I wrote a while back that Peter Thiel, a close Trump advisor, has invested heavily in Marley brand cannabis. If that sort of thing is of interest you can go here for reviews and assays of Marley herbal products.

But this is about politics. And the politics is getting interesting. After picking more than a few anti-cannabis people for cabinet positions (like Jeff Sessions) Trump is considering Peter Thiel associate Jim O’Neill to head the FDA.

Jim O’Neill, the Thiel associate, hasn’t been officially selected, according to the people, who asked to remain anonymous because the decision process is private, and the Trump team could still go in another direction.

O’Neill is a managing director at Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management, and last served in government during the George W. Bush administration as principal associate deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s also a board member of the Seasteading Institute, a Thiel-backed venture to create new societies at sea, away from existing governments.

Thiel’s spokesman Jeremiah Hall said O’Neill is a good candidate. “Jim O’Neill has extensive experience in government and in Silicon Valley. He is a strong candidate for any of several key positions,” Hall said in an e-mail. Separately, Politico and CNBC reported that O’Neill could be under consideration for various positions.

Bloobmberg (news) goes on to say:

O’Neill also could push the agency in new directions. In a 2014 speech, he said he supported reforming FDA approval rules so that drugs could hit the market after they’ve been proven safe, but without any proof that they worked, something he called “progressive approval.”

“We should reform FDA so there is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety — and let people start using them, at their own risk, but not much risk of safety,” O’Neill said in a speech at an August 2014 conference called Rejuvenation Biotechnology. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

Legalized? Hmmmm.

Checking drugs for safety only was how it used to be done. It lowers the cost of drug development by at least a factor of 10X. Lowereing costs for development would mean that Big Pharma will take quite a hit because efficacy testing keeps little guys out of the market. It is a price support mechanism for Big Pharma.

I jokingly said that Trump should nominate Bernie Sanders to head the DEA. Maybe that is not as much of a joke as I thought.

4:44 AM Central Time.

The days will start getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Fun fact: Hillary Clinton lost the most electors of any candidate in 100 years.#ElectoralCollege pic.twitter.com/vrYwkAjzw1

— Tennessee GOP (@TEN_GOP) December 19, 2016

H/T Going Sunny

With all the talk about Russian hacking, why are we putting the Power Grid on the Internet? The so called “Smart Grid” initiative is a stupid idea.

I have written quite a few articles on the stupidity of the “Smart Grid”. Here are some of them:

Slave Meters
Domestic Terrorism?
Smart Grid Insecurity
The Smart Grid Is A Stupid Idea
Stop The Smart Grid
The Smart Grid Guys Are Ganging Up
The Stupidity Of The Smart Grid

Gail Combs alerted me to this story: Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists. Well isn’t that interesting? Yes. It is.

Well, let me do some excerpting and analyzing.

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump has decided to risk a confirmation fight, officially nominating ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state this morning.

Tillerson and Trump had no previous relationship, but the Texas oilman and the New York developer hit it off when they met face to face. One of the things that they have in common is their shared affection for the works of Ayn Rand, the libertarian heroine who celebrated laissez-faire capitalism.

“Atlas Shrugged” was big in my High School (Omaha Central High) the year I graduated – ’62. Quite a few kids were carrying it in the halls that year. I thought it rather odd. I did not look into it until many years later.

This has now officially become a trend. Trump is turning not just to billionaires but Randians to fill the cabinet:

Andy Puzder, tapped by Trump last week to be secretary of labor, is an avid and outspoken fan of Rand’s books.

One profiler last week asked what he does in his free time, and a friend replied that he reads Ayn Rand. He is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which is owned by Roark Capital Group, a private equity fund named after Howard Roark. Puzder, who opposes increases in the minimum wage and wants to automate fast food jobs, was quoted just last month saying that he encouraged his six children to read “Fountainhead” first and “Atlas Shrugged” later.

That is quite encouraging. Trump is inclined to nominating and associating with people who prefer smaller government. I have been one of those guys since I joined in with the Libertarians in 1988. Since 9/11 I have been more of a libertarian. But still…

And it looks like there is a guy who may be brought back into the fold. At least he is not unfamiliar with the ideas Rand espoused.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also used to be an outspoken booster of Rand, but he distanced himself in order to advance his political ambitions.

In a 2005 speech, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns.

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told a group called the Atlas Society, according to a New Yorker profile by Ryan Lizza.

He has since disavowed his interest in Rand. And it shows in his behavior. Maybe Trump can convince Ryan to return to his small government roots.

Politico has a look at how libertarians in government view Trump.

…several libertarian leaders noted, there’s been much for libertarians to cheer about as well, from high hopes for scaled-back regulations, to strong selections, in their view, for appointments to lead departments like the Environmental Protection Agency and Health and Human Services.

“People have some concerns, but for the most part I think are pretty positive with the big-picture outlook, with regard to lower taxes, less regulation,” said Brian Darling, a former top Senate aide to Paul. “So I think you’ll see the liberty movement, moving forward, being critical at times, but being very supportive on big issues like repealing Obamacare, regulation reform, tax reform.”

Well I’m encouraged. But you know me. I want to know who he has in mind for the head of the DEA. I doubt he will announce that until after 20 January 2017, if he has someone controversial in mind. Like say Ron Paul. Or Bernie Sanders. The pain a Sanders nomination for that position would cause Democrats would be a sight to behold. And just think of Sanders being put in a position to make government smaller. The cognitive dissonance (trolling?) all around would be a sight to behold.

After spending a lot of time on the ‘net (too much) I have come to some conclusions about the recent election. I was discussing those conclusions with the blog master at this blog post.

It turns out that each side of the two main opposing groups in the last election is sure the other side is unrepentantly evil. And in fact that is correct. They are.

How is it possible that both of them are correct? Well each side is correct because they live in different environments. And the different ecologies require different moralities. The rules for success are different. I explained that in A Thermodynamic Explanation Of Politics. You should read the longer article linked there to get a deeper feel for the thermodynamics of each ecology and its associated culture.

A short hand explanation that most Americans will get is City vs Country. In recent election terms we had Hillary Clinton who won the City folk and Donald Trump who won the Country folk. It becomes obvious in this map.

The morality difference is highlighted when you hear City folk disparage Country folk. “Rubes” (the current version of rubes is deplorables) is what City people call Country people. And when the shoe is on the other foot, the Country folk call City people “liars and crooks”. Does that sound like an election you just experienced? It should.

What happened on 8 Nov. was that Country folk won. In time City folk will win again. Each side believes it is correct about everything. And they are right. For their ecological niche. Where we get it wrong is in thinking one set of laws can cover both niches. It is not possible. We should be thinking about how to handle this. Instead each side is sure the other side is totally demonic and should be punished accordingly.

Country is conservative. City is liberal. It is a fact of nature. We should take a more knowledgeable view of the situation and get over it. If we had sense enough to leave each other alone we would all be better off. “Mind your business” used to be a motto printed on our money. I’d like to see a revival of that with one minor modification. “Mind your own business.”

I came up with this idea while talking to the OL about this article.

The City is a structured environment, the people are wild.

The Country is a wild environment, the people are structured.

Evidently nature requires a minimum amount of chaos to function properly. We see that in electronics. You can make some circuits more accurate adding a little noise. The noise helps prevent the circuit from getting stuck at a close but not as exact as possible value. But you have to “tune” the noise. Too little noise and there is no effect. Too much noise and the results get too noisy.

Now let us get back to politics. Why hasn’t this understanding gotten more attention so we can better optimize our political systems? Divide and rule. With Country and City at each others throats (‘they are a direct threat to my way of life’ – “they” of course being the “other” side). While that little (as in full time giant) war is going on our owners can focus on using government for their own ends.

Here is a guy who agrees with my premise.

…the left versus right dynamic is being instigated by global elites, and that this could result in both sides moving to opposing extremes of the political spectrum; communism versus fascism. That said, they also wanted to know what I thought should be done about the left in particular? Sure, the elites are the root cause of the threat, but what about all the crazed leftists the elites hide behind and exploit? Don’t we have to deal with them at some point as well?

