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ROSC 13: Time to Have Fun Again

Last Wednesday was my day to reorient myself. I end up doing that from time to time, and I think it’s essential, given the complexity and pressures of modern life… and very certainly so, given the complexities of a non-standard life.

Immediately I focused on the messes of the sanitarium and the “superfluous” people I had lent my time to. I don’t regret it of course – it was the right thing to do and may end up keeping a few people from deep trouble – but it quickly became a double-scoop of drama, the kind of thing that can raise your blood pressure unhealthily.

But as soon as I descended toward gloom over these things, I remembered a wise old friend from many years ago. And I knew that if he were present, our conversation would go like this:

“These things you’re worried about, do you need to do them for the money?”

“No.”

“For your family?”

“No.”

“Then either find a way to enjoy them or quit.”

And while this advice is a bit simplistic – there are situations that deserve effort and risk even though they’re neither fun nor profitable – my friend makes a good point.

“Then I’ll make it fun,” I said aloud.

And so that’s what I’ll be doing from now on. I’ve spent far too much of my life dour and scowling. I’ve worked hard to recognize the big picture, and if you can see the whole panorama over time, including the payoffs, things become fun again.

So, as I walked into our meeting at Jays on Thursday, I was feeling happy about what lay before us. Everyone else was a bit sullen. But as I recounted what I’d been thinking, they pulled out of their funk at least a little.

“The people of the sanitarium,” I told them, “will fight their battles, split up, and then continue forward. Or not. Once the trauma is over, we’ll help those who wish to continue.”

They slowly nodded their heads.

“And what about Mike?” one of them asked.

“Mike made a conscious choice. He’s doing what he feels is necessary, and whether he’s right or wrong, he’s acting upon his own mind and his own will. Just by itself that’s a very positive thing. I do, however, think he’ll be gone for a while. Have any of you heard from him?”

They had all heard from him, as it turned out.

“He’s leaving the country,” was the universal response, “within the next week.”

“Remember,” I said, “gone for a while is not the same as gone forever. Life is long and things do change.”

They nodded their heads again, and then several of their faces brightened and they began discussing their businesses: what was working, what wasn’t, and what they wanted to try next. I just listened.

But before I get lost in those details, I want to tell you about the old lawyer’s response to Mike. Surprisingly, he copied the entire email to me. In it, he never answered any of Mike’s questions. What he did, weirdly enough, was tell him a story about O.J. Simpson. Here’s the core of that email:

Everybody knows that when O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering his wife, F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran and a host of other lawyers defended him. But what is forgotten is that for a few brief moments before he was arrested, he had another lawyer, famous in Hollywood: Howard Weitzman.

I believe that O.J. ran to Weitzman and told him what he’d done and asked for his help. Weitzman was perfectly capable of handling the defense team. But what he would have been unable to overcome was an admission of guilt. So, he told O.J. to never tell another soul, even his lawyers, that he did it. Then Weitzman passed him off to Johnny Cochran.

Cochran and Bailey are about the smartest lawyers going, and there is no way they didn’t suspect the guilt of their client. But if O.J. had told them he was guilty, they could never have put him on the stand. Those are the rules. In the end they didn’t, but it was not because they couldn’t.

O.J. used a disposable lawyer to find out how to deal with another lawyer. I don’t know where he got the idea, but I’ve seen other people do the same thing: Set up an appointment. Use a pen name. Pay cash for the consult. Ask every question they can think of. Suggest every “What if?” Always, it’s their cousin who needs help. Ask for the exact laws the situation impacts on. Ask about penalties for getting caught. Ask about law enforcement tricks.

For better or worse, this is what saved O.J.

I found the whole thing immensely interesting… and clever.

As I’ve been recounting this, however, I’ve received three emails on the sanitarium. It looks like the split is nearly complete. I’ll give you the details next time.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 12: The Second Blow

* After I left the big breakup at the sanitarium, I spent a few days ruminating on it all. I took a couple phone calls from Esther and another from Johnny (who was worried for Esther). I was hoping that things would reach their end quickly. I’ve never seen one of these situations heal, so I’d rather the break was quicker than slower.

What I didn’t expect was another crisis to be thrown on top of it. But that’s what we got.

“I’d rather go to jail”

When a sane, healthy young man says something like this, it should get our attention, and it certainly did mine. We were at one of our regular meetings at Jay’s, and the group told me that Mike – one of our regulars but not one that I knew especially well – had opened a cryptocurrency exchange.

That’s precisely the thing I warned the group about, and I remember that Mike was present when I did. He’s under no obligation to listen to me of course, but I was pretty clear on the dangers involved and I’m sure he understood them.

As I was thinking through this, however, I was interrupted by Johnny, who had gone to school with Mike.

“He’d like to talk to you,” Johnny told me.

“Why?” I asked.

“I’m not certain, but he’d like to talk to you privately, and today if at all possible.”

We made the arrangements and Mike met me at the train station on my way back home. I found him waiting at the coffee shop on the upper level of the station. And before I could settle into the booth, he was speaking.

