Such are the AI world and collapsing environments at the moment

So, which mousetrap is it, artificial intelligence or environmental chaos? Humankind rolls the dice and they come up snake-eyes on either choice.

But being human, and having sole access to that ‘big brain’ we’re so proud of, we’ve chosen to kick both cans down the road for the foreseeable future. Indeed, we are mice, and mice are more attracted to cheese than the possibility of a sprung trap.

But one mouse, one sprung trap and one dead mouse does not rid humanity’s house of mice.

But hold on, you mouse trappers. Physicists were stumped for nearly a hundred years on something called the Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness Problem.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

A couple weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it successfully solved the problem ( one of the seven historic Millennium Prize Problems). The job was done in 88 hours by 10,000 autonomous AI agents working concurrently. Physicists and mathematicians are now asking themselves (and each other) if the profession they chose is no longer viable and if, in mid-career, they have become redundant.

AI, as I have insisted in a number of articles, is only a tool. I may be wrong, and much is no doubt at risk, but break-though tools have both thrilled and threatened humankind for its entire history.

• The invention of the longbow, prior to Europe’s Hundred Years War, was thought to be so deadly as probably the end of warfare. And yet here we are, six centuries later, killing one another with drones and hypersonic missiles.

• The invention of the steam engine sparked the First Industrial Revolution, powering factories, steamships, and locomotives It fundamentally reshaping labor (at their horror), global trade, and urbanization.

• Electricity became a universal utility. Powering the Second Industrial Revolution, it lit up cities, prolonged productive hours, and reinvented nearly every subsequent modern technology.

• Antibiotics revolutionized medicine and doubled the average human life expectancy in the 20th century.

• The Internet and World Wide Web reorganized global information access, interconnected humanity in real-time, and restructured the global economy, each of them (as we have seen) for both good and bad.

• America’s wealthy trundled off its industrial power to China, in return for profit, and the former middle class lay wounded and bleeding by the side of the road. A billionaire class emerged to replace it.

And now it’s Artificial Intelligence’s turn so, hang on to your hats, but don’t despair (yet).

Other risks are now hanging off the landing-gear of this wobbly AI helicopter. Mathematicians are worried, but what of physics and medicine? Might Einstein’s theory of relativity have been proven in days, rather than decades? Might the cure for cancer have already arrived?

When trying to evaluate the risk/benefit values, it becomes obvious that the value of a new tool depends upon the uses to which it is put. And that’s a very scary and unknown element.

An AK-47 is a benign piece of hardware, unless in the hands of a school-shooter. AI, which may open all sorts of roads to medical progress, might also be used for evil purposes. A madman might design a widespread outbreak of a deadly infectious disease, such as the Spanish Flu tThat killed 18 million people early in the 20^th century. That was under relatively isolated circumstances. But the world is an open space these days.

So, rather than opening Pandora’s Box, it’s mostly a matter of who is allowed to peek inside, and under what circumstances.

That’s a very large and currently unanswered question. It has been said that “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

Perhaps a ‘resident cat’ is the solution.

Or smellier cheese.

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Don’t take that too seriously, because the U.S. made damn sure it never signed any of those morally complicated international treaties, for fear they might come to bite them in the leg. Remember torture? Nah, we don’t do that.

But Trump has taken time out from plans for his aggrandizement of the nation’s capitol to greenlight a $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel. Interestingly, it’s you and I who are going to get the bill for that, regardless of our support or lack thereof for Netanyahu’s genocide.

And, by the way, don’t send me any outraged messages, because there isn’t a single grain of antisemitism in the criticism.

It is not antisemitic to criticize a government for its actions, although it does meet the definition to blame Jews for a genocide. They didn’t do it, their prime minister and military did. Russians aren’t guilty of what’s going on in Ukraine, either. President Putin and his military are. That’s not splitting hairs, that’s putting blame where blame belongs.

But the costs of this morally questionable transaction is yours and mine to pay for, due to an interesting little snippet of foreign policy.

The $2.8 billion is being made available through the U.S. Foreign Military Financing system. The program was established through the 1976 Arms Export Control Act and is overseen by the Office of Security Assistance within the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs of the Department of State.

Funds given directly to the country in question (in this case Israel) are paid directly by them to U.S. defense contractors, supporting the American defense industrial base. They are not loans, they are gifts, and once given, the Foreign Military Financing system is topped back up by tax dollars…your and my tax dollars.

Think on that for a moment.

God knows there’s been a lot of criticism since Eisenhower’s caution pertaining to the military-industrial-congressional complex. These funds (and others like them) are distributed outside that complex, but directly to its base. Those numbers aren’t counted.

And the spending by the Pentagon has, according to its Inspector General, been unable to account for upwards of $35 trillion in what they call ‘accounting adjustments’ in a single year (2019) to force its mismatched books to balance. Since then, its books remain unbalanced.

Getting back to the Israeli case at hand.

“The United States reserves the right to protect its national and international interests. Our commitment to Israel is ironclad,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. “Israel has the right to defend itself, and the United States supports Israel taking necessary action to defend its country, consistent with international law.“

That statement fails on at least three levels.

• No international agreement (to my knowledge) gives the U.S. the ‘right’ to protect its interests,

• Our ‘commitment’ to Israel is no more ‘ironclad’ than to any other nation we might admire, and

• Our ‘support’ is, according to the State Department, ‘consistent with international law’

As in baseball, three strikes and you’re out. But at least baseball doesn’t require any open-ended financial support, other than a ticket, a hotdog, and a cold beer. Nor does it ask the tax-paying American public for an ‘ironclad commitment.’

The military package contains 20,000 MK-84 and 20,000 BLU-117 bombs as well as tens of thousands of controversial one-ton bombs, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

Just a year and a half ago, in early 2025, Trump lifted Biden’s pause on shipments and sidestepped congressional review by invoking emergency measures to process a sale to Israel that included 35,500 MK 84 and BLU-117 bombs. The sale went through after bypassing congressional review.

Presumably, they used up all that hardware in Palestine and Lebanon.

“Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition,” unless it’s Ukraine.

The State Department does not confirm or comment on pending arms sales before formally notifying Congress.

And the Congress, is once again on an extended vacation (so they don’t have to attend to the public work). God forbid it would let ‘we the people’ in on the fact that the arms deal is our stick of chewing gum to chew.

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In many ways, Osama bin Laden accomplished every wish he had against America, and then some. That’s not commonly understood, because it’s very uncomfortable to contemplate.

First, and I guess most importantly, America is no longer an island nation beyond attack. An ocean on each side and a friendly nation top and bottom is comforting, but we’ve experienced a terrorist attack so abnormal and impossible to understand that the plot couldn’t survive a work of fiction. I doubt any of us who saw it will ever forget the images.

Secondly, and way more to the point in many ways, bin Laden accomplished an event way beyond his expectations.

What, you say? It took us a while, but we killed the guy, and there’s no way you can count that as a win.

I understand what you’re saying. It wasn’t a win, and in no way am I sympathetic. But consider his publicly stated motives:

• To attack America spectacularly, (he certainly achieved that)

• demonstrate that America was vulnerable, (spectacularly done)

• provoke an enormous American military response, (Iraq, Afghanistan)

• make that response financially and politically ruinous, ($8 trillion +)

• radicalize Muslims against America, (more externally than Internally)

• and disrupt U.S.-backed Middle East governments, (Israel, Saudi, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan)

• force America out of the Middle East, (not accomplished, but hostile)

• overthrow those governments, primarily Israel, (not yet done) and

• create a new Islamist political order (the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, called by some the budding “Muslim NATO,” representing a massive shift away from total reliance on a U.S. security umbrella).

Among the other costs.

At least 940,000 people, probably more, have died directly from associated wars, with several million additionally estimated indirect deaths. Tens of millions were displaced, and those numbers continue to increase.

Meanwhile, America blindly created something hastily called the Department of Homeland Security.

Outright panic created a piece of legislation no one bothered to read before its congressional approval, and it enormously expanded U.S. domestic surveillance.

We remain chained even today to the murky waters of that legislation by DHS, hooded and roaming the streets of our major cities and kidnapping whoever they want without even the flimsiest legal consultation. We deport at will, terrorize others, and put the lie to future president John Adams’ statement in 1776 that we were created as “a nation of laws, not men.”

We fought two major wars, one of which (George Bush’s Afghan war,) was the longest ever fought by America, five times the length of WWII. During those undeclared wars, we tortured our adversaries, established abu Ghraib, and operated an indefinite detention center at Guantánamo, all without trials. Guantanamo was chosen because it was not on American soil, apparently caring more about the soil than the victims.

All of this before the eyes of the world, a world that initially was 100% on our side, and willing to support a wounded America in any way possible. If that didn’t radicalize Muslims against America, I don’t know what would.

Osama bin Laden knew he could never destroy the United States.

His gamble was that, frightened and enraged, the United States would do much of the damage itself. If there was any win at all for bin Laden, it was that.

We Americans have for too long failed to recognize the damage we have done, and continue to do, all by ourselves, in the fury of our loss and mistaken belief that might means right.

Those who died on 9-11, and the many who have died since from its result, deserve a more accurate accounting of what they gave their lives for.

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There seems to be a broad misunderstanding among Altman and his fellow AI enthusiasts, like Elon and even Zuckerberg (who understands the least of them all), about what they’re actually building.

Meanwhile, it’s cringe-time for both the environment and the public at risk.

Let’s get the environmental foolishness out of the way first.

A partial (and only partial) list includes,

• OpenAI + Oracle + SoftBank and others. Named Stargate, it includes building an enormous nationwide computing system for training and operating increasingly powerful OpenAI models. Originally targeted at 10 GW of U.S. AI infrastructure by 2029, it has already secured more than that.

• Microsoft Fairwater / AI infrastructure network promises huge, interconnected AI “factories,” in Wisconsin and Atlanta, to support Microsoft AI and OpenAI-related workloads (whatever that means). The Atlanta complex is tracked at roughly 636 MW and Wisconsin at 369 MW.

• Amazon / AWS + Anthropic, Project Rainier. A gigantic Indiana computing complex principally supporting Anthropic. The current tracker puts it around 910 MW and more than one million Trainium2 chips.

