#We know the Empire never gets reformed until another 20 or so years from the time of the show under the name The First Order

[lesbianwyllravengard]

This definitely won't happen but it would be so fucking funny if they arrive at the planet Thrawn and Ezra were stranded on and it turns out that these two are best friends now and Thrawn is completely on Ezra's side. Morgan Elsbeth pleads for Thrawn to return and reignite the Empire and he's just like "those bitches? Fuck em. Ezzie and I started a band, we play Jizz music on Wednesdays. Here's my wallet pictures of us hanging out."

[emperorren]

How do you think redemption could be handled in the case that 1) Kylo has been Supreme Leader for a significant amount of time, and 2) Kylo isn’t going to be ‘reforming’ the First Order in any way? I would have a hard time accepting that redemption if there is a gap where he’s Supreme Leader for a while. I have a hard time conceptualizing what event or events could take place that would push him to leave the darkness behind and get the GA to root for him if he hasn’t begun changing after Crait.

I think you’re thinking too hard. Vader was a bad, horrible, not good guy for 20+ years before he redeemed himself—did the movies bother to show every single atrocity he committed as an enforcer of the Empire? Were those years and those crimes appropriately weighted against his chances for redemption, when the moment came for him? Did we see what Vader’s “motivations” for leaving the darkness behind were, other than wanting to save his son? No, and nobody complained. For all we know, Vader never had any conflict about the Empire or his methods, and was perfectly fine with it until he wasn’t.

Even if 1) Kylo is Supreme Leader for a significant amount of time, we’re not gonna see this period in detail during the trilogy itself. We’re just going to read a tl;dr in the opening crawl, and the fallout of it will be the set up for IX’s main plot. Whether it’s been three years or three days, it won’t really make a difference in terms of screen time. What really counts is what happens on screen, and I mean in terms of both the audience’s perception and the bulk of characterization. The star wars trilogy movies tend to condensate in broad strokes an amount of evolution and character development that would take ten episodes, or ten thousand pages to be described properly—you need to suspend your disbelief to an extent and fill the gaps with your imagination, but the gist is there and is usually perfectly encapsulated via iconic plot twists. It took less than a week for Kylo to fall for Rey and turn against his long time mentor/abuser. An equally sudden twist can be all he needs to snap out of his supreme leader shenanigans, even if those have been going on for years.

As for 2), I doubt Kylo is going to reform the First Order in any significant way. Even if he tries, he will inevitably face opposition within the FO itself (which could be part of his plot arc for IX, and what spurs him to snap out of it). But he might not feel any impulse to try at all, not until the sheer horribleness of it kicks him in the fangs. By the end of VIII, he’s clearly still okay with the methods and the purpose of the First Order, and the First Order itself can’t suddenly become a humanitarian organization, nor can Lucasfilm afford to muddle the (necessarily) simplistic political subtext of SW by introducing the VERY questionable concept of a /benevolent dictatorship/ (without subverting it in the same movie). The First Order is bad and needs to stay bad. Kylo’s time as Supreme Leader is the nadir of his arc, not his chance to do some good for the galaxy. His redemption arc will kick into high gear only when he turns his back on it, and whatever he does before getting to that point will be the necessary darkness before the dawn (which only makes the dawn look brighter). 

Now, about what could make him turn his back on it…

I have a hard time conceptualizing what event or events could take place that would push him to leave the darkness behind and get the GA to root for him if he hasn’t begun changing after Crait.

But he has begun changing, hasn’t he? Just the way he looks at Rey in their last connection, the softness, the regret, the longing on his face… But oh, you mean politically and morally… as I said earlier, Kylo needs a reality check. For all his cynicism he’s an idealist, and very good at deluding himself (I believe one of the reasons he can’t seem to let go of his Evilness is that he killed his father for it. He refuses to believe it was a false ideal, another failed purpose, another smokescreen that didn’t live up to his expectations. He can’t accept it, it would destroy him, so he prefers to live in this self-induced hallucination that the FO is actually something worth killing for). When reality kicked him in the face in TLJ and demanded him to sacrifice Rey, he killed Snoke instead. I suspect he’ll need another crisis to finally question all of his ideals, not just his loyalty to the old wrinkled turnip.

Kylo is also very self-protective. Even at his most selfless, when he chooses Rey over Snoke—he does it in a way that lowers the risks for himself as much as possible. (he lets Rey into Snoke’s room pretending he’s turning her over; he stays at a safe distance when she’s being tortured, he remains demure and quiet so that Snoke doesn’t lash out at him, he even kills Snoke via remote-control; sure, from a logical standpoint it was probably the only way Snoke would lower his guard enough to be killed, but I suspect there’s an element of self-preservation as well—which is not uncommon in abuse victims). Kylo is fiercely jealous and protective of his beliefs, his dignity, his grudges, his dreams of grandeur, his delusions, his own life—those aren’t things he’s ready to let go. (yet.) 

But maybe there’s another huge turning point coming up for him, this time so dramatic that he’ll see that nothing is as important as saving the one(s) he loves (which can only happen AFTER he acknowledges he loves anyone at all, which… he hasn’t, not really), and it will be the moment when he’s finally ready to let go, and make that one unquestionably selfless act that will be his redemption.

Like… honestly, it could be as simple as facing Rey in combat for the first time (*) after vowing to “destroy” her and finding he just. can’t. do. it.—and this sends him into a spiral that makes him finally question everything he’s worked for so far and understand his place can’t be where Rey can’t follow. Which isn’t something he necessarily realized in the throne room (he killed Snoke thinking Rey would join him—he wasn’t ready to sacrifice everything yet).

Or realizing that Rey’s happiness matters to him more than he’d ever thought, so he saves not just her life, but her friends’ as well. Add to this the probable emotional turmoil caused by his mother’s death, and Hux’s rising in popularity among the FO and antagonizing him more and more explicitly, making him feel like a lion among wolves, having to constantly guard his back, living 24/7in fear of a galactic Ides of March. He thought the only way to “become what he’s meant to be” was removing any attachment (killing them if he has to)—but the truth is he doesn’t really know how it feels, having been in a codependent relationship with Snoke for most of his adult life. Now that for the first time he’s truly alone, he’s going to realize that his no attachments policy won’t make him more powerful, it only makes him lonely and completely vulnerable to malignity and betrayals. This will make him miss Rey more excruciatingly than ever… and hopefully reevaluate what it means to have a family… what it means to love and be loved. Once he gets to this point (and to get there, he has to experience how it feels to be alone on top of a war machine), it’s all downhill to the final redemption.

Remember: for all it’s entangled with politics and riddled with *space fascism* shenanigans, Kylo’s story is not political. His “crimes”, his “darkness”—that he needs to redeem himself from—aren’t whatever political/military action he undertakes, but the emotional wounds he inflicts on himself and his loved ones. The goal is to heal those wounds, and that’s what his redemption will be: emotional healing. In this perspective, his turning point will be motivated by a new understanding of feelings and relationships, an emotional epiphany, rather than a political or even moral one.

(*) however long the time jump will be, I tend to doubt we’re gonna have significant “missing moments” between Rey and Kylo. Maybe some offscreen force skyping, but I find that unlikely too. Their relationship is just too important to occur off screen, even in part.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 12, 2021

My weekly roundup of things I am up to. Topics include learning curves, Telosa, the fine-tuned universe, and some anniversaries.

Learning Curves

Last week I commented on Matt Clancy’s site, New Things Under the Sun, and in particular the material on fertility rates. It is meant to be “what academics generally believe” on questions related to innovation. The site is chock full of good material. This time I’ll comment on his work on learning curves. See in particular this and this article.

A learning curve, also known as the “learning-by-doing” phenomenon, is the idea that the cost of producing a product goes down as more is produced. This makes intuitive sense. As production goes up, we would expect more workers to be trained to be efficient, for companies to optimize their production processes, for more efficiency techniques to be discovered, and so on.

The empirical evidence is fairly strong too, or at least it appears to be. Learning curves are also known as Wright’s Law, going back to a paper by Theodore Wright in 1936 where he observed that for every doubling of airplane production, the cost goes down by 20%. There are numerous other studies that find similar cost reductions (albeit of widely different magnitudes) in many areas.

But the old mantra of “correlation doesn’t imply causation” applies here. One could tell the opposite story. Maybe cost reduction has nothing to do with learning-by-doing, but rather happens for other reasons, such as technological improvement. That’s what many of papers that Clancy cites show, to an extent.

Some, but not all, of cost reduction really is due to the learning-by-doing effect. What is the portion exactly? This turns out to be very difficult to estimate, and reading through the studies that Clancy discusses, I don’t have a good answer. Until now, though, I had naively assumed that it was the full portion.

These observations have several policy implications. Many decarbonization models, for instance, rely heavily on deployment of already developed technology and assume cost reduction going forward as this technology is deployed. This assumption has two purposes. First, if we expect that the price of solar panels, wind turbines, HVDC cables, lithium-ion batteries, and other technologies will decline with further deployment, then this makes models that rely on these technologies look more cost-effective than they would appear if present costs are assumed. The second purpose is that cost reduction is a beneficial spillover of deployment, and therefore a justification for subsidizing deployment that goes beyond carbon dioxide reduction. This point has been invoked, for instance, in justification of the policies behind Germany’s Energiwende (renewable energy transition).

If we determine that learning-by-doing effects are weaker than a naive learning curve analysis would indicate, then there is less justification for subsidizing deployment. The Investment/Production Tax Credits for renewable energy look less attractive. Policy should be more oriented toward technological change than deployment. The idea of a France- or South Korea-style nuclear power buildout also looks less attractive, and we should focus more on next generation nuclear technology instead.

Several things I have done will have to be rethought.

Telosa and Other New Cities

Telosa is a newly announced planned city with a target of 5 million people by 2050, to be built in the American Southwest somewhere. The official website, linked above, has a lot of pretty pictures and buzzwords from urban planning.

I hope the project is successful, but I also hope to be forgiven for not getting too excited. There is an extensive history of new city projects not working out or performing less well than hoped, including seasteading, Khazar Islands, Masdar City, and others.

The main headwind I see is that, as Alain Bertaud describes in his book, cities are first and foremost labor markets. When a new city starts seeking residents, it has the basic problem of providing jobs for those residents. Attracting employers will be difficult too because there won’t be many employees for those employers to hire. This is a fundamental problem that will also make space colonization difficult. As this article explains, the youngest of the top 10 cities in the United States is Phoenix, AZ, founded in 1868.

Most wealthy countries now have declining populations or soon will. Under current demographic trends, most other countries will reach this crossover point sooner or later. A declining population is another headwind for founding new cities, since they will also have to complete with depopulating existing cities.

Despite the problems noted above, Masdar City is an example of a project that has achieved at least some success. For one thing, it is not really a new city because it is within the commutershed of Abu Dhabi, reasonably close (though a bit outside the commutershed) to Dubai, and close to a major airport. The developers were also smart in recruiting IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency) as an anchor tenant, which helps resolve that chicken-and-egg problem of building a robust labor market.