“I know you don’t like this idea, Paul, but I had to do it anyway.”

“But why, Mike? It’s life-changing dangerous.”

“But it’s not evil,” he shot back, making me check my bearings.

“No, it’s not evil, Mike. There’s nothing morally wrong with running an exchange. It’s an honest business. But the risks are huge. So again I ask, ‘Why?'”

He became introspective. “My grandfather was a bricklayer, and he used to drive me around the city and show me all the buildings he built. He was proud of his work till the day he died, and I grew up believing that I’d get that same satisfaction… but I never have.”

I was starting to feel where he was coming from.

“And I tried hard!” he added. “I’m 30 now, and I’ve worked all sorts of jobs, but all of them were temps and most of them were nearly meaningless. For the last four years I’ve been on disability, doing almost nothing. At my first meeting with you guys, someone said something about ‘living parasitically,’ and I realized that’s exactly what I was doing and that my grandfather would maybe rather have died than to accept such a thing.”

He looked at me with conviction in his eyes.

“So that’s why I’m doing this, Paul. I can’t go back to being a parasite. I won’t. I’d rather go to jail.”

I didn’t know what to do, save to tell him that I understood and that I respected his decision, even if it concerned me.

“I knew you would,” he said, “and that’s why I needed to see you.”

I didn’t think he was seeking my approval, and the look on my face must have shown that I didn’t catch his full meaning.

“I need you to tell me what to do,” he said. “I’d rather go to jail than do nothing, but I’d rather not go to jail either. How do I do that?”

He didn’t realize it, but this put me too close to a choice I didn’t want to face again. If what he was doing was in fact illegal and if I gave him advice on operating his system or evading the law, a prosecutor could argue conspiracy. And trouble like that I don’t need.

And so, I told him four things, which he dutifully wrote down:

First, I gave him the name of a retired lawyer I once knew. I told him to contact him carefully (encrypted only) and get his advice. The man is 90 years old, an old-world style ‘liberal’ (more or less libertarian) living in Geneva.
He was not to discuss his idea with anyone else in the US. Conspiracy is a cruel tool in the hands of modern prosecutors, who care mostly about their kill ratios.
That he needed to get out of the US right away and play PT (perpetual traveler) for some years, probably a decade or two.
That he should decentralize his exchange at the earliest possible date and get away from it. Then, with some money in his pockets, he could be a crypto-entrepreneur in other ways.

Prosecution in Our Time

Honestly, I’m not sure if Mike’s exchange is truly illegal, and that’s quite normal these days. Laws are written to please a stream of purchasers, and the enforcers tend to pick a few favorite laws and ignore most of the others. You can’t find a stable line between legal and illegal, and you can’t find a stable line between being punished and being ignored.

But if the punishers ever go after you, they’ll get their friends in the media to destroy your reputation and then they’ll destroy you in their courts. I’ve seen it happen to people I’ve known. In one case they got 40 people to roll over (getting a pass or near-pass on their own crimes for testifying against the target of the investigation) in order to nail the “offender.” In another case, the local newspapers embarrassed the target in deeply invasive, personal ways, ways that had nothing to do with his crime.

Prosecution is a big, nasty machine, and things like decency and proportionality are non-factors in most of it.

Next Time…

A week later I got an encrypted email from the old lawyer, explaining what he told Mike. I’ll pass along some of that next time.

* As a reminder, this series is fictional.

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 11: The Stone of Stumbling

Last time I left off as we sat in a full dining room at the sanitarium, where, hopefully, we had broken through the hurtful theology of our time, giving these people a chance to heal on the inside. And while the moment lasted a useful amount of time, it was soon enough broken by Dora, who excused herself for a doctor’s appointment. Esther excused herself as well and drove her mom.

Again we sat silently, thinking now about Dora, and how little time she had left. She’d probably be hospitalized within a week or two.

Then one of them turned to me and asked, “What are we going to do without Dora?”

“You’re going to remember the things she did,” I said. “You’ll learn from them and then do better than she did.”

I could see that this statement didn’t meet with universal approval. Clearly, some of them – especially the ones who lauded Dora… who had taken refuge under her leadership – didn’t want the responsibility of exceeding her.

“That may take you some time,” I added. “That’s the purpose of someone like Dora, not to hit a high mark that won’t be exceeded but to help people learn to walk the path she paved and then to go farther than she did. Your excellence is her legacy.”

I looked around the table to see gently nodding heads… but not all of them. And the two people who obviously didn’t agree were Anthony and Bertrice – the same two who didn’t approve of my previous statement.

This meant trouble.

I’ve seen this happen before, you see, and I knew what was about to hit me… about to hit the people of the sanitarium: a psychological and philosophical war. We had reached what Jesus called a “stone of stumbling” – where the authentic contents of hearts would be revealed, dividing the healthy from the unhealthy.

And I’ve never seen one of these moments that didn’t turn ugly.

Anthony – an old man with a deformed arm and hand – looked insulted and angry, though he said nothing. Bertrice, however (60ish, lame and very homely), had plenty to say.

“Spoken just like someone who was born pretty!” she nearly spat out at me. “You have no concept of what it is to live in our condition, and yet you come in here and pretend you’re some kind of holy guide.”

I thought briefly about defending myself but realized it was better for them to deal with this themselves. The battle had been engaged and I was an outsider.

Sophie spoke up from her wheelchair: “We invited him here, Bertrice, and we asked him questions. He did nothing more than answer them.”

I cracked a quarter smile at her in thanks.

“That doesn’t matter anyway,” Bertrice fired back. “I’m not going to be ordered around by pretty people again, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Esther – a pretty person – will take over Dora’s position, and we’ll be back under their thumb.”

“That’s unfair, Bertrice. Esther has been among us all her life.”

“And tell me she won’t take Dora’s spot! You know she will!”

“I don’t know that she will,” answered Stanley, one of the first two men I met at the sanitarium. “But so what if she does? If she can do the job best, why not?”

“Tell me she’s not pretty,” Bertrice challenged. “And now she has a pretty boyfriend… and she’ll have pretty children. She’s not one of us, no matter what you say.”

At that, the room degenerated into chaos. Some defended Esther and others agreed with Bertrice, at least in part. I could see what was happening: They were sorting themselves.

And then Bertrice stormed from the room, followed by Anthony. A moment later we heard pounding from down the hall, where her room was. Bertrice had a hammer, a nail, and the plaque that Esther showed me on my first visit. She turned to see several of us watching as she hung the plaque on her door. Then she glared at me and read parts of the plaque:

Go away. We’re not pretty like you and we never will be. We are the rejects of the world, and it’s your obligation to leave us alone. Don’t try to make yourself feel good by soothing us.

Then she went into her room and closed the door with emphasis. I walked slowly toward the front door.

Several of them, led by Stanley and Sophie, followed me and stopped next to the door.

“What’s going on?” they both asked, surrounded by several others.

I really didn’t know what to answer, so I hung my head, tried to calm my own feelings, and to love them.

“They’re dividing your group,” I answered, “for the sake of their personal issues. They’ll make you choose sides. I’m sorry.”

With that I tried to comfort them as best I could for another minute and then left.

This is a situation they’ll have to face themselves. I’ll help with the aftermath as best I can, but the battle is theirs.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 10: Truth at the Sanitarium

Last week young Esther asked me back to the sanitarium and told me that the people there “wanted to talk.” I was reasonably sure that the meeting was prompted by Dora’s cancer diagnosis – she seemed to be important to the rest of them, making her passing a turning point – but I also gathered from Esther’s expression that they had more on their minds.

And so I did two things that I’ve learned to do over the years in demanding situations.

First – and I learned this from taking tests – rather than obsessing on the facts I might be expected to know, I focused on getting myself in the best possible condition to face the situation. Whatever was going to happen, I would be the central instrument in it, and so I prepared myself first and foremost: good sleep, a nourishing but not heavy meal several hours prior, and so on.

Second – and I learned this one from doing radio shows – I focused my mind, not on knowledge, but on loving the people I’d be addressing.

(If you find yourself stepping into a demanding situation, please try these two things. They work.)

“We Need to Know Why”

They sat me at the head of the dining room table, which was pulled so far toward the wall that I was almost against it. Then they all came in and sat, filling up the remaining spaces at the table and then the open space at the other end of the room. Everyone in the sanitarium was there.

Dora spoke for all of them.

“Look,” she said, “we’re about to ask you some hard questions, and you probably won’t like it, but we need answers, and you’re our best chance at getting them.”

I made myself focus on my own operations and on loving them. I nodded my understanding.

“We need to know – really know – why this happened to us. Why are we ugly and deformed? We know that some other people have suffered worse, and we can understand the words, “We just got unlucky,” but that’s not enough! This is us; we suffer through this every day, and will, every day, till we die…

“So, we want you to make sense of this for us. And I think you can.”

Two thoughts slid through my mind – helluva a job you stepped into and I’m less sure about this than I am that 2 plus 2 equals 4 – but they only slid through; they didn’t seize the mechanism.

“Okay,” I said, I’ll tell you what I think, flat out.”

They sat back and waited. And I waited too; I could feel things forming in me, but I still didn’t know what I’d say. When I opened my mouth this is what came out:

“You’re quite correct that the things that happened to you were accidents, but that’s never going to be satisfying until you have an overview that supports it,” I said.

“And right now you’re struggling within the old model of God… So are the atheists,” I added. “They base their anger upon the same model.

“And so, here’s the big thing: There was a creator, but there is no “omnipotent God” as people imagine him, controlling everything that happens in the world. That much is clear from the condition of the world and it’s also implied fairly well in the Bible… religious people just don’t see it because their theologies come first.”

I paused to let the words sink in.

“And so we can drop the dark imaginings that are tied to that structure – that someone didn’t care enough about us and that he cared about other people more. That whole model is simply wrong. Those ideas were based upon distortions.”

