Blog

There are moments in a man’s life when he’s sure he’s achieved greatness. Some folks climb mountains, others write symphonies.

Me? I made the perfect sandwich.

I’m talking masterpiece-level perfection here. Balanced, layered, and beautiful.

Fresh sourdough, toasted just enough to whisper when you bite into it. Roast beef piled high, four pieces of bacon, two slices of pepper jack cheese, three slices of tomato so red it could’ve modeled for a seed catalog, and a thin spread of Jalapeno mustard to make it feel fancy.

I even went the extra mile. I washed the lettuce.

Now, when you’re staring down a sandwich like that, the world fades away. There’s a golden silence, like angels holding their breath.

I plated it with reverence and stepped back to admire the craftsmanship. It was, if I may say so, a thing of beauty.

Then I made my fatal mistake.

I turned around, just for five seconds, to grab a drink from the fridge. Five seconds.

That’s it. I wasn’t gone long enough for the ice maker to finish a cube.

When I turned back, my plate was empty. Gone, vanished, not even a crumb remaining.

At first, I thought I’d lost my mind. Maybe I’d already eaten it and just forgot?

But no, there, sitting beside the plate, was Buddy. My faithful companion, and the very picture of innocence, except for one small detail: he was licking his lips.

“Buddy,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Did you eat my sandwich?”

He blinked. Then, with the composure of a man falsely accused, he yawned, stretched, and looked away.

If dogs could whistle, he would’ve done that too.

Now, I’ve known Buddy for over nine years. I’ve seen him fake injuries for treats, pretend to bury toys he later stashed under the couch, and once, memorably, act like he didn’t know where the missing sock went while sitting squarely on it.

He’s clever. Charming, even.

But innocent? Not a chance.

I started gathering evidence like a detective in a low-stakes crime drama. The plate was spotless, polished to a shine.

Not a single crumb. That’s not natural.

No human eats that clean. And then I spotted it, off to the side, on the kitchen floor, a single piece of lettuce.

The smoking gun.

I held it up like a badge. “Aha!” I declared. “Care to explain this, Buddy?”

He gave me a look that said, “Lettuce? Never seen it before in my life,” before he sauntered off toward the living room, tail wagging like he’d just closed the case himself.

I sighed. I wasn’t mad, exactly.

You can’t really stay mad at someone who looks like a cloud with eyes. But I did feel a little betrayed.

That sandwich was supposed to be my moment of triumph. My culinary victory lap.

Instead, I got five seconds of glory and a lettuce leaf.

Later, as I made myself a far less impressive peanut butter and jelly, Buddy flopped down beside me, resting his head on my lap like nothing had happened. His stomach gurgled contentedly.

“Enjoy your lunch, huh?” I muttered.

He thumped his tail once, slow and satisfied.

And I had to laugh, because that’s life with Buddy, part crime, part comedy, all heart. You can’t take yourself too seriously when being outwitted by a dog.

Especially one who leaves behind the evidence himself, like a calling card.

Yesterday morning, I came across a story written by my long-deceased acquaintance, TC, in 1990. I never knew his last name.  He gave it to me one afternoon while we were rebuilding a radio station in Reno.

After rereading it, I realize he used “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service, as a template, which I find ingenious, because he turned it into a Nevada tale. I spent most of yesterday rewriting and correcting grammar and spelling, and adding dialogue.

And now, I want to share it with you. I might expand on it come 2026.

On the Edge

Nevada is a land that makes its own rules. Stay long enough beneath its hard blue sky and you’ll stop wondering at the odd things it holds, ghost towns left to the coyotes, miners chasing shadows of silver, travelers swearing they’d heard voices on the wind.

Still, there was one story the old-timers told with a kind of caution. It concerned two prospectors, a bitter night, and a promise a man had no business making.

Ray Dalton and Milo Crane weren’t seasoned hands. They were lean on experience but rich in stubbornness, the sort who believed the next ridge might carry the shine they were hunting. That winter found them in the hills north of Elko, camping light, working hard, and trusting luck more than skill.

Then the cold came down out of the Ruby Mountains, sharp and sudden.

It froze the sagebrush into rattling bones and turned their coffee thick as tar. Nights were long, the wind mean, and the dark seemed to press close enough to hear your thoughts.

Ray weathered it. Milo struggled.

By the time they reached the Great Basin, Milo’s usual grumbling had faded into something tighter and more serious. His lips were blue, his eyes hollow, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of a man who knew he was losing ground.

“Ray, if I don’t see morning, I want your word on something.”

“You’re not dying,” Ray said, though he wasn’t certain.

But Milo gripped his sleeve with a strength that didn’t match his condition.

“Don’t put me in this frozen ground. I couldn’t stand the cold in life, and I don’t want it in death. Burn me. Promise me that.”

Ray sighed. Promises are easy when a man expects the dawn.

“All right,” he said. “You have my word.”

He wasn’t long in regretting it.

Within the hour, Milo slumped forward, still as stone. Ray knelt beside him, watched the slow silence settle, and muttered a tired, “Well, damn.”

He tried the ground. Frozen. Tried for wood. None was worth the striking. A promise, though, sits heavy on a man.

His lantern threw a pale circle as he paced the camp, and in that circle he found a rusted relic half buried in the sand—an old refinery furnace from a camp that hadn’t seen life in twenty years.

It was a poor idea, but it was the only one he had.

Ray hauled Milo over the sand with a kind of apologetic determination, packed the furnace with every scrap of burnable material in their camp, and put flame to it. The fire caught fast, roaring up through the chimney, hungry and bright against the cold.

Ray stepped back, rubbing warmth into his hands, wondering if this counted as honoring his word or breaking it in some cosmic way.

Then he heard a cough. He froze.

“Milo?”

Another cough answered him, followed by a raw voice full of irritation.

“Ray… it’s too damn hot in here!”

Ray stumbled backward, heart thumping, while Milo fought his way upright in the furnace, dazed and thoroughly thawed.

They spent the rest of the night wrapped in blankets, arguing in low, hoarse voices, Milo insisting he’d only been “mostly” gone, Ray insisting he’d come far too close to keeping his promise.

By morning, they were both laughing about it, the kind of laughter men use when fear has just passed over them.

Nevada didn’t say a word about the matter. The desert rarely does.

It keeps its secrets buried deeper than gold or silver, and it was just one more odd truth lost beneath its silent sky.

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me, “Tommy, you can’t have world peace if you can’t make peace at the dinner table.”

Of course, it came right after my brother Adam and I had come to blows over something stupid like who got to sit by the window. Dad, a career Air Force man, had seen more than his share of politicians promising peace, and he had a way of cutting through the noise with plain talk.

These days, it seems like every time I turn on the news, someone’s declaring that peace has broken out somewhere, usually right after a photo op and a firm handshake. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good peace deal as much as the next fellow.

It gives me hope that maybe, we humans are getting a little wiser. But I’ve also been around long enough to know that peace isn’t something you can sign into existence.

It’s more like a stubborn and stray cat. You can invite it in, but it’s only going to stay if it wants to.

Recently, there has been some excitement about what President Trump has accomplished between Israel and Hamas. I get it.

It’s tempting to put a man on a pedestal when he seems to be doing the impossible. But I was raised with a healthy suspicion of idolizing anyone, especially politicians.

My mother was fond of reminding us that “even the best folks have clay feet.” She said it once after our town council tried to elect a man who couldn’t resist the sound of his own voice.

There’s a verse in Jeremiah that’s been floating around in my head lately about people crying “Peace, peace,” when there really is no peace. That hits home for me.

I’ve seen what happens when we start believing in headlines instead of heartlines. It’s easy to point to treaties and think we’ve done our part, but peace doesn’t stick unless it’s practiced on the front porch, in the kitchen, and between the ears.

I remember when Mary and I were first married. We had our share of “peace talks.”

There was one about the toothpaste tube and how to squeeze it. Mary from the bottom, me from wherever my fingers landed. Another time, it was about whose turn it was to do the dishes.

There were no dignitaries present, no pens for signing, and certainly no press coverage, but there was negotiation, patience, and a whole lot of humor. And wouldn’t you know, the peace that came from that has lasted longer than any treaty I’ve ever read about.

What I’m saying is, we should celebrate success, sure, but not worship it. Leaders come and go, and peace, real peace, is something we build one small act at a time.

It’s in how we talk to the folks who disagree with us, how we treat the clerk at the grocery store, and how we handle the moments when we’re right but let someone else feel heard anyway.

So before we start engraving anyone’s name on a marble statue for “bringing peace to the world,” maybe we ought to look closer to home. If I can get through a Sunday dinner without a family debate over politics, that feels like a miracle, and I’ll take that kind of peace any day.

As for the world’s troubles? Well, I’ll keep hoping for the best, but I’ll also keep practicing at home. After all, Dad was right, if we can’t find peace at the dinner table, we’ve got no business trying to export it.

What compelled Luis to the spot, he never quite knew. It wasn’t beauty that called him there, at least not in the ordinary sense.

The place itself was harsh and narrow, a shallow gully hemmed in by walls of sandstone that twisted upward into a pale, sloping V. Yet every day, as the sun reached its late-morning height, Luis found his feet carrying him up the rocky path, as if pulled by an unseen hand.

By the time he reached his special place, his thoughts often blurred, fading like footprints in shifting sand. He would sit on a flat rock near the top, gazing down at the valley below, the wind whispering through the cracks. He felt an ache of peace there, as though something in the stillness was remembering him.

