Medical science may be on the verge of identifying a previously unknown psychiatric disorder.

Kamalosis: A rare condition characterized by compulsive cackling, geographically unstable accents, delusions of profundity and an advanced inability to recognize that one has become one’s own parody.

Yes, Kamala Harris is back with cackle—and more!

And nobody seems entirely certain why.

Certainly not the voters who decisively trounced her in November 2024. And even her own party is dubious.

But there she is, crisscrossing America, grinning, gesticulating, cackling and delivering speeches in an assortment of accents that would exhaust the dialect coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Detroit. Sacramento. Las Vegas. New Hampshire. Wisconsin. Georgia.

Officially, she’s campaigning for Democrats in the midterms.

Unofficially, she’s auditioning for a another presidential campaign.

Her performances are so extravagantly Kamala that she has become a caricature of herself. Any comedian attempting an impersonation would struggle to be more humorous—or tragic—than The Kamel herself.

Which brings us back to Kamalosis.

Symptom One: Spontaneous Cackle Syndrome

The patient erupts into prolonged, high-decibel laughter—without the presence of a joke.

This is a a sound suggesting that a hyena has swallowed a car alarm.

Her supporters call it infectious.

So is measles.

The laughter may occur during interviews, political speeches, difficult questions or while contemplating the price of groceries.

Meanwhile, the afflicted appears unaware that nobody else is laughing.

Symptom Two: Acute Accent Migration

The patient’s speaking voice undergoes sudden geographical transformations.

In Detroit, she may sound as though she has spent 30 years in a Motown sausage factory.

In Georgia, her vowels suggest she’s been eating succotash.

I’d pay good money to hear her address the Scottish National Party.

Symptom Three: Chronic Platitudinal Inflation

The patient loses the ability to communicate a simple thought without transforming it into a grand philosophical revelation.

A normal person might say, “It’s Tuesday.”

A Kamalosis sufferer says: “We must recognize that Tuesday is not merely a day. It is a moment in time, and that moment is now, because now is the moment in which we find ourselves.”

In New Hampshire, she announced that an election was coming.

In Wisconsin, she proclaimed that the period of feeling powerless was over, saying something like “power is what empowers us to feel the power of being empowered, because when we understand our power, we understand that powerlessness no longer has the power to make us powerless.”

The sufferer delivers such revelations with the solemnity of Moses descending Mount Sinai, accompanied by vigorous hand gestures, as though conducting an invisible orchestra whose musicians have all gone home.

In short, a Kamala Harris speech is like a series of mangled fortune cookies.

The future is ahead of us.

Tomorrow follows today.

We must do what must be done because what must be done must be done.

Then she laughs.

Some of us are befuddled; others laugh out loud.

Symptom Four: Progressive Self-Caricaturization

The afflicted gradually exaggerates every recognizable personal mannerism until she becomes indistinguishable from a professional impersonator.

The laugh rises in volume. The gestures become grander. The accents become more adventurous. The platitudes become longer.

Eventually, the sufferer reaches a condition known as Total Parodic Convergence.

Imagine Kamala at Home, Making Breakfast

“Doug, we must understand that the eggs we cook today are the eggs that will nourish us tomorrow, because nourishment is about being nourished!”

HA! HA! HA!

(Doug quietly retreats behind the refrigerator.)

Treatment and Prognosis

Currently, there is no known cure for Kamalosis.

The prognosis, for Kamala, is poor.

This is partly because, wherever The Kamel goes, some people continue to applaud as she explains that tomorrow is the day after today.

Which raises the possibility that her state-to-state itinerary is actually a tour of America's lunatic asylums.

The British Empire once ruled a quarter of the world.

Its armies conquered continents. Its navy commanded the seas. Its monarchs presided over territories upon which the sun never set.

But on Sunday, in Antigua, the British monarchy encountered an adversary for which it was spectacularly unprepared.

Rain.

King Charles III was attending celebrations marking Antigua’s 45th anniversary of independence. And the heavens opened.

It is then that His Majesty discovered, to his considerable consternation, that nobody had thought to provide him with an umbrella.

A constitutional crisis was unfolding.

Charles raised his arms. He gesticulated. He appeared to mime the shape of an umbrella, presumably for the benefit of his shocked and awed courtiers.

“Where’s the umbrella?” he demanded.

No umbrella materialized.

For a monarchy that employs an entire household devoted to anticipating the sovereign’s every conceivable need, this represented a protocol failure of staggering proportions.

Somewhere in Buckingham Palace, one imagines, an emergency meeting will be convened.

The Lord Chamberlain will be informed.

The Royal Meteorological Liaison Officer—if such a person does not exist, one surely will by Wednesday—must explain how precipitation had penetrated the King’s person.

This is a country that has maintained a monarchy for more than a thousand years, perfected the art of queuing, developed elaborate protocols for forking fish, and established a constitutional arrangement under which a man may be King without ever expressing an opinion.

Yet nobody had established a procedure for keeping him dry.

There will be recommendations.

A new protocol.

An Umbrella Readiness Task Force.

Possibly a dedicated Equerry for Precipitation, with a deputy for drizzle.

It is worth remembering that Charles has previous experience with catastrophic failures.

In 2022, shortly after ascending the throne, he was betrayed by a leaking fountain pen.

The offending instrument deposited ink upon the royal fingers, provoking an outburst of indignation that briefly threatened the stability of the Commonwealth.

A pen.

Now an umbrella.

One shudders to imagine what might happen should a royal shoelace snap.

For years, I thought of Carroll Quigley only as a dedicated historian and towering intellect.

The man who could explain the rise and fall of civilizations with the ease that most people describe last weekend’s football game—which, by his thinking, was the new opiate of the people to keep them distracted from policies devised with sleight of hand from behind the scenes.

Only recently, while researching his life for this series of posts, did I discover another Quigley

In 1968, the professor purchased an 82-acre farm near Glengary, West Virginia. It became his refuge from Georgetown University, Washington DC, and academia. There, the historian who’d spent his days, months and years studying the evolution of civilizations and empire building, devoted himself to something somewhat smaller.

Bluebirds.

In letters to friends, Quigley wrote affectionately of successive generations of bluebirds that nested on his property, getting to know them one by one as individuals. He observed their habits, personalities, courage, and quirks with the same patient attention he once applied to history.

When someone complained about raccoons raiding rubbish bins, Quigley offered an unexpected response: Why fight nature? Better to understand it.

He delighted in feeding a fox each evening, watching it carry the choicest morsels back to its mate and young before returning for its own supper. Ever the observer, he even timed the fox’s round trips.

To the public, Quigley was formidable—a historian, teacher, and (to his chagrin) a controversial thinker.

The private Quigley found equal satisfaction in birdsong, wildlife, and the rhythms of a West Virginia hillside.

An evening by the fire and Beethoven on the radio became as rewarding to him as discovering a new treasure trove of historical archives.

And why should this be surprising?

The best historians are, first and foremost, observers.

They notice what everyone else overlooks.

After learning about Quigley’s life on the farm I experienced a curious dream.

I found myself visiting him there. His wife served champagne while he and I conversed in the farmhouse kitchen.

I accidentally chipped my glass, and someone warned me that a tiny splinter had lodged beside my eye. Carefully, I reached up with my little finger, lifted it away—and discovered it wasn’t glass at all, but a minute insect. I placed it gently on my plate, from which it crawled away unharmed.

So why did my subconscious take me to Quigley’s farm instead of his classroom?

The lesson wasn't about history.

It was about how to see.

Pay attention to detail. The smallest details often reveal the largest truths.

Across much of Europe, November 1st is a day for visiting the dead.

In France, families arrive at cemeteries carrying chrysanthemums. In Italy, graves are cleaned and decorated with flowers. In Spain, relatives gather to remember those who have departed.

And in Poland, something extraordinary happens. As darkness falls, cemeteries begin to glow.

Thousands upon thousands of candles illuminate the graves, transforming entire burial grounds into shimmering cities of light.

The occasion is All Saints’ Day, a Christian feast honoring those who have attained heaven.

Strictly speaking, November 2—All Souls’ Day—is devoted to remembering and praying for the faithful departed. But across Europe, the two observances have become intertwined.

In France, La Toussaint is a public holiday. In Italy, Ognissanti is followed by Il Giorno dei Morti. In Spain, Día de Todos los Santos brings flowers to the graves and a curious traditional confection called huesos de santo—saints’ bones.

The living visit the dead. They tidy their resting places. They bring flowers, light candles and speak to those who can no longer answer—an ancient human impulse expressed through Christian tradition.

And beneath the flowers, the prayers and the flickering candlelight lies a question considerably older than Christianity.

Where have they gone?

Not their bodies. We know where those are.

But the personalities we loved. The voices we remember. The consciousness that once animated those familiar faces.

Has everything simply vanished?

Or has something survived?

For thousands of years, philosophers, priests and initiates into ancient mystery schools have attempted to answer that question.

Among those who devoted a lifetime to examining their answers was Manly Palmer Hall.

The Mystery of the Afterlife

Yesterday, Halloween, we contemplated the skull.

Today, All Saints’ Day, we contemplate what happens after what once accompanied the skull finished its earthly business.

Does consciousness survive death? Does the soul continue its journey? Or is death simply the end of the performance with no encore?

Humanity has been wrestling with these questions for thousands of years.

Some of the most sophisticated answers emerged long before Christianity.

In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, published in 1928, Manly P. Hall examined the mystery traditions of Egypt, Greece, Persia and other ancient civilizations.

He believed their rituals concealed profound teachings about the nature of existence, the immortality of the soul and the possibility of spiritual transformation.

For Hall, death was not necessarily the opposite of life.

It was a transition.

But to where?

The Egyptian Experiment

The ancient Egyptians took death seriously.

Very seriously.

They constructed enormous pyramids, developed elaborate embalming techniques and furnished tombs with everything a deceased aristocrat might require in the next world.

Food. Furniture. Jewelry. Servants represented by figurines. On the basis—I suppose—that good staff are hard to find and the afterlife might involve housekeeping.

But beneath the elaborate preparations lay a sophisticated religious philosophy.

The human being, they believed, possessed several spiritual aspects.

The ka represented a vital essence. The ba embodied an aspect of individuality capable of movement between worlds. The akh was a transformed spiritual state associated with successful passage into the afterlife.

The deceased faced judgment.

In Egypt, the heart was weighed against the feather of Ma’at, representing truth and cosmic order.

A heart burdened by wrongdoing risked destruction.

A heart found worthy could proceed toward a blessed existence.

The message: How you lived mattered.

And no amount of expensive embalming could compensate for a badly conducted life.

The Secret at Eleusis

The ancient Greeks developed an even more intriguing approach.

For nearly two thousand years, initiates traveled to Eleusis, near Athens, to participate in secret religious ceremonies honoring Demeter and Persephone.

The precise rituals remain unclear because participants were forbidden to disclose them. What we do know is that the ceremonies concerned death, renewal and the possibility of a more hopeful existence beyond the grave.

Persephone’s descent into the underworld and periodic return symbolized the recurring cycles of nature.

Life disappeared. Life returned.

The Roman statesman Cicero praised the mysteries for teaching people not only how to live more joyfully but also how to die without the terror of extinction.

The Soul’s Journey

Plato took the argument further.

In the Phaedo, he portrayed Socrates discussing the soul’s immortality shortly before drinking the poison that would end his life.

Socrates suggested that the philosopher spends his lifetime preparing for death, not cultivating morbidity.

In the Republic, Plato offered the Myth of Er, describing a warrior who dies, witnesses the judgment and reincarnation of souls, and returns to recount the experience. In this account, souls choose new lives. Their choices reflect their wisdom—or lack of it.

Some repeat old mistakes. Others learn. The afterlife becomes a continuation of moral education.

Hall found such traditions compelling because they presented existence as a process of development rather than a single biological episode.

The soul, in this interpretation, is not simply rewarded or punished.

It evolves.

But the philosophical question survives. What if our most important task is not accumulating experiences, possessions or achievements, but developing the consciousness with which we encounter them?

The Christian Transformation

Christianity inherited a world already filled with ideas about immortality, judgment, resurrection and divine salvation—and developed its own understanding of these mysteries.

The Christian promise was not merely that an immortal soul would escape the body. Central to traditional Christian teaching is the resurrection of the dead and the restoration of life through God.

Hall interpreted Christian symbols alongside those of earlier mystery traditions, searching for recurring patterns of spiritual death, purification and rebirth.

The Great Initiation

Hall regarded initiation as a process through which the individual relinquishes ignorance and awakens to a higher understanding.

Symbolic death was central to many of the traditions he studied.

The old personality dies. A new consciousness emerges.

The initiate experiences, while still alive, a transformation that resembles death and rebirth.

This is the question that connects the ancient mystery schools to our own lives.

We spend decades constructing identities.

Our careers. Our reputations. Our grievances. Our cherished opinions.

Eventually, the body dies and these constructions lose their earthly importance.

Perhaps we can surrender some of them beforehand.

The person who learns to observe his thoughts without being governed by them has discovered a degree of freedom that no material possession can provide.

We need not wait until our final breath to experience a kind of rebirth.

What if There is Nothing?

What if consciousness is entirely dependent upon the brain?

Modern neuroscience has established relationships between brain activity and conscious experience, though it has not resolved consciousness.

Nor has anyone supplied scientific proof of survival after death.

Hall’s writings are best understood as explorations of esoteric philosophy, not demonstrations of immortality.

Nevertheless, his insight remains valuable even if death is final.

If this life is all we have, why squander it on trivial resentments, imaginary catastrophes and the endless pursuit of approval?

If consciousness continues, perhaps what matters is the quality of that consciousness.

Either way, the practical instruction is much the same.

Wake up.

Pay attention to this day.

Live in the moment.

This isn’t New Age awareness.

It is Ancient Age wisdom.

The ancient Egyptians weighed the heart.

The Greeks initiated seekers into the mysteries of death and renewal.

Plato imagined souls choosing their destinies.

Christianity promised resurrection and eternal life.

Manly P. Hall searched these traditions for a common philosophical thread: that human existence might possess a spiritual dimension far greater than our ordinary awareness suggests.

The most important question may not be whether we survive death.

It may be whether we have truly learned to live before death arrives.

Freaking unbelievable!

Thumbing back to 9/11, the Bs stop me cold.

It is a report written in Warren’s typical no-nonsense, succinct bureaucratese titled “Bilderberg Group.”

It seems interesting, so with only a tiny amount of battery power left, I use my flash to photograph the room, the boxes, file cabinets and desk set-up.

Then I step out, close the three-orbed door and lock it shut.

We have been taught to fear the skull.

It grins at us from pirate flags, poison bottles and the occasional heavy-metal album.

It means danger. Death. Do not enter.

And, in the case of certain Yale undergraduates, welcome to the club.

But what if we misunderstood the skull entirely?

What if that empty-eyed, toothy remnant of ourselves is not a warning about life’s inevitable conclusion, but an invitation to begin again?

Enter Manly Palmer Hall.

One of the twentieth century’s most remarkable students of ancient wisdom, Hall devoted his life to examining the symbols, rituals and mysteries that civilizations have handed down through the ages.

His monumental 1928 work, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, explored a world in which symbols were not merely decorations but keys to understanding the human condition.

Among the most powerful of those symbols dealt with death. Not necessarily the kind involving a coffin, a funeral director and relatives arguing over the silverware.

Another kind altogether.

The Death That Makes Life Possible

In the ancient mystery traditions Hall studied, initiation frequently involved a symbolic death.

The initiate was required to leave behind an old identity before assuming a new one, on the basis that the ignorant self must perish so that a wiser self might emerge.

