Category: Uncategorized

“If you are going to bluff, make it a big one” Amarillo Slim, Famous American Gambler and Author

Mikhail Gorbachev died yesterday, eighteen years after his partner in peace, Ronald Reagan. They were strangers to each other, even though they represented opposing sides to a seemingly never ending conflict known as the Cold War. Their strange partnership led to the signing of the INF Treaty in the East Room of the White House on December 8, 1987. Unfortunately, their hard work that led to what should have been an enduring peaceful relationship was not to be, but at the time it was a huge achievement that ended the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan is considered the man who won the cold war, and liberating various countries that had been devoured by the Soviet Union after WWII, and often called “The Man Who Beat Communism.” In true Reagan fashion of graciousness, tact and self-deprecation, he used the Hollywood jargon of only being a supporting actor, saying that “Mr. Gorbachev deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this (Russia) country.” They were both simply patriots of their countries caught up in the life and death conflict of their time. However the demise of the Soviet Union shows that the main protagonist was indeed Ronald Reagan, and the real supporting actor was Mikhail Gorbachev.

When Reagan began his first term in 1981, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan just two years earlier, ending détente and killing any chance for the SALT II agreement. As various historians who personally knew Reagan have written, he truly despised nuclear weapons as the biggest threat to humanity. He was intent on doing his best to end that threat, and he apparently had a plan to do so. What that plan was as stated herein seems the most logical, but not universally accepted; logic is often the orphan of history.

We have an historical meeting initiated by Ronald Reagan with Pope John Paul II. There was no public announcement as to the agenda. There were none present but Reagan and the Pope. The meeting took place in the Vatican on June 7, 1982. The meeting lasted almost an hour, but there’s no record of what they discussed. Odd though that the most powerful leader on earth, and the leader of the largest religion on earth, spoke that long together and there’s no record. But consider the fact that John Paul II was the first Polish Pope in history, that the Polish Solidarity movement was being crushed by the Soviet regime, coupled with the growing tensions between the two super powers, and that their opening public remarks were about such things, it can be assumed it was not a prayer meeting. Both men were clear in their disdain for communism, Soviet domination and aggression, and condemnation of the nuclear threat.

What followed does shed some light on the fact that these two very serious men embarked on a coordinated campaign against all these things; they definitely had a plan.  The Pope embarked on various visits to the Eastern Block, including Poland, espousing human rights and the morality of freedom. He was one of the most beloved Popes of all time and his mere presence in these oppressed countries had a destabilizing effect on the Soviet backed regimes.

Reagan had an equally risky role, an American style poker game of bluff. It was risky because he couldn’t pull a punch as it required him to create what could not be doubted as being real. His plan has derisively been called “Star Wars” for its fantastical concept of rendering a nuclear strike useless, making the Soviet advantage of such weapons obsolete with a satellite system of laser technology shielding the US.  It was called SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Reagan announced SDI on March 23, 1983 as a technological achievement not only for national defense but to make nuclear weapons obsolete. Some, especially the Soviets, wondered if in fact it already existed; it was Soviet doctrine back then that Americans were always methodical in their development of technology and lacked the deceptive know how for “active measures”. That doctrine was inaccurate, at least in this instance as SDI did not yet exist, and at best was only in a theoretical phase. In fact, despite huge funding, much of which was a red herring, it never came into existence. The Soviets never recognized it as a bluff, took it as an existential threat to their security, condemned it as aggression, and proceeded developing their own shield, but at a cost bankrupting an already sclerotic economy.

When Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet General Secretary in 1985, he was not looked on as being anyone radically different from his predecessors, but following various discussions and meetings with Reagan it became increasing clear that he was a revolutionary. Reagan was not a geopolitical visionary, although he did reject the failed accommodation policies of détente; he was a pragmatist who saw in Gorbachev someone he could work with to achieve a common interest. It was not the failure of either of these men that after their tenure Russia devolved into chaos, with Putin ultimately taking control; that is more the failure of those who followed as we have not had such leadership since then.

It was strange but great that these men were able to reach out to each other to achieve what was at the time a way to peace, but it is the Reagan legacy that he so intuitively understood the dynamics of leadership in others like Pope John Paul II and Gorbachev to make that happen. The real catalyst however is what Henry Kissinger described as “A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.”

“Give with a free hand, but give only of your own” J.R.R. Tolkien

As most people know from the books, if not the movies, the above quote is the wise counsel by the wizard named Gandalf to the Hobbits in the trilogy “Lord of the Rings”. While the books are fantastical fiction, this counsel should be well regarded by not only those in government, but perhaps even more importantly, the American people. It is amazing that many believe that the student debt that Biden forgave simply disappears, as if he is a wizard with magical debt disappearance powers.

