Post #1: The Current State of Affairs

Paradigm Misalignment

Shitshow Macro Issue 1 - November 2023

Money, war, religion, markets, geopolitics, social dynamics, the human condition, and societal implications. As everyone with a platform spends their time hyperfocused on single issues that draw you in, this is my attempt to step back to show the larger picture (and potential implications or concerns). 

The ever-changing media cycle seems built to give us the attention spans of fruit flies - but there are issues that we should take the time to focus on and understand. 

These are those issues.

*author’s note: this edition is likely to be longer than most, as it’s a required “level set” for where we are. Future editions will (hopefully) have fewer topics to focus on, with an ability to focus on each in more granular detail and how they fit into the larger picture. If you want to know where you currently are and are going, however, you have to know where you’ve been.

Topics covered in this edition

• Smart vs intelligent, paradigm misalignment

• Conflicts of interest (in & on media)

• The (trusted) information crisis

• Paradigm misalignment and warfare

  • Ukraine is not Charlie Wilson’s War

• The experts were wrong - again

• War in Israel is not for the squeamish

• War, Holy War, and forgetting that we all come from the same place

• Immigration and the border

• Epstein and the FBI’s “hide evidence” department

• Economy and markets

• US credit downgraded - again

• The derivatives dilemma (again)

• Did the WEF already win without the public knowing?

• Paradigm misalignment and markets

• How/why are the economists so wrong?

• Fake economic data from BLS

• Closing

Intro

The world is currently awash with smart pundits and “experts” who are more than happy to run their mouths about any subject that a media outlet will publish or news network will have them on to them talk about. 

There are several problems with this which have each been adding to the slow degradation of society and its information awareness for quite some time, but were highlighted beyond the ability to ignore when the COVID hysteria came. 

1. Many (if not all) of these “experts,” pundits, and journalists have conflicts of interest that are rarely disclosed. This goes for former USMIL generals and admirals, scientists, politicians, intelligence community leaders, and even the journos & their networks/outlets themselves. We’ll explore this more below.

2. There is a stark difference between “smart” and “intelligent.” Most of the information domain is currently dominated by smart “experts” (ability to memorize & regurgitate info) vs intelligent people (able to apply information & knowledge to new or unique situations or paradigms). We’ll also expound more on this below.

3. We are currently in an information crisis. Yes, there is more information available now than there has ever been. However, the high levels of bias, obfuscations, gaslighting, and outright lies that have been found in “information” sources like the media, Wikipedia, USGOV officials, and even AI have led to a “crisis of two information-based societies” where each half of our society has a totally different view of reality, and neither trusts each other. Guess what? We’ll get into that further below. 

I will try to leave my own biases, name-calling, and politics in general out of this, but we’ll see how long that can last. 

I’m personally one of the politically homeless, as I lean mostly Libertarian in my beliefs that the government has no right to meddle in your personal affairs & should be extremely limited. 

As a former warfighter, however, I understand the need for a solid defensive (and sometimes offensive) national strategy. I believe in fiscal responsibility and (very) limited government, but my understanding and appreciation of the “gray areas” of life leave me solidly outside the camps of any political party (or at least their current incarnations).

I try to always err on the side of personal freedoms and typically choose my support for political candidates or parties based on their temerity, ability, track record, and willingness to face and fix the most pressing issues that I see. 

As of current, I’ve been wildly disappointed more often than not in those regards.

Why Do I Have the Right to Discuss Any of These Issues?

As mentioned above, our society & celebrity culture is lousy with people who have large platforms and zero problems spouting definitive statements about things they have no experience in nor understanding of…so what gives me the right to give my two cents?

As the popular saying goes, one could call me a “jack of all trades, master of none” who knows just enough about many different subjects to get myself into trouble. I’m a former GWOT Green Beret veteran who went to Afghanistan (2x), Iraq (2x), and Trans-Sahel Africa, keeping a lot of friends from my former life and never ceasing my studiousness of global matters, history, and happenings.

In terms of geopolitics, there are quite a few who will quickly tell you that they saw all of our current troubles coming quite some time ago, but I’ve got my own bona fides as I started publishing a series of books calling it out in 2012:

https://www.amazon.com/The-Pact-Book-1-audiobook/dp/B00UD33VQ4

Full disclosure, we haven’t realized the full extent of what I foresaw as a rapidly increasing potential quite yet (invasion of the US homeland), but I think that on our current trajectory, we aren’t far off.

In terms of financial understanding, I’m a former Series 6, 63, and 65-licensed financial advisor, MBA, and have helped a handful of high-net wealth advisors and financial platforms with their marketing, which required a keen understanding of the financial and economic landscapes, as well as how those particular advisors perform that made them better than their competitors. 

I’ve worked for several Fortune 500 companies, including in the executive capacity, so I understand corporate speak and how big corporations think & act (for the most part - some are unique, but most are dominated by the apprehensive HR culture of today). 

This comes into context in several different ways, including constraints that companies put on what their workers can do/say, and the recent experiences of corporations forcing workers to follow medical diktats based on propaganda, poor science, and bad health practices against their will. 

That last part will have profound implications that we haven’t even begun to see yet, but some like Ed Dowd and Ethical Skeptic are calling attention to the “writing on the wall” of what is coming.

Tracy Beanz and her journalism outfit UncoverDC were way ahead of everyone, calling out the fraudulent PCR testing scheme and Fauci’s dubious & corrupt past deeds long before anyone else.

One of her writers worked in medicine and tried to blow the whistle on Fauci’s fraud and destruction during the AIDS crisis. Trying to call attention to what was going on during the COVID fiasco resulted in her being smeared and attacked yet again, in many respects by the same people who covered for Fauci the first time.

I provide the three short paragraphs above to drive home a point. 

I noticed long ago that the people promoting “conspiracy theories” that are actually baseless and post no threats to “The Machine” are allowed to say them as often and as loudly as they wish. Those that have actual merit & truth to them, however, are hit with monstrous attacks against themselves, their livelihoods, and their character.

Paying attention to those who are viciously attacked merely for speaking up is a near-perfect weather vane for knowing where the truth lies in our current media & political environment. So I do just that and juxtapose it against what those doing the attacking are saying - which is often easily exposed as the actual disinformation.

In terms of societal implications, I’m a father of two and a former dad to two others whom I helped raise. I care very deeply about the world that we leave for our children to inherit, so long-term societal implications matter to me intensely. I left the Army to start a family, and I’ll be damned if I let this world implode before they get to have families of their own.

For my nation specifically (the USA, in case this gets any readership outside of these borders), while I’ve not told many this, I have a reason to be quite invested in ensuring the USA maintains its position as the “grand experiment” and the “shining city on the hill.” 

I was adopted as an infant and raised by my family whose name I bear and love dearly. By blood, I am descended from one of the six men who signed both the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Another part of my bloodline takes me back to the king who united the Nordic tribes into nations, but that’s so distant that it almost isn’t worth listing.

I was raised in a highly patriotic family with a long history of military service and am related by blood to those who were willing to put it all on the line to give us our chance at freedom. Let’s just say that I have a very vested interest in helping people see the warning signs that things need to be fixed before they become unfixable and untenable.

In terms of seeing troubling issues forming far before anyone else, part of that curse comes from my ability to see things in the macro view rather than hyper-focusing on the micro, my understanding of human nature, behavioral economics, and being a student of history, mainly ancient religious and military. 

You may think the last part is an odd combination, but the more you study it, the more you realize they go hand-in-hand. If you are studious about our past, you can see the same exact societal and strategic mistakes being made in real-time, while the historically ignorant think that it’s an original problem. 

As the quote adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes goes, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

Or if you prefer a more modern mantra, there’s always Mark Twain with his quote that “history never repeats itself, but it sure does rhyme.”

With all of that out of the way, let’s get into my thoughts about some of the issues that you’re being told to fixate on as individual problems, which in reality have larger, interconnected implications that deserve understanding and your focus.

Smart vs Intelligent, Paradigm Misalignment

As I mentioned above and I’ve said quite a few times in personal discussions, there is a profound difference between someone who is “smart” and one who is “intelligent.” This is quite important, because smart people are exceptional at certain things that don’t require much understanding outside of their scope, but certain jobs absolutely require an intelligent person to do them. 

A smart person is one who is able to memorize a large amount of information or requirements and regurgitate, implement, or repeat that information in the appropriate situation/scenario. Most doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, coders, and politicians are smart. They have degrees from universities because they were able to study the books or materials they were assigned, memorize the information, and repeat it for their tests and professional certifications.

There are members of each of the classes above who are highly intelligent, and those are the ones who typically stand out for discovering or creating new & novel ways of doing things. For the most part, however, the modern requirements of those jobs require smarts rather than intelligence. 

They learn everything they can about a particular subject, go into professional life, will often specialize, and then learn everything that they can about that specialty. Their lives are busy, and they are deemed “experts” in their fields, so they often lack the need or desire to understand the implications of their particular specialty in relation to anything else. That is why they will refer you to other specialists if things venture outside of said specialty. 

We saw some of the worst detriments of this process during the COVID hysteria, in which data scientists were suddenly given the expertise to recommend shutting down the global economy, despite no understanding of macroeconomics, actual health at the tactical (or personal) level, education and socialization needs for children, the needs of small businesses for cash flow and customers, or any real-world consequences that fell outside of their columns of numbers, data, and pivot tables.

It should be remembered that Anthony Fauci hadn’t seen an actual patient in decades, yet his dictums were allowed to have actual doctors in the field & on the front lines censored and blacklisted for reporting what they were seeing on the ground, and what was actually working to battle COVID.

Remember these guys?

Drs. Dan Erikson and Artin Massihi, some of the first to sound the alarm that COVID was not what it was sold as

An intelligent person is able to apply their knowledge in new and unique ways, situations, and paradigms. Intelligent people may not have been straight-A students, often because they have myriad interests and focus more on exploring the world and learning new things than specializing in one specific field. 

To this point, most successful entrepreneurs have the ability to see things in the macro and respond to unique situations in real time which gives them the ability to do things that “experts” in the same field often cannot because those experts lack “outside of the box” thinking. 

The experts’ lives have been spent inside of the box, and they will fight anyone with enormous ferocity who attempts to look outside of the conventional walls of that box for a better way of seeing or doing things.

The doctors in the picture above are both entrepreneurs (they owned a large practice comprising multiple clinics) and intelligent doctors. They were able to quickly discern that what they were seeing in their clinics did not match the narrative that the public was being told, no matter how many scary reports were being plastered everywhere by data scientists in London and echoed by the WHO, the CDC, and the entirety of the media/political machine. 

If you’re in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment with a large set of variables and great consequences, you should choose the intelligent person over the smart one every time. That is not, however, how the managerial, bureaucratic, or expert classes see things. 

In my personal opinion, the world is falling apart because of it.

We are in a very scary time in our history, however, where the intelligent who have the temerity to speak up are often attacked with great ferocity when what they say:

• Offends the unintelligent

• Contradicts the official narrative

• Interferes with powerful business interests that are set to profit from a crisis

Conflicts of Interest 

In addition to settling for the smart “experts” to comment on highly complex issues that they don’t fully understand (much less understand the implications of), the current infosphere of media often allows those with extreme conflicts of interest to use their platforms to push the narratives preferred by those who are paying both the “expert” and the media platform on which they are speaking. 

They often do so without ever disclosing the check writers who are preparing their talking points, so the greater public often doesn’t understand that they are listening to an advertisement parading as news (to put it in a nice way), or an information operation meant to change their own personal beliefs on an issue (to put it more accurately). 

It has become fairly common knowledge that scientists, health officials, doctors, journalists, musicians, athletes, celebrities, and even late-night talk show hosts were paid to help promote the COVID shots that proved to be highly ineffective at best & dangerous at worst, but those were far from isolated incidents. 

Scientists in the 1960s took payouts from the sugar industry to lie and essentially wreck the American diet, pharmaceutical companies have paid some of the largest fines in US history for lying about the safety/effects of some of the drugs they push (Vioxxx/Oxycontin), and nearly every former US General or Intelligence Community official that you see in media is there at the behest of think tanks, defense contractors, or sometimes even US adversaries who are paying them to repeat certain desired talking points. 

Every financial “expert” in media and politics told you that everything was fine in the runup to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, even though there were a smattering of intelligent traders and financial analysts who knew the jig was up. 

We are in a reenactment of that same setup right now, partially caused by some of the same exact types of financial instruments, which I will get into further below in the markets section. 

It has recently come to light that there are multiple foreign agents who have represented (and some allegedly still owe allegiance to) either Iran or Qatar working in the Pentagon, DoD, DHS, and high levels of the Biden admin. 

There are US think tanks writing policy papers that influence politicians & their legislation that are funded by our adversaries, be it Qatar, China, or any others from the grab bag of nations that wish to remove the USA from its hegemony of the globe.

These think tanks and their mouthpieces are allowed to publish opinion pieces directly in some of the largest media outlets in the US and work in tandem with PR firms from DC and other places to run information operations against the American people to try to influence the public and lawmakers’ opinions. 

The issue is that there is often little to no pushback against these tactics, so most of the American public is totally unaware that they are being propagandized by monied interests, often to the detriment of their own interests. 

It is now widely known that a DC public relations firm led us into the Desert Storm war based on a lie. When Sadam invaded Kuwait, that nation hired a high-powered PR firm to goad the US populace into supporting its defense. 

The PR firm hired the daughter of an ambassador to go in front of Congress and lie about babies being pulled from incubators in hospitals and killed. This was repeated ad nauseam on the nightly news, angering the American people and giving the onus to invade Iraq (the first time). 

We know that The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a lie used to pull the US into the Vietnam War, and as we will discuss below, the current Ukraine War could have been avoided had it not been for Western interests convincing Zelensky to abandon peace talks pre-invasion.

All the while our media and social media were filled with former military generals, foreign policy “experts,” politicians, and journalists telling us that Russia was the aggressor and anything other than full acceptance of that viewpoint made you a “Putin puppet.”

There is something that should be important to restate before we move on: I am by no means a peacenik, as noted above. 

I have served in multiple wars, and I still have foreign metal in my body from it. What I and many other veterans have woken up to, however, is that our onus to defend our country against outside aggressors has, in many proven cases, instead been propaganda designed by political power brokers and financial interests. 

How many of our military actions have been in those types of situations? I don’t know, but one is too many. 

Men of my ilk will be the first to step forward if it means defending the ones that we love. But when it turns out to have actually been a financial or political scheme that sends our Brothers-in-arms to their deaths or to be maimed?

That is one of the worst crimes against humanity that I can imagine. 

The Information Crisis

Some know that they are being targeted by information operations but lack the ability to discern what is true versus what isn’t. Others know that the media has been caught lying or misconstruing the truth many times over the last several years and has never offered a mea culpa. 

Still others believe that all of the above are merely right-wing talking points with zero basis in truth. 

Roughly half of the country sits within the latter option of that described above. Since their preferred sources of media or information have never provided a mea culpa, nor told their audiences/readers about why former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith went to jail, why Andy McCabe, Peter Strozk, or Lisa Page were fired from the FBI, why COVID continued to spread despite mask and shot mandates, or any other number of issues, they are not even cognizant that those things even happened. 

Half the country knows about the investigations by the Intelligence Community Investigator General (ICIG) Horowitz and Special Counsel Durham and their reports outlining FBI malfeasance in the SpyGate and RussiaGate debacles (see: hoaxes). 

The other half only knows what they were told by the media, which is very little of the actual substance.

Half of the country saw videos of or at least knows about ANTIFA Black Bloc ransacking downtown Washington DC during Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the other half thinks it’s a conspiracy theory that ANTIFA even exists. 

Half the country knows about CHOP and ANTIFA taking over downtown Portland with non-stop riots for a month, the other half never heard anything about it. 

Half of the country believes that January 6th, 2021 was the “worst attack on our nation since Pearl Harbor,” but doesn’t know anything about the May 29th, 2020 leftist attacks on the White House that resulted in St. John’s church and a White House security shack being burned to the ground, nor the +70 law enforcement officers (Secret Service, DC Metro, US Park Police) that were injured in those attacks.

The same media that laughed and poked fun at the President of the United States having to be taken into the White House bunker in 2020 called Congress being evacuated in 2021 the worst thing to ever happen to our nation.

The media has also successfully memory-holed the 1960s-era leftist radicals who firebombed the US Capitol (inside of it), and even shot a Congressman in the face as he was descending the stairs to the rotunda.

That seems a bit worse to me than people walking through doors held open for them by Capitol Police to go on self-guided tours whilst staying within the velvet ropes, but the US media assures me that isn’t so.

In fact, they won’t even mention the leftist radicals mentioned above, as that may draw a juxtaposition to J6 that the media doesn’t want out there.

Only one side of any narrative may exist in our “fair and balanced” media environment.

It may, heaven forbid, even cause people to do a little digging into where those leftist radicals from the 1960s are today. 

How many are college professors, US government bureaucrats, or running the financing of progressive groups like BLM, the Open Society Foundation, and the Tides Foundation?

For half of the country, those historical truths don’t exist because their television didn’t tell them about it, and their social circles never discuss it as part of the understanding of the societal & historical context of this nation.

As I said, we live in two different realities. 

This is a larger issue than many realize, and it needs to be rectified in some way or another. There are two completely different versions of reality in our nation at present, and which sphere you reside in depends largely on what media either you or your social circles consume. 

I do not want to take this series into conspiracy theory territory, but every American who hasn’t should watch this interview with former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on the four stages of ideological subversion. 

It is his assertion that the Soviet Union began doing this to America several decades ago, and the state of our society currently lends a lot of credence to what he outlined all the way back in 1984:

You can debate or argue with people until you are blue in the face, but if they believe that your information sources are simply left/right wing disinformation or unreliable, there is nothing to be gained, and no resolution to be found through debate. 

We are in a massive “low trust of information” environment at the moment, which is precluding our ability for society to come down on any “middle ground” for the great issues that face us, as no one can agree on the simple facts or ground truths. 

Paradigm Misalignment and Warfare

Ukraine is not Charlie Wilson’s War

Tying several of the points made so far together, one of the most dangerous aspects of having a nation run by smart (but not intelligent) bureaucrats, defended by the same type of generals, and being informed by the same types of journalists whose own insights are formed by those with conflicts of interest, is that these intellectually unprepared midwits are trying to run old playbooks in new paradigms for which they are no longer adequate.

Part of this may be because we allow octogenarians to stay in office pretty much for life, whose decisions are made on opinions that are formed by twenty-something staffers with no real-world experience and lobbyists who are nothing more than walking conflicts of interest.

There is no better place to see the disastrous outcomes of these situations than Ukraine, where the Old Guard neocons, defense contractors, lobbyists for monied interests, and media taking money from all of the above convinced a part of the American public that running the Charlie Wilson’s War strategy from the 1980s would work again, despite significantly different US, global, and proxy-state paradigms.

For those who may not know, many attribute at least part of the Soviet Union’s downfall to the US-funded proxy war of funding the Afghan rebels (see: modern-day Taliban & Al Qaeda, including Bin Laden) to defeat the Soviets. Some will immediately see this and call it a conspiracy theory, despite it being so open-source that there was a major Hollywood movie made about it called Charlie Wilson’s War.

In Afghanistan in the 1980s, we had a USA with a powerful and adequate “projection of strength” strategy, an economy that was still quite strong on manufacturing and creating real things, and a partner who was wholly invested in defending themselves, pretty much to the last man and to the death in the name of their own Holy War.

This is a civilization (Afghanistan) whose fighters were bold enough to repel Alexander the Great and everyone since that has tried to invade and take over their highly strategic geographical location, and that fighting spirit has never left those willing to fight back against foreign invaders. 

As we used to say when I was in Special Forces, “There are still plenty of steely-eyed fighters in Afghanistan, but none of them are willing to fight for the ANA” (Afghan National Army).

While that was a joke and we did have some true hard-nosed freedom fighters who fought alongside US troops in Afghanistan, as the fall of Kabul recently showed they were the minority of Afghans who chose to fight on our side. That is a topic worthy of its own post entirely, and I hope to dissect that totally avoidable cluster^&$% soon. 

Contrast that operational environment with Ukraine, where in 2014 the US State Department (along with some help from NGOs that were funded by a very well-known Democrat megadonor & hater of organized society) funded, staged, and ran a Color Revolution that deposed a democratically-elected popular leader because he wouldn’t bend to the wills of the US (and NATO, but really the US). 

