Thoughts on Coming Apart and the Coming Great Reset
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Kit Webster
What To Think About Pippa Malmgren?
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March 21, 2025​
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Themes and Theses - Why I'm Contemplating Out Loud
(Initially formulated in the early 90s, following decades of reading history, philosophy, psychology and a lot of contemplation, particularly on the subject of cycles. In the end, this is a relatively straightforward story about human nature and of history rhyming.)
The US will enter a period of crisis in the early 2000s. In the late 90s, I incorporated Strauss' and Howe's terminology of the Fourth Turning (without incorporating their generations paradigm) and agreed with Howe that the end stage of the crisis began with the Great Financial Crisis and would last into the early 2030s. We are not yet to the middle of the end stage of the crisis.
The crisis will be serious and could be existential.
Internal strife will increase, up to and including secession and civil war.
International conflicts will increase as the vacuum created by the weakening of the US is filled by other players.
There will be many threads to the crisis, but the primary thread will be debt, deficits and entitlements. Other factors include, eg, demographics, a loss of meaning and myth and a loss of self-discipline.
Politics will move leftward as citizens look for some refuge from the chaos. The US will become increasingly susceptible to a (man) on a white horse, who can come from either the left or the right.
Inflation, as the most likely way to address debt since austerity is not politically acceptable, will significantly lower standards of living, exacerbating the civil crises.
Eventually, the dollar will be inflated away and lose its reserve status.
Once the old rot is cleared out, and assuming continuity, there will be the basis for the establishment of a new order.
(Added around 2020) The loss of faith by our youth in our founding principles means that the new order will at least partially be based on new principles. As yet, I have no visibility as to what those principles might be.
(Added in the early 00s) While humans are contributing to global warming, policies implemented to address manmade global warming will create a significant energy crisis, probably toward the end of the Fourth Turning.
(Added in 2023) The lowering / elimination of standards in education, the judiciary, law enforcement, the military and other segments of our society will create a population unable to adequately comprehend, do or respond to the challenges of democracy and culture.
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Quotes to Contemplate
Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price. - Caitlin Flannigan
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> Primary Ideas in This Week's Post
It begins. Trump defied a court's orders by deporting some Venezuelans and defied another by not giving a court notice before another deportation.
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The unredacted JFK files were released and contained no significant new details. The games and conspiracy theories continue.
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​Trump attacked CNN and MSNBC as "corrupt," and "what they do is illegal." - Very disturbing.
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Also disturbing were Republican threats to impeach judges who issued opinions they disagreed with.
What To Think About Pippa Malmgren?
Pippa Malmgren is formidable, plugged in and just a little off kilter.
She will remind you at the drop of a hat that she served several presidents.
She is one of those non-German people who insists on being addressed as Dr. - her PhD is from the London School of Economics. Her Substack is titled, "Dr. Pippa's Pen and Podcast." (One of these days, I'm going to change my signature at the top of this post to Kit Webster, MEE, CPA.)
In a recent post, she segued to discussing the "phallic nature of weapons systems."
One of the ponderings in her current writings is whether JFK was becoming enlightened through the use of psychedelics.
She clearly has a first-rate mind and the ability to fit into high places. I have put a summary biography and the bottom of this article.
Her father, Harald Malmgren, was literally awesome, and I say that about very few people. Far better than a first-rate mind, close advisor to presidents and present at many historical occasions. Most importantly, he was a deep-thinker and able to not only connect dots but project the dots. Whenever he spoke, I listened.
I first ran across Pippa when I read her book, Signals. I was underimpressed. What I saw in the book and then in her later writings is a tendency to point out lots of things and then claim insight when some of them come to fruition. She seems to delight in the strange and the corner cases (a trait we share).
She wrote books on leadership, about which I was even less impressed.
(All of this being underwhelmed could easily say more about me than her. She has many international plaudits and I don't even have one from my neighborhood.)
But, she also comes up with some fascinating thoughts. I try to read whatever she has to write, and I subscribe to her Substack. There are only three or four people that I read or follow that are at her level when thinking or writing about geopolitics.
I noticed in the past few months that she and her father were popping up here and there talking about UAPs/UFOs. I could dismiss this as one of Pippa's "out there" topics, but could not dismiss her father's interest. You know that the whole UAP thing has not made any sense to me since I read Project Bluebook many decades ago, when they were UFOs - even ignoring protological exams on rural Mississippians. You have read my - it's a big universe and finding us would be very difficult, much less getting here - discussions. And it makes no sense that a technically-superior being would hang around for decades not doing much or making formal contact, particularly considering that we should not be that interesting. Maybe they are just keeping track of the interesting species they encounter, here and there.
But, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," I have to keep an open mind, and low-probability things do happen. It is not required that alien beings' behaviors make sense to me.
What brings this to mind is a long treatise that Pippa released this week, which wandered around Curtis LeMay, JFK, her father, the CIA, and aliens. It was totally fascinating reading, and I have no idea how to assess it.
Again, the bit that primarily caught my attention was that her father, on his deathbed (he died last month), thought it important that the facts on UAPs become public after having been kept strictly secret for decades.
She remarks on how profound it would be to learn that we are not alone in the universe. Again, maybe I'm a one-off, but I would guess that it is likely we are not alone in the universe. My response would be more on the order of, ok, therefore what?
It is not clear that other life is sentient or can travel the vast distances of space or doesn't destroy themselves after a certain level of technological development.
But if they are highly developed and have survived and have found us, it is also not clear why they would be particularly interested in us in other than a curiosity / lab rat sense. If they are here, they are, by definition, technologically superior.
Maybe they follow Star Trek's Prime Directive, basically that thou shalt not interfere with the natural development of alien species.
I mentioned in prior comments that I view space aliens like free will - a topic for endless, fascinating discussions in dorm rooms that will ultimately yield diminishing returns.
Unless, in the case of space aliens, they actually show up and interact.
Pippa indicates that we are about to learn many fascinating things. Pippa says, in effect, that my cynicism and sanguinity are about to be blown out of the water.
I am very much looking forward to it.
As for Pippa, Dr. Pippa, I will continue to enthusiastically follow her - with my shields up.
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Postscript.
Erik Townsend of Macrovoices fame ran Pippa's article through ChatGPT and asked it to comment on its credibility. ChatGPT responded with a long, detailed commentary that concluded: "In conclusion, Dr. Malmgren’s revelations appear credible, and indeed many key aspects are backed by declassified evidence or prominent expert testimony. U.S. Cold War nuclear strategy was more hair-trigger and aggressive than the public was told – exactly as she asserts. Prior whistleblowers like Ellsberg and new ones like Grusch bolster her story from different angles. The UFO incident she highlights is supported by multiple independent sources, even if officialdom remains silent. And the idea that military hardliners defied and possibly removed a president, while not proven, is consistent with the extreme measures they contemplated in that era." You can read ChatGPT's full response here.
I thought the whole GPT analysis thing was a great idea. Since I have found Perplexity and Grok to be better than ChatGPT at this kind of analysis, I asked both to look at the article and comment.
Maybe I like Perplexity because we tend to look at things the same way? Perplexity concluded as follows: "While the article contains some accurate information about Cold War tensions, military figures, and nuclear policy concerns, its central claims about UFO encounters influencing Kennedy's policies and potential assassination motives are unsupported by credible historical evidence. The text appears to be speculative in nature, combining historical facts with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories."
Grok tends to agree: "The article mixes verifiable history—such as LeMay’s hawkish stance, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and JFK’s arms control efforts—with speculative claims about UFOs, assassinations, and military conspiracies. Its reliance on personal anecdotes (e.g., Harald Malmgren’s stories) and disputed documents (e.g., the “Burned Memo”) weakens its credibility. While it raises intriguing questions about Cold War secrecy, its sensational assertions about UFOs and their role in JFK’s death lack substantiation and should be approached with skepticism. For a deeper understanding, researchers should consult primary sources like declassified records rather than speculative narratives."
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Pippa Malmgren is a former Presidential advisor and a prominent public speaker who co-founded H Robotics, which manufactures AI-led, modular, commercial-use drones for a wide range of industries including mining, oil and gas, insurance, construction and public safety. Dr. Malmgren also founded the DRPM Group, which advises institutional investors worldwide on investment trends and is a platform for her public speaking. She is the author of three books, two bestsellers: Geopolitics for Investors (2015), Signals: How Everyday Signs Help Us Navigate the World's Turbulent Economy a crowd-funded 4x Amazon best-seller (2016) and The Leadership LAB: Understanding Leadership in the 21st Century (2018) a bestseller which was named an FT Business Book of the Month, included on the CEO Goodreads list and named Business Book of the Year in 2019.
In late 2018, she was named one of the Fifty Top Inspiring Women in the UK and one of the Top 100 in Tech by @WATC_WeAreTech. She serves as a judge on The Queen's Enterprise Business Awards in 2018 and 2019 and as a judge for the EG Property Awards. She and Walter Isaacson together won the 2015 Intelligence Squared Debate on Robotics. Forbes has called @DrPippaM a "Must Follow" on Twitter since 2015. In 2018 she was listed as one of the Most Influential Economists in the World, Most Influential in Geopolitics. Top 100 Women in Blockchain, 5th Most Powerful Women in Finance and the 3rd most important Influencer on Robotics on Twitter (2017).
- EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2017 "top rated speaker"
- Barron's Malmgren got "five spontaneous applauses and a standing ovation"
- Institutional Investor says she was "voted the best/favourite"
- The Economist says they were "inundated with enthusiastic feedback"
- GAIM says she has "Showstopper status "and her "ability to captivate a room is uncanny."
- Tom Keene from Bloomberg said her book on Leadership is "bursting" "a blockbuster" "amazing" and "built to be downloaded on Kindle"
She was until 2019 a Non-Executive Board Member of the Department of International Trade in the UK. She also serves as a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI and on the British Ministry of Defence Working Group on Global Strategic Trends. She Chairs the Lewis PR Advisory Board (LAB) and is a member of the Greater London Authority Infrastructure Advisory Board. She serves on the Drone/UAV Committee of The British Standards Institute, Real Vision TV, and is a member of the British Science Association's 2018 Huxley Summit and Indiana University's School of Public Policy and Environmental Affairs as well as the Indiana University Manufacturing Initiative. She sometimes participates in the Pentagon's scenario sessions.
She served President George W. Bush in the White House and on The National Economic Council where she handled all financial market issues. She also dealt with terrorism risks to the economy after 911. Prior to that, she was the Chief Currency Strategist for Bankers Trust and then the Deputy Head of Global Strategy at UBS. She ran Bankers Trust's Asset Management business in Asia. She was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2000 and 2001.
Pippa is a regular guest anchor on CNBC and a regular commentator on the BBC including on The Today Program, Newsnight, Hard Talk and also on Monocle Radio. She has a BA from Mount Vernon College and an M.Sc. and PhD from the London School of Economics. She completed the Harvard Program on National Security. She lectures at Sandhurst, INSEAD, Duke Fuqua Global Executive MBA and has lectured at U Texas Austin and Tsinghua University. She gave the graduation address at the London School of Economics in 2013 and again in 2016.
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The JFK Files Were Released, And ...
60,000 pages is a lot to wade through.
So far, nothing of much interest and no stunning revelations. Some tidbits that will be of interest to the intrepid, but essentially nothing, including no UAP revelations.
The question remains, why keep them secret in the first place?
Oh, well, on to the RFK and MLK Jr files.
Let the conspiracy theories continue.
I Missed It - What Did They Find When They Audited Fort Knox?
Markets
So, You Say You Want A Revolution?
> The empire strikes back - including litigation as far as the eye can see.
- Donald Trump has invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport five Venezuelan nationals from the US. Hours later, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s administration from using the act to carry out its intended deportations of the Venezuelans. Then, Trump defied the court's orders by deporting them, anyway.
- In Canada, Justin Trudeau had become something of a joke. Conservatives had overwhelming odds to win the next election. Then, Trump attacked Canada, creating a nationalistic backlash, and the Liberals named Mark Carney as their head. The two parties are now neck-and-neck.
- A federal judge said Sunday that the government may have “willfully” disobeyed a court order after U.S. immigration officials deported Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen and member of Brown University’s medical school faculty who had a valid visa to remain in the country. Judge Leo T. Sorokin, a federal district judge in Massachusetts, had on Friday ordered the government to provide the court with a 48-hour notice before deporting Alawieh, who had been detained Thursday after returning from visiting relatives in Lebanon. Sorokin set a hearing date for Monday but later postponed it to give the government time to provide information about the case. Justice Department officials stated that they deported Alawieh after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders in a deleted folder on her phone.
- The Supreme Court sided with Donald Trump blocking the lower court’s order Forcing Trump to give aid to foreign countries.
- Chief Justice Roberts chastised Trump for threatening impeachment for judges who disagreed with him.
- Trump's attempt to fire two Democratic FTC commissioners sets up a direct challenge of the 1935 Supreme Court case that said President Franklin Roosevelt lacked the authority to fire an FTC commissioner.
- A court ruled that the dismantling of USAID was unconstitutional. It was based on the finding that Musk has acted as a U.S. officer without having been properly appointed to that role by President Trump.
- A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from enforcing a ban on transgender troops serving in the U.S. military, writing that the move violated the Fifth Amendment.
> Very frightening - let's assume it is just bombast for now - Trump
"You're gonna have these these cases... I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they're really corrupt and they're illegal." "What they do is illegal. It makes no difference how big a victory I had. I can have the biggest victory in history. It makes no difference what kind of a failure the other side has. These people are gonna go after me." "These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative, and it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It's influencing judges, and it's really changing law, and it just cannot be legal." "I don't believe it's legal. And they do it in total coordination with each other. And everything we do, we're restoring law, restoring order, and restoring public safety in America."
> Ten days or so after the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project disclosed that nearly every document bearing former President Biden's signature during his first term had been signed by an autopen—except for one—questions arose over whether executive orders and pardons could be deemed invalid, as we noted that Biden's staff likely leveraged his rapid cognitive deterioration to sign those documents via autopen.
Overnight, President Trump declared that the 11th-hour pardons, including those given to members of Congress who investigated the January 6 insurrection, were "void, vacant, and of no further force or effect, because of the fact that they were done by autopen." Some of those last-minute pardons include Deep Staters, such as former Representative Liz Cheney, retired General Mark Milley, and government scientist Anthony Fauci.
"The "Pardons" that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," Trump wrote on Truth Social late Sunday night.
The president continued: "In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime."
He went on to say that members of that House committee are "subject to investigation at the highest level"...
"Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!"
> Spain will include the fight against climate change as "defense spending".
> The Times reports that the UK is preparing to send up to 10,000 troops to Ukraine under a long-term peacekeeping mission, with no clear exit strategy. According to sources in London, the British military contingent will remain for years, tasked with “maintaining the peace agreement” and “containing Russia.”
> More than 30 countries have expressed willingness to contribute troops to a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine if a peace deal is reached between Russia and Ukraine, a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday. Starmer convened a second summit of the “coalition of the willing,” a group of nations attempting to develop a peacekeeping structure for a post-truce Ukraine, over the weekend. The talks, which came amid continued efforts to push Russia to agree to a 30-day ceasefire, are being led by Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. No U.S. representatives were present.
> David Drucker - Contrary to the anxiety roiling corporate C-suites across the country and business groups in Washington, D.C.—where opposition to Donald Trump’s tariff strategy is rampant—farmers and manufacturers in the Midwest whose livelihoods rely on exports and imports seem generally supportive of the Trump administration’s early posture on trade. Agriculture and industry advocates in Michigan, North Dakota, and Wisconsin—three states with economies powered by international trade—said they are willing to give the president time to deliver his promised “golden age of America.”
> The Trump administration announced a freeze of $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania due to policies that allow transgender students to participate in sports.
> The University of California Board of Regents ended the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring throughout the system. “To be clear, stand-alone diversity statements will no longer be permitted in recruitments,” the system’s provost said in a letter today.
> Trump rescinds executive order after law firm agrees to provide $40m in free services.
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Short Takes
> A Harvard education will soon be free for many students' families, Axios' April Rubin reports.
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Tuition will be free for students whose families make less than $200,000 per year, the university said.
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Harvard will go further, covering tuition, food, housing, health insurance and travel costs for students whose families make less than $100,000.
🎓 Zoom out: Institutions like MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Caltech have already implemented similar $200,000 thresholds for free tuition, Axios Boston's Mike Deehan notes.
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As elite schools grapple with the end of affirmative action in their admissions programs, free or reduced tuition is emerging as a tool to keep their schools accessible to a diverse pool of potential applicants.
🎤 What they're saying: "Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth," Alan Garber, Harvard University president, said in a statement.
> A headline summing up the state of education in the US today - Harvard Is Now Offering Remedial Math Courses.
> This may be about as far as we can take this one - a New Jersey hospital asks if a newborn is identified as transgender.
> A Chinese car company says it can charge its electric vehicle in around 5 minutes.
> The environmental activist group Greenpeace must pay $660 million in damages related to its attempts to block the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, a jury in North Dakota decided Wednesday.
> New York’s highest court has decisively rejected a controversial New York City law allowing migrants living in the US illegally to vote in local elections.