News

Local media exposes state agency that spent billions of taxpayer dollars on homelessness didn’t track spending.

An audit was unable to determine how a California agency spent $24 billion on the state’s homeless problem, which has only become worse since the money was doled out.

According to KTLA, the California Interagency Council on Homelessness recently claimed they were unable to track the effectiveness of the taxpayer-funded program, saying it “has not consistently tracked and evaluated the state’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.”

“If you’re a taxpayer, right, you should be outraged because obviously your money is being wasted,” said Republican assembly member Josh Hoover.

“But even if you’re a homeless advocate, someone that wants to support these programs with state dollars, you should be outraged right because the reality is they’re clearly not getting people the help that they need,” he added.

While the audit failed to find how the missing billions were spent, another proposition, Prop. 1, passed by voters this month touted by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) will also dole out another $6.4 billion to the homeless issue.

USA Today reports:

Prop. 1 had passed by less than half a percent of the vote and will allocate about $6.4 billion to build mental health treatment facilities and housing. It will also provide rental assistance for the unhoused who are chronically homeless and have mental health or addiction issues.

Funding will be used to add 11,150 new treatment beds and supportive housing units and over 26,00 outpatient spots, according to the governor’s website. The bond includes $1 billion set aside specifically for veterans’ housing.

While the measure is not expected to significantly change the number of unhoused people in California, it received bipartisan support to boost funding for housing and mental health.

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NATO is preparing to mobilize forces in Europe in a bid to thwart Ukraine’s inevitable defeat against Russia.

Jack Posobiec joins The Alex Jones Show to break down the unfolding developments in NATO’s proxy war against Russia, warning attacks on U.S. soil may be forthcoming to renew public outrage against Russia.

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“What it tells me is that we can make good on our commitment to defend Israel,” Kirby responds.

White House National Communications Security Advisor John Kirby completely avoided answering an incisive question by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on the Israel-Iran conflict Sunday.

“This Week” host Stephanopoulos pointed to Biden’s weak and ineffective leadership, asking: “The President also called on Iran not to retaliate, but they did anyway, what does that tell you?”

Kirby dodged the question and replied with a platitude about Biden’s commitment to defending Israel.

ABC: Biden called on Iran not to retaliate, but they did anyway — what does that tell you?

JOHN KIRBY: “What it tells me is that we can make good on our commitment to defend Israel…” pic.twitter.com/j6X7jqVhuq

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 14, 2024

“What it tells me is that we can make good on our commitment to defend Israel,” Kirby responded. “It tells me that Israel does have superior military capability, just think about the hardware that Iran threw into the sky and how little damage it caused.”

Kirby couldn’t even offer a mediocre non-answer!

In a separate appearance on MSNBC Sunday, Kirby refused to directly answer if Israel and Iran are now engaged in a “wider war.”

“I don’t think there’s any reason that it needs to,” he replied.

“But has it?” host Kirsten Welker asked.

NBC: “Has this now escalated into a wider war?”

KIRBY: “I don’t think there’s any reason that it needs to.”

NBC: “But has it?”

KIRBY: “The president doesn’t believe that it needs to.” pic.twitter.com/Byzd1EfnE9

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 14, 2024

Kirby avoided the question again, “The president doesn’t believe that it needs to.”

Yikes.

In another instance of Biden’s weakness on the world stage, the puppet president urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate against Iran’s unprecedented attack, but was ignored.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi on Monday announced Israel will indeed retaliate against Iran imminently.

“We are looking ahead, we are considering our steps, and this launch of so many missiles, cruise missiles, and UAVs into the territory of the State of Israel will be met with a response,” Halevi declared.

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Gone is the talk of separating money and state, of a market-based means of exchange, of genuine revolution that would extend from money to the whole of politics the world over.

Those who involved themselves in Bitcoin markets after 2017 encountered a different operation and ideal than those who came before. Today, no one much cares about what came before, speaking of 2010-2016. They are only watching the upward price momentum and are thrilled for the increase in the asset valuation of their portfolio. 