Transformation.

The Egyptians, Greeks and later esoteric traditions developed elaborate rituals around this principle.

Death became a metaphor for the destruction of illusion. Rebirth represented the awakening of consciousness.

The initiate did not actually die. He simply emerged from the ceremony with a new understanding of what it meant to be alive.

That was the idea, anyway.

Whether everyone who emerged from such ceremonies was genuinely enlightened is another matter. Humans have always possessed an ability to undergo elaborate rituals without learning a damned thing.

The Skull Has No Ego

Consider the skull itself.

Strip away the flesh, the hair, the carefully cultivated expression, the fashionable spectacles and the expensive dental work, and what remains?

A remarkably democratic object.

The skull of a king looks much like the skull of a beggar. The billionaire’s grin is indistinguishable from that of the fellow who spent his life asking for spare change.

Titles disappear. Reputations are gone, too.

The ego, that indefatigable little public-relations department inside every human being, finally shuts its doors.

The skull is what remains when all our pretensions have departed.

Which is why the skull serves as such a powerful philosophical instrument.

It reminds us that much of what we spend our lives defending—status, vanity, possessions, social standing—is temporary.

And perhaps not terribly important.

The ancient injunction memento mori—”remember that you must die”—was not intended to induce depression. It was intended to encourage perspective.

You are mortal.

Therefore, stop wasting your life behaving as though your social position were a permanent appointment.

Dying Before You Die

The purpose of contemplating death is to improve the experience of living.

Hall’s interpretation of initiatory philosophy repeatedly returns to the idea that genuine wisdom requires an inner transformation.

The old self must be surrendered. Ignorance must give way to understanding.

The person who emerges is not necessarily someone different in appearance. He may still wear the same shoes, enjoy the same breakfast and complain about the weather.

But something fundamental is different.

He no longer identifies quite so completely with the character he has spent his life constructing. He recognizes that the personality is, to some extent, a costume.

And costumes can be changed.

Most of us spend our lives improving the costume. We acquire possessions to decorate it. Achievements to justify it. Opinions to defend it.

And enemies to confirm that it must be terribly important.

The mystery traditions suggest something more radical.

Take off the costume.

Discover who is wearing it.

The Brotherhood of Bones

This is why the skull has been adopted by numerous secret societies, fraternities and initiatory orders.

Most famously, Yale’s Skull and Bones.

Founded in 1832, the society counts American presidents, senators, financiers and other establishment figures among its alumni.

Its emblem features a skull, crossed bones and the mysterious number 322.

And what, precisely, does 322 mean?

Three theories compete for the honor.

Theory One: The Dead Greek

In 322 BCE, the great Athenian orator Demosthenes died after resisting Macedonian domination. Early Bonesmen revered classical traditions, and historical evidence suggests they adopted this date as the beginning of their society’s peculiar calendar.

Theory Two: The Illuminati Connection

Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft. Russell had spent time in Germany, where secret societies were something of a specialty.

Among the most notorious was the Bavarian Illuminati, founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor who believed society might benefit from enlightened leadership operating behind the scenes.

The Illuminati was officially suppressed in the 1780s.

But did it really disappear?

According to a theory popularized by researcher Antony Sutton, Skull and Bones may have been an American offshoot of the Illuminati.

In this interpretation, 32 represents 1832, the year of Skull and Bones’ founding, while the final 2 signifies a second chapter of the original organization.

Theory Three: The Death of Democracy

Also in 322 BCE, Athens lost much of its political independence, and Macedonian authorities restricted citizenship through property qualifications.

Some have suggested that 322 celebrates the replacement of democracy by rule favoring the wealthy.

Given the society’s distinguished roster of presidents, bankers and political grandees, the symbolism would be appropriate.

One might reasonably wonder whether the symbolism reflects an ancient philosophy of personal transformation or simply makes an exclusive undergraduate club feel superior to everyone else.

Manly Hall did not provide a definitive interpretation of Skull and Bones’ particular rituals. But the broader symbolism he examined offers an illuminating contrast.

In the ideal mystery school, initiation was supposed to diminish the ego.

In an elite social network, membership may have precisely the opposite effect.

There is a certain irony in using the symbol of humanity’s ultimate equality to distinguish a small number of people from everybody else.

A skull, after all, is unimpressed by your connections.

The Transformation That Matters

There is no need to join a secret society, memorize a password or submit to a ceremony in a crypt to appreciate the philosophy.

The real initiation is available to everyone.

It begins whenever we recognize that the person we have become is not necessarily the person we must remain. And the accumulated baggage of a lifetime need not accompany us into every new morning.

We can discard what no longer serves us.

We can change our minds.

We can begin again.

In this sense, the skull is not an emblem of hopeless finality. It is a reminder that transformation requires letting something die.

An illusion.

An attachment.

An obsolete version of ourselves.

The Last Laugh

Manly Hall spent much of his life suggesting that the great mysteries of existence were concealed in plain sight. In architecture. In mythology. In religious ceremonies.

In symbols that most people glance at without a second thought.

The skull may be one of the simplest and most provocative.

We look at it and see death.

The philosophical initiate looks at it and sees the possibility of liberation.

Both interpretations begin with the same unavoidable truth: the identity we cherish so fiercely is temporary.

The difference lies in what we choose to do with that knowledge.

We can spend our remaining years desperately defending the person we have always been.

Or we can allow that person to die, metaphorically speaking, and discover what comes next.

The skull, meanwhile, keeps grinning.

Perhaps it knows something we don’t.

Salud Carbajal has been in Congress for almost ten years.

That’s ten years of taxpayer-funded salary, staff, travel, offices, benefits, press releases, ribbon cuttings, ceremonial handshakes and photographs of the congressman looking deeply concerned.

Very deeply concerned.

But after a decade representing Santa Barbara and the Central Coast, a reasonable question presents itself: What, exactly, besides an expression of deep concern have we got to show for it?

What has he actually accomplished?

The Legislative Scorecard

Let’s begin with the numbers.

In the current Congress, Carbajal has introduced 37 bills, according to a legislative tracker updated October 18.

Number becoming law: zero.

Now, zero is not necessarily evidence of incompetence.

Congress is divided. Legislation gets buried. The majority controls the agenda.

But Carbajal has been in Washington since January 2017, serving through Republican and Democratic majorities.

At some point, voters are entitled to distinguish between legislative ambition and legislative achievement.

A bill introduced is not a bill passed.

A press release is not a public policy.

And a photograph holding a shovel is not a completed highway.

To Be Fair

Following the horrific Conception dive-boat fire, which killed 34 people in 2019, he helped secure maritime safety legislation.

And he supported the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.

Credit where due.

But Carbajal’s office claims more than $50 million in funding for local community projects.

Perhaps it might provide a detailed accounting.

Which projects? How much was actually spent? What was completed? What measurable benefits resulted?

And, crucially, how much of that funding was directly attributable to Carbajal rather than federal programs already distributing money?

The Central Coast Reality Check

Meanwhile, back in the district:

Housing remains ruinously expensive.

Young families struggle to establish themselves.

Water security remains a concern.

Insurance costs have become a nightmare for many homeowners.

And public schools face serious questions about academic performance and facilities.

Not all these problems fall within a congressman’s jurisdiction.

But federal representatives possess something valuable beyond their votes.

Influence. Access. Oversight authority.

The ability to summon officials and demand answers.

Where has Carbajal exercised that authority to produce decisive results on the problems that most directly affect his constituents?

A Voice From the District

On October 2, the Santa Barbara Independent published a letter from Angel Rodriguez, a self-described longtime Latino Democratic voter.

Its title was revealing: Where Has Congressmember Salud Carbajal Been for the Last 10 Years?

Rodriguez complained about immigration, housing and a Democratic establishment he believes has failed working families.

He pointedly observed that Carbajal’s clearest achievement appeared to be renaming a post office.

The Incumbency Business

Congress has become an extraordinarily comfortable place to remain.

Once elected, representatives enjoy the considerable advantages of incumbency: name recognition, fundraising networks, party machinery and the ability to issue official announcements announcing themselves.

Every election becomes an opportunity to request another two years to finish the work that somehow never gets finished.

Which brings us to the question of accountability.

Ten Questions for Salud:

We invite Congressman Carbajal to explain:

1. Which five achievements during his congressional career have most directly improved life for Central Coast residents?

2. How many bills he principally authored have become law, including measures incorporated into larger legislation?

3. What measurable progress has he personally helped deliver on housing affordability?

4. What has he accomplished to improve regional water security?

5. What federal oversight has he initiated concerning failures in local public institutions?

6. What has he done to address the insurance crisis affecting Central Coast homeowners?

7. How much federal funding can he document as having been secured through his direct intervention?

8. Which federal agencies has he successfully challenged on behalf of constituents?

9. What major policy has he advanced despite opposition from his own party?

10. Why should voters believe another term will produce results they have not already seen?

These are not trick questions.

They are the sort of questions any elected official should welcome.

Particularly one approaching a decade on the public payroll.

The Verdict—For Now

Salud Carbajal’s voting attendance is strong. His committee work is substantial. He has participated in meaningful bipartisan legislation.

But diligence is not the same as distinction.

Being present is not the same as being effective.

And supporting worthwhile causes is not the same as producing transformative results.

After nearly ten years, Carbajal should be judged not by the length of his résumé but by the weight of his accomplishments.

On that basis, Carbajal’s performance has been vastly underwhelming.

Ten years is a long time to be warming a seat.

This district will never elect a Republican.

The folly of party affiliations.

Which means the Democrats should put up a more dynamic candidate who desires to make a difference.

Because Salud might otherwise serve for another ten terms without hardly being noticed—and without bringing any benefit to the district he blandly represents.

Ira Einhorn had gained weight.

It was two years—and hundreds and hundreds of emails—since I had first met this fugitive killer. His face was now ravaged with stress, cheeks swollen with malevolence, teeth rotting, and gums rotted.

And a short, barrel-shaped body that left a trail of pig-snot.

The only way to fool beezlebub is on his own terms, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other.

So it was that I came head to head with Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, on January 16th, 2001.

We met at Le Claud Gourmand, a Restaurant-Hotel de Charme, halfway between Saint-Claud and Champagne-Mouton.

I extended my right hand, but Einhorn wanted to hug, ensuring that I catch a whiff of his putrid breath.

I checked Einhorn and his wife Annika into Chambre 2 (the FBI’s tab, unbeknownst to him, of course) and myself into Chambre 3. This place wasn’t The Ritz, but it sure beat Hotel Plaisance in Einhorn’s grim village, where I’d stayed last time.

We settled in the parlor for tea and anchovy-filled croissants, and reacquainted ourselves. We had the hotel and restaurant to ourselves—the only guests this day and night.

Einhorn, ever the enthusiastic blabbermouth, desired an update on all my book activities since last we met.

Had I been to Cuba? he asked. How did that go?

I told him about my Cuban escapades: Vesco, Chesimard, Castro, a spy-ring...

Einhorn listened with attentiveness. Then he said just above a whisper: “That’s where my lawyer has advised me to go. Cuba. He says he can make the introductions and arrangements. All my friends have been urging me to flee.”

So here it was. Surprise, surprise.

This stinkard was planning an exit-stage-left.

“But aren’t you watched by the French police?” I asked.

Einhorn nodded. “I have three sets of surveillants,” he boasted. “The local gendarmes, who take turns coming down from Lille, the anti-terrorist squad in Paris, and the federal intelligence agency.”

“So how can you flee to Cuba?”

“Very easy,” Einhorn replied. “I’d only have to walk across my garden.”

“But don’t you have to check in with the cops every few days?”

“I’d have five days before they knew I was gone,” Einhorn whispered. “Annika will stay and pretend all is well. She can’t live underground again.” He paused. “And in a worst case scenario, I have a plan to kill myself. But lets not talk about that in front of Annika. It upsets her.”

The last thing we wanted was for Einhorn to end up in Cuba, where scores of American fugitives freely roam, courtesy of Fidel Castro, who gave political asylum to American criminals, including murderers. And Einhorn was driving distance of Madrid, where he could catch a nonstop flight to Havana.

“Cuba sucks,” I said. “I have another idea—and it sure beats killing yourself.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A plan that will generate massive publicity for your novel.”

“Let’s not talk about it here,” Einhorn whispered. “Later.”

Einhorn suggested a stroll in the grounds.

He pointed out his watchers—one unmarked car with two policemen—and told me most of them had been friendly and sympathetic to his plight; that several had helped him stack firewood and come into his home for New Year’s drinks.

He added, contemptuously, that one had even given Annika a kiss.

Einhorn’s smirk and body language implied that the liberty-loving French were—literally—helping him get away with murder.

“Annika and I are now separate,” said Einhorn.

Annika froze, upset. “Are you saying we’re not married?” she asked him.

“Of course we are,” Einhorn patronized her stupidity. “I mean we’re separate financially. The house is in her name. I have nothing.” Einhorn dug into his blue-jeans pocket and plucked a 200-franc note. “Except this.” He chuckled.

We soon cut indoors from the cold for a round of Pineau. Einhorn seemed anxious to hear my publishing plan for his rancid novel, Cantor Dust.

I laid out this fantasy: We would print 500 deluxe copies, bound exquisitely with slipcovers. They would be numbered. The first 100 would bear his signature. Signed books would sell for $250; unsigned, $100. We would also print 250 bound galleys for reviewers.

Einhorn grew excited. “I need 50 bound galleys,” he said. “I need to demonstrate to the French that I am a man of letters. This will help my case.”

Through our special deluxe edition, I continued the fantasy, we would hope to attract a large publisher to publish a mass-market trade-paper version. Interest would depend, I added, on the amount of publicity Einhorn could generate.

Einhorn nodded. It all made such sense.

“I need an advance,” said Einhorn. “We’re broke.”

The roof was still leaking like a sieve.

“I almost mentioned it to you before you came, so maybe you could bring some money.” Einhorn shrugged, polyester sheepishness. “Is $20,000 possible?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’d have to calculate the total cost of publishing and see what I can afford. Maybe I should have your bank details?”

“Give it to him, Annika,” Einhorn instructed.

Annika dipped into her handbag and produced a handwritten note: Annika’s Bank Account, Annika Flodin, Moulin de Guitry, 16350 Champagne Mouton, France 31-127 246-43 Compte bleu, Banque Generale de Luxembourg, Agence B6L “Royal Monterey” 27, Avenue Monterey, L - 2163 Luxembourg SWIFT B6LL LU LL TEL. 352-4799-2556, FAX. 352-4799-2112.

So no we had Einhorn’s “secret” bank account.

Annika’s concern was timing: How soon could I publish the novel?

“How fast can you correct and return the galleys?” I asked.

“You can have them tomorrow morning,” said Einhorn.

We would be the only dinner guests this evening, he added, so whenever we wanted to eat, they’d serve us.

I suggested we get on with it.

The dining room lights switched on and we took our seats at a round table in the corner.

Proprietor-chef Jean Marc Rougier appeared before us and suggested a five-course truffle dinner.

Who could say no?

Chef Rougier scooted to the kitchen then reappeared, big grin, with a jar of fresh truffles.

I asked him to recommend a fine red wine to accompany our meal.

How about, he suggested, a selection of wine to compliment each course?

You kidding? Do it.

Chef Rougier descended to his wine cellar and returned with three half-bottles of red. The first, a Domane Sant Vincent Saumur-Champgny 1999, he uncorked and poured, then served the first course: warm sliced truffle over a piece of garlic toast on a bed of mixed greens.

It was heavenly.

“What are you reading?” Einhorn asked me.