Seasons passed unnoticed. Rain pooled in the hollows; snow dusted the ridges white. Summer came with its shimmering heat and humming silence.

Through it all, Luis continued his daily climb. Sometimes he wondered why he returned. Sometimes he forgot to wonder at all.

He began to notice changes, not in the land, but in himself. His clothing grew thin, the fabric pale and ragged at the seams.

His hands looked older than he remembered, skin translucent, veins like faint rivers. He could feel the roughness of the rocks, yet not their warmth. The sun, once comforting, had no real heat.

Then, one morning, the gully was wet. It had rained through the night, and the air was cold and heavy with the scent of damp stone.

Luis trudged up the slope as always, his shoes soaking through. The pools of water reflected the sky in trembling mirrors.

When he reached his usual seat, he let out a long, weary breath. It felt strange in his chest, shallow and echoing.

A flicker caught his eye, a small puddle nearby, perfectly still despite the wind. It glimmered, sunlight dancing through the clouds.

Luis smiled faintly and leaned over to peer into it. What he saw made his breath stop altogether.

The reflection was not his, not truly. The face staring back looked hollow and pale, eyes sunken deep into shadow, mouth open as if mid-plea.

He flinched back, scraping his hands on the rock. Pain, sharp, immediate, flashed through him, and with it came a rush of memory, wild and merciless.

The sound of stones breaking loose beneath his boots. The tumble.

The crack of his head on cold earth and the stillness that followed. He tried to stand, but his legs gave way, and he fell hard against the ground, the same ground that had claimed him long ago.

The chill seeped into his bones. He reached for his knee, but his hand met nothing soft, only a hard and unyielding shape beneath the remnants of his sleeve.

Bones.

Luis lay still, the truth rising slow and terrible. He was not living.

He had not been living for years. His daily pilgrimages, his silent meditations, the strange peace he felt, it had all been the restless wandering of something left unfinished, a soul circling the place where its story ended.

The clouds shifted, dimming the last trace of light. Wind sighed through the gully, carrying the sound of distant thunder. The puddle rippled once, then stilled again, empty.

And when the next morning came, no footprints marked the path up the draw, only the whisper of wind, and a single hollow echo fading into the stone.

For years, I’ve relied on a simple mental dystopian reality checklist to separate real information from engineered narratives, the kind pushed by governments, corporations, activists, or viral social media threads. I just called it connecting the dots.

Then I discovered that someone with far more serious credentials, Chase Hughes, a guy who spent twenty years teaching elite military and intelligence operators how to both run and detect psychological operations, had turned almost the same instincts into two formal tools: a lightning-fast ten-question version and a deeper twenty-question system that scores narratives from 0 to 100.

Here’s the quick ten-question test you can keep in your phone and use in thirty seconds flat.

1. Is the claim attributed to a specific, named person or organization, or is it just anonymous “sources say”?
2. Does the source have a verifiable track record of accuracy on this exact topic?
3. Is primary evidence—documents, video, raw data, direct quotes—actually provided or linked?
4. Are counterclaims or conflicting evidence acknowledged and fairly addressed?
5. Does the story lean mostly on emotional language and loaded adjectives instead of facts?
6. Is the timing suspiciously perfect for some political or economic agenda—October surprises, earnings weeks, deflections from bigger scandals?
7. Do multiple outlets from across the ideological spectrum report the same core facts, even if they spin them differently?
8. Has the claim already been walked back, clarified, or quietly edited after publication?
9. Is the evidence as strong as the extraordinary claims require?
10. And finally, if you swapped the parties or the ideology, would you still believe it?

You get one point for every yes on questions one through four and seven through ten, and one point for every no on five and six. Eight to ten means highly credible. Six or seven means it’s moderately credible. Four or five tells you to proceed with caution. Anything from zero to three is almost certainly an engineered narrative or outright propaganda.

The short version devastates modern propaganda because it fails the same handful of tests: anonymous sourcing, lack of primary evidence, heavy emotional manipulation, perfect timing, and coverage that remains inside one ideological bubble. Run it cold on the Russian “Ukraine biolabs” stories, the Jussie Smollett hoax, some of the early COVID lab-leak suppression efforts, or atrocity claims from both sides in the Gaza-Israel war, and they all collapse to one or two points.

The best part is that it doesn’t care whether the narrative flatters your politics or not; it only asks whether the story is built like journalism or messaged like a psyop.

The lengthier twenty-question version exists for the more dangerous cases: stories built around a kernel of truth but still weaponized to control what you think. Scores between forty and seventy are the most insidious because partial truth is the perfect Trojan horse.

Chase tested the entire system against hundreds of confirmed psyops and found the same twenty patterns every time: convenient timing, emotional manipulation, authority overload, uniform messaging across outlets, financial incentives, suppression of dissent, and so on.