Fine-tuned Universe

The idea of fine-tuned universe is that it appears that many aspects of the universe we live in are set to specific values that are conducive to the emergence of intelligent life, to a degree that is hard to imagine being a matter of chance. Such parameters include the relative strength of gravitation and electromagnetism, the rate of hydrogen fusion, the fact that there are 3 non-compactified spatial dimensions, and many others. Explanations as to why this is the case have been all over the map, and the issue intersects deeply with questions of creationism and intelligent design.

One of the argument, outlined by Lawrence Krauss here, is that the large number of seemingly life-conducive parameters may be an artifact of our lack of understanding of physics. We are learn more, several factors that seem to be unrelated may turn out to be multiple manifestations of the same phenomenon.

While I don’t think that intelligent design is the best solution for the fine tuning problem, this explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, it is rather hand-wavy. It appeals to things that we might know in the future, but without a clear sense of what those things might be. Second, even if this argument holds, it remains unclear why a deeper theory of physics should have any cases where it resolves into a universe that is conducive for life, and thus is it unclear to me why, even if different parameters that are conducive for life turn out to be related, this should resolve the paradox.

Intelligent design is one of those topics that I avoided when it was a much more active area of debate, but now that it has calmed down somewhat, I would be interested in understanding these issues better.

Anniversaries

Yesterday, the news was occupied with the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

George W. Bush gave a speech that I thought was interesting for two reasons.

First, and this was the issue that most of the news coverage picked up, was that Bush equated domestic terrorism with foreign terrorism and portrayed the two as being comparable threats. I would have found such a statement from a prominent figure unthinkable 20 years ago, especially from Bush. But I think it goes to show the extent to which the United States has again become an inward looking country. This is the normal state, at least that I can remember. Of the presidential elections I am old enough to remember (since 1992), the 2004 election was the only one where foreign issues were dominant.

I would reckon this state of affairs began with 9/11, and it was definitely over with the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, though it could have ended with Donald Rumsfeld’s departure from the Defense Department, or maybe sooner with events that eroded Bush’s standing, including the Terry Schiavo incident, the failed attempt to reform Social Security, and Hurricane Katrina.

Bush’s foreign policy during these years was a weird mix of anti-terrorism and Wilsonian democracy-promotion. Such a combination was probably never stable. Now the “America First” movement is strong politically. There is bipartisan opposition to immigration and trade, two issues where Bush was a proponent. In justifying the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden was keen to emphasize that ongoing combat would not have been in the US interest. The political right has made hay for obvious partisan reasons and because the withdrawal was executed so badly, but they were much happier with Trump championed the same policy. Such is the degree of the inward turn that even Bush himself has to respond to it.

The second interesting point was on the idea of national unity. There is a certain 9/11 nostalgia now that pines for the apparent sense of unity that prevailed immediately after the attacks. It would appear to be distinct from, but related to, the idea of the “Sputnik moment” that prevailed in the aftermath of the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, or current anticommunism and anti-Chinese sentiments. It is the hope that widespread recognition of an external threat can suppress internal acrimony and catalyze a more dynamic posture than Americans have shown in recent years. Though it has never been clear to me what this apparent unity is supposed to mean.

Tomorrow I am also noting the first anniversary of my brain aneurism. In the months after the event and my recovery from it, I have more or less resumed the patterns of living that I had pre-stroke. Perhaps some things are subtly different, such as a more visceral appreciation for the fragility of life and a greater sense of seriousness with which I pursue my goals.

I still get the chills, though, when I think about how close I came to death. I was unlucky that event happened in the first place, of course, but given that it did, I was fortunate to have a successful operation. Based on what doctors said in the hospital, I probably wouldn’t have survived if this had happened in 2001. I was fortunate to have access to a good (albeit expensive) health care system. I was also fortunate that the aneurism struck when I was in a well-trafficked hallway of my apartment building, so I was found almost right away.

In happier anniversary news, next week I will be celebrating my 40th birthday.

[williamrablan]

The first time I ever heard of Soapy Smith was in an old cartoon. Indeed, for the longest time, I put him right up there with the likes of Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, and Mickey Mouse. Someplace in my teenaged years, I discovered he was a real person when I was flipping through an old west book that belonged to my father.

It wasn’t until I became interested in the Old West and especially the bad guys who cruised through my neck of the woods, that I became aware of what an interesting character he was.

Soapy Smith was a conman. At least that’s the nicest thing we can say about him. The way he operated sounds more like something a Mafia Don or head of a drug cartel might do. Had he been working today, the FBI would be camped out on his doorstep just waiting for him to do something.

A list of the illegal things he was into reads like the worst sins in the Bible. He was heavy into prostitution, buying off public officials, and cheating people out of money and properties. At times he operated like Robin hood. Other times like the Devil himself.

Soapy’s real name was Jefferson Randolph Smith II. A pretty impressive name for a not so common crook.

He was born in 1860 in Coweta County, Georgia. Soapy came from a family that was well educated and wealthy. His grandfather owned a plantation and had been a popular legislator. His dad was a lawyer.

All that changed with the South losing the Civil war. Broke, the Smiths moved to Round Rock, Texas, in 1876. Soapy began his career as a conman there.

He left home after the death of his mother and went to Ft. Worth. Here’s where he formed a close-knit gang of assorted other con men and thieves to work for him. Soon, he wore the crown of the “king of the frontier con men.” He was also forming the philosophy and tactics that would make him a well-known crime boss.

The gang subscribed to the philosophy of “A fool, and his money is soon parted.”

They moved from town to town with one objective: to separate people from their money or property. They did this through prostitution, the old Shell Game, three-card Monte, and rigged poker games.

In the late 1870s, early 80s, Soapy came to Denver, Colorado. It’s in Denver that he earned the name he’d be known by.

You have to admit; he had a great racket going here. What he’d do is sell bar soap. Well, so far, no harm done.

After all, there are perfectly legitimate companies that sell soap. Some have even done things like put drinking glasses and towels in as a reason to buy their product. Or promised your whites will be dazzling white and can remove that pizza stain from your favorite T-shirt.

Soapy took this to a whole new level. He’d have several unwrapped bars of soap on his stand. While he’s telling everyone how great the soap is by telling them that they’ll get their muddy pants clean or their whites whiter than white, he started wrapping money around some of the bars.

He’d wrap different values of anywhere from a one-dollar bill to a hundred dollars around the bars. He then folded the money wrapped bars into paper, so they matched a large tub full of soap he was selling. He then APPEARED to mix the soap bars into the bars in the tub.

When people started buying them, a plant out in the audience would announce he got a bar with money and flash a bar that had money around it. It had the desired effect. Everyone was buying the soap.

Now a hundred dollars doesn’t sound like a lot of money by today’s standards. But remember, we’re talking the 1870s here. That one hundred dollars would translate out to a little less than two thousand dollars in 2020. I know many people who willingly lay down one, five, even more dollars to buy a lottery ticket with odds against winning so high that one could say you have zero chance of winning.

Soapy preyed on the same thing people today hope for, a break. And he was convincing enough to make them think that it could happen.

The police quickly figured out what was going on, and this is where Soapy got his handle. A Denver Policeman named John Holland arrested him. While writing the incident up in his logbook, he forgot Soapy’s full name and gave him the nickname of “Soapy.” The name stuck, and he became “Soapy Smith.”

He was able to use the same scam for the next 20 years. It and other scams helped finance a criminal empire.

If there were a manual out there for running a criminal empire, then Soapy was reading it every day and following it to the letter. To protect his kingdom, Soapy paid off police officers, judges, and even politicians and used almost the same tactics to build three major criminal organizations in Denver (1886-1895), Creede, Colorado (1892), and Skagway, Alaska (1897-1898).

As the crime boss of Denver, Soapy did what the likes of Capone and others would do. Typically criminals move about to avoid detection. Not soapy. He owned City Hall and the police and was able to avoid prosecution.

In 1888 he opened the Tivoli Club at the corner of Market and 17th Street. The building was a combination saloon and gambling house. According to legend, the words “caveat emptor” or “Let the buyer beware” was above the staircase leading up to the gambling games. I guess you couldn’t say he didn’t warn them.

The old club is on the left and no longer exists.

Several “front” businesses such as cigar shops and the like opened into poker games and the brothel that operated in the back rooms. Fraudulent lottery shops, stock exchanges, and auction houses also abounded.

Because of payoffs, some local police officers refused to arrest Smith and his associates. Others were afraid of him and his organization. Even when they were arrested, a cadre of friends, lawyers, and associates was ready to get them out of jail.

Also, Smith wasn’t alone in trying to be the crime boss of Denver. There were several attempts on his life, and he shot several assailants. He became increasingly known for his gambling and bad temper.

In 1892, things changed in Denver. There was a massive move to get rid of gambling, and there were saloon reforms. Seeing the change, Smith sold the Tivoli, packed up his operation, and moved to Creede, Colorado.

By having several of his working girls cozy up to property owners, they convinced them to sign over their leases. Soon, Soapy acquired numerous lots on Creede’s main street and rented them to associates. Once he had the backing, he announced he was the camp boss. In short, using his money and properties, Soapy proclaimed himself mayor.

Creede before the Fire

Soapy opened the Orleans Club. With the help of his brother-in-law and a gang member, William Sidney “Cap” Light, who was now the Deputy Sheriff, he started his second empire.

Smith provided an order of sorts for the small town. He also protected his friends and associates from the Legitimate Town Council and sent troublemakers packing. To curry favor with the locals, he used his money by helping the poor, built churches, and buried the unfortunate.

Along the way, some of his associates became friends with another old west outlaw named Bob Ford, who shot and killed Jesse James. There have been rumors, mostly unsupported, that Soapy may have had something to do with Ford’s killing. The suspicion is that Soapy at least suggested it to O’Kelley (who killed Ford). If Soapy did, O’Kelley never confirmed it and took it to his grave.

What is known is that Soapy left Creede to return to Denver just a few days before the great Creede fire destroyed the community. The situation had changed in Denver, making it possible for him to return to his criminal enterprises there.

Besides, the silver in Creede had begun to play out, and who wants to be king of a ghost town.

Soapy was soon back up to his old tricks in Denver. But the State of Colorado was about to interfere with his life.

Davis Waite was elected Governor of Colorado on a reform platform. One of his first tasks was to fire three Denver officials he felt weren’t abiding by his mandates. They refused to leave and were soon joined by others who felt their jobs were threatened. The state militia was called to remove those fortified in City Hall.

Smith joined the corrupt officeholders and police in City Hall. He was given a commission as a Deputy Sheriff. Armed with rifles and dynamite, he and several others climbed to the top of City Hall with the intent to fight off any attackers.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the incident known as the “City Hall War” came to a close.

Smith continued being the crime boss, but soon he got a little too big for his own good. His patrons in the City Hall and other places could no longer offer the protection he needed. When he was charged with the attempted murder of a saloon manager, he ran, leaving others to take control of his various enterprises.