This was his favorite question, as he considered himself the world’s most voracious reader.

“On Writing by Stephen King,” I replied. “I don’t read books about writing anymore, but I flipped it open at a bookstore and it looked good. I learned a few important things.”

“Like what?” asked Einhorn.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

Needless to say, Einhorn’s novel was paved all the way to hell with adverbs.

The second course was even better: sliced warm truffle with pan-sautéed foie gras in a rich butter sauce, accompanied by Ampelida 1998.

With the French doors closed, Einhorn proclaimed it safe to speak as we moved into our third course: truffle potpie and a Clos les Cotes Pecharmant 1997.

“Poland,” I whispered. “I’ve kept up a relationship with the former underground activists from Solidarity. Using a network of old safe houses, these guys can hide you, and settle you in Krakow. It’s full of intellectuals, like yourself.”

Einhorn absorbed everything. He liked the plan, the best he’d heard, said he. “And very do-able,” he declared.

Traveling by car, Einhorn could cross the border into Germany without identification, then drive across Germany to the Polish border.

“That’s where you would need papers,” I said. “My Polish friends will be able to organize that.”

Einhorn said it would mean separating from Annika. “She can’t live underground again.”

Annika confirmed that an underground existence could no longer work for her; she was happier with the stress of litigation than living on the lam. However, she added, life for Ira in Poland would be better than his plan to commit suicide.

“If the court goes against me,” said Einhorn, “I will kill myself in a very public demonstration.”

“How?” I asked.

“Self-immolation,” replied Einhorn. “I plan to set myself on fire in a public place.”

(When he later heard this, Mike from Philly’s Fugitive Squad quipped, “Can I bring the marshmallows?”)

As much as Einhorn liked my Poland plan, he was in no hurry to leave France and separate from Annika. He believed he had many, many months, perhaps years, before his pro bono lawyers would exhaust their appeals, ultimately—they were hoping—at the Court of Human Rights in The Hague.

Course four: sliced truffle with fried egg.

And finally dessert: truffle inside warm peaches with a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with cocoa powder. A chilled bottle of Sauternes.

This being cognac territory, Chef Rougier poured snifters of the best of the best: Vielle Grande Champagne Cognac Hors D’age Paul Beau.

I suggested a Cuban cigar. Einhorn agreed.

I returned to my room and retrieved two Monte Cristos.

We lit, puffed and drank fine armagnac as we conspired into the night.

Next morning, Einhorn joined me for breakfast and produced his corrected galleys.

Einhorn told me he and Annika had labored intensely; that he was finally satisfied with the novel’s ending:

She once again glanced at him with the eyes of the 19 year-old and calmly walked to the hook on the wall that held the strap they had used to beat each other and shyly smiled at him as she reached for it. Daddy’s little girl was home again.

Again, we agreed to use fax for all sensitive communications. I devised a code for the escape plan. We would refer to this as a documentary. Hence, if I could get him false Polish ID, I would fax: The documentary producer has offered a contract.

As I settled the hotel-restaurant tab, a tough-looking character—shaven head, black leather jacket, commando boots—strode by to get a fix on things.

I went outside, returned to the lobby.

Baldy and his fellow cop were chatting with Chef Rougier.

The plan had called for Annika to drive me to the airport, but when we got in, her Fiat wouldn’t start. A dead battery. By sheer luck, a taxi meant for Einhorn—to take him home—rounded into the forecourt.

“I’ll take the taxi,” I said, not planning to miss my flight—nor wanting to stick around with Baldy.

The French Napoleonic code allows them to hold anyone they want for weeks just for the hell of it. And who knew what they thought of my presence with the man they were either keeping under surveillance—or protecting.

“I must check with Ira,” said Annika, who wouldn’t so much as belch without Einhorn’s permission.

To hell with Ira. I stowed my bag in the trunk, seated myself in the cab.

Annika returned. “Ira says it’s okay.”

As if it really mattered at this point.

Many hours later, beneath a long hot shower in a London hotel, I endeavored to scrub away every last trace of beezlebub’s breath and persona.

Bob Woodward’s forthcoming memoir reveals that among his confidential sources were five Supreme Court justices, presidential lawyers, White House advisers and assorted guardians of the nation’s secrets.

Which raises a fascinating question.

Why do powerful people leak?

And an even better one.

Who benefits?

The DC Plumbing System

Washington is a city where everybody knows something, nobody knows everything, and almost everybody wants somebody else to know what they know.

Preferably without anyone knowing they told them.

A proper leak is intentional. Calculated. Delivered to a carefully selected recipient with the expectation that something useful will happen.

It is an ancient art.

Roman senators whispered damaging intelligence about rivals. Renaissance courtiers slipped information to ambassadors. European monarchs employed agents to spread rumors about their enemies.

Modern Washington industrialized the process.

Today, the capital operates a vast underground plumbing system through which secrets flow from government offices into newspaper columns, television studios and digital publications.

The pipes are invisible.

The plumbers are everywhere.

The Seven Deadly Motives

Why does someone entrusted with confidential information decide to betray that confidence?

In our nation’s capital, there are seven principal explanations.

1. Revenge

The most emotionally satisfying leak.

A bureaucrat gets passed over for promotion. Think Mark Felt, who became “Deep Throat” after President Nixon bypassed him to succeed J. Edgar Hoover.

Suddenly, a journalist receives a telephone call.

“I thought you might find this interesting.”

Translation: That bastard is going to pay.

2. Vanity

An underappreciated official possesses information that would make headlines.

Unfortunately, nobody appreciates how important he is.

Until a famous journalist starts calling.

Now he is a person of consequence.

His name may never appear in print, but he knows that the nation’s political conversation is being shaped by his whispered revelations.

Anonymity can be intoxicating.

3. Self-preservation

A scandal is brewing.

An official realizes that when the explosion comes, he may be standing too close.

Solution?

Leak first.

Establish a narrative in which he was skeptical, concerned, perhaps even courageously opposed.

By the time congressional investigators arrive, the public record already portrays him as the sensible fellow who saw disaster approaching.

A leak can be an advance purchase of innocence.

4. Bureaucratic warfare

Government departments frequently dislike one another more intensely than they dislike foreign adversaries.

The Pentagon distrusts the State Department. Intelligence agencies compete for influence. White House factions conduct private wars over access to the president.

A classified document becomes a weapon.

Why argue with a rival when you can arrange for his foolishness to appear on the front page?

5. Policy manipulation

A government official wants a particular policy adopted.

His superiors disagree.

He therefore leaks information suggesting that failure to adopt his preferred policy will result in catastrophe.

Public outrage follows.

Congress demands action.

The president finds himself responding to a controversy he never expected.

The leaker has effectively bypassed the chain of command and converted a newspaper into an instrument of policy-making.

6. Conscience

Wrongdoing is concealed.

Illegal surveillance. Abuse of authority. Crimes committed under the protective umbrella of national security.

An insider concludes that the public has a right to know.

This is the whistleblower.

Such people deserve serious consideration, and sometimes protection.

But conscience is also the most convenient explanation offered by those motivated by the other six.

7. Deception

The most sophisticated leak of all.

Information is deliberately planted because someone wants the recipient to believe something that is false.

A misleading intelligence assessment. A genuine fact stripped of essential context.

The journalist believes he has obtained a secret.

In reality, the secret has obtained him.

Welcome to disinformation.

The Journalist as Unwitting Agent

Intelligence services understand this game particularly well.

A carefully orchestrated leak can accomplish what an official statement cannot.

It can embarrass a foreign government, unsettle an adversary, sabotage negotiations, influence elections or create uncertainty within an enemy intelligence service.

The beauty of the operation is plausible deniability.

Nobody officially said anything.

A journalist merely reported what a confidential source disclosed.

And the source?

Protected by journalistic ethics.

This creates an intriguing paradox.

The very principle that allows reporters to expose wrongdoing can also protect those who manipulate them.

The journalist becomes a transmission mechanism.

Sometimes knowingly. Sometimes unwittingly.

An experienced reporter understands that sources have agendas. The professional challenge is to extract truthful information without becoming an obedient servant of those agendas.

Not always easy when the source is offering something irresistible.

Such as exclusives.

The Addiction

A scoop is journalism’s equivalent of a narcotic.

It produces excitement, professional prestige and the gratifying knowledge that competitors have been beaten.

Sources understand this.

They know that a journalist who receives privileged information may become emotionally invested in its publication.

They also know that a reporter who develops a valuable source relationship will be reluctant to jeopardize it.

Eventually, each may begin to believe he is managing the other.

The Most Dangerous Leak

Not every leak involves classified information.

Some of the most damaging disclosures concern private conversations, confidential legal advice, personnel disputes or embarrassing personal behavior.

A president discovers that his advisers are describing him as incompetent.

A politician finds that a supposedly private conversation has appeared in print.

The damage may be devastating even when no law has been broken.

Does the disclosure serve the public interest, or merely the private interests of the person disclosing it?

Frequently, the answer is both.

Follow the Beneficiary

When confronted with a sensational leak, the intelligent reader should ask several questions.

Why this information?

Why now?

Why this journalist?

Who suffers?

Who gains?

And, perhaps most revealingly, what does the source want to happen next?

These questions will not always identify the leaker.

But they may illuminate the operation.

Because if information is power—and it is—a leak is one way of exercising that power without accepting responsibility for its consequences.

Washington has perfected the arrangement.

Officials condemn unauthorized disclosures while cultivating journalists who might someday prove useful.

Politicians denounce leaks that embarrass them and celebrate leaks that embarrass their opponents.

Journalists promise confidentiality while knowing that their sources may be conducting private campaigns of revenge, ambition or bureaucratic sabotage.

And everybody insists that the public has a right to know.

Which, of course, it often does.

But the public also has a right to wonder why somebody wanted it to know.

Two billion dollars.

That’s the astonishing sum at the center of an increasingly bitter dispute involving Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

Investigative journalist Matthew Cole, writing in Vanity Fair, alleges that Kushner had access to secret financial arrangements involving approximately $2 billion supplied by the rulers of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while serving in the White House.

The money, Cole contends, was connected to covert diplomatic activities involving the Middle East.

And how did Cole supposedly uncover this remarkable story?

Through Dutch intelligence officers who, according to his account, recruited a Russian GRU hacker and subsequently gained access to Kushner’s iPhone.

But the plot has thickened.

Kushner categorically denies the allegations and has threatened legal action.

The Bank of Israel says it is unaware of the alleged arrangement involving its accounts.

The Jerusalem Post has withdrawn its coverage, citing serious factual questions.

And neither Vanity Fair nor Cole has publicly produced the banking documentation necessary to settle the dispute.

Which leaves us with an extraordinary allegation, an emphatic denial and an unresolved mystery.

Whether Cole’s allegations survive scrutiny remains to be seen.

But the controversy points toward a larger question.

Who conducts American foreign policy when diplomacy moves outside the institutions designed to supervise it?

For another example of America’s increasingly unconventional diplomatic establishment, consider Steve Witkoff.

The Witkoff Method

Steve Witkoff has met Vladimir Putin repeatedly.

And on October 21, during their meeting in St. Petersburg, America's billionaire special envoy offered an extraordinary compliment.

He called Putin a humanitarian.

Yes, Vladimir Putin.

The man whose invasion of Ukraine has produced years of slaughter, shattered cities and displaced millions.

A humanitarian.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis responded: "WTF, Steve?"

An admirably concise assessment.

Witkoff was thanking Putin for releasing an American detainee, Stephen Hubbard.

Fair enough.

But one suspects the State Department's traditional diplomats might have found a less extravagant way to express appreciation.

Witkoff is a real-estate developer and longtime friend of Donald Trump who has, in a remarkably short time, become one of the most consequential American diplomatic figures on earth.

After selling buildings.

There is actually something refreshing about this.

Diplomatic establishments can become intellectually inbred institutions populated by people who attended the same universities, read the same newspapers and spend decades agreeing with one another about why their previous mistakes were actually successes.

Trump looked at that system and essentially said:

I’ll send Steve.

And sometimes Steve gets results.

But the Witkoff model introduces another problem.

Where does diplomacy end and dealmaking begin?

The Lukoil Connection

Anne Applebaum recently raised an intriguing question:

Who is American foreign policy for?

Her question followed reporting that Witkoff and Kushner, while involved in negotiations concerning Russia’s war in Ukraine, had also been connected to discussions surrounding a multibillion-dollar investment involving Lukoil, the Russian oil giant.

Among the prospective investors, Applebaum reported, was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates.

His investment vehicle had purchased a substantial stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial.

Another prospective investor was a Qatari conglomerate controlled by brothers who were also partnering with Kushner and Ivanka Trump on a luxury hotel project in Albania.

And hovering over the entire transaction was the United States Treasury Department.

Because Lukoil is subject to American sanctions.

Which means Washington possesses enormous leverage over whether such a deal can proceed.

Pause here.

The people helping negotiate American policy toward Russia inhabit a world that also contains Russian oil, Middle Eastern money, Trump-family cryptocurrency, Kushner-family business interests and billions in prospective investments.

None of this proves corruption.

But it raises a perfectly reasonable question.

Which hat is everyone wearing?

And perhaps an even better one:

Who is buying the hats?

The Shadow State Department

The State Department still exists.

There are embassies. Ambassadors. Diplomatic cables. Career Foreign Service officers carefully drafting memoranda nobody outside the building will ever read.

But increasingly, the interesting business appears to be happening somewhere else.

Through businessmen. Political allies. Special envoys. Family members. Billionaires. Ideological fellow travelers.

People who know people.

The embassy has not disappeared. It has been bypassed.

Welcome to the Shadow State Department.

It has no headquarters. No seal. No diplomatic corps.

And increasingly, it may be where American foreign policy actually happens.

The Brazil Channel

Relations between Washington and Brasília deteriorated dramatically over the prosecution and conviction of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

Normally, disputes between two large countries are handled through governments.

Foreign ministries talk to foreign ministries. Finance ministers talk to finance ministers. Ambassadors finesse the action.

But Applebaum describes something quite different.

In August 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent canceled a scheduled meeting with Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad.

On the day that meeting had been scheduled, Bessent instead met with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son.

Eduardo wasn’t representing the Brazilian government.

He was, however, extremely well connected to the Trump administration.

Welcome to the new diplomacy:

Credentials optional, connections essential.

Foreign Policy, Inc.

Trump has not merely changed American foreign policy.

He has changed its architecture.

The old system was hierarchical: President. National Security Council. State Department. Ambassador. Diplomatic corps.

The emerging system looks more like a spiderweb.

And occasionally like a spiderweb on LSD.

Trump sits in the middle.

Around him are cabinet officials, special envoys, wealthy supporters, technology executives, family members, foreign political allies, media personalities and assorted intermediaries.

Influence travels sideways.

Anyone who has spent time around intelligence services will recognize the arrangement immediately.

It is a network.

Networks have advantages.

They move quickly. They circumvent bureaucracy. They allow unconventional people to accomplish things conventional institutions cannot.

I know something about that. It is what I did for Prince Albert II in Monaco for five years, running his intelligence service.

But networks also have a weakness.

Accountability becomes difficult to locate.

And when diplomatic interests overlap with private financial interests, something else becomes difficult to locate.

The national interest.

Nothing New Under the Sun?

Official Washington—and the media—should avoid becoming too sanctimonious about any of this.

American presidents have always used private emissaries.

Franklin Roosevelt had Harry Hopkins.

John F. Kennedy had his brother Bobby Kennedy.

Henry Kissinger ran back channels for Richard Nixon.

Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and assorted unofficial operators wandering through the Iran-Contra bazaar.