• Meta Prometheus & Hyperion, Meta’s infrastructure for increasingly powerful Llama-family AI and Meta products (anyone out there know what Llama-family is?). Hyperion in Louisiana is being built toward an extraordinary 5-GW scale.

• xAI Colossus / Colossus 2 (before we even knew what Colossus 1 was) is Elon Musk’s Memphis supercomputer system for Grok (currently under investigation for undressing children). Colossus 2 is under construction and is being developed toward roughly 2 GW.

• Google Gemini + Google AI infrastructure plans to develop Gemini and integrate AI throughout Search, Workspace, Android, Cloud and Google’s other businesses (I guess that means GPS as well). Its New Albany, Ohio frontier facility alone is tracked at about 453 MW.

• Anthropic Claude is (or plans to) develop a competing frontier model with particular emphasis on reliable/safe AI and enterprise use. Although no one yet has defined ‘reliable/safe,’ Amazon is providing much of its enormous computing base through Rainier.

• NVIDIA’s AI computing platform is somewhat different: Different that what, one might ask, but rather than principally competing with ChatGPT, it supplies the GPUs, networking and systems upon which much of everybody else’s AI is built. It is also directly involved in some enormous new AI campuses.

And, of course, it’s the enormity and power usage and groundwater supplies and lack of definition of terms and even who pays and who benefits that has the American public scared to death (or, if not death, at least environmental destruction).

Who provides the permitting for all these unknown knowns, and who’s in charge if the electric grid fails and the water-table disappears?

America (my sources tell me) is presently engaged in thousands of separate artificial-intelligence projects, but the race for genuinely advanced AI is concentrated in perhaps a dozen corporate and government empires—OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, xAI, NVIDIA and the federal defense and scientific establishments foremost among them.

At what cost?

No one really knows, but our largest technology companies are now committing something on the order of three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year to capital investment, principally driven by the Las Vegas-style race to build AI, while other unknown quantities of individual multi-year AI infrastructure programs are being measured in hundreds of billions more.

A billion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.

In this private shell-game, using (apparently) some government, some investment, and some private money, who pays when some (or all) of it goes south?

No one is actually telling us in all this murky water, but the murk makes 2008 look like a day at the beach. No one told us then either.

But, there are indications,

• Tech shareholders lose first through falling share prices and impaired investments.

• Data-center owners and their equity investors take losses if facilities become worth less than their construction cost.

• Bondholders and private-credit investors get hit if borrowers cannot service the debt. Those investors include funds ultimately containing pension (your money), retirement (your money again) and insurance money.

• Banks can be exposed through loans, credit facilities and financing supplied to those private-credit structures (smacks of ‘too big to fail,’ for me).

• Employees and suppliers (your money) pay through layoffs, cancelled construction and contracts.

• Communities and utilities can be left with infrastructure built around demand that never materializes (your losses).

• And there, at the very end, the taxpayer is already standing named as a jay-bird behind the curtain.

Federal policy (that’s you and me) explicitly permits loans, loan guarantees, grants and tax incentives for qualifying data-center and related projects. Government is also financing power infrastructure (you and me again) associated with rising AI electricity demand; for example, DOE recently approved up to $1.9 billion for restarting an Iowa nuclear plant whose output Google has contracted to buy.

No guarantor stands between you and me in those obligations. We are entirely naked, and standing by the curb in old clothes.

The other shoe to drop that fits no one’s foot.

Are these actually independent AI projects, or are we watching perhaps eight or ten organizations (think Google, Musk, Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg) constructing a privately owned infrastructure that will dominate the American economy?

Interesting question. I suspect they are. They (and many other billionaires) already own the Congress, Supreme Court, presidency, most major corporations, as well as nearly all media organizations.

Why should we think otherwise?

Used in the best interests of the public, these labs could create a purpose-built plumber’s interface, preparing a daily schedule with tools and parts lists, keep customers up-to-date on expected arrival times, take incoming calls and schedule new appointments in open slots, and then send out all the bills.

I’ve heard no one suggest that the wreckage to communities by accommodating datacenters would lead to that.

It seems they would be more inclined toward automating everything not tied down, and sending workers home. No plumber’s interface will exist unless coders (and those who direct them) understand both the technology andthe need for time to understand the plumber.

It may turn out that Big Tech prefers to ‘move fast and break things.’

Are we the ‘things’ to be broken, or merely the ‘things to pay the bills when other things get broken?’

There are a thousand players in this shell-game, and only one or two will survive.

Even Las Vegas provides better odds than that.

Someone is going to have to pick up the lost loser-trillions.

Betcha we both know who that will be…

…and it ain’t the Tech-Bros.

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Yeah well, I’m not sure anyone could count them from memory, without taking time to consult an AI source. That tells me you’ll probably need one of those articulated, double-long city buses that are in such favor these days.

Even so, The Cabinet names that belong in the discussion are:

• Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security. Trump threw her under in March of 2026 and shifted her to an envoy position.

• Pam Bondi, Attorney General. Trump ousted her in April of 2026. His public announcement actually praised her as a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend.” That’s what loyalty gets you.

• Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Secretary of Labor. Less known to the public, she resigned under pressure in April.

• Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, Cabinet-level. She announced her departure rather than being publicly fired, so crawled under the bus before being thrown.

Beyond the Cabinet, the numbers build:

Seventeen inspectors general were summarily fired in January 2025, and Trump failed to provide the legally required detailed reasons and advance notice.

As the beat went on, independent-agency officials got he hook, including Rebecca Slaughter, Alvaro Bedoya, Gwynne Wilcox, Cathy Harris, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels.

Then, of course, there’s senior military leadership.

By September 2026, more than two dozen senior military officers had been forced out during the Trump/Hegseth Pentagon shake-up. Concentrating on only the women senior officers, the list would include,

• Adm. Lisa Franchetti — U.S. Navy, four-star admiral. Chief of Naval Operations and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was the first woman ever to lead the Navy and the first woman on the Joint Chiefs. Removed in February 2025 without a specific individual explanation.
  
  Wow!

• Adm. Linda Fagan — U.S. Coast Guard, four-star admiral. Commandant of the Coast Guard and the first woman in American history to lead a branch of the armed forces. Fired January 20, 2025. Unlike Franchetti, the administration did state reasons for Fagan’s dismissal, including alleged leadership and operational deficiencies and excessive emphasis on DEI. Naughty, naughty.

• Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield — U.S. Navy, three-star admiral. U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee. Fired in April, 2025. NATO wasn’t high on the Prez’s list at the time.

• Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, U.S. Air Force, three-star general. Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense; previously an A-10 pilot and C-130 navigator. Dismissed in 2025.

• Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, U.S. Army, another three-star general. Director of the Defense Health Agency, responsible for the military health system. She was removed and forced into retirement after a 32-year career. And,

• Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, U.S. Navy Reserve, three-star admiral. Chief of Navy Reserve and commander of Navy Reserve Force. She was removed from the position in 2025.

Apparently, there was insufficient testosterone among the ladies, regardless of their incredible rise in a military dominated by men.

There is an additional category with which we should pay particular attention.

Women in the military who weren’t actually fired, but sidelined, reassigned, denied promotion, or effectively encouraged to retire. A significant example is Vice Adm. Yvette Davids. Davids was a former Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, who and was reassigned.

Subsequent investigations found that women and Black officers were disproportionately singled out by Hegseth’s promotion interventions. The most egregious fact in this military blood-bath is the rank involved: two four-star and at least four three-star women were among the early removals. According to CBS, there are now no remaining active-duty four-star female generals or admirals in the U.S. military.

An almost unbelievable degree of military brass shines out under Trump’s bus.

The greater point (if there can be a point greater than the destruction of military careers for gender reasons) is the degree of trust lost to this president. When one is asked, appointed, or selected to serve a sitting president of the United States, trust in his judgement and character are among the first circumstances required.

When that is either missing or lost, his closest advisors or associates live under the shadow of dismissals. No position is secure, no advice without danger and, most importantly, no honest appraisals without the shadow of those previously thrown under the bus, and the frivolous circumstances of that constant possibility.

Is that how dictators come to power?

It’s a question worth asking.

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Americans, one must admit, are largely addicted to gambling. It’s the ‘something for nothing’ attraction, even though we’ve conveniently set aside the ‘nothing’ side of the equation. Simply look at the $5 water-cooler bets on Sunday’s game.

It seems to me, and I am not a gambler at heart, that Prediction markets are worth taking seriously, because they’re yet another way to lose the family farm without your family having a clue. And you don’t have to take time off to go to the track or Las Vegas, because it’s all available at your fingertips online (so long as nobody looks over your shoulder).

Prediction markets sit at the intersection of forecasting, financial markets, gambling, politics, journalism, and increasingly, public policy. That’s six points of information most of us know nothing about, so it’s easier to worry, betiing wise, about whether Patrick Mahomes gets injured in the first quarter.

What is in the way between us and a win, is

• if the Dow Jones makes a sudden jump,

• what Trump may tweet,

• what the guy we’re betting to win a primary says at a public meeting, and

• if he has a heart attack.

Mahomes is simple, compared to that.

So’s a slot-machine, and at least you can try to time a slot-machine for payoff. It’s easier to simply bet the farm on black or red, spin the wheel and blow your brains out or go home.

But, if you’re addicted to smoking, any brand will do. Where the government comes in, is usually not on the side of a gambler’s family.

When Prohibition made booze illegal, Al Capone and the boys invented the speakeasy, ran illegal alcohol routes and made big dough. Legend has it that this is where John Kennedy’s father made the family fortune. So, government threw in the towel, quit the deal, and repealed the 18^th Amendment, because prohibition wasn’t working, everyone was drinking bad booze, while Capone made dough and the government looked foolish (which is a bad look for any government).

Similar, but hardly exacy, story with gambling.

America spent much of the twentieth century severely restricting gambling, and governments subsequently discovered that legalized gambling could also produce tax revenue. Lots of it, at a time when politicians were eager to turn on any faucet available.

It wasn’t that guys lost the rent money or farms changed hands, it’s that state and national governments weren’t holding the cards. When Trump told Zelenskyy he wasn’t holding enough cards, where do you think the expression came from, and why do you think everyone instantly knew what he meant?

And so, we come at last to Prediction Markets.

They have existed experimentally for decades, but since the 2024 election they’re qualitatively different: they have become a very large commercial industry. Suppose the question is: Will Democrats win the presidential election?

A YES contract (yep, these things are contracts) might trade for $0.63 and a NO contract for roughly $0.37. Buyers and sellers create those odds through trading, saying the probability is 63%. If YES happens, the contract settles at $1. If not, it becomes worthless. Before the event occurs, traders can buy and sell their positions as expectations change. To the fellow losing his money, the distinction between “market price” and “betting odds” may seem wonderfully academic.

That produces something ordinary opinion polling does not.

People are not merely telling a pollster what they think, they’re putting money down. The economic theory is that thousands of participants possess fragments of information. Trading causes those fragments to become incorporated into a single price. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) describes prediction markets as “information aggregation vehicles.”

As I’ve explained so many times in judging Banks and Wall Street, a ‘vehicle’ is what robbers take off in, after the robbery. That was true in the 2008 housing bubble, has been true in other bubbles such as dotcoms, and is likely in prediction markets as well.

Those who agree or disagree will ether make money or lose the farm.

So, the defensible statement isn’t that prediction markets always predict elections better than polls, it’s that there’s considerable empirical evidence that properly functioning prediction markets can aggregate dispersed information extremely effectively and sometimes outperform conventional polling, particularly farther down the pike from Election Day.

And, that’s a mouthful, so if you understand it, let me know.

The keywords are ‘properly functioning,’ ‘extremely effectively,’ and ‘sometimes outperform.’ If you’re comfortable with all those adjectives, I have a whole lot of investment opportunities for your portfolio.

What AI tells me is; Imagine 10,000 people trying to predict an election.

• One knows polling,

• Another knows turnout history,

• Another follows fundraising,

• Someone lives in Pennsylvania,

• Someone else understands Hispanic voting behavior,

• Someone further follows economic indicators,

• Another knows something about campaign organization, and

• Each possesses incomplete information.

A prediction market provides an incentive for people who believe the market is wrong to put money behind their information. If knowledgeable traders believe a 40¢ contract actually has a 60% chance of occurring, they buy it.

A prediction market works beautifully, in theory, when you have

• lots of independent participants,

• sufficient liquidity,

• informed traders,

• no manipulation,

• reliable settlement rules and

• nobody with privileged information affecting the outcome.

I know damn well I ever saw Wall Street work that ‘beautifully.’ Greed trumps theory in both Vegas and Wall Street.

In my experience, reality more often gives you thin markets, whales, political partisans, insiders, people betting on events they themselves influence, journalists reporting the market price as news, and traders potentially trying to manipulate that price.

We’ve taken gambling out of Las Vegas, removed the travel, removed the closing time, put the casino in everyone’s pocket, and renamed the bets “contracts.”

And that, rather than any rational and thought-through process, is how I expect boatloads of investors, who don’t live within 500 miles of tillable acreage, to lose the farm.

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Ignoring its constitutional duties, as it has for much of this decade, the Supreme Court should be made to get off its well-cushioned ass, and stop the bleeding of Trump’s national building rampage.

Every day of delay diverts money from citizens without healthcare, and others who are homeless across America.

The commander-in-thief is on a naming and building spree of unparalleled proportion. Trump has estimated so far to have set in motion roughly $1.3 billion in monumental construction and gilded ‘beautification’ projects around Washington—approaching $1.4 billion if his triumphal arch is built.

At least $800 million appears likely to come from the public coffers, while much of the supposedly private remainder comes from both people and corporations seeking favor from his government. Those seeking favor are infinitely more costly, in that every dollar donated by the wealthy returns an average of four or five bucks.

The aristocracy are, indeed, smooth operators…

But, back to the Supreme Court and its antics.

In the ‘every day of delay’ department, it’s impossible to suppose their delay on the Trump Ballroom legality as anything except a blank check to keep going.

Either the damn ballroom is legal or it is not.

Meanwhile, 28 million Americans have no health insurance at all, while another 16 million go without needed medical care because they cannot afford it. Not that it’s a trade-off, but every casual expense needs to be recalculated against the damage it does to the public.

There has not even been a halt to construction until a decision is made. At least six major construction and planning safeguards were bypassed before Trump demolished the East Wing and began the ballroom project.

• Congressional authorization — Trump did not obtain Congress’s approval to demolish and replace part of the White House. In August 2026, the federal appeals court ruled that a project of this magnitude required congressional authorization.

• Congressional appropriation — Private donations were accepted and construction commitments made without an appropriation authorizing their use for this purpose. Public money was subsequently directed to security and underground portions of the project.

• National Capital Planning Commission review — Construction and demolition began months before plans were submitted to the NCPC. Approval came only in April 2026, after the East Wing had disappeared and work was well underway.

• Commission of Fine Arts review — The project proceeded before this traditional architectural review. Trump then dismissed all six commissioners and replaced them with people considered more sympathetic to his plans. His newly constituted commission approved the design in February 2026—and treated a preliminary conceptual review as final approval.

• Historic-preservation review — There was no meaningful advance assessment or consultation under the National Historic Preservation Act before demolishing a historically important section of the White House and removing its gardens and commemorative trees.

• Environmental review and public participation — The required environmental assessment, design disclosure and opportunity for public comment did not occur before demolition. An environmental document was prepared privately and became public only through subsequent litigation.

• When comments were finally accepted, more than 35,000 were received and approximately 97–98 percent opposed the project.

Well, I guess that last one gives a hint of how the public likes the national menu the Trump administration has laid before them. “I’ll have ‘none of the above, please.'“

Without question, the Supreme Court oughta prick up its candy-assed ears, because its Gallup public approval rating for July of 2026 is 33%. That’s the lowest Supreme Court rating in Gallup’s 26-year history.

That, like many items in our political world, at the moment, is not sustainable.

And, what did Abraham Lincoln say?

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”

This American house, abandoned by a divided White House of its constitutional right of representation by its Supreme Court, is on very shaky ground.

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That was a quote from Edward Thurlow, a British lawyer and Tory politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1765 to 1778. They clearly knew a thing or two about corporations in those less controversial times.

At noon on Feb. 13, 1788 (so says today’s NYTimes), huge crowds gathered outside Great Britain’s Parliament to witness members of the House of Lords process into Westminster Hall. They were there to impeach the man who ran much of India as the East India Company’s governor general of Bengal. This was the moment when the British state finally flexed its muscles to take on the greatest corporate oligarch of his day, the Elon Musk of 18th-century London.

Ah well, there’s a comparison that will raise the hairs on your neck.

Warren Hastings was the man at trial, and the question at hand was an attempt to decide whether a private corporation—and the men acting through it—could be held responsible for governing and exploiting millions of people abroad.

How prescient is that, of America’s concerns regarding our present circumstances?

They wore wigs, pointed fingers and brooked no nonsense. The East India Company had begun as a trading corporation, but after its military victories in Bengal during the 1750s and 1760s, it acquired the power to collect taxes, maintain armies, wage wars and govern extensive territories. It was, in effect, a profit-seeking corporation operating as a sovereign state, not entirely unlike America’s military-industrial-congressional organization.

The difference was, the Brits (from whom we would soon establish many of our own laws) were having none of it.

It seems America today cannot get enough of it and, with our transformation to a technological operandi, have let our Elon Musks run off with the entire kit and caboodle. For those of you too young to recognize the reference, kit and caboodle is an idiomatic phrase meaning the whole lot or collection of things. Sometimes you can get away with stealing the kit but, when you include the caboodle, the illegality is complete.

Idiomatic might (or might not) refer to today’s automatic allegiance to idiots in high places.

But, getting back to Thurlow in his wig, the East India Company’s dude’s frequently returned to Britain immensely wealthy, while Bengal endured oppressive taxation, administrative disorder and the catastrophic famine of 1769–1770. When the Company itself approached financial collapse and sought government assistance, Parliament could no longer pretend that its conduct in India was merely private business.

Pretense is largely a political child, an American Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on the 4^th of July.

The principal prosecutor, Edmund Burke, accused Hastings of accepting gifts, payments and contracts for improper purposes. Delicate language there, as I don’t understand what ‘proper’ purposes might have been, but that’s the Brits for you…always proper, even when being improper.

Burke’s larger charge was that Hastings had established a system of arbitrary power, affecting both cruelty and extortion by claiming that such conduct was customary in India.

Where, pray tell, have we Americans heard that before?

Burke claimed Indians possessed rights and that no governor, king, Parliament or corporation could legitimately confer unlimited power upon, declaring

“Arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give.”

Perhaps our existing president should try that on for size, and it’s the principal reason for this essay.

That was a revolutionary element in Burke’s prosecution, arguing that morality and law followed British power abroad. Distance, racial difference and corporate organization did not excuse conduct that would be criminal at home.

I rest my case for relevance.

But the whole trial begs the question of “When a corporation acquires the power of a government, who is personally responsible for what it does?”

In the America we have fashioned for ourselves today,

• failed banks are rescued by their victims,

• failed administrations operate beyond the reach of the law,

• media companies that make addicts of our children avoid personal responsibility,

• illegal wars are begun without congressional approval,

• corporate mergers harm our choices,

• health care remains beyond affordability,

• billionaires bribe our legislators for preference,

• unions are busted,

• industries are packed up and shipped to China, and

• our once prosperous middle class faces pressure from both top and bottom.

Yet, no one goes to jail, except some desperate small-drug dealer struggling to survive.

Wigs or no wigs, that is the republic Benjamin Franklin warned us we might not keep.

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A ‘pathocracy’ is is defined as when a democracy is taken over by psychopaths. So, it makes sense to define the term. Experts tell us (and, of course, we must always turn to ‘experts’) that psychopaths come in four flavors:

• Flavor one (vanilla) includes a need for control;

• a grandiose sense of self;

• pathological inner response to challenge;

• vengefulness; and

• refusal to compromise.
  

• Flavor two (chocolate) includes being predatory or exploitative;

• sadistic and cruel;

• having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes;

• no boundaries in sexual relationships; and

• unreasonable expectations of others.
  

• Flavor three (dark chocolate) relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality;

• they are chameleon-like;

• dishonest; devious and manipulative; and

• unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause.

• Finally, flavor four (very dark chocolate) is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life:

• their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it;

• they are callous and devoid of empathy;

• unremorseful;

• self-interested; and brazen.

It’s not exactly Baskin Robbins 35 flavors, but it doesn’t require a professional psychiatric diagnosis to name the offenders, either. We citizens know who they are by simply judging them against the flavors listed above.

It’s not brain surgery, not by a long shot.

And, of course, it’s not proper to hang that psycho tag on a friend, relative, or business associate who tends toward one or two single-scoops of a flavor. We all share the commonality of imperfection. Some, like myself, may be extreme in our degrees of perfection, but your mileage may vary depending upon whether your fuel is democrat, republican, or independent.

A bit further down in the Guardian article, we learn this…

… The idea of a “pathocracy”, a democracy of normal people taken over by psychopaths, was conceived by an obscure Polish psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, who had lived under both the Nazis and then Soviet-era communists.

His ideas never landed, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and blogger Harrison Koehli. It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,’” says Koehli.

There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established as a psychiatric principle that professionals are not allowed to diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this was after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context.

“I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognize individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behavior, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”

I agree. There is honest political debate upon individuals and parties that occur in a deliberative democratic society, and America once had those debates.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get all of his programs through during the Great Depression, but bipartisan debate in the congress agreed among themselves to weather the storm.

The Skokie Lagoons, a series of small lakes near where I lived in Evanston are an example. We had plenty of machinery capable of doing that work at the time. But they were dug with shovels and wheelbarrows by jobless men in Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), to keep families together and food on the table.

Yet we currently have an administration, headed by a president who is clearly off the rails.

I’m not an enemy of those who voted him into office, and understand the co-conspiratorial party politics of the last seventy years that destroyed their livelihood. It makes sense to me because I lived through it and watched it happen.

But the point has been made and enough is enough.

By even the most charitable reading of the Four Flavors listed above, Donald Trump’s national and international behavior shows, perhaps, the most extreme psychopathic behavior ever seen in public office. And he came by it naturally, in his business and private associations long before his election.

Score him as you will, by those listed Flavors.

Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency for far less offence to the office he held.

But those were times when the flavors of character, morals, and respect for the responsibilities public office demanded were better understood.

The Goldwater Rule established a principle (with which I disagree). It replaced the Truman Rule, one that (like the man) was easy to understand and had no moral equivocations.

The Buck Stops Here.

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There are certain bedrocks of history that I have depended upon in my long life, and a middle-of-the-road NYTimes was one of them. Conservatives complained it was too liberal and liberals had a fit about its obviously conservative positions, which suited me admirably.

An occasionally burnt or underdone piece of toast proves the toaster is working.

No longer can I count upon that truth.

One of the really disturbing aspects of reaching my nineties, is the aspect of watching the world around me degrade, in hunks both large and small.

• Automobiles that, in my youth, seemed both beautiful and identifiable, now resemble half-used bars of soap, their provenance known only by squinting at their badge,

• Banks that once recognized me with a smile, now regularly go bust and ask me to save them,

• Likewise, fast-fashion has abandoned the fabrics I once knew would soften comfortably with age,

• And cel-phone addiction has all but removed reading and conversation from common use.

I know, I know, most of my readers today will find those merely the rantings of an old man, with his best days behind him.

And yet I smile at the remembrance of my father buying all three copies of the Chicago papers every day, commenting that he read the Tribune for the right-wing, the Sun-Times for the left, and the Daily News for the truth.

The president of The First National Bank of Evanston lived a block and a half from our home, knew us by name when we walked in, and drove a Buick.

These days (and I know this is only a partial truth), few are aware any more of who the hell owns anything. Businesses, whose names were once proudly displayed on yesterday’s mastheads, are now subsidiaries, subordinate to a conglomerate of an international organization, whose board members are occasionally made up of competitors.

What they now have in common, is no human voice at the other end of a telephone ‘chat’ offering, and a directive to join a group of other poor souls on an internet helpline.

Except for L.L. Bean

God love ‘em, here I am, living in Europe these past 33 years and still wearing a pair of Bean hunting boots. It used to be that when (and if) the rubber bottoms wore through, they would replace them (and send them back to you) at no charge, preserving those well worn and soft uppers.

They no longer do that, but if you call the company in Freeport, Maine (no matter the time of day or night), your call will be answered by a knowledgeable and friendly Maine resident, usually a woman, eager to put your smallest wish to the test. No phone answering services with slight Indian accents and a canned response will do for L.L. They are among the last of a diminishing number of retailers who care enough to do their very best.

And yet the NYTimes continues to disparage any welcomed changes in a Democratic Party that abandoned its base, as divisive or, at the very least, polarizing.

Have we really come to that in our national political discourse?

Has the combination of a Trump presidency, billionaire ownership of Congress, inflamed internet radicalization, and family dinners turned combative, actually captured the press?

Jefferson claimed that, given the choice of “newspapers without government” over “government without newspapers,” he would unflinchingly prefer the former.

The newspapers of his day, limited as they may have been, reported the news…and trusted the public to form their own opinion. Nowadays, we trust neither our news sources or ourselves.

And that has been made clear in recent NYTimes articles without raising so much as a hair on the neck of the American public.

If that was our only problem, perhaps I could learn to live with it. Even as I typed those words, my better self cried out, “Nah, probably not.”

I have met Mr. Divisive, walking down the street, hand in hand, with Miss Polarizing, and I recognize them today. If memory serves, they were not among those affecting my youth, except very briefly in the late 1930s when the America First Committee (including Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg) lobbied against joining the war in Europe.

You may have missed that, but Hitler had his American supporters in those days. Japan finished them off at Pearl Harbor.

Nor were the Divisive and Polarizing couple in evidence just after the war, when the Marshall Plan rebuilt a devastated Europe, and the American government welcomed home its troops with university educations and deeply subsidized housing.

Those ‘socialistic’ responses were not popular (or even well remembered) during my business years of the fifties through seventies. Those were times when everyone who cared to do it could make a buck, the wealthy paid their taxes, and we had no national debt…

…I can name the exact moment in our history they disappeared.

Strutting down the street, smiling at the public, Ronald Reagan introduced the divisives to an America too innocent to recognize their polarizing divisions.

We should have checked their nametags, but the Reagan Convention met mostly behind closed doors and a guarded agenda.

Reagan took me in as well, a lifelong Republican who first voted for Eisenhower. I’m enbarrassed to say he got me in both terms. As a small businessman, I’d prospered during he decades just past, and didn’t yet see Division and Polarization slouching their way down his road, all dressed up to kill, as a golden future.

You will not remember, if you were not paying attention almost fifty years ago, but the ‘Great Communicator’ presided over numerous scandals, resulting in the investigation, indictment or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president of the United States.

I’m tempted to say ‘until now,’ but we’ll leave that for history to answer.

Somewhere along the line, we lost our connection to our founders, and the constitution they handed down to us.

Perhaps they had an idea that even those events lay far in our American future. Surely they knew that ‘all men are created equal’ was a promise more than a fact in a slaveholding nation. When Ben Franklin was asked what kind of government the Constitutional Convention had given us, he replied, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

So, there were clues.

Keeping it has been more fraught for ‘we, the people’ than expected, considering how casually and carelessly we spent much of our 250 year history until now. America staggered through a Civil War, a World War, a Great Depression, and another World War, without learning much.

We are a nation quick to judge, and slow (painfully slow) to learn.

In my mind, we have behaved like kids with permissive parents, doing drugs, sliding through education, and expecting it all to work out somehow, without much attention for what came before us, living in a comfortable vacuum.

Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum.”

And he was most certainly right about nature.

But politics loves a vacuum.

That was proven many times over, hollowing out governments after governments of our nation. Post-Reagan, the United States Government dropped its trousers in surrender, and greedily submitted to the siren calls of the wealthy class.

Clad in the golden clothing of ‘trickle-down economics’ and ‘international trade,’ we destroyed our union movements, shipped our industrial base off to China, and willingly destroyed our middle class in a trade for cheap goods, opting for bread and circuses in the garb of McDonalds and Netflix.

America’s economic strength responded by trickling down the legs of working America, out across the floor anddirectly into the bank accounts of an entirely new class; America’s billionaires.

Millionaires built America, and I helped them do it, in my working years.

Billionaires sold it off to line their pockets, creating the ‘best government money can buy,’ and I stood by and watched while they did it.

Remember, Donald Trump is not the cause.

He is the result of a vacuum in politics.

His supporters are what’s left of a destroyed industrial behemoth that money burned down, and to argue otherwise is both divisive and polarizing.

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Drones Are the Hot Topic These Days, and When the Fox Is Out, the Chickens Are at Risk.

A NYTimes article caught my eye and, it being a Sunday, I thought “what a great time to sneak out a hot topic, and let it cool a bit overnight.”

That’s my natural suspicions borne of a long life, watching news-chickens being hatched. The hatching process involves a great deal of crowing before pin-feathers even appear.

The article announces ‘The U.S. Start-Up Making Low-Cost Interceptors for the Iran War,’ subtitle ‘For Florida-based Powerus, becoming a global supplier of counterdrone technology has meant involving the Trumps, a golf course and a new way of doing business.’

There were simply too many pin-feathers on that hatchling for me to ignore.

Its promotional nonsense reminded me of a Johnny Mercer lyric written in 1944, nominated for an Academy Award and made famous when sung by Bing Crosby in Here Come the Waves, co-starring Betty Hutton.

Gooey, I admit, but WWII needed all the help it could get.

You gotta ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mr. inbetween

You gotta spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene

Sorry ‘bout the old timey reference, folks, but it’s a reminder that ‘what goes ‘round, comes ’round’ when history picks up the baton.

But the cleverly named ‘Powerus’ desperately needs to keep pandemonium from walking all over what facts are currently known.

