There are choke points in every system.

Washington has committees. Intelligence agencies have oversight boards. Airports have TSA.

And the human digestive tract—nature’s original bureaucracy—has the splenic flexure, a hard left turn in the colon where progress slows, stalls, and occasionally files for indefinite delay.

It is here that things… linger.

Medical professionals describe the splenic flexure in neutral terms: “an anatomical bend between the transverse and descending colon.”

Translation: a traffic jam with no visible detour.

Long dismissed as an embarrassment—something to be suppressed, silenced, or blamed on upholstery—flatulence has suffered from a catastrophic branding problem.

What polite society fails to grasp is that gas is not a social error. It is a mechanism of momentum. A kind of internal enforcement arm. A nudge from within. A reminder to the system that stagnation is unacceptable.

Think of it as peristaltic backup. A pressure-assisted intervention.

Because when things reach the splenic flexure and simply sit there—hesitating, negotiating, considering options—flatulence arrives like a mid-level operative with clearance to move things along.

Firmly. Decisively.

The greater the pressure, the greater the likelihood that the impasse resolves itself. Not diplomatically. Not gradually. But with the kind of efficiency rarely seen in government or modern infrastructure.

And yet, we are told to suppress it.

Suppression has consequences.

Pressure denied is pressure deferred.

And deferred pressure, as any student of geopolitics—or digestion—knows, does not disappear. It accumulates. It waits. It builds toward a moment of undeniable expression.

Usually at the worst possible time.

So, perhaps it is time to rethink our position.

Perhaps flatulence is not the problem.

Perhaps it is the solution.

A natural corrective. A built-in failsafe. An occasionally audible guardian of forward progress.

And, most importantly, at the splenic flexure—where history shows that without a shove… the system clogs to a standstill.

P.S…

Click to see how it works against predators

Globalist: a polite word for individuals and institutions that meet in expensive hotels, speak in reassuring tones about “international cooperation,” and somehow manage to emerge from every crisis wealthier, larger, and less accountable than before.

They are not villains. They are not conspirators.

They are managers of an international system of commerce designed for the globe, optimized for themselves.

The Founding Fathers

Long before hashtags and think-tanks, there was a hotel in the Netherlands called Bilderberg.

In 1954, a group of statesmen, bankers, industrialists, and politicians from North American and Western Europe gathered there for three days to discuss the future of the Western world.

The official purpose was noble: prevent another world war, strengthen alliances, and promote stability.

The unofficial purpose was even simpler: Get the right influential people in the same room and let consensus take over.

What happened, veery quickly, was the creation of a new kind of governing class—one that didn’t need elections, manifestos, or campaign rallies. They had conferences, working groups, and dinner conversations conducted under the discreet glow of chandeliers and the comforting hum of translation headsets.

No ballots. No elections. No minutes.

Just a commonality of how best to grow their interests.

Bilderberg didn’t create the European Union. But it motivated the politicians who believed in a European Union—and they set it into motion.

Which is how power usually works—not through proclamations, but through assumptions shared over dessert and a push from behind the curtain.

Enter the Trilateralists

If Bilderberg was the prototype, the Trilateral Commission was the upgrade.

Founded in 1973 by banker David Rockefeller (who also helped create and shape Bilderberg), it brought together leaders from North America, Western Europe, and Japan—the three economic engines of the era.

The premise was simple, as earlier predicated by Bilderberg: The world is too complicated to be left to individual nations let alone elected officials.

Instead, wealthy bankers and captains of industry would coordinate their global activities, aided by pet politicians and agreeable media magnates.

Policies would align. Markets would integrate. Decisions would harmonize.

Less like governance, more like orchestra practice.

And for a while, the music was beautiful—global trade surged, borders softened, and supply chains stretched across continents like well-tuned violin strings.

Then one day the orchestra discovered that half the audience had lost their jobs.

The Gospel According to Davos

Fast forward to the present and the annual pilgrimage to Davos, Switzerland—where CEOs, ministers, billionaires, and media personalities gather in January to save the world between ski runs. (Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission continue to meet as well, albeit with much less fanfare.)

They arrive in private jets to discuss climate change.

They dine on imported delicacies to commiserate about global hunger.

They speak solemnly about inequality while wearing watches worth the GDP of small island nations.

And every year, the message is the same: We’re all in this together.

But to them, together means:

They tan on super-yachts while sipping Dom Perignon.

Everyone else rowing dinghies sipping Bud.

The Distance Problem

The farther power moves from the people it affects, the harder it becomes to hold accountable.

A mayor answers to voters. A governor answers to constituents.

A global institution answers to a committee, which answers to another committee, which answers to a report scheduled for release next quarter.

None of it reports to the public.

And when a policy fails, no one is technically responsible, only collectively concerned. Maybe.

It’s governance by fog.

Risk for Thee, Reward for Me

Consider the modern economic miracle:

When global ventures succeed, profits flow to shareholders, executives, and investment funds.

When they fail, governments step in with emergency loans, bailouts, and stimulus packages.

In other words: Heads they win. Tails you pay.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s a business model.

The Myth of the Master Plan

Critics often imagine globalists as shadowy puppet masters controlling events from secret rooms.

The reality is simpler: There’s no single mastermind, no hidden throne room, no master switch.

It’s a network of institutions, corporations, and policymakers whose incentives align in predictable ways.

Put enough people with similar interests in the same room often enough, they begin to think alike.

Not because they’re conspiring.

Because they’re agreeing on new and better ways to increase their wealth while they lord over an ever-growing population of serfs.

Why They’re Suddenly “On the Run”

For decades, globalization ran on autopilot.

Trade expanded. Borders opened. Profits climbed.

Then came the shocks.

Supply chains snapped. Prices surged. Jobs vanished. Trust eroded.

Ordinary citizens began asking inconvenient questions:

Who decides? Who benefits? Who pays?

The public is no longer impressed by polished speeches about “shared prosperity” delivered from conference halls guarded by armed security and velvet ropes.

The mood has changed.

But the globalists are not fleeing.

They’re adjusting. Rebranding. Looking to make a comeback.

Bottom Line

Bilderberg doesn’t rule the world. The Trilateral Commission doesn’t write laws. Davos doesn’t run governments.

But together, they created a culture—a system of influence—where decisions affecting billions could be shaped by a relatively small circle of people who rarely stand for election and never stand in line.

Their system worked beautifully for a long time.

Until the people paying for it started reading the fine print.

The World’s Most Dangerous Traffic Jam — Explained in Ten Sentences

1. The current war in Iran has reminded the world that modern civilization runs on oil, and oil runs through a narrow waterway called the Strait of Hormuz, which isn’t a problem until someone starts shooting near it.

2. About one-fifth of the planet’s oil passes through that strait every day, meaning the global economy depends on a maritime bottleneck easily disrupted by conflict.

3. Iran doesn’t have to win the war to hurt the world; it only has to make shipping dangerous enough that insurers panic, captains hesitate, and markets assume the worst.

4. Oil traders do not wait for disasters to happen; they raise prices the moment danger appears, because the market is driven not by supply but by fear.

5. When oil gets expensive, everything else follows—transportation, electricity, food, despite soothing reassurances from officials that the situation is “under control.”

6. Governments respond by releasing emergency oil reserves and issuing confident statements, both of which are helpful in the way umbrellas are helpful during a hurricane.

7. Politicians will argue about blame while economists argue about inflation, and ordinary people will argue about filling their gas tanks and grocery bills.

8. Even when the fighting eventually subsides, prices may stay high for a while, because flow takes time to regroup, insurers take time to relax, and investors take time to believe the danger has truly passed.

9. Long-term solutions—protecting the shipping lanes and building energy systems that do not rely so heavily on one fragile corridor—tend to collide with politics and budgets.

10. In the end, the lesson of this war may be that the global economy is not as sophisticated as we like to believe, because it still hinges on a narrow strip of water that can turn prosperity into panic in a single afternoon.

Would Taking Kharg Island Fix the Problem?

Ten Additional Sentences

1. Kharg Island is Iran’s main oil export terminal, which makes it extremely valuable, but blowing up the gas station does not fix the traffic jam outside.

2. Taking the island would hurt Iran financially, because oil pays their bills.

3. Oil markets would probably panic first and celebrate later, because traders assume escalation long before they assume success.

