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What genius retail executive mind could have figured this one out - that locking up merchandise in stores actually makes its more difficult for honest, paying customers to get to, and buy what they want?

Walgreens - facing a significant drop in year-over-year earnings - just announced plans to close 450 more stores nationwide, according to Futurism/The Byte. 

Efforts to curb "shrink" — losses from theft or fraud — included increased security measures, such as locking merchandise in containers requiring staff assistance.

However, these measures proved ineffective and counterproductive, frustrating customers.

CEO Tim Wentworth said on the company's earning's call: "It is a hand-to-hand combat battle still, unfortunately."

"But it does impact how sales work through the store because when you lock things up. For example, you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively," he continued. 

The report says that Walgreens is struggling with rising prices, which are making it harder for consumers to afford products. The company faces challenges in its retail business due to inflation and higher interest rates, leading to more cost-conscious shopping and changes in purchasing habits.

In 2021, Walgreens faced backlash for closing five stores in San Francisco, citing "organized" shoplifting, though police records showed only 23 incidents between 2018 and 2021.

During a 2023 earnings call, Walgreens CFO James Kehoe admitted the company may have over-invested in security to address theft, acknowledging the company had perhaps exaggerated the problem. This suggests Walgreens has often used theft concerns as a cover for deeper issues within its retail operations.

President Trump on Monday gave a 'full pardon' to over 1,500 political prisoners who were involved in the Jan. 6 riot.

?? President Trump has pardoned approximately 1500 January 6th political prisoners of the Biden era pic.twitter.com/LwL2S7l5Ft

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 21, 2025

Earlier in the day, Trump told a yuge crowd at the Capitol One Arena that he was going to "release our great hostages," referring to the Jan. 6 prisoners.

"As soon as I leave, I'm going to the Oval Office, and we'll be signing pardons for a lot of people, a lot of people," Trump continued.

Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy, is currently being processed for release from FCI Pollock, a medium security federal prison in Louisiana, NBC News reports. Tarrio had been sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after his conviction.

"He is being processed out," said his attorney, Nayib Hasssan. "We do not know what type of clemency he is receiving."

A U.S. Navy corpsman was administratively reprimanded last year after he attempted to access President Biden's medical records, according to a new report from CBS.

On Feb. 22, at the Naval Medical Readiness and Training Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, a Navy corpsman sat at his desk amidst the hum of computers and quiet chatter. Nearby, a licensed civilian nurse and an Army soldier worked.

The routine setting took a turn when a colleague left her workstation, her Common Access Card (CAC) still logged in. This smart card, about the size of a credit card, grants access to secure military networks and facilities.

The group began discussing the security risk of unattended CACs, with one person noting the potential for misuse: "Someone could maliciously use your CAC when you walk away."

Spurred by "curiosity" and this conversation, the corpsman accessed restricted files. According to a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report obtained by CBS News through a Freedom of Information Act request, the low-ranking sailor attempted to access the president's medical records.

The investigation led to a nonjudicial punishment for dereliction of duty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The corpsman, whose identity was withheld, was demoted from E-3 to E-2, given 20 days of extra duty, and had pay reduced by half for six months. An E-2 with two to three years of service earns about $2,260 monthly.

The CBS report says that during a discussion about the risks of unattended CAC accounts, someone suggested such access could be used to view the president's medical records. Curious, the Navy corpsman tested this by searching "Joseph Biden" in the Genesis Medical Health System. A single record appeared, with a matching birthdate verified via Google. The file was accessed for about 20 seconds, revealing minimal information, including a doctor's name, which didn’t match publicly available details.

Realizing the seriousness of his actions, the corpsman closed the file. A female colleague advised him to self-report, but he delayed. Another coworker reported the violation first. The corpsman later confessed, citing curiosity and denying any intent to save, share, or document the record.

NCIS launched an investigation, discovering no link between the corpsman and political motives or hacktivist groups, though a reverse image search on his Instagram profile hinted at potential Anonymous imagery. Searches on his laptop included terms like "Biden" and "Anonymous." His devices, seized and analyzed, were eventually returned.

The accessed record was later confirmed to be non-legitimate. The president was informed quickly, undergoing an unrelated physical two days after the investigation began, where he was deemed "fit for duty." The corpsman faced disciplinary action but cooperated fully throughout the inquiry.