I paused again for a few beats.

“Now, let me give you something further. We’re all at an early stage of development – even the best of us. We’re not ready to even imagine what our final state might be. Really, we’re not terribly far past crawling out of our holes and making sense of light and dark.

“But… the seed of our advanced state – whatever it may be – is already in us. As Moses said, we don’t have to send someone into the heavens or into a far country to get it for us and bring it to us. It’s in us already.

“And it’s in you – as unfortunately as your bodies may be formed – equally as much as it’s in anyone else.”

Then I knew I was done and I stopped. In my younger days I would have been tempted to elucidate on the theme, but I’ve learned to simply shut up. It’s better.

Seeing tear-filled eyes I was grateful that I was able to do this job. And so we sat in silence for some time.

I’ll tell you next time what happened afterward.

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 9: Maladjustments

As I sat with the TCM crew at Jay’s (for those who don’t recall, TCM means the creatively maladjusted), I realized that they were living up to their name. The ideas they came up with for the sanitarium people were pretty far outside the box.
One idea, for example, was to keep a rolling stock of Uber driver credentials, which could be abandoned after each tax season (or if Uber noticed their fake tag numbers) and replaced by another. And before I could complain about innocent people being hassled, they explained that they would only use IDs from the deceased. I warned about feds going after them anyway, but they had heard my argument before. Besides, for some of them skating on taxes made the difference between a plain life and destitution.
I’m not sure if they’ll do this or not (and they had the idea of doing the same for all the “gig economy” professions), but since I believe the threat of destitution is real for some of them, I left that subject aside and tried to insert a few ideas on being clear about the morality of what you do.
“Legality is about state punishment,” I explained, “but morality is about what we are. That’s something we can never skate on.”
Again I thought about the barbarity of a system that forces productive people to choose between parasitism and criminality. It’s an evil choice, and it condemns the status quo in no uncertain terms.
Another idea was to keep the sanitarium busy scouring the darknet for the newest opportunities that might arise. The real service there wouldn’t be to find the ideas, but rather to curate them: to determine which of them were real, didn’t involve crazy levels of risk, and involved honest, voluntary commerce.
Regarding this curation idea, a question came up: How should the sanitarium sell this service? The fact had dawned upon them that if they did things in false names, there could be no legal protections they could call upon.
“You wouldn’t have them anyway,” I told them.
They looked at me with confused faces.
“There’s no legal protection at the low end of the economy,” I said. “Are you really going to sue someone who rips you off for a thousand dollars? The lawsuit itself would cost far, far more.”
This they understood.
“There’s no effective protection for small players anymore. So, you either get payment in front, or you adjust.”
“Adjust how?” they asked.
“Do business with people you trust, don’t let the amounts get large, and withhold services to anyone who pays late. People did this all the time in the old days. They just don’t think of it now, since the system became God.”
Then came a brilliant idea. It was from Jordan again, our resident computer genius.
“If any of them have specialty skills,” he said, “they could open a darknet-based certification agency.”
I thought I knew what he meant but waited for him to explain.
“The only reason real names matter for commerce,” he said, “is that customers need to be assured about honesty and skills.”
Everyone nodded their understanding.
“So, someone who was really good at plumbing, for example, could certify that the bearer of a certain PGP key was a competent plumber. He could be tested in the same way government certified plumbers are, and even more carefully. And if he did bad work, his certification could be yanked. The protection for the customer would be equally good or better than government certification.”
This again set the table humming. They came up with a long list of jobs that could be digitally certified and paid for in cryptocurrencies. The market for this was gigantic. With just a little bit of creativity and courage (or desperation), the vast majority of lower- and mid-level jobs could be conducted this way… crypto-only.
“And no one is already doing this?” asked Adam, our budding biologist.
We all looked at each other and shook our heads.
This, I thought, is a prime opportunity. I’m not interested in such things these days, but 20 years ago I would have jumped at it.
They continued talking, but just a moment later I could see where these “creative maladjustments” were heading: The sanitarium would end up as a kind of umbrella organization for these things. That would put tremendous responsibility upon its scarred residents, and they’ve never had “pretty people” relying on them before. That would be tremendously validating for them but also intermittently terrifying.
I see interesting days ahead for these people.

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 8: The Exchange

I don’t use phones very often; most days I talk on the phone no more than once or twice, and often not at all. Phone calls interrupt me, and interruptions waste a lot of my time… I have to figure out where I was before the call, reassemble the pieces, and get going again. In the construction business, we used to call that demobilization and mobilization, and it led to serious losses.

And so, back in the 1990s, I trained all my friends and business associates to email me, not to call me. Emails don’t interrupt you… unless you’re silly enough to add a ring tone. Michele at Jay’s Bar, however, has the number of my business phone; he’s used it occasionally to confirm reservations. And he surprised me last week with a phone call. It started like this:

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Michele, from Jay’s Bar.”

He sounded like something was on his mind.