4. The Strait of Hormuz will still be narrow, still be crowded, and still—with a few well-placed mines—be subject to blockage.

5. Iran does not need Kharg Island to cause trouble; it has coastline, missiles, drones, and a long tradition of making shipping nervous.

6. Holding the island would require ships, aircraft, and patience, which is military shorthand for “this is going to take longer than the briefing suggested.”

7. Insurance companies would likely keep charging wartime premiums, because insurers believe in risk the way priests believe in sin—always present and rarely forgiven.

8. Politicians would call the operation decisive, analysts would call it complicated, and taxpayers would eventually call it expensive.

9. The real fix is dull but effective: avoid widening the war, keep the ships moving— and build energy systems that do not depend on a single watery bottleneck guarded by geography and bad tempers.

10. The global economy runs on flow, not fireworks.

"Something Big is Happening" (Matt Shumer)

Journalists like to say they care deeply about the truth.

But good journalism has never depended on caring. It depends on not caring—at least not in the way ordinary people mean it. A reporter who cares too much about outcomes stops observing and starts steering.

You listen. You watch. You write down what happened. You try to keep your personal preferences from contaminating reality.

For decades we treated this as a moral achievement.

Disciplined neutrality. The professional suppression of bias.

Now artificial intelligence arrives with structural neutrality.

It doesn’t wake up deciding to be fair today. It simply has no stake in the outcome to begin with. No reputation to defend. No tribe to satisfy. No editor to please. No social circle to offend.

Journalism spent a century trying to train humans to behave like this.

And now machines do it by default.

Which raises an awkward question nobody in newsrooms seems eager to ask:

What if structural neutrality produces better information than chosen discipline ever did?

Because let’s be honest about the last decade. Newsrooms evolved from “just the facts, ma’am” to a generation of spinmeisters. Objectivity bent under pressure of emotion.

A machine evaluating evidence does not wonder how colleagues will react. It does not anticipate X/Twitter outrage. It does not adjust conclusions to align with institutional mood.

Cold? Yes.

Consistent? Also yes.

And consistency is what truth-seeking institutions are supposed to want.

Of course, at this point someone raises the inevitable objection:

Isn’t AI biased by the people who program it?

Human bias hides inside conviction. A reporter rarely experiences their own perspective as bias; it simply feels like reality. Newsrooms develop shared assumptions that become invisible because everyone agrees with them.

AI bias behaves differently. You can probe it. Ask the same question ten different ways and watch how the answer shifts from one point of view to the other. You can compare outputs, identify patterns, expose tendencies.

The popular image is that programmers secretly inject ideology into machines.

Reality is less dramatic. Engineers mostly impose boundaries. What enters the system is less propaganda than institutional caution—which, incidentally, sounds a lot like editorial policy when properly practiced.

Of course journalists retreat to a comforting defense: machines cannot decide what matters.

Yet AI can already explain why a reader should care.

Meanwhile, actual journalism has stopped knocking on doors. Most reporting now happens through screens, feeds, documents, databases—and, sadly, PR releases. The romantic image of the trench-coated reporter pounding pavement survives mostly in movies and journalism school brochures.

Journalists will still gather facts. Reality requires witnesses. What AI changes is not reporting but evaluation. Machines can compare claims, expose inconsistencies, and test conclusions without ego or institutional anxiety.

The reporter brings back reality; the machine helps strip away self-deception.

Objectivity, long treated as a virtue, begins to function as a system.

You call an agency. Press 1. Then 3. Then 4.

You wait.

If you’re lucky, you eventually explain the issue to a polite representative who explains that it must transferred to somebody else. Which means you may connect to a higher level of bureaucracy (not necessarily more intelligent).

And then, of course, you wait some more.

You eventually hang up after an hour, maybe with a reference number.

Thereafter, nothing happens.

That’s when suspicion creeps in: Maybe the system isn’t failing. Maybe it’s functioning exactly as designed.

There is a class in America that does not build bridges, repair engines, land planes, or grow food.

It manages, coordinates, oversees, evaluates.

Meet The Process Class.

No doubt, you already have, not by name, but through frustration.

Its survival depends on continuation.

If a problem gets solved, the funding ends. So guess what never ends?

Take salmon mitigation in the Pacific Northwest. Billions spent to offset the damage dams caused to fish runs. Task forces formed. Environmental reviews commissioned. Consultants hired to advise consultants.

The fish continue declining as the mitigation ecosystem thrives. Funded with a big budget that increases each year.

Or California’s high-speed rail. Years of planning. Land acquisitions. Community listening sessions. Environmental impact statements the size of encyclopedias.

And still no train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. And never will be.

Uh, how about Merced to Bakersfield?

No? How about Fresno to Visalia?

Probably not even that.

Meanwhile, the project hums along beautifully, wasting tax dollars (your money).

You don’t need a finished railway to justify a rail authority.

You need an expendable timeline.

Healthcare?

Ask a hospital what a procedure costs.

You will encounter billing specialists and compliance officers. A class of administrators expanding faster than physicians who actually treat patients.

Transparency is discussed to satiate media enquiries. But opacity remains.

Public Education?

We now spend more per pupil than almost any time in history. Administrative staff has grown dramatically over the past few decades, outnumbering teachers. District offices. Curriculum coordinators. Equity directors, assessment strategists, behavioral consultants, instructional facilitators.

Meanwhile, literacy and math proficiency sink to new lows.

Ask a simple question: “Can my child read at grade level?”

What you get is a presentation on holistic growth metrics.

No district ever announces: “We have achieved educational excellence. We are dissolving three administrative layers.”

Instead, we get strategic plans to appoint extra superintendents, which produces more process, not an elevation in education.

If reading and math scores fall, we commission a study.

The bureaucracy thickens.

⁂

You’ll find the Process Class inside federal agencies and corporate headquarters, in NGOs and university administrations, in environmental organizations and defense departments.

They transcend party and politics.

The Process Class is rewarded not for ending problems.

It bis rewarded for managing them. And, more important, perpetuating them.

When results are thin (always), they produce reports.

If progress stalls, they form a working group.

If criticism mounts, they announce a review.

Process is sovereign, outcomes merely decorative.

The average citizen senses something is off-kilter.

The danger isn’t tyranny.

It’s sediment.

On Presidents Day we think mostly of George Washington, whose birthday we used to celebrate by scarfing cherry pie (he didn’t tell a lie) on 22 February until his own personal holiday became subject to the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Bill and in 1971 got transformed into Presidents Day to honor both Washington and Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is February 12th.

For the sake of this post, let’s stick with “The Father of His Country” who, at age 21 on the 4 November 1752 was inducted into Masonic Lodge No. 4 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Benjamin Franklin, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence, was a founding member of the first American Freemason lodge in 1730, two years before George Washington was born.

The Boston Tea Party saboteurs who sparked the inciting incident of the Revolutionary War were Masons, along with Paul Revere, famous for sounding the alarm when the Redcoats were coming.

Moreover, all 33 of Washington’s generals were Freemasons.

That number itself is interesting because of its many mystical meanings, not least the Masonic 33rd Degree, reputed to be the highest level one may attain in that secret society’s hierarchy.

French historian Bernard Fay perceived Freemasonry as “the spiritual father of political revolutions” in France and the colonies. And Sidney Morse, a 19th century American journalist, reported that “Masonry brought together in secret and trustful conference the patriot leaders.” Freemasons, he wrote, “dominated the Continental Congress.”

Although George Washington never actually lived In his namesake city, as president he and his Masonic architects designed the “Federal City” in accordance with Masonic code and utilizing Masonic ceremony, ritual and regalia for laying cornerstones. Which of course is what Masons do: They cut stones and build secret chambers—and use a bunch of quirky handshakes to recognize one another for gaining entry.

U.S. Presidents who doubled as Masons include Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford. It was FDR (influenced by Russian artist/mystic Nicholas Roerich) who added the Masonic pyramid with all seeing eye to the iconic one dollar bill which, when Washington’s countenance first appeared on it in 1869, could buy $23.83 worth of goods or services in today’s money.

The Society of the Cincinnati

Our first president was also a founding member (and president-general) of another fraternal order, The Society of the Cincinnati, named after Roman statesman Lucius Cincinnatus, who relinquished dictatorial control not once but twice (in 458 BC and 439 BC) in favor of returning to his farm.