Gone is the talk of separating money and state, of a market-based means of exchange, of genuine revolution that would extend from money to the whole of politics the world over. And gone is the talk of changing the operation of money as a means of changing the prospects for freedom itself. The enthusiasts around Bitcoin have different goals in mind. 

And during this entire period, the exact time when this digital asset might have protected multitudes of users and businesses from rapacious inflation growing out of the worst and most globalized experience of corporatist statism in modern history, made possible due to the money monopoly of central banks that funded the operation, the original asset that carries the symbol BTC was systematically diverted from its original purpose. 

The ideal was nicely articulated by F.A. Hayek in 1974. Much of his career as an economist was spent arguing for sound monetary policies. At every important turning point, he faced the same problem: governments and the institutions they serve did not want sound money. They wanted to manipulate the currency system to benefit elites, not the public. Finally, he refined his argument. He concluded that the only real answer was a complete divorce of money and power. 

“Nothing can be more welcome than depriving government of its power over money and so stopping the apparently irresistible trend towards an accelerating increase of the share of the national income it is able to claim,” he wrote in 1976 (two years after his Nobel Prize). “If allowed to continue, this trend would in a few years bring us to a state in which governments would claim 100 per cent of all resources—and would in consequence become literally ‘totalitarian’.”

“It may turn out that cutting off government from the tap which supplies it with additional money for its use may prove as important in order to stop the inherent tendency of unlimited government to grow indefinitely, which is becoming as menacing a danger to the future of civilisation as the badness of the money it has supplied.”

The problem in achieving this ideal was technical and institutional. So long as state money worked, there was no real drive to change it. Certainly the push would never come from the ruling classes who benefit from the present system, which is precisely where every old argument for the gold standard faltered. How to get around this problem?

In 2009, a pseudonymous developer or group released a white paper, written in language for computer scientists and not economists, for a peer-to-peer system of digital cash. For most economists at the time, its functioning was opaque and not quite believable. The proof came in the functioning itself which unfolded over the course of 2010. To summarize, it deployed a distributed ledger, double-key cryptography, and a protocol of fixed quantity to release a new form of money that operationally tied together money itself and a settlement system in one. 

In other words, Bitcoin achieved the ideal about which Hayek could only dream. The key to making it all possible was the distributed ledger itself, which relied on the internet to globalize the nodes of operation, bringing a new form of accountability we had never seen in operation before. The notion of melding together the means of payment plus the mechanisms of settlement on this scale was something that had previously not been possible. And yet there it was, earning its way into the market with ever increasing valuations made possible by the distributed ledger. 

So, yes, I became an early enthusiast, writing hundreds of articles, even publishing a book in 2015 called Bit By Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. I could not have known it at the time, but those were in fact the last days of the ideal and just before the protocol came to be controlled by a consolidated group of developers who jettisoned entirely the idea of peer-to-peer cash to turn it into a high-earning digital security, not a competitor with state-based money but rather an asset designed not to use but hold with third-party intermediaries controlling access. 

We saw all this unfold in real time and many of us were aghast. All that is left to us is to tell the story, which has not been done in a complete form until now. Roger Ver’s new book Hijacking Bitcoin does the job. It is a book for the ages simply because it lays out all the facts of the case and lets readers come to their own conclusion. I was honored to write the foreword, which follows.

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The story you will read here is of tragedy, the chronicle of an emancipationist monetary technology subverted to other ends. It’s a painful read, to be sure, and the first time this story has been told with this much detail and sophistication. We had the chance to free the world. That chance was missed, likely hijacked and subverted.

Those of us who watched Bitcoin from the earliest days saw with fascination how it gained traction and seemed to offer a viable alternative path for the future of money. At long last, after thousands of years of government corruption of money, we finally had a technology that was untouchable, sound, stable, democratic, incorruptible, and a fulfillment of the vision of the great champions of freedom from all history. At last, money could be liberated from state control and thus achieve economic rather than political goals—prosperity for everyone versus war, inflation, and state expansion.

That was the vision in any case. Alas, it did not happen. Bitcoin adoption is lower today than it was five years ago. It is not on a trajectory of final victory but on a different path to gradually increase in price for its earlier adopters. In short, the technology was betrayed by small changes that hardly anyone understood at the time.

I certainly did not. I had been playing with Bitcoin for a few years and was mainly astounded at the speed of settlement, the low cost of transactions, and the ability for anyone without a bank to send or receive it without financial mediation. That’s a miracle about which I wrote rhapsodically at the time. I held a CryptoCurrency Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2013 that focused on the intellectual and technical side of things. It was among the first national conferences on the topic, but even at this event, I noticed two sides coalescing: those who believed in monetary competition and those whose sole commitment was to one protocol.

My first clue that something had gone wrong came two years later, when for the first time I saw that the network had been seriously clogged. Transaction fees soared, settlement slowed to a crawl, and vast numbers of on-ramps and off-ramps were closing due to high compliance costs. I did not understand. I reached out to a number of experts who explained to me about a quiet civil war that had developed within the crypto world. The so-called “maximalists” had turned against widespread adoption. They liked the high fees. They did not mind the slow settlements. And many were involving themselves in the dwindling number of crypto exchanges that were still in operation thanks to a government crackdown. 

At the same time, new technologies were becoming available that vastly improved the efficiency and availability of exchange in fiat dollars. They included Venmo, Zelle, CashApp, FB payments, and many others besides, in addition to smartphone attachments and iPads that enabled any merchant of any size to process credit cards. These technologies were completely different from Bitcoin because they were permission-based and mediated by financial companies. But to users, they seemed great and their presence in the marketplace crowded out the use case of Bitcoin at the very time that my beloved technology had become an unrecognizable version of itself. 

The forking of Bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash occurred two years later, in 2017, and it was accompanied by great cries and screams as if something horrible was happening. In fact, all that was happening was a mere restoration of the original vision of the founder Satoshi Nakamoto. He believed with the monetary historians of the past that the key to turning any commodity into widespread money was adoption and use. It’s impossible to even imagine conditions under which any commodity could take on the form of money without a viable and marketable use case. Bitcoin Cash was an attempt to restore that. 

The time to ramp up adoption of this new technology was 2013-2016, but that moment was squeezed in two directions: the deliberate throttling of the ability of the technology to scale and the push of new payment systems to crowd out the use case. As this book demonstrates, by late 2013, Bitcoin had already been targeted for capture. By the time Bitcoin Cash came to the rescue, the network had changed its entire focus from use to holding what we have and building second-layer technologies to deal with the scaling issues. Here we are in 2024 with an industry struggling to find its way within a niche while the dreams of a “to-the-moon” price are fading into memory.

This is the book that had to be written. It is a story of a missed opportunity to change the world, a tragic tale of subversion and betrayal. But it is also a hopeful story of efforts we can make to ensure that the hijacking of Bitcoin is not the final chapter. There is still the chance for this great innovation to liberate the world but the path from here to there turns out to be more circuitous than any of us ever imagined. 

Roger Ver does not blow his own trumpet in this book, but he truly is a hero of this saga, not only deeply knowledgeable of the technologies but also a man who has clung to an emancipatory vision of Bitcoin from the earliest days through the present. I share his commitment to the idea of peer-to-peer currency for the masses, alongside a competitive marketplace for free-enterprise monies. This is a hugely important documentary history, and the polemic alone will challenge anyone who believes himself to be on the other side. Regardless, this book had to exist, however painful. It’s a gift to the world.

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Does this story seem familiar? Indeed it does. We’ve seen this trajectory in sector after sector. Institutions born and built by ideals are later converted by various forces of power, access, and nefarious intent into something else entirely. We’ve seen this happen to digital tech in particular and the Internet generally, not to mention medicine, public health, science, liberalism, and so much else. The story of Bitcoin follows the same trajectory, a seemingly immaculate conception turned toward a different purpose, and serving again as a reminder that on this side of heaven, there will never be an institution or idea immune to compromise and corruption.

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Learn Why The Globalists Are Killing Their Own Monetary System

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‘He kept saying he was dying. I stayed up all night trying to figure out how I could possibly get the ivermectin to him that I had IN MY HANDS.’

