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Shoeshine boys in airports ‘round the world must be whispering about Bitcoin as the crypto-currency coils upward to tickle the $10,000 line. Ethereum’s roaring up, too, along with most other cryptos, from Byteball Bytes to Tattoocoin (Limited Edition). Whatever else you think about it, this action is sending a message, perhaps several.
One would be Get Rich Quick, of course. Eight months ago, you could have copped Bitcoin for a mere $1000, and around Labor Day it touched $5000, which seemed, well, figment-ish. In the last two weeks it went all out hockey-stick, doubling. To a certain sort of mind this must seem irresistible. The result: a good old-fashioned mania. Digital tulip bulbs.
Another message probably goes something like duck-and cover. Some nervous nellies are seeking shelter in Bitcoin as they detect tremors in the more traditional markets creeping ever-higher to new records. To some degree, Bitcoin may be doing the job that gold used to do, providing the aura of a “safe haven” from a possible global financial mega-storm. The last time such an event came out nowhere (ha!) after the “permanent plateau” of 1929 collapsed, the government confiscated as much physical gold as it could get its paws on. So who wants to be there? (Echo answers….)
These days, the zeitgeist also points to new-and-improved government monkey business for shoving global populations into cashless monetary regimes where the authorities could monitor and control (and collect a vig on) all transactions — and there is the theory, at least, that Bitcoin’s block-chain computer math would be secure from any government’s clutches.
I’m not so sanguine about Bitcoin’s supposed impregnability, nor about many of its other appealing claims. The Mt. Gox affair of 2014 must be forgotten now, but back then some sharpie hacked 850,000 Bitcoins (valued over $450,000,000) out of the exchange, which was processing almost two-thirds of all the Bitcoin trades in the world. Mt. Gox went out of business. Bitcoin tanked and then traded sideways for three years until (coincidentally?) the Golden Golem of Greatness was elected Leader of the Free World. Hmmmm…..
Not many readers understand the first thing about block-chain math, your correspondent among them. But I am aware that the supposed safety of Bitcoin lies in its feature of being an algorithm distributed among a network of computers world-wide, so that it kind of exists everywhere-and-nowhere at the same time, a highly-valued ghost in the techno-industrial meta-machine.
However, the electric energy required for “mining” each Bitcoin — that is, the computations required for updating the block-chain network — is enough to boil almost 2000 liters of water. This is happening world-wide, and a lot of the Bitcoin “mining” is powered by coal-burning electric plants, making it the first Steampunk currency. If Bitcoin were to keep rising to $1,000,000 per unit, as many investors hope and pray, there wouldn’t be enough electric power in the world to keep it going.
Pardon me if I seem skeptical about the whole scheme. Even without Bitcoin bringing extra demand onto the scene, America’s electrical grid is already an aging rig of rags and tatters. There are a lot of ways that the service could be interrupted, perhaps for a long time in the case of an electric magnetic pulse (EMP). I’m not convinced that crypto-currencies are beyond the clutches of government, either. Around the world, in their campaign to digitize all money, there must be a deep interest in either hijacking existing block-chains, or creating official government Bit-monies to seal the deal of total control over financial transactions they seek.
Anyway, there are already over 1300 private cryptos and, apparently, a theoretically endless ability to create ever new ones — though the electricity required does seem to be a limiting factor. Maybe governments will shut them down for being energy-hogs.
My personal take on the phenomenon is that it represents the high point of techno-narcissism — the idea that technology is now so magical that it over-rides the laws of physics. That, for me, would be the loudest “sell” signal. I’d just hate to be in that rush to the exits. And who knows what kind of rush to other exits it could inspire.
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Monday!
And apparently ‘much to do about nothing’. No slam on the article by saying that, just joking since bitcoins are made of nothing.
‘much to do about nothing’ – K-Dog
========
Ado, not to do. – Wm Shakespeare
BackRowHecklerNovember 26, 2017 at 8:03 pm # Maybe someone here in the CFNation can explain Bitcoin.
I can’t figure out where the value comes from.
Brh/ Go to youtube and spend a few hours.
What is bitcoin? Lines of code. BLOCKCHAIN. Web2.0.
Satoshi Nakamoto is — Satoshi with his elegant code of blockchain/bitcoin brought the digital Truth into our world of Deception./ I assume the Bankers are the source of bitcoin and SN is a non existent frontman. When the banks-real gov want bitcoin to disappear, it will =THE CASHLESS SOCIETY THAT THE BIBLE ALLUDED TO.
Silk Road Shutdown: NY US Attorney Seizes $28 Million In Bitcoins Belonging To Ross Ulbricht–On Friday, New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced the seizure of $28 million in bitcoins that belonged to Ross Ulbricht, the alleged owner of Silk Road, an infamous online drug marketplace. According to the report, Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco but was later sent to New York, where he faces three felony charges.
Bharara described Silk Road as “a hidden website designed to enable its users to buy and sell illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services anonymously and beyond the reach of law enforcement.” Bharara, along with the FBI, DEA ……..
I already have more than enough to worry about without adding Bitcoin to the mix. Too much complexity. Too much stress. Too much information overload. Or, as Mr. Kunstler said “Too Much Magic.”
AKMOFO–How is she different than any other politician, other than her skin colour? [you a Brit? The ‘u’]
The only real difference is the poor level of “professionalism” in her theft.[moral relativity]
What’s interesting is that in racist USA, the thieving white whales are given a free pass and a blind eye by the rest of the gov mafia and the idiots that follow the “news”. [tell that to Madoff and Martha Stewart]
These billion dollar thieving white whales can run for President, can openly flaunt their treason, mass thieving, mass rape, mass murder, child trafficking and pedophilia, and other despicable criminality, but some lowly black poorly mimicking the thieving all around her is set up to be crucified because she’s black. Tell me that’s not racism. [SHE IS NOT LOWLY, NOR OPPRESSED INTO BEING LOWLY BY WHITES].
BINGO– How nice that CONgressman CONyers of Michigan has respectfully removed himself from the House Judiciary Committee.
It was only because he utilized 27K of taxpayers money to pay off a female subordinate resulting from his predatory sexual antics. What else I wonder? After 53 years at the trough, he has got to have a fine stash of cash somewhere and some other hushed-up peccadilloes. Cayman Islands maybe?
I replied to this message last night, and I wouldn’t want it to get lost in the undertow, so here’s my response again, lightly edited:
This is about more than Conyers. His name is front-and-center because this happened to come to light as part of the current everything-must-go Charlie Foxtrot house cleaning of sexual predation and general crumminess that got set off with the Harvey Weinstein revelations.
Here’s an interesting link about it:
http://www.ninaillingworth.com/2017/11/25/the-simple-truth-the-congressional-sexual-harassment-cover-up-scandal/
The way that Congress currently deals with sexual harassment allegations was pretty much designed to shield members of Congress against any likelihood of genuine consequences for their actions. Hilariously, the provisions were set up by a 1995 law called… brace yourselves… the Congressional Accountability Act. Both Republicans and Democrats have made use of this very special kind of ‘accountability’. Here’s a year-by-year breakdown of the payouts made, at US taxpayer expense, to silence the victims:
http://www.dailywire.com/news/23700/chart-breaks-down-year-year-congressional-sexual-amanda-prestigiacomo
What’s also worth noting is that the Congress that passed this enabling-sexual-harassment-by-legislators act in 1995 was the GOP majority that took the House in the 1994 election. These same people pursued a presidential sex scandal to the point of impeachment while crafting a law to ensure they could get away with exactly the same behaviour (and their Democratic colleagues got the benefit as well).
Wow, American politics is corrupt. Just… wow.
Hey there malthuss!
I am pleased that you quoted me. Where’s the attribution?
belated thanks…I would have done a reply but this is a new topic, being that it is monday.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the Jesus Christ of the digital reality. Satoshi with his elegant code of blockchain/bitcoin brought the digital Truth into our world of Deception.
The Truth of the blockchain/bitcoin is one for all, infinitely verified by everyone from the first transaction in the distant past and up to this very moment, without the ability to forge it, as tens of millions of copies of it and its entire history are recorded on the computers of users of the entire community.
The technology blockchain/bitcoin accomplished the impossible:
Total strangers completely trust each other’s money and resources using blockchain technology and do so without paying taxes, fees and commissions, using their own and their community resources with a 99.999% guarantee.
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies is just one of thousands of possible applications to use this blockbuster platform, and besides it’s not the most important one.
Exchanges, Investment Banks, Central Banks, whole industries related to the sale and registration of real estate, cars and other property, documents, securities, ratings, voting of citizens are all morally obsolete as the technology of the blockchain will do it for free and a million times faster and a thousand times safer.
The whole world around you is morally obsolete and the already successfully working model of blockchain/bitcoin confirms this every day and every second.
And additional thought: all virtual currencies in addition to diverting morons from real life perform one important function. The issuance of the crypto currency creates a massive monetary demand for them, relieving the monetary pressure on the real currencies in conditions of large-scale emission by Central Banks, thereby weakening the rate of inflation. For how long? Hardly too long.
NY US Attorney Seizes $28 Million In Bitcoins Belonging To Ross Ulbricht.
“Satoshi Nakamoto is the Jesus Christ of the digital reality”
Finc,
Christ, huh? That guy disappeared 2000 years ago, and we haven’t heard from him since…not a very reliable role model.
A money worthless without computers and electricity seems worthless to me.
I suspect the first thing most clusterfuckers would do if they had a bitcoin is sell it. I would. I’ll get dog biscuits.
To believe in the future of crypto-currency means you can’t believe collapse is around the corner. You can’t believe in a fast or even a slow collapse because in a slow collapse crypto-currency will certainly lose value.
A slow collapse means technical innovation will slow to a crawl. The first casualties in an economic downturn among engineers are those working in R & D and new products. The next time engineers are booted to the unemployment line will mean technical innovation will slow down to a crawl just as it did in 2008 and before that in 2001. When that happens crypto-currency value will tank. Failure in innovation will threaten the liquidity of crypto-currencies and that will trigger a loss in value.
I don’t see a crash in crypto-currency value triggering a crash of civilization. It will however be one of the first casualties. If bitcoin value does collapse before other things do it may be because bitcoins are falling over like canaries in coal mines. Not a cause but and indicator.
‘an’ indicator Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
kick back and smell the tulips.
Tulips don’t have much of a smell. But then neither do bitcoins.
Totally in agreement that any currency based on endless uninterruptible supplies of electricity is a disaster waiting to happen! Wonder how bitcoin is trading in Puerto Rico right now with half its electricity still off?
Doug Henwoods Behind the News had an interesting interview about the Paradise Papers and all those trillions from plutocrats sloshing into overseas tax havens.:
https://tunein.com/radio/KPFA—Behind-The-News-p29650/?topicId=118065549
A good point made by Doug Henwood and his guest is what does it tell you about the prospects for Capitalism when the uber wealthy are content to stuff their ill-gotten gains in off-shore tax havens rather than productive investment? The best return for the money for these .01% is to simply park their money and avoid taxes??
Hmmmm
Milk Bones and other treats will be considered an excellent store of value when/should the fiat money of the world collapse.
A pack of very hungry Canines is quite the terrible and formidable force.
Ah yes and another pet peeve of mine is those idiotic handwaving electric paper towel dispensers- wonder how those are working in Puerto Rico right now? First off, the sensors frequently don’t work properly and you wind up shaking your fist spastically hoping they will pick up the signal to dispense a towel.
What was wrong with the manual paper towel dispensers which you could trigger with your elbow thus avoiding germs?
Cornucopian insanity reigns!
“Ah yes and another pet peeve of mine is those idiotic handwaving electric paper towel dispensers- wonder how those are working in Puerto Rico right now”
Orbit,
You assume PR’s wash their hands after peeing….
What is money? You can google that question and get many different answers.
While I am intrigued by the crypto-currency idea, I do not trust it. Set aside all the crazy ideas of an EMP disaster (natural or manmade) and you are still left with something that is one step away from being obsolete. Currently there are many people working on functioning quantum computers and when they figure it out, it will only be a matter of time before that shit is stolen anyway.
You can apply the same theory to modern banking. How many of us actually have a sizeable amount of cash? There may be the occasional guy that buries it in the backyard but most probably would not go to that extreme. I bet most people keep their dollars in a bank account. That makes me wonder how one would get access to their money if the grid was down and the only proof of an account balance was the last statement that you kept. How many of us don’t even get paper statements?