President Donald Trump's imminent executive orders addressing the illegal alien invasion, border crisis, and cartel violence could not come soon enough, as a new report out of Arizona says a multi-agency investigation led to the arrest of several asylum seekers and a US citizen in possession of 30,000 rounds of ammunition. 

Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, Arizona, revealed Sunday in a Facebook post that in mid-January, Cochise County Counter Narcotics, Trafficking Alliance assisted Homeland Security Investigations and Burau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized 10,000 rounds of .50 caliber ammunition and 19,640 rounds of 7.62x39 ammunition from multiple vehicles, operated by several asylum seekers and one US citizen from Texas.

Dannels' Facebook post read:

Multi-agency investigation results in ammunition seizure

In mid-January of 2025, the Cochise County Counter Narcotics and Trafficking Alliance (CNTA) assisted Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Burau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) with an investigation leading to the seizure of 10,000 rounds of .50 caliber ammunition and 19,640 rounds of 7.62x39 ammunition.

The .50 caliber and 7.62x39 rounds were separated within two vehicles traveling east on Interstate 10 from the Phoenix area. The vehicle containing the 7.62x39 ammunition was interdicted by the Pinal County Sheriff's office. Still, the second vehicle containing the .50 caliber ammunition was located by CNTA investigators at Motel 6 in Benson.

CNTA, HSI, and USBP contacted the vehicle's two occupants at the motel. One of the occupants was found to be an asylum seeker out of Cuba and the second individual was identified as a US citizen out of Texas. The second vehicle was occupied by two asylum seekers. This investigation is ongoing and led by HSI and ATF.

Images of the seizure: 

Facebook users responded to the sheriff's post with disgust: 

"This isn't even the tip of the iceberg of what has traveled from this country. Smh Hope they never see American soil again!" one Facebook user said. 

Another person said the ammo was mostly likely destined for cartels. 

"Bet it was heading to the border or worse, heading to all the illegals who are planning an attack on US soil! So many people from different countries came here and we know nothing of their past or their true intentions," someone else said. 

"Deportation for all. Go, Trump," someone else said. 

Local law enforcement and federal agencies have yet to disclose the buyer or final destination of the ammo. Speculation points to cartels as the likely customer, but the billion-dollar question remains: for cartel operations in the US or in Mexico? Or worse, terror organizations within the US could've outsourced ammunition and weapons procurement to migrants.

The good news, according to President Trump earlier today, is that the era of open southern borders under globalist Democrats, which has threatened national security to unprecedented levels, is coming to an end. After being sworn in, Trump assured Americans that he would designate drug cartels as terrorist organizations.

Law and order must be restored. That's the mandate the American people have given Trump. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“Your credibility with me … is about none.”

Those words to CNN counsel by Judge William Henry also clearly spoke for the Florida jury which, on Friday, awarded $5 million for Navy veteran Zachary Young and approved an additional amount, still to be determined, for punitive damages.

The CNN loss is only the latest in a series of media cases that have reversed decades of case law where the media largely prevailed under highly protective legal standards. It says a great deal about the state of modern journalism and its unrelenting efforts at self-destruction.

In “The Indispensable Right,” I discuss the radical shift in American journalism that occurred with the rejection of neutrality and objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism. J-schools now teach that objectivity is a dated concept. As former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has explained, “All journalism is activism.”

After interviewing more than 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, detailed how media leaders view neutrality and objectivity as dated concepts that inhibit social and political agendas.

The public’s response to this trend has been both predictable and pronounced. The famous “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident after a NASCAR race, after all, was more of a criticism of the media than of Joe Biden — a “Yankee Doodling” of the press for its distortion of facts.

Revenue and ratings for media outlets have plummeted, although there are other contributing factors. During the trial, CNN host Jake Tapper was challenged for his testimony that he “doesn’t pay attention to ratings.” That does not appear to be the case at the network, which is cratering and desperately trying to reverse the ratings plunge. CNN has reportedly lost half of its viewership, hitting lows not seen in three decades.

The jury clearly believed, as the network’s slogan claims, that “This is CNN.” That is probably the reason it will soon award punitive damages. However, this is not just CNN. The case itself highlighted everything wrong with modern media.

The segment aired on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” on Nov. 11, 2021, and trashed Young in a story about Afghans being preyed upon by groups promising to get them out of the country amid the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces. Tapper told his audience ominously how CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt discovered that “Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success.”

