“An Alabama jail incarcerated a pregnant woman for months after she said she smoked pot, refusing to release her unless she entered drug rehab.
The woman incarcerated in Alabama, 23-year-old Ashley Banks, said she was incarcerated at around six weeks into her pregnancy, according to a Wednesday report by AL.com. After six weeks of being jailed, she started to bleed and continued to do so for another five weeks, AL.com reported. She was forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding, she said, even after being diagnosed with a condition that heightened her risk of miscarriage.
Specialists repeatedly ruled that Banks didn’t qualify for free addiction services, leaving her unable to go to rehab.
“I have reckless murder cases where defendants have been released on bond,” said Banks’ attorney Morgan Cunningham, AL.com reported. “Requiring her to go to rehab is not Constitutional.”
How Peter Thiel Thinks: Anti-Mimetic & Contradictory
In the course of my many interviews with Thiel for my book Conspiracy I would observe his extraordinarily sharp mind in action. There are a few things that are worth pointing out.
First, one of the most profound intellectual influences on Peter Thiel is a French thinker named René Girard, whom he met while at Stanford and whose funeral he would eventually speak at. If you haven’t heard of his work, he is famous for his theory of mimetic desire, which holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so are drawn to what other people want. A more crude way to say it is that you don’t have any real preferences and desires of your own, and you are always looking at others. It’s this, Girard says, that is the source of almost all the conflict in the world—people wanting the same things. In one way, this would forge Thiel’s modus operandi: shun social convention and think from first principles. People say that Thiel is “contrarian” but it’s more accurate to say he is anti-mimetic.
I mean, take a look at the unique path he has shaped for himself, and I will focus on his earlier days here. In some ways it is very traditional and highly competitive with other people— from Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to a high-powered law firm—but it is also marked by bouts of rebellion and doing the opposite of “what he is supposed to do.” At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. All these are examples of his decisiveness to make his choices based on first principles—not how you’re supposed to do things but what is true.
Second, another interesting method in his intellectual toolkit, is that he uses the Steel Man technique when arguing or explaining a complicated issue. This surprised me given that he had taken to calling Gawker, the website that outed him as gay, terrorists and such. But really, he was always very open-minded when it came to discussing things. For instance, if you ask Thiel a question—about Gawker or Trump or whatever—he doesn’t just pull up some half-formed opinion. Instead, he begins with, “One view of these things is that . . . ,” and then proceeds to explain the exact opposite of what he happens to personally believe. Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion, which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox—all of it punctuated with liberal pauses to consider what he is saying as he is saying it.
Thiel seems to eschew social media and most popular culture as well. A friend would say that Thiel is averse to “casual bar talk” and I think part of the reason for that is that he is not well versed in the topics that typically make up those conversations. In one of our meetings I made an observation about how the HBO show Girls gets much more media attention than the the CBS show The Big Bang Theory even though the latter has a much, much larger audience than the former. This observation fell flat because Thiel was not familiar with either show. However, when I mentioned an obscure chapter in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Thiel could cite it from memory and discuss at length. The same went for the Battle of Valmy, an early episode in the French Revolution. This is because Thiel is extremely well-read and again, tends to focus on talking about and thinking about deep, obscure topics rather than superficial, trivial matters.
It could also be said that Thiel’s default state is to embody contradiction. Even when he does describe his opinion, he prefaces it with “I tend to think . . .” or “It’s always this question of . . . ,” as if what he is about to tell you is simply capturing where his opinion falls the majority of the time when running a thought exercise on the topic, as if he is always in the process of deciding what he thinks. Doing so is what makes him such a brilliant investor, considering each trade and investment anew from a dozen perspectives, seeing what others aren’t able to see and to do it on a regenerative basis. A friend would say that “Peter is of two minds on everything. If you were able to open his skull, you would see a number of Mexican standoffs between powerful antagonistic ideas you wouldn’t think could be safely housed in the same brain.”
All these traits combine to make someone who is not only traditionally intelligent, but also unique and singular in his views on the world. He once told Wired that, “The things that I think I’m right about other people are in some sense not even wrong about, because they’re not thinking about them.” That’s a good encapsulation of Thiel’s approach. He’s smart because he thinks about the things you and I aren’t thinking about, and thinks about them in a way we likely wouldn’t.
My new book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, which the New York Times raved about, is out now. Not only is the book an epic page turner, it’s designed to be a deep meditation on strategy and power inspired by the decade-long conspiracy engineered by the billionaire Peter Thiel to take down Gawker. Order your copy now.
Why Louisiana Stays Poor
With all Louisiana’s wealth in natural resources and industry, WHY DO WE STAY SO POOR?
Comments
Wow, as an outsider (not from Louisiana) I’ve visited the state numerous times, and the impression is always the same—shocking poverty and decay. I’ve always thought of Louisiana as an under-developed state that has just been passed-by the 20th & 21st Centuries. To learn that economically, it’s a very wealthy state with huge economic production and growth from which residents are deriving little to no benefit SCREAMS exploitation. This is a clear lesson in the vital importance of taxes and how they are used.