The pattern shows up across history.

• The 1990 “Kuwaiti incubator babies” testimony that helped sell the Gulf War scored eighty-eight out of a hundred.
• Tobacco’s decades-long “doubt is our product” campaign hit eighty-two.
• Facebook’s algorithm-fueled ethnic hatred in Ethiopia in 2021 came in around seventy-eight.
• Both the early 2020 “lab leak is a conspiracy theory” push and the counter-campaign insisting “lab leak is obvious and anyone who disagrees is a Chinese shill” scored in the sixties and seventies.
• Recent waves of UFO whistleblowers from 2017 through 2025 routinely land in the sixties, perfect timing, hyperbolic language, uniform phrasing, upcoming books and companies, and very little verifiable evidence.

The playbook never really changes; only the delivery system gets faster. In the 1950s, tobacco companies employed scientists and bought advertisements in newspapers and on television. In 1990, a PR firm sold a war with a tearful teenage girl, and here in the 2020s, algorithms sell genocide for ad revenue. Same tricks, new medium.

So copy the ten-question version, paste it into your notes app, and start running it on every story that makes your blood boil or gives you that satisfying “finally someone said it” rush. You’ll begin to see the matrix everywhere. You’ll also become insufferable to friends who want permanent permission to stay angry online, but that’s a small price to pay.

Because every time we scream at each other over politicized narratives, we’re doing exactly what the engineers of those narratives want. The real question isn’t who’s pulling the strings. It’s why we keep handing them over?

Freedom is one of humanity’s most cherished ideals, yet it is also one of the most misunderstood. Many assume that a free society exists because a government declares it so, or because a constitution guarantees it.

In truth, freedom does not spring from the state. It arises from the Creator, and the spirit and actions of the people.

Governments may safeguard liberty, but they do not create it. Free society is a construction, maintained and defined by citizens who take responsibility for their own rights, their communities, and the moral foundations that make self-government possible.

The essence of a free society lies in individual responsibility. When people rely entirely on the government to make decisions, solve problems, or define justice, they exchange liberty for dependence.

Laws and policies may reflect freedom, but they cannot instill the discipline, compassion, and courage that sustain it. A society is free when its citizens govern themselves, when they choose to act with integrity, respect others’ rights, and participate in shaping their communities. Freedom demands that individuals not only claim their rights but also accept the duties that accompany them.

History offers countless lessons on this truth. The American Revolution, for instance, was not won by a government.

It was ordinary people who believed in self-determination. They created a government to serve liberty, not to define it. Their experiment in self-rule has endured only because succeeding generations of citizens have continued to defend those same principles through civic participation, open debate, and personal accountability.

When governments attempt to take the burden of directing society, controlling speech, property, enterprise, or thought, freedom withers.

A centralized authority may promise equality or safety, but it often results in conformity and dependence.

The stronger the state grows at the expense of its citizens’ initiative, the weaker the people become. In contrast, when individuals are empowered to think, work, and associate freely, innovation and prosperity flourish.

The moral strength of the people becomes the foundation upon which the nation stands. A free society also depends on active citizenship.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It requires informed voters, honest dialogue, and participation in local and national affairs.

When people disengage, believing their voices don’t matter or that others will do the work, corruption and apathy creep in. A free people must therefore cultivate civic virtue.

It lives through volunteering, voting, respecting differences, and holding leaders accountable. These are not acts of compliance but of ownership, and recognition that freedom lives or dies by the habits of its citizens.

Liberty does not come through legislation. Governments may protect rights, but they cannot provide people with the wisdom to use them well.

A free society endures only when its citizens understand that freedom is not a gift bestowed from above but a responsibility carried within each person. The moment people forget this, they lose their freedom, not because the government stole it, but because they surrendered those rights.

I have not felt trepidation like this since 2006, and the afternoon I exposed a rendition aircraft sitting motionless near a chain-link fence at Reno–Tahoe International Airport, the paperwork tied to a man who did not exist, and yet somehow maintained an office in a suite that belonged to a U.S. senator.

There is nothing like spending five hours in an interview, questioned, as others rummage through my life to see why I would want to damage our National Security. It also solidified in my mind the understanding that there are layers of government and influence that operate beyond the general public.

Until last night, I assumed I had already walked through the darkest door in my career. I was wrong.

What happened on the Internet, whether a failure, a breach, or a coordinated demonstration, lasted only minutes. Such data is usually compartmentalized, siloed, and insulated from one another, becoming briefly, strangely visible, and none of it was classified.

None of it was the sort of material that would land someone in a federal indictment. But it was raw: unfiltered institutional metadata, historical documents, relationships between systems, and technical records that, when assembled, formed a picture of the global banking and securities architecture more complete than anything I had ever seen.

