Pittsburgh is a city of hills. A northern outpost of Appalachia. Between the hills are hollers, which in other regions might be called valleys. But a Pittsburgh-style holler requires a steep descent into a semi-inaccessible space. You didn’t go there, so much as look down on it from one of the many bridges. Panther Hollow was an exception, because it was a popular ice-skating spot in winter. As a paper boy delivering the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it was mainly the hills I was concerned with. I lugged about a hundred newspapers, in an official canvas bag provided by the Post-Gazette. I planned my route to lighten the load in the flatlands, before climbing the hills. Many houses had steep flights of steps. My mentor in the news business, Hildy, taught me how to fold the newspaper into an elongated triangle that would keep its shape while being lofted up onto the customer’s porch or doorstep. Ideally it would land a little short of the door rather than crashing into the door, especially a metallic screen door that made an awful bang sure to startle the inhabitants. Ideally also the folded newspaper would not come apart in the air, scattering its contents across the lawn or slope. The toughest days were Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas when the paper was heavy with ads and features.

I collected payments every week, in person, giving the customer little yellow perforated cardboard chits from the front of my collection book and marking the amount paid in the back of the book. I made change from a coin changer attached to my belt. Sometimes I’d chat with the customer about the weather or the Pirates or offer to place the newspaper inside the screen door if it was raining or snowing. The number of subscribers was fairly constant during my tenure.

Now (2026) the news is delivered electronically. Paper boys like me have gone the way of buggy whips. Payment systems have automated personal transactions out of existence. Here on Substack, automatic renewal relies on most people forgetting an expiration date and letting it continue, ad infinitum. Substack is parlaying this revenue model into an ecosystem financed by readers instead of advertisers. The contrast between reader-financed writing and advertiser-financed writing could not be greater. And yet, I miss the personal touch of collecting from my paper-route customers every week. They could opt-out anytime, but generally they chose to continue. As the purveyor of Pittsburgh news, I liked it that customers judged it worthwhile every week. I would like that at Substack too, for subscribers to make an active judgment every year to continue, rather than making it a perpetual obligation, like a tax. I think enough people would be attracted by that option, were it available, to offset those who would forget to renew.

Telecom companies in Japan have even more onerous methods of customer retention. They require two- or three-year contracts that can only be cancelled without a stiff penalty within a week or 10 days of the expiration date. They also enforce an intentionally cumbersome procedure of applying for an authorization code and waiting three days to receive it, typically after waiting on hold for an hour or more. Software vendors have likewise perfected elaborate systems of customer lock-in designed to prevent migration to competitors. The software industry also devised the current labyrinth of validation, verification, authentication, and registration procedures, all premised on universal criminalization, the notion that all customers would copy and re-sell the product if not algorithmically prevented from doing so. Government agencies soon adopted the same concepts for mass surveillance, and now for anything requiring interaction with officialdom, from visas to stargazing permits.

About two years after I handed my coveted newspaper route to an eager recruit (to be duly trained in the art by the ageless Hildy), something other than stargazing occupied my night-time hours. Yes, dates. One date spot was a remote parking lot where you could watch railcars dump flaming coals from the steel mills onto the slag heaps. Better than a drive-in movie. Then in the early hours, a quick tour of one of the better neighborhoods to paint the darkie lawn ornaments white.

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Japanese legislators have been considering whether to allow Princess Aiko to become the first female sovereign of Japan. Legislators have approached the matter obliquely by passing laws nearly everyone (except the Communists) can agree on. These have to do with issues that are too old to be controversial, such as allowing members of former Imperial families who became commoners during and after WWII to be adopted into the current Imperial family, and other Imperial House-keeping matters. Perhaps this is a way of beginning a process of enabling a future female sovereign of Japan.

Prime Minister Takaichi has stayed out of it, perhaps to avoid the appearance of conflict-of-interest, as a well-known person of the female persuasion.

The continuity of the Imperial family is based on its having authority without power, a symbol of the nation rather than a ruler. The legislative summary below, provided by my Diet Member, quotes Yukio Mishima on the nature of Japanese Imperial authority.

My view is that the Japanese Emperor is best thought of as a kind of shaman-deity whose most important function is ensuring a bountiful rice harvest. Rice is a gift from Amarutetsu, a female divinity. So there, full circle!

‘Voting behavior in the Diet is in line with the consensus of the people

‘The special session of the Diet ended on July 24th. Various bills were passed during the special session of the Diet. One of these is the revision of the Imperial House Law. This reform focuses on allowing female members of the imperial family to maintain their status as members of the imperial family even after marriage, and to allow male lineage males from former imperial families who became civilians after the war to be adopted by the current imperial family

‘In the House of Representatives, the only party that opposed this amendment was the Communist Party, which has four members. Even if we take into account the members who do not belong to the same party and some centrist members who are against the bill, more than 90% of them approved it and passed it. In the House of Councilors, the bill was passed with 184 votes in favor, 57 votes against, and 2 abstentions, with 76.34% of the total votes cast. The constitution stipulates that the imperial system is based on the consensus of the people, and the voting actions of the Diet were in line with this provision.

‘Yukio Mishima’s ‘Why is the Emperor Inevitable?’

‘With the recent revision of the Imperial House Law, I myself once again thought about what the Emperor system is. What I found interesting was Yukio Mishima’s `Why is the Emperor inevitable?’ video on YouTube. Historically, the Emperor had no power, only authority.

‘Under the current constitution, it is stipulated that `The Emperor is the symbol of Japan and the symbol of the unity of the Japanese people, and this position is based on the collective will of the Japanese people, who are sovereign.’ The constitution also stipulates that the Emperor has no power but only authority. However, Mishima states that the Emperor system has continued because the Emperor had no power long before the Constitution stipulated it.

‘Power defeated by something stronger

‘It has happened all over the world that many powerful dynasties have been overthrown by other, more powerful powers. Even in Japan, the shogunate has been defeated by stronger forces. However, in the history of Japan, there have been extremely few instances in which the Emperor held and exercised power.

‘The Emperor as the origin of the cultural timeline

‘Mishima said that the emperor ‘composes a song with 31 characters and prays for a rich harvest.’ He says that it has continued because there is nothing to take away from it. He states that the imperial system is the origin of Japanese culture and the origin of the ever-changing time axis.

‘Our country’s culture has no form. Ise Grand Shrine’s Shikinen Sengu has been going on for 1,300 years, and the shrine is rebuilt every 20 years, but Mishima explains that Japanese people believe that the spirit of the shrine from 1,300 years ago resides in the current shrine. He states that the origin of that timeline is the selfless imperial system. This is very helpful when thinking about what our country’s imperial system is like.’

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This Timeline, to be published by Washington Books, chronicles a period, 2000 through 2020, when:

1. Personal privacy disappeared.

2. Truth was de-legitimized.

3. Competence and merit were sidelined.

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation.

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide (this post, below).

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5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide. Civilizations collapse as much from internal self-destruction as from external attack. Why does this happen? To anyone with common-sense, behavior and policy choices resulting in societal destruction appear inexplicably mad. The primary cause is ideology oriented to short-term means obsessively pursued as ends in themselves, whilst unaware or uninterested in actual consequences even as they unfold. Western Europe, the progenitor of Western Civilization, seems particularly prone to civilizational suicide in roughly 100-year cycles. While such cyclical theories have mathematical appeal, they give these episodes of collapse an ersatz aura of inevitability, placing them beyond human reckoning or remediation. They do not satisfy our search for meaning and motivation, to understand the mad logic by which each stage of destruction advances upon the last. Peering through the miasma of ideology and intention, it is possible to discern the specific actions and sequences leading to societal destruction. That indeed is one purpose of the Timeline with regard to America.

Energy and immigration. During the Timeline period (2000 - 2020), Western Europe in an eerie reversal of roles, took its cues from America. From American solar and wind energy crusaders, Western Europe’s Green Parties took up the banner of dismantling fossil and nuclear energy resources. Yet as Germany found out to its dismay, this only caused its manufacturing industry to flee to China, whose leaders were happy thus to improve their geopolitical position and terms of trade. At the same time, Western Europe imported millions of ungovernable and unassimilable immigrants, who expressed their gratitude for having escaped their murderous homelands by raping and murdering native Europeans. European jurists and politicians bizarrely excused these crimes as cultural artifacts, refused to punish the criminals, and often blamed the victims for their white skin or Nordic appearance. This white self-hatred was also derived from the American example, where it had been taught in schools for decades.

Drug addiction. One of the most visible examples of societal suicide is drug addiction, on view in the ever-increasing homeless encampments in American cities. While the primary responsibility for self-destructive behavior is their own, behind each one is an industry that profits off their misery. Chinese fentanyl suppliers, Mexican drug cartels, U.S. developers of taxpayer-subsidized homeless housing, Medicaid fraudsters, immigrant traffickers, and many more feed drug addiction while lining their own pockets. Drug overdose deaths in the United States jumped from 20,000 in 2000 to 92,000 in 2020, and exceeded 100,000 in the following year, driven primarily by fentanyl and to a lesser extent by amphetamines, cocaine, and doctor-prescribed drugs. The United States led the world by a large margin in drug-overdose death. Wherever the responsibility for these appalling statistics may be, the burden of their misery falls on the victim and his family.

Fertility. Family formation responds to a wide variety of economic considerations, social obligation, fashion, educational and career goals, and long-term life-plans. The resulting aggregate demographic trends reveal confidence or fear about the future. While the U.S. fertility rate (live births per woman), as noted above, reached a 60-year low of 1.64 in 2020, following 2.06 in 2000, EU native-born fertility rose from a record low of 1.30 in 2000 to 1.40 in 2019, then dropped to 1.27 in 2024. In France in 2024 it was 1.10, Spain 1.00, Germany 1.20, according to Google Gemini. EU immigrants recorded much higher fertility rates, replacing native-born Europeans. European countries that adopted explicitly pro-family policies, as Hungary and Czechia did, saw their fertility increase, though perhaps only temporarily. For the nations comprising Western Civilization, their speed of demographic suicide varies according to how far below the sustainable-population fertility of 2.1 they are.

Debt. After Lord Keynes found government to be exempt from the laws of arithmetic, his followers jumped at the opportunity to share the good news with government officials, which they received most warmly. They proceeded to spend more than the government took in taxes, borrowing from future generations. The United States took advantage of its status as the issuer of the world’s de facto currency by exchanging its debt for other countries’ goods. This continued rather harmlessly until French Prime Minister Pompidou sent a warship into New York harbor to collect his nation’s gold from the vaults of the Federal Reserve. This ended the convertibility of paper currency into gold, a severance which President Nixon ratified in 1971. In that year gold could be exchanged for $35 per ounce. Now (2026) it takes $4,400 to purchase that same ounce of gold. That is a measure of how much the U.S. Dollar has been devalued, though for the moment it maintains its relative purchasing power against other currencies. After the U.S. currency’s decoupling from gold, however, debt rose to heights not even seen in wartime. America’s $39 trillion debt is now 125 percent of its GDP, or 25 percent more than the total value of its annual production. Debt was just 33 percent of GDP in 2000. U.S. Government debt was a mere $19,950 per person in 2000, now (2026) it is $114,000 per person. That is what every man, woman, and child in the United States owes the rest of the world. A glance at the national debt clock shows in real time the dizzying speed at which U.S. national debt grows. Interest on the debt exceeds the cost of national defense. Social Security and Medicare are the two largest expense items in the budget.

Money-printing is the default response to out-of-control debt that has continued unabated throughout the Timeline period and beyond. Were the Federal Reserve and the Federal Government unable to conjure money out of thin air, they would have gone bankrupt long ago. In 2000, there were $4.67 trillion in circulation. The Fed’s printing presses manufactured an additional $10.74 trillion by 2019, bringing the total then to $15.41 trillion. With the money-printing presses in high gear, the total in 2025 grew to $22.35 trillion. Throughout the Timeline period and beyond, the supply of U.S. Dollars grew at three times the rate of GDP growth. This devalues the currency, meaning every Dollar-denominated asset is losing value in the same proportion. It erodes debt as it erodes savings and income, while building-in long-term price inflation.

The U.S. Government is kept in operation by a coalition of U.S. taxpayers and domestic and foreign bondholders -- those buyers of Treasury debt make up the difference between tax revenue and actual expenditures. Lately (2026) they are exacting a higher price, about 4.5 percent interest, for U.S. debt, reflecting risk and inflationary expectations. Bondholders, in other words, are demanding and receiving compensation for the eroding value of the U.S. Dollar. On the other side of the ledger, this of course increases government interest costs, which add to the debt, creating both an inflationary spiral and a debt trap. If or when it reaches the point where even the most drastic spending cuts fail to reduce the debt, then it will be seen in retrospect how damaging and possibly suicidal the trillions of dollars in unauthorized and fraudulent government payments identified by DOGE and others have been. Should other countries either refuse to accept U.S. Dollars in payment for their products, or charge usurious interest rates for purchase of U.S. Treasury debt, Americans’ standard of living would suffer a precipitous drop.

One measure of the betting on a grid-down emergency, which might accompany such a scenario, is sales of portable power stations, which have risen by 10X since 2015 to $15 billion in 2025. Water filtration equipment, long-shelf-life foods, and satellite phones have also seen rapid growth in sales during the Timeline period, and even moreso since 2020. As such preparations have moved from ‘fringe’ to ‘good citizenship’, education in and practice of farming, construction, mechanical maintenance, home medical care, herbal remedies, off-grid energy, rainwater collecting, and food storage are acquiring greater salience in the post-2020 world. Networks forming around such independent-living skills aim to survive the potential collapse of established governments and support systems.

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All the trends running through the Timeline period from 2000 culminated in the covid panic, pandemic, and vaccine stampede beginning in 2020. Indeed each of these trends enabled it:

1. Personal privacy disappeared. Nothing is more private than bodily autonomy. Two decades of mass surveillance and corporate spying that turned everyone’s life into an open book prepared the way for billions of people around the world to surrender their bodies to experimental genetic modification. They (we) already had hardly any privacy left to lose when faced with the demand to inject a substance that would hijack our immune systems and turn our bodies into pharmaceutical factories.

2. Truth was de-legitimized. The French post-modernist academics who taught that all truth was relative, situational, and an arbitrary social construct, despite being inspired by the Marquis de Sade, could hardly imagine how their ideas would come to fruition. And the scientists who seized on these ideas, though clueless about their origins, applied them to claims of supremacy over the unscientific masses and their official representatives. Urging worshipful submission to ‘follow the science’ soon devolved into suppression of critical factual information about covid lab-leak origins, clinical evidence of mRNA-caused death and disability, censorship of true scientific studies, and professional de-certifications of doctors who followed their own clinical judgment and ‘do-no-harm’ philosophy.

3. Competence and merit were sidelined. Under routine, pre-covid conditions, the drag of race- and sex-based selection on medical competence was offset by increasing automation of diagnosis and treatment. Overall health improved during the first 19 years of the Timeline period. In an emergency, however, such as the covid pandemic, the weaknesses of sacrificing individual practitioner competence came to the fore. Faced with a novel pathogen projected to produce mass death, they panicked. All but a few refused to treat patients and heeded faulty advice to consign them to ventilator death. Their common-sense deserted them as they accepted absurd assurances of mRNA safety and efficacy and equally absurd estimaes of covid lethality. In an emergency, left to their own resources and dependent on mendacious public health authorities, the competence deficit proved disastrous. Coincidentally with the vaccine stampede, excess deaths and disabilities unmistakably caused by the experimental gene-altering injections began showing up in 2020, and increasingly in 2021 through 2023 until the people themselves refused to take any more shots. The covid episode diffused self-reliant competence throughout the patient community. Patients grew up. Realizing they would have to take the consequences of their choice, they took charge of their own health, at least to the extent of refusing unsafe and ineffective injections.

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation. Government public health authorities and government-controlled medical boards, accreditation committees, and scientific publications deployed techniques of mind-control that had previously been used in other settings. Blanketing the airwaves and print channels of nearly all media, public health authorities and their cheerleaders conveyed identical messaging of fear and panic converging on one exclusive salvation — an injection using the self-same spike protein as the (lab-crafted) Wuhan virus to stimulate overwhelming production of antibodies. After several months, the messaging was refined to appeal to altruistic sentiments to avoid infecting others. This then evolved into an obligation such that those who refused vaccination were pilloried as disease transmitters. Nursing mothers were even urged to stop breast-feeding because it made them ‘vaccine-hesitant’. The mythology of virulence dictated mass house-arrest and prohibitions of commercial, religious, and political gatherings; with the notable exception of the George Floyd riots, which served to disorient the populace. The covid episode, an experiment in compliance not medicine, showed that about two-thirds of the populace could be coerced or cajoled into harming themselves.

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide. It is hard to escape the horrifying conclusion that at least some of those in charge of the covid vaccine stampede intended it to cause mass death. Pfizer and Moderna knew the lethal effects of their mRNA injections from their own internal test data. One of the major vaccine financiers, Bill Gates, had previously asserted that the elimination of several billion people would be good for the planet. Economic officials worried about Social Security costs might heave a silent sigh of relief at the prospect of shorter lifespans reducing those payout obligations. Canada, which has been acting as a proving-ground for extremist governance, has expanded its assisted-death eligibility to those whose death ‘is not reassonably foreseeable’, for government cost-reduction purposes. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla apparently does not see the deaths of millions of vaccine-takers as a problem, because secret contracts with governments enable Pfizer to offset fewer vaccine-takers with higher prices per injection. Scientists whose work inflicts death and disability on millions believe that their speciality of adapting bat viruses to infect humans is nevertheless worthwhile. No society or nation dedicated to its own continuity would allow people like this to operate without supervision. There is something very like negligent societal suicide in allowing such activities to continue.

The Timeline depicts an America edging close to a precipice, highly sensitive to external threats, yet nearly unaware of its own self-inflicted injuries. It may be hoped that this chronicle will help others now and in future to recall in detail what happened, the better to influence fate in a more favorable direction.

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As the Car Talk hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, used to say at the end of their radio show, ‘Well you’ve frittered away another hour of your time...’. Time is our most precious resource, and if you’ve used some of yours to read these jottings, perhaps they’ve helped put things in perspective. It’s not easy, amid work and family obligations, personal health and finance, home maintenance, etc., to think about how worldly matters affect your own life. The default mode may be to ignore them in the hope they will go away. But they unavoidably affect all of us in unexpected ways, that I try to unravel. People who are looking for tranquilizers here are free to hit the unsubscribe button. I don’t feel obliged to deliver happy-talk, but if there is one silver lining, it is your own innate common-sense. Whatever ‘support’ there is to be had will not come from authorities or experts — they are not on your side — it will come from your own internal guidance. That realization is admittedly disquieting, maybe frightening. But there is more strength in your own natural (not artificial) intelligence than they — authorities and experts — would grant. If these posts help you see for yourself, maybe they will see your way toward a brighter future.

This Timeline, to be published by Washington Books, chronicles a period, 2000 through 2020, when:

1. Personal privacy disappeared.

2. Truth was de-legitimized.

3. Competence and merit were sidelined.

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation (this post, below).

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide.

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4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation. In mid-20th-century America, Edward Bernays adapted the psychological insights of his uncle Sigmund Freud to the selling of cigarettes. At the time, women didn’t smoke; they were a large untapped market. Bernays deduced (long before the transgender craze) that they wanted to be men. The ad campaign based on that premise took off, and cigarette sales to women skyrocketed. In those simpler times, all it took to expose these techniques and to some extent neutralize them was a book, Vance Packard’s ‘The Hidden Persuaders’. Now (2026), mere exposure doesn’t seem to enhance awareness, as many people ‘freely consent to be addled’, in Saul Bellow’s apt phrase.

Around the same time in mid-20th-century America, the CIA was experimenting with a variety of mind-control techniques, such as MKUltra, which until recently the Agency claimed did not exist. They aimed to get the truth out of uncooperative prisoners. Recognizing that hostile prisoners believed in the rightness of their own cause, CIA interrogators also sought techniques of getting them to do things contrary to their ethical or moral principles.

Attracted by Swiss chemist Albert Hofman’s discovery of LSD, the CIA believed it could be used as a ‘truth serum’, that people under its spell would give truthful answers whether they wanted to or not. LSD does indeed connect with truth, but not the kind the CIA was interested in. Under laboratory or hospital conditions where most LSD experiments took place, results were nearly always unfortunate. Under benign, non-threatening conditions, LSD turns every cell in the body into a thinking, feeling, experiencing being, exponentially growing consciousness to encompass all of life, where sensory perception and mental activity are so thoroughly intertwined as to be indistinguishable. Neither the threatening nor benign incarnation of the hallucinogen suited the CIA’s ‘truth serum’ purposes. The Agency then released it for recreational use through an errant Harvard professor, hoping perhaps that uncontrolled field experiments would yield useful findings by chance.

With MKUltra starting in 1953, CIA officials administered LSD and other drugs with and without the subjects’ knowledge or consent, thus evoking later condemnation and lawsuits. The CIA explored many methods of obtaining true testimony from unwilling subjects: behavioral drugs, alcohol, hypnosis, electro-shock, sleep deprivation, extra-sensory perception, defector motivation studies, polygraph, toxins, exotic pathogens, aerosols for unwitting drug delivery, and so on. A 2025 review found that personality destruction did not achieve the CIA’s desired results: ‘Psychoactive drugs, electric shocks, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation may have been successful in destroying subjects’ personalities, but they seem to have done little to get the CIA any closer to actually controlling people’s minds.’

Eventually the CIA settled on the same methods as those employed in Nazi death-camps: ‘erasing’ personality so that more compliant mental/emotional contents could be inserted in their place. MKUltra officially ended in 1973, with then-CIA Director Helms ordering destruction of all its records, though some records survived due to mis-filing. America’s defeat in the Vietnam War in 1975 elevated the primacy of ‘hearts and minds’ in American strategic doctrine, adding further urgency to the search for effective mind-control techniques. This was the beginning of the impetus toward applying prisoner-interrogation techniques to mass populations. Instead of trying the persuade the American people of the wisdom of their policies, military and intelligence officials sought to control public opinion by selective disclosure and secrecy designed to induce a mass-compliant mindset. Early primitive efforts failed to distinguish individual from mass psychology, and also failed to segment the audience or appreciate how various constituencies might respond differently. These flaws were later corrected.

The brief period of euphoria following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 soon gave way to more decentralized and dispersed threats, with islamist attacks on the West. The fiery destruction of New York’s iconic World Trade Towers by Arab-hijacked airliners, and the collision of another hijacked airplane into the Pentagon, together killing more than 3,000 people, marked the beginning of the 21st century, and of this Timeline. The intended target of a fourth hijacked airplane brought down near Somerset Pennsylvania by courageous passengers is unknown. This crime vastly increased the Federal Government’s need for mass surveillance of the populace, to detect future attacks before they might occur. As with individual prisoner interrogation, getting the truth involved turning minds around toward useful cooperation, to anticipate and disarm such attacks in advance.

Unresolved questions about 9/11. Questions have arisen since 2001 about the official and generally accepted explanation of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, as entirely the work of Saudi jihadists bent on martyrdom. Circumstances suggesting other motives and interests include: 1) The announcement on September 10, 2001, by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that $2.3 trillion were missing from Defense Department accounts; 2) Issuance of a visa to known chief terrorist Mohammed Atta by CIA desk officer John Brennan in Saudi Arabia; 3) Failure of the FBI to heed a report by its Minnesota field office of Zacarias Moussaoui seeking flight instruction only for takeoffs and not landings; 4) Complete orderly demolition of Building 7, containing CIA records, adjacent to the WTC site but not hit by any debris or other impact; 5) Fire temperatures sufficient to melt structural steel in the WTC towers exceeded jet-fuel explosion temperatures by at least 50 percent.

It is not clear who besides Osama bin Laden and the islamist hijackers might have organized the 9/11 attacks. Regardless of whether we accept or doubt the official version, both versions moved the Deep-state toward mass mind control. If we follow the official version, mass surveillance including monitoring of all social media, email, and telephone communications, is essential to ferret out potential attackers. If government involvement or negligence is plausible, then the same mass surveillance and mind-control techniques are all the more essential, to destroy evidence of criminal activities, make them seem utterly implausible (’conspiracy theories’), and to silence prominent critics. Both versions — prevention of further attacks, and organizational self-preservation — motivate the same invasions of privacy, the same efforts to control the very content of thought.

Such dilemmas are an occupational hazard of spydom, and a staple of spy fiction as well. Sting operations epitomize the risks: It is common practice, for example, for spy agencies to provide suspects with information, resources, and coaching to draw them out to commit crimes for which they can be arrested. (Only overt acts can be successfully prosecuted.) Agents may become disoriented, so obsessed with the task at hand that they precipitate the very crimes they meant to prevent. Similarly, firemen sometimes commit arson, and computer programmers break into (’hack’) corporate and government computer systems, perhaps to test system vulnerabilities. Over-zealous scientists have ‘improved’ bat viruses to make humans susceptible to them, turning remote threats into pandemics. Experts unconstrained by generalist common-sense are particularly apt to fall into these syndromes.

Scaling-up mind-control. From its origins in prisoner interrogation, the application of mind-control techniques spread to entire populations. The threat logic implied universal criminalization. As this unfolded during the Timeline period (2000 - 2020), the naturally adversarial nature of governance turned toward covert conflict. Deep-state agents increasingly applied the same mind-control techniques en masse that were previously used for interrogation of individual prisoners. By monopolizing the airwaves of electronic and social media, print channels, and gossip, enough people proved susceptible to personality breakdown to agitate ‘color revolutions’ to change governments. After trying-out these scale-ups in Libya and Ukraine, Deep-state officials together with tax-exempt organizations launched them in America.

To scale-up prisoner interrogation techniques to entire populations, something akin to personality breakdown en masse had to be devised. Stories so absurd, so manifestly untrue as to cause large numbers of people to question their hold on reality, could be widely dispersed to replicate individual personality breakdown on a mass scale. The point is not to elicit belief, but to sow confusion. As David Bell wrote,

‘[G]overnments elected to represent the people openly employed behavioral psychology to lie to their constituencies on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans of family funerals, cover faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians, and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent.’

A disoriented populace, its connection with reality severed, could be made to believe and acquiesce in anything. The Chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, famously advanced the fatuous homily that ‘you will own nothing and be happy’. The climate cult promised doom in myriad ways (rising sea levels, etc.) which, despite always missing their scheduled arrival dates, continued unabated. It was asserted, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that people of color were arrested and incarcerated out of proportion to their numbers not because they committed more crimes, but because they were targeted by police. The Russian President was actively campaigning for and supporting a popular U.S. presidential candidate, according to an unemployed British spy hired to make such claims, and derived, as it turned out, from an alcoholic third-hand source. Life-threatening riots during the summer of 2020 were headlined ‘mostly peaceful’. Most absurd of all, in that anyone could check by direct observation, was denial of any difference between men and women. This identity of the sexes was, according to its advocates, not merely a matter of legal equality, but biological fact. To ‘prove’ it, thousands of grotesque surgeries were executed to contrive cosmetic reversals of natural biology, disfiguring victims for life. And in a further extension of this reification of an easily demonstrable falsity, laws requiring dual-use of bathrooms, and forcing girls’ sports teams to admit biological men, were passed, also with predictably tragic consequences. One can hardly imagine a more lurid severance of the connection between personal experience and shared understanding of reality.

It is equally difficult to imagine the motivations of people who would impose such gratuitous cruelties on innocent though confused children, merely for the purpose of reinforcing and reifying a tendentious argument about sexual equality. All of the assertions listed above are so readily contradicted by elementary common-sense observation that the motives of those propounding such views may seem mysterious.

One inquiry into the motives of another avatar of absurdity, Jeffrey Epstein and his set, suggests indulgence in diabolical pleasures as the primum mobile. Such motives may co-exist with the more ‘practical’ objective of reproducing a state of mind in the entire society like that of an individual prisoner subjected to personality-breakdown interrogation.

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Practical application of mind-control. Psychological operations (’psy-ops’) played a key role in the 2020 presidential election, as chronicled in the Timeline here and there as millions of people were frightened out of their wits by the covid plague, wild projections of hospitals overwhelmed, mass house-arrests, forced business and church closures, violent riots in more than 40 cities, and forced injections of an untested experimental gene-modification product. All of this was reified by official statistics exaggerating covid deaths, concealment of mRNA-caused harm, and suppression of actual remedies and of information about them. This ‘all-of-Government’ juggernaut terrorized the populace, enforcing obedience to its constantly changing diktats.

Polling data indicate the scope and effects of government terror on the American populace. Six years earlier, a 2014 poll found 37 percent feared the federal government, and 54 percent considered it a threat to individual liberty. In a multiple-choice list, fear of corrupt government officials tops the list of Americans’ worst fears in every annual poll since 2015, when it hit 58 percent. It rose to 75 percent in 2017, 80 percent in 2020 - 21, and fell to 69 percent in 2025. In another annual poll, Americans’ trust in government fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in 2020 and 17 percent in 2025. A 2018 poll found only ten percent trust government to spend tax money wisely. The fear trend reached a peak in 2020 - 21, falling only slightly since then, while trust in government continued its decline since 2020 regardless of the party in power. That perception increased during and after the Timeline period. For example, a May 2026 poll found that 63 percent of likely U.S. voters ‘believe federal officials helped conceal the role China played in the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak’.

Donald Trump at once channeled and leveraged that distrust in government. Himself an outsider, he attracted increasing numbers of ‘deplorables’ and others in three successive elections: 2016, 2020, and 2024. His abrasive humor struck a responsive chord of authenticity, and his willingness to offend liberal pieties encouraged many to say out loud what they had only been thinking in silence. His rallies, drawing tens of thousands to remote locations like airports, unlocked ‘no-go’ zones of free speech that had been off-limits for decades, in effect relieving the siege that psy-ops had put on free speech. Trump’s 2024 campaign portrayed impeachments and legal charges against him as attacks on the American people themselves for the leader they had legitimately chosen. The July 13, 2024 attempt to assassinate him at a poorly guarded site in Butler Pennsylvania, which but for a miraculously fateful turn of the head would have succeeded, seemed to confirm this account, endowing his second Presidency with charismatic inevitability.

Toward the end of his first term in 2020, Trump had naively sought salvation for his doomed Presidency in a ‘vaccine’. Like millions of Americans and billions around the globe, he was told this genetic therapy would safely end the plague from Wuhan. Faked data on safety and efficacy, vastly exaggerated covid death statistics, deliberate concealment of mRNA-caused death and disability, and suppression of successful alternate treatments were all part of a psy-op that had actually begun in 2015. That was the year Jeffrey Epstein set up a ‘donor-advised fund’ for Bill Gates and others to invest in pandemics -- meaning globalize a novel human-adapted pathogen, use the World Health Organization and other public health authorities to panic the populace, and provide a purported remedy through a tax-exempt ‘charity’ converted into a for-profit entity. In late 2025 and early 2026, a bi-partisan majority urged by Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie decreed, over Trump’s objections, that all of Epstein’s email communications must be released.

As a result, the contours of this investment plan, including its mind-control elements, were revealed. These included numerous apocalyptic predictions of impending pandemics, public officials rehearsing their roles in the psycho-drama to come, and authoritative-seeming though implausible projections of hospital-bed shortages. These features were all designed to bypass rational thinking and activate atavistic survival fears, cloaked in ‘follow the science’ tech-talk. Having found several months into the psy-op that many people were altruistically more concerned about infecting others than about their own health, officials adjusted the messaging to highlight this fear.

The experimental nature of the globally administered mRNA ‘vaccine’ was actually not medical. Pfizer and Moderna executives and scientists knew from their own internal test data that it killed and disabled many people in clinical trials, that the drug-stimulated spike protein circulated to every organ in the human body, that it did not prevent covid, and that it weakened immune defenses against other diseases. Abundant evidence removes the slightest doubt about the mRNA suppliers’ prior knowledge of their own products’ lethal effects: Evidence1, Evidence2, Evidence3, Evidene4, Evidence5, Evidence6.

It was actually an experiment in compliance. The research questions were how many people could be cajoled or coerced into taking an unknown genetic injection that might harm them, how far mind-control could induce them to surrender their most fundamental rights and freedoms, and to what extent authorities could get away with putting masses of people under house-arrest and prohibiting commercial, religious, or educational gatherings. The answers: About two-thirds of Americans, and a similar proportion globally, were mRNA-injected; larger proportions endured ‘lockdowns’, especially in urban areas and in nations with large concentrations of urban populations.

These results led officials to try to herd more people into cities, where they are more easily controllable and dependent than in rural areas. California, for example, pre-empted local zoning to provide tax subsidies to developers for ‘affordable’ (higher-density) housing, while increasing taxes and regulations on single-family homes. Digital identity authentication, for travel and financial purposes, has become substantially more invasive, with faces and documents photographed from several angles becoming routine — for ‘security’, we are told. The covid-emergency experiment with ‘digital passports’ — requiring proof of vaccination to shop or travel — suggests this could become routine if made to appear ‘convenient’. Mind-control efforts augmented by artificial intelligence are fast becoming part of the routine social and mental environment. Reclaiming minds from such psy-ops will take constant effort and awareness…

Previous: 3. Competence and merit were sidelined.

Next: 5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide.

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As the Car Talk hosts, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, used to say at the end of their radio show, ‘Well you’ve frittered away another hour of your time...’. Time is our most precious resource, and if you’ve used some of yours to read these jottings, perhaps they’ve helped put things in perspective. It’s not easy, amid work and family obligations, personal health and finance, home maintenance, etc., to think about how worldly matters affect your own life. The default mode may be to ignore them in the hope they will go away. But they unavoidably affect all of us in unexpected ways, that I try to unravel. People who are looking for tranquilizers here are free to hit the unsubscribe button. I don’t feel obliged to deliver happy-talk, but if there is one silver lining, it is your own innate common-sense. Whatever ‘support’ there is to be had will not come from authorities or experts — they are not on your side — it will come from your own internal guidance. That realization is admittedly disquieting, maybe frightening. But there is more strength in your own natural (not artificial) intelligence than they -- authorities and experts -- would grant. If these posts help you see for yourself, maybe they will see your way toward a brighter future.

This Timeline, to be published by Washington Books, chronicles a period, 2000 through 2020, when:

1. Personal privacy disappeared.

2. Truth was de-legitimized.

3. Competence and merit were sidelined (this post, below).

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation.

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide.

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3. Competence and merit. During the Timeline period, the trend of demographic selection based on race and sex, that had already been in progress for several decades, accelerated to ‘warp-speed’. That term, as used in the popular television series ‘Star Trek’, denoted passage through a time-warp, which warped reality itself. So it was, and still is, with race and sex preferences. At once both symptom and cause of the fracturing of social consensus on what constitutes virtuous character and intellectual merit, the gatekeepers of American society substituted external appearances and group-identifications for these individual qualities.

Preferences. An elaborate system of preferences took over selection of college and graduate admissions, employment and promotion, Government contracts, entertainment, and more. Enforced by Government statistical prescriptions, guardians of careers were explicitly exhorted to favor darker skin color and femaleness, seeking to match and then exceed (because reparations) their proportions in the general population. Additional identities, each with their own story of victimization deserving remediation, arose or were surgically fabricated to gain similar preference. These in turn required vast governmental, educational, and corporate bureaucracies to enforce and fine-tune the algorithms of preference. This effort called forth lawyers to argue that lowering academic standards to attain Federally mandated demographics did not violate civil rights protections.

Between 2000 and 2025, the number of college and university administrators doubled from 1.1 million to 2.2 million (according to Google.ai), a growth rate far higher than that of students or faculty. Administrative duties included compliance with Federal mandates, monitoring and policing racial and sexual discrimination, and various record-keeping functions. Not content with mere statistical reporting, administrators felt called upon to require courses or extra-curricular activities reinforcing their mission. Race- and sex-identity themes displaced practical mathematics and communications skills. As graduates would later discover to their dismay, this was hardly a winning strategy for any real-world work. There is no evidence that this explosive growth in administration improved campus living or learning environments, or future work competence. Yet it had surprisingly little effect on organizational competence, at least as measured by performance outcomes.

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Aviation and medicine. Where competence could conceivably make the difference between life and death, for example in commercial aviation and medicine, one might expect strictly merit-based selection criteria to prevail. But there too, race and sex made inroads on qualifications directly related to ability.

Like many aviation accidents, the January 2025 mid-air collision over the Potomac between a helicopter and a passenger airplane resulted from a cascade of errors and vulnerabilities: an over-crowded air corridor, a night landing, miscommunication between civil and military air traffic controllers, over-worked air traffic controllers, and over-reliance on automated systems. Demographic selection played a part, too, as an inexperienced helicopter pilot brought her craft to an altitude directly in the flight path reserved for passenger airplanes, with deadly consequences. For the 67 people who were killed in the resulting collision, and their families, aggregate air safety data are meaningless. Yet by measures such as numbers of accidents, numbers of near-misses, and fatalities, the overall safety of air travel in the United States has steadily improved throughout the Timeline period and beyond. This has occurred despite firings of skilled pilots and air-traffic controllers for refusing to take the covid-vax, and despite cardiological and other health problems of those who did take it.

Medical education during the Timeline period in the United States suffered the same demands as undergraduate education to issue free passes for preferred demographics. Doctors completing two years of medical school must demonstrate knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and pathology to qualify for medical residencies. Racial disparity in test scores led medical educators to eliminate numerical scoring in favor of a pass/fail system. As Heather MacDonald notes, medical education was also reformed to ‘offer more classes in white privilege and focus less on clinical practice,... and to require that medical faculty demonstrate knowledge of ‘intersectionality’ — a theory about the cumulative burdens of discrimination’. Yet even this obvious lowering of standards to accommodate a favored demographic failed to halt generally favorable trends in health outcomes.

U.S. infant mortality declined from seven per thousand live births in 2000 to 5.5 in 2020. Life expectancy rose steadily from 76.64 years in 2000 to 78.79 in 2019, then dropped sharply in the covid pandemic years to 76.33 in 2021. In 2025 U.S. life expectancy resumed its upward path, reaching a record high of 79.4 years. The U.S. fertility rate (births per woman), however, reached a 60-year low of 1.64 in 2020, following 2.06 in 2000, and what seems now the unimaginably high level of 3.65 in 1960. That hopeful year saw the election of JFK and marked the end of the postwar ‘baby boom’.

Health care costs per capita in the United States more than doubled from $4,500 in 2000 to nearly $12,000 in 2020. Clearly not all of this world-leading additional health-care expenditure improved health during the Timeline period. However, one clear consequence is that a huge amount of individual income was transferred to insurers, drug companies, large hospitals, diagnostic equipment suppliers, and government health bureaucracies.

In these two fields, aviation and medicine, where competence or the lack of it has fateful consequences, selection of practitioners by race and sex had surprisingly little or no consequence during the Timeline period (2000 - 2020) for aggregate air safety or health outcomes. One possible explanation for this paradoxical result is that the Timeline period also saw massive investment in new technology that effectively internalized the thinking and judgment involved in the practices of aviation and medicine. The multi-dimensional mental feat of keeping track of the crowded airspace around major airports with split-second timing was increasingly delegated to computers, as was the autopilot navigation of large airplanes. Pilots now spend as little as five minutes per flight actually flying the airplane, the rest of it on autopilot. If they are ‘de-skilled’ by this automation, in nearly all cases it simply doesn’t matter (the exceptions can be disastrous though). Likewise in medicine, more thorough testing, though often criticized as unnecessary and expensive, has brought about earlier and more accurate diagnoses, improving health outcomes. Medical treatment, including drug delivery, is increasingly automated, (ideally) building collective medical experience and knowledge into each encounter. There too, as more and more of medicine is practiced by algorithm, the competence and even the clinical judgment of the individual doctor may not matter as much as it has done traditionally. Thus, it appears that the effects of demographic selection are more than offset by the growth of system (or artificial) intelligence.

However, these systems can prove unexpectedly fragile amid unprecedented outbreaks of either natural or artificial origin. Devoid of human intelligence, their immense powers can be commandeered by unscrupulous individuals for their own enrichment or aggrandizement. One such system failure occurred near the end of this Timeline. In late 2019, ‘Patient Zero’, an employee of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, came down with a mysterious pneumonia-like illness. Later found to be a derivative of an earlier coronavirus called SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), it was designated SARS-CoV-2, or covid for short. Within two or three months, it spread around the world, airborne on flights from Wuhan and then rapidly from person to person. Public health officials anxious to conceal the lab origins of the virus proposed a series of improbable animal vectors, sponsored ‘research’ claiming natural ‘zoonotic’ origin, and aggressively censored factual evidence that what eventually became a pandemic originated in Wuhan China.

Their motivations in doing so became clearer when a ‘vaccine’ replicating the spike-protein in the covid virus in the form of an untested experimental mRNA injection suddenly appeared soon after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic.

This injected material, encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles, circulates to every organ in the human body and hijacks the immune system to produce billions of antibodies. These antibodies are useless against mutated covid successors, but there is no off-switch. Over time, though in some cases immediately, this injection caused severe cardio-vascular, neurological, reproductive, immune-system, and other problems. Public health authorities suppressed practical treatments of covid symptoms in favor of the mRNA ‘vaccine’ to which they attributed magical properties. The medical systems of the United States, and of many other countries, were utterly unprepared for this assault on humanity.

The covid pandemic and its sequel the global mRNA injection campaign had been planned years in advance, and rehearsed only three months before covid Patient Zero showed up. A global commandeering of all information outlets operating a psychological conditioning campaign (’psy-op’), overwhelmed critical judgment and common-sense. Only the most courageous and independent-minded doctors understood what was happening in real time and used well-known medicines, enduring threats to their livelihoods and reputations. When factual information on the devastating health consequences of the covid-vax emerged from censorship, the people themselves finally refused to take any more of these deadly shots. A massive health system failure thus led to better health practices in the general population, as practical medical intelligence spread widely among the self-help community and alternate medical practitioners.

As for the fate of competence, the medical example suggests that personal experience matters more than education for positive outcomes. (Aviation offers fewer opportunities to take matters into one’s own hands, except in selecting airlines, routes, and destinations.) The entire premise of college education as job training may be mistaken. Love of learning, cultivation of the ability to think clearly and creatively, and developing the knack of adding to one’s own stock of useful knowledge, experience, and enlightenment, may be the most valuable ‘skills’ acquired in college; but competence at work is best developed by... working. Thus, course content may not matter as much for future work competence as might be wished. The real lessons of the ‘woke’ education that flourished during the Timeline period are: 1. Race and sex preferences are inherently and intentionally divisive, illegal, and contrary to civilized norms of merit-based selection; and 2. The un-preferred may have to work harder in such an environment.

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Previous: 2. Truth was de-legitimized.

Next: 4. Mind control as standard government practice.

This Timeline, to be published by Washington Books, chronicles a period, 2000 through 2020, when:

1. Personal privacy disappeared.

2. Truth was de-legitimized (Epilogue Part 2, below)

3. Competence and merit were sidelined.

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation.

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide.

If this Timeline brings to mind previous notions of privacy, truth, competence, freedom, and stability, amid the extraordinary distortions witnessed from 2000 to 2020, then it will have served its purpose.