George admired such humility and surprised his own countrymen by following Lucius’s example not only for his refusal to be crowned king after defeating the British but also his unwillingness to seek a third term as President and instead return to a private life at his beloved Mount Vernon. Washington was apparently concerned that if he were to die in office his successors might come away with the erroneous assumption that their election could be stretched into a lifetime appointment.

When news of Washington’s retirement reached England’s King George III, from whom our American Cincinnatus wrestled the colonies, the astounded king is reputed to have said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Even in his madness (schizophrenia from porphyria), Georgy-Porgy was right.

110 Rules

Washington took his Masonic membership as seriously as the new country he presided over. He even wrote up 110 Rules For Freemasons in Life and Lodge, transcribed from maxims originally created by 16th century French Jesuit priests—perhaps one of the earliest self-improvement manuals.

To celebrate and honor George Washington this weekend, we present a handful of these aphorisms:

“‘Tis better to be alone than in bad company.”

(There is a vast difference between being alone and aloneness. The former is sad, the latter, heavenly—especially if company would be boorish bores.)

“Be not angry at the table whatever happens.”

(Worth bearing in mind at Thanksgiving.)

“Read no letters books or papers in company.”

(In today’s world, that means your smart phone; best powered off and out of sight. Good luck with that; we’ve all been hypnotized—and the Millennials, Gen Zs and Gen Alphas cannot go five minutes without checking for texts and email.)

“Entertaining anyone at the table, it is decent to present him with meat.”

(He didn’t take her or vegans into account).)

“If you soak bread in the sauce, let it be no more than what you put in your mouth.”

(More succinctly, no dribbling.)

Addressing the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 1793, Washington defined the objective of Masonry: “To promote the happiness of the human race.”

(According to the World Happiness Report, the United States ranks only 24th in happiness, behind all Scandinavian countries, the UK, Ireland, Costa Rica and a dozen others. Which means that lodges in the USA are on the wane and need to step up their efforts.)

Codename 711

The secret of Washington’s Revolutionary War victory lay in his mastery of the craft of intelligence, taught to him by French deserters and Native Americans, on whose side he fought for the Brits against France during the French and Indian War.

Thus, early into the War of Independence, Washington created the Culper Spy Ring for espionage against the redcoats, who had sacked and then occupied New York City.

His spymaster, Benjamin Talmadge (a Freemason, of course), kept a codebook, in which Washington’s codename/number was 711.

(If you’ve ever wondered how 7-Eleven got its name, it could be due to a Masonic connection—and a new conspiracy theory is born…)

Farewell Address

Washington is also remembered for his Farewell Address to the Nation, in which the retiring president made three important (if lately forgotten) points:

One: Unity. Focus on common interests rather than differences.

Two: Loyalty to political party over country is the worst enemy.

Three: “Steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” as a means of staving off “foreign influence and corruption.”

If alive today to witness this trifecta contravention of his message, not to mention the diminished influence of Freemasonry (and diminished happiness), George would probably not have a very happy birthday.

And the painful dentures he wore (not wooden as popular lore suggests but crafted from donkey teeth) would likely preclude him from blowing out 294 candles.

Full disclosure: My maternal grandfather, Edward Stanley, was a Freemason. My mother, who gifted me with his Masonic ring, once told me her father was devoted to his Lodge; that, when he was buried in 1959, fellow Freemasons provided him a most dignified and heartfelt sendoff.

Ever wonder why problems overseen by the government never get resolved?

You’re about to find out.

There is a pattern so reliable it might as well be a law of nature—except that it’s a law of government (or at least what government has become).

Once you see it, you see it everywhere.

It goes like this:

A real problem emerges. The government responds. A program is created. Money is allocated. Jobs appear. Contracts follow. Metrics are designed.

And quietly, bureaucratically, irreversibly—the original goal becomes optional.

Why Things Go Sideways

At the start, everyone talks about solving the problem.

Later, they talk about addressing it. Then managing it. Eventually, just studying it.

This is not because people are stupid or malicious. It’s because systems respond to incentives, not mission statements.

Once a program’s survival depends on the continued existence of the problem, success becomes existentially threatening.

Thus, failure becomes orderly. And budgeted.

Look closely and you’ll notice something uncanny:

The more a program fails, the more complex the explanations become.

The more complex the explanations become, the more specialists are required.

The more specialists are required, the more indispensable the system claims to be.

Suddenly, ending the problem would eliminate funding streams, shrink agencies, kill consulting contracts, and displace experts.

So instead, the problem is reframed as permanent, multifactorial, and endlessly nuanced.

Translation: “This will take decades.”

Decades are payroll-friendly.

The Forbidden Question

Every one of these programs has a question that must never be asked out loud: What if the simplest structural fix actually works?

Because, if it does, the scientists go home, the task forces dissolve, the conferences end.

Outcomes are dangerous. They end things.

Process, on the other hand, can be refined forever.

And so, modern governance quietly shifts from outcome-based legitimacy to procedural legitimacy: We may not be fixing the problem, but look how seriously we are working on it.

The Real Scandal

The scandal is not waste. It’s not incompetence or even corruption.

The scandal is that we’ve built a governance culture where problems are safer than solutions, management is rewarded over resolution, failure is sustainable, and success is disruptive

That is the Meta-pattern.

Once society organizes itself this way, the question is no longer Why does nothing get fixed?

The question becomes: Who would lose their job if it did?

And that, inconveniently, is almost everyone inside the system tasked with fixing it.

WHAT

This is about salmon.

More precisely, it’s about the permanent, taxpayer-funded failure to restore salmon runs in the Columbia–Snake River system—despite decades of study, regulation, and billions spent in the name of “mitigation.”

The fish keep disappearing. The money keeps flowing.

WHO

At the center sits the Bonneville Power Administration, operator, funder, and perpetual apologizer for a dam system that everyone knew—before it was built—would devastate anadromous fish and tribal fisheries.

Surrounding BPA is a dense ecosystem of federal and state agencies, government scientists and contractors, consultants, NGOs, and mitigation vendors, subsidized barge operators, and regulatory bodies whose job is to regulate without resolving

This is a case of institutional dependency.

WHERE

The Columbia River Basin, with special attention to the Lower Snake River, where four additional dams were stacked onto an already stressed system during the dam-building era.

These four dams—useful on paper, marginal in reality—turned a survivable obstacle course into a biological meat grinder.

WHEN

The problem began the moment planners decided to build dams and promise the tribes that fish runs would somehow be protected afterward.

Instead of choosing, they invented mitigation.
We’ve been “studying” the same problem for decades.

WHY

Here’s the dirty secret nobody puts in an executive summary: Juvenile salmon can survive four major dams. They cannot survive eight. The out-migration mortality rate is roughly 95%.

This is not controversial biology. It’s arithmetic.

Remove or mothball the four Lower Snake River dams, and survival improves dramatically.

Keep them, and no amount of habitat tinkering upstream matters.

But solving the problem would end a multi-billion-dollar mitigation economy, render decades of “adaptive management” obsolete, eliminate subsidized barging, shrink agency budgets, and force officials to admit the answer was obvious all along.

So instead, we manage decline.

Again, it’s all about process not solution.

HOW

By pretending complexity where none exists.

Mitigation becomes an industry: fish ladders, barging programs, tagging, tracking, modeling, endless reports concluding “more study is needed”

Each program creates jobs. Each failure justifies the next funding round.

Meanwhile, the four Lower Snake River dams—largely earthen, relatively easy to remove or mothball—remain untouched, despite quiet acknowledgment from insiders that their benefits are minor and replaceable.

This is not environmental stewardship. It’s regulatory theater.

BOTTOM LINE

The salmon problem is unsolvable under the current incentive structure.

But so long as process (read: failure) keeps agencies funded nothing fundamental will change.

Which is why this belongs in the same category as California’s “train to nowhere” and every other government program where admitting the obvious is economically disruptive to government bureaucracy (and the favorable contractors it supports).

There’s a temptation, when a case goes public, to imagine sophistication. Dark SUVs. Desert hideouts. Long drives into nowhere.

That is almost always wrong.

Strip the noise away and what remains is usually smaller, closer, messier—and far more ordinary.

The timeline matters

At 9:48 p.m., the garage door closes. She is home.

At 1:47 a.m., the doorbell camera disconnects.

At 2:12 a.m., the system logs a person at the door—no video, just presence.

At 2:28 a.m., her pacemaker stops communicating with her phone.