I agree with Kunstler that the money system that we have is full of fraud and bullshit. Do you have a mortgage? If you do, your mortgage is most likely held by MERS. MERS is a fraudulent method of assigning ownership of liens on real property and used to circumvent recording fees imposed by the county government. It used to be that you recorded all transactions at the county courthouse when a lien was sold to another entity. This has been the case for hundreds of years.
Does anyone seriously think that we have an honest financial system in regards to bonds or stocks? I laugh just thinking about the idea of the central bank raising interest rates.
Just think about all the bullshit in the last 10 years.
-no more mark to market
-Too big to fail
-Federal Reserve illegally buying AIG stock and then pushing hard for TARP to cover it up and sell the shit to the Treasury
-Treasury issuing notes that are gobbled up by the Federal Reserve
In the absence of enforcing the law, the only real way that you can own something today is to have physical possession of it. Unfortunately this is not an easy thing to do. I have tried making small steps towards that goal by limiting debt. I only owe money on my house. I own 3 old vehicles and they are all in running order. I will take surplus money to pawn shops and buy “junk silver” if I can get it at spot plus 5% or less. I refuse to “own” metals in a certificate form or an online account.
Even the silver markets are fucked up. The short sellers have kept the prices of silver down for a long time. I question how long they can keep that up because eventually people are going to lose faith and start demanding their metals.
Yes this shit will all come to a head. That part we can all agree upon. The question is when will it happen. So far it looks like the fraudsters have managed to keep things spinning for far longer than I ever thought they would.
As Keynes said…”The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” In this case WAY longer than you’d have expected 10 years ago….
Ofcourse, if you have more than $1000 or so in cash, the cops can seize it under the piracy act. The cash is declared guilty until proven innocent. You can get it back sometimes with a good enough lawyer…
Ive thought about bcoin but basically have no $ to invest due to having to reinvent myself; partly because of economy and partly because of injury. A friend of mine in Sweden was able to maintain his work while he was given a few years to recover by his work and put his life back in order which enabled him to maintain his lifestyle as well as his family. America needs another direction.
Sweden aka Sewer-den needs another direction.
Whats your connection?
So you’ve been there then?? I have, and you are an idiot. As per usual, mista moon denier.
You mean those ‘goddamn commies!’ actually CARE about their taxpayers? Go figure…:)
The high point of techno narcissism indeed! There is only one aspect of currencies of exchange that no one can argue and that is that in the end it is all about Faith. In a place and a time where Faith of pretty much every kind has been set on fire and pushed out of the quay like Hrolf Kraki’s flaming farewell, there is no Safe and Happy Place in which to “store value”. Certainly not any that require electricity in order to even exist. Excellent work in S&HP, BTW James, thank you. I could not put it down until it was done and it somehow made me a slightly different person. Techno currencies certainly do exist as a new form of roulette parlor but time will show, as it always has, that just as in the sexual confusion that runs rampant today, the only thing that matters is what is in your hand when you need to use it. Functioning land, water, a food supply, the tools to maintain it and perhaps enough lead to keep it should others covet it will always be the best place to keep our worldly Faith.
Do you really hope that Islam takes over or were you just longing for the Patriarchal Good Ol’ days?
We often see in other cultures what we have lost. Thus America’s love affair with the Indians – a longing for our lost tribalism.
No JS, I really would rather NOT like see the Islamification of America but America HAS opened the door to Hijrah through our incessant meddling in the Middle East. It is the “It’s ok they are peaceful line of crap” has really pushed my patience for such discussions past my ability to hear it anymore. If the Muslims ever get to the point where they are a majority in America, and unless they are successfully Americanized as so many other immigrants have been, they will continue the unbelievable birth rates that they currently are maintaining and Yasser Arafat’s prophecy will become reality. They will not achieve victory through their weapons but through their wombs. If this does in fact happen, those who tout the harmlessness of such Hijarh will either be executed and silenced or kept quiet under their Burkas. I cannot see how America can do anything anymore to stop this invasion, so waiting for it to achieve success seems to be my only option. I am aware of information and aerial surveillance data that does not allow me to deny the dangers that lie ahead for we Kafirs if current trends are not turned around. I am also a believer in Darwin’s real Theory. In the end, it is not the strongest, nor the smartest that survive but those that are most able to adapt to changes.
It doesn’t take a majority simply around 10% and then the attacks really begin.
Robert Spencer runs jihadwatch and it is a great resource for understanding the true scope of the problems Muslims provide the world.
Oh ok. I was wondering. Some few hate our secular society so much that they might welcome such a change, alien though it might be. You were just pretending, evidently, to be such a one.
I hate it but the Muslims would be a bridge far too far….
Bitcoin and its skyrocketing value is a byproduct of currency debasement by the Fed.
IMO Bitcoin started as a reaction to Fed funny-money policies of the last generation. And maybe also possible “bail-ins” as financial institutions go tits-up.
But now Bitcoin has the attention of Wall Street, and Wall Street being what it is, cannot resist the temptation. So there’s a Bitcoin asset bubble as a result. But again, this asset bubble, like others of the last generation, wouldn’t have started without the Fed.
I think there’s another factor, that certain big money players no longer trust the USD as a store of wealth, nor do they trust stocks and bonds given the massive Fed-inflicted asset bubbles there. So, for the time being at least, it’s Bitcoin as a way to diversify. Just in case.
It could also be that enough people see Bitcoin as a practical alternative as a medium of exchange in case the USD goes splat.
Comex will have BC futures?
So they say.
This reminds me of the time Enron was the darling of the stock market.
I briefly toyed with the idea of buying some of their stock until I saw an energy analyst on CNBC. This guy spent his whole career working for a major brokerage house slicing and dicing the financials of oil and gas companies. When he was asked about Enron he replied that he couldn’t understand how they made money. A year or so later they bit the dust, thankfully without me as one of their stock holders. Never invest in anything you don’t understand.
I invested in a small company from MIT that invented an electric frontwheel for standard bicycles in 2016. I bought one myself and LOVE IT! Just by replacing the front wheel on any standard bicycle and hooking up a throttle you can ride up hills and get extra oomph crossing streets quickly. You can only use the throttle and not have to peddle at all but of course the optimum is to peddle and use the throttle slightly as needed. The battery recharges going down hills.
This is a viable solution in the future – a 23 pound electric front wheel easily rechargable rather than the 2 ton electric cars pushed by Auto Addicted cornucopians which require the energy of a small house.
And it is a LOT of fun!
What is the company?
The electric bike seems like a good thing for anyone who travels long distances regularly. If you get one just to make your occasional three mile trip easier, in my opinion it would be like eating a lot of junk food.
These bike conversions cost around $1000. If I had that much money to spend, I would buy a used car and keep riding my standard bike for neighborhood trips.
Is that the Copenhagen Wheel?
I have this image in my mind of a nail driven into a wall, to serve as a hook to hold up some important things. Over the years, more and more and more really important things get strung on the nail — which is now old and tired and a little rusty.
Still, we continue piling it on, until this one little nail (fossil-fuel power) holds up … everything. If we know one thing for sure, it’s that gravity always wins.
It may not be possible to create a whole new support system for ourselves, but we can sure try. Backyard chickens and kitchen gardens and won’t feel a thing when the nail fails. Good relations with the neighbors will help steady things a bit. There’s at least some comfort in that.
The problem is finding like minded people because if you are the only one with backyard chickens it is going to be: No dinner for you.
A Cambodian friend was incredulous that his neighbor had received a $10,000.00 fine for killing , and eating his dog. He said, ” I thought that U.S. was a free country ! Why cannot someone eat their own dog, why else keep them ?”
First ,the poultry and fowl,
then, the ruminants,
then, the pets, especially dogs.
then, the long pork ( which requires the least amount of processing skill, and will thus probably be at the top of the list of “like minded people ” in a city that you occupy.)
BTW, if my pencil isn’t lying, the combined current value of the Mt. Gox hack, plus Ulbricht’s stash, is 8 trillion 780 billion dollars.
Ulbricht’s portion was only 280 billion. It is interesting how BC traded sideways for three years until the advent of the GGofG.
Coincidence? Those guys running Mt. Gox weren’t noobs either; who had the right stuff to hack them?
-just sayin’-
First, they came for the fish.
then they came for the birds.
Then they came for the dogs.
I looked around and saw what multi cult did to USA.
True. People are the weak link in the chain. But effort to strengthen it is never wasted.
My favourite take on Bitcoin comes from Yves Smith at nakedcapitalism.com, who likes to refer to Bitcoin as “prosecution futures”.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin foreground a fact about money that I think needs to be more widely understood. When someone asks ‘what is money?’, there’s a standard three-part answer. Money is:
– A unit of account.
– A medium of exchange.
– A store of value.
How can value be ‘stored’? What is value, to begin with? Basically, anything that meets a human need or satisfies a human desire could be called valuable. So how do you ‘store’ the ability to satisfy human needs or desires? Obviously, you do it literally: you store food for the winter, you store clothes until someone needs something to wear, you ‘store’ a house by building it proof against the elements and maintaining it over time, etc..
But most people don’t make the things that satisfy their own needs; we have a complex society with division of labour. And people don’t take advantage of the value that surrounds them except under special circumstances: when they have enough money. (Steven Wright: “I have a large seashell collection which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.”)
So money is potential value that can be realized at will. Exchanging it for goods and services closes the circle of value. There’s another way to put this: money is virtual value — and remember, as JHK likes to say, ‘the virtual is not a viable substitute for the real’. What should be obvious but isn’t remarked on is that this is true of money in all its forms. It’s true of paper currency, it’s true of all forms of specie, and it’s true of Bitcoin. It’s true of cash on the barrelhead, and it’s true of every kind of credit. The difference between cash and credit is that with cash, the virtual value exchanged for the real value is understood to be present at the moment of the transaction, while with credit the virtual value follows later, and usually at greater expense in interest.
That’s why I don’t get worked up about fears over hyperinflation, why I’m not a goldbug, and why I’m hardly more or less impressed by Bitcoin than by paper money or credit. To use money is to trust that the real, actual value that money represents can be realized when we want it. To live in a world where we depend on value produced by others via division of labour is to live in a world where the need to trust in others to some degree is inescapable. If you want that kind of independence, you should forget about everything that follows from the invention of agriculture and go back to hunting and gathering.
Gold, Bitcoin — all of it — to me represents an attempt to escape trust. But here’s the thing: I like trust. A high-trust society, one that is actually worthy of me putting my trust in it — is a very valuable thing. I like what a high-trust society has to offer. Read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s writings about growing up female in Somalia, a zero-trust society if there ever was one, and you’ll understand something about how valuable a trustworthy society is.
I for one am not going to invest my efforts in preserving what meager wealth I may happen to accumulate in this all-too-brief life. I’d rather invest my effort in maintaining the great value that high-trust society offers to us all.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a WINNER!
Thanks! Now I realize I left out something I want to add: “Gold, Bitcoin — all of it — to me represents an attempt to escape trust and replace it with control. But here’s the thing: I don’t like control, but I do like trust.”
If and when collapse comes, trust is going to become a premium commodity, and there will be titanic efforts to replace trust with control. That’s why conserving as much trust in each other as we can in the times to come, in my view, is vital to anyone who values real freedom.
I also like trust and disdain control. But to me fiat currency is a case of elitist money printers (unworthy of trust) deceiving and controlling the laboring class.
If and when collapse comes, be careful who you trust.
A century ago, the elitists weren’t the money printers; they were those whose interests were served not by printing money but by limiting its supply. They were opposed by the populists of their time. You have heard of William Jennings Bryan, haven’t you?
It’s possible for the supply of money to far outstrip the available real goods and services. That’s called inflation if nominal prices for constant amounts of real goods and services go up; whereas if real inflation remains low, fiat money that sits unused on bank balance sheets remains a technicality, no matter how eyebrow-raising the dollar amounts.
On the other hand, it’s also possible to starve in the midst of plenty if no one has money they’re willing to spend, lend or invest. During the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped their milk into ditches because no one could afford to buy it from them at any price. An increase in the money supply and policies to encourage spending were exactly what was needed if the economy were to start being productive again. But of course, increasing the supply threatens to dilute the value of hard money for those who have it, or threatens them with confiscation and replacement of specie with a paper replacement, as JHK alluded to. So the question is, who loses out? The many, or the few?