Marquardt detailed how “desperate Afghans are being exploited” and need to pay “exorbitant, often impossible amounts” and then named Young and his company as examples.

The trial revealed internal messages from Marquardt that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young motherf—–” and thought the story would be Young’s “funeral.” After promising to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded that he was “gonna hold you to that cowboy!” CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan described Young as “a s—.”

As often occurs today, CNN allegedly gave Young only two hours to respond before the story ran. It is a typical ploy of the press to claim that they gave someone a chance to respond. The call often comes at the end of the day to create the appearance of fairness.  Nevertheless, Young did respond to the chagrin of CNN producers and made clear that key elements of the story were untrue.

CNN’s defense in court was a case study in how not to defend a defamation lawsuit. It included a series of self-inflicted wounds, delivered in front of the jury. However, it is only the latest loss for major media, given recent courthouse setbacks for the New York Times, NBC, and Deadspin. ABC News recently settled its own defamation case out of court, and previously Fox News paid a massive settlement.

Nevertheless, some outlets appear to be doubling down in the hope that they can ride anti-Trump coverage back to robust ratings. Last week, NBC announced that it was bringing Yamiche Alcindor to the White House press corps. Alcindon, who also worked for PBS, was widely criticized for often preceding questions with attacks on conservatives or over-the-top praise for Joe Biden or Democrats. While others saw raw political bias, Alcindor explained that it was her job to use journalism to bend the “moral arc toward justice.”

For decades, the media found ample protection within the protective shell created by the Supreme Court after New York Times v. Sullivan. The Court sought to create “breathing space” for the media by articulating a standard that now applies to both public officials and public figures. The demanding standard requires a showing of “actual malice,” where the media had actual knowledge of a statement’s falsity or showed reckless disregard for whether it was true or false.

The string of media losses reflects a change not in the law but in the media itself. As the press increasingly engages in advocacy journalism, reckless disregard for the truth is becoming the norm, as shown in the CNN case. It could get worse.

Some have questioned the extension of this protective standard to cases involving public figures, which encompasses anyone who has achieved a modicum of fame in business, sports, or other pursuits. A couple of justices have also expressed skepticism about why non-public figures should shoulder such a burden when people lie about them.

Meanwhile, the public is abandoning legacy media at a run, turning to new media in the form of blogs and citizen journalists. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such a citizen journalist in a criminal case — a woman known as La Gordiloca (loosely translated as “fat, crazy lady”). Describing her as a “swearing muckraker who is upending border journalism,” the New York Times admitted that La Gordiloca “reflects how many people on the border now prefer to get their news.”

The rise in citizen journalists in new media and advocacy journalism in legacy media will only likely increase the number of such cases in the coming years. For mainstream media, the skepticism that they are facing in society is now becoming equally evident in courts. To paraphrase Judge Henry, their credibility with the public is about none.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

For much of the past year, oil traders were desperate to find a bullish thesis. Now, in the span of just a few weeks, they have two.

On one hand, amid mounting fears of a supply and inventory glut, Biden's parting gift of accelerated sanctions against Russian oil exporters and tankers appears to have promptly removed as much as 1.5 million barrels in daily supply, and pushed oil prices to a 5 month high.

But while Russian supply is set to shrink materially for the next few months, US demand is about to surge. That's because President Donald Trump said during his inaugural address that he plans to refill the US’s strategic oil reserve “right to the top” after it reached lows not seen since the 1980s under Joe Biden's handlers, who drained about half of the SPR after the Ukraine war to prevent a surge in oil prices.

Trump vowed to “bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world” during his inaugural address at the Capitol Monday.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a maximum capacity of about 700 million barrels, currently stands at at 394.4 million barrels following a record selloff during Biden’s administration, which drained about half by late 2023. The drawdowns under Biden included selling 180 million barrels into the global market in an attempt to bring down gasoline prices following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Biden had begun slowly refilling the emergency cache, which was created in the aftermath of Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, but ran out of funding to buy more crude after purchasing about 60 million barrels. It would take an act of Congress to appropriate more money for the Energy Department’s petroleum account.

Of course, the moment such act is passed, oil traders will start frontrunning the US government and push crude prices sharply higher, especially if and when China finally capitulates and unleashes the massive stimulus its economy so badly needs.