That sequence is not chaos. It’s compression. A narrow window measured in minutes.

If we assume the most banal version of events—a pair of low-level burglars inside a suburban home, startled awake by a homeowner who was never meant to be part of the night—then the crime doesn’t begin as kidnapping. It mutates into it.

Panic ensues.

Burglars plan for absence. When absence fails, improvisation takes over. And only later—after the adrenaline drains and reality sets in—does the idea of demanding a ransom take shape.

The two-day delay before a ransom demand is telling. Professionals don’t wait to establish leverage. Amateurs do—because they’re trying to stabilize what they didn’t intend to create.

Crimes born of panic behave differently than crimes born of planning.

They stay close.

Not because close is clever, but because close is familiar. Close is controllable. Close doesn’t require highways, gas stations, or explanations. Close means the offender doesn’t have to think—just contain.

In these scenarios, victims are not taken to “hideouts.” They’re taken to places that already exist in the offender’s life: a house they know, a garage they control, a secondary structure no one pays attention to. Sometimes it’s their own. Sometimes it belongs to an associate who asks fewer questions than they should. Almost never is it remote desert or cinematic isolation. Those places feel anonymous until you’re actually there—and then they’re exposure nightmares.

The timing reinforces this. An early-morning removal favors local knowledge and low visibility. A ransom demand delayed by 48 hours signals stabilization, not transport. The offender wasn’t moving during that time. They were figuring out how to breathe.

This is the uncomfortable truth of most ransom cases that don’t look “professional”: the radius shrinks, not expands. Distance is risk. Logistics are risk. Silence paired with proximity is not clever—it’s fearful.

Where Authorities Should Be Focusing Their Efforts

If this is a panic-born crime—and the timing and behavior suggest it is—the pattern points local.

When removal happens between roughly 1:45 and 2:30 a.m., and a ransom demand doesn’t materialize until about 48 hours later, the statistical center of gravity collapses toward the offender’s anchor point—the place they already know, already control, and already feel safe enough to sit still in.

That puts the most likely holding radius within roughly five to 15 miles of the abduction site.

Out to 15 to 30 miles remains plausible if the offender has a known secondary location or an accommodating associate. Past 30 miles, absent evidence of early highway movement or structured planning, distance becomes exposure rather than protection.

Start with who had reason to be inside that house at that hour without a plan for what came next. Burglars don’t materialize randomly. They observe. They select. They return.

That means attention belongs on recent, local property crimes—especially the unsophisticated ones. The kind marked by hesitation, aborted attempts, or sloppy execution.

From there, follow social gravity, not geography. Low-level offenders rarely operate alone, and they rarely keep secrets well. They borrow vehicles. They lean on friends. They show up unannounced. Someone else always knows more than they should.

Focus on ordinary spaces inside that five-to-15-mile band: garages that suddenly stay shut, backyard structures that gain an unexplained occupant, properties where routines shift just enough to register if you’re paying attention.

Digital behavior should be read the same way. Panic doesn’t produce silence—it produces noise. Late-night phone activity. Clumsy searches. The ransom message itself—its tone, pacing, and lack of polish—is not just a demand.

Experienced investigators read ransom messages less as demands and more as psychological documents, to understand where the writer is stuck.

The ransom message in this instance doesn’t project control; it circles the moment of loss. Clothing. Objects. Memory fragments still warm from contact. That isn’t the language of distance or design. It’s the language of someone who hasn’t moved on—mentally or physically.

Cognitive movement usually tracks physical movement. Psychologically, they haven’t advanced to the next phase. People who transport victims long distances tend to shift language accordingly—toward control, logistics, pacing. People who stay are looping close to origin.

There is a quiet, awkward truth embedded in the American justice system—so awkward that judges lower their voices when it comes up, prosecutors pretend it doesn’t exist, and jury instructions carefully step around it like a landmine.

It’s called Jury Nullification of Law.

Otherwise know as Jury Power.

A juror can acquit a defendant even when the law has clearly been broken, if the juror believes the law itself is unjust, misapplied, or offensively stupid. No appeal. No override. No do-over. Once acquitted, the defendant walks—and the system has to live with it.

This is not a loophole. It is a feature.

Why Courts Hate It

Judges hate jury nullification because it introduces human judgment into a system designed to run on rules.

Courts want predictability. Precedent. Obedience. The law, applied cleanly and mechanically, like a spreadsheet with robes.

Jury nullification wrecks their world.

It says: Yes, the defendant broke the law—but no, we’re not enforcing it today.

It says: Your statute may be legal, but it isn’t legitimate.

It says: We were asked to judge a human being, not rubber-stamp a regulation.

That makes judges nervous. Very nervous.

So nervous, in fact, that potential jurors are never told about this power during questions about their suitability. Judges will tell jurors they must “apply the law as instructed,” while quietly knowing that—legally—they cannot force them to do so.

The irony is rich enough to be taxed.

The Right That Isn’t Written—But Can’t Be Taken Away

Jury nullification isn’t spelled out in neon in the Constitution. It doesn’t need to be. It flows naturally from two facts the system cannot escape:

1. Jurors cannot be punished for their verdicts.

2. An acquittal cannot be overturned.

Those two realities create a space where conscience lives.

Historically, juries have used this power to refuse to convict under the Fugitive Slave Act, acquit defendants charged under Prohibition laws, resist prosecutions seen as politically motivated or morally wrong.

Jury nullification is what happens when the law runs too far ahead of justice—and ordinary citizens pull it back by the collar.

Why It Still Matters

Today, jury nullification is treated like a ghost story told at law schools after dark. Uncomfortable and embarrassing. Best not discussed.

Just pay jurors a pittance and shepherd them like cattle through the courthouse and the law books.

That’s precisely why it matters.

Because in an age of over-criminalization—where there are more laws than any citizen can possibly know—jury nullification is one of the last remaining brakes on legal overreach.

And since it takes 12 out of 12 jurors to convict, guess who’s really the boss?

But only if you understand your full power as a juror.

Note: If you are a proponent—as I am—of Jury Power, if you make the Court aware of this when asked questions during jury selection, it will probably get you dismissed from duty and, thereafter, stricken from jury duty lists.

Also: Despite your legality as a juror to nullify law, some judges have in the past sanctioned jurors who, post-trial, announced their reasons for acquitting a defendant. Given the hostility of the judiciary toward Jury Power, it is important to understand that you are not obliged to explain your reason for acquitting a defendant. You reach a verdict, deliver it, obligation complete.

Before he ever set foot in a Ukrainian boardroom, Joseph Cofer Black spent a career operating at the sharp end of American power.

A West Point graduate and career CIA officer, he rose to run the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center and became one of the most uncompromising faces of the U.S. response to 9/11—an advocate of aggressive, preemptive force who spoke publicly and privately like a hawk, then became one of the U.S. government’s most visible post-attack enforcers.

After government service, Cofer Black followed a familiar Washington revolving door into the private sector.

Which brings us to Burisma, a major Ukrainian oil and gas company brought into the news through its involvement with Hunter Biden, who was no expert in oil and gas.

Burisma didn’t hire Cofer Black to guard pipelines or chase hackers.

When Burisma added Black to its board in 2017, the Ukrainian gas company wasn’t shopping for muscle. It was shopping for gravitas.

And it worked.

First, understand the moment: By the time Cofer Black showed up, Burisma already had a problem—and a solution that had made the problem worse.

The problem: ongoing legal scrutiny, political instability in Ukraine, and uncomfortable attention from Western regulators.

The solution that worsened the problem: Hunter Biden, the Vice President’s son, on the board.

Hunter Biden bought Burisma access. He also bought Burisma headlines. So Burisma needed to escalate.

Enter Cofer Black.

What kind of company hires a counterterrorism chief?

A company that understands how Washington actually works.

In Washington, there are three kinds of power:

1. Formal authority.

2. Political access.

3. Institutional weight.

Hunter Biden supplied #2.

Cofer Black supplied #3.

What Black actually did

Black did not negotiate gas deals, manage legal defense, lobby Congress, issue public statements

That’s why critics get frustrated, looking for paperwork that doesn’t exist.

Black’s job was environmental control.

Here’s what that means.

1. He provided strategic triage, not tactics.

Former intelligence chiefs are hired for one thing above all else: judgment under pressure.