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2. Truth and reality. Within living memory, not very long ago, we knew what was true from personal experience, or from reliable witnesses. Certain truths are ‘self-evident’, as the American founders noted — part of the natural order of things. ‘Natural science’ is a compendium of what we know from experience, experimental observation, and reasonable inference. The historical breakthrough in thought that gave sensory testimony primacy powered Western civilization, science, and prosperity.

Planetary motion is the archetypical case of truth that exists regardless of how we feel about it. Even if I am offended by the eccentricities of Pluto, or wish that (the planet) Venus were closer, those two heavenly bodies will not be the slightest bit perturbed in their orbits. Describing them mathematically enables precise predictions of their future positions. In this endeavor, adding two and two will only ever produce four, however fervently I might wish for more or less. Reality doesn’t care whether I like it or not, nor whether I believe it exists; it simply is.

With living beings, observation cannot be entirely separated from desire. But this is only because all life is related. Watching the Shetland or Trobriand Islanders, factories, boardrooms, stock exchanges, churches — changes their behavior. Large organizations go awry with unanticipated consequences, and are actually run by personal networks not found in any organization chart. Thoughts and feelings are intermingled with the very stuff of life. Every wish, hope, fear, flutter of the heart, foreboding, threat-sense, safety-sense, etc. is moderated by a complex series of enzymes, hormones, endocrine states, electrical signals, and more. Animals, plants, water, and microscopic biota too respond to our emanations. These essential qualities of life make measurement and prediction hazardous.

We may search for truth in data generated by everyday activity. Like footprints, demographic, employment, purchasing, epidemiological, residence, transportation and such data lend themselves to tracking, quantification, computer collection, and analysis. Indeed the loss of privacy mentioned above derives from the insatiable belief that more and more data yields greater truth. Nevertheless these kinds of data, anonymous and remote, appear relatively unaffected by wish-fulfillment, if accurately collected and tabulated.

This, then, briefly summarizes our notion of truth as it was until very recently: physical reality that exists regardless of our desire, observed by sensory experience, and a subjective reality mediating the living world, where we try to verify knowledge by comparison with known and widely observed facts.

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Post-modernist malleable truth. In the last third of the 20th century, French philosophers and their post-modernist followers disavowed the notion of truth as a product of sensory experience and empirical observation. In its place they propagated a version of truth subject to situational variability (Jean-François Lyotard), momentary feeling (Jacques Derrida), power relations (Michel Foucault), or sexual identity (Gilles Deleuze). The Marquis de Sade is an intellectual godfather as well as a lifestyle role-model of the post-modernists. Reared in the Communist tradition prevalent in elite French universities, they were stunned by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. To recover the cachet that Communism had lost, they re-branded it as post-modernism. It migrated into colleges and universities throughout the West, where it influenced admissions standards, faculty hiring, and curricula. Students favored by race or sex were delighted that they could get in and get on without effort, and that their truth counted for more than that of ‘dead white males’. They were told to cultivate self-expression as a higher truth, and they did as they were told. Reality was what they made it out to be, and truth depended on the circumstances. Both were malleable, and that felt good as long as individuals could mold them to their liking.

As we enter the Timeline period (2000 - 2020), however, the chaos of individual truths coalesces into masstruth, all events fitted into a script. The talking-points media take their cues from Deep-state-approved narratives, overlain with local color. Following M Foucault’s playbook, they construct an alternate universe of belief molded around how the audience should be made to feel. The realities of what actually happened, such as conveyed long ago by reporters like Walter Cronkite, are merely raw material for this artificial world. With all sources of information leveraged into one airtight package, an audience trapped in this hall-of-mirrors cannot see outside it. Whoever ventures to contradict an official narrative is immediately labeled a ‘______ denier; fill in the blank with ‘climate’, ‘election’, ‘vaccine’, or whatever is needed to preserve the official narrative. Economic and professional sanctions directed against the deniers’ livelihoods ensure that virtually any absurdity can become masstruth.

Reification. Real-world events convert a vague and remote danger into one that is ‘clear and present’, calling for action to avert it. Events fabricated to fit a preconceived reality are known as reification. The Timeline period includes, for example, presidential warnings of fictitious Russian collusion with a presidential candidate, followed by sanctions against Russian diplomats (the ‘insurance policy’). Similarly, a September 2019 pandemic-response rehearsal was followed, two or three months later, by a mysterious pneumonia-like illness from China that soon spread to Europe and America early in 2020. The official truth of the matter was apparently established by the events themselves. Only later were the hidden contrivances supporting the official narrative revealed. The Timeline places these latter-day revelations in the actual sequence where they belong, contemporaneously with the surface appearances reported at the time of occurrence.

An audience educated to accept the notion of truth as relative, situational, or circumstantial proved vulnerable to these contrivances. Such events and their official explanations might seem absurd, or contrary to one’s own experience, or untrustworthy, but those potential objections were often overcome even before they could be voiced. Pressure to distrust their own experience led to passive acceptance of expert or official assessments. A bizarre variety of doublethink implanted conflicting ‘realities’ in the collective mind, one an implausible story, the other an incredulity self-suppressed by fear of the consequences of denying it. Silence became the default response.

Projections and modeling. One more element of the new masstruth superimposed itself on the collective mind — computer modeling. Computer projections generated entirely non-empirical ‘data’ by building unstated assumptions and analogies into formulas thrust into the future. These charts, tables, and graphs had the superficial appearance of evidence, neglecting to mention that assertions about the future are inherently uncertain. Try as we might, the future cannot be observed. And unlike data from prior activity, projections into the future cannot be verified. Only time will tell whether they are true or false. To the modelers and those who believed them, that didn’t matter. By conflating models with actual facts, they assimilated their preferences into the body of public knowledge comprising generally accepted truth.

By 2020, so entrenched was the cult of expertise that public health authorities could talk or coerce billions of people into risking grave bodily harm by taking an experimental gene-modifying mRNA injection. Even when irrefutable evidence of excess deaths and disease, caused by the mRNA injections, accumulated, deference to public health officials’ assurances of their safety persisted. Tragically, many died of vaccine-caused illness (confirmed unequivocally by autopsy) after proclaiming the safety of the very drug that killed them! Far from a harmless intellectual pastime, the post-modernist notion of malleable truth has often proved fatal.

Examples could be multiplied, but the point of this brief summary is that the nature of truth — of what passes for generally accepted truth — changed radically during the Timeline period. Putting truth ‘up for grabs’ handed it to whoever could shout the loudest, put the most money into propagating their version of it, and/or claim official authority for their narrative. Yet independent voices, against enormous odds, somehow manage to survive and find an audience among people who demand coherent plausibility in keeping with their own experience and common-sense: For example, Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Brownstone Institute, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institution, Just The News, and many writers on this Substack platform…

Previous: 1. Personal privacy disappeared.

Next: 3. Competence and merit

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This Timeline, to be published by Washington Books, chronicles a period, 2000 through 2020, when:

1. Personal privacy disappeared.

2. Truth was de-legitimized.

3. Competence and merit were sidelined.

4. Techniques of computer-assisted mind-control achieved practical operation.

5. Western nations moved toward societal suicide.

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From the present-day perspective of 2026, 20th-century notions of privacy, truth, competence, freedom, and stability appear as quaint memories foreign to the current video-game world surrounding physical reality. But some recollection of these notions may help us prepare for the day when they will once more be of use.

At the moment, this all-encompassing progress offers no opt-out. We cannot purchase goods, pay bills, earn income, educate children, treat illnesses, call a friend or relative, keep up with current events, or travel without surrendering our biographies and likenesses. We are forced to contend with mass delusions about ‘the planet’, human biology, governance, and so on, each one of which entails some state-enforced ‘moral imperative’ that we may or may not share. The only truth of expert assessments and official pronouncements is to reveal what authorities want us to believe. And mere survival requires enough foresight to reject demands to harm ourselves or engage in unsafe or self-destructive behavior. If this Timeline brings to mind previous notions of privacy, truth, freedom, and so forth, amid the extraordinary distortions witnessed from 2000 to 2020, then it will have served its purpose.

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1. The disappearance of privacy. During the Timeline period, 2000 through 2020, personal privacy ceased to exist. It is truly a thing of the past, a quaint remembrance of a bygone age, far removed from present-day reality. Nobody announced it. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution was not repealed. Objections were noted and then dismissed as irrelevant. Seemingly a temporary expedient, to last only as long as the crisis at hand, the destruction of privacy became an end in itself. Vacuuming up more and more personal details, as if everyone’s life-purpose consisted only of supplying data to the state, became the consuming obsession of corporate and official busybodies.

Mass surveillance, or universal spying, made the personal details of everyone’s life an open book. From this, a climate of threat and menace pervaded all governance, automatically putting everyone in the wrong. Universal spying led inevitably to universal criminalization. (Among the 300,000-plus federal crimes on the books are those specifying jail time for such offenses as transporting dentures across state lines, mailing a football, writing a check for less than $1.00, issuing a false weather report, or feeding garbage cooked in a garbage cooker without a garbage-cooking permit to pigs.) The assumption, adapted from software validation procedures, is that everyone is suspect unless authenticated by some invasive ritual of identity. Aided by exponential advances in computer memory capacity and processing speed, plus eager cooperation by big-tech intermediaries possessed of vast amounts of consumer data, the digital dragnet became ubiquitous and all-encompassing. The ‘what have I got to hide’ crowd, slyly insinuating guilty secrets on the part of those who held back, pressured acceptance of this profound transformation. No domain of personal privacy remains untouched. Even thoughts, emotions, neurological activity, blood-sugar, alcohol and drug-taking become accessible, through implants, to whoever has a remote-reading device. The architects of all this invasive technology never articulated a purpose, as if the value of surrendering one’s digital biography were self-evident. Perhaps they expect the intimacy sucked out of private life to magically reappear in relations with devices.

The U.S. Federal Government led the way into this dystopia, with the Chinese Communist Party as a role model, the World Economic Forum and United Nations as standard-bearers, and other Western Governments as followers. At first, Government collected private data simply for the sake of amassing a universal database, without really knowing what to do with it. Early applications involved clumsily targeting political opponents with keyword search terms like ‘patriot’. Commercial and official search tools evolved in tandem to widen the scope of surveillance encompassing everything from consumer purchases to medical records to social-media browsing, and more. These nuanced portraits proved to be remarkably accurate predictors of political behavior. And they could be ‘reverse-engineered’ to produce the attitudes and beliefs sought by authorities.

Both commercial and official info-entrepreneurs effortlessly crossed the line from passive observation to active intervention, marking another significant loss of freedom. Unlike prior Madison Avenue Bernays-style psychological manipulation, data-driven psychological operations are so ubiquitously well-integrated into the everyday lives of people glued to their screens that they don’t notice the psy-op. Even exposing the psy-op doesn’t disable it, as the addicted acquire an emotional attachment to their on-line communities and the convenience that comes with them. Exchanging privacy and freedom for convenience seems like a good deal to them…

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2. Truth de-legitimized

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‘Enter ye in at the strait gate. For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’

-- Matthew 7:13-14

A strait, meaning a narrow passage, is always fraught with peril. In classical antiquity, Odysseus was forced to navigate between a six-headed sea monster and a torrential whirlpool in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria.

There are no good options, the sorceress Circe tells him — he must either sacrifice six of his men (one for each head of the sea monster) or lose his entire ship in the voracious whirlpool. Odysseus watches in horror as Scylla gobbles up six sailors, but his ship manages to get through the strait.

Further west, we sail through the Strait of Gibraltar — if the Imperial British Navy will permit!

That’s who has controlled the Strait since 1704, when Great Britain captured it from Spain. The American Revolutionary War gave Spain, with France’s assistance, an opportunity, or so they thought, to take it back. Nearly four years of the Siege of Gibraltar, launched in 1779, failed to dislodge the British; they signed a peace treaty in 1783, the same year the United States formalized its independence with another Treaty. The 13-km wide Strait between Europe and Africa had enabled the Moorish capture of Spain, which became the Caliphate of El Andaluz from 1160 to 1462 (with minor interruptions). Passage through the Strait from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean links the Old World and the New, a transit of immense importance to both trade and conquest. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the maritime route from the Mediterranean became global. Today Gibraltar remains in British hands by Treaty ‘in perpetuity’, despite occasional claims by Spain.

In the Far East, as it is known in the West, lies the Strait of Tsushima, a narrow passage between Korea and Japan.

There, in 1905 an exhausted Russian fleet arrived from the Baltic, apparently unaware that Mongol invasions in 1274 and 1281 had been routed from that same area. In 1905, the Japanese Navy waiting for them inflicted devastating losses, the first defeat of a Western power by an Asian one. It set Japan on a triumphal course of imperial expansion that soon turned disastrous, and it was the prelude to the elimination of the Romanov Dynasty by the Bolsheviks a little more than a decade later. The loss of Russia’s Baltic Fleet in the Strait of Tsushima continues to haunt Russian naval authorities today, as they cling to islands between Sakhalin and Hokkaido to protect another strategic strait there (La Pérouse). The Strait of Tsushima remains a vital strategic passage for Japan, through which 90 percent of its oil is imported. Tsushima is also the site of the popular action-adventure video game ‘Ghosts of Tsushima’, and of the world’s northernmost coral reef.

Now we sail northeasterly to... the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Siberian province of Chukotka.

It is named for Danish-Russian explorer Vitus Bering, who sighted Alaska in 1741, though he was actually not the first to do so. At least one Russian preceded him, and presumably the Inuits and Aleuts who lived there saw it first. A land bridge, also named for Bering, connected the two continents during previous Ice Ages, leading to crossings from Asia to North America by humans and other animals. Did the flow go the other way too, or was America even in prehistoric times a big draw for immigrants? Bridge or tunnel links across the Bering Strait are occasionally proposed, then abandoned for cost and logistical reasons. Even so, the Bering is the most peaceful Strait on this tour, and could become a major trade route if, due to global warming or whatever, the Arctic were to become navigable.

The most troublesome Strait at the moment, Hormuz, seems to resemble the choice offered Odysseus, of dealing with a six-headed monster, which, as soon as the six heads are slain, grows another six. It is, however, preferable to getting sucked into the maelstrom of global economic chaos and depression. Decarbonization has become strangely unfashionable of late, ever since tech-oligarchs discovered their AI-equipped data centers will soak up enormous amounts of energy. Yet in 1974, reduction of energy consumption by as much as 20 percent, in response to OPEC’s oil embargo and quadrupling of oil price, was considered feasible. Maybe we don’t need those data centers after all.

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April 26, 2026

1. Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), founded in 1971, had a problem. In 2014, hate crimes in America reached a record low. Defined by the FBI as criminal violence motivated by bias against the victim’s race, religion, ethnicity, sex, or sexual orientation, the downward trend of such crimes threatened the very basis of SPLC’s existence.

Donors might conclude ‘good job, well done’ and move on to the next worthy cause. SPLC’s work as a moral and political influencer, exercised through its interactive hate map, was also at stake. According to Wikipedia, ‘The SPLC interactive map tracks hate and anti-government groups’, by ideology (anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Muslim, anti-government, Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Confederate, etc.) and by state.

Wherever you look on the interactive map, you are sure to find plenty of hate. SPLC’s ‘Hatewatch Staff’ ‘monitors and exposes white supremacy and its impact on communities’. Among the hateful things these groups have done recently, according to SPLC, is to present evidence of election fraud in the 2020 election, advocate voter-ID, and write about the harm done to children by genital mutilation.

Wikipedia notes:

‘The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases against white supremacist groups, for its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting anti-bias education. The SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery [Alabama].’

Beginning in 2014 when hate crimes descended to a record low point, SPLC directed $3,000,000 to the very organizations that its Hatewarch staff had identified as violent and extremist. This funding flowed covertly from bank accounts opened by SPLC in the names of Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, North West Technologies, Tech Writers Group, Imagery Ink, J&J Electronics, Kelly’s Marine, and Turner Personnel -- all fictitious entities. According to an April 21, 2026 Grand Jury indictment in Montgomery Alabama where SPLC is located, the purpose of the secrect accounts was to conceal SPLC’s control of the funds disbursed. Although the recipients of this funding were labeled ‘informants’, the amounts were lavish by their standards, providing ample support for organizational activities including hate crimes.

The most successful, by far, of SPLC’s ventures of this sort was the $270,000 it paid to a chat-group leader who rallied hundreds of neo-Nazis, Confederacy nostalgics, white-supremacists, and extreme-right bikers to join an event in Charlottesville Virginia billed as ‘Unite the Right’. They came to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee. The stage was set for violent conflict as counter-protesters converged while police failed to separate opposing groups. A self-identified white-supremacist drove his car into the counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 35 others. President Trump blundered into the trap set for him by failing to condemn the white-supremacists by name, and later issuing a series of apparently dismissive corrections. Unaware that the SPLC had actually sent the neo-Nazis and others of that ilk to Charlottesville, Trump’s response damaged his public approval, kick-started the Biden candidacy, and stimulated donations to SPLC by George Clooney and other wealthy luminaries. The Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundation also contributed to SPLC.

The SPLC grew its revenue from $58 million in 2016 to $136 million in 2017, making it the most profitable non-profit in the civil-rights pantheon. Its assets jumped from $328 million in 2016 to $450 million in 2017. CEO Margaret Huang pulled in $523,000 in compensation. Its current (2024) net assets have risen to $787 million. Not bad for an organization whose middle name is poverty.

According to the indictment:

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America.

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment of money laundering.

These are only allegations at the moment; however, the evidence appears irrefutable.

2. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

After the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989, NATO faced a brief moment of existential angst, as its main adversary no longer existed. The Cold War was over, a ‘peace dividend’ was at hand, a State Department pundit proclaimed ‘the end of history’, and NATO’s very raison d’etre vanished. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany posed the question how the expanded Germany would fit into Europe. Could it join NATO? Of NATO’s territory, ‘not one inch eastward’, solemnly intoned U.S. Secretary of State Baker, echoed by every European head of state.

Russia might even become a NATO member, it was hinted. Wars in the Balkans following the breakup of Yugoslavia brought NATO into action there in the 1990s, but peace settlements raised anew the question of NATO’s, um, sustainability. I personally experienced the euphoria of Russian - U.S. amity, participating in a joint celebration of American Independence Day aboard the USS Fort McHenry in 2003 on the occasion of an art exhibit in Vladivostok.

In attendance are the captains of the Russian and U.S. ships anchored alongside, the Mayor of Vladivostok, the Bishop of Primorsky Krai, and the U.S. Consul.

But new sources of Russia - U.S. hostility were already underway with the inauguration of a U.S. president in 1993 who by his own admission knew nothing about foreign policy. Thanks to the intervention of billionaire Ross Perot, who was miffed that George Bush as Vice President had rejected his hostage rescue plan, Bill Clinton became President with 43 percent of the vote. Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, had previously demonstrated his willingness to cooperate with the Deep State by facilitating the CIA’s drug-smuggling operations through the little airport at Hope Arkansas. Had they hoped for a president who would re-start the Cold War, they could not have made a better choice than one who knew nothing and cared less about the ‘not one inch eastward’ commitments.

The former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe were slowly, then precipitously, integrated into NATO. NATO’s continued existence was in effect guaranteed (and underwritten) by the U.S. Deep-State. Missiles were placed in Poland 20 miles from the Russian border, with Clinton asserting they were meant to ‘deter Iran’. Subsequent activities gave ample scope for NATO to play a starring role in regime change operations in Ukraine leading to the ongoing war there. NATO, totally preoccupied with Russia as the only country worthy of its enmity, to the exclusion of all others, will not have to abandon its palatial offices anytime soon.

3. Firefighter arsonists

The search for social approval can lead individuals as well as organizations astray. Some of the most bizarre cases involve firemen who start fires. Well-known to the firefighting profession, the fires set by this infinitesimally small number of misguided people cause injury, death, and enormous damage. Their motives vary, but prominent among them is the desire to be a hero. It somehow escapes their thinking that saving people or property from a fire one has set oneself doesn’t produce a positive balance of virtue.

Here is one example of the hero fixation:

Caleb Lacey was proud to become a Long Island volunteer firefighter, and he yearned to be a hero. Months passed, and Lacey grew frustrated. He had answered 90 emergency calls, and none of them were active fires. In February 2009, Lacey decided to create his own opportunity to be a hero. He splashed gasoline on the staircase of a neighbor’s home and lit it on fire. Lacey ran 0.8 kilometers (0.5 mi) to his firehouse and put on his gear. He was long ready by the time the alarm sounded. Lacey and his crew rushed to the fire. As Lacey was new, he was not allowed to enter the burning building. He held the hydrant secure for his colleagues as they fought to control the flames.

Lacey had lit the fire in the worst possible spot. The staircase he burned was the second floor’s only exit. Several of the residents survived by jumping from windows. However, a mother and her three children died in the blaze. Less than two weeks later, Lacey was arrested and charged with arson. After being found guilty of manslaughter and arson, he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Another arsonist-fireman enjoyed outwitting investigators, even to the point of leaving clues in the manuscript of a novel he wrote about his exploits:

In Glendale, California, John Orr was a 17-year firefighting veteran who received national acclaim for his investigative work. He was also an arsonist. Orr liked to set fires in the back of occupied businesses using a signature time-delay device consisting of a cigarette, matches, a rubber band, and a piece of paper.

Orr spent years undetected as an arsonist. The respected fire captain seemed immune from suspicion. However, people began to notice that fire followed Orr. Arson rates rose wherever Orr went — even arson investigator conventions. Arson investigators could no longer ignore the evidence against Orr, so they stuck tracking devices on his car. After a few months, they had enough evidence to arrest him. Police discovered a manuscript — Points of Origin — in his home. The novel described the activities of a firefighter-turned-arsonist who used his knowledge to outwit the authorities. The novel’s protagonist used a slow-burning incendiary device to burn a hardware store, killing a woman and her grandson. The crime mimicked one of Orr’s own.