But while it will take some time before Trump's plan to refill the SPR is implemented, the Russian export squeeze is already hitting the global commodity market hard, with costs to hire an oil supertanker on key routes to China more than doubling since the US imposed sanctions on Russia two weeks ago, showing the extent to which the move has upended the global shipping market.

The sanctions have jolted a freight market that was, until recently, dealing with softer demand due to supply curbs, a tepid Chinese economy, and an easing of Middle East tensions. The number of confirmed journeys hasn’t changed much, but the pool of available ships has shrunken rapidly, and there’s intense competition on certain routes.

As shown below, daily rates for very-large crude carriers on the Middle East-to-China route surged 112% to $57,589 in the week through Friday, according to Baltic Exchange data, after Washington sanctioned nearly 160 tankers hauling Russian crude on Jan. 10. Those on the US Gulf-to-China journey jumped 102%, while West Africa-to-China saw an increase of 90%.

The reason for the surge in tanker rates is that in recent days, major Chinese refiners have been been rushing to buy crude from the Middle East, Africa and the Americas to make up for the loss of Russian oil. A VLCC from the US Gulf to China was hired for $9.5 million last week, compared to a low-$7 million range over the last couple of months, shipping fixtures show.  Indian Oil Corp. is also snapping upup Middle Eastern barrels, adding to the pressure.

Separately, there’s concern that tanker rates could remain elevated if Trump takes a tougher line against Tehran, which he has also promised to do.

“Rates could hold at these levels if Trump dials up the pressure on Iranian oil shipments, which is more likely than not,” said Junjie Ting, a Singapore-based shipping analyst at Oil Brokerage.

The rising demand for VLCCs, which can carry around 2 million barrels of oil, is also feeding through to costs for smaller vessels, which tend to be viewed as less cost-efficient on longer routes. Rates for Suezmaxes, that hold about 1 million barrels, have climbed on increased demand and tight supply, shipbroker SSY said in a report.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

Frazzledrip Overdrive

In 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler released the first of three seminal books about the trajectory that America, and the world was on. They published them at roughly decade intervals: Future Shock (1970), Power Shift, (1984), and Third Wave (1991). There were others (like War & Anti-War and Revolutionary Wealth), but those three laid out what was coming down the pipe and they were largely correct about it because their core premise was so simple:

The rate of change was accelerating.

That was it. But it affected everything. The ramifications went beyond cycle theory or long waves because it meant that cycles and long waves would themselves accelerate.

As this acceleration accelerated, it would begin to overwhelm the coping mechanisms of both individuals and institutions alike. Nobody would be exempt, and everybody was facing a kind of technological and cultural shell shock, which they called: Future Shock:

It is impossible to produce future shock in large numbers of individuals without affecting the rationality of the society as a whole. Today, according to Daniel P. Moynihan, the chief White House advisor on urban affairs, the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.” For the cumulative impact of sensory, cognitive or decisional overstimulation, not to mention the physical effects of neural or endocrine overload, creates sickness in our midst.

Of course, the “today” in the above passage was in 1970.

The Tofflers probably underestimated how bang-on they were, and the pace of change we’re experiencing just over the past few years (since “The Jackpot” event of 2020) probably would have dazzled both of them (Alvin passed away in 2016 and his wife Heidi in 2019).

I have long ascribed the kind of rampant “mass formation psychosis” (to use the Dr. Peter Malone term) to one thing above all else: Future Shock.

Most of the ridiculous bullshit people believe today

… and nearly all the policy blunders that are so catastrophically stupid as to appear to be intentional conspiracy

- are pure and simple Future Shock.

Go back and read the entire series.

Then you’ll get what’s actually… pic.twitter.com/9xGmhtnJJk

— Mark Jeftovic, The ?itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) June 18, 2024

While the Tofflers exhaustively explored the coming breakdown of our prevailing systems of government, education, military and business, there a few additional catalysts at play today – since the Jackpot – which are converging, and adding even more instability and disruption to the future shock.

I can think of three:

#1) We’re in a Crack-Up Boom

The first Future Shock book dropped right on the cusp of the Fiat Era. Less than a year later, the Nixon Shock would rug-pull the concept of “money”, and set in motion yet another accelerant: compounding debt and money creation.

Take all the cognitive dissonance and social breakdown that the Tofflers said future shock would cause, and add to that a doom-loop of money-printing and Cantillon Effect (if you don’t know what that is, just think of it in terms of accelerating wealth inequality).

