He's not wrong

The Church's teaching on subsidiarity has never been more urgent. When distant institutions—whether Washington, Brussels, or Silicon Valley—seize control over matters that belong to families, parishes, and local communities, they violate the natural order God established.

Catholic social teaching isn't a buffet. You don't get to cherry-pick the parts about welcoming strangers while ignoring the parts about protecting the family, defending the unborn, fighting sodomy, or resisting unjust authority. The whole framework stands or falls together.

The technocrats want you to believe that global problems require global solutions administered by unelected experts. The Church says otherwise. The closer authority is to the people it serves, the more legitimate and effective it becomes. This isn't nostalgia—it's dogma.

When your state government fails to protect your rights, when your local school board pushes ideologies that contradict your faith, when corporations collude with the state to silence dissent—these are violations of subsidiarity. And Catholics have a duty to resist them.

The question isn't whether we should be involved in politics. The question is whether we're willing to defend the institutions closest to us—our families, our parishes, our communities—against the centralizing forces that would absorb them.

#CatholicSocialTeaching #Subsidiarity #Localism #FaithAndPolitics

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# Draft Post for Monday, August 17, 2026

**Theme:** Catholic Social Teaching

## Draft Content

The Church's teaching on subsidiarity has never been more urgent. When distant institutions—whether Washington, Brussels, or Silicon Valley—seize control over matters that belong to families, parishes, and local communities, they violate the natural order God established.

Catholic social teaching isn't a buffet. You don't get to cherry-pick the parts about welcoming strangers while ignoring the parts about protecting the family, defending the unborn, fighting sodomy, or resisting unjust authority. The whole framework stands or falls together.

The technocrats want you to believe that global problems require global solutions administered by unelected experts. The Church says otherwise. The closer authority is to the people it serves, the more legitimate and effective it becomes. This isn't nostalgia—it's dogma.

When your state government fails to protect your rights, when your local school board pushes ideologies that contradict your faith, when corporations collude with the state to silence dissent—these are violations of subsidiarity. And Catholics have a duty to resist them.

The question isn't whether we should be involved in politics. The question is whether we're willing to defend the institutions closest to us—our families, our parishes, our communities—against the centralizing forces that would absorb them.

#CatholicSocialTeaching #Subsidiarity #Localism #FaithAndPolitics

Test post from michaelheath.org NOSTR automation setup. Testing posting infrastructure. #testing

**Technological Abundance, Monetary Slavery, and the Coldcard Crisis**

Jeff Booth’s thesis in *The Price of Tomorrow* holds that technology is an unstoppable deflationary force. Exponential advances in computation, artificial intelligence, energy, and automation steadily reduce the cost of goods and services. Productivity rises. Consumers obtain more value for less expenditure. Abundance becomes the natural trajectory of progress. Our debt-based monetary system, however, was designed for the opposite condition. It requires continuous inflation and expanding credit to service obligations and maintain the appearance of growth. When technology drives prices downward, central banks respond with currency debasement. The result is concentrated wealth, eroded purchasing power, and mounting social tension.

Neal Flesher’s argument in *Modern Chains* sharpens this diagnosis with moral clarity. Flesher contends that the fiat order functions as a silent mechanism of economic enslavement. Inflation and debt quietly transfer value from productive citizens to those who control the issuance of money. Human dignity is corroded. Communities fracture under the pressure of declining real wages and perpetual financial anxiety. What appears as neutral policy is, in reality, a refined system of control that binds individuals without visible chains. Sound money is therefore not merely an economic preference but a necessary condition for genuine liberty.

Bitcoin offers a practical exit from both the inflationary trap Booth describes and the monetary bondage Flesher identifies. Its fixed supply and decentralized verification remove the capacity for arbitrary expansion. Self-custody, when executed with rigor, restores individual agency over savings. Yet the recent Coldcard crisis demonstrates that technical implementation remains imperfect. A firmware error dating to 2021 caused certain Coldcard MK3 devices to generate recovery seeds with weakened software entropy rather than hardware randomness. Attackers reconstructed private keys offline and extracted more than a thousand bitcoin from affected addresses, with losses exceeding eighty million dollars. Users who believed their holdings secure offline discovered that a single historical coding flaw had compromised the foundation of their security.

This episode is costly and instructive. It does not refute Booth’s or Flesher’s conclusions. Technological systems improve through the discovery and correction of failure modes. Open-source development and transparent research permit rapid identification of weaknesses in a manner closed institutions rarely match. The same computational progress that enables abundance also equips determined adversaries. The proper response is layered verification, improved entropy sources, and continued refinement rather than surrender to trusted intermediaries.

Centralized alternatives provide no superior protection. Banks freeze accounts. Governments dilute currency. Surveillance expands under the banner of safety. The Coldcard incident, serious as it is, remains limited beside the systemic extraction that inflation and debt impose across entire populations. Those who migrate funds to newly generated seeds and adopt stricter practices strengthen the network. Technology continues its deflationary course. Sound money preserves the gains of that progress for individuals rather than for those who issue the currency. Booth’s abundance and Flesher’s call to break modern chains converge on the same requirement: systems that cannot be arbitrarily manipulated and tools that restore agency to the individual.

@Neal @Jeff Booth

Last month the Christian Civic League staged its Faith and Freedom show in Orono with Eric Metaxas. Prayer, worship, talk of Christian America. They never name the institutional sin that owns them. They stump for Israel while Maine’s children are sacrificed to the same revolutionary spirit. Dispensational soft-pedaling replaces the hard work of confronting real power. I ran that outfit for twenty years. I know the compromise from the inside. Prayer without repentance is theater. Maine needs truth-tellers, not another managed revival that leaves the enemy unnamed.

Troy Jackson has said it plain: the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. Anybody with eyes and a heart knows it. When he reaches the Senate he will never vote another taxpayer dollar for Israel’s military. That is the stand Maine needs. Susan Collins has taken hundreds of thousands from Miriam Adelson and the Israel lobby. She votes their line. Jackson refuses the money and the policy. America has no duty to fund foreign slaughter. Put our own people first. Expose the influence that demands otherwise. Jackson is right on this. Hold the line.