Foreign policy has never been conducted exclusively by men wearing striped trousers.

What appears different now is scale.

And commerce.

The exception is becoming the system.

The private emissary is increasingly difficult to distinguish from the private businessman.

And the businessman may have a financial interest in the outcome of his diplomacy.

The Real Danger

After World War II, dozens of wealthy, powerful countries voluntarily organized their security and economic systems around the United States.

Governments believed agreements would generally survive administrations.

Allies believed institutions mattered.

Foreign ministers believed that when the American secretary of state said something, he was speaking for the United States government.

Nobody needed to determine whether he was also speaking for a donor, a business associate, a son-in-law, a cryptocurrency investor or somebody who had played golf with the president on Saturday.

Now countries hedge.

Canada looks toward Europe.

Europe discusses strategic independence.

Middle powers cultivate China.

Governments search for alternative technology, trade relationships and defense arrangements because they are no longer certain which America will answer the telephone.

Or who will be holding the telephone.

The Russian Irony

For decades Washington complained about the way Russia conducted foreign policy.

The Kremlin operated through oligarchs, businessmen, intelligence officers and unofficial cut-outs.

Western analysts produced thousands of pages explaining how dangerous this was.

They called it hybrid warfare. Influence operations. Kleptocracy.

For Russians, it was business as usual.

Now Washington is experimenting with its own version.

Perhaps Trump has concluded that the traditional diplomatic establishment is too slow, too ideological and too deeply invested in maintaining the machinery it operates.

He may even have a point.

But dismantling one establishment inevitably creates another.

The striped trousers disappear.

The billionaires arrive.

The bureaucracy gives way to the network.

Diplomacy becomes dealmaking.

And dealmaking becomes diplomacy.

The State Department is still there.

Flags still flutter outside U.S. embassies.

Ambassadors still attend receptions.

But increasingly, if you want to know what America is really doing abroad, don’t watch the embassy.

Watch the president’s friends and family.

Watch them closely.

Guided by Professor Carroll Quigley, I paid a visit to the Liberty Lobby in Washington.

And before long, I found myself connecting dots that had nothing to do with the conclusions Liberty Lobby wanted me to reach.

With the publisher Macmillan out of the picture, Tragedy and Hope had been pirated by an obscure entity called Angriff Press, operating from a post office box in Hollywood, California.

“Angriff” isn’t just a German word meaning “attack.”

It was the title of the official Nazi newspaper founded by Joseph Goebbels in Berlin in 1927.

Angriff Press turned out to be a book publishing front for Willis Carto, who founded Liberty Lobby—a neo-Nazi organization masquerading Nazi beliefs as populism.

It is doubtful Quigley made the connection. He was simply trying to make the best of a disturbing situation. They pirated his book. He threatened to sue. And they came to an agreement with him. Aside from royalties that should be paid to an author, Quigley needed ongoing copies for students of his popular Georgetown University course, Development of Civilization.

The Liberty Lobby was then one of the principal promoters of the radical right’s interpretation of Tragedy and Hope. It was also one of the few places back in 1975 where you could obtain information about a little-known annual gathering called the Bilderberg Group.

Back then, mentioning it in polite company was enough to earn a raised eyebrow and evoke the phrase “conspiracy theorist”—a fairly new invention at that time, having been coined in 1967 by the CIA to discredit journalists investigating the assassination of President Kennedy.

As I later wrote in The Global Manipulators:

I interviewed E. Stanley Rittenhouse, Liberty Lobby’s legislative aide. Rittenhouse solemnly explained the existence of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to rule the world by way of a ‘New World Order.’ To prove his point, Rittenhouse recited passages from a pocket Bible.

“It all goes back to the Illuminati,” Stanley explained to me, referring to a secret society formed in Bavaria in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt. It is based on the philosophical leanings of John Ruskin, at professor at Oxford University in the 1870s and—he said —a secret disciple of the Illuminati.

Rittenhouse also provided me with a report on Bilderberg produced by Liberty Lobby that contained a smattering of news articles by Edith Kermit Roosevelt, the Washington, D.C. correspondent for the Manchester Union-Leader in New Hampshire—a newspaper owned by the notoriously right-wing William Loeb.

I sought out Ms. Roosevelt and she entertained me in the lobby of her apartment building on Connecticut Avenue.

For me, it confirmed the existence of Bilderberg. And since I was taking Dr. Abdul Said’s International Politics course at American University, I told him I wanted to write my term paper on the Bilderberg Group.

He approved. Then he offered two words of advice that were new to me.

Think tanks.

Like Quigley before him, and all good educators, Dr. Said wasn’t trying to give me conclusions.

He was giving me a direction.

So I investigated.

I began by writing to foreign embassies in Washington whose members of government had been represented at previous Bilderberg meetings. If presidents, prime ministers, finance ministers and cabinet officials had attended such a think tank, surely their embassies would acknowledge the group’s existence.

The replies began arriving.

One after another, they all said essentially the same thing.

They had never heard of it.

I decided letters were too easy.

I picked up the telephone.

A diplomat at the Embassy of West Germany sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Bilder... what?” he exclaimed.

He repeated the name slowly, as though hearing it for the first time, before assuring me no such organization existed.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Britain eventually replied to my letter by stating, “Unfortunately, we can find no trace of the Bilderberg Group in any of our reference works. on international organizations.”

Bilderberg had been meeting annually for over 20 years, attended by some of the UK’s most influential political and financial figures in the Western alliance, yet Britain’s own Foreign Office professed no knowledge of it.

As for the U.S. State Department:

Having established that two senior State Department officials—Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Winston Lord—had attended Bilderberg meetings, I contacted Foggy Bottom for more information.

Surely they could answer a few straightforward questions—not least because both officials had attended in their official capacities, i.e., at taxpayer expense.

Instead, their secretaries passed me from office to office, each transfer designating responsibility elsewhere.

Eventually I reached Francis Seidner, who identified himself as a “Public Affairs Adviser.”

I explained that President Gerald Ford himself had attended Bilderberg before entering the White House. Given that fact, why was the government behaving as though the organization did not exist?

There was a pause.

Then Seidner offered advice that was memorable for its brevity.

“Mind your own business.”

For a young student, it was a surprisingly revealing response.

The more doors that closed, the more convinced I became that I was on the right track, asking the right questions.

I traced names. Institutions. Foundations.

The investigation eventually carried me beyond Washington to New York City.

By then I’d accumulated a growing list of names, fragments of correspondence, obscure press clippings, and institutional connections.

Together, they pointed to a “public relations” company called Murden & Company.

When I arrived at Murden’s Madison Avenue office, nothing suggested I had reached the North American gateway to one of the world's most influential annual conferences.

Just a very discreet office well appointed with mahogany paneling and low brass lamps.

Old money clubby.

Murden & Company served as the administrative headquarters of American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc., the nonprofit foundation supporting the conference’s North American activities.

There I met Charles Muller.

Unlike almost everyone else I had encountered during the investigation, Muller did not pretend Bilderberg was imaginary.

Quite the opposite.

Matter-of-factly, he confirmed that the meetings existed and that his office handled their North American administration. Along with Bilderberg’s European Secretariat, it set conference agendas and determined who should be invited to participate, in coordination with a Bilderberg steering committee.

It was an oddly understated moment—a gentle confirmation of a fact that dozens of officials had either denied, ignored, or claimed never to have heard of.

At that instant, my term paper changed.

It was no longer about whether Bilderberg existed. It was about the investigative trail that led to the one office willing to acknowledge it.

That became the topic.

And—for the first time in my academic life—it earned me an A.

Not only: The Diplomatic Pouch—the student-run publication of American University’s School of International Service—ran it as a cover story. (Its editor thereafter caught much flack from his professorial overseers.)

When I returned to London, I rewrote the paper and sent it to Penthouse magazine.

To my astonishment, they bought it—my first published investigation into elite policy networks.

I was 22 years old.

Looking back, I understand that Quigley’s influence extended far beyond the classroom.

He never encouraged me to become a conspiracy theorist.

Nor had he encouraged me to become a debunker.

He encouraged me to become something far more useful.

An investigator.

Conspiracy theorists begin with conclusions and search for evidence.

Good investigators begin with questions and follow the evidence wherever it leads.

That distinction would shape the next 50 years of my life.

It led me into journalism—and later, unexpectedly, into intelligence and espionage.

It took me from Washington to London, Moscow, Havana, Monaco—and beyond.

Along the way I met spies, presidents, defectors, billionaires, terrorists, and more than a few accomplished liars (including a prince).

Some conspiracies proved entirely real.

Most turned out to be more complicated than either believers or skeptics imagined.

Others dissolved the moment original documents replaced recycled allegations—a case of, there’s less here than meets the eye.

Perhaps that was Quigley’s greatest gift.

Not Tragedy and Hope. Nor his theories about the Round Table and elites operating from behind the scenes.

It was a habit of mind.

An insistence that truth deserves evidence.

Oh, and I eventually got round to lifting the veil on Liberty Lobby’s “populist” front— and exposing it as a neo-Nazi organization.

It resulted in a textbook case that landed before the Supreme Court.

Read more about it here…

ONE: RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION

On October 20, The Daily Telegraph exposed how former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, best known for his notorious Trump-Russia dossier, briefed Labour MPs on allegations that subsequently found their way into parliamentary questions and speeches.

Parliamentary privilege protected the MPs from defamation lawsuits over their statements in the Commons.

Among the targets were billionaire brothers Christopher and Richard Chandler.

In 2018, Labour MP Chris Bryant accused them of concealing money from dubious Russian sources and maintaining questionable criminal associations.

The allegations were false; Bryant subsequently apologized.

Christopher Chandler later won an $8 million defamation judgment against American private investigator Donald Berlin, whose 2002 report had contained similar accusations.

But what the Telegraph did not know was where this so-called “intelligence” originated.

The trail leads beyond Christopher Steele.

And beyond Donald Berlin.

The chief architect of a Russian intelligence operation to smear the Chandler brothers was former CIA Eurasia Division Chief William Lofgren, who either wittingly or unwittingly conspired with elements of Russian intelligence to defraud clients while simultaneously spreading Russian disinformation.

It was Bill Lofgren who should have been sued for defamation, criminally prosecuted for fraud—and investigated as a possible traitor in the pay of Moscow.

More about Lofgren here…

SMOKESCREEN: Bill Lofgren, Russian Disinformation & the CIA's Fourth Man

TWO: THE PENTAGON OPENS ANOTHER SPY SHOP

According to an October 21 investigation by The Washington Post, the Pentagon is quietly developing its own deep-cover espionage service, recruiting operatives to masquerade as businessmen to steal economic and technological secrets from China.

In the trade, these operatives are called NOCs—Non-Official Cover officers.

No embassy credentials. No diplomatic immunity. Just a convincing business card, a plausible expense account and the ability to remember your cover story.

The man reportedly organizing this enterprise is Tom Rakusan, a 39-year CIA veteran who rose to deputy director of operations before retiring in 2021.

Rakusan subsequently joined Cerberus Capital Management, the private-equity firm co-founded by Steve Feinberg, now deputy secretary of defense.

Feinberg brought Rakusan into the Pentagon as a senior adviser.

And now, according to the Post, the Pentagon wants its own clandestine intelligence operation.

The Pentagon denies the program exists.

Which, in the intelligence business, is not necessarily conclusive.

There is one rather obvious problem with the Pentagon’s reported ambition to create its own clandestine espionage service.

It already has one.

It’s called the Defense Intelligence Agency.

And within DIA sits the Defense Clandestine Service, established in 2012 to run human-intelligence operations abroad in cooperation with the CIA.

So why does it need another collection of spies?

Is DIA not delivering the goods?

Or does somebody simply want an intelligence operation answering to a different set of masters?

A question that ought to interest Congress.

If the Pentagon already possesses a clandestine intelligence service, what exactly is this new one supposed to do that the existing one cannot?

THREE: THE SAUDI SPY IN SILICON VALLEY

Federal prosecutors have revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi engineer employed by OpenAI in San Francisco, communicated regularly with a member of the Saudi royal family while planting a secret listening device in his employer’s executive conference room.

The room was used for meetings involving senior executives, government officials and business partners.

An MIT-educated engineer who previously worked at Meta, Alfozan earned $385,000 annually and received a $2.2 million equity grant when he joined OpenAI in 2025.

According to the FBI, he used an AI chatbot to research how to build and conceal an audio recorder, encrypt its contents and permit remote access.

The device was plugged into the USB port behind a conference-room television. And wrapped in toilet paper, an ingenious concealment method unlikely to impress Q Branch.

OpenAI security discovered the contraption on September 30.

Investigators then found a second recording device in Alfozan’s bag.

The device’s contents were encrypted.

The story became considerably more interesting when prosecutors disclosed WhatsApp communications between Alfozan and an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family.

The royal reportedly encouraged him to return home and participate in Saudi Arabia’s expanding AI industry.

One message declared that Saudi Arabia needed him more than America.

Alfozan apparently agreed.

But there was a slight complication. He wanted to wait until his OpenAI stock vested.

Even international intrigue must occasionally accommodate the compensation package.

Alfozan was arrested October 9, shortly before a planned one-way journey to Saudi Arabia.

According to prosecutors, a Saudi military official subsequently paid for business-class tickets enabling his wife and son to leave the United States.

They departed the day after his arrest.

On October 19, a federal judge ordered Alfozan detained pending trial, citing a significant flight risk.

FOUR: THE CIA CONTRACTOR, HIS GIRLFRIEND, CLASSIFIED INFORMATION AND SUBSTACK

Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA officer who defected to Moscow, once told me:

“It's the woman who gets you caught.”

Howard knew something about getting caught.

And something about women.

Which brings us to Ian Brinksman, 42, a CIA contractor arrested by the FBI on October 23 and accused of leaking classified intelligence to his girlfriend, investigative journalist Aída Chávez.

Chávez publishes on Substack.

Brinksman held a Top Secret security clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information and had worked for the government before becoming a contractor involved in systems integration.

In an exquisite irony, he coauthored a 2019 study examining insider threats to national security.

According to investigators, Brinksman began a romantic relationship with Chávez, a former correspondent for The Intercept and The Nation, who was establishing her own foreign-policy platform.

In a November 2025 email to a friend, he described helping her build the venture and found the project surprisingly fulfilling.

Brinksman suggested edits and reportedly sought official clearance for articles they coauthored.

The alleged disclosures were not trivial.

Chávez published reporting based on CIA intelligence assessments concerning some of Washington’s most sensitive foreign-policy relationships.

One article alleged that Israeli officials had privately urged the Trump administration to assassinate Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a key figure in negotiations with Washington.

Another described Israeli efforts to make the American strategic alliance virtually irreversible, including discussion of a possible permanent U.S. military base in Israel.

A third concerned a CIA scenario analysis exploring whether Israel’s deepening political and social divisions could produce severe internal instability.

Other reporting examined disagreements among America’s Gulf allies over the war with Iran.

Prosecutors allege that at least five Chávez articles contained information corresponding to classified reports Brinksman had accessed.

Some carried Top Secret classifications.

In September, Chávez even wrote that she had published information from classified CIA assessments because she believed the public deserved to know about them.

The FBI quoted that statement in its affidavit.

Investigators examined classified database records.

On one occasion, Brinksman accessed a classified report on October 1, then spoke with Chávez for 47 minutes and again for 37 minutes.

Four days later, she published a story concerning the possibility of serious internal upheaval in Israel.

The FBI alleges similar patterns involving other articles.

Chávez has not been charged with a crime.

American journalists routinely cultivate confidential sources, including government officials with access to information the public would otherwise never see.

