Stupidity Watch 1

Business As Usual After the 2026 Midterms By Robert Korczynski November 5th, 2026 On Wednesday, November 4th, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new round of major economic sanctions under Operation Economic Outcast, disabling a multi-layered maritime fraud network in India and an aviation support hub in Turkey that were funneling money to the IRGC in Iran. These sanctions are the latest in a weekly series of Treasury actions designed to eliminate every single source of funding for the IRGC in Iran. The ability to enforce shutting down grey markets and shadow fleets stems from Bessent's unique skill stack. As a former macro hedge fund manager who famously shorted the British pound in 1992, netting his boss George Soros a billion dollars in a single day, and shorted the Japanese yen in 2013 to make Soros another 1.2 billion dollars, he analyzes global commerce as a fluid system of liquidity and leverage rather than a rigid set of rules. He then spent the subsequent d...

The Two US Proxy Wars In The Ukraine By Robert Korczynski In the West, the Ukraine-Russia War is consistently framed as an unprovoked invasion by Russia that began in February of 2022. However, official declarations from the Kremlin from March of 2022, and a quick glance at history tells a different story. The 8-Year Border War in the Donbass (2014–2022) Following the 2014 Maidan Revolution and the Ukraine's subsequent political pivot toward NATO and the European Union, the Russian-speaking Donbass region rejected the new pro-Western government and declared their intention to join Russia. Over the next eight years, the United States provided roughly $3 billion in security assistance to fund, train, and equip Ukrainian forces along the Donbass frontline, while Russia backed the separatists and maintained its position in Crimea. In February of 2022, after 8 years of this first US proxy war in the Donbass, Putin had enough, and he pushed across the line. His troops swept through Easte...

The Irkutsk Plague Institute and Russian Phage Therapy By Robert Korczynski October 7th 2026 The recent death of 28-year-old laboratory technician Darya Shipilova at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute, and the resulting lockdown of sixty scientists at the Institute alongside the hospital monitoring of two hundred likely family contacts will never be officially explained by the Russians, who are not known for their transparency. If this event was a localized lab leak of an engineered super plague, the Russian Scientists and their family members are certainly being given pneumonic plague bacteriophage therapy. The Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute was explicitly designated for dual-use biological weapons warfare research under the Soviet system, meaning the likely research was with the endemic Pneumonic Plague, creating one or more Multiply Resistant Pneumonic Plague (MRPP) strains from regional wildlife reservoirs like marmots and ground squirrels. Recent revelations from t...

Why American Democracy Lasted 250 Years ​By Robert Korczynski ​Between odd-year voting for local municipal elections, even-year voting for the House and Senate, and the Electoral College for the presidency, the United States operates with three distinct governing models inherited directly from ancient Greece and Rome. Depending on which office is on the ballot, power is allocated through an ancient property-owner direct assembly, an aristocratic Roman-style representative republic, or a mechanical lottery system that ancient Athenians would instantly recognize as sortition. ​The first tier operates quietly at the local level. Research from the Sightline Institute and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab analyzing more than 25,000 local governments nationwide shows that roughly 60% to 75% of municipalities hold their elections off-cycle, either in odd-numbered years or on separate spring and summer dates. By scheduling municipal, school board, and mayoral elections away from the...

Odd-Year Voting is Classic Greek Democracy By Robert Korczynski In ancient Sparta and Athens democracy only included land-owning male veterans that were citizens of the state, and never included people passing by or temporarily living there, and no women, and no slaves. The amount of the population that fit this criteria was about 13%, and they were the only ones that were allowed to vote. Up until 1820 in the United States and everywhere on the planet, the definition of democracy had always been some version of Greek democracy. America was set up with classic Greek democracy, but in 1820 three American states extended voting rights to poor white men, participating in the slippery slope into universal suffrage on the planet started by the French and the Haitians, but without killing the ruling class. Over the next 100 years the suffragist movement finally achieved universal suffrage in the United States, first with "all persons" to reverse Dred Scott and to include freed blac...

America Declares Control of Space By Robert Korczynski ​In 1967 the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom signed the Outer Space Treaty, establishing an international framework intended to prevent the weaponization of satellites in orbit, legally barring nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction from orbiting the Earth. For decades, the Pentagon leaned into that ideal, treating the orbital theater as a sanctuary dedicated to communication, GPS navigation, and reconnaissance satellites. ​On August 28, 2026, President Trump stood at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston to sign an Executive Order establishing the Presidential Commission on the United States Space Academy, laying the groundwork for a dedicated federal service academy to train a permanent officer corps for orbital defense, NASA, and the commercial space sector. ​Then on Monday, September 14, 2026, at the annual Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Secretary of the Ai...