The way I see it, in a high-trust society, if pain is unavoidable then it should be shared. Mankind should not be “crucified on a cross of gold”, as Bryan put it, so as to protect the privileges of a few. As for central banks, they need to be under democratic control, not a captive instrument of elites to everyone else’s cost. But the very fact that these institutions exist is not an intrinsic evil as far as I can tell.
Hmuller,
Trust.
Trust should be earned and not freely given. Repeat as a mantra as needed….
Not really. He dismisses Hyperinflation, but HI is here, if you compare costs of;
Autos
Food
homes on both coasts
college ‘education’,
between 1977-2017.
That’s not hyperinflation, it’s just inflation. Honestly, do you see people walking around with wheelbarrows of cash? Do you expect the value of a cheque to noticeably depreciate between the time you receive it and the earliest possible moment you can spend it? How can something that takes ~40 years to happen be reasonably described as ‘hyper’ anything?
I see peeps walking around with cell phones.
They may, and some do, have their bitcoins on the phone.
One can carry a billion dollars of cryptos in their hand.
GOT YA, Rondy.
No, you don’t got me. You’re getting hung up on a fake, arbitrary dollar amount that you yourself came up with. One “can carry” a billion dollars in a phone, and therefore a billion dollars is worth no more than the phone? Here’s a clue: it’s not the number. It’s what the number can buy.
Remember, it was you who said “a billion dollars of cryptos in their hand”. A billion dollars is a billion dollars. Here’s a list of ten things you could buy if you had a billion dollars:
https://www.therichest.com/expensive-lifestyle/the-top-10-things-you-can-buy-if-you-had-a-billion-dollars-2/
If someone is walking around with a smartphone containing $1 billion worth of bitcoin, then they’re walking around with enough money to buy the Chicago Cubs, or the Solomon Islands, or A.C. Milan, or a couple of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. (You can keep the Antilia Mumbai, which JHK may want to feature as his next Eyesore of the Month.) All that’s required is one other person who attributes the same value to the bitcoin, and the willingness to do the deal. That’s it.
And that’s because, as of today, a billion dollars is still worth something. It doesn’t matter whether the billion dollars is represented by a bank draft, by stacks of bills, by bits in a phone, or by 1/1000th of a platinum coin. As of today, a billion dollars is still a life-changing amount of money. It still has the power to make even the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet sit up and take notice. You’re talking as if hyperinflation has already occurred, when it just simply hasn’t.
What is value, to begin with? Gold? Seashells, to some. Greenbacks.
Personally, I don’t care who Satoshi is, what the crypto currencies will be doing in 2030, or what the math behind it all actually is.
What I do care about is the likely fact that less than 10% of the population actually has a bitcoin or any other crypto currency. So the shoeshine boys talking about the price moves likely doesn’t actually have any cryptos. What this also likely means is cryptos have a much longer way to go before this bubble pops. Any seasoned doomer has heard how the stock market is going to implode anytime soon since at least 2000 yet it just goes up. Yes it’s all bullshit, but most all of us could have already bought our freedom from this bloodsucking system if we invested heavily in stocks back in the day.
Now everyone who just heard about bitcoin this year is weighing in on how they are going create a whole bunch of disillusioned paupers down the road. Meanwhile, those who bought in a while back are just riding and watching. I don’t care about any of the crap the naysayers want to bitch about when it comes to cryptos. If cryptos allow me to buy my freedom during this bubble, so be it. If I can buy my freedom while not giving a single cent (or satoshi) to a fucking banker or stock broker douchebag, then life is really, really good.
On the other hand, if it all goes to hell in two seconds, then I pretty much am where I was before it all started but I had a glimmer of hope before hell was unleashed. I’m a big boy with broad shoulders who is pretty much disappointed with all of the smoke that’s been blown up my ass for 56 years of life anyway. I’ll just add this one more disappointment to the heap and move on.
Personally, I don’t care who Satoshi is–Personally, I don care who Satoshi is, As I think he does not exist as the BC creator. I think BC is the new tool of the banksters.
Maybe. But if you had bought 1,000 bitcoins 4 years ago you could have bought your doomstead and moved on instead of worrying about the banksters, who likely own your ass right now anyway, being behind this evil scheme.
All of the doomers, and non-doomers, here are free to live in monetary purity and only deal in those ideologically pure forms of exchange that lead to the utopian post-industrial reality we are screaming toward. Adaptability likely is a more important tool in that realm than ideological purity. We will see. Although I am betting that bitcoin is closer to $30K or above by next October than it is to $5,000. Write it down and you can all tell me how you told me so if I am wrong.
I dont care if you are wrong.
Whatever is going to happen with Cryptos will happen.
Exactly.
“If ”
If your Aunt had balls….
Life has no guarantees. “If” is part of every day. Every plan. It’s funny to see the doomers so squeamish about a new monetary possibility that could accelerate the dollar’s demise when they have been talking about the dollar’s demise for years now…and still talking…”if the dollar turns to shit I have gold and silver.” “IF.”
Zekesdad, the other lesson with Enron is to trust your own eyes. If something doesn’t look like it can possibly be true, then it isn’t true.
When you hear the reams of government-supplied numbers that try to tell you that all is well, do you believe said numbers? Do the narratives that accompany the numbers sound true to you? Or do the numbers look bogus? Do the stories sound like a pack of lies?
Every business is in its essence a lemonade stand. It has to end the day with more cash in the till than it started with. If it doesn’t, if it can’t make-up the shortfalls, the business is toast.
Does Bitcoin sound plausible to you? Or is it on the garbage barge of failed arrangements?
http://www.apttax.com/ Proposed Transaction Tax
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-mining-electricity-usage-2017-11 Bitcoin Electricity usage more than 159 countries
Yes, I had seen something about BCM used as much acdc as a small European country.
The estimate I head is that it has now outstripped most African countries, and is now around the level of Ireland.
I read Romania or Bulgaria or Albania.
And counting.
Wow! we are truly insane when more electricity is used for a madeup virtual currency than 159 countries!
So much for Peak Oil and Climate Change – this is more idiotic than the proposal for the New Jersey Meadowlands to have skiing year round in a huge mall in the Meadowlands swamp rather than run our existing trains!
Climate Change –nature is ever in flux, always.
Hi Malthuss
Yes nature is ever in flux. Ageing is also natural, but if in the next year, your body aged 20 years you’d have a problem of adaptation. That’s similar to what’s happening with climate change now compared to gradual climate change in the past that took aeons.
There are answers here to all the common ‘arguments’ put forward by people not willing to accept the science. But they’re scientific answers, not the ones people would choose to hear.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
https://grist.org/series/skeptics/
‘People prefer to believe what they would prefer to be true’.
Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
Nothing new under the sun, in other words 🙂
Watts up with that.com
From Wiki:
“The blog predominantly discusses climate issues with a focus on anthropogenic climate change, generally accommodating beliefs that are in opposition to the scientific consensus on climate change. Contributors include Christopher Monckton and Fred Singer as guest authors.’
Viscount Monckton – say no more. Bless 🙂
I propose you start KunstlerKoin, (limited to 1 million) and hand out one to each person posting to this forum. Maybe we can’t all agree, but we can all get rich together.
May the farce be with you.
A man in Iceland is doing something like that. All Icelandic s will get some ecoins.
Great, why not? The church monetized saintly bones, wafers, wine, and spoken blessings. Let us monetize electronic impulses we can’t see, phantoms somewhere in cyberspace. Isn’t the universe (including us) all just information conveyed in waves?
We can even engage in conflicts and kerfuffles, championing our various favorites in virtual currency holy wars.
In 1929 an article appeared in a magazine, ‘Everyone Ought to be rich.’
Everybody Ought to Be Rich” was an article published in August 1929 just before the beginning of the Great Depression in the Ladies’ Home Journal by John Jacob Raskob.
Raskob, a wealthy financier at the time, believed in the stock market as a viable means of wealth creation for everyone. However the article is often seen as an example of irrational exuberance due primarily to the unfortunate timing of its publication.
“In Jim We Trust!” with his cute little bald mustachioed mug inscribed on the front, of course. On the back, maybe something like “Clusterfuck This – Bitches!” surrounding a Jim ham-print engraved in the center. Suitable for collecting, of course.
Digerati and Millennials I know disdain cash; they want to wave around their phones to pay for things.
Not me. Not ever. Cash will be king, as it was for my sly immigrant ancestors trying to evade taxation.
Tangible money will survive a Collapse, too. Paper won’t be worth as much in the long term, but we’d be trading coins or laminated dollar bills like characters in William Gibson’s excellent short story, “Dogfight.”
Yes. But between now and collapse, those who currently own bitcoin likely will be able to buy a hell of a lot more of those silver coins and laminated dollars down the line than they could now.
This whole “yeah but what will you do in 20 years when that shit is worthless” thinking seems dangerous to me. Sometimes things might burn hot for 6 months then disappear. But if that 6 months of burning put you in a better spot for the next 20 years of your life, do you really care that it was a flash in the pan?
For that matter, screw the whole “store of wealth” through collapse concept. Personal skills and being in the right place at the right time, or not being in the wrong place at the wrong time are about the only “wealth” that could matter. I’d venture that dogmatic thinking would be a liability too.
Ain’t that the truth. So much of our individual circumstance has to do with only a very few key decisions and lucky (or unlucky) strokes. You try to plan and prepare for a good life, and it happens (or doesn’t) for reasons that are actually pretty much out of your control.
As much as I appreciate the idea of being prepared for the long emergency, like most of us in American cities, I’m almost totally reliant on huge social agreements that keep me fed and housed. Elrond Hubbard comments above about the need for “high trust,” and he’s exactly right. I suppose that’s what the phrase “In God We Trust” on our currency refers to — we have to trust that everyone along the way honors the currency to keep the goods flowing. (Which makes Donald Trump’s stiffing contractors ever more disgusting).
@TiredOTT
“For that matter, screw the whole “store of wealth” through collapse concept. Personal skills and being in the right place at the right time, or not being in the wrong place at the wrong time are about the only “wealth” that could matter. I’d venture that dogmatic thinking would be a liability too.”
Yep, I’d go with that exactly. I’m not young enough to acquire the survival skills it would take so I just hope my kids and grandchild will be OK. Although my other half’s a doctor, but I don’t know if he could manage to produce his own laudanum like the one in the WMBH novels! Even while civilisation is struggling on and whistling past the graveyard, we’re just around the corner from an onslaught of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so with a collapse in the supply of even the antibiotics and vaccines that we have, the situation will be extreme.
@City_of_76
Totally agree with your last para. In fact I read some years ago in the New Scientist a special edition they put out called ‘The God Issue’ which related to religion seen from a scientific viewpoint. One of the authors specifically described how the development of trade and exchange related to religious beliefs. He suggested that, while people only exchanged goods and services within their own small community, there was no trust issue because everyone knew everyone else. Later, when communities traded further afield, with strangers, the ‘trust’ which didn’t automatically exist came from knowing that the stranger nevertheless had the same belief system as yourself and was accountable to the same god(s). Or it didn’t exist, hence the development of distrust between peoples with different belief systems.
So yes, trust it pretty much the basis of everything that matters, especially when the Law can no longer be relied on (or afforded). And yes, Trump is despicable. We’ve just had a 3- or 4-part serialisation on the BBC about his ‘rise’ and each time you think his behaviour has hit an all-time low, he digs deeper. It’s shocking that so many people even still think he’s some kind of business guru. Although I do remember the old 80s joke ‘why are business gurus called ‘gurus’? Answer: because the press can’t spell ‘charlatan’. Quite.
GreenAlba
I can’t resist it. You know the Jewish joke?
‘Help! My husband (the doctor) is drowning!’
Alba,
Or Sarah Silverman’s joke;
Being raped by a doctor for a Jewish girl can be considered a bittersweet moment….
I’m not so sanguine about Bitcoin’s supposed impregnability, nor about many of its other appealing claims.
The Mt. Gox affair of 2014 must be forgotten now, but back then some sharpie hacked 850,000 Bitcoins (valued over $450,000,000) out of the exchange, which was processing almost two-thirds of all the Bitcoin trades in the world. Mt. Gox went out of business. Bitcoin tanked and then traded sideways for three years until (coincidentally?) the Golden Golem of Greatness was elected Leader of the Free World.
A few days ago, a third BILLION dollars worth of Veratusium [the names they dream up, geez] was destroyed by ‘accident.’
