Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 1/23/25
"Col. Douglas Macgregor: The Coming World War III"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Musical Interlude: Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen"
Full screen recommended.
Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“What powers are being wielded in the Wizard Nebula? Gravitation strong enough to form stars, and stellar winds and radiations powerful enough to create and dissolve towers of gas. Located only 8,000 light years away, the Wizard nebula, pictured above, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380. Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer.
The active star forming region spans 100 about light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon. The Wizard Nebula can be located with a small telescope toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus) Although the nebula may last only a few million years, some of the stars being formed may outlive our Sun.”
Chet Raymo, “Examination of Conscience”
“Examination of Conscience”
by Chet Raymo
"I have been reading Stephanie Smallwood's “Saltwater Slavery,” a close examination of the trade in human beings between the coast of West Africa and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a sobering read, but if there is one thing I came away with, it was this: We have an enormous capacity to rationalize the most horrendous crimes. Everyone involved in the slave trade - the European owners of the ships, the masters of the trading companies, the ship captains and crews, the plantation owners in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, the African tribal chiefs who captured and sold their neighbors to the European merchants - knew in some part of their souls that what they were doing was wrong. All of them - good Christians among them, pillars of their communities - found ways to rationalize their participation.
Who among us is immune to self deceit? To what extent am I implicated in the horrendous tragedies that are Darfur and Iraq? What do I owe to the global environment? Is there such a thing as innocence when we are so intimately connected that people in Fiji and Japan will read these words only moments after I write them?
What about science, the favored subject of this blog? Here is Smallwood: “The littoral [of the West African coast]...was more than a site of economic exchange and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied upon a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”
Even science, like religion and democratic politics, can be pressed into the service of evil. We are all of us to some extent in the grip of economic forces as powerful and sometimes as pernicious as those that drove the saltwater slave trade. Few of us are required to personally face the direst evils. We are saved from moral anguish only by the fact that our acts of commission and omission ripple outward until their consequences are diluted and lost in the general happiness or unhappiness of humankind.”
Who among us is immune to self deceit? To what extent am I implicated in the horrendous tragedies that are Darfur and Iraq? What do I owe to the global environment? Is there such a thing as innocence when we are so intimately connected that people in Fiji and Japan will read these words only moments after I write them?
What about science, the favored subject of this blog? Here is Smallwood: “The littoral [of the West African coast]...was more than a site of economic exchange and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied upon a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”
Even science, like religion and democratic politics, can be pressed into the service of evil. We are all of us to some extent in the grip of economic forces as powerful and sometimes as pernicious as those that drove the saltwater slave trade. Few of us are required to personally face the direst evils. We are saved from moral anguish only by the fact that our acts of commission and omission ripple outward until their consequences are diluted and lost in the general happiness or unhappiness of humankind.”
“Just Sit Down And Think?”
“Just Sit Down And Think?”
by Oliver Burkeman
“’All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone,’ wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. It's a line repeated so frequently, in the era of smartphones and social media, that it's easy to forget how striking it is that he wrote it in the 1600s. Back then, a sentence such as "Yo is a messaging app that enables iPhone and Android users to say 'Yo' to their friends" might have got you burned as a witch.
Yet even in 17th-century France, apparently, people hated being alone with their thoughts so intensely, they'd do almost anything else: play boules, start the Franco-Spanish war, and so on. Still, I'd wager even Pascal would have been disturbed by a study published in Science, showing that people detest being made to spend six to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think – even to the extent of being willing to give themselves mild electric shocks instead. It's natural to conclude that there's something wrong with such people. Which means, all else being equal, that something's probably wrong with you, too.
Modern humans spend virtually no time on "inward-directed thought", and not solely because we're too busy: in one US survey, 95% of adults said they'd found time for a leisure activity in the previous 24 hours, but 83% said they'd spent zero time just thinking. The new study, led by Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, first asked students to entertain themselves with nothing but their thoughts in an "unadorned room". Most said they found it hard to concentrate; half found it unpleasant or neutral at best. In further experiments, older people, and those who rarely used smartphones, got similar results. Meanwhile, those given the chance to do something outward-directed, such as reading, enjoyed it far more. And when 42 people got to choose between sitting doing nothing and giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women chose the latter.
