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From the Archives: 9/11 Remembered

Everything Has Changed N.B. First published as Volume II:26 on JamesKBishop.com, September 12, 2001. I wrote it from Internet America, then the largest independent ISP in Texas. The security team stayed on duty more than twenty-four hours. We were sure a cyber attack against the Internet itself was coming. It did not. The planes had already done the work. This is what I filed while we waited. On Tuesday, the world became smaller. The hijacking and suicide mission of four commercial flights caused the destruction of the World Trade Center, severe damage to the Pentagon, and a loss of life that…

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Here’s to Better Ideas

Repeal the Surtax A $5,000 check is a rally line. Killing the 3.8 percent investment tax is a statute. Dallas, Wednesday night. The line was built for the hall. “If the Republicans win,” the president said, “you win with us and you get $5,000.” He called it a Trump Dividend. Spend it in America. Pretend he is on the ballot one more time. I have a counter-proposal. It is not a check. It is not conditioned on an election night. It does not require the Treasury to invent a mailing list of a quarter-billion adults and then police where they shop.…

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Carry the Water

The Rant and the Invoices Rick Santelli leaves the floor on October 2. The question he asked in 2009 is the fraud docket since May. February 19, 2009. Chicago Merc. CNBC had Santelli on the floor for a housing plan that would refinance the people who could not carry the note. He did not file a memo. He pointed at the traders and asked the country a question it still has not answered. Why don't you put up a website and let people vote on whether we subsidize the losers' mortgages, or reward the people who can carry the water instead…

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Expand the Child Tax Credit

Tax Parents Less. Do Not Put Them on the Dole. N.B. This follows "A Parent is Not a Vendor." If policy can pay a parent for being a parent, it can pay a person for being a person. That is the sentence the Vance draft cannot survive. A future Democratic administration will not need to love stay-at-home marriage. It will keep the payee and delete the adjectives. It will call the marriage gate discriminatory, relax the hours test, raise the income cap, and tell Congress the Child Care and Development Fund is oversubscribed, which it will be. Ro Khanna already wrote…

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A Parent is Not a Vendor

Do Not Put Parents on the CCDF Ledger A stay-at-home parent is not a vendor. A Clinton-era work pot is not a family stipend. Do the family work in the tax code. The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let some married stay-at-home parents collect money from the Child Care and Development Fund. Vice President JD Vance has made the idea a priority. The draft invents a new category called "parent-based child care." One spouse works at least thirty-five hours a week. The other stays home with the child. The family meets the income test. The check, about nine…

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Trump’s Strategic Patience

Time Is No Longer on Tehran’s Side Strategic patience is not passivity. It is a Navy that answers fire with arithmetic, a Treasury that maps every node that pays the IRGC, and a map that is quietly making the Strait of Hormuz optional. N.B. This follows “The Art of the Hammer” (June 2026). The memorandum was a pause with a clock. The clock ran out. See also the statecraft file and prior Kharg Island notes. It has been a couple of months since I last wrote about Iran. That was not neglect. It was the interval the story required. In June,…

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Positive Labor Day Numbers

Labor Day, and the Slope Changed The official story finally faces the same direction as the policy. Labor Day is the weekend America sets aside to praise work and then talk about anything else. This year the holiday has a plot. The government spent Friday morning describing a country that no longer looks like the one it described from 2021 to 2024. The border is not a monthly spectacle. The foreign-born population is not still climbing like a flood gauge. The job market did not fall through the floor when the inflow stopped. That is not atmosphere. That is the official…

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Compute and Creaturehood

Data Centers Have Neighbors Compute will find a home. The only live civic question is whether the neighbors are treated as creatures or as throughput. I have never believed a tool decides a people. I said that when the argument went to orbit. I will say it again with the argument on the ground. The demand for compute is not a zoning category. It is load. It will clear. It will clear on a brownfield with its own generation, on a river that still has surplus power, behind a posted payment in lieu of taxes, in the next county that wants…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VI

The Orinoco Settlement N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, and V of this series. January 3 was the writ. August 28 was the recording. This series has treated the Western Hemisphere as an operating theater, not a neighborhood watch. Part II called the Orinoco the biggest real-estate deal since Manhattan. Part IV flew Maduro and Cilia Flores to New York. Part V carried the same logic north to Greenland. Friday closed the southern flank. President Trump and Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, put a number on the prize named before the raid. Seventeen fields. Sixty-five billion barrels. A private company…

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What Flock Actually Sells

The Pole Is Not the Product Flock did not sell Texas a camera. It leased cities a searchable graph of other people's cars. People keep arguing about a black box on a pole. Police chiefs hold up recovered trucks and missing children. Opponents hold up 1984. City managers hold up a vendor invoice and a transparency portal. All three groups talk about a camera because a camera photographs well and fits on a council agenda. Here is the thing the agenda never quite names. Flock Safety did not become a national fixture by selling poles. It sold a searchable graph of…

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