The picture that emerged made one thing clear: the American banking system, global financial markets, and elements of the intelligence community are far more interconnected than the public realizes. I am not claiming a conspiracy, but I am saying that the architecture of these systems allows consolidated power in a way that resembles the thing critics call the “Deep State.”

And at the center of that architecture, over and over, was the same institutional name: The Depository Trust Company, or DTC.

When the outage struck, the digital world flickered. Search engines choked.

Authentication services failed. Proxy networks went dead.

In those brief minutes, as the system wavered, I watched public but rarely accessed institutional data sets bleed into one another, creating threads that remain discreet. It was as though someone had detonated a small charge in the basement of the Internet, not enough to collapse it but enough to rattle the pipes.

One of those pipes belonged to the infrastructure of the Depository Trust Company, whose technical records briefly revealed the breadth of its global connections. There was nothing illegal or hidden.

All of it was the kind of information that compliance officers, regulators, and IT architects see every day. But when seen together, the scale was astonishing.

There were network relationships between DTC systems, Federal Reserve settlement rails, large commercial banks acting as liquidity providers, SEC regulatory feeds, authentication systems tied historically to intelligence-adjacent contractors, and links to overseas securities depositories.

I sat back in my chair and felt the same cold weight in my chest that I had felt standing near that plane at Reno–Tahoe. I had stumbled across something much bigger than any single office, airplane, or agency.

It was infrastructure, and nearly absolute.

Most Americans have never heard of the Depository Trust Company, and yet nearly every financial asset they believe they “own” passes through it. The DTC does not function like a traditional bank.

It offers no checking accounts, no credit cards, no mortgages, and holds no consumer deposits. Instead, it is a limited-purpose trust company, chartered under New York State banking law and a member of the Federal Reserve System.

Its purpose is not to serve individuals but to serve the entire U.S. securities market.

The DTC is a central securities depository. That means it is responsible for storing and managing the official records of ownership for stocks, bonds, municipal debt, money market instruments, and other securities.

Instead of physically moving certificates around Manhattan, as was once the case, the DTC immobilizes these certificates, literally locking them away, and transfers ownership electronically through “book-entry” changes. Those changes occur under the DTC’s nominee name, Cede & Co., which is the official owner of nearly every publicly traded security in the United States.

In other words, if you believe your brokerage account shows you as the owner of shares, what it actually shows is that you are the “beneficial owner.” The DTC, through Cede & Co., is the registered owner.

The system was born out of necessity. In the late 1960s, the securities markets were collapsing under their own growth.

The so-called “paperwork crisis” overwhelmed Wall Street clerks who physically shuttled stock certificates between brokerages. Mountains of envelopes, slips, and certificates piled up, and trades ended up delayed for weeks.

Created in 1973, the DTC was a fix to the problem. It was part of a broader industry effort led by the New York Stock Exchange and the American Bankers Association, with the Banking and Securities Industry Committee, known as BASIC, steering the process.

The transformation was profound. The markets modernized almost overnight, and what followed was decades of unprecedented growth.

Today, the DTC holds more than 3.5 million securities issues from over 170 countries, representing nearly $87 trillion in global assets. Through its parent organization, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, or DTCC, it processes hundreds of trillions of dollars in transactions each year. In 2022, the DTCC handled an incredible $2.5 quadrillion in settled value.

Despite being a private institution owned by banks, broker-dealers, and exchanges, the DTC exists under heavy regulatory oversight. It is a clearing agency with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, regulated by the Federal Reserve, and complies with New York State banking laws.

It holds an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to facilitate settlements with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and other institutions. Yet the public never deals with the DTC, because your broker does.

The DTC’s invisibility is part of its function, and retail investors are not supposed to interact with it, ensuring the public only sees the surface appearance. But last night’s data tremor exposed the scaffolding.

As I research into the DTC’s history, one name kept rising to the surface: William Thompson Dentzer Jr., its founding chairman and CEO from 1973 to 1994. Dentzer’s background is as fascinating as it is unusual for the man who built the backbone of American securities custody.

Born in 1929, Dentzer grew up in a household steeped in public service. He met his wife, Celia Hill, in college at Muskingum University, where he graduated in 1951. They married the following year and eventually raised five children, all while he built a career that zigzagged through diplomacy, intelligence, and economic policy.

Shortly after college, Dentzer entered U.S. intelligence circles during the late 1940s and 1950s. He later downplayed his involvement, but colleagues from that era often described him as someone who had a deep understanding of international affairs at a time when the Cold War demanded it. He went from intelligence to foreign aid, with leadership roles in the U.S. foreign assistance program.

Dentzer led the National Security Agency for more than a decade before a 1967 Ramparts magazine exposé revealed the CIA had been secretly funding the organization since the early 1950s. Dentzer left in 1952.

