Paranormal Activity

First, we need to tell you about an almost ‘para-normal’ experience we had last night. We had just arrived in Baltimore from New York. It was 11 p.m. when we headed to bed. And then, we looked out our front window…and there we saw the most remarkable display.

In two trees facing us, one directly in front of the window and the other in the park across the street, tiny blue lights danced, darted, and swirled. They looked like the tiny lights on a Christmas tree. But they were in motion. Too fast and bright to be animal. Too light and unattached to be mineral. Too intense and quick to be vegetable. What were they?

We thought, at first, that our eyes must be playing tricks on us. But as we studied the lights, they became more real. They seemed to be moving about randomly, but there was a pattern…a whirling gyre in one tree…a sparkler of lights, as if the tree were on fire, in the other.

This was no random motion. In the smaller tree, three tiny blue lights, at the very top of the tree, lit up regularly, about once a second. And in the bigger tree, there were several fixed rows of blue light — unmoving — along with a few lights in red. There was no variation in the colors. They were either bright red…or light blue.

Could they have been some projection from across the street? Yes, that’s what we think they were. But no natural cause or source was visible. An alien invasion? Maybe. By 7 a.m. they had vanished, leaving no trace — no wires, no dust, no scorched leaves. Here’s a little of what we saw:

But let us return to business.

The burthen of the last few days was merely that ‘mistakes’ have their place. As a society matures, its elites seek to get more and more of its surplus output for themselves. They ‘milk the system,’ becoming more corrupt over time. They get richer. But their mistakes — policy creep, debt, inflation, war, sanctions, tariffs, imperial over-reach — slow the economy. The poor get poorer. But the ‘mistakes’ turn out not to be mistakes at all; by comparison, the rich get even richer!

Self-dealing has always been a temptation in government. But it rose to a new level in the 21^st century. Back in the 1960s, Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation that the ‘military-industrial complex’ was getting out of control. Then, he and Mamie retired to his family farm in Pennsylvania, where he lived on his federal pension.

“Every other president since the civil war has avoided any significant financial conflicts of interest with their official duties,” says Richard Painter, former White House ethics lawyer.

But when the Obamas left Washington, they walked away with a $65 million book contract, the highest amount ever paid for a presidential memoir.

And then, ‘Biden, Inc.’ went even further. Hunter Biden peddled access to the White House. His shameless hustling might have earned him a jail sentence, but for his father’s final act as president. With only 15 minutes to go, he gave a blanket pardon to all the members of his family who might be called to account.

Alas, with its typical bravado, the Trump Team builds on Biden’s tawdry legacy. Gone are the concerns about ‘cashing in’ on the presidency. Gone are worries about down-market advertising or cheap profiteering. Gone too are the old soucis about ‘conflicts of interest.’

The Financial Times is on the story:

After making millions of dollars selling branded bibles, cologne, sneakers and autographed guitars, the president has extracted tens of millions of dollars from social media and news companies who settled lawsuits brought by Trump that few legal experts believed had merit.

This is an entirely new and unexpected way to buy influence. Get sued by Trump. Then, ‘settle’ by giving him money. The FT continues:

But the heart of Trump’s newfound wealth is a rapidly growing cryptocurrency empire built by the president and his family. According to the Financial Times investigation, this business has already reaped more than $1 billion in pre-tax profits over the past year, in part thanks to a crypto boom fueled by the administration’s own industry-friendly policies.

A cryptocurrency empire? Trump told a crypto conference that “the rules will be written by people who love your industry.” He went on to say he intended to make the US the “crypto capital of the world.”

But what ‘industry’ is it? What is its product? What is its service? What wealth does it create? We don’t know, but the Trump family has gotten a lot of it.

Whatever else it is, crypto is a great way to channel money to POTUS and his family…and perhaps gain ‘access’ to the White House. The Financial Times implies that ‘a Chinese born crypto billionaire’ may have dodged a fraud charge by putting $75 million into one of Trump’s crypto ventures. Then, he dined with the president in May and pledged to put in another $100 million.

Trump’s ‘super pac’ got at least $41 million from the crypto bros in the first six months of this year. The Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX bought $2 billion worth of a Trump stable coin. A Chinese company said it had raised $300 million for Trump-related crypto. And a fund from the UAE said it bought $100 million in tokens from a Trump-backed crypto investment group.

And who can complain? Steve Witkoff’s family now is said to have more than half a billion dollars’ worth of crypto. And Eric Trump says bitcoin will eventually be worth as much as $1 billion each.

Let’s see, rather than bail out the farmers or try to bring back $25-an-hour factory jobs…why not just give everyone a single Trump crypto coin, now? They cost nothing to produce. And then, when they are worth $1 billion each, we’ll be a nation of billionaires. And with a billion-dollar Trump coin, maybe you’ll be able to buy a cup of coffee.

But wait. Is the ‘crypto’ industry just another ‘mistake’ — ‘creating wealth’ while producing nothing…gobbling up huge amounts of time and money, and ultimately reducing the amount of capital available for producing real wealth? Will it actually make most people poorer, not richer?

We’ll see.