When the scoffers tell me “you can’t eat gold,” I think to my self: if gold is not edible at least it has physicality and has been a medium of exchange for 5000 years; is venerated for its beauty; has properties that make it valuable for industry and science……
I get it. It is not au courant, trendy, high-tech, have anything to do with computers, robots or A.I.
Let the speculators, children and lemmings have their fun. When the musical chairs on this cybernetic will-o-the-wisp stops and the value dissipates because someone hacked the system, a Best Korea surprise EMP event or, like the Puerto Ricans know by now, when a monster natural disaster strikes and the power is out for the duration; there will be a lot of unhappy folks. Very unhappy.
I can hear the conversation at the restaurant now:
Server: “I’m sorry Sir, but your Botcoin wallet seems to be not functioning at this time. Do you have some credit card or cash to pay for your meal?”
Customer: “Uh no, what do you mean the Botcoins are not available?
Server: “The manager says you will have to wash dishes for the next week just to cover your bottle of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild Paulliac, 2010. We will need to borrow your teen-aged daughter (cue Roy Moore joke) also for a week, to cover the remainder of the bill.”
Read the prospectus first. Oh right, there is no prospectus.
One will need more than a 12 gauge to get their money back when this thing takes the big dump. The Evil FUckers will be quite hard to track down when the going gets really tough for the Lumpen.
When the scoffers tell me “you can’t eat gold,”
You can eat dirt, so what? It will kill you if you eat a lot of it.
Gold is a Ayurvedic Medicine. But to be used it has to first be “digested” with mercury. And the mercury carefully prepared as well. You can’t just break your thermometer and pour it on the gold and then drink it after 24 hours.
Apparently many Black Africans eat dirt. Some Southern Blacks over here, too. Don’t know if this is a good thing or some kind of pathology or if they’re just hungry.
“Apparently many Black Africans eat dirt. Some Southern Blacks over here, too.”
Although I’m no longer of the faith, I’m reminded, from my youth, of St Paul’s saying:
“A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it.”
Which puts those people so far above you that you wouldn’t be fit to touch the hem of their garments.
I think you mean bentonite clay which is used for parasite elimination.
Alba: Now you say you don’t want Islamification of the West, yet you support unlimited Islamic immigration, right? Do you any inkling of how insane that is?
Especially as you seem to be aware of Islam’s penchant for violence, equal you say to Christianity’s of yesteryear. Yet you hate Christianity more even though you admit it has changed by and large – and Islam has not. Irrational? Of course. But rational in a political sense as per my thesis that you want these infinite minorities in the West in order to take us down. And you are first and foremost a political creature like all of your Tribe. But fair, rational, profound, or even completely sane? Not so much.
Consider! You have some vague hope perhaps, in some corner of your mind, that the Muslims can be converted to Liberalism. But is that happening? With hundreds of no go zones throughout Europe? Clearly, THEY are conquering, not you. They are going to assimilate us – and that means you. Not only have you not thought it thru, you never even tried to. Admit it: all you really cared or care about is crushing Conservatives and Traditionals. The long term effects are a mystery to which you are indifferent. And the slimy Elite will simply convert! And you will have participated in their utter betrayal of your People and Culture.
@Janos
Your obsession is affecting your powers of comprehension. My comment relates to your disgraceful comment immediately above. You have no shame. There are no words. Really, no words…
As for your anti-Muslim rant, there are only ‘hundreds of no-go zones in Europe’ if you are an ignoramus who gets his ‘news’ from Fox ‘News’ or Breitbart or the even worse websites where you graze. You don’t live in Europe – you know nothing of reality, only the hate that keeps you alive. I have never denied that there are problems, but to go from there to ‘hundreds of no-go zones’ is where you lose all credibility (like the ‘news’ sources above lose theirs). Truth matters.
Your post is nonsense. Your assumptions about what other people think and what they may or may not have thought about are also nonsense, based as they are on nothing more substantial than the voices in your head. You need help, but it’s not my job to supply it. I’m just glad we have so few of your type anywhere near the civilised place I live.
I happen to have a fond nostalgic feeling for my Christian upbringing and heritage (the good bits of it anyway). I do not hate Christianity – I only wish it were true (again, the good bits) – but the fact that I have never suggested any such thing and yet you draw that conclusion shows your intellectual capacities for exactly what they are. And proves why discussion with you is pointless.
Why don’t you just take a break, go outside, and be nice to somebody. Anybody, no matter what colour they are.
I feel sorry for you, Janos, I really do.
By your squeals of outrage I know I have hit pay dirty. You have no answer to my simple logic that endless Muslim immigration will lead to the Islamicification of the West.
You are comical. And yeah I know I didn’t respond to your taunt but to one of your posts from last week. Sheesh.
“By your squeals of outrage I know I have hit pay dirty. ”
Sad, sad man…
“You have no answer to my simple logic that endless Muslim immigration will lead to the Islamicification of the West.”
In the absence of a crystal ball, you do not know if it will lead to the secularisation of Islam instead.
I don’t know why you even care. You don’t live anywhere near Europe. You live in a mad country where people shoot one another every day by mutual constitutional agreement without Muslims having anything to do with it.
When people tell me “You can’t eat gold”, I ask “Do you eat your federal reserve notes? Or do you pack banana’s into your wallet? Money and food are two different things. Contemplate that, believe it!”
JIm K, I went to a two day Cryptocurrency conference and I am in grade 1 of understanding.
If Bitcoin were to keep rising to $1,000,000 per unit, as many investors hope and pray, there wouldn’t be enough electric power in the world to keep it going. –IS THIS REALLY TRUE???
I get a kick out of ‘mining’–what a bogus term when used like this.
1300 ecoins, At conference I was told ‘way more but exchanges wont trade them.’
Think of it on a cost-per-transaction basis:
One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week
Bitcoin’s surge in price has sent its electricity consumption soaring.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change
“Bitcoin’s incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency.
“An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to “mine” more Bitcoins. That’s about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.”
—
The above article is nearly a month old and thus certainly out of date, but I can’t get through to the Digiconomist link itself right now. Basically, Bitcoin stands a chance of surviving if someone, somewhere, finds it useful at the cost of a week’s (or however much more) worth of electricity, per transaction. In the long emergency, does that sound likely to anyone?
All that cost could be put into creating new levels of the blockchain.
The funny thing is, that’s exactly what it is doing. The blockchain is designed as a continuing competition between all the participating computers to come up with valid blocks that compete to be recognized as the next valid computation in the chain. This is called Bitcoin mining.
All that escalating computation has to be done continually in order for the blockchain to have the properties that its designer(s) considered desirable. (E.g.: enabling zero-trust transactions between anonymous participants; no requirement for third parties such as banks to process payments or provide escrow; no issuing authority that can devalue the currency; etc.)
Bitcoin can’t function any way other than it does, as far as I know. For a differently-designed cryptocurrency it might be possible, or it might not.
Ok Elrond, maybe you can tell me: What is the deal with computers churning away to solve “cryptographic puzzles”? Who wants this service enough to pay outsider contractors for it? CIA, NSA, Chinese spy agencies, some shadowy group? Of what marketable value is the work these bitcoin earning computers are doing? I’ve been wondering about this for a while, but no one talks about it. To me the big issue is not how much electricity are they using, but exactly what the hell are they doing!
It reminds me of a short story I read nearly 50 years ago. A computer consultant arrives at a lamasery in Nepal. He sees monks writing on scrolls. The abbot says they are methodically writing out all possible names for God and in about 15,000 years their work will be done. But the computer the guy is installing will get the work done much faster.
So he installs the computer and as he’s leaving he asks the abbot why they want to write out all the possible names for God. The Abbot replies that when that work is completed the universe will cease to exist. As the consultant’s plane lifts off into the night sky he sees the stars fading into darkness one by one.
So there you have it; this bitcoin mania may really be a sneaky attempt to change or even destroy the fabric of our reality.
“The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke. Good one!
The kind of cryptography we use nowadays is based on exploiting the fact that certain mathematical problems are intractable in order to do useful things. For example, a good cipher can enable two people to establish secure communications that only they can decode and understand, even over a channel that they know is being monitored by an adversary. The better ciphers are strong enough that not even the resources of a nation-state have a hope of breaking them. (Therefore the nation-states typically resort to other tactics, like breaking into your house; forcing technology companies to embed back doors into their services; social engineering to fool you into revealing your credentials; or just physically forcing you to apply your finger to a fingerprint reader, maybe while you’re asleep).
Cryptocurrencies have different goals in mind. Typically they’re ideologically-driven projects that want to abstract the blessed free market away from reliance on government-backed currencies, and ‘breath the air of freedom’ (freedom as these libertarian types define it). It’s not an accident that Bitcoin maxes out at 21 million coins; that’s hardwired into the protocol and is considered a feature, not a bug, by its creators. This permanently limits the supply and, once the last Bitcoin is mined, builds deflation into the system forever (crucifying humanity on a cross of bits).
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are intended to emulate the ‘moneyness’ of money in a purely abstract form, while getting rid of pesky issues like democratic oversight or other unsightly blemishes that turn libertarian stomachs. In my view, they are best avoided except in small doses.
Thanks for the answer, Elrond. But are you saying all these bitcoin earning computers are doing is spinning a security web around bitcoin transactions?
That doesn’t make sense to me. We’re talking about an enormous amount of computing activity.
Yep, that’s pretty much it. The profligacy really beggars belief, doesn’t it?
“The first steampunk currency” earns the blue ribbon today.
JHK’s interesting comment about bitcoin energy use also got me looking around for more information. This is crazy. It reminded me of Tom Murphy’s articles of a few years ago. For instance, what would happen to the Earth if the growth in energy use continues:
“…The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years…”
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
According to a recent news article, preppers are selling their gold and buying bitcoins. This is craziness squared. The people who are spending everything they have to survive the apocalypse believe that, after it happens, there will still be an electrical grid and an internet. That they can be fending off their neighbors with their AR-15 and still be buying gourmet coffee online with their cyber currency. That the EMPs didn’t drive all the nuke plants into meltdown, killing everything on the planet including them, no matter how much their bitcoin was worth.
Was it all that lead that we put into gasoline for so long that caused our severe brain damage? The atmospheric nuclear testing? I don’t know, my mind is a little too foggy to figure it out right now.
windward,
The stories that we tell ourselves in order to believe what we’d like to believe are pretty amazing, aren’t they?
…So beyond that, it’s all a game of “who do you trust?”. I certainly have no faith in the credibility of hardcore ideologues, they have a proven M.O. of parasitism and “leading from behind”. (No trust will be wasted in that regard.)
As was said above, when the fecal matter hits the oscillating air-moving device, be very careful who you choose to trust; establishing some of those connections should best be made beforehand. Trust: hard won and easily lost.
Good luck and stay flexible!
Charles Hugh Smith is usually a highly sensible person but I think his enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies is misplaced. Yes, the idea of a currency safe from government clutches is compelling, but the government will crash the grid before it will let Bitcoin supplant their management of currency.
Plus, the whole “mining” thing does not pass the small test. Wasting electricity and processing power on tending the blockchain is no more a legitimate creation of value than inventing a new derivative.
Owners of both instruments would like to think they possess wealth but, come crunch time, both will turn out to be hallucinations.
Doesn’t it seem logical that given the direction in which our civilization is heading, electricity is considered so valuable that it becomes currency?
Who or what controls that currency is beside the point. Right now we are allowed to accumulate money, but we do not control its creation or mass distribution. Our “wealth” is subject to the machinations of others, so how does bitcoin differ from what is already in effect, since it can be eradicated by any entity that has the ability to simply flick an “off” switch?
Did you read Larry Niven’s “Near Space” series? Or his “Ringworld”? The big drug is electricity piped right into the bliss centers of the brain. Cheap and utterly addicting. The “wireheads” do nothing all day, everyday. Many of them can’t bring themselves to disconnect and just starve to death. Louis Wu, has his machine turn off and he has to solve a puzzle to turn it back on. Usually before he solves it, he is down enough to put it down and attend to his bodily needs instead.
I’ve read a lot of Niven. I remember reading about Gil the arm,organleggers and the direct electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure center as you describe.
A number of years ago I went to a world sf convention in Boston, where I attended Louis Wu’s 200th birthday party. Also there or at another Boston world sf convention I met Isaac Asimov and got his autograph. My wife took the picture and I still have it hanging in my office. I also got George R.R. Martin’s autograph. That was before he got famous for writing Game of Thrones.