Orr was convicted of 20 cases of arson, including a firestorm in which 67 homes sustained damage or were completely destroyed. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After he was imprisoned, brush fires around his area near Los Angeles declined by 98 percent. Authorities believe that Orr was responsible for close to 2,000 fires over a seven-year period ending in 1991.

Taken together, these cases resemble the gain-of-function researchers who combined ersatz heroics with scientific ingenuity in evading detection. Equating their own career advancement with the highest virtue, they dismissed entirely the risks of infectious viruses escaping from their laboratories. First they denied the possibility of lab-escapes, then they claimed that if mass infection occurred, it was worth it to advance the science of virology. Opposing such research was -- here comes the clincher -- ‘anti-science’. End of discussion. Fauci and others went to great lengths to conceal evidence of covid origins in the Wuhan lab, concocting fanciful stories of pangolins, snakes, and wet-market viral soup that were prima facie false. If ingenuity in covering their tracks by splicing manufactured elements out of the lab-crafted covid genetic sequence were eligible for a Nobel Prize, they’d have certainly deserved at least a nomination. Aggressive censorship of contrary factual information proving lab origins of the covid plague completed the bizarre profile of these scientists’ criminal motivations. (A further inquiry into the motives of those seeking to exterminate a substantial fraction of humanity delves into the realm of the diabolical.)

Organizations seeking to perpetuate themselves beyond their useful shelf life are nothing new. They are well-documented in organizational sociology. Yet they seem to have proliferated lately. Traditional business firms — those not backstopped by the public purse — progress to a natural end if they are no longer making anything useful: They go bankrupt. Government agencies, on the other hand, and those firms whose business consists mainly of government contracts, are averse to considering whether their continued existence really benefits society. Repeated attempts to evaluate them come to naught, as they are preternaturally adept at gaming whatever systems may be used to judge them. Occasionally a fiscal blitzkreig like Elon Musk’s DOGE interrupts their funding streams, but complaisant judges and self-serving bureaucrats quickly re-establish the status quo, restoring their immunity from judgment. Perhaps the unceasing growth of government accounts for the proliferation of self-perpetuating organizations, devoid of common-sense, or the slightest awareness that they may be doing more harm than good.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization founded to combat race-hatred, giving millions of dollars to Nazis; a military alliance and its Deep-State backers fomenting international hostility; firemen setting fires and scientists creating plagues to make heroes of themselves — all of these display a profound dearth of common-sense. It will be up to all of us who are affected by these phenomena to apply our own innate common-sense to their operations or cessation thereof.

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At this stage of the long-running psycho-drama (March 2026), we have exhausted all of the conventional explanations. Money? Economics assures us that wealth-seeking at any cost is not only OK, but praiseworthy. In this spirit, Jeffrey Epstein, as we learn from his recently released emails, advised Bill Gates, the Rothschilds, Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla on how to profit from pandemics. Epstein’s financial advice to his clients lists pandemic investment alongside other categories such as energy, communications, artificial intelligence, and other sustainable growth areas. What makes pandemic investment particularly lucrative is the opportunity to inject novel ‘vaccines’ into a panic-stricken populace, using governments as intermediaries and enforcers. This is precisely the structure that Gates, Johns Hopkins, and others rehearsed in August 2019 just before the actual virus from Wuhan inflicted a global plague on humanity. The killing was a feature, not a bug. It worked synergistically with the purported vaccine, designed with exactly the same spike protein, sold to governments around the world via secret contracts. It is still as of this date (March 2026) on the market, to the immense profit of both companies.

Epstein’s recently released emails detail a scheme hatched over several years to set up a ‘donor-advised fund’ at J P Morgan Bank with a phantom wall between tax-exempt non-profit philantrhopic good works and hugely profitable vaccine sales to governments:

‘Internal J P Morgan emails from 2011 show Jeffrey Epstein advising the bank’s most senior executives on how to pitch a Gates-anchored donor-advised fund, insisting the presentation include the phrase ‘additional money for vaccines’ and directing the creation of an ‘offshore arm — especially for vaccines.’ In 2011 Epstein advises J P Morgan to make ‘a silo based proposal that will get Bill [Gates] more money for vaccines’. He specfically acknowledges ‘The tension is making money from a Charitable Org. Therefore the money making parts need to be arms length.’ As Sayer Ji summarizes: ‘The architect of this structure — a man convicted of sex crimes against minors — is explicitly acknowledging that the vehicle is designed to generate profit under the legal cover of charity.’ Epstein develops the pitch further in an email of August 17, 2011, by describing Bill Gates’ emotional state as follows: ‘Bill is terribly frustrated. He would like to boost some of the things that are working without taking away from those that are not… therefore, explaining that this would allow ‘additional money for vaccines’ must be included in the presentation.’

Sayer Ji flags the salient points of this message:

‘This sentence tells us four things at once. First, Epstein is speaking with direct knowledge of Gates’ internal emotional state. Second, he is shaping JPMorgan’s presentation strategy. Third, vaccine funding is the hook — the narrative justification for the financial structure. And fourth, Epstein is the one dictating what ‘must be included’ to close the deal.’

J P Morgan emails from 2011 show Jeffrey Epstein advising the bank’s most senior executives on how to pitch a Gates-anchored donor-advised fund, insisting the presentation include the phrase ‘additional money for vaccines’ and directing the creation of an ‘offshore arm — especially for vaccines.’ In 2011 Epstein advises J P Morgan to make ‘a silo based proposal that will get Bill [Gates] more money for vaccines’. He specifically acknowledges ‘The tension is making money from a Charitable Org. Therefore the money making parts need to be arms length.’ As Sayer Ji summarizes: ‘The architect of this structure — a man convicted of sex crimes against minors — is explicitly acknowledging that the vehicle is designed to generate profit under the legal cover of charity.’

Epstein, Gates, and J P Morgan continued to develop the pandemic-oriented donor-advised fund, with ‘a 2017 email thread between Epstein, Gates, and [Gates Foundation Science Advisor] Boris Nikolic naming ‘pandemic’ as a ‘key area’ for donor-advised fund structures — three years before COVID-19.’

To set this money machine in motion, all that was needed was to stampede the global population into panic-driven fear.

This turned out to be far easier than its organizers expected. They were aided by the very altruism missing in themselves, the common desire not to infect others with a deadly disease. Gates, Bourla, Fauci et al twisted compassionate concern for fellow human beings into a force that bludgeoned individuals into ‘taking one for the team’, leveraging state and corporate coercion to enforce compliance with unprecedented violations of liberty and bodily autonomy. Using the Gates-financed WHO, Pfizer and Moderna enlisted every government in the world, and nearly every source of authoritative medical information, to propagate their story of the dire necessity of compliance, along with massive ‘all-of-government’ censorship of the slightest hint of contradiction. The censorship was crucial, because if the truth of the matter got to only a few of the intended victims, or to honest medical authorities, the whole criminal vaccine enterprise would be doomed.

Unfortunately for everyone, panic spread more quickly than truth. The injectors moved fast, censorship stifled awareness, and within months, they hijacked the immune systems of about one-third of the global population. They also hijacked official statistics by the simple expedient of bribing hospitals and doctors to report covid as the cause of death in any instance where it was merely present among more obvious causes. Spike-loaded mRNA killed 17 million worldwide — and still counting — and subjected hundreds of millions of others to debilitating diseases of the heart, circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory, reproductive, and central nervous systems, and vastly increased rates of cancer.

Many were spared by storage conditions that neutralized the genetic material (mRNA), intentional substitution of harmless placebos in some lots, imprecise injection, or other defects of the campaign. The net effect was to mask the ‘excess death’ count (the vaccine-attributable number causing a ‘spike’ in the normally stable death rate) until after they had occurred.

The lethal effects of this diabolical medicine went unnoticed by most, thanks to censorship, concealment, and denial by medical authorities. Pfizer and Moderna scientists and their financiers knew perfectly well from their internal testing what they were doing. Somehow the immense profitability of this plague and its advancement of scientific research made it all worthwhile to them, ethically. Yet such grotesque mental distortions transcend money and power, complicating the search for motivation.

However hard it may be to grasp the fact that Epstein, Gates, Bourla, Fauci, Baric, Schwab, and their colleagues actually planned, rehearsed, and carried out a program of mass murder and illness for the express purpose of their own enrichment, the documentary record is clear. But despite the colossal sums involved — hundreds of billions of dollars — the economic explanation for their crimes against humanity seems inadequate. Surely they must have had other motives, at least when wondering how they might be judged in future.

For Gates, with his family history with Planned Parenthood, the supplementary motivation that came most readily to mind was ‘saving the planet’ from over-population, an old trope of the Club of Rome which meshed nicely with popular environmental hysteria. As he explained frankly in a TED talk, there were too many people (six billion then) in the world. A billion or so of them could be killed off with vaccines and other health care services. He didn’t say ‘killed off’, only that subtracting them, like a mathematical problem, would leave the survivors better off. Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, another exponent of eugenics, threaded the needle more carefully by asserting ‘For world population to be kept ‘stationary’, there must not be many more people to be fed than there are now.’

Lord Keynes, a mathematically inclined economist who popularized deficit spending, also embraced eugenics throughout his life, though he kept that and other unsavory tendencies under wraps. Nobody else articulated it more clearly than Gates did, but it seems that others involved in the death-by-vaccine enterprise believe likewise.

The scientists who doggedly took swabs (one is tempted to say schwabs) of batshit to find and develop viruses capable of infecting humans seem motivated primarily by career advancement. While they are certainly not averse to monetary gain, they and their financiers seek above all to advance their warped version of science. In this endeavor it was the pixieish Dr Anthony Fauci, proprietor of a multi-billion-dollar tax-funded research empire, who provided the most sweeping justification of this dubious enterprise. Appointing himself the sole avatar of ‘science’, he urged all in his domain to ‘follow the science’ — meaning himself. Massive censorship and denials of lab origins of the pandemic virus at first obscured its funding by none other than the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Americans’ tax money laundered through a cutout called Eco-Health Alliance followed an intentionally tortuous path. Multiple layers of coverups, including an ingenious gene-splicing exercise to conceal the actual method of enhancing human infectiousness, further obscured the trail. But empirical research, the essential forerunner of real science, eventually uncovered the actual sources and methods.

These methods consisted of infecting dozens or hundreds of animals in series, until the pathogen gained the ability to bind to human endothelial cells. The scientific purpose of this long-term drudgery was to simulate, or in this case actually accelerate, a process of species-jumping that, if Nature were left to her own devices, might pose a vanishingly remote danger to humanity. Not one of the scientists doing this research, least of all the Bat Lady, Shi Zhengli, and her University of North Carolina collaborator Ralph Baric, asked the common-sense question: ‘Is this really worth doing? Does the clear likelihood of a pandemic emanating from a lab leak that could easily kill and sicken millions exceed the danger posed by an extremely unlikely natural migration of a virus from an isolated batcave in southern China through numerous intermediate species, all the while executing numerous extremely intricate modifications of its DNA and basic structure to adhere to human endothelial cells?’ The obvious answer is no, except for military purposes, of which bio-warfare specialists in both China and the United States were well aware. For the scientists, however, career motivations outweighed danger to all of humanity. It wasn’t just research funding, it was research funding as an imprimatur of valuable public service that motivated them. Fauci himself had said the research was worthwhile even if a virus slipped out the lab door and killed a few million people. That was good enough for his grantees.

In addition to financial and career motivations, covid enabled legions of nameless faceless bureaucrats to discover their inner tyrant. From federal health officials to governors to petty local functionaries, the covid pandemic came to them as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decide which businesses were essential and which nonessential, which groups could meet together (rioters) and which could not (churchgoers), to impose house arrest and threaten those caught outdoors without a mask, to promulgate and change dozens of intrusive regulations, and so on. Vast numbers of Western officials exercising these long-dreamed-of ambitions found in the Chinese Communist Party — which welded apartment doors shut to imprison the inhabitants — the role model for their own local dictatorships. The sudden access of power proved to be catnip to this class of drudges. That too was a motive.

Down at street level, such power as this new moral authority conferred on the vaccinated granted them virtue-signaling privileges to lord it over their skeptical family members and colleagues. Government officials lost no time in exploiting yet another source of division, adding vaccination status to their arsenal of race-hatred, class conflict, immigrant-v-native tensions, and other fabricated divisions. As the comatose person acting as president himself famously opined, ‘This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated’. Knowledge of the ineffectiveness and toxicity of the mRNA shots was already in wide circulation, but that was not the point. The point was to keep the pressure campaign going long enough to dispose of the government’s stock of purchased vaccines before they (the vaccines) expired.

But even the aggregate of all these motives — money, career advancement, political power, virtue-signaling rights — doesn’t explain why so many highly placed people acted so monstrously. The entire cast of characters entrusted with direction of Western Civ, comprising top government officials of the elected, deep-state, and royal flavors, scientists at prestigious universities, showbiz celebrities, financiers, and tech-oligarchs, seems to have been involved directly or indirectly with the talented Mr Epstein. Not all, but surprisingly many, flew on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’, according to flight logs, visited his Little St James Island, his New Mexico Zorro Ranch, or his palatial Manhattan residence. Others happily accepted money from him, persuading themselves that if their valuable research didn’t get funded by this sexual abuser of children, then the Communist Party of China would have taken up the funding slack.

The talented Mr Epstein. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s many talents was ingratiating himself with the rich, the powerful, the influential, and with deep thinkers. Through his salons together with literary agent John Brockman, and his funding of the Edge Foundation, he became adept at connecting these diverse constituencies. He connected money with grant-seekers, power with intriguing ideas, spies with forbidden activities, media mavens with audience-seekers, royalty with commoners, celebrities with philosophers. Mapping out the permutations and combinations probably appealed to his mathematical mind. He served as the go-to node, financial intermediary, and all-purpose fixer for any entity skirting the edge of legality or ethically permissible conduct. Part of his service was to provide appealing rationales for questionable behavior.

Epstein’s ingratiating manner, as seen in an interview with Steve Bannon, provides a glimpse of how the child-rapist was able to seduce so many of the rich and powerful into his orbit. In June 2019, less than a month before his demise by his own or others’ hands, Epstein sought to rehabilitate his terminally tarnished public persona. Reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter speaking to a learned assembly at a monastic library in Italy, Epstein appears as a charming, erudite, and patient teacher, adept at teasing out the complexities of abstruse subjects for an intellectually curious audience. This is probably how he performed when teaching at the Dalton School for girls in New York. His upper-West-side patois sounds very much like Woody Allen — smart, witty, irreverent, insightfully original.

Bannon asks Epstein ‘How did a schmuck like you get on the Rockefeller Board?’ Epstein explains he got to know David Rockefeller by asking him what were the best and worst moments in his life. David, he says (Epstein quickly got to a first-name basis), related the angst of how his father said he would never give him a dime, but at school he was always the one to pick up the check because his name was Rockefeller. Epstein explains to David that math is taking over medicine and Rockefeller University has to adapt to the calculus of profit-and-loss and evidence-based triage. David asks the 30-year-old Epstein to come on the Board of Rockefeller University and teach them, like the Dalton girls, the fundamentals of math. Epstein joins the likes of former President Clinton, former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker, and other luminaries on the Rockefeller University Board.

The interview continues with David’s establishment of the Trilateral Commission, a forerunner of the World Economic Forum. It was intended as a stabilizing influence run by bankers amid the shifting tides of political leadership in the Western world.

Epstein then explains that almost nobody understands banking, how banks are entitled to lend out ten times what they have. (This is true — banks create credit, which is why their lending decisions determine whether an economy grows productively or not.) Epstein is frank about who and what caused the 2008 financial meltdown — Bill Clinton as President forcing banks to lend to bad credit risks under threat of DOJ enforcement against racially discriminatory lending (’red-lining’), and setting up FNMA and GNMA to guarantee the bad loans. So the banks, reinforced by government (taxpayer) guarantees, happily approved a massive volume of unrepayable loans. (This is also true.) It took 10 years to play out, from 1998 to 2008, but with mathematical certainty it did, putting the entire banking system on life-support. The 2008 financial meltdown happened to coincide with Epstein’s imprisonment, which is presented in the interview as something visited upon him without cause.

The surreal scene of Epstein in solitary confinement in West Palm Beach jail (for his protection, it was said) features him learning about the Lehman bankruptcy from his jailers worried about their pensions asking him for financial advice. This is followed in the interview by Epstein recounting the two telephone calls he is allowed to make. The telephones have short cords, so that — here he makes a self-choking gesture that eerily foreshadows his later demise — he couldn’t strangle himself. He calls the CEO of Bear Stearns (where he once worked) and the head of J P Morgan. He also counsels ‘someone at Treasury’ to pump liquidity into the banking system, likening it to a dying patient who must have a blood transfusion if he is to survive. That is exactly what then-Federal Reserve Chief Bernanke did.

Setting up the Santa Fe Institute is explained by Epstein as a way of finding useful work for unemployed Los Alamos physicists. Epstein bought the Zorro Ranch in New Mexico as a retreat for them, he says, without mentioning the appalling crimes against children committed there by him and by Hollywood celebrities and others. Also left unsaid in the interview is New Mexico’s key advantage for Epstein being that he would not be required to register as a sex offender in that State. As we now know from recently released emails, Zorro Ranch served as the venue for his plan to improve the gene-stock of the human race by inseminating as many girls as he could there. The model, as Marcos Paulo Candeloro explains here,

‘was the Repository for Germinal Choice, a real sperm bank stocked with material from Nobel laureates that operated until 1999 to strengthen the human gene pool. Epstein saw himself as superior genetic raw material. He called this obsession transhumanism. In scientific meetings he systematically redirected conversations toward how humans could be genetically improved. Alan Dershowitz, his own attorney and professor emeritus at Harvard, reported being horrified by the discussions, given the use of eugenics by the Nazis. In a session at Harvard, Epstein openly criticized efforts to reduce hunger and provide healthcare to the poor because it increased the risk of overpopulation. Steven Pinker pushed back and was excluded from subsequent meetings.’

The girls selected as breeding stock did not always survive Epstein’s program of improving the human race. According to one former Zorro Ranch staff member, ‘Somewhere in the hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey [Epstein] and Madame G. Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.’

But (staying on-message in the interview) the whole New Mexico mission was a failure, Epstein says, because you can’t quantify the unexplainable. Then the conversation moves to Newton — what did he do? Isaac Newton made it possible to predict the behavior of the physical world — a neat summary. Epstein also explains quantum physics in a completely understandable way, that when you look really closeup at electrons, they’re not there, all there is, is a force field, and quanta are simply very small objects that you can never see, but you can detect their influence and calculate their effects.

But you can’t do that with human systems, he says, they’re too complex, nobody understands the whole system, like no specialist doctor really understands the whole human body. It’s systems on systems on systems ad infinitum. Their interactions are too complex even for AI. That’s why the quantification of human behavior, which was the goal of the Santa Fe Institute, failed. With self-deprecating humility, Epstein summarizes the impossibility of something he had invested tens of millions of dollars in doing. The interview ends with Bannon alluding to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and asking Epstein whether he is the devil. Epstein acknowledges the legitimacy of the question but declines to answer.

Overcoming inhibitions. In the Bannon interview, and undoubtedly in countless unrecorded encounters, Epstein presented himself as the nodal gateway to whatever one wanted, be it money, power, philosophy, or moral justification. He was extraordinarily adept at sussing out just what his counterparties were after. With the intellectual luminaries from Harvard and M.I.T., and the aging royals and bankers, it wasn’t hard to figure out they wanted what they had been deprived of in high school — sex with complaisant young girls. Epstein enabled them to make up for lost time.

On both sides of the equation, the operational problem was how to overcome inhibitions. The older men, like Clinton, Summers, and Prince Andrew, certainly knew that sex with young girls, especially without the girls’ consent, violated well-known norms, not to mention laws. And the young girls, usually pictured with frozen smiles trying unsuccessfully to look relaxed, were quickly made aware that their role was not voluntary. The luxurious settings (private airplanes, yachts, remote islands or ranches) somehow trivialized inhibitions. And the network effect of gathering groups of famous or rich or powerful people, each reinforcing the self-esteem and moral probity of the others, further dissipated what few inhibitions remained. As for the young girls, Epstein’s sidekick Ghislaine Maxwell (daughter of British media mogul and spy Robert Maxwell) expertly normalized the entire setup, promising them modeling jobs or whatever it took to have them understand that sex with unattractive older guys came with the territory (they were confined to). By such means of psychological conditioning were inhibitions overcome.

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s many talents was persuading prominent people that their peers regarded the rape and serial passage of young girls among other predators as normal. He simulated a kind of peer-review process used in scientific publication to contrive a network effect, such that it seemed wierder to opt-out than to go along. The videos and photos of the goings-on served, bizarrely, not so much for blackmail as for legitimation. As Mike Benz explains,

‘It would’ve been stupid for Epstein to blackmail his associates. With the island, the jet, the mansion, he wanted to give them experiences of what they could not get elsewhere, so that they would want to have long-term financial dealings with him. He wanted to provide a fun, easygoing, free-sex atmosphere.’

Prince Andrew with a 17-year-old girl, Bill Clinton with another teenager of indeterminate age, Adnan Khashoggi using girls to close weapons deals — the vibe said ‘That’s the way the world works, like it or not, and if you hanker after world-class influence, that comes with the territory.’ This was the state of mind that Epstein induced in his recruits.

