The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'cartoon pants.'
Yesterday I sent out a Substack newsletter titled Birthday pants. It was about pants shopping at the Mall of America to celebrate my birthday. The endeavor was successful. Now I'm 42 years old and I have new pants.
The newsletter was shorter than usual and it turned out okay. This may be the dawn of a new era of shorter newsletters. My readers probably won't mind. Hopefully they'll like it.
Tonight I'm going to an event at the Hook and Ladder Theater called 'The Power of Personal Courage in an Era of Mass Censorship.' 
As this is the anniversary of 9/11, it's worth noting the role that Wikileaks might have played in preventing the attacks, had the media organization been around in 2001. Back then, agents within the FBI were on the trail of would-be hijackers. For reasons unknown, the FBI higher ups kept interfering with the investigation. Had Wikileaks existed then, these agents might have anonymously published information about the terrorist plot or the effort to quash the investigation into it.
The more time passes, the more convinced I am that elements within the US intelligence and defense communities knew approximately what was coming on 9/11. Yet instead of stopping it, they allowed it to happen and used the tragedy to greatly expand their power. Something similar happened with Pearl Harbor when, according to this article, "President Roosevelt was warned in a memo from naval intelligence that Tokyo's military and spy network was focused on Hawaii."
Obviously, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were different. Pearl Harbor was launched by Japan and we responded by going to war with Japan. 9/11 was launched by Saudi Arabia and we responded by going to war with Iraq and Afghanistan. Now we're trying to prosecute Julian Assange for publishing true information about American war crimes in Iraq. There's no part of this that isn't screwy.
9/11 changed everything in our society. Privacy vanished entirely as politicians donned little American flag pins. An international network of secret torture prisons sprung up. Government lie after government lie was publicly exposed and people mostly just ignored it. The only thing that didn't change was our country's close friendship with the Saudis.
From my perspective, 9/11 marked the beginning of society's descent into dystopia. The completion of this descent was evident in the pandemic response. Now we live in a bizarro world where the government is trying to bring a foreign media publisher into the country in chains to charge him with crimes for telling the truth. This seems like the exact opposite of what a free society would do.
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