By the mid-1960s, Dentzer had become the Executive Secretary of the President’s Committee on Foreign Economic Assistance within USAID. Soon after, he was appointed USAID Mission Director to Peru, a position that placed him and his family in Lima during a turbulent period in Latin American politics. His experience there propelled him into a role as Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Dentzer was a senior USAID official during the Kennedy/Johnson-era push to counter communism with economic aid. The entire Alliance for Progress program later drew criticism for propping up oligarchies, enabling U.S. corporate influence, and wasting taxpayer money on ineffective projects.

In 1969, he transitioned back into domestic economic work as Executive Director of the New York State Council of Economic Advisors. It led to his appointment as New York State Superintendent of Banks, a role he took despite having no traditional banking background.

In 1972, the Securities Industry Committee recommended Dentzer for rebuilding the failing securities settlement system. He became chairman and CEO of the Central Certificate Service, a transitional step toward forming the DTC.

A year later, he became the first CEO of the Depository Trust Company. Under Dentzer’s leadership, the DTC transformed from a crisis-driven experiment into the sprawling infrastructure that underpins today’s financial markets.

He guided the organization through a shift toward a fully dematerialized securities environment. When was the last time you received a certificate showing that you purchased and own a stock?

My grandfather had 10 cents in stock from Bell Telephone and proudly displayed it in a picture frame in the kitchen. I have several stock investments in my IRA, but lack certificates to prove ownership.

Even after retiring in 1994, Dentzer continued to influence financial policy through board positions and academic work, eventually writing The Depository Trust Company: DTC’s Formative Years.

Last night’s digital slippage did not uncover illegal acts, secret memos, or covert financial operations, but it revealed how the system is tied together. It showed DTC servers exchanging authentication signals with Fedwire, including settlement messages routing through commercial banks with long-standing intelligence contracts.

It also showed how the DTC’s nominee, Cede & Co., is a chokepoint for ownership transfers worldwide. It provided a window into compliance data sharing between agencies, demonstrating how closely financial transactions are being tracked, regulated, and analyzed.

It offered a glimpse into a world where the flow of global capital, the surveillance capabilities of governments, and the private infrastructure of financial institutions overlap so smoothly that their borders are almost indistinguishable.

I am not saying the DTC is nefarious. But it feels that way when any system with this much consolidation, opacity, and indispensability can be exploited, either intentionally or by the nature of its design.

The “Deep State,” as popularly defined, is a caricature in the realm of the media. In reality, the interconnectedness of finance, regulation, intelligence, and infrastructure is much more complex and powerful than previously thought.

And last night, for reasons I still cannot fathom, I saw it directly. And in the end, I had only one question: Why does this matter?

Almost every pension fund, 401(k), index fund, publicly traded company, and U.S. government bond operates through the DTC, a system that the CIA may have established. Yet the public remains unaware of who actually holds their assets, how ownership gets recorded, and what systems control the movement of wealth worldwide.

The Internet came back online. The data windows closed.

The world returned to its routine hum, but I could not shake the feeling that something fundamental had revealed itself, something I had been close to before, but never quite touched.

I don’t know who will be unhappy about my article, or if anyone is reading, but I do know I am afraid again. And fear, for any reporter, is often a sign that the truth is finally in sight.

They say actions speak louder than words, but words, too, hold immense power. The way a person speaks, the words they choose, and the tone they use all reflect their inner attitude.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, our speech reveals our mindset, values, and character. From casual conversations to professional settings, language acts as a mirror of our attitude toward life and the people around us.

First impressions often begin with words. When we meet someone for the first time, their language immediately shapes our perception of them.

A person who speaks kindly, listens attentively, and uses respectful language conveys warmth and confidence. Conversely, a person who often complains, criticizes, or interrupts conveys an air of impatience or negativity.

Words are like windows that allow others to see into our hearts. Even before people truly know us, they sense our attitude through how we speak.

Moreover, the tone and manner of speech often say more than the content itself. Two people can express the same idea, but one might sound encouraging while the other comes off as dismissive.

For instance, saying “You can do it” with enthusiasm motivates others, while saying it flatly or sarcastically can have the opposite effect. The tone of our voice, whether it’s calm or harsh, confident or uncertain, communicates our emotional state and attitude far beyond the literal meaning of our words.

Our attitude toward life also shows in the language we use daily. Optimistic individuals tend to focus on possibilities and use positive language, even in challenging situations.

They say things like “Let’s find a solution” or “We’ll get through this,” which reflect resilience and hope. In contrast, a person with a negative attitude may dwell on problems, saying “This will never work” or “What’s the point?”

Such language not only influences others but also reinforces one’s own mindset. Words are powerful tools that can either uplift or limit our potential.

In professional environments, communication skills are indicators of a person’s attitude toward teamwork, leadership, and responsibility. Employees who communicate respectfully and clearly show cooperation and professionalism.