Opportunity, the third element of the Epstein-Maxwell criminal enterprise, was engineered by the time-limited nature of airplane flights and island or ranch stays, with entry to and exit from these venues entirely controlled by Epstein. For the sex-starved men, it was ‘now or never’. For the girls, children really, who might otherwise be awakening to playful affection of their own volition, forced into the most grotesque sexual performances for the warped gratification of prominent older men, their lives became a hellscape from which many never escaped. The Epstein-Maxwell duo built a structure systematically designed to normalize these atrocities. The roster of political, showbiz, financial, and intellectual ‘leaders’ who consorted with Epstein is apparently all-inclusive. By their active partnership, solicitation and acceptance of money, comradeship, participation, complicity, enablement, silence, and a thousand and one varieties of acquiescence, they signal their approval of the most appalling violations of human personhood.

The Epstein lists. Those who appear either in Epstein’s aviation flight logs, address book, or (as recently revealed) as email correspondents of various degrees of professional and personal intimacy, include the following: Former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Senator Chuck Schumer, former Senator George Mitchell, Harvard President and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson (resigned); lawyers Cyrus Vance Jr, Alan Dershowitz, Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler (resigned), Paul Weiss Chair Brad Karp (resigned), Gerald Lefcourt, Darren Indyke; leading intellectuals and deep thinkers like Martin Nowak, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Gerald Edelman, Lawrence Krauss, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Murray Gell-Mann, and many others; persons of prodigious acquisitive talent Bill Gates, Steven Hoffenberg, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Ariane de Rothschild, Epstein benefactors Leslie Wexner and MoMA Chair Leon Black (resigned), Nicolas Berggruen, Bear Stearns Chair Ace Greenberg; royalty including British Prince (now former Prince) Andrew, Duchess Sara Ferguson, and the Sultan of Brunei; journalists Graydon Carter, Charlie Rose, Katie Couric, George Stefanopolous, Barbara Walters, and Mike Wallace. All of these names and many more were found in Epstein’s appointment book or flight logs, reported by New York magazine in 2019.

Revelations from Department of Justice files of Epstein’s email correspondence continue. The people whose names have appeared had various kinds of association with Epstein, ranging from casual to intimate, and from one-time visit to multi-faceted relationships spanning sex, money, conversation, and collaboration. Nearly all continued their association with him despite their awareness of his abusive relationships with young girls. (Two exceptions are Dr Naomi Wolf, and Evgeny Morozov, who broke ties with the Brockman literary agency after learning the Edge Foundation was financed by Epstein.) Some Epstein associates participated in the same abuse, others either denied it or considered it a minor quirk and nothing more. The fate of these girls, it seems, was considered trivial compared to Epstein’s donations for outside-the-box research at Harvard, collaboration with Bill Gates to ‘improve’ the human species with genetic-modifying injections of everyone on the planet, or with Bryan Bishop to produce designer babies. Few even bothered to justify their association with Epstein, as everyone in their set would immediately see it as merely a professional necessity. When pressed, they said just that, assuming their exalted positions would see them through.

You may not have heard of all the names listed above, but for the purpose of understanding their motivations, the key point is they are all at the pinnacle of their professions. And this lofty position in itself made everything normal — but they weren’t satisfied with ‘normal’. They wanted their demented satanic practices to be sanctified. So the dispensers of honors, awards, prizes, and money were marshaled into lockstep obedience to grant these monsters their wished-for praiseworthiness. Medical academies and health officials didn’t merely tolerate the sexual mutilation of children, they made it obligatory. Unwilling to keep their practices in the closet, because they crave public approval, they enlist approval-granting institutions in their wretched causes. Everyone is thereby compelled to see them not merely as normal, but exemplary.

In finance, law, science, academia, government, media, and high society, they exert tremendous moral authority in their realms. They set the tone, they are looked up to by those of lesser status who seek to emulate them. These people are the exemplars of virtue. If they enjoy the companionship of a vicious sex predator, then that validates the sick behavior as not only normal, but praiseworthy. A good cause, like advancing offbeat sciences, makes it OK. That is the essence of the argument advanced by Edge-set member Eric Weinstein. Because of their prominence, their acquiescence or complicity or collaboration — whatever the nature of their involvement with Epstein — radiates out to their own reference-groups through the power of example, as if they were shouting through a megaphone ‘Jump in — the water’s great!’. They don’t have to say anything. Observing what they do and how it advances their careers sends an unmistakable message that not only is this behavior OK, we would all be well-advised to do likewise in order to succeed. ‘Everyone (in their set) does it’ — the seeming universality silences any qualms.

Satanic rites. Elizabeth Nickson’s testimony on the appalling crimes revealed in the Epstein files is especially significant because she met Epstein, media mogul Robert Maxwell, Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, and various members of the British aristocracy when she worked at Time Magazine in London. She was personally molested by some of the latter. ‘In a small wood-paneled lift at the House of Lords with the Earl of Bessborough, 50 years my senior’, she writes, ‘pushed me violently into a corner, and plunged his hand down the front of my dress.’ Other women told her this was part of her job, to submit to the unwanted advances of grotesque lords of the realm.

As a teen in Montreal — where her mother was a victim of the CIA’s M K Ultra mind-control experiments — she was attractive enough to predators that her father moved the family to British Columbia to get away from them. So she knows what she’s writing about.

The coded emails in the Epstein files are real. ‘Pizzagate’, derided by bien-pensants as the fevered imaginings of rabid reactionaries, describes actual gatherings which the participants know they must hide, yet the disguises are absurdly transparent. ‘Pizza’ is children, ‘jerky’ is dried baby parts, and yes, the food metaphor is no metaphor. However shocking it is, none of it should be surprising, because there is no difference from what these people were doing out in the open, and proud of it with their self-proclaimed morality of abortion, genital mutilation, genetic modification, trans-monstrosity, designer babies, and so on.

Such license only exists insofar as society and their peer-group grant it. Louche tendencies, if incentivized, will flourish, as they have done in the arts since at least the 1960s. A particular case in contemporary art involves the former Chairman and Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, Leon Black. Accused in a 2023 lawsuit of sexually assaulting and raping a 16-year-old girl in Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse in 2002, the case had enough credibility despite his denials to force Black’s resignation as MoMA Chairman. Medical records indicated the teenager had suffered vaginal bleeding, possibly from biting as she claimed.

Black, whose Apollo Fund had made him a billionaire, had previously paid Epstein $158 million for ‘tax advisory services’. This is a person whose wealth and art collection brought him into position as gatekeeper of the premier temple of contemporary art in America. ‘Lifestyle choices’ such as his inevitably ooze into the academy, the media, the polity, the economy, science and medicine; with perversity displacing virtue, beauty, and merit, degrading art, culture, and everything they touch.

Manipulating cultural norms of tolerance to normalize their perversions, they mobilize religious, medical, and social-service officialdom to sanctify their warped beliefs, pressuring everyone to honor them or risk seeming ‘bigoted’ or ‘phobic’. Normalization soon devolves into celebration. Self-righteously characterizing their practices as scientific curiosity or ‘challenging orthodoxies’, Hollywood royalty, tech and finance oligarchs, science luminaries, princes of the Deep State soon come to believe they are fully entitled to rape children and gorge themselves on their victims’ traumatized blood. Why? Because they can, because they’ve gotten away with it and are not sated, because they believe this blood-lust will extend their own miserable lives. The sexual exploitation rituals enacted in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, the bloodiest of which were cut by Warner after the Director’s untimely death, could well have been based on actual practices known by Kubrick.

Maybe this is the significance of the Epstein files and their release — a release forced by a bi-partisan vote of Congress, pioneered by Representative Thomas Massie. What’s disclosed in those millions of pages is an architecture encompassing nearly everyone in charge of (what remains of) Western Civilization. They presided over a vicious cycle of tolerating, sanctifying, and reveling in grotesqueries, of virtue-signaling carried to the point of absurdity and self-destruction. Their motivation, beyond money, power, scientific advancement, or whatever rationale can be contrived, is ‘Because they can’. The imperative, then, is to build structures of norms of acceptable behavior so that they ‘cannot’.

There are no hundred-percent guarantees, but it is possible to increase the odds of reprehensible and criminal behavior being detected and exposed. The immunity accruing to wealth or high office can be damaged so that potential bad actors will think twice before risking their freedom or public humiliation. Legal prosecution can ensure that wealthy and highly-placed criminals will no longer get away with mass murder, sexual exploitation of children, satanic blood rituals, looting of the public Treasury, or other atrocities. Indictment, trial, conviction, sentencing, and incarceration convey a forceful sense, in lieu of a miscreant’s innate sense of right and wrong, of the limits of acceptable behavior. And just as violating common-sense norms sets a bad example for others, so adhering to such norms inspires others to do likewise.

Legal penalties reinforce — and are reinforced by — social sanctions against crime. Thus, ending indiscriminate tolerance of gratuitous offense, which inevitably progresses into normalization, celebration, and sanctification, is essential. Government can stop subsidizing it and is doing so.

Legal initiatives can set limits, and policy initiatives can move social judgment toward competence instead of racial or sexual identity in the awarding of contracts and jobs, redefining honor in terms of excellence. Government edicts can only work to a limited extent, however, without support from a critical mass of common-sense. Such changes can only take root and spread organically through posts like the one you are reading now.

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From the Timeline, §5. Perfidious Albion and the Walrus, January - June 2016: January 22, 2016: United States pays $1.7 billion in cash to Iran. The payment is converted to Euros and Swiss Francs by Dutch and Swiss central banks and delivered on pallets in three tranches on Jan 17, Jan 22, and Feb 5, via Iranian cargo planes. U.S. Treasury Department says cash is necessitated to avoid U.S. sanctions specified in Section 560.204 of Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations. || Source

January 17, 2016: President Obama announces final agreement on nuclear agreement with Iran. Obama Administration removes DEA Cassandra Task Force authority to continue investigating Hezbollah drug and weapon networks, moves supervisory agent Jack Kelly and other senior agents to other positions. Ten years of information on Hezbollah connections to Syrian, Venezuelan, and other officials, and on the extent of cocaine entering the United States, are lost. || Source

As defeat of the inept Mrs Clinton looms in early 2016, a ‘last-chance’ mentality gripped officials who undertook increasingly reckless efforts to prevent discovery of their unauthorized secret activities. The Iranian Ayatollahs, past masters of the U.S. presidential election cycle, obtained $1.7 billion in cash, personally delivered on pallets by State Department diplomats, U.S. acquiescence in further nuclear weapons development, and cancellation, by direct order of then-President Obama, of all U.S. DEA efforts to end Hezbollah’s billion-dollar-a-year drug-smuggling racket. In return, the Ayatollahs assured U.S. diplomats they would pause nuclear bomb-making for a while. The agreement was not submitted to the Senate for ratification because the Senate would have certainly rejected it.

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People throughout Japan turned out to give Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi a decisive victory, despite a fierce midwinter storm. The LDP’s electoral calculus — a new coalition of impoverished youth and reasonable Japan-first sentiment — paid off.

Good news if she follows through on her pledge to abolish the hated Consumption Tax, and root out government waste. Ironically it was her mentor Shinzo Abe who raised the Consumption Tax. It burdens every stage of value-added, falling disproportionately on small and medium-sized companies that are forced to absorb the higher cost they are unable to pass on to their customers. These companies are the lifeblood of Japan — their prosperity is essential for all. Rooting out government waste is the ‘other side of the coin’ of abolishing the Consumption Tax. The money-pundits fret about increasing Japan’s already unwieldy debt, but if Takaichi goes ahead with her plan, there are as many opportunities for cutting government waste in Japan as in the United States. We don’t have any Somalians here, but there are plenty of native Japanese corruptocrats.

Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan/China a few months ago caused the Chinese Government to threaten to stop sending so many Chinese tourists. To which many here would respond ‘You promise?’ And Komeito, China’s appeaser-in-chief in Japan, is out of the picture, which gives Takaichi a lot of foreign policy maneuvering room. Taiwan's president, Lai Ching-te, was one of the first to congratulate Takaichi.

Japanese stocks now might be a good bet. When Takaichi’s mentor Shinzo Abe first became head of the LDP, the Japanese stock market took off like a rocket. It fizzled after Abe’s ‘third arrow’, structural reform (a euphemism for cutting government waste) failed to gain momentum. If Takaichi knows what’s good for her and the LDP and the country, she’ll do whatever it takes to get more money to those who have been out-of-pocket for 20 years or more.

‘Nothing to Hide’. In the early days of mass surveillance, many people saw nothing ominous in official or commercial demands for their personal information. They reassured themselves with the mantra ‘I have nothing to hide’, believing this made the snooping harmless. In those carefree times, the immense resources of technology, money, and effort that would be dedicated to compiling universal private information on everyone would have been unimaginable. It was easy to wonder why anyone would bother, and hard to anticipate the purposes of doing so. The spy agencies proceeded to invent ever more encompassing rationales for amassing personal data. The 9/11 attacks gave them all they could ever wish for in the realm of mass surveillance.

Traditional espionage confined itself to the usual suspects among foreign states -- the Soviet Union and satellites, Communist China, North Korea, and a few others. These others included allies, since Soviet spies had established active networks in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. In the 1940s heyday of Soviet espionage, the Soviet Union acquired U.S. atomic secrets, breaking the U.S. nuclear monopoly in only four years; and placed agents in the top echelons of the U.S. State Department. Afrer several years of delay in appreciating the extent of Soviet penetration of U.S. and allied governments, U.S. spy agencies and the general public finally recognized domestic subversion as a serious problem. While traditional American espionage divided the work neatly into foreign (CIA) and domestic (FBI), with each supposed to keep out of the other’s territory, this soon proved untenable.

The advent of mass surveillance. As globalization of commerce expanded, information technology took in previously unimaginable volumes of data. In addition, non-state enemies proliferated, and national borders became porous. The 9/11 (2001) attacks sparked a fateful crossover point, wherein targeting ordinary people at home for surveillance, without any grounds for suspicion, became the norm. People with ‘nothing to hide’ became targets of mass surveillance.

The NSA’s PRISM program (exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013) reveals ongoing collusion between U.S. spies and Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and other tech firms. Banks track private accounts to detect large cash withdrawals, purportedly as an anti-money-laundering precaution legalized by the Patriot Act. Banks around the world are required by a U.S. law called FATCA to report all accounts held by U.S. citizens, violating other countries’ sovereignty. Unfortunately for all, they meekly submit, fearing loss of access to the global currency, U.S. Dollars.

The ever-expanding inventory of devices (in addition to mobile phones) that spy on their owners includes: voice-activated clocks and televisions, smart refrigerators, outdoor cameras with built-in facial recognition software, coordinating with social-media portrait scraping, cars that know when their owners are too drunk to drive, license-plate readers tracking drivers’ movements nationwide, iris scanners, and coming soon, dermal patches to enable detection of vaccination status from afar, and brain implants to read thoughts and emotions, and engage in ‘predictive policing’ to identify likely criminal behavior before it happens.

Enormous quantities of raw intelligence accumulating in electronic records available to official, private, and increasingly to unauthorized overseers, inevitably invite abuse. As in any sado-masochistic relationship, it takes two to tango. This sort of abuse was pre-figured in the arts since the 1960s, where it was gleefully enacted in louche theatrical performances, graphically pictured, and imposed on the public with architectural monstrosities. Exhibits and performances in public institutions gave license to ‘challenge’ — meaning to impose gratuitous suffering on — viewers. Normalized into the arts, this S-M mode of conduct progressed into politics, business, science, and medicine. Thus an S-M relationship between officials and the public was institutionalized.

Public-private partnership: filtered and targeted intelligence. The mania for gathering raw intelligence rarely pauses to consider why this is done. Governments around the world, including those of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, cite omni-present threats as justification for their unrestricted snooping. Spyware pioneered by Facebook, Google, Apple, and others for commercial purposes, is secretly commadeered by government spy agencies, without stating a purpose. Not only is the previous standard for snooping — ‘probable cause’ to suspect someone of a crime -- missing, the entire apparatus of raw intelligence exists without any clear mission or purpose. It does not take long, however, for politically motivated actors to discover a purpose, albeit one that was never embodied in legislation. The tech-savvy Obama Administration set about targeting political enemies like the Tea Party, using then-primitive methods like keyword searches (’patriot’ was one). Rising candidate Donald Trump comes in for special scrutiny in 2015. Supposition is quickly transformed into a fanciful story of collusion with Russia, then to a self-reinforcing reification of that narrative. Policies, such as the last-minute sanctions on Russia imposed during the dying days of the Obama Administration, are proclaimed to create an appearance of offensive Russian behavior, and to entrap officials of the incoming Trump Administration into unwinding them, reinforcing the appearance of their collusion. In short order the entire apparatus of government and spydom is conscripted into the service of blocking a presidential candidate, and failing that, crippling his presidency from within (the ‘insurance policy’).

Domestic mass surveillance takes a giant leap into new territory with the release of the NIH-Wuhan-crafted virus in late 2019, and its fraternal twin the covid-vax in early 2020. As German political prisoner Reiner Fuellmich puts it, ‘The vaccine was not created for the Wuhan virus. The virus was created for the vaccine. Once you understand that, it all makes sense.’ So dire is the ‘emergency’ of this man-made pandemic that nearly all national governments in unison enact mass house-arrests and try to enforce universal injection of an experimental gene-altering drug to treat (ineffectively and unsafely, as it turned out) an illness with a death rate of 0.15%.

This extraordinarily invasive injection requires an unprecedented enforcement apparatus. After all, people confronted with this demand can simply refuse. How to get them to accept an experimental invasive medicine that may harm them? The covid episode *ratchets-up passive surveillance to active intervention*, transforming government into an activist force pursuing its own ends without even the pretense of popular consent.

To compel compliance, ‘all-of-government’ is mobilized is required to target individuals and groups, fine-tuned to their specific fears and aspirations. The range of individually targeted sanctions encompasses threats of job loss, denial of school admission, removal of professional accreditation, blacklisting, de-platforming from social media, censorship of publications, and others, amounting to deprivation of livelihood. Some people respond more to fear of illness or death, while with others it is found that more positive psychological motivators such as purported anti-infection obligations (’two weeks to stop the spread’ and ‘take one for the team’) are effective. About midway throught the pandemic, covidians devise the ‘vaccine passport’ to enforce compliance with government edicts. Like a travel passport, the ‘vaccine passport’ admits the bearer to restaurants, offices, schools, public transit, shopping, or other sorts of access required for normal life. In the next iteration of this technology, the ‘vaccine passport’ could be embedded into the obedient subject’s skin, with a trans-dermal or micro-needle patch. MIT Researchers describe this patch as an ‘on-patient medical record (OPMR)’ that ingeniously uses invisible but machine-readable quantum dots to record medical or vaccine status without the patient’s knowledge or consent.

The thrill of remote-control intimacy. Edward Snowden in his memoir Permanent Record, provides intriguing clues as to the motivations of spies who seek intimate knowledge of others while themselves remaining hidden, remote, untouchable:

‘I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.

‘It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop.’

This was Snowden’s introduction to what the NSA’s XKEYSCORE enabled a 20-something analyst to do. It produced a high unlike any he had previously experienced. Snowden calls it

‘the most significant change in the history of American espionage — the change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations.... In secret, it [U.S. Govt] assumed the power of mass surveillance, an authority that by definition afflicts the innocent far more than the guilty.’

‘STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.’

‘According to the [classified] report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency ‘searched for and retrieved’ them from its database.’

Snowden describes what the violation of privacy removes from human experience:

‘All you wanted to do was to read — to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to be with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life. And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or ‘exploits’, they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now — this sentence — on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you.’

‘This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation — the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.’

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Raw intelligence is first gathered without purpose, simply because the technical means exist for doing so, and it might come in handy someday. Eventually a purpose emerges: Rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Passive surveillance then changes into actively influencing how users respond to information they are given. Surprisingly (to me), they respond in measureable, predictible ways to news-information. I thought awareness of information with manipulative intent would ‘break the spell’, nullifying the influence of that manipulation on one’s own thinking and behavior. But apparently not -- millions recognize the operation of mind-control, but they’re OK with it! They prefer the convenience of crowd-sourced traffic information, or of an app presenting them with choices based on their ‘Likes’ and other information not specifically intended for public consumption.

From this predictable knowledge of how individuals who are classified by demographic or psychological attributes will react, it is s short step to tailoring news and other information to produce officially desired responses. This matching of content to character is the basis of ‘cognitive surveillance’, otherwise known as mind-control.

It is used to bring masses of protesters into the streets, drive buying decisions and voting choices, enforce compliance with invasive medical practices, and quell resistance to migrant invasions. In extreme individual cases such as the MK Ultra experiments, mind-control psychological operations (’psy-ops’, as they are known in the spy trade) break down moral inhibitions against sexual exploitation, murder, drug addiction, terror, torture, and similar activities incompatible with civilization. Moving from passive to active surveillance, and thereby facilitating such experiments, is thus a profoundly fateful choice. America leads the world in incorporating mind-control seamlessly into the tech-wizardry of convenience serving as the point of entry for centralized control of the populace.

Americans are conditioned to accept the next fix delivered by mad scientists, while the digital dragnet draws ever tighter around their throats. Oligarchs champ at the bit to install machine-readable brain sensors, trans-dermal skin patches, and other invasive devices in our bodies. Covid lockdowns prove that officials could largely get away with enforcing ‘vaccine passports’ to control access to food, meeting-places, bank accounts, travel, and all other fundamentals of existence. Substituting an inconspicuous implant for a piece of paper is the logical sequel — unless large numbers of people refuse.

Democratization of intelligence by AI. Artificial intelligence upends the standard intelligence hierarchy, giving everyone genius-level memory, reasoning, number-crunching, computer-programming, diagnostic, analytical, data-relation, economic forecasting, and many many other abilities. New uses of AI are discovered daily. Traditional experts are threatened with extinction, while crowd-sourcing ousts specialized fiefdoms. Vast expanses of unknown territory become transparent to anyone with a GPS navigation system. Its possessor can navigate around the locale better than natives can.

