The Weekly Weird #30
Gaetz-keeper of Bitcoin, Assange goes free, men behaving badly, bye bye Missouri, Geriatric Bumfight 2024, the Commie penthouse
Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, where we wonder at the worrying whorls of dystopia!
Before we crack on, don’t forget to check out Episode 116, where I spoke with the creator of the UK’s first AI parliamentary candidate, the ‘Real’ Steve Endacott. Real Steve was good fun to talk to. We had a spirited conversation about the pitfalls of democracy and the ways it could improve - check it out!
Alrighty then, let’s get weird…
Gaetz-keeper Of Bitcoin
Representative Matt Gaetz, Florida man and Beavis look-a-like, has proposed a bill that would allow federal income tax to be paid in bitcoin.
“This is a bold step toward a future where digital currencies play a vital role in our financial system, ensuring that the U.S. remains at the forefront of technological advancement.”
The Secretary shall develop and implement a method to allow for the payment with bitcoin of any tax imposed on an individual under this title.
Is this latest proposal part of a broader swing towards the adoption of digital non-state currencies?
From CryptoAdventure:
Several U.S. states, including New Jersey, Kentucky, and Colorado, have started to implement their own crypto tax regulations, allowing for cryptocurrency payments for state taxes. Gaetz’s bill aims to modernize the federal tax system by officially recognizing Bitcoin as a payment method for federal income taxes.
In addition to growing acceptance of cryptocurrencies, the well-documented slow dance towards a widespread rollout of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) seems to have attracted a certain amount of pushback.
The State of Louisiana recently passed House Bill 488, to permit crypto-currency self-custody, mining, and use for payments, and “to prohibit governing authorities from requiring use, payment, or testing of central bank digital currency.”
It’s pretty stunning for a state legislature to simultaneously protect cryptocurrencies and prevent the use or testing of a federal CBDC.
The effulgence of cryptocurrencies at the moment brings to mind the American Free Banking period of 1837 to 1863, when the charter of the Bank of the United States lapsed and the right to charter banks reverted to the states. The result was wildcat banking, a heady brew of widespread currency issuance, free-floating exchange rates for banknotes, varying degrees of oversight and reliability, depositor losses, bank failures, and, eventually, a much stricter and more far-reaching central banking regime, culminating in the creation of the Federal Reserve.
This 2016 article by Daniel Sanches at the Philadelphia Fed is worth a look:
Free banking didn’t mean no rules. It is important to keep in mind that free banking is not the same as laissez-faire banking, in which there is no government interference of any kind. Free banking simply means that no charter or permission is needed from a government body to start a bank, unlike the current chartered banking system in the U.S. The free-banking laws specified that a state banking authority determined the general operating rules and minimum capital requirement, but no official approval was required to start a bank.
From The Changing Face of American Banking by Ranajoy Ray Chaudhuri:
Issuing paper currency wasn’t just limited to banks; even drugstores and railroad and insurance companies sometimes issued their own notes. The notes were also of varying size and color, and forgers had a field day: approximately a third of all paper currency during this period was counterfeit. Benchmarks like the reserve ratio, the capital adequacy ratio, and interest rates were set by the states. About half of these banks failed, and their average lifespan was five years.
Sound familiar?
I’d submit that we’re seeing a digital version of free banking right now, enabled by the advent of blockchain, asleep-at-the-wheel regulators, and a gerontocracy incapable of or unwilling to understanding the utility and relative merits of the technology being used, or the corrosive distrust in central government underpinning the interest in it.
In the 19th century, people losing their money led to enough discontent (and therefore action by authorities) to raise barriers to entry and, in the process, more or less centralise the money supply. What the 21st century version of that process will look like is anybody’s guess, but human greed and foolishness are universal constants, so odds are it won’t be too different this time.
Perhaps getting a younger generation accustomed to digital transactions and self-custodial digital wallets will strengthen the shift to CBDCs eventually, rather than stand in its way.
Who knows?
Also tangentially involving bitcoin…
Assange Goes Free
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is free. After 14 years of legal trouble, asylum, and incarceration precipitated by his publication of documents and media related to the US war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Assange cut a deal with US authorities which effectively commuted any sentence he might receive to the time he had already spent in London’s Belmarsh prison.
The plea deal saw Julian Assange plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information, rather than the 18 he was originally facing.
[…]
Assange formally entered the charge on the remote Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory in the Pacific, two days after leaving Belmarsh prison.
In return, he was sentenced to time already served and released to fly home.
The driver behind the deal that ended Assange’s ordeal has been Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, according to the BBC:
Anthony Albanese, the new Labor prime minister, said he did not support everything Assange had done but "enough was enough" and it was time for him to be released. He made the case a priority, largely behind closed doors. "Not all foreign affairs is best done with the loud hailer,” he said at the time.
Another “key player was Stephen Smith, who arrived in London as the new Australian High Commissioner in early 2023.”
One of the stranger elements of the deal was that Assange was required to charter a private jet to fly from London to Saipan via Bangkok for his formal hearing to enter his plea and be officially released, and then onward to his home in Australia, because “he had been barred from using commercial airlines,” according to Crowdsourcing Week.
The epic flight path saddled him with a debt of $520,000, owed to the government of Australia.
His wife Stella Assange solicited donations on social media to help with the cost, and the result was astounding. Not only did the public respond with enough money to cover the charter flights with money to spare, but a single donor gave over 8 bitcoin, valued at around $492,000.
For balance, however, it’s worth including a few points. The following is from Boston University’s Paul Hare, in a 2017 interview:
If you’re a transparency activist, you should treat every country the same. I would have more sympathy if they were evenhanded. But as far as I know, WikiLeaks has never made any suggestion that they would like to show what the Russians do, because of course the link between Assange and Russia seems to be pretty close. He actually ran a show for Russian TV, which is Russian government funded.
[…]
It’s also the bigger story, which is nobody knows really where WikiLeaks funding comes from or what they were paid for these things. How is Assange living? They are the total negation of transparency themselves. They are highly secretive.
[…]
To be a genuine issue organization globally, in my view, you have to be evenhanded. [Assange] never speaks ill of [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin, he never speaks ill of the Chinese. He has an agenda, which is not pure transparency.
That agenda was put plainly in a news interview by Assange himself some time ago:
“We have a mission to promote political reforms by releasing suppressed information.”
From CBS News in 2016, after the publication of Democratic National Committee emails by the platform in the run-up to the Trump/Clinton election:
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
Also from CBS, an interesting nugget from the very birth of Wikileaks:
Prominent transparency advocate Steven Aftergood privately warned Assange a few days before the site’s debut that the publish-everything approach was problematic.
“Publication of information is not always an act of freedom,” Aftergood said in an email sent in late 2006. “It can also be an act of aggression or oppression.”
Even Teen Vogue critiqued Wikileaks at the time, perhaps as part of a full-court press in favour of Clinton in advance of the election.
So Julian Assange is free, back home in Australia, and unburdened by debts. A win for freedom of the press, certainly, although the fact that he was ultimately found guilty still sets a precedent of which the world’s press will be wary of falling foul. We’ll find out soon enough whether he’ll acquit himself as an ethical journalist, further pursue the path of so-called ‘radical transparency’, or even retire from public life to be with his family.
From one Australian man to all Australian men (in the state of Victoria) now…
Men Behaving Badly
Australians in the state of Victoria have said “g’day” to the crocodile-wrestling nation’s Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behavioural Change.
Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan announced Wednesday that state MP Tim Richardson would serve as the inaugural Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behavior Change – the first position of its kind in the country.
Sky News Australia with more:
The new position has been pitched as part of the Allan government’s efforts to “make Victoria a safer place for women and children”, with the goal of helping end the scourge of the state's women dying at the hands of men.
To achieve this, the government has given Mordialloc MP Tim Richardson a junior ministerial role focusing on “the influence the internet and social media have on boys’ and men’s attitudes towards women and building respectful relationships.”
Dubbing the role “absurd”, Terry Barnes (from Victoria) wrote a scathing partisan criticism for The Spectator in the UK.
Cursed with a conservative opposition that can’t organise a knees-up in a brewery, Victoria is all but permanently governed by an Australian Labor party that, even compared to its national and other state counterparts, is striving to remake Victoria as a socially progressive paradise. It is dominated by MPs from the party’s hard-left faction, which leads to social policies that even Corbynites in Britain would applaud.
There are extremely permissive drug laws. The most radical policies on transgenderism, children’s gender dysphoria and euthanasia of any state in Australia. There is unquestioning acceptance and propagation of the left’s standard narrative that Australia is a racist society, and British colonialism an evil thing for which all Victorians must atone. Not to mention the fact that the state’s capital, Melbourne, was the most locked-down and curfewed city in the western world in the dark Covid years.
Regardless of partisan issues, and of course noting the horror of domestic violence and the need for its prevention, this certainly doesn’t dispel the image Australia has forged for itself: a nanny state obsessed with micro-managing the behaviour of its citizens.
Speaking of micro-managing the behaviour of citizens, especially during “the dark Covid years”…
Bye Bye Missouri
The Supreme Court of the United States has determined that no plaintiff in the case of Murthy v. Missouri has standing, leaving the issue at the heart of the case unresolved.
Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.
[…]
Here, the plaintiffs’ theories of standing depend on the platforms’ actions—yet the plaintiffs do not seek to enjoin the platforms from restricting any posts or accounts. Instead, they seek to enjoin the Government agencies and officials from pressuring or encouraging the platforms to suppress protected speech in the future.
The one-step-removed, anticipatory nature of the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries presents two particular challenges. First, it is a bedrock principle that a federal court cannot redress “injury that results from the independent action of some third party not before the court.”
[…]
Second, because the plaintiffs request forward-looking relief, they must face “a real and immediate threat of repeated injury.”
[…]
Putting these requirements together, the plaintiffs must show a substantial risk that, in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one Government defendant. Here, at the preliminary injunction stage, they must show that they are likely to succeed in carrying that burden. On the record in this case, that is a tall order.
The Court goes on to say that “while the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.”
Government pressure is irrelevant because individuals and companies have free will and their own interests? This seems to elide the central question of whether it is unconstitutional for the US government to pressure private companies or individuals to engage in censorship that it would itself be prohibited from engaging in under the First Amendment.
This particular line raised an eyebrow as well: “Because the plaintiffs are seeking only forward-looking relief, the past injuries are relevant only for their predictive value.”
So even if it is proven that the government behaved unconstitutionally in the past in a specific manner, the Court cannot use that track record to rule that the government cannot do that again in future?
Dissenting, Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas said Murthy v. Missouri “is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years,” and that the Court’s decision to leave it unresolved “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”
Referring to a previous speech case, National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, in which the decision affirmed that “government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech,” Alito wrote:
What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision together with Vullo will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.
Send it they did, and to whom?
Geriatric Bumfight 2024
The US presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27, 2024 may go down in US history as the nadir of American democracy. How much of this idiocy needs to go on before the political parties of the United States pull their finger out and field a pair of mentally stable and capable candidates?
Here’s Biden visibly exhausting his neurons while talking about tax and healthcare, with a priceless double-take from Trump in the split-screen:
Here is Trump, for some reason, using his golf prowess as an example of how on-the-ball he is, which degenerates into two old geezers arguing about a golf handicap:
Biden’s voice is like wind through dry leaves. He sounds like a retiree you found lost in a local park. His presence at the podium, and the insistence of the Democratic establishment that he has to be the candidate in this election is, to your humble correspondent, elder abuse at this point. Let the poor guy go home to play with his grandkids, grab the Blue Plate Special for supper, and get in some shuffleboard once in a while. Make it stop.
None of this makes Trump a desirable candidate, although he at least came off as less likely to trail off incoherently in mid-sentence. What a choice.
In his typically disjointed free-wheeling style, Trump offered up probably the best line of the night, something the entire electorate are probably thinking as they contemplate a near future where one of these specimens is in control of the nuclear football (again):
We knock on wood wherever we may have wood.
True dat.
And now for the comic relief…
The Commie Penthouse
Peak Irony has been reached.
“A multimillion-pound luxury penthouse flat named after the revolutionary socialist thinker Friedrich Engels” is on sale in the British city of Manchester, according to The Guardian.
The 290 sq metre (3,126 sq ft) flat is listed on the developer’s website as a showhome, but in promotional material it was advertised with a price tag of £2.5m.
[…]
“The Engels” features three en suite bedrooms, as well as a home office and a sweeping open-plan living area.
Isaac Rose of the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, offered this pithy comment:
“[Engels] deliberately fled the life of the bourgeoisie to live and be among the working class, but maybe he’d have found it ultimately amusing that things have got this mad that they were naming penthouses after him.”
Mad indeed.
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone.
Outro music is Prince Fatty’s dub cover of Insane In The Brain, a fitting tribute to the fever dream we seem to be collectively living through.
Stay sane, friends.