I’m against dealing with them in the ordinary sense. We should try to figure a way to acknowledge our different ecologies and form a solution based on that. The author has some ideas. (Emphasis added)

The danger is that while conservatives now appear to hold the keys to the behemoth that is government after wrestling it from the left (again, at least in appearance), we will be tempted to swing the cannons of the bureaucratic battleship towards our foes and in our favor. I’ll have to use the old Lord of the Rings analogy once again here — big government is like the “one ring;” it will always result in evil, no matter who is wearing it. Good people will take hold of it thinking they can resist abusing it and that they will exploit its incredible power to help others; and they will fall into darkness like everyone else.

The solution? Conservatives must face leftist extremists on equal ground. We must avoid the temptation of using government as a weapon to extinguish them. We must avoid stooping to their level. Otherwise, there is an serious risk that we will falter in our principles and become just as bad if not worse than the regressive left. And yes, this means a decentralized civil war — a war in which government is denied as a player.

As long as conservatives refuse to wield government as a sword in our arsenal, we will win against all enemies.

The second we wimp out and beg government to aid us in our fight, we will be co-opted and assimilated by the elites.

My god. Do you see what he is saying? He is advocating some kind of libertarian solution. Stop government growth? Who ever heard of such a thing? Limited government? Isn’t that some kind of blasphemy? Doesn’t government need control? More control? Unlimited control to keep order? I don’t think so. Too much control promotes disorder by making government unadaptable. And that leads to chaos. Too much chaos.

Also note: I have been saying for years that if Republicans stuck to economics and gave up their war on Democrats (the culture war) they couldn’t lose. The benefits of a prosperous economically sound country would be a boon enjoyed by all. Winning a culture war battle only satisfies half the country.

The abortion war is a prime example of how the Republicans should work to achieve a goal. The abortion rate has been cut by about a factor of two over the years and it is still declining. It has gotten to the point where a vast majority of the country opposes abortion. And it shows up in the abortion rate. It should also be noted that despite wide spread personal objections to abortion, over half the country wants abortion to remain legal. But of course that tends to vary by State and population density. What should be done? Keep talking. And keep government out of it. In fact that ought to be a general rule.

Probably a rule for all ages. Our founders generally thought so.

Update 18 December 2016 1345z

Edited to correct the abortion rate decline.

Jill Stein has uncovered voter fraud in Michigan. Except I’m sure it is not what she was hoping for.

The recount crusade of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein may have turned up massive voter irregularities, but they’re not the kind Democrats were hoping to find.

In heavily-Democratic Detroit, more votes than voters were found across the city and now state Republicans are calling for an investigation.

Delicious.

Kathy reminded me of:

Here is what he had to say.

Today is November 20, 2016. As many of you know, I spent the week before last in jail. The judge had ordered me to serve a 10 day sentence in addition to fines. This was in relation to the trial last year which has been under appeal for some months. The ultimate outcome of which we lost and I was ordered to serve the time. This concludes all pending legal action at the time, but what we expect to happen is for the city to come cite us again and start this process all over again. I’m not sure exactly what they’re planning to do, but I’m sure this won’t be the end of it.

As for my experience in jail, there is one aspect of all this I briefly wanted to mention. Most of the jail and court, city, county etc. employees seem to be on our side. I had numerous guards tell me they thought our situation was messed up and apologize for what is happening to us. The deputy at the courthouse even said “Hey, aren’t you that guy who was on TV living off grid? I can’t believe they are doing this to you. That’s really messed up.” As he proceeded to carry me out without a word of protest to anyone else. That seems to be the common sentiment, and what I want you to notice is the key word “they”. People always say “they”, as if that person, “just doing their job”, has nothing at all to do with this. Just a bunch of little cogs in a big machine all doing their little part with no control over their own actions.

The best thing about jail is that when you are in there, you know you’re a prisoner, no questions about it. Complete with orange jumpsuit, metal bars, and bland, hastily prepared prison food. But what about the people on the outside? All those little cogs just doing a job with no control over their own actions? Going to a job they hate every day and doing exactly as they are told even when it irks their own moral conscience. I think this begs the question, “Who is the real prisoner?” And what kind of invisible walls inside our minds force us to act this way?

*****

The point is that every time you’re forced to do something you feel is wrong without putting up the least bit of resistance, you only further train your mind to be compliant. Now is when it’s easy to say no. Do you think it will be any easier when people are rioting and there is chaos everywhere to make the right decision when you only have a moment to decide? Let’s remember, all the people at the Nuremburg trials were just following orders too, and I’m sure most of them never imagined themselves doing the types of things they did.