Time for me to run for the writerly cover of claiming opinion. I am not personally presenting any insider information about Powerus. This entire essay is conjecture on my part…it cannot be taken to any reliable bank.

Having said that, a whiff of chicken is detected by this old fox, not because Powerus is misleading, but because its public claims seem to run well ahead of independently verifiable evidence. There is an actual company here, with real hardware, and serious financing behind it.

But “proven combat effectiveness,” “hundreds of confirmed intercepts,” and claims of “current deployment across multiple Middle East countries,” are a number of lengths ahead of the actual horse in this race.

Janes, one of the world’s oldest and most respected independent military and defense-intelligence publishers, identifies three already operating companies that make up the Powerus combine.

1. Kaizen Aerospace for heavy-lift drones,

2. Tandem Defense for tactical drones, and

3. Agile Autonomy for maritime systems.

But these are drone manufacturing companies and Powerus is claiming the production of interceptors. Quite a different thing, that.

The company centerpiece is its Guardian interceptor, currently described as a “Confirmed interceptor with proven combat effectiveness.” By whom, one might ask?

Powerus was only formed in 2025, yet it claims ‘hundreds of confirmed intercepts,’ while what it claims as a ‘fire and forget’ version is still being tested.

Forgive me, if this sounds more like a ‘make claims and forget’ pitch to investors.

I have, so far, not been able to verify any sort of independent documentation for where those ‘hundreds of combat intercepts occurred, which military operated the aircraft, against what targets, or what percentage of those actually succeeded.’

Five months ago, the company advised that “Our team is doing many demos across the Middle East right now for our interceptors.”

Which is cool, but it wouldn’t identify the countries or provide details. Bearing in mind that a demonstration is not a deployment, a deployment isn’t necessarily an operational interception, and an operational interception doesn’t mean a successful combat record, one can but wonder what any of that nonsense actually means.

Hang on, the story gets even better in the ‘ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive’ department.

Just this week, Powerus announced a $22 million contract to supply counter-drone technology to oil-and-gas operators in the Middle East (without naming the companies) and announced that Erik Prince’s newly created Vectus Air Defense Systems may use Powerus equipment as part of integrated air-defense packages.

Now you see it, now you don’t, folks, in the race to ‘spread joy up to the maximum, bring gloom down to the minimum, have faith, or pandemonium, liable to walk upon the scene.’

Oops, hang on again, Pandemonium just walked upon the scene.

Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are backing Aureus Greenway Holdings (their publicly traded golf-course company) through which Powerus plans to become publicly traded by reverse merger.

If you don’t understand what a ‘reverse merger’ is, neither did I.

Apparently, it’s a way for a private company to become publicly traded without going through the normal IPO process. Sounds more shady than the old oak tree to me, but it’s legal…yet another example of the wonderments that are legal in this brave new world.

Imagine this:

• Private Company A, an operating business that wants its shares traded publicly, merges with

• Public Company B, already listed on a stock exchange, but perhaps much smaller.

• Instead of Company A conducting an IPO, it merges with B. And A’s owners receive enough shares to control the combined company.

• Legally, the public company may be the surviving corporation. Economically, however, the private company has effectively taken it over.

That’s why it’s called a reverse merger, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell at a really good price if you believe all that hocus-pocus.

Anyone interested?

The Trump family is involved.

Now, is anyone interested?

Possibly so, but certainly the fox.

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If ever there was a definition of ‘cross purposes,’ that would serve as well as any.

Is “We’re full. We like it the way it is. You can go somewhere else,” a logical path forward, tied as it is to litigation and zoning constraints?

Just to keep my credibility clear on this issue, my home for a major part of my earlier life was Lake Forest, Illinois, and you can’t find a better illustration of that circumstance. Additionally, as a retired landscape architect, I have in my day sat through more Chicago-area meetings on the subject than I care to remember.

Because there is no single American housing-development approval system, a project may encounter municipal, county/regional, state, federal, and quasi-public utility approvals, and the exact combinations vary enormously by location and project. But they will likely include,

• zoning compliance; rezoning or zoning-map amendment;

• comprehensive/master-plan consistency;

• subdivision approval; preliminary plat; final plat; site-plan review;

• conditional/special-use permit; variances; density/height/FAR approvals;

• design/architectural reviews; a historic-preservation review;

• demolition permits; tree-removal/landscape approvals;

• grading/earthwork permits; erosion-control plans and a stormwater/drainage plan;

  street/access approval; curb-cut/driveway permit; parking approval;

• water connection; sewer connection/capacity; fire-department review; and

• building-plan review; building permit; electrical permit; plumbing permit; mechanical/HVAC permit; elevator permit; construction inspections; fire inspection, and certificate of occupancy.

But hold on, that’s only the beginning. A spadeful of earth will not be turned until,

• Planning commission approval; zoning board/board of adjustment; design-review board; historic commission; sometimes city council/county commission approvals;

• public hearings; neighborhood notifications; sometimes development agreements or negotiated community benefits,

• county subdivision reviews; county roads/access; health department approvals; septic systems; wells; drainage/flood control; regional transportation review; school-impact review; regional water/sewer authorities; regional planning agencies; sometimes separate environmental or open-space reviews (whew),

• State environmental reviews in states having NEPA-like laws; state highway access/traffic permits; state water-quality certification; wetlands permits; stream-crossing permits; dam/reservoir approvals; groundwater/water-withdrawal permits; sewage-treatment approvals; air-quality permits where applicable; endangered-species review; historic-resource review; coastal-zone permits; state fire/building-code requirements; utility/public-service commission approvals in some circumstances, and possibly

Federal Clean Water Act 404 wetlands/waters permit; 401 water-quality certifications connected to federal permits; NPDES construction-stormwater permit; Rivers and Harbors Act permits where navigable waters are involved; FEMA/floodplain requirements; Endangered Species Act reviews where federal action is involved; National Historic Preservation Act review; NEPA environmental review when federal funding, land, approval or other federal action triggers it; HUD environmental review for HUD-assisted projects; various EPA, Army Corps, Fish & Wildlife, highway and other agency requirements depending upon the project.

And those are (most) of the requirements meant to be acted upon.

If you ever had a hankering to develop some low-cost housing, bear in mind that such terms as ‘review’ and the ever-present ‘permits’ have various waiting times, and almost endless meetings (with paid experts in tow).

Two additional federal requirements are particularly common on large sites.

• Construction disturbing one acre or more—or a smaller parcel that is part of a larger development ultimately disturbing an acre—generally requires construction-stormwater coverage under the Clean Water Act.

• If development involves filling federally regulated waters or wetlands, a Clean Water Act 404 permit may be required, generally administered by the Army Corps of Engineers or, in some places, an approved state or tribal program.

Oh shit, let’s just fold our tent and get the hell out of here.

There will be a half-dozen nearby residents who will show up at each of the above meetings, because they have nothing else to do in their retirement years, and at least one of them will take you to court.

These ‘not in my back yard’ groups have in common the fact that they are both relentless and vicious.

If you wonder why it costs so damn much to build housing in America, this is a major part of the answer. The relevant burden isn’t simply the number of permits, it’s the accumulated cost of land held idle, lawyers, architects, engineers, consultants, financing, redesigns, hearings, studies, fees, uncertainty, further redesigns, and years of carrying costs while those approvals are obtained.

There can be (and at some point, will be), ways to fix the seemingly unfixable.

• We need a National Building Code, which would undo much of what hinders approvals, and allows manufactured housing at the same time, as well as,

• a national Right to Purchase obsolete shopping centers, dead malls, underused parking lots, abandoned industrial land, surplus government property, underutilized military property, aging office parks, commercial strips, municipal land, and low-density parcels around existing cities.

• Many of those properties already have something extraordinarily valuable: roads, electricity, water and sewer nearby. A dead shopping mall surrounded by 80 acres acres of asphalt may actually be far more valuable as a housing resource than 80 acres of untouched farmland.

Here’s what may be an interesting twist on the problem.

Cities and states are already bidding against each other to offer tax breaks for businesses and individuals moving elsewhere for tax purposes. Some of these incentives are extremely generous.

Suppose, just suppose, we encouraged small-town America to bid for mixed-use housing projects that would repair the misery the interstate highway system caused them. Small-town America is, and has been suffering for decades from boarded-up Main Streets, as well as populations that abandoned them.

Local restaurants, barber and hardware shops, jewelers and grocery stores fell victim to the Wal-Mart five miles out of town, or the fast-food joints at their nearby interstate interchange. Small-town America is our heritage, an asset left swinging in the wind.

That asset can be recovered, instead of dying off with its aging residents.

A combination of businesses-looking-for-workers, and workers looking for a peaceful place to live, educate, and bring up their kids, could quite logically feed off one another.

Levittown, in an upgraded version, might easily rise again and support the building of the 5 million homes we need over ten years, and another 5 million the following ten.

We built Levittown for returning WWII veterans. Are our underhoused, and youngsters today who can’t afford a starter-home, any less important?

I think not.

But what we have isn’t working.

It may be time to try something new…

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And, of course, it’s not only technology. The power of those with nothing to lose, up against those with everything to lose, comes into the equation. The gunman high on drugs that mugs a wealthy person, and we immediately know the outcome…Here’s the money, just let me live and go away.

Extortion works, in peace and war, while artificial intelligence (AI) hovers quietly in the background.

We have, indeed, met the enemy and he is us, courtesy of Silicon Valley.

Power, it seems, is no longer a zero-sum game. Winners and losers have become unknowns, while the David and Goliath syndrome is rising again.

There are so many ways to look at this. The ‘quick and dirty’ is

• Ukraine and its remarkable defiance of the Russian Goliath, and

• Iran bringing the United States to its knees by closing off international shipping, as it attacks nearby US bases.

Before that, Paul Simon reminds us that ‘the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls,’ which indeed they were, as in

• Korea, where General MacArthur’s overwhelming might was fought to a negotiated standstill,

• Vietnam, in which 56,000 American dead couldn’t turn the tide of a war where the most powerful military in the world fell to tunnel-fighters with bags of rice around their necks,

• Iraq, where American might proved we could kill a nation, but never change its mind,

• Afghanistan, George Bush’s loss of the longest war America ever fought, leaving the field in disgrace and

• Iran, an unnecessary war that brings us full-circle to the reality of this essay’s premise.

