Being There in Trump's America

The Trump White House generated outrage and disgust several weeks ago when it released a short video combining cliched Hollywood war movie clips, bizarre anime style AI generated video and actual footage of US ordinance blowing up targets in the Persian Gulf and Iran. The video was shredded in the media for the crass use of slick Hollywood content from a completely different context and childish looking cartoons that were completely inappropriate as references in any public communication describing actions that risked the lives of US military forces and actually killed Iranians.

If critics were outraged two weeks ago when these types of videos were first released to the public, they should be absolutely crapping their pants in fear from the content of a story published by NBC reporters on March 25, 2026.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-receives-daily-video-montage-briefing-iran-war-rcna263912

The key of the story is this:

Each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours, three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official said.

The daily montage typically runs for about two minutes, sometimes longer, the officials said. One described each daily video as a series of clips of “stuff blowing up.”

But the video briefing is fueling concerns among some of Trump’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week, two of the current officials and the former official said.

(snip>

They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.

The NBC report didn't actually state this, but it certainly seems plausible that the too-tacky-for-Tik-Tok videos first pushed to the public by the White House media office might in fact be EXACTLY the types of videos the President of the United States is being provided every day about his war. The brevity. The confusing intermixing of Hollywood film clips and meme content amid reconnaissance videos captured by drones as targets blow up and people die.

So here America sits, in the middle of a US-initiated war that no one fourteen months ago thought anyone would be insane enough to launch. The American government launched this war amid a government shutdown, when crucial law enforcement and public safety departments are understaffed while the level of threat facing the country is arguably the highest it has been in twenty five years since September 11, 2001. The country is saddled with a President whose attention span is so crippled he cannot be bothered to read a briefing on his war but instead requires a meme-style video montage peppered with enough gore to spike his interest before he'll consider ingesting any information.

Because he likes to watch television.

If citizens and elected officials in a position to actually DO something to correct the danger posed by a senile idiot who is taken seriously by all of the wrong people need something to watch to trigger an epiphany, there's no more appropriate recommendation than a watch of the 1979 movie Being There, directed by Hal Ashby and starring Peter Sellers, adapted from the 1971 book by the same name by Jerzy Kosinski.

Seller's character, Chance, is a quiet, sixty-something man employed as a live-in gardener in the mansion of an elderly wealthy man. As the movie begins, Chance goes through the initial part of of his daily routine that involves gardening, eating breakfast and watching television. A lot of television. Sesame Street. Morning exercise shows. It dawns quickly on the viewer that something with Chance is "off." After Chance is informed by the housekeeper Louise that the "old man" has passed away, Chance's reaction makes it clear he has, shall we say, PROFOUND cognitive limitations.

A pair of lawyers handling the deceased owner's affairs visit the house to scope out the property for resale then encounter Chance in the home, figure out he has no claim to the old man's money, quickly realize he is cognitively stunted as well, then inform him he's got to leave. Chance is essentially pushed to the street and into a modern world with which he is completely unsuited to engage on any level.

As it turns out, Chance lived in Washington DC. He spends his first day wandering through the ghetto that evolved around the mansion that has cocooned him all his life, inadvertently encounters drug dealers, asks a random woman on the street to serve him lunch then eventually hits the jackpot... He finds an electronics store with a video camera pointing out of the front window at passersby and displaying it on a TV. He is instantly mesmerized by the experience of seeing himself on television. Eventually, he begins walking away but somehow manages to step between a limousine attempting to park and another stationary car, getting squeezed a bit in his knee.

There the plot pivots because somehow, rather than the wealthy woman riding in the limousine realizing her vehicle just hit an older man far out of his element, her interactions with him convince her he is a very reserved but uber-philosophical genius. The woman happens to be married to a man Ben Rand framed by the move as a Warren Buffet type. Someone who seems like's he's been 80 years old all of his life. A multi-billionaire consulted for behind-the-scenes economic advice by everyone, including the President of the United States. And when Ben does offer advice, the President comes to him at his home, if you had any doubt. Chance rides along with the wife back to the Rand mansion and, from that point on, everyone in this rarified strata of the rich and the wise who encounter Chance comes to the same WRONG conclusion. That he's a low-key, understated economic and philosophical genius.

The plot emphasizes Chance's simplistic but insatiable appetite for television through numerous scenes. At several points, someone interacting with him will indirectly reference what he's watching rather than paying attention to them and he simply responds with "I like to watch." That quote was actually used as the tag line for the movie when it was released.

Of course, not everyone is fooled. Due to a spiraling series of unlikely events, Chance is present as the President seeks advice from Ben Rand and Chance is asked to opine on some weighty subject of economic importance. He does, the President winds up quoting this genius and mentioning him by name and suddenly the media is clamoring to know more about him. Of course there is NOTHING to learn about him because he has no footprint and even his name Chance Gardener is a fluke. People around him crossed wires when trying to get his last name after his "old man" died and he answered with his occupation. This of course further amplifies the hype around this unknown sage.

He eventually appears on a television talk show which is seen by the housekeeper Louise who informed Chance of the death of the "old man" and was let go at the same time as Chance. Her character essentially represents everyman (the rest of us) in the plot and she is stunned at the fawning treatment provided to Chance. She's watching the appearance with friends and yells at the TV...

It's for sure it's a white man's world in America. Hell. I raised that boy since he was the size of a pissant. I'll say right now he never learned to read or write. No sir. Had no brains a'tall. Stuffed with rice pudding between the ears. Short-changed by the Lord and dumb as a jackass. Look at him now. Yessir. All ya gotta be is white in America to get whatever you want.

At the same time, all of the elites he's encountered are watching the same appearance and further cementing their prior conclusions... That he's a philosophical visionary.

Being There was produced as a satire. It was acted as a total dead-pan comedy. The dialog in the movie perfectly captures the simplistic euphemisms the rich and powerful use to reference complex issues without having to actually explain the underlying issue even ONCE to confirm they have any clue what they are talking about. Because the entire script is played totally straight, the viewer spends the entire time on the figurative edge of their seat waiting to see who finally sees through the upper crust nonsense and calls out Chance for what he is. A total, blithering idiot.

And while waiting for someone -- ANYONE -- in the movie to have that epiphany, the viewer listens to each scene as weighty topics are "discussed" using these nonsense metaphors about gardening and seasons and harvesting, recognizes the same type of meaningless, bloodless language being used today and desperately wants to see, just once, one of the characters scream BULLSHIT!

Sound familiar? The United States is presently trapped within a Being There parallel universe. The American President has always been mentally deficient but is obviously experiencing compounding problems stemming from dementia. He has zero attention span. He requires himself to be "entertained" by any information presented to him to absorb. His universe of themes for anything he discusses is limited to tariffs, flattery of himself, denigration of anyone else who might be compared to him, grift, "deals", lawsuits, using law enforcement for score settling and purposely destroying anything done by his black, first-term predecessor Barack Obama, out of pure racism, jealousy and spite. And this Iran war may be the cornerstone of Trump's "erase Obama" fixation that dates back to Trump's first term.

As of late March 2026, roughly sixty five percent of Americans disapprove of the Iran war, disapprove of tariffs and disapprove of pretty much anything Trump is currently doing or contemplating. But until we have elections to provide some chance for that sixty five percent to change the balance of power, the existing balance of power is dominated by members of a party who refuse to recognize their leader is a utter, complete idiot. Not a single member of the majority party has called bullshit on a single catastrophic decision made by the President.

In the movie, none of the elites ever have an epiphany about the idiot that rose into a position of extreme influence out of nowhere. No character engaged in or within earshot of any of the solemn, economic discussions relying on nonsense metaphors ever calls bullshit. But Being There was a movie. The failure to learn was part of the satirical bite of the script. Part of that bite came from seeing everyone fail to recognize reality then imagining for themselves how bad things could get without correction.

America in 2026 isn't a satirical movie. America in 2026 has launched another war of choice. It has disturbed oil markets in ways even doomsday middle east policy wonks never imagined ANY actor initiating. It has spiked prices and cut supply in ways that will trigger rampant inflation worldwide, limit the availability of fertilizer due to liquid natural gas shortages for the next five years and has unwound nearly fifty years of global economic practices that benefited US citizens more than any other nation on earth.

The United States is going to "be there" in the new hellish reality it is creating for itself for decades to come. And that reality will only worsen until enough of the rich and powerful have that epiphany that never came in the movie and act on it.

WTH

Mystery Science Security Theater 2026

Back in the day, in the late 1980s, a low-budget television production called Mystery Science Theater 3000 began airing on local stations in Minnesota and gained a cult following over the next decade as the show began appearing on cable TV. It's made comebacks as crowd-funded mini-seasons released via streaming outlets as well. The premise of each episode involved an ordinary guy who was captured by two mad scientists and forced to watch bad B-movies so the scientists could monitor him like a cinematic rat in a biology lab. The entertainment value stemmed from the ordinary guy, making the best of his situtation, reverting to providing a running critique of the bad movie he was being forced to watch.

That vibe, that well of cynical humor, seems perfectly appropriate for use in explaining recent laws, regulations and corporate plans regarding "security" in a variety of settings. Each action exhibits unique failures to understand the larger problems they claim to be addressing and each action exemplifies the manipulation of public opinion for the benefit of large corporations and government itself. But these critiques are not merely entertaining, like listening to someone diss a bad B-movie. Some of these plans reflect a drastic reduction in the freedom of individuals to secure their own property and use physical devices they have purchased as they see fit. Understanding why requires a bit of explanation. Think of this as Mystery Science Security Theater 2026.