All fiat currencies throughout history have gone to zero, no exceptions and as they approach their final glide path, society starts to experience the effects through ever accelerating inflation (sound familiar?)

There have been close to a dozen hyperinflations over the course of the 20th century, and there have already been a few in the 21st (the Venezuela and Zimbabwe) and a couple that have been teetering on the precipice (Argentina still struggling with 104% inflation in 2024, Turkey, Nigeria).

Usually when this occurs, it’s isolated to a single currency and there at least theoretically exists the option for capital flight into other currencies.

But owing to the global debt super-bubble, and rampant money creation of the fiat era, which accelerated through The Jackpot (Covid), high inflation is now happening pretty well everywhere (the only country I note that is experiencing deflation right now is Afghanistan).

Most significantly, the currency experiencing inflation (albeit officially “under control”) is the US dollar, the global reserve currency.

For months in The Bitcoin Capitalist (since that 50bps cut in September), we’ve been tracking how the Fed has lost control of the yield curve, and this portends a massive crisis regardless of what the official CPI is.

This is also why whenever we see something like a memecoin rocket from zero to stratospheric valuations, we don’t think of it in terms of a crypto bubble, we rather suspect what the Austrian School economists called “Katastrophenhausse” – literally “Catastrophic boom” or “Crack-up Boom“.

Tell me we're in a "crack-up boom" without using the phrase "crack-up boom"... pic.twitter.com/5P1DF7mvQj

— Mark Jeftovic, The ?itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) January 18, 2025

When a currency is in a real hyper-inflation territory, the crack-up boom becomes a flight to safety of “anything but“ the currency, which is in the process of disintegrating (see: It’s the Denominator, Stupid“)

We aren’t there yet. We may be a few years away from that – and so the pile-in to these memecoins isn’t about the preservation of purchasing power. But I suspect it is about financial nihilism: and the realization the the current system is doomed; that the path for “getting ahead” lies in being early on crazy moonshots and only needing to be right once.

The Tofflers never talked about how a global hyperinflationary event would effect their thesis. I can fill in the blanks: it’s like pouring accelerant on it.

#2) The Singularity Has Already Happened

The Tofflers never came out and said that the accelerating pace of change would result in humanity evolving into something else entirely; just that the effect of this ever quickening change would have profound effects on the collective psyche.

The pronouncement that it would result in an evolutionary quantum leap would be made by others, in later decades. “We will merge with machines”, was the overall theme. We will upload our consciousness into the cloud. We will transcend our physicality, we will experience a “post-biological” existence. We could even become …immortal.

What would make all this possible is the virtuous cycle created by digital computer networks, powered by Moore’s Law, incessantly halving their physical footprint while doubling their processing power – eventually we would achieve, and then surpass, the interconnectivity and the processing power of the human brain itself.

When that happened, all bets were off.

The assumption is that somewhere along this continuum, when the right thresholds of parallelism and power were surpassed, “mind” itself would leap out of the process – emerging with a vengeance and folding back in on itself, forking off subprocesses even more intelligent than itself, and so on, ad infinitum.

“Our final invention” will then survey the world, with all its deficiencies and inefficiencies, and being infinitely smarter than all human minds combined, will deftly solve everything.

At that point there will be little left for us clunky, slow-witted humans to do.

We can then retire into a life of leisure, experiencing anything existence has to offer courtesy of the super-intelligent beings we had engineered into existence. We can even shed our mortal coils and experience it all from within the safety and comfort of an artificial computer generated construct. Our own personal, chrooted universes where we could experience anything our minds desired.

The likes of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamondis posit this oncoming event as “The Singularity”. Kurzweil (who turns 77 next month) thinks it’ll happen by 2045, and reputedly guzzles about 300 capsules per day of various nutrients and supplements in a bid to keep his mortal coil alive long enough to make the leap into immortality.

There are various problems with this scenario, in fact back before Covid (“The Jackpot event“), I started writing a book about it which has since languished on the back-burner (my focus over 2025 will be to finish the CBDC Survival Guide).

As a general rule, things never play out along the lines of the best forecasts. I’ve written about this before, and borrowed the term recipriversexclusion from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to describe it. In the Douglas Adams book, it meant a number whose value could be anything but itself (i.e “The given hour for a dinner party is the one moment in time that it is impossible for any of the guests to arrive”).

