After reluctantly experiencing my first WNBA game, I found myself wanting to know more about the controversy surrounding Caitlin Clark, one of the league’s brightest young stars. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was knee deep in research about a bigger controversy: the so-called “gender pay gap” in women’s sports.

Take a look at what I dug up and let me know if you came to the same conclusions I did.

Just One Thing: Drug Trafficking in the Military 

I came across the following little essay by John Leake, a writer I follow, in Courageous Discourse – a good source for content about Big Government, Big Business, Big Health, and Big Media.

He writes about a murder he once investigated that was committed by a soldier who had recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan – and then he recommends an interview that Tucker Carlson did with Seth Harp, the author of The Fort Bragg Cartel, a book about another murder (a double murder) involving members of Delta Force, the most elite unit of soldiers in the American military.

Read the article. Watch the interview. And then you can decide if you want to read the book. Or you can wait till they make a movie about it, for they surely will.

I’ve been hitting you up with some hard-core political and economic stuff lately, so I thought I’d give you a break and put out an issue of visual briefs – a curated collection of about 20 short videos culled from about 60 I clipped in the past 30 days.

Enjoy them. I’ll be back to my job of irritating your happiest thoughts and beliefs in another few days.

I got an email from a friend – a successful, well-educated man. He shares many of my views on economics and business, but his views on public health are what I’d call “conventional.” Which means that he has always thought my ideas about COVID – the virus, the government reaction, and the vaccines – were crazy.

Attached to his email was an article published in a mainstream media outlet arguing that the “facts” promoted in 2020 through 2023 by the World Health Organization, the NIH, and the CDC were basically valid – that COVID was a deadly virus and that the shutdown of our economy and the mandates on masks and distancing and vaccinations saved millions of lives.

I was going to dissect and dismember the article. It would have been easy because it was so full of factual errors and long-since-disproven claims. But I thought that rather than spend a half-hour on that I’d spend a few hours collecting the many reports being published these days that support my position – especially my belief that the vaccines did more harm than good.

So, that’s what I did last night. I spent about four hours putting together no fewer than 30 reports on no fewer than 20 recent studies – all of which were scientifically valid and half of which were based on sizeable populations. And then, when I went to save it, the damn thing somehow disappeared!

I spent another hour and a half unsuccessfully trying to retrieve it before I realized that any attempt to help my friend see the truth by overwhelming him with evidence would be futile. Like many major public issues today, the debate on the lethality of COVID and the effectiveness of the vaccines has been, for most people, rooted in personal political prejudices, all of which are supported regularly by bad or good data and arguments located and delivered based on algorithmic fingerprints.

So, following that logic, I decided that, instead, I should be writing a piece about why I’m not going to bother to write about the COVID story anymore.

But by a happy coincidence, one of the COVID-related articles that slipped into my inbox this morning was a new report on “all-cause mortality studies” – which, because I didn’t fully understand how important they can be in the vaccine debate, I hadn’t included in my previous reporting.

“Hell,” I thought, “let me give it another try.”

And so I did.

But before I get into that, here’s something that might help to bring my friend over to my side on COVID, even if he isn’t willing to consider the all-cause mortality argument…

I read yesterday that Kash Patel said that he and his team had uncovered evidence that almost everything the government health organizations and mainstream media have been telling the public for five years was wrong. Not just wrong, but consciously propagated bullshit.

His team is in possession of documents and communications showing that officials in government agencies worked with Big Pharma lobbyists and liaisons to suppress critical information – about the virus’s origins, vaccine safety, and even effective treatments – that was brushed aside.

“The full story will be revealed soon,” Patel promised, and “it’s going to shake up a lot of people’s beliefs about this entire pandemic.”

We’ve been promised full reports before that haven’t materialized, so I’m going to hope for the best but prepare for worst by assuming that none of that info will see the light of day – and by doing the next best thing, which is to publish and explain the ugly facts as they are exposed.