Publishing information that embarrasses an administration is not, by itself, a crime. Nor is receiving classified information automatically equivalent to unlawfully disclosing it.

Brinksman, on the other hand, was entrusted with protecting government secrets.

If he deliberately passed classified national-defense information to someone unauthorized to receive it, he faces serious criminal consequences.

Which brings us back to Edward Lee Howard.

He betrayed CIA secrets and fled to the Soviet Union.

Brinksman stands accused of betraying his security obligations to help a woman publish journalism.

Very different cases. One common vulnerability.

Sometimes the greatest threat to an intelligence officer’s career isn’t an enemy spy.

It’s the other person who knows about it.

FIVE: THE PENTAGON HANDS ELON MUSK THE KEYS TO OUTER SPACE

Elon Musk does not own outer space.

Not yet.

But the Pentagon appears increasingly comfortable allowing him to manage the traffic.

According to reporting by The Guardian on October 25, the U.S. Space Force has entered into a data-sharing arrangement with Musk’s SpaceX that gives the company access to sensitive, though unclassified, information about objects orbiting Earth.

In return, the military gains access to SpaceX’s own orbital-tracking capabilities.

Earth’s orbit is becoming crowded.

Thousands of satellites circle the planet, joined by spent rocket stages, fragments of destroyed spacecraft and assorted debris left behind by decades of human ingenuity.

At orbital velocities, even a small piece of junk can cause catastrophic damage.

Someone must keep track of it all.

For decades, the Pentagon has maintained an extensive system for monitoring objects in space.

The information serves military purposes and also helps civilian satellite operators avoid collisions.

SpaceX, meanwhile, operates Starlink, the world’s largest commercial satellite constellation.

Which gives Musk an extraordinary advantage.

He doesn’t merely launch satellites. He operates thousands of them.

And those satellites generate information about the orbital environment.

SpaceX has consequently developed its own tracking and collision-avoidance capabilities.

Now the Pentagon and SpaceX are sharing information.

On its face, that makes sense.

The more accurately everyone understands what is happening overhead, the less likely someone is to lose a billion-dollar satellite to a stray bolt.

But there is a larger question: Who owns the map?

The United States has been developing a civilian system for coordinating space traffic through the Commerce Department.

It is meant to move routine space-traffic management away from the military and make reliable orbital information available to commercial operators.

A public service. Not a private monopoly.

But the Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for that civilian effort.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s relationship with the Pentagon continues to deepen.

And the result?

The federal government supplies information. A private company supplements it with its own observations. And the same company becomes increasingly central to the system everyone else must use to avoid collisions.

Including its competitors.

Imagine the Federal Aviation Administration handing an airline privileged access to air-traffic information while reducing support for an independent civilian traffic-control system.

The airline would insist it was merely helping.

And perhaps it would be.

But its competitors might reasonably wonder if such access provided it with a huge competitive edge.

This is not the first time Musk’s business interests have become entangled with American national-security responsibilities.

Starlink has been indispensable to Ukrainian military communications.

It has also demonstrated the risks of depending on a privately controlled network whose availability can become entangled in political and commercial decisions.

SpaceX maintains that it operates within contractual and regulatory requirements.

But the strategic question extends well beyond Ukraine.

What happens when a single private company becomes essential to military communications, satellite launches and potentially the information used to navigate Earth’s orbit?

At what point does a government contractor become something closer to a government dependency?

And who decides when its commercial interests conflict with the public interest?

To be clear, the reported arrangement does not establish that SpaceX controls America’s military tracking network.

Nor does access to sensitive unclassified data automatically confer exclusive control over space-traffic management.

The immediate agreement may improve collision warnings and orbital safety.

But the combination of expanding private capabilities, privileged government relationships and shrinking public alternatives deserves scrutiny.

Especially when the private partner is simultaneously a major government contractor, satellite operator, launch provider and competitor to companies that may depend on the same information.

There is a difference between hiring a company to help manage the heavens and allowing that company to become the gatekeeper.

Elon Musk hasn’t conquered outer space.

But Washington, currently, seems determined to make him its landlord.

When I was a toddler during the mid-1950s, TV Westerns owned the airwaves.

My father was devoted to them.

He would labor at his draughtsman desk, inking commercial art through the evening while Have Gun, Will Travel and other Westerns accompanied him.

My own favorite was Roy Rogers.

Happy Trails

And though the stories seemed to be coming from Texas, Arizona, or Wyoming, many of the TV Westerns were filmed just outside of Lone Pine, California, a small town on Highway 395 beneath the towering Sierra Nevada.

Here, among the extraordinary rock formations of the Alabama Hills, Hollywood manufactured the American frontier.

Cowboys galloped. Indians attacked. Outlaws robbed stagecoaches. Posses pursued desperadoes.

Sometimes several times a day.

And all within a few miles of a perfectly respectable California town.

The Alabama Hills are a geological wonderland.

Enormous rounded boulders lie scattered across the desert beneath Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States.

Hollywood discovered the possibilities early.

In 1920, The Round-Up, starring Fatty Arbuckle, helped establish Lone Pine as a filming location.

By the 1930s, the Alabama Hills had become a Western factory.

Production crews arrived with horses, wagons, firearms, cameras and actors who could look convincingly dangerous while wearing immaculate cowboy hats.

The same dusty trails became Texas one week, Arizona the next, and occasionally Mexico when the script demanded a border crossing.

The landscape obligingly played whatever role was required.

The Cowboys Who Never Left Hollywood

William Boyd rode through the Alabama Hills as Hopalong Cassidy.

Gene Autry, America’s singing cowboy, came to Lone Pine.

So did Roy Rogers, the King of the Cowboys, along with Dale Evans.

Their horses became celebrities in their own right.

Autry had Champion.

Roy had Trigger.

The actors galloped across familiar terrain, pursuing villains who had been hiding behind the same boulders since the previous production.

Hollywood’s movie cowboys crossed the whole Wild West without sound studios or ever leaving California.

The Television Invasion

Then came television.

In the 1950s, the Western became America’s favorite form of entertainment.

The Lone Ranger.

Have Gun, Will Travel.

The Gene Autry Show.

The Cisco Kid.

The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.

And, toward the end of the decade, Bonanza.

Not all these productions were filmed in the Alabama Hills. Hollywood used ranches, backlots and locations throughout the American West. But Lone Pine played a memorable role in the genre's history.

Western heroes rode into American living rooms every week, dispensing justice with six-shooters, fists and a moral certainty that would be considered dangerously unfashionable today.

The good guys wore clean clothes.

The bad guys were suspiciously disheveled.

Women generally required rescuing.

And the local sheriff was either a pillar of integrity or so spectacularly incompetent or corrupt that a passing cowboy had to restore law and order.

The plots were reassuringly simple.

The Great American Illusion

Hollywood’s Westerns helped create America’s understanding of its own frontier history.

For generations, children grew up believing the West consisted of heroic cowboys, villainous outlaws, noble sheriffs and occasional encounters with Indigenous peoples whose own stories were rarely permitted to interfere with the mainstream narrative of a screenplay.

Good versus evil.

White hats versus black hats.

A man could resolve almost any disagreement with a Colt revolver.

American mythology, manufactured for mass consumption.

The reality was considerably more complicated.

The frontier involved land speculation, railroad monopolies, cattle interests, mining fortunes, political corruption and displacement of Native Americans.

Not nearly as entertaining as a shootout at high noon.

When the Cowboys Went Home

By the late 1960s, audiences were more skeptical.

The Vietnam War had complicated America’s relationship with heroism.

The civil rights movement challenged old assumptions.

And filmmakers began producing Westerns in which the heroes were morally ambiguous, the villains occasionally sympathetic and the violence rather less tidy.

Clint Eastwood arrived with a squint and a bad attitude.

Sam Peckinpah introduced bloodshed that looked considerably more realistic than in the days of Hopalong Cassidy.

The old television cowboys began riding into retirement.

The same rocks that once concealed cattle rustlers eventually provided scenery for science fiction and superheroes.

Hollywood discovered that the American frontier could also pass for another planet.

Tremors, Gladiator and Iron Man are among the productions that continued working in the Alabama Hills.

The Rocks Remember

Today, visitors can drive Movie Road through the Alabama Hills and recognize landscapes that appeared in hundreds of films.

The boulders remain where they were when William Boyd rode past them.

The mountains still rise majestically behind the desert.

The dusty trails continue winding between the rocks.

One can visit the Museum of Western Film History in Lone Pine, where costumes, props, posters and memorabilia preserve the region’s extraordinary cinematic past.

A museum devoted, in large part, to things that never actually happened.

Which, come to think of it, describes a sizable portion of mainstream narrative American history.

The frontier represented freedom, adventure, individualism and the comforting belief that a decent man could make a difference.

Hollywood packaged those ideals into half-hour television episodes and feature films.

The Alabama Hills supplied the scenery.

For a long while, this dusty patch of California desert became one of the most recognizable frontiers in the world.

Now, the cowboys are gone.

The horses are gone.

Most of the cameras have moved elsewhere.

But the boulders remain.

After recovering from shock, I find the box of raw paperwork referenced and cut through the masking tape. Inside are piles of revealing agency notes and memos that form the basis of Warren’s report.

I cannot believe my eyes.

Sarah McGuffin always got ridiculed and laughed at—just like the reporters and book authors that investigated the assassination of JFK.

And here I discover that, in 1967, the CIA invented the term “conspiracy theorist” specifically to shame suspicious reporters and those who listened to them.

Which gets me thinking—is there a file on that?

So I look to the Cs—and sure enough…

I lasted one night at Tamarack Lodge before checking into the brand new Limelight Hotel.

The contrast could not have been more stark.

Which means I could take a decent shower.

The Limelight sits adjacent to The Village, a European-style ski burg with chalet-inspired architecture, timber and stone façades, balconies, restaurants, boutiques and a central plaza.

This alpine fantasy was assembled by developers in 2003, helping transform Mammoth into one of California's premier ski destinations.

Dinner in The Village is at Vulcania.

Italian with a modern twist.

A tastebud sensation. World-class.

And—a testament to just how good—very busy, even during the lull between summer and ski season.

The ricotta and pecorino ravioli in lamb bolognese sauce, sublime—and I’m still dreaming about their pizza.

During the course of three days we got June Lake Looped…

…and braved the long gravel road to Obsidian Dome—a mountain born of volcanic fire, composed of black volcanic glass.

Unlike most stones, obsidian can be polished into a mirror.

A black mirror.

And therein lies its mystical reputation.

A conventional mirror reflects the world around you.

An obsidian mirror seems to absorb it.

Stare into one and, depending on the light, you may see your face floating in darkness.

Or something else.

Ancient Mesoamerican cultures attached considerable spiritual significance to obsidian.

Among the Aztecs, it was associated with Tezcatlipoca—“Smoking Mirror”—one of their most powerful and complicated deities, associated with fate, sorcery, conflict, rulership and the night.

Obsidian mirrors were employed in ritual and divination, and the material itself associated with sacred power.

The Aztecs also fashioned obsidian into weapons and sacrificial blades.

A combination of spirituality and surgery.

Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Sierra likewise fashioned obsidian into cutting tools and projectile points, trading this valuable volcanic glass across considerable distances.

The Magician’s Mirror

Obsidian’s mystical reputation traveled far beyond the Americas.

One of the most fascinating examples belonged to John Dee, the Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and enthusiastic investigator of invisible worlds.

He pursued what he believed was communication with angels through scrying: gazing into reflective objects in hopes of receiving visions.

Whether the mirror revealed celestial intelligence or merely reflected the considerable imaginations of its owners remains an open question.

Today, obsidian occupies a prominent place in crystal spirituality, commonly described as a stone of protection, grounding and truth.

Practitioners believe it absorbs negative energy, exposes deception and helps its owner confront unpleasant aspects of their personality through shadow work.

The shadow is a concept developed by the psychologist Carl Jung and refers to the aspects of ourselves we repress, deny or prefer not to acknowledge.

In other words, a black mirror that invites you to confront what you ordinarily refuse to see.

Most of us spend considerable time polishing our public image.

Obsidian suggests we might profit from examining the parts we keep hidden.

Modern crystal traditions also attribute protective properties to obsidian; that it shields its owner from hostility, emotional manipulation and negative influences.

At Obsidian Dome, an entire mountainside of glass—once molten rock, now cold, hard and gleaming beneath the Sierra Nevada sky—provides its own sense of wonder.

Gazing at a whole mountain of this stuff delivered a message to me:

You’re not a mountain man so don’t aspire, at your age, to become one.

So my romantic notion of living full-time in a bare-bone rustic cabin back in the woods got shattered.

High-altitude mountain towns, which once beckoned any soul, are not for me.

I prefer my air generously supplied with oxygen and a climate that, while chilly, doesn’t routinely deliver ice and snow.

Smoky Quartz

Obsidian isn't the only geological treasure found in the Eastern Sierra.

In Lone Pine, I picked up a splendid specimen of smoky quartz.

Unlike obsidian, which is born of volcanic violence, smoky quartz develops slowly, as crystals grow within the earth.

The color results from natural radiation acting upon trace impurities in the crystal structure, particularly aluminum.

As though somebody had trapped a thundercloud inside a gemstone.

A Spiritual Anchor

In contemporary crystal spirituality, smoky quartz is considered a principal stone of grounding—bringing one's attention away from mental turmoil and back to the physical world.

The present moment.

Practitioners believe smoky quartz dissipates fear, anxiety and emotional confusion.

Rather than eliminating darkness, it accommodates it.

The Alchemy of Shadows

Smoky quartz also lends itself to an intriguing psychological interpretation.

In the language of Carl Jung, the shadow represents the parts of ourselves we would rather not acknowledge.

Our fears, resentments, weaknesses and forbidden desires.

Obsidian, with its black reflective surface, has become a popular symbol of confronting that shadow.

Smoky quartz suggests something different.

Integration.

The crystal remains transparent despite its dark coloration.

Light still passes through it.

Darkness is part of its character.

Perhaps the spiritual lesson is not that we should rid ourselves of darkness, but that we should learn to live intelligently with our shadow.

The Crystal of Transformation

Smoky quartz is also associated in modern metaphysical traditions with transformation and the release of old emotional burdens.

Its admirers believe it helps people let go of habits, fears and attachments that no longer serve them.

An ambitious assignment for a mineral composed of silicon and oxygen.

But attaching an intention to a physical object may be psychologically useful.

A stone on a desk can become a reminder.

To remain calm.

To stop worrying about what cannot be controlled.

To distinguish genuine danger from imaginary catastrophe.

And to remember that even difficult experiences can become part of something beautiful.

The stone need not radiate mystical energy to perform that function.

It merely needs to remind its owner of something worth remembering.

Perhaps that’s the real magic.

Not what the stone does to us.

But what we allow it to teach us.

Welcome to Solomon Hills, a proposed new community between Orcutt and Los Alamos, where a former oil-producing property may be transformed into one of the largest residential developments Santa Barbara County has ever contemplated.

The developer calls it Community Reimagined.

Naturally.

Nobody ever calls a development Four Thousand Houses and a Traffic Jam.

But this particular enterprise deserves more than the usual scrutiny accorded to developers promising affordable homes, green spaces and a brighter tomorrow.

Because the men behind Solomon Hills have an interesting corporate history.

And they’re negotiating to acquire something that Montecito residents might one day wish they had kept.

Our water.

A New Town in the country

Solomon Hills occupies a 4,195-acre site between Highway 101 and Highway 135.

The proposal includes 4,000 residences, 650,000 square feet of commercial and office space, a school, parks, public facilities and approximately 950 acres of open space.

