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“I’m not upset that you lied to me. I am upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Some may recall back in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic that there was much speculation as to the origins of this virus.  At first we were told it came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, possibly from meat contaminated with diseases from bats, known to be reservoir hosts of SARS-related coronaviruses. Some scientists discounted that theory as such viruses seldom jump the species hurdle from animal to human, while others noted that SARS did so in 2003, also originating in China. 

Much speculation as to what was true or not followed, which was understandable since nothing definitive at that time was known. What was not understandable was why then did the CDC, the WHO and the NIH proceed with not only making the “wet market” theory the official account, but labeling all other explanations “misinformation”, and even worse, censoring those with alternative accounts.  It became such a censorious campaign as to cause the dismissal of many doctors and scientists who did not subscribe to the official narrative.

What was even more troubling were the accounts in the Washington Post, The Intercept, and other news articles about the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the National Institute of Health (NIH), funding gain-of-function (GOF) research through the US based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its laboratory. This would be a direct violation of the 2014 Congressional ban on such research that makes such viruses more transmittable to humans.  Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of NIAID at that time who claimed that “…it has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Despite the NIH’s refusal to release requested documents regarding such funding, Empower Oversight Whistleblowers & Research, a well-known and respected public advocacy group, sued under the FOIA in order to obtain them. They were reviewed by various scientists and journalists, such as Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, Newsweek and The Washington Post.  Ebright concluded that “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement in Wuhan are untruthful.”

The conclusion was that unequivocally NIH grants were used to fund controversial GOF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, contrary to Dr. Fauci’s denials; such accounts were published by both Newsweek and The Washington Post.  Subsequently, under direct questioning by Senator Rand Paul at a Senate Health Committee hearing on 07/20/21, Fauci became enraged when Paul suggested he lied to Congress about the NIH funding GOF research, testily denying any such involvement.

So compelling are the facts supported by documentation that now the US Department of Energy says that Covid-19 most likely originated from an unintentional laboratory leak in China, according to a “classified document”. Following that announcement, the Director of the FBI, Christopher A. Wray yesterday said Covid-19 “most likely” originated from a “lab incident” in Wuhan, China. Despite all the documentation, facts and findings, even from their own agencies, the Biden administration inexplicably continues to insist there remains no “consensus” about whether Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese lab.

In light of the draconian and clearly unconstitutional measures the administration inflicted on Americans with lockdowns, mandates, and the censorious campaigns about so-called “misinformation”, wherein if you questioned the actions of the government, you were labelled an “extremist”, but apparently if you lied as Fauci did, you are anointed as an “expert”, this administration can’t be trusted to tell the truth as it seems to operate on Adolf Hitler’s  theory that “If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

Further, we now learn that despite the claims from the two main pharmaceutical regimes, i.e. Pfizer and Moderna, claiming respectively in early 2020 that the efficacy of their vaccines were 95% and 90% respectively, neither one has proven to exceed even 35%, and further they now state that their vaccines are not effective against transmission. Recall that in promoting and in some cases mandating vaccines, the administration extended these two medical behemoths immunity from liability regarding any negative effects from their vaccines; how fortunate for these corporations given the growing incidence of cardiac adverse events such as myocarditis or pericarditis. The whole basis of the tyrannical medical passport system was built on a lie as we now have a frank admission from Pfizer and Moderna that their product was never tested on its ability to reduce transmission.

I do believe that the truth will out, but the issue now is what Americas make of this tragic chapter in our history where the government actually connived to not only deceive us, but to destroy the means by which we could know the truth. These lies represent egregious acts of what can only be considered intentional frauds and cover-ups by both the corporate and government actors involved. We must not forget or forgive those responsible because if we do, then what will come to pass is, as George Orwell spoke of in 1984, that “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

“Hope is waiting for someone else to do it.”

The above quote is by a character in Robert Harris’ book “Munich”, the German diplomat Paul von Hartman, in a conversation with his British counterpart, Hugh Legat; it is in reference to stopping Hitler. It takes place during the 1938 negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler. I recently saw the movie version, which was not disappointing as often is the case. It is a very insightful understanding into the nature of hope when it is not accompanied by a plan of action; in essence a useless emotion often leading to frustration.

I heard on the news the other day about recent polls that show the majority of Americans find they are worse off now than they were in years past, and even more troubling, do not see a better future, one where they can achieve prosperity; it’s understandable that when people have positive expectations of the future that are not realized, there will be disillusionment. If those expectations, or hopes, are not accompanied with a plan of action to achieve prosperity, then all they become are disappointments waiting to happen.

What were these expectations, and perhaps even more importantly, given current circumstances were they realistic? What was puzzling to many news commentators was the concurrent news about how well the economy was doing; I’m not referring to all the political bravado on display with the administration’s victory laps given the latest economic data, I’m referring to the economic data itself. Beating all the forecasts, we have a record 517K jump in jobs created, decelerating core inflation, and increased labor force participation. So why all the doom and gloom?