After their Color Revolution, a phone conversation between Victoria Nuland (who is still in a position of power) speaking with other bureaucrats and diplomats was leaked. It was arguably the group deciding who should and who shouldn’t be allowed to be elected officials in a nation that is supposed to be a sovereign, democratic nation:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

It should be noted that January 6th, 2021 seemed to follow the exact playbook outlined for US State Department-led Color Revolutions that have occurred across the globe, from Ukraine to the Middle East and South America - but we aren’t allowed to talk about those similarities. 

The more one looks into those events, the more questions one comes up with about what transpired that day.

If you haven’t seen it, the documentary Ukraine on Fire by director Oliver Stone which was released in 2014 gives a comprehensive understanding of what happened in Ukraine, and the many issues that the country has been known to have for quite some time. 

These issues (rampant corruption, Bandera Nazis present since WWII, a divided populace with little care for the nation itself) have been “known quantities” and were openly discussed prior to the buildup of Russia’s invasion of that country. 

Once the US machine decided that it wanted that war to happen, however - and it absolutely wanted that war to happen - any discussion of those issues was verboten, censored on social media, and blacklisted from polite society and mainstream media networks. 

This has largely been replaced by other stories online so it’s tough to find, but you may remember the headline (briefly) making the rounds when the UN’s Jen Stoltenberg said that the US & Boris Johnson essentially stopped Ukraine from making a peace deal with Russia before the war even started.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch-why-did-the-west-stop-a-peace-deal-in-ukraine/

The media blackout of Ukraine’s (many) issues is finally starting to lift (a little), now that there’s another conflagration to worry about in the Middle East (Israel). 

The documentary below will help catch you up on all of the things that we weren’t allowed to talk about for the last couple of years and may help you catch a glimpse of how much propaganda you were fed from all directions about Ukraine.

Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire documentary (2014)

https://rumble.com/v3m8ssi--ukraine-on-fire.html

“The Experts” Were Wrong (Again)

The true Ukraine war began nearly a decade ago when Ukraine & Russia began fighting over the Russian-speaking territories in Ukraine that voted for (and were given, via the Minsk Accords) their own autonomy (to which Ukraine decided to attack their own people in said regions). 

“The experts” came out in force prior to the escalation/invasion to change the narrative and make you forget about all of that.

Journalists with no experience/understanding of Ukraine were happy to “yes, and” with former Generals now on the payroll of defense contractors, their lobbying groups, or think tanks who fooled the US into believing every ludicrous idea that those of us with an even elementary understanding of geopolitics, military history, or strategy laughed at. 

The usual suspects who surrounded the 2014 Color Revolution (Lindsay Graham, Vicky Nuland, John McCain types) came out of the woodwork and dominated the airwaves repeating the same lines that many of us remembered from the runup to OEF and OIF.

“We have to fight them there so we don’t fight them here!!!”

You’re hearing that one again a lot right now, so please pay attention. 

Neither smart people nor midwits (who make up most of the US bureaucracy) are able to refocus their efforts on changing paradigms, so they largely just repeat the same exact playbook whether it fits or not. 

They told us that Putin would be pushing into Poland and taking over Europe. He didn’t.

They told us that Putin was dying of cancer. He wasn’t.

They told us that Putin was going to be overthrown by his own people, despite being extremely popular domestically. He wasn’t. 

If you don’t know the last bit, and can’t understand how that could possibly be true given all that you’ve heard about the current state of Russia and its leadership, here’s Konstantine Kilimnik (a native-born Russian and host of the widely popular Triggernometry podcast) explaining why Putin is so popular amongst his people:

Without getting into the micro of Putin’s most likely objectives with regard to his invasion of Ukraine and making this post far too long (when there are other great observers who have covered that in spades), there should be a few extremely obvious facts about what really happened versus what “the experts” told you was going to happen:

• Russia never deployed anything near its full capacity in the war. One could argue that was being held in reserve in case they were attacked by NATO, but it doesn’t jive with what the media or “military experts” brought onto their networks told us was supposed to happen 

• Russia didn’t level the major population centers or send Luftwaffe-style bombing raids over Kyiv when they very well could have

• Despite having had a pretty superior lead over Ukraine for most of this year, Russia didn’t push further to gain large swaths of territory - which gives a lot of credence to the (oft-censored) view that Russia simply wanted to keep their deep water naval base, take the land bridge to Crimea, and protect the native-born and Russian-speaking population in Ukraine from being attacked by their own (Ukrainian) government - yes, it was happening quite a bit prior to the invasion

The rampant corruption that we were told suddenly vanished when Russia decided to invade is now being put into the spotlight again, with reports coming out that Ukrainian bureaucrats and military officials are escaping the country and funneling massive amounts of US taxpayer dollars with them.

The average age of Ukrainians on the battlefield is now being reported at 43 years old, as they have resorted to throwing anyone & everyone into that meat grinder that they can, despite it being nearly certain that the show is over, and Ukraine should not have let the West and NATO (see: the Biden admin) talk them out of a peace deal early on. 

The Nazi problem with the Azov Battalion and Banderites running all over the country…that one never went away. I’m sure those chickens will be coming home to roost in the near future.

Hey, at least they’re armed to the tits now thanks to Lindsay Graham and the neocons. 

Long story short: “the experts” (who nearly to a man all had conflicts of interest) thought that we could merely repeat the Afghanistan in the 1980s proxy war strategy to beat Russia again, despite a paradigm that had massively changed. In their folly, they empowered Putin to build a BRICs powerhouse, make more money than ever off of his energy exports, destroyed the lives of an entire nation and generation (Ukraine), and they drained the coffers of the US taxpayers to a massive degree. 

All of these were known outcomes to anyone paying attention and looking at the actual chessboard from very early on. 

They are now starting to slowly make the pivot to the “Ukraine is unwinnable” narrative, and again will not admit that they were wrong (see: lying) from the get-go. 

With the current conflagration growing in the Middle East, it seems they may get away with it. 

War in Isreal is Not for the Squeamish

There is a great quote that I often heard during my time in the Army, as we traveled the world to some very interesting places, regarding taking the word of “the experts” on strategy concerning nations they’ve never spent time in. 

“You cannot understand a nation until you’ve smelled its dirt.” 

As I recall, it was attributed to a British general of lore, but I can’t remember which general, and I can’t seem to find an attribution for who said it. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of my buddies made the quote up and attributed it to one Brit general or another to add some credence, but it still makes the point no matter who said it.

I can talk about the Hebrews and Palestinians living together (tenuously) in Egypt as far back as the time of the Library at Alexandria, of which there is much written (see: Philo). We can discuss the different powers that have each controlled the region, and who does or doesn’t have a right to mandate who lives where. 

We could also get into the religious nature of that specific plot of earth, but each of those is a powder keg of argument and dissension with heels dug in on both sides (see: information crisis above).

If you’ve not seen these yet, Jocko Willink and Daryl Cooper (MartyrMade on X) have a series called The Unraveling via Jocko’s YouTube channel where they have been going into the history of the Israel/Palestine blood feud in great detail. 

The first episode after the October 7th guerilla warfare bloodbath via Hamas is episode 38, and they did a follow-up the next week (episode 39) further expounding on the conflict.

I will go into my own context below this link, but Daryl (MartyrMade) has, in fact, “smelled the dirt” of Israel, and has a far more educated view on the conflict (with nuanced insights for both sides of the equation) than you will see on any mainstream media programming, newspaper, or politician screaming for all-out war in the nation immediately:

If you’re willing to invest the time and really want to understand the full history of Israel and the region, Daryl (MartyrMade) has a series that he recorded for his podcast called Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem. 

It is long, but so is the full story of that piece of land. 

If you want to be able to speak or think with a full understanding of what has led up to this current conflagration, give it a listen:

War, Holy War, and Forgetting that We All Come From the Same Place

Watching how quickly people who were fully “dug in” on the Slava Ukraini issue pivoted to the Israel/Palestine issue brings up some important lessons for life and our current society that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention. 

The “out of Africa” theory has been largely disproven, but that still doesn’t change the fact that there is only one race of humans: homo sapiens. 

If you have any medical background or knowledge of physiology, you know this: there are three different phenotypes (genetic presentation) of humans (caucasoid, mongoloid, and negroid), but we are all humans with the same basic genotype (genetic makeup) despite some slight differences.

So if we’re all the same race of people with minor differences in appearance and sometimes major differences in language and culture, what is the time-tested way to get brothers or cousins to kill each other?

We’re seeing it currently play out with the conflagration in Israel, but not only between the Israelis and Palestinians.

You’d have to be living under a rock since October 7th to not have seen the massive demonstrations, protests, and violence that has broken out on college campuses and in large urban centers across the West. 

Perhaps the most important thing to notice is that an enormous number of secular atheists have strongly held positions on what is often seen from the outside as a Holy war (it’s not, really). 

If you listen to the MartyrMade podcast linked above - either his own 6-part series or the 2-part version with Jocko - you will have a firmer grasp than most about how this situation entails far more than most understand. 

One very interesting takeaway for those who believe this is an Epoch-long blood feud is that when the Zionists first began the move to establish Israel, the beef was not between Jews and Arabs. 

It was between Jews and the Eastern Europeans who had been waging pogroms of mass murder upon them for decades. 

Atheists will often cite the egregious atrocities committed in the name of religion - and nearly every religion has done it - as why they think that we Believers are misguided hypocrites.  

I am a firmly Christian faithful (although the first to admit that I’m by no means the best one), but I agree with the first part of that thought. The atrocities committed under the name of religion by the Spanish Inquisition (my blood is Italian/Spanish Jew/Nordic, by the way), the Romans, and many others are terrible.

As were those by the Ottomans, the Caliph, the Taliban, and before them the Aztecs, Persians (Zoroastrians, Mithrians, Islam), the Vikings under their religion to Alfader, the pagan Celts, and those before them, and those before them, on ad finitinum.  

Perhaps I will share my personal faith and beliefs at some point in these writings, and I guarantee that they are unique to many who read this. I said above that I am firmly Christian, and I’m also a Theist (believe that God takes an active role in human existence vs a Diest who believes He has no active role) and an avid student of ancient history, religion, and warfare. 

When we go through this in greater depth, I will bring the historical receipts for my own belief structure. God made me with a very inquisitive mind that doesn’t accept “just because” for an answer, so I’ve been searching for answers for most of my life. 

Many I’ve found, many remain. But that’s for another time and place. 

