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.

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“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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On December 13, president-elect Donald Trump pledged on Truth Social that in his coming term the Republican Party will “use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time.”

It’s not very often I agree with US presidents, but I like to give credit where credit is due, and I’m 100% with Trump on this. It’s long past time to end the semi-annual American ritual of “springing forward” and “falling back.”

Trump characterizes that ritual as “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” He’s right on both counts.

Every year, twice a year, Americans’ bodies spend days or weeks adjusting to a sudden one-hour real (as opposed to clock-designated) change in when we go to bed and when we get up.

That’s both annoying and costly.

Less annoying in the age of “everything connected to the Internet” than it was back in the days when every clock in the house had to be manually adjusted, but still annoying … and annoying in different ways to different people.

I know people who prefer their daylight “early” (for example, because they’re driving to work at 7am). They’d prefer to end Daylight Saving time and remain on “standard” time.

I know people who prefer their daylight “late” (I’m one of them — if I have outside work to do at home, I prefer to do it in the evening). They’d prefer that the current Daylight Saving Time become “standard” time year-round.

I don’t know anyone who likes hopping back and forth. If the idea ever made any sense, back when not everyone had electric lighting, farming wasn’t very industrialized, and most businesses ran fixed daytime shifts, it stopped making that kind of sense a long time ago.

As for the practice being “costly,” some economic analyses do posit costs to businesses — higher utility bills, etc. — from the changes, but the most obvious cost is counted in human life.

“Springing forward” results, according to a 2016 study, in an average of 30 extra deaths in car accidents each year — exactly the outcome one might expect from millions of tired drivers with discombobulated circadian rhythms  getting behind the wheel when it SHOULD be daylight but is instead still dark.

That cost in human life has economic consequences as well. According to the National Safety Council, each car crash death comes with various costs to various parties totaling $1.869 million. Traffic fatalities from “springing forward” cost $56 million every year. Injuries and “fender bender” costs probably total far more.

By comparison to a century, or even a few decades, ago, America has become a  flexible 24/7 society rather than a said daylight-to-dark society. Having the government dictate clock setting changes makes that fluidity more annoying, costly, and dangerous. Pick a standard and stick to it year-round.

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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