The Four Security Shams

Before diving in to the specifics of each sham, the terminology and claimed benefit of each are summed up below. Most of these are hot topics within specific interest groups on the web and more detail is widely available but hopefully these summaries suffice for purposes here.

Operating System Age Verification -- Several American states have begun enacting laws that require operating systems running on mobile phones, tablets and desktop/laptop computers to collect a human user's age at the time a userid is created for that user within an operating system and make that age information accessible via API so that the device itself can block access to age-restricted web sites rather than requiring each web site to implement age-related checks. Why? To protect children, of course.

Developer Verification and New Hurdles for "Sideloading" -- Since the Android operating system for phones and tablets was released, the OS allowed developers writing applications for the devices to load them directly onto the device via a USB connection rather than uploading the app to the Google Play Store (Android's restricted download source) then downloading it from there. This served two use cases. First, developers can TEST new apps through multiple debugging iterations without the extra time of uploading to the Play Store process. Second, it allowed developers to write their own software without EVER needing Google to "approve" the application. In the last year, Google announced restrictions on this sideloading process and devised a new policy requiring any developer wanting to release apps via the Play Store submit a government identification. They also initially stated the "sideload" flow would be eliminated, seemingly requiring every developer wanting to write their own applications for their own use to have to register with Google. (This has been relaxed a bit...) Why? To protect everyone from scams, of course.

FCC Bans on Foreign-Made Home Wifi Routers -- The FCC published an update to an existing policy stating that all newly designed home wifi routers would be blocked for sale within the US until the maker submits information to the government about the company’s ownership, the physical supply chain for the product’s hardware and software and plans for the maker to build that product in the US over the next five years. Why? Because the US government is worried that China might embed backdoors in routers sold in the US, providing them unchecked paths for cyber attacks.

ICE Goons Deployed to Airports to Backfill Vanishing, Unpaid TSA Agents During Shutdown -- Much of the federal government has been shut down since January 31, 2026 due to a funding impasse over DHS funding and particularly ICE funding. The shutdown halted pay of most government workers, including TSA agents, while requiring those TSA agents to continue working. After 53 days and counting, many TSA agents are calling in sick or quitting, backing up security checkpoints nationwide. To address this staffing collapse, the Trump Administration decided to deploy ICE agents to airports. Why? No one has a clue. Not one.

Unique Forms of Security Theater

Each of these farces share a baseline of technical illiteracy on the part of any who proposed these actions. At the same time, each exhibits its own unique strain of cynicism and misdirection of public attention from more appropriate issues that need to be understood by the public.

OS Age Verification, Responsibility and Futility

Legislation calling for operating systems to collect and maintain age verification data for each user is an extension of existing technology present in most consumer PCs and phone/tablet devices that allows the OS to retain crucial security and licensing data in an encrypted store. Originally, this capability was aimed at ensuring a one to one relationship between the DEVICE and a LICENSE of a particular piece of software to deter theft or cloning of the hardware or theft or cloning of the software based on its license key. Age verification laws are attempting to use this same capability to retain age information about each userid defined within the device and make that accessible through an API to external applications automatically.

The premise is that sites hosting "adult" content" could interrogate this API and block display of content unless the response returned confirms the appropriate age. Of course, this expands upon existing laws passed in many of the same states requiring adult content to collect "proof" from the visiting user of their age. Business selling adult content or selling adult products (alcohol, marijuana, etc.) HATED this original age verification requirement because those laws put the onus on the BUSINESS to validate the visitor's age. Those businesses supported this new OS-based age verification law because it shifts the onus on age verification away from the web site owner and back to the operating system vendor or the user.

Who were the business supporting this new law? Meta and OpenAI among others. You know... Firms who have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to facilitate sharing offensive content and synthesizing offensive AI images without accountability. Who are some of the organizations objecting to this new requirement? Apple, Google, most Linux communities. Curiously, Microsoft has not exerted much push in public in one direction or the other. It has implemented identical features for products sold in the UK so its relatively low profile on this issue seems to reflect a goal of minimizing controversy rather than any principled stance for faux "safety" or actual "privacy".

The stupidity of OS age verification requirements becomes obvious after seeing that these laws make NO distinction about ANY operating system on ANY device. A smart TV technically requires compliance yet who is the "user" of a TV in a household? Do legislatures enacting these laws expect us to login to the TV in the great room? How about the operating system of a server running "human-less" processes for multiple users (inside a home or in a data center)? How about shared computers in a household? Sure, any modern OS like Windows, MacOS or Linux supports creating multiple users and Linux users in particular are used to creating multiple users to run different pieces of software with different userids as part of securing the machine. However, do most families actually create unique userids for Mom, Dad and the 2.5 spawn?

The pure theater of this type of legislation comes down to this. For the California law and the pending Colorado law, the actual language of the law requires collection of the ATTESTATION of a user's age. Attestation isn't truth and it isn't proof, it's simply a statement. Both laws also stipulate $2500 penalties per child for each "negligent" violation or $7500 per child for each "intentional" violation with exclusive authority to bring civil charges assigned to the State Attorney General.

So what circumstance would lead to a civil case being pursued? Maybe a child abduction traced to a perpetrator who groomed the child via an online system that was blocked per this technology for users under 18, thus proving the child was using a rigged userid with a false attestation? Or a credit card fraud case traced to an online purchase on an adult site by a teen who used a parent's credit card? Are parents really going to fight illicit credit card charges if doing so exposes them to a $7500 fine and legal fees defending themselves against the State Attorney General in court?

It seems pretty obvious most of the parties who might be involved with a false attestation or those benefiting from that false attestation have ZERO incentive to initiate actions that would allow wholesale access to adult content and products by children to be reduced by even ten percent, much less by one hundred percent. But these laws establish a "pencil whipping" precedent of simply physically complying with regulations that solve no problem while conditioning everyone to scoff at the actual law.

Sideloading and Device Ownership

Google's decision to tighten restrictions on "sideloading" immediately raised concerns with developers not only due to the hassle of the process but by the control (implicit and explicit) that Google would be able to exert over developers and the types of applications written for the OS. One aspect of concern stemmed from the fact that use of Android extends far beyond mobile phones and tablets. Many high-resolution touch interfaces used in cars, appliances, kiosks, etc. today uses the Android OS and rely on "non-Play Store" flows to provide updates or simply facilitate development. It isn't clear Google can keep up with reviewing this extra volume of development and enhancement releases or making Play Store a bottleneck for physical installation to devices.

Of course, the larger point of opposition expressed by developers was that it simply is none of Google's business WHO is writing software for Android OS devices and what those applications do. The poster child example of this intrusion is the ICEBlock app that was developed in 2025 to allow individuals to share information about the presence and actions of ICE agents with other users in the immediate area with the app installed. Versions of the app were released for both iOS and Android and both Apple and Google removed the app from their stores after being requested by the Trump Administration which claimed the app was a threat to law enforcement personnel. Well, if you count people showing up to witness and capture evidence of beatings and shootings by ICE agents of random people on the street exercising freedom of speech, yes. Concerns about government or large corporations "banning" applications they don't like are not hypothetical, we have already encountered them.

It's worth noting that on March 19, 2026, Google altered the implementation plan for the sideload process. Rather than eliminating it entirely or imposing a 24-hour wait EACH TIME a user or developer wants to push a standalone APK archive onto a device, Google decided to implement a first-time 24-hour waiting period, followed by another option to disable repeated delays that appears in user settings after the first 24-hour wait. Google's rationale is that this flow is effective at prevent casual users from being tricked by scammers into downloading malware with a false sense of urgency. At the same time, knowledgeable users and developers will be able to see an advanced configuration option that further allows sideloads for the next 7 days or forever after the first 24-hour wait elapses. A rare example of push-back leading to a much better result.

Manipulating Consumer Markets for National Security or Grift?

The FCC announcement of bans on any new home wifi routers is an example of government regulation that sounds appropriate at first but sounds ridiculous after the briefest of technical review. The FCC's announcement can be read here

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-420034A1.pdf

The policy announcement included this statement:

The Executive Branch determination noted that foreign-produced routers (1) introduce “a supply chain vulnerability that could disrupt the U.S. economy, critical infrastructure, and national defense” and (2) pose “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure and directly harm U.S. persons.”

President Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy stated: “the United States must never be dependent on any outside power for core components—from raw materials to parts to finished products—necessary to the nation’s defense or economy. We must re-secure our own independent and reliable access to the goods we need to defend ourselves and preserve our way of life.”

The announcement links to a separate document identifying steps manufactures must take to obtain approval to sell their products in the US:

https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/Guidance-for-Conditional-Approvals-Submissions0326.pdf

The approval document includes three categories of information that must be submitted, including corporate structure (legal name, shareholders owning more than 5%, board members), factory and supply chain disclosure (bill of materials required to make the device, origin of each part, intellectual property owners of hardware or software, etc.) and a US manufacturing and onshoring plan (a time-bound plan for establishing or enlarging US manufacturing of the device, percent of components already made in US, current US headcount, etc.).

Yer humble obedient scrivner WTH actually has extensive familiarity with the administration and logistics of purchasing, activating, configuring and updating tens of millions of consumer-grade Internet access devices. From as neutral a perspective as can be mustered coming from this background, all of this SOUNDS as though its motivations are plausible. Discovery that tens of millions of home routers have backdoors that could be instantly turned on at a previously arranged time to execute denial of service attacks WOULD be devastating to national security and the economy. The nature and severity of these concern are not new in 2026. Identical concerns were raised about Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei in the early 2010s, leading to that vendor being banned from use within American telecom networks.

The plausibility of these concerns vanishes in the context of the Trump Administration and the Trump Family grift machine. Note that approval requests must provide a "plan" for on-shoring some or more of any new device's manufacturing. It only requires a "plan" and it also allows the "Department of War" to explicitly approve devices it deems to pose no risk. These devices have a typical physical lifespan of about 7-10 years but the security standards and user features implemented within them typically lead to replacement every 4-6 years. As such, the market for these within the US is probably about 22 million yearly (133 million households spread across six years, worst case).

This new "ban" serves to add a new arbitrary choke on supply while putting a corrupt Administration and Pentagon in a position to pick and choose exceptions to the rule with virtually zero public oversight. It also provides a means for Trump Family insiders to front-run trading in any stock of any firm that might be particularly helped or hurt by any arbitrary decision made within the Trump Administration.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Numerous news outlets have documented cases of ENORMOUS trades being executed 15-30 minutes prior to major announcements from the Trump Administration or Trump's own social media that involved between $192 million and $1.5 billion dollars of futures position trades executing on that inside information. These trades were TEN TIMES the size of average trades executing during that period reflecting an extremely high confidence level in the outcome and reflecting a belief that nothing would be done. After a year of this pattern, nothing HAS been done so that sense of legal invincibility seems justified at the moment.

ICE - A Dessert Topping and a Floor Wax

I mean, really... Is there anything these ICE agents can't do? Is there any problem that doesn't get better by adding ICE in the mix? In Trump's mind, anyway? Shooting people in cars? Kidnapping children and transporting them across state lines? Sure, why not deploy a bunch of heavily armed, poorly trained, ignorant goons to overpacked, already-tense, high-security airports and have them do EXACTLY NOTHING?

The ICE deployments to airports have been obvious shams from Day One. Local and national news crews ROUTINELY recorded video combining a line of travelers snaked around a terminal waiting to pass through security while five or ten heavily armed ICE agents stood next to a bathroom or sat in a food court doing absolutely NOTHING to facilitate actual SCREENING of passengers. There's a good reason for that. ICE agents have no training on scanning procedures and equipment and, equally importantly, ICE agents have no logins to TSA systems to act as drivers license and boarding pass checkers. There is literally NOTHING an ICE agent can do inside an airport to fill in for a missing unpaid TSA agent.

So why have ICE agents been deployed to airports? The first obvious answer is Trump is literally so dementia-diminished that he doesn't understand the difference in roles between ICE and TSA and has no underling willing to tell him no to one of his many, many, MANY bad ideas. In Trump's dementia-impaired cognition, ICE has become the fill-in word he uses any time he needs to name an actor to pursue an action he has proposed with no rational thought. And again, because no underling is willing to say no, we get ICE agents walking around on paid overtime doing NOTHING while TSA agents work with no pay or stop showing up entirely.

In reality, this actually IS the core of this issue. The government is shutdown PRECISELY because Trump has insisted on a MASSIVE funding INCREASE for ICE while simultaneously rejecting the imposition of requirements of ICE officials to comply with rules of transparency that apply to all other government law enforcement. The government is shut down PRECISELY because Trump is insisting on a giant blank check to grow an agency already involved with calamitous failure while eliminating ANY accountability for that agency.

The fact that Trump and his cloud of advisors including types like Steve Bannon have publicly mused about deploying ICE agents to voting sites in the November 2026 midterms clearly indicates Trump views ICE as his personal storm troopers. Deploying them to airports serves absolutely no practical point for citizens but serves to remind all of us that Trump doesn't care about legality or practicality, only loyalty.

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In general, a few parting remarks must be conveyed with all of these cases of "child safety" and "security" theater.

First, if anyone ever believes that government and giant corporations and the billionaires that control them care ANYTHING about the safety of children and the need to protect them from predators, ponder this. We are now seven years into a saga that has divulged the existence of nearly six million documents covering a period of nearly thirty years. Those documents confirm at least a DOZEN wealthy millionaires and billionaires were involved in the sexual exploitation of at least ONE THOUSAND minors and young women across multiple countries. They indicate corruption and ethical failings on the part of multiple state and federal prosecutors over multiple Republican and Democratic administrations.

Yet, the only person convicted of any crimes related to this saga was shifted from a minimum security prison in Tallahassee, Florida to a lower security level federal prison camp in Bryan, TX after meeting with the President's former personal defense lawyer and current deputy Attorney General. Sex offenders are supposed to be ineligible for minimum security camp facilities per federal sentencing guidelines yet this offender gets relocated within two days of a private discussion with a top Administration official?

Yet, despite an explicit law enacted nearly UNANIMOUSLY by Congress requiring the disclosure of nearly six million pertinent documents, the Department of Justice has only released about 3.5 million of the documents, heavily redacted many in ways that violate the explicit law involved and is stonewalling on the rest?

Proposals that fixate on "child safety" in this environment are often red herrings, intended to silence criticism of the larger futility of the proposal given the way things actually work or to distract from concerns over hidden aims not explained by proponents.

Second, there may not be any better example of the insanity of the mind of Trump than the deployment of poorly trained, poorly vetted ICE agents into the existing security theater of the TSA screening process at airports who then literally do nothing. We are spending a premium to transport these agents to remote cities, put them up in hotels and pay their wages while TSA agents work through a shutdown with zero pay so the President can satisfy some dementia driven mental tic that requires him to feel like he's being tough on someone while every aspect of the actual problem goes unsolved. America is likely at a threat level not seen since September 11, 2001 due to America's attack on Iran. Yet TSA is shorthanded because of a shutdown triggered by Trump's demand to EXPAND the budget of ICE while accepting zero controls and accountability on its actions.

Trump is incapable of lying over any extended period because he is incapable of silencing his inner dialog. He's made it clear that "ICE" is his mental shorthand for a dedicated force beholden to him as President to support ANY goal he imagines. The current shutdown is worth continuing indefinitely until Congress is willing to exert the required control over Trump's private gestapo.

The karma on these matters cannot accumulate forever without returning to make an appearance at some point.

WTH

Ten Days In: So Far, So Bad

The US launched its latest war of choice on Iran on February 28, 2026. The war has been underway for ten days and while the total value of damage inflicted on the world will never be exactly quantified, some obvious areas of damage can already be at least itemized.

Again, it seems necessary to caveat any discussion of this war with a disclaimer. Any discussion of mere financial and economic impacts of the 2026 United States / Iranian war must START with an explicit acknowledgment of the immorality, illegality and pure strategic folly of this war. Period. Full stop.

Beyond that, discussing the financial impacts MIGHT provide more context for individuals forced to make important personal decisions amid this turmoil or convince them to defer such crucial decisions until more stability and sanity are apparent. Discussing financial impacts might have some chance of changing the opinions of those who previously supported the criminal President and Cabinet who chose to launch this war. However, that's highly unlikely. Supporters of this American regime have proven themselves not only to be incredibly crass when it comes to financial matters and the larger public welfare but profoundly and proudly ignorant as well.

What follows isn't intended to serve as a complete encyclopedia of every ripple of economic blow-back already triggered by ten days of war. It is merely a list of a few of the more obvious lines of analysis being triggered by the last couple of days of stories about the war and the breadth of attacks seen so far.

Force Majeure

The term force majeure is used in contracts to allow parties to a contract to escape obligations under the contract when certain "external factors" occur which are not under the signatory's control and make it impossible to meet those obligations. These terms have historically included acts of war, acts of terrorism, a change in government, destruction of required infrastructure, etc. As might be expected in light of current events, businesses all over the world are now actively reviewing existing force majeure clauses to see if they can escape current contracts or to determine if contractual partners will try to escape existing contracts leading to cascading difficulties meeting other contractual obligations.

One collection of business interests now contemplating force majeure impacts are middle east sovereign wealth funds managed by the very rulers whose countries are coming under attack from Iran. These funds previously claimed to commit billions of dollars for investments in the US to curry favor with Trump. Will these deals collapse as these countries keep the dollars locally to rebuild their countries? Will these deals collapse as these countries contemplate the folly of partnering with such a corrupt President who is also phenomenally stupid? Either is possible and would make sense.

Economically, the true impact of such reversals is likely to be relatively small. Every one of those existing or promised future deals was structured to magnify the APPEARANCE of the investment in the "US" while actually minimizing it and managing to put just enough into Trump's pockets to distract him into giving them what they want. The actual amounts that would have made it into actual job-creating investments were likely to have been zero. The withdrawal of such plans won't serve as a political wake-up call to Trump supporters either. They have yet to comprehend the criminal nature of these deals and seem invested in the cult for the long haul, reality be damned.

However, the specter of force majeure declarations has REAL impacts in other ways, within the shipping insurance realm and financial contracts in general. Obviously, the halt of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz is a huge cause but the US worsened shipping and insurance problems by at least a multiple by torpedoing an Iranian tanker off Sri Lanka. The shipping insurance players looked at that and said, "Hmmm, the war zone isn't just the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, now it's the Indian Ocean. That pulls in an entirely new set of routes that affect shipments headed south around the southern tip of Africa and puts them all at risk. Shipping insurers have already retracted policies on existing shipments and brought ships to a standstill while the ship owners and cargo owners haggle over updated terms for the new reality.

Any uptick in declarations of force majeure probably increase financial risks by one or two orders of magnitude. Private equity firms have been making news on a weekly basis since June 2025 as giant losses suddenly become visible after years of rolling over bad loans to bad credit risks. This soaking of bad credit risks with transactional fees with no valid hope of ever seeing the actual loan paid off is a business model that has also taken over used cars and mobile homes. This level of weekly implosions was occurring in a climate ABSENT any larger excuses for tearing up prior contracts under the cover of force majeure declarations.

In 1998, the geniuses at Long Term Capital Management never modeled spreads in interest rates DIVERGING further into a bond's lifetime to maturity and lost roughly $4.6 billion dollars. In 2008, hundreds of billions were lost when banks continued assuming widespread mortgage defaults across all regions of the country could never happen because they never did previously, even as evidence of wholesale loan origination fraud was readily evident and defaults were already rising. In 2026, it is absolutely clear that no PE firm or hedge fund has modeled the integrity of their portfolio in a world where banks and creditors are leveraging force majeure language to escape contracts en masse.

Private Equity Losses, Inflation and Unemployment

All of these weekly losses suddenly reported by PE firms involve dozens of bad bets they've hidden on small and medium capitalized firms who are now losing their credit lifelines that have been keeping their doors open. As previously discussed on this blog, the private equity credit market is a scam jointly operated by private equity firms and large banks that continues rolling over known bad loans to failing businesses as a means to continue collecting up-front fees and higher interest payments as the company inches closer to bankruptcy. This scam depended upon PE firms and banks being confident enough in the near term of the firm's ability to pull in enough revenue to cover new fees and interest payments. As long as interest rates were low and the borrower had some remotely plausible claim to steady revenue in the short term, all of the fraudsters were willing to take another spin at the roulette wheel, hoping to dump the loan at the next re-financing. With higher unemployment, more of these businesses were seeing their revenue tank and with higher interest rates, the risk facing the next lender to spin the wheel goes up and the game grinds to a halt.

Higher inflation is likely due to all of the factors discussed here and unemployment is already rising. All of these factors are thus taking all of the energy out of this private equity credit scam. With those credit lines gone, firms previously requiring this Ponzi financing are folding but because they're all relatively small, these job losses aren't being widely reported. As an example, private equity has a big footprint in local contracting businesses like roofing firms, remodeling firms, etc. There are FAR FEWER actual local contracting firms remaining than it first seems. Even firms with names you've seen for 20 years are getting gobbled up by PE firms operating regionally or nationally while keeping their original names to maintain the "local", "hometown" vibe.

This level of consolidation is driven by the fact that much of the work performed by these firms is being covered by insurance and insurance companies require use of special cloud software for generating bids and submitting revisions during work to minimize their claims processing costs. These estimating and claim filing subscriptions are expensive to use (the estimate tools can cost north of $150 per estimate whether they win the bid or not) so a small local firm cannot afford to eat those costs for their scale.

This competitive dynamic means that when these private equity losses are being announced, there are probably at least 2 or 3 regional contracting firms instantly going out of business which control what used to be dozens of local firms that each might employ thirty to forty people. Their workers instantly lose their jobs and customers with deposits now face a struggle to recover their deposit or worse, find someone to finish work that's in progress. If they manage to time the bankruptcy to avoid stranding customer deposits or leaving unfinished jobs, local news media won't notice the actual job losses and report it but they add up.

Energy Prices and Inflation

Oil prices have already jumped from about $62/barrel on February 27 to $103 on March 9, a whopping 66 percent increase, but that spike doesn't yet reflect a further reduction in refined product supplies stemming from bombings of storage tank facilities in Iran by Israel and the pre-emptive shutdown of the world's largest LNG plant in Qatar. And on March 9, Iran struck Bahrain's largest oil refinery as well.

Americans have been misled by two decades of claims in ad propaganda from oil companies and ignorant politicians that our economy is less susceptible to uncertainty in the middle east because we now obtain virtually none of our oil from Persian Gulf supplies. It is true that America gets virtually none of its oil from Persian Gulf nations but the Gulf still supplies 20% of the world's oil and now most of it goes to China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam who still do about 69% of the manufacturing of products consumed in the US. If energy costs rise 66 percent, EVERYTHING purchased from Asia is going to be more expensive to produce there, ship across the ocean to reach America and truck within America, triggering more inflation.

The loss of LNG production capacity is very dangerous for Europe because much of their electrical generation is dependent on LNG, as is the case within the US as well. Because oil and gas are fungible commodities, any loss in supply will raise prices everywhere it is used, spiking prices for electricity which is already rising due to AI compute demand. This will also feed into inflation in every industrialized country.

America's Increasing Defense Strategy Isolation

The escalating conflict is also providing lessons about weapons systems and military strategy. Iran has fired probably a few thousand drones and missiles at nearly every neighboring country within range of its weapons. But the US has fought back with $1 million dollar Tomahawk missiles and used Patriot batteries and newer THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) systems that focus on incoming targets in their final (fastest) portion of flight. These systems seem to be working VERY well on a per-target basis but are already proving completely unsuitable due to the asymmetry in cost. No nation can sustain a defense strategy relying on weapon systems that cost ten to one hundred times the weapon they are fending off.

The key danger sign in this aspect of the war is that the Trump Administration has stupidly commented on the likely duration of the war. First a couple of days, maybe a week. Then a couple of weeks, MAYBE a month or two. Now as of March 9, September is being floated as a worst-case wrap up date. What isn't being addressed is the likelihood that this first wave of attacks from Iran has triggered the US into using up nearly ALL of its stockpiles of missiles and drones under the premise that we're almost done beating them, they'll topple any day.

Well, the Iranian government HASN'T toppled, they just declared Khamenei's son his replacement, and the quantity of daily attacks from Iran shows ZERO sign of abating. How is the US going to defend its assets and neighbors in another two weeks after further depleting our stores of our best weapons? And it is HIGHLY likely that replenishing these weapons will require semiconductor components from China and other Asian countries. Those parts will likely SKYROCKET in price or become unavailable for strategic reasons.

Europe has learned the correct lesson from watching Ukraine perfect newer defense measures that are physically effective AND cost-effective against Russian / Iranian drones. Europe has internalized this lesson to the extent that European countries have started walking away from new US designed weapons systems because US makers remain fixated on gold-plated, high-margin, cost-plus weapons systems that produce billions in profits. And that's in addition to former allies concluding that America cannot be trusted as a partner in defense alliances to begin with.

It's easy to get complacent when the weapons you make get used on "little countries" and not your own homeland. Weapons that don't work or are not cost effective are of no direct concern when they are used on "little countries" abroad, as long as profits are rolling in. As prior allies grow fed up with the arrogance and complacency of American defense firms and the US government, more of these weapon systems partnerships will end. This will reduce demand for US-built weapons, reducing design and manufacturing jobs in the US defense sector and result in even more astronomically expensive weapons systems for US-only consumption... Thus, a flawed defense strategy will create even more job losses AND inflation, in addition to failing to meet actual defense needs.

American Debt and Cash Flow

A new war whose planning was not previously shared with Congress obviously adds unplanned costs to the government's budget. It is difficult to imagine a scenario more dangerous to the financial stability of the United States than the conditions under which this war was launched. The federal government was already expected to incur a $1.8 trillion dollar budget deficit for its fiscal year 2026. The Trump Treasury department was already gambling it would succeed at forcing the Federal Reserve to LOWER interest rates by shifting VAST amounts of existing US debt from longer term maturities (ten, twenty, thirty years) to extremely short term maturities of less than a year. As of March 2026, a staggering 31.4 percent ($11 trillion of $36 trillion) of the total debt is financed for terms of twelve months or less. This is the government equivalent of financing a home with pay-day loans.

This shift toward shorter maturities when interest rates MAY be rising substantially to tame inflation and SHOULD be rising to reflect vastly higher borrower risks means the cost to America of keeping current on interest payments will SKYROCKET. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that given the distribution of the existing $36 trillion in debt across existing maturities, each one percent increase in interest rates increases yearly interest payments owed on that debt by $100 billion dollars.

A War on the Environment

Could the outcomes from this war be any worse? Absolutely. They ARE worse. All of the destruction of storage tanks and LNG facilities in the Persian Gulf is burning WEEKS worth of refined energy products which is obviously magnifying the factors contributing to global warming which are already racing beyond the tipping point. And that catastrophe is made worse by the knowledge that NO ONE on the planet is gaining anything from that damage. If the climate damage from this much energy destruction had an offsetting "credit" by having supported some effort that developed a cure for cancer, at least a debate could be had about trade-offs. There's no trade-off here. The world is literally setting part of the planet ablaze for ZERO BENEFIT and accelerating damage that will become evident in months and years, not even decades.

WTH

America's World War of Choice

A series of painful lessons are enroute to American citizens over the next few decades. You get to choose your leaders (for now...). You get to choose your wars (for now...). You DO NOT get to choose your consequences. You need to be more careful in your choices of leaders.

Let's Not Bury the Lede, Shall We?

Any attempt to analyze America's latest elective military disaster poses a substantial rhetorical risk to both the analyst and anyone bothering to read the analysis. Analysis relies upon logical, rational thought processes in the brain which typically start by assuming a modicum of rationality and worthiness to the act being analyzed. It assumes the aim of the analysis is to identify flaws in the execution of an act or identify corrections going forward to improve likely outcomes.

This attack by the United States has no basis in rationality or morality. It's important to start any analysis of this type of act with the most important facts up front.

Wars should always be a last resort for solving disputes of any kind.

Wars have NEVER ended the way ANY participants in those wars expected.

Wars attempting to project power over a remote land without soldiers to impose and maintain order have never resulted in victory for the entity projecting power.

Unless a weapon is actively raised and / or a munition is on its way, pre-emptively launching a war against an enemy is morally indefensible.

A government that lies to its citizens about the justifications for launching a war has no moral authority to retain power.

There is no way to "win" an immoral war as the instigator.