Are we mad? In his book "Back To Sanity," the Leeds Metropolitan University psychologist Steve Taylor answers: yes. The condition he diagnoses, "humania", isn't recognized as a disorder, but only because we're all victims, he argues, and it's part of the definition of a mental illness that most people don't have it. The "urge to immerse our attention in external things is so instinctive that we're scarcely aware of it", he writes. We often speak of emails, tweets and texts as if they're annoyances that we'd eliminate if we could. Yet the truth, of course, is that half the time we're desperate to be distracted, and gladly embrace the interruption.
Taylor's explanation for this puzzle borrows from Buddhism (among other places). We mistake ourselves for individual, isolated beings, trapped within our heads. No wonder we don't dwell on what's inside: that would underline the loneliness of existence, so obviously watching TV is more fun. To sit comfortably with your thoughts first requires seeing that there's a sense in which they're not real. A less new agey way of putting it is simply that you don't need to believe your thoughts. Whereupon they become fun to watch, and the need for distraction subsides. To quote the title of a book by Sylvia Boorstein, a meditation teacher: don't just do something, sit there.”
"All Is Not Lost..."
"If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost;
you can still call him vile names."
- Elbert Hubbard
you can still call him vile names."
- Elbert Hubbard
"Artificial Eternity"
"Artificial Eternity"
by The ZMan
"One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.
Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.
It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.
Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.
That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”
The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.
In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.
Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.
in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.
Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.
Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.
Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us."
o
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
For in fact what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a meeting between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and of the infinite in which he is swallowed up."
- Blaise Pascal, "Pensees"
○
"As Humans..."
“It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short just wants to be.”
- Bill Bryson
"Lifes Impermanence..."
"Lifes impermanence, I realized, is what makes every
single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here.
It's what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted."
- Wes Moore
"All We Really Need..."
"Causes do matter. And the world is changed by people who care deeply about causes,about things that matter. We don't have to be particularly smart or talented. We don't need a lot of money or education. All we really need is to be passionate about something important; something bigger than ourselves. And it's that commitment to a worthwhile cause that changes the world."
- Steve Goodier
"Find the things that matter, and hold on to them,
and fight for them, and refuse to let them go."
- Lauren Oliver
"Alert! Watch How This Develops Very Closely – 'We Can Do It The Easy Way, Or The Hard Way'”
"Alert! Watch How This Develops Very Closely –
'We Can Do It The Easy Way, Or The Hard Way'”
by Michael Snyder
"We have reached such a pivotal moment in world history. During his time in the White House, Joe Biden brought us closer to nuclear war with Russia than ever before. If Kamala Harris had won the election, I am convinced that a nuclear war with Russia would have almost certainly happened during her term. But Donald Trump won the election instead, and now he has a historic opportunity. He can end the conflict in Ukraine and avoid a nuclear war with Russia. If he is able to do that, he will save countless lives. However, if he handles this situation with Russia badly and nuclear missiles start flying back and forth, it will be the end of America (and the world- CP) as we know it today.
It is not going to be easy to end the war in Ukraine. Anyone that suggests otherwise simply does not understand the dynamics that are at play. The good news is that unlike Biden, Trump actually wants to make a deal, and on Wednesday he posted a message on Truth Social in which he revealed quite a bit about what he is thinking…"I’m not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin – and this despite the Radical Left’s "Russia, Russia, Russia" HOAX. We must never forget that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing almost 60,000,000 lives in the process. All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way – and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!
I very much agree with Trump that we need to end this ridiculous war. But Trump needs to be very careful. Diplomatic finesse will be required to reach an agreement, and making threats is not going to help at all. In particular, telling Russia that we “can do it the easy way, or the hard way” is not going to move the needle in the right direction.
Precisely what would “the hard way” look like? Would that mean greatly escalating the conflict in Ukraine? Already, Trump is calling on the Europeans to substantially increase their financial support for the war… Additionally, the U.S. President reiterated his call for European Union nations to step up their contributions to support Ukraine, calling for an extra $200 billion [USD].
I understand what Trump is trying to do. He has repeatedly expressed his desire for “peace through strength”, and so he is attempting to get leverage on the Russians. But issuing threats could threaten the temporary “window of opportunity” that we have right now.