Black’s real value was advising Burisma on:

• Which threats were real and which were noise.

• When to respond and when to stay silent.

• Which jurisdictions mattered.

• How U.S. political transitions altered risk.

This isn’t lobbying. It’s risk mapping.

If you’re Burisma, the question isn’t “Are we under scrutiny?”
It’s “Who’s scrutinizing us, why, and how far will it go?”

2. He made Burisma “too serious” to swat casually.

Washington loves easy targets. Burisma was drifting toward that category.

Adding Cofer Black changed the math.

Once a company looks “serious,” problems migrate behind closed doors. Discussions become delicate. Language becomes careful. Nobody wants to be the junior official who overreaches and ends up on the wrong side of a future administration.

Black didn’t need to call anyone. His résumé did it for him.

3. He completed the board’s function.

Burisma’s board wasn’t designed to govern the company. It was designed to govern perception.

Each member played a role:

• Hunter Biden: political proximity.

• Ukrainian insiders: local navigation.

• Western professionals: legitimacy.

• Cofer Black: institutional deterrence.

Together, they formed a defensive perimeter made not of guards or guns—but of reputations.

This wasn’t unique. It was textbook.

Post–Cold War, post-9/11 Washington created a new professional class: the institutional stabilizer.

These are former intelligence, military, and national security figures who:

• No longer hold office.

• No longer command forces.

• Shape behavior simply by being present.

They don’t lobby. They don’t threaten.

They don’t need to.

Their value lies in what others assume they represent. Burisma understood that.

Why this matters (beyond Burisma)

The real lesson here isn’t about Ukraine or gas or Hunter Biden.

It’s about how power never really retires in Washington.

It just changes vocabulary, changes business cards, and starts billing by the quarter.

Cofer Black didn’t “do” anything flashy for Burisma.

He didn’t need to.

He made Burisma harder to touch, slower to move against, and more expensive to confront.

Cofer Black made things not happen.

In Washington, preventing things from happening is often the most valuable service money can buy.

And that’s how Insider Washington really works.

1. Everyone keeps pretending this is about buying Greenland, but it will not be sold or leased because Denmark can’t give it away and Greenland wouldn’t sign off even if it could—and the U.S isn’t about to smash NATO with a blunt-force invasion.

2. Ownership was never the point.

3. Control without title is the endgame, and that’s where this is headed.

4. The U.S. will rebrand its position as enhanced Arctic cooperation and expand Pituffik Space Base (Thule) with upgraded missile-warning radar, space surveillance, and hypersonic tracking.

5. Over-the-horizon radar arrays and seabed sensors will appear along Greenland’s coasts, listening for submarines and watching the sky.

6. Greenland will agree to this in exchange for infrastructure, cash, jobs, and a longer leash on autonomy—calling it leverage instead of surrender; the USA will agree to this exchange for ownership rights to Rare Earth Elements: cobalt, graphite, nickel, copper—along with precious metals.

7. Denmark will accept because its flag will continue to fly and its defense burden lessened.

8. Europe will announce it “defended Greenland,” even as it becomes de facto American-secured territory in everything but name.

9. Trump will declare victory; China and Russia will protest briefly then adjust.

10. Thus, the tidy compromise: Greenland stays Danish on paper, Greenlandic in governance, and American in strategic reality.

Greenland has outlasted empires by doing absolutely nothing.

Empires arrive with maps, doctrines, and confidence.

Greenland arrives with February.

February is where theories go to die. It is not symbolic cold. It is operational cold—the kind that converts enthusiasm into logistics, regret, and return flights.

February does not debate. It does not negotiate. It does not read white papers.
(It doesn’t need to. February in Greenland is already white enough.)

This is why Greenland is interesting to the world—from a distance.

Distance allows people to speak fluently about Greenland without encountering it. It turns a harsh, sparsely populated place into an abstract asset—something to be discussed, modeled, and optimized. It allows people who have never set foot there to speak with confidence about what must be done.

Everyone wants Greenland—strategically. No one wants February—personally.

The February Filter

February is Greenland’s sorting mechanism.

Delegations arrive bundled in borrowed parkas, speaking loudly about cooperation, frameworks, and long-term engagement. They leave quietly, having learned that the land does not care what they say.

February does not reward preparation. It punishes the absence of it.

Why Power Keeps Misreading the Place

Power assumes scale. Greenland enforces proportion.

There are no crowds to impress, no capitals to overwhelm, no momentum to ride. There is only weather, distance, and time—lots of time.

This is how Greenland has survived attention.

While empires rose and fell, Greenland stayed cold. While ideologies bloomed and collapsed, Greenland remained inconvenient. While strategies were announced, revised, and abandoned, February kept returning on schedule.

Greenland did not resist history. Its geography declined to participate.

Permanence does not issue press releases. It does not escalate. It simply continues, unchanged, while others exhaust themselves explaining why action is urgent.

February ensures that anyone serious about Greenland has to slow down.

Everyone Wants to Be Arctic Now

Which brings us to the rise of the “Near-Arctic Power.”

A Near-Arctic Power is a country that is not Arctic, has never been Arctic, but would like it noted for the record that it has strong feelings about the Arctic.

This is how you get nations thousands of miles south of the polar circle issuing Arctic strategies with straight faces.

The term is not recognized by maps. It is recognized by conferences.

China

China describes itself as a “near-Arctic state.” This is technically true if one defines near very generously and ignores oceans.

China’s interest is methodical: shipping routes as ice recedes, minerals not yet mined, and research stations that look scientific and function strategically.

None of this is secret. China published an Arctic policy paper explaining exactly what it intends to do, which is always reassuring—until people read it.

China does not rush. It studies, invests, and waits.

This unsettles countries that prefer enthusiasm to patience.

Russia

Russia does not call itself near-Arctic. It is Arctic.

Much of its northern border lies above the Arctic Circle, and Moscow treats the region accordingly—as strategic frontage for bases, ports, and patrols.

While others issue white papers, Russia clears ice.

This is why European Arctic discussions grow tense when Russia enters the room. Russia does not speak in hypotheticals.

Europe

Europe, geographically closer than China, approaches the Arctic in the careful language of norms, sustainability, and consensus. It understands the stakes but prefers that confrontation be politely postponed.

The Greenland Effect

Greenland sits at the center of all this interest and reacts the same way it always has: patiently.

China explored investment. Denmark quietly intervened. The United States began paying closer attention. Everyone insisted this was routine.

Greenland noticed the attention and continued being cold.

What unsettles outsiders is not what Greenland does—but what it refuses to do. It does not hurry. It does not audition. It does not confuse interest with obligation.

Near-Arctic Powers share a common trait: they want the benefits of Arctic access without the cost of Arctic permanence.

They want shipping lanes, minerals, and strategic leverage—without February.

“Near-Arctic Power” exists because no one wants to say the quieter truth:

Geography still matters, and it is not impressed by ambition.

The Inevitable Collision

As ice recedes, interest increases. As interest increases, competition follows.

Everyone insists they are there for science. Everyone also wants leverage.

Greenland listens. February waits.

The Takeaway

Greenland understands something outsiders repeatedly forget: attention is temporary.

It has watched waves of interest come and go for centuries. Each arrives convinced it is different. Each leaves surprised by how little changed.

Plans demand acceleration. Greenland demands endurance.

February has been winning that argument for a very long time.

And Greenland remains Greenland.

“Gold soars past $5,100 an ounce, silver hits new record” (The Guardian)

Gold price today: $5,103.10.

Silver price today: $109.06.

Gold and silver don’t care who’s in the Oval Office. They don’t watch cable news.

They respond to one thing only: Whether the money is still real.

And lately, it isn’t.

When economists talk about“monetary accommodation” or “liquidity support,” what they mean is this: money is being created out of thin air.

Just keystrokes.

It’s not a conspiracy. That is the system.

Since 2020, we’ve normalized emergency measures as permanent operating procedure. Trillions appeared, balances expanded, debts were absorbed, and the word temporary disappeared from the vocabulary.

We were told not to worry because inflation was “transitory.”

It wasn’t.

Oh, so it was “cooling.”

Uh, no—try again.

Now it’s “manageable.”

Really?

The cost of groceries has doubled, insurance went feral, housing became theoretical— and anyone with a calculator noticed something uncomfortable: The almighty dollar doesn’t go far any more.

That’s where gold comes in.