The reality of the student debt forgiveness is that it’s actually a transfer of the debt from those that signed the loans to those that did not. It should be obvious that in order for someone to ethically give something away it needs to be their own. The U.S. Department of Education owns the guarantees on about 92% of the 43 million student loans; so by forgiving between $10-20K per loan means an obligation of $395-791B. The lenders are not liable for this obligation as they hold the guarantees, but should this debt forgiveness actually become law, the American taxpayers are.

Constitutionally the government does not have the money to do this without the legislative action of Congress to enact both the law and appropriation required. This in turn requires a source of funding through taxation or loans, which is actually the same thing. The Biden administration seeks to justify the executive action by citing things like The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, the HEROES Act of 2003, and various acts related to relief during the pandemic. However, there is nothing in these legislative acts that provides the president an authorization by Congress for this debt forgiveness. Recently Jonathan Turley, a respected constitutional scholar and law professor at George Washington University, stated that “President Biden is something of a constitutional recidivist when it comes to executive overreach. He has been repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution in his unilateral use of executive powers.”

Among Trump’s egregious failures as president was his ignorance of and disregard for the constitution, the rule of law, and basic ethical conduct in general. With Biden we have similar problems but cloaked in his never ending virtue signaling of caring for the welfare of the less fortunate.  However a simple look at the statistics regarding student loans debunks such noble sentiments. Approximately 60% of student loan debt is held by the economic top 40% of households, with the lower 60% having the remaining 40% of student loans. Some of those top households represent students with loans for graduate degrees, many in professional occupations like law and medicine.

One of the largest voting blocks for the Democratic Party are college students and graduates holding these loans. Biden’s behavior is not wizardry but a wanton disregard of ethics by burdening Americans with the cost of benefits for the wealthier of his party’s electoral base. This is the very thing that he and his fellow politicians accuse Republicans doing, who also justify such actions with equally dubious reasoning. It appears that hypocrisy is indeed an occupational requirement in politics.

There is another consequence of this travesty, one that is morally corrosive; loans are freely agreed contracts which should be honored. Both sides should understand the possible consequences of their free choices. Borrowers should repay, even if that requires making sacrifices, and creditors who make bad lending decisions should suffer losses; but the conundrum here is that the borrower is being forgiven the debt, or portion thereof, while the lender is incurring risks insured by a third party through guarantees that become the obligation of those that made no such agreement.

Further reflection requires an explanation as to why this situation is called a student debt crisis to begin with? These loans were voluntarily agreed to; there was no compulsion to do so, just a desire for an education to improve one’s economic wellbeing. The “crisis” occurs if it was not worth the debt because the degree obtained did not provide the employment with an income justifying the investment in the education received. There’s actually more costs that the loan because it means a considerable amount of time in college without working for an income. However that does not mean that others owe you for the choices you made. This is especially true for some of the dubious degrees some students obtained, like Memeology, Egyptology, Sexuality Studies, Popular Culture and a host of other degrees with dubious employment opportunities.

This action by Biden is just another in a history of such actions that erode all sense of individual responsibility. FA Hayek expressed this well in “The Road to Serfdom” when he said “Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”

“It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights, the right to education, the right to health care, the right to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery, hay and a barn for human cattle.” Tocqueville

All too often we are introduced by politicians and the media to new “rights”, which aren’t actually rights but demands for the expropriation of the rights of others; it’s as if rights are a zero sum game in which all resources available are divisible, regardless of who owns them, by the calculus of political power. The idea that such things as Tocqueville enumerates in the above quote are a right would of necessity mean they are freely available to whoever needs them. In reality this creation of such rights means someone must pay the cost; inevitably it’s the government who, through taxes, takes money from some to spend it to the benefit of others. Those on the receiving end of these rights, or more appropriately tax funded benefits, become in effect dependents of the state.

Such a system is a common element of socialism where the state becomes the arbiter of who has the right to the benefits it has created through the confiscation from those whose rights have been violated. Thus the beneficiaries lose their self-reliance and become dependent on and indebted to the state, and in effect they become enslaved; the benefactors, i.e. the tax payers, having lost the right to their own life, liberty and property, are likewise enslaved.

It is and always has been a parasitical relationship made possible by the majoritarianism of democracy empowering political elites the creation of what we know today as the “Welfare State”; this is a phenomenon that Karl Marx observed when he said that “Democracy is the road to socialism.” The process begins with politicians selling the fiction that the public is entitled to rights that are actually not rights at all, but a means for them to create powers that constitutionally do not exist. It’s a confidence game in order to make the public dependent on them, when in fact they are actually dependent on the gullibility of the public.

All scams require good marketing, which in this case is found in the idea of social justice, which is simply a catch-all best described by Thomas Sowell for what it is when he said that “Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice.”; it can mean or pertain to whatever the cause of the moment may be, but invariably it involves creating rights that previously did not exist, or rights whose definition has been altered in the Newspeak of the day. If that all it were, it could be dismissed as misguided compassion, but unfortunately in the hands of the state it becomes a tool for coercion. Apparently what socialists and progressives miss is that if you require compulsion to achieve your desires, then you are effectively more like a mobster than an idealist.