In our context, it’s that consensus estimates and expert forecasts describe the single timeline that is impossible to occur.

I’ll go one further. I think that we are already in the post-singularity era. Right now. 

It happened within the last couple years with the AI wave – of third major technological wave of this century (internet, crypto, now AI) and the eighth major technological leap since the industrial revolution (electricity, radio/TV, telephones, semi-conductors, personal computers).

Now we’re past the point where the code is coding. The feedback loop there is already underway, and it too is accelerating…

I'm not sure people understand how important this is:

Goldman Sachs CEO says that AI can draft 95% of an IPO prospectus “in minutes.”

White collar jobs will go first.... and fast. pic.twitter.com/ZWbMEGIhhs

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) January 17, 2025

#3) We’re in a bizarro-verse alternate reality

We crossed into it on July 13, 2024.

At that moment, our entire reality phase-shifted into another timeline. This happens constantly (JFK assassination, 9/11), but sometimes, the most monumental shifts are the result of almost accidental “hinge moments”  (there’s an excellent book by that name that lays out a few of them over the past thousand years).

Hanging chads in 2000 US election. Trump turning his head to point toward a chart at a key moment…

We're in a completely different timeline now.

...and it's accelerating.

Not very many people get that.

Sound on. ???? pic.twitter.com/7Z2me11dED

— Mark Jeftovic, The ?itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) November 10, 2024

(That’s a Bill McClintock mash-up, btw, be sure you crank it loud)

So now, we’re in an ever-accelerating technology loop, amidst an Austrian School Crack-Up Boom, taking place within the early innings of a global hyper-inflationary event, in the early days after the technological Singularity.

And, we’ve flipped timelines, into what looks like some kind of bizarro-verse.

Earth 29, from the DC Multi-verse, apparently.

At least that’s what it feels like. 

This is one of the symptoms of Future Shock.

And the craazy thing is, we’re aren’t even in the parabolic acceleration phase yet. We’re still just rounding the corner, in the inflection point:

So What Does “Frazzledrip” Mean?

Anything you relied upon for stability and predictability in the past is over. Governments are near-comedic basket cases, healthcare under nearly every system is a disaster, educational systems near-catatonic. Businesses are moving with the times, some with aplomb, some bomb.

But the most visible casualty of them all is the real-time self-destruction of the corporate, state-approved media complex.

How information travels between nodes has shifted from broadcast to interlocking networks (neural nets) and this will never revert back.

Today we get higher signal news, and faster, on X, than we do from the MSM – the latter of which gets to “breaking news” hours or even days after the fact; and only then after it gets pureed through an intersectional sieve of agitprop.

But the flip side is that in this super-conductive neural net of unrestrained signal, a lot of truly unhinged stuff gains traction.

In the past, we had a centrally organized information publishing ecosystem: news, publications, broadcast, and they all had editorial processes and filters that, for awhile, almost looked objective and neutral – focusing more on “getting it right” than punditry.

That all went by the wayside over the past decades, especially since the twin populist crimes of 2016: Brexit, and the first Trump election. That was when it became clear that the gatekeepers were now curating informational pathways that most people were in the process of abandoning.

In the emergent system – the decentralized, internet system, there is no effective way to manage or control “misinformation” or “disinformation”. In fact, after reading countless NGO and policy papers on the topic, I rarely see one that can even offer a clear definition of what those terms mean.

So we’re all stuck trying to cope with sensory overload – note that I didn’t say information overload, because a lot of it isn’t information – a lot of it is conjecture, conspiracy and shared neurosis.

My catch-all phrase for everything that seems crazy and unprovable is “Frazzledrip”, which is the name of my bookmarks folder where I keep all my clippings that fit in this bucket…

Frazzledrip is my preferred term to “conspiracy theory” (because there are a lot of real conspiracies):

• Directed energy weapons caused fires so that oligarchs could buy property cheap
• Michelle Obama and Brigette Marcon are dudes
• Flat Earth “truthers”

Basically the common theme among Frazzledrips is that everything that happens anywhere is the result of a carefully calculated cabal that rules the world and is intentionally destroying civilization to serve their own ends.

Before you get mad at me because you suspect I don’t subscribe to one of your personal Frazzledrips, we have to acknowledge that:

• Powerful groups do conspire to protect their own power, increase their wealth and wield outsize influence.
• There really is a lot of crazy, unhinged stuff actually happening.