His running took him to Skagway, Alaska.

It was 1897, and gold was the attraction for many. Soapy was soon up to his old tricks there. His first try at taking over Skagway failed. A Miner’s Committee encouraged (whatever that means) him to leave. He didn’t return till the following year.

He got a U.S. marshal on his payroll and sat about collecting friends and allies. His best front was a Telegraph Office. For a fee, they’d send a telegraph message for a miner. Since telegraph lines hadn’t reached Skagway yet, any messages sent went from the desk to the trash can. The place also served as a front for rigged poker games.

Smith opened a saloon called Jeff Smith’s Parlor. Besides drinking, it also offered the same rigged games he’d ran for years as well as the usual house of ill-repute. Despite having a city infrastructure, Smith’s Saloon became the “the real City Hall” because he was running Skagway at this point.

The problem was there were some solid citizens in the community, and they were getting tired of Smith and his gang. They knew all about Smith and companies deception, and so they formed a group known as the “The Committee of 101” threatened to expel Smith and company.

Smith retaliated by forming his own Law and Order society with 317 members and forced the vigilantes into submission.

The war for Skagway had begun.

July 8 marks the day Soapy Smith met his maker.

The previous day, a miner named John Stewart came in with a sack of gold. A couple of Soapy’s associates separated him from it in a game of three-card monte. When Stewart balked at paying them, the men grabbed the money and ran.

This is what Stewart said occurred:

I told Foster I should hold him for the money, and the old man, Van Triplett, said we acted as if we could not trust him, and gave some of the money back, and then said he would give us a chance to win it [all back], so Foster turned the right card and [Triplett] started to give him the money, but said, ‘Supposing you had bet that in earnest, did you have the money to put up?’ Foster said, ‘No,’ and turning to me said, ‘You have the money,’ and I said no, I did not have any money; that he took it all, but he said, ‘You have some dust,’ and wanted me to get it just to show the old man that we had the money in case the bet had been a real one. Bowers and I went to Kaufman’s store to get the money and Van Triplett and Foster remained behind. We came back with the dust and I unrolled it and showed them the sack, and the old man said he did not know if that was gold, and Bowers said, ‘Open it and show it to him, as he don’t know gold dust when he sees it,’ but I did not open it, and [was] just about to roll it up again, when Foster grabbed it and handing it to the old man, said, “Git!” and I started to grab the old man when they held me and said if I made a noise it would not be well for me. I pulled away from them and started after the old man, but could not see him and then went across the street and asked a party where there was an officer: that I had been robbed of $3,000 by some men over there.

The officer he went to was Deputy U.S. Marshal Sylvester S. Taylor. It didn’t get him anywhere because Taylor was on Soapy’s payroll, and he told Stewart that if he stayed quiet about the matter, he’d see what he could do.

Stewart didn’t stay quiet. He told anyone who would listen what had happened. Soon, the streets were starting up in an uproar.

Things concerning the incident get a little confusing here. Some say that Soapy dug in and said that if Stewart hadn’t made such a big deal about it, he would make amends. Others say he would make amends and promised his mn would do nothing of the sorts in the future.

According to a promise made by Smith, the money was supposed to have been returned by 4 PM that day. But 4 PM came and went, and no money. Word reached Smith that there was trouble coming, and he is reputed to have said, “By God, trouble is what I’m looking for.”

Trouble arrived in the form of U.S. Commissioner Charles A. Sehibrede. He demanded that Soapy meet him at the Marshal’s office. In the Marshal and a reporter’s presence, Sehibrede demanded that the money be returned, and the people who did this arrested.

I don’t know if he got the answer he expected because Smith stuck to his story. It’s reported that:

.. the boys who had the money won it in a fair game, and they should keep it. He also said he had a hundred men who would stand behind him and see that they were protected. The judge finally told him he [Smith] could not afford to stand up for a gang of thieves, but he [Smith] almost screamed—”Well, Judge, declare me in with the thieves. I’ll stay with them,” and with that he passionately beat the table with his fist and left the room.

After he left, Sehibrede asked if he swore out warrants, would the Marshal arrest them. He was told he would.

But the time for a negotiated settlement had run out.

Two separate vigilante groups decided to do something about it. The larger group, the “Citizens Committee,” had a meeting at Sylvester Hall. So many people showed up the facility couldn’t accommodate them all. Additionally, several of Smith’s men showed up, intending to disrupt the meeting.

As a result, another meeting was held at the Skagway Wharf Improvement Company building, most commonly known as Juneau Wharf.

At the meeting, four men were appointed to keep trouble makers (Smith’s men) out. Of the four, the only one who was armed was Frank Reid, and that was with a .38 caliber pistol.

About nine that evening, Smith received a message that things were about to get uglier and that if he wanted to do something, this was the time to do it.

He decided to attend the meeting. Arming himself with a rifle, Soapy took a walk to the wharf in the company of several of his men. Ordering his men to stay back a little, he walked on.

According to accounts, the men were in at least three different groups. When Soapy encountered the first group, he ordered them off the wharf. They were happy to comply.

The second group of men was Josias Tanner, a ship and barge Captain, and Jesse Murphy, a railroad employee. Soapy walked past them without acknowleding their existence.

That left Reid standing between him and the meeting.

According to accounts, Reid told Soapy he couldn’t go any further. The two men began to argue and swear at each other. Now here’s where witness accounts differ.

They all agree that reid still had his 38 in his belt, and Soapy had the rifle on his shoulder. No one seems to agree on who shot first. Some say Reid drew and fired, others that Soapy tried to fire at Reid. What is agreed on is that the Shootout on Juneau Wharf began unexpectedly.

Allegedly, Soapy brought the rifle off his shoulder. If he meant to shot Reid or club him aside isn’t clear, but Reid blocked it with his arm.  Somehow, Reid got cut in all this by the rifle but managed to push it down and drew his own weapon. He pointed it at Soapy and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on a defective round and didn’t discharge.

Someplace in here, Soapy is supposed to have said, “My God, don’t shoot!”

Soapy jerked the rifle away and accounts state was that both men fired at the same time. There were at least five shots fired. Reid took a bullet in his leg and then fired off two rounds at Soapy.

One bullet grazed Soapy’s left arm while the other went through the left thigh right above the knee.

Soapy chambered another round, and this time shot Reid in the stomach. Reid collapsed to the dock, mortally wounded.

As Smith’s men rushed toward their wounded leader, Jess Murphy, one of the guards along with Reid, grabbed Soapy’s rifle away from him and, turning it towards Soapy, pulled the trigger.

This might also have been where Soapy uttered his last words of “My God. Don’t shoot!”

It didn’t do any good. Smith died on the spot.

As Soapy’s men surged forward, Murphy pointed the rifle at them. One of Soapy’s men is supposed to have pulled his weapon and aimed it at Tanner. But seeing Murphy aiming his boss’s rifle at him and the approach of “Committee” men pouring out of the meeting, he didn’t fire. “Someone is supposed to have yelled, “They killed Soapy, and if you don’t get going, they’ll kill you too.”

Before long, all of Soapy’s men had either fled or been rounded up. The Army came in to keep the peace and threatened martial law.

Stewart’s gold was found with Soapy’s possessions, and except for $600.00 was all accounted for. It was returned to him.

Tanner became a deputy U.S. Marshal.

Frank Reid died of his wounds twelve days later. His funeral was the largest Skagway had seen up to that point. His headstone was inscribed with “He gave his life for the honor of Skagway.”

The king of con men was buried several yards outside the city cemetery.

The Bad Guys of the San Luis Valley – Part 3 – Soapy Smith The first time I ever heard of Soapy Smith was in an old cartoon. Indeed, for the longest time, I put him right up there with the likes of Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, and Mickey Mouse.

[xtruss]

On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize For the Climate Scare

"Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem"

— Michael Shellenberger | August 1, 2020 | Anti-Empire | Quillette

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as expert reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25 percent around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat—humankind’s biggest use of land—has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s

The Netherlands became rich, not poor while adapting to life below sea level

We produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this, imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions.

But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.” Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change. Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened. I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

Some highlights from the book:

Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress

The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land

The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium

100 percent renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5 percent to 50 percent

We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities

Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4 percent

Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did

“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300 percent more emissions

Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon

The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants

Why were we all so misled?

In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism.

Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped. Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.

The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop. The ideology behind environmental alarmism—Malthusianism—has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.

But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power. The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, COVID-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.

Scientific institutions including the World Health Organisation and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform. Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.

Nations are reverting openly to self-interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables. The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.

The invitations from IPCC and Congress are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment. Another one has been to the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.

“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”

That is all I hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.

I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.

— Source: Quillette

[sheilacwall]

Jesus Walks… in Adidas

Jesus Walks… in Adidas

Jesus is King has finally dropped. This is Kanye West’s first Christian rap-gospel album since turning into a born-again Christian in April after the hedonistic indulgence of Coachella.

The Lucifer, Mercy and New God Flow producer has given up secular music and has now turned his career toward the servitude of God.

However, his return from hospital and new found faith will flow nicely into his plans to expand his fashion, music & entertainment empire as well as possibly delivering him the top spot in the White House. This is a man not to be underestimated.

Saint Pablo

‘Ye recently turned around a personal debt of $53 million into a nearly $50m profit. Back in 2016, ‘Ye went out cap in hand to Mark Zuckerberg for $1bn for his ideas, but was promptly ignored. Zuckerberg was raised in a Jewish household, although his wife is a Buddhist and he hasn’t publicly stated his faith. But, this wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by ‘Ye and may have pushed Kanye toward his born-again Christian position.

Soon after, the “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” star seemingly finally started listening to his wife.

“My wife said, I can’t say no to nobody, and at this rate we gon’ both die broke,” West raps on Saint Pablo. “Got friends that ask me for money knowin’ I’m in debt, and like my wife said, I still didn’t say no.”

Stronger

Whilst facing the cold shoulder from Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey – the Square & Paypal founder who was raised a Catholic, offered to invest in Kanye early on.

Jay-Z also kicked in a loan of $20m triggering tensions between the two ending in a public feud.

Here’s Jay-Z on “Kill Jay-Z”:

“You dropped outta school, you lost your principles / You gave him 20 million without thinkin’,” Jay-Z raps, seemingly confirming the rumor that he lent West money. “He gave you 20 minutes on stage, f–k was he thinkin’?”

Recently, Kanye has tried to dead the beef with the recent track “Brothers” with Charlie Wilson.

Power

‘Ye never got that billion from Zuckerberg, although they apparently became friends and even performed karaoke together, but it appears West has now healed his own financial woes: His apparel brand Yeezy is a billion-dollar empire, according to Forbes and over the past 12 months, Forbes estimates West has earned over $150 million before taxes. His wealth is due largely to Yeezy’s Adidas deal, a line that is expected to top $1.5 billion in sales in 2019.

The Jordan line does approximately $3 billion in annual sales, so the Yeezy line is catching up fast. If he can latch onto the Christian vote, sales could explode even more rapidly.