There is no shortage of proposals to achieve all sorts of rights from income equality to climate justice, but all such plans have in common the essential idea that there is a plan to be followed, so laws are passed, usually with such tortuous and incomprehensible rules and conflicting regulations that no one can be held in compliance. The government knows this, which is why the Inflation Reduction Act includes an appropriation of $80B for 87K additional IRS agents. It doesn’t take all those additional agents to go after the 1% or inforce a minimum corporate tax of 15%. According to the Tax Foundation, the U.S. is ranked number 31 out of 35 developed countries in terms of a comprehensible and compliable tax code; wonder why that is?

Of course there are other ways the US funds this endless array of rights, such as tariffs that are actually taxes on consumers, manipulated interest rates to provide for lower government debt service, and currency inflation in order to monetize debt. There are also sleight of hand gimmicks like selling the American people that the minimum 15% corporate tax is there to make business pay its fair share. The reality is that corporations will never pay taxes because taxes are the cost of doing business, and like all costs they become part of the calculation for the price of goods and services that corporations sell to the American people; corporations are in effect tax collectors for government.

Welfare is not only expensive but corrosive, a burden for the productive and a narcotic for the recipients and the power hungry politicians. There is an old saying by Ayn Rand about where this situation leads that we should keep in mind, especially on election days, and that is “The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.”

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

When Animal Farm was published in 1945 soon after Germany surrendered, all but one publisher had rejected the book as critical of regimes like the Soviet Union, an ally during the war. Four years later we get Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the term Newspeak was created. George Orwell clearly showed that he was an unrelenting advocate for free speech and a foe of authoritarianism and censorship.

The accusations that he was not any of those things because he was a socialist were an ignorant evaluation of the man. While he readily admitted to being a socialist in his early life, clearly from his own writings it’s apparent that he came to see the contradiction socialism had with his ideals. This is evident in his 1944 review in the Observer of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom when he wrote, “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stop at nothing in order to retain it.” His late life remark that in all politics “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” clearly illustrates where his intellectual development was headed; unfortunately, he tragically died from tuberculosis at age 46 in 1950, denying us more of his eloquently insightful novels.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four portrayed a dystopian society ruled by “Big Brother”, whose control over the populace was via the distortion of language he called Newspeak. So ubiquitous did this term become that it is described now in most dictionaries as “…propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings, and is the deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language used to mislead and manipulate the public.” Which brings us to our own “Age of Newspeak”; here are some examples.

While predating Orwell, few examples top FDR’s Newspeak rationale behind the 1933 confiscation of American citizen’s gold as a measure to benefit them; actually, it was in order to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve in increasing the money supply as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve Notes. In other words, FDR illegally expanded the money supply for his New Deal policies by pulling off the greatest gold heist in history.

Truman’s Newspeak that the use of the atomic bombs, contrary to all human decency and the advice of his military leaders, would save both American and Japanese lives, was actually a justification for a war crime, making the US the only country to date to use nuclear weapons on defenseless civilians. Truman again, on a Newspeak presidential directive involved America in a “Police Action”, which is what he called the Korean War. That Newspeak sidestepped the constitutional requirement of Congress being the only branch of government to authorize war; it set the precedent for Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq twice and a multitude of other lesser war crimes. In fact, the last time Congress actually declared war was during WWII. Yes, Newspeak can be deadly.

You really have to hand clever monetary Newspeak to President Richard Nixon, who truly deserves the nick name “Tricky Dick”. While he can be overshadowed on a criminal level by FDR, his reasons for eliminating the gold standard all together were to address the country’s inflation problems. Imagine, creating a purely fiat currency was sold as an inflation fighting measure!

The “Affordable Care Act” was a clever piece of Newspeak as it did not have an affordable outcome but caused health care insurance premiums to double. While the egregious mandate was declared unconstitutional and removed, the lesser known result was the elimination of all but four of the largest insurers with the administrative burdens government concocted, obviating competitive choices.

The 9/11 Terrorists Attacks resulted in the longest war in US history in Afghanistan, another military action without a Congressional declaration of war, and directed at the wrong country; it was Saudi Arabia who financed and manned the attack. We followed up on this error by passing “The Patriot Act”, a dangerous piece of Newspeak considering its unconstitutional violations of civil liberties.

The end game manipulation of US currency is QE (Quantitative Easing), a piece of Newspeak meant to disguise corporate welfare; it’s the genesis of our current inflationary dilemma, which took this long to manifest itself because the “Financial Crisis of 2008” caused the deepest and longest recession in US history, known as “The Great Recession”, because Newspeak no longer allows the word “depression”.

The COVID Pandemic was not the “crisis” Newspeak claimed. The statistic that one million people died of COVID over the 2 ½ year period of the pandemic is inaccurate as the data audited shows a growing proportion as having died “with COVID” versus “from COVID”. Taking that statistic at face value would represent a .30% death rate, compared to .55% for cancer or .53% for heart disease. The draconian mania of public officials with lockdowns destroyed our economy together with the monetary and fiscal irresponsibility that followed with QE Phase…what number are we up to?

Despite the horrendous damage to our currency and economy, the Biden administration is pushing for ever more spending plans, the latest entitled the “Inflation Reduction Act”. First we were told that inflation is transitory, and then that there isn’t a recession; such mind numbing Newspeak as we face record high energy and food costs loses any pretense of sincerity and leaves us frustrated with the tone deafness and callous disregard of reality.

The gem of recent Newspeak is the “The Disinformation Governance Board”, a perfect example of what Orwell was cautioning against in Nineteen Eighty-Four with the “Ministry of Truth”. Encouragingly, there was such an outcry that the board has been “paused”; hopefully this horrible dystopian idea will be eliminated permanently.

Unfortunately we still have the never ending Congressional hearings demanding that social media “monitor against disinformation”, which apparently many are, creating a proxy censorship as the constitution blocks the government from doing so directly. This development is most concerning, seeking to eliminate what once was the town hall of America.

As universities and other institutions fall prey to the culture war against free speech, which is now called a tool of oppression (an ultimate example of Newspeak) we need to understand that the greatest protection for liberty lies with the America people, not our government. Hopefully Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which has often been banned in the US, becomes mandatory reading in all school curricula.

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” H. L. Mencken

Increasingly, parents are abandoning public schools and turning to either private schools or home schooling. Contrary to what many people believe, the impetus for this trend has less to do with religion, and more to do with the quality of the education, and an aversion to indoctrination through curricula designed more to do with politics than essential intellectual skills. The awareness of those trends in public education became apparent during the pandemic when public schools shut down and turned to virtual instruction, which exposed to parents what was being taught. The reaction was a tsunami of parental involvement at school board meetings and increased demand for some sort of financial relief for alternative education, mostly in the form of vouchers.

The market size of the private school industry in the US grew 1.2% per year on average between 2017 and 2022. While public schools have existed in parts of the US since the mid 1800s, most states started in the early 1900s given the trends for compulsory education around that time. Prior to that education was almost entirely privately supported and controlled throughout the United States. While many of these schools were operated by religious organizations, there were also numerous secular institutions. Financial support was by directly paid tuition and alumni contributions. These private schools successfully turned out students who could properly read and write, and were knowledgeable of geography and civics. This system was widely diverse with various educational philosophies and a wide degree of experimentation making regimentation of instruction virtually impossible. The percentage of literate persons was not only large and increasing, but this diversity by its very nature enriched our culture.

As the trend toward public education grew, two phenomena resulted. First, the growth of government involvement and the resulting school taxes which financially limited the ability of many parents to enroll children in private schools, creating an ever increasing monopoly on education. Second, standardization of curricula and teaching methods created regimentation. Limiting choice to regimented instruction is not only a violation of essential liberties, but a dangerous manipulation of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of children. If there was any silver lining to the pandemic, it was the parental reawakening of responsibility for their children’s education.

While this growth of parental involvement is a positive development, the financial restraints are still a huge impediment for most Americans to exercise the liberty of free choice in this most basic need for their children. While progress on this issue is being made, it unfortunately faces huge resistance from government and the teacher’s unions, a crony partnership that has less to do with the wellbeing of children but more the perpetuation of their own power.

The alternative for parents who, until their financial rights are restored, do not have the ability to send their children to a school of their choice, but have the time, there’s home schooling. The latest census found homeschooling households jumped from about 3% pre-pandemic to about 11% by the fall of 2020, with current growth accelerating. Home schooling in the 1980s and 1990s was mostly among white religious conservatives. However, according to current CRPE research, it is becoming far more diverse with Black, Asian and Hispanic homeschoolers growing dramatically and with widely varying motivations.

Whether the parental choice is private or home schooling, the motivations are consistently about two concerns, i.e., the quality of public education, and the political manipulation of curricula. According to recent studies, including Colin and Alma Powell’s America’s Promised Alliance, public schools experience a 30% rate of students failing to graduate high school, hardly an endorsement for public education. The very idea of having government controlling education is creating a dangerous opportunity for its politicization. Joseph Stalin, a dictator well aware of the power of government controlled education, said “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

The arguments from politicians and teachers unions against parental choice provides a clear insight as to their motivations to manipulate education as a power tool in shaping their image of society, not in providing what is best for our children. It is parents that have the right and the responsibility for the welfare and education of their children, and it is this awakening among Americans that provides us the best hope for the future of liberty in our society. We need to provide the intellectual basis for our children to think for themselves in order to create a citizenry that again engages in civil discourse, devoid of the “cancel culture” endemic in our current environment; to do this we need education and not indoctrination.

