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Iran Hits US Targets in Iraq

About that Air Base in Iraq

After the Iraqi parliament (sans Sunni and Kurdish members) voted to oust US troops from Iraq, Trump said, “We will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before, ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame. We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.”

Trump threatens economic warfare as casually as other people announce their intention to go shopping. We couldn’t count the number of times he’s done so. At any rate, it seems like a strange way to treat a presumed friend that the US government created. What’s a few more miserable Arabs anyway?

As for demanding money “back” for the airbase, that is even more bizarre. The US government didn’t buy the base for the Iraqis; it was for the American power elite and military-industrial complex. Were Iraqis free to reject it when the base was first proposed? The US government made a risky “entrepreneurial” decision when it built the base, so if access is denied, well, tough luck. It was an “investment” gone bad. You know about such things, don’t you, Mr. Trump?

bitcoin is Dead: Part 3

bitcoin is Dead: Part 3

Click here for Part 2

For the audio version, check out my podcast A Boy Named Pseu where you can download it on all podcast platforms. (read starts at 8:54)

Read full piece here.

If bitcoin is dead, then the President didn’t tweet about it

Governments have officially recognized bitcoin as a threat to the modern financial system. In an article from The Daily HODL, Congressmen, French Hill and Bill Foster, wrote a letter in September urging the Fed to “consider creating a national digital currency as the rise of crypto and projects like Facebook’s Libra threaten paper money.”

The open letter revealed the following

  • Belief that the US dollar risks getting left behind as digitization sweeps the globe and governments around the world move to modernize their monetary systems and reinvent how they transfer, distribute and create money.
  • concerns about the status of today’s US dollar, a decidedly old instrument that is one stop in a long line of early colonial currency and paper money known as Continental currency that was first issued by Congress roughly 240 years ago.
  • governments are facing the emergence of a massive project that can scale instantly, that can cross borders without banks and onboard a built-in userbase of billions to send money around the globe as easily as email (AKA bitcoin)
  • The revelations are forcing lawmakers to rethink how to tackle the threat to the US dollar. Instead of assuming that the technologies underpinning digital assets will suddenly disappear
  • many are devising plans to create competitive products to mitigate the risks of obsolescence or significant loss of leverage of traditional currencies.

To this last point, it’s inevitable that their efforts fall short. The whole point of bitcoin is to be decentralized and free from a trusted, single point of failure. While having the feds run a digital currency of their own, (to quote Hillary Clinton), “what difference does it make?”

Truthfully, there’s literally no difference because it’s not backed by a hard currency, which is why Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin in the first place.Unless they decide to back fiat by a crypto hard cap, we’d all be suckers to take them at their word of proposing such a solution.

Unfortunately, such news didn’t get as viral as a tweet from everyone’s favorite tangerine. The President of the United States of America himself, Donald J. Trump, tweeted that he was not a fan of bitcoin. Even if Trump doesn’t fully understand how bitcoin works, he understands well enough that bitcoin would threaten his monetary policy of keeping interest rates low and continuing trade wars with China.

However, what Trump did/didn’t say about bitcoin or how he said it is irrelevant. His tweet is a prime example of the Streisand effect, the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. The point is, if bitcoin wasn’t on your radar, it is now.

No doubt the average Joe started talking or thinking about bitcoin, even if they had no idea what it was. Regardless, now grandma and the whole world knows of its existence.

But, you know. Bitcoin is dead.

Will Iran Choose 1,953 Sites?

Trump tweets that he has selected 52 sites in Iran, including cultural sites, for bombing if the Iranian regime retaliates for Trump’s assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani. Why 52? That “represent[s] the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago,” Trump noted.

I wonder if that will prompt Iran to select 1,953 American targets for its own retaliation. After all, 1953 was the year that the CIA carried out a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically elected prime minister and reinstalling the brutal monarch (shah) Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his feared Israeli-trained secret police, the SAVAK. The hostage-taking, which lasted 444 days, occurred after the 1979 revolution in Iran, which drove the hated shah from power and established the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As for the reference to targeting cultural sites, this was Trump at his pettiest. Imagine destroying the symbols of ancient Persian civilization just for spite! It brought outcries from around the world, and even the US secretary of defense said those sites would not be touched.

War Powers Resolutions Don’t Matter

Marbury v. Madison took the written U.S. Constitution and superseded it with a British style system of an unwritten constitutionality.  This was judicial review and it lasted until the New Deal when the jurisprudence of limited government figured out that the Executive Branch was just as able to modify the unwritten rules as was the Judicial.  Oops.

Do you really think the states and the people respectively would have allowed this Empire to come about?  So, yeah, war powers under the “written part” of the Constitution matter.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to be found under the “unwritten part”, where war powers rules don’t matter.  While the “unwritten part” includes jurisprudence, it obviously also just includes whatever the hell people can get away with based on whatever deals they have made in back rooms.

If the written Constitution mattered, we’d have added 200 to the list of 13 things Congress can do.  The states, under the X Amendment, could rule on constitutionality.  Rules are rules aren’t they?  If words can just be “interpreted”, then they’re not rules.  The writing part is symbolic, the real constitution is just a running consensus.

