The U.S. spends a tremendous amount of its energy on paranoia, checks and balances, and being remarkably resistant to large-scale changes of the status quo, particularly with respect to rights attendant to private property.

In the current period of bullet trains, wind farms, and unisex bathrooms, it is incredibly inconvenient, even dangerous in its own right. It looks like an operating system bug, but only because it is holding up a feature that the real owners of America don’t like advertised.

There is a reason the dollar is still the global reserve currency- because the entire system was set up to make private property despot-and-revolution-resistant, and the smart money knows it.

The world is heading into a major demographic shift that is going to hit everybody’s social model like a brick through a plate glass window- too many pensioners and not enough taxpayers, and no one has built the roomba that cooks and cleans for grandma yet. We will get to watch a preview in China and Russia quite soon. The pitchforks are going to come out again, and politicians will blow with the wind.

But if you own land/stuff in America, you will still own land/stuff in America.

I’m not saying it is right, or just. It is simply some useful perspective on what such an awkward, irritating, distributed, recursive system might have been designed for, because it certainly wasn’t designed for speed.

The term “storm canvas” comes to mind, and with it a reminder to keep an eye to windward.

This man fights in the shade.

Please explain the universe in which there is utility for Putin to have an incognito Prigozhin running around on a beach somewhere sufficient to fake a plane crash.

Cui bono?