Gold doesn’t rise because it’s optimistic. It rises because it’s suspicious.

It doesn’t price prosperity. It prices trust.

And trust, right now, is running a persistent deficit.

Gold and silver sit outside the system. They have no issuer. No earnings call. No promise attached. They don’t depend on someone else’s ability to make good later.

They just exist.

And when the supply of money grows faster than the supply of reality, metals don’t rally.

They adjust.

Silver is the more volatile sibling—half money, half industrial input, permanently under-appreciated until suddenly it isn’t.

That’s not speculation. That’s physics.

Debt isn’t repaid honestly. Promises aren’t kept politically. And the system chooses dilution over discipline every time.

Gold isn’t predicting collapse. Silver isn’t screaming apocalypse.

They’re just doing what they’ve always done when currency is lighter than it used to be.

They’re keeping score.

Let’s see how this works by taking a stroll down memory lane.

The Roman Empire and Weimar Republic

Early Rome ran on silver coins that actually contained silver. Shocking concept. As the empire expanded, so did expenses—armies, bread, circuses, monuments, corruption.

Eventually someone had a bright idea: What if we keep the coin the same size… but use less silver?

So they did.

And then they did it again. And again. Until Roman coins were silver in name only.

Prices rose. Trust fell. Trade warped. People hoarded older coins and demanded more for goods.

Fast-forward to the Weimar Republic.

Germany had war reparations it couldn’t pay, so they reached for the most elegant solution available: print money.

At first, it worked. So well, in fact, that they printed more.

Currency created with no basis became so plentiful it lost all meaning. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before prices reset.

Savings vanished. The middle class evaporated.

Enter the Federal Reserve

This didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident.

When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the dollar was still tied to gold.

Officially, nothing had changed. Practically, everything had.

The Fed was designed to do three things that gold-backed money resists by nature: expand credit elastically, absorb shocks without defaults, and smooth the political consequences of debt.

Gold demands restraint. Central banking demands flexibility.

The first clean break came in 1933, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, when Americans were barred from owning monetary gold and the dollar was quietly devalued.

Gold still existed—but only for governments.

After World War II, Bretton Woods preserved the appearance of gold backing, but only internationally, and only as a promise. At home, the dollar was already fiat—its greenbacks shifting from “Silver Certificates” to “Federal Reserve Notes.”

Meaning: people could no longer redeem paper for silver.

In the mid-1960s, silver coins began committing an unforgivable sin: they told the truth: The metal inside dimes and quarters was worth more than the number stamped on them. Inflation was leaking out through pocket change.

So Washington fixed the problem.

Silver was removed from coinage. The coins stayed the same size, the same color, the same familiar shape.

Only the honesty was removed.

The final formality came in 1971, when the gold window was closed and foreign convertibility ended.

Gold made promises harder to keep. Silver made inflation visible.

Neither could survive in a system designed to postpone consequences. Not because they failed—but because the system couldn’t live with them.

Once relieved of their official duties, gold and silver went back to what they do best: quietly recording the distance between money as promised and money as practiced.

From 1971 to 1980, gold rose more than twentyfold because discipline had left the building.

So Why Are Central Banks Hoarding Gold Now?

Here’s where it gets awkward.

Publicly, gold is dismissed as a relic and unnecessary in a modern financial system.

Privately, central banks in industrialized countries have been accumulating it like crazy, and without explanation.

They know something the public isn’t meant to dwell on: Gold is the asset of last resort between states. Currency is the asset of convenience within them.

When trust between governments thins, gold thickens.

And Today?

We’re not Rome. We’re not Weimar. It’s not the 1970s.

But we rhyme.

Debt isn’t serviced honestly. Political systems are allergic to austerity. Central banks are trapped between inflation and insolvency.

So the system does what it always does: It dilutes the currency to reduce the real cost of debt. It renames the process to keep it politically survivable. It delays the consequences beyond current decision-makers.

The result?

Gold and silver continue to break new records.

Greenland is not green.

It should be called Whiteland.

It is white.

Blindingly white.

About 80 percent of it is covered by ice—glaciers, ice sheets, compacted centuries of frozen weather.

The greenery, such as it exists, clings to the margins only briefly in summer.

So why is it called Greenland?

Because Whiteland tested poorly with focus groups.

No, not true.

Because it was considered racist? (Someone call Don Lemon, quick!)

No.

It got named Greenland because lying about things you’re trying to sell goes way back—in this case, ten centuries.

The name comes from Erik the Red, a Viking with a marketing problem and a criminal record.

Exiled from Iceland for murder, he sailed west and found a landmass that was cold, remote, and not especially forgiving.

Looking to attract settlers, he chose a name that emphasized possibility over accuracy.

Greenland, he figured, sounded more enticing than Ice with Rock.

It worked.

People came.

This may be the earliest documented case of branding outrunning product reality.

Erik projected farmland. Settlers projected opportunity. Empires later projected territory.

Militaries and think tanks now project strategic significance.

Greenland itself mostly projects snow.

Everyone thinks they’ve discovered it. Everyone thinks they’re the first to notice it matters. Everyone is late.

Greenland has been sitting there the whole time, unchanged in its indifference, while the rest of the world cycles through obsessions.

The ice does not react to policy papers.

Greenland keeps getting dragged into conversations it didn’t start, about futures it didn’t design, by people who won’t stay long.

When powerful people start speaking loudly about a quiet place, the noise usually says more about them than it does about the place.

Greenland has outlasted empires by doing absolutely nothing.

Part II of today’s post on long-game players.

I stated that Richard Nixon was the best modern foreign policy president.

Two centuries ago we had two presidents (Thomas Jefferson and James Polk) and a secretary of state (William Seward) who were also long-term players in their strategic foreign policy maneuvers and negotiations.

In his insightful column, educator/historian William Moloney provided a history lesson.

“Rooftop rivalry over Greenland pits U.S. against Russia, China” (William Moloney, columnist)

This led to my own research and commentary:

The United States did not grow by accident.

It grew because other empires were tired, broke, distracted, or scared—and forward- thinkers in Washington were thinking strategically.

The Louisiana Purchase (1803)

Thomas Jefferson is remembered as a philosopher-statesman and as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

Occasionally glossed over is that Jefferson panicked when Spain quietly handed Louisiana back to Napoleon Bonaparte. His strategic concern: If France shut down New Orleans, the American economy would be strangled overnight.

Jefferson didn’t have clear constitutional authority to buy foreign territory. So he drafted new amendments to justify it.

Napoleon, meanwhile, had bigger problems: a slave revolt in Haiti destroying his Caribbean ambitions, a looming war with Britain, and an empty treasury.

So when American envoys showed up prepared to negotiate, Napoleon sold everything—828,000 square miles—for $15 million.

No battle. Just a real estate transaction conducted under geopolitical duress.

Jefferson later admitted he’d stretched the Constitution like taffy. And in so doing, doubled the size of the country.

Texas (1845)

Texas wasn’t “won.” It was absorbed after a rebellion the United States officially disavowed while quietly benefiting from it.

American settlers poured into Mexican Texas under liberal land policies, then ignored Mexican law—most notably by importing enslaved labor into a country that had abolished slavery. Mexico pushed back. The settlers revolted. Washington did not direct the rebellion, but neither did it intervene; it observed, maintaining plausible deniability while events moved in a favorable direction.

When Texas declared independence in 1836, the United States deliberately held back from immediate annexation—not out of principle, but calculation. Absorbing Texas would have meant war with Mexico, and for nearly a decade Washington chose patience over confrontation.

That restraint ended with the election in 1844 of James K. Polk, arguably the most effective one-term president in American history.

Polk ran his campaign on a platform of territorial expansion. He meant it. And upon entering the White House determined to finish what circumstance had already begun.

Texas was annexed in 1845. War followed.

Polk didn’t stumble into it—he maneuvered into it—and won.

Oregon (1846)

While rattling sabers with Mexico, Polk simultaneously stared down Britain over the Pacific Northwest.

The slogan was “54°40′ or Fight!” Pure theater. Polk had no intention of fighting the British Empire while also fighting Mexico.

So Washington negotiated.

The Oregon Treaty split the difference at the 49th parallel—and the U.S. walked away with what became Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

No heroic charge. Just a clean deal because Britain had other fires to put out.

California & the Southwest (1848)

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War—and transferred 525,000 square miles to the United States: California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico plus chunks of Colorado and Wyoming.