A woman, whose father was dying from severe COVID complications in the hospital, detailed how she snuck in ivermectin treatments to him, crediting the medication with saving his life.

The woman explained that as her father’s health deteriorated and as doctors discussed potentially putting him on a ventilator, she became increasingly desperate to get the medicine to him.

The woman’s story was shared on X by Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who had previously been “permanently suspended” from the platform for criticizing Covid injections for children and for promoting ivermectin as an alternative therapy for COVID.

Here’s the woman’s story on how she saved her father’s life, excerpted from Bowden’s X post:

I wanted to share with you how I was able to save my dad’s life with ivermectin while he was in the hospital, even though I wasn’t allowed to see him.

He was one of those who got incredibly sick when he got Covid. His doctors were talking about the possibility of a ventilator but he wasn’t on one yet. His doctors would not even give me a prognosis or a guess. He was still able to talk and understand me on the phone but they wouldn’t let me see him. I already had the ivermectin for him but didn’t know how I would get it to him.

One night after talking to him on the phone, I could tell he was declining. He kept saying he was dying. I stayed up all night trying to figure out how I could possibly get the ivermectin to him that I had IN MY HANDS. I wanted to hide it in some clothes and get the hospital staff to take him his things but they wouldn’t allow anything that couldn’t be wiped down.

I stayed up all night long and tore my house apart trying to find something I could put the ivermectin in that was acceptable to the hospital, but not something they could easily open up and see the contents.

I found an old laptop. I disassembled it and put the ivermectin in tiny bags for each day and put them under the laptop keyboard. I put it back together, prayed, and then took it to the hospital. I left the laptop with security. They wiped it down and said they’d make sure he got it. They took it to his room having no idea they were personally delivering to him the drug that ultimately saved his life.

I don’t mess around when it comes to the wellbeing of the people I love.

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See Dr. Bowden’s appearances on Infowars:

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“Iran wanted to harm the strategic capabilities of the State of Israel — that is something that had not happened before,” says top IDF official.

The Israeli military announced it will retaliate against Iran’s drone and missile attack over the weekend that was mostly defended with the help of U.S. forces.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi on Monday declared the Iranian attack, which was the first ever on Israel launched from Iranian soil, “will be met with a response.”

“Iran wanted to harm the strategic capabilities of the State of Israel — that is something that had not happened before. We were prepared for the ‘Iron Shield’ operation — preparation that brought Iran to also meet air superiority,” Halevi said in a statement from the Nevatim Airbase, which suffered minor damage in the Iranian attack.

BREAKING: IDF chief of staff General Herzi Halevi said on Monday during a visit to an F-35 squadron at the Nevatim air base which was hit in the Iranian attack that “Israel is considering its next steps and the launch of so many missiles and drones to Israeli territory will be… https://t.co/gi12AzT9Hh

— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) April 15, 2024

“Last Monday, we saw what was being organized, and we think that the State of Israel is very strong and knows how to deal with it alone, but with a threat so numerous and so far away, we are always happy to have [the United States] with us,” Halevi added.

“We are looking ahead, we are considering our steps, and this launch of so many missiles, cruise missiles, and UAVs into the territory of the State of Israel will be met with a response,” Halevi concluded.

Iran released a statement to the United Nations following its unprecedented attack, which was a retaliatory measure in response to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus that killed top-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders earlier this month.

“The matter can be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe,” read the statement.

Conducted on the strength of Article 51 of the UN Charter pertaining to legitimate defense, Iran’s military action was in response to the Zionist regime’s aggression against our diplomatic premises in Damascus. The matter can be deemed concluded. However, should the Israeli…

— Permanent Mission of I.R.Iran to UN, NY (@Iran_UN) April 13, 2024

Joe Biden on Sunday urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on a retaliatory strike, telling him to “take the win” of largely defending against Iran’s missiles and drones and avoid escalating the conflict.

Unsurprisingly, it appears neither Israel nor Iran are taking Biden’s warnings seriously.

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