Removing the religious connotation from the current conflagration in Israel, there is a very important concept that people need to understand, and a removal of preconceived biases needed to do so.

With so many “conspiracy theories” being proven right these days, I see many online making the argument that Hamas was created and/or funded by one intelligence agency or another, thus removing some blame from that group.

While that is not without merit - we know that the Taliban was created, funded, and handled by the Pakistani ISI (their CIA), which meant that US tax dollars paid to Pakistan during OEF were actually being funneled to the people who were killing our soldiers.

If you want to go down that rabbit hole, with receipts, read Ghost Wars and the follow-up book Directorate S by Steve Coll:

​​https://www.audible.com/pd/Directorate-S-Audiobook/B075DJYSCT

We know that global intelligence agencies have created quite a bit of the chaos and blowback that we’ve seen in the world over the decades, and we will go further into some of the more diabolical ones below.

In this situation, however, it’s neither here nor there in our current moment.

The Japanese committed some absolutely heinous atrocities and war crimes during WWII. There is the infamous story of one of their guerilla fighters hiding in the jungle of the Philippines and continuing to launch attacks over decades after the war ended.

The resolve of many of their fighters was total, in a “to the death” way that most Westerners cannot understand (see: kamikaze pilots). Dropping the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended what would have been an immense level of bloodshed and brutality had the war continued and the Allies attempted to invade Japan.

The rate of recidivism among terrorists is near 100%, whether they are released from Guantanamo, proper prisons, or POW camps. The levels and lengths of programming that led them to their actions are not simply ideas that can be changed - they are fully baked in.

Hamas is no different. Most of them are not “on the fence” fighters simply taking a paycheck to fire pop shots at foreign troops in the way that we saw poor dirt farmers do in Afghanistan.

Like the Japanese in WWII, most of them are fully on board with the “from the river to the sea” ideology that means as long as they have breath in their lungs, their duty is utter destruction of Isreal and the Jewish people who inhabit that land.

If they get out of that land, they will continue what they feel is their duty wherever they go. DO NOT allow the media and midwit US politicians to convince you otherwise.

No matter where the group came from or who funded it, that is not a self-correcting situation. No ceasefire or peace agreement will change their minds or cause them to change course.

The leadership of Hamas is living in absolute luxury under the protection of (and in) Qatar, and I’m of the belief that head needs to be cut off the snake entirely. The Hamas fighters, both those who participated in October 7th and every one who makes up their ranks, needs to be removed from existence.

Moving them to the West (as their neighbors know the danger and refuse to take them) will not change that ideology, but will only import it here. They will not “change their minds,” as that ideology is too far baked in to reverse. 

Protect the civilians that you can, but allowing Hamas to continue its existence is only prolonging future conflagrations. That the group could commit the absolute atrocities it did on October 7th and not be wholly rejected by its other members and the civilian populace is proof enough that the issue needs to be resolved, in a method of absolute finality. 

That being said, I also don’t believe it’s our place as Americans to get involved. The Israelis have the military and intelligence capabilities to do what needs to be done without US financial aid or conventional forces. Our position should be a hands-off approach and allow them to defend their land and people.

The Biden administration has not taken this approach, instead continuing to release funds to Iran (further fueling the conflagration) and attempting to put constraints, both publicly and behind the scenes, on how Israel should react. 

As with the idea of allowing Hamas to remain in any capacity, this is only prolonging future bloodshed.

This is known, and so perhaps that is the administration’s desired goal. 

We will get into Iran and its proxy terror history in a future post, including Obama shutting down the multi-agency Operation Cassandra which was tracking their operations within US borders.

They had plans and a team in place to assassinate an ambassador at a cafe in Washington, D.C., and the Obama administration let them go back home to Iran.

It doesn’t take a lot to wonder how we go here when you know the history.

Immigration and the Border

If you’ve read my thinly-veiled fiction novels trying to call attention to what I’ve been warning about for the past decade (The Pact trilogy), you’ll know that there are two major root causes that I attribute to the worst American policies/outcomes so far, and the worst that will come:

• Corrupt politicians

• An open border

The first allowed the second, so that would be the true root cause in my mind. The second, however, opened the pathway for many different levels of destruction. 

Let me explain.

Those who understand warfare know that the “invasion” comprising large numbers of conventional forces is never the first tranche of troops into a combat theatre. 

When Americans saw the 173rd Airborne jumping into Bashur, Iraq for the OIF invasion, the airfield was already secured and surrounded by Green Berets and their guerillas. 

The initial hunt for Bin Laden and waylaying of the Taliban & Al Qaeda was enacted by 5th Special Forces Group and CIA teams. Why did the command decide to allow Pakistani police to block his escape from Tora Bora instead of the 75th Ranger Regiment as requested by the men on the ground?

That’s another barrel of monkeys that I hope to get into in one of these writings, as that decision prolonged the war for 2 decades. We had him surrounded and dead to rights.

Maybe they didn’t want it to be over so soon…

Of course, there was also the SEAL team that had Bin Laden in their sniper reticles pre-9/11 only to be called off by Bill Clinton.

And his Secretary of State was caught stealing those records when Hillary decided to run for POTUS.

But those are all conspiracy theories…right? Nope.

Getting back to the point, the open border was one that I knew better than most to be something that could only be left open for nefarious reasons.

Many will half-jokingly say that Democrats must be getting kickbacks from the cartels for drug and human trafficking operations thanks to the open border, but remember that the GOP also fought Trump when he tried to build a border wall.

The border has been a platform issue of the GOP for decades, and public sentiment has placed it in the top 3 priorities for Americans since the 1980s.

Why has neither major party made any real moves to seal or at least protect it, despite decades of promises to do so and it being a major issue for the populace?

Drugs and humans will always be able to be snuck in as long as there is a lot of money to be made. One of those makes my blood boil that it isn’t being fixed or even addressed, but that isn’t what terrifies me.

What does is the knowledge of how Special Operations troops, clandestine agents, and terror squads make their way into target nations. 

With modern radar, the long travel times by ships, and the unreliability of wind patterns, open borders are still the best way to get into a target nation if it’s stupid enough to leave theirs open.

Remember the Green Berets that I mentioned above who were already in Iraq long before the 173rd jumped in?

Wanna guess how they got into the country? 

They drove right across the border with trucks full of gear.

I was on a trip to Peru and Columbia just a few years ago, and I noticed something in Peru that I had never known about. The Chinese influence there is so great that Mandarin has entered the local lexicon in some ways, and there are Chinese restaurants everywhere.

Do you want to know what else China has in great supply in Peru? 

Warehouses, shipping, and logistical operations. 

Peru isn’t that close in proximity to us, but it is a coastal nation on the same side of the Pacific as California and Washington State. 

It’s no secret that China has been buying up port operations in the US and that our receiving docks only inspect a very small fraction of the goods that are shipped into them from international locations.

We know that thousands of military-aged males of Chinese origin have been streaming across our southern border this year. What if those Peruvian and other South and Central American-based warehouses have been shipping materiel into our ports for decades? 

It’s known that the Iranian IRGC (their Special Forces) has a weekly flight from Tehran to Caracas (Venezuela) where the terrorists are given new documents (fake US passports) and sent up north to the US.

Yet while our politicians have been screaming about a need for Ukraine to get hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to defend their homeland, nobody has cared about closing or protecting our own border since it became a hot-button issue in the 1980s.

In fact, both parties viciously fought the one guy who actually tried to secure it for a fraction of what we’ve sent Ukraine monthly. 

The $3bn that Trump asked for is also far less than the $450bn it was just reported that the US will be spending to house the migrant caravans who have been streaming across the border since Biden got into office.

Take a moment to think about that. 

Epstein and the FBI’s “hide evidence” department

Jeffrey Epstein’s (second) arrest was the first thing that finally opened many American’s eyes to the fact that those of us who had been screaming about child sex trafficking were not actually conspiracy theorists. 

We were just paying attention.

Many of those who are now willing to share the memes that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” or make posts and comments on social media asking for his client list still don’t know how deep that rabbit hole goes. 

There have been major busts quite similar to his in scale and their diabolical nature, including the law enforcement and media coverup that always comes afterward. 

If you’ve never heard of these crimes against children and humanity outlined below, click the links if you believe that your stomach and soul are strong enough to follow these rabbit holes of depravity.

If you originally believed the media’s immediate attacks against PizzaGate conspiracy theorists but now have questions after multiple members of the media have been arrested for child porn or trying to set up “dates” with underage boys…the links below are worth looking into.

• The Franklin Scandal (that ended up with former (GOP) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert called a “serial pedophile” by the judge that finally put him in jail)

• The Finders Cult (from the FBI vault, files released by Trump)

• The Dutroux Scandal (Belgium and international)

• Pizza Gate 

• Jeffrey Epstein (whose “little black book” included the name of a former (Democrat) Senate Majority leader with his name circled, which Epstein’s former house manager attributed to him “taking part in the festivities”)

  • Second note: the Shawn Ryan interview linked above is with the journalist who published Epstein’s “little black book.” Did you even know that was public?

• The (Sir) Jimmy Saville Scandal

I know that I’m sharing a lot of his content here, but there really isn’t anyone in our current dynamic who covers topics in the full historical and deep context like MartyrMade. I listened to his The Jeffrey Epstein Series in full last weekend, and it was extremely well done. 

While it is long, it covers all of those incidents listed above in great detail. To understand the scale & scope of the child sex trafficking issue, one needs to understand each of them together, and not merely try to approach them as singular issues.

When you see the same organizations involved in massive, far-reaching coverups that reach across oceans and long timelines yet are remarkably similar, it’s obtuse to see those patterns as purely coincidental. 

When one understands that nearly the same exact playbook is used to obfuscate, lie about, and cover up these massive child sex trafficking rings that occur across multiple decades and international borders, they can begin to understand that there is something far larger than isolated incidents of depravity taking place.

Here are parts 1 and 2 of his series combined into the same episode (3 ½ hours long):

And here’s part 3:

There are a lot of pieces of evidence that certainly point to Epstein being connected to intelligence and his operation being a blackmail honeypot. US Attorney Acosta has publicly stated that after Epstein’s first arrest, Acosta was told to back off because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

Take a brief moment to consider that there are, by law, only 2 levels of people who have the authority to tell a US attorney to “back off.” One of those is the Attorney General.