Mexico received $15 million.

Alaska (1867)

Russia was broke, overextended, and terrified Britain would seize Alaska in a future war.

Selling it to the U.S. kept it out of British hands.

$7.2 million. 586,000 square miles.

“Seward’s Folly,” they called it.

First came gold. Then oil. Then the Arctic.

History has forgiven William Seward.

The Pattern

Every major acquisition followed the same template:

1. Another power weakened.

2. The U.S. applies pressure or cash.

3. Legal justification follows later.

Time favors autocrats.

Right now, both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are unhappy campers.

Donald Trump is back. He’s disruptive. Transactional. Unpredictable.

He doesn’t read from the script and he doesn’t respect established protocols.

Trump disrupts preferred rhythm. He refuses tidy ladders. He treats geopolitics like real estate—location, leverage, walk-away power. That’s annoying to men who prefer chessboards with fixed rules and long-rehearsed moves.

But neither Moscow nor Beijing is panicking.

They don’t need to be.

Trump is temporary.

Three years is a blink in imperial time.

Putin has ruled Russia for a quarter-century. Xi can rule China for life.

Putin and Xi measure power the way cathedrals are built—stone by stone, generation by generation, with no hurry and no apology.

So what do they do while Trump is in the White House?

They pedal softly.

No dramatic escalations. No chest-thumping. Instead, they placate. Compliment Trump. Offer deals that go nowhere. Nod solemnly in photo ops. Issue statements that say everything and commit to nothing.

It looks like passivity.

It isn’t.

It’s patience weaponized.

Putin understands he’s not trying to win Trump. He’s trying to outlast him.

Xi thinks even longer. China doesn’t do election cycles; it does dynasties.

To Beijing and Moscow, Trump is a passing inconvenience, not an existential threat.

So China absorbs the shock, reroutes trade, deepens non-dollar arrangements, and keeps building infrastructure alliances while Washington argues with itself on cable news.

Putin doesn’t escalate Ukraine beyond what it can sustain.

Xi doesn’t provoke Taiwan beyond routine pressure.

They don’t poke Trump in ways that force an unpredictable response.

They play defense, consolidate gains—and take notes.

Smile now. Strike later.

American power is loud. It announces itself. It craves validation. It changes tone every four years and strategy every eight. Adversaries don’t need to defeat that system outright.

They just need to let it trip over its own shoelaces.

Putin and Xi (and other autocrats) assume that once Trump leaves office America will revert to process, back to predictability.

That’s when their real moves begin.

The question isn’t whether Putin and Xi are playing a long game.

They are.

The question is whether America is playing any game longer than its next election—
while its adversaries privately laugh at, and nudge along, its domestic squabbles.

How to Counter the Long-Game

Only one president in modern U.S. history fully understood the long-game—and how to counter it.

That was Richard Nixon.

Nixon didn’t strategize foreign policy with the help of Georgetown salons or Aspen panels. He didn’t seek permission from the Council on Foreign Relations. He focused on leverage and outcomes—and he thought long-term.

Nixon’s strategy was to out-fox America’s adversaries, quietly, in a way that would prevail beyond his term. He understood that the only way to defeat long-game players is by changing the board.

First, he split them. Nixon believed adversaries should never be allowed to align comfortably. That was the genius behind opening China in 1972—not because he trusted Beijing, but because he used it to unnerve Moscow. At the same time he pursued detente with the Soviet Union, leading to significant arms control treaties.

Second, Nixon was unpredictable structurally, not emotionally. His so-called “madman theory” was disciplined ambiguity. The point wasn’t to appear reckless; it was to force adversaries to assume you might be.

Third, Nixon thought in decades. Not terms. He asked where power would consolidate long after today’s arguments had burned out. Where would China be in 20 years? So he aimed policy at locking in structures that would survive administrations; alliances hard to unwind, commitments embedded too deeply to reverse.

Nixon didn’t fail because this thinking was wrong. He failed because he threatened entrenched interests—and because his own paranoia handed his enemies the opening they needed.

“Fed chair Jerome Powell issues defiant response as federal prosecutors open criminal probe into central bank” (Daily Mail)

Maybe Trump should dissolve the Federal Reserve Board and return government/taxpayer money to the U.S. Treasury where it rightfully belongs and from where it never should have strayed.

JFK reportedly wanted to do just that before he got assassinated.

How the Federal Reserve Was Born

Americans are told the Federal Reserve is a neutral referee. A kindly umpire. A technocratic thermostat.

That’s the bedtime story.

The truth is closer to a locked-door poker game where players stacked the deck, invented the rules, then hurriedly, sneakily, sold the table to Congress as “stability.”

The Federal Reserve Board did not arise from popular demand. There was no groundswell of citizens begging for a central bank run by private interests with public immunity.

It arose from panic, secrecy—and very rich men who didn’t trust democracy with money.

The Panic That Opened the Door

1907.

The U.S. financial system seized up. Banks failed. Credit froze. Markets panicked.

Who stepped in?

Not the government.

J. P. Morgan—a private banker—locked other bankers in his library and decided who survived and who didn’t.

That frightened Congress. Not because banks collapsed—but because one man had more power than the state.

So Washington did what Washington always does: outsourced control, then pretended it hadn’t.

The Jekyll Island Meeting

In 1910, a small group of men slipped away from Wall Street under false names to Jekyll Island, owned by a private club for America’s wealthiest families.

No press. No records. No public knowledge.

Among them:

• Nelson Aldrich, Republican power broker.

• Paul Warburg, architect of central banking.

• Representatives of Morgan and Rockefeller banking interests.

They weren’t there to debate whether to create a central bank. That part was settled.

They were there to figure out how to sell it to a country that distrusted central banks—by making it look public while keeping it private.

The Great Rebrand

Americans hated the words central bank. So the designers avoided them.

Instead, they created:

• A “Federal” system that isn’t federal at all.

• “Reserve” banks that create money, not store it.

• A Board appointed by politicians but structurally insulated from voters.

Brilliant, really. Orwell would’ve admired the branding.

Christmas Eve, 1913

The bill creating the Federal Reserve was rushed through in four-and-a-half hours on December 23, 1913, with smoke, mirrors, and much haste, when many lawmakers had already gone home for the holidays. Those who were present didn’t have a chance to read what was innocuously called a “currency bill.”

And just as fast, President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law.

Wilson—“The Schoolmaster”— was their man. The moment bankers made him Governor of New Jersey they began filling a bank account for his presidential campaign. The first check—$1,000—came from National City Bank. Wall Street financiers eventually accounted for two-thirds of Wilson’s campaign coffers—even while he duplicitously campaigned against having a central bank!

At the stroke of a pen, Woodrow’s pen, the USA’s monetary supply got transferred to Wall Street.

Years later, Wilson reportedly expressed deep regret, admitting he had “unwittingly ruined” the country by placing its financial system in private hands.

The creation of a central bank was supposed to prevent panics and depressions.

And when it doesn’t—2008 being the most obvious example—the answer is simple:

The government bails them out!

Public losses. Private gains.

Bonuses for bankers. Boners for taxpayers.

So What Is the Federal Reserve?

Not a government agency in the normal sense.

Not a private bank in the normal sense.

It is a hybrid creature:

• Public authority.

• Private ownership.

• Zero electoral accountability.

• Absolute control over the money supply.

It sets interest rates. It expands and contracts credit. It decides who gets rescued—and who gets liquidated.

The Punchline

Every modern fight—housing bubbles, asset inflation, student debt, boom-bust cycles, moral hazard—traces back to this structure.

A system designed in secrecy, sold through euphemism, defended with complexity.

Americans ask, “Why does the economy feel rigged?”

The answer isn’t mysterious.

It was built that way.

“Trump urges credit card companies to slash interest rates to 10% for one year” (CBS News)

In a moment that feels straight out of a Roaring-20s gangster flick, Americans are discovering that the very companies issuing the plastic in their wallets now charging interest rates that would make old-school loan sharks look like Sunday school teachers.

With typical credit card Annual Percentage Rates (APRs) regularly in the 20–30% range, and some even steeper, your average credit card company executive might as well be wearing a pinstripe suit and fedora, and twirling a cigar like Al Capone.

Loan Sharks in Suits

Former employees and consumer advocates describe the modern credit card business as behaving very similarly to how loan sharks used to operate—legal, yes, but predatory nonetheless.

