It’s “year in review” time for most political columnists, so here’s my opinion on 2024, along with a recommendation for 2025.

Opinion: Zero out of ten, would not recommend. If you’re reading this in the year 2525 as you’re preparing to test a time machine and trying to decide what past year to visit, avoid this one.

At the societal level, I can’t think of any major positive events — political or cultural — worth your energy. No Armistice Day, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or man on the moon moments come to mind (maybe the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, will help with that — it comes out on Christmas Day, after this column goes to press).

The year was equal parts anger, outrage, violence, and boredom.

The US presidential campaign was weird in certain ways, but not in ways that make it uniquely interesting unless dementia, opportunistic ladder-climbing, and the Truth Social equivalent of “mean tweets” happen to be hobbies of yours.

Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continued, but they were more “major downer” than “major development” in character. A lot of bodies, not very many moves toward peace or even closure.

And so on, and so forth. It just really hasn’t been a very good year.

I’m not complaining on a PERSONAL level, mind you. I’m happy that my family made it through 2024 without major medical or financial setbacks, and that I started getting a little more adventurous as my golden (grayen?) years approach (to wit, with my nuclear birth family all dead and unable to worry about, or scold, me, I started riding a motorcycle). I hope your year was good as well and suspect it probably went better in inverse relation to the attention you paid to politics and world affairs.

I also wish you and yours a happy, healthy, prosperous holiday season and new year.

Which brings me to my recommendation for helping bring that result about NEXT year.

There oughta be a law.

If you know me at all, you know I don’t say that very often.

But I really think this one could be important. In faux legalese, here’s my proposal:

“No government employee, elected or appointed government official, or candidate for election or appointment to government office, shall make, utter, or issue any public statement relating to those positions between midnight on December 18 of the current year and midnight on January 1 of the next year.”

No speeches. No press conferences. No press releases. No social media posts on “official” accounts. If you want to tell family members “Merry Christmas,” etc., in person, by phone, or on your personal social media accounts, fine. But none of this “my fellow Americans” stuff. When you’re not annoying or enraging your fellow Americans, you’re just boring us. So shut your yappers for a couple of weeks and leave us alone.

I guess that kind of law would run afoul of the First Amendment … but most of the people affected don’t care about the First Amendment anyway, right?

Happy holidays.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On December 18, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert banning drone flights over parts of New Jersey through next January 17 for unspecified “Special Security Reasons.”

The unspecified actual reason is lots of people getting creeped out because they believe they’re seeing lots of drones hovering over the state at night.

There’s an element of panic here, and panic tends to spread and get silly.

Former governor Larry Hogan took his panic public, only to get told that the “drones” he thought he saw over his house were probably, you know, stars — the constellation Orion.

New Jersey congressman Jeff Van Drew babbled about “circumstantial evidence that there’s an Iranian mothership off the East Coast of the United States, and that’s launching these drone incursions,” a claim Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh denied, probably right after spewing coffee all over her desk and rolling around on the floor unable to speak without laughing for awhile.

Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, so well-known for her calm demeanor and sharp analytical skills, announced that she’s ready to “shoot the drones down myself along with every other red blooded freedom loving American.”

Some otherwise non-politician normal (but I repeat myself) New Jerseyans apparently made it their whole lives without noticing that airplanes use the sky before seeing 737s on approach to Newark Liberty International and thinking “drones.”

But yeah, there are probably quite a few real drones involved at this point. Some of them may even be up to no good. But every drone hobbyist in the state is probably having a few good laughs at the panicked public every night over a few beers.

In a rare moment of calm and lucidity, president-elect Donald Trump tried to shut down the idea that the drones — real and imagined — are some kind of attack on the US. The government may not want to issue a clear statement on what’s happening, for some reason, he says, but “I can’t imagine it’s the enemy, because if it was the enemy they’d blast it.”

Maybe it’s just a bunch of civilian drones and a bunch of things being mistaken for drones.

Maybe the aliens are finally here in force, hoping to find and rescue their lost explorer, the Jersey Devil.

Maybe the Iranians or al Qaeda or the Judean People’s Front managed to build a “mothership,” park it off the eastern seaboard, and launch multiple large drone incursions, all  without attracting the notice of the world’s leading surveillance state.

Maybe it’s a US government operation of some kind — dangerous or harmless, necessary or pure money-waster — that’s “classified” because REASONS.

Who knows?

The only thing we can be sure of is that an FAA notice won’t put a  stop to it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Bitcoin,”  economist Dean Baker argues at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “won’t put food on the table. Bitcoin also won’t put gas in your car or provide medical care for your family.  … Bitcoin doesn’t actually produce these items or anything else that we directly consume.”

Baker is absolutely right. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies don’t produce  the various goods or services that we directly consume.

Neither, however, do dollars, euros, rubles, rupees, etc. produce the various goods or services that we directly consume.

For the most part, that is. Dollars, euros, rubles, rupees, etc. — and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — do produce one thing, and it’s possibly the most important of all consumables: Trust.

When your employer pays you on Friday, you trust that the money he pays you with will in turn be trusted by those who sell you everything from gas to groceries to gardening tools.

Trusted as a medium of exchange that can be spent forward on other things.

Trusted as a store of value that will remain approximately as valuable to other people tomorrow as today.

Trusted as a unit of account that allows accounting to work, making the other two trust types feasible.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are at least potentially capable of besting  government-issued currencies on all three metrics.

Bitcoin is highly trustworthy as a medium of exchange and unit of account for two simple reasons.

First, it requires trust only in the system/algorithm that processes the transactions — not in third parties who might, to quote Darth Vader, “alter the deal” at any time and without your permission.

Governments and central banks can’t inflate Bitcoin’s value away, stealing a little bit of your wealth at a time, by magically creating more — as they can with dollars, etc. Per the system’s design, there can never be more than 21 million Bitcoins.

Nor can dishonest parties “charge back” transactions as they can with debit cards — once a Bitcoin transaction has taken place on the blockchain ledger, it’s immutable and irreversible.

That 21 million Bitcoin limit ticks the second box, making it a solid unit of account.

As for the middle function, “store of value,” yes,  Bitcoin — like all other currencies — will fluctuate in value as people find it more or less attractive and useful.

That happens with all forms of money. If it didn’t, traders wouldn’t be able to profit (or lose) on currency trades by predicting those fluctuations correctly (or incorrectly).

Bitcoin has, correctly, been called “volatile” when it comes to fluctuations versus other currencies.  But it’s worth noting that the “volatility” has trended upward. Some (not all) fiat currencies may be less volatile … but most continuously lose value due to inflation, while Bitcoin’s volatility will likely fade as adoption/use increases. Its resistance to government/central bank inflation makes it far less vulnerable to volatility worries.

Baker’s real problem with Bitcoin seems to be that it doesn’t fit into his Keynesian-leaning economic ideas on government control of money. But that’s a point in favor of, not against, Bitcoin.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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