CEOs Should Never Be on Vacation 

I’m sure that many people who read the next paragraph will think I’m kidding. And I’m sure that those that realize I’m not kidding will think I’m both irrational and also inhumane. Nevertheless, I have to say it:

Running a company is and should be a full-time job. And by full-time, I mean 24/7, every day of the year.

You got that right. I believe that the time it takes to responsibly run a company, and especially a growing company, is limitless.

That commitment is, in my admittedly insensitive opinion, the first and most important truth one must accept when taking on the role of CEO.

This is a demand I would require only of CEOs. Employees – even executive employees – are entitled to days off and vacations. They are also entitled to leave those obnoxious auto-responder notes saying, “Hi! I’ll be away from the office and unavailable for the next two weeks! If you have an urgent concern, please contact Gini, my 23-year-old assistant, who knows nothing about the business and has been told to never, ever interrupt me when I’m ‘away from the office.’”

There is a big difference between the role of CEO and every other role in a business. All employees are expected to do their jobs earnestly, energetically, and well. But every employee’s job is to some extent limited in scope. If you’re the IT guy, you need to be responsible for competently helping employees with all things IT. If you’re the CTO, you are responsible not only for making sure all things IT are functioning well and correctly, but also for anticipating and developing IT solutions for the future.

Except for the CEO, each job in the business has finite definitions and identifiable expectations. Because of those two simple limitations, employees, even senior employees, can get away from the grid completely, so long as they have a suitable backup.

But when one takes on the job of “running” the business, one must accept responsibility for everything that happens within the business.

There is no way to deny that. If you are a CEO and don’t understand it, you are not the right person for the job.

Put differently, the CEO – and only the CEO – has the ultimate and final responsibility for the company’s life and longevity. That means assuming responsibility for creating the revenue needed to meet or exceed customer expectations and accepting the responsibility for making sure that the business is always profitable enough to pay fair compensation to all its employees.

I’m not saying that CEOs must sleep in their offices, like Elon Musk does during start-up and expansion periods. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a CEO to be away from the office on weekends and take a family vacation now and then. But I don’t believe they ever have the right to go “radio silent” (as they say) with their top executives and shareholders.

Most of the time, in my experience, a business can function perfectly well without the direct and constant attention of the CEO. But every so often, every business faces some sort of unexpected crisis or opportunity that cannot be dealt with “when the boss returns.” An immediate answer needs to be given. And that answer can come only from the CEO.

So Many People in Jail for Using Drugs…
What If We Decriminalized It?

It’s no secret that there are more people in jail in the US than in any other country. In recent years, it’s been about 1.8 million and 1.9 million. China is next with about 1.6 million of its population behind bars… and their total population is more than four times larger than ours.

Looked at from a percentage-of-population perspective, the countries with the highest percentage of their people behind bars are El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa. The US is next, followed by about 16 or 17 countries with underdeveloped economies (such as Panama and Guam) before you get to another country with a developed economy (Russia).

Any way you want to look at it, the US is top of the list when it comes to incarcerating its citizens.

Why?

One reason often given is the growth of private prisons in recent years.

There are many undeniable benefits to the private management of jails and prison – more order, less trouble, and a better cost-per-prisoner ratio. But there’s also a downside. If private enterprise can make jails and prisons profitable, why wouldn’t they do whatever is in their power to grow the prison population, even if it means putting people in jail who should not be there?

I’ve done a little research into this. And while it persuaded me that the privatization of prisons is, in theory, a major factor in the growth of the jailed population, I found no data to support it. (One factual example: In 2000, about 80,000 people were held in private prisons. That number rose to about 140,000 in 2010. But by 2020, it had dropped to about 90,000.)

However, there is one factor that is considerably and demonstrably significant: the illegal drug trade.

In 2019, according to Pew Research, 1.6 million people in the US were arrested for drug-related offenses, compared to about 1.0 million arrested for property crimes, simple assault, and DUI. Among the +/- 1.8 million people locked up at that time, about 20% of them (360,000) were there for drug-related crimes, according to the Prison Policy Institute. Today, the total incarcerated population is about 2.4 million, of which 456,000 are serving time for drug-related offenses, according to The Center for American Progress.

In 1971, President Nixon declared illegal drug use to be “Public Enemy Number One.” Soon thereafter, Congress approved “the war on drugs” – a get-tough policy that has cost American taxpayers more than $1 trillion.

Unfortunately, this acceleration in arresting and convicting people for drug offenses has not deterred substance misuse rates. In fact, they have gone up. If that’s not bad enough, all these extra prosecutions have significantly increased the likelihood that, after being released from prison, ex-prisoners are 13 times more likely to die than the general population.

