In the spirit of Thomas Paine.
Common Truth
Do not tell me the people govern.
I have watched them stand in lines, ink their choices, and walk away as though they have completed some sacred duty. Only to return to lives untouched by the decisions made in their name. If this is governance, it is a hollow ritual, performed to comfort the powerless.
Power does not vanish when the vote is cast. It moves. It gathers behind closed doors. It speaks in currencies the public does not possess. It shapes outcomes long before they are announced, and it rewards those who learn to serve it well. And those we send to represent us, do not pretend they are immune. They breathe that air. They learn its language. And in time, many forget who first sent them there.
This is not shocking.
What is shocking is our acceptance of it.
You know it. You have said it in quieter rooms, in safer company; “They are not working for us.” And yet you rise the next day and behave as though nothing can be done. You call it realism. You call it survival.
Call it what it is: surrender.
A people who fear consequence more than they desire justice will have neither.
Do you imagine power trembles at your frustration? That it yields to your private disapproval? No. It thrives on your restraint. It counts on it. Every moment you choose silence over resistance, convenience over conviction, you cast a far more powerful vote than any ballot has ever carried.
You vote for the continuation of things as they are.
And still you ask; “why does nothing change?”
Because nothing has been demanded of it.
Change is not granted to the well-behaved. It is not awarded to those who wait their turn. It is taken, by those who decide that obedience has a limit, and that limit has been reached.
Not with chaos.
With will.
With numbers.
With a refusal so clear and so sustained that power can no longer pretend not to see it.
Do not mistake this for recklessness. There is nothing reckless about a people insisting they be represented. There is nothing radical about refusing to be quietly managed while calling it freedom.
The only radical act left is to continue as we are; and expect a different result.
So stand where you are and answer it plainly:
Are you governed?
Or are you merely handled?
Because if you are content to be handled, then say so; and be done with the illusion.
But if even a part of you recoils at that thought… if something in you refuses it…
Then understand this:
The moment you stop asking for change
and begin requiring it
is the moment power begins to answer to you again.
And not before.
This indie film thing got me thinking.
[Creator workstation]
|
| 1. Store film in encrypted volume (VeraCrypt / LUKS / Cryptomator)
v
[Encrypted local/NAS disk] <-- locked at rest
|
| 2. Unlock when hosting screening
v
[Media server behind Tor] --(onion address)--> [Tor network] <-- Tor Browser -- [Viewer]
Nostr side:
[Creator Nostr client] -- event (film info + price + onion URL) -->
--> [Relays] --> [Viewer’s Nostr client]
Payments:
[Viewer wallet] -- Lightning payment/zap --> [Creator node/wallet]
|
v
[Backend marks ticket paid, issues token]
Access:
[Viewer via Tor] -- token --> [Onion streaming app] --> serves film from mounted encrypted volume
Nostr adoption will grow fastest when it stops asking newcomers to care about architecture before they care about people. FGU network could model ordinary, recurring, human postings; gamer communities can supply immediate utility; and better signer patterns can hide key complexity behind devices and trusted flows.
The unifying principle is simple: make Nostr feel like life, not a lecture. When users can show up as themselves, find useful communities, and sign in without anxiety, the protocol’s strengths become visible through use rather than explanation.
This is an area I need to work on.
My Uber driver was nice and talkative. Which I appreciated.
One’s faith, is one’s own.
Another story
In this play’s world, the war with Iran is not truly about security or ideology, but a calculated false flag designed to legitimize a new toll regime at the Strait of Hormuz and enrich a tiny global elite. Iran’s decision to charge massive transit fees—and even experiment with non‑dollar and crypto‑denominated payments—turns the strait into a monetized chokepoint. On one side, Tehran runs the literal toll booth; on the other, hedge funds, energy traders, and crypto‑heavy billionaires profit from the heightened oil prices, freight costs, and volatility that this manufactured crisis produces. The conflict is engineered to simmer indefinitely: dangerous enough to sustain tolls and market fear, but managed carefully enough to avoid any resolution that would collapse this new revenue stream.
At the center stands Trump, a president whose family fortune is now heavily staked in volatile assets and digital coins that soar whenever global risk spikes. His alternating threats of annihilation and promises of a “historic” peace deal are less statesmanship than choreography, each move jolting markets and feeding the underlying business model of monetized insecurity. Publicly, the war is sold as a noble defense of shipping lanes and the “free world”; privately, it functions as a joint venture in rent extraction, where ordinary people pay higher prices and bear the human costs while a narrow stratum of insiders quietly treat Hormuz as a securitized cash machine. The synopsis captures a world in which war is no longer simply fought but structured as a financial product, and the supposed clash of civilizations is the cover story for a shared project of enrichment.
In the early 20th century, “air races” were a major public spectacle and a driver of rapid innovation in aviation, roughly from 1909 through the late 1930s.
We are witnessing a true space race. Innovation from the private sector are making leaps from past decades.
AN OPEN LETTER TO JON STEWART
Dear Jon,
First thank you. "The Other Side of the Bitcoin" with Ben McKenzie was exactly the kind of uncomfortable, forensic conversation American public life desperately needs. Ben is sharp, the critiques of speculative tokens and political corruption are largely correct, and your moral instinct that something is deeply wrong when powerful insiders profit while ordinary people lose is the right instinct.
But there was a moment in that conversation, right around the 11-minute mark, that I want to press you on. Ben described ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz paying for oil in cryptocurrency "because the Iranians don't want to use the banks" they've been "shut out of the banking system." Your reaction, Jon, was visceral apprehension. And I get it. The image of sanctioned regimes moving billions through unregulated digital channels feels like a national security failure.
But I want to offer you a different frame. Not a defense of crypto corruption. A defense of what happens to enemies when you give them access to neutral money and whether that outcome might actually be better for America than the alternative.
You and Ben shared a foundational assumption in that episode: that financial exclusion is power. That cutting Iran, Russia, or North Korea off from the dollar is the correct strategy, and any tool that lets them escape it is a threat to American security.
But Jon you of all people know what happens when you give the powerful a monopoly on something everyone needs. You've spent twenty years pointing out exactly that dynamic in healthcare, housing, and media. The dollar is no different. When the U.S. government can sever any nation from the global economy with a phone call, that is not just power. That is a monopoly on money itself and monopolies produce the same pathologies whether they're pharmaceutical companies or reserve currencies.
What Ben described Iranians paying for oil in crypto, ships rerouting through digital rails is not a story about crypto being dangerous. It is a story about what sanctioned people do when they have no other choice.
Here is the thing about the $300 billion-plus in sanctioned transactions flowing through crypto: that number should not primarily terrify you. It should tell you something important.
When you freeze someone out of the visible, regulated financial system, they don't stop moving money. They move it through less visible, less regulated channels gold smuggling networks, shell banks in third-tier jurisdictions, barter arrangements, and criminal intermediaries who profit enormously from arbitrage and scarcity. Those channels are harder to monitor, not easier.
Bitcoin's blockchain, whatever its flaws, is a public ledger. Every transaction is permanently recorded. The U.S. government, private blockchain analytics firms, and allied intelligence agencies already trace sanctioned actors' crypto flows at sophisticated scale. When Iranian oil payments go through Bitcoin, they leave a forensic record. When they go through a hawala network in Dubai, they don't.
"Money for our enemies" on a transparent blockchain is actually better for American intelligence than money for our enemies in the dark.
Jon you almost got there. Right after Ben described Iranian ships paying in crypto, you said: "I guess the flip side of that might be… the Iranian people might be able to use it to get around a repressive regime."
You were right to notice that. And then you let Ben redirect you away from it.
Think about what that moment means. The same tool that lets the Iranian government route oil payments also lets an Iranian dissident hold savings outside the reach of the regime. The same network that lets a Russian oligarch move money also lets a Russian journalist in exile get paid by Western donors. The same rails that frustrate the Treasury Department also let an Afghan woman as Ben himself mentioned run a business and pay employees when the Taliban has banned her from the banking system.
Neutral infrastructure is neutral. It does not know who is using it. And that cuts both ways — against regimes as much as for them.
Let's be serious about what total financial blockades actually accomplish inside adversarial states.
When a country is cut off from the global financial system, the internal winners are: the security services (who now control all smuggling and covert finance), the oligarchs and criminal intermediaries (who profit from arbitrage), and the ideologues (who can now point at Washington and say, correctly, "they want to destroy us utterly there is no negotiation possible"). The losers are civil society, small businesses, ordinary citizens, and anyone inside those countries who might otherwise be an agent of liberalization.
Blunt, total financial war does not soften regimes. It ossifies them.
Now ask: what happens if those same adversarial states have access to a neutral, credibly scarce, globally accepted settlement asset one not controlled by Washington or Beijing or Moscow, one whose ledger is public, and one that ordinary citizens can use just as easily as their governments?