There are explanations regarding the labor statistics offered by some economists, like the end of the extraordinary benefits that enabled many workers to wait until they had to get back to work, coupled with the growth in wages due to high labor demand. Then some note that the inflation stats ignore the increasing costs of food and energy. Some express concern that the Fed’s policies on interest rates are pushing us toward a recession and that labor statistics are a lag event. All of this has validity, but does that really address the doom and gloom found in various polls?

Polls also show that the majority of people find that the nation is going in the wrong direction and that its leaders appear unable or unwilling to do anything about it. Apparently the doom and gloom is more than just economic in nature. What the polls don’t tell us is what people find to be the right direction; we have the negative but not the positive feedback. Maybe the right questions are not being asked, or maybe we are looking in the wrong places for the right answer.

There’s a great study called “The Human Freedom Index”, published biennially; it’s a huge joint undertaking by the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, and the Cato Institute in DC. They work with and draw on statistical data from various organizations throughout the world that study and measure the personal, civil and economic freedoms of people in 165 countries, measuring over eighty indicators to establish rankings; they’ve been doing this for about twenty years, establishing a solid reputation based on experience, breadth and depth of objective analyses, and clarity of presentation. This latest edition was published in 2022 for the period 2018 to 2020; the lag is due to the huge data base they need to gather and analyze, a very time consuming process. What struck me as an American is the poor ranking of the US, especially compared to previous editions; for 2020, the overall ranking for the US is 23^rd, lagging behind such countries like Switzerland, Sweden, and even Taiwan; it fell seven places since the prior edition. While relatively high in economic freedom, the US had appallingly low rankings in personal and human freedom, a country founded in principle to highly value those things. 

Among the statistics that jump out are the low rankings for the rule of law, freedom of movement, and the size of and regulation by government. One would hope that in the land of the free the US could manage to at least place in the top ten overall rankings, but hope is not a plan. While we have what many countries do not, i.e. a constitution that simply and clearly establishes the rule of law, we fail to protect basic rights; we have the plan, we just lack the action. This poses a loss of identity as to what differentiates the US as a country, which in turn accounts for a lack of confidence in leadership; while there have been expectations for a meaningful change with each election cycle over the last twenty years, they were crushed with one myopic administration after another.

While Americans have become painfully aware of their falling purchasing power due to bad monetary and fiscal policies, they can’t seem to grasp that the addiction to a free lunch was not a solution, but a drug making them numb to the reality that such policies contribute to the erosion of the freedoms they took for granted. They are distracted by the political theatre of endless partisan posturing, little of which addresses our problems, like crushing debt, cultural polarization, or dangerous foreign policies.

What history shows us is that the policies of a century ago led us to failed economies, rising trade tensions, expanded government, loss of liberty, rampant nationalism and ultimately catastrophic war. If this all sounds familiar it’s because here we are again, and despite our hopes to the contrary, we don’t seem to have a plan of action to change course. Hope is useless without action but aimless without a plan. Hope is not just wishing for things to get better, it involves actively making things better.

Maybe it’s time for the American people to act rather than just hope; encouragingly, we see signs of that happening. Parents are becoming more involved with their children’s education instead of just complaining about politically motivated curriculums, falling standards and failing scores. Alternatives like charter, private and home schooling are increasing rapidly. People who are not career politicians are running for local office at an increasing pace.  Some local and state governments are actively resisting the dictates of the Beltway and performing as they were intended.  There are student organizations at some universities pushing back against the draconian dictates of the administrations of higher learning.

These are just nascent and localized signs that people are beginning to understand that just hoping for change is not a plan.  There are even some in Congress that have shown the courage to propose ideas that others are afraid to even think about, like a plan to balance the budget; the resistance to such common sense, especially in the face of record debt, exposes the level of corruption that has become so imbedded in our political DNA.

It is also increasing apparent that the political class, the elitist regime that makes the hunt for power such a blood sport, is in panic as the two main political parties are fracturing along the fault lines of failed ideologies. This will become increasing obvious as we enter into yet another round of elections in 2024 that will likely be even more contentious than the last. What the American people should not just hope for, but vote for is whoever represents a true change of course away from all the failed policies that have led us to rank only 23^rd in real human freedom. “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.” Benjamin Franklin

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular. We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” Edward R. Murrow

The amygdala is an anatomical term for the part of the brain that deals with emotions, “… the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli…and activation of appropriate fear-related behaviors in response…”; quite often it responds to crowd reaction without even knowing what the threat is. I always found the phrase “irrational fear” to be an oxymoron since, when you calmly think it through, it is an emotion and therefore has no rationality. What we should really fear is not the fear itself, but giving into it; seldom does anything good from that.

To calm the amygdala we are often told to slow down (except of course if it triggers fleeing from a rabid dog or some wild beast), take deep cleansing breaths and think things through in order not to be a slave to your emotions. As Aristotle put it, “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” Wise man that Aristotle, he knew that by controlling your fears you will find a way to overcome them, find solutions to problems and also avoid destructive and embarrassing behavior.

Unfortunately we live in a time when such wisdom is no longer accepted; emotions are more valued than reason, and fear is no longer something to be addressed as harmful, but embraced as both an ideology and a manipulative tool. Does the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for logical thinking, reasoning, and managing emotions, no longer exist? Has society had a collective frontal lobotomy? We should understand that as an emotion, fear only exists in the mind where it creates a perception of danger or a threat that may not be real.

