Cop is out looking for someone. Sees some other random black guy. Shoots him to death. Now claims this completely innocent man, who just went to get sandwiches for his family, threatened to murder a cop for no reason. That is a lie. The cop is the murderer. And we all know he will get away with it too.
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Vijay Boyapati: The Bullish Case For Bitcoin
I recently transferred my crypto to a Ledger wallet, it felt great to have complete control of my assets. No bank, no government and no third party intermediary.
With the price of a bitcoin surging to new highs in 2017, the bullish case for investors might seem so obvious it does not need stating. Alternatively it may seem foolish to invest in a digital asset that isn’t backed by any commodity or government and whose price rise has prompted some to compare it to the tulip mania or the dot-com bubble. Neither is true; the bullish case for Bitcoin is compelling but far from obvious. There are significant risks to investing in Bitcoin, but, as I will argue, there is still an immense opportunity.
Genesis
Never in the history of the world had it been possible to transfer value between distant peoples without relying on a trusted intermediary, such as a bank or government. In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown, published a 9 page solution to a long-standing problem of computer science known as the Byzantine General’s Problem. Nakamoto’s solution and the system he built from it — Bitcoin — allowed, for the first time ever, value to be quickly transferred, at great distance, in a completely trustless way. The ramifications of the creation of Bitcoin are so profound for both economics and computer science that Nakamoto should rightly be the first person to qualify for both a Nobel prize in Economics and the Turing award.
For an investor the salient fact of the invention of Bitcoin is the creation of a new scarce digital good — bitcoins. Bitcoins are transferable digital tokens that are created on the Bitcoin network in a process known as “mining”. Bitcoin mining is roughly analogous to gold mining except that production follows a designed, predictable schedule. By design, only 21 million bitcoins will ever be mined and most of these already have been — approximately 16.8 million bitcoins have been mined at the time of writing. Every four years the number of bitcoins produced by mining halves and the production of new bitcoins will end completely by the year 2140.
more here
The Worlds Largest Arms-Producing Companies
No surprise. I don’t expect this to change under Biden (or any president). While he didn’t make the worse pick for Secretary Of Defense, he did pick an ex-military four star general that took the all to common career path. Military – head of Centcom – retire – work for hedge fund that invests in defense contractors and government contracts – Board of Directors at Ratheon – back in government as SOD.
Last year, sales by the world’s 25 biggest arms companies were 8.5 percent higher than in 2018, totaling $361 billion, according to new data released by SIPRI. The 12 American companies in the top 25 accounted for $61 percent of that total. Lockheed Martin retained its place at the top of the biggest arms-producing companies with $53.23 billion in sales. Boeing’s arms sales came to $33.15 billion last year while Northrop Grumman came third with $29.22 billion.
SIPRI noted that the Middle East is now represented in the top 25 for the first time. EDGE was formed by the merger of 25 smaller companies and it accounted for 1.3 percent of the list’s total arms sales. There are three Chinese companies in the top 10 and a total of four in the top 25. They grew their sales by 4.8 percent between 2018 and 2019, mainly due to modernization programs being carried out by the People’s Liberation Army.
More at Statista
Loser Michele Flournoy
She always loses. Like that time she tripled and lost the war in Afghanistan.
She could have been Obama’s secretary of defense. The first woman(!) and everything.
But no, she decided to wait so she could be appointed by Hillary Clinton and be a part of the big women taking over the government and smashing the glass ceiling together thing and all that. So she let it be known she did not seek and would not accept Obama’s nomination for SecDef.
Then Hillary lost! Haha.
So Flournoy was in purgatory for four years, making millions of dollars from arms dealers. Waiting.
Then Biden won the election! Everyone said she was a sure thing. No one cared that her CNAS has been horrible on everything. She would be the new first female secretary of defense! Yay!
But then Biden gave it to somebody else, Lloyd Austin from Centcom.
Haha! You have to go back to sucking off the taxpayer but don’t get to exercise real power! Loser!
Grading Candidates For Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
Robert Wright and Connor Echels at nonzero.org
“Background: Flournoy, a candidate for secretary of defense, was an undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, where she played a big role in designing the Afghanistan “surge.” She is perhaps best known for co-founding and then running the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that is considered liberal-hawkish and gets an unusual amount of funding from defense contractors. Her involvement with the military-industrial complex also includes co-founding (with Secretary-of-State-designate Tony Blinken) the consulting firm WestExec Advisors and working for (along with Blinken) the investment fund Pine Island Partners—endeavors that have lately drawn critical scrutiny. ”
They are obviously grading on a curve – you have to leave some room for people even worse.
Constitution Revisited on Decentralized Revolution
Aaron Keith Harris and I discussed America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited on the LP Mises Caucus podcast, Decentralized Revolution. Listen here.
I’d Rather By Ruled By One…
… or three, or five, or even ten. Yes, I know, i dOn’T wAnT tO bE rUleD bY aNyOnE (But for us over here living in reality and not Fantasyland…). But when you are ruled by 2.1 million civil employees, who do you blame when something goes wrong? How about horribly wrong. Who would you blame for the Covid hysteria? Fauci, Trump, the Governors, county officials? Are you starting to follow? You really don’t know who’s to blame because they can always point to one of over two million people and blame it on them.
One of the things that made the October Revolution far simpler than others was how centralized the provisional government was. The Czar was already with his family in Siberia – out of the way – and Kerensky and his council were pretty much all located in Petrograd. Get control of the telegraphs, trains stations and then arrest Kerensky’s provisional government and BOOM, you are in charge. Over 90% of the country didn’t even know what happened. It could be months before people in eastern Russia knew a coup took place.
The United States government is deviously decentralized. There are too many snakes. Cut the head off of one and get bit by another. If the head of the ATF presides over a massive screw up they have sovereign immunity. The worst that may happen is they step down and another takes their place. The snake regenerates a new head. In most cases nothing happens.
What if when the new president is installed, they and their VP get to pick 3 other people and they are granted full power. “You work for us now, there’s five of you, you screw up we know who to blame.” If worse came to worse even the most feeble-minded among us can point and say, “Yep, it’s their fault.” That would at least be a start.
But in this leviathan we find ourselves no one gets the blame. The worst that can happen is an elected official is voted out but then appointed to the boards of eight different companies they helped while in office. How do I get a no-show position on a board and still get paid? Oh, that’s right, I have to become an evildoer.
Most people who study politics understand that smaller is better when it comes to the individual’s quality of life. Anyone who has visited Monaco, Andorra or even Switzerland (pre-”pandemic”) will tell you there are less police, less fines and more freedom. They are smaller in population but also arranged so that a small group of administrators are in charge. In a parliamentary monarchy such as Luxembourg one of the MPs may be a neighbor. In the USA a state legislator may be one as well. But is that the top of the pyramid? Who exactly is?
There is No Such Thing as ‘Law’ in America
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