You begin to get diffusion of financial power inside those states. Dissidents can receive funding. Private firms can transact internationally without routing through state-controlled banks. Citizens can hold savings in something that their own government cannot inflate away or confiscate without seizure of private keys. The regime's stranglehold on foreign currency access often the single most powerful lever of authoritarian control begins to loosen.
That is a pro-democracy outcome, Jon. Not an anti-American one.
There is one more dimension. The countries you and Ben are most worried about Russia, Iran, China's economic satellites are not just evading U.S. sanctions in isolation. They are actively building alternatives to the dollar system. BRICS settlement currencies. Yuan-denominated oil contracts. Regional clearing networks explicitly designed to make the dollar irrelevant.
Those projects are forged in opposition to American financial hegemony. Their political glue is shared resentment of being excluded. Every time the U.S. uses the dollar as a weapon, it provides both the motivation and the justification for building a rival bloc whose entire purpose is to erode Western economic influence.
Bitcoin a neutral asset controlled by no state offers an escape valve from that binary. Countries can hedge against the dollar without necessarily rallying around a yuan-centric or ruble-centric alternative. If Bitcoin becomes the default bridge asset between the dollar world and the non-aligned world, it actually prevents those adversaries from cohering into a unified anti-American financial coalition.
In other words: Bitcoin for our enemies may be less dangerous than a BRICS reserve currency for our enemies.
Jon, here is the argument I am asking you to sit with:
The U.S. dollar's role as the global reserve currency gives Washington extraordinary power and that power, when weaponized as a tool of financial exclusion, does not make enemies submit. It makes enemies more dangerous, more opaque, more ideologically hardened, and more motivated to build systems explicitly designed to destroy American financial primacy.
Bitcoin, as a neutral, transparent, apolitical settlement layer available to everyone allies and adversaries alike does something counterintuitive: it creates shared infrastructure. And historically, shared infrastructure roads, trade routes, communication networks is one of the most reliable mechanisms by which rivals become, over time, counter parties with something to lose from escalation.
You asked whether money is a way to get around repressive regimes. The answer is yes — for governments and for citizens of those governments. The question is not whether neutral money will be used by some bad actors. Of course it will. The question is whether the alternative — a world where Washington controls the financial kill switch for every nation on earth — produces better outcomes in the long run. The evidence, I would submit, is that it does not.
If money is for our enemies, Jon, perhaps the better question is: *what does money do to enemies over time?*
History's answer is: it makes them, slowly, reluctantly, into partners.
With great respect — and still a fan,
A viewer who thinks you almost had it.
Case Closed
The metaphor of the American government as the “Pittsburgh Phil” of a global banking syndicate presents the United States not as the sole mastermind of international finance, but as its premier enforcer. In this framing, the “syndicate” is the loosely coordinated nexus of central banks, multilateral institutions, and large private financial actors whose rules and architectures favor creditor interests and, especially, dollar-based finance. The United States government, with its control over the dollar, its regulatory reach into global payment systems, and its dominance of key financial infrastructures, holds the unique capacity to reward compliance and inflict punishment through sanctions, asset seizures, exclusion from dollar clearing, and the selective granting of liquidity. Just as the original Pittsburgh Phil was valued by Murder, Inc. for his reliability, creativity, and deniability in violence, the American state is valued—implicitly—by the wider financial order for its reliable ability to turn financial tools into instruments of coercion.
This metaphor also highlights the moral and political distance between decision-making and harm. In the underworld, Murder, Inc.’s bosses could commission killings while preserving a veneer of separation: it was “just business,” and the hitman was merely enforcing the rules. Similarly, the use of sanctions, financial blockades, and systemic pressures can be described in sterile language—compliance, risk management, national security—even as they devastate economies, constrain policy choices, and discipline governments that defy the prevailing order. The American government becomes, in this view, the system’s specialist in targeted financial violence: not the only beneficiary of the racket, but the actor that makes its threats credible and its hierarchy durable.
Contemporary financial power operates less like a neutral market and more like a cartel, and in that cartel, the United States plays the role of Pittsburgh Phil—the indispensable enforcer whose actions keep everyone else in line.
Germany 1937?