AI translation breaks down linguistic barriers to an unprecedented degree, opening up everything ever written to foreign inquiry. This is a task its ‘large-language-model’ (LLM) design is ideally suited for. We are just beginning to realize the enormous benefits of this capability. As one example of the extraordinary inter-lingual possibilities, the author of a book on ‘umami’ (savory taste in Japanese and other cuisine) uses AI to translate recipes from out-of-print Meiji-era books found in Jimbocho shops. All the books ever published and lying dormant in used-book shops and libraries are now available to everyone, regardless of their native language.

Just as filtered or targeted intelligence gives purpose to raw intelligence, so artificial intelligence enhances filtered intelligence. AI does this by responding to users’ prompts in a seemingly intelligent way, incorporating very large sets of the world’s published knowledge into its answers. Instead of the endless lists of irrelevant references produced by keyword-based search engines, AI focuses on the topic at hand, with nuanced, well-organized, and comprehensive compilations beyond the ability of any individual researcher to produce.

At the same time, AI prose is typically bland and devoid of opinion or humor. It is a reliable guide to the conventional orthodoxy on any subject, or to the biases of its designers. As published sources are increasingly colonized by AI output, it is becoming more and more self-referential, recirculating content in an endless loop. This phenomenon is hardly confined to AI. For example, the made-up pastische of the Steele dossier passed through multiple sources among journalists, Congressional aides, spies, and special-counsel investigators, like a virus serially passed through animals in a gain-of-function experiment. Repetitive references abound in online searches as well, with circular citation chains. Indeed Google started by ranking references according to numbers of citations. AI did not invent regurgitative reporting, but its sources consist increasingly of mutually-cited unedited content. The remedy is to focus instructions as precisely as possible, issue multiple prompts, and apply common-sense judgment to the results.

AI (so far) fails to catch up with human knowledge, because human knowledge continually evolves. New experiences make us ‘see things in a new light’. News about an earthquake in Indonesia acquires great salience because a friend lives there. A medieval herbal manuscript gathering dust in a library reveals a headache remedy. A picture evokes a memory of someplace visited decades ago. Real thought interacts dynamically with its environment, evolving as it goes, blending new knowledge with previous experience. AI has proved unexpectedly adept at predicting how masses of people will react to certain well-defined stimuli (especially stimuli associated with negative emotions), but that is only because those masses have been pre-programmed to bypass their innate common-sense. AI’s formidable ability to rearrange words does not yet rise to the level of creative thought. As long as at least some people continue to exercise their own innate common-sense, creation of new knowledge will continue to outpace AI.

Investment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) reached $252 billion in 2024, or under a more inclusive definition, nearly one trillion dollars, projected to have reached $1.5 trillion in 2025. As of the end of 2025, the return on this massive investment is trivial, with the most common levels of increased revenue attributable to AI being less than five percent of the firm’s prior revenue. Cost-cutting from AI has fared little better, with the most common savings under 10 percent of prior costs. As AI users have discovered, its effectiveness depends on the prompts, or questions, they pose. Like a search engine, it performs better if you know what you’re looking for. In the early days of the The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) blitzkrieg, Elon Musk’s team used AI to uncover hidden money flows they knew were there, such as the Treasury Department’s daily $50 billion payments to unidentified recipients.

At the end of Musk’s appointed term, DOGE claims $214 billion in savings, but accounting uncertainties and judicial decisions restoring budget cuts and reinstating fired employees cut actual savings to $67 billion. While AI in Musk’s hands has proved to be a useful tool in revealing massive unauthorized and illegal Government payments, stopping them is another matter altogether.

Aside from Musk’s Grok, the most prominent AI product is ChatGPT, posting annual revenue of $13 billion for OpenAI. Due to its ambitious expansion plans, the company anticipates a net loss of $9 billion in 2025. CEO Sam Altman and his partner are diversifying into the designer-baby business. Feminist darling Jennifer Doudna supplied the CRISPR gene-editing technology that fuels this mad experiment. Scientists rolling the genetic dice, skirting regulatory oversight, have already produced ‘off-target’ genetic anomalies with ‘unanticipated serious consequences, such as mutation, oncogene activation, immune response, and activation/inactivation of undesired genes’ in animals’. These unfortunate animals are routinely killed, but Altman and partner haven’t disclosed what they plan to do with human babies emerging from laboratories bearing similar CRISPR gene-editing anomalies. Like the experimental alterations of the human genome wrought by mRNA technology, long-lasting harm without conceivable benefit is a clearly foreseeable consequence.

A new architecture of thought. Investors and promoters of AI are after bigger game than sparing researchers the drudgery of looking up references for footnotes. In a 21st-century version of the ‘Great Game’, rival powers are engaged in cognitive warfare — an arms race for hegemony of the last frontier, the human mind. For about half a millennium, Western Civilization has dominated the architecture of human thought. It has done so through its superiority as a survival tool for large-scale societies. Individual freedom drives cultural, political, and scientific innovation, creating prosperity and improved lives for all. Societies that can’t tolerate freedom — whether socialist, theocratic, or tech-utopian — inevitably fail. Central planners simply cannot even begin to encompass the myriad variables, facts, trends, knowledge, and events in their deliberations and decisions, as noted by Friedrich Hayek in The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization. It is precisely this universal knowledge that developers of artificial intelligence aspire to own and apply to global governance. If central planners possess all knowledge relevant to economic, health, geopolitical, and other decisions affecting humanity, then the fatal flaw of systems based on total state control of society ceases to exist.

This governance by expertise is what the tech-utopian architects of thought seek to substitute for Western Civilization. The stakes in this contest — between Western and Chinese AI on the one hand, and between tech oligarchs and Western Civilization on the other had — are sky-high.

The credibility of AI as a domain of universal knowledge is central to its role in crafting a new architecture of thought. For as we think, so do we act. If we believe that artificial intelligence is not only intellectually superior to human intelligence, but also morally and even spiritually superior, then we will blindly ‘follow the science’. This new architecture of thought enshrines a priesthood of savants and oligarchs remarkably similar to the alliances of religious and secular powers described by James Bryce in his history of the Holy Roman Empire. They are out to triumph over both Chinese rivals and freedom-loving Westerners.

Much has been written about where Jeffrey Epstein got his money, whether sex with adolescent girls was just his hobby or a means of securing kompromat on prominent persons, whether he was a CIA asset or not, and whether he was murdered, and if so, by whom. A brief review of his career suggests his part in the AI saga.

Mike Benz, in assessing Epstein’s role as that of a financial intermediary, summarizes his specialty succinctly: ‘Girls juice deals’;

‘It’s not really a party unless you have girls there... It was a very different thing from blackmail. That’s how Adnan Khashoggi got to be the biggest arms dealer in the world. Pretty girls are the currency of the mideast.’

‘Spy agencies want financial facilitators far more than they want blackmail material. They need a deal-maker who can broker deals that the U.S. Government does not want to be seen as brokering, but that they want to happen in the world. [Epstein] served as the broker between Israel and the U.S. for Bechtel to build a pipeline to get Iraqi oil out overland instead of the increasingly risky sea route.’

This is plausible as far as it goes, but Benz doesn’t account for why Epstein particularly recruited cognitive scientists engaged in integrating diverse fields of inquiry, including neurology, psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, mathematical modeling, and computer programming. Brought together by the publishing impresario John Brockman and his Edge Foundation, they specialize in outside-the-box thinking unbound by traditional disciplines. Jeffrey Epstein provided two resources to the Edge set that were lacking in their lives: girls and money.

Eric Weinstein, a member of the Edge set, reviews the Epstein case in a long monologue full of superfluous complexity. But Weinstein is absolutely clear on one point: If Epstein hadn’t supported the geniuses and heterodox thinkers of the Edge set, then China would have done so. Here we see the self-congratulatory cult of expertise, with its belief in their own pre-eminence in comparison with lesser mortals.

Surely the formidable effort applied to corralling the Edge set had some purpose other than cybernetic badinage. Chances are, that purpose was to build a new architecture of thought with artificial intelligence engrafted onto human intelligence. Aiming for organic integration of human thought with comprehensive information-gathering and -processing capacity, they seem to be after super-human intelligence capable of taking real-time action. This new species of humanity would have previously undreamed-of powers -- for good, of course, despite unfortunate precedents. This appears to be the goal cognitive scientists of the trans-human persuasion, and their financiers, are pursuing, asserting that it’s better for America to have a race of super-human-robots than for China to have it. The gargantuan hype makes a persuasive investment story, for now. What happens when the reality fails to live up to the hype is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile many can benefit from the democratization of intelligence, if they use AI tools as assistants rather than authorities, and, as always, apply their own common-sense to the results.

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October 4, 2025 (Ten-Four)

Common-sense, composed of etiquette, ethics, instinct, learning, and shared expectations, guides us through encounters with friends, strangers, work associates, and others. Though surprisingly complicated, it doesn’t feel scripted. It feels natural. We just know to wait our turn, protect children, not harm others, give everyone a fair shake, stay healthy, do our jobs, have fun, and so navigate peacably through myriad different situations. Those who have tried to write rules for such encounters find that there are always exceptions, and the exceptions always have exceptions, so it’s awfully difficult to codify. It’s like riding a bicycle, complicated to describe, but easy to do once you learn.

Scaling-up natural-born common-sense to the larger society turns out to be exponentially more complicated than in small groups. When it works, it does so through a sort of fractal replication of small-group dynamics. The people and groups we care most about filter and diffuse personal choices throughout the larger society. Consumer purchase decisions and voting have been studied the most, because that’s what those who pay for the studies are most interested in. While this might seem a rather limited sphere of human experience, from the empyrean of philosophy comes confirmation that it is the ‘genealogy of morals’. Friedrich Nietzsche, an unlikely source, located the origins of common-sense in commercial relations:

‘The feeling of ‘ought’, of personal obligation has had its origin in the oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower.... Making prices, assessing values, thinking out equivalents, exchanging -— all this preoccupied the primal thoughts of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted thinking itself.’ [p 80]

Divine Right transferred from kings to people. The American Founders, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, transcribed then-extant common-sense on human relations and governance. They did not invent free society, they merely sketched how it would be without kings, by investing the ‘divine right’ of governance in some (though not all) of their fellow-humans. They didn’t pretend they were granting favors to the citizenry. Having overthrown a king, Americans understood intuitively that the restraints embodied in freedom of speech, assembly, religion, enterprise, and the guarantees of due process, made social peace possible, and thereby prosperity.

In American tradition, these choices derive their validity from friends, family, ethnic associations, schools, work associates, unions, voluntary organizations, sports buddies, churches, 4-H clubs, and so on. America, as Tocqueville observed in the 19th century, was extraordinarily rich in these social resources. But scaling-up common-sense can suffer setbacks, as restraints on what the state could do to the citizenry were gradually sloughed off in the 20th century, under a variety of pretexts. War, central banking, national security, terror attacks, financial crisis, health emergencies, digital/crypto currency — all led to the same end, centralization of state control at accelerating speed. An ethos of expertise imposing whatever is technically possible erased common-sense memories of why government must be restrained in the first place.

Transformation. One of the saddest spectacles of late-20th-century America has been the systematic subordination of those vibrant social resources to hostile cults, and the consequent atrophy of those resources. Common-sense, hijacked by ersatz associations, amplify rather than restrain anti-social tendencies. In their place, now (2025) personal choices are validated by a dystopian realm of influencers, hackers, mendacious fact-checkers, trolls, gamers, avatars, disrupters, cyber-spies, paid mobs, glory-seekers, and others. AI-generated prose adds another layer of unmoored content to the toxic mix. All of this co-exists with some very well-informed, thoughtful, and penetrating analyses (especially here on Substack), up-to-the-minute real-time accurate information, wide expansion of consumer choice, research in previously unreachable depth, a global range of freely available art, cultural, and scientific resources, and many other creative resources.

In a world where ideas and choices are vetted by a battery of friends and associates, the crazy ideas circulating today would have been stopped cold. With innate common-sense intact, it would be impossible to get billions of people to accept the insane proposal to inject them with an experimental gene-altering drug, or to harm themselves in the many other ways that have been devised for perverse delectation.

Unrestrained by common-sense, fundamental societal and mutual protection break down. Wars careen mindlessly toward nuclear holocaust, bio-weapons like the Wuhan virus coupled with another bio-weapon, mRNA injections, disguised as the antidote, an industry of mass migration built on sexual slavery of children, vaccine-driven neurological damage grotesquely ‘cured’ by genital mutilation, addictions to marijuana, fentanyl, opiods, amphetamines, cocaine, anti-depressants, and other products of the pharmaceutical laboratory, politically motivated murders and mass shootings prompted by these same drugs, and so, sickeningly, on, in the most vicious of circles imaginable.

Transforming youngsters into robotic remote-control killers would once have been ‘mission impossible’. But persons subjected to extreme psychological trauma, and deprived of the mutual obligations of normal relationships, develop split personalities wherein normal inhibitions and restraints are switched-off. A trauma-trained shooter may even forget what he has done, or leave telling clues to the crime, as a signature indicating pride of accomplishment.

Christian restraint. In the West (basically Europe and America plus the Anglosphere), Christianity once supplied what restraint there was to be had, with the significant exceptions of war and imperial conquest which it inspired. The system it replaced, however, made human sacrifice to propitiate the gods routine, regularly enslaved conquered tribes, and required such exact obedience to law that it was readily bent to serve a parasitic priesthood and anointed leaders. Jesus Christ took the sins of humanity upon himself to end human sacrifice, re-interpreted law as a moral code of mutual obligation, and offered his own life to inspire hope for peace. His followers converted ritual bloodshed into a harmless symbolic re-enactment. Within a millennium, the Christian priesthood obtained dominion over secular rulers, by threatening them convincingly with eternal damnation. Eventually they stretched belief in miracles to the breaking point, giving way to the rationalist mindset of the Enlightenment.

Despite its over-reaching, Christianity supplied many useful restraints that were not noticed until they were gone. Ideas that were novel two millennia ago restrain the urge to murder one another. Now human sacrifice is back, re-packaged as science, women’s choice, identity affirmation, genetic transformation, eldercare, organ harvesting, or planetary salvation, all of which are now valued higher than human life itself. And disturbingly large numbers of people believe it’s OK to murder those whom they disagree with. Law can hardly express a sense of mutual obligation in a society where that common-sense that gives rise to law has atrophied.

Awareness of influence. Something impelled me to take a physical book from the shelf, which included Malcolm Gladwell’s now-classic 1999 New Yorker article on Clairol’s huge success in driving hair-coloring from usage by seven percent of American women to 42 percent. Their perception of hair-coloring changed almost overnight from ‘trashy’ to ‘elegant’, propelled by the mystique of ‘Does She or Doesn’t She?’

As feminine aspirations changed from the Doris Day role model to a more self-assertive type, L’Oréal eventually drew even with Clairol on the back of ‘Because I’m Worth It’.

Then, women could change their identity with a five-dollar bottle of tinted shampoo, and feel thoroughly satisfied and confident about the result. The notion of rearranging their genitals would have been unimaginably abhorrent to them. Now, drastic alterations of physiology are promoted to both sexes with vastly ‘new and improved’ techniques of psychological pressure.

Modern techniques of mind control vastly outpace our ability to comprehend them, become aware of them, and neutralize them. Early efforts to connect consumer goods to deeply felt psychological needs, pioneered by Edward Bernays, seem primitive today. Now, armed with detailed personal information willingly or unwillingly surrendered by social media users, far more granular appeals precisely targeted to individual preferences can sway behavior and thought while short-circuiting awareness. Formal education apparently does not enhance awareness of this influence; more highly educated people may even be more susceptible to such mind control, if the contents of their education and their media exposure reinforce one another. The result is a society with masses of people from all strata of intelligence and class mesmerized into near-robotic states of acquiescence.

Common-sense persists among those who have opted-out of psychological conditioning and central control. In rural areas where social ties are strong, among independent-minded people, unafraid to say what they see instead of zombie-like doing as they’re told, in small businesses not tethered to government contracts, in alternate media, with people who believe in their own innate health and ability to sort through the morass of data to find truth, and in like-minded communities both online and off-line, perceptions of reality not drowned out by noise survive. These are precisely the groups under attack, first during the covid episode with state-sponsored riots, suppression of civil liberties, government-directed censorship, job losses, forced vaccinations, then continuing currently with unprecedented extensions of mass surveillance and central control systems. The bait is convenience. It is undeniably more convenient to identify oneself or pay with a swipe of the mobile phone than with paper documents or currency. The cost is incurred later, with personal data accumulated centrally, unlimited spying authorized (’By using this app, you hereby agree...’), and an unconscious mental shift toward automatic acceptance of the loss of privacy. By design, it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘just say no’. But that is precisely what we must do to keep our common-sense.

The insistent push for universality reveals its inherent weakness. If even one person refuses — an mRNA injection, a fake ‘scientific consensus’, a digital ID, whatever — the whole system of control acts as if threatened. Because it IS threatened, as any ideology or religion claiming universal applicability must be, by the slightest individual variation. Perhaps that is the secret virtue of common-sense — the quirks, eccentricities, and unexpected oddities of human nature, which can neither be predicted nor centrally controlled by any AI algorithm. Therein lies the best hope for common-sense able to withstand the extraordinary pressures imposed on it in these turbulent times.

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August 6, 2025

Six miles above this island in the Inland Sea of Japan, B-29 pilot Paul Tibbets readied the 9,000-pound cargo of his aircraft, the Enola Gay, on August 6, 1945. He had named the plane after his mother. Commanding bombardier Tom Ferebee to open the cargo bay, the crew watched as a nuclear bomb descended toward the unknowing populace of Hiroshima. Tibbets instantly executed a 155-degree banked turn to escape the shock wave from the blast. Forty-three seconds later, at 8:15 am Hiroshima time, from 1,890 feet above Hiroshima the detonation caused a flash and blast of unimaginable intensity, followed by a mushroom cloud 45,000 feet high, in which pieces of buildings were seen. By then, 12 miles away, the crew of the Enola Gay felt several shock waves from the blast. Of the 350,000 residents of Hiroshima that day, 140,000 died from the blast, the more than 3,000-degree Celsius heat, or radiation of the nuclear explosion.

Directed by Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicists of the Manhattan Project had worked feverishly to develop this awesome weapon for the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. But, by August 1945, Germany had already surrendered three months earlier. Japan’s surrender was imminent, as Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower knew and advised. All of the atomic scientists who witnessed a test-explosion at Los Alamos were well aware of the mass murder it would inflict on a civic populace. One of them, Hungarian refugee Leo Szilard, questioned the military need for the atomic bomb, since Germany had already surrendered. Szilard may have felt a particular responsibility to try to stop the atomic bombing of Japan because he had persuaded Albert Einstein to join him in a 1939 letter urging FDR to convene a group of physicists to develop bomb-grade nuclear fission. Both Szilard and Einstein had fled Nazi Germany and were motivated by what they thought was the likelihood of that country developing such a weapon first. Einstein's enormous prestige got FDR's attention, as Szilard was well aware it would, and this led to the mobilization of physics talent, government money, and expert coordination that became the Manhattan Project. Einstein later said this letter of his and Szilard's was 'the biggest mistake of his life'. Szilard, regretting his role in persuading Einstein to join him, tried to petition FDR's successor President Truman, to offer Japan a demonstration of the atomic bomb's awful destructive power before actually incinerating a city. But circulation of this petition among the scientists at Los Alamos was blocked.

General Leslie Groves, the military supervisor of the Manhattan Project, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Secretary of State James Byrnes nevertheless considered a demonstration of the atomic bomb as a way of persuading Japan to accept unconditional surrender in June 1945. But as Stimson later recalled in a 1947 article, they were dissuaded by A) the possibility that a test-bomb might not explode, and B) the lack of other bombs. 'Nothing would have been more damaging to our effort to obtain surrender', Stimson wrote, 'than a warning or a demonstration followed by a dud — and this was a real possibility. Furthermore, we had no bombs to waste. It was vital that a sufficient effect be quickly obtained with the few we had.' Other objections to a demonstration included the possibility that if a Japanese surrender were not forthcoming, they would try to intercept the incoming bomber, or move American prisoners of war to the designated target.

The Manhattan Project scientists disclaimed responsibility for the consequences of their handiwork: 'With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights,... no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.' Of the construction of nuclear bombs set to obliterate two cities, Stimson wrote triumphantly to Truman on July 31, 1945: 'What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history.'

The Soviet Union invaded Japan on August 8, 1945, Stalin hoping to capitalize on Japan's certain defeat to seize more territory. The status of the four islands off Hokkaido that were then captured from Japan remains unresolved as of August 2025. Stimson wished to use Hiroshima to deter Stalin from expanding Communist territory any more than he had already done. But one of the scientists, himself a former Communist less reticent than his scientific comrades about political intervention, took it upon himself to even the postwar nuclear balance. This post tells that story:

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'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,..' — Allen Ginsberg, 'Howl' (first and last lines)

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Almost August 2025

The intelligentsia — artificial, human, and extra-terrestrial — is all the rage these days. For most of the 20th century, computers couldn't think fast or comprehensively enough to simulate human consciousness, and alien intelligence was the stuff of science fiction. Now, as the finale of the first quarter of the 21st century draws near, these barriers are breaking down. And those human thinkers who are storming the barricades have become much sought-after by financial and sexual predators.

At the height of his game, Jeffrey Epstein was sated with sex, money, real estate, and aircraft, but he wanted something more. He had used each element of his career to propel a quantum leap into a faster orbit. Teaching math to the daughters of the rich at the Dalton School (whose Headmaster Donald Barr was the father of Attorney General William Barr) introduced Epstein to the nexus of finance and sex that he parlayed into an alliance with Victoria's Secret founder Leslie Wexner. The models or wanabe models entertained clients in Wexner's New York mansion which he gifted to Epstein. This and other lavish settings in the Caribbean and New Mexico, decorated with teenage girls, proved irresistible to highly placed officials and influentials. Who were they? The furor over the Trump Administration's refusal to release the client list is curious, because an annotated list was already published in 2019! An updated list was published in June 2024, with additional names from Court filings and other sources.

But we were talking about the 'higher calling', the title of an apologia by former FBI Director James Comey, to whose daughter Maureen Comey fell the task of prosecuting Epstein. A well-honed acquisitive bent and a talent for deception had served him well, but he wanted intellectual respectability above all. He set out to buy it.

His collaborator in this endeavor was famed literary agent and master-networker John Brockman. Epstein financed Brockman's Edge salon,1 bringing together those who regarded themselves as the best minds of their generation to contemplate... their own minds. They thought about thought, in all its transcendental variations — consciousness, awareness, artificial intelligence, neural networks, genetic evolution, computational reasoning, information systems, mind control, and so on, billed as 'redefining who and what we are'. The ominous overtones of that notion, as in tinkering with the human genome, had not yet broken out of the laboratories.

Brockman was an inspired party-giver, adept at ferreting out common interests among people of diverse disciplines and sensibilities. They turned out to be interested in money and sex. One of Edge's most successful events was its annual millionaires' -- later changed to billionaires' — dinners with the great minds. Epstein collected them as trophies, like the stuffed animals he decorated his homes with.

They (the great minds, not the stuffed animals) proved remarkably pliable to Epstein's nonsensical patter. Edge posed a question for the great minds to mull over every year. An example of Epstein's 'thinking' which his grantees praised as 'profound' or 'enlightening' was his response to the 2008 Edge question: ‘What have you changed your mind about? Why?’

'The question presupposes a well defined “you”, and an implied ability that is under “your” control to change your “mind.” The “you” I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures,) i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their “you”. The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one’s control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? because it is a part of it.'2

Jasun Horsley observed that 'Jeffrey’s [hobby] was scientists... Lawrence Krauss, Marvin Minsky, and Roger Schank; also Gregory Benford, George Church, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, David Gross, Stephen Hawking, Danny Hillis, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Stephen Kosslyn, Jaron Lanier, Seth Lloyd, Martin Nowak, Oliver Sacks, Lee Smolin, Robert Trivers, Frank Wilczek, and more.'

Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman (physiology and medicine, 1972) says 'Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations. He asked Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.' What a novel idea! Epstein gave half a million dollars to Martin Nowak for research on how altruistic behavior arises despite competitive instincts. Nowak says 'Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field' — the highest compliment possible, elevating a mere financier into the ranks of the tech-intelligentsia. Epstein was apparently not the only person in this dyad adept at intuiting what the other wanted to hear. How altruistic of him!

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The Epstein Files Resurface and Submerge, Again

The Epstein files, which Attorney General Pam Bondi said were 'sitting on my desk' in February 2025, apparently got up and walked away over the July 4 Independence Day holiday. To quash further speculation, Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Director Dan Bongino recited, unconvincingly, the catechism that Epstein killed himself. President Trump himself deplored Epstein's taking attention away from the economic successes that he (Trump) preferred to focus on. He told a reporter: 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein, at a time like this, where we're having some of the greatest success.' When the furor refused to die down several days later, he claimed, preposterously, that Democrats made up their own guilty appearance in the Epstein files, likening this to their proven fabrication of the Steele dossier.

Nothing excites greater interest in such a story than an attempt to suppress it. A broad swath of supporters and opponents alike voiced skepticism, renewing their concerns about sexual exploitation of children, the obscure sources of Epstein's wealth, what the highest echelons of government and education were getting from their association with Epstein, and whether a disgruntled prominent person or oligarch had arranged for him to be murdered.

Bondi said her February statement about the Epstein client list 'sitting on her desk' actually referred to 'a file, along with the JFK files, MLK assassination and other files, is what I meant by that.' Her memo on DOJ stationery said 'Epstein died by suicide. This systematic review revealed no incriminating client list. There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.'

Patel in January 2025, in response to news-host Laura Ingraham asking Why is the FBI protecting Epstein, said 'Simple, because of who's on that list'. Patel also asked rhetorically: 'You don’t think that Bill Gates3 is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?'

Patel in July 2025 echoed the new claim there is no list, adding that 'Having been a prosecutor and seen many prisons, you know a suicide when you see one, and that's what that was.' Bongino remarked while pointedly not looking at the camera: 'He [Epstein] killed himself.' Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt deflected a question about Epstein with 'This Administration has done more to lock up bad guys than certainly the previous Administration.... They [DOJ] committed to an exhaustive investigation, that's what they did -- and that's transparency.' They all at least have the good grace to appear embarrassed at the inconsistencies, and give every appearance in their facial expressions that they'd rather be anywhere else.

They seem unaware that an annotated list of names compiled from Epstein's 'little black book' and flight logs had already been published. Perhaps they wish to avoid having to sort through hundreds of names, some of whom appear to be casual acquaintances, society-party attendees, suppliers of interior-decorating services, and others who would object strenuously — and legally — to being swept up in a dragnet of bad guys. It's also possible that suppressing information that has already been released is meant, as Tucker Carlson has suggested, to reassure those who have good reason to fear exposure, that they are being protected at all costs.

The numerous lapses — surveillance film missing, guards asleep or absent, rope-marks not consistent with suicide — suggest not only a reassuring message of protection of prominent people, but also an effort to deter additional revelations. Where deterrence is a motive, the very sloppiness of the hit advertises the ability of the perpetrators to get away with murder.

Epstein counsel and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz argues that the most complete and accurate information about Epstein would come from Ghislaine Maxwell. 'She knows everything. She arranged the trips, coordinated everything. She's serving the sentence that Epstein should have served. She should be released with immunity, and compelled to testify before Congress on what she knows.' Dershowitz argues that discovery documents and depositions, currently sealed, would be more informative than grand-jury records or Federal records. These could only be disclosed by Court order.

Dershowitz claims that 'Epstein did not work for any intelligence agency, not Mossad, not the CIA, none'. Dershowitz says he would know because he would have used such connections to get a better deal for his client. 'That's what lawyers do.' But U.S. Attorney (later Labor Secretary) Alex Acosta said that Epstein received a lighter sentence than he deserved because he (Acosta) had 'been told' to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. 'I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to 'leave it alone', he said to the Trump transition staff.

The DOJ arranged with Epstein’s attorneys to avoid sending 'notification letters' to Epstein's victims, as required by law, that would inform them of the plea deal and afford them the right to testify at any plea hearing. This also suggests especially lenient treatment that's hard to explain away in the absence of forceful influence. Appearance in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book does not necessarily signify client status, but it does prompt inquiry about what sort of quid pro quo existed between them and Epstein.

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A Higher Orbit

Returning to Epstein's quantum leap into a higher orbit beyond sex, riches, real estate, and aircraft, what he really craved most, as noted previously, was intellectual respectability. Yet actually reading books and journal articles, or doing lab experiments, or even sustaining interest in a topic of conversation for more than 30 seconds — these were not his forte. Even after his own desire for money and sex had plateaued, they could be used to gain the allegiance of those who lacked them. They provided Epstein with a convenient short-cut. Corralled into the Edge salon and Harvard/MIT, the intelligentsia were easy prey for someone spouting their jargon and offering them money and the teenage girls they missed out on in high school.

But what was Epstein ultimately after? Naomi Wolf suggests that Epstein, Brockman, and others were part of a mission to control the direction of science, by compromising all the top scientists in the United States. These self-nominated 'top scientists' are not the ones solving practical problems in, say, agronomy or structural engineering, but those working in cognition, artificial intelligence, neurology, brain science, biology, mind control, machine learning, computer-human interface, and the like. Regardless whether they did anything naughty or not, they gradually and in some cases reluctantly understood that their association with Epstein would not, on balance, be good for their careers and reputations.

Naomi Wolf guesses that

'guys from the Silicon Valley community, who have been the ones to put the fuel of their billions and their technical and media support into President Trump’s campaign and administration’s engines — whether they are innocent or guilty, are in the Epstein files. (Remember why Mrs Gates broke up with Mr Gates?) And I think this nation’s most important scientists, innocent or guilty, are in the files. And my guess is that the funders have confronted President Trump.'

With what?, one might ask. Naomi Wolf cites her own experience in watching Epstein's network cling to him even after his abhorrent crimes were known to them. She concludes that even the President of the United States wants to be part of this tech-network. For someone who thought in 2015 that Obama was using such primitive methods of surveillance as wiretapping, Trump has learned enough in the ensuing decade to persuade himself that the tech-network is essential to national (and his own) security. If these people represent science, it's prudent to stay on their good side. Even though Trump tried in 2020 to 'follow the science' at 'warp-speed', the science didn't follow him, preferring a president with dementia. After three years of that, Trump and his tech-savvy VP-to-be JD Vance found ready acceptance among the Silicon Valley tech-elite. Both Trump and Vance very much wish to stay in the tech-network.

Eric Weinstein, in a July 14, 2025 interview quoted by Naomi Wolf, attributes the interest Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's father) had in starting Pergamon Press to a desire to control the direction of Western science. Pergamon Press was later acquired by Elsevier. Alternatively, perhaps Robert Maxwell merely sought to add to his extensive publishing empire, with no end-in-view other than further expansion. Scientific and medical publishing did in fact later undergo drastic changes, censoring any publication stating that the Wuhan virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, that Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment, and that mRNA injections cause heart disease and damage the immune system. Adoption of a draconian censorship code by nearly all scientific and medical journals during the covidian episode (2020 - 2024) did nothing to advance intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Through pre-prints, Substack, and numerous other Internet outlets, however, innovative and dissident research became widely available from about 2022 onward. If Robert Maxwell's successors were trying to control the direction of Western science, they haven't done a very good job of it.

It may be, as Naomi Wolf's thesis suggests, that Epstein and Brockman with their Edge salon had previously contrived a better way of exerting control over science. As Wolf notes, 'Harvard was an avid matchmaker for Epstein among the scientific and mathematics community. Harvard accepted about $9 million from Jeffery Epstein, and gave him an office in the institute that he helped to fund.' There had actually been a lot of debate within Harvard about providing an uncredentialed person with an office in such a prime location, but in the end the nine million dollars proved persuasive. Soon after Epstein had settled into his chambers, complaints were heard about his luring coeds there, but these were dismissed, for the same reason.

The Harvard/MIT - Edge axis provided a friendly community for innovative and dissident thinkers uncomfortable with disciplinary barriers, who wished to roam freely in wide-open fields of inquiry.

'So: systematically, consistently, major intellectuals, especially in the fields of computation, genetics, evolutionary biology, and consciousness, were being herded by gatekeepers into proximity to Epstein, who had been planted physically in their midst; and these academics were urged to accept his funding money and to meet with him and by implication, to befriend him or to accept his friendship, and even his invitations. Brockman Inc primarily represented the very pinnacle of science and science-adjacent writers: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet, psychologist Daniel Kahneman.'

'By 2010, Brockman’s community of intellectuals went far beyond the scruffy if distinguished Harvard professors of the early 2000s. By that year and then throughout the teens, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, via the Billionaire’s Dinners, somehow convened the leaders, indeed the emperors and empresses, of the tech world.'

After learning in 2019 that Edge had been financed by Epstein, Naomi Wolf broke ties with Brockman's literary agency. Her decision had a searing personal basis:

'I immediately broke up with my career-long representation, and wrote a heartbroken letter to John Brockman and his wife and colleague Katinka Matson; heartbroken because I had actually loved them, and because I had trusted them with my development as a writer, which task they had managed brilliantly for decades, and heartbroken too because I was a survivor of child rape myself.'

Many of her fellow members of the Edge intelligentsia felt called upon to explain their own failure to break ties with someone whose avocation and vocation were to have sex with children.

'After I left, I had a lot of conversations with Brockman’s other clients. They called me — I did not call them. To a man (and they were all men) these distinguished intellectuals explained that they empathized with my views and shared my indignation about Epstein’s misdeeds, but that they were not going to leave Brockman Inc.'

'I guess what I am trying to explain is the power and endurance, and really, the sanctity, of 'the network' in the worlds of the elite.'

'Even with the news breaking that the agency’s cultural activities were funded by a pedophile, Brockman’s other clients rightly calculated that their staying within the shelter of such a powerful network, would be more beneficial to them, than would be leaving, even if on principle, and losing the support of and access to that influential network.'

'And they were right.'

Naomi Wolf cautions that the files probably contain innocent as well as guilty names, but does not support concealment of any information that would lead to the prosecution of child-sex abusers and traffickers. She also sees clearly there is more to the Epstein case than 'a sexual blackmail operation for US and foreign political leaders and hedge fund guys'.

'We are also looking at a 'construct' that seduced and lured scientists; that was institutionally set up to seduce and lure scientists; and that may have created conditions that look compromising on paper, whether the scientists did anything wrong or not. We are also looking at a machine constructed to entrap and perhaps pressure, whether they are innocent or guilty, a generation of the most important scientists of our time.'

'Why? Perhaps... to steer science itself.'

'The scientists in this targeted 'stable' deal with pre-AI; with the management of awareness; with the difference between brain and consciousness; with genetics and the altering of genes; with evolution; with ritual; with what makes humans human, and with what allows them to transcend human limitations.'

'This all greatly complicates the Epstein story. It makes it a story about the corrupting and perhaps even the blackmailing and directing of science and technology, and maybe even of both guilty and innocent scientists, and maybe even of guilty and innocent technologists...'

'It may mean that innocent people as well as guilty — major scientists and major technologists, perhaps — may have been set up or enmeshed in circumstances that they now fear coming to light, whether they did nothing wrong at all, or whether they did something wrong.'

'I guess what I am trying to show you is — no one, or very few, in truly elite circles, wants to risk losing the valuable, precious, life-sustaining network. So he or she goes along with just about anything... This doesn’t mean they approve — but they go along.'

'Is that what President Trump is facing now?'

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Where the Worship of Genius Leads

This post started as an effort the rate the Trump Administration on its successes, failures, and work-in-progress on vital matters of national and international well-being. These include prosperity, trade, debt, sovereignty, public safety, freedom, and culture, on which the rating is largely positive (as President Trump himself is the first to admit). The best that can be said of progress on resolving overseas wars and improving health and medical freedom is that these will take more time. On the last category, removing malicious officials from power, virtually no concrete progress has yet (as of almost August 2025) been made. However, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has referred Barack Obama for prosecution for intentional falsification of an intelligence assessment.4

Whether Obama will actually be prosecuted, it's too soon to say. This matters because all officials, including a former President, who have abused their authority or committed crimes under color of that authority, will try to protect themselves and those still in office from accountability. The public outcry for release of the Epstein files — even though the names of his contacts were already published in 2019 — reflects an understandable desire for prosecution of those named. But the Epstein files probably have less utility for removing malicious officials from power than the records DNI Gabbard cites.

Both Alan Dershowitz and Naomi Wolf warn that exposing the innocent together with the guilty damages reputations needlessly. Their reasons are different but complementary. Dershowitz points to one accuser who admitted making up her story, and others whose testimony he regards as unreliable, as legal grounds for distinguishing true from false accusations. Naomi Wolf concludes that the demand for transparency should recognize that Epstein’s list mixes-up the innocent and the guilty, but that this caution should not impede identification and prosecution of the guilty. She believes the Trump Administration considers it unwise to mix-up the innocent and the guilty because of the possible harm to the entire tech-intelligentsia and the ‘best and brightest’ scientific minds in America.

Are they really the best that science has to offer? The Edge scholars have produced many original thought-provoking theses and much reductionist nonsense. It is beyond the scope of this post to sort out which is which, but the common-sense of the matter is that the contributions of today's intelligentsia are determined not by their content but by their effects. The most visible effect so far has been to refine methods of mind control to a previously unimaginable degree. Both popular and elite belief have become subject to extraordinarily adroit manipulation, oblivious to common-sense and direct experience. These very geniuses in the Epstein community (with one notable exception, the professional optimist Daniel Pinker) have been motivated to praise their benefactor unreservedly as an avatar of wisdom. Endorsed and paid by an exploiter of children for his own and others' sexual enjoyment, one has to wonder whether these geniuses are truly the best scientific minds around. That is not to say they should all be pilloried, merely that they should not be worshipped either.

Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the company that bears his name, once said 'we don't need geniuses in our organization'. As the uncomplimentary nickname 'maneshita' (真似した) ('copied') implied, too much conformity can stifle innovation. But the Western worship of untrammeled genius has led to that self-annointed tribe seeking god-like powers. Geo-engineering, genetic tinkering, bio-weaponry, programmable brain implants, eugenics-inspired depopulation, planetary climate modeling, central-bank digital currency — these are just a few of their plans for humanity. This is not the first time that central planners have used new technologies to re-do humanity, as witness the 'New Soviet Man' and the National Socialist 'Ubermensch'. Those experiments did not turn out well. Neither did America's worship of the nuclear priesthood, an earlier generation of scientists entrusted with apocalyptic powers. It is predictable, indeed inevitable, that endowing the current crop of scientists with god-like powers will not turn out well; early returns suggest they are already outdoing their predecessors.

All the more reason, then, not to leave science to the intelligentsia, but instead to apply our own innate common-sense to sort out what is worthwhile from what is useless, corrupt, ideologically-driven, self-promoting, wasteful, or harmful. Opinions may differ, but everyone can see that inflicting a plague on humanity is not a good thing, that taking an experimental gene-altering injection damages the innate immune system, and that boys and girls are fundamentally different in ways not subject to change, to take a few obvious recent examples. Accepting such absurdities on faith jeopardizes not only the truth-basis of the scientific enterprise itself, but divides humanity between the few who profess to know and the many who passively submit to their 'expertise'. This passivity is a key precursor of the malice that many experts and officials feel for ordinary people, as I wrote here:

Scientific expertise enabled the techno-utopians to bypass moral restraint, at the same time projecting the appearance of a natural aristocracy privy to the secrets of the universe. No sooner had they arrived at this pinnacle than the common run of humanity, viewed from above, appeared to them as an amorphous depersonalized mass.

Even on less obvious matters, it is the responsibility of scientists (or science writers) to explain what they are doing and why, in common-sense terms. Hiding in obfuscatory, jargon-filled language is a tip-off that a scientist does not wish his work to be understood. Decoding and translating it into common-sense terms distinguishes the charlatans from the truly creative practitioners. Fortunately here on Substack and on many independent news and analysis sites, the intellectual resources for informed consent — or refusal — are at hand.

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Former CIA Director John Brennan together with Obama, FBI Director Comey, and others, orchestrated an elaborate — yes, conspiracy — to persuade a gullible public that President-Elect Trump was an agent of Russia. Armed with a phony ‘dossier’ cobbled-together from the alcoholic ravings of a third-hand source, Brennan forced through a ‘consensus’ of intelligence agencies based on a single day’s consultation in late December 2016. The Washington Post and the New York Times dutifully trumpeted this ‘consensus’, even before the report was released, that President Putin ‘aspired’ to elect Trump. The new review discloses that Russia-specialists in the CIA objected to this conclusion, calling it ‘weakly supported’. Analysts at other intelligence agencies felt ‘jammed’ by the rushed schedule, observing there was no operational basis for such urgency. At least one of them resigned rather than take part in such fatally flawed ‘tradecraft’, the spys’ term for analytical rigor or evidence-based research. Among the specific defects noted in the current review are ‘a higher confidence level than was justified; insufficient exploration of alternative scenarios; lack of transparency on source uncertainty; uneven argumentation; and the inclusion of unsubstantiated Steele Dossier material’. As late as December 29, 2016, the Agency’s own Russia specialists wrote that the Steele dossier on which the CIA report was based 'did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards'. The following day, they advised Brennan to remove the statement that Putin ‘aspires’ (during the election campaign) to elect Trump. Not only was it unsubstantiated, they also feared it would subject the CIA to political repercussions. The New York Times exceeded the standards even of disgraced FBI Deputy Peter Strzok, who described their story of intercepted Russian communications as of ‘no substance’.

We insert later revelations like this new CIA review into the Timeline when the events referred to actually occurred. This fills out our understanding of the full extent of the deception practiced by top officials like Brennan and Comey in forcing through preordained conclusions designed to damage President-Elect Trump even before his term of office began. The Timeline thus reinforces the truth, partially suspected at the time but not yet generally acknowledged, by superimposing on the past what becomes generally known years later. The objections of Russia specialists and other analysts to the CIA’s deeply flawed analysis in December 2016 were suppressed at the time, compomising the Agency’s ‘tradecraft’, its very integrity. If anyone in the CIA or any of the 16 other (as counted then) intelligence agencies expressed dismay at the impact of these false accusations on U.S.-Russia relations, that has yet to be revealed. If word of such objections emerges, we will place it in the Timeline whenever it occurred.

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June 27, 2025 — five months and a week after President Trump’s inauguration

Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trump v Casa means the American people will finally get what they overwhelmingly voted for in November 2024. The lawfare-driven reign of a handful of local judges is over. No longer will they be able to nullify Executive action that is fully within the scope of Executive authority. Can a local District Court judge issue a universal nationwide injunction blocking Executive Orders of the elected President of the United States? ‘No way’, said the Supreme Court, in a 6 - 3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. As Attorney General Pam Bondi pointed out in an informative press briefing, ‘The judges have tried to seize the Executive Branch's power, and they can-not do that.’ There are 94 judicial districts; 35 of the 40 nationwide injunctions blocking Executive Orders came from five judicial districts: Maryland, DC, Massachusetts, California, Washington. Those local judges can decide cases involving specific individuals within their districts, but nationwide, universal applicability of those decisions — which was always absurd — has ended.