Edward R. Murrow was a courageous WWII correspondent and journalist, and a leading voice against the abuses of McCarthyism.  If he were alive today, I can only imagine his reactions to the phenomenon of “Wokeism”, that hysterical and irrational fear mongering that values subjective feeling while denying objective fact. He would caution that to allow fear to dominate would lead us into “…an age of unreason…” making us easier to control; he would be horrified that such an acute anxiety disorder became a political ideology as it did with the McCarthy hearings.

One of the main premises of wokeism, if it has any, is that anything or anyone it considers offensive is not just objectionable, but literally needs to be “canceled”; it goes so far as to redefine people, places, words or things to fit a conclusion, rather than a thought process of finding the facts to support one. While such behavior can hardly be called an ideology, anything that the woke find offensive is subject to a categorization like “racism”, “white supremacy”, “fascism” or whatever the latest fashionable derogative of the day they embrace. If the woke finds something offensive, they are entitled to destroy whatever liberties it finds in the way of their solutions, like freedom of speech, expression, property rights, etc.

This has been the historical behavior of authoritarian activists and ideologues through the ages like Napoleon, who once observed that “In politics, an absurdity is not an impediment.” They too used such tactics because they were insecure in their own positions and feared to intellectually engage with anyone who disagreed with them. They did differ with today’s woke in so far as cancellation had a more fatal meaning; that’s not to say wokeism will not evolve similarly as their day is young. For now they avoid, and even rage against any idea that they answer to any objections to their worldview; easier that way to maintain their moral superiority.

This closed vision against reality pertains to the arts too as a rejection of the joy of creation, of song, of stories that offend, whether it’s literature or the daily news. For the woke everything offends someone, even the most insignificant things, which creates a world of darkness where we are incapable of learning anything because everything is offensive. The worst fear for the woke is that there are people who don’t feel guilty about what the woke find offensive, who don’t subscribe to the ideology of fear, but have found that nothing in life is to be feared, only understood.

“The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.” Thomas Sowell

If the specter of debt, whether it’s the nation’s, your town’s or your own (inevitably all the same thing) has you stressed then ask yourself if you believed the lie rather than the reality. If you believed the lie like the proverbial free lunch, yet voted based on your desire for what you knew deep down was really “impossible”, then perhaps Sowell’s quote above applies. But you’re not alone, not in an America drunk on debt that has just had the sobering cold shower of inflation and rising prices, high interest rates and falling real wages. If you buy the lie that it’s the greed of business that makes the price of energy and food so high, and you continue to support politicians that spew that nonsense, then the shame of the lie is yours because when you kill the truth, all that remains are lies.

Recently, the reality of the fact that the Fed is actually bankrupt has hit the financial news because you really can’t hide something like that.  The Fed’s own balance sheet exposes that fact as its assets are less than its liabilities.  When that occurred, the Fed quickly moved to actually violate its own stress test protocols, including GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures) to make an entry it disingenuously called “Deferred Payments” for money it owes the US Treasury now; that’s a unilateral default on debt it passes off with an accounting gimmick that would have regulators in court with any bank or financial institution attempting such fraudulent behavior.

Why the Fed committed such a fraudulent act is explicable only as one may accept Madoff’s excuse for getting caught when his Ponzi scheme imploded – he ran out of money; the Fed simply fell into a scheme called Quantitative Easing (QE), which started back in 2008, and basically refers to the gimmick of the Fed “buying” UST bonds and MBS (Mortgage Backed Securities) with dollars printed as they ordered from the UST to create liquidity enabling expanded credit and therefore debt. It actually worked for a while, but like all Ponzi schemes you eventually get caught in your own devices. As inflation took off, the Fed had to raise rates, and that meant paying off a higher debt service as the value of your assets fell; the cost of bonds are the inverse of their yield, meaning interest, making the cure as bad as the disease.

Now to make matters worse, the administration went on a spending binge, which of course is contrary to the Fed’s attempt to rein in inflation.  In effect, you have the right hand fighting what the left hand is attempting to do. As Sowell so eloquently put it “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” Spending for that free lunch is what politicians do because that’s what gets votes from the very people that suffer the consequences.

The meaning of shame is the painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior; however, as Sowell noted in the quote above, politicians can be shameless liars convincing the voters that they can give them what is impossible. While the media was filled with stories about FTX, focusing more on cryptocurrencies than the actual frauds committed, the government promised investigations and hearings, virtue signaling moral superiority while causing even more economic destruction with monetary corruption and irresponsible fiscal policies.

The Newspeak never stops as the focus now is on the debt ceiling, with the usual partisan hysteria about how the world will come to an end with an economic Armageddon if this isn’t resolved immediately. As usual, whoever is in power refuses to negotiate claiming how the other side wants to deprive Americans of all sorts of things, and whoever challenges accuses the other side of gross fiduciary negligence as custodians of the national pocketbook. Few talk to the issue of the glaring absence of an approved budget since Fiscal Year (FY) 2020. For FY 2021, what the Administration and Congress did was to pass a series of five continuing resolutions, which was really not a budget but more a running account of what they spent as they went along, accumulating at the end a deficit of $2.6T, equal to about 12.5% of the US GDP.

