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The Difference Between Fear and Concern

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The last 24 hours were quite interesting for me, and have sparked all sorts of thoughts and tangents in my mind. I’ve been absolutely thrilled that yesterday’s post, A New Financial System is Being Born, has been so well received in the broader Bitcoin/crypto/tech world, but I also noticed a meaningful contradiction. While the post has been cheered beyond the confines of this website, within Liberty Blitzkrieg itself, it hasn’t been celebrated by anyone, at least not publicly in the comment section. In fact, if you scroll through the comment section of the post, you’ll see it’s basically 100% skepticism or dislike for Bitcoin. The reason I find this so interesting is because of what it tells me about sentiment.

I got a lot of insight from the comment section of this particular post because I know for a fact many of my readers love Bitcoin and have been involved in it for years. I know this based on private conservations I’ve had as well as many donations over the years. In a euphoric market environment, I’d expect the comment section to yesterday’s post to be filled with gloating, giddiness and “to da moon” commentary. There was absolutely none of that. In contrast, the skeptics were out in full force and totally dominated the discussion, which is fine. I want people to express different opinions and feel like they have the space to totally disagree with something I write. At the same time, it does tell me something about overall sentiment. The people who are long and sitting on gains are largely keeping their mouths shut, while the skeptics are very, very vocal. It’s not just here either, the skepticism and dislike for Bitcoin is even more prevalent within my Twitter feed. Incredibly, despite the recent enormous run, Bitcoin sentiment seems cautious-to-negative. Take that information as you see fit.

This sets the stage for the key part of this post which relates to the difference between fear and concern. One of these is a largely unproductive emotional state, while the other is a rational response to potential or real trouble. The reason Bitcoin sparked my interest in the topic is because I’ve witnessed a lot of people miss the Bitcoin run due to irrational fear, as opposed to reasoned concern. This isn’t to gloat about Bitcoin, or predict its future price. Pretty much everyone involved in this space for more than a few days understands that its price could completely collapse any minute and, despite all its advances, Bitcoin remains an experimental project that could end up worthless. I knew that back in 2012 when I first became involved and I know it now, yet I got involved anyway. Why did I do that?

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A New Financial System is Being Born

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If Bitcoin blew you away when you first discovered it, and continues to do so to this day, Spiral Dynamics can help explain why. Bitcoin was an expression in the physical world of the newly emergent leading-edge integral level consciousness. It drew lessons from history and attempted to take the best of orange and green worldviews and incorporate them into an entirely new form of money. We see the clear presence of free markets and individualism, as well as the intentional separation of the system from dominator hierarchies (bureaucratic government meddling), which had corrupted all money before it. Its greenness is evident in the fact that by design no individual or company controls the network. Global, decentralized, revolutionary technology. This is perhaps the perfect example of integral consciousness operating on our planet at this time from an economics standpoint, and why it has captured the imagination of so many, while at the same time being violently rejected by so many others.

From February’s post: Why Increased Consciousness is the Only Path Forward

Although I had heard about it much earlier, I didn’t truly start investigating Bitcoin until the summer of 2012. The more I learned the more my mind was blown away, and for a while I couldn’t think about anything else. What truly solidified its real world usefulness to me was when I discovered it had been used by Wikileaks to accept payments in the midst of a financial services blockade against the renegade publisher. This realization inspired my first Bitcoin related post in August 2012 titled, Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists? 

In that piece, I linked to a Forbes article that detailed the revolutionary events taking place. We learned:

Following a massive release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables in November 2010, donations to WikiLeaks were blocked by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union on December 7th, 2010. Although private companies certainly have a right to select which transactions to process or not, the political environment produced less than a fair and objective decision. It was coordinated pressure exerted in a politicized climate by the U.S. government and it won’t be the last time that we see this type of pressure.

Fortunately, there is way around this and other financial blockades with a global payment method immune to political pressure and monetary censorship.

On its public bitcoin address, Wikileaks has taken in over $32,000 equivalent in more than 1,100 separate bitcoin donations throughout the blockade (1BTC = $10.00). But these amounts may be significantly higher, because it does not even include the individually-generated bitcoin addresses that WikiLeaks provides for donors upon request.

I knew right then and there that Bitcoin had the potential to change the world. My passion for Bitcoin was always framed by my ten years working in the financial industry. Many of us who lived through the 2008 crisis knew the financial system was dead. We knew it was corrupt, archaic and terminal, so many of us began bracing for what might come next. We did what we thought made sense at the time, which included buying precious metals like gold and silver given their historic track record of protecting wealth in periods of paradigm-shifting financial disruption. Others took more extreme measures to protect themselves from the end of the financial system, but a small group forward thinking geeks decided to do something much better. They decided to build an alternative.

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Meet JK2 Westminster L.L.C. – The Kushner Family Real Estate Subsidiary Preying on Poor People

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Cox stopped cooking for herself and her son, not wanting food near the sink. A judge allowed her reduced rent for one month. When she moved out soon afterward, Westminster Management sent her a $600 invoice for a new carpet and other repairs. Cox, who is now working as a battery-test engineer and about to buy her first home, was unaware who was behind the company that had put her through such an ordeal. When I told her of Kushner’s involvement, there was a silence as she took it in.