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.” Tom Stoppard

Recently I had a conversation with a friend about the 2000 presidential election. The issue was whether or not Gore conceded the election for the sake of the political process and an end to a contested outcome. My recollection was that he never actually conceded and certainly not for any “greater good”.  At the time we agreed to disagree, but the issue got me thinking whether or not I was having a senior moment, so I read up on Bush v. Gore and discovered that my memory was still functional.

On further reflection I started thinking about the broader historical context of contested presidential elections as so many today think such events are limited to Trump’s contention that the 2020 election was a fraud; actually, there were quite a few such episodes, in fact seven to date, with three of those in the 21^st Century.

Following Washington’s presidency in 1800 we had for the first time the opportunity for a peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another. Jefferson and Burr of the Republican Party were tied in the Electoral College with Adams and Pinckney of the Federalist Party. During the bitter debate that followed in the House of Representatives where the deadlock would be resolved, Federalists and Republicans openly discussed preparing for civil war. After 36 votes some of the Federalists conceded to Jefferson, giving him the edge by one vote and avoiding a violent resolution.

Soon thereafter we have what Andrew Jackson claimed was the “The Corrupt Bargain”. In the 1824 election, Andrew Jackson faced a slate of many candidates thanks to changes in how they were nominated and how electors were chosen; there was John Adams, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and William Crawford, all representing the same party as the Federalist had ceased to be a viable political force. The net outcome was that Jackson drew the most popular and electoral votes, but not the majority of the latter to be elected. Again the decision was deferred to the House of Representatives. During that process bargains were made among the various candidates and their supporters leading to a victory for Adams by one vote.

The worst contested election in our history, what historians call the “The Ultimate Crisis”, was in 1860, when Lincoln faced John Breckenridge, Stephen Douglas and John Bell. Lincoln won the majority of electoral votes, and a plurality but not majority of the popular vote. Many historians attribute Lincoln’s efforts to attract a pro-Union constituency and northern Democrats, promising that he had no intention to abolish slavery where it existed, as an error that cost him a majority of the popular vote as it left abolitionists and others within his own party disillusioned, and that had he not done so he may have averted the Civil War with a more overwhelming election victory. Regardless, his election split the Union and therefore ranks as the most contested to date.

It took the infamous “Compromise of 1877” to finally settle the contested election of 1876. While Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and seemingly the electoral, Rutherford Hayes challenged the count. A “special commission” was formed to review disputed state electoral tallies. In the meantime Hayes made a deal with a Congress whose majority was Southern Democrats, the essence of which was the withdrawal of the last of the federal troops of the Reconstruction from South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. The Commission found for Hayes; nothing was officially noted about the deal but historical accounts tell a story without the need to read between the lines. 

In the 2000 election Gore initially conceded to Bush, but after subsequently learning that Oregon, New Mexico and Florida were too close to call, Gore recanted the concession. Eventually the count came down to Florida, and a recount which led to a Bush victory. The Gore campaign filed suit demanding a hand recount versus the machine one as stated in Florida’s election laws.  The Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Gore petition based on the famous “chad” issue. The Bush campaign appealed. Eventually, and for the first time in US history, it went to SCOTUS with both campaigns arguing their case for and against the overruling of Florida’s election laws. SCOTUS narrowly ruled (5-4) that, as election procedures are determined by the states, Florida’s election laws could only be changed legislatively. Further, SCOTUS ruled that there was a constitutionally mandated time limit for recounts and appeals which had already expired. Gore actually never really conceded, but stated that while he disagreed with the SCOTUS ruling, he accepted it.

The 2016 election was not the first time where the winner had the majority of electoral votes but not the popular vote as that has happened nineteen times. While the constitution clearly states that the Electoral College determines the presidential election, Hillary Clinton always refused to rule out challenging its legitimacy even though she admits that such a move would be unprecedented and legally questionable. Clinton dismissed Trump as an “illegitimate president” and stated that he knows that he stole the election. The investigation by special counsel Mueller concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump and harm Clinton, but that he found no evidence that the interference changed the result, and did not establish a criminal conspiracy by the Trump campaign; he did however state that the investigation established obstruction of justice. When asked if she would completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election, Clinton has to this day maintained that the 2016 presidential election was not conducted legitimately.

The 2020 presidential election was the first since 1992 in which the incumbent president failed to win a second term. Biden won a hard fought campaign in Georgia and the battleground state of Pennsylvania, reaching 270 votes and securing the majority in the Electoral College; final tally was Trump 232 electoral votes to Biden’s 306. To this day, after countless investigations which all showed that there was no fraud, and after a moronic riot at the capital, Trump still refuses to concede defeat. As the House investigation of the January 6^th riots, or insurrection of you prefer, goes on seemingly without end, and apparently with no proverbial smoking gun, a nation has grown weary of the denials and posturing of both parties.