In fact, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov just stressed that the “window of opportunity” that has opened up is “a small one”…"‘Compared to the hopelessness in every aspect of the previous White House chief (President Joe Biden), there is a window of opportunity today, albeit a small one,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies in Moscow. ‘It’s therefore important to understand with what and whom we will have to deal, how best to build relations with Washington, how best to maximise opportunities and minimise risks.’
Hopefully the two sides will sit down and talk very soon, because if an agreement does not happen in the coming months there probably will not be one at all. And when talks do commence, they will be quite tricky.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that the Russians must be allowed to keep all of the territory in Ukraine that they have conquered and NATO forces will not be allowed on Ukrainian territory once the conflict is over… Putin has repeatedly said that he is ready to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine but that Russia’s current control of 20% of Ukrainian territory will have to be accepted and that Ukraine must remain neutral.
On the other side, the Ukrainians have no intention of accepting what Russia is offering. The Ukrainians want all of their territory back, and President Zelensky just told that world that he wants “a minimum of 200,000 European soldiers” on Ukrainian soil once the war has concluded…"Zelensky said “a minimum of 200,000 European soldiers will be required to secure Ukraine after any peace deal is reached.” “A minimum, otherwise it’s nothing,” he said, emphasizing the need to keep Putin in check." He also decried Russia’s demand to cut Ukraine’s army down to a fifth of its current size of 800,000 troops, saying that would leave the country defenseless.
The Russians will absolutely not accept NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine. In fact, during a recent broadcast Russian television host Vladimir Solovyov issued an ominous warning to “every mother in Europe”…"During a state TV broadcast, he furiously declared, “[The West] don’t understand that we can easily destroy all these countries, at least their capitals, which send peacekeepers….”, reports the Express US. “For us, these are not peacekeeping troops, but interventionists. And we will kill them all. The French, the English, the ******* Germans.”
Addressing his audience across 11 Russian time zones on Kremlin-controlled state TV, he said, “I just want you to translate my words carefully so that they reach the consciousness of every mother in Europe. You will send your sons and they will all be destroyed. And if that happens, thanks to your politicians, war will come to your homes.”
That is rather chilling. Unfortunately, Solovyov represents what mainstream Russians are thinking. The Russians will not accept NATO troops in Ukraine under any circumstances, and the Russians will not give any territory back. And with each passing day, the Russians are taking even more territory. It literally will take a major miracle to end this war.
But now Trump has his chance. He is the master of “the art of the deal”, and so let’s see what he can do. I just hope that he realizes that the fate of our society (and the world- CP) hangs in the balance. We’ve got one shot at this, and if an agreement cannot be reached the consequences will be apocalyptic. I know that everyone is focused on Trump’s domestic policies right now, and they are certainly important. But if he doesn’t get negotiations with Russia right, the domestic policies that he is instituting aren’t really going to matter much at all."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Here is Some Crazy News - Get Over It"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 1/23/25
"Here is Some Crazy News - Get Over It"
"Get ready for some of the craziest news you’ll hear this week! From a watermelon-sized chunk of blue ice smashing through a roof (and JetBlue refusing to take responsibility 😱), to Olympic medals literally falling apart, I’m breaking it all down. Oh, and did you know your donuts at Dunkin’ aren’t even made fresh on-site? Yeah, we’re talking about that too. Plus, a cat that became an airline frequent flyer, collapsing housing markets, and a guy who performed his OWN vasectomy (yes, you read that right). It’s all here on IAllegedly! I’ve got updates on wild airline stories, jaw-dropping economic news, and downright weird happenings you won’t hear anywhere else. Please join our email list to stay connected. Let’s keep this conversation going!"
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"Oh How It Really Is"
The O'Jays, "For The Love Of Money"
“All the money you make will never buy back your soul. ”
- Bob Dylan
"The Silk Road Less Traveled"
The Gadsden Flag,
flown by revolutionaries since December 20, 1775
"The Silk Road Less Traveled"
Freedom for Ross Ulbricht and the Legacy of his Silk Road marketplace.
by Joel Bowman
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation,
the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
~ P.J. O'Rourke, from "Parliament of Whores" (1991)
"As dear readers know, our beat here is Free Markets, Free Minds and Free People. We’ve been following this pithy tricolon, on and off, for most of our writing career. Over twenty plus years... across ninety countries (and counting)... we’ve been fascinated by stories of human liberation – whether intellectual, geographical, financial, political, philosophical etc. – in the epic, age-old battle of Man vs. the State.
You can imagine our delight, then, when news crawled across the “socials” earlier this week that Ross Ulbricht, the American entrepreneur and creator of the Silk Road online marketplace, was given a “full and unconditional pardon” by President Donald Trump. From his Truth Social:
Ross spent more than a decade behind bars after his arrest, at a California public library, back in 2013. What, exactly, was Ross’s heinous crime against humanity, that he should be handed a sentence that extended well beyond his earthly years?
Did he receive millions of dollars in bribes from foreign governments by peddling access to his influential father, a.k.a., The Big Guy? Perhaps he funneled hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to US “defense” contractors, by way of a war torn country in Eastern Europe, which he swore to defend until the “last drop of their blood”? Or maybe he used taxpayer money to fund a Chinese research lab that leaked a synthetically manufactured virus into the human population, resulting in tyrannical worldwide lockdowns and immeasurable death and despair?
Not quite. Besides, as we’ve learned in recent weeks, such petty misdemeanors carry no sentence whatsoever. At least, not in this life…At the time of Ross’s arrest, the U.S. government claimed it shut down the highly popular Silk Road website, and cuffed its creator, because that renegade outfit “facilitated the purchase of drugs” which the State deemed illegal, using cryptocurrency to “launder” the profits along the way (thereby cutting the State, forever with its greasy palm outstretched, out of the deal).
But before we rush to judgement, let us first consider...What was the Silk Road, anyway? And why was the State so keen to cut it down... and to make such a pariah out of its founder?
Like most of its self-serving projects, the State’s so-called “War on Drugs” is not really about victory as advertised... but rather extracting, by monopolistic force, as much money out of the market as it can squeeze. It is not about ending drug use, in other words, or minimizing societal harm, as much as it is about prolonging...and profiting... from the exchange.It stands to reason, then, that any competition would come into conflict with the State’s primary interests: money and, by extension, power. Read on for more..."
"The Silk Road Less Traveled"
By Joel Bowman
"First up, a couple of cold, hard facts:
• Drugs exist.
• People who want them exist.
As with all markets, the drug market exists to fill the space between the two: between supply and demand. Of course, man’s desire to experiment with mind-altering substances is hardly new. Archaeological records indicate the presence of psychotropic plants and drug use in ancient civilizations as far back as early hominid species about 200 million years ago.
We make this last point neither to condone nor condemn drug use, but merely to suggest that millions of years of demand seems unlikely to yield to the arbitrary, man-made edicts of the day.
The U.S. government's disastrous, multi-decade “War on Drugs” stands in service of precisely this point. Anyone who doubts this reality is invited to Google “drugs in U.S. prisons,” where they will encounter no shortage of literature on how, even in the State’s own cages, “supply and demand” trumps “laws and commands.”
Until relatively recently, the illegal drug market was largely confined to dark alleys and celebrity parties, where violent gangs – both outside the government's reach and within its own ranks – fought turf wars for market supremacy. The tragic results are well enough documented elsewhere.
Then, in February 2011, the game changed... perhaps irreversibly. A website called Silk Road – named after the old trade routes between Europe and Asia – brought the drug trade out of the gutter and onto the Internet. Suddenly, individuals were free to transact anonymously through Tor hidden services technology.
Predictably, the site flourished... until the U.S. government shuttered it. (Though, perhaps just as predictably, Silk Road 2.0 was soon up and running... followed by a rapidly growing list of competing sites thereafter, many of which exist today. The toothpaste, as the saying goes, was out of the tube.) Suffice to say, Silk Road may not be for all people... but it was clearly for some people.
Freedom vs Force: Proponents of the website argue that Silk Road helped to reduce violence (by keeping drugs off the streets), lowered costs (by providing a competitive marketplace) and increased product quality and consumer safety (through a trusted user review system, similar to Trip Advisor, whereby merchants trading on their reputation were dis-incentivized from providing low-quality goods and services for fear of bad reviews).