Cool beans. We’ve read some of the same stuff. I don’t keep up anymore – it’s all fantasy now for the most part. I like some of that, but I miss the hard Scifi. It just seems so far away now….
But maybe not. I picked up a novel in a little free library the other day you may be interested in, called “Pillar to the Sky” about some kind of elevator into space. The basic idea is that rockets are impossibly crude and wasteful, basically shooting someone out of a cannon. Dangerous too! Apparently this is a real idea with serious proponents. The author, William Forstchen, is a good writer, mostly patriot stuff, and is well known for his superb, “One Second After” about survival after an EMP attack on the United States.
The technology for wire heads is already here, though I tend not to think people could last very long in such a state. Bliss takes subtle resources in the form of biochemistry that would be rapidly depleted I’d say.
I’ve somewhat given up on sf for the same reason. I loved the old classic science fantasy too. I grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett’s Mars stories and the like. I liked the old space opera stories. Nowadays, the trend is mediocre, multi-volume series. One modern series you may like is Stephen Bennett’s Koban books. It has a sort of classical tinge to it.
I’ll look into Pillar to the Sky. Arthur C. Clark was into space elevators. We could build them now, except for one thing: we haven’t yet developed a material strong enough and light enough to be able to support the weight of the cables. A hundred-mile elevator cable would have such an enormous amount of weight pressing on it’s lower section that it would collapse on itself.
Larry Niven used to be one of the great idea men in science fiction. Science marches on, though, and sometimes good books get written based on ideas that later turn out not to work the way it seemed at first. One such idea that Niven used had Pluto being covered with ice that was a mixture of, I think, solid oxygen side by side with hydrogen, a mixture that can be stable on a planet as cold as Pluto. So Niven wrote a book where a spaceship crash ignites a firestorm that spreads out from ground zero in a ring that conflagrates the entire world, clear around to the antipodes. The theory was later disproved, but it made for a cool scene.
Sadly, Niven grew to be such a lazy writer in his later years that I have given up on him. (Ringworld’s Children was so boring!) Nowadays Greg Egan holds the crown for idea-driven science fiction. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Greg Egan is a pen name for a writer who is non-binary. It strikes me as unlikely that a cis het man would write so many characters with non-traditional gender identity in their work.
I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who popularized the space elevator idea in The Fountains of Paradise. There are materials now that, in principle at least, should have the tensile strength to tether a geostationary object to the ground: fibers spun from carbon nanotubes or boron nitride. The practical problems are still enormous, to say nothing of the up-front expense (the payoff of much cheaper access to space comes on the back end).
For sheer techno-grandiosity, of course, the space elevator idea gives even Bitcoin a run for its money. And just imagine what a tempting target it would make for terrorists. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars includes a scene where a space elevator is destroyed and the cable wraps itself around the planet like a belt, with the impact destroying everything in its path. Not a pleasant thought.
Cool beans.
– it’s all fantasy now for the most part. – Janos
==========
Janos, do you see the difference between saying “Cool beans” and Cool, beans?
And, you often use the phrase “for the most part” right after saying “all.”
You need to make up your mind, is it all or most?
Reminds me of those idiotic chain letters back in the 60’s.
What is the value of bitcoin expressed in?
I’ve only seen it in terms of USD. Maybe in other places it’s expressed in terms of other currencies.
Pick your currency.
https://www.coindesk.com/calculator/
Cryptocurrencies are just another ridiculous diversion for foolish people (people such as preppers for Armageddon, tulip buyers, get-rich-quick schemers, etc.). There is too much energy risk, technology risk and political risk. Mainly political: governments tell you what your currency is (for taxes) and if they go digital they’ll make all other cryptocurrencies illegal. Governments are probably watching all of this very closely for their edification purposes: so they can create their new digital currency/cashless societies which they will enforce upon society.
Currency will be controlled by governments and administered and managed by some type of bank (central or whatever). This will not change until there is some sort of New Age Magna Carta where governments, like monarchies, are made obsolete.
Or Bankers started it.
I found this bit of …..
I have good info (London bankers) who have said Satoshi is an acronym for the US government.
Bitcoin is a Beta-test program for the world financial system (i.e. digital/cashless society).
The ramping up in price is to lure more and more users into the system, to test user ability and efficiency.
Very feasible, very possible in my opinion.
One of Warren Buffett’s rules for investing is “If you don’t understand an investment, don’t buy it.”
Sage (of Omaha) advice for anything.
Exactly. P T Barnum proved it with signs in his circus tents that said “This Way to Egress” and our poorly educated mass of rubes of that era thought it was some kind of exotic bird. They followed the signs only to find they had been directed out through the exit and had to pay, again, to get back in.
Buyer beware. IMO Bitcoin is a scam, a nothing burger, and as usual our regulators and SEC are asleep at the wheel, no doubt sitting around reading a bunch of tweets from our king twit.
Barnum would love Bitcoin, Trump, and sucker all those millions of poor souls fleeced and flummoxed by the GOP and evangelical money grubbing mega-preachers.
Don’t blame bitcoin on trailer dwelling, GOP voting, beer guzzling Bubba’s. I think it far more likely over paid Silicon Valley Liberals are buying it. You know, those courageous censors of fake news who only want us to get the truth over the internet.
Youre right hmuller: the people I know into Bitcoin seem pretty sophisticated and technologically savvy.
its knuckle draggers like myself still buying gold, silver and lead.
brh
T “Boone” Pickens…”If you want a deal real bad, you’ll get a real bad deal”. This sums up the quest for an alternative currency sans governmental approval.
Right after all this cryptocurrency hysteria, the Euro (Renminbi, Dollar etc.) fiat money implosion, plus bourses collapsing globally , will be the perfect time for the United Nations General Assembly to vote on a global currency. We will avoid a WOrld War at any price they will say. Great idea. Let’s (Evil Fuckers In Charge) offer EVERYONE a nice RF chip for their hand. Real, secure, global government and local jurisdiction issued and “backed” money for very insecure times.
The only catch is without it one cannot buy or sell anything irrespective of their place in society.
Gulp.
Which reminds me; I’m going to pick up an extra few candles and a case of Alpo while at the market later today.
Cryptocurrencies have many weaknesses, but their weaknesses are fewer than the Fractional Reserve Banking System which is known to be wholeheartedly rigged whereby all the gains in the system accrue to the top place holders in the pyramid/Ponzi scheme. USD fiat is wholly defunct as a currency in so far as it is well over 100 years old now, and has no special status, or advantage, to overcome the inherent weakness that overcomes currencies when they lose spending power at the nadir of the currency lifecycle. Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are contemporary constructs
of value that are beginning the currency lifecycle as opposed to ending the lifecycle. Further, cryptocurrency is aligned with contemporary technological developments, and the old ‘greenback’ Petrodollar is a product of dying BIG oil markets, technology, & marketing, that works hand-in-hand with the Fractional Reserve banking monopoly.
Clearly, it is time to move on from the Macroeconomic Petrodollar Reserve Currency that has automatically become defunct due to the changing technology that Quantum Physics & Quantitative Finance
have brought to markets via High Speed Algorithms/trading, and Statistical Mechanics, as well as cryptologic code.
Presently, Saudi Arabia controls USD via OPEC, and the price per barrel of oil cannot possibly rise in opposition to Green Renewable Solar Energy when the lion’s share of government investments are geared towards divestment away from BIG oil and investment into renewables.
I rest my case, oh skeptical one!
RW
Yeah, there’s what you said. And there’s also Fed Chairwoman Yellen saying she doesn’t understand inflation.
I mean, there’s a battalion of economics PhDs in that building she works in, there’s been university departments of political economy studying inflation for generations, and if at this point the top monetary official in the great and illustrious United States of America doesn’t understand inflation, I would say that the intellectual A Team has been occupied in pursuits other than studying the economy.
As you say maybe “it is time to move on from the Macroeconomic Petrodollar Reserve Currency that has automatically become defunct….. ” Other people obviously have had the same notion because how else do we explain the rise of private currencies?
Fiat money, currencies and credit are irrelevant and really not a big issue. Either is our Fed Reserve–which has so many bogus conspiracy theories and false data attached to it. Doesn’t matter what the “currency” is, as long as it facilitates productivity, trade, wealth-building, etc. Doesn’t matter if the US government spends hard currency or digital currency into the economy. Same thing. Plus, only 5% of our “currency” is actually hard paper dollars and coins. The other 95% is digits on computers. So what. Doesn’t matter. Need to leave the gold standard/fiat money paradigm behind and wake up to present time and how our monetary and fiscal systems and policies work.
” USD fiat is wholly defunct as a currency in so far as it is well over 100 years old now, and has no special status, or advantage, to overcome the inherent weakness that overcomes currencies when they lose spending power at the nadir of the currency lifecycle. Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are contemporary constructs”
RW,
This is incorrect. The US Dollar has the full faith and credit of the U.S Marine Corps.
To paraphrase Josef Stalin….”How many divisions does Bitcoin have…?”
Money is a political construct…the unwashed have little voice, and only at the suffering of government…Gresham’s Law notwithstanding.
I tend to agree with you, but don’t confuse money and currency. Money isn’t political, and on its own, hasn’t much to do with politics; but currency totally is.
I can accept your fine point….
It seems that the Marine Corps did raided Langley after all
I open the news tape and there … such an attack on Clinton and Clintonoids, which I have not seen yet.
And in recent days, I’ve listened to a few very serious analyzes of widespread rumors about the Marines’ raid at the CIA headquarters in Langley, and all these analyzes point out that the source of these rumors, in addition to video helicopters over the CIA roof, shot on the mobile phones by chance witnesses to this raid, seems to be a targeted leak of relevant information by the US National Security Agency – an agency that supported Trump more than a year ago, in the midst of the election campaign.
And the core of this leak is the assertion that the CIA department Mockingbird was engaged in the mass media manipulation.
In principle, the effect of this raid was felt yesterday, when Sunday’s political commentators were extremely reluctant to criticize Trump, clearly fearing to lie without borders, as they did during the last year and a half. And today’s news feed looks like this:
Africans are being sold at Libyan slave markets. Thanks, Hillary Clinton
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/27/clinton-ponders-2020-run-lets-not-forget-her-real-libya-scandal-glenn-reynolds-column/895853001/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories
The above article is a mortal blow to the Clintonoids attempts to turn the fight against Trump America into a race war.
Donald Trump launches attack on news networks ‘not including Fox’ for ‘corrupt’ presidential reporting
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-launches-attack-news-141754214.html
Retired general launches remarkable attack on Donald Trump: ‘I have wasted 40 years of my life’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-cia-director-criticises-donald-110244717.html
Former CIA director Michael Hayden, who created the Mockingbird system after learning about Trump’s attack on CNN (on his pet project?), felt that forty years of his life had gone to trash.
Russia warns of ‘apocalyptic scenario’ on Korean Peninsula
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/27/russia-warns-of-apocalyptic-scenario-on-korean-peninsula.html?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo&doc=104863691&yptr=yahoo
Why Russia Should Fear North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons and Missiles
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/why-russia-should-fear-north-koreas-nuclear-weapons-missiles-23367
The last two articles do not correspond to their headlines and tell us that Russia can mix the launch of Alaska anti-missile rockets that flew to intercept North Korean missiles for a nuclear attack on Russia and launch a salvo response and counter strike.
And it follows from the comments that even the dumb Americans realized that the same considerations fully apply to missile defense in Europe, the sacred cow of Clintonoids, which is the axis of all their geopolitical plans.
“It seems that the Marine Corps did raided Langley after all”
…What the hell is this…Russia?
I’m not so sanguine about Bitcoin’s impregnability. Whenever I hear the word “encrypted” I start thinking the content in question is already on its way to the Ukraine.
There was some guy that said there’s three rules for internet security: 1) don’t buy a computer 2) don’t turn it on 3) don’t use it.
A computer is a four-terminal device. The inputs are energy and data. The outputs are heat and information. Kind of like a toaster.
So, the outputs are also energy and data.
Nope. The heat is irrecoverable. The information is the result of lowering the entropy of the data.
Try to operate with a currency that isn’t condoned and authorized by your government and you’ll be poor, disenfranchised and unable to operate within the contemporary society you are in. Simple as that. The “currency” will be what the government dictates is acceptable for paying taxes. That has and will continue to be into our future… the USD.
Try paying your taxes with something other than USD. Try buying US Treasuries with something other than USD.
Wake up to reality.
