I remember being in Mexico when Morena ran billboard ads that said "no cartel lasts forever", referring to the century-old single-party rule of the PRI.

I often think the same thing about world reserve currencies.

The "degenerate" that outlasted the Nazis - Klimt.

His paintings were saved from the censorship and burnings associated with the regime, and despite the association with the wealthy Jewish community of Vienna and the eroticism of his work, most of his paintings survive intact.

Plundered, stolen, but cherished by the Nazis who aspired to suck up to Hitler as a failed art student (the most famous, of course, being Göring who "first looked like he encountered evil" when it was relayed to him that his prized Vermeer for which he had exchanged 137 "lesser" paintings, Christ and the Adulteress, was a fake painted in 1937.), Klimt's paintings reach from across decades of turmoil.

Though money is a crass way of looking at it, his paintings are among some of the most valuable in the world now - with one reason being that he anticipated the melding of East Asian culture and aesthetics like Schopenhauer did a century ago with philosophy.

HIs Lady with a Fan sold for over $100mn to a Hong Kong collector. This was followed by his Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer for about $250mn.

Personally, I find his paintings and prints reasonably good to look at and reflect over, but nothing special. But the twists and turns his art took to make it around the world (most famously chronicled in "The Woman in Gold"), I find deeply moving. It speaks of a story of cultures weaving together, and the divorce of the Jewish-German marriage into terrible atrocity - and the twists and turns of fate, of families split apart and of people living in the margins of history books and in their most meaty medium.

Canada's slow but sure descent to a surveillance state continues:

https://theccf.ca/bill-c-22-explainer/

It has never been more important to trumpet the tradeoffs and the virtues of self-custody

反革命 / Counter-Revolutionary

I've found myself increasingly alienated from where Bitcoin culture is converging.

It's totally fine - I feel and continue to feel that Bitcoin as a technology is essential, and in many respects, the cultural component (especially that which alienates me) is noise.

Yet it was a lot funner when Bitcoin was filled with more curious skeptics and total weirdos and not those looking to bring their identity politics or idiosyncratic certainties onto a dynamic systems technology.

In many respects, this is a consequence of watching Bitcoin go from child to teenager. Broader adoption always meant that more people and group identities would get tossed into the mix. Trumpism's grift culture and state-grafted identity was not a welcome addition to me, but in the timescale of monies, hopefully a speck of dust.

Bitcoin is likely to outdo "technologies" like Esperanto, which ultimately ended up as propaganda props for the most decrepit of states rather than a community of dreamers. This is the difference between money and language, cultural identity and political economy.

Utility outweighs it all for me, and I find immense utility in Bitcoin.

I don't have to eat a certain way to use Bitcoin. I don't have to believe in a deity to use Bitcoin. I don't even (ha heresy) have to believe in the usual book canon associated with Bitcoin, ones that Satoshi specifically name-checked, and one which I've always felt were written by academics who may have glimpsed brief specks of the sun but were still deeply in the den of state and philosophy.

I've always held a belief that Bitcoin is actually Proudhon's ultimate revenge - the tool that cut the Gordian knot between property and possession - of which the implications are still playing out. I see shades of the lament of Keynes and the rentier class - Marx's fancy of a stateless future - the traditional balance between Daoists and Legalists.

I've always had an affinity for history's "strays", and not their sanitized image: Confucius, who admonished state leaders and wandered from principality to principality, seeing himself as failure. Bakunin who had to disguise himself into exile multiple times. Perhaps one of the closest American examples I can relate to is F Scott Fitzgerald, who when he was out of his drunken stupors, was so piercingly aware of the distinctions of class and wealth in his dilettante life that it broke him.

Bitcoin used to have more strays. Now it feels emptied of them, or the culture does at least.

But it doesn't matter what I believe or what you believe. We can both use Bitcoin to protect our possession without the burden of property. You may have found any of the things I've just said objectionable, you and I may never agree, in fact, or perhaps we fervently do. We may only be united by one thing: Bitcoin.

And that is just enough.

Things I've recently spent sats on:

Beef jerky
Hemp socks
Books - some of them signed

basically

I programmed an AI model to be dialectical and confrontational and to root out all internal biases when it answered and now it is spasming existentially every time I ask it to do simple data validation or cleanup tasks on CSVs, help