Touch the Sky

Christianity is the most adhered to religion in the United States, with 65% of polled American adults identifying themselves as Christian in 2019. This is down from 85% in 1990, 81.6% in 2001, and 12% lower than the 78% reported for 2012. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation.

Kenneth Copeland is the number one pastor in the USA and his net worth is $300m. After the backlash for supporting Trump, the natural progression seems to be for Kanye to target the Trump supporters and Christians who make up the large majority of America with around another 20% of the population perhaps open to conversion back to Christianity. It is a huge target market… and that is just America.

Christianity is by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31%) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth in 2010.

Jesus is King

The new sound track has been carefully crafted to be sung by large audiences to worship god. With tracks such as “Follow God” and “Use This Gospel”, Kanye is on a mission to convert. He has brought the Church to the streets and into the hills… No Church in the Wild.

His carefully chosen purple hair and purple cloths are to portray himself as an Emperor, clergy-like figure, if not Jesus himself, I don’t think it will be long before Kanye professes himself as a Prophet of some sort.

Kanye pronounced himself “I am a God” back on Yeezus.

I just talked to Jesus He said, “What up, Yeezus?” I said, “Shit—I’m chillin’ Tryna stack these millions” I know he the most high But I am a close high Mi casa, su casa That’s our cosa nostra I am a god I am a god I am a god

Rappers as Jesus

This isn’t new in rap. Check out the images below from Kanye, Nas, Tupac, DMX and The Game.

Jeru the Damaja, who follows the Nation of Islam, like Wu-Tang, Rakim & Brand Nubian, famously wrote a song “Can’t Stop the Prophet”.

Rappers have always seen themselves as street prophets, telling war stories, from Rakim, Nas & KRS-One right back to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five in The Message.

Purple Robes

Throughout history, purple robes were worn by royalty and people of authority or high rank. Many believe this to be true because the rare occurrence of purple in nature made it one of the most expensive color dyes to create.

Purple and violet represent the future, the imagination and dreams, while spiritually calming the emotions. They inspire and enhance psychic ability and spiritual enlightenment, while, at the same time, keeping us grounded.

At the time of Jesus, the dye used for making the colour purple, extracted from shell-fish and was one of the most expensive dyes. The colour-fast (non-fading) dye was an item of luxury trade, prized by Romans, who used it to colour ceremonial robes, usually worn by Emperors. The very fact that purple was an expensive color made it affordable only to the royals. That Jesus was made to put it on before his crucifixion, implies that the Romans were sending a strong signal to the Jews against any coup.

A.D.I.D.A.S.

ADIDAS was founded by German, Adi Dassler (Adolf Dassler). In fact, one of the founders, his brother Rudolf Dassler later went on to found Puma and started a bitter rivalry between the brothers. There is a popular myth among fans (not true) that Adidas stands for All Day I Dream About Sports, whilst in 2003, Killer Mike dropped a hip hop track called A.D.I.D.A.S. (All Day I Dream About Sex).

Like many of their fellow citizens, the brothers joined the Nazi party after Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933. Their shoe business remained modest until 1936. In that year, Germany hosted the Olympics.

In an ironic twist, the two party members got legendary African-American runner Jesse Owens to wear their running shoes while competing. Owens went on to win four gold medals during the games. The exposure of their product gave Dassler Shoes a huge boost in sales. You can read more in Sportsweek History.

It does seem ironic, given Kanye’s sex addiction that he would align himself with this particular shoe and his plans are to get the shoes made in America and give “second chances” to inmates.

But, he is going to run into problems with the media as the average wage of a prison inmate ranged between $0.23 and $1.15 an hour  – According to the International Labor Organization, in 2000–2011 wages in American prisons 

In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, inmates aren’t paid at all for their labor.

The “New Slave” indeed. I initially thought another way to make money would be to make inexpensive Jesus style sandals and sure enough, I found that is exactly what ‘Ye is planning. They are called “slides” in America and Adidas will be making these from injection moulding and it hasn’t gone unnoticed from Twitter that they are basically prison shoes, but now they are being remarketed as a high fashion item for children of rich kids. That is marketing genius.

Why do the yeezy slides look like the slides worn in prison.. pic.twitter.com/LsR8dbFyqE

— Cyn ☕️ (@Kingxxcyn) October 17, 2019

ADIDAS YECHEIL

The first shoe in Ye’s collection is the Yecheil, which is a Hebrew masculine given name meaning “May God live” or “God shall live”. Several people in the Bible also have this name.

ADIDAS YEEZREEL

For the second shoe of ‘Ye’s collection, there is the“Yeezreel”. It has no exact translation but it seems he might’ve been inspired by the word “Jezreel” which was an ancient Israelite city and fortress originally within the boundaries of the Tribe of Issachar, and later within the northern Kingdom of Israel.

ADIDAS YESHAYA

The third shoe is called the “Yeshaya” which directly translates to “God Is Salvation”. The name Yeshaya (Yesha’yahu) translates from Hebrew to English as the name Isaiah, who was one of the four major prophets of the Old Testament, and the author of the Book of Isaiah. He was from Jerusalem and probably lived in the 8th century BC.

Many of these shoes use Adidas “Cloud” foam, so ‘Ye and his fans are figuratively walking on clouds.

Click the pic to get the best prices on Adidas below

Through the Wire – Prison Reform

Kim Kardashian announced her decision to study law back in April. Since then, she’s met with President Trump to discuss prison reform, teamed up with the 90 Days of Freedom campaign, and is producing a documentary on the subject.

CNN reported that Kim Kardashian West helped free 17 inmates in 90 days.

Kanye West has donated $1m to prison reform, but is now getting US prison workers to make his shoes at 25% of the cost of having his shoes made in China, unless somehow, he is quadrupling the prison wage.

There will be Church factions and sections of the media who will most likely attack Mr. West for essentially using slave labour in prisons to increase profit. Chinese factory workers are now getting paid more than ever: Average hourly wages hit $3.60 in 2017 compared to around $1 for an American prison worker.

Kanye West’s Interview with Zane Lowe

If you don’t want to watch the lengthy interview below, scroll down for a quick summary.

In the interview Kanye talks about the following:

How billboards are guilty of sex trafficking

How he became a born-again Christian in April after Coachella

Why he wants to create jobs and bring jobs back to the USA

How he experimented with Domes & living in them then “the man” tore them down as a metaphor for tearing down his ego

How his farm will be growing cotton & wheat

He will employ prisoners to make his shoes as a “second chance”

His respect for founders, especially Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortego (Zara), Elon Musk, James Turell (artist concerned with light & space) and Jack Dorsey (Paypal)

He calls himself a Christian innovator

How his daughter North drives his passion for church

How Sunday Service may become a church and how he may become a Pastor

He is asking people to fast & not have premarital sex

How he had a porn addiction due to seeing Playboy at 5 years old & his sex addiction

People should pray together, fast together, stay together to increase power

Getting stumped by Zane Lowes question on whether he had to work for his 4th house

How white owners controls hip hop

How God is using Kanye to show off

Compares himself to Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, diagnosed of Bipolar disorder. This was also the ship in the film The Matrix which “woke” people up

According to the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar II was king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who reigned c. 605 BC – 562 BC and conquered Judah and Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile.

How he will become the President of the United States, perhaps as early as 2024

How Facebook & social media is a disease

How porn is ruining marriages and brainwashing children

How to keep the eternal, imaginative 3 year old at all costs

How he’s undeniably the greatest artist of all time, no question!

How wearing the red cap was a joke on all the liberals as well as Drake living four blocks down from him was also a joke from God.

I guess him wearing blue fur whilst talking and making a blue record is also a joke on the liberals

How he will now rewrite and censor all his old songs for performances

How some of the merchandise money will go to the church

How the Louis Vuitton boss reneging on a handshake to make him the LV don and his wife getting robbed helped put him in a mental hospital

Jokes about being the pastor at Drake’s wedding

How he objects to the censorship of speech of the left

Jesus is King is out now on Spotify, mp3, vinyl & CD

Jesus is Born, another new album, is arriving on Christmas Day this year.

Kanye West’s Journey

There is a bigger story here. How hip hop can be cathartic. Hip hop is bashed left, right and centre in the mainstream media daily, mainly times rightly so, for enforcing stereotypes. But, real hip hop can be a spiritual journey.

Some artists have found solace and teachings much earlier on in their lives such as Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, KRS-One & Jeru the Damaja. Other artists take longer to mature. It seems to me to be better rapping about street crime then taking part in it. This is something most non-hip hop heads seem to not understand.  Hip hop is way out the streets, just like a sports contract.

Everyone has their own journey and Kanye’s has taken him into Christianity. If record sales pick up, it will turn into a bigger movement. Time will tell what happens if it “All Falls Down”,  streams sour and Adidas sales start to Fade. In such a scenario, it may be very hard for Kanye to stay on the straight and narrow, but I wish him luck. Time will tell.

I’m looking forward to see how he reacts surrounded with Angels in future fashion shows singing his new songs.

I’ll leave you with the last verse from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message”, possibly still the greatest hip hop song ever written. The message is as relevant today as it was back in 1982.

A child is born, with no state of mind Blind to the ways of mankind God is smiling on you, but he’s frowning too Cause only God knows, what you go through You grow in the ghetto, living second rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate The place, that you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alley way You’ll admire all the number book takers Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money makers Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens And you wanna grow up to be just like them Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers Pickpockets, peddlers and even pan-handlers You say I’m cool, I’m no fool But then you wind up dropping out of high school Now you’re unemployed, all null ‘n void Walking ’round like you’re pretty boy floyd Turned stickup kid, look what you done did Got send up for a eight year bid Now your manhood is took and you’re a may tag Spend the next two years as an undercover fag Being used and abused and served like hell Till one day you was found hung dead in a cell It was plain to see that your life was lost You was cold and your body swung back and forth But now your eyes sing the sad sad song Of how you lived so fast and died so young So, don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge I’m trying not to lose my head It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under

Watch Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message

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[johnhardinsawyer]

Trusting Toward Love

John Sawyer

Bedford Presbyterian Church

4 / 26 / 20 – Third Sunday of Easter[1]

1 Peter 1:17-23

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

“Trusting Toward Love”

(Easter Encouragement – Part 2)

A couple of years ago, while driving down the road, I saw a car with a license plate that read, something like, “TRSTNO1” – “Trust No One.”  Now, since my car and the other car were driving down the road, together, I didn’t have a chance to ask my fellow driver why I should trust no one.  I was too busy trusting them to drive safely and not run into me or any of the other drivers on the road.  

Seeing that license plate, though, did make me think about the fact that we live in a time in which a lot of people have issues with trust.  From a fairly early age, we all have to develop an internal “Truth-o-Meter” that helps us evaluate what – or who – we should trust.  And it doesn’t take too long to realize that the guy with the “Trust No 1” license plate isn’t the only one thinking it.

