Wrap your brain around this:

· The Policy Director for the Intelligence Division of the Department of Homeland Security - who has access to classified information on all our ports, airports, and everything else pertaining to national security - is a Moslem with direct ties to Islamic radicals under indictment by the FBI.

· This individual, named Faisal Gill, received his security clearances despite his lying on his clearance forms about his ties to Islamist organizations. When his deception was disclosed, he was suspended last March - and then reinstated with his clearances intact.

· The reason he got the job, received his clearance, and was reinstated after being suspended, was pressure from the single most influential Republican activist and lobbyist in Washington, Grover Norquist.

Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this happens, some journalists compete to foment fear, ably assisted by cautious but worried scientists, and then tell the world to keep calm.

We need a new way to talk about the risk of a flu pandemic, because the overwhelming probability is that this virus will kill people, yes, but not in vast numbers.

In recent years flu has always proved vastly less perilous than feared. In 1976 more people may have died from bad reactions to swine-flu vaccine than from swine flu. Since 2005, H5N1 bird flu has killed 374 people, not the two million to 7.4 million deemed possible by the World Health Organization. In 2009, H1N1 Mexican swine flu proved to be a normal flu episode despite apocalyptic forecasts.

No doubt some TTPers will remind me that, in the story of the boy who cried "Wolf!", there eventually was a wolf. And that in 1918 maybe 50 million people died of influenza world-wide. So we should always worry a bit. But perhaps it's not just luck that has made every flu pandemic since then mild.  It may be evolutionary logic.

Last week, Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation's largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, revealed that the bank had made a $2 billion-plus trading mistake. The bank has more than $2 trillion in assets and made a profit of about $20 billion last year. So it lost one-tenth of 1 percent of its assets and about 10 percent of its income for last year. No big deal, despite all the hand-wringing of the political and media class.

Predictably, Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and arguably the most irresponsible member of Congress, immediately issued a press release calling for more bank regulation.

Congress has the oversight responsibility for the U.S. government, in much the same way a corporate board has the oversight responsibility for a corporation. Mr. Levin has the responsibility (along with his colleagues) to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and not wasted or stolen.

Medicare, for example, spends more than $500 billion annually. Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican (and medical doctor), who, unlike Mr. Levin, tries to be fiscally responsible, estimates that about 20 percent, or $100 billion, of Medicare spending is fraudulent.

Yet  Mr. Levin and many of his colleagues prefer to spend their time bashing private businesses rather than protecting the taxpayer, which is their responsibility.

Here’s my initial take on CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation today (June 3). I think this is very good news. It shows that the Pentagon, Rumsfeld in particular, is fighting back. Remember - as was discussed last week in The Real Problem in Iraq - the real war in Iraq is between the State Department and the CIA on one side (that of the UN and Arab rulers like the Saudi Royal Family) and the Pentagon on the other (America and freedom-democracy for Arabs and Iraqis).

The focus of the war is now over the Oil-For-Food scandal, with State-CIA trying to squelch it, the Pentagon trying to expose it. As the fellow who discovered the scandal - some $5 billion in bribes paid by Saddam to dozens of the world’s most powerful people - and who has the incriminating documents, Ahmad Chalabi had to be destroyed.

As of last week, State/CIA was winning. Then they overplayed their hand - twice.

Seems like everyone these days is talking about Bitcoins and their implications for private money.

Bitcoins - a form of digital private money - shot up in value from $90 to $260 each after Cypriot bank accounts were raided by the State, then plunged last month before recovering some of their value. These gyrations are symptoms of a bubble. Just as with tulip bulbs or dotcom shares, there will probably be a bursting.

All markets in assets that can be hoarded and resold - as opposed to those in goods for consumption - suffer from bubbles. Money is no different; and a new currency is rather like a new tulip breed.

Yet it would be a mistake to write off Bitcoins as just another bubble. People are clearly keen on new forms of money safe from the confiscation and inflation that looks increasingly inevitable as governments try to escape their debts. Bitcoins pose a fundamental question: will some form of private money replace the kind minted and printed by governments?

It has happened before.

Denial is leading to collective economic suicide in Europe and the United States. The French on Sunday (5/06) elected a socialist president who wants to raise taxes on those elusive rich and keep spending as if there is no tomorrow. 

Many on the left, including European socialists in tandem with the New York Times and its economist Paul Krugman, are falsely claiming that Europe and even the United States are being saddled with "austerity." Their claim is that governments are not spending enough to reduce unemployment. They want higher taxes on the most productive plus bigger government.

The chart below shows that rather than the austerity the left is whining about, government spending has risen as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) in all of the major economies.

The irony is that the refusal by those on the left, in both Europe and the United States, to deal with the "entitlement" problem is going to cause an involuntary austerity in which real incomes are going to fall for most people.

India’s stock market collapsed this week in a panic free fall after the return of the Congress Party in last week’s elections. The investor freak-out increased when it seemed that Congress would have to include India’s Communist Party of Marxism-Leninism in its ruling coalition.

Then came Sonia Gandhi’s masterstroke.

Anti-reform hardliners in China's Communist Party have become seriously alarmed by the sharp slow-down in economic growth, creating a "task-force" to crank up production.

China's Caixin Magazine reports that there is a growing "sense of crisis" not felt since the depths of the global banking crash in 2008-2009.

The State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) has assembled a team to "protect economic growth" and pressure state companies to boost jobs at all costs.

SASAC is the bastion of vested interests and controller of 115 state behemoths with assets above $6 trillion and a lock on much of the economy.

The move comes amid further signs that growth is faltering across all fronts. HSBC's gauge of Chinese services fell three points to 51.1 in April, the lowest in almost two years.

What would you think of a secretary of the Treasury who failed to do serious cost-benefit analysis about regulations that could cost millions of Americans their jobs and cause innocent people to be subject to political abuse or worse, and yet have almost no benefit to the United States?

Over the past several years, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner was warned by many private economists and members of Congress of the adverse consequences of a proposed rule that would force U.S. banks to be uncompensated tax collectors for foreign governments. On April 18, Mr. Geithner issued the rule anyway.

It only gets worse. The Treasury/IRS has finalized another rule set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2013, called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.