These facts have led many, including yours truly, to believe that America should end its costly and useless war on drugs by decriminalizing the use of drugs, and spend some of that saved money on deterrence and treatment.

This was the notion that the state of Oregon embraced in 2020, when they decriminalized drug use. I remember being happy about the prospect of so many fewer people being incarcerated for taking drugs, and hopeful that the number of violent drug-related crimes would be reduced because the market for selling drugs would become more relaxed and laissez faire, and less dangerous and competitive.

That’s not exactly what happened.

Decriminalizing drug use, obviously, drastically reduced the number of drug addicts in Oregon’s prisons. Unfortunately, it increased the number of drug users in the state and had no positive effect on treatment.

The 2020 ballot measure (which was supported by 58% of Oregon’s voters) simply dumped tens of thousands of people that would have been in prison onto the city’s streets. That, of course, hurt retail businesses and increased the cost of maintaining some semblance of cleanliness and safety.

As a result, earlier this month, the state reversed its three-year experiment in leniency and reinstituted jail time for drug use.

In retrospect, this shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Why? Because – like I’ve been telling you for months now – when it comes to bad habits, any kind of bad habits, people almost never change. They may try to change if you ask (or pressure) them to. But they usually only get worse.

So, if decriminalizing drug use only makes things worse, is there anything that can be done to minimize the enormous damage that is done every year because of drugs?

I have an idea that I’ll explain next week. It’s radical. But I think it could work. Stay tuned!

Trump’s New York Civil Fraud Case: 
What, Exactly, Was the “Crime” He Committed? 

Last week, a Manhattan judge fined Donald Trump and The Trump Organization $355 million and barred him from serving in a top role of any New York company for three years. The charge was that he “fraudulently inflated his wealth for financial gain,” including “falsifying records, issuing false documents, and related conspiracy offenses.”

This was wonderful news for the Anti-Trumpers. You could hear them gloating about it on every mainstream talk show.

For anyone who knows little to nothing about how the real estate business works, this charge must sound like a serious violation of law, and the penalty indicative of a Bernie-Madoff-level scam.

In fact, what Trump and The Trump Organization did was remarkably common in the high-finance portion of the real estate universe. It happens commonly, not just in NYC, but in every city in America and in every country. Moreover, the over-valuation charge is essentially meaningless because it involves a part of the loan application that is extraneous to what the bank looks at in determining whether a loan seeker has the liquidity and the resources to pay off the loan.

Let me break it down for you…

Imagine you are a big real estate developer wanting to construct a new building. The cost of construction is, say, $30 million. So, you go to a bank to get a construction loan. The bank wants collateral to protect its investment. And what they ask you to do is provide them with two sorts of numbers.

Their first and most important requirement is that you have liquid assets that (a) are sufficient to cover the loan, and (b) they can easily claim if your project fails to hit its targets. This would include cash and certain physical assets that, if needed, the bank could cash in immediately and without complication. (Assets that are encumbered in any way are correctly considered by the bank to be next to worthless for them.)

Banks will also ask for a list of assets that they would have no intention of going after – all sorts of assets that would give them a general idea of your net worth.

Valuing real estate is not a precise science. It involves calculations that are based on numbers that are really guesstimates, as well as guesses about what the property will be worth over the span of time that the loan is in play. If you have ever bought a house using the value of an existing house for collateral, you know that there is likely to be a range, depending on the bank’s assessment and the assessment of an expert you hire.

When it comes to valuing the assets on list one, the bank is going be conservative to give it leeway against miscalculations or future imponderables. If you think the bank’s valuations are significantly understated, you will make your argument. But the final decision is the bank’s.

Now here’s what I think is crazy about Trump’s case. The assets that the judge says he grossly overvalued were in list two – assets meant to provide a general idea of his overall net worth. They were not assets that the bank really cared about.

It is quite possible that Trump overestimated the value of one or more of the assets on list two. But that is, at best, a technical violation that would have no impact on the solidity of the loan. And to me, it simply sounds like something he has been doing from the beginning – overestimating his overall net worth so he seems richer than he is.

Several things happened here that convince me the entire thing was another politically motivated example of rogue judges and prosecutors trying to put Trump in jail by cooking up and prosecuting phony charges. It was worse than the Georgia case because there was no trial and no jury. It was one judge, who either knows nothing about how real estate loans work or is downright unethical, deciding to exceed his legal and moral authority in order to cripple Trump financially.

