News Items

Jeff Sessions Just Demonstrated Why We Need to Decentralize Government

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Late last year, I wrote a series of posts where I highlighted three specific areas I thought the U.S. government might overreach and do something really stupid in 2018. Jeff Sessions didn’t waste any time making my first prediction look prescient.

Here’s an excerpt from that post, Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 1 (Cannabis):

Today’s topic is cannabis. This seems the least likely area for government action, specifically because it would be such a monumentally stupid move. That said, just because something’s idiotic doesn’t mean we should simply discount it, particularly with human fossil Jeff Sessions continuing to chirp on the issue every chance he gets.

If the Trump administration actually moves on this issue, we’ll know for sure how completely inept and desperate it is. Part of me almost wants to see them try, because the resulting monumental fail will demonstrate the power of the people and give a gigantic black eye to authoritarians in government.

Stuff like this is all part of the process we’ll be going through over the next few years, and we need to be mentally prepared for it. We the people will increasingly move to take sovereignty back in a variety of ways, and government will respond with panic. The good news is they’ll be reacting from a position of weakness, not strength.

Fast forward one month, and Jeff Sessions couldn’t help himself from doing something monumentally stupid and evil, both politically and ethically.

Here’s a brief summary of the changes from the AP:

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Welcome to 2018 – We Are All Connected

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To see a world in a grain of sand
And to see heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Over the course of 2017, I spent a lot of time detailing where we stand as a species and where I think we’re going. To summarize, I think the positive impact of the internet and social media on humanity is still very much in its infancy. The more connected we become to one another across the planet, the more we’ll realize we have far more in common with one another than we do with the sociopathic oligarchs and politicians in charge of our respective nation-states.

Much of the 20th century was defined by unimaginable human conflict and terror, unleashed upon the public by crazed elites and rulers who were able to successfully manipulate large populations. The key to preventing a repeat of this sort of thing in the 21st century is billions of human beings across the planet communicating and sharing friendship with one another to the point we can no longer be tricked in killing each other. We need to learn to see “the other” in ourselves and voluntarily collaborate with our fellow humans on the challenges that face us in order to bring our species to the next level. This isn’t just a pipe-dream or insane utopian ramblings, I think it’s entirely possible.

That said, the road could be long and some real disasters may lie ahead before we finally get our footing as a species. As far as I see it, there are several factors still preventing us from getting from point A to B. For one thing, leaders of nation-states throughout the world are almost always some of the worst individuals society has to offer. The types of people who aspire to, and generally attain political power, tend to be the most unconscious, power hungry, sociopathic characters around. That’s just how this stuff works.

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Reflections on 2017 – A Personal Journey

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2017 was a tumultuous and extremely binary year for a considerable number of Americans. For those who thought everything was going swimmingly during the Obama years, Trump’s election wasn’t simply a shock to the system, but an extinction level event for civilization that handed the U.S. government to bunch of Putin-controlled fascists. In stark contrast, Trump’s election was seen as divine deliverance by his devoted cheerleaders and red hat wearing obsessives. Finally, someone from outside the swamp had successfully trash-talked their way into the Presidency. As such, an imminent restoration of American greatness is all but assured.

Naturally, neither one of these perspectives is remotely accurate. They’re just distinct fairytales that quarreling groups of Americans have enthusiastically embraced within an increasingly insane and divided political environment. The societal pressure to self-segregate into either passionate support for “The Resistance” or “Trumpism” was overwhelming all year and has continued to this day. I recognized this early on, and wrote about it back in February.

Here’s an excerpt from that piece, Lost in the Political Wilderness:

I think the U.S. citizenry is being afflicted by a sort of mass insanity at the moment. There are no good outcomes if this continues. As a result, I feel compelled to provide a voice for those of us lost in the political wilderness. We must persevere and not be manipulated into the obvious and nefarious divide and conquer tactics being aggressively unleashed across the societal spectrum. If we lose our grounding and our fortitude, who will be left to speak for those of us who simply don’t fit into any of the currently ascendant political ideologies?

Little did I know it at the time, but the sentiments expressed in that piece, coupled with the four-part series on Spiral Dynamics that followed, would result in profound changes to my overall outlook on life and the evolution of this website.

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A Dinner Conversation

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Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet the stray flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver to the two friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood out in bold relief against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; proud (who knows?) of her corruption, she stood like a queen of pleasure, like an incarnation of enjoyment; the enjoyment that comes of squandering the accumulations of three generations; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over a corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old men into boys, and make young men prematurely old; enjoyment only possible to giants weary of their power, tormented by reflection, or for whom strife has become a plaything.

– Honore De Balzac, The Magic Skin

I don’t get out all that much these days, but last evening I had a really engaging and illuminating dinner conversation. In attendance was a 47-year old commercial real estate investor and fellow Boulder resident who I’ve become friends with, a 32-year old professional poker player looking to move here, and 28-year old tech startup founder. Although I hadn’t met the younger attendees before, it became immediately apparent that everyone in attendance was highly intelligent and very engaged with the world around them.

We discussed religion, philosophy, crypto assets, the importance of nature to humans, travel and more. That said, the reason I’m writing this post is due to some of the generational observations I came upon. It confirmed the overall thesis I discussed in detail within last month’s post, The Generational Wheels Are Turning.

Here are a couple of passages from that piece to refresh your memory:

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U.S. Border Crossings Have Become Authoritarian Testing Grounds

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Last week, my brother and his longterm girlfriend entered these United States at JFK international airport in New York City. She’s a Chinese citizen with a tourist (B1/B2 visa), which leads to many restrictions on when she’s allowed to enter and for how long. They are always meticulous about playing everything exactly by the book, and this time was no different. The only unusual thing about this latest episode is his girlfriend happened to encounter an authoritarian and power-tripping U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, who pulled her into a room and immediately began berating her. He accused her of breaking the law (she hadn’t), and forced her to hand over her phone and divulge her password. After initially refusing to provide the password, the officer threatened deportation, at which point she relented. Entering the password for access to the phone wasn’t enough, he forced her to write it down on a piece of paper. The officer then proceeded to scroll through her phone for 15-20 minutes, looking for who knows what. My brother was separated from her during this time.

With his girlfriend still isolated in the room, the officer in question emerged and began barking at my brother to sit down in an extremely aggressive manner. The officer told him she had broken the law, at which point he assured him that she hadn’t. At this point, the officer became extremely agitated that a pleb had the nerve to challenge him, and lectured my brother about how he didn’t know the law, pointing out that he wasn’t an immigration lawyer so he couldn’t possibly know his rights. He then implied that the only reason someone would know their civil rights is if they’re a criminal with an intent to commit a crime. The officer also threatened to deport his girlfriend and deny her reentry for five years if my brother continued to challenge his false assertions. She was ultimately allowed to enter.

Many of you will read this and think her experience was a result of not being a U.S. citizen, but the truth is far more disturbing. The border is seen by the government as a civil rights-free zone where U.S. citizens are being increasingly treated like criminals and subject to the exact same sort of degrading abuse as my brother’s girlfriend. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, and this recent experience inspired me to do so today. Many of you have no idea how bad things already are.

One of the most disturbing and important articles I’ve read on the topic was published at Naked Capitalism a few months ago titled, Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU Sue Over Warrantless Phone, Laptop Searches at US Border.

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It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 3 (The Future of College)

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Over the next ten years, I suspect the concept of a college education will be questioned to such an extent, and by so many people, that all assumptions we currently hold dear will be discarded. The spark for this momentous shift will start, as is so often the case, with simple economics. Too many young people have taken on too much debt to get jobs that didn’t require this education they were told they needed. We quite literally have an entire generation that understands this intimately, and this understanding will shape the way they see college, and education in general, as they raise kids of their own.

As I write this, I’m excited to say we live in one of the most extraordinary times in human history. The old way of doing things in virtually every aspect of human civilization has either broken down, or is breaking down as I write this. Communications, media, finance, money itself, etc. The list is seemingly endless, and education is no exception. In fact, I think education is an example of extremely low-hanging fruit and will be disrupted and decentralized in unimaginable ways in the years ahead.

If it was just a function of student debt, the changes in how human education functions going forward wouldn’t be as extreme as I expect. As I mentioned earlier, the problem of widespread debt serfdom is merely a catalyst for the paradigm level change I foresee. As younger generations who grew up with the internet start to question how schooling works, from kindergarten to grad school, it’ll become very apparent how archaic and stifling our current methods really are. I already highlighted many examples of this in Parts 1 and 2, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Today’s post will center around the concept of college, and whether or not people will perceive it as a useful experience in the decades to come. I suspect not.

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It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 2 (Unschooling)

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There are several components, but the real shocker is that more of us aren’t embracing the current age of access to mastery of any topic. But that may not be so surprising—most of us were taught to be passive learners, to just “get through” school. It’s easy to be lazy. The rewards of becoming an autodidact, though, include igniting inner fires, making new connections to knowledge atnd skills you already have, advancing in your career, meeting kindred spirits, and cultivating an overall zest for life and its riches.

One good reason to dive head first into self-initiated learning is that much of what you were taught is already obsolete. “Knowledge workers succeed not based on what they know, but rather how they learn,” writes James Marcus Bach in his book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. He dropped out of school when he was 14 and, in the early days of home computing, taught himself enough to become a software tester for Apple. He’s now an independent consultant.

Bach’s philosophy is rebellious yet inclusive: “Intellectual buccaneering is about self-education, but schools are OK, too. I’ve learned in schools, and I’ve learned from people who were trained in schools. I happily plunder knowledge wherever I find it. I don’t seek the destruction of schools. I am out to dismantle something else—the popular belief that schooling is the only route to a great education and that the best students are those who passively accept the education their schools offer.”

– From the Psychology Today article: The Golden Age of Teaching Yourself Anything

While some of you will be familiar with the educational concept of unschooling, it’ll probably be new to most of you. Personally, I never looked into the concept until I became a parent a couple of years ago, and it was my wife who first became fascinated with the idea and bought a bunch of books on the topic. I’m really glad she did.

The book we’re currently reading is by a fascinating individual named Ben Hewitt, titled Home Grown. Back in 2014, Ben wrote an excellent article for Outside Magazine in which he provided a concise description of what unschooling is. It’s quite distinct from home-schooling, which most people are already familiar with.

In the piece, We Don’t Need No Education, he explains:

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It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 1 (Indoctrination)

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Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
– Mark Twain

As a father of two young children, my thoughts have increasingly started to center around their young lives and the future world they’ll inhabit. Such considerations quickly lead to stressful questions such as, what are the best schools in the area? Which option can provide the best environment in which to thrive? If the best options aren’t public, can we afford them? Is it worth the money? All these questions and more have filled the minds of my wife and I over the past couple of years, but lately we’ve started to ask even bigger questions; such as whether the compulsory education system as it exists in the U.S. in 2017 makes any sense in the first place. I’m increasingly starting to conclude that it doesn’t.

Before I get into that, let’s take a step back. A lot of what I do here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is highlight what’s perverse and destructive about human behavior at this time, and how things can be made dramatically better in the future. If I had to summarize my worldview concisely, I’d state that human beings at the moment are living under highly centralized, hierarchical power structures which are gamed by unethical, greedy and corrupt people at the top who exploit the masses ruthlessly.

Since the worst of humanity will always work hardest and most violently to attain power (this will always be the case), the only way to achieve lasting, positive change is to systemically move to a different model for human activity. Trying to get decent people at the top of a highly centralized power structure is counterproductive and merely a short-term solution if it can even be achieved in the first place. What we need to do is tear down and reduce centralized power as much as possible in the first place. If power becomes distributed far more widely across the planet, the ability for mass control and consolidation becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.

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Video of the Day – Arizona Cop Executes Terrified Man in Cold Blood

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Correction: Since I published this post, a material mistake in my analysis has come to light. It affects the entire tone of my writing, and is thus significant enough to highlight and address.

It appears the psychopathic officer yelling the preposterous demands and needlessly escalating the situation toward an execution of a U.S. citizen, was not the cop who shot and killed Daniel Shaver, but another officer, Sergeant Charles Langley. Sergeant Langley has since retired from the force and moved to the Philippines. Not kidding.

While this makes the overall situation far more disturbing, it also makes they jury’s decision more complex than assumed. If this was just the individual actions of one crazed, murderous cop, that’d be bad enough, but this was actually a tag team of two crazed, murderous cops. Which means this is systemic, and Mesa, AZ obviously has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to hiring and training police.

Oh, and something else I didn’t mention in the original piece. The officer who did kill Shaver, Philip Mitchell Brailsford, had “You’re Fucked” etched into the dust cover of his service weapon. The judge did not allow the jury to see that.

The full post as published originally is below:

The events in the video below took place in January 2016. Every U.S. citizen should watch this and share. It’s horrifying that a person hired to “protect and serve” seems to derive so much pleasure from demeaning and then executing someone he swore to defend.

This police officer acts as if he’s mentally deranged, and based on his statements before killing the terrified, crawling victim, it seems he was looking for any excuse to shoot. Then, after he does shoot and kill, he doesn’t flinch. At all.

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Expect Desperate and Insane Behavior From Government in 2018 – Part 3 (War)

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In the first two installments of this series, I discussed the potential for the U.S. federal government to make some spectacularly foolish moves against its own people in the realms of cannabis and Bitcoin. My basic assumption is that government tends to despise freedom, and that “leaders” of an empire in decline like the U.S. are particularly vulnerable to very bad decisions.

Government propagandists constantly instruct the public that they need to be fearful of their neighbors or some guy in a cave overseas (who they probably funded in the first place), when they themselves tend to be the most unethical, corrupt thieves of all. It’s a very clever scam.

With that in mind, today’s post will zero in on what I consider to be the greatest threat to world peace going into 2018. While I remain unsure as to what the U.S. government may attempt when it comes to cannabis and Bitcoin, I’m far more concerned about the prospects of Donald Trump entangling this nation in an escalating and increasingly disastrous conflict in the Middle East. The signs are everywhere, and it’s all becoming very obvious. In fact, I’ve probably written more articles on this topic than any other in 2017.

Rather than rehash everything I’ve already said, below are links to my October series on the matter:

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