For FY 2022 we have record spending, but we are told the deficit for that period decreased to $1.4T; are we to believe that although more was spent the deficit fell year-over-year? Assuming that’s true how then did we hit the all-time high of $31.5T in debt? Well that simply attests to the fact that the government monetized much of it through a huge currency inflation causing a painful rise in prices, and now more pain with rising interest rates. Despite all this, we are told by the administration that the economy has never been better. 

As far as the debt ceiling goes, why do we even have one if there is no ceiling on what we spend? Also, why are we told the ceiling has to be raised in order to pay the bills of what has already been spent?  If it’s already spent, the money is gone, so why do we need the ceiling raised? The fact is it’s not money already spent; its money approved but yet to be appropriated, and in order to actually spend it the restriction known as the debt ceiling needs to go higher. Hearing all the partisan ranting about this brings to mind one of my favorite Chris Isaak songs called “Somebody’s Crying.” In it, there’s a refrain that goes “I know that somebody’s lying, I know that somebody’s lying.” That somebody who’s crying is the American people trying to follow this contorted litany of lying by our politicians. We all need to understand however that there’s nothing more shameful than the consent of the victim.

“We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot.” Abraham Lincoln

Donald Trump promised that the US would not get into another foreign war and that we would disengage from those that we had conducted for decades; that didn’t happen.  Then Joe Biden promised that, and to his credit he withdrew from Afghanistan; very badly done, but he did it. 

But Joe forgot the other part of the promise about not getting into another foreign war, and so here we are in a war in Ukraine, a country with whom we have no treaty alliance as they are not a member of NATO.  In fact, although the US had previously pushed to have Ukraine in NATO, nearly all other members said no; they don’t even want Ukraine in the EU for various reasons, including that country’s persistent history of authoritarianism and corruption; per the New York Times recent reporting, Ukraine’s cabinet ministry announced the firings of several top Ukrainian officials in the biggest upheaval in President Zelensky’s government to date due to widespread corruption.

The fact is Europe doesn’t really want anything to do with this dispute between Russia and Ukraine as they are all too well aware that not only could their involvement escalate to a wider and more dangerous conflict, but historically for over 350 years Ukraine was simply a region of Russia, culturally and ethnically Russian, and only became “independent” with the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few decades ago.  Further, Ukraine is far from a “democratic” country, and until 2014 was closely aligned with Russia, and like Russia, ruled by an authoritarian regime replete with oligarchs like their former Motherland. If not for US bullying, Europe would have remained neutral.

So what does this thug Zelensky, an authoritarian that has repressed all political opposition and his country’s press and media, have on Joe Biden that gets him to enter a proxy war, funding that regime with billions in arms and armaments, impose illegal sanctions on Russia causing horrendous harm to the EU economy with the loss of Russian energy, and risking an escalation that could lead to a nuclear war?  There is no benefit to the US, indeed not even for our European allies and is a drain on the US economy when we can least afford it. If something doesn’t make any sense it doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to explain it; likely the reasons can be found on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Now despite promising the American people that we will not provide the one thing that some so called “military experts” in the Senate say could turn the tide decisively in Ukraine’s favor, i.e. MBT (Main Battle Tanks), in the case of the US the Abrams M1, Biden flips over and now says we will, pledging 31 of these $10M behemoths. An odd number but apparently the rigid composition of a Ukrainian tank battalion. It has been learned that the US was pressuring its NATO allies, principally Germany and the UK, to provide MBT, but they insisted that the US lead the way or they would not contribute. It doesn’t look like there’s much consensus on the team.

Adding to the fumbling, we now learn that it will likely take considerable months for these tanks to be actually deployed in Ukraine. It’s not, as has been reported, a matter of not having the tanks; while the US Army actively deploys about 2,500 of these monsters, there are about 3,700 in storage. The issue is they have to be commissioned, an arduous process, shipped, and then there’s training on what is a highly technical and difficult weapon to operate and maintain.  Further, they were designed to be a part of a far more flexible and nimble mechanized infantry force, a format that the Ukrainian military doesn’t deploy.

As our Department of Defense has repeatedly advised the administration, these tanks are not in and of themselves a panacea for military success, even when joined by German and UK MBT, and further that providing the Ukrainians a system that they can’t afford, successfully operate or sustain, and doesn’t fit their military model could be counterproductive. In short, we potentially have a situation of a square peg in the proverbial round hole, a very deep hole of billions in armaments that may have little actual military benefit, but potentially escalate a regional conflict into a world war.

It’s become painfully obvious that this administration is following the same pattern as previous ones in jumping down a rabbit hole with little to no thought as to where it leads or the consequences of becoming engaged in a conflict that’s virtually not only none of our business, but with no clear benefit for America but with enormous risk and ever increasing costs. There was no clear goal and therefore no real strategy to achieve a goal. What we hear from supporters of this administration’s policy, if indeed there even is something approaching one, is that if you criticize it, you are supporting Putin; that’s a typical reaction we have heard with Viet Nam, Afghanistan and Iraq as if dissent means support for the enemy rather than concern for our country. It appears that Ron Paul was right when he said that “The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.”