Ghislane Maxwell’s dad was a known Mossad and Western intel asset. There are rumors he was often used as a go-between for messages between Western and Russian intel agencies as well.

Professional investors and money managers have frequently remarked that it would be impossible for someone with the level of assets that Epstein claimed to control, and that would be required to account for his enormous wealth, to do so completely off the books and with no paper trail of trades. 

The traditional hedge fund management expense is called “2 and 20.” 2% of Assets Under Management (AUM) and 20% of profits. Epstein didn’t have a hedge fund office or team that he managed, so the scale of transactions and assets he’d need to amass the wealth he had would have been quite difficult for a single person.

And yet there are no transactions or investments, and nobody can seem to figure out where his money came from.

Eric Weinstein has given several interviews discussing the time he actually spoke with Epstein, and knew immediately that the guy didn’t actually understand the type of financial instruments and trading that were claimed to be the basis of his enormous wealth. 

Weinstein formerly worked in the investment office for billionaire Peter Theil, which is why a mathematician would have a comprehensive understanding of technical, large-volume asset trading.

And, of course, we have reports of multiple rooms on every Epstein property being wired to record video & audio, initial reports of the FBI seizing CD ROMs full of pictures & video from Epstein’s safes, yet all of that has mysteriously gone “missing.”

We can’t ignore, of course, the level of connections that one would need to get into a secure prison, disable video cameras, and convince two security guards to “fall asleep” at the opportune time to get rid of a problematic prisoner that people didn’t want talking about who or what he actually was.

This is all pretty frightening when you see the same hallmarks and fingerprints across all of the child sex trafficking scandals listed above, from the organizations and operations to the coverups that followed. 

Take a moment to consider something…

When evidence of things like those listed above comes to light, it is taken by the FBI and never seen or heard from again. 

I’ve become quite a fan of journalist Whitney Webb recently, and if you haven’t read her One Nation Under Blackmail book (parts 1 and 2), it’s not only excellently written and wonderfully cited, but it also jives with things that I’ve learned on my own through completely separate lines of research into different subjects. 

https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-Blackmail-Intelligence/dp/1634243013

I’ve been reading everything that I can get my hands on about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the WWII-era intelligence agency that gave rise to US Special Forces and the CIA once it was decommissioned post-war. 

A lot of people today believe that the FBI is a hyper-politicized organization that has been bastardized to serve as the American KGB at the behest of the Deep State, but I believe that is quite wrong.

They didn’t become that, they’ve always been that.

One of the things that I’ve learned in my research of the OSS for my latest book is that the organization came about roughly the same time as the FBI. Wild Bill Donovan was at the head of the OSS at the same time that closet transvestite Hoover was running the FBI.

Power-hungry and blackmail-prone Hoover was worried that the OSS would steal some of his power post-war because they had proven incredibly capable of hunting down spies, double agents, and even breaking into safes inside foreign embassies in the US when needed.

Out of fear of having to relinquish power, Hoover had his lackeys in the FBI spy on OSS agents while they were operating inside of the US. These gumshoes were trying to gather blackmail on war heroes who’d jumped so far behind enemy lines that they were the only Americans in the country, while the FBI had never left the comfort of the lower 48.

Webb cites many examples of testimony, documents, and books that allege Hoover had been blackmailed himself, given his tranny and homosexual proclivities at a time when that surely would have seen him fired and ostracized from society. 

So, let’s take a brief moment to piece all of these things together…

When politically charged evidence that could harm powerful politicians on either side of the aisle is found (Epstein’s blackmail CDs found in his safe, the Weiner laptop, the Seth Rich laptop, the Finders Cult docs, etc), it gets taken by the FBI and put into a dark hole where it is never seen or heard from again.

Hoover started the FBI with a penchant for collecting blackmail on Americans who were doing good for their country. 

US politicians have shown a tendency to routinely ignore the will of their constituents, and Senator Lindsay Graham was taken completely off guard earlier this year when he was told by Hannity that he’d co-sponsored a TikTok bill that would have provided far more domestic spying and censorship capabilities to the US intelligence community than even the PATRIOT ACT had. 

If you’re following what I’m trying to put down, it would seem to me as if it’s entirely possible that the CIA runs underage sex trafficking ops for blackmail, and the FBI keeps/uses that blackmail when it’s needed against anyone who would dare do something they don’t like (say, refuse to build a new FBI HQ that is bigger than the Pentagon or demand to know how many FBI agents & CHSs were present on J6).

It’s just a working theory…but boy are there a lot of pieces of circumstantial evidence that point in that direction. 

Maybe someday we’ll dive into the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was put on the Whitewater Commission to Hoover up the blackmail evidence that the CIA agent & asset “plumbers” were looking for.

If you missed the pertinent fact that most of the “plumbers” were connected to the Agency, that there was pretty solid evidence the DNC was running a prostitution ring out of the office they broke into, and that the group had maps & keys to and for the precise phone and desk that it was being operated out of…listen to this 9-part podcast series called The Fighter. 

There is a lot that you were purposely misled about regarding Nixon and White Water:

Economy and Markets

Domestic and geopolitics are both gigantic shitshows at the moment, but most Americans don’t seem to wake up or pay any mind until it affects them personally, affects their pocketbooks, or both. 

Welp, we’re there.

I’d like to add a gentle reminder, again, that every economist, financial pundit, and government agency told the public that everything was fine and the system was perfectly strong in the runup to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis until they couldn’t hide it anymore.

We’ll get into the fake data that is released by the USGOV and used to drive the global economy below. This is a bipartisan problem, by the way: nearly every administration for decades has changed how key economic data is collected and tallied, to make it seem as if they are doing a better job than they actually are.

Along with the fake data, there are some extremely dangerous credit and banking rules that have been put into place around the globe under everyone’s noses.

You thought that Klaus Schwab’s “you’ll own nothing and be happy” comment was something that we still had time to prevent.

A recent book published by an international hedge fund owner outlines how the backbone for ensuring Klaus gets his way may have been put into place by every major nation around the world without any of their populaces knowing about it.

By the way…did you catch Klaus’ interview that showed he keeps a bust of Lenin on his bookshelf?

The hedge funder calls it “the great taking,” and it’s terrifying if you understand what our financial markets and credit systems have become. The response to 2008 teed this up for them perfectly. 

US Credit Downgraded - Again. 

Sane and rational people see the US racing towards $34 trillion in debt and are getting extremely uncomfortable with the absolute refusal of Congress to slow down even a little. 

Senator Rand Paul has been doing his annual “Festivus Report” outlining some of the most egregious spending for many years, and the RandoLand.US account on Twitter (or X) has been going line-by-line through some of the massive porkulus bills for the past couple of years to highlight just how ridiculous some of the programs that US taxpayers fund around the world are.

While many in this country see the insane spending and immediately tie it to corruption by our government officials, that isn’t the only problem. To be fair, it is an enormous part of the problem, but it’s not the only one. 

In a previous position, a group that I founded was able to discover how taxpayer dollars, grants, and subsidies are laundered to fund the highly partisan and most radical leftist orgs that are responsible for much of the violence that you’ve seen over the past few years.

You didn’t really think those massive “protests” full of masked and violent young people who always seem to be able to travel to where to controversy is, stay in place for days, and have professional signs printed to wave were organic and self-organized, did you?

Besides the rampant corrupt and partisan “megadonors” who are actually “donating” your taxpayer dollars to highly partisan orgs, there is an academic theory called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that leads those who ascribe to it to believe that the US can never run out of money, so it doesn’t matter how much we spend.

These are the people who believe that government deficit spending is good for the economy, and thusly aren’t embarrassed when caught calling the 5.5% increase in government spending that was recently reported as “GDP growth.”

The grift really isn’t that difficult to see when you look at it in the macro rather than merely trying to focus on a single aspect of it.

The richest counties in the country are those that surround Washington, D.C.

Those counties aren’t rich because of manufacturing or producing anything real or of real, tangible value.

They are rich because they are full of lobbyists, NGOs, non-profits, and people whose entire livelihood is dependent on the government teet.

The more money the government spends, the more money they make.

To entice the government check writers to spend more, they find unique ways to incentivize them to do so.

“Foundations” that don’t have to follow the same reporting guidelines as campaign donations. Shell companies owned by family members (this is called “The Princeling Strategy” when done in China), and offshore bank accounts (a la The Panama Papers).

Gold bars given by Egypt to Senator Menendez. Diamonds given to Hunter Biden by Chinese energy executives.

These public officials don’t bat an eye at ensuring that US taxpayer dollars are allocated to their schemes, because both parties are getting rich from those very schemes. And hey, if you believe in MMT you believe the US can never actually run out of money because the money printer can just go brrrr forever. 

Unfortunately, the inflation that you’re currently living through, and failed US Treasury auctions that we keep seeing happen beg to differ.

The MMT zealots can believe this nonsense as much as they want, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to.

Moody’s got caught with their pants down in 2008 by giving AAA ratings to extremely shady derivatives that were built upon subprime mortgages and became nothing more than Wall Street gambling, which led to (a part) of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

Given that people inside of that firm actually understand economics, they aren’t MMT believers. As such, they’ve now downgraded the US Government’s credit rating twice because Congress has blown far beyond every benchmark previously seen as a rational metric that spending needs to stay below.

Along with Moody’s, the major investors in US debt around the world are also crying foul.

While most Americans mistakenly believe that China is the largest holder of US debt, that privilege actually goes to ally Japan.

That island nation has started to see the folly of its ways, however. Owning so much US debt has made their own economy inexorably tied to that of the US, which is becoming a very worrisome place to be as of late.

I was given an extremely interesting investment newsletter from a high-volume investor friend of mine over a year ago that outlined how Japan has backed itself into a corner with only 2 options to get out of it:

1. Screw over the Japanese people

2. Screw over the US

If you know anything about Japan, it’s pretty easy to know which of those options they will eventually choose. 

The nation has extremely low crime because it doesn’t tolerate it, doesn’t allow much immigration at all and will expel those who don’t assimilate or be productive members of society, doesn’t allow foreign ownership of real estate, and is the only true 1st world “honor culture” left on the planet.

They actually care about their own people. That’s wild for Americans to hear these days as it’s become painfully obvious that our politicians and financial leaders do not.

If you want to understand Japan’s complete aversion to allowing outside interests to corrupt its nation, here’s a short explanation of the teen who used a sword to assassinate a Japanese Socialist Party leader live on stage: 

So while those in DC are more than happy to subscribe to MMT because it benefits them (greatly), those around the world who have a vested interest in sound economic principles do not.