Very few of the complex residents I met, even ones who had been pursued at length in court by JK2 Westminster, had any idea that their rent and late fees were going to the family company of the president’s son-in-law. “That Jared Kushner?” Danny Jackson, a plumber in his 15th year living at Harbor Point Estates, exclaimed. “Oh, my God. And I thought he was the good one.”

At the Carroll Park complex, I met Mike McHargue, a private investigator, and his girlfriend, Patricia Howell. “They’re nothing but slumlords,” Howell told me of Westminster Management. “They take everyone’s money.” When I asked if they knew who was behind the company, they said they did not. “Oh, really?” Howell said when I mentioned Kushner’s name. “Oh, really. And I’m a Trump supporter.”

From The New York Times Magazine article: Jared Kushner’s Other Real Estate Empire

Yesterday, The New York Times Magazine published a deeply disturbing story about a Kushner family real estate subsidiary with a consistent pattern of aggressive and questionable collection practices aimed at lower income people who can’t defend themselves properly.

Excerpts from the piece are below, but it should really be read in full.

Warren sent a letter reporting the problem to the complex’s property manager, a company called Sawyer Realty Holdings. When there was no response, she decided to move out. In January 2010, she submitted the requisite form giving two months’ notice that she was transferring her Section 8 voucher — the federal low-income subsidy that helped her pay the rent — elsewhere. The complex’s on-site manager signed the form a week later, checking the line that read “The tenant gave notice in accordance with the lease.”

So Warren was startled in January 2013, three years later, when she received a summons from a private process server informing her that she was being sued for $3,014.08 by the owner of Cove Village. The lawsuit, filed in Maryland District Court, was doubly bewildering. It claimed she owed the money for having left in advance of her lease’s expiration, though she had received written permission to leave. And the company suing her was not Sawyer, but one whose name she didn’t recognize: JK2 Westminster L.L.C. 

Warren was raising three children alone while taking classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, and she disregarded the summons at first. But JK2 Westminster’s lawyers persisted; two more summonses followed. In April 2014, she appeared without a lawyer at a district-court hearing. She told the judge about the approval for her move, but she did not have a copy of the form the manager had signed. The judge ruled against Warren, awarding JK2 Westminster the full sum it was seeking, plus court costs, attorney’s fees and interest that brought the judgment to nearly $5,000. There was no way Warren, who was working as a home health aide, was going to be able to pay such a sum. “I was so desperate,” she said.

If the case was confounding to Warren, it was not unique. Hundreds like it have been filed over the last five years by JK2 Westminster and affiliated businesses in the state of Maryland alone, where the company owns some 8,000 apartments and townhouses. Nor was JK2 Westminster quite as anonymous as its opaque name suggested. It was a subsidiary of a large New York real estate firm called Kushner Companies, which was led by a young man whose initials happened to be J.K.: Jared Kushner.

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Did Several Democratic IT Staffers Under Investigation Just Flee to Pakistan?

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Today’s post is a little different than most, and highlights the very strange case of a few Democratic IT Staffers who have apparently fled to Pakistan while under investigation. If what The Daily Caller reported yesterday is accurate, it’s certainly something to keep your eye on.

First a little background. Politico reported the following back in March.

Two House Democrats this week fired technology staffers linked to an ongoing criminal investigation, more than a month after the couple in question was barred from House computer networks.

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) confirmed to Politico that Hina Alvi’s last day as an IT support staffer in his office was Tuesday. Her husband, Imran Awan, was working for Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) as of Tuesday evening, but a spokeswoman for Fudge said midday Wednesday that Awan was no longer an employee. 

As of Wednesday, Awan was still working as a technology adviser for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), although he’s been blocked from accessing the House computer system since early February.

Alvi, Awan and three other House aides, including Abid Awan and Jamal Awan, relatives of Imran Awan, and Rao Abbas, are all linked to the criminal investigation being conducted by the U.S. Capitol Police.

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America Has Become a Total Joke

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I’ve stopped calling what our government has done a cover-up. Cover-up suggests a passive activity. What they’re doing now I call aggressive deception.

– Former Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of Congress’s 9/11 Joint Inquiry

This country is becoming a total joke and it’s not merely because of Donald Trump. While he’s certainly becoming a key player in our national embarrassment, this country’s decent into a reckless Banana Republic has been a long time coming.

Let’s take stock of where things stand in mid-2017. Our opposition Democratic Party (Hillary in a leather jacket yelling about Russia) is a joke. Our corporate media is a joke. Our foreign policy is a joke. Our economy is a joke. Our justice system is a joke. It’s all a joke, and it might even be somewhat humorous if it wasn’t so incredibly dangerous.

Today’s post will focus on Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia, a revolting spectacle which I could barely bring myself to follow. It all started Saturday morning as I tried to enjoy a beautiful day with my growing family and parents who were in town for a visit. My day was more or less ruined upon witnessing the appalling scene of Trump and his top advisors dancing with the rulers of the terrorist sponsoring state of Saudi Arabia while clutching swords. I’m sorry for doing this to you, but in case you missed it.