I guess what I’m asking all of you to do is remember that the choice actually is yours. All those invisible walls only exist in our minds, but we can tear them down and see what real freedom feels like. Stop living like a slave or prisoner to some giant system. Instead of “they”, it’s “we”. Stop abdicating the personal responsibility for your own actions. If you can do that, then you will truly be free. We don’t need to depend on some presidential savior, Trump, Bernie, Hillary, Obama, etc. to make America great again and make all our choices for us. America is the people, all of us. Only through our own actions, taking personal responsibility and making ourselves great, can each of us do our part to make America great.

Instead of “they”, it’s “me”.

There is no collective.

And of course there is the aspect of government regulating near everything. Except it is no longer at the level of regulation. It is now well into strangulation.

Email is not a secure means of communication.

This simple fact has been known since there was email.

This is so obvious that there really should be no need for me to say it, and it ought not require serious commentary.

Here’s why:

Email could be intercepted and accessed by an unauthorized party

Email could be shared inappropriately by the recipient

Email could be compromised for as long as it is retained by you or the recipient

There are no retention controls over the recipient’s system

Accessing your email over an insecure network (i.e., Internet Cafe or open wireless network) can expose your user account information

Although encrypted connections can mitigate the risks of having ones’ authentication credentials compromised, email itself is still plain text when traveling between the sender and the recipient and can be easily intercepted

Regardless of the provider, email is not a secure method of communication. This applies to our current campus email systems as well as most third-party email providers

There is nothing new about any of this. When I first started using the Internet in the 1980s I learned an abiding Internet truth:

Nothing that goes out on the Internet is private.

Doh.

So why does this need to be restated? Because, apparently there are still people in this day and age who are so moronic — so non-Internet savvy — that they are actually shocked to discover that their email is not secure.

Other than the fact that he suddenly wants the election results undone because Russian hackers accessed his gmail account, just who the hell is this John Podesta, anyway?

He is anything but an innocent naif!

Podesta served as both an Assistant to the President and as Deputy Chief of Staff. Earlier, from January 1993 to 1995, he was Assistant to the President, Staff Secretary and a senior policy adviser on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy. In 1998 he became President Clinton’s Chief of Staff in the second Clinton Administration and executed the position until the end of Clinton’s time in office in January 2001. Podesta encouraged Executive Order 12958 which led to efforts to declassify millions of pages from the U.S. diplomatic and national security history.[12]

Wow, so he goes way back. He’s not merely an experienced Internet user, he was a policy adviser to the White House on government information, privacy, and telecommunications security.

Got that?

And now we are now told that this poor, hapless man — never mind that he’d have been among the top five people in a Hillary Clinton administration — was a victim of email hacking.

Wow, for a guy like that to have been hacked, it must have been an incredibly sophisticated operation. Right?

Uh, wrong!

Here is what happened to Podesta:

SecureWorks concluded Fancy Bear had sent Podesta an email on 19 March 2016 that had the appearance of a Google security alert, but actually contained a misleading link—a strategy known as spear-phishing. (This tactic has also been used by hackers to break into the accounts of other notable persons, such as Colin Powell). The link—which used Bitly, a URL shortening service—brought Podesta to a fake log-in page where he entered his Gmail credentials.[1][6][7][8]

Huh? You’ve got to be kidding! Unless the Russians hacked the Wiki entry, I’m dumbfounded.

Seriously, I can’t imagine how a man at that level would fall for something as mundane as an attempted phishing attack! I get them all the time!

I get fake FedEx delivery notifications, fake insurance company notifications, fake bank notifications, fake notifications from my email server, etc., etc., etc. I get so many it’s almost tedious deleting them, and I have given up on emailing the companies at [email protected] and receiving their useless replies. I’m on my own, as is everyone else.

Admittedly, I am a bit more sophisticated than some of the poor schleps online, and I realize that many people have to be constantly reminded to “never click on a link that comes to you in an email, even if you think it’s from a trusted friend.”

I honestly feel sorry for the elderly people who fall for these phishing attacks.

