The following was written as I entered NYC's harbor aboard a ship:

It is September 11th and my, no doubt controversial, thoughts appear at the end of this writeup.

The entry to NYC’s harbor invariably takes place during the early morning. There are few harbors that can compete with the visage; with the dawn to the east and the giant green mistress given to us by France in celebration of our dedication to liberty to the west and the towers of Manhattan manifesting themselves to the fore. First crossing under the giant Verrazzano Bridge, bracketed by twin ancient forts controlling “The Narrows”, and then, again to the east, confronted by the trio of smaller bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn on its long island. With the massive orange Staten Island ferries and the smaller commuter ferries competing with the various cargo ships and pleasure boats which clutter the route.

Every time we have returned to NYC and passed the Statue of Liberty, I get a chill when I realize that my ancestors saw the same view when they emigrated to the US. Unfortunately, this time, much is hidden by rain and fog welcoming us to a new year.

The following couple of paragraphs add to the current limitation of sea routes due to the spreading conflict attached to our attack of Iran coupled to our ally, Israel’s attacks on a wide variety of fronts as well as limitations caused by the Ukraine-Russian war.

U.S.-based cruise lines have dropped or rerouted port calls in mainland China due to massive retaliatory port fees imposed by China's Ministry of Transport. (Exceptions include MSC – which is privately owned and headquartered in Switzerland and a couple of the Royal Caribbean ships which are based in China).

The key reason is a function of the escalating U.S.– China trade friction. In response to U.S. tariffs and maritime fees targeting Chinese shipping and cargo interests, China enacted retaliatory port regulations aimed at U.S.-owned, operated, or flagged vessels.

The regulations, in response to similar ones placed by the US against Chinese vessels, charge US-associated vessels prohibitive "Special Port Fees" based on net tonnage. For a mid-to-large cruise ship, this translates to $1.5 million to over $2 million per single port call (with scheduled rate increases through 2028).

Paying millions in fees for a 1- or 2-day stop in ports like Shanghai or Sanya destroys the profit margin for a voyage and creates an unviable financial model. Lines such as Oceania Cruises, Regent Seven Seas, and Holland America determined that visiting mainland China was no longer financially feasible.

And now back to today’s timeline.

It's currently September 11, and I am forced to become melancholy and remember that day, 25 years ago, when the world we took for granted was irretrievably lost. I'll leave stories of my personal ties to the event for another time, but it's worth considering the new contour lines drawn in the sand of our personal freedom that the event invoked.

We've only been out of the US a couple of months, but the changes in our national condition, even during that short period, are clear. My somber thoughts about 9/11 have pushed me to think about the vast gap between what we once took for granted about how our government should act, and what passes for the same government today.

We're at a point where the current POTUS has to be held responsible for the results of his own actions, rather than continuing to blame his predecessors. Each time a new distraction is created — say, from disclosing the rest of the Epstein files — the fallout from that distraction becomes more disruptive than the last.

We started with rising inflation from the new tariffs, and now find ourselves in an acceleration of that inflation due to gasoline and diesel costs driven by the Iran war. Meanwhile, the US fiscal deficit has ballooned past $40 trillion. At the same time, the president negotiated a deal with his own appointees — his former personal attorneys — to forgive income-tax "irregularities" that had been under investigation. Worth remembering: if money was owed and has now been unilaterally forgiven, that money would otherwise have reduced the deficit. So this "gift" to a few individuals is effectively a cost passed to everyone else.

We're currently involved in another self-inflicted war of dubious long-term benefit. The Korean War didn't prevent the establishment of North Korea; the Vietnam War accomplished even less. Our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan haven't been shown to be particularly beneficial either, despite the cost in lives and treasury.

Our war against Iran has little upside beyond, at best, restoring the status quo from before we attacked — while the costs have already accrued. The loss of US service personnel and national prestige is incalculable, but the financial toll is not: comprehensive models tracking the 108-day high-intensity period estimate total direct military spending at roughly $113.3 billion, based on initial daily burn rates north of $1 billion. The conflict's disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz drove energy prices up enough to cost American consumers an estimated $100+ billion in extra fuel expenses — averaging $760 to $780 per household. According to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, the war's total cost to the average American household — combining energy, interest rates, and direct war costs — was about $1,650 as of last week. He noted the number grows by the day.