Hey American legal, military, and government officials?  When you swore an oath to the Constitution, you do realize that all you did was bound yourself to something which does not bind your leadership?  We need a reset.  Unfortunately, that’s just what the powerful want as well.  In. my. opinion.

Ron Paul asks: Why Was Soleimani Assassinated?

President Trump and Mike Pompeo told us that Iranian Gen. Soleimani had to be assassinated when he was in Baghdad at the end of last week because he was on a mission to plan and implement attacks on US military and diplomatic personnel in the region. But their story is not holding up very well, as reports surface that he was on a peace mission and other US claims are not adding up. So…why was he killed? Watch today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Tales from the Monetary Empire

Tales from the Monetary Empire

After hearing January 3rd’s episode of Tales From the Crypt, it’s an understatement to say I’m inspired by Alex Leishman and his mission to bring free banking to those who need and deserve it most. Responsible banking is long a thing of the past. No proof of reserves? No use in offering financial services. Period. What is the point if most Americans can’t even make interest on their savings? It’s only a matter of time before negative interest rates become a reality in the states just as it already has in many countries. Instead, Keynesianism plagues the minds of not only Americans but the rest of the world. They’re incentivized into irrational spending of funds and resources that shouldn’t be spent, or worse, don’t even exist.

It’s no surprise the price of BTC shot up over the weekend. After the President ordered the killing of Iran’s most popular general, oil prices soared past $70 a barrel. Saudi stock prices dipped in fear of Iranian retaliation via attacking oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Naturally these tensions lead to gold reaching its highest level in seven years as global investors are looking for safer and reliable options. Is bitcoin one of them? Could bitcoin fulfill Nik Bahtia’s prediction of becoming apart of the triumvirate of liquidity sooner than we think? 

Won’t authoritarians learn from their past authoritarians? This is how empires fall. Inflating the money supply for corporate, imperial greed. FDR confiscated gold via executive act 6102. Maybe we should be lucky we haven’t reached hyper bitcoinizaiton? Otherwise, would our government attempt to seize or private keys? Come knocking on the door and threaten you and your family at gun point to hand over your bitcoin because it’s the only sound currency on Earth that can pay to fund a world war?

The mere fact Alex was mocked by friends and family in civil society for questioning why the Federal Banking act isn’t illegal is appalling. God forbid anyone thinks for themselves these days. These are the kinds of questions everyone should be asking. It’s not a conspiracy to consider that this is intentionally programmed into the failed system, dictated by corrupt authoritarians. Ray Dalio was right when he wrote that profound blog post on LinkedIn, “The World Has Gone ad, And The System Is Broken.”

It was questions like this that Ron Paul was criticized for asking during both of is Presidential campaigns. The hard truth is, nobody asks these questions because they’re either ignorant of the problems, or they wanna keep their cushy, or sticky waged jobs as they count their fiat before bed. Can you blame them though? As much as it kills me to ask that question, it’s also a hard truth that not just bitcoiners, but anyone who’s knowledgeable of how this crippling financial system dominates the world is what inconceivably keeps it rotating on its fragile axis. At any moment that axis will snap and have us hurtling straight into that black hole sun of our desolate future that (quite literally) will bleed us into bankruptcy. As Ron Paul states many times over, this is not what the founding fathers wanted. This is not the American Dream.  

Yes, it’s the fractional reserve central banking system that enables this country to fund decades-long wars.

Interventionism for imperialistic wet dreams (nightmares rather), as well as economic interventionism, is anti-American. Therefore, being anti-bitcoin is anti-American, and so is war. Land of the free? Home of the brave? How is any of that possible when government has total control of the fruits of your labor? Where your money goes, who you’re allowed to send money to and when. Satoshi Nakamoto’s goal was to cure the economic cancer that is the Central Banking system: a permission-less, P2P cash system. For once, voluntary participants of the network are now able to seize full financial sovereignty by running a full node. These new-born sovereign individuals are validating that every transaction is true, not counterfeit, and that you are the sole owner of this bearer asset that is digital gold. 

This, bitcoin, is the very first time in the world that we as individuals actually own something. As Marty brings up at 28:40 

“what do you really own at the end of they day?”

“How we move our money is how we express our desires.”

If this is taken away from us, then we have no say in what we believe in. We can’t boycott a military industrial complex. We are slaves.

Like bitcoin, River Financial is competing with the Central Bank by offering a robust, secure service built on sound policy of human incentive (if being self-hosted in a volt worth a couple grand isn’t enough for you, tough). Having Executive Act 6102 framed on the wall in the River Financial office should be a tradition and custom in every financial institution in America, to remind them that governments can seize the wealth of individuals in an economy that lacks a truly free money. It’s a reminder of what this country was founded on, and how important property right are to individual liberty. The hope and will for new, earned opportunities. To lavish in the fruits of your hard, well-deserved labor. To invest in yourself so that you can nurture the skills necessary for maximal success, and minimal force. Bitcoin is the juiciest fruit of my labor, and River Financial is ready to garden and ripe for the pickings.

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