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
Let’s talk about the people Trump doesn’t know….
0:00
well howdy there internet people it’s bo
0:02
again so today
0:04
we’re going to uh talk about how trump
0:07
doesn’t know these people
0:09
you know
0:11
it’s a common refrain
0:13
many of the people who criticize him
0:17
when
0:18
their
0:19
criticisms become public
0:21
he says he doesn’t know him
0:23
never knew her never met him coffee boy
0:28
right and his base buys this
0:33
and
0:35
the thing is
0:37
i feel like by this point they should
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know
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that this is just how he disavows people
0:41
and throws them under the bus and he did
0:43
it to them
0:47
what happened on the sixth
0:50
his base will call legitimate political
0:52
discourse
0:53
a tourist visit
0:55
a protest
0:57
what did trump call it
0:59
a heinous attack
1:06
because it could have came back on him
1:08
right
1:10
looked bad on him so he disavowed it
1:13
tried to move away from it
1:17
to uh the people who were there
1:19
you know the people wearing like all the
1:21
maga stuff
1:23
very much
1:24
his supporters his movement what did he
1:27
say
1:28
you will pay
1:31
you
1:32
do not represent our movement
1:36
you do not represent our country
1:41
those people
1:42
that now
1:43
he’s pretending that he cares about
1:45
because it’s good for him politically
1:47
the day after
1:48
they weren’t his people he didn’t know
1:51
them
1:52
never met him right
1:55
certainly didn’t encourage them
1:58
to go to the capitol
2:00
didn’t say that he was going to walk up
2:02
there meet him there all of that stuff
2:06
they went under the bus just like
2:07
everybody else
2:09
it’s what he does
2:11
this is how he disavows people it’s how
2:14
he
2:15
separates himself
2:17
from his mistakes
2:20
and lets other people pay for them
2:25
so many people
2:28
going out of their way to try to show
2:30
loyalty
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to the former president
2:35
when
2:38
it will never
2:39
be returned
2:42
even those people
2:44
willing to put themselves at risk
2:48
those people willing to quite literally
2:51
stand on the front lines for him
2:54
those people
2:56
willing to be in custody for him
3:02
they’re not part of his movement
3:06
and they became not part of his movement
3:09
as soon as he uh no longer had a use for
3:12
him
3:14
anyway
3:15
it’s just a thought
3:17
y’all have a good dayComments
Trump was initially unpredictable because he didn’t act like a normal politician—or human being—but once you get that he doesn’t act like a normal human being, he’s surprisingly predictable.
The Supreme Court is laying the groundwork to pre-rig the 2024 election
Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced—a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar—that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.
Republican strategists are gaming out which states have Republican legislatures willing to override the votes of their people to win the White House for the Republican candidate.
Here’s how one aspect of it could work out, if they go along with the GOP’s arguments that will be before the Court this October:
It’s November, 2024, and the presidential race between Biden and DeSantis has been tabulated by the states and called by the networks. Biden won 84,355,740 votes to DeSantis’ 77,366,412, clearly carrying the popular vote.
But the popular vote isn’t enough: George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes and Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but both ended up in the White House. What matters is the Electoral College vote, and that looks good for Biden, too.
As CNN is reporting, the outcome is a virtual clone of the 2020 election: Biden carries the same states he did that year and DeSantis gets all the Trump states. It’s 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, a 74-vote Electoral College lead for Biden, at least as calculated by CNN and the rest of the media. Biden is heading to the White House for another 4 years.
Until the announcement comes out of Georgia. Although Biden won the popular vote in Georgia, their legislature decided it can overrule the popular vote and just awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes to DeSantis instead of Biden.
An hour later we hear from five other states with Republican-controlled legislatures where Biden won the majority of the vote, just like he had in 2020: North Carolina (15 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20) and Arizona (11).
Each has followed Georgia’s lead and their legislatures have awarded their Electoral College votes—even though Biden won the popular vote in each state—to DeSantis.
Thus, a total of 88 Electoral College votes from those six states move from Biden to DeSantis, who’s declared the winner and will be sworn in on January 20, 2025.
Wolf Blitzer announces that DeSantis has won the election, and people pour into the streets to protest. They’re met with a hail of bullets as Republican-affiliated militias have been rehearsing for this exact moment and their allies among the police refuse to intervene.
After a few thousand people lay dead in the streets of two dozen cities, the police begin to round up the surviving “instigators,” who are charged with seditious conspiracy for resisting the Republican legislatures of their states.
After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.Sound far fetched?
Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced that one of the first cases they’ll decide next year could include whether that very scenario is constitutional or not. And it almost certainly is.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution lays out the process clearly, and it doesn’t even once mention the popular vote or the will of the people:
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress… [emphasis added]
“The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons … which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President…”It’s not particularly ambiguous, even as clarified by the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Neither mentions the will of the people, although the Electoral Count Act requires each state’s governor to certify the vote before passing it along to Washington, DC. And half of those states have Democratic governors.
