Joseph Valenzuela

I am getting lots of incoming questions about the public execution of Nidal Hasan, mostly because I have been outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade. My position is simple: Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized. They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence, and the only way to keep that from running out of control is to confront voters with the trade they have made every single time, that they might have appropiate confidence or revulsion in the institution. This is not new thinking. George Washington thought the same. The way we have shifted from hanging to firing squads to doctors quietly injecting chemicals that send our worst gently off to sleep is awful and dystopian, a total short-circuiting of important feedback mechanisms. It makes needless executions more likely, not less so. People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point. It doesn't somehow become torture or inhumane (as the UN is suddenly claiming) just because we decline to hide the act behind a curtain. And then there are those who suggest any revel in the death of those who truly deserve it is an indicator of a broken or diseased mind. To the contrary. It is normal, good, and aligned with our natural and national order. That it has not been done here in 60 years is an indictment in and of itself. And that is without even getting into the fact that men were not hung for stealing horse, but that horses may not be stolen. "I would to God that one of the most attrocious in each State was hung in Gibbets, up on a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the Man, who can build his greatness upon his Country’s ruin." - George Washington, 1778

I'm back.

In her latest sciolistic letter to me, @SenWarren made it clear that she knows even less about foreign exchange markets than she does about banking. What is equally shocking, but not surprising: not a single member of the media mob has a rudimentary-enough level of financial market literacy to spot her remedial error. To reiterate: under @POTUS, the United States delivers for America’s trusted partners. For a fuller explanation, I recommend Senator Warren take any entry level course in international finance for her and her staff, or I can personally give her a tutorial on Foreign Exchange for Dummies. Although I am not holding my breath, I hope her next letter will demonstrate that she has learned the difference between a currency purchase and a swap or a loan.

I believe the Shroud of Turin was forged by a medieval artist. I believe he chose a very expensive linen cloth to wow only the very few who would notice, matched the Gospel accounts in extraordinary detail, rejected the artistic conventions of his own time in many ways for the only known time in history, depicted crucifixion with striking anatomical realism, used real blood or blood-derived material instead of simply painting the wounds, created an unremarkable faint image whose most remarkable property would not be recognized until photography revealed it as a negative more than five centuries later, embedded three-dimensional image information that would only be discovered with modern image analysis, produced an image so superficial that modern microscopy still can’t explain it, anticipated details that align perfeclty with modern forensic understanding of crucifixion, executed the entire work without mistakes or corrections on a valuable cloth, he nailed it without error in one shot, invented a technique that no one has convincingly reproduced, left no record of how he did it, inspired no known followers, and did it to wow only us centuries later as nobody viewing the work at the time would even see it for what it is, and then disappeared from history without anyone ever mentioning the greatest technical achievement of medieval art.