A Meme-Based, Post-Reality World War

It is crucial to understand the event that was launched on February 27, 2026 for what it is. The joint United States / Israeli attack on Iran has resulted in bombs dropping in multiple countries -- Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, Iraq and Cyprus. Some of those attacks triggered treaty obligations involving the UK and Germany after bombs hit facilities they operate in affected countries. There is already a war originally involving Russia and Ukraine that has spread to nearby European countries as terrestrial and ocean pipelines are targeted for attacks. We literally have a world at war.

This latest attack was first conveyed to the public via a video post on Trump's social media application rather than official, serious communication channels to either the American public or its elected Congressional officials. Iran has issued fake video posts depicting fictional damage to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier in a bizarre attempt to fool its own citizens, despite the fact that virtually none have access due to the shutdown of Internet services within the country.

Modern technology is providing near-live video of launches of dozens of million dollar Tomahawk missiles and bomb damage at targets intermixed with real-time video and social media messages from US officials completely contradicting each other on basic questions such as the justification for the attack, what the goals are for the attack, how long the Administration expects the war to last, etc. It is crucial to reiterate this point. It is NOT the case that DIFFERENT officials are giving DIFFERENT statements on these topics where PersonA says A, PersonB says B, PersonC says C. What is happening is PersonA is saying X, PersonB is saying NOT X and PersonC is saying X again with maybe Y or Z. War strategy is being discussed and set in public via competing tweets and public appearances by Cabinet officers trying to catch the attention of an addled President who will not read a briefing book. Utter chaos.

Any media outlet claiming to make sense of this or present talking head analysis to tell us what comes next is completely misleading their audience and the wider public. NO ONE can predict what comes next because the leaders in control have no rational core anchoring the decisions that are being made. When a fuller history of this disaster becomes known in five years or a generation, it will be clear that every crucial decision was triggered by attempts to satisfy the whims of a President with the attention span of a gnat and the intellect to match.

No Legal or Moral Justification

Trump first spoke of the war after it began via a short message recorded from his home in Florida. In a pre-recorded video, Trump wore a bitchin' white baseball cap with USA letters reading a statement off a teleprompter. That first statement included this claim:

 Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing the long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland. 

Yet multiple Senators and House members who were given a top-secret briefing lasting seventeen minutes on Sunday morning March 1 were told by top Pentagon security analysts that the action was NOT in response to any imminent threat. And no one in the defense establishment was claiming Iran has any capability to reach European countries with missiles of any kind, much less the US mainland.

In contrast, Iran does have missile technology that can reach Israel and that capability is much closer to the true motivation behind this attack In fact, Secretary of State Rubio made a stunning comment in an appearance before Congress on March 2:

The second question I’ve been asked is ‘Why now?’ Well, there are two reasons why now. The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States. If we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties . So, the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.

Of course, this explanation was carefully re-re-re-explained in subsequent hours to minimize any appearance of over-stepping on Trump's verbal diarrhea while simultaneously attempting to erase the obvious strategic and legal implications that the US launched a pre-emptive attack because it feared another client state of America would launch an attack on Iran that would result in Iran attacking US assets in the region. Not exactly an imminent threat meriting a unilateral decision of a President to launch a full scale war under the most lenient interpretation of constitutional powers.

No Rational Security and Intelligence Strategy

The Trump Administration has already demonstrated gross incompetence and indifference in the security and intelligence aspects of this war. The fact that Kuwaiti air defense forces fired upon US fighter jets shows that US leaders were not properly synced with allied command and control on tactics.

After launching the war, the US State Department issued travel warnings to US citizens to avoid virtually the entire middle east. At the same time, the US also issued a notice to existing US personnel in those states that they were completely on their own and that no assistance would be provided for them to get out of harm's way. This presumably includes top intelligence personnel in the region. People's whose intelligence in the coming months and years will be quite valuable. People completely hung out to dry, unprotected.

As the final coup de incompetence, FBI Director Kash Patel, fresh from his trip to the US Hockey Team locker room, returned to Washington DC in time to fire roughly one dozen experts and staff within the FBI with expertise in... WAIT FOR IT... Iranian counter-intelligence. They were fired literally DAYS before the attack. Given Iran's operation of a worldwide network of violent terrorist cells, one would normally presume Iran would have means to trigger attacks on infrastructure, communication networks and similar targets here in the US.

Fears of Iranian regime blowback in the US are not far-fetched. Earlier in January, a pro-Iranian individual drove his car into a group of protesters in Los Angeles who were protesting for the return of the prior Shah's son to power in Iran. A man was shot by police at a bar in Austin, TX early Sunday morning March 2 after he shot three people amid a flurry of shots. That man, a Senegalese national age 53, was wearing a sweatshirt with Iranian insignia.

If there was EVER a time in which a staff of Iranian counter-intelligence resources should be safe from a budget axe or score-settling, one would assume that time would be now. So how carefully was this effort coordinated across our unified "Department of Homeland Security"? I guess we should just put that in quotes. The title is clearly no longer actually descriptive.

No Rational Political Strategy

Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth were asked separately at different times for estimates on the duration of this war. Both provided completely different answers not only about the duration but the underlying mission. Trump first stated the goal was to eliminate Ayatollah Khamenei but leaving what happens next up to the Iranian people.

Hegseth opened a press appearance by explicitly stating the attack was not about regime change but look at what happened cuz clearly the regime changed. In reality, Iran has continued organized, consistent attacks on oil facilities throughout the region in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc. indicating the February regime is still in control and that Hegseth has no connection to reality.

In a later appearance, Trump was asked again about regime change and filling the void if the current regime did eventually fall. Trump stated that the US had identified several A, B and C alternatives to replace Khamenei but unfortunately, A, B and C were all wiped out with Khamenei.

So what is the actual reality within the Administration? First the goal was simply eliminating the current leader. Then the goal WAS regime change. Then the US had identified preferred replacements but all three preferred replacements were WITH the current leader when he was killed. How much of a regime change would be gained if the replacements came from the same team? About the same amount of change as achieved in Venezuela. NONE.

In another twist direct from the Department of Can't Make This **** Up, the Trump Administration is now making references to involving the Kurds in the fight to topple the Iranian regime. America and the Kurds go way back because America has been playing Lucy and the Football with the Kurds for DECADES. The Kurds are an ethnic population of nearly 30 million people tied to a region loosely scattered across the touch points between western Iran, northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and northern extremities of Syria. Of course, these countries and the boundaries between them have come and gone and moved hither and yon since the latter 1800s, always at the whims of western powers and their selfish interests in oil and never factoring into account these types of ethnic groups living within those borders.

Since 1979, America in particular has found great use in pitching partnerships with ethnic Kurd fighters in a perpetual game of Lucy and the Football where America creates a disaster for itself (first with Iran after 1979, then with Iraq after 1990 then again in Iraq in 2003) and when the prospect of AMERICAN boots on the ground to control territory becomes intolerable, the idea of "partnering" with Kurdish forces for them to attack the enemy in exchange for a promise of being able to establish their own homeland is pitched. It's never worked out, yet here we are again, looking for another remake of a movie that never was.

In the interest of actual reality, as of March 4 around 3:00pm CST, it appears there will be no immediate regime change. Multiple news outlets are reporting that Iran's power structure seems likely to appoint the departed Khamenei's 56 year old son Majtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader. Other outlets in India are reporting the decision has already been made. Meet the new boss... Same as the old boss.

No Comprehension of Economic Reality

Prior to attacking Iran in February 2026, the United States was already running yearly deficits around $1.8 trillion dollars per year with an accumulated debt of over $36 trillion dollars. American businesses have lost hundreds of billions of dollars in business for the foreseeable future as Trump imposed tariffs triggered foreign countries to negotiate two-way deals with each other leaving American businesses and American dollars completely out of the loop. Soybean deals? Gone. Wheat deals? Gone. Not reduced. Gone. Other products such as California wine sales to Canada and Kentucky bourbon / Tennessee whiskey sales to Canada have dropped seventy percent.

Trump's authority to collect these tariffs was rejected by the Supreme Court but the court deferred any decision on what to do with already-collected revenue to lower courts. Given the roughly $287 billion dollars collected under the illegal tariffs, this acts like a giant looming accounting adjustment on the US Treasury ledger and a $287 billion dollar question mark seen by investors worldwide. Those worldwide investors are looking at a country that didn't just launch a new expensive war of choice, they're looking at a country that just launched an expensive war of choice from a position of profound economic weakness that faces a multitude of threats:

• rising inflation rates, despite the ruling rejecting existing tariffs
• more inflation en route due to rising oil prices from the Iran war, driving up costs throughout the world
• more inflation en route due to rising oil prices from the Iran war that increase trucking / distribution costs within the US for nearly all goods
• reductions in consumer credit as private equity lending firms begin facing hidden losses in the tens of billions of dollars
• a hype bubble in the AI tech sector that could trigger a trillion dollar collapse in the only firms that have resulted in stock market growth for the past three years
• GDP growth figures that have dropped to an annual rate of roughly 1.4% (dropping from a 4.3% rate in 3Q2025) which reflects a huge slowdown and a rate insufficient to maintain tax revenues to control deficits
• layoffs in tech sectors previously offering some of the best paying jobs in the economy continue on a weekly basis
• housing starts are up compared to prior quarters in 2025 but those percentages are based upon a multi-year low hit in October 2025 and are still far below earlier levels from 2020 to 2023

Launching this war of choice has further alienated every country that previously viewed the USA as a stable ally, both financially and militarily. And the US is heightening this alienation at a time when economic uncertainty may soon require "adult leadership" to avoid meltdowns that could tank the entire global financial system. This is the type of "adult leadership" the US could previously be relied upon to provide and -- as no small compensation for incurring the headaches of BEING the adult in the room -- use to its unique advantages for American businesses and the American government itself.

That world is GONE. That level of faith in the United States will NEVER return.

