On August 23, the Southern District Court of New York unsealed an indictment accusing two Romans of money laundering.

“Romans” doesn’t refer here to people from Rome. It refers to two guys named “Roman” — Roman Storm of the United States and Roman Semenov of Russia.

And “money laundering” doesn’t refer here to actual money laundering in either the real or metaphorical sense. It refers to developing software that protects people’s privacy, namely a “cryptocurrency tumbler” which allows people to move money around without permission from or — hopefully — the knowledge of government spies.

The software in question is called Tornado Cash.

Unlike some “tumblers,” Tornado Cash is open source (anyone can see the code it runs on) and decentralized (it has no single “owners” or decision-makers and is governed by “smart contracts” and the votes of anyone who holds its “tokens”).

Storm and Semenov face the “money laundering” charges because, the government alleges, people it doesn’t like have used Tornado Cash to avoid US government sanctions, US government taxes, etc.

Programs like Tornado Cash scare the hell out of politicians. The ability to earn and spend money without their permission is an existential threat to their power over you. That kind of thing must be nipped in the bud at all cost. Therefore, selected victims must be made examples of, and Storm and Semenov drew the short straws this time around.

Tornado Cash takes the form of a “Decentralized Autonomous Organization.”

Governments don’t mind organizations, as long as those organization can be carefully monitored, tightly controlled, and harshly punished should they happen to get on any politician’s wrong side in any way at any time.

The “decentralized” and “autonomous” parts make it harder to monitor, control, and punish an organization.

Whether the Tornado Cash DAO is decentralized and autonomous enough to survive the attempts on its life (so to speak) is questionable. Because it’s a for-profit proposition, with token holders still maintaining some control over, and benefiting from, its operations, there may be further weak points.

But for now, the weak point is “who wrote the code?” The government is going after Storm and Semenov because they’re known to have been involved in doing so.

In the future, we’re going to need Decentralized Autonomous Programs, not organizations — anonymously authored, open source software that, once released into the wild, fulfills its functions without further human supervision.

With governments increasingly looking to get into the “Centralized Bank Digital Currency” game, your future options boil down to two:

Government can control every cent you earn, hold, or spend, in every respect, all the time, 24/7/365.

Or government can lose its control over money entirely.

This is an all-or-nothing scenario, folks. It’s one or the other. Choose wisely.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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

I keep hearing that COVID-19 is back — but of course, it never really left and likely never will. Case numbers and hospitalizations are ticking upward, something we’re likely to see as a seasonal phenomenon from here on out.

I finally experienced the virus firsthand last week. I rate it zero stars, not recommended.  As flu-type illnesses go, it was far from the worst I’ve lived through, but it wasn’t pleasant.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve been getting off easy. It killed my mother in 2020, and last year, the other four people in my household all experienced it with varying degrees of severity, but I never tested positive or felt any symptoms (I credit the Novavax vaccine, for which I was a clinical trial volunteer). This time, we ALL got it. I can’t say it wasn’t my turn.

Another thing that  never fully left and seems to be raising its ugly head again: COVID-19 authoritarianism.

For two years, politicians and “public health” bureaucrats at all levels of government got their jollies pushing us around.

They threw centuries of actual, hard-earned epidemiological knowledge and experience — for example, the absence of evidence that masking prevents the spread of viral disease — in the trash can and replaced it with a state-established religion they called THE SCIENCE.

At points, they attempted to shut life as we knew it completely down across large parts of the country. They insisted on visible displays of faith in their new religion, in the form of those ineffectual masks. They limited our travel, threatened our jobs if we declined their heavily promoted, but also largely ineffective, mRNA vaccines, and admonished us to just get used to a “new normal,” the distinguishing feature of which was to be them remaining in charge of everything we did, indefinitely.

Yes, the madness subsided over time. But the sense of entitlement to rule obviously remains.

NewsNation’s Elizabeth Prann reports that, per a group called No College Mandates, more than 100 universities and colleges across the US still maintain vaccine mandates, and that a few (including Rutgers and Georgetown) still require religious face gear indoors.

Every spike in cases brings our technocrat masters around to muse about the possibility of returning to mask mask mandates, “encouraging” (because they’ve so far mostly failed to mandate) vaccine and booster “uptake,” etc.

Their “new normal” never really achieved “normal” status, but it lives on, largely due to the complete absence of real penalties for getting so power-hungry while getting nearly everything completely wrong.

How many of them went to jail, or  coughed up fines, for their various violations of your rights to live, travel, and work?

How many  lost their jobs for abandoning basic standards of science and getting nearly everything completely wrong?

How many have even admitted and apologized for their  totalitarian antics?

We do indeed need a “new normal” — and the distinguishing feature of that normality must be that in the future the technocrats show their work and ask, rather than order, us to trust them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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

To me, Jason Aldean’s recent hit “Try That in a Small Town” provides the best  answer to an Internet joke question I’ve seen floating around for several years: “If you could completely eliminate one genre of music, what genre would you choose and why would it be modern country?”

The only thing remotely “country” about the song is the singer’s too thick by half insertion of a “hick” accent into what’s otherwise a weird mix of ’80s hair metal ballad instrumentation and ’90s girl pop singing cadence.

Then, of course, there’s the political angle. As an actual country/small-town boy by both upbringing and current residence (I grew up on a farm and then a town of less than 5,000), I kind of resent being portrayed as an angry, violent ignoramus by a guy who grew up in two mid-size cities (Macon, Georgia and Homestead, Florida) before moving to a large one (Nashville, Tennessee).

It’s the kind of “country” song that may draw people out to urban bars with mechanical bulls and cowboy-boot-shaped shot glasses, where they park their shiny big pickup trucks that have never hauled feed or driven fenceline, and put on their fancy hats that were picked to match an outfit, not to keep the sun off a face that’s never worked in a field. Or maybe even seen one. I have yet to hear anyone blasting it out of a rust-bucket old Chevy 3/4-ton in the town nearest me (the metropolis of Archer, Florida, population 1,118), though.

If you’re looking for REAL country music, you could do a lot worse than to give Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” — a so-called “viral hit” — a close listen.

According to The Oklahoman, Anthony “lives off the grid with his three dogs in Farmville, Virginia” (population 7,473).

He’s a high school dropout and former factory worker.

His backing band isn’t some recycled heavy metal combo. It’s himself, playing a resonator guitar.

His response to record deal offers: “I don’t want to play stadium shows, I don’t want to be in the spotlight. … No editing, no agent, no bullsh*t. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should never have gotten away from in the first place.”

When I say he just might be a hillbilly, that’s intended as  a compliment, not an insult.

His “hit” song — whether one agrees with its every political implication or not — evokes the real problems of real people in real small towns and the real countryside, instead of using those people as some kind of yee-haw punch line.

I think he’s the genuine article. And I hope listeners engaging with “country music” for the first time find him before they find Jason Aldean.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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