Which brings me to this…

Something New… 

Here’s something new I’m thinking of adding to my job of keeping you uncomfortable with your convictions.

If I read something insightful or surprising or newsy that has the potential to upset at least half of my readers – in other words, an article or essay that I believe all my readers should know about – I’m going to help you decide if you want to read it.

To make the process as quick and easy as possible, I’m going to reproduce the piece as I found it, but I will highlight a dozen or so sentences that give you the gist.

I’ll limit the highlighted sentences to less than 200 words in total, so you can skim through the piece in a minute or less.

If those sentences pull you into the piece, then good. You can then go back to the first paragraph and read the whole thing.

Not only that, but in case, after skimming those sentences, you are left with doubts about the creditworthiness of the piece, I’ll lay down some facts in bullet form, which won’t take more than another minute to read.

How’s that for service?

I’m going to kick this off today with an article by James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal about crime in DC.

But first, a story about my own experience with it…

It’s time for my annual report on the comment my publishers tell me they most often get from our readers:

“Mark writes about business, entrepreneurship, investing, and all sorts of other ways of building wealth, but what is he actually doing now with his money?”

It’s a fair question, and I don’t mind answering it. In fact, I don’t even mind giving away details in some cases to illustrate the ideas behind my decisions. But I do worry that because my strategy for building wealth is so much bigger and smarter and safer than just a stock portfolio, many readers, looking for a half-dozen super stock picks, will find it too much for their taste.

But that’s not stopping me from doing it again this year. What you are about to read is a 100% frank and open report on everything I’m doing to make, grow, and safeguard the wealth I’ve accumulated in the past 42 years, as well as several new things I’m doing that I’m excited about, some of which may surprise you.

Note: I’m not a broker or financial advisor. I’m a businessperson who has spent the better part of my life working in the center of the Financial Industrial Complex, working with some of the brightest minds in the business, learning from the sharpest analysts, listening to the smartest economists, and paying attention to the millions of ordinary investors that subscribe to these experts and make their decisions accordingly.

So that’s the “Main Course” for this issue.

But first, I want to share a few more thoughts I have had about the Portuguese since returning from Lisbon on Sunday, including some gross generalizations that I’m pretty sure are 90% true…

A few thoughts about Portugal, the Portuguese people, and the way art is displayed in museums before I get to more serious concerns. Like why are rich Americans buying up property in London? And why did HHS break with the CDC’s COVID vaccine recommendation? Then, in today’s “Main Course,” I get to the big question – the one that’s making me crazy: Why haven’t we heard anything from the mainstream media about the stack of newly released proof about the truth behind the “Russian Collusion” story?

Today, I take an in-depth look at two “local” issues – one on the East Coast (the Mamdani question) and one on the West Coast (the failure of San Francisco) – that have potentially serious consequences for everyone in the country.

Still Digging into the Epstein Files Fiasco 

In the last issue, I promised to write a follow-up piece on the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco. I’ve been reading truckloads of reports and opinion pieces published since then, and I’m collecting some interesting facts and theories. I’m more convinced now that Trump’s one-eighty on this story was a rashly conceived and terribly executed cover-up to protect him and who knows who else. But I don’t yet have enough meat on this bone to serve it to you. Maybe I will next week.

In the meantime, several more presidential scandals have been revealed through recently released FBI documents. I thought I’d cover them briefly in this issue because, although they are things I already believed to be true, they look to be worse than I thought. So, I’m going to make this a Just-the-News-on Trump issue and get it out to you right away.

Next week, I’ll put together a “regular” full issue.

Last week’s issue  was devoted entirely to the topic of “happiness.” I’m sure that pissed off a lot of readers. I can’t say I blame them. All this happiness stuff is embarrassing. And, as I mentioned in that issue’s “Just the Facts” section, it’s contagious.

I’m going to make up for it today. Nothing but bad news and views.

Starting with my take on “the Epstein thing.”