The Future Costs of Current Incompetence

Given the players currently making decisions, it is pointless to attempt to develop estimates for specific types of costs stemming from this attack on Iran. Looking backward, recent overseas wars tended to cost $1 billion dollars per day in 2026 dollars during the missile and bombing phase, then slow to maybe $190 million to $250 million per day in the extended boots on the ground / car bomb phase of operations.

If the Iran war lasted 365 days with 20 days of "missile war" and the balance "boots on the ground" intensity, the "cost" might be $106 billion dollars. But that assumes a traditional trajectory where the US attempts to impose some sense of order on the ground, if only in an initial attempt to dictate who takes over. It cannot be assumed the Trump Administration feels any obligation to somehow secure basic government operation and public services for electricity, water, and sewer. The US may very well return its planes to the carriers, sail back to international waters and watch the fires burn from afar for the next few years. Active military costs could thus be very small compared to recent history.

Would that be a "win" for America? Hardly. Other indirect costs will more than make up for direct material costs avoided. If the current Iranian regime retains power, the US will have gained nothing while alienating its prior military and economic allies throughout the world, further limiting US trade prospects and reducing interest in participating in the US defense ecosystem. European nations are already declining to be purchasing partners with America and its defense firms on future weapons programs. Why? Partly because they see the future in Ukraine in leveraging far less expensive drone technology over billion dollar fighter jets and twelve billion dollar aircraft carriers. Partly because America has proven itself to be a highly irrational, unstable partner in intelligence, defense or economics.

If the current regime topples and is replaced by chaos, then the economies of nearly every neighboring country will be impacted for the duration of that uncertainty, likely causing energy and economic problems in Asia which will ripple back to the US as massive cost increases or product shortages. But Trump Administration officials seem clueless to the lessons from the supply chain shocks of COVID. If energy issues or military strife halts the supply of chips from China, Taiwan or South Korea, US manufacturing in nearly every sector will halt within DAYS, including manufacturing to replenish all of the weapons fired on Iran.

But... but... but.. but what if the Iranian regime is toppled and the people of Iran with help from the Kurds (remember the Kurds? The militiamen without a country the US has magically discovered each time we needed a local hero to provide local legitimacy to a hair-brained American military strategy in the Middle East?) manage to establish a democracy that makes it safe for entrepreneurs to wallpaper the country with Starbucks, Dollar General and payday lender locations like America?

There is ZERO chance of that happening. Iran has operated as a religious dictatorship since 1979 with no mechanisms in place allowing for multi-party government. Prior to 1979, it operated in a similar secret police mode for twenty six years (with the full support of the US) only without any claim to divinely inspired rule, just sheer will and brutality. There is ZERO social or cultural DNA within the country to support an instant conversion to modern democracy or whatever America thinks it operates domestically.

---

This so-called war of choice is just only one of a rash of choices made possible by the worst possible choice American voters could have made in 2024 electing Donald Trump as President and voting for Republican majorities in the House and Senate. There is zero chance that mistakes of this magnitude will stop until all of the forces permitting it are removed from power. Previously, it would be difficult imagining how things could get worse for Americans. There is zero difficulty in imagining it now. The possiblities are endless and completely unchecked.

WTH

Moats and Artificial Intelligence

Since at least mid-year of 2025, engineers and business analysts with expertise in particular fields involved with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been publicly citing concerns with very simple, indisputable, physical constraints that guarantee currently announced spending plans for AI infrastructure cannot be completed per schedules touted by the firms involved. Of course, this means that investment decisions based on these announced spending plans are fundamentally flawed. Those constraints involve all of the following physical limits:

1. shortages of capacity to manufacture the unique GPU chips optimized for AI computations
2. shortages of capacity to manufacture basic DDR memory chips to house ever-larger data sets in memory for faster processing
3. a lack of construction resources and expertise to design and erect dozens (hundreds?) of data centers slated to be required to meet computing demands
4. a lack of AC power generation capacity to supply the additional gigawatts of raw power required
5. a lack of capacity to manufacture the highly customized AC transformers and switching gear required to connect AC generators to the grid at the source and connect the grid to new data centers at the destination
6. a lack of electrical grid capacity to carry the additional AC power already lacking from the generation facilities that don't exist to the data centers that would need it if they did exist

Any ONE of these factors alone is enough to prove the existing self-reinforcing justification for "investing" in AI is pure fantasy. Yet none of these realities has seemed to make a dent with markets. Indeed, as signs of more insanity, two other events on February 12 and February 15 of 2026 are confirming that reality is not sinking in. On February 12, Anthropic announced it had secured an additional $30 billion in equity funding to pay for equipment and power for continued infrastructure growth. Given the share of ownership surrendered for the $30 billion, by normal mathematics, the $30 billion for this chunk equates to a total valuation of $380 billion for the entire company, which is not yet publicly traded. Anthropic made a point in its press release of stating that its revenue has grown from $1 less than three years ago to $14 billion. Of course, nothing is publicly stated about actual INCOME levels.

On February 15, OpenAI announced it was creating a "foundation" to manage the OpenClaw tool just released about a week earlier by Peter Steinberger as an open source project. Upon its release, the tool underwent two emergency name changes due to trademark conflicts then went viral among developers and hobbyists interested in seeing how linking multiple AI systems together with scripting capabilities might speed turnaround times for solutions or eliminate more drudge work. What they found instead was a tool that fully trusted any local connections made to it from its host machine making it WIDE OPEN for hacking. That didn't seem to concern Sam Altman and OpenAI. It isn't clear what OpenAI thinks it is capturing by creating this "foundation" and folding Steinberger in as an employee. Normally, the purpose of such deals is to essentially catch and kill a potential competitor and / or its underlying technology to leverage it internally or prevent competitors from using it.

Both of these news events are confirmation of another aspect of the business model of AI and any large business that AI business leaders are utterly failing to understand and reflect in their planning. The simplest term for this aspect going unheeded by industry leaders is the concept of a moat.

Business Models and Moats

The value of a moat to a castle in medievel times is fairly obvious. It makes it vastly more difficult for invading hordes to get INTO the castle. It also makes it more difficult for those inside the moat to ESCAPE the castle. Moats in business provide the same conceptual protections. The more technical terms for these two functions are barriers to entry and barriers to exit. An established business LOVES barriers to entry for OTHER competing businesses, especially if the business has significant investments (millions?, billions?) in fixed assets that require years of amortization to pay off.

An established business also LOVES barriers to EXIT -- for its current customers (and employees). One way to erect a barrier to exit might be deemed a positive approach and involves making your product so much more efficient, easier to use or inexpensive to operate compared to competitors that your existing customers have no incentive to switch. Of course, a negative approach for creating a barrier to exit is for your product to be so complicated and proprietary that adopting it fundamentally TRANSFORMS your customer's business processes and data in ways that have little synergy with ANY competing product. This drastically spikes so-called "switching costs" that will be incurred if the customer ever gets fed up and wants to switch to ANY other competitor.

The value of such "moats" to providers and the costs of such moats to customers cannot be overstated. In the information technology field, there are two apocryphal statements heard nearly every day in the Fortune 500. One is that no migration project for a company's ERP / HR / Financial planning systems has a) ever completed on time, b) ever been completed on budget and c) ever delivered remotely close to 100% of what it promised. And this is for systems that might require three years of planning, tens of millions of dollars in one-time development and consulting fees and will still cost millions of dollars per year to license to keep running, even if nothing is allowed to change from that point on.

Of course, the other apocryphal saying in information technology circles is that virtually no Chief Information Office ever remains employed through an ERP / HR / Financial system migration. Why? Because the users of these systems are the most powerful executives in the company and they inevitably become frustrated by the poor functionality and soaring costs of touching these systems and someone must be sacrificed when reality sets in.

Moats and AI

The concept of moats -- barriers to entry and barriers to exit -- is crucial for investors, politicians and the public to understand in the realm of AI for one key reason. The AI realm has no material barriers to entry or exit. Even those who don't explicitly analyze the position of firms from this formal strategic perspective are likely making decisions which still assume such moats exist and will provide the expected protections and support a competitive advantage for those that spend first and spend the most.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Barriers to Entry?

In terms of barriers to entry, CEOs of the top firms involved with AI are all behaving as though the following sequence of events is guaranteed:

• they spend C billion in capital building out infrastructure for P units of processing
• that C level of upfront capital will cost O billion in recurring operations expense
• customers adopt their solution and generate U level of usage equating to R units of revenue
• if the amortization on C and recurring opex spend O are covered by the R level of revenue, the customers they attracted will stick around and the business model will (eventually) pay off
• since the capacity P already exists and the revenue R is already flowing to them, no other business will have the incentive to also invest C up front to try to win over those customers and the associated revenue R

That sequence SOUNDS logical. Whether consciously considered or not, such thinking seems to perfectly bypass normal skepticism and fear that should be present when someone wants to spend billions of dollars on something. Surely, there's no way a company can spend $50 billion dollars on five data centers this year and have them become worthless next year. They were worth $50 billion last month when you finished loading up the racks and powering on the servers. The gear is all still there. Surely, it's still worth closer to $50 billion than zero, right? Right?

This thinking is seriously flawed. First, there is no guarantee a competitor will ALSO need to shell out the same up-front capital C that an incumbent did. Why? Because every incumbent is betting on the same "brute force" approaches for training AI systems by feeding them ever larger bodies of electronically ingestible data. This assumption is flawed in many ways. First, the total volume of "real" electronically ingestible data has already been reached. Any numeric increase in petabytes of "new" data ingested for training is likely AI generated data, not original human generated "data." This means these brute force AI efforts are already eating their own tails and poisoning future rounds of training with "data" of highly dubious quality and provenance.