The conflict has also caused significant, asymmetric drawdowns in US weapons stockpiles, creating a multi-year replenishment backlog that Pentagon officials and defense analysts warn could hurt overall global readiness. The heaviest toll has fallen on defensive interceptors used against Iranian ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drone swarms: assessments indicate 50–65% of the pre-war Patriot interceptor stockpile has been expended, leaving reserves below 1,000 units. THAAD stocks are down 38–40%, to around 250 interceptors. The Navy fired over 1,000 Tomahawks, severely depleting naval stockpiles. And so on.

Replacing these assets will be costly, and in the meantime our ability to respond to other threats — say, a flare-up between China and Taiwan — is badly constrained.

We find ourselves in a world of parables. There's "the boy who cried wolf": during his business career, Mr. Trump was repeatedly accused of not paying contractors per their contracts. As president, he tore up NAFTA and replaced it with a "beautiful" agreement — only to later call that same deal terrible and start a trade war with Canada, after first threatening to annex it.

In his first term, he also tore up the treaty limiting Iran's nuclear program and then spent considerable, unsuccessful effort trying to replace it with something less binding. It has always been obvious to anyone looking at a map that Iran could threaten the Strait of Hormuz — yet he launched an unprovoked attack, apparently convinced this would be quick and easy despite all evidence to the contrary. When a memorandum of understanding was finally reached, the US ignored its terms, and the situation didn't improve. Given that track record, I find it almost darkly funny that we now say Iran can't be trusted to keep an agreement. Instead, we've spent enormous resources only to end up begging for the pre-war status quo so we can claim victory and save face.

It all comes down to trust.

Why did I write this? Because today I woke up to the president telling supporters to go out and vote with family and friends, saying: "I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell." Whatever they taught in junior high history elsewhere in the country, I was never taught about an American president openly encouraging election cheating and then offering a cash bribe to vote for his party.

Meanwhile, the wars have spread. The Yemeni civil war has intensified, with the Houthis capturing key coastal areas — including the strategic port of Mocha and the entire western coastline facing the southern Red Sea. This gives the group control of the Yemeni side of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the vital chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal, further worsening the global fuel picture. And the Israeli government, emboldened by the US, continues to strangle Gaza, has approved new West Bank settlements, and continues advancing into and bombing Lebanon and Syria.

While we're on the subject of education: it's sadly funny that some people still believe "China will pay billions in tariffs," not understanding that China won't pay a penny of it. Tariffs are essentially a sales tax — something like Europe's VAT — paid by the consumer. The revenue collected was supposed to offset the losses from tax cuts at the top. Instead, while tariffs added inflationary pressure on ordinary consumers, the funds collected never came close to replacing the lost income-tax revenue.

So we've crossed the $40 trillion mark in federal debt — roughly $118,000 per person living in the US. This week, the president proposed giving every American adult $5,000 if Republicans win the next election. Setting aside that this is blatant electoral bribery, that's another trillion added to the deficit.

From my friend Jim, a joke that fits the moment:

A bunch of prisoners have been in jail a long time. The turnkey arrives and announces, "Good news! A change of underwear for everyone!" Cheers go up. Then he adds: "You change with him, he changes with you, you change with him..."

It's the same with the $5,000: you pay for his bonus, he pays for someone else's, and so on down the line. Don't have the $5K to cover Joe's bonus? No problem — just borrow it. A fellow named Mr. Ricardo will lend it to you; he works for a central bank.

On Thursday, in *The New Republic*, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party and to all Americans, outlining how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January, following a Democratic win in the November 2026 midterms. (newrepublic.com - New congress final battle american democracy)

Our current leader seems far more at ease with long-term autocrats like Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un, and Netanyahu (two of whom have ICC arrest warrants) than with the leaders of the democracies that have been America's traditional allies for decades, whom he freely insults and threatens.

