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🇺🇸 NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani criticized Trump for spending billions on killing people in Iran. 👏 Reporter: "Do you oppose the war in Iran?" Mamdani: "This war killed thousands of civilians, so yes, I strongly oppose it."🔥 Reporter: "Are you frustrated by $900 million a day being wasted on these wars?" Mamdani: "We're spending tens of billions to kill people. That money could help our own people instead.🔥🔥 We always have money for war, but never to feed the poor." Finally, a voice of reason from the US. We need more leaders like this pushing for peace. Respect.

Mayor Mamdani: the refugees you post about exist because 22 Arab states launched a war to destroy Israel on May 15, 1948—rejecting the UN plan that also called for a Palestinian state. In its aftermath, 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands. Your post mentions none of this.

One of the things I have come to understand about this universe is something I first learned, in sharper form, from the writings of Terry Pratchett. He understood something that many solemn men in expensive rooms never quite manage to grasp. We are not merely Homo sapiens. We are Pan narrans — the storytelling ape, the storytelling chimp, the creature that does not merely observe the world but survives by wrapping it in meaning. That is what we are. Not the rational animal, not the economic animal, not the statistical animal, not the glorious little spreadsheet mammal that consultants dream about after too much airport coffee. We are the animal that tells itself stories and then builds empires, religions, markets, wars, technologies, and entire civilisations around them. People like to pretend otherwise, of course. It is one of their more charming weaknesses. They imagine that the world runs on facts, when most of them would not recognise a fact if it arrived with a passport, three witnesses, and a signed confession. They imagine it runs on science, when half the institutions invoking science are merely laundering authority through a lab coat. They imagine it runs on money, when money itself is only a story that has learned to wear a suit. The strongest force in this universe is not gravity. It is not electricity. It is not the elegant machinery of physics, though I have published in physics and have more work in that field coming. I understand the appeal of equations. They are clean. They are disciplined. They do not flatter fools merely because the fools have followers. But human beings do not run on equations. They run on narrative. They run on stories. Stories are what tell a man whether he is defeated or merely delayed. Stories tell a mob whether it is righteous or merely numerous. Stories tell cowards they are prudent, thieves they are innovators, parasites they are intermediaries, and bureaucrats they are guardians of order. The right story can keep a civilisation alive. The wrong one can make a civilisation applaud while it walks into the furnace. That is why narrative matters. That is why people fight over it. That is why they lie, distort, censor, sneer, smear, and posture. Not because they care about truth. Most people have only a holiday acquaintance with truth. They visit it occasionally, complain about the weather, and return to the warm swamp of consensus. They fight over narrative because narrative governs what people believe is possible. And one of the oldest, strongest, most enduring narratives is the comeback. The return. The man who was declared finished, buried, dismissed, mocked, written off, and explained away by people whose chief talent was being wrong in groups. The amusing thing about such people is that they always mistake the middle of the story for the end. They see blood and call it defeat. They see silence and call it absence. They see delay and call it destruction. They see a man forced to endure and assume endurance is weakness. That is because their imagination is small. And small imaginations always confuse survival with failure. But the comeback is powerful because it does not require permission from the crowd. It does not ask the mob to revise its opinion first. It does not wait for the priests of fashionable consensus to announce that the weather has changed. It simply arrives, inconveniently alive, carrying receipts and a very poor opinion of those who celebrated too early. That is where we are now. They wrote their story. They told themselves they had won. They convinced each other that the patents would disappear, the IP would vanish, the work would be erased, and the man would be stopped. A touching little bedtime story, really. The sort told by people who need the dark to feel safe. But reality has an unrefined habit of entering the room without asking permission. The work remains. The IP remains. The publications are coming. The story is not over.

It has been nearly a decade. Just under ten years since Arnhem. A decade from stating this. Ten years since I said the words that apparently still require repeating, because some people hear a bell and spend the next decade arguing with the echo. No more kings. Not new kings. Not better kings. Not kings with friendlier branding, softer shoes, cleaner websites, and a committee-approved vocabulary about openness. No more kings. The world has had quite enough of little thrones built in the middle of every road. Platforms as kingdoms. Banks as kingdoms. Exchanges as kingdoms. Foundations as kingdoms. Committees, regulators, custodians, influencers, gatekeepers, and every other velvet-gloved parasite standing between work and value, solemnly explaining why their hand on your throat is actually there for your safety. That age is ending. What comes next is not chaos. That is the word frightened courtiers use when the peasants discover the gate was never locked. What comes next is responsibility. Real responsibility. The sort that does not descend from the top like a royal favour, but rises from those who can build, maintain, prove, deliver, and endure. Open republican-style power means power tied to duty. Power tied to competence. Power tied to contribution. Not inherited. Not granted by proximity. Not assigned by a boardroom full of men whose greatest achievement was being present when the old machine still had fuel in it. Earned. That is the part they dislike. Kings prefer obedience. Republics require citizens. And citizens are troublesome creatures. They ask questions. They build things. They own property. They trade. They refuse to kneel merely because someone has discovered a taller chair. This is what Bitcoin was always meant to enable: not the replacement of one priesthood with another, but the removal of the altar. A system where value can move. Where ownership can be proven. Where work can be rewarded. Where creators can create without begging. Where builders can build without permission. Where power does not gather at the top and rot there, perfumed by consultants, guarded by lawyers, and worshipped by fools. No more kings means no more excuses. It means no more waiting for permission from people who have mistaken delay for wisdom. It means no more asking the middle to approve the future. It means those who earn it can take responsibility and build. Not America. Not China. Not some blessed jurisdiction chosen by the bureaucratic priesthood. The world. Ten years ago, I said no more kings. Now it is time to find out who actually understood the sentence.

Small blockers all want Satoshi to be a dead guy or a criminal, and they think he was a hard-line cypherpunk cryptography expert. That belief tells me they either haven’t looked very hard at bitcoin, or they have malicious goals.