Who is it that writes on those subway walls today, and what is their message?

It’s the many and the small, who scratch their truth to the powerful in the darkness of midnight. Not our truth, not the world’s truth…their truth. It’s far more Butch Cassidy than it is The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

For most of industrial history, size conferred power, and we’re still locked in that wrong-headedness.

Digital technology increasingly makes size a liability and coordination a source of power. It’s a dangerous thing to be locked into anything, but past history is the most dangerous of all. AI has already crossed the bridge and we’re still standing there, wondering if it will support our weight.

Consider what you and I are doing at this moment.

Fifty years ago, distributing an argument to thousands of people required access to a newspaper, magazine, radio station, publisher or television network. Those institutions owned scarce machinery and so distribution was scarce as well.

Now one writer with a laptop can potentially reach millions. I haven’t yet quite personally worked out the millions side of that equation but, apparently, it’s there.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Walmart, all demonstrate that technology can certainly make the large larger. So, it isn’t simply that technology decentralizes everything.

Something subtler is happening.

A tiny company today can rent computing power rather than build a data center; contract out manufacturing to China rather than own a factory; sell globally on the internet without owning stores; advertise without buying television time and use AI instead of paying for layers and layers of clerical and professional labor.

A ten-person company can possess capabilities that once required 500 employees. Have you paid attention to the multiplicity of ‘side hustles’ that are outperforming paid positions in large companies?

It’s a moving target. Increasingly, one person can possess capabilities that once required those ten.

Politics provides the more dangerous version of the premise, and if you don’t see that in the present US administration, you’re not paying enough attention.

Political organizations like the DNC and RNC once required headquarters, organizers, mailing lists, printing presses and money. The money is still there in toxic amounts, but organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are breaking out more or less independently.

Zohran Mamdani, an independent, socialist, Muslim just won the Mayor’s race I New York City. A number of elections ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, defeated a ten-term pin New York’s 14th congressional district. A member of the Democratic Party, she has now joined the New York City Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Now millions of people can assemble around an idea almost spontaneously, disempowering traditional politics, and making the Ted Cruzes and Chuck Schumers in Congress wonder what the hell is going on.

What’s going on is that the DSA is having what looks like its strongest electoral year in decades, and the important point is that the victories are no longer confined to municipal offices or a handful of safely left districts.

Its own 2026 tracker currently counts 63 wins among 172 races, although that includes state and local contests as well as congressional races.

The darker side of that is that many and small don’t necessarily produce democracy, wisdom or truth.

I come from the times when many and small elected Harry Truman, followed by Dwight Eisenhower.

I’ll settle for that.

In these darkest of the dark political times in America, perhaps you will as well.

But yes or no, the old days are as long ago as yesterday, and it’s probably time to fasten our seatbelts because there’s turbulence…

…and it may be a bumpy ride.

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There are bunches of ‘systems,’ just as there are grapevines in a winery. The most interesting thing to me is that we (you and I) have a personal interest in a vintage. What’s your choice, among the ‘systems’ to fight?

• Political power, that includes the Presidency, Congress, federal agencies, courts, state governments (can’t forget the 50 states), and the two major parties.

• Money and corporate power that takes us to Wall Street, the banks, major corporations, private equity (somewhat of a newbie), billionaires, and institutional investors.

• The military-industrial-congressional complex. Eisenhower’s warning against the cancer-like growth of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, congressional defense committees, and American military bases in over 80 countries.

• The influence industry, a whole new industry that grew out of lobbyists, PACs and Super PACs, political consultants, trade associations, think tanks, and (shudder) lawyers.

• Media power, made up of newspapers and online broadcasters, social platforms, advertising, public relations, publishers, and increasingly including AI and its owners

Hang on, I know that’s already a lot, but we’re not done yet.

• The administrative system that we usually call the ‘bureaucracy’ and includes the Civil service, regulators, tax authorities, entitlement programs, procurement, all of which include thousands of rules and procedures.

• The economic system underneath everything, made up of workers, consumers, small businesses, corporations, housing, healthcare (there’s a beauty), education, energy, and transportation.

• The billionaire class that runs all of the above.

• And finally, what’s left over. Us, the voters, taxpayers, consumers, shareholders, pensioners, homeowners, employees, and what’s left of the American middle class, since we sent our industrial wealth to China.

So, the next time you hear someone complaining about ‘the system,’ you might want to keep a copy of all the above, haul it out and ask them, ‘which one?’

Us, of course, is everyone. So, when Walt Kelly’s cartoon character POGO said, fifty-five years ago, “we have met the enemy, and he is us,” Kelly was making an incredibly prescient look into the future, rather than a mere comment on the plastic trash covering the swamp in which POGO lived.

But we, the we who get all huffy and puffy about our environment (both natural and political), aren’t simply standing outside the ‘System’ shaking our fists at it. We all had a hand in building it.

The Teacher’s Pension Fund that contributes to your retirement may own shares in Lockheed Martin without you knowing it. You and I, as voters, may denounce corporate influence while buying everything we purchase from the corporations creating it. Your 401-K and/or company retirement benefit likely owns shares in both Oil Companies and Private Equity.

That’s a cold, hard, fact that might never have occurred to those of us who are the most vocal complainers.

Your congressman (or woman) may deplore Pentagon waste in his or her campaign interview, while voting to keep open the weapons factory employing 4,000 people in your district. So, if you’re going to pick a target, there are a hell of a lot of choices.

I have a suggestion, as you knew I would. No sense writing down 500 words of lead-in, and then bailing out on my thoughts.

The connective tissue of the ailments that afflict us is the political misuse of money.

That’s always been with us, since America’s founding. It’s the blood that flows through the veins of Republican Democracy, and it’s undeniable that we are both a Republic and a Democracy. Which means we do not vote directly on issues, but vote for representatives who do that nasty bit of business in our name.

It was our slave-owning founders who claimed that ‘all men are created equal.’ That was not a fact at the time. It was a promise for the future, and we fulfilled that promise with a Civil War.

We still have not undone the crimes of inequity, but we work steadily in that direction.

So, my hope is that our current move in the perfection of national equity will concentrate itself on getting money the hell out of direct political control.

The Supreme Court has not been helpful in that regard. But it has been dishonest, in that the Court must count itself among those institutions infected with the disease of legal bribery, which is yet another discussion for yet another time.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on January 21, 2010, by a 5–4 vote, opened the floodgates of corporate money in politics. Interestingly, it cozied its way around the sharper edges of that decision by deceptive language.

Citizens United did not legalize unlimited corporate contributions directly to political candidates. Those remain prohibited under federal law. What it did instead was to find that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of their own money on independent political expenditures—advertising and other advocacy supporting or opposing candidates, provided it is not legally coordinated with the candidates.

A wag at the time declared that he would believe a corporation had the same rights as a citizen, when the state of Texas executed one. As Shakespeare wrote, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

That was the setup. The result was yet to come.

In 2010, Citizens United v. FEC, followed almost immediately by SpeechNow.org v. FEC, opened the door through which virtually unlimited corporate and individual money could pour into independent American election spending. We gave the right of free speech to both citizens and corporations, but reserved the size of the megaphone for delivering that speech for corporate use only.

Thus, over that past sixteen years, the United States of America has been known internationally as ‘the best government money can buy.’

So, that’s where we need to go first. Detach money from politics.

That’s first.

All else comes from that.

Aren’t you glad it’s that simple?

No need to thank me, I was glad to do it…

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The Planet is not in trouble, folks, and anyone who thinks that has too high an opinion of humanity and our influence.

Have we caused this environmental catastrophe we keep on having international meetings about?

Indeed, no doubt about that.

But if you ever watched a labrador retriever come out of the water, you know that neither it nor the planet is in danger of drowning. It shakes itself off, wets everyone within wetting distance, and wags its tail.

What we’re observing in wildfires, record heating of the atmosphere and oceans, tornados, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, droughts, crop failures, disappearing potable water, and increasing human stupidity, is merely Planet Earth shaking off tens of thousands of years of human mistakes.

There were warnings, little doubt about that. But they were all raised by indigenous communities, and we swept them aside like flies at a barbeque. As an example, history tells us indigenous Americans occupied what is now North America, for 12,000 years without disturbing its ecosystem.

If you believe in God, you believe he put us here as an experiment.

There is much made of the ‘human experiment,’ the ‘democratic experiment,’ and other such references, but God holds the title in Games Building. He ran his for quite some time, although the exact period is in dispute between believers and scientists. Now it’s time for the final exam on the results of God’s experiment.

Examination papers have been handed to the creatures of this Earth and pens are at the ready.

Hours later, the buzzer has sounded ,and it’s time to hand in all papers. The planetary room falls silent, as participants leave to await grading and find their place in the Earthly Hierarchy.

In six day’s time, God will reconvene the attendees and announce results.

On the seventh day, He will rest.

On that sixth day, at precisely 2pm, having breakfasted well, God appears at the lectern, gazing across the audience, all eyes turned in his direction.

He clears his throat.

God apologizes for the inconvenience to the human species (purportedly created in his image), but you failed His test and were beaten by hedgehogs and crows—one land based and the other an inhabiter of the sky.

Whales came a close third but, even though God is credited with making them, they are underwater creatures, and his eyesight is in decline.

And yet, the demise of the human species should be an event for human celebration as well, even though we will miss the party, the drinks, and the toasts proclaimed by all creatures great and small.

Problems have been solved. The Paris Accords finally vindicated…although Paris itself will surrender to vegetation.

We humans gave it our best shot.

Einstein, Jefferson, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Ronnie O’Sullivan, and Liberace were simply not enough, even with a Roger Federer and Muhammed Ali thrown in here and there.

The difference is that, although one or two human groups experimented with the idea of balancing humanity’s impact from to time, the natural world just seemed to have more heart and less ego in it.

We, the human species, made the critical error of male dominance.

