I’m very late to this but hope it’s going well. Consider an incentive reward system in which a certain number of days and later weeks of perfect abstinence from smoking enables you to indulge in a reward for someone you love - not yourself since your reward is x days of unbroken success in sticking with yourself! The reward/gift might start small (chocolate, some flowers, …) and later get bigger - after all, you’ll be saving fiat that would have otherwise been burned up in smoking. 👍
GN and fresh inspiring dawn.
Dangerously misleading! The objective of some types of propaganda is the reinforcement of complacency and compliance. Barry is a smart guy who seems willing to swim against the tide, but this short excerpt is a form of lying by omission - unless there’s a lot more to the book. I wonder if he’s deluded or sold out.
Good idea
GN and good, regenerative, or inspirational dreams to all (except predatory primates to whom I wish “final night”).
Maybe so. Maybe they’ll form an alliance with the termites and rot out the rats lurking in the roof.
Killing one cockroach might not end the infestation but it’s one less cockroach. Flushing the shit down the toilet doesn’t mean it won’t have to be flushed again.
GM as I’m heading into GN
GN to all humans and other primates except for the parasitic, predatory primates whose deaths are long past untimely. May we all awaken to a beautiful morning harboring fewer of those creatures and bursting with joy, creativity, and love.
Seems like a good way to suppress rabies outbreaks.
Baaah. baaahhh 🐑🐑🐑
Excellent video to catch up on, a d understand, what did and didn’t happen to the Japanese economy over the mast 30 years - and how it’s relevant to all countries.
GN and pleasant dreams to all - except for Putin and those like him who are less welcome among the living than rabid raccoons - so dawn arrive with the blessed news that vlad and his ilk have ceased wasting perfectly good food, water, and air - permanently.
Antonopolous - 2013 - Bitcoin conference in San Jose - (Great time to buy - too bad I was brain dead back then)
Yeah - peaceful protest at Kent State University of the American war in Vietnam (peaceful that is except for the organized crime participants a.k.a. the minions of the government)
Crime and Punishment
Trump Treasury Expands Financial Surveillance
"More than one million Americans are about to face a new level of financial surveillance. The Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that the threshold for currency transaction reports has been lowered from $10,000 to $200 for Americans living in 30 zip codes in California and Texas. Financial surveillance in the United States has long needed reform, but this move is in the wrong direction.
FinCEN officially announced the temporary policy change as an effort “to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border of the United States.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “As part of a whole-of-government approach to combatting the threat, [the] Treasury remains focused on leveraging all our available tools and authorities to better identify and counter these criminal activities.”
While this announcement is disappointing, it is not surprising. Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studies, warned people in February that President Trump’s decision to designate cartels as terrorists could have repercussions for civil liberties and the economy at large. Specifically, Nowrasteh noted that the designation would allow the government to freeze assets, enact secondary sanctions, and take greater control of the financial system generally.
What makes this announcement especially troubling is that the $10,000 threshold for currency transaction reports is long overdue for reform. At the very least, many people agree that the amount should be adjusted for inflation. Whether you base that adjustment off the reporting done under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1945, the enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970, or the Treasury’s currency transaction report regulation in 1972, it’s clear that this reporting regime has gotten out of hand (Figure 1).
https://infogram.com/inflation-thresholds-1hnp27exewxnn4g
Yet, instead, we are seeing a drastic increase in financial surveillance, making the problem even worse.
Whether it’s the mob or the cartel, organized crime is not an easy thing to deal with. However, this challenge does not mean Americans should have their rights stripped away in the pursuit of justice. As Fight for the Future warned Congress in 2023, “Should [criminals] successfully tempt the United States to abandon the human right to privacy and the U.S. Constitution, everyone will lose.” That was true when the Biden administration tried to surveil bank accounts with just $600 in activity, and that is true now that the Trump administration is surveilling as little as $200 in activity."
By Nicolas Anthony, Cato Institute
https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-treasury-expands-financial-surveillance
#IKITAO #Politics #Privacy
FinCEN is simply an enforcer for organized crime with “badges.” As for Trump, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss . . .”