Florida of postcards is behind you. The Florida in front of you has hills, real hills by Florida standards, with white-board fences running along the ridges and thoroughbreds grazing in pastures that look like somebody airlifted them out of Kentucky. The exits start carrying horse names. The road signs point to the World Equestrian Center, a place so large and so deliberate that it changed the conversation about what Ocala is and what Ocala could become. And out beyond those horse farms, along the commerce corridors, you'll see something else. Warehouses. Big ones. New ones. Steel rising on what used to be pine flats and pasture. The trucks moving in and out tell you that the rest of the world has figured out something the locals have known for a while: this part of Florida is positioned at the intersection of just about everywhere. Hold that picture in your mind, because we have a question to chew on for the next little while. Could the Ocala metropolitan area, the heart of Florida and the country just north of Orlando, be poised for a film, television, and video production boom? Could the same combination of land, infrastructure, beauty, and cost advantage that's drawn equestrian sport, retirees, distribution centers, and breeders also draw the cameras? I'm not going to tell you yes and I'm not going to tell you no. The honest answer is more interesting than either. But by the time we ride out of this together, you'll have a clearer picture of where the industry is, where Florida is, what Ocala has, and what would have to happen if the forward-thinking minds in this region decided that the next chapter was going to be theirs to write. Now, before we get to Ocala, we have to take an honest look at where the picture business actually stands. Because if we don't understand what's happening to Hollywood and why, we'll either oversell what's possible here or undersell it. Both are mistakes. There's a story going around out west that just about tells the whole tale. A television producer was putting together a game show. He had Rob Lowe lined up to host. He had contestants ready to play. And when he set the cost of filming in Los Angeles next to the cost of flying the whole production to Ireland, Ireland won. Not by a nickel either. By enough to make the decision easy. So they packed up Rob Lowe, packed up the contestants, packed up the cameras, and off they went across the Atlantic. That one decision, by one producer, on one show, captures more about the modern entertainment business than a thousand pages of trade press. For a hundred years, Hollywood was the place. If you wanted to make a picture, you came to Los Angeles. The talent lived there. The crews lived there. The stages were there. The vendors were there. You could walk down a street in Burbank and find every craftsman, every camera operator, every costume designer you needed within a five-mile radius. It was the kind of cluster that took a century to build and nobody figured could ever come apart. Well, friend, it's coming apart. The numbers tell the story plain enough. Last year, on-location shoot days in the greater Los Angeles area dropped to about nineteen thousand seven hundred. That's a sixteen percent fall from the year before and the lowest count in recent memory if you set aside the pandemic shutdown. The first quarter of last year saw a twenty-two percent drop year over year, with television down better than thirty percent and feature films down nearly twenty-nine. There's been no annual increase since 2021. Early 2026 did show a small bump, about ten percent better quarter over quarter, with features leading the way, but the overall level still sits below where it stood in better years. Soundstages that used to run at near full occupancy are sitting at about sixty-three percent. Tens of thousands of jobs have evaporated. Forty-two thousand in entertainment-related sectors in Los Angeles County alone over a couple of years, with the below-the-line folks taking the worst of it. Those are the grips, the gaffers, the prop masters, the caterers, the people who actually build the magic. An old rancher I knew used to say that when the water dries up, you find out pretty quick which cattle were grazing for love and which were grazing for grass. Hollywood is finding out which productions were there for the talent and the legacy and which were there because that's just where the trail ended. Turns out a lot of them were the second kind. So why is this happening? It isn't because the talent moved. It isn't because the audiences disappeared. It's because doing business in California got too expensive to pencil out. Start with labor. Wages are high, benefits are high, payroll burdens run anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty-four percent. Workers' compensation costs are eye-watering. Union work rules add expense at every turn. None of this is to say workers don't deserve fair pay. They do, and they earned it. But when you stack it all up, Los Angeles becomes a number that simply will not compete with the numbers a producer can get in Georgia, New Mexico, New York, or overseas. Then add the real estate. Housing in Los Angeles is a punchline at this point. The crews who used to live thirty minutes from the studio now live three hours away or have left the state entirely. The vendors are getting squeezed by the same costs. The whole ecosystem that made Hollywood Hollywood is being priced out of Hollywood. Then there's the permitting and the regulation. Layer upon layer of process. Sign here, wait here, pay here, do it again. Here's where I have to stop and admire the situation for a moment. California, the state that prides itself on being the cultural capital of the world, has spent decades writing rules, taxes, and regulations that make it economically irrational to produce culture inside its own borders. Then it acts surprised when the cameras leave. That takes a certain kind of accomplishment. You almost have to applaud it. To be fair, the state has finally noticed. Last year they expanded the Film and Television Tax Credit Program to seven hundred and fifty million dollars a year. They call it Program 4.0, which is what folks call something when they've already tried three other versions of it. They raised the base credit to thirty-five percent and stretched it as high as forty-five with bonuses. They made the credits more refundable. They broadened who could qualify. FilmLA says there are early signs of recovery. That's good. That's something. But uncapped programs in other states and overseas still beat what California is offering, and tax credits cannot fix the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that everything else in California is too expensive. Some of the analysts are now warning that parts of the Hollywood ecosystem could end up looking like Detroit looked in the 1980s. Detroit didn't lose the automobile. It lost the assumption that everything had to be built in Detroit. Hollywood is losing the assumption that everything has to be shot in Hollywood. Once that assumption is gone, you don't get it back easily. That's where Hollywood sits. Now let's swing east, bec...

20 de may de 20261 h 0 min

Either the President Owns the Wreckage or He Owns the Rescue. Pick One

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