The Derivatives Dilemma 

I took a macroeconomics class taught by a former leader of multiple different Federal Reserve branches during his career, and as a former financial advisor and options trader I’m probably more tuned in to what different types of financial instruments are than most - and which ones are incredibly risky from the start.

If you don’t remember the explanation given for what caused the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, here’s the scene from the movie The Big Short where it’s explained:

Got it? Time to get scary.

Whether you call them synthetic CDOs, derivatives, swaps, or whatever new acronym they’ll make up, they are all a version of the same thing - bets on something that someone else owns. 

We’ve all heard of fractional reserve banking and how a bank is allowed to 10x every $1 of liquidity (through investments or retail (deposits)), right?

Derivatives are quite similar in a way, except they aren’t regulated to the same degree as deposits, and many today don’t have any collateral to collect if the whole thing goes bust.

Wanna know the value of current derivatives held by banks around the world today?

$7.4 quadrillion 

Yes, that’s a real number. And yes, many of those are uncollateralized.

To put that number in a context that people can understand, the GLOBAL GDP is around $76 trillion.

According to some of the current reporting that is out there, Bank of America on its own has more derivatives than the global GDP.

And that’s just one bank. 

This issue has actually been looked at by the “very serious people” in politics and finance, but assurances were given that nothing bad would happen as long as the banking sector was strong and there were no cracks in the foundation or crises. 

Guess what we’re in right now? If you guessed a banking crisis, you’d be correct.

One could say that 6 banks failing in the US this year alone would be a sign of some major cracks in that foundation. 

Why does that matter and what could go wrong? 

I’m glad you asked. 

Did the WEF Win Without the Public Knowing?

This is already getting longer than I’d hoped for the first posting, and as the point of these writings is to help people see the “bigger picture” I’m trying to avoid getting too much into the weeds.

This topic, however, has some pretty deep weeds. I’ll try to keep it as high-level as possible and include links where you can dive in as much as you’d like on your own if you want to know the specifics. 

They are important.

To begin, I think that we all know that the global economy, in its current form, is run on debt. For every debt transaction, there is a debtor and a creditor, the person or entity that takes on the debt and the other that provides the credit.

The systems, volumes of transactions, and amount of debt have grown to enormous levels over time and created quite a Byzantine and confusing amount of regulations, regulatory agencies, intermediaries, and processes through which much of this debt is transacted.

In our current society, some of the largest and most profitable companies in the world make their business in either data or debt, and the chances are pretty high that you’ve never heard of most if any of them.

I stumbled onto a book called The Great Taking via a finance and markets-related account that I follow on X called @FinanceLancelot. The link attached to his name will take you to the post/video in question, and it’s a doozy.

If this is something that interests you, the author has created a website for the book called TheGreatTaking.com, at which you can download the free PDF of the book. 

There’s also a Reddit poster that describes not only this book in some detail and links other videos that cover its sections, but also other great books like The Creature from Jekyll Island (a very detailed book about the fraud used to create the Federal Reserve) and a few others. 

You can find that Reddit post here. 

What I’m about to try to explain sounds pretty unbelievable to those who haven’t been going down the path of discovering the rampant amounts of fraud and corruption that have been fully built into all of our systems over the decades, so here’s a little blurb about the author to help you understand how he uncovered these things:

About the author

David Rogers Webb has deep experience with investigation and analysis within challenging and deceptive environments, including the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 80’s, venture investing, and the public financial markets. He managed hedge funds through the period spanning the extremes of the dot-com bubble and bust, producing a gross return of more than 320% while the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ indices had losses. His clients included some of the largest international institutional investors.

There are, interestingly enough, quite a few David Webbs who work in global finance, and even several who have owned/run/worked at hedge funds. Myself and others think we’ve nailed down specifically which one wrote this book, but by the author’s own accounting in this writing he’s tried to spend most of his life “under the radar.”

If your only understanding of hedge fund operations is through the show Billions, I regret to inform you that many of them try not to be as public as “Axe” in real life. Hedge funds are designed to provide a hedge against losses for institutional investors, and they typically don’t want the world to discover and crowd out the hedges that they use.

So, let’s dive in by reiterating the point made in the section above that while global GDP is around $76 trillion, there are $7.4 quadrillion in derivatives floating around the world.

Another important point to reiterate is that the global economy is fueled by debt, every debt transaction has a creditor and debtor, and derivatives can be shady “bets” on assets that somebody else owns.

What David Webb tells us in the book linked above, at a very high level, is that regulations and practices around the world have been rewritten and codified into law in such a way that any creditor can seize the assets of any entity they have issued debt to if that entity goes insolvent. 

We’ve all seen those videos, posts, and heard podcasts or interviews that outline how at the “top of the food chain” there are only a few companies that control all of the large companies in the US, right?

Guess what - above those companies are other global entities that issue them debt to conduct their transactions.

To put this into context, do you know how Blackrock became the powerhouse that it is today?

In the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, that firm was given a sweetheart deal by the Obama administration to take over the “toxic” assets that no other bank wanted to.

Blackrock was then able to take those billions worth of assets and “lever up” its portfolio. For those unfamiliar with the term, it means creditors were willing to allow Blackrock to use those toxic assets now sitting on their balance sheet and add leverage to invest far more in other activities than what the firm actually had on its balance sheet.

Think of it as fractional reserve banking but in the investment world. 

We will go far deeper into Blackrock in a future post, but it should also be noted that Blackrock is allowed to force its will on US companies through stock holdings that the firm never actually bought itself. There are plenty of reports out there that Blackrock “controls” the majority shares of somewhere around 95% of companies on the S&P 500 - but the company isn’t even using its own shares.

It’s using the shares of pension funds and investors who’ve bought shares for their portfolios through Blackrock.  

Here’s where this all comes together: over the decades, more and more “intermediaries” have been placed into the investment processes. It used to be thought by most investors that when they bought stock in a publicly traded company, that meant that they actually owned those specific shares of the company.

According to Webb’s book, this is no longer true. Not only does he report that US stock investors no longer even own those shares, but that derivatives (bets) have been taken out by most of the intermediaries inherent within the system of purchasing stocks as investments. 

At the first level of this reported change, US investors used to have “segregated accounts” which meant that the stocks they purchased were held by the brokerages they bought them through under an account that was specific to that investor. That meant they were owned by the investor, who was the only one who could do anything with those shares.

The reason that the Reddit post above and SuperStonk community that it was in is so important is because the Reddit Ape Army learned firsthand that this is no longer the case when their community got stiffed in several investment strategies. 

What happened in their debacles with Gamestop and Robin Hood are too deep to go into within this post, but there is plenty written about what happened for you to dive deeper on your own.

The point that is important is that, according to The Great Taking, US stock investors no longer actually own the stocks that they purchase.

The brokerages now keep these stocks and investments in “pooled accounts,” through which they can then take out their own debt against those book entries from outside creditors. The brokerages can then use that debt (levering up) to conduct their own investments.

Now we come to the next level of what this means.

The brokerages doing this on their own would be bad enough, but as stated above there have been multiple levels of intermediaries added into every financial process over the decades. According to this book, any of those intermediaries can also take on debt based on your assets to “lever up” and fund their own investment activities.

Remember, any issuance of debt (or levering up) requires both a creditor and a debtor. In this case, the debtor is taking on debt using its customers - or even someone else’s customers if the debtor is merely an intermediary - to lever up their own investments.

While this began in the US financial markets, the book reports that a process called “harmonization” was quickly implemented to “facilitate global finance” and spread the practice to all major financial markets in the world. 

After it was implemented in financial markets, it seems to have spread to nearly every type of asset that there is.

Did you know that the largest mortgage underwriters in the US don’t typically keep the mortgages they write for home buyers? Once the mortgage is written, they will quickly sell those mortgages to outside creditors who then own your mortgage. 

This came as a surprise to many homeowners in the US a few weeks ago when a company they’d never done business with had a security issue that meant homeowners couldn’t pay their mortgages online. Suddenly it became known that while they’d taken a mortgage with a well-known, “household name” mortgage issuer, their mortgage was actually owned by a company that they’d never heard of.

So now we come to the next level of this.

According to The Great Taking, the same process of intermediaries using book entry accounting to “lever up” and take on debt against assets they don’t actually own has spread to nearly every industry. Auto loans, mortgages, business credit, payroll companies, credit card companies - everything.

This is how the $7.4 quadrillion worth of derivatives ended up in existence. 

While this was going on, laws were rewritten globally, and case law precedent has already been set to enforce that any creditor that issues debt can seize the assets of its debtors when those debtors become insolvent.

The first case testing this was established when Bear Stearns went under, and Goldman was allowed to seize its customer accounts despite those customers having never done business with Goldman. 

Let’s reiterate a few points made above:

• It’s well-documented that a few multi-national conglomerates own most of the large businesses in the US

• Those large multi-national conglomerates take on debt to keep their daily operations running

• US investors, according to this book, no longer actually own their stock, and brokerages & intermediaries are allowed to take on debt against their stock

• Case law has already set precedent that a creditor can seize all assets of its debtor that goes insolvent, including customer assets 

• The “levering up” and derivatives practice has spread to all debt-driven industries 

  • If you take a loan out for something, it’s likely your creditor has used that loan to take on their own debt with a larger creditor

Here’s the summary that ties it all together: as many of these derivatives and debt issuances are tied together, they’ve rebuilt the “house of cards” that crashed the global economy in 2008. The difference is that now, it’s spread to every industry that uses debt or loans and has legally codified the ability to seize customer assets that were used to take on their own debt.

Was this what Klaus had in mind when he said, “You’ll own nothing and be happy?” Did he know this was being orchestrated behind the scenes with the ability for a few multi-national creditors to have the full legal authority to seize whatever assets they want when the next financial crisis comes?

I have some bad news for you: the next financial crisis is here, so we may find out soon.

A friend and fellow former Green Beret called EM Burlingame has a very interesting theory that I can’t stop thinking about any time I consider the issue stated above. 

If you’ve read The Fourth Turning (and all of you should if you haven’t yet), you know about the 80-year saeculum cycle that repeats through all of recorded history in four 20-year “ages.”

EM has uncovered a greater, 400-year “supercycle” (which would be every 5 saecula, for those of you who aren’t math whizzes) which upends the entire feudalism/ownership/global asset ruling systems that make up society at the time the supercycle comes due.