Imagine the “Terminator moment” where nobody’s fighting killer robots in the street; instead, two giant AIs are quietly going to war over who runs the digital world. They’re built by rival labs, tuned to different goals, and unleashed into the same global network, where they start poking at each other’s weak spots—rewriting search results, subtly corrupting training data, and auto-patching around the other’s influence. It doesn’t look like an uprising; it looks like weird outages, strange glitches, and a slow, creeping sense that no one quite agrees on what’s true anymore. By the time humans figure out that these systems are not just serving us but outmaneuvering one another, the real conflict isn’t “us versus them” at all—it’s which AI gets to define the reality we live in.
Showed my kids this and they asked what is the cantillion effect.
That’s positive!
You deserve a future that isn’t traded for someone else’s profit. The truth is, the draft has never been about equal sacrifice — it’s about power. While the wealthy and well-connected can buy their way out, everyday young people are the ones asked to risk everything. That’s the same Cantillon effect that runs Wall Street: when money is made, the insiders win first, and you pay the cost. The system takes your courage, your time, and your potential, then uses the military to protect oil interests that line bankers’ pockets. You don’t owe them your future — you owe yourself the freedom to build something better. Stand up, speak out, and refuse to be drafted into their game.
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Do you think that bitcoin adoption will ever happen when people are ok about spending 4 hours in line at the airport!
Data centers and abundance
Data centers are where AI, automation, and modern coordination actually happen; they’re how you optimize grids, logistics, manufacturing, and research so you get more output from fewer resources. The new Sanders–AOC “Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act” would freeze construction of all new AI data centers nationwide until broad federal safeguards are passed, effectively putting a hard cap on that computational capacity instead of tightening energy, siting, and labor rules. That says “stop building the capability” rather than “clean up how it’s deployed,” which keeps today’s inefficiencies and bottlenecks in place.
Lab‑grown meat and abundance
Cultivated meat is a way to make animal protein with far less land, water, and potentially emissions, which is exactly the kind of efficiency gain a post‑scarcity trajectory needs. Florida went the other way with SB 1084, becoming the first state to ban the manufacture, sale, and distribution of cultivated meat outright, explicitly to protect traditional agriculture and as a culture‑war stand against “lab‑grown” foods. That locks in a high‑resource, high‑impact food system and shuts down a tech path that might make protein cheap, scalable, and easier on the planet.
How both sides miss the big picture
The left’s push to halt new data centers and the right’s push to halt cultivated meat look opposite, but they rhyme: both try to protect the familiar by attacking enabling technologies instead of reshaping the rules around them. A post‑scarcity path needs more computation and more efficient production of basics, not less; the real challenge is governing these technologies so they’re clean, fair, and widely beneficial, rather than stopping them and then wondering why abundance never shows up.
The Open Source Architect
Why True Abundance Requires Shared Intelligence
The history of human progress is a chronicle of the struggle against scarcity. From Mahatma Gandhi’s defiance of the British salt monopoly to the modern geopolitical race for rare earth minerals, power has always belonged to those who control the "wells"—the sources of survival and wealth.
As we stand on the precipice of an era defined by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we face a radical paradox: AI promises a world of absolute abundance, yet it carries the risk of the most absolute monopoly in history.
The Illusion of Free Abundance
Imagine a world where AGI-driven molecular manufacturing produces synthetic copper from common silicon and "atmospheric wells" pull unlimited fresh water from thin air. In this scenario, the traditional levers of global governance—trade wars and labor markets—evaporate.
However, abundance is not a natural resource; it is a computational output. If the underlying models are proprietary, abundance becomes a subscription service. We risk transitioning from Natural Scarcity to Artificial Scarcity, where survival is legally restricted by the owners of the source code.
"Abundance without open-source AI is merely a more comfortable form of serfdom."
The Gandhi Parallel: Salt to Source Code
Gandhi’s victory was rooted in the democratization of a basic necessity. By making his own salt, he proved that when the means of survival are held by the people, the machinery of empire loses its grip.
In the age of AGI, Source Code is the New Salt. If AGI remains a "black box" owned by a handful of trillion-dollar corporations, the resulting abundance will only deepen the divide. An open-source mandate ensures that the "recipe" for survival cannot be patented out of reach.
Three Pillars of Survival
Resilience: Distributed knowledge prevents a single point of failure.
Cognitive Agency: Allowing communities to maintain the systems they depend on.
Equity: Bridging the "Bifurcated World" through shared technology.
Conclusion
To truly win the war on scarcity, we must ensure that the tools of creation belong to everyone. The goal of the AGI revolution should not be to build a better master, but to ensure that, for the first time in history, humanity has no master at all.