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Benjamin Franklin

With all the news about classified documents being found in the possession of Trump, Biden and most recently Pence, little has been said as to how they came in possession of these documents. What has been said in Trump’s case is speculation that in the mad rush to vacate the White House once the reality of having lost the election set in, his staff simply dumped everything in boxes, including these documents, and hauled them off to a basement file room in Mar-a-Lago.  In Biden’s case, he just doesn’t recall how they got wherever they were found; the same is said by Pence.

But that doesn’t really explain how something that various officials and the media claim is so critical simply is “discovered” to be where it’s not supposed to be. The responsibility for the retention and security of these documents is the “Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives and Records Administration”. When a document is requested by those with the proper clearances it is brought to what the U.S. Department of Defense calls a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), basically a room certified and accredited as meeting Director of National Intelligence security standards for the processing, storage, and/or discussion of sensitive compartmented information. Wow, does this stuff get thick on the tongue but apparently thin on effectiveness.

The fact is that the process is so ineffective that there have been many presidents, vice presidents and other government officials who have been found to possess classified documents outside of these SCIFs, both while in office and after they leave office, like Truman, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and of late Trump, Biden and now Pence; all have cooperatively and willingly returned such documents, with the infamous exception of Trump who first denied possession, then fought for retention with at best dubious legal tactics. 

However, we are still left with the explanation as to how, with all these seemingly strict security protocols, does this happen? Is there some secret password they use, a special nod and wink signal to leave the SCIF with this stuff in hand? As one official at the National Archives and Records Administration anonymously confided with a reporter, the SCIF is an illusion, an invention on paper; the reality is sloppy housekeeping made newsworthy once exposed.

It is still concerning that this has happened, especially in the case with Trump and Biden, both of whom have had dubious relationships with foreign governments in Russia, Ukraine and China. While the Steele Dossier has been discredited as a fabrication by a now disgraced FBI agent, Trump’s relationship and business dealings with Putin have always been concerning, but in truth no more so than Biden’s through his son Hunter with Ukraine and China. In fact, Biden had classified documents that go back 14 years to his time as a Senator, as do Hunter’s influence peddling schemes.

Now consider the case of Julian Assange, the Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded Wikileaks in 2006, and who the U.S. Department of Justice has indicted, alleging that he conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak and publish classified documents which showed that the U.S. military killed Iraqi and Afghani civilians and did not report the incidents. Further, during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, he published confidential Democratic Party  emails showing that the party’s  national committee conspired against Bernie Sanders in the primaries in order to get Hilary Clinton the nomination. WikiLeaks also published a series of documents which detailed the CIA’s electronic surveillance of not only US allies, but US citizens. Assange has been confined in Belmarsh Prison, London since April 2019; as of July 2022, Julian Assange is appealing the UK decision granting extradition to the US. The point is that if Julian Assange is subject to prosecution for taking classified documents, and then exposing US war crimes, rigged elections and illegal surveillances, what should we expect for both Trump and Biden? My guess is Trump and Biden will not face what Assange has so far.

Which brings to my mind the question of what exactly qualifies for something to be classified information? The government’s ready answer is whatever constitutes an issue of national security; how often have we heard that line before? So what constitutes an issue of national security? When our government was more direct and honest, which was a long time ago, the answer was any issue involving military or non-military threats against the territory of the US and its citizens, their properties, their commerce and economic security; lately it seems to be whatever the government says it is. What Julian Assange is really guilty of in the eyes of the government is exposing that which it did wrong.

So who decides what information is classified?  According to Federal law classification authority may be exercised only by the President and, in the performance of executive duties, the Vice President, agency heads and officials designated by the President. Now that’s a whole lot of people who, with little if any Congressional oversight, can simply deem information to be of sufficient sensitivity as to be classified, like war crimes, rigged elections and illegal surveillances.

“The measured or measurable period during which an action, process or condition exists or continues; duration; a continuum which lacks spatial dimensions and which events succeed one another from past to present to future; the point or period when something occurs.” Webster’s Dictionary

As a child I always wondered why adults where so concerned about time, yet when I asked what that was everyone looked at me as if I was either a genius or a dolt. I know more now than back then so I don’t consider myself either a genius or a dolt; however, back then I didn’t really understand what time actually is. The above definition just didn’t do it for me; it told me it can be measured, but that it has no spatial dimensions; it references past, present and future as periods of time, but not as to what time is.

Actually the answer as to what time is depends on the subject involved. If you were to ask why someone is spending time asking the question what time is, then it could be answered with a question as to what is being spent? However, the initial question is a fair one, especially since people either dismiss it or obsess about it, but never really can say why they do either. Regardless what subject is involved, what we do know about time is that we have devised a way to measure it, and with the exception of ignorant people, we know it has value. Measuring it tells us how much time there is or has been, but its value is subjective as all values are.

Aristotle’s Law of Identity includes the simple concept that nothing can both exist and not exist at the same time and in the same respect. So time can be a specific occurrence, but in the context of identity what something is at any one time never changes, which in effect makes time irrelevant to identity. On the other hand Aristotle defines time as a number of changes with respect to the past and the future, that time has a dimension that can be calculated. Then we have Einstein, who said that time is relative and flexible, and the dividing line between past, present and future is an illusion as reality is ultimately timeless. Einstein also famously said that “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”; thanks Albert, nothing like clarity and consistency to confuse us lesser minds. Like I said, I’m no genius, so as to define time according to either Aristotle or Einstein as a useful concept for everyday life for us mere mortals really doesn’t do it for me.

All things in the human story didn’t, as Albert said, happen at the same time, but as time is the most import thing in the human story, we ought to be able to understand what it actually is in the sense of what it means for our lives. Well there was a man who gave us that, and he remains my favorite American sage, good old Ben Franklin; well not old anymore as he’s been dead for quite some time now, but he was really good at cutting to the quick with common sense and obvious insights. “Remember that time is money.” is a famous proverb that I doubt most Americans know is from good old Ben; he has a corollary to that with “Lost time is never found again.”

I may never be able to grasp what Einstein understood time to be, or Aristotle’s existential meaning in the law of identity, but I get where Ben is coming from because everyone spends their lives trying to make a living, and the time we put into that comes to us as money, i.e. as a value we trade for by giving the time of our lives to get it. Some of us get more value for our time than others, but as time is our true currency and each day has the same account of time, we all have that one same thing in common; the difference is what we do with it. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Aristotle or an Einstein, if you don’t value your time, why should anyone else?  

In a common sense context, the value of time is an essential thing we need to understand as a civil society. The greatest fallacy of our age is to waste, or allow to be wasted, time on unnecessary and extraneous efforts based on political motivations; that this is happening with increasing frequency and intensity has led American society away from a civil, harmonious and more productive way of life. The American people in the past had more in common than now as they were focused on their livelihood and less so on things that did not serve to its benefit; this focus included the educational development of their children, on the reality of having to spend the time to learn the skills and knowledge necessary for a productive life. Education was valued as a way for the next generation to have a better time than the previous one. It’s vital that the time spent on education is used this way; as a famous coach by the name of John Wooden once said “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?”

Now education is more about how to make others use their time to someone else’s benefit; hardly a way toward a more civil society or a productive use of time. So when we hear such ignorant platitudes like “Money isn’t everything.” or “Money is the root of all evil.”, understand that what is being so mindlessly dismissed is actually the time in our lives. That it takes time to create value should not be a difficult concept for anyone to grasp. What we do with that time is to expend mental and/or physical effort in order to achieve a purpose or result which has value. When a thief steals from us, what they are actually taking is the time of our lives that created the value they’re stealing. It doesn’t matter if that thief is a burglar, a swindling financier or a corrupt politician, the result is the same.

As Ben Franklin said, time can’t be replaced; as it passes, so does the opportunity to gain those things that make the time we have of more value. The greater value we place in the time we have, the more value we will gain from the time we give. The only regret we should have when our time is up is hopefully not what we did, but more about what we didn’t have more time to do.

“Stupid is as stupid does.” George Bernard Shaw

Many people think this phrase originally came from the film “Forest Gump”, but it’s actually from the play “Major Barbara”, written by George Bernard Shaw more than a century ago. Stupidity and ignorance is not the same thing; stupidity is a lack of intelligence, whereas ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Back in Shaw’s day we could actually use these words to describe someone’s actions with a clarity of understanding as to what was meant; unfortunately today saying something so obvious is deemed insensitive and derogatory, making you subject to condemnation, cancellation or even dismissal from employment.

Listening to mass media exposes you to many instances where either of these words would succinctly and aptly describe people’s actions; what is astounding is how often this occurs in finance, academia and politics. Any person with common sense should immediately ask themselves if they are witnessing stupidity, ignorance or perhaps something else. There are, and likely always will be people who depend on the stupidity, ignorance, greed, or the delusions of others as a way to make a buck; Bernie Madoff famously comes to mind and now we have Sam Bankman-Fried, both of whom saw such instances as opportunities for their fraudulent schemes.

In the case of Bernie, he was much more skillful than Sam, running the largest Ponzi scheme ever for more than 20 years for some $65B before he got caught.  Fortunately nearly 88% of the assets were recovered and returned to investors. On the other hand we have Sam, whose $8B scheme began in 2019 and recently ended with his arrest. Bernie’s was a classic and simple Ponzi scheme, doing the usual return on investments to existing clients from funds secured from new ones; it was inherently unsustainable as kicking the can down the road means you will eventually run out of road. Few made excuses for Bernie or expressed sympathy for his demise, which is as it should be.

Now we have the case with Sam, a bewilderingly obvious fraudulent scheme diverting funds from FTX where his clients invested their money, to Alameda, his private hedge fund, with which he made huge real estate purchases and political donations. Prior to FTX announcing that it had financial problems in early November, many in the media and academia lauded Sam as the new face of socially responsible investment management, praising his progressive approach, while saying nothing about the risky assets FTX was involved with. Even when FTX announced bankruptcy there was this fawning reaction of many as to the altruistic motives and intentions of Sam, deploring not the theft of his clients’ money, but the failure to fund the grants he made for biodiversity and other worthy causes. 

Eventually, so obvious was this fraudulent machination that many financial commentators began wondering why anyone would have invested with FTX and why it took so long for it to be exposed. To add to the stupidity and ignorance of this story is how to explain the focus of some of the politicians involved on the risky assets Sam invested in, principally cryptocurrencies; it’s not the assets that he invested his client’s money in that was a crime, but his fraudulent actions in siphoning off investor’s money into his own pockets from which he bought extravagant real estate and political favor. While the real estate bought can be liquidated, what about the political donations? This is where we need to look beyond the stupidity and ignorance of these actions, and the media coverage. We have learned that these donations were made to both Democrats and Republicans, and in violation of campaign finance laws. 

As the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York reports on the names of the recipients, some have stated that they will be refunding the donations; however, that fails to explain whether or not they were aware of the source of or manner in which these donations were made. The fact that politicians are making so much of the assets invested in by calling for investigations into cryptocurrencies appears more as a deflection given their acceptance of the donations, especially as they were made illegally. Considering that 60% of the House, and 66% of the Senate are attorneys, and Congress makes such laws as those governing campaign contributions, it seems impossible to explain their involvement as either a case of stupidity or ignorance.

We should not be deceived here into thinking that those intelligent enough to win an election, even if disingenuously, and who have a considerable level of education, often in the legal and business professions, were not at least aware of the source of or manner in which these donations were made; neither should we be distracted by the purported altruistic intentions of our poor misguided Sam, who incredulously claims he was unaware of what was going on, any more than we should consider the same from the politicians involved.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

“Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things.” Mises

The Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy is a declaration for intervention everywhere in the world, with the justification to assure the progress of democracy. The policy actually claims that the US has the unlimited ability to, in effect, remake the world; the absurdity of such a statement is childish as it ignores the fundamental essence of economics as the science of scarcity, which is all about trade-offs as everything is constrained by the reality that the demand for all goods and services is greater than the availability, thereby limiting choices. Embracing a policy based on an unlimited ability means you believe there are no constraints, similar to a spoiled child’s demands for endless gratification.

It stinks of the hubris of a new “Manifest Destiny”, only this time not limited to North America. It’s hard to imagine after all that the world has suffered through a century of endless wars that an American President would propose a stratagem to impose a new world order in its own image and likeness. The elitist messaging that this sends to both allies and enemies alike is that no part of the world is safe from US meddling and interventionism; the justification for such a policy is cloaked in that age old and tired mantra of our national security interests.

While not literally, or honestly, admitting to the weaponizing of sectors of the economy like finance, energy, food and trade, what this policy makes clear to both friend and enemy alike is a manifesto to rule the world. While this is not actually something new as the US has essentially behaved in this manner since the end of WWII, exporting democracy via proxy wars and regime change is reminiscent of a Soviet like strategy during the Cold War. The twisted ideology that the US has a moral duty to police the world is pure war mongering propaganda, making US intentions blatantly obvious and therefore critically alarming to all that value peace.

We have in fact already witnessed elements of this policy with how the Biden administration has meddled in the Russian-Ukrainian War; through its dominance in NATO it uses sanctions and the subsidization of Ukraine’s military. Sanctions and proxy wars are not diplomacy, they are the path to direct and expanded conflicts, or at the least a way to make enemies even of those who could otherwise be friends; they are also a drain on our economic health, one already burdened by a crushing debt. The Biden administration’s sale of arms and military supplies to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Yemen war, facilitating horrific death and destruction, is another example of this malignant policy.

Curiously, a generation ago it was the Democrats who criticized Republicans and Neocons for such war mongering; now we have a reversal, although partial as many Republicans support the Administration’s policies. There’s an old joke how Republicans are actually big government liberals too, but they do it cheaper than Democrats; unfortunately the results are not very humorous. The original idea for US policy was an American tradition of foreign non-intervention, a tradition now dismissed and long forgotten.

Historically sanctions, tariffs and other such trade policies have led to violent conflicts. Conversely, free trade produces an environment where countries that trade with each other are reluctant to go to war for fear of the economic losses and a desire for the benefits of peace; a sense of tolerance and of living and letting live grows with the economic progress that results. However, the state is essentially a concept of power, of competition, and gives rise to nationalism. Policies such as those espoused by the Biden Administration seek to confuse the wellbeing of society with that of the state. “What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?” asked then Congressman Ron Paul in his 02/12/09 speech before the US House of Representatives; great question, one that appears lately to be making some impression nearly 14 years later.

In my 09/08/20 post entitled “The Warfare State”, I mentioned the 1952 article “The Rise of Empire” by the famous American journalist Garet Garrett, who outlined what he called the “Hallmarks of Empire”, summarized as the dominance of executive power, subordination of domestic policy to foreign policy, ascendancy of the military, development of foreign satellite or proxy regimes, and last, but in relation to this current policy, is the frightening sense of  “What we will to do, that we can do.”, what Garret called “vaunting”, and its corollary of “fear”, that we will ultimately standalone against all the evils of the world unless we aggressively act.