Which brings us to the Supreme Court’s probable 2023 decision. As Robert Barnes wrote yesterday for The Washington Post:
“The Supreme Court on Thursday said it will consider what would be a radical change in the way federal elections are conducted, giving state legislatures sole authority to set the rules for contests even if their actions violated state constitutions and resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering for congressional seats.”
While the main issue being debated in Moore v Harper, scheduled for a hearing this October, is a gerrymander that conflicts with North Carolina’s constitution, the issue at the core of the debate is what’s called the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine.”
It literally gives state legislatures the power to pre-rig or simply hand elections to the candidate of their choice.
As NPR notes:
“The independent state legislature theory was first invoked by three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices in the celebrated Bush v. Gore case that handed the 2000 election victory to George W. Bush. In that case, the three cited it to support the selection of a Republican slate of presidential electors.”
That doctrine—the basis of John Eastman and Donald Trump’s effort to get states to submit multiple slates of electors—asserts that a plain reading of Article II and the 12th Amendment of the Constitution says that each state’s legislature has final say in which candidate gets their states’ Electoral College vote, governors and the will of the voters be damned.
The Republicans point out that the Constitution says that it’s up to the states—”in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—to decide which presidential candidate gets their Electoral College votes.
But the Electoral Count Act requires a governor’s sign-off, and half those states have Democratic governors. Which has precedence, the Constitution or the Act?
If the Supreme Court says it’s the US Constitution rather than the Electoral Count Act, states’ constitutions, state laws, or the votes of their citizens, the scenario outlined above becomes not just possible but very likely. Republicans play hardball and consistently push to the extremes regardless of pubic opinion.
After all, the Constitution only mentions the states’ legislatures—which are all Republican controlled—so the unwillingness of the Democratic governors of Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to sign off on the Electoral College votes becomes moot.
Under this circumstance DeSantis becomes president, the third Republican president in the 21st century, and also the third Republican President to have lost the popular vote election yet ended up in the White House.
This scenario isn’t just plausible: it’s probable. GOP-controlled states are already changing their state laws to allow for it, and Republican strategists are gaming out which states have Republican legislatures willing to override the votes of their people to win the White House for the Republican candidate.
Those state legislators who still embrace Trump and this theory are getting the support of large pools of rightwing billionaires’ dark money.
As the highly respected conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig recently wrote:
“Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine … and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.”
I take no satisfaction in having accurately predicted—in March of 2020—how Trump and his buddies would try to steal the election in January of 2021. Or how the Supreme Court would blow up the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump’s January 6th effort failed because every contested state had laws on the books requiring all of their Electoral College votes to go to whichever candidate won the popular vote in the state.
That will not be the case in 2024.
As we are watching, the Supreme Court—in collaboration with state legislatures through activists like Ginny Thomas—are setting that election up right now in front of us in real time.
We damn well better be planning for this, because it’s likely coming our way in just a bit more than two short years.
The Supreme Court is laying the groundwork to pre-rig the 2024 electionSix Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced—a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar—that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.Republican strategists are gaming out which states have Republican legislatures willing to override the votes of t…https://www.rawstory.com/supreme-court-election/What is the “Independent State Legislature” theory?Wikipedia: Moore v. Harper (Case scheduled for Oct)
But how does bitcoin actually work? (2017)
The math behind cryptocurrencies.
Help fund future projects: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown
An equally valuable form of support is to simply share some of the videos.
Special thanks to these supporters: http://3b1b.co/btc-thanks
This video was also funded with help from Protocol Labs: https://protocol.ai/join/Some people have asked if this channel accepts contributions in cryptocurrency form. As a matter of fact, it does:
http://3b1b.co/crypto
ENS: 3b1b.eth2^256 video: https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY
Music by Vincent Rubinetti: https://soundcloud.com/vincerubinetti…
Here are a few other resources I’d recommend:
Original Bitcoin paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Block explorer: https://blockexplorer.com/
Blog post by Michael Nielsen: http://3b1b.co/crypto
(This is particularly good for understanding the details of what transactions look like, which is something this video did not cover)Video by CuriousInventor: https://youtu.be/Lx9zgZCMqXE
Video by Anders Brownworth: https://youtu.be/_160oMzblY8
Ethereum white paper: https://goo.gl/XXZddT
Comments
>> It’s 100% possible. And in fact, the top 4 miners of bitcoin have more than 50% of the network’s total hashing power. However, if you have 50% of the total mining network’s computation, you’re probably better off using it to make ~$2.2 Million a day with honest mining than you to defraud a single individual.
>> the specific name for this scenario is a “50% attack”
The Future the Central Bankers Want (Bank of International Settlements Report)
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