Conversely, those who use harsh or dismissive language can create tension and misunderstanding. Successful leaders understand this and use words to inspire, guide, and build trust. Their speech reflects confidence, empathy, and vision—key elements of a positive attitude.

Even silence can speak volumes about attitude. Choosing when to speak and when to listen shows maturity and respect.

Those who dominate conversations without allowing others to speak come across as self-centered, while those who listen attentively demonstrate openness and humility. In this way, the absence of words can reveal as much about a person’s attitude as the words themselves.

Ultimately, our words are a reflection of who we are inside. They reveal not only our thoughts but also our respect for others, our level of self-control, and our general outlook on life.

By choosing our words carefully and speaking with kindness, honesty, and positivity, we can project an attitude that attracts trust and goodwill. After all, while actions define our deeds, words define our heart, and through them, the world comes to know the kind of person we truly are.

I’ve been watching all of this unfold for a long time, since 2012, back when the smartphone stopped being a gadget and started behaving more like a silent companion that never left my side. I own one. I rely on one. And maybe that’s why I noticed something most people don’t: the feeling that my life didn’t exactly belong to me anymore.

If you’ve ever felt it, that strange sense that something is off, that your emotions feel preloaded, that the arguments in your head don’t quite sound like your own, let me tell you something that took me years to admit out loud: you’re not paranoid for noticing. You’re paying attention.

Because as deep as the rabbit hole of modern technology goes, what really shook me was realizing its roots stretch back long before social media, before television, even before World War II. Every time people talk about psychological manipulation, they jump straight to MK-Ultra. But during my research, I stumbled into a sobering truth: before MK-Ultra, there was Tavistock.

For years, I couldn’t shake the sense of being controlled. The outrage I felt online was too instant.

The dread I woke up with felt too familiar. I’d catch myself spiraling through emotions that didn’t match my day or my circumstances.

I blamed stress, work, and myself.

But over time, I began to realize there was a rhythm to it all, as if someone had found the right emotional lever to pull at the exact time. And the strangest part was that other people seemed to feel the same way.

Anxiety wasn’t an occasional storm anymore; it was the climate. Despair felt normal, and outrage felt addictive.

That’s when I started digging. And the deeper I went, the more I discovered that these psychological patterns weren’t accidental, but manipulation.

The story doesn’t begin with Silicon Valley or intelligence agencies. It starts in a quiet office in London in 1921, called the Tavistock Institute.

Publicly, Tavistock existed to treat soldiers with shell shock, what we’d now call PTSD. It sounded noble, compassionate, and necessary.

But the truth was far more complicated.

In studying trauma, Tavistock didn’t just explore how to heal people; they discovered how trauma could reshape a person. Trauma made the human mind pliable, suggestible, and open to influence, and that realization didn’t stay within hospital walls.

The theories that emerged spilled into government, media, education, and advertising. After WWII, Tavistock’s fingerprints were everywhere.

They helped design Cold War messaging. They advised NATO and influenced the foundations of mass communication and social persuasion.

And once you understand what they learned about group psychology, how fear spreads, how crowds react, how grief and confusion steer behavior, you start seeing it everywhere. And if Tavistock was the laboratory, Edward Bernays was the salesman.

Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, figured out how to take unconscious desires and turn them into levers for mass influence. He took psychology and wrapped it in marketing.

He convinced women to smoke by branding cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” and tied bacon and eggs to the American identity of breakfast. Bernays helped spin the overthrow of Guatemala’s government into a fight against communism. Bernays made persuasion feel natural, invisible, yet inevitable.

And once you realize how much of what we consider “culture” was engineered by a marketing strategist with access to subconscious behavioral insights, you cannot help notice how often desire and fear manipulate our identities in the same way today.

Then came the intelligence era.

Operation Mockingbird revealed just how effective headlines could be as tools of control. Instead of influencing journalists, the CIA directly embedded agents inside major newsrooms.

They wrote scripts, shaped commentary, and framed national narratives. Not through threats or force, just through stories.

By the 1970s, hundreds of journalists were part of intelligence agencies. Trusted voices. Anchors. Columnists. Information gatekeepers.

When I learned this, it reframed my entire understanding of media. Not in a “everything is fake” way, but in the sense that information has always been curated, and often by people whose goals we never see.

And then came MK-Ultra, the program everyone whispers about.

Behind locked doors, scientists experimented with sensory deprivation, electroshock, drugs, and psychological stress in an attempt to understand how identity could be stripped and rewritten. The goal wasn’t healing, justice, or science, but control.

Some of the most disturbing experiments happened in Canada, where Dr. Ewen Cameron subjected patients to “psychic driving,” looping messages into their ears while they were heavily medicated and disoriented. Some patients forgot their names, their families, and even how to walk.