Considering there have been 59 presidential elections so far, with seven contested and the results doing perhaps more harm than good, we should all take a step back and consider Mark Twain’s insightful observation that “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”

“A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.” Aesop

It was a grotesque display of an American tragedy that our president has again gone to Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, known as MBS, the crown prince, deputy prime minister, and effectively the de facto current ruler of the House of Saud, hat in hand to virtually beg for increased oil production. What makes this so tragic is that his own administration’s domestic policies stifling US energy production, but the worst part is that he is choosing to deal with what he had once correctly called a pariah state.

Has Joe Biden forgotten or failed to understand that the House of Saud is an enemy of America, despite his own government’s proof that they were responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed thousands of our fellow citizens, murdered the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and continue with the genocide in Yemen, and with the illegal and immoral assistance of the US military?

We were also treated to his hypocrisy by on one hand pledging continued support for Israel, our only real ally in the region, while at the same time providing financial support to the PLO, who continue to call for Israel’s destruction. If Israel is indeed our ally, then aiding and abetting their enemy is a gross betrayal. Israel could, and maybe should view the US as a doubtful friend, especially given the rhetoric from his own party condemning it.

The pain that has been expressed on the news by families and friends of those Americans murdered on 9/11 who witnessed this tragic event is testimony to a tone deaf and blundering administration that only adds to the discontent festering like an open wound. While I’m not a supporter of either of our major political parties, I can see why there is such certainty for what is called the “Red Wave” come the mid-term elections this November.

I say all this not only from a clear headed historical perspective of what has occurred, but from the personal anguish as the brother-in-law of a recently deceased first responder to the Twin Towers that day who suffered from a brain cancer being at Ground Zero, but from the loss of the many friends and associates in the design and construction industry who perished in the building collapse. I am angry with my government, I am ashamed of my president, and I am disheartened for my country to have come to such a dismal point in our history where our heroes are so disregarded and dishonored.

Now we must not only live with the memories and sorrows of these tragedies, but the shame our leadership has brought us. We must never forget any of this but we must learn from it, and teach our children that this is not the legacy we wanted and not one we should support in any way. As Dan Rather once observed, “But we cannot rely on memorials and museums alone. We can tell ourselves we will never forget and we likely won’t. But we need to make sure that we teach history to those who never had the opportunity to remember in the first place.”

“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.” Malcolm Forbes

Sage words from the most influential business journalist of all time. In an age that was much like the mindless green eyed envy of the progressivism of today, he courageously took a small and relatively obscure business journal he had inherited to become Forbes, the premiere business publication in America, with a sub caption famously known as the “Capitalist Tool.” With surgical skill the magazine eviscerated the business ethos of cronyism, the corrupt symbiosis with government.

It is no surprise that the vast majority of Americans are most concerned about inflation, whether it’s with food, energy, or shelter. They are far less interested in solutions to things like the war in Ukraine, abortion, green energy, gun control, social justice, or any other issue government or media put out there when they are faced with life support issues. Clearly the government is floundering by spinning solutions to problems that are at best of secondary concern to its citizens; no surprise then that the polls show such a low level of approval for this administration.

An axiom of good management is that in order to solve a problem you first must understand and admit there is one, clearly identify what it is, what caused it and then focus on solutions to it; the corollary to that axiom is not to be distracted by your bias about the nature of the problem, who to blame for it, or indulge in prejudices against possible solutions that may not fit your political narrative. In all things in life there are guard rails that constrain the field of possible solutions ethically, legally and physically, but to successfully solve a problem requires an objective focus, and that often presents the biggest hurdle, most often because of confirmation bias.

The lack of objectivity is so apparent regarding the essential problem behind the existential threats in food, energy and shelter that Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated. While this is understandable, it is creating another problem, and that is anger. While that may fuel the partisan agenda for some politicians, it’s a distraction from focusing on the problem, and hence the solution. This is not the first time that common sense is ignored in favor of partisan pandering, but this is certainly one of the more dangerous times for this to be happening.

What Americans are focused on is survival; that admittedly sounds like an exaggeration until we consider the simple fact that more than 40% of Americans are living solely on pay checks now, no more “stimulus”, and little savings. The government and media keep telling us how the economy is doing well because all the major corporations are in great shape with strong balance sheets, while small businesses, which not long ago accounted for 52% of employment, are failing in record numbers and Americans are paying record high prices for life’s essentials. We are given low unemployment statistics with little said about low participation rates. We are told that the Fed is determined to bring inflation down with higher interest rates but sees no cause for concern about a recession given the strong economy, despite the fact that there has been a yield curve inversion indicating a recession has already started.