The Magna Carta was signed in 1215 at the end of one of these supercycles. 400 years later, between 1606 and 1699 the world saw:

• Jamestown, VA established as the first English colony on the American mainland (1606)

• First version of the King James Bible published in England (1611)

• The Thirty-Years War (Protestants vs Catholics - 1618 to 1648)

• City of Boston founded (1630)

• English civil war (1642)

• End of the Ming dynasty in China (1642)

• England returned to a monarchy (1661)

• The Great Plague that killed 75,000 in London (1665)

• French settlers moved into Louisianna and Mississippi (1699)

We are moving into the latest iteration of both the “Fourth Turning” of the end of one saeculum, and the 400-year supercycle that EM postulates right now. 

It is interesting how well that fits into The Great Taking issues listed above.

Paradigm Misalignment and Markets

I wrote above about how dangerous unintelligent people who get to run foreign policy can be given their inability to see or respond to paradigm changes. That problem is not resigned exclusively to government bureaucrats, however, and we’ve seen a lot of the same types of issues festering with financial markets.

The fabled 60/40 portfolio (equities to bonds) was a gold standard of the investing world for quite some time…until it went bust. 

It was one of the ugliest “it works great - until it doesn’t” lessons for many people who simply held to something they’d been taught by people they considered to be smart, and never bothered to consider that they may have been wrong.

Or, to be more specific, that the paradigm had changed.

The 60/40 portfolio was actually great for our former investment/economic paradigm, but not enough people noticed when the paradigm changed. This issue was compounded by the vast number of propagandists who insisted that we were seeing a strong market and economy, despite the fake data being used for those assertions that we’ll get into below.

Even more disturbing, however, is the possibility that the entire underlying structure of the stock market may be built upon wrong or fraudulent assumptions.

Again, I’ll try to keep this at a very high level for the non-traders out there. For those interested in diving deeply into this, here’s an interview between Mike Green (Logica Advisors, former Peter Theil advisor) and Grant Williams (RealVision co-founder).

Here’s the link to the episode if you’d like to listen: 

https://www.grant-williams.com/podcast/the-end-game-ep-3-mike-green/

The interview is a few years old (2020), but it’s still one of the most all-around intelligent and insightful interviews that I’ve ever heard that covers a few topics that concern the overall structure of the stock market, in multiple ways.

The topics that Green brings up are evergreen (unless they get fixed or the whole thing burns to the ground), as they cover some of the fundamentals that drive the market as a whole.

Here are a few 101 things for people to understand about the stock market before we go further:

• All of the “smartest guys in the room” of finance - professors, traders, pundits - subscribe to the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). Passive investing has changed that paradigm, however, and they don’t yet recognize it. 

• Far more options are traded on a daily basis than actual stock shares.

• The Black Scholls model is used to determine options pricing and is based on the EMH - and it may be wrong according to Green’s assertions.

• The bond market is far larger than the stock market.

• Passive investing, through which investors simply invest a certain amount of money at intervals has grown substantially over the years.

• According to Green’s models, there is a potential, albeit low, chance that the S&P 500 could go to $0 if certain parameters are met (based on currently inaccurate assumptions by the market).

• The stock market is no longer based on prices going up or down simply because more shares are being bought or sold. There are some incredibly complicated dynamics that underlie the market movement today.

• More trades are made on a daily basis by computers & algorithms than by humans.

Here’s my best attempt to cover this at a high level so the non-finance people can understand.

The EMH suggests that markets are fundamentally efficient. This means that arbitrage cannot exist, as all inefficiencies will be worked out of pricing nearly immediately. Based on this theory, if a stock or option is priced too high or too low for its actual value, some entity within the market will immediately capture that arbitrage opportunity to make a profit and bring prices back in line.

This fundamental theory is based on the practice that previous to passive investing, the stock market was based on people who were buying or selling stocks according to their actual value.

At our current time when 7 stocks are driving the entire stock market and their Price-to-Earnings ratios (P/E ratios) are through the roof, it’s hard to see anyone still ascribing to the EMH. Yet, this is what the top business schools, books, and trading firms do. 

In the pre-passive investing paradigm, the idea was that a stock would be sold when its price started getting too high (overvalued), and bought when the price was too low (undervalued). 

Passive investing, which made up nearly 40% of the stock market by 2020 and is run largely by two firms (Blackrock and Vanguard, who own the majority shares of each other), changed that paradigm completely. Yet nobody seemed to notice.

You see, passive investing doesn’t care about the price of a stock. Passive investing is done through funds (mutual funds, ETFs, or others), and they only have one parameter for when to buy and one for when to sell.

When inflows (client investments) come in, buy.

When outflows (redemptions or clients selling) orders come in, sell.

Passive investments do not care what the current price of the stock or underlying asset is. They buy when a client puts money in to buy, and they sell when a client wants their money back.

No EMH, Black Scholls, P/E ratios, or other calculations are used. 

To recap, passive investing, which now makes up over 40% of the stock market, doesn’t care what the price of the stock that it’s buying is currently at. 

When nearly every pricing model, forecast, and lesson teaching people about the stock market is based on the EMH that dictates prices and efficiency run the market, it’s not difficult to see the issue here. 

In addition, current regulations require that institutional and larger investors buy (or sell, depending on their strategy) hedges against their investments. Much like passive investing, these regulations don’t require that those hedges be at the EMH-derived price - it only matters that it offsets potential losses or market manipulations.

On top of that, while the stock market can seem like an overly complicated and amorphous thing, really it’s quite simple in the most macro sense. At its core, the stock market is simply a place where two parties meet for a transaction, and the price bought/sold is the agreed-upon price for said transaction.

There are periods of extreme volatility in which price becomes discontinuous (like 2020 when Green gave the interview linked above), which means in layman’s terms that the “ticker price” doesn’t simply tick from one point to another, but instead “jumps” because buyers or sellers are not willing to buy or sell near the last price.

Where this matters is in the fundamental difference between “cash on the side” for discretionary investors (buy based on stock price) and passive funds (buy simply because clients send money in or take it out). 

Discretionary investors traditionally hold between 5-10% of their portfolio in cash. This makes sense, as they want money in the account that is prepared to seize an opportunity if one presents itself. 

Passive funds, however, typically only hold about 10 basis points (bps), or 0.1% of their portfolio in cash. 

As the market moves more towards passive investing, it also means that more money is allocated into the market rather than sitting on the sidelines and waiting for the right price/opportunity. This means that more money is at play, which on the aggregate means there’s about 50x more invested directly into the market with passive vs discretionary (active) investing. 

Along with that 50x in assets invested directly into the market comes an extreme level of volatility, and a significant issue: what happens when the market is freaked out, but most of the funds have gone towards passive, and there aren't enough discretionary funds left to buy all of the passive fund selling?

As stated above, the “perfect price” for either buying or selling in a passive fund is simply any price at which the client wants to buy or sell. So when a large number of passive clients get spooked and want to sell, what’s the correct price at which those sales transact if there isn’t enough discretionary trading within the market to buy and absorb those sales?

In a worst-case scenario, $0.

There are of course “limit down” breakers built into the market now, but I would imagine that could make matters even worse. We’ve seen in both 2008 and 2020 that firms were perfectly happy to cancel redemptions rather than give clients their money back when the markets went “limit down” and clients wanted to cash out.

So imagine what happens if we get into this scenario and passive clients can neither sell nor get their money back? Imagine if the next order effect is that the fiduciary goes insolvent because there’s nobody to buy a portfolio that is cratering and a creditor decides to seize its assets, as discussed in the above section.

Alternatively, as discretionary (active) investors make up less and less of the market, what happens when they come to the need to unwind a large trade (sell a large number of shares) but it happens at a time when passive investors are either holding back their investments or their investments for the period are already made?

Again, holding only 0.1% in cash means there isn’t much - nor are the funds created in the way to allow - for them to buy those shares that the discretionary trader is trying to unwind, no matter how sweet the deal or price.

When there is a supply/demand imbalance within the market but a sale has to be made, there can be a gross price dislocation to the side of the imbalance. In this scenario, that dislocation goes downward.

To $0? It’s certainly a non-zero probability. 

I’m not trying to scare you, but there is another paradigm-changing effect that has occurred in markets lately that ties a lot of this section and the one above together, which is discussed by Green in the interview linked above.

Blackrock and Vanguard are both enormous, potentially market-moving financial institutions. As mentioned at the outset of the section (and will be covered in more detail in another post), Blackrock became a behemoth by getting a sweetheart deal from the Obama admin during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and then using those toxic assets on its balance sheet to lever up.

Blackrock and Vanguard each own majority stakes in each other, and are so large that they can often handle client transactions internally. 

To develop that a little more, when a client with a smaller brokerage wants to buy or sell a stock, the brokerage sends the potential buy or sell order out to the market to transact.

Blackrock and Vanguard are so large, however, that typically those transactions can be and are handled internally, from Blackrock client to Blackrock client, or the same with Vanguard. 

The banks that were called “too big to fail” in 2008 were so named because their sheer size and holdings could rock the market if they had to go into “fire sale” mode rapidly. 

Remember, the law of supply & demand drives asset prices, even in the stock market. 

Neither Blackrock nor Vanguard has had a “net sell” event yet - meaning they haven’t reached a point where there were so many sell orders at once that they couldn’t be handled internally.

As the firm grows, however, one does have to consider that happening is not within the realm of the impossible.

We are currently in the greatest transfer of wealth in history, as baby boomers retire, get sick, or die off from health issues.

The amount of assets that demographic contains is the largest of any demographic, and we are currently in a turbulent economic cycle with incredibly high inflation, rising cost of living, savings being depleted, younger generations needing help from parents or grandparents, and baby boomers looking to sell properties and move out of states like California, New York, and Illinois.

Most of the news and social media blips that you’re seeing are talking about the lowest home sales in decades, but what they aren’t talking much about are the massive numbers of price drops for listed homes in places like Palm Springs, CA, or across AZ where retirees are trying to get out of their current housing markets but still can’t sell.

What happens when baby boomers can’t sell their homes due to current mortgage rates, housing prices, inflation, and potential buyers unable to meet down payment requirements but those baby boomers need money to move, sustain their retirement, or cover healthcare costs?

They begin selling off their portfolios. 