But — I have a lot of trouble feeling sorry for a man who almost became one of the most powerful men in the world, yet who was dumb enough to click on the sort of link we warn children and elderly rest home patients about.

Forgive me if I feel just the opposite.

I don’t know who hacked Podesta’s email account, but the very fact that it happened makes me think he really wasn’t the right man for either the job he had, or the job he would have had if Hillary Clinton had won.

(I’m not saying the hackers did us a favor, mind you. But I am old enough to remember when the argument was made that by exposing vulnerabilities, hackers did just that.)

SNL can laugh all they want, but the DEA is a deeply corrupt organization that should be abolished, which makes this video more on point than they realize.

Anyway, the EPA deserves to be cut down to size, and as I said before, I support that.

So what makes the DEA so damned sacred?

I saw a comment at this marvelous video that explains where at least some of the Trump Democrats were coming from.

CHAS1422

I changed my party affiliation 6 months ago. I voted in Trump and accepted him as the pro-wrestling version of Demosthenes. Trump is the medicine to the inculcated echo chamber of the left. He is terrible at rhetoric, but he knows who is good and will pull them in to his circle of influence. In reality Trump is a Chuck Schumer Democrat who saw the tyranny of the left, and went full right to oppose it. I followed. Now the left is throwing out pejoratives like “racist”, “bigot”, “misogynist”, “Islamophobe”, as though it were candy at a halloween party. My trek started 3 years ago when I questioned the Obama/Clinton administration’s support of Muslim Brotherhood agendas in Egypt and the supply of arms to the Islamists fighting the Assad regime in Syria. The growing SJW movements were the final influence. I grabbed the pendulum as it swung past me.

We have had nothing but lies from the government for what? Probably forever. Immediately post 9/11 I was pissed. And so I was in a WAR mode. I wanted BLOOD. And I got it too. Rivers of it. Iraq. Afghanistan. But at least that was enough for me. My blood lust was sated. And then Libya. Syria. Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

After 15 years I’m tired of Blood. I should have kept to what I learned from Vietnam. Or at minimum kept in mind what I learned from Prohibition (The Government lies). But 9/11 was such a goad. I recall at the time that I was not alone. Bush got re-elected in 2004.

But I have had enough. I had enough by 2008. Leave Afghanistan. Pacify Iraq (a fifty year job – we broke it we pay for it). Enough. And then Obama comes and the Middle East gets more locations bombed. I sure wasn’t going to vote for Hillary.

Trump with some of his Cabinet picks is worrying. But I’m going to withhold judgment until I see how he governs. At least with Trump there was/is a chance (probably small though I thought it was 50-50 at the time) that things would be different. With Hillary there was no chance.

Styx makes the point that all the “fake news” screaming may be because those doing the screaming are afraid of some upcoming revelation. He doesn’t think it is #Pizzagate. I think it might be. Why? Because the CIA is one of the agencies doing the screaming.

Compromising an intelligence target is a very old trick. It used to be that sex with some one other than your spouse was used as a discrediting tool. And that became unexceptional (thanks Bill Clinton). OK. Some kind of same sex interaction. Larry Craig’s “wide stance” worked well – at the time. Now a days that is nothing. So what personal behavior is discrediting now?

A very old practice. Organized child abuse. And how do I know it is not of a recent origin? Aleister Crowley in his book Magick In Theory And Practice seems to describe ritual child murder in the book. Was he trolling for people who might be interested in such practices? He claims to have been (at least for a while) a British agent. And what do agents do? Compromise people they want to control.

So has our spy agency compromised targets by providing them children? What are the odds?

So is that what they fear? Their tools and targets becoming public? That is likely a near certainty. Whether it is what I described or something else.

This is something I wrote a while back that is germane.

The thing that is clear to our overlords is that I have no secrets in the Internet Age. What is not yet clear to them is that neither do they. Any action on the secrets they hold is a reveal. So their knowledge is of limited value or useless. Counterproductive even.

Of what use is a self destruct button? I’m not a Christian. At all. But the best advice I can give them is, “Go in peace.” If you need to own something try owning yourself. Because that is an infinitely harder job than owning a civilization. And infinitely more worthwhile.

By acting the CIA is giving their position away.