Recently, while in Madrid for the NATO Conference, Biden chooses such an inappropriate venue to speak about the recent SCOTUS ruling on Dobbs which overturned Roe v. Wade. Further, why would he, as president of the US, denigrate its Supreme Court while at an international conference, and then go on to set himself up for failure by announcing plans to void the filibuster in order to attempt passing legislation to address abortion at the Federal level when the Supreme Court has already ruled that in belongs with the states, and which some in his own party will not support, and even if passed will not survive a constitutional challenge? The president and congress propose even more senseless spending and raising taxes, all of which will only exacerbate an already egregious inflation not to mention an unsustainable debt. The lack of focus is apparent except to the spinners.

What’s really bewildering in all of this is the dissonance of proposed solutions with the existential problems the county is facing; the public would be happy to hear the explanation if the president and congress can provide a direct answer without resorting to spinning another narrative that puts people in the awkward position of the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. We are way beyond the point of politely ignoring the embarrassingly obvious reality that the administration lacks either the ability or the integrity to address inflation.  

“People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.”  Will Rogers

The title of this post comes from an old phrase attributed to various sources, some biblical, some literary and some colloquial; it is very appropriate in describing the environment of the world today, including the US. We saw this in the summer of 2020 with the assaults and vandalism following the murder of George Floyd, the same with the January 6^th Capital Riots, the Uvalde School massacre, and most recently the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. As Will Rogers said, all this flying into a rage has resulted in bad landings.

Where does this psychosis come from that so many people act as if no one can honestly disagree with them, and if you do, you will be censored, vilified, cancelled, fired or perhaps even shot? There is no more civil discourse, just civil unrest. American culture has devolved into partisan trench warfare, an endless series of narratives based on nothing more substantial than derogatory labels followed by violence.

While there is such a thing as righteous anger, what we experience is more akin to narcissism; it does not seek to engage and understand but to destroy; it is cowardly and envious because it sees the success of others as a threat, whether that be in an election or court decision.  Thankfully, the majority of Americans are above the fray, but unfortunately we are all victimized by this sad state of affairs, and that can create an atmosphere of fear and hopelessness.  

The latest example of this with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade is a case in point.  While I am a pro-choice advocate, I always thought that the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision had a shelf life. In fact, I was surprised the overturning took this long as that decision was based on things not supported by the Constitution as the entire issue has no place at the Federal level. While I believe that it has no place at all with government at any level, apparently that will have no bearing with the outcome and I will have to live with that, as will many people in some states that will now ban or restrict abortion.

The existential problem arises with the violent reactions, which started with the leaked Alito draft. Actually, violent reactions regarding abortion started in 1973 with the attacks on clinics and doctors following the Roe vs. Wade decision, and now with the Dobbs decision on pregnancy centers. There is no real dialogue about abortion and with the recent SCOTUS ruling, only curious jubilation or unwarranted rage. The ruling was no surprise to the observant as the court was now decidedly conservative, and the leaked document was like a weather report after the storm, with the ruling of record a mere historical foot note about federalism.

What both sides on the non-debate are missing is the actual basis for any government involvement does not exist in the constitution even though the Founders were all aware of the practice. From colonial times to the mid 19^thcentury abortion was legal in the US in most states, although socially unacceptable to many. But it is also true that some of the Founders, in their legal capacity within their states, viewed abortion as a misdemeanor based on common law, particularly as espoused by William Blackstone, a famous English jurist and frequently cited thinker in the American political writings of the founding era. Blackstone believed that fetuses, even while in the mother’s womb, are legally considered born.

What could hopefully happen, now that the issue has been returned to the states, is that each goes about its business according to the will of its people but respecting the decisions of other states. Making it illegal to leave your state for another to get a legal abortion, and return to your own state is contrary to the constitution on many levels, but some states have already made that law.  

So far eleven states have now banned or restricted abortion, and likely there will be more, while many states will allow it under some guidelines and even provide fiscal support. Whether or not there will be cases of prosecution of women and their medical providers for an abortion remains to be seen, but if so such cases will likely make their way back to the Supreme Court by pro-choice advocates, and the outcome will likely spawn further conflict and violence. This is a movie that just gets endless remakes with no real progress in calming the polity of our country.

What we need is a thoughtful leadership that will help guide a polarized nation to a truly civil discourse on this, and other intractable issues, and back to a respect for the constitution and the right of all to their beliefs and opinions, regardless of how wrong we may find them; unfortunately no such leadership is on the horizon, and in fact the contrary seems more likely. For now we seem trapped in this Age of Rage, and as Thomas Sowell so insightfully observed “It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Dessert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand” Milton Friedman

The above quote has many iterations from 1951 to 1980, attributed to various pundits such as the William F. Buckley, Alfred Kahn and Milton Friedman, whose version is the most remembered and repeated. It targeted various ludicrous situations such as the Soviet shortages of just about everything, the Swedish lumber shortage, the Emirates oil shortage and our own housing shortage.

It is the anatomy of such blunders that speak to the phenomenon of governments creating a crisis that they then made even worse with solutions that exacerbated the very problem they created. The US is not exempt from this malaise, and currently is suffering from an energy crisis that clearly illustrates this.