The reality is that if monied elites (Wall Street, companies in the Fortune 500, the Davos Club) abandon the USD in favor of Bitcoin or other private currencies, the future of the USD as a global and generally accepted means of exchange could be short.
To date the record of the Fed has been to discredit itself and cobver itself in disrepute. Debase, debase, debase. That’s apparently the only trick the Fed knows. It’s like Herb Stein said, if something can’t go on, it won’t.
That’s apparently the only trick the Fed knows
No, that’s not all! You forgetting about a FED capacity to turn a giant IBM mainframe into a flying toaster, spewing 100 dollar bills and jelly-and-peanut butter toasted sandwiches, according to DurangoKid.
I apologize, I take my “dumb americans” comment back, I shouldn’t’ have.
Does that mean that you would proudly refuse a thick wad of Euros just because you can’t pay your frigging taxes with it?
You are a smart one, indeed!
Don’t know who you are talking to. If it is me, are you smart for not having used the reply button under my post?
That is a dumb comment and misses the whole meaning and intent of my post. Of course I’d take Euros and then they’d have to be converted to USD to pay taxes, buy treasuries, buy real estate, etc.
Ugh.
If only JHK had put “bitcoin accepted here” on his shingle years ago he’d be singing a different tune today.
Ain’t that the Great and Infernal Truthiness?
That’s what I keep telling myself every second of every day: when you, dumb ass, had come to America in 88 you should’ve put that 20 grand into Microsoft instead of blowing it on booze and girls!
“you should’ve put that 20 grand into Microsoft instead of blowing it on booze and girls!”
…And blue jeans, Finc, do not forget the blue jeans….
Mt. Gox was a few years ago, the thefts at ethereum and tether more recent. And still bit coin soars.
Who can understand it all, hash functions, mining, public key cryptography, etc.? We hardly understand how the underlying computers themselves work, or even our modern TVs.
If you read “Digital Gold” by Popper, you can get some sense of the workings of cryptocurrencies. You will also see that in addition to the code warriors and Cypherpunks, there were many wealthy people also involved with visions of more wealth.
When the bit coin forum went on line in 2009, a guy called NewLibertyStandard received from one named Marti, 5,050 Bitcoins for seeding the new exchange. In return, Marti received $5.02 by paypal.
So what should a bit coin be worth? At this time no one had bought or sold, so NLS himself determined its value. The cost of electricity to generate a coin, using his electric bill. Using this measure, one dollar was worth about one thousand Bitcoins at the end of 2009.
Well, exactly! he block-chain technology is definitely cool and is here to stay, the speculative value of bitcoin is just a pure gambling and speculation – make or lose money if you dare!
Even a fool can follow directions to the nearest bus stop without understanding anything else.
I’m counting on my collection of 1984 Los Angeles Olympics souvenir
pins to barter with when the going gets rough.
How many you got?
I think that was the last Olympics to make any money and not end up deep in the red.
brh
I’ll stick with Silver and a bit of gold. I’d make sure I had 60-90 days of food and water purification plan along with seeds as we know the price of a package of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds may go up a hundred fold along with ammo. Those with knowledge of natural food plant identification and herbal use will be the Anointed Ones. Current Bitcoin spot price of 10G’s leaves out the 90 percenters of America as the bottom 60% are hard pressed to pull $1000 out of their ass Oh Hell maybe most are up to their eyeballs in debt or living off the government dole and the goodness of others.
A whole bitcoin is like a pound of gold; ounces or fractions thereof are equivalents.
Three things I don’t want for Christmas
1. Chocolate “diamonds”
2. Al Franken chia pet
3. Bitcoins
Jen in San Jose
But Jen, Christmas gift giving is all about giving people things they don’t want, because if they did, they’d already own them.
What about a “famous” Claxton fruitcake there Jen?
You know the kind that everyone hates, and when they receive one as a Christmas “present” instead of an Amex gift card , use it as a doorstop.
Imagine Claxton fruitcakes as the next big thing in speculative currency. It could happen. That will be $9,300 for that fruitcake please. Would Amazon accept fruitcake slices as payment for the latest video game and Dizney movie? (Jeff “Wapo” Bezos could make a killing in cornering the fruitcake market as well.)
As ELrond points out about dough, the Claxton fruitcake can easily fulfill the three requirements for money:
– A unit of account.
– A medium of exchange.
– A store of value.
Additionally, they do not degrade over time (Grandma had one that was from the early 20th century, still in the wrapper, plus they can be cut up into tiny pieces e.g. take a gooey cherry off for trade or payment; it has to be worth $50 today with the Bitcoin – fruitcake exchange rate being 1 to 1.
And on top of everything, not like gold, bitcoin, or dirt, a human could theoretically actually eat it.
Just some food for thought for this contentious holiday season, gift giving and on-going cryptocurrency mania and controversy.
Exclusive: Nearly 4 Million Bitcoins Lost Forever, New Study Says
http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/
“Just as gold bars are lost at sea or $100 bills can burn, bitcoins can disappear from the Internet forever. When all 21 million bitcoins are mined by the year 2040, the actual amount available to trade or spend will be significantly lower.
“According to new research from Chainalysis, a digital forensics firm that studies the bitcoin blockchain, 3.79 million bitcoins are already gone for good based on a high estimate—and 2.78 million based on a low one. Those numbers imply 17% to 23% of existing bitcoins, which are today worth around $8,500 each, are lost.
“While others have speculated about the number of lost bitcoins, the Chainalysis findings are significant because they rely on a detailed empirical analysis of the blockchain, where all bitcoin transactions are recorded.
—
By design, the Bitcoin mining algorithm returned many more bitcoins for the earliest blocks than for the later ones. That’s one reason why Bitcoin mining takes so much energy: the amount of computing that needs to be done per newly-created coin keeps increasing.
So in theory, the people who happened to be in on the ground floor should be obscenely rich. But of course, no one really knew whether the world’s first cryptocurrency was going to turn out to be anything (we still don’t).
Hold on to those old thumb drives, people. They could be valuable antiques one day.
Technically all you need is a private key (string of characters) and a public address (string of characters) on a piece of paper
Or a rock
Sounds like a Ponzi Scheme.
Its a riddle, inside an enigma.
General Theory of Relativity against Cultural Consequences of the 4th Crusade
The first major discovery of the 20th century in 1905 became Einstein’s realization that the Lorentz transformations and Poincare’s reasoning about the relationship between the properties of the “ether” and space-time intervals in relative frames of reference are not explained by dynamics, but by kinematics.
It was this idea that formed the basis of the Special Theory of Relativity (SRT) and later led humanity to realize that no a priori properties of space-time exist, that the world can be arranged as anything, and it should be studied with humility, and not try to interrogate nature and/or impose your own ideas on it.
SRT was, and probably remains, the highest manifestation of such an important component of the scientific method, as the Occam’s Razor, which in the course of the Great Indiction directed the development of science.
And the greatest achievement and a swan song of the scientific method as such was the ingenious simplicity of the General Theory of Relativity and the dizzying singularity in Alexander Friedman’s cosmological solution, that made mankind not only “embrace the immensity” and finally realize the whole universe as an object of unlimited knowledge gathering but also recall the Creation Of The Universe From Nothing, described in Genesis.
And the most important was the ability to realize in concrete scientific terms HOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING was before the Creation.
The entire 20th century continued attempts to revive the pre-eternal matter, and, along with it, the old conflict of science and religion that began with the Fourth Crusade.
But when Grigory Perelman in 2003 published the last of his articles devoted to the Poincare conjecture, it became clear that not only extravagant equations of state of matter and/or deviations from spherical symmetry can not eliminate the singularity at the beginning of time, (as it was already proved in 80s by Stephen Hawking), but any conceivable Universes will have this property.
Quantum mechanics was forced to step down from the throne and try on a crystal shoe on the foot of the scientific Cinderella of the second half of the 20th century – the General Theory of Relativity.
And so the Perelman ‘s work revealed the abscess of the most carefully concealed scientific conflict of the 20th century, thus opening up the account for the great scientific discoveries of the third millennium since the birth of Christ.
But in addition, this discovery asked the most important moral questions of mankind, as if by flash, highlighting the most remote and dark corners in the science of the United States, Russia and China, thereby putting an end to the drama that began in 1994 (and maybe several years earlier)
The Prince was ‘trying on’ the ‘fur slipper’ of the maidens in the kingdom. Kinda what scientists have been doing with mother nature.
Would you summarize that?
Ha, that’s what I was trying to do…
Finca,
Nope. Didn’t read that one either. It’s possible that I may missing one of life’s great epiphanies, but I seriously doubt it. It may also mean that I don’t trust you. Oh well; feel free to return the sentiment.
Wampum — sea shells strung together with leather strips — was the legal tender for Plymouth Plantation and outlying towns for about the first 10 years of the colony’s existence, until 1630 when the much larger Puritan migration reached Boston, bringing silver plate, coins and bullion.
Both the Indians and the English used it extensively for trade. I suppose it had value because the people using it said it had value, and accepted it as such. I don’t know if Wampum can be compared to Bitcoin.
brh
At least it was honest money.
The wampum belts were also used as strategic communications devices. Treaties and prophecies were woven into wampum belts and the originals exist today including the Seven Fires prophesy belt and the George Washington Belt:
http://ganondagan.org/Learning/Wampum
Bitcoin, not so much, as it seems a money made for the Silicon Valley – MIT- Wall Street-Global Criminal Syndicate spheres almost exclusively.
The message of our cryptocurrency age is: In Computers We Trust.
Pocahontas wants Wampum so she can be Big Chief instead of Hillary. What you do White Man? You give her Wampum? She Big Liar like Chief Trump say. You want this Liar for your Chief? Ozone, Elrond, and Alba do. You want them in your Tribe?
Alexander Brodsky: What happens when you try to impose English 101 on a Soviet Student of Dialectical Materialism
I have already spoken about how the atmosphere in the USA changed dramatically in 1991. What happened at this time in the USSR is very difficult to discuss in view of the unimaginable scale of events. But there were people who not only presented these events, but also were able to make the only true decisions that followed from them.
Nevertheless, the next few years were probably one of the lowest moments in the history not only of Russia, but of the United States and the whole of mankind, although it became clear to me personally only in 1994. The time was terrible, although I just got it right and I, like many Americans, was full of hope of succeeding on the world’s ashes.
I was leading an absolutely crazy life: from 9 to one I taught physics and mathematics in various colleges and at one o’clock I changed clothes in a toilet and turned into the most terrible detachment of the Pratt Institute – Notorious Brodsky, please welcome!
I was very lucky because the unusuality of my arrival in Pratt led to the fact that I had to take “English 101, 102,” the courses that determine the essence of the American educated class.
Indeed, it is in these lessons that the American naive young people get the basic worldviews, backed up by the ingenious English-language literature. A person without a higher philosophical education simply can not appreciate the ingenuity and effectiveness of the indoctrination that hits him, and American schoolchildren brought up with constant breaks for advertising can only sit with a gaping mouth and admire the cultural treasures of Western civilization from Shakespeare and Freud to John Nash and Cormac McCarthy.
But the fact of the matter is that no person with university education gets to English 101- he either has to take English as a second language, or immediately gets on English 103. What happened to me is this really unique case, so I managed to certify the transcription of the Soviet diploma, but did not have time to provide a description of humanitarian subjects that were taught.
And imagine the situation when English 101 will be studied by a person with experience of Soviet dialectical materialism polished by the American postgraduate course of the NYU and Courant Physics Department.
Meanwhile, if the United States and Russia decide to establish real cooperation, and not the “détente” with a pistol in a pocket and a dagger in a hand, then these lessons will allow me to become a unique translator from one mentality to another.
And so I, completely unaware of my good fortune, after a desperate resistance, found myself at one desk with 17 year old American teenagers and, with them, with my mouth opened listen practically to my peer, a Vietnamese veteran, the captain of the US Army in reserve, who had just received a full professor, about the rules of versification and on why Americans have always been good guys, about Milton’s “Lost Paradise,” and about the role of the RAND Corporation in the Cold War, McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses” and the “Army vs McCarthy” process, about the well-being of society, careless lotteries of ritual murder and the theory of games in the economy. The latter was especially interesting to me, since this story was based on an uncommon from the literary point of view article of a well-known professor Sylvia Nasar about the freshly baked Nobel laureate John Nash, in the fate of which the fatal role was played by my good friend Luis Nirenberg. Could I imagine that in a few years Sylvia Nasar will write about another of my good acquaintances – Grigory Perelman, and that this article will not only turn my world around, but also make me write about it.