Second, this approach assumes there are no other algorithms for modeling information and training systems that do not require exponential increases in training set size. AI executives should already understand this assumption is flawed based upon the Deepseek system created in China and released in January of 2025. That system matched most quality measurements of OpenAI's release at the same time but required only about five to ten percent of the training corpus and only required about five or ten percent of the compute to run the final model.

Customers of AI systems have no loyalty to the firm that spent the most and spent it first. All other things being equal, customers will use whichever AI solution solves their particular problems either the fastest or at the least cost. And that is why barriers to exit are so important to understand.

Barriers to Exit?

The initial discussion above regarding moats in business used examples in the realm of "ERP" systems for Fortune 500 firms as an example of a business sector with highly effective moats. ERP systems are extraordinarily complex and difficult for upstarts to develop without years of accumulated understanding of business requirements in payroll, HR, financial planning, operations management, etc across multiple business sectors (manufacturing, retail, shipping, services, etc.). Such systems are hard to implement because of the complexity and variety of models required to house data within them and transform it to share with other systems. This not only makes the product difficult to clone for competitors, it also makes it very hard for the customer to leave an incumbent vendor and drop in something else without great risks to business continuity and high costs.

AI solutions being promoted to corporations have no such barrier to exit. Ironically, AI systems lack such barriers to exit because of the very nature of their primary "API", the prompt screen, that relies on the ability to parse "plain language" and derive far more complicated expectations from it. This merits some examples and explanation.

Existing systems are typically tied together using complex web services to rigidly structure information for transmittal then convert back to internal models for further processing. For example, information about a Certificate of Deposit purchased through a brokerage at a distant bank might look like this when described to a relational database

 CREATE TABLE `cds` (
  `cd_id` int(5) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `status_id` int(3) DEFAULT NULL,
  `brokerage` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
  `cdbank` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
  `cusipid` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
  `confirmationid` varchar(15) NOT NULL,
  `depositamount` decimal(9,2) NOT NULL,
  `balanceamount` decimal(9,2) NOT NULL,
  `annualpercentagerate` decimal(5,3) NOT NULL,
  `termmonths` int(3) NOT NULL,
  `compoundmonths` int(3) NOT NULL,
  `withholdrate` decimal(5,3) NOT NULL,
  `purchasedate` date NOT NULL,
  `settledate` date NOT NULL,
  `maturedate` date NOT NULL,
  `balancedate` date NOT NULL,
  `autorenew` varchar(1) DEFAULT 'N',
  `manualrenew` varchar(1) DEFAULT 'N',
  UNIQUE KEY `cd_id` (`cd_id`),
  KEY `purchasedate` (`purchasedate`),
  KEY `settledate` (`settledate`),
  KEY `maturedate` (`maturedate`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=162 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb3 COLLATE=utf8mb3_general_ci 

but might look like this when converted to text to send in a request from one system to another in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation):

{
    "cd_id": 161,
    "status_id": 2,
    "brokerage": "Fidelity",
    "cdbank": "Northeast Bank",
    "cusipid": "DS1240098",
    "confirmationid": "#B10PHDD",
    "depositamount": 40000,
    "balanceamount": 40000,
    "annualpercentagerate": 0.0595,
    "termmonths": 12,
    "compoundmonths": 3,
    "withholdrate": 0,
    "purchasedate": "2025-02-16",
    "settledate": "2026-02-29",
    "maturedate": "2027-02-19",
    "balancedate": "2026-02-16",
    "autorenew": "N",
    "manualrenew": "Y"
}

This is a particularly simple example because every field name is identical between the database table definition and the JSON field name used for a web service payload. In real world scenarios, the web service might have to convert between conflicting names for every one of those fields in both the request and response directions, requiring significantly more requirements discovery, development and testing work. For modern systems, there will be handfuls of service endpoints for literally HUNDREDS of crucial business data objects requiring this type of painstaking integration work. These types of hard-coded "application programming interfaces" (APIs) and the costs associated with mediating between them act as a massive barrier to exit for a company that has already paid to link complex systems together.

Vendors for incredibly complicated, expensive systems KNOW this and rely upon it to keep existing customers trapped. Vendors know this not only protects existing revenue, it gives them additional latitude to raise prices every year or every contract period because the customer is reluctant to jettison the system. The customer isn't reluctant to jettison the system because they LIKE it or that it DOES everything they need it to do, they just loathe the thought of spending tens of millions all over to swap it out for something else.

AI systems have no such barrier. To the extent they deliver on their promise to accept plain language requests for complicated tasks and do the background heavy lifting, they overcome these barriers to exit. But the AI provider itself is providing this essentially unrestricted API to the user who can ask it to talk to any other system and sort out the details. This leads to two crucial conclusions.

The first conclusion is that by their very nature, AI systems result in "switching costs" that are nearly zero. If a major customer purchases services from AIProviderX and uses X to integrate ten systems together, the users at that customer can just as easily supply the same prompts to the system from AIProviderY, have it generate similar if not identical integrations, then switch their general AI consumption from X to Y. And compared to olden days (five years ago) when such integrations might have taken three years to implement, these AI integrations could presumably be devised, tested and implemented in a few months, then switched on nearly instantly.

That first conclusion leads to a less obvious but perhaps more financially disastrous risk for AI providers. The fact that an AI provider's demand could drop to nearly zero in the bat of an eye is bad enough. Making that volatility worse is the fact that virtually every AI vendor is selling their services on a USAGE basis with monthly minimums and caps. AI services are NOT being sold per older enterprise software licensing terms that are typically based upon either a) the number of user "seats", b) the number of employees whose data is under management by the system or c) the annual revenue of the customer. Those older models provide great revenue continuity for providers. Selling AI services in increments of 1,000 tokens or 1,000,000 tokens (when one task can consume hundreds of thousands of tokens) means REVENUE can literally vanish overnight if the customer switches to another provider.

Adding Yet Another Gotcha to the Pile

It's important to state the implications to the business models of the firms leading current AI development efforts in very stark terms. The current approach betting on brute force spending to increase capabilities and "capture market share" is perhaps the WORST business model to adopt. It's a business model

• with astronomically high fixed capital costs
• with capital assets that optimistically have a 5-7 year lifespan
• with few barriers to entry for competitors
• with few barriers to exit for would-be customers
• and cash flows with nearly zero predictability of short term revenue

Based on the list at the start of this piece, this is now the sixth serious sign of the level of delusion in markets regarding AI technology and the firms pushing it. Will investors figure this out? Stay tuned.

WTH

A Grand Unifying Theory: Takeaways

This post is one of six posts in a series on this topic. The full list of posts are linked here for convenience.

A Grand Unifying Theory: Overview
A Grand Unifying Theory: Creativity / Productivity / Specialization
A Grand Unifying Theory: Trade / Money / Banking
A Grand Unifying Theory: Groupthink / Power
A Grand Unifying Theory: Current Case Studies
A Grand Unifying Theory: Takeways

---

The models described in this analysis are ridiculously simplified compared to the real world. Their purpose was not to attempt a 100% accurate explanation of the current state of the world or its state in the future. Instead, the goal was to provide at least some plausible explanation of how key forces interact with one another over time to produce results that may differ greatly from what was desired, promised or intended. Applying these explanations to current events provided a way to cement the understanding and minimize concerns over hand-waving or cherry picking examples to justify conclusions.

Ultimately, theories serve no purpose if they cannot be used to predict future events and influence those events in ways that improve society. The key takeaways from these theories that must be applied going forward are set out here.

Creativity, Monopolies and Wealth Inequality

Throughout history, it has always been the case that at any point in time, there are always certain economic endeavors which become HIGHLY rewarded in the larger economy producing great wealth for those involved in those endeavors. It has also been the case that, at each of those points in time, those capturing out-sized wealth from those endeavors attempted to convince everyone else that they EARNED that wealth and should be allowed to continue capturing that wealth or "progess" would be impaired. The analysis involving creativity, productivity and specialization showed how those forces contribute to wealth but also showed that human progress cannot be accurately predicted and shifts from sector to sector as part of an iterative cycle.

Because of that feedback cycle, there will ALWAYS be some new technology emerging that provides the next leap in productivity and profitability that will supersede the incumbent monopolies. That isn't an argument for allowing existing monopolies, it's an argument that no business or sector merits reaching monopoly status in the first place. Allowing monopolies not only fails to ensure the continued economic success of such monopolies in their sector but existence of monopolies WILL harm society in the short term by over-charging and under-supplying existing needs and WILL harm society in the long term by starving other sectors of needed resources to allow development of the next big thing. A benevolent monopoly has never existed in the recorded history of mankind.

Monopolies in the modern data-driven industrial world are particularly dangerous because they place enormous economic power into the hands of private corporations whose behavior exhibits all of the groupthink flaws described previously and distort risk-taking decisions made by those corporations. Concentrating great economic power into a tiny fraction of society simplifies the process of corrupting government which already operates under its own groupthink patterns and distorted incentives made possible by gerrymandering and revolving doors between public service and private sector rewards for the right votes favoring the powerful.

Breaking up economic monopolies is essential to restoring democracy and correcting wealth inequality.

The Only Viable Path is Forward

The introduction to this analysis described two solution paths likely to be suggested as fixes to all of the current ills of the world. Those paths were labeled as:

• Rollback -- Rolling the clock backwards decades to some magical, mythical time where everything was simpler and everything will return to "normal".
• Course Corrections -- Making a few minor corrections and "investing in the future" will correct the most crucial problems allowing everything to move towards some better state.