When those documents surfaced in the 1970s, people were horrified. However, the research didn’t vanish; it shifted into something far more subtle.

Fast forward to today, and the battleground isn’t in a secret facility; it’s in our homes, our feeds, our pockets. We used to think of manipulation as physical experimentation, but now it’s digital experimentation, quiet, constant, and invisible.

Algorithms don’t just “recommend” content. It measures you, maps your nervous system by tracking every hesitation, every swipe, every moment you stop scrolling.

They learn what spikes your cortisol, triggers your anger, fuels your fear, and keeps you hooked. And once they know it, they feed it back to you in a feedback loop so tight that eventually, your emotional patterns stop feeling like reactions and start feeling like personality traits.

It is why outrage is the currency of the internet, not because people are angrier, but because anger keeps you watching. And the longer you watch, the more predictable and programmable your reactions become.

Most people think social media’s goal is attention, but attention is just the surface. The real goal is conditioning.

Everywhere I look, people are drowning. Kids are depressed before they hit puberty.

Adults are exhausted just existing. Anxiety isn’t an exception; it’s baseline.

And when you step back, it becomes painfully clear: if you wanted to exhaust, distract, and divide a population, this is what it would look like.

A mentally worn-down society cannot resist, cannot unite, cannot wake up. And numbness is the point, because numb people don’t question; they follow.

If you’ve ever felt like your life doesn’t feel like yours, like you were following some invisible checklist someone else wrote, that’s not madness. That’s awareness.

From childhood, we chase approval, aesthetics, popularity, status, and measurements that never end and never fulfill. And when we reach the finish line, what do we find?

Nothing.

That’s because the script isn’t about fulfillment; it’s about blind participation. The part that changed everything for me came the moment I stopped feeding the system.

In the quiet that followed, something ancient woke up in me. It isn’t about finding myself and never was, but about remembering me.

Beneath the noise, under the programming, through the outrage, there is a version of me untouched by algorithms, headlines, or psychological engineering. And once I felt it, once I recognized the difference between reaction and intuition, my outlook shifted.

The confusion is real because the system is cracking, and everyone feels it. The façade’s thin, and the old tools aren’t as effective as before.

And that means real life is still available. The only question left, the one I had to ask myself, is this: Who am I without their script?

And once you start asking that question, the system loses all power. And because you are waking up, even a little, you can’t go back to sleep.

Not now, not ever.

In every era of American history, citizens and leaders alike have grappled with a central question of civic virtue: to whom, or to what, should their loyalty be given? While patriotism often inspires allegiance to national symbols, political parties, or influential figures, the foundation of American loyalty must remain in the U.S. Constitution.

The document, not any institution or individual, is the supreme expression of the nation’s ideals, limits, and liberties. To place loyalty elsewhere is to misunderstand the very principle of self-government.

The Constitution represents a covenant between the people and their government. It does not belong to a party, a president, or even to the courts. It belongs to the citizenry. Its framers deliberately designed a system that guards against the concentration of power by distributing authority across branches and levels of government.

The separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism are not mere bureaucratic structures; they are safeguards against tyranny. When citizens or officials prioritize loyalty to individuals or institutions over the Constitution itself, they erode those safeguards and invite the very abuses the framers sought to prevent.

History provides countless examples of the dangers of misplaced loyalty. Politicians who prioritize their party over constitutional principles undermine the rule of law for political gain.

When citizens grant blind trust to leaders who claim to act in their name, they surrender their role as participants in a constitutional republic. And when government agencies or courts assume that their own preservation is more important than the principles that justify their existence, they cease to serve the people and start serving themselves.

True constitutional loyalty demands both vigilance and humility. It requires citizens to question authority, even the authority of those they admire, and to measure every action against the Constitution’s enduring text and spirit.

Loyalty is not about reverence for parchment, but for principle: the belief that no one, not even the highest officeholder, stands above the law. It calls upon Americans to defend freedoms of speech, religion, press, firearms, and due process when doing so is unpopular or inconvenient.

Moreover, loyalty to the Constitution requires a civic imagination that extends beyond partisan lines. The document’s preamble, beginning with “We the People,” does not define citizenship by ideology or identity, but by shared commitment to liberty and justice.

When Americans anchor their loyalty here, they reaffirm the idea that constitutional principles are stronger than temporary political victories or charismatic leaders. The Constitution survives precisely because it does not depend on the virtue of any one person; it depends on the collective virtue of citizens who hold it sacred.

In today’s politically polarized climate, it is crucial to remember where our loyalties lie. Institutions may falter, and leaders may disappoint, but the Constitution endures as the framework through which we continually strive to form “a more perfect Union.”

To be loyal to it is not to worship tradition. It is to preserve freedom.

The health of American democracy depends on citizens who know that their highest allegiance is not to power, but to principle.