Nearly 1 million people who used Silk Road agreed: The online market was preferable to the highly controlled, gang-centered game on the street... a game that wrecks millions of lives annually and costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars along the way.
Whatever one's own personal opinion of drug use and/or abuse, the Silk Road experiment invites us to ask some important questions, to have a real and meaningful conversation about this very important subject...
The U.S. government's opposition to Silk Road was, in a very real way, a stated opposition to having that conversation. The motivation is not hard to understand. After all, the drug business is big business for big government.
By enacting myriad laws prohibiting individuals from making consensual decisions regarding their own bodies (and what they freely choose to put inside them... or not), the government sets itself up as the judge, jury and executioner of its own, arbitrary rules. It claims a monopoly on justice, in other words... at least as it chooses to define the word at any given moment.
Through its so-called “War on Drugs,” the State is able to funnel vast sums of other people’s (taxpayers’) money unto... itself.
Local, state and federal police departments all have quotas to make and budgets to bloat. The DEA, FBI, DHS et al. each carry their own wish lists of must-have police gadgetry. Think Tasers, lasers, tanks, drones, machine guns and all the other weapons-grade toys required to “keep the peace.”
Conveniently enough, the military has plenty of leftover killing machines to swap out for newer, shinier models (another racket of epic money- and life-wasting proportions). But hey! Whatever it takes to keep people safe from themselves!
Prison Planet: Of course, there's little to no evidence that all this iron-fisted policing actually reduces drug-related crime or violence. Au contraire! By making certain substances illegal, the government naturally drives up the price of the product - and therefore the profit incentive for black market suppliers.
And since the market is now a risky one – owing to the government's cages and guns and foot soldiers crowding out honest competition – it stands to reason that only the toughest, riskiest players remain in the game. It is hardly surprising then that these actors – the very same drug cartels to whom the Feds were found selling weapons in their “Fast & Furious” operation – enjoy record profits year after year.
The same thing happened during the last Prohibition era, which gave rise to the Torrios, O'Banions and Capones of the 1920s and ‘30s. And it's not only the wise guys – both inside and outside the police departments – getting rich off the War on Drugs.
The government's lucrative arrangement likewise benefits its own prison systems, with a steady stream of minor offenders (and offending minors) sent to occupy cellblocks around the country and around the clock.
Since President Nixon officially declared a war on drugs back in 1971, the prison population in the Land of the Free has risen by a non-trivial 800%. By 2015, more than half (52%) of all inmates were incarcerated on drug-related charges. At around $24,000 per head and $5.1 billion in new prison construction annually, the US government's human caging racket consumes more than $81 billion in budget expenditures per year. Over the same time period, more than $1 trillion has been funneled into drug related law “enforcement.”
In 2010, the year before the Silk Road began operations online, more than 1.5 million Americans were hauled away for non-violent drug violations. Half of those arrests were for marijuana-related infractions... almost 90% of which were for possession only... the vast majority of which would be non-criminal offenses today.
With barely 5% of the world's population, the U.S. somehow manages to account for more than 25% of the planet's prison population, making the country the world's single largest jailer... by far. By comparison, Communist China, which has a population more than 4 times larger than the US, contributes roughly one-sixth of the global prison population. Russia, whose population is about 42% the size of the US, accounts for ~4% of the world’s prisoners.
According to a report by the Pew Center, one in every 31 American adults was under some form of correctional control - i.e., prison, jail, parole and/or probation – around the time the Silk Road was founded.
Laws of the Jungle: What would you expect, dear reader, from a bull market in government? Where abject failure is rewarded with an ever-increasing budget and where no idea is too vicious or too stupid to be given a place on the growing list of federal agencies?
Market-based alternatives, like the Silk Road, pose a clear and present threat to this cozy arrangement. Hence the reason the State wants them shuttered, looted and stomped out of existence. For all its lofty rhetoric about a government of, by and for “the people,” the State remains, by its very nature, an agent of force. In the end, to “govern” is not to “debate” or “converse” or “compromise.”