Finca, we know you’re working out of a warehouse in St. Petersburg Russia, a whole squad of you all called Finca posting day and night on these political sites based in the US. Last year the WSJ ran an article about it.
Still, I have to ask, what the hell are you talking about?
brh
Well, after you have solved that “warehouse puzzle” you feel so good about yourself that you forgot trying to collect on that “unpaid” Lend-Lease deal.
See how it works?
Finca,
Nope. Didn’t read that one either. It’s possible that I may missing one of life’s great epiphanies, but I seriously doubt it. It may also mean that I don’t trust you. Oh well; feel free to return the sentiment.
What is sad is how expensive this crap is making high end video cards!!!
In my day, we had Pong! And we liked it!
I remember Pong it came out the same year I got a vibrating football game with moving players and a wire controlled helicopter.
Good times.
Bitcoin price growth in days:
$0 – $1000: 1789 days
$1000- $2000: 1271 days
$2000- $3000: 23 days
$3000- $4000: 62 days
$4000- $5000: 61 days
$5000- $6000: 8 days
$6000- $7000: 13 days
$7000- $8000: 14 days
$8000- $9000: 9 days
What’s driving it up?
brh
Demand
Ok, demand. That makes sense.
The question I have is: can Bitcoin be exchanged for cash money like gold and silver can?
A few summers ago I found a platinum ring on the beach with a metal detector and sold it to a precious metals dealer for $300. Where can you sell Bitcoin?
brh
There are a number of well-established exchanges like Kraken and Coinbase.
Greed.
georgie summed it all up quit concisely, “It’s all bullshit, folks, and it’s bad for ya.”
There’s really nothing more that needs to be said about bitcoin and a lot of other “bullshit” that’s being passed around as reality.
~toktomi~
https://www.amren.com/news/2017/11/indiana-nurse-every-white-womans-son-sacrificed-wolves/
Fired. It’s no longer safe to prey on Whites. It’s only going to get worse for White haters from here on in – even if they’re White. Sorry Alba Elrond.
THIS is the signal:
https://www.infowars.com/exclusive-fbi-director-preparing-to-drop-the-hammer-on-mueller-comey-and-the-clintons/
C
A
Good news indeed if true. Someone has to win here. And the Clintons, Comeys, and Muellers are jackals. We need a night of the short knives – a surgical action against these people. The investigation of the Clinton Foundations via the Rico Act will be a long drawn out affair, involving much of the corrupt Regime and greater World Order. Obviously, unless these people are Pinned, such an investigation will never happen.
yawn–slick willy jailed?
Janos, it becomes wearisome pointing out to you repeatedly that the stuff you spout makes no sense. Elrond is right – your insults should be treated as lashing out with angry swear words, rather than rational communication.
Your use of the term ‘White haters’ to encompass all people who don’t share your bigotry merely indicates the narrowness of your mind and the paucity of your reasoning capacity, not to mention the severity of the psychopathology that I previously pointed out to you, which is not amenable to rational discourse.
If you had any moral or intellectual calibre worth respecting, I might be flattered by the tenacity of your antagonism.
But you don’t.
So I’m not.
Alba,
Very virtuous post…dismissive In the extreme, but virtuous!
elysianfield, you appear to be repeating yourself (I read the repetition below before the first iteration).
But thank you, it’s meant to be dismissive. So it should be – some things absolutely need to be dismissed if hate is not to triumph.
Its virtue or otherwise is of no interest to me. If you mean ‘virtue signalling’, rather than actual virtue, then we will all have to put our real name, with curriculum vitae, as otherwise there would be absolutely no purpose on an anonymous website.
And now I’m off out to the cinema for some very black humour in the form of the recently released ‘The Death of Stalin’ which sounds very promising. So you will have to excuse me. I wish you a good evening – it’s already dark here.
Alba,
Virtuous in your condemnation of a member of our community that, in your eyes, is unworthy of civil discourse…I would expect that Janos’s comments could be dissembled and destroyed point by point, if one would only condescend…? Janos does , at times, post comments that, contain an obvious truth couched in hyperbolae, metaphor, and are often obscured in classical references…but the outlandish solutions he sometimes offers cannot be parsed? Is this not part of the Socratic Method?
Dismissiveness does not promote the dialog that the Socratic Method intends.
Enjoy your evening…the movie does sound interesting.
This is just what she cannot do. For I am right and she is wrong. She cannot admit this, nor allow the light of debate to shine on her demented schemes for the attainment of power for the Labor Parties.
elysianfield: “Janos does , at times, post comments that, contain an obvious truth couched in hyperbolae, metaphor, and are often obscured in classical references…but the outlandish solutions he sometimes offers cannot be parsed?”
If Janos isn’t sincere, then he’s a tarpit — a troll emplaced especially to make other people waste their time and breath trying to counter him. Don’t get fished in.
elysianfield (to GreenAlba): “Very virtuous post…dismissive In the extreme, but virtuous!”
The wages of toxic absurdity is contempt!
No, wait. The wages of toxic absurdity… are contempt? Contempt, and also ridicule.
Hold on. Amongst the wages of toxic absurdity are contempt and ridicule. Contempt, ridicule, and an almost fanatic devotion to… Wait. I had it. It’s right on the tip of my keyboard, just hold on.
… All right, fine. Janos toxic, GreenAlba right. So there.
Endless Non-White immigration into the West and then the favoring of those people over the White natives spells the end of the West. You are in favor of all this so you are a White hater. We always hate those whom we have wronged after all. And your kind hate utterly wronged the People of the West.
And now Prince Harry is going to marry a mixed-race (and absolutely gorgeous and charming) American woman. Oh, Janos, what shall we do? What shall we do?
It must be difficult for you to go through life seeing happy, successful, bright people whose skin color happens to be a shade darker than your pasty white epidermis.
Oh, Janos, what shall we do?
It must be difficult for you to go through life…etc. – DrGonzo
===========
I’ll bet Queen Elizabeth is beside herself too and doing her best not to show it.
The cultural difference between Harry and his squeeze is so enormous, I’ll give the marriage 5-10 years.
If Bitcoin gets too big for its britches the anti Net Neutrality Brigade– aka The GOP– will put that bitch back in the very slow lane.
How slow? So slow that to get back on the highway ramp a fee will be charged; a very hefty fee.
See how it works now?
Of course the time to take Bitcoin seriously happened earlier in the year when arch-criminal Jamie Dimon declared it all a scam. This was the signal to climb on board for the savvy investor.
One interesting crypto is Ripple, with an established use case and all its coined pre-mined. It is not a power hog. Ripple works within the system to accomplish cross-border payments in approx. 4 seconds opposed to the utterly insane 5 days that the 70’s era SWIFT system takes now. The fees are negligible.
Anything that wrests the storage of value away from the criminal banks is a welcome development.
How to transact a million dollars for free without energy:
1. Write the private key and public key of a bitcoin address holding a million dollars worth of bitcoin on a piece of paper.
2. Give the paper to someone else.
…
I watched a couple of Russian talk shows, Solovyov and the Time program. In addition to all the complications associated with the antiquity of their profession, they can not understand what is happening now, because they can not imagine that in 2016 US elections really the question of whether or not there will be a nuclear war was resolved, and perhaps will there be or not the humanity.
You should agree that in comparison with this issue, even such a bleeding wound on the body of historical Russia as Ukraine seems to be um … well, you understood me. I would say that this knowledge is a necessary condition for understanding hm … everything.
In America, for example, the emerging recovery of the American people from the enchantment of the golden hat and the fear of the flying monkeys is clearly connected with the realization of the real possibility of a nuclear war with North Korea, although compared to Russia, the firepower of this country is negligibly small. But for some reason those who are so afraid that Trump will provoke a nuclear war with North Korea are not at all afraid of provoking a nuclear war with Russia and are actively provoking it, in particular in Ukraine.
Apparently they do not believe that Russia has not only a button, but also a finger to push it, and the only way to disprove this faith I do not even want to discuss. And without this refutation it is like Russia does not even have nuclear weapons, if the Clintonoids are in power in the United States.
Trumpistas are another matter and for the Clintonoids assertion that Russia understands only the strength they respond well, Hillary does not even understand the strength and are poking at them with North Korea.
And in this article, the Trumpistas seem to have found a way to not only explain to Americans the danger of Euro-ABM on the example of Alaska-ABM, but also to explain that the finger has already pushed the button long time ago, in which case everything will happen automatically, in full accordance with 1980’s depiction by Hollywood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DQsG3TKQ0I
Finca,
Nope. Didn’t read that one either. It’s possible that I may missing one of life’s great epiphanies, but I seriously doubt it. It may also mean that I don’t trust you. Oh well; feel free to return the sentiment.
Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, a way for a few tech guys to get rich and the rest of us to eat the losses. Same as everything else.
I am warning you guys and it is here in this comment at this blog. Mark the day if you have to. Do not say “nobody say it coming” when this thing collapses.
Moore’s Law is a bit of a misnomer. It’s merely an observation that every 18 months or so the feature size on an integrated circuit roughly halves. For a good long time this was exciting news because as feature sizes shrink, the time and power required to change the state of any one element in an integrated circuit was diminished. For the same amount of silicon and power you could perform many more state changes per unit of time. For those with the money to spare, investing in this exponential growth in computing seemed like a good idea. Jump on the curve and ride it up to riches.
But there’s a snag with Moore’s Law. As the feature size decreases, quantum effects start to degrade the performance of integrated circuit elements. Moore’s Law is limited to something like 10 nanometers or so. There is an upper limit to the speed and state changes per watt in silicon based computers.
As Joseph Tainter points out, complexity solves problems. The “solution” to Moore’s Law is to apply more silicon computing elements to particular sets of problems. Bitcoin is a good example of feeding more and more machine cycles into solving larger and larger problems. Recently there have been blurbs on-line about how much energy is devoted to mining bitcoins. It’s a lot. If we look at the source of all that electricity we find currently bitcoin runs mainly on coal, nuclear, natural gas, with a smattering of hydro and a vanishingly small fraction of solar thrown in for the requisite green washing. Once again we’re brought back, kicking and screaming, to the inescapable conclusion that we’re burning fossil carbon to generate value.
I remember watching the Ed Sullivan Show. Occasionally there’d be the plate spinning act where the performer would spin plates on sticks. The trick was to see how many plates he could keep spinning at once. After getting about eight or so going the first ones would start to wobble and he’d have to rush over and get it spinning faster again to stabilize it. Then it was back to starting more plates spinning. After a few minutes of this the performer would run around and collect his plates and take a bow.
Now, theoretically, one could argue the spinning plates could be a form of money. The performer has done work on the plates and therefore each plate has value. But, in the world of Platecoins, the value exists only as long as the plates are spinning. If you want to exchange Platecoins you have to find a way to keep them spinning as you move them onto someone else’s sticks. Now imagine you’re at the DMV waiting in line to pay the fees for your driver’s license in Platecoins. That could be exhausting.
Fossil carbon is finite. The solar flux is finite. What happens to Bitcoins when you pull the plug?
Durango, thanks for the excellent, concise explanation about the some of the physics of energy consumption concerning the IT Mystery Religion. You sound as if you are a hierophant, as does Elrond.
Then you make the moment of revelation approachable and comfortable forsome of us regular CFNers with the great visual of the “spinning plates guy” from Ed Sullivan Show days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k44uoVm0lPI
Amazing that that act is considered entertaining. I never got it. Still don’t. Just like cryptocurrencies.
Alba,
“Exxon Mobil: Rockefellers Behind Climate Change Conspiracy”
“A conference in January to discuss activism and education efforts surrounding Exxon Mobil’s climate work was held at the offices shared by two Rockefeller family funds. One potential subject of discussion suggested by a participant was “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”
Alan Jeffers, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said in an interview, “At every turn, as we saw the company coming under attack, there was a link back to either the Rockefeller Brothers Fund or the Rockefeller Family Fund.”
http://yournewswire.com/exxon-mobil-rockefellers-climate-change-conspiracy/
let me know yr albanizations.
Haha Malthuss, you’ve done it again! Every time you quote something from a website that you like, I check out the actual website to see who they are.
This one came up in a ‘List of Fake News Websites’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
The specific example in the case of ‘yournewswire’ is:
“Founded by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway in 2014. It has published fake stories, such as “claims that the Queen had threatened to abdicate if the UK voted against Brexit.”