The rising costs for energy, especially when you go to the gas pump, has a genesis that goes back quite a few years, but let’s start with the Bush administration and it’s illegal and tragic war mongering in Iraq, destroying a major source of oil production, which has yet to recover. Move then to the Obama administration and its grossly premature move to reduce the oil industry in the pursuit of green energy. Even with these issues, during the Trump administration we were still at the point where we were importing less than 17% of our energy needs, mostly from Canada and Mexico.

At this point a brief story to illustrate an important development I learned from my financial adviser. A few years ago he recommended that I buy stock in oil refiners. I was skeptical as back then oil had just dropped below $30/bbl, but he quickly corrected my ignorance and said to notice he wasn’t referring to oil producers but refiners, those that take crude and make it into useful products like gasoline, diesel and home heating oil. Apparently ever since the Obama Administration, refining capacity in the US had declined by more than 30% due to the regulatory hurdles in building new refining capacity as the old plants became obsolete; apparently the effective tool in the push to go green was DC’s glacial bureaucracy. I found that astonishing considering that the US was once the world’s leading refiner, but facts are facts and so I became an investor in refining. Recently those refiners’ stock prices hit the projected peak so we sold, more than doubling the investment.

Now there’s a clue here as to why, despite the fact that the last time that oil hit $120/bbl gasoline only rose to just about $4/gal. Refining capacity back then was relatively adequate, presenting no huge increase in cost in distribution, and demand was not as high as it is now. Yes, one result is huge profits much of which went to stock buy-backs. Further, those 900 oil leases that the Administration says weren’t being used were either spent, found economically untenable or inaccessible; that, coupled with the absence of capital over the last few years as the source for investment was mostly from pension funds and university endowments, nearly all of which dried up with the advent of the ESG investing mania.

Oil production is capital and labor intensive. This is not a problem for authoritarian and socialist regimes like OPEC countries and Russia where capital is in the hands of governments who weaponize energy, environment is a nonissue and labor is cheap; in the US we have unionization, capital markets and burdensome regulations. Add to this the current administration’s cancellation of major useful leases and pipelines resulting in declining domestic supply, coupled with reduced refining, and the US becomes, as it was in the 70’s, vulnerable to imports from countries not exactly friendly or dependable.

So we have the anatomy of twenty years of blunders giving us the crisis we are now in, but we hear nothing in the way of solutions from the Biden administration, except of course if you count accusations of greed, blaming Putin’s war in Ukraine, begging the Saudis to increase oil supplies, or proposing a Federal gas tax holiday. All of these things are irrelevant and easily debunked and none gets to the cause or constitutes a solution.

Take the accusation of greed leveled at the oil industry. True, American oil companies have record profits, but nowhere to invest them, so they buy-back their stocks, increase dividends, all to make their stock more valuable; while that’s their ethical obligation to their shareholders, it’s short money; long money requires planning for future development, but the Biden Administration has made clear the oil industry, along with natural gas, is to be replaced by the Green New Deal. Now there’s an old cowboy adage that’s appropriate here that goes something like “Don’t shoot your horse from under you unless you have another one to ride.” Maybe someday we will have sufficient green energy to replace carbon based energy, but it’s not today; you would think government would have the simple common sense of cowboys and not kill an industry vital to energy before we had a replacement. If the government didn’t shoot the horse out from under us, we would be a net exporter of energy.

Then we have the Putin narrative. We import less than 6% Russian oil, little of which is refined to gasoline and diesel. The real problem with the Ukrainian War in regards to energy is the US policy of meddling in the foreign affairs of other countries; in this case we are providing billions in military aid to Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in Europe and one with which we have no treaty or security interests. We then strong arm our NATO Allies into sanctions against Russia, incurring severe energy shortages for them even greater than our own, and bidding up the price for oil and natural gas. We then have the hubris to tell them not to worry, we will send them LNG, which some of them are beginning to realize is proverbial nonsense as we are actually killing that industry in our own country, and even if that were not the case, it would arrive too little, too late.

We have the embarrassing spectacle of an American President begging the Saudi’s to increase production, first with phone calls that go unanswered, then with physical trips with little results. They are not our allies, even with the unconscionable assistance we give them in their genocide of the Yemen people. This is not just a bad idea; it’s a horror show, especially considering that we have the resources ourselves if we would only stop shooting the horses out from under us.

As far as the three month holiday from federal gas taxes, it will make a slight difference, more so if you just abolish it altogether, but regardless Congress has made it clear that’s not going to happen. I think Biden was just looking for something to show that he’s trying to address this crisis, but in the face of the budget and debt issues, again created by the government, Congress has little appetite for tax cuts.

Where will this lead? Few economists are willing to take a guess, and the same with inflation, another government creation and also a strong contributing factor to the energy crisis. Despite what the government and the media tell the American people how all this is “unprecedented”, more and more are coming to realize that we’ve seen this movie before, like sand in the Sahara.