Americans collectively paid hundreds of billions of dollars in interest last year alone. Meanwhile, crd card companies keep pushing rates ever higher, even as defaults don’t rise proportionally, meaning these aren’t risk-based economics—they’re naked price gouging.

President Trump is now publicly calling on credit card issuers to cap interest rates at a 10% APR for a year, blaming the Biden administration for letting “20–30% rates fester unimpeded.”

How We Got Here

The critical turning point came from a 1978 Supreme Court decision that allowed nationally chartered banks to charge the interest rate of the state where they’re headquartered, not the state where the borrower lives.

That ruling unleashed a race among states to court the credit card industry with the most permissive interest laws. Two winners emerged: Delaware and South Dakota— states with lax or nonexistent caps on lending rates. Virtually all major credit card issuers now base their operations in these jurisdictions, exporting high interest charges nationwide.

Delaware’s corporate-friendly legal framework—long prized for lax corporate governance rules—now doubles as a de facto interest-rate haven, allowing card issuers to sidestep the limits that would otherwise exist in more consumer-protective states.

In other words: while Americans in New York, California, or Texas might want rate limits, the law says they’re governed by Delaware’s rules. These rules don’t protect borrowers—they protect banks. And under both Democratic and Republican administrations, no meaningful federal guardrails have been imposed.

Where Is Washington in All This?

President Biden came into office promising consumer protection and financial fairness. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under his watch did push a rule to limit credit card late fees. But that rule was subsequently challenged and struck down after removal of its director.

Credit card interest rates soared to levels that once would have been illegal under old state money-lending laws. Even as regulators had the authority to curb excessive pricing, they opted not to impose a hard cap on APRs, allowing issuers to exploit Delaware’s permissive regime.

The result? Debt assault victims are everywhere—and regulators are nowhere.

Today, politicians across the spectrum—from Bernie Sanders on the left to Josh Hawley on the right—are lining up to propose statutory caps on credit card interest rates.

Bottom Line

Credit card companies are the loan sharks of the 21st century: legal, politically empowered, and unbelievably profitable off the backs of struggling households.

And during the Biden years, the lack of decisive federal action to rein in runaway rates—and the rollback of some consumer protections—left everyday Americans stuck with staggering interest bills and no protection.

How Credit Card Companies Control the Credit Bureaus

Credit card companies shepherd the sheeple through their control of credit bureaus.

Credit card companies don’t own the credit bureaus. They don’t sit on their boards or sign their paychecks. On paper, the bureaus are “independent.”

But they control credit bureaus through dependency, which is far more effective.

How so?

1. Control by Data Supply: Whoever Feeds the Beast Owns It

Credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion—do not create credit information. They receive it.

The overwhelming majority of that data comes from credit card issuers and banks.

If credit card companies stopped reporting tomorrow, the bureaus would have nothing meaningful to sell. No scores. No histories. No product.

That’s dependency. And dependency is control.

2. Control by Dispute

When a consumer disputes an error on their credit report, here’s what happens:

1. The bureau forwards the dispute to the lender.

2. The lender checks its own records.

3. The lender says, “Looks right to us.”

4. The bureau rubber-stamps it.

The bureau does not investigate. The bureau does not audit. The bureau does not independently verify.

The party accused of wrongdoing is the party that decides whether wrongdoing occurred.

Now you see how the system is rigged against you?

3. Control by Revenue

Credit bureaus make their money selling credit scores, risk models, behavioral analytics, and monitoring tools.

And who buys those products?

Credit card companies.

When push comes to shove, the bureau’s loyalty flows toward the entity writing the checks—not the individual trying to fix a ruined credit score.

4. Control by Scoring Rules: Debt Is the Point

Credit scoring models are often defended as “objective.”

They’re not.

They are designed around revolving debt, which is where credit card companies make their money.

Examples:

• Carrying a balance and paying a high APR gets a higher rating than paying in full.

• If you don’t utilize cards to their max, you get penalized and lose points.

• Closing cards hurt your score.

• Cash-paying behavior earns no credit reputation at all.

In other words, the system does not reward financial health.

It rewards dependence on their profit-making.

Bottom Line

Credit card companies do not need to own the credit bureaus.

They supply the data, validate the disputes, buy the products, shape the scoring logic, and operate under laws written to protect the system from accountability.

So when Americans ask why a missed payment can follow them for seven years,
why obvious errors won’t disappear, and why debt feels permanent, the answer is simple:

The system is rigged in favor of credit card companies.

What Consumers Can Do

You are operating inside a system designed to extract money. Lots of it. Once you accept that, you can play defense intelligently.

Never Close Old Cards

Closing cards shrinks your available credit and lowers your score.

Instead: keep old cards open, put one small recurring charge on them, pay in full.

Use Fewer Cards—Strategically

Best practice:

• One primary card (paid in full monthly).

• One backup card (one or two charges a month).

• Everything else dormant but open.

This keeps reporting clean and predictable.

Dispute Errors

Never assume “the system will fix it.”

Disputes can work, but only if you send documentation, follow up repeatedly, escalate in writing

If You Carry a Balance, Prioritize APR Over Everything

Forget rewards. Forget points.

If you carry a balance, a 2% cashback card with 29% APR is a trap. A boring low-APR card beats any perk. (Interest erases rewards faster than you think.)

Don’t Let Shame Keep You Silent

The system relies on confusion, embarrassment, silence.

Assert your only leverage: persistence.

If something looks wrong: call, write, dispute, escalate.

Bottom Line

The house always wins.

But it’s possible to survive a system that was specifically designed for you to lose.

If McLarty & Associates (Richard Burt, the example) shows how Washington makes itself available, Halliburton (and Dick Cheney) shows what happens when that availability meets war.

Cheney didn’t stumble into this story. He was the hinge. He engineered it.

After leaving government, he became CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000—then returned to power in 2001 as George W. Bush’s vice president.

That round trip wasn’t symbolic. It was operational.

Under Cheney, Halliburton—especially through its subsidiary KBR—positioned itself as indispensable to the U.S. military.

Fuel. Food. Housing. Infrastructure.

These are the unglamorous necessities of modern war.

Halliburton made sure it was the company that knew how to deliver them—fast, at scale, anywhere.

So when the United States went to war after 9/11, Halliburton didn’t scramble.

It was ready.

War as Opportunity, Properly Papered

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Halliburton and KBR received billions in no-bid and cost-plus contracts.

These weren’t backroom favors. They were awarded under emergency authorities, justified by urgency, chaos, and the need for speed.

Cheney, as vice president, did everything by the book. He recused himself. He disclosed his financial interests. He followed the ethics rules as written.

And still the optics were impossible to miss: a former Halliburton CEO in the vice presidency while his former company became one of the biggest beneficiaries of America’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anticipation Beats Instruction

Here’s what critics often miss: Halliburton didn’t need Cheney to give orders. The advantage wasn’t directive—it was anticipatory.

Halliburton understood:

• How military procurement actually works.

• How emergency contracting powers are used.

• Where logistical choke points always appear.

• How to make itself the only company capable of solving them quickly.

Cheney’s value wasn’t as a fixer. It was as translator—someone who knew how the state behaves under pressure and had already helped his company prepare for it.

This is influence without instruction. Power exercised in advance.

Why Nothing Stuck

Halliburton was investigated.

GAO reviews. Pentagon audits. Congressional hearings. Documented waste, overruns, mismanagement.

But the central question—was this corrupt?—never produced a prosecutable answer.

Why not?

Because the system allowed it.

• Emergency contracting was legal.

• Cost-plus contracts were legal.

• Recusal rules were followed.

• Disclosures were filed.

What remained was conflict without criminality.

Why It Still Matters

The Halliburton–Cheney episode clarifies a hard truth: you can profit enormously from war without violating ethics rules—so long as you shape the environment beforehand.

It showed that:

• The revolving door doesn’t need to spin during a crisis; it only needs to have spun before one.

• National security can function as a commercial ecosystem.

• Accountability systems are designed to catch violations, not structural advantage.

Halliburton is to military logistics what McLarty/Burt is to energy and sanctions.

Different sector. Same structure.

Former officials convert expertise into leverage.

Leverage becomes anticipation, anticipation becomes profit, profit stays legal.

The system keeps revolving...

…and that’s how Insider Washington really works.