Smoke, Fire, and Of Course

Monday, December 29, 2025

As the massive fraud in government benefits in Minnesota unravels, actual elected (Democratic) officials are becoming implicated.  I’m shocked, shocked.  More shocking; however, is that billion dollar amounts of fraud in California have gone virtually unreported and somehow government officialdom has avoided implication.  Come on people – the time has come to face up to reality.  Covid was an event of mass hysteria and people took advantage.  Funny things happen when you set reason aside for panic.  We’re going to get all tied up in knots as these schemes are exposed; we’re all going to create evidence boards trying to connect players and roles on each individual scandal and in the end miss the big picture.  There are two major lessons to be drawn from the events of spring 2020 forward.

Lesson one – Don’t panic.  “Arthur C. Clarke said Douglas Adams’ use of “don’t panic” was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity.”  Clarke and Adams were right and we blew it, big time.  Old investing advice that everyone knows – “Don’t sell into a panic,” and yet we did – whole hog.  We did so for two reasons.  One, in an information age a lack of information is uncomfortable.  Decisions were made on scant to no data and what data existed was unverified and untested.  But in this age where trying to find a restaurant can be answered with a simple query to your phone we demanded action now.  Secondly, then President Trump’s (term one) instincts to not panic guaranteed that the media would do the opposite.

Lesson two – The Democratic Party is rife with phonies.  And phonies drag fraudsters along in their wake.  So what do I mean by “phonies.”  These are well intentioned people that can manage a media presence enough to get elected, but have zero to less-than-zero capability to lead or govern.  They may be politicians but they are not government officials.  Joe Biden was physically incapable of performing the duties of his office.  Kamala Harris can’t form an actual sentence that makes sense.  Gavin Newsom  – well just look at California.  He has been in office a long time now and nothing there works.  This is just three examples.  They are phony office holders – they cannot do the job.  And in this void of leadership and governance fraud is simply inevitable.

Moving forward two things have to happen.  One, the Democratic Party needs a major overhaul or its days are numbered.  (At this juncture my money is on the latter.)  Two, the time has come for this nation to look itself in the eye and understand what happened during the panicked pandemic.  The government overreach, missteps and abuse of power was immense.  That cannot be denied, but we took the bait.  The entire alphabet soup of federal and state governments would have been rendered powerless if we had just exercised some common sense and told them “You’re crazy – we can’t shudder the world economy,” and gone about our business.  You have to face your mistakes so you don’t repeat them.

We’re going to be cleaning up this mess for a long, long time.