It is to employ force, violently if necessary. As Allen Thornton wrote in his classic essay "Laws of the Jungle": “When you advocate any government action, you must first believe that violence is the best answer to the question at hand.” After half a century of State aggression... millions of humans in cages... and trillions of dollars spent on enforcement that fails on every meaningful measure... the inquiring mind begins to wonder...
Is that really the best we can do? At the very least, Ross Ulbricht and his Silk Road marketplace invited us to consider the alternatives. In light of Ross’s full pardon and pending release, we offer our heartfelt congratulations to Ross and his family, in particular his mother, Lyn Ulbricht, who fought tirelessly for her son’s cause. Their victory is all of our victory... and a victory for free markets, free minds and free people everywhere."
Gregory Mannarino, "We Have A Problem: The Economy Is Coming Apart Faster!"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/23/25
"We Have A Problem:
The Economy Is Coming Apart Faster!"
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "Bye Bye Biden"
"Bye Bye Biden"
Joe Biden's initiatives added over $7 trillion in national debt,
led to the highest inflation in 50 years,
and to the slowest GDP growth rates since the Great Depression.
by Bill Bonner
"We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral."
- David Brooks
Baltimore, Maryland - "Poor Joe Biden. He shuffles off stage... almost completely forgotten, just hours after having been the world’s most powerful man. He has been pulled from the show. Let’s recall him... before he disappears, like an old shoe swept away at high tide.
Not that there is anything about the man worth remembering. His career was not marked by courage, grace or intelligence. As a member of the Senate for half a century, he was just a willing, even eager, water carrier for the powers-that-be. Almost every dumb proposal, law, budget and program that pains us today has a greasy smudge of his fingers on it.
When he was elected, in 1972, the US owed $450 billion. Now, the debt is 80 times higher. Properly invested, that $36 trillion would have gone a long way. It would have built 180 million modest houses, for example. Or, at 5%, it should be paying the US $1.8 trillion in dividends each year. Instead, it was spent on misadventures overseas and stimmy bamboozles at home - most of them approved by Joe Biden. And today, ‘We the People’ don’t get $1.8 trillion in dividends... instead, we pay that much in interest... for which we get nothing.
It’s not pronouns, Panama, or presidential pardons that are most likely to trip up Team Trump. It’s ‘boring policy issues.’ And the legacy of Joe Biden, along with George Bush, Barack Obama and Trump himself. The interest expense on US debt has approximately doubled in the last three years. Soon, it will overwhelm us.
Federal deficit spending over the last eight years has driven
interest expense on the debt above defense spending,
something that only previously happened at much higher interest rates.
And there are only two ways to deal with it. The first and only honest way of bringing it under control is the way Javier Milei is doing it in Argentina. Balanced budgets, he says, are ‘non-negotiable.’ No more deficits. No increase to the national debt. Pay as you go.
The other way is the Biden way… let ‘er rip. Keep on spending. Biden, in his four years, added almost as much debt as Trump ($8.4 trillion for Trump, $7.9 trillion for Biden, roughly).
The first thing we see, looking back at four years of Biden’s presidency, is an almost relentless falsity. Everything he did, said, or failed to say was based on cowardice and mendacity. Even the things said about him were mostly lies. Here’s Kamala Harris:
“Joe Biden’s legacy of accomplishment over the last three years is unmatched in modern history.”
Not so. His accomplishment merely added to those of other 21st century presidents, including the one who both preceded and succeeded him. Otherwise, his policies were predictable... fruitless... and maybe criminal.
When Joe Biden ran against Trump in 2020, his promise was that he offered voters a change of direction. The dumbest thing he did was not keeping that promise.
Coming into office in 2021... he could have easily told the truth. By then, it was obvious. The fight against the Covid virus was a fool’s errand. It didn’t do any good to shut down the economy... the virus didn’t care. Sending out trillions in fake-money on false pretenses — the ‘stimmy’ checks’ — was another colossal error.
Taken together with tax cuts and tariffs, these initiatives added over $7 trillion in national debt... led to the highest inflation in 50 years... and to the slowest GDP growth rates since the Great Depression.