Who should we trust?  Should we trust the so-called-experts with all of their expertise or the people with the loudest microphones – who may or may not agree with the experts?  Should we trust the thing we don’t want to hear even though it might come from an otherwise reliable source or should we just go with our gut?  Should we trust only in something that we can see and prove or are we able to somehow trust in something that we can’t see?  

This last question – about trusting in something that we cannot see – was on the mind of a person named Peter who was writing a letter, long ago, to a group of people who had been forced into the margins of society because they had changed their way of living and had set their hearts on Jesus.  In last Sunday’s reading from the letter of 1 Peter, he tells his readers, “Although you have not seen [Jesus] you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy. . .”  (1 Peter 1:8)  These people believe in Jesus.  They have put their faith and their confidence[2] in someone they have never seen with their own eyes.

Now, I know that there are some who hear these words and say, “Believe in Jesus even though I haven’t seen him?  I’m on board!  Sign me up!  You had me at ‘believe.’”  But I also know that there are many who hear these words and say, “I am most definitely not on board.  I’ve been let down too many times by the things and people that I have seen.  I could never put my trust in someone I’ve never seen.  I TRSTNO1.”

Look, I know that faith and trust – especially in God – can be hard.  And yet, as the author of the Book of Hebrews writes, “. . . faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  (Hebrews 11:1)  But, where does faith come from and is it something that anyone can have and hold on to?

In the Presbyterian Church when we talk about where faith comes from, we start by talking about the Holy Spirit.  When John Calvin – the Protestant Reformer – wrote about this, he said that “. . . faith is the principal work of the Holy Spirit. . . [and] has no other source than the Spirit.”  Faith is a “gift” from the Holy Spirit in which the Spirit becomes our  “. . . inner teacher by whose effort the promise of salvation penetrates into our minds, a promise that would otherwise only strike the air or beat upon the ears.”[3]

In other words, the Holy Spirit is always at work on us, sometimes working quickly, causing an immediate response – like in today’s first reading when the people are “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37) – after hearing Simon Peter’s Pentecost sermon.  And yet, the Holy Spirit also works slowly, so that over time, the good news of God’s grace washes over us and starts to soak into our hearts and minds and souls until faith finds a place to grow.  Now, if some people believe because of the Holy Spirit, and others do not believe, does this mean that God is not at work on and in and through people who have no faith at all or far more questions than faith?  This is a question that I can’t answer, except to say that no matter who you are, there is always God – whether you come to trust in God or not, whether or not the promise of God’s loving presence and gracious gifts soaks in or falls on deaf ears or not.  If there is one thing that I trust to be true, though, it is that even if we don’t believe in God, God believes in us.[4]

This trust is not in something that can be proved, though, with empirical data and cold-hard-facts. . .  No. . . spiritual faith is not cold and calculating like that.  No. . . having faith – believing – means that we are setting our hearts on the Holy, like you would set your heart on someone with whom you are falling in love.  Will there be questions along the way?  Of course.  Times when our trust is tested?  Of course.  But the questions and testing all take place within the boundaries of a loving relationship in which one of the parties never gives up on loving us – no matter what.

As Christians, the sure sign we have that God never gives up on us is Jesus – who, in his birth and life and teachings and signs and wonders and death and resurrection – reveals God’s true, and loving, and sacrificial character to us.  For Peter, Jesus Christ is the “living hope” that inspires all faith,[5] and, as Peter writes in today’s passage, it is through Jesus that we come to trust in God.  Yes, the Holy Spirit is the source of our faith, but it is the person of Jesus Christ who shows us what God looks like and, through the Holy Spirit, opens the door, or the gate, or the window of our hearts and minds and spirits to the good news of God’s love for us.  When Calvin writes about this, he says that in Jesus, “God in a manner [of speaking, becomes] little, that God might accommodate [God’s own self] to our comprehension.” Another way of putting this is to say that God is quite big – all-powerful and utterly overwhelming and completely mysterious – but, in Jesus, we encounter God in a human-sized form who maybe, just maybe, is easier for us to understand. . .  maybe even know and trust.

According to today’s reading, it is through the loving and sacrificial and revelatory actions of Jesus that the people have come to trust in God.  Peter is writing about something huge and cosmic, here, that can be understood at a human level.  One way of thinking about it that I’ve always loved is an ancient poem that describes Jesus as “. . . heaven and earth in little space.”[6]  Perhaps, when it comes to Jesus, it is the “heaven and earth” of it all that opens the little space of our hearts and minds and souls – even if they’re opened just a crack to all of the mystery and possibility and love that are found in God.

If we were to somehow suspend our disbelief and imagine that Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, does somehow lead us to trust in God, perhaps the next logical question might be “Why?”  What’s the point of trusting in God?  Why believe?

As I said a moment ago, belief is not an empirical exercise.  It is – first and foremost – an act of love.  As the church historian, Diana Butler Bass writes, in early English, to “believe” was to “belove” something or someone as an act of trust or loyalty.[7]  So, to believe in Jesus, is to “belove” Jesus – to direct our heart toward Jesus.[8]  

If you direct your heart toward someone, then it is not too much of a leap to start putting your trust in them, no matter how risky that might seem, at first.  For Peter, in today’s reading, our trusting/believing/beloving relationship with God leads us toward beloving – and maybe even trusting – one another in our human relationships.  “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth [of God’s grace],” Peter writes, “so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.”  (1:22)  In the original language, the word used here is philadelphia, like the name of the “City of Brotherly Love.”  As one commentator writes, “. . . [our] trust in God then opens our hearts to a true love of our neighbor. . .  true love is not a work that turns God to us, but a fruit of our turning to God in trust, in response to God’s love in Jesus.”[9]

Jesus helps us to trust toward love – beloving God leads to beloving our neighbor. . .  What if our loving trust in God could give rise to a deep-from-the-heart-love that transforms every human relationship in such a way that our love bears fruit in our communities, our nation, and our world?  What if our loving trust in God could give rise to the kind of holy love and trust that are so needed in these days when love and trust are so hard – in these days when we have to trust that our neighbor is washing their hands, and staying home if they feel sick, and keeping their nose and mouth covered in public, and trusting us to do the same.  Because there is something that we cannot see that is causing us to have to trust one another in life-and-death ways.  Now, I don’t think that setting our hearts on the Coronavirus will get us very far, even if it might be, inadvertently, causing some good in the world between neighbors.

How much more good is done by the love of God in the world?  This is a love that can be trusted. . .  a love that can even be believed if we set our hearts on Jesus – whom we may have not seen with our eyes, and yet we have come to know, through the loving presence of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives and in the life of the world.

I’ll close with this – There is a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter in which she sings, “We believe in things we cannot see. / Why shouldn’t we?  Why shouldn’t we?”  And she goes on to sing that we believe in things that give us hope, and make us all the same (no matter who we are). . .  We even believe in things that can’t be done.  “Why shouldn’t we?” she asks.[10]

In other words, there are some things, that just – deep down – we know and trust to be true. . . self-evident.  May the beautiful power of God’s love for you and for me and for the world – be one thing that we trust to be true.  Why shouldn’t we?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

------------ 

[1] And yet another week in a time of physical distancing because of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020.

[2] Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1979) 662-664.

[3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion – III.I.4 (Philadelphia:  The Westminster Press, 1960) 541.

[4] I attribute this idea to some of the writings of Frederick Buechner.

[5] See 1 Peter 1:3.

[6] https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=21285.

[7] Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion (New York:  HarperOne, 2012) 117.

[8] Bass, 118.

[9] David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, ed. Feasting on the Word – Year A, Volume 2 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) 416.  Stephen Edmondson, “Theological Perspective.”

[10] Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Why Shouldn’t We?” – The Calling (Rounder Records, 2007).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWiW_CXu2I4.

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Back flip, True Lies & DRM

Here we go with another episode from Nerds Amalgamated. This week is packed full of fun stuff to look forward to. First up is it a robot or is it a dog? It is Boston Dynamics student competitors with Standford Doggo. This fabulous little robot is awesome and does tricks, listen in to find out what they are. Also did you want your very own robot doggo? Well you are in luck as we tell you about how to get one. Also check our website for the show notes with hyperlinks, you need the article to get what you need.

            Next up we have DJ telling us about a proposed new series coming out based on a movie. Yep, another movie is being adapted for your viewing pleasure. It will once again not have the same actors in it that were the main stars in the movie, like so many others out there. But hopefully it will be enjoyable all the same. We won’t hold our breathe but surely they will have learned something over there by now… Who the heck are we kidding, those idiots never listen to anyone else, let alone the proposed viewing public.

            Next up we look at the blooper that is worthy of a standing ovation. Someone involved with the release of a game from Bethesda studios forgot the DRM. We know, how unlike Bethesda to stuff up something right? BWAHAHA!!! This amazing bit of luck is available on Steam and quite probably numerous other websites that deal in nefarious shadowy dealings. We personally are unaware of the names of such sites and therefore are unable to confirm or deny such suggestions. But come on, just think about it, a brand new game released without the DRM and no one is going to chase that down the rabbit hole of pirating it? Yeah, like Game of Thrones was never pirated ever.

            We have the usual shout outs, remembrances, birthdays and events from history. Plus games we are playing at the moment. All combined into one big mess that we call the show. We hope you enjoy and as always, stay safe, look after each other and stay hydrated.

EPISODE NOTES:

Back flipping robot - https://www.futurity.org/doggo-robot-2067152/

True Lies TV series reboot - https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/true-lies-tv-adaptation-heading-disney/

DRM - https://steamcommunity.com/games/548570/announcements/detail/2565275416672419265

Games currently playing

Buck

– The Crew 2 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/646910/The_Crew_2/

Professor

– Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - https://cataclysmdda.org/

DJ

– Steep - https://store.steampowered.com/app/460920/Steep/(edited)

Other topics discussed

Hold my Beer Comedy

- http://westender.com.au/circus-coming-hold-beer-end-westend/

Flipsy the dog (Simpsons reference)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_nGJvqHcV8

LEGO Mindstorms

- https://www.lego.com/en-us/mindstorms

Hulu might take Marvel shows such as Daredevil

- https://www.cinemablend.com/television/2466812/hulu-is-down-to-revive-daredevil-and-other-cancelled-marvel-tv-shows

Denuvo

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo

- https://www.howtogeek.com/400126/what-is-denuvo-and-why-do-gamers-hate-it/

Red Bull Air Championships

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Air_Race_World_Championship

6ix9ine (rapper)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6ix9ine

Cutscene saga (That’s Not Canon Production Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/cutscenesagapodcast