Even though we humans made a stab at empowering females, we came at it too near the end of the game, and women hadn’t time enough to right our wrongs.

In a horserace the planet will not soon forget, there were simply too many Pete Hegseths cheering the odds-on favorite, Testosterone, down the home stretch. Estrogen gave it a game go, rounding the far turn and closing the gap on the last furlong to the wire, but good breeding simply wasn’t enough to overcome eons of neglect.

Admittedly, it’s a hard blow to the human species.

But concrete, capitalism, a love of war, and greed for what others have, was just too damaging in the long term to boost us ahead of hedgehogs.

Had it merely been crows, we might have had a run at it.

But hedgehogs and crows were a bridge too far.

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Well, foolish me.

I thought that was what the Pentagon was insisting upon, as those military-industrial guys were eating up such a large percentage of our national budget.

Apparently not.

But with some 800 Flag Officers stumbling around the Pentagon with their spit-shined shoes untied, who would know? Who salutes whom anymore, as they stumble down those corridors?

Hegseth insisted on high testosterone, which is why he fired all the top female officers. He never mentioned production rates at home, so I guess that accounts for empty warehouses.

But, if Heggy is going to insist upon defense firms building more weapons, the logical thing a business does, prior to the CEO thundering down from his perch on the umpteenth floor, is to look at the numbers.

Unfortunately, there are no numbers to look at. At least none that have ever passed the acid-test of a balance sheet.

The echo can still be heard from the depths Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, if one cups his ear and listens carefully.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice, when reality stopped behaving itself.

Reality has had a great deal of difficulty behaving itself in our complicated governmental arena lately. Hegseth, his face buried deep in the pillow of despair, continues to mumble, “it only requires more testosterone.”

In any case, who would expect a weekend talk-show host to run (or even supervise) the military Armaments Production machinery?

Have your secretary dial up Michael Duffey’s phone, Pete. He’s the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. That’s the Pentagon’s chief weapons-acquisition official, overseeing more than $300 billion in annual procurement, as well as keeping an eye on the defense industrial base and efforts to expand munitions production. He took office June 5, 2025.

Ever hear of him? Maybe not, but he’s there somewhere. Ask your secretary. The secretaries know everything, Pete.

You might want to set up a meeting with him, and invite Michael Cadenazzi to join the two of you. He’s Assistant Secretary for Industrial Base Policy. Mike’s responsible for developing and maintaining the actual defense industrial base.

No matter, one of them is bound to actually have control of what you’re short of. Take your testosterone tester along with you, to make sure they pass.

That could be the issue right there.

Maybe one of the two Michaels can tell a very fidgety Pete Hegseth exactly why the United States has difficulty rapidly increasing missile and drone production.

Certainly Trump’s small war with a weak little old nation like Iran, shouldn’t have emptied the warehouses. This is not Ukraine we’re fighting for god’s sake, it’s Trump’s slam-dunk instead of Putin’s, something for them to chat about in their weekly phone calls.

But apparently, the Pentagon has built itself an enormous, program-by-program acquisition apparatus.

It’s deeply intertwined with a highly concentrated group of suppliers.

Yet the question remains, ‘How could a Pentagon containing roughly 33,000 people in 1944, preside over an industrial system capable of producing tens of thousands of aircraft, tanks, ships and millions of weapons, while today’s Pentagon, with roughly 24,000 people (plus that enormous acquisition establishment outside the building), struggles to increase production of comparatively small numbers of missiles and drones?’

It’s complicated, Jim.

I understand that.

It was complicated then, and complicated now, but it worked back when I was watching the show. One possibility is, the WWII version was not run by a talk show host.

During that war, the last one we truly won by the way, the job was under the control of Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. Marshall’s personal (but unmeasured) testosterone was sufficient at the time to not only to gain the confidence of President Roosevelt (no small challenge), and equip a war on two fronts, but devise a rebuilding plan for after the war.

Another answer trotted out for public consumption is technological complexity. A modern missile may not be a Sherman tank, but building an American aircraft that could take on (and defeat) a German Messerschmitt was as technologically complex as the world got in the 1940s, forgiving another small detail like an atomic bomb..

The third and more compelling answer (in my opinion) is that we were under an existential war footing then,

All American industry turned to the task at hand. My memory of those times is Mom saving bacon grease for munitions, women turning their shoulders to a Rosie-the-riveter workforce, gas rationing, my father working at Douglas Aircraft, communal “Victory” gardens, and the auto industry shutting down to build tanks and bombers.

These days we are not on a war footing, except in Hegseth’s mind, and if we are to keep some reasonable degree of weaponry on hand, we’re pretty much in the hands of the military-industrial-congressional complex Eisenhower warned us of.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed“

-General/President Dwight Eisenhower

The CEOs of America’s five dominant defense contractors are compensated at roughly $25 million apiece per year. But the “not being on a war footing” is the reason the cupboard is bare in drone and missile stockpiles.

The Pentagon is now spending nearly a thousand-billion dollars annually on the Defense Department in peacetime.

That $trillion would house Eisenhower’s homeless, feed the hungry, and cloth those who are cold. But we wouldn’t have the luxury of sticking our finger in anybody’s eye, and can’t seem to break that habit.

Logically, Pentagon leadership is wrestling with why that enormously expensive permanent establishment cannot rapidly manufacture relatively inexpensive drones, missiles and munitions in wartime quantities, but they don’t read my essays.

Bottom line, we are not at war, at least in any realistic sense. After 1941, I watched an America that was at at war, totally mobilize. But what Heggy doesn’t seem to understand, is that Iran is under existential threat and totally mobilized.

We are not.

That’s why mugging is so traumatic.

I have been mugged. You don’t ever want it to happen. It’s not an even game.

My assailants hadn’t much to lose, poor, black, and on drugs at the time.

I had a wife, two dogs, a pretty fine lifestyle, a good business, a nice car in the garage… and all I wanted to do was live.

That fact, and that fact alone, is why the Iranian war is so badly misunderstood. Russia misunderstood Ukraine in the same way. That’s also the tie that binds every war we’ve lost since WWII.

Sub context: Hegseth’s frustration (and his boss’s as well) lies in the fact that the request, budgeting, contract delivery, agreement, scheduling, tooling, manufacture and delivery process is too long for the ‘small-wars-at-a-moment’s-notice’ mindset of our current president.

Maybe it’s worth it.

Maybe it’s not.

But it’s what we got…

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So says Nobel Prize winner Daron Acemoglu, and that’s the fourth leg of the chair that supports the argument he makes in his new book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?”

And if indeed his observation is correct, then the counter argument made by ‘fake news,’ and the internet’s splintering of what is and is not true, salted by billionaire influence, will give us a society “less intellectually curious, poorer, and less free.”

There is no doubt in my mind that, within my nine-decade lifetime, we have suffered precisely that fate.

Acemoglu, I’m told, is one of the world’s most influential political economists, and his work is unusually relevant to questions about why the United States and other liberal democracies have become more unequal, less trusting, and increasingly politically unstable.

That’s okay with me, as I’ve made similar arguments for decades…and don’t we all love to have our positions supported by ‘one of the world’s most influential political economist?’

Hold on, Nobel Committee, there may yet be a spot for me.

But Daron was born in 1967, and a great deal of his knowledge was gleaned from a history that I lived.

I’ll share with you a salient example, although you may laugh at the fact: Every time I shave, and every time I have shaved since it was necessary, as I apply the razor to my upper lip, I think of Hitler. It is impossible for me not to do that, since I actually heard him rage and pound a rostrum so many times during the war. Not the identical mustache on Charlie Chaplin.

Hitler!

I doubt that anyone who read about Hitler from history books, or watched old newsreel images, would have that visceral connection. It’s among the things I cannot unlearn, like counting the steps up or downstairs. I must hum or sing (much better at humming) in order not to do that. Living in a third-floor flat, it’s a constancy

There is, I am convinced, a difference between what we have read and what we have lived.

I do not put down any of Daron’s brilliant writings, nor question their authenticity, but ‘pooled and shared knowledge’ is first learned at the family table. That knowledge also has age-old tribal connections, learned in the circle around a common fire by listening to one’s elders.

I grew up at family dinners, served precisely at 6pm and eaten beneath a candle-chandelier which, metaphorically, serves as ‘learned in the circle around the common fire by listening to one’s elders.’

Those dinners were not so much instructional, as conversational. My brother and I were expected to contribute. Our shared upbringing demanded contribution to other adult conversation as well, saying a word or two when appropriate, and shutting up and paying attention when not. There was no such as ‘shutting up’ at my father’s dinner table, but the talk was of art and architecture, philosophy and why the world was what it was.

Carl and Bobby Wood were close friends of my parents, who came to play bridge on a weekly basis. Carl flew fighter planes in the First World War, when they were made of paper and glue. My father drove an ambulance in France, until they discovered he was only sixteen and sent him home.

Can you imagine the conversations?

Daron was not yet born when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or when Eisenhower took over as commander of Europe’s combined forces. He was not there as the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe, and assassinations took John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King, Jr. from us.

I do not question him for that…we have no power over our date of birth.

So, I can learn from him because of his perspective, research, writing and intellect, just as I learn from writer’s Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

“He was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten,” wrote Dickens

There are ‘odors of the times’ in which we live and breathe and take in the world around us.

And there you have it.

The difference I sought so imperfectly to define.

My lived history has a smell, much like the balls of hot tar we rolled up from the street when we were kids.

Driving past road work here in Prague, some 85 years later, that smell instantly takes me back to the curb in front of my home in Evanston, in 1941. I recognize my friends, I understand the fact that the lawn needs mowing and it is my chore to do it. But not until we have whooped our way off on three-dollar bikes to see the world, as small as that world may have been.

I know, because it is my experience, and Daron Acemoglu enjoys that smell of his lived life from when he was a kid, right up to accepting the Nobel Prize.

His is a different smell, more or less pungent than mine.

Daron and I are not acquainted.

But it’s what we share.

And that’s important to me.

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What does ‘military superiority’ even mean, when the largest military on the face of the earth can’t win a war?

Korea was simply a north-south split, no win there but for a divided nation. A dangerous and erratic North Korea is the price we still pay today for that.