At full occupancy, the development could accommodate 10,000–12,000 people.

A town, in other words.

And not necessarily one that the neighboring communities of Orcutt and Los Alamos asked for.

The project would convert land currently designated for agriculture into an entirely new urban community.

When Santa Barbara County planners first considered the application in 2023, staff recommended referring the matter to the Board of Supervisors because of its unprecedented scale, agricultural conversion and expansion beyond existing urban boundaries.

The Planning Commission nevertheless voted unanimously to allow the application to proceed.

That was permission to study the proposal, not permission to build it.

The developer still has a formidable collection of obstacles to overcome.

The Oil Beneath the Dream

For more than a century, portions of Solomon Hills have produced oil and gas.

County documents identify 66 known oil and gas wells associated with the property.

Sixty-six.

Not exactly the foundation one imagines beneath a picture-perfect California community.

The developer proposes permanently plugging and abandoning the wells, removing petroleum infrastructure and remediating the land.

But who verifies that the cleanup is complete?

Who guarantees money will be available if contamination proves more extensive than anticipated?

And who assumes responsibility if abandoned wells become a problem decades after the developer has departed?

A plugged oil well does not necessarily remain trouble-free forever. Cement seals can crack, steel casings can corrode, and methane or other gases can migrate through underground pathways.

In some circumstances, residual hydrocarbons or contaminated fluids can reach the surface or affect groundwater.

Methane accumulating in enclosed spaces presents a fire or explosion hazard. hydrogen sulfide, where present, is toxic.

California has already learned expensive lessons about methane beneath developed land.

Then there is Playa Vista, the enormous residential development near Marina del Rey, built on land with a history of oil production.

Methane concerns required elaborate engineering precautions, including gas barriers, ventilation systems and monitoring equipment.

Imagine buying a luxury California home and discovering that its amenities include an engineered defense against explosive gas.

Neither example establishes that Solomon Hills is unsafe.

But both demonstrate why developing former oil-producing land requires rigorous investigation and enforceable safeguards.

Who will monitor the wells after the houses are built?

And who pays if something starts bubbling up beneath somebody’s living room?

Solomon Hills promises environmental responsibility.

Santa Barbara County should require independently supervised, long-term methane monitoring and remediation measures appropriate to the risks identified by site investigations.

That means regular testing where warranted, publicly accessible results, clear thresholds for corrective action and legally enforceable obligations to address problems whenever they emerge.

Most importantly, adequate financial security—whether bonds, insurance, escrowed funds or other enforceable guarantees—must survive changes in ownership and corporate restructuring.

Plugging a well should not mean plugging the public’s right to protection.

Future homeowners should not inherit an environmental liability along with their mortgage.

The Danish Connection

The man publicly leading Solomon Hills is Klaus Hasbo, chief executive of Solstra Communities California.

Hasbo is not your conventional California property developer.

A petroleum engineer by training, with an MBA from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, he has spent decades in the international oil business, private equity and corporate acquisitions.

His professional background emphasizes acquiring, managing and restructuring assets rather than building residential communities.

Which makes his latest ambition—creating an entirely new California town—all the more intriguing.

Follow his corporate trail across the Atlantic and you arrive in Denmark.

Danish business records identify Hasbo as manager of K4 Oil Company ApS, an investment company established in 2015.

Among its reported shareholders is Solstra Capital Partners A/S, another Danish company.

There is also K4 Oil Holding ApS.

A little corporate nesting.

Nothing unusual in international finance, where one company may own another, which owns another, which owns the company you thought you were investigating in the first place.

But the Danish records raise some questions.

What relationship, if any, exists between these investment entities and Solstra Communities California?

And who are the ultimate investors?

There is a more fundamental question.

Where are the completed residential communities?

Hasbo’s published credentials emphasize petroleum engineering, financial management and acquisitions.

I have yet to identify a comparable American residential development completed by a company under his control.

Perhaps there is one.

If so, he should tell us about it.

Because acquiring an oil field is one thing.

Transforming it into a town for 10,000 people—with schools, roads, utilities and a thoroughly cleaned-up industrial past—is quite another.

Before Santa Barbara County entrusts its future to this enterprise, it would be useful to know whether the people directing it have successfully undertaken anything comparable.

Trouble in the Oil Patch

In 2023, Evergreen Capital Management brought litigation involving Pacific Coast Energy Company, Newbridge Resources and Hasbo.

The dispute concerned the Pacific Coast Oil Trust, an investment vehicle established to distribute proceeds from oil production.

Investors alleged that changes in accounting for future oil-well abandonment expenses substantially reduced the trust’s distributions.

They further alleged that the accounting treatment undermined the trust’s value and could facilitate acquisition of its assets at an advantageous price.

The complaint placed the disputed assets’ value above $100 million.

Serious allegations.

But allegations nonetheless.

The defendants successfully obtained dismissal of claims in the litigation. The records examined do not establish a judicial finding of fraud by Hasbo or Newbridge.

Nevertheless, the dispute is relevant to understanding the business history of individuals seeking to undertake a multibillion-dollar-scale development enterprise, particularly when that enterprise proposes rehabilitating an oil field whose historic operations carry substantial environmental obligations.

How a company accounts for future liabilities is not an academic matter.

Just ask anyone who has ever inherited an abandoned oil well.

An Unhappy Executive

A separate lawsuit was filed in Santa Barbara County in 2020 by former executive Scott Wood naming Newbridge Resources Group, Hasbo and several associates.

Wood alleged that promises concerning financing, executive authority and business arrangements had not been honored.

His complaint included allegations of contractual breaches, misrepresentation and misuse of proprietary business information.

Among the other defendants were Oscar Crohn, a Danish investment executive, and Alshair Fiyaz, an international financier with interests in European real estate and petroleum.

Both men have documented historical connections to businesses operating under the Solstra name.

That does not establish that either currently owns or finances Solomon Hills, and the final disposition of Wood’s lawsuit has not been verified.

But their appearance in the corporate and litigation history raises a legitimate question.

Who, ultimately, are the investors behind Solstra?

When a private company seeks public approvals for an entirely new town—and proposes purchasing substantial water entitlements from a public district—its ownership and financial capacity are matters of public interest.

The Road to Solomon Hills

The developer has also fought a legal battle over access to the property.

North Four Deer LLC challenged the proposed use of an existing roadway easement, arguing that its scope did not accommodate the contemplated development.

Solstra and Pacific Coast Energy prevailed in the issues tried before Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Jed Beebe.

A victory for the developer.

But the dispute illustrates the complications of turning rural property into a town.

What Happens to Orcutt and Los Alamos?

Four thousand homes could bring 10,000 or more new residents to northern Santa Barbara County.

They will drive cars.

They will need schools, medical services, police, firefighters, electricity, sewage treatment and water.

They will shop, commute and use surrounding roads.

Orcutt could face substantial additional traffic and demands on public services.

Los Alamos, whose charm derives partly from its rural setting, may confront development pressures extending well beyond Solomon Hills itself.

The question is not simply whether a new community can be built.

It is who pays for the consequences.

Follow the Water

Now the connection to Montecito.

Solstra is negotiating to purchase 1,400 acre-feet of annual State Water Project entitlement from the Montecito Water District.

Permanently.

That represents approximately 42 percent of the district’s contracted entitlement.

The developer also has a long-term water arrangement with Cadiz Inc., a company no stranger to controversy.

For decades, Cadiz has sought to develop groundwater supplies beneath California’s Mojave Desert and sell water to communities elsewhere.

Environmental organizations, Native American tribes and scientists have challenged the project, warning that excessive pumping could harm desert ecosystems, deplete groundwater resources and threaten natural springs, including Bonanza Spring.

Cadiz disputes those concerns and maintains that its project can operate sustainably.

The late Senator Dianne Feinstein opposed the project. California imposed additional restrictions in 2019, and in June 2026 Congressman Raul Ruiz called for rigorous federal environmental scrutiny.

The following month, the Trump administration authorized the conversion of an existing oil-and-gas pipeline for the Cadiz water project, prompting renewed objections from conservationists.

An old oil pipeline carrying desert groundwater toward a region planning a town on a former oil field.

In California, even the water business eventually leads back to petroleum.

But here is the especially curious part.

Cadiz’s April 2024 agreement with Solstra contemplated using Montecito Water District’s State Water Project conveyance capacity to help deliver water to Solomon Hills.

The agreement also tied the timing of a $150,000 payment to a satisfactory offer involving Montecito, among other conditions.

That was nearly two and a half years before the Water District publicly authorized its September 2026 letter of intent.

When did discussions with Montecito begin?

Who initiated them?

And when were ratepayers first informed that their district’s water infrastructure and entitlements were being contemplated as part of the Solomon Hills development?

There is another intriguing provision in the Cadiz–Solstra agreement.

Subject to contractual conditions, Solstra may assign portions of its unused Cadiz water to third parties or ask Cadiz to remarket that water for Solstra’s benefit.

In other words, the contract contemplates commercial value in water beyond what flows through the faucets of Solomon Hills homeowners.

That provision concerns Cadiz water. It does not establish equivalent resale rights under the separate proposed Montecito transaction.

But it raises an important question.

Will Montecito prohibit Solstra and its successors from reselling, assigning, pledging or otherwise monetizing the acquired entitlement independently of the approved development?

Why Sell the Water?

Water is valuable.

Water entitlements are valuable.

And in a state plagued by recurring drought, population pressures and increasingly unpredictable weather, their strategic importance is unlikely to diminish.

Which raises a rather obvious question.

Why is the Montecito Water District selling such a valuable asset?

Not leasing it.

Not temporarily transferring surplus water.

But selling a substantial portion of its State Water Project entitlement.

Permanently.

The district argues that the proposed transaction would generate approximately $40 million while saving ratepayers an estimated $1.8 million annually in associated costs.

Gee, does that mean Montecito residents will pay a lot less for water?

Because if it doesn’t, then what is really going on here?

And if water is needed for Montecito after the allocation is gone, permanently, what might the entitlement cost to replace in ten years?

Twenty?

Fifty?

Has the district obtained an independent assessment of its long-term value?

Has it compared a permanent sale with temporary transfers, leasing, banking or retaining the entitlement as insurance against future drought?

How does the district intend to protect future generations against the consequences of a decision made today?

There is an old saying in the American West: Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.

Perhaps we should add another.

Water is for keeping. Especially when someone else is so eager to buy it.

Who Gets Rich?

Solomon Hills could create considerable wealth for its investors if approved and successfully developed.

That is what private development is supposed to do.

But the identities and financial interests of its ultimate investors have not been fully established in the public materials examined.

Nor have we established whether anyone associated with Montecito Water District has a personal financial interest in the developer or its affiliates.

There is no evidence before us of improper payments or corruption involving the proposed water transaction.

There is, however, ample reason to demand transparency.

Because this is not simply another subdivision.

It is a proposed new town, on former oil land, requiring substantial public approvals and infrastructure, with a private developer seeking a valuable water asset from an established community.

A Bunch More Questions That Need Answering

Before Santa Barbara County approves Solomon Hills—and before Montecito permanently parts with its water interests—someone should answer the following:

Who ultimately owns and finances Solstra Communities California? Identify its beneficial owners and controlling entities.

What is the complete business relationship among Solstra, Newbridge Resources, Pacific Coast Energy and their financial backers?

What comparable residential communities have Hasbo and his companies successfully completed?

What was the final disposition of the Scott Wood litigation, and how does Hasbo respond to the allegations concerning the Pacific Coast Oil Trust?

Who guarantees the costs of properly closing, monitoring and, if necessary, remediating the 66 known oil and gas wells? Will those guarantees remain enforceable if the developer sells its interests or ceases operating?

How much additional traffic will Orcutt and Los Alamos experience, and who pays for the necessary infrastructure?

When did Solstra first approach Montecito about water, and why was the district’s conveyance capacity contemplated in a 2024 Cadiz agreement?

What happens if Solomon Hills is never built? Could the water entitlement acquired from Montecito be transferred or sold elsewhere?

And has Montecito Water District conducted independent due diligence into the developer’s ownership, financing, litigation history and ability to complete the transaction?

Finally, the question that transcends all the others:

Why should Montecito permanently surrender any of its long-term water entitlement without first demonstrating that doing so is in the community’s best interests—not merely today, but for generations?

California’s history suggests that the people who control the water frequently end up controlling the future.

In Chinatown, Noah Cross understood that.

The rest of us would be wise to pay attention.

The Russians are at it again.

This time their target—among others— is James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas.

A newly circulated video purports to show a former student accusing Talarico of sexual abuse.

Disinformation researchers say the allegation is fabricated, the video apparently AI-generated, and the operation bears the fingerprints of Storm-1516, a Russian influence network.

The smear has already attracted hundreds of thousands of views. Meanwhile, senior members of Congress, citing classified intelligence, warn that Moscow is targeting American candidates ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Apparently, the Kremlin has decided that Americans aren’t sufficiently adept at smearing one another without Russian assistance.

But here’s the thing.

This is not new.

Not remotely.

Moscow has been meddling in American politics for generations.

The technology changes.

The tradecraft doesn’t.

Strip away the artificial intelligence, deepfakes, algorithms and social-media accounts and you find something remarkably old-fashioned underneath: Russian tradecraft.

Moscow has been attempting to manipulate foreign politics for more than a century. And American elections for generations.

The story did not begin with Donald Trump. It did not begin with Vladimir Putin.

It did not even begin with the Russian Federation.

It began with the Bolsheviks.

The Original Algorithm

In 1919, Vladimir Lenin created the Communist International—the Comintern—to encourage communist movements around the world.

Money moved secretly. Propaganda was financed. Foreign political parties were assisted.

Front organizations appeared. Public opinion was manipulated.

The objective was not merely to persuade people that communism was wonderful. It was to influence the political systems of other countries from inside them.

The Soviet Union eventually built an entire profession around this.

The KGB called such operations aktivnyye meropriyatiya.

Active measures.

Espionage steals secrets.

Active measures do something more ambitious. They attempt to alter reality.

The toolkit eventually included forged documents, planted newspaper stories, front organizations, clandestine financing, agents of influence, rumors, conspiracy theories and carefully manufactured scandals.

The best disinformation contained enough truth to make the lie comfortable.

(A senior MI6 executive told me that the Russians will give away 98 percent genuine intelligence to get its opponents to swallow a strategic two percent of disinformation.)

The finest Russian active measure did not require convincing Americans of anything. It merely encouraged Americans to distrust one another.

Sound familiar?

1960: Anybody But Nixon

Nikita Khrushchev did not like Richard Nixon.

The two men had famously clashed during the 1959 Kitchen Debate in Moscow, and when Nixon ran for president the following year, Khrushchev preferred John F. Kennedy.

According to accounts subsequently given by Soviet intelligence officials, the KGB station in Washington was instructed to follow the American election closely and consider measures that might encourage Kennedy’s victory.

There were attempts to establish contact with the Kennedy camp.

They went nowhere.

Then another maneuver.

Two American airmen whose RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down by the Soviets in July 1960 remained imprisoned throughout the presidential campaign despite American efforts to obtain their release.

Khrushchev later claimed that keeping them until after Election Day deprived Nixon of a potential diplomatic victory.

Kennedy won by one of the narrowest margins in American history.

Did Moscow elect him?

It certainly had a preference. And was willing to act upon it.

1964: Barry Goldwater, “KKK Sympathizer”

Four years later the target was Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater was ferociously anti-communist.

The Soviets preferred Lyndon Johnson.

Soviet-bloc intelligence went to work.