If discretionary funds get crowded out by passive funds that suddenly start selling with no buyers to absorb the sales, we get into the territory of the events mentioned above. 

If either Blackrock or Vanguard gets into a “net selling” position and has to send a maelstrom of sales to the greater market, it can have some pretty massive and detrimental effects.

Although those two firms are enormous - imagine what happens if things were to get so bad that they become insolvent, and the creditors they used to lever up come to collect client assets.

Again, it may not be likely, but it’s certainly a non-zero probability. 

Because I’m no fan of the Federal Reserve, there’s an important note to highlight given all of the above. The Federal Reserve’s policies have massive effects on the greater markets, even though Fed governors typically have no history of running the types of large portfolios that drive the economy.

The Fed also uses historical data to determine its policies - meaning that all of its decisions are made based on prior paradigms.

As to the running theme of this post - that means that they have neither experience in, understanding of, nor forecasting abilities into a changed paradigm. 

There’s a running joke in the investing community for the absent-minded trader who sees patterns forming that led to trouble in the past yet says, “But this time, it will be different.”

It doesn’t typically work out that way, but perhaps this time it will. Again to the Mark Twain quote from the beginning of this post:

“History doesn’t often repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.”

How/Why Are the Economists So Wrong?

One incredibly annoying thing that we’ve seen so often in our current moment is a cacophony of pundits, economists, journalists, politicians, and others telling us that we shouldn’t “believe our lying eyes” and that cost of living is down, quality of life is up, and the economy is extremely strong. 

Paul Krugman hilariously put out a graph on X showing that if you removed the things that are actually required to survive in modern society (housing, food, gas, etc), that inflation was way down!

Others gaslight us by saying that inflation is currently at 0% when in reality it’s only at 0% increase over the past month (using lagging data and excluding the things it takes to survive)...but inflation also hasn’t decreased over the past month so it’s not 0, it’s still at the massively increased level that we’ve seen over the past year. 

So how could all of these very smart people be so wrong about such basic economic data that all of us can see with our eyes and wallets anytime we have to fill up with gas, buy groceries, or pay rent? 

I got a little taste of this in person when I was invited by a local professional group to listen to the economist who creates reports and studies for their group came to talk to their chapter last month. 

This group is for real estate professionals in Southern California, which is a pretty difficult group to paint a rosy picture of right now. Not only are mortgage rates locking a lot of people into their current homes and pricing many potential buyers out of the market, but California has a home insurance crisis at the moment that is causing a lot of harm.

California bureaucrats did what California bureaucrats do, and created regulations that massively increased the cost for home insurers but blocked them from passing those costs along to consumers. The bureaucrats don’t understand how business works, but the leaders of those businesses do. 

The quote I was given was that, on the aggregate, CA insurers are paying out $1.30 in claims for every $1 in premium they bring in. That doesn’t sound too bad for one, but if you consider the millions of policies across the state, and that claims for home damages are far more than $1, you can see the issue. 

As a result, many fled the state. I spoke to the owners of a few “household name” insurance offices, and one of the biggest ones that remained in CA limited the number of policies they could write statewide to a minuscule number. 

Others are threatening current policyholders that their insurance will be dropped if their roofs, plumbing, and/or electric wiring is too old and they don’t have it updated (by licensed professionals). 

One anecdote I was given by a franchise owner was that 128 policyholders were dropped in one region in a single month because their roofs were too old and they refused to get them replaced. 

This may tie in with the data coming out of financial circles showing that a large number of Americans have blown through their savings and are getting close to maxing out their credit cards. SoCal homes are typically older than most of the rest of the country, and getting that kind of work done can be a large out-of-pocket expense in a state that has a higher cost of living than most of the country already. 

Despite all of these things going on, the economist spent his talk repeating most of the things you’d see if you watched CNBC or read WaPo right now: the economy is strong, job numbers are great, inflation is coming down, and we see a bright future starting at the beginning of next year!

The economy is a very large wheel, and large wheels move slowly. That’s a given, and there are many unforeseen variables that can have positive or negative effects on the economy. 

I believe that I was at this meeting because I am the way that I am - I’m not one to sit by and allow people to blow smoke up my butt, so I asked a pretty simple question in the Q&A portion.

“If the economic conditions are doing so well, why do you think the US credit was just downgraded? Also, if we stay on our current trajectory and don’t reign in government spending, do you think there’s a possibility that it gets downgraded again?”

Boy did that change his tone. 

He was cordial and nice, and extremely professional. His change in tone and message, however, seemed very much like the car dealer who pulls you aside and says, “look buddy, I’m not supposed to tell you this but my boss isn’t going to allow you to get a good deal here. You should go down the street to the other dealer.”

We got into the softer-than-reported jobs market, the insane debt-to-GDP ratio that the US is running, the subpar treasury auctions that we’ve been seeing, and some other issues. 

It was like asking a logical and well-reasoned question knocked him off of a sales pitch and brought him back to reality. 

Why was that? I don’t know, I can’t assume his intentions, and I can’t pretend to know his motivations. 

What I can say is that he was smart and well-credentialed, having graduated from a top-tier economic school. He seemed quite intelligent with his ability to go off-script when pressed about information that wasn’t contained in the data that he was prepared to present. 

Whether he recognized the stark difference in the presentation he gave and his answer to my question, I can’t know. I do know, however, that he at least understood the dangerous path that our country is going down with rampant, uncontrolled spending.

He seemed to recognize at least when questioned that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) having to revise every single jobs number they’ve reported under the Biden administration downwards means that the job market is not as stellar as everyone is trying to promote. 

And therein lies the greater question: are economists, investors, politicians, and pundits so wrong about things that we can see with our very eyes because they are taking the fake data that is being reported as legitimate? 

Or are they simply reciting a script or narrative because they know any deviation will see them fired, ostracized, or losing potential speaking gigs and/or book deals?

Again, I can’t get into their heads and make assumptions as to their intentions or motivations. It is, however, quite astounding that we see so many professionals willing to outright castigate and insult the American public for complaining about inflation, rising prices, and low wage growth at a time when it’s so easy to see through multiple variables of daily life. 

People don’t deplete their savings & max out credit cards when the economy is going well.

Homeowners don’t willingly allow their home insurance to expire for unfixed repairs because they are so comfortable with their financial situation.

A plurality of the nation doesn’t cite a declining quality of life in polling responses due to the economy out of the blue. 

And yet all of the very smart people on television and writing articles tell us that we’re crazy for thinking that there is an economic downturn in our present moment. 

Fake Economic Data From BLS

There’s an inverse trend that I’ve been watching since around 2017 which is incredible to see and alarming that nobody else really seems interested in talking about.

No matter how you feel about the guy, we had some great economic numbers overall during the Trump administration. 

Despite the growing and positive numbers that we would see publicly reported out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), those paying attention to the markets and economy may have noticed something: a month or two after each set of economic numbers would be released publicly during Trump’s term, there would be quiet upward revisions made showing that the economy was doing even better than reported. 

These quiet revisions were of course tampered down even further with fake news doing all they could to print headlines claiming (falsely) that tax breaks were “only going to rich donors” or that “Trump was destroying the (insert marginalized class) community with his economic policies!”

Under Biden, we’ve seen the exact inverse. 

Every single publicly announced jobs report out of BLS has been revised down lower to show that the economy, unemployment, and new job openings under his administration have in fact been worse than what was originally reported. 

Often these initial reports are given much fanfare with front-page headlines and TV news segments on CNN and the financial networks. The downward revisions (and some of them have been massive) often receive zero fanfare or attention. 

I’ve seen some other anecdotal evidence from across the country that there may be several levels of fudging the data going on, even at the state level. 

It appears that at least a handful of states have changed their procedures for filing unemployment claims, with some even refusing to answer the phone and their websites making it impossible to file or report online.

If you can’t file for unemployment, the numbers can’t go up. 

When looked at as singular incidents, it could easily be written off as incompetence. 

Having these same types of things happen across multiple states, at the same time, while we’re seeing the BLS promote fraudulent data, however, is a totally different story and far less likely to be incompetence. 

There have also been scattered reports of job seekers saying that sites like Indeed and LinkedIn are crowded with potential job openings, yet people are quickly and routinely denied jobs that they are well-qualified for. 

Are those jobs real? Are they just being paranoid, or is this another level of fudging the numbers with fake job opening data?

Anecdotal evidence is simply a piece of the puzzle that can’t be depended on entirely or taken as absolute truth, but it seems to be another piece in a puzzle that is becoming very well formed at this point. 

Some wise people are beginning to posit that perhaps the political left who are currently in control are setting up a “win-win” situation for the 2024 election. 

They build up the false pretense of a robust economy and job market to make it look like things are running well under the current administration, and the fake data (plus some juicing by the Fed, that we’ll get into in another post) helps to drive the stock market to obnoxious numbers that have no true fundamental basis.

If Biden is reelected (or he’s replaced and that person is reelected), they can let the whole house of cards fall down and not have to worry about another reelection.

If Biden loses and another party comes into power, they inherit a mess that the political left can then use as ammo to campaign on for 2028.

In a normal political paradigm, that could be seen as standard political maneuvering and honestly wouldn’t be a stretch to believe. 

Like many things, and with the running theme of this post, however, we are not in the traditional paradigm that people are used to. We are not within the realm of normal politics at the moment, and things are getting pretty crazy out there. 

Closing

This first post was far longer than I’d hoped, and I’ll try to keep future ones shorter and with fewer topics. As outlined from the start, there was a lot required to get a “level set” of our current operational environment and understand where we are at the moment. 

I’ll try to put out new posts on at least a weekly basis. If this gains traction and readership I may ratchet that up to multiple posts per week, especially if important events come up that deserve insight into what they really are, as well as how they fit into the larger picture.

If this gets a large following I may add podcasts and/or videos, or perhaps that will be a move for paid members. I’m still trying to figure this out, and I’m open to suggestions from you as to what you’d like to see.

It’s my intention to keep this platform free to read, but with the ability for people to donate if they are so inclined and feel the content here is worth their hard-earned dollars. This first post has taken me several weeks to complete, but as I work it into my routine the flash-to-bang on new posts should reduce dramatically.

If you are so inclined and feel this is worth your time to subscribe for updates, share with others, or become a paid member, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Regardless, we’re all in this shitshow together. I’m going to do what I can to help you see the bigger picture and keep your eyes on the things that matter. 

Until next time,

RPL