Biden could have distanced himself from the wreck. Instead, like a driver following too close in the fog, he added to the pile up. He stuck with Trump’s tariffs, ramped up spending and amplified the Covid hysteria. “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” and “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.” None of it was true.
Then, Biden offered more money. The American Rescue Act was the third round of stimmy checks, with $5,600 per family of four. That was almost immediately followed by his $1.2 trillion ‘infrastructure bill’... and his CHIPS act. And then came yet another huge mistake. Forbes: "President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law on Aug. 16." While its name claims it will tame soaring inflation, estimates show that the bill likely won’t do much to pull down the inflation rate... CBO estimates it will have a “negligible effect on inflation” in 2022, and in 2023 it will change inflation somewhere between 0.1 percentage point lower and 0.1 percentage point higher than it is currently.
Rather than draw attention to the real reasons for the inflation of 2022, Biden signed more jackass spending bills. – each one designed to be easy-to-understand, but fundamentally fraudulent and idiotic. Then, as Larry Summers warned, inflation was not Trump’s problem; it was his problem...And it was bye-bye Team Biden."
Adventures With Danno, "Amazing New Deals At Kroger"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/23/25
"Amazing New Deals At Kroger"
Comments here:
"WTF Alert! Trump AGI Emergency Declaration! WW3 Doomsdays Weapon; 'Stargate'; Snowpocalypse! Fires!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 1/22/25
"WTF Alert! Trump AGI Emergency Declaration!
WW3 Doomsdays Weapon; 'Stargate'; Snowpocalypse! Fires!"
Comments here:
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "The People Are Mad As Hell, Walking Through Burned Out Neighborhoods"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 1/22/25
"The People Are Mad As Hell,
Walking Through Burned Out Neighborhoods"
Comments here:
John Wilder, "Enjoy Until Midnight. Then Back To Work"
"Enjoy Until Midnight. Then Back To Work"
by John Wilder
"I had a football coach that had a speech that he saved for the team after we had won a big game. Since we were 2-7 my senior year, he rarely got to use it. It went something like this: “Alright, team, we won the big game and are feeling pretty good right now, except for Jenkins. I’m pretty sure he was left-handed, anyway, so don’t worry too much about him. We won. Enjoy it. Relax. Until midnight. After midnight, it’s back to being hungry for a win – the score is zero-zero.” Since this was before the GloboLeftElite clouded the minds of men, he’d then hand out cigarettes and beer to the freshmen and sophomores, with cigars, tequila and strippers for the upperclassmen. I loved high school. I learned a lot about Destiny there, though I think that was just her stage name. I never did get all the glitter off the truck seat.
Anyway, Trump has once again assumed the presidency. This is not the naïve, friendly, Trump of his first administration. Nope, he’s played the game, had four years to marinate in his mistakes, and is surrounded by a bunch of people who are nearly as pissed off as he is. The biggest initial impact, besides bleaching the Oval Office to get the old man smell out, are the plethora of Executive Orders he issued nearly immediately. I’ve got an incomplete list below, and let’s spend a few minutes reveling in them.1,500 pardons for January 6 protestors.
This was a big one, and was needed for legitimacy. So many of the folks on January 6 did absolutely nothing wrong in what was effectively the largest panty raid in American history – you could tell because Nancy Pelosi certainly had her panties in a bunch. Sorry for that. Now you probably need mind bleach.
The sentences for the protesters were, in almost every case, extremely disproportionate to the crimes alleged. This is justice.Declared a national border emergency. This was one that really got the goat of the GloboLeftElite. Butch Maddow, MSNBC© Lesbian at Large, reporting from the MSNBC™ Safe Space© bunker, immediately asked where Steiner’s troops were. But what happened is the border shut down. Immediately. The Border Patrol ceased their most recent duty of diaper delivery and social work and began, well, patrolling the border.
Removed birthright citizenship. Pure genius, and well overdue. If I vault over my neighbor’s fence and my woman gives birth on his lawn, I don’t have a claim to his house. Oddly, that’s been our theory for decades. The wording of the amendment establishing citizenship at birth clearly says, “and under the jurisdiction thereof.” Criminals are not citizens, and not under the jurisdiction, just like diplomats, people on student, tourist, or work visas, or ILLEGAL ALIENS aren’t.