Neither of these paths is viable. Both would somehow revert to a prior state of existence from which all the current rules in play originated. We now know those old rules and norms didn't prevent the de-evolution into the current state we face so attempting a major rewind or minor tweak to revert to any prior state solves nothing. In the case of the United States, these current experiences may not have been foreseen or intended as outcomes from our current Constitution of 1789 or the original Declaration of Independence in 1776 but they stem DIRECTLY from DECADES of effort by special interests who learned to manipulate and paralyze the government we have to yield these results. In sarcastic software terms, at this point these consequences aren't bugs, they're features of the system and the ultra-wealthy and corrupt politicians who serve them like these features. They will resist any attempts to eliminate these features for anything helping those not already holding the power and wealth.

A prior post reviewing the book We the People by historian Jill LePore summarized the problem facing the United States this way:

LePore's core point in writing the book is to convey that amending a constitution is the only way to keep it alive. Many conservatives would like Americans to believe that all of the existing amendments and any new proposals are corruptions of the original, "pure" and perfected Constitution and that all of our troubles stem from straying away from that original perfect text. Of course, reverting to 1787 would eliminate nearly two hundred and fifty years of racial / social progress and economic / environmental protections. The truth is that amending the Constitution is required for the country to move forward and attempts to amend the Constitution should be viewed with hope, not fear.

The current United States Constitution is irrevocably crippled by undemocratic stipulations regarding representation and improper powers being abused by the Executive Branch. No improvement in the long term direction of the United States is possible without a new constitution. The founders of this country didn't expect ANY constitution to last more than twenty years. They didn't fear constitutional conventions. They expected them. Americans today should demand them, at both the federal and state levels.

Think Calculus, Not Arithmetic

The larger goal of this analysis was to illustrate a technique of thinking through complex problems and systems by zooming in, then out, then across, then in, then out over a variety of forces people may think about individually but may seldom consider as a set. No issue of any consequence in a modern economy can be explained in a single dimension only involving a single variable or decision. The flip side of this point is that no human is capable of devising an accurate model for the real world nor would they understand one if someone else magically claimed to do it for them. But that doesn't mean that analyzing two, three or even four factors SIMULTANEOUSLY is pointless. Even if a simplified model is incapable of predicting an EXACT outcome of a proposed policy, the model can provide insight into how the change will alter the outputs. If a simple analysis says changing X by twenty percent will improve Y by ten percent but a politician or business is promising Y will change by two hundred percent, questions need to be asked and answered. Either the simplified model is wrong or someone is lying. Are they just ignorant? Or do they have a vested interest in boosting spending on X?

Another way of stating this lesson is to think in terms of calculus (a field of math that analyzes the rates of change between variables) rather than simple arithmetic. Economists can argue for decades over a simple demand curve, arguing over exactly where horizontally or vertically the curve should go on the price and quantity axes. They can argue over the precise shape of the graph (straight line or curve? slope?). But if anyone participating in the debate argues that the demand curve slopes UPWARD (reflecting that the quantity demanded increases to the right as prices increase), then everyone knows that regardless of any NUMBER coming from that economist, that economist doesn't understand the basic THEORY of supply and demand. Any NUMBER suggested by that economist is therefore pointless to consider.

Politicians, executives and special interests presenting simplistic, one-dimensional descriptions of problems and solutions cannot be trusted. Citizens should not tune out discussions involving complexity, they should seek them out. The mere complexity of a proposal isn't a guarantee of validity either but if the person advocating the proposal can speak to the complexity and explain the interactions between the variables their proposal addresses, they are less likely to be intentionally misleading the public.

False Precision

The idea that Jack Welch got away with manipulating quarterly earnings at General Electric for nearly two decades and became "America's CEO" never ceases to amaze. By the end of Welch's tenure in 2000, the firm was worth $600 billion dollars and had operated businesses in every sector imaginable over that term -- nuclear submarines, generators, home appliances, light bulbs, television networks, locomotives, jet engines. But for most of that tenure, GE's actual quarterly numbers for earnings per share matched its prior forecasts to the penny. Ponder that. It is impossible to find two economists who will forecast the same number on any financial statistic in the economy much less have even one of those economists get the estimate right yet a firm operating at nearly the same scale in nearly the entire economy managed to forecast its earnings correctly for nearly twenty years?

Should anyone have believed it at the time? Absolutely not.

In the present time, anyone showing up to argue a position that has numbers calculated to the decimal point and simple straight-line graphs pointing up is lying through their teeth. In a $32 trillion dollar economy, few statistics can be measured to more than two decimal points so anyone showing up with figures such as $3,141,592,653.50 has spent too much time carrying insignificant digits and not enough understanding the problem they have converted into a formula. And no one should listen to anyone providing forecasts down to the penny for any policy being proposed in current debates. A business begging for a $100 million dollar tax abatement because they will produce $4.79 million in additional salaries for a local community yearly? Don't get distracted by the precision. Ask the business under oath to show the math.

Any entity providing forecasts for specific economic or demographic statistics that contain false precision is succumbing to Excel syndrome (it was calculated in a spreadsheet so the number must be correct) or is attempting to mislead the audience with false precision. In some contexts, the presentation of such numbers may very well constitute fraud.

Investing Versus Gambling

The exponential growth in so-called cryptocurrencies is the most obvious current danger stemming from a failure to understand the difference between BANKING and INVESTING. This is because cryptocurrencies themselves are attempting to blur the line between the intended function of a CURRENCY and the intended purpose of INVESTING. An INVESTMENT is a transaction between two parties where both knowingly consummate a transaction which exchanges current and future values over some arbitrary period of time which exchanges a significant RISK between the parties. An investor who buys a new stock issue or a new bond issue of a corporation is surrendering CURRENT value to that corporation in exchange for a promise of future payback, either in interest payments and principal for the bond or in dividends and a higher future share price that can be captured by selling the shares later. Both parties understand that the longer the period of the bond (or the arbitrarily infinite period of stock ownership) generates risk and both assume the prices involved reflect that risk.

In contrast, BANKING is focused on optimizing the storage of existing wealth by providing security and convenience of access WITHOUT exposing that wealth to undue risks. A depositor placing $10,000 in a savings account paying a nominal 1% interest rate in a world of 4% inflation is essentially paying the bank 3% to protect that money. When the bank loans some of that $10,000 to another customer for a car loan at 9%, the bank is essentially taking a risk on the car loan to make some additional income off the $10,000 to further defray the cost of physically operating the bank, hiring tellers, oiling the hinge on the vault, etc. But the risk taken with the car loan by the bank and the risk taken by the depositor are FAR LESS than risks taken with INVESTMENTS.

When "investors" are buying cryptocoins as an "investment", they are speculating on the value of what they are calling a currency which defeats the purpose of trying to use the cryptocoin as a currency. Having the price driven up through speculation isn't allowing the cryptocoin to act as a store of value -- they WANT it to go up in value, even in the short term. The problem is that if a cryptocurrency can go UP significantly in the short term from speculation and hype, it can FALL in value significantly over short periods and thus FAIL at serving as a store of value.

In an environment of limited regulation on business in general and financial businesses in particular, individuals saving for their own futures require far greater literacy about how banking works, how different types of investing address risks and how nearly every transaction will extract money from and transfer risks to the least-informed participant in a transaction. Never confuse investing with gambling.

The Dangers of Decentralized Power

The section on groupthink and power theorized that organizations are likely to drift away from official stated goals or goals of individual members as the organization grows in size and becomes more difficult to control. Well, if allowing too much centralization of power and economic influence leads to monopolies in business or corrupt, unresponsive leadership in government, then surely decentralizing power and economic control would be good, right?

Wrong.

Government, law enforcement and the judiciary is a good example where too much de-centralization of power is creating harm in society. The harm stems from two problems created by de-centralization. First, decentralization duplicates hierarchy which requires more people to fill roles in those hierarchies. But what if the supply of people with those particular skills (mayor, controller, alderman, police chief, public works commissioner, judge) is limited? What if low tax rates restrict the amount of money available for pay and the entity cannot pay market rates for these skills? In this climate of low pay, those jobs are likely to be filled by workers checking at least one of these boxes:

• they are not qualified for similar positions of authority / responsibility in the private sector, or
• they can use that position of power and authority for their own financial gain, either directly to their own businesses or those of family and friends, or
• they simply want to exert power over others or abuse power for sadistic purposes

I live in a county with over NINETY individual municipalities. Each with a mayor and aldermen who exert influence over local policing, zoning and real estate development. Many of those have individual police departments, a city manager, a controller, etc. The pay may be low and the overall economic power of these people may be limited, but ultimately they still influence policing which can impact the freedom of people not just in their community but anyone driving through. Is that level of local autonomy necessary? Is it actually increasing safety?

As a final example of the trade-off between overly centralized and overly decentralized power, consider the murder of Letcher County, Kentucky judge Kevin Mullins by his own sheriff Shawn Stines on September 19, 2024 in the judge's chambers. Local officials quickly found the shooting was triggered after Stines suspected the judge of being involved with allegations that a deputy in that sheriff's department and others were operating an extortion ring between the county court and the jail that traded improved bail / probation terms for females in exchange for sex. The sheriff seems to have concluded this system was abusing his own daughter. Subsequent reporting has confirmed dozens of women in the county have been exploited for years by this group, including this judge. This type of abuse of power is much likelier to occur when everyone is habituated to believing "more government" is bad, "less government" is good and no one needs state or federal officials looking into their operations.

The opposite of a problem is seldom a solution. The opposite of a problem is likely to just create another problem. The world doesn't need MORE government. The world doesn't need LESS government. The world needs the RIGHT level of government with the RIGHT controls in place to be accountable for serving the public.

WTH