“Hi Michele, what can do for you?”

He hesitated and then answered with his voice lowered, as if he didn’t want someone to hear him. “I didn’t know if I should call you or not, but the girl from your meetings is here, and she’s sitting in the back of the bar, crying.”

I almost asked Michele if he was sure it was the same girl, but I knew better. He didn’t make that kind of mistake. Still, I didn’t know what was best to do. And so I decided to do something rather than nothing.

“If you would, please, Michele, ask her to come to the phone.”

“Wait,” he said. “Another of your group is here… a young guy. He’s going to her.”

That had to be Johnny.

“A polish kid?” I asked.

“Yeah. Could be.”

“What are they doing?”

“Well, he’s sitting next to her… putting his arm around her… and she’s crying on his shoulder.”

“Okay, then we should stay out of their way. Thanks very much for calling, Michele.”

“You bet.”

I found out at our next meet-up that Esther’s mother, Dora, had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. It’ll be a few months and no more. Given her unusual circumstances and her relatively young age, that had to be a major blow to Esther. And I was very pleased with Johnny; he stepped up and handled it the way a man’s supposed to. God bless him.

But no one uttered a word of this at the meeting. Esther told me only afterward, as we headed back to the train station.

The meeting did, however, center on the people at the sanitarium. The kids in my little group – and I think all of them are young enough to be my children – have taken up the sanitarium as a cause. (Don’t tell me free people aren’t charitable enough.) They had a long list of business ideas for them.

The first idea that caught my attention was running a Bitcoin exchange, and it caught my attention because it was extremely dangerous. Granted, this was a very clever way to do it, but that’s the kind of thing that the feds are searching for these days – they want to shut down every avenue of cryptocurrency transfer to national currencies… or at least the ones they don’t control.

They’re arresting people wildly to scare everyone else off. It’s terroristic, to be frank, but fed agents believe their rules are from God. What’s worse, these guys are worshipped in an unending series of TV shows and movies, and they get promotions for punishing the crime-of-the-month.

The idea was to set up a decentralized and modular cryptocurrency exchange system. At its core would be the Ripple system and a bidding structure like Google ads. A user would ask to exchange their cryptocurrency, and chains of others – none of whom may know each other – would bid on fulfilling parts of the order.

One might change Litecoin to Monero, another change that into dollars on a prepaid Visa card, and then another take the currency off the card and deliver it in person or by messenger. And so on, limited only by the imaginations of the players. Ethereum contracts would handle the escrow and payouts, and an independent blockchain would verify all the details as the orders progressed. They planned on using Open Bazaar’s reputation system as well. There would be no center, only a protocol.

As I say, it was an intriguing idea, but I told them, urgently, that this could not be done in the United States and perhaps almost nowhere else as well.

“They will throw millions of dollars at hunting you down, if you do this,” I told them.

I almost started recounting the story of what the feds did to Ross Ulbricht. But the whole purpose of that disgrace was to instill fear, and I wasn’t going to help them in their filthy mission.

“Yes,” I insisted, “what those people are doing is barbaric, but barbarians have done a hell of a lot of damage in the world. I don’t want you guys to be next in line.”

“Then how could it be done?” Mike, one of the newer kids, asked.

“Mike, this is a job for old men… for very old men and women.”

They all looked at me with blank faces.

“This is the kind of thing you do when you’re 85 or 90 years old and you don’t give a damn if they come after you. What’s the worst they can do against someone that old? Send them to prison for life?”

They got the point.

“But if someone wanted to dance with martyrdom, they’d have to do it somewhere beyond the easy grasp of the US government. And I’m not sure where that would be these days. Laos or Cambodia maybe or possibly Brazil. Russia or China perhaps. But the real way to do it would be Satoshi’s way: Write it, drop it into the world, and vanish.”

Then I steered the conversation to other subjects. I’ll give you more details next time.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 7: The Cloaked Life

The Thursday after my visit to the sanitarium, I showed up early to the TCM lunch at Jay’s Bar. I brought a legal pad and a pen, sat down, and started making notes.
“You look serious this time, Professor.”
I looked up to see Michele handing me a lunch menu.
“Yeah, I picked up another hard problem, and I want the team to help me with it.”
Michele laughed. “I remember you biting off a lot of hard problems before.”
He couldn’t have been more than a teenager the last time I hung out in the back room with the cypherpunks, but he was right. I had always been a sucker for a hot new project.
I laughed too. “I hate to admit it, Michele, but you’re right. I did. I’ve pretty well gotten over that, but I couldn’t turn away from this one. It’s for people who are pretty badly disabled.”
“You and this group are doing something to help those people?” he asked.
“We are, at least as well as we can.”
Just then a couple sat at the bar and his busboy showed up. He turned to go, but before he did, he said, “I’m very glad you do that.”
Soon the group assembled and I explained my problem: that I had a group of people who, because of their infirmities (or disabilities, or whatever their conditions should be called) couldn’t conduct business the usual way and needed to do it entirely in the digital realm.
“They shouldn’t use their real names,” Nikos was quick to say. “Regardless of what they’re doing. There are a lot of feds skulking around these days, and they can make anyone look like a crook if they want to.”
We all nodded our heads in agreement, and I added, “Yeah, that’s their plan. Pseudonyms only.”
“Good,” Nikos said, adding, “And they have to use encryption… all the time… as a default.”
And that set the table into a near uproar, both of agreement and of disgust with the lack of reason on the darknet.
Johnny’s was the voice I noticed most. He said, “Did you see the details of the dark market takedown last month?”
“What about it?” a couple of them asked.
“The feds pulled more than 10,000 unencrypted emails from the system. Unencrypted, while buying drugs! What the hell were these people thinking? There’s some kind of brain virus at work here.” Then he turned to me. “You have to make them use encryption, and if they don’t, you refuse to teach them. Anything else would be crazy.”
I wrote Thunderbird, GPG and Enigmail on my pad and underlined it twice. Then I turned to Esther, whom I knew would be critical in this. “Do you know how to use these tools?”
“No, not really,” she said.
“All right then; this is step number one. Nothing else happens until everyone is using encryption on a daily basis. It’s not hard, but they have to do it. Without encryption, nothing happens.”
Johnny turned to Esther and said, “I can teach you.”
She agreed.
I had been wondering if Johnny was sweet on Esther, and this convinced me. I hope things can work out between them. And they should; pairing off is simply what young men and women do if you get out of their way and let them. We’re all awkward about it, but it happens nonetheless.
Then Jordan, one of the newer people to our group, jumped in.
“And they must never trust Tor nodes. I’m convinced that the feds run most of them.”
“Of that I’m sure,” I added. “Several years ago – right about the time they went after Silk Road – the number of Tor nodes doubled in a month. That’s when the feds ramped up their search techniques. For a one-time in and out, Tor is probably okay, but to run an ongoing service is asking for trouble. If you get big enough for them to focus on you, they will find you.”
“I2P is better,” Jordan added. “At least the new version that’s in C++, not Java. It requires you to use a command line, but that’s only hard if you think it’s hard.”
I explained to everyone, and especially to Esther, who was doing a nice job of taking notes, that the Invisible Internet Project (properly, I²P) was like Tor, only better and not overrun by feds. It’s the new darknet of choice.
Then Jordan, with surprising elegance for a young man, turned to address Esther and Johnny together. “If you want to set it up, just bring a laptop to one of these lunches and I’ll help; the new version still requires configuration. They’ll make it smoother eventually, but you shouldn’t wait for that.”
They thanked him, and I thought that this was enough techie stuff for the day. So, when the food arrived and the conversation shifted, I backed off and let it.
More next time.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 6: Rise of the Scarred People

In the back room of the sanitarium, young Esther showed me a handmade plaque, about the size of a typical award plaque, which it may have been originally.
“Everyone here has gone through this,” she said. “Even me.”
I’m pretty well used to dark things (having read lots of nasty history), but this was a dark perspective that was new and slightly jarring. It read:

This is where scarred and rejected people live. Go away and don’t embarrass us any further. We’re not pretty like you and we never will be. We don’t have money and we don’t have power and we know we never will. We are the rejects of the world, and it’s your obligation to leave us alone. Don’t try to make yourself feel good by soothing us – it doesn’t help. And don’t try to make us prosperous and happy like you – we can’t do it and we don’t want to be reminded.

I didn’t know how to respond, so I simply said, “I’m sorry.”
Esther nodded.
But I still had her words in my ears, We’ve all gone through this. And “going through” implies coming out the other side,
“But this is no longer entirely true, is it?”
“Partly,” she said, “but no, not entirely.”
“Like your mom’s story?” I asked. “Wrung out with loss and anger but realizing that you’re still here… and that what’s inside can still operate?”
She smiled halfway. “Yes,” she said. “Not as crisp and clean as you say it, but mostly.”
“Mostly” is a good start, I thought.
A few minutes later I found myself at a large dining room table with most of the sanitarium’s residents. Esther’s mom, Dora, explained what they wanted.
“We want to run businesses from right here in our home and never have to go to banks and other offices. I don’t want to walk down the street and have people looking down at me and comparing themselves to me, which I know is what they do. Can we do that with these new cryptocurrencies?”
“The short answer, Dora, is that yes, you can. But you should know that it’s kind of hard, and a few parts are of questionable legality… not ’cause they’re bad in any real way, but because the governments haven’t a clue what to do with these things and they tend to lash out wildly from time to time. When someone’s frustrated and angry, and if all they own is a whip, they tend to get malicious with it.”
Dora thought for a moment, then responded, “When you say ‘hard,’ what do you mean?”
“I mean that part of it will be slow and plodding, not that it requires you to write computer programs or anything like that.”
“We can do that,” she said. (This would have been the time when I might have smirked were I her, but her face never flinched. It seemed that she had trained herself not to smile, which I found painfully sad.) “We have plenty of time on our hands.”
“Okay,” I said, “then you should be able to do it. There will be the occasional false start and all the usual difficulties of business… and you’ll be limited to the cyrpto-economy, which is still developing… but you can do it.”
This time I saw just a little bit of light in Dora’s face, and just as fast I told myself that I could not – no matter what – allow myself to subvert that tiny sprout of happiness.
“Will you tell us how to do this?” she asked.
“I will, Dora, but what I’m really going to do is to teach you how to learn about all this stuff. In fairly short order, you guys will know more than I do.”
Her face began to turn suspicious and I remembered the plaque: Don’t try to make yourselves feel good by soothing us, so I jumped right back into the conversation.
“And I’m serious about that. I know the broad outlines and I can tell you where to go, but I’m not up on the new tricks. I no longer have time for that.”
Dora seemed to be content.
I explained that my time was limited but that I could stop by their place the following week and get them started. I took a look at their computer equipment and their internet connection and advised some upgrades. They said they’d take care of them.
So now I have to teach a group of people how to conduct business purely in the digital economy – no banks, no offices, and so on. Plenty of people do that already, but I’m not one of them. So, I just bit off yet more learning. Thankfully, I have cool friends.
More next time.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 5: The Late, Great Chester Cruz

I found the Mueller Sanitarium for the Chronically Ill a few blocks from a place I worked back in the 1980s. It sits almost by itself, at least if you don’t count parking lots, and only a block or so from a rapid transit train. It’s tucked in between a middle class neighborhood and a small industrial park. The building itself is an old brick six-flat, apparently in good condition, and the sanitarium sign in front is almost discrete. It’s easy to see as you approach the building but was clearly not designed to attract attention.
I walked up the stairs with some trepidation. While I have experience with lots of unusual things, deformed people are not my specialty, and it seems that most of us are instinctively turned away from such sights. I honestly don’t think any kind of hatred is involved, or even devaluation per se; it’s just that those things strike us as very wrong. Humans – in our deep instincts it seems – are supposed to be healthy, attractive creatures.
But I had prepared myself along the way, and I was confident that I was ready. I rang the bell and within a few seconds Esther appeared. She welcomed me in and guided me to their “front room,” where I couldn’t help seeing a large portrait hanging, painted fairly well in oils.
“That’s the man who founded this place,” she said. “Chester Cruz. He died when I was very young, so I’m not sure if I really remember him or not, but we all owe him the effective portions of our lives.”
Just then, two old men walked in. They seemed half afraid of my reaction and half happy to meet me.
“You wrote the article on tortured children?” one of them asked.
The man had a badly withered right arm and a twisted torso. He walked with difficulty.
“Yes,” I said, “I did.”
He extended his left hand to me and I shook it.
“Thank you,” he added.
“It was my pleasure, sir. I felt I needed to. Those children deserved to be defended.”
Then I looked at the other man. I had to stop myself from gasping, not because of how he looked, but because I thought I knew him. I have, however, learned not to trust my poker face too well and so I spoke quickly.
“I think I know you… or rather… I used to see you.”
He smiled. Even through a badly damaged and poorly repaired face (this man had obviously been through some horrible accident), I could tell. And by this time, I was no longer concerned about my expressions.
“Back in the 1990s, did you used to walk down the alley between Wabash and State in the very early morning, going north from 11^th Street?”
He smiled again. “Yes I did,” he said. “I used to work at the police headquarters there, from 11 at night till four in the morning. They tucked me away in the repair garage, but they kept me on till retirement.”
I had seen this man when I lived on 9^th Street and parked on State. When I got up very early in the morning, as I did occasionally, he would appear in the alley like a character in an old film noir movie: his collar pulled up and a fedora pulled down over his face, sticking to the shadows underneath the elevated train tracks. I’ve been tempted several times to write a story about him or at least to include him in a novel. It just never worked out.
I shortly met four other residents, and I’ll get to their commercial efforts next time, but first I want to tell you about the founder of the sanitarium, Chester Cruz.
Cruz was a hunchbacked lawyer. In most cases of this condition (kyphosis), the curvature of the spine doesn’t change over time. But in a small percentage, one of whom was Chester, it gets worse, to the point where it’s almost completely debilitating.
As a young lawyer, Chester looked like he had a bad back or some type of injury. He got tailored suits and covered it up fairly well. And since he was very bright and very motivated, he did quite well in the practice of law.
As time passed, however, Chester’s condition became much worse, to the point where his appearance was a distraction in court. The firm moved him to office work (at the same rate of pay), but Chester’s days were clearly numbered. He could barely stand with his head up after a while. And so, while he still could, he gathered his money, pulled some political favors, and created the sanitarium, securing a permanent tax exemption for it.
Eventually he left the law firm, which, to their immense credit, provided the sanitarium with annual donations through the rest of Chester’s lifetime and several years beyond. The donations stopped only when the firm was purchased by a mega-firm and reorganized.
Chester lived at the sanitarium for the last 14 years of his life, brought people who “needed to be there,” arranged for psychologists to visit regularly (he forced them to wear lab coats to maintain the appearance of a clinic), and created the model of voluntary cooperation that they still maintain.