Step by step, we seem determined to dismantle the financial and geopolitical system that gave the US such extraordinary power since World War II.

So where does this leave us?

Financially: the massive debt required to build the data centers the AI boom is assumed to need, layered on top of existing government debt and rising stock-market margin debt, has made the system so fragile that a sudden rate increase risks a genuine financial meltdown of all that leverage. Setting aside whether AI itself poses a danger to society — I think it's capable of causing real social and financial unrest before long (especially after Trump’s executive order entitled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence”, which allows AI self-enhancement by the creation of “agent swarms” which are capable of inflicting unfathomable changes in the world as we know it today) — do we actually need all the data centers currently being built? Almost certainly not. If China's more efficient approach to scaling AI keeps gaining ground, as it appears to be doing, many of those data centers may turn out to be superfluous — and someone will be left holding the financial bag.

We have a Congress whose majority feels too intimidated by the prospect of POTUS's wrath to exercise its own constitutional role as a check on the executive branch, and so it has essentially forfeited that authority. And we have an executive branch headed by someone who spends his nights posting on social media in a way that, coming from anyone else, would spark plenty of debate among geriatric psychologists about whether he's in worse shape mentally than Biden was at the same age.

The spike in inflation is forcing the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, POTUS tantrums notwithstanding. Meanwhile, as Treasury Secretary Bessent buys our long-term debt with short-term debt in a panicked effort to push down long rates — a move likely to fail and counterproductive in the long run — China's Xi is encouraging the BRICS nations to build a new world order, using the yuan as a trading medium instead of the dollar. If that effort to create a counterweight to the dollar succeeds, it will erode a major source of US wealth and power that we've relied on since World War II.

As I write this, Trump has just suggested it "would be cool" if Ireland became a single nation — a real jab at UK sovereignty and a suggestion that could reignite the Troubles and tear at Northern Ireland's social fabric.

We seem to be living under a cloud of chaos.

Which brings me back to 9/11: the acts of a handful of terrorists changed our nation forever. A question I've been asked repeatedly over the past couple of months is, "How bad is it now that Zohran Mamdani has become mayor of New York City?" My honest answer is that he seems to be doing everything right, and that I don't much care about his personal politics either way.

The question itself makes me uncomfortable, for a few reasons. First, I couldn't tell you the name of the mayor of any other US city — so why should mine be on everyone else's mind? It suggests people are absorbing opinions from folks who don't live in NYC, opinions shaped more by racial prejudice and by misunderstandings of what "socialism" actually means in the context of police, fire, sanitation, clean water, and education departments. It feels like we've entered an Orwellian world where the lessons taught in school were never really learned, and have gradually been replaced by socially engineered "alternatives."

One striking example is the outrage over a pied-à-terre tax on apartments owned by non-residents — often wealthy individuals based in places like China or Russia. Some legitimately use these apartments occasionally; others use them as tax shelters or as a way to park laundered money. Either way, these owners use city services — police, fire, and so on — without contributing income tax to support them. My view: if they want to keep the apartment, they should help pay for the services they use. Otherwise, they can establish residency and pay income tax, or give up the apartment and help ease the housing shortage. For people living far outside the city to get outraged on behalf of multi-billionaires being asked to pay a little tax on multi-million-dollar condos is, frankly, bizarre. In fact, most of the things they have mentioned accusingly that he has done are simply fabrications and point towards their own xenophobia being taken advantage of by others.

All four living ex-presidents and first ladies — Bill and Hillary Clinton, George W. and Laura Bush, Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe and Jill Biden — attended the Ground Zero commemoration in Manhattan, where victims' names were read and, for the first time, a moment of silence was held for those who died of illnesses related to conditions in the aftermath of the buildings' collapse. President Trump reportedly skipped the ceremony because organizers don't allow speeches there; instead, he went to the Pentagon, where he delivered a speech tying his war on Iran to the September 11 attacks.

Anyone who doubts that rational democratic countries can, over time, craft their own national insanities need only read 20th-century European history.

Enjoy!

Jeff