Czechoslovak intelligence, cooperating with Moscow, conducted a propaganda operation portraying Goldwater as a racist and Ku Klux Klan sympathizer.

Printed material was manufactured and circulated to politicians and journalists in the United States and abroad.

Goldwater lost overwhelmingly.

Nobody seriously argues that Soviet propaganda caused his defeat.

But the operation demonstrated the principle:

Identify the candidate Moscow dislikes. Find the political vulnerability. Exaggerate it. Distribute it through ostensibly independent sources.

And never put the Kremlin’s return address on the envelope.

1968: Would You Like Some Money?

By 1968 Moscow was again worried about Nixon.

This time the Soviets dispensed with subtlety.

Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later revealed that Moscow authorized him to approach Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey with an extraordinary proposition.

The Soviet Union was prepared to provide his campaign with assistance.

Including money.

Humphrey refused.

Half a century before Americans began arguing about Russian election interference, the Soviet government was offering clandestine support to an American presidential candidate.

The candidate said no.

Nixon won.

Then proceeded to pursue détente with Moscow.

Maybe that’s what had worried the KGB.

1976: Operation Porok

The Soviets were equal-opportunity meddlers. Their enemy in 1976 was a Democrat.

Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson was an anti-Soviet hawk seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

The KGB wanted him stopped.

Service A—the KGB component specializing in active measures—launched an operation codenamed POROK, meaning roughly vice or defect.

Officers were instructed to search for compromising material.

They apparently couldn’t find much.

So they manufactured some.

The KGB created a forged FBI memorandum supposedly dating from 1940 suggesting that Jackson was secretly homosexual.

Copies were sent to American newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

One was even sent to Jimmy Carter’s campaign.

Nobody took the bait.

Think about that operation for a moment.

A foreign intelligence service manufactured a supposedly authentic American government document containing a politically explosive allegation and attempted to inject it into the American press during a presidential campaign.

Ronald Reagan: Public Enemy

Ronald Reagan presented Moscow with a larger problem.

The KGB began searching for compromising information on Reagan during his 1976 challenge to Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.

After Reagan became president, Soviet concern turned into alarm.

In February 1983, KGB headquarters instructed its officers to begin preparations aimed at preventing Reagan’s reelection the following year.

Contacts were to be cultivated around presidential campaigns and inside both political parties.

Propaganda portrayed Reagan as dangerous.

A warmonger. A McCarthyite. A servant of the military-industrial complex. A threat to peace.

One forged document purported to be a 1947 letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover suggesting that Reagan had cooperated with the FBI in identifying communists in Hollywood.

The FBI examined it.

Fake.

Reagan won 49 states.

Back to the drawing board.

Where Moscow discovered something more useful.

Polarization.

The Golden Age of the Forger

During the Cold War, Soviet active measures became extraordinarily inventive.

Documents were forged.

Stories were planted in foreign newspapers and subsequently cited elsewhere as independent reporting.

Conspiracy theories were seeded.

Front organizations were funded.

Western activists sometimes promoted Soviet narratives without knowing where they originated.

One of its most successful disinformation campaigns claimed that AIDS had been created by the United States military.

This was information laundering before anyone used the phrase.

Plant the story in one country. Have another publication quote it. Allow a third to report that “foreign press reports” are raising questions.

Soon nobody remembers where it started.

The internet would eventually perform the same process in minutes.

Then the Soviet Union Disappeared

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed.

The KGB was broken apart.

But tradecraft does not disappear merely because someone changes the flag outside headquarters.

When former KGB officer Vladimir Putin eventually arrived in the Kremlin, he brought the old KGB with him.

And the old active-measures tradition encountered the greatest intelligence instrument ever invented.

The internet.

The KGB had once needed printing presses, couriers, front organizations, cooperative journalists and diplomatic pouches.

Now all it needed was a laptop.

2016: Escalation

The 2016 American presidential election represented a dramatic escalation.

The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that Russia conducted a multifaceted influence campaign.

Russian intelligence officers hacked political organizations.

Stolen material was released publicly.

Russian state media amplified preferred narratives.

Meanwhile the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency created fictitious Americans online.

Hundreds of social-media accounts.

False identities. Political groups. Advertisements. Memes. Posts.

The operation was not merely pro-one-candidate.

It was pro-chaos.

Russian operatives organized political demonstrations inside the United States while pretending to be Americans.

After the election they promoted rallies supporting Donald Trump.

They also promoted rallies opposing Donald Trump.

On the same day.

That is the part of Russian active measures Americans still have difficulty understanding.

The objective is not one candidate over another. It is discord.

A country arguing with itself is easier to manipulate than one arguing with Moscow.

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee later described 2016 as a significant escalation in a much older Russian campaign.

There is no evidence Russia altered the actual vote count.

Nor did the Intelligence Community claim that Russian activities generally changed the result of the election.

2020: Change the Channel

By 2020 the Americans were watching for Russian trolls.

So Moscow adapted.

The Intelligence Community subsequently assessed that Putin and the Russian state authorized influence operations intended to damage Joe Biden’s candidacy, support Donald Trump, undermine confidence in the election and deepen American divisions.

This time an important technique was laundering.

Russian-linked individuals fed narratives into American political and media networks.

If the message emerged from an American commentator, politician or media personality, the Russian fingerprints disappeared.

The messenger had changed.

The message had not.

2022: Midterms

Presidential elections are not the only target.

The Intelligence Community concluded that Russia again conducted influence operations surrounding the 2022 midterms.

But something fundamental had changed: Election interference was no longer necessarily an operation Moscow switched on every four years.

It had become persistent.

American politics itself had become the battlespace.

2024: Doppelgänger

Then came something almost pure Soviet.

Fake newspapers.

In 2024 the Justice Department seized 32 internet domains allegedly associated with a Russian government-directed influence operation known as Doppelgänger.

The Russians created websites designed to resemble legitimate Western news organizations.

A visitor might think he was reading an established American newspaper.

He was actually consuming material produced as part of a Russian influence campaign.

The operation employed fake personas, social-media accounts, advertisements and—in a distinctly modern improvement—artificial intelligence.

Another operation involved employees of the Russian state media organization RT funneling nearly $10 million into an American media company to produce and distribute online content.

2024: The Fake Voter

As Election Day approached, American intelligence agencies publicly attributed several fabricated videos to Russian influence operation.

One purported to show Haitians illegally voting in Georgia. Another, election fraud in Arizona.

The objective had evolved beyond simply helping or hurting a candidate. It was to make Americans doubt whether their elections could be trusted at all.

2026: Now They Steal Julia Roberts

The new Russian campaign targeting the midterms uses manipulated celebrity videos.

Real faces. Real footage.

Fake words. Artificial voices.

Borrowed television logos. Hashtags. Social-media distribution.

The technology would have astonished the men of Service A.

The concept would not.

A forged FBI memorandum in 1976 and an AI-generated celebrity video in 2026 are essentially the same weapon.

Only the delivery system changed.

The Evolution of the Lie

1919: finance political movements.

1960: discreet diplomatic and intelligence maneuvering.

1964: smear a candidate.

1968: offer clandestine campaign assistance.

1976: forge an FBI document.

1984: plant narratives and forged correspondence.

2016: hack, leak, troll, impersonate Americans and manipulate social media.

2020: launder narratives through domestic intermediaries.

2024: manufacture news organizations and fabricated videos.

2026: manufacture human beings.

The cost has fallen. The speed has increased.

The audience has become enormous.

The Real Russian Candidate

There is a temptation whenever Russian election interference is discussed to turn the subject immediately into American partisan warfare.

Who benefited? Which candidate? Which party?

Moscow’s preferences have changed repeatedly.

Kennedy over Nixon. Johnson over Goldwater. Humphrey over Nixon.

Almost anybody over Scoop Jackson. Almost anybody over Reagan.

More recently, according to American intelligence assessments, Trump over Clinton in 2016 and Trump over Biden in 2020.

The ideology is secondary.

The Kremlin does not interfere because it loves Republicans.

It did not interfere because it loved Democrats.

It interferes because it loves Russia.

And because an America that distrusts its elections, its press, its institutions and finally its fellow citizens is a divisive America.

The Russians discovered this long before Facebook, when they needed printing presses, forged letterheads and journalists willing to swallow a story.

Now Americans carry the distribution network in their pockets.

We forward their disinformation. We amplify it. We fight over it.

We do most of the their work ourselves.

Which may be the greatest Russian active measure of all: outsourcing the KGB to us.

Within a few weeks of our meeting, Ira Einhorn pressed me for a critique of his novel, Cantor Dust.

I couldn’t very well tell him it was the most incoherent load of crock I’d ever read.

So I emailed this quick comment: One of a kind. Astonishing in its depth.

Einhorn zapped me right back: “Remember, there are 3 more.”

Oh, joy.

My report to the FBI on this manuscript by Sam (codename for Einhorn, though this later changed to Fat-ass ) was somewhat different:

Cantor Dust is a long, rambling essay disguised as a novel. Its most blatant flaw (and there are many) is this: A novelist is supposed to show, not tell. This manuscript tells, doesn’t show. It is an amalgamation of great philosopher meets new age spiritualism, regurgitated in Sam’s incoherent psycho-babble.

The protagonist—obviously Sam, himself—holds himself out to be the world’s greatest genius and is a proponent of incest and sadomasochism.

When I telephoned Einhorn, he was focused—again—on money.

All money talk should be communicated by fax, not email, he decreed.

“We have a secret bank account in Luxembourg,” said Einhorn. “My book’s gonna be big because I’m famous. And I’ve got some more writing I’m sending you. It’s called Fragments, modeled after Nietzsche’s style of writing.”

Einhorn and I now emailed each other daily, talking by phone weekly—he, giving me updates on his legal situation in France.

When I met with Mike and Ed from the FBI’s Fugitive Squad on March 16th in DC —the Philly boys were beside themselves over how my relationship with Einhorn had flourished. And headquarters was so pleased with our progress, they pledged 20 grand for Albuquerque Field Office to support the mission.

For his birthday on May 15th, I sent Einhorn a birthday card featuring an artsy montage of pens, bound journals, and handwriting. I also telephoned him and suggested he open a fine bottle of wine, blow out some candles. “You know what to wish for.”

“I sure do,” Einhorn replied. “Thank you for calling. I really appreciate it.”

Two-and-a-half months later, a jury awarded the family of Holly Maddux a judgment against Ira Einhorn: $907,000,000.

In his communications with me, Einhorn sounded euphoric, for two reasons:

1) He thought the judgment made him worth that much (”With interest, I’m the one-billion dollar man!”).

2) “It elevates my case” toward getting a good advance for his novel.

(Einhorn sent me so many emails that the most time-consuming part of writing this serial was wading through them.)

In mid-August, I huddled with John H, Ed and Mike at the Sheraton Wardman Tower in DC. It would be my last meeting with John H before his retirement from the FBI.

We agreed two main issues:

1) We would create a dummy book contract for Einhorn as we played for time.

2) We would push for Einhorn to leave France so we could rendition him on the lam.

In September, Einhorn bubbled with excitement over a story Esquire planned on him. He expected a photographer to visit his home any day and, said Einhorn, “He’s going to do a day in my life.”

A month later the photographer had come and gone.

“They took photos of me coming naked out of the water,” Einhorn told me. “I hope they use them for the cover.”

In mid-November, Esquire hit the stands with its Einhorn story by Russ Baker, whom Einhorn professed to have liked.

I emailed Einhorn:

I have Dec. Esquire. No cover. Opens with full page of frontal nudity. They appear to have cropped your dick to one inch. Will read presently.

Einhorn zapped back: “I was in 45 degree very cold water for a half hour, so shriveled rather than cropped, perhaps.”

I emailed him again two hours later:

I’ve read it. I don’t think you’re going to like Russ Baker anymore.

Einhorn’s return email: “We never liked him. Use it my friend and laugh last.”

Precisely.

Come January 2000, Einhorn started to grow impatient. His roof was still leaking and I hadn’t gotten any closer to getting him cash to repair it.

I swore about shortsighted publishers no longer willing to take chances on experimental fiction, and I offered to buy his novel myself.

For the sake of verisimilitude, I had sent a number of queries to likely publishers, like Barricade Books. But an Einhorn book was considered of such poor taste, nobody would even respond. When I bounced it off a New York literary agent, he responded with disapproval: “I knew a girl in Philadelphia who was raped by Einhorn. She rang his doorbell to deliver something, he answered his door naked, yanked her inside and raped her.”

Enter my operative Rick K, who would evaluate Cantor Dust for another editorial opinion.

Rick out-did himself. The opening paragraph of his evaluation:

CANTOR DUST is a powerful and provocative novel that provides a history lesson of twentieth century culture and politics and stretches the intellectual boundaries of anyone who reads this book.

Rick recommended (in cahoots with me) that a) the novel’s ending be revised “to enhance the book’s literary impact” and b) the dialog between characters be rewritten because, basically, all his characters sounded the same.

Responded Einhorn: “Rick obviously got it, and his criticism is correct, especially as to the dialog.”

Einhorn immediately went to work on revisions of Cantor Dust, and I put Rick and Einhorn into contact with one another.

That’s when the FBI’s Washington Field Office suffered a financial crunch and opted to scrap the operation.

Mike and Ed drove down from Philadelphia. They wanted things to continue and were pleased I had not frozen my contact with Einhorn like WFO had frozen my funding. They promised to get their superiors back home to put pressure on WFO.

In July 2000, after several hearings on Einhorn’s case, France approved extradition.

Einhorn’s lawyers appealed to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, but they felt serious heat.

If Einhorn had thought about fleeing, this was a good time.

The French, for their part, erected a twenty-four hour observation post outside his house.

In April, Einhorn told me he had Bryant Gumbel, U.S. News & World Report, Fox TV, and Theresa Conroy (“that demon lady”) from the Philadelphia News banging on his door.

But it was me he wanted to see.

By this time, Cantor Dust was in Rick K’s hands for a total re-write.

Come May 15th, another birthday card from me to Ira. He turned 60.

Come July, Rick was “about ten hours away from completion.”

Einhorn must have been pulling his hair out of his head with frustration as we bought time, pending new developments in his appeal to the French prime minister.

Not a development went by without Einhorn reporting in detail what was happening, how he felt, and what he and his legal team were going to do about it. Which meant we knew what he was thinking, doing, and thinking of doing.

Einhorn, in an email September 29th, 2000: “Any idea when the present phase of the book will be done AND when you will be here?”

My reply: “I’m working on the galleys—would like to bring them with me.”

Two months later, I had galleys—typeset page-proofs. I sent Einhorn this email: “The galleys look great! I will dispatch them to you.”

Einhorn’s reply: “Happy to hear that. You will feel my smile when I get them... now all we need is you.”

On December 6th, this from Einhorn: “Arrived. What a good feeling! A lift! Thanks! Let us set a date (for your visit) as soon as possible, as we are in the middle of complicated legal actions.”

Einhorn set to correcting the galleys.

It was amazing we’d been able to spin him for so long.

Now the time was right for me to face the devil again.

There is a school in Santa Barbara where children are expected to sit at their desks, concentrate on their lessons and absorb whatever knowledge today’s public school teachers are capable of teaching while the temperature outside approaches 95 degrees Fahrenheit.

And no air conditioning.

Welcome to Santa Barbara Junior High.

Where “education” includes an occasional course that should be called Heat Endurance 101.

During two recent heatwaves, temperatures in Santa Barbara soared into the mid-90s.

The school continued operating, although the district did shorten the day during an August heat emergency.

Imagine being 12 or 13 years old, sitting in a stuffy, very hot classroom, attempting to master algebra while your brain slowly turns to tapioca.