Learning nothing from that, Vietnam (which was a problem the French were unable to solve), cost us the lives of 56,000 young Americans, PTSD disabling an entire generation, and an exit with desperate Vietnamese dripping unceremoniously from the landing gear of military helicopters. Who can ever forget those images?

Having learned nothing from that, we barged in to Iraq, a country we new nothing about, and whose leadership we didn’t much like. We hanged their leader, Saddam Hussein, threw out the Sunnis (who had largely run the Iraqi state), and transferred political power a know-nothing Shiite majority, leaving them military equipment as well. We left Iraq a smoking ruin, deeply corrupt, and with a poorly trained (by us) military. More than two decades later, it has rebuilt much of the rubble, but is still living with the political, institutional and human wreckage of invasion.

Having, once again, learned nothing from that, President Bush decided Afghanistan was an easier target, even though it had held off invaders across the history of the world. Before Bush invaded Afghanistan, declaring victory from the deck of an aircraft carrier, the Afghans had already defeated Alexander the Great, three invasions by the British Empire, and a fourth by a very determined Soviet Union.

Bush apparently decided we needed a fifth defeat for the record books, encouraged by his Vice President, Dick Cheney, that this time it would be a cakewalk. Georgie Boy sallied forth, into the longest war Americans had ever fought, including a Civil, First, Vietnamese, and Second World War.

An astonishing twenty years later, the United States withdrew, having spent roughly $2.3 trillion, killing 2,461 service members, and departing again with helicopters awash with hangers-on, and essentially the same governing organization it had overthrown in 2001.

The Taliban was back in control of Kabul.

Our military left behind in Afghanistan about $7.1 billion in U.S.-funded military equipment, amounting to more than 300,000 weapons, 40,000 military vehicles, 78 aircraft, 9,524 air-to-ground munitions, large quantities of night-vision equipment, communications gear, surveillance equipment and biometric systems.

More hauntingly, we left behind tens of thousands of Afghan interpreters and other employees who had served the United States. Counting their families, well over 100,000 people were potentially exposed to Taliban retaliation

As Henry Kissinger once said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

The axe falls equally on both Democrat and Republican Presidents; Truman and Johnson for Korea and Vietnam, George Bush for Iraq and Afghanistan.

You decide whether or not Trump upsets that balance by supporting an Israeli genocide in Gaza and a Republican supported war in Iran.

Which is really not the point.

The point is that, in all of those lost and costly wars, we never faced opposing amies. There were no military bases to wipe out, no uniformed armies, tanks, aircraft, battleships, cruisers, or aircraft carriers. Wars are no longer fought on those terms. The enemy today is insurgent, and difficult (if not impossible) to sort out from civilian populations.

Rommel is no longer up against Patton in North Africa

It’s an Israeli Army and Airforce up against Palestinian insurgents, and we’re witnessing the frustrations and inhumanities of that. Winning, if you can even call it that, requires a genocide.

The weaponry has changed as well. Car bombs and (as we’re seeing in Ukraine) drone strikes by both sea and air. We recognized our enemies in WWII, and that was the last time in history we will probably ever have that advantage.

Another, and far more devastating, advantage we have lost is keeping these attacks away from our shores.

Because the weapon of choice is a drone, and because Amazon and your local pizzeria plan to deliver by drone, who can possibly know exactly what is being delivered to whom?

War may be hell.

And war may be fought differently.

But only Amazon and the delivery systems will be keeping score…

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In a recent headline, the NYTimes announced to its readership that “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.”

Well, god love ‘em, after decades of decendence, anything ‘ascendant’ must be avoided. Otherwise, what would they do with Chuck Schumer?

The so-called moderate wing of the party, already trying to flap the broken wings of financial under-water-manship, is $3.4 million in debt…under the financial covers, sobbing under Ken Martin’s pillow, without a realistic way to peek out at America, much less offer any way to make a showing at November’s mid-term elections.

Dems thought just ‘not being Republican’ would be enough.

Just ‘not being the other team’ has never been enough in sports, and politics is the roughest sport of them all.

Meanwhile the Republican National Committee floats in a $125 million surplus.

The far more serious immediate problem is PAC funding. The Supreme Court (and other American institutional oddities) has made free and fair elections a money-game. And it is expected that the 2006 mid-terms will ring up an astounding $11.6 billion, making it the most expensive political advertising cycle ever.

Astounding? Really? Ever?

Yep, and even more remarkably, that would exceed the $11.2 billion spent on advertising during the entire 2024 presidential cycle.

In the economic arms race, to say that Dems are on the decline, would be such an understatement, it’s a joke…a bad joke, while facing a Republican Party headed by a convicted criminal, but owned and financed by Bezos and Musk ad nauseum.

With a mid-term shootout on the street, and only one bullet left in its political gun, the DMC aims to fire it at the only hope they have left, the emerging Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Good god, why not just do the honorable thing and commit suicide.

Apparently, they were looking the other way, when Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, a Socialist, and a Muslim to boot, ran away with a victory that made him Mayor of New York City.

Just a few days ago, Abdul El-Sayed, another socialist-leaning Muslim, won a divisive Democratic Senate primary in the crucial swing state of Michigan, with an unabashedly progressive message.

Sixty million dollars was spent to defeat him—thirty times the DNC debt—and they still turn their backs on Democratic Socialists.

Rather than welcoming both new blood and enthusiastic social Democrats to their sagging bosoms, the DNC is planning to shoot them out of the saddle.

With a single bullet, no less.

Just as the Cavalry shows up in the final scene of this political spaghetti western, the Dems slammed shut the doors of the stockade.

A major party with no more sense than that, deserves to dry up and blow away, and stop torturing the few supporters it has left. Two quotations from 1930’s humorist, Will Rogers come to mind:

“I’m not a member of any organized political party…I’m a Democrat.”

and

“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

The Democratic National Committee is standing at that fence, with its fly open.

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In an ordinary Flea-Circus (if any actually exist anymore), no one cares much where the fleas live, as their maintenance costs are very close to zero.

The fleeing of billionaires to tax havens matters a good deal, but perhaps not as much as tax collectors, and the politicians who worry over them, might think.

On the other hand, Mark Twain was quoted as having said, “Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can,” and he had not yet been introduced to billionaires.

So, let’s ponder that for a moment, as I find myself in a pondering mood.

If my informants are correct, Florida and Texas are the winners in the actual body-count of this economic incursion, and California, New York and Illinois the losers, in an ongoing (and relatively recent) conflict.

Although the youngsters among you may find it hard to believe, there was a time during my 35-year business career when the wealthy gladly paid their fair share in taxes, and were proud to do it.

But that was the 50s and 60s, when being a millionaire was quite enough riches for most.

Today’s high earners mostly see legal tax avoidance as their sworn duty, rather than as a crime that doesn’t require a gun and a mask.

Profit, in its overwhelming principle, is mostly legal but not a very pretty thing to watch. And yet those we celebrate these days are mostly sports heroes and investment fund managers. I understand the sports thing because, unlike wars and economic depressions, they’re over quickly and have a winner and loser. We love winners and despise losers.

I accept that, but it makes me grumble.

Looking for an analogy to the flight of capital, the landscape architect remaining in me suggests comparison to a tree.

The roots are corporate engineers, factories, suppliers, and employees.

The trunk supports middle, and occasionally upper management, while the juicy, leafy, upper part, with all the fruit, represents the Owners, Shareholders, and Boards of Directors.

Yum.

Over the past several decades, we’ve seen both roots and trunk stay pretty much in place. A company may continue to draw nourishment from its roots, but the strategic decisions that keep the wealthy wealthy, are increasingly decided elsewhere.

Nor does it matter, as interconnected as we have become.

California has seen a number of high-profile departures from its high-tax location over the past decade, including major dudes such as Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Joe Lonsdale, and others, all of whom established residency elsewhere.

Interestingly, and contrary to what one might imagine, at the same time, California has for the most part maintained its progressive tax structure, sustaining one of the nation’s highest top marginal income tax rates.

California voters have continually, for some decades, elected governors and legislators who favor relatively high taxes. Funding education, healthcare, transportation, environmental programs, and social services are important to the state’s voters. From the perspective of many policymakers, the proof is in the pudding, and the obvious benefits of those returns on investment outweigh the risk of some wealthy residents leaving.

What you may not know, is that California is home to the 4th largest economy in the world, up recently form 6^th place.

California sets the stage for much of what’s right in America, and so, with slightly modified wording, trading ‘a Billionaire for a Blackbird,’ a song springs to mind:

Pack up all my cares and woe,
Here I go singing low
Bye Bye Billionaire

Where somebody waits for me,
Tax relief is sweet to see,
Bye Bye Billionaire.

No one here loves and understands me,
Oh! What hard luck stories
they all hand me.

Make my bed and light the lights,
I’ll arrive to get my rights
Billionaire, Bye Bye.

All that’s missing is the late, great, Ella Fitzgerald to sing it.

Just so California doesn’t seem like too much of an outlier, there’s Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York. Too soon to tell?

Maybe, maybe not.

Most interesting to me, is not so much what he’s done, but who he is and where he came from. Those are the things upon which history is built, and New York City is no small deal.

Mamdani was born in Uganda, in 1991 and, beyond his charm, forthrightness, and wide smile, he’s a Muslim.

That cracks me up, you gotta love a 35-year-old, with that background becoming Mayor of an American international city, the best of the best, New York.

In his first months in office, he expanded childcare, including more than 2,000 new free 2-K places immediately after taking office, one of his signature campaign promises. City-owned grocery stores are next, and while they’ve not yet opened, the project jumped into the city’s planning process much faster than expected. And, the beat goes on, with a deed-theft office, fixes to a hazardous cycling bottleneck on the Williamsburg Bridge, using a relatively small infrastructure project to signal a broader emphasis on street safety and active transportation.

New York City is home to 123 billionaires, making it the city with the largest billionaire population in the world.

Together, they have an estimated combined net worth of about $759 billion. Ex Mayor Bloomberg was one of them, so we’ll soon see how all that shakes out.

My bet is that Mamdani will never be one, or care to be…

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