To make matters worse, the way this judgment works, Trump must pay the fine before he can appeal the decision. One judge. No trial. No jury. And a huge fine that he must pay before he can get a chance to defend himself.

Remember… nobody was hurt in these loan transactions. Not the bank. Not the bank’s investors. Not the businesses involved in the project. Nobody. On the contrary, everyone made money.

The COVID Response: What We Got Wrong

New Information About Fauci’s role in the Cover-up

According to a CIA whistleblower and information obtained from the House Oversight Committee, Anthony Fauci did in fact play a major role in both the creation of COVID-19 and the subsequent misinformation campaign about the danger of the virus, the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, and the cover-up that kept the vaccines selling as reams of data contradicting the government’s position began to appear in scientific journals.

Among other things, Fauci is being accused of:

1. Influencing a CIA review on the origins of COVID-19.

2. Pushing a bunk paper (titled “Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2”) at meetings in the State Department and the White House.

3. Funding the Wuhan lab.

4. A history of bug escapes from his gain-of-function research projects.

And Fauci isn’t the only “villain” in this story. Read the details here.

Then click here to watch Fauci forgetting what he did and didn’t say about COVID at the height of the shutdown.

What If, as New Studies Suggest, the Alarmists Are Right?

Is There Anything to Be Done to Defeat “Post Vaccination Syndrome”?

In the Oct. 20 issue, I talked about spike proteins – projections on the surface of some viruses (including COVID-19) that facilitate the spread of the infection. In response, the body produces antibodies to fight the virus. Once the antibodies are made, the proteins are broken down so the body can get rid of them. The mRNA vaccines work by giving your cells instructions on how to make this protein to fight the virus if you later become infected.

But the spike proteins produced by the COVID vaccines are different than those produced naturally by the body. They don’t break down in a way that allows the body to get rid of them. Which is why, according to some experts, the vaccines have left about 15% of those that have taken them with some sort of medical problem. Click here.

Among the reported negative side effects of the vaccines are the late development of blood clots, myocarditis, and even cardiac arrest as long as two years after the vaccination was given.

So, what can we do to help prevent what is now being called “Post Vaccination Syndrome”?

While the media ignored this news and some government agencies refuted it, concerned scientists have been working on a way to detoxify the body of the “residual” contaminants from the mRNA vaccines. And on Aug. 25, the first detoxification protocol was published in the US medical literature. Click here.

In this clip, Dr. John Campbell explains and evaluates a recent Yale study on the negative side effects of the COVID vaccines. It is the first study I’ve read that used the term Post Vaccination Syndrome.

And if you are up for a technical explanation of the contaminants resulting from the vaccines, click here for the first of a two-part report by Sonia Elijah.

Nikki Haley’s Plan for Managing the Future of Social Media in America

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said that if she becomes president, the first thing she’ll do is make social media platforms show their algorithms. “Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing,” she said. After that, she is going to ban anonymous posting on social media. She called it a national security threat. “When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say and… then you’re going to get some civility when people know their name is next to [it].”

I’ve had that same thought many times, and had mentally filed Haley’s idea as “maybe a good one” until I came across this tweet in response from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis: “You know who were anonymous writers back in the day? Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison when they wrote The Federalist Papers.” He called Haley’s proposal “dangerous and unconstitutional.”

“Yeah,” he’s right,” I thought. “What was I thinking?”

A few days later, I read this.

Evidence on the Adverse Effects of the COVID Vaccines Is Piling Up 

Who’s Counting? Many drugs and medical procedures have adverse reactions. That includes radiation and chemotherapy for cancer. The sensible and historic response to reports of these adverse reactions is to record them (which is done by the WHO and other organizations), study them, and then compare them – in terms of how common they are and how serious they are – to their positive reactions (benefits). Can you guess how many adverse reactions to the mRNA vaccinations have been recorded since 2001? Click here.

“Unassailable Proof” from an MIT Professor. In March 2023, MIT Professor Retsef Levi disclosed data acquired by the Israeli Ministry of Health. In his Nov. 5 newsletter, Steve Kirsch, a longtime critic of the Biden administration’s COVID policies, presented key components of that data, which demonstrates that (1) “the mortality risk curve” is the opposite in slope to what it would be if the vaccines were safe, (2) the risk of death “monotonically increases” after the COVID vaccinations, and (3) the risk of death increases “exponentially” with each shot.” His conclusion: The Israeli data is “unassailable proof the vaccines are killing people.” Click here.