And somewhere in the over-staffed, over-paid administrative hierarchy, somebody has decided this is an acceptable environment for learning.

The Great Air Conditioning mystery

Historically, Santa Barbara has enjoyed one of the most agreeable climates in America.

Which perhaps explains why generations of school administrators considered air conditioning unnecessary.

Open a window. Problem solved.

But the climate has changed. Humidity suddenly arrived this season, along with unusually hot weather. When temperatures climb into the 90s, opening a window does not help; it invites more hot air inside.

A fan may help. Barely. If they bring one in.

At La Colina Junior High, also part of Santa Barbara Unified, a teacher measured a classroom temperature of 91.9 degrees during a September heatwave.

Two fans were running. But the classroom never cooled below 85 degrees.

This is not only about extreme discomfort. Excessive heat can impair concentration, increase fatigue and make it harder to learn.

Furthermore, children who are dehydrated, overheated or feeling faint are not likely to produce their finest work.

Teachers aren’t immune either. Try delivering an enthusiastic lesson on American history while perspiration drips onto your notes.

Some children have medical conditions that make extreme temperatures especially hazardous.

Others may not recognize the symptoms of heat illness until they are already in trouble.

Which raises an obvious question: At what classroom temperature does the school district decide that enough is enough?

Eighty-five degrees? Ninety? Ninety-five?

Or does everyone simply carry on until somebody collapses?

Look, for some children, school is never fun. A situation like this only confirms—to some kids—that public school is not an educational experience but nothing more than daycare. Or on a very hot day, torture.

The $60 Million Explanation

Santa Barbara Unified School has known about its air conditioning problem for years.

In 2024, district officials estimated that installing air conditioning throughout the district could cost between $50 million and $60 million.

That’s a considerable sum.

Old buildings require expensive retrofitting. Electrical systems may need upgrading. Funding is complicated.

But here is a thought.

Schools exist to educate children.

And providing a classroom in which children can actually learn ought to rank fairly high among the prerequisites.

Before architectural enhancements. Before administrative embellishments. Before bloated administrative salaries.

Before WOKE programs, DEI meetings or whatever fashionable “educational” initiative happens to be circulating through the superintendent’s office.

Keeping children cool enough to think in a classroom should come first.

The Minimum Day Solution

On August 27, Santa Barbara Unified shortened the school day at six campuses, including Santa Barbara Junior High, because of extreme heat.

Students who could not leave early were accommodated in cool spaces.

Uh, might that have been in the administrative offices?

In any case, it tells us two things.

First, educators are surprisingly smart enough to recognize that excessive heat can make normal instruction untenable.

Second, it has the authority to modify school schedules when conditions warrant.

So… who decides whether a school day should be shortened?

What temperatures trigger that decision?

Are measurements taken inside classrooms, where children actually sit, or are decisions based on the outdoor forecast?

And are the rules applied consistently across district campuses?

These are not particularly complicated questions.

They should have straightforward answers.

Where Does the Money Go?

Santa Barbara is hardly an impoverished community.

Its property values are extraordinary.

Its residents pay substantial taxes.

Its public institutions are supported by an affluent population that expects—and deserves—competent administration.

Yet our school children are reportedly trying to learn in classrooms exceeding 90 degrees.

There is something fundamentally wrong with that picture.

The district will undoubtedly point to budgets, bonds, competing priorities and the Byzantine mysteries of public education finance.

And maybe they’ll form a commission to study the problem! (Yes, bring in expensive consultants, that’s the solution…!)

Taxpayers and parents deserve to know how classroom cooling ranks among the district’s capital priorities.

How much has been allocated?

How much has actually been spent?

Which schools are scheduled for upgrades? And when?

A Few Questions for the Principal

I have written to Dr. Valarie Labrentz, principal of Santa Barbara Junior High, requesting information about classroom temperatures, the number of rooms without air conditioning, heat-related incidents, emergency procedures and the timetable for improvements.

Her response is pending.

I have also asked whether the school maintains temperature records.

It should. Because without measurements, how can our well-paid administrators know whether their classrooms are safe?

And without transparent criteria, how can parents know when a school day should be shortened or canceled?

These are matters of public accountability, not meteorological philosophy.

The Final Examination

There is an irony here.

California imposes extensive regulations on buildings, workplace safety, energy efficiency and environmental standards.

We have rules governing everything from automobile emissions to the precise circumstances under which a plastic straw may be handed to a customer.

Yet a public school can apparently operate without adequate cooling during a serious heatwave.

The district should establish clear, publicly available classroom-temperature standards, publish its cooling plans and explain how it intends to protect students in the meantime.

Parents should not have to wonder whether their children are being educated or slow-roasted.

Santa Barbara Unified should hastily address this unhealthy situation before the next heatwave arrives.

The weather is not waiting for the next school board meeting.

Montecito has discovered a new way to make money.

Sell the water.

In this case, water rights.

And it seems to have forgotten that water has been California’s most strategically valuable resource since the Gold Rush, when prospectors discovered that controlling water could be as lucrative as finding gold.

Ever since, fortunes have been made—and empires built—by those who controlled its flow.

Fresh water will become much more scarce in the coming decades.

But even 90 years ago, in LA, the smart money was on owning the water.

Just ask Noah Cross, the fictional water baron of Chinatown, 1937 LA: “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!”

Yet Montecito Water District is negotiating the permanent sale of more than 40 percent of its State Water entitlement!

The prospective buyer?

A private development company planning to build 4,000 homes on agricultural land north of Santa Barbara.

The price: $36.5 million (potentially rising to approximately $40 million by the time the transaction closes).

But before Montecito Water District congratulates itself on becoming water merchants, a few matters deserve attention.

Starting with who is buying, who stands to make money—and who will be left holding the garden hose if and when Montecito’s water supply falls victim to emergency conditions

A New Town Needs a Drink

The buyer is Solstra Communities California LLC, a privately backed company developing a project called Solomon Hills.

Its proposed community occupies 4,195 acres between Orcutt and Los Alamos, west of Highway 101.

The plans include 4,000 homes, commercial and office space, schools, parks, roads and other infrastructure.

In effect, a new town.

Before any town rises, the developer must navigate environmental reviews, zoning changes, infrastructure requirements and county approvals.

And secure water.

Lots of it.

Which brings us to Montecito.

Montecito’s annual State Water Project entitlement is 3,300 acre-feet.

The proposed deal would transfer 1,400 acre-feet—42.4 percent—to Solstra.

Also included are 550 acre-feet of groundwater banking capacity and 1,650 acre-feet of water already stored in the Semitropic Groundwater Banking Program.

In return, Montecito would receive $36.5 million, adjusted for inflation until closing, and save approximately $1.8 million in annual State Water expenses.

Solstra also agrees to cover $600,000 in transaction costs, even if the development ultimately fails.

Montecito Water District would retain 1,900 acre-feet of State Water entitlement.

This is not an immediate diversion of 1,400 acre-feet of water flowing through Montecito’s taps. It is a proposed permanent transfer of contractual water interests, including associated infrastructure rights.

State Water has become expensive and unreliable. During the drought years of 2021 and 2022, California delivered only 5 percent of Montecito’s contracted allocation.

Meanwhile, Montecito negotiated a 50-year desalination arrangement with the City of Santa Barbara, receiving approximately 1,400 acre-feet annually.

The District says that since 2019 it hasn’t needed State Water to meet customer demand.

Why pay millions every year for water you don’t need?

A fair question.

But here’s another.

Why permanently sell a strategic resource instead of leasing it until you might need it again?

Meet the Developer

Solstra describes itself as an American company backed by private investors.

Its chief executive is Klaus Hasbo.

Solstra acquired another entity, Pacific Coast Energy Company, in 2019.

An interesting corporate trail.

In litigation involving Pacific Coast Energy Company, Hasbo was identified as chairman of Newbridge Resources LLC, an entity described in court papers as controlling Pacific Coast Energy Company.

The litigation identifies a corporate relationship. It does not establish wrongdoing by Hasbo, Newbridge or Solstra. But it suggests that understanding this developer requires looking beyond the name Solstra.

Who owns Newbridge?

Who ultimately controls the development company?

Who supplied the acquisition capital?

And who receives the profits if the land becomes a valuable residential community?

Solstra’s public description refers to private investors without naming them.

When a public utility proposes transferring valuable assets to their enterprise, the identity of the ultimate beneficiaries becomes a legitimate public-interest question.

Enter Cadiz

Here the plot thickens.

In April 2024—more than two years before Montecito’s public vote—Solstra signed a water-supply agreement with Cadiz Inc., a publicly traded California water company.

Cadiz agreed to supply 1,275 acre-feet annually to Solomon Hills through a complicated system involving its water infrastructure and exchanges with State Water Project contractors.

The agreement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, specifies a maximum delivered-water price of $1,750 per acre-foot in 2024 dollars.

And here’s the interesting part.

Buried in the agreement is a provision concerning a $150,000 initial payment from Solstra to Cadiz.

The payment was due at the earlier of two events: 180 days after execution, or five business days after Montecito Water District provided Solstra with a satisfactory written offer to make available sufficient State Water Project conveyance capacity.

Montecito was specifically named in a private commercial agreement in April 2024.

This was two and a half years before the district’s September 2026 public vote.

Although not proof of impropriety, it is evidence that Montecito’s possible participation was being contemplated long before the public was asked to consider the current sale.

Who first approached whom?

What discussions took place in 2023 and 2024?

Were district directors aware of the Cadiz arrangement?

And why was Montecito specifically named?

The Cadiz contract also contemplates water exchanges and groundwater banking arrangements designed to maintain deliveries during dry years.

The proposed Montecito transaction would give Solstra its own State Water entitlement and storage interests.

These are related elements of a much larger water-supply strategy.

Precisely how the Cadiz contract and Montecito purchase fit together financially and operationally deserves examination.

The underlying agreement is publicly available in Cadiz’s SEC filing.

The Value of Water

Water does not merely allow houses to function.

It makes land developable.

Solomon Hills proposes to transform thousands of acres of largely rural property into a community containing 4,000 residences and extensive commercial development.

Without an adequate, legally defensible water supply, the project faces a substantial obstacle.

With one, its prospects improve considerably.

Suppose that securing water increased the potential economic value of each proposed residence by $25,000.

Across 4,000 homes, that represents $100 million.

At $50,000 per residence, $200 million.

These are hypothetical calculations, not appraisals or estimates of Solstra’s actual profit.

But they demonstrate why a developer might willingly pay $40 million for water interests.

And why Montecito residents should want an independent assessment of what those interests are worth to the buyer.

The important question isn’t simply what Montecito saves by selling.

It is what the purchaser gains.

And What About Our Water Bills?

Montecito residents have become accustomed to expensive water and periodic exhortations to conserve it.

The Water District estimates that the transaction would eliminate approximately $1.8 million in annual costs.

But will our bills decline?

Not necessarily.

The district says proceeds could finance infrastructure improvements, strengthen local water supplies and reduce debt or future rate increases.

All worthy objectives.

Yet a credit assessment published by S&P Global Ratings in 2025 noted that Montecito’s financial planning anticipated annual rate increases of 5.75 percent.

It also identified approximately $67 million in capital improvements planned between 2025 and 2029.

That forecast predates the proposed sale, and it does not establish what future rates will actually be.

Residents should be asking whether the sale will produce lower bills, smaller increases or merely another pool of money for capital expenditure.

If the answer is infrastructure, which projects? At what cost?

And what measurable benefit will customers receive?

The Drought Question

There is an irony in all this.

For decades, Californians have been instructed to treat water as an increasingly precious commodity.

Conserve it.

Store it.

Don’t waste it.

Plan for the next drought.

And now Montecito proposes selling a substantial portion of its contractual entitlement permanently.

The district insists its remaining supplies are sufficient.

But water security is not only about average annual demand.

It is about the unexpected.

Earthquakes.

Infrastructure failures.

Energy interruptions.

Wildfires.

A prolonged drought affecting several supply sources simultaneously.

Montecito’s desalinated supply is valuable insurance against drought. But the desalination plant and its delivery infrastructure are not immune to disruption.

And a 50-year agreement, however attractive, is not the same thing as owning unlimited water.

Selling a right permanently means surrendering future options.

A temporary lease could preserve them.

Has that alternative been thoroughly evaluated?

A Very Quiet Decision

On September 29, Montecito Water District directors unanimously approved proceeding with a nonbinding letter of intent.

According to Noozhawk, several residents expressed skepticism.

Marshall Miller, a fourth-generation Montecito resident and Montecito Planning Commissioner, was among those concerned about permanently relinquishing State Water rights.

Board Vice President Cori Hayman acknowledged that she had initially opposed the idea before becoming persuaded of its merits.

Board President Brian Goebel joked that the meeting attracted the fullest boardroom in a decade.

There was relatively little debate among directors before the vote.

Perhaps a transaction of this magnitude deserves a broader public conversation before everyone becomes comfortable with it.

The proposed sale is not final.

A purchase agreement is expected to take months to negotiate, and closing depends on approvals for Solomon Hills that could take years.

Which means there is still time to ask questions.

Here is the first.

Who is Making Money?

Solstra’s investors stand to benefit commercially if Solomon Hills succeeds.

Cadiz stands to receive revenue under its separate long-term water-supply contract.

Montecito Water District stands to receive a substantial payment and reduce its operating expenses.

Those are identifiable financial interests.

What has not been established is whether any Montecito Water District director, employee, consultant or associated individual has a personal financial interest in Solstra, Cadiz or the development.

Nor is there evidence that public officials received improper payments, commissions or other benefits.

Investigative journalism should uncover conflicts of interest, not invent them.

But neither should it assume that every potential conflict has been ruled out merely because none has yet been documented.

Financial disclosures, corporate ownership records, consulting contracts and communications surrounding the proposed sale are all appropriate subjects for scrutiny.

Questions That Need Answering

Before Montecito permanently parts with a substantial portion of its State Water entitlement, its residents deserve answers to the following:

1. Who ultimately owns Solstra Communities California LLC? Identify its beneficial owners, investment partners and parent companies.

2. What is the relationship between Solstra, Klaus Hasbo, Newbridge Resources and Pacific Coast Energy Company? Who controls each entity, and who stands to benefit financially from Solomon Hills?

3. Has any Montecito Water District director, employee, consultant or immediate family member had a financial, business or consulting relationship with Solstra, Cadiz or their affiliates?

4. When did negotiations with Solstra first begin? Who initiated them, and why was Montecito explicitly named in Cadiz’s April 2024 contract?

5. Was the $36.5 million price independently appraised? Who performed the valuation, what assumptions were used, and did it include the groundwater banking and stored-water interests?

6. Were other potential purchasers invited to bid? If not, why was Solstra selected for exclusive negotiations?

7. What would Montecito earn by leasing these rights instead of selling them permanently? Has a 25-, 50- and 75-year comparison been prepared?

8. What happens to Montecito water bills? Will residents receive rate reductions, smaller future increases or neither?

9. What happens if Santa Barbara’s desalination plant suffers a prolonged interruption during a severe drought? How much additional resilience would the district retain after the sale?

10. How much does securing Montecito’s water increase the value of Solomon Hills? Has the district considered the economic benefit to the purchaser when negotiating the price?

11. What happens if Solomon Hills is never built—or is substantially reduced? Can Solstra transfer or resell the acquired interests, and would Montecito have any right to recover them?

12. Will the full purchase agreement, financial analysis, valuation reports and relevant conflict-of-interest disclosures be made public before any binding commitment?

And one final question:

Why should Montecito residents be in such a hurry to sell something that future generations may desperately wish they still owned?