If this all sounds familiar to anyone, it should; this was the theme of many of the worlds past war mongering regimes, and they all led their people to disaster. In all cases these policies were linked to the state’s dominance in society’s economic life.  As Mises so insightfully observed it is axiomatic that such policies can’t succeed without socialism; as Ron Paul noted “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” Such policies are extremely expensive, so in order to implement them, you need money, more than what can be obtained with a sound currency, so corrupt it, control it, and you have your war chest.

It is clear that Biden’s foreign policy statement is informed by those that understand that statism needs war because it can only survive with power, and to get power it needs the wealth of the nation, and to get the wealth of the nation, it will perpetuate war.  Notice how the Defense Department, while still unable to account for all the money it has spent, again got an increase in its budget.  It is a policy that, as George Orwell observed, “The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” Galileo Galilei.

When the NY Post first broke the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, I read about it first in the NY Times, who claimed then that the story was Russian disinformation, as did the Washington Post. At that time I discounted the NY Post story given that then President Trump began using it as the grounds for his campaign accusations of corruption against Joe Biden. The only excuse for what is now an obvious error by many, including myself, is that you could not trust what Trump said given his record of deceitful rants.

However, the story simply would not die. It was soon learned that Hunter Biden, in his state of drug and alcoholic abuse, had in fact simply forgotten that he had left his laptop in a repair shop; it eventually wound up in the hands of the FBI. We were then treated to brain numbing by a thousand micro-fact releases until the NY Times in March 2022, and the Washington Post in April 2022 both confirmed that the NY Post story was true as the information on the laptop confirmed the activities of Hunter and the involvement of his father.

How did such legacy newspapers like the NY Times and Washington Post not only fail to get the story right to begin with, outdone by a tabloid sheet like the NY Post, but why did they trash the story as nothing more than Russian disinformation? I admit that I was fooled at the time, and failed to consider that if the NY Post story was based on the information found in the laptop, we are talking about verifiable data, not “disinformation”. Apparently I was not alone as many Americans were also skeptical of a tabloid’s reporting and a known liar’s election campaign rants. It was a clear case of what John Adams said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The story keeps getting worse as more facts come out. There are emails and other documents on the laptop that address what can only be characterized as influence peddling. With Hunter’s reference to the “Big Guy”, this is no longer just a Hunter Biden story as much as it is more a Joe Biden story. What makes it all the more concerning is who was after the influence, and we get such disreputable players like Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt player locked in a never ending conflict with Russia, and for whom the US is involved in a proxy war sending them billions in arms. There are other countries like China and Saudi Arabia, not exactly friends of democracy.

The story does not end with the laptop. We are now inundated daily by legacy journalism, the administration and much of social media having a meltdown over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; the ostensible reason for this is Elon’s avowed policy to cease the censorship of the prior ownership, as if free speech is now a danger to democracy. As the new Twitter team digs through the past, it comes to light that there was a collusion to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story on that platform by none other than the FBI, who was tasked to advise Twitter to suppress any posts in reference to it.

Elon had the related files sent to Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, who then released them.  Elon did so because he was skeptical of how the major media outlets would handle the files based on prior performance; his concerns were confirmed justified given the outrage by mass media and politicians in both parties, who denounced the release as “unethical” and a “distraction”; curious comments considering the historical behavior of those institutions regarding this story. Given the mast head slogans of the NY Times, “All the news that’s fit to print.”, and the Washington Post, “Democracy dies in darkness.”, and the midterm election claim by the Biden Administration that the vote was about saving democracy, the hypocrisy of such reactions is astounding.

It is uncertain where all of this will lead, other than providing a political fire storm; surely there will be hearings, but I think Will Rogers will again be proven right about how congressional hearings are a sure way to get things out of the public’s mind. However, there is another dimension here that is far more important than another case of executive misconduct; we now have the FBI joining the list of politicized agencies like the NSA and CIA, representing a clear and present danger to liberty in America. Hopefully the fact that the top police agency in the US colluded to suppress the facts about this misconduct will not be glossed over in the paper chase of Senate or House investigations.

So now we have all the threats to Elon Musk and Twitter by both the political and media powers. While it’s hard to imagine that the Disinformation Governance Board would be put back in operation, based on the reaction to what will infamously be known now as the “Twitter Files”, the possibility can’t be discounted.  The fact that the NY Times and the Washington Post performed so badly regarding this story is just a continuation of why Journalism in the US is rated so poorly by the Reuters Institute:

“The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford’s 2021 survey of trust in media ranked the US last among 49countries with a media trust of only 29%. The majority of Americans surveyed responded that they found that the media has embraced advocacy journalism resulting in a quasi-state media where journalists are more bound to the government’s embrace of ideology rather than independent and objective reporting, and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation. They consider current media as an echo chamber rather than a reliable information source.”

How can our “free press” have fallen so low given the role of the very same Washington Post in the Watergate scandal with the disclosure in 1972 of Nixon’s paranoid activities against the DNC, or the NY Times admission and disclosure that the Bush administration’s claim of WMD to justify the invasion of Iraq was false?  There’s another story here as it is becoming ever more apparent that the culture of American society is fractured with most increasingly distrustful of its institutions, and some more receptive of its repression of liberty. Not too long ago there was a president who spoke to this issue:

“Freedom of information is a fundamental human right; for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” JFK