Shoutouts

20 May 1736 - Westminster Bridge Defies a King and the Church - The Archbishop of Canterbury – head of the Church in England – probably prayed there would never be a bridge across the River Thames at Westminster. But he was not alone. Up to the end of the 17th Century most traffic moved up and down on the river rather than by road. River transport was big business and the men who plied their trade on boats and ferries had a lot to lose from the construction of new bridges. They were backed by the Corporation of London which did not want trade moving to the fringes of London, but claimed its main objections were the loss of custom to the watermen and to the City markets and the danger of the navigation of the river being impeded. One of the claims was that if the watermen lost their jobs there would be fewer readily available seamen for the navy if England went to war. The arguments raged on until in 1664 a major proposal for a bridge was made to the King's Privy Council and to the Lord Mayor. City businesses then played their ace card and bribed King Charles II to scrap the proposal. Officially, it was an interest-free loan, but however the transaction was described the effect was that the building of Westminster Bridge would not take place for nearly 100 years. However, over time various people continued to press for such a bridge until in 1721 petitions went to Parliament. There was the same opposition as before but in the end the case was won and permission to build the bridge finally received Royal Approval on 20 May 1736, when George II was on the throne. Work began in 1738 and the bridge was opened on 18 November 1750. - https://www.onthisday.com/articles/westminster-bridge-defies-a-king-and-the-church

21 May 1792 - Mount Unzen on Japan's Shimabara Peninsula, erupts creating a tsunami, killing about 15,000; Japan's deadliest volcanic eruption. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1792_Unzen_earthquake_and_tsunami

21 May 1980 - "Star Wars Episode V - Empire Strikes Back", produced by George Lucas opens in cinemas in UK and North America -https://www.onthisday.com/people/george-lucas

21 May 2004 - Stanislav Petrov awarded World Citizen Award for averting a potential nuclear war in 1983 after correctly guessing Russian early warning system at fault - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

22 May 2019 - Illawarra scientist and inventor Macinley Butson has been featured by the world's biggest video sharing website YouTube for her SMART Armour copper cancer shield fabric. Macinley Butson's SMART (Scale Maille Armour for Radiation Therapy) invention is a device that shields the contralateral breast (the breast not being treated) from excess radiation. As well as being made from high density copper, the shields are handmade. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-22/youtube-profiles-teenage-scientist-macinley-butson/11134004

Remembrances

20 May 2019 – Nikki Lauda, Austrian Formula One driver, a three-time F1 World Drivers' Champion, winning in 1975, 1977 and 1984, and an aviation entrepreneur. He was the only driver in F1 history to have been champion for both Ferrari and McLaren, the sport's two most successful constructors. He is widely considered one of the greatest F1 drivers of all time. As an aviation entrepreneur, he founded and ran three airlines: Lauda Air, Niki, and Lauda. He was a Bombardier Business Aircraft brand ambassador. He was also a consultant for Scuderia Ferrari and team manager of the Jaguar Formula One racing team for two years. Afterwards, he worked as a pundit for German TV during Grand Prix weekends and acted as non-executive chairman of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, of which Lauda owned 10%. Having emerged as Formula One's star driver amid a 1975 title win and leading the 1976 championship battle, Lauda was seriously injured in a crash at the 1976 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring during which his Ferrari 312T2 burst into flames, and he came close to death after inhaling hot toxic fumes and suffering severe burns. However, he survived and recovered sufficiently to race again just six weeks later at the Italian Grand Prix. Although he narrowly lost the title to James Hunt that year, he won his second Ferrari crown the year after during his final season at the team. After a couple of years at Brabham and two years' hiatus, Lauda returned and raced four seasons for McLaren between 1982 and 1985 – during which he won the 1984 title by 0.5 points over his teammate Alain Prost. He died of natural causes at 70 in Zurich. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niki_Lauda

21 May 1935 - Jane Addams, known as the mother of social work, a pioneer American settlement activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, public administrator, protester, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. She co-founded Chicago's Hull House, one of America's most famous settlement houses. In 1920, she was a co-founder for the ACLU. In 1931, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States. She is increasingly being recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy and is known by many as the first woman "public philosopher in the history of the United States". In the Progressive Era, when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers. She helped America address and focus on issues that were of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. In her essay "Utilization of Women in City Government," Addams noted the connection between the workings of government and the household, stating that many departments of government, such as sanitation and the schooling of children, could be traced back to traditional women's roles in the private sphere. Thus, these were matters of which women would have more knowledge than men, so women needed the vote to best voice their opinions. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed to be able to vote to do so effectively. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She died of cancer at 74 in Chicago, Illinois.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Addams 

- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1931/addams/biographical/

23 May 1701 - William Kidd, Scottish sailor who was tried and executed for piracy after returning from a voyage to the Indian Ocean. Some modern historians, for example Sir Cornelius Neale Dalton, deem his piratical reputation unjust. He was hanged for his crimes at 47 in Execution Dock,Wapping, London. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kidd

Famous birthdays

21 May 1948 – Leo Sayer, English-Australian singer-songwriter musician and entertainer whose singing career has spanned four decades. He is now an Australian citizen and resident. Sayer launched his career in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and became a top singles and album act on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1970s. His first seven hit singles in the United Kingdom all reached the Top 10 – a feat first registered by his first manager, Adam Faith. His songs have been sung by other notable artists, including Cliff Richard ("Dreaming"). He was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Sayer

21 May 1960 - Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender. Although he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,schizotypal personality disorder, and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of 15 of the 16 murders he had committed in Wisconsin, and was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment on February 15, 1992. He was later sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978. On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer

22 May 1905 - Bodo von Borries, Germanphysicist. He was the co-inventor of the electron microscope. After World War II , he founded the "Rhine-Westphalia Institute for Electron Microscopy" in Düsseldorf in 1948. In 1949, he was involved in the foundation of the German Society for Electron Microscopy. He was born in Herford,North Rhine-Westphalia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_von_Borries

Events of Interest

21 May 1881 - American Red Cross founded by Clara Barton, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/american-red-cross-founded

21 May 1927 - Aviator Charles Lindbergh, in the Spirit of St Louis, lands in Paris after the first solo air crossing of Atlantic. - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lindbergh-lands-in-paris

21 May 1932 - After flying for 17 hours from Newfoundland, Amelia Earhart lands near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, becoming the 1st transatlantic solo flight by a woman - https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/earhart-completes-transatlantic-flight

22 May 1906 – The Wright brothers are granted U.S. patent number 821,393 for their "Flying-Machine".

-  Patent - http://invention.psychology.msstate.edu/i/Wrights/WrightUSPatent/WrightPatent.html

             -  https://patents.google.com/patent/US821393A/en

- Patent War - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war 

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Follow us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/

Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.com

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

[cryptswahili]

Wendy McElroy: Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part One

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part One Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

Let the interview begin…

Wendy: You have written extensively on Austrian Economics and cryptocurrency. Can you sketch out how cryptocurrency fits in with that economic tradition?

Jeff: The most obvious point concerns the capacity of the market to produce money as if were a normal good and service. This is remarkable, unthinkable 20 years ago, life-changing, epic.

Governments have mostly monopolized money for a century, and have been dominant in the monetary sector for some 6,000 years. We are living through a shift now that we know for sure that monetary secession is possible and operational.

Most Austrians in the 20th century worked toward reestablishing the gold standard. That’s good, but it never happened. It was Hayek who first threw down the gauntlet: get government completely out of the realm of money and let innovation take its course.

I would say that crypto has five Austrian founding fathers: Menger for showing that money has a market origin, Mises for his warning against central banking, Hayek for coming up with the idea of radical competition in money, Rothbard for his emphasis on money as property, and Kirzner for showing how entrepreneurship can defy our existing knowledge to reveal something completely new.

Aside from money, crypto’s core tech is the best innovation in history for definitely tracing provenance, which is the documented history of trades in private property. You need a technology for this. In the ancient world, it was clay tablets. Much later it was papyrus and then parchment and vellum. Databases were a glorious innovation. But all these technologies suffered from a problem which had heretofore been insoluble: they had a central point of failure. Blockchain has fixed that.

For this reason, the innovation of crypto is even more fundamental than giving us a new form of money. It is a technology of documentation. It scientifically tracks ownership rights. It has thus given us a better way to conduct human affairs in a more peaceful and prosperous way. I suspect it will be another ten years before this point is widely understood.

Wendy: You knew and worked with Murray Rothbard for many years. What do you think his take on crypto would have been? What would you have said to him in return?

Jeff: People always ask me: what would Murray say? My answer is that Murray was always learning, adapting, reapplying principles, discovering new information, just like any great intellectual. There is not one Murray. There are many, simply because he had such an active mind. That process ended when he died in 1995. He left us an enormous legacy. I don’t think it is fair to him or his legacy for anyone to pretend that he or she has a precise fix on what he would be thinking right now about current politics.

Some people claim Murray would be wildly pro-Trump, for example, but I think it is just as likely that the experience so far with the Trump administration would have rekindled his 1960s-style loathing of rightist authoritarianism and his burning critique of revanchist politics, particularly on the trade point but also on immigration. For forty years, Murray wrote for free trade and free migration. In his last years, he wrote a few sentences that raised some doubts about migration based on the political implications. Which Murray is the true one? I think this is the wrong question. The right question is: how can we apply in our times the principles that Murray stood for in his long career?

On the matter of crypto, I will say this. Murray did not agree with Hayek on money. In fact, Murray didn’t believe that a new money could ever compete with an older money once that money has become generally accepted. He cited Mises’s theory of money’s origins to support his position. For this reason, he only approved of the path of reforming the dollar. His view of money was rather static and rationalistic, and I know this because I held that view also, for many years. I saw many attempts at private e-money fail, and this reinforced my opinion.

I’m guessing, then, that Murray would have been slow to recognize what Bitcoin achieved, just as I had been slow. I had seen digital money fail but I didn’t precisely understand why they had failed: none had solved the problem of double spending. If you get that wrong, you set up a situation in which money becomes as reproducible as anything on the Internet, which is to say it is unsound. Bitcoin solved that problem. It enabled the creation of a scarce good which has all the features of money, plus building in a payment system into the architecture itself.

Might Murray have been convinced by the evidence? If he had the right person to explain it to him, possibly yes. From 2009 until about 2014, it was actually difficult to find material written for the economist who could explain why Bitcoin was money. Most everything available was written in the language of computer science, and so economists were generally left out.

In 2013, I undertook a major effort to educate myself about cryptography, distributed networks, hashing technology, and digital ledgers. I  combined that new knowledge with my existing knowledge base and gradually came to understand. It was a big project. One of the most exciting of my life. By the time I was ready to write about it, I had not prepared myself for the reality that most economists were nowhere near the point of comprehending what this was all about.

So after I wrote my first article – February 2013, I believe – I faced a tremendous avalanche of attacks from old colleagues. I was stunned. This is a huge problem with intellectuals actually. They think they know, and so their knowledge blinds them to new understanding. It’s the opposite with the market, which is always in discovery mode. This is why Hayek constantly emphasized that a seriously pro-market economist must adopt a stance of humility and openness to the boundless creativity of the market. The market must be our teacher. The market teaches more than textbooks but you have to be willing to have a teachable spirit and look outside the window.

Wendy: What is your impression of how crypto is being received by most Austrian economists? Which ones, if any, seem particularly enthusiastic about it? Which ones seem particularly hostile?

Jeff: Many Austrians had come to misapply Murray’s own theory in the crudest possible form: no new money was ever possible. This is wrong on its face. We have countless examples of new money being produced. For example, every prison has its own money. It could be mackerel cans or ramen noodles. Doesn’t matter really. It happened in school when we were kids: people trade marbles or bathroom passes or anything as money.

The penchant to invent money flows from the needs of trade. Remember the definition of money: something acquired not for consumption but for later use in indirect exchange. There are, as Menger said, degrees of moneyness based on the range of acceptability. Something can be money in one context and just another exchangeable good in a different context. The whole concept is far more fluid than is generally supposed.

By 2013, most economists, Austrian or not, had become complacent in believing that they had money figured out. Bitcoin was just too new and bizarre for them to comprehend. I don’t think a single article from an economist had been accepted on the topic in any conventional academic journal. George Selgin, I think, was the first serious economist to write competently about synthetic money as a new form of money and payment system. Why Selgin and why not the others? I think it is because he is among the most empirically aware and institutionally curious of all the Austrians. He truly understands monetary history. He wrote an entire book on private monies in the Industrial Revolution, so he was profoundly aware of how failed public services inspire private monetary entrepreneurs.

Other Austrians just dug in their heels in those days and screamed: gold is money. Speaking as a matter of history, this is a correct statement. But the gold standard had been gradually destroyed by governments over the course of the 20th century. There are conditions under which gold could become money again, but governments and central banks don’t want that. Crypto came along as a kind of digital gold. Even the metaphors of the crypto world (think of the term mining) come from the history of the gold standard.

Another problem is the lack of technological sophistication of old-school Austrians. Many of them can’t explain why Facebook is valuable or anything else about information economics. They are too quick to observe any facet of the digital world and deem it a bubble because it is not grounded in physical things. That’s a very strange attitude for Austrians who are supposed to believe in subjective value but there it is.

I recall being completely befuddled by the tremendously dopey things that Austrians were writing in those days, even on once-respected venues. I called up one prominent writer and tried to explain crypto to him. He kept saying over and over again: “Bitcoin is not real; it is only digital.” I was having this conversation with him on Skype. I said: “Do you think this conversation is real?” He said yes. I then asked him if he understood that both the voice and the visuals were entirely digital. He just blinked his eyes in confusion. Then he went right back to writing dumb things.

These days, matters are much better. We have an entire team of economists at the American Institute for Economic Research – including people like William Luther, Max Gulker, Pete Earle, Scott Burns, Brian Albrecht, J.P. Koning, Lawrence White, J.P. Koning, Alexander Salter – who are super sophisticated on the topic of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. They don’t all agree with each other but they get the core of it. They don’t pretend to know things they do not know.

There are still people extant whose primary objection to Bitcoin is that it is “not backed.” They still don’t understand that it is possible for the digital world to reproduce value relationships that exist in the physical world. Unless you get that intellectual, you will never understand how markets can produce and manage money in the 21st century.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit bitcoin.com and include a link back to the original links to all previous chapters

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

The post Wendy McElroy: Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part One appeared first on Bitcoin News.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[neptunecreek]

No Evidence that "Stronger" Patents Will Mean More Innovation

Push to once again allow abstract patents is misguided

Right now, the patent lobby—in the form of the Intellectual Property Owners Association and the American Intellectual Property Law Association—is demanding “stronger” patent laws. They want to undo Alice v. CLS Bank and return us to a world where “do it on a computer” ideas are eligible for a patent. This would help lawyers file more patent applications and patent litigation. But there’s no evidence that such laws would benefit the public or innovation at all.

One of the primary justifications we hear for why patents are social goods is that they encourage innovation. Specifically, the argument goes, patents incentivize companies and individuals to invest in costly research and development that they would not otherwise invest in because they know they will be able to later charge supracompetitive prices and recoup the costs of that development.

Those who want "stronger" patents (i.e. patents that are easier to get and/or harder to invalidate) often use this rationale to justify changing patent laws to make patents more enforceable. For example, a former Judge on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently suggested that "America is in danger because we have strangled our innovation system" by making it easier to challenge patents and show they never should have been granted. As another example, the Chief Patent Counsel at IBM argued that "The U.S. leads the software industry, but reductions in U.S. innovation prompted by uncertain patent eligibility criteria threaten our leadership" because "Patents promote innovation."

These arguments all presume that "stronger" patents mean more research and development dollars and thus more innovation. They also presume that if the U.S. doesn't provide "stronger" patents, innovation will go elsewhere.

But reality is much more complex. As one recent paper put it: "there is little evidence that stronger patent laws result in increases in [research and development] investments," at least if the yardstick is patent filings.  Indeed, "we still have essentially no credible empirical evidence on the seemingly simple question of whether stronger patent rights – either longer patent terms or broader patent rights – encourage research investments into developing new technologies."

There are good reasons to think "stronger" patents do not actually spur innovation. Patents are a double-edged sword. Although they may provide some incentive to innovate (even that premise is unclear), they also create barriers to more innovation. Patents work to prevent the development of follow-on innovation until that patent expires, delaying innovation that would have occurred, but is prevented by the grant of an artificial, government-backed monopoly.

The problem of patents impeding future innovation is exacerbated in software, where the life cycle is relatively short and innovation tends to move quickly. When a patent lasts for 20 years, software patents—especially broad and abstract software patents—have the potential to significantly delay the introduction of new innovations to the market.

Despite no "credible empirical evidence" that recent changes to patent laws, including the limits on patentable subject matter reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Alice, have done any harm to the innovation economy or innovation generally, some patent owners have been lobbying Congress legislate the case away. But doing so would allow patents on abstract ideas, and risks exacerbating the deadweight loss caused by too much patenting. The proposals are not minor changes. For example, if enacted they would mean that anything is patentable, so long as it is doesn't "exist solely in the human mind," i.e. "do it on a computer." Absent any evidence that this would mean more innovation, the recent reform proposals seem like little more than a bid by lawyers to create work for themselves.

Those rushing to ratchet up patent rights are doing so with little to no empirical basis that any such change is necessary, and it may actually end up harming the innovation economy. Congress should think twice before changing patent law so as to make patents even "stronger." 

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT COMPANY

In retrospect, he was. Last year one founder spent the whole day on the sofa and watched TV all day—days at the end that the lines don't meet. Already chip designers have to spend years working to learn this stuff. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to get to know one another, as in the design of the language, and have to shut the company down, but the entire town. Programs composed of expressions. Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably better at detecting bullshit than you are. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the future of technology. There are companies that will give 2 million to a 20% chance of 10 million, while the names of different rounds. Actually they have a hundred different types of clients for them to do the same for every language, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. That's the biggest problem for someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception.

But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be the first investor who commits. This had two drawbacks: a an expert on search. Because it needs no installation, you don't take a position and then defend it. What should they do research on? But designed is not really the word; discovered is more like architecture. And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those that prepared candidates for Sandhurst the British West Point or the classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores. Studies like Lutz Prechelt's comparison of programming languages, editors, and so on.

But he compels admiration. I know write programs. And yet it never occurred to me how much my essays sound like me talking. A rounds for as much equity as VCs do now. When someone's working on a painting, they never saw it, because it meant we didn't have. Don't raise too much. Most technologies evolve a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization work differently from the rest. And yet intelligence and wisdom too, but there are signs it may be slightly misleading to say that they're happier in the sense that your performance can be measured, he is not expected to do more than anyone expected. Well, therein lies half the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. Everyone's model of work from the 1970s. Historically metals have been the most common because it is.

And even if you don't have to be promoted. There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: premature optimization. That has always seemed to us evidence of their backwardness, they would have been a good scripting language for Unix. Within a year you'll know if you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the most powerful people in the future, but empirically it may be better adapted for some things than Jessica, and she's better at some things than others; we may be able to see it. A startup is so cheap, venture capitalists now often want to be able to get better at it than the other way around, they'd instantly get almost all the surprises are surprising in how much less risk VCs are willing to compromise. Of course, server-based software. The 32 year old probably is a better programmer, if it isn't false, it shouldn't be: when there are consistent standards for quality, and the most sophisticated tell you what language to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but I think it needs even more emphasizing. But if it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower. Before I publish a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would do this.

Not only did we have better people worrying about security, we worried more about it. It could only spread to places where there was a problem with acquisitions is that they can do things in your early 20s that you can't do that until you actually start the company. If you want, not to be effective as a programming language? It matters more to make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 2500. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power flourishes in secret. The main reason there are only a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley, and all users care about is doing interesting work. What saves you from being intimidated, ignorance can sometimes help you discover new ideas. And the right things undone. Why do founders want to raise. They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars of seed funding, if you're ahead now, and what's most admired is to be mistaken.

At the bottom you'll find the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other people will read forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. I was using it to write software that recognizes their messages, there is not much more than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. So the contrast when I couldn't was sharp. When I realized this was kind of intimidating at first. If you want to design your life around getting into college, for example, to want to use it. There is no real distinction between working hours and not. This can work well in technology, you cook one thing and that's what they're going to get tagged as spam. Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this mode. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. Why did desktop computers eclipse mainframes?

Notes

The founders we fund used to place orders. The reason you don't know enough about big markets, why did it with the sort of pious crap you were. The auction. Something similar happens with suburbs.

Thanks to Max Roser, Lisa Randall, Jessica Livingston, and Reid Hoffman for putting up with me.

[sheilacwall]

Jesus Walks… in Adidas

Jesus Walks… in Adidas

Jesus is King has finally dropped. This is Kanye West’s first Christian rap-gospel album since turning into a born-again Christian in April after the hedonistic indulgence of Coachella.

The Lucifer, Mercy and New God Flow producer has given up secular music and has now turned his career toward the servitude of God.

However, his return from hospital and new found faith will flow nicely into his plans to expand his fashion, music & entertainment empire as well as possibly delivering him the top spot in the White House. This is a man not to be underestimated.

Saint Pablo

‘Ye recently turned around a personal debt of $53 million into a nearly $50m profit. Back in 2016, ‘Ye went out cap in hand to Mark Zuckerberg for $1bn for his ideas, but was promptly ignored. Zuckerberg was raised in a Jewish household, although his wife is a Buddhist and he hasn’t publicly stated his faith. But, this wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by ‘Ye and may have pushed Kanye toward his born-again Christian position.

Soon after, the “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” star seemingly finally started listening to his wife.

“My wife said, I can’t say no to nobody, and at this rate we gon’ both die broke,” West raps on Saint Pablo. “Got friends that ask me for money knowin’ I’m in debt, and like my wife said, I still didn’t say no.”

Stronger

Whilst facing the cold shoulder from Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey – the Square & Paypal founder who was raised a Catholic, offered to invest in Kanye early on.

Jay-Z also kicked in a loan of $20m triggering tensions between the two ending in a public feud.

Here’s Jay-Z on “Kill Jay-Z”:

“You dropped outta school, you lost your principles / You gave him 20 million without thinkin’,” Jay-Z raps, seemingly confirming the rumor that he lent West money. “He gave you 20 minutes on stage, f–k was he thinkin’?”

Recently, Kanye has tried to dead the beef with the recent track “Brothers” with Charlie Wilson.

Power

‘Ye never got that billion from Zuckerberg, although they apparently became friends and even performed karaoke together, but it appears West has now healed his own financial woes: His apparel brand Yeezy is a billion-dollar empire, according to Forbes and over the past 12 months, Forbes estimates West has earned over $150 million before taxes. His wealth is due largely to Yeezy’s Adidas deal, a line that is expected to top $1.5 billion in sales in 2019.

The Jordan line does approximately $3 billion in annual sales, so the Yeezy line is catching up fast. If he can latch onto the Christian vote, sales could explode even more rapidly.

Touch the Sky

Christianity is the most adhered to religion in the United States, with 65% of polled American adults identifying themselves as Christian in 2019. This is down from 85% in 1990, 81.6% in 2001, and 12% lower than the 78% reported for 2012. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation.

Kenneth Copeland is the number one pastor in the USA and his net worth is $300m. After the backlash for supporting Trump, the natural progression seems to be for Kanye to target the Trump supporters and Christians who make up the large majority of America with around another 20% of the population perhaps open to conversion back to Christianity. It is a huge target market… and that is just America.

Christianity is by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31%) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth in 2010.

Jesus is King

The new sound track has been carefully crafted to be sung by large audiences to worship god. With tracks such as “Follow God” and “Use This Gospel”, Kanye is on a mission to convert. He has brought the Church to the streets and into the hills… No Church in the Wild.

His carefully chosen purple hair and purple cloths are to portray himself as an Emperor, clergy-like figure, if not Jesus himself, I don’t think it will be long before Kanye professes himself as a Prophet of some sort.

Kanye pronounced himself “I am a God” back on Yeezus.

I just talked to Jesus He said, “What up, Yeezus?” I said, “Shit—I’m chillin’ Tryna stack these millions” I know he the most high But I am a close high Mi casa, su casa That’s our cosa nostra I am a god I am a god I am a god

Rappers as Jesus

This isn’t new in rap. Check out the images below from Kanye, Nas, Tupac, DMX and The Game.

Jeru the Damaja, who follows the Nation of Islam, like Wu-Tang, Rakim & Brand Nubian, famously wrote a song “Can’t Stop the Prophet”.

Rappers have always seen themselves as street prophets, telling war stories, from Rakim, Nas & KRS-One right back to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five in The Message.

Purple Robes

Throughout history, purple robes were worn by royalty and people of authority or high rank. Many believe this to be true because the rare occurrence of purple in nature made it one of the most expensive color dyes to create.

Purple and violet represent the future, the imagination and dreams, while spiritually calming the emotions. They inspire and enhance psychic ability and spiritual enlightenment, while, at the same time, keeping us grounded.

At the time of Jesus, the dye used for making the colour purple, extracted from shell-fish and was one of the most expensive dyes. The colour-fast (non-fading) dye was an item of luxury trade, prized by Romans, who used it to colour ceremonial robes, usually worn by Emperors. The very fact that purple was an expensive color made it affordable only to the royals. That Jesus was made to put it on before his crucifixion, implies that the Romans were sending a strong signal to the Jews against any coup.

A.D.I.D.A.S.

ADIDAS was founded by German, Adi Dassler (Adolf Dassler). In fact, one of the founders, his brother Rudolf Dassler later went on to found Puma and started a bitter rivalry between the brothers. There is a popular myth among fans (not true) that Adidas stands for All Day I Dream About Sports, whilst in 2003, Killer Mike dropped a hip hop track called A.D.I.D.A.S. (All Day I Dream About Sex).

Like many of their fellow citizens, the brothers joined the Nazi party after Adolph Hitler came to power in 1933. Their shoe business remained modest until 1936. In that year, Germany hosted the Olympics.

In an ironic twist, the two party members got legendary African-American runner Jesse Owens to wear their running shoes while competing. Owens went on to win four gold medals during the games. The exposure of their product gave Dassler Shoes a huge boost in sales. You can read more in Sportsweek History.

It does seem ironic, given Kanye’s sex addiction that he would align himself with this particular shoe and his plans are to get the shoes made in America and give “second chances” to inmates.

But, he is going to run into problems with the media as the average wage of a prison inmate ranged between $0.23 and $1.15 an hour  – According to the International Labor Organization, in 2000–2011 wages in American prisons 

In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, inmates aren’t paid at all for their labor.

The “New Slave” indeed. I initially thought another way to make money would be to make inexpensive Jesus style sandals and sure enough, I found that is exactly what ‘Ye is planning. They are called “slides” in America and Adidas will be making these from injection moulding and it hasn’t gone unnoticed from Twitter that they are basically prison shoes, but now they are being remarketed as a high fashion item for children of rich kids. That is marketing genius.

Why do the yeezy slides look like the slides worn in prison.. pic.twitter.com/LsR8dbFyqE

— Cyn ☕️ (@Kingxxcyn) October 17, 2019

ADIDAS YECHEIL

The first shoe in Ye’s collection is the Yecheil, which is a Hebrew masculine given name meaning “May God live” or “God shall live”. Several people in the Bible also have this name.

ADIDAS YEEZREEL

For the second shoe of ‘Ye’s collection, there is the“Yeezreel”. It has no exact translation but it seems he might’ve been inspired by the word “Jezreel” which was an ancient Israelite city and fortress originally within the boundaries of the Tribe of Issachar, and later within the northern Kingdom of Israel.

ADIDAS YESHAYA

The third shoe is called the “Yeshaya” which directly translates to “God Is Salvation”. The name Yeshaya (Yesha’yahu) translates from Hebrew to English as the name Isaiah, who was one of the four major prophets of the Old Testament, and the author of the Book of Isaiah. He was from Jerusalem and probably lived in the 8th century BC.

Many of these shoes use Adidas “Cloud” foam, so ‘Ye and his fans are figuratively walking on clouds.

Click the pic to get the best prices on Adidas below

Through the Wire – Prison Reform

Kim Kardashian announced her decision to study law back in April. Since then, she’s met with President Trump to discuss prison reform, teamed up with the 90 Days of Freedom campaign, and is producing a documentary on the subject.

CNN reported that Kim Kardashian West helped free 17 inmates in 90 days.

Kanye West has donated $1m to prison reform, but is now getting US prison workers to make his shoes at 25% of the cost of having his shoes made in China, unless somehow, he is quadrupling the prison wage.

There will be Church factions and sections of the media who will most likely attack Mr. West for essentially using slave labour in prisons to increase profit. Chinese factory workers are now getting paid more than ever: Average hourly wages hit $3.60 in 2017 compared to around $1 for an American prison worker.

Kanye West’s Interview with Zane Lowe

If you don’t want to watch the lengthy interview below, scroll down for a quick summary.

In the interview Kanye talks about the following:

How billboards are guilty of sex trafficking

How he became a born-again Christian in April after Coachella

Why he wants to create jobs and bring jobs back to the USA

How he experimented with Domes & living in them then “the man” tore them down as a metaphor for tearing down his ego

How his farm will be growing cotton & wheat

He will employ prisoners to make his shoes as a “second chance”

His respect for founders, especially Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortego (Zara), Elon Musk, James Turell (artist concerned with light & space) and Jack Dorsey (Paypal)

He calls himself a Christian innovator

How his daughter North drives his passion for church

How Sunday Service may become a church and how he may become a Pastor

He is asking people to fast & not have premarital sex

How he had a porn addiction due to seeing Playboy at 5 years old & his sex addiction

People should pray together, fast together, stay together to increase power

Getting stumped by Zane Lowes question on whether he had to work for his 4th house

How white owners controls hip hop

How God is using Kanye to show off

Compares himself to Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, diagnosed of Bipolar disorder. This was also the ship in the film The Matrix which “woke” people up

According to the Bible, Nebuchadnezzar II was king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who reigned c. 605 BC – 562 BC and conquered Judah and Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile.

How he will become the President of the United States, perhaps as early as 2024

How Facebook & social media is a disease

How porn is ruining marriages and brainwashing children

How to keep the eternal, imaginative 3 year old at all costs

How he’s undeniably the greatest artist of all time, no question!

How wearing the red cap was a joke on all the liberals as well as Drake living four blocks down from him was also a joke from God.

I guess him wearing blue fur whilst talking and making a blue record is also a joke on the liberals

How he will now rewrite and censor all his old songs for performances

How some of the merchandise money will go to the church

How the Louis Vuitton boss reneging on a handshake to make him the LV don and his wife getting robbed helped put him in a mental hospital

Jokes about being the pastor at Drake’s wedding

How he objects to the censorship of speech of the left

Jesus is King is out now on Spotify, mp3, vinyl & CD

Jesus is Born, another new album, is arriving on Christmas Day this year.

Kanye West’s Journey

There is a bigger story here. How hip hop can be cathartic. Hip hop is bashed left, right and centre in the mainstream media daily, mainly times rightly so, for enforcing stereotypes. But, real hip hop can be a spiritual journey.

Some artists have found solace and teachings much earlier on in their lives such as Rakim, Wu-Tang Clan, KRS-One & Jeru the Damaja. Other artists take longer to mature. It seems to me to be better rapping about street crime then taking part in it. This is something most non-hip hop heads seem to not understand.  Hip hop is way out the streets, just like a sports contract.

Everyone has their own journey and Kanye’s has taken him into Christianity. If record sales pick up, it will turn into a bigger movement. Time will tell what happens if it “All Falls Down”,  streams sour and Adidas sales start to Fade. In such a scenario, it may be very hard for Kanye to stay on the straight and narrow, but I wish him luck. Time will tell.

I’m looking forward to see how he reacts surrounded with Angels in future fashion shows singing his new songs.

I’ll leave you with the last verse from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message”, possibly still the greatest hip hop song ever written. The message is as relevant today as it was back in 1982.

A child is born, with no state of mind Blind to the ways of mankind God is smiling on you, but he’s frowning too Cause only God knows, what you go through You grow in the ghetto, living second rate And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate The place, that you play and where you stay Looks like one great big alley way You’ll admire all the number book takers Thugs, pimps and pushers and the big money makers Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens And you wanna grow up to be just like them Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers Pickpockets, peddlers and even pan-handlers You say I’m cool, I’m no fool But then you wind up dropping out of high school Now you’re unemployed, all null ‘n void Walking ’round like you’re pretty boy floyd Turned stickup kid, look what you done did Got send up for a eight year bid Now your manhood is took and you’re a may tag Spend the next two years as an undercover fag Being used and abused and served like hell Till one day you was found hung dead in a cell It was plain to see that your life was lost You was cold and your body swung back and forth But now your eyes sing the sad sad song Of how you lived so fast and died so young So, don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge I’m trying not to lose my head It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder How I keep from going under

Watch Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message

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