News Items

It wasn’t just me of course. It was an entire nation that was callously manipulated in the aftermath of that tragedy. The courage and generosity exhibited by so many New Yorkers and others throughout the country and indeed the world was rapidly transformed into terrifying fear. Fear that was intentionally injected repeatedly into our daily lives. Fear that translated into pointless wars and countless deaths. Fear that was used to justify the destruction of our precious civil rights.

Other than widespread fascination over its meteoric price rise, much of the discussion around Bitcoin in 2017 has revolved around questions over the future direction of the protocol, most specifically the highly charged scaling debate and the implementation of SegWit. With the forthcoming fight over the 2x part of SegWit2x, the blocksize issue remains unsettled and the community will stay firmly focused on this over the coming months, as it should.

Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.
- Edward Snowden
Today's post will focus on the political environment I'd like to see, not in my ideal fantasy world, but within the context of the system we have today.

The political environment since Trump's election seems to get worse and worse by the day, as much of the American public becomes increasingly divided, embittered and downright insane. People across the political spectrum are enthusiastically fueling this destructive behavior in their varied quests to show how right they are and how hopelessly wrong everyone else is. Meanwhile, those who truly wield power in our society continue to laugh all the way to the bank.

Many people involved in politics swear by the notion that “the ends justify the means,” which is typically the sign of a self-serving actor attempting to justify questionable if not downright evil action in order to get what he or she wants. While pursuit of “the greater good” is often put up for public consumption, the driving force behind this sort of action is almost always personal gain of some sort. This is what most politicians do for a living, which is why they are justifiably hated by the general public.

Today I want to highlight a troubling bill moving through Congress that seems inspired by a thuggish, authoritarian speech given earlier this year by CIA head Mike Pompeo.
I found that speech so disturbing at the time, I wrote an entire piece taking it apart. Below is an excerpt from that talk which is relevant to this piece:

About 10 years ago, Tim Wu, the Columbia Law professor who coined the term network neutrality, made this prescient comment: “To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king.”
Wu was right. And now, Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.

There are plenty of unconscious humans, many of whom happen to inhabit positions of great wealth and power, committing all sorts of horrible deeds to their fellow humans on a daily basis. I've spent much of the past five years highlighting such behavior, but we've arrived at a point where it's time to give increased attention to the multitude of conscious, deeply caring people trying to make a positive difference within our current very challenging and hostile environment.

This past weekend, my brother and his girlfriend came out to visit and it once again reminded me of what really matters in life. I've noticed that having friends and family in town forces someone like me to disconnect from the 24/7 news cycle more than usual, which I always find to be extraordinarily healthy.

Those of you who've read me for many years will have undoubtedly noticed a major transformation in the tone and content of my writing over the course of 2017. This shift has been the result of much personal introspection regarding how I had been doing things in the past and whether I was pleased with the outcome.
In the June post, People Are Devolving Into Degeneracy and Violence – Don’t Join the Club, I noted: