The first thing to think about with holes is whether you are in one. Second might be to consider stop digging and climb out and see what the situation is out there. We just had a demonstration of a national effort on the flat screen in the conference room with a parade of bureaucrats. They seemed sort of worked up about discovering an Everest of corruption that both major Parties ignored since the Johnson Administration. There seems to be an effort to cease the excavation and start building again as we have successfully over the last quarter millennium.

The contrast between the aura of 2021 and 2026 is palpable, with a series of events jammed atop one another in a seemingly endless gaudy procession. The FIFA Championship has a multitude of Europeans marveling at the things we accept as perfectly normal. Our anniversary celebration has been rising in energy with the National State Fair event starting on the Mall as the Park Service attempts to fix the destruction of the vandals on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool.

It all has been a potent reminder that our life here is good and lived well by pretty nice people. But of course there are some who prefer to keep digging and we wish them Godspeed on the way to their destinations.

Wednesdays are a particularly good day to climb our of our holes and look around. It is a brilliant blue morning, unvarnished and light to the touch. That wasn’t true when HHS Secretary RFK JR was at the Podium yesterday talking about some of the corruption in Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the DOJ sent a grim young man up to talk about billions stolen in fraudulent billing. One fellow alone scored $1.6 billion and was living in the Philippines. Having that much cash there means you could purchase the entire city of Olongapo and everything and everyone outside the gate to the old Navy Base.

The Chairman has arranged a deal with a nice lady who gives Socotra House a couple hours with a warm seat in the barber chair down in the salon to keep the boys and girls presentable though the rest of the week. The cleaning crew from Central Services does this end of the 4th Floor in the middle of the week and the sound of people actually working gives things a little flair of energy through lunch. Then Miles has scheduled a seminar on the acceptance of staggering fraud laid atop a border wide open to the regional jails and asylums that were emptied onto these shores.

We are always amazed when one of these gigantic acts of industrial scale corruption are revealed, but this scale of fictional medical practices is part of a rip-off of almost unimaginable scale. It is said the entire system of fraud is at every level of government might be size of the War Department dispensing a unique form of limited foreign aid.

We know the scale of fraud conducted for decades is in the trillions of dollars. And that amount was stolen while we still built one of the most successful societies in human history. Yeah, we know a lot of it was spent right here on fancy homes and cars, but still….The carnival of clowns included a burst of Woke virtue-signaling enacted by a socialist cadre that managed an elder politician into all sorts of strange things masquerading as a moderate.

Time to stop digging. It is a nice day out there and we ought to start getting out of the hole we allowed to get dug on our watch!

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com