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UK Government Moves Aggressively to Censor and Control the Internet

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I’ve got family in town, so today’s post will be brief.

I’ll just leave you with the following dystopian excerpts from today’s UK Independent article titled, Theresa May to Create New Internet that Would Be Controlled and Regulated by Government:

Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.

“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” it states. “We disagree.”

Thanks for clearing that up.

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Is There a Coup Attempt Underway in America?

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Personally, I’m horrified by the fact that Goldman Sachs goons are in total control of the Trump administration’s economic policy. I’m also horrified that our new President’s first overseas trip will be to the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia, a autocratic, brutal monarchy with undeniable ties to 9/11. I’m likewise disgusted by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions’ oppressive and uncivilized relaunch of the misguided and disastrous “war on drugs.” Finally, I’m very troubled by the fact Mike Flynn attempted to disrupt a military operation using Syrian Kurds to rout ISIS in Raqqa because Turkey didn’t like it, given he was working as a paid agent of Turkey months earlier and never disclosed it.

There are a plethora of things to be deeply concerned about when it comes to Trump, yet the coup attempt against him being launched by elements of the deep state, corporate media and Hillary dead-ender Democrats is more concerning still. It’s obvious what’s happening right now is not a sincere attempt to hold a President accountable, or fight him on policy or personnel choices. Rather, this all seems to be a very deliberate and premeditated attempt to remove him from office.  

What’s so troubling about what I just wrote is not so much that I think it, but that it’s becoming accepted truth by a growing number of mainstream Americans. For example, can you believe CNBC actually published a post with the following title?

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Wall Street Completely Owns the Trump Administration

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While America’s corporate press remains singularly obsessed with unproven and likely fabricated Russia-collusion conspiracy theories, Wall Street’s well on its way to getting away with financial murder thanks to an army of cronies embedded within the Trump administration. Indeed, Goldman Sachs running Donald Trump’s economic policy is perhaps the most concerning aspect of his Presidency when it comes to negative impacts on average citizens, yet it’s almost never placed at the forefront of the corporate press narrative.

Many of you probably recall headlines in recent weeks about how Trump might be in favor of “bringing back Glass-Steagall” as well as breaking up the big banks. These are two things I think are extraordinarily necessary and important, but it turns out Trump has no intention of actually doing any such thing.

As the title of Bloomberg’s recent article on the topic so perfectly sums up…

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Manufacturing Resistance – The American Public is Being Manipulated Into Irrelevance

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No honest person could accuse me of being a Trump fan or supporter. I refused to back his candidacy despite my total disdain for Hillary Clinton and pretty much everything she stands for. More importantly, I’ve written a multitude of articles since he was inaugurated severely taking him to task on a wide variety of subjects. I’ve tirelessly discussed how he’s outsourced his economic policy to Goldman Sachs, and condemned his burgeoning neocon foreign policy, evidenced by his disturbing coziness with the autocratic barbarians of Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, the most incredible aspect of the past four months is not how much of a fake populist Trump’s proven to be, but how the corporate media’s managed to disgust me even more. I’m happy to become outraged at Trump, because I find many things about Trump outrageous. That said, I find it telling that the stuff about Trump that outrages me, is never the same stuff which outrages the corporate media. Why is that?

The reason is the corporate media doesn’t mind Goldman Sachs running U.S. economic policy. It also doesn’t mind a close alliance with the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia, or our government’s endless string of disastrous neocon wars abroad. In fact, when it comes to the latter, the corporate media is reliably the primary cheerleader for unprovoked militarism.

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Rand Paul Fears His Conversations May Have Been ‘Unmasked’ by the Obama Administration

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Before we get into the meat of this post, it’s important to refresh our memories on what the unmasking scandal is and why it’s important. In order to do that, let’s revisit excerpts from last month’s post, If What Susan Rice Did Wasn’t Illegal, It Should Be:

U.S. citizens who are caught up incidentally in foreign intelligence surveillance are typically subject to minimization rules to conceal their identities, though there are some exceptions.

Individuals can be exempt from the minimization rules if their identities are necessary to understand the value of the foreign intelligence.

Paul used Monday’s development to renew his push for reform of a controversial provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that allows the U.S. intelligence community to target non-Americans outside the United States without a warrant. The provision, Section 702, is up for renewal later this year.

Paul’s emphasis on reforming the law is exactly where it ought to be. For example, Susan Rice herself explained during a recent MSNBC interview, how the unmasking process works. Basically, she sees an intelligence report containing surveilled conversations between a foreigner and an American, and if she decides she wants to unmask the American, she makes that request to the intelligence community, which then approves or denies the request. That’s all it takes. Think about how potentially abusive this is. What happened when you have a situation where the deep state and the President are adamantly united against a candidate, as they were against Trump? Naturally they’re going to approve the unmasking of a political enemy, and it appears that is precisely what happened.

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