The reality is, those powerful groups conspiring to their own ends are not a monolith, they are factions, and those factions are fractal. There is not only no consensus between these groups, aside from temporary, ever-shifting alignments of interest – there is active conflict between them. Possibly to the point where geopolitical events of the day are more likely the result of internecine factional conflicts than between identifiable sovereigns.

Even still, none of them are in control – let alone one of them, or even all of them: we live in an out of control world, and for many – that is a more terrifying prospect than the possibility that we live in a dystopian caste-based society, lorded over by an insular class of dynastic, elites (who are really shape-shifting lizards).

(Source?)

The reason people are prone to believe these narratives is because, in a weird way, they provide some semblance of structure, some kind of mental model that can explain the high weirdness (not to mention institutionalized incompetence) which typifies our day-to-day existence.

But the reason we live in a world of high weirdness and incompetence, is (you guessed it) Future Shock. 

Just to make it even harder to parse reality – it turns out there are heterodox narratives which really do have a higher probability of being accurate (like the Covid lab-leak, Epstein didn’t kill himself, or even 9/11 was an inside job), but are less likely to be widely believed than your typical “Frazzledrip”.

What’s To Be Done

The bitterest pill to swallow coming out of Covid, even after being a Libertarian and aspiring Sovereign Individual for most of my adult life, was the realization of just how on our own, each of us are.

Most normies live their entire lives under this assumption that “the system mostly works”, along with its support structures, governance models and information apparatus.

People like you and me had an awareness that this wasn’t as guaranteed as most others thought, and that we were on a path where this would become less reliable over time.

With Covid it seemed like complete institutional breakdown: our governments became openly tyrannical and the media complex went full brainwashing mode, while the healthcare system imploded. Suddenly, we, as individuals were tasked with shouldering a level of personal responsibility unlike anything we had ever faced before – it was one thing to lean toward self-reliance in the Beforetimes. Now we not only had to fill the vacuum left by a dysfunctional system, that system was openly hostile toward us.

Add to that, yet another technological revolution with AI blowing wide open and posing its own unique existential threat to anything that was still left intact.

I would submit that this actually isn’t  the time for radical self-reliance, you just have to be a lot more thoughtful about what and on whom you rely on.

This is probably a major contributor to why the Bitcoin culture has taken such hold. As a zeitgeist (Bitcoin is it’s own kind of morphic field, very distinct from “crypto”) – In addition to providing something an immutable: a globally dispersed ledger secured by Proof-of-Work, Bitcoin places heavy emphasis on personal fitness, contemplative practices (mindfulness, meditation) and family; which overflows into a kind of tribalism that I predict will come to define this era.

We also have to train ourselves to think more in terms of probabilities than binary true or false – if only because the truth is practically impossible for any of us to know when it comes to events and matters outside our own immediate frame of reference. Especially with AI, deepfakes, and botnets.

Finally, we have to focus on our own internal states and own personal goals – if we’re not examining all this wild mayhem happening around us through the lens of how it impacts (or even empowers) our ability to pursue our own goals, then we’re just a pinball being batted around everybody else’s machine.

(Last year I soft-launched an email list focusing on this called Sovereign Mind, which I’m going to get into gear in 2025).

Events are accelerating so fast, we have moved well beyond Hanlon’s Razor (“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”) I don’t actually believe politicians, central bankers, technocrats or pundits are stupid.

But they are all, as a group, collectively out of their depth and completely tone-deaf. They’re trying to function in a 3D world that’s in the process of turning into a hypercube.

They keep insisting on trying to apply Cartesian boundaries and frameworks on to a place that has been undergoing a rather disorderly phase shift into another dimension.

(That dimension, was the advent of cyberspace, and I’ll have more to say about this transition from our 3D to a hypercubic world in the next piece. Subscribe here to get it when it drops).

We’ll close with a final warning from the Tofflers:

“Social rationality presupposes individual rationality, and this, in turn, depends not only on certain biological equipment, but on continuity, order and regularity in the environment.

...

It is premised on some correlation between the pace and complexity of change and man’s decisional capacities.

By blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty, and the extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with these environmental preconditions of rationality. We are condemning countless millions to future shock.”

Fast forward 50 years, and we’re soaking in it.

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