Yes, really 🙂
You need to try harder. I respect genuine science and genuine investigative journalism, not fake news.
I would direct you toward the following serious book, published by a proper publisher – you know, one of those organisations that you can sue for libel if they print lies. Unlike troll websites and the white supremacist cesspools where You-Know-Who dines.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Money-secretive-billionaires-political/dp/1925228843/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511883010&sr=1-1&keywords=dark+money
But I don’t imagine that you’re remotely up to it. Happy trolling.
I would be wary of what you call “genuine science”. Scientists are like other people, they’re egotists and careerists and money grubbers and group-thinkers.
“Facts and evidence” – when selectively massaged or distorted or ignored by a “scientist” with a career or position to protect or who is ideologically motivated or motivated by corporate sponsorship money – can be worse than worthless, they can do harm.
This especially applies to emotionally charged, culture-war fields like economics, climate science, anthropology, sociology. With practitioners in these areas, it’s man-the-barricades.
Economics is especially disreputable, shill infested and which long-ago shed any pretense of being a dispassionate field of inquiry.
Journalism is itself a cess-pool. There’s a reason why the profession is held in such low regard. You can think what you like about Trump but a journalist has to step back. But they don’t. Even Bob Woodward said that they’re binge-drinking anti-Trump Kool-Aid. Journalists seem to want to saw off the limb they’re standing on.
Use your head and your own eyes. Trust them first. If what you’re being told contradicts readily apparent visual evidence, and if the field in question is something other than quantum mechanics, tell the talker to go fuck his hat.
“Use your head and your own eyes. Trust them first.”
Absolutely not, in the realm of science. This is anti-science and if we followed this advice we’d consider the earth flat and the sun and moon to be revolving round it. This is the entire point. Science has to demonstrate facts reliably and repeatedly. So, if I want to know how the climate is changing globally I don’t look out my window locally and draw any conclusions whatsoever.
I’ve read your refutation of the integrity of scientists by different denialists more times than you can imagine (including by the ‘scientists’ paid by fossil fuel interests). It holds no more real water now that it did the first time.
What scientists are supposed to do is trust their own head and trust their own eyes. That’s the basis for scientific inquiry.
What gets in the way of this is human nature. Scientists are hardly these emotion-less Vulcan-like beings without a full spectrum of human failings.
Reality is multi-faceted. The more facets of reality you can apprehend, the better off you’ll be.
OTOH, reality-denial is a maladaptive trait. It never works out for the denier. But be my guest, you can think what you like.
She’s just a tape recorder, the perfect “Citizen”. She thinks Tyson is a real Scientist. And that Elizabeth Warren, aka “Pocahontas” is a real Indian. No intellectual or moral compass whatsoever.
You are too smart by half.
See a pattern in links between the UN, Rockefeller, Gore, Carbon Taxes?
John D. Rockefeller Jr. Donated Land for United Nations …
Home Trivia John D. Rockefeller Jr. Donated Land for United Nations … rockefeller-jr-donated-land … $8 million donation made in 1946 by John D. Rockefeller …
Search domain americanprofile.comamericanprofile.com/articles/john-d-rockefeller-jr-donated-la…
Headquarters of the United Nations – Wikipedia
Headquarters of the United Nations … the land occupied by the United Nations Headquarters … Jr., who donated it to the city. The Rockefeller family owned …
Search domain en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headquarters_of_the_United_Nations
Secretary-General, Marking Historic Donation to League of …
When Rockefeller’s donation of the land was announced in the … the Rockefeller Foundation and the United Nations Global Compact launched a new framework for …
Search domain http://www.un.orgun.org/press/en/2012/sgsm14498.doc.htm
Was the United Nations building really built on land donated
This is for Volodya,
I get a kick out of his/her sign off,
But I don’t imagine that you’re remotely up to it. Happy trolling.
“Absolutely not, in the realm of science. This is anti-science and if we followed this advice we’d consider the earth flat and the sun and moon to be revolving round it. ”
Alba,
Are you not concerned with issues that have been decided and are not subject to rational debate?
Holocaust
Climate causality
Racial Eugenics?
Don’t even get me started on the female orgasm. The issue at hand is not climate change, but rather the causality….
volodya: “What scientists are supposed to do is trust their own head and trust their own eyes. That’s the basis for scientific inquiry.”
Wrong. Dead wrong. Wrongwrongwrong. Two all wrong patties on a wrong bun with wrong sauce and a super-sized side of wrong. Incorrectamundo.
What scientists are supposed to do is formulate theories that explain phenomena, test their theories against reality, then publish the results so that the theory, the experimental design, the measurements, and the conclusions can be inspected, criticized, examined sideways, disproved, or (occasionally) found to pass rigorous tests of consistency, validity and reproducibility by other scientists. This is how science, when pursued rigorously enough, sometimes overcomes human frailty. A scientist who trusts only their own head and their own eyes incurs a greatly increased likelihood of trying to convince the world of nonsense, like the idea that comets are powered by electricity, or fraudulent and dangerously untrue ideas such as a <a href=“https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield”link between mercury and autism.
No, their special white coats give them special immunity!
Volodya
Fully agree with you. Who was the famous economist who said that economics is no better than astrology? Galbraith I think.
We have the problem here again of our host’s unthinking thinking classes (Peter Hitchens has called them the unintelligentsia). I remember from school the last bit of 1984 where your man looks out the window at the prole woman, almost cheerfully unconcerned by the bigger picture, was hanging out her washing. What is it that confers a special immunity on ordinary people who have not had a higher education? I have given up recommending the website of the late Richard Webster (Sceptical Essays), especially his two-part essay Flat Earth News. A superb indictment of journalism, American journalism in particular (but it applies throughout the West), can be found in a YT video by Colin Flaherty where he takes the Philadelphia Inquirer to task for ignoring black mob violence.
I read a book by a Swedish philosopher recently, Asa Wikforrs, who is a professor no less, called Alternativa Fakter. (It is a simple yet quite serviceable language.) She was stung into writing it when President Trump’s team referred to alternative facts about the numbers at his inauguration. She goes to unnecessary and tedious lengths to defend the position that knowledge is objective and to counter (without completely dismissing, note) postmodernist ideas of knowledge that it is a ‘power construct’ (or whatever) and whatever you want it to be. I’m with her on that, but her examples are either trivial or highly contestable. She is relying on journalists and on researchers who obviously share her (declared) bias. The big problem is that her facts are wrong. As in untrue, or lies if you prefer.
I have seen her speaking on YouTube and she is passionate about what she says, and quite cross.
She made me laugh out loud at one stage, writing about global warming, as the source of her information in the footnote is the IPCC. Donna Laframboise’s book about the IPCC is short and to the point as well as being very well researched. It should be utterly discredited as an organization. But the problem isn’t just the scientists who are living the dream but the journalists (and by extension the politicians) too. The assertion that ‘science’ has pronounced on AGW is simply untrue, and laughable. The 97% figure bandied about is a joke: there are plenty of scientists (including those working in the field) who dismiss out of hand or are sharply critical. I once spent a wearying time arguing with a warmist on one YT blog who insisted that ‘not one climate scientist’ is sceptical. So I asked him about Judith Curry. And he went away, as they always do. (He tried throwing insults at me but he wasn’t any good at that either, whereas I have discovered an unsuspected talent in that area that I am a little bit ashamed of.)
So, yes, as JHK keeps saying, we have a big, big problem with thinking and with proper information.
Here is the link to the Philadelphia Inquirer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7mdp58Tf8s
Clarification: ‘or lies if you prefer’
I am not implying that Wikforss is a liar but rather I argue that her facts are faulty and that their media purveyors are often deluded or engaging in deceit. She argues, reasonably, that we all depend on expert knowledge but obviously does not realise that much of this knowledge is false. Or to use Flaherty’s phrase when discussing black criminality, they (the media and others) “ignore, deny, condone, excuse, encourage and even lie about it.”
Alba,
Virtuous post…very demeaning, but virtuous!
You contradict yourself, elysianfield, but I forgive you, virtuously 🙂
But I don’t imagine that you’re remotely up to it. Happy trolling.
Fake News is a cliché brought in to distract peeps like you from facts.
It appeared during the PizzaGate scandal.
PG was not Fake News –it is all too real.
“Pizzagate” is sodden grist for the tinfoil hat wacko brigade.
It has about as much validity as the “fact” that astronauts never landed on the moon — that it was all done on a Hollywood stage.
GreenAlba: I’ve read “Dark Money.” It’s fascinating. I like the way you think.
“Books–because reality if over rated.”
What did you learn from the book?
Short answer. In meticulous and carefully researched detail, Jane Mayer outlines in “Dark Money” how the libertarian efforts of the Koch brothers and their millionaire allies have created a system of organizations that have worked to covertly control academic institutions, courts, statehouses, and Congress.
They keep their funding hidden and are ruthless in their attacks on the environment, unions, tax laws, “entitlements” such as Medicare and SS. They have been largely responsible for the current US oligarchy and for purchasing the US government.
Hmmmm…. my post on bitcoin mining using sustainable energy sources like solar and geothermal was removed immediately.
“Hmmmm…. my post on bitcoin mining using sustainable energy sources like solar and geothermal was removed immediately.”
Janet,
Tell it to the Marines….
Semper Fi… trivia site can’t handle facts.
Parabolic moves are never sustainable 🙂
I can only guess what made Grigory Perelman around this time to give up a very promising university career in the United States and return to Russia. But the words of Grigory Perelman, told by him in an interview with Slivia Nasar somewhere in 2006 do not leave any place for a doubt – he faced the repulsively dishonest behavior of his colleagues in the United States.
And he could not face this after he left the United States, and those events that all the same happened without him were characterized as insignificant by him. It is logical to assume that the events that caused the disturbance took place between 1992 and 1994, and therefore are not related to the proof of the Poincaré theorem. Even if they caught up with him in Russia – American scientists have many friends in the Russian Academy of Science. In particular, Perelman in an interview with Sylvia Nasar, speaking of Yau – the famous Chinese mathematician who claimed that he and his students had proved Poincare’s theorem, and Perelman only indicated approaches to the solution of the problem, – said, It can not be said that I am outraged by him. There are some people who are worse than him, of course, there are a lot of more or less honest mathematicians, but practically all of them are conformists, they are honest, but they tolerate those who are not.
As you know the best way to understand what is written is to understand the author. Silvia Nasar according to Wikipedia was born in Germany in 1947, and her mother was a German, and her father was a CIA officer of Uzbek nationality Ruzi Nasar.
She graduated from NYU as an economist and worked for a long time under the leadership of the Nobel Laureate in Economics Wassily Leontief, whose work was used not only to select the goals of the strategic bombings in Germany, but also to build the postwar economy and the strategy of economic pressure on the countries of the Socialist Bloc.
Subsequently, she became a journalist specializing in economic issues, including a column in very prestigious and influential publications, but became widely known after she wrote the book “A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Prize winner John Nash”, a hero who was also an ingenious mathematician who dealt with game theory and Riemannian geometry, very close to what Perelman did.
And apparently she began writing a book right after John Nash in 1994 received the Nobel Prize in Economics for introducing the Game Theory into it.
The piquancy of the situation was that during the time of McCarthyism, it was precisely for this work, which confirmed the theory of the surplus value of Marx, that he became an outcast in MIT, and only by miracle was not dismissed. It is necessary to know what people who became an object of attention of the Commission on anti-American activity had to go through, and Nash did indeed develop a theory that confirmed Marx!
Having thoroughly tasted the bitter bread of occasional gigs, he enlisted in the RAND Corporation, where his Game Theory formed the basis of the Cold War strategy and encryption methods. For unclear reasons, he didn’t work there for a long time and after returning from California, he continued to work at MIT, began working at Princeton and at Courant Institute in close contact with Luis Nirenberg and Peter Lax over elliptic partial differential equations, which in the Soviet Union were solved by the method of alternative parameters.
What happened next remains a mystery and my partners in the Stratigo game warned me that it is strictly forbidden to ask Nash about this, however, as well as about elliptic equations. According to the legend of Sylvia Nasar, Nash’s psyche did not survive when, having proved the theorem important for solution of 19th of Hilbert’s problem, he suddenly discovered that this theorem was proved a few months before him by the Italian mathematician De Giorgio. The paranoid idea that he was robbed, overlapped the memories of the persecution of the