Boot ‘em. Sadly, this isn’t retroactive, but this is a start. Already H1-B Indians are complaining that they can’t chain migrate their 4,323 close relatives from India because of this. Yes, this makes me cry inside. But it’s tears of joy. Shut down refugee resettlement.
Every picture about this particular order showed the fat Squatamalan woman wearing designer clothes crying because her appointment to negotiate to come into the United States was cancelled. She had a cell phone (nicer than mine) showing that her appointment was cancelled. Why, oh why does it make these people cry when they are told that they have to live in their home country surrounded by people just like them?
Food stamp balance: $13,401.82
Cash Balance: $4,498.85
WTF! I repeat, for emphasis, WTF!
Rescinded 78 Biden Executive Orders on DEI. Imagine you’re a diversity trainer. Imagine you had a contract to teach diversity to listless herds of .gov employees. Imagine now you’re unemployed. I know, I know. I’m in pain, too. It’ll probably take plastic surgery to remove the smile from my face.
Froze .gov hiring. This is a good start. Now start firing ever DEI employee, every gun control policy wonk, and every third employee, randomly. That’s a better start.
Required immediate return to in-person work for .gov employees. They have to go to work? In a building? That’s not their home? And put on pants? Sheer monstrosity!
Required regulation cutting. This is a sleeper, because it has a huge ability, if done right, to lower costs for businesses and individuals. We’ll see.
Required removal of climate policies that raise costs and withdraw from the Paris Accords. Again, a sleeper because all of that alternative energy is really, really costly when compared to regular old energy, and yet raise your costs invisibly because the cost is just passed on to you via your bill. The Paris Accords aren’t a treaty, because the GloboLeftElite couldn’t pass a treaty. It’s just...an agreement that bound us to GloboLeftElite goals, i.e., they keep their jets, but we have to have crappy cars. Or, it was an agreement.
Withdrew from the World Health Organization. I’ve written about this bureaucratic overreach with no particular purpose after they actually did some good and important things. Mainly, it’s a bunch of high-paying jobs and a really cool building with a rooftop café for foreigners to sip cappuccinos while they laugh at us plebs.
Created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate entire agencies and many .gov jobs. I’ve written about DOGE before. I’m certainly in hopes that it works, though, like so many of the above, it all depends on the executions. After fair trials, of course.Removed the security clearances from the 51 intelligence officers who said that Hunter’s laptop was fake, and, also John Bolton.
I found this one particularly delicious. These intelligence grifters retire and use their credentials to maintain access to secret information, and then sell their opinions to big corporations or mainstream media. Sadly, I’m not sure the Executive Orders covered Bolton’s mustache, which I think is Bolton’s primary sensory and information storage organ.
Declared that there were only two genders. It took mankind 2020 years to forget this, but one stroke of the pen and it made sense again. I wonder what will happen to all of those trans celebrity kids now that they’re illegal. Maybe we can send them to Guatemala, too.
Declared that it’s now the Gulf of America. A troll from Trump, but a beautiful, hilarious troll that the GloboLeftElite will focus on while Trump’s busy gutting the federal government like a trout or an MSNBC© Safe Space™. There are, of course, more, like firing the DEI obsessed Coast Guard L.I.C. (Lesbian in Charge) or shutting down most foreign aid, immediately.
So, tonight, I’ll sit back and not gripe. I’ll enjoy the moment. Until midnight."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Big, beautiful, barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300 lies some 70 million light-years away on the banks of the constellation Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe is one of the largest Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy.
NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy's dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. In fact, on close inspection the nucleus of this classic barred spiral itself shows a remarkable region of spiral structure about 3,000 light-years across. Unlike other spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, NGC 1300 is not presently known to have a massive central black hole.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120325.html
Chet Raymo, "Lessons"
"Lessons"
by Chet Raymo
"There is a four-line poem by Yeats, called "Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors":
"What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass."
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass."
"A Lof Of People Will Be Disappointed..."
“When science discovers the center of the universe,
a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”
- Bernard Baily
The Poet: Linda Pastan, “What We Want”
“What We Want”
“What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names-
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.”
- Linda Pastan
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