The USA is a machination that turns the work of good people into means for evil people.

Just finished watching Barry Lyndon. Absolutely loved it. I had no idea Kubrick was so hot on the trail. Would he have been a bitcoiner?

- Kubrick believed the private creation of the Fed handed the U.S. money supply to the same European banking dynasties (Warburg, Rothschild, Rockefeller-Morgan interests) that had already captured the Bank of England generations earlier.

- He underlined in his copy of G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island the passage claiming the Act was drafted in secret on Jekyll Island by seven men who controlled one-fourth of the world’s wealth.

- Quote he repeated to Herr: “Once you let private bankers issue the nation’s currency and charge interest on it forever, the politicians become employees and the voters become extras.”

When engaged with what is (right in front of us), we are engaged with all that is.

Trust more, micromanage less

Observe more, react less

I agree the Bitcoin content gets repetitive after a bit. I think the spiritual layer is closer to the roots (though spiritual content can also get repetitive)

It requires some deep poise at times like these

I just watched the Big Short for the first time. I absolutely fucking loved it. Also, what the fuck?

This rules

How so?

Our sensations and intuitions are “dying” constantly. Slipping away moment by moment

Some thoughts on the below Lyn Alden passage on price as information compression.

Growing up in Massachusetts, I was taught to be suspicious of anything that sounded like “free markets.” The phrase carried a whiff of greed and exploitation. But what Alden points to here is simple: ten million people making everyday choices process far more real-time truth than a handful of planners ever could.

From a Buddhist perspective, this is akin to dependent origination. Reality itself is a web of conditions — no central controller could ever grasp it all. The ego that tries to run the show limited, rigid, and eventually corrupt. When you let go, the interdependence of things takes care of itself.

It’s scary to trust that — just as it was scary for me to leave an aikido teacher who had turned a bit cultish, or to question the state’s role in money. But the lesson keeps repeating: liberation isn’t in handing power to a central authority, it’s in seeing that no authority is needed. The ten million small decisions — or the ten thousand things (Lao Tzu) — are wiser than any ruler or guru could ever be.

The passage from Broken Money p. 230:

"Suppose that ten million people in a country make economic decisions, and they each buy five things per day. That’s 50 million transactions per day, or 18.25 billion transactions per year, nationwide. Can a central committee of elders allocate prices better than those ten million decentralized people can?

Most evidence suggests no; ten million people can incorporate real-time information, and allocate prices better than a detached central committee of a handful of individuals. That is why politburos are not the most efficient form of economic planning; regardless of how wise and intelligent those individuals may be, they are incapable of processing and organizing the amount of information that ten million everyday people can with their various specific expertise."

Last night I was at a book bar in the east village and reading “broken money” by Lyn Alden. Some Indian dude and I started talking and we ended up talking about bitcoin for 3 hours…

I then dreamt about an infinite money glitch where all I had to do was go into a zoom and it would print $…

Bitcoin is worming its way deeper into my psyche 🤷‍♂️

Time is so fleeting. Try too hard to take advantage of it and it slips away even faster.

This rips

Yup!

“Never Attained Anything” mini-rendition. Fully fleshed version on Spotify and nostr:npub1yfg0d955c2jrj2080ew7pa4xrtj7x7s7umt28wh0zurwmxgpyj9shwv6vg

https://blossom.primal.net/688eb3e2167e6bd8d0ca402edd9399210834d3f35e95d82095c243ba8409e45c.mov

Another glorious 1-2 punch about how abstract money gives government overnight access to citizen’s savings from page 102 of Broken Money:

Inness (1914):

“What is a monetary unit? What is a dollar? We do not know. All we do know for certain — and I wish to reiterate and emphasize the fact that on this point the evidence which in these articles I have only been able briefly to indicate, is clear and conclusive — all, I say, that we do know is that the dollar is a measure of the value of all commodities, but is not itself a commodity, nor can it be embodied in any commodity. It is intangible, immaterial, abstract. It is a measure in terms of credit and debt.”

Lyn Alden, Broken Money:

“Some economists such as Saifedean Ammous have argued that from a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended once it began in 1914. In prior wars throughout history, wars had to be funded with savings of taxes or very slow debasement of coinage. Physical coinage held by citizens could usually only be debased by their government gradually rather than diluted instantaneously, because a government couldn’t just magically change the properties of the coins that were held by households; it could only debase them over time by taxing purer coins, issuing various decrees to try to pull some of those purer coins in, and spending debased coins back out into the economy (and convincing initial recipients to accept them at the same prior value, despite the lesser precious metal content, which would only work for a time and might not even be noticed at first).

However, with the widespread holding of centrally issued banknotes and bank deposits that were redeemable for specific amounts of gold, governments could change the redemptive value with the stroke of a pen or eliminate redemption all together. This gave governments the power to instantaneously devalue a substantial part of their citizens’ savings, literally overnight, and funnel that purchasing power toward war or other government expenditures whenever they determine that the situation calls for it.”

Another beauty from Lyn:

In 1970, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act, which made banks file reports to the government whenever their customers do more than $10,000 in transactions within a day. Back then, this dollar amount was worth more than the median annual income, and reporting therefore happened rather infrequently. However, the Bank Secrecy Act was not adjusted for inflation, and so over the course of five decades the government has automatically reduced the threshold for necessary reporting and has therefore continually expanded their surveillance mandate each year without further legislation.

The combination of restricting the number of physical banknotes in circulation, making it undesirable to hold physical banknotes for long periods of time due to inflation without interest, and surveilling bank deposits, has been an effective surveillance and control combination.

A beautifully put foundational insight by Lyn Alden at the end of chapter 6 in Broken Money:

“Overall, it’s the combination of the banks and the government that have power over the ledger that most people use as money in any banking system. For a gold-backed banking system, the only part of the ledger that individual users have control of is the precious metal coins that they retain in their own custody, and for that they rely on the properties of nature to maintain the integrity of the ledger. Once they surrender coins over to the banking system, they have begun to rely on a hierarchy of other people to control their money.”

$131,050

A mini rendition of a song from the album ‘Cranky’ I released last month. This one is called Ride My Steed.

(You can find in Wavlake, bandcamp and lots of other places)

https://blossom.primal.net/e8d7d7a947d8195addb393d5719b3e88e0fdf1a402b05694a15b98e8e09d4422.mov

"I slept, and dreamed that life was joy;

I woke, and found that life was service.

I acted and behold, service was joy."

The Dial (July 1840) — Poet Ellen Sturgis Hooper