Nothing Is Certain Except Death And Taxes - How A Determined Woman Tried To Cheat Both

Sarah Marshall was a reasonably intelligent woman who had been brought up in an atmosphere of respect, responsibility and above all objectivity.  Although her mother was a rabid IRA supporter and significantly drew down the family's treasury every St. Paddy's Day, she was otherwise a practical, obedient housewife who made her own clothes and saw to the good Catholic upbringing of her daughters. 

 

Coleen Marshall (nee O'Shaughnessy) had been brought up in the solidly Irish neighborhood of The Forks, a lesser Old Country redoubt than South Philly or Revere, but still one of Guinness, drunkenness, and feisty radicalism.  By the time Sarah was old enough to realize the very seditious nature of her mother's dealings, the whole IRA thing had been settled, and Londonderry was just another English neighborhood; but her mother never let up on the idea of Irish sovereignty and independence.  To be Irish, she said, was to be closer to God. 

Perhaps because the Marshall family was always on the economic margin, or perhaps thanks to old grandmother Bridey O'Shaughnessy who never spent a farthing unless it was gruel for her youngest and who stitched together bits and pieces of odd ends of cloth from formal fittings, Sarah was a most parsimonious and financially careful woman.  She had an innate sense of value, one that never was relative but absolute.  A pair of knickers, a set of tires, floorboards for the kitchen all had a given, innate worth, and no opportunity cost or relative value nonsense ever got in the way of her calculations. 

Conservative economics and practical accounting were as much a part of her doxology as was A Mighty Fortress or the counsel of St. Paul.  There was no give, no accommodation, no compromise in her mighty, defiantly practical world view. 

 

All of which stood her in good stead, for thanks to her and her careful financial husbandry, she and her family were sitting on a handsome portfolio.  She had along the way become a successful estate planner, investment counselor, and wealth management consultant. 

It was when she took her moral rectitude to the barricades of Chicago that the wheels of the bus started to wobble.  As much as she tried to protect and shield her family's wealth from the irresponsible spending of the City Council, she ran into unforeseen obstacles.  The codes, internal legislation, and complex tax investment instruments were so complex that even she could not sort them out; and so she burned the midnight oil week after week looking for a way to safeguard her investments and her children's legacy. 

She became an obsessed woman, and all other interests fell by the wayside.  Her book club, of which she had been a member for years waited in vain for her items to put on the agenda.  Whereas in the past she had been a tiger, a one-woman lobby group for popular woman authors - The Heart And Soul of the South, a treacly, overwritten romantic novel intending to display the pluck of Southern womanhood was her favorite - she was rarely to be seen except in eyeshade and poor lighting over an Excel spreadsheet on her PC. 

Short of banging on the door of the City's CFO - a position which suggested financial rigor but which in reality was a rubber stamp position at the behest of the radically liberal city council - Sarah could only work the ins and outs of legalities, codicils, provisions, and offerings. 

'It can't be', she howled to her accountant. 'It's just not right'; but for all her emotional Sturm und Drang, the city's case was airtight.  They were coming after her millions to be distributed among the poor and disenfranchised, and so be it. 

The accountant suggested a well-known tax attorney who had successfully litigated major corporate lawsuits, but Sarah, always under the legacy and influence of the old O'Shaughnessy morality, hesitated.  She knew enough about wills, estates, trusts, and post-mortem affairs to go it alone. 

Yet the municipality was a bastion of inbred progressivism, and had been bolstered over the years by savvy liberal lawyers; so the fight, once engaged, would be tough sledding. Nevertheless, she went full steam ahead. 

'Opportunity cost', her husband advised.  At this precarious later stage of life, shouldn't one be more concerned with one's soul and The Great Beyond?

'Frivolity', she retorted.  'Head in the sand ignorance', and proceeded with hours-long searches for ways around the punitive measures of the city estate law.  Meanwhile, the family portfolio, thanks to blue chip investments and savvy off-market flyers in iridium and cobalt, kept growing; and she was sitting on at least $50 million, most of which she and her husband would never be able to spend. 

In a hateful, spiteful, and vengeful fight against municipal bullying, she held her ground, but at the expense of the anticipated benefits of retirement - access to old, persistently engaging interests, grandchildren and the metaphorical chaise lounge.  There were no reflections about her past life, no consideration of the unknowable future, not one thought given to death, dying, and the meaning of it all.

 

She was goner, and she would die in her traces, a fitting enough end for a seriouswoman. 

'We won!' she garbled through the breathing tube, holding up the official document from the City of Chicago; but no one else cared. She was buried without ceremony or fol-de-rol, her descendants tearful at the loss, but unconcerned with the elaborate financial dossier she left.  

Such is the nature of life and legacy- important to some, irrelevant to most others,

Trump, Zelensky, And The Food Fight In The Oval Office - Great Television And A Harbinger Of Things To Come

Donald Trump was not 'acting presidential', observed commentators on the Left; but what is such thing other than an outdated, miscast version of reality?  Who but the dumbfounded Left could imagine that a President must be a gentlemen, a man of carefully chosen words, a philosopher king, a man of sincerity, honesty, and moral principles; and that a vaudevillian, a tummler, a crude, crass, uninhibited man of Las Vegas runways, Hollywood glitz, and New York real estate deals could never, ever be President of the United States? 

 

His DOGE blitzkrieg, his flurry of dismantling executive orders, his outspoken reversal of supposedly absolute, sanctified foreign policy; his outrageous personal attacks and refusal to bow and scrape to received wisdom, ceremony, and expectations are to be expected.  Why should a man of the mean streets, a brawler, bar fighter, and gunslinger make nice with those who have tried over the past ten years to disgrace, cancel, and destroy him? 

No one but the most one-sided Trump haters was surprised at the dustup in the Oval Office where Trump and Vance put the arrogant little Ukrainian pecker in his place.  Zelensky has received trillions in military and economic assistance from the United States, much of which has either gone down the rathole or into Swiss bank accounts, and at the very least has propped up a tinpot imperator who has bilked and milked the United States for years

   

Zelensky, said the Biden Administration, was fighting for the survival of democracy against a dangerous, opportunistic, imperialistic power which if not stopped would move on all fronts to create a Russian caliphate, a hegemonic rule over all of Europe.  Biden, for all his pompous posturing, never had the chutzpah to confront Russia, to use American military force to defeat the enemy; but instead sat back in his dotage on Pennsylvania Avenue content to pass on billion dollar contracts to American arms dealers and bask in the limelight of as a hero of freedom. 

A new world order has been established in less that two months.  Gone is American exceptionalism, defiance from afar, the glorification of American democracy as a higher-order moral value; and in its place is a hard and fast Machiavellian realpolitik, an America first policy of realistic alliances, objective risk assessment, and preview of gain.  

 

The new axis of power - the United States, Russia, and China - will indeed rule or at least dominate world affairs; and the relationship among them, while always suspicious and at times contentious, will result in power-based accommodation, give and take within well-understood and -respected parameters, and a stable world. 

Ukraine has only one value to the United States - rare earths - and the United States is right to ask for a large share of them in repayment for its past military support. The era of free lunch is over.  Contracts, international agreements, and arrangements will from now on be based on a payment due basis. 

Donald Trump knows that to continue an adversarial relationship with Russia and China will only exclude the United States from what would be a dyad of power instead of a triad.  The innate, instinctive, self-preservational motivation of all human beings are applicable in geopolitics - stick to your own kind - and in this case the rich, the powerful, and the mighty are birds of a feather, not the has-beens and wannabes of the world

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And so the little guy was put in his place in the Oval Office.  This shabby political shaman was told to love it or leave it, sign on the dotted line or go home.  So Zelensky was shown the door and then to no one's surprise, trots out his begging bowl in Europe where febrile, panicked politicians are ready to pour volumes into the con man's saddle bags.  The Europeans will be taken for a ride just like Biden was, and sooner rather than later they will realize that they are impotent. 

'The only reason the EU exists is to screw us', said Trump, so begone with them, and see what life is like without the old traditional bending over at the ankles NATO obeisance and American greenbacks. 

Faded progressive academics like Jeffrey Sachs says that the unceremonious booting of Zelensky by Trump opens the door to unrestrained Russian expansionism and Chinese regional imperialism. He is wrong to assume that the new Trump realpolitik will give carte blanche to predatory regimes; but right to note that the Administration will decide whether Tibet, the Uighurs, and Taiwan are worth fighting over, worth the effort in practical, objective terms. 

The members of the new axis will weigh their options very carefully.  The new world order of power sharing and accommodation is not without risk.  Trump, Putin, and Xi are smart men and certainly smart enough to know how to maintain parity in the highest stakes card game of them all. 

The Left is flabbergasted.  This is beyond belief, beyond their worst fears.  Not only is an SS-style pogrom underway in Washington, with storm troopers smashing down doors, rounding up bureaucrats, and loading them on cattle cars bound for some Sobibor or Auschwitz in North Dakota, but the careful, respectful diplomacy of Christian Herter, George Bush I and the old guard WASP diplomats of the past is history.  The Doomsday Clock has inched more towards midnight.  Hell is upon us.  The End of Days is nigh.

This is only the beginning, and the flabbergasted Left is at sixes and sevens, discombobulated and lost.  All they have managed is more of the same hot air blown at Trump during the election, vaporous nonsense.

So, Zelensky is out on the street, and Putin and Xi have been invited to tea.  The way it should be, the way it always had to be.  Only those in coastal caves never saw this coming.  The rest of America did and is cheering.

Poverty Is A State Of Mind - The Slave Mentality Of Entitlement

Washington, DC Mayor for Life Marion Barry was a master politician who remained in power for decades thanks to walkin' around money, no-show jobs, and millions of dollars paid from the public treasury to reward his constituents.  To black Washington he was a hero, to white Washington he was nothing but a crook, thief, and con man. 

 

Remembered for 'It'll melt', his retort to wealthy white residents who complained that snow still made their streets impassable and demanded municipal action; 'Get over it', to the same white voters who in a bloc voted to remove him from office but whose efforts were for naught as black Washington overwhelmingly returned him; and 'The bitch set me up', an angry response to federal agents who had burst in on him smoking crack, Mayor Barry was impervious to white justice, deaf to white concerns, and a champion of Ward 8. 

LaShonda Evans was  an old Barry girlfriend he had met on one of his walk-arounds.  She, a brazen, cocky, uppity black woman, child of the streets, high bitch and nobody's fool offered herself to the Mayor and said, 'No strings attached', the kind of woman Barry liked, befriended, kept in his harem and called upon when needed.  

Each woman in the harem had a particular allure - Letitia with the long, ferocious nails he loved raked along his back; LaToya who howled like a she-wolf when she sat on his face; and the lovely Mabel, church-going daughter of an Alabama preacher come to the Nation's Capital for wealth and some kind of recognition after a miserable childhood in a tarpaper shack, who prayed over him as she worked his body to a fever pitch. 

Yet LaShonda was Sultaness of the harem, the primus inter pares among women but also counselor, consigliere, and confidant in business matters.  Together they ran every kind of scam, scheme, and subterfuge to bilk white people out of their millions, siphon it to the poor, and take a hefty cut for themselves.  Kickbacks were child's play to these two - a few million from a developer, another few from the construction company - what they wanted was a steady gross income, a reliable source of funds for 'The Community'; and so they invented financial instruments the envy of Enron and the Wall Street Ponzi schemes of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. 

Barry and LaShonda led the good life.  She, as Chairwoman of Pride, Honor, And Courage the NGO cover that was accredited by the city council, was the liaison, the ombudsman, the intermediary between the Mayor and white liberal Washington, easy marks for their universal support for the black man, racial pride, and the social and economic progress of the inner city.  

These dyed-in-the-wool progressives bit their tongues at voting time - the black man might be the rightful heir to human regency and soon would sit atop the social pyramid, but Barry's indifferent mismanagement of their tax dollars nettled, a burr under the saddle.  So they invested in private, non-profit agencies like LaShonda's, hoping that their monies would be put to better use than the no-questions-asked entitlement money engineered by Barry. 

It was brilliant.  Barry appropriated millions in shady doings via the tax system and unofficial emoluments from big capitalist developers who simply wrote Barry's favors into their balance sheets; and political liberals - public interest lawyers, professors, and social reform lobbyists - added to the Mayor's coffers via LaShonda and her agency. In short, white Washington was dunned, bilked, threatened, and cajoled and poured millions Barry's way. 

Now Anacostia, the deep, dark, nastiest slum of Washington is fly-over territory for white Washingtonians, and even those with the greatest fervor for the plight of the black man stay away.  No Congressional oversight, no federal agency investigation ever set foot anywhere near it, and so the money poured in was absorbed, sucked, savored, and forgotten. 

From a governance point of view, it was the perfect storm - a devaluation of enterprise, the perpetuation of a culture of entitlement, and enough free money to keep the crack flowing, the police at bay and personal responsibility far from the door.  

It was a case of moral collusion at its worst.  White liberal Washington felt that poor blacks were entitled to a free ride after centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.  Black official Washington saw easy money to be made from the ghetto and perpetual power guaranteed, Congress had written off the District under the cover of Home Rule and didn't think too much of what they considered a racial sinkhole within sight of the Capitol, and as long as developers got to build to the height limit, they were happy. 

'Poverty is a state of mind', said former black Trump cabinet member Ben Carson, a man who had rejected entitlement, and was brought up with American entrepreneurial values and ambitions.  He refused to be enslaved by affirmative action, DEI, and white patronage.  The only way out of the perpetual black slum, was subscription to white values. 

For this he was dunned and hammered, an Uncle Tom, a turncoat, a traitor to his people; but he was undaunted.  The longer the black man bowed to black massas, let themselves be used and abused by preachers, drug runners, and ho's, he would be pimped to death, left to die of a bullet to the head on the very street where he was born. 

Mayor Barry and LaShonda Evans are long gone, but little has changed in Anacostia or official Washington. The City Council appropriates millions in barely disguised walkin' around money - self-help schemes, drug rehabilitation centers, community organizations, programs of diversity, equity, and inclusivity - without an iota of accountability.  Black preachers, aided, abetted, and financed by white liberals continue to crow about endemic, systemic racism. Teachers unions continue their fight against school choice, and despite over $25K per student annually, the schools are little more than lockups.  Truancy is over 50 percent, and performance is among the worst in the nation.

President Donald Trump has expressed a personal interest in the affairs of the District of Columbia.  It is intolerable, he says, to have the seat of federal government within the most poorly governed, shamelessly entitled, indifferent city in the nation. Only by withdrawing all federal funds for the hopelessly racist, political schemes that have been business as usual for the District, and by insisting on a sink-or-swim ethos of individual responsibility, can there be any hope for the persistently rotting, foul, and crime-ridden slums of the capital. 

We wish him luck.