Bitcoin Tech Talk #507
Interesting Stuff
Kennedy and Israel - Rolf Kvalvik digs into 2025 declassified Kennedy assassination documents revealing that four words were systematically redacted across four release cycles before finally seeing daylight. The four words were “the Israeli Intelligence Service,” suggesting that there’s someone powerful that kept the link with Israel in the dark the first three times. Apparently, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton met with Mossad reps up to five times weekly and personally controlled Oswald surveillance files, yet lied about any pre-assassination knowledge. Kennedy had issued ultimatums to stop Israel’s nuclear weapons program, and his successor LBJ abandoned that fight immediately, with Israel completing its first nuclear bomb by 1966. Most striking revelation is that Angleton removed Oswald from federal watchlists six weeks before Dallas.
Red and Blue Families - Benjamin L. Mabry lays out two distinct family models. The “Blue” model is a partnership optimized for shared career projects and the “Red” model is a kinship embedded in extended community. As you might expect the distinction isn’t black and white nor cleanly split along political lines as the names would suggest. The main insight is that each breaks down through completely different failure modes. Poverty devastates Blue families by destroying the partnership's economic foundation, while vice like alcoholism ravages Red families because it violates communal resource-sharing obligations. Regardless, both types of families are now being undermined by worker mobility and suburbanization, making it hard to make either approach work.
Childhood Freedom - Johann Kurtz documents a reversal. In 1971, roughly 80% of British seven-year-olds traveled to school independently, but by 1990 that figure collapsed to 9% despite violent crime falling by half. Unsupervised childhood now requires expensive real estate, religious community membership, and/or wealth to privately recreate every social function. He cites Robert Sampson's Chicago research showing how neighbors' willingness to intervene predicted safety far better than poverty levels, showing that the current situation of childhood freedom being a luxury good need not be the case. The fiat dependence on government, unfortunately, incentivizes not caring very much about neighbors or neighborhoods, and children are left paying the price.
Young Women Aren't Converting - Madeleine makes the refreshingly honest case that young women aren't joining conservative Christianity at the same rate as men because the lifestyle costs are dramatically front-loaded. Before getting a husband, they must abandon social signaling, restructure career plans, and sever secular friendship circles. Men converting primarily sacrifice premarital sex while women sacrifice visible social status, career mobility, and access to secular support networks. She paraphrases the rich young ruler from Matthew 19 to frame women's hesitation as entirely rational cost-benefit analysis. Yet like the rich young ruler, there are long term consequences to such short term thinking, which unfortunately prevails to the fiat educated.
Benefits of Forgetting - Luke Burgis recounts discovering at age 39 that his father's undiagnosed Alzheimer's had progressed so far that he failed to recognize his wife's catastrophic health decline. The crisis only surfaced because a parish priest noticed the family had stopped attending Mass, illustrating the difference between “thin” communities that reward conformity and “thick” communities that notice when someone goes missing. His father's remaining memories center entirely on deep relationships while resentments have evaporated, to quote: “It's not all bad being me, because there are a lot of things that are not worth remembering.” Even in things we think of as tragic, there are trade-offs.
What I'm up to
Atomiq Level - I was on this podcast on Substack Live a while back, but it’s now on YouTube. We talked mostly about Bitcoin as money and as freedom technology.
Origin Seoul - I will be in Seoul, Korea for this event on July 18th. There’s a gathering of Christian Bitcoiners followed by a more general one afterward. Sign up and come on by if you’re in town then!
Nostr Note of the Week