The Most Censored Chart in Congressional History. On Jan. 25, 2022, Sen. Ron Johnson (WI-R) held the “Second Opinion” panel with top experts in the medical field. During that hearing, he presented a chart comparing adverse events of different medical products, like ivermectin, remdesivir, and the COVID-19 vaccines. After doing so, Johnson’s chart was whitewashed from the internet, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (1.0), TikTok, and other major social media platforms. On Nov. 13, nearly two years after his initial chart went viral, Johnson presented the chart with updated figures at the “Injuries Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines” hearing. The data is alarming. Click here.

The Hospital Death Trap. On a recent installment of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk explained how he knew, in the very early days of COVID Mania, why ventilators didn’t save lives, but increased deaths. Click here. (Reminder: I wrote about this almost a year ago!)

My Conspiracy Prediction Is Looking Good

As regular readers know, I’ve been predicting that Biden would not be the Democrat nominee for president for more than a year. He won the 2020 election because Democratic strategists wisely made it about COVID, when the fear of it was at hysterical levels (thanks to the CDC and the NHI) and because his handlers kept him locked away as much as possible. Today, the Democrats once again have a tailwind behind them thanks to the Supreme Court decision on abortion, but measures taken by individual states are reducing the anger over that and confidence in Biden has dropped to an all-time low. So, with the economy suffering and Biden’s brain in serious decline, there is no way they are going to take the chance of putting him up against Trump in 2024.

I’ve said that I expect Biden to announce his withdrawal from the race sometime around Thanksgiving in order to give his replacement (probably Gavin Newsom) time to build his own campaign. I’ve also said that, in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving, the mainstream media would begin to publish stories calling for him to step aside.

That’s happening. In the past several weeks, they’ve been popping up all over the place. Click here and here and here and here and here.

Five New COVID Discoveries and Stories You Haven’t Heard About

Celebs dying! One of the COVID “conspiracy” newsletters I read occasionally is dedicated to keeping the public on top of the young actors, athletes, and other celebrities that have been mysteriously dying since the introduction of the mRNA vaccines. Matthew Perry (54) and Tyler Christopher (54) are just two of the more than 50 recent cases they’ve reported on so far. Click here.

Remember the ventilators? They were considered lifesavers in the early days of COVID. Now pretty much everyone knows that they did not save lives. In fact, there is good evidence that they made things worse, damaging heart tissue and elevating death rates. Here, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk talk about it.

Worrisome findings from two studies. One from Harvard, which found mRNA stuck in the hearts of people who died following COVID-19 injections, and a human cardiac PET study showing that positron emission tomography scans of the heart changed in almost everybody who took the shot. Click here.

Neurological complications. According to a recent study published in the journal Vaccines, almost one-third of individuals who received a COVID-19 vaccine suffered from neurological complications such as tremors, insomnia, and muscle spasms. Click here.

Was Trump, the blowhard, right? Ivermectin, the drug once called “horse de-wormer,” has been shown to be effective against COVID-19, as well as flu and RSV. And if that were not enough, it’s said to have cancer-fighting properties. Click here for five facts you should know.

Recent Notable Reactions to the Israel/Hamas War

“It wasn’t the rallies with ‘Keep the World Clean’ posters and chants of ‘gas the Jews.’ Nor was it the glorification of Hamas paragliders by the Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter or, in New York and London, the tearing down of posters with the faces of Israeli children held hostage by Hamas. Not even the off-the-charts uptick in antisemitic incidents in Germany (240%), the United Kingdom (641%), and the United States (nearly 400%) convinced me.

“It was, rather one of those realizations that so many generations of Jews before me have experienced. A realization that they, like me, surely tried to push out of their minds until the reality became unmistakable.” (Michael Oren, writing in the Oct. 26 issue of The Free Press). Read more of Oren’s essay here.

American Jews make up 2.4% of the US population. And yet, according to the FBI, they have been, for many years, the targets of 60% of hate crimes. It’s much worse now, with mass protests where people chant “from the river to the sea” (i.e., wipe Israel off the face of the earth) and shout threats against Jewish students locked in university rooms. The percentage has got to be over 80% now. And what is the Biden administration doing about it? They’ve asked Kamala to head up the “first ever US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia”! Click here.

Learn your history, kids. One of the arguments we’ve been hearing about Israel vs. Hamas concerns which group has “ancestral” rights to the disputed land. Here is a definitive history of the argument from a self-described “proud” Arab.

So much is lost – or distorted – in reporting the facts. Click here for a call to journalists reporting on the war.

After reading so much about the Israeli-Hamas war, I’ve been feeling a sort of ennui composed of dread and despair. But when I saw this video, it gave me – somehow – a very different feeling. It is a young boy singing. That is really all it is. But it is beautiful, and I found it soothing and almost inspirational.