More to Come

Next time I’ll tell you about their dealings with the outside world, and especially their current difficulties.

* * * * *

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I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

ROSC 4: The Sanitarium

When I walked into our latest TCM lunch, I saw a few new members, two of whom were young women. That made me feel good, because there had been a flaw in most 20^th century liberty movements, in that they never drew many women. Liberation movements of the past featured lots of women, many of whom showed more courage than the men.
So, I took it as a healthy sign that women were showing up at our lunch, as indeed they do at Bitcoin meetups.
The group discussed a new ridesharing service that seemed to be an improvement (Libre Taxi) and decided that they were worth checking out. Nikos volunteered for the job, and the rest of us gave him a list of things to look into. After that, we moved into a discussion of recent events in the cryptocurrency world.
But through all of this one of the young women, Esther, jumped in with questions, mostly directed to me, on side subjects. That was odd. And they were odd questions like, “Why do people care about beauty?” and, “Have you ever spent time with mentally challenged people?” She was polite and tried to avoid derailing the main conversation, but she clearly had some alternative purpose. So, I answered her as best I could and waited to see where she was headed.
I soon found that she was going nowhere I had imagined.
As the meeting broke up, she asked me to stay and talk, and so I did. We sat at the empty end of the bar.
“I had reasons to ask you those questions,” she said.
“I was pretty sure of that,” I responded, offering a small smile, which she returned ever so briefly. Then she handed me a card that read: Mueller Sanitarium for the Chronically Ill.
“That’s where I live,” she added. “Myself, my mother, and about dozen others. We want you to come help us.”
I was lost and could only reply, “I’d be glad to help, but I’m not a doctor.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’re not really sick.”
And if that wasn’t enough to send my mind reeling, she added that the people at the sanitarium already liked me.
“How’s that?” I squeezed out.
She explained that they had seen an article I wrote on children being tortured in schools a few years back. And for that, they trusted me.
“That’s very nice,” I said, “but I’m entirely lost here, Esther. What is this sanitarium and what would you like me to do? And I should add that I have very limited time these days. It’s stretching it for me to make these lunches.”
“I know,” she said, “but once I explain, I think you’ll make at least a bit of time.”
I nodded and waited for her to continue. And what a story she told.
The residents of the sanitarium, Esther explained, had once called themselves “The Rejects.” I immediately stiffened, displaying my objection. No one should accept such a verdict; it’s an offense to human dignity itself.
“They no longer use that,” she added, “but I want you to understand this. These are people who are very homely or physically deformed… the kinds of people who were tortured in schools, pointed at, and insulted all their lives. Either that or tucked away in an asylum, where they’d simply be housed till they died.”
“And they really have their own place, where they live together?”
“They do,” she assured me. “The sanitarium sign, even if it’s false, provides protection for them. Behind it they’re not bothered, and they can live without torment.”
She was right; I very definitely wanted to help these people. I immediately made an appointment to see them, but I needed more information. This was a wild story, and I needed to understand it.
Esther began by explaining herself. “My mom,” she said, “is a very homely woman. She never once had a man who was interested in her.”
“I’m sorry,” I injected.
“We all are,” she said, “but there was nothing to be done about it, and so, after decades of crying, blaming God, hating the world, and hating herself, she found that she was still a human being with choices, thoughts, and dreams. She decided that she could either wallow for the rest of her life in the same old pool of pain or she could start living out of her inner self, which wasn’t ugly if she didn’t want it to be.
“And that,” she said with her first real smile, “is how I came into the world.”
Esther’s mother, as it turns out, had been one of the early customers for in vitro fertilization. She had always wanted a child and wasn’t yet past the age limit for pregnancy, and so she decided to do what she wanted. She found the appropriate doctor, picked the best looking sperm donor she could find, and had her baby. (Here I should add that Esther turned out to be an attractive young lady.)
Esther was raised at the Sanitarium and mainly homeschooled there. She went off to college for a few years and then returned. Now she’s setting up businesses for the residents… which became necessary because their bank account, after nearly 30 years, was finally running out. But even more than that, Esther told me, “They’ve learned, slowly, that they can do most of the things pretty people do… and now they want to do them.”

More to Come

I’m already running long for a weekly post, so I’ll stop here. But there is definitely more to come.

* * * * *

A book that generates comments like these, from actual readers, might be worth your time:

I just finished reading The Breaking Dawn and found it to be one of the most thought-provoking, amazing books I have ever read… It will be hard to read another book now that I’ve read this book… I want everyone to read it.
Such a tour de force, so many ideas. And I am amazed at the courage to write such a book, that challenges so many people’s conceptions.
There were so many points where it was hard to read, I was so choked up.
Holy moly! I was familiar with most of the themes presented in A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the concepts you presented at the end of this one.

Get it at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)

* * * * *

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com