Neither the Judiciary Act of 1789, its early applications, nor the founders’ clear understanding of the limits of judicial authority from British practice at the time, enable local courts to issue universal injunctions. Justice Barrett distinguishes between ‘universal’ and ‘complete’ judicial remedies, observing that in the case law, ‘complete’ refers only to the satisfaction of the specific litigants, not to everyone and his brother, and in no way to ‘nationwide’ applicability. To extend rights in equity from specific litigants to everyone universally, nationwide would stretch judicial authority to the breaking point. Today’s Supreme Court’s decision saved the lower courts from issuing further ill-advised decisions likely — or perhaps designed — to provoke border violence such as has already occurred in Los Angeles.

Only five years ago, in 2020, riots in 40 cities throughout the United States, including attacks on courthouses and police stations, intimidated local judges and officials into giving the rioters a free pass for their mayhem. Senator Tom Cotton noted: ‘Progressive prosecutors refused to do their job as more than 500 violent riots broke out across the nation. Over 2,000 police officers were injured, and line-of-duty deaths rose by 28 percent. Dozens of Americans were killed, and between $1 billion and $2 billion dollars’ worth of property damage was inflicted.’ Supreme Court Justices too have been threatened, by name, by prominent Democrat Senator Schumer. These threats are not mere rhetoric, as they called forth attempts by followers to harm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in their homes. Threats against federal judges doubled from 224 in 2021 to 457 in 2023. It’s a dangerous job. Not only the threat environment for the judiciary is at stake in this case, but for the general public as well. Public safety is the bedrock responsibility of any government, and yet all of the ‘advanced’ nations, not only the United States, failed this essential test by inviting in violent criminals without even the most cursory vetting. Acting as if the same collective madness seized them all at once, they all received with open arms and taxpayer gifts the inmates of prisons and madhouses, and gang members, that their former countries were only too glad to dump into America and Europe. President Trump with his consummate common-sense stopped that madness. And now the Supreme Court too says ‘no way’. Many genuine refugees and asylum-seekers have also sought and gained entry, but the Trump Administration has made it clear its first priority is deporting violent criminals. So selective enforcement is taking the place of the vetting that should have been done in the first place, while removing financial and other incentives stimulating excessive immigration.

President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 of January 20, 2025, his first day in office, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, disallowed citizenship to any child of whom either parent was unlawfully present in the United States when the child was born. It outlawed the well-known practice of conceiving ‘anchor babies’ to contravene legal immigration procedures and buttress appealing ‘family-separation’ stories for media and NGOs running the child-trafficking racket. Within three days of EO 14160, the NGO child-trafficking complex found a complasisant federal judge in Washington State. He put the Order on hold (a Temporary Restraining Order), after which another judge in Maryland prevented the order from taking effect (Preliminary Injunction) until the legal issue would be resolved. The legal issue is fairly simple, as these things go: Does the Judiciary Act grant local courts the authority to stop Executive actions nationwide and universally? The Supreme Court rules today that local courts possess no such authority, nor have they ever possessed it.

The three dissenting Justices cite Constitutional claims of Equal Protection to justify a ‘universal’ injunction, one that applies not only to the specific plaintiff, but to all others similarly situated. But the Justice Department very carefully avoided Constitutional arguments, focusing instead on the exact limits of the authority Congress had granted district courts in the Judiciary Act and in subsequent case law. The Supreme Court found that such ‘universal’ and ‘nationwide’ scope of authority as the local judges profess to exercise simply does not exist, and never had existed. And as the ‘similarly situated’ language suggests, class-actions (pursuant to Rule 23) provide exactly the sort of relief that groups of aggrieved citizens can already obtain. The dissenting Justices complain this is too expensive, but the more-than-ample resources of the lawfare crowd belie that claim.

Justice Barrett brushes away Justice Jackson’s dissenting opinion as a plea for judicial supremacy which does not even bother to delve into statute or case law:

‘Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a 'mind-numbingly technical query', she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.’

Justice Jackson’s mind is particularly numbed by references to ‘the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution’, apparently preferring her own version of Constitutional history to any actual inquiry, technical or otherwise. President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 must be illegal because, like the lower-court judges, she doesn’t like it. Justice Sotomayor’s arguments are even more absurd, being premised on states losing federal funding if EO 14160 is implemented, and asserting that the Supreme Court should automatically obey the rulings of lower courts.

One might wish that the dissenting Justices had marshalled better arguments, lest a future president take undue advantage of the freedom from interference by a meddlesome judiciary with Executive action. There are rarely if ever any final decisions in the Supreme empyrean, however, because the Justices wish to preserve their own freedom to restrain the Executive if they deem it necessary. The public-safety case, so vividly presented by President Trump and Attorney General Bondi, forms the inescapable ‘penumbra’ of the legal case, not compelling today’s decision, but lending enough urgency to give the Executive the latitude he needs to do the job he was elected to do.

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Americans love to identify with the Lone Ranger, heroically riding to the rescue of a beautiful maiden possessed by a powerful foe intent on doing her wrong. It was the most popular television show in America in the 1950s. To Americans, no maiden is more fetching than Europa, kidnapped by Zeus in the form of a bull. So what if she had foolishly allowed herself to be seduced? The Lone Ranger is not judgmental. Whatever her faults, Europa embodies all the virtues upon which his own nation (the United States of America) was founded. He must rescue her.

So, twice in the 20th century, American Lone Rangers in their multitudes journeyed far from their homes and farms, across an ocean, to do what had to be done ‘over there’. Destiny had called upon them to rescue the European continent from its own folly. And so they did, the second time hand-in-glove with the Soviet Union, which if truth be told bore the brunt of the casualties. Soviet Russia sacrificed 20 million lives to keep its homeland intact, stopping Nazi Germany in its tracks, and was given half of Europe in return by a dying FDR at Yalta. This sad history set the stage for the current war in Europe. But who is fighting whom? This has to be sorted out before applying the Lone Ranger-rescues-Europa template to the current situation.

It ought to be easy to figure out who the belligerents are, but in this age of proxy wars, unmarked soldiers, and drones, it seems at first to be devilishly difficult. Television viewers and media consumers in the West, who would have been hard put to find Ukraine on a map, were first introduced to this war in 2022 as ‘Russia invades Ukraine’. The history of Crimea as an integral part of Russia since the time of Catherine the Great, the Nazi core of the Ukrainian Army, the U.S.-EU promise of ‘not one inch eastward’ by NATO following the reunification of Germany, the constant bombardment of Russian civilians in eastern Ukraine since 2014, the overthrow of an elected President of Ukraine (Yanukovich) by coordinated action of EU/CIA/State Department/Soros forces — all these inconvenient facts were blacked-out in Western media. Only the Russia-v-Ukraine narrative was allowed to appear.

In this narrative, Ukrainian President Zelenskiy, who despite overstaying his constitutional term of office, plays the part of Europa — to the hilt. He regularly garners much applause — and money — in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris. Like a music-hall performer, he picks up the money cast at him, keeping some for himself, and without reserve demands more. Increasingly sophisticated equipment such as drones, long-range artillery, and underwater explosives is flowing into Ukraine. It is deployed with great ingenuity against Russia, as in the recent (June 1, 2025) attacks on Russia’s strategic air fleet in Murmansk and Irkutsk, and on the Kerch Bridge linking Crimea with the Russian mainland. Technical assistance from the United States, Britain, and France is essential to these forays, and to Ukraine’s overall prosecution of the war.

The timing of the recent drone attacks deep within Russia, on the eve of peace talks, leaves no doubt as to their purpose — to torpedo any talk of peace. Although some prisoners were exchanged, peace was off the table — again. For every juncture where peace beckoned was marked, by no coincidence at all, by another provocation. The numerous precedents include former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s emergency mission to Kiev to urge further warfare when Ukrainian President Zelenskiy seemed inclined toward peace; the U.S.-Norwegian sabotage of the Nordstream II gas pipeline from Russia cutting off inexpensive Russian gas to Germany and Europe; and the intentional scuttling of the Minsk Accords by Macron/Merkel, who later admitted publicly this was nothing more than a ruse to give Ukraine more time to prepare for war. All of these saboteurs openly boast of their roles in prolonging the war. From all of the above, it becomes clear through the fog of proxies that this is a war of the United States against Russia. The role that EU/UKNATO has cast for itself is to egg on the belligerents enough to attack one of them in a way that can be portrayed sympathetically on television news in America. The Europeans, who cannot possibly fight Russia by themselves, hope to draw the United States further into their conflict, resuscitating the 85-year-old narrative. Cue the comely maiden Europa beseeching the dashing Lone Ranger for aid in her hour of need.

Will President Trump take the bait? It appears he was not informed in advance of the attacks on Russia’s strategic aircraft. Why, one might ask, are Russia's strategic aircraft sitting on the tarmac in plain view? They have to be, according to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), visible to satellite surveillance. It's an essential element of Mutual Assured Destruction, which is what prevents the U.S. and Russia from attacking each other. Zelenskiy and his backers just blew up that Treaty. Putin is a lawyer, he takes international law seriously. This now gives Russia the 'right' to attack the U.S. and any other country that supplied weapons. That doesn't mean it will happen immediately, but the U.S. is at DEFCON-2, meaning the military assesses such an attack as more probable now. (DEFCON-1 designates nuclear-capable aircraft or missiles already in the air, or actual nuclear attack.) An Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack, by means of a thermonuclear bomb exploded in the upper atmosphere, would take out the entire North American electrical grid. No communications, no Laverne and Shirley reruns, no Internet, no Facebook, no Bitcoin, no antiquated FAA air traffic control, no water distribution, no bank transactions, lights-out, and no warning of all of the above.

To prevent this outcome, President Trump must first recognize the reality that Russia and the United States are the real parties to this conflict. There is nothing to be gained by hiding behind proxies. If Russia and the United States agree to end the war, they can end the war now, leaving Zelenskiy and EU/UK/NATO entirely out of it. What to do about the inevitable provocations? EU/UK/NATO would then be fighting Russia on their own, without US assistance, which they cannot do. They would accuse Trump of 'abandoning Europe', implore him to take up his predestined role as the Lone Ranger, make him out to be a puppet of Putin if he doesn’t. These are formidable historical/mythological appeals. But this is 2025, not 1940.

The self-appointed officials in charge of Europe change every few years, while drifting ever further from traditional European freedoms and human rights. The current crew of Macron-Merz-Starmer prosecutes political opponents and disqualifies them from contesting elections (France), employs Stasi-like surveillance against the most popular party (Germany), and jails more people for social media posts and tweets than for violent crimes committed by immigrants (Britain). Governance of these nations is fast approaching the style of the Soviet Union. President Trump would do well to discard the role of Lone Ranger and adopt that of Tonto, the solemn peacemaker who feels kinship with both warring parties. Let him make common cause with those who really represent Europe — Meloni in Italy, AfD in Germany, Orban in Hungary, LePen in France, plus populist parties in Romania, Slovakia, and Poland, many of whom would be in power now if fair elections were held with free media reporting.

If the warring parties — the United States and Russia — will have signed a peace treaty, any act of war by other belligerents is subject to legitimate counter-attack. That would end the war very quickly. With deepstaters, Democrats, media, EU/UK/NATO all braying for more war, President Trump risks getting snookered by them again if he doesn't act. Alexander Markovsky suggests in his Strategic Analysis of Peace (May 25, 2025) that if Trump extends his peace efforts toward returning the territories taken at Yalta from Poland, Hungary, and Romania to those nations, he could become known as the liberator of Eastern Europe. And if Trump does end the war, which he devoutly desires to do, even his opponents on the Nobel Peace Committee would have to award him the Prize.

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This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself	 
Against infection and the hand of war,	 
This happy breed of men, this little world,	 
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,	 
Or as a moat defensive to a house,	 
Against the envy of less happier lands...

— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Act II Scene I

In the waning days of the British Empire, a group known as 'Little England' advocated divestiture of colonial possessions and global entanglements. Britain itself, 'this precious stone set in a silver sea', was for them all the world they needed. As the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion in India made clear, maintaining a global empire entailed ever-increasing costs, and worse, shifted the domestic balance of power toward imperialist bullies forever seeking new conquests, and taxing their fellow-citizens to pay for them. Little-Englanders sought to end all that and concentrate their efforts at home.

Island nations like Britain and Japan often in their history wish to be left alone; yet they seek resources, wealth, and markets in the rest of the world. Japan shut itself off from the outside world for two-and-a-half centuries before being forcefully pried open. Whereupon it embarked on overseas conquests that did not end well. Currently these competing desires play out in dramas enacted in Japan's dealings with foreign (meaning non-Japanese) companies, capital, and executives.

One such case involves block trades — transactions in large numbers of shares — by SMBC-Nikko, the third-largest stockbroker in Japan. As the hyphenated name suggests, Sumitomo-Mitsui Banking Corporation, itself an affiliate of two of the largest zaibatsu trading companies, and Nikko Securities, the descendant of a firm founded in the early 20th century, have undergone multiple reorganizations and changes of ownership. Their job, like that of all financial firms, is fund-raising — shepherding the distribution of corporate shares to investors large and small, so that share-issuers have working capital to grow their operations, and people and institutions with funds to spare can obtain income or additional capital.

Because selling large numbers of shares all at once can depress share prices, block trades are often done after-hours privately, with the price negotiated in advance. Stock trading firms may also purchase some or all of these shares for 'market stabilization' purposes, that is, to prevent excessive price movements. These common finance industry practices enable companies to acquire working capital quickly and efficiently.

SMBC-Nikko's block trades caught regulatory attention because the company traded on its own account on both the sell side and buy side of the ledger. It may also have placed large buy orders for shares in individual stocks in April 2021 before selling those shares. Traditionally a broker acting as neutral middleman brings sellers or stock issuers together with buyers or investors, and is compensated by a percentage of the transaction value, without itself taking part in the transaction. However, being in a position to know — or even influence — the buy-sell spread can prove tempting for a nominally neutral broker to seek a piece of the action for itself. Conflating the market-stabilizing function with profit-seeking on its own behalf is one of those grey areas of finance that could be negotiated informally with regulators; but that wasn't done in this case.

Though stock-brokers are permitted to trade with their own funds on their own account, mixing such trading with their market-stabilizing role apparently caught the regulators' attention. Japan's Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission (SESC), probably believing SMBC-Nikko was influencing share prices excessively in its favor, launched an investigation into possible 'market manipulation' in November 2021. Yomiuri reported that SMBC-Nikko's profit on block trades of 10 stocks in 2021 amounted to 1.1 billion Yen (about seven million Dollars).

Whether this was excessive in relation to trading by other brokers is not clear. Intensive questioning led to the heart-attack death of an SMBC-Nikko trader; according to one participant, this tragedy precipitated prosecutorial action. On March 4, 2022 prosecutors arrested four senior SMBC-Nikko executives for buying 320,000 shares of car-headlight maker Koito in December 2019, allegedly to prop up its stock price. On March 24, 2022, an additional executive was arrested, and all five were criminally charged. Further criminal charges were filed on April 13, 2022.

Of the five executives charged, three are Japanese, two foreign. A Court imposed a fine of 700 million Yen $4.8 million) and additional penalty of 4.47 billion Yen ($30 million) on SMBC-Nikko on February 14, 2023. Despite profuse apologies by the arrested executives, prosecutors asked at a hearing on March 6, 2025 for multi-year prison terms for the SMBC-Nikko executives, including two foreigners.

A verdict is expected in July (2025), which if innocent the prosecutors may and very likely will appeal. Some have observed that in regard to the foreign defendants, this prosecution sends a clear message that foreign financial talent is not wanted in Japan. They assert that depriving Japanese finance of their creative talent could weaken Japan in international competition, and prevent Tokyo from becoming a global financial center.

As to the possibility of being deprived of foreign financial talent, there may be some in Japanese finance and officialdom whose reaction to that prospect might be 'You promise?' The intensive investigation, arrest, incarceeration, and three-year trial delay, likely to be extended by prosecutors' appeal of an innocent verdict, may be exactly the message they wish to send to foreign financiers: 'Stay away'. And for Tokyo to become a global financial center, the Yen would have to become an international currency. A glance at the fate of the Dollar and its deeply indebted issuer (the United States Government) makes the downside of that world-currency status obvious. There is more at stake here than financiers' careers.

Japan is haunted by the stagnation wrought by its own finance industry's orgy of speculation in the late 1980s (precipitated by the U.S. Government's extremely ill-advised devaluation of the Dollar, in futile hope of stimulating U.S. exports). Japanese finance abandoned its role as a neutral allocator of capital and went into a froth of asset-churning. Such gross abuses of trust occur periodically: They drive business cycles. Confidence evaporates, credit dries up, the economy shrinks or stagnates, ordinary people experience hard times in their lives, and young people's expectations shrivel. Japanese officials fear above all any recurrence of rampant 'zai-tech'. They seek steady growth without the razzmatazz.

The purpose of a financial system is to allocate capital to where it can productively be used. It's an intermediary. But the financial system also does something that is not generally understood -- it creates credit, that is, it creates money out of thin air. Banks lend out ten times what they actually have in-house, and securities issuers grant themselves access to capital far in excess of their firms' book value. That's how a modern economy works and grows. It's a responsibility of enormous trust. When that trust is abused, as it is periodically, confidence evaporates, credit dries up, and real suffering occurs as incomes stagnate or decline.

A run on the bank occurs when depositors lose confidence that 'their' deposits can ever be redeemed. In panic mode, they don't understand that the full contents of 'their' bank account don't really exist. Recall the movie What a Wonderful Life, where small-town bank owner George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) tries to explain this banking principle to depositors.

His bank's reserves plunge below the required percentage, and bank examiners arrive to shut it down. Whereupon his friends all pony up to support George's bank, it's Christmastime, and even the scrooge-like bank examiner makes a contribution. Unlike George Bailey, the real-life owners of Silicon Valley Bank didn't have any friends, since they catered mainly to the very rich, who quickly withdrew their funds at the first sign of trouble. Investors in the crypto empire of the eponymously named Sam Bankman-Fried (you can't make this stuff up) were not so swift — they lost billions of Dollars.

For any financial innovation to be worthwhile, it must help the financial system allocate capital better -- more productively, more efficiently, more attuned to stable steady growth. The test is not whether it produces higher fees for bankers, or, as with some derivatives, packages and sells an incomprehensible product of questionable value.

The fundamental wisdom of the Japanese system is that — except for occasional episodes of frenzied speculation — it does not regard finance as an end in itself. It's merely a means, an intermediary, to serve larger ends. That's why boosting finance to where it gets a third or more of total corporate profits, as in the U.S. and UK, does not benefit anyone other than financiers. Financialization causes industry and business to lose touch with production know-how, research/development, and innovation. It substitutes a metric (currency accumulation) for real wealth. Banks do legitimately create money out of thin air, but only to fuel commerce, industry, livelihoods, and future prosperity.

While 'creating money out of thin air' is OK for banks in general that are dealing with a finite money supply, extending this principle to faith-based currency printing is another matter altogether. The U.S. Federal Reserve, despite its name, is not constrained by any reserve requirement. The Federal Reserve is actually a consortium (some would say a cabal) of private banks, to which Congress a long time ago delegated the authority to print currency, apparently without limit. The nature of the Fed's 'creating money out of thin air' is fundamentally different from that of a private bank extending credit to a borrower. The Fed has been exploding the money supply without any corresponding increase in production of goods and services, merely to support the Federal Government's out-of-control spending and debt. This is a recipe for runaway inflation and bankruptcy. There is a world of difference between banks' legitimate credit creation on the one hand, and the U.S. Treasury's unaccounted-for disbursements along with the Fed's uncontrolled currency printing, on the other hand. Treasury officials themselves have characterized the $1,000,000,000 per week payouts, devoid of identifiable recipient, expenditure category, purpose, or legislative authorization or appropriation, uncovered by Elon Musk's DOGE team as 'obvious, unequivocal fraud'. Ordinary people have been experiencing the resulting hidden tax on their incomes, in the form of higher prices accompanied by stagnant wages and salaries.

There is a built-in conflict-of-interest between the societal role of finance as market-maker and credit allocator, versus the natural profit-seeking activities of a trader. Entrusting both these roles to the same organizations risks their exploiting public trust for private gain. Every society has these built-in role conflicts. The U.S. and the UK have 'resolved' them by delegating the market-making role to private finance, via central banks and regulators, trusting that financiers will act for the common good. The record shows that given the opportunity, bankers will favor their own interests over the common good (surprise!). The bankers' current push for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) will, if realized, give them, in their own words, 'absolute control' of all private transactions.

Here is the digital-finance future presented by Bank of International Settlements General Manager Agustin Carstens:

'With cash, we don't know who is using the $100 bill today, we don't know who is using the 1,000-peso note today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control...'

That would enable central control of travel, food purchases, medical care, education, public assembly, speech, and so on, making access to these subject to ideological conformity, forced vaccination, or whatever a tyrannical regime might require.

Perhaps, one may hope, Japan does not wish to buy into this program. Whether or not SMBC-Nikko manipulated the stock market in violation of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, it would be preferable to clarify the credit allocation and profitable trading roles through negotiation rather than having the allowable overlap determined by criminal prosecution. Leaving finance to its intermediary role will let bankers do their job of creating and allocating credit, without granting them an outsize share of the profit of an entire economy, and without imposing central-bank control of private transactions. By adapting the 'Little England' approach to international finance, renouncing global ambitions, Japan can, as it has often done, selectively innovate for domestic purposes and discard what is useless or threatening; becoming, if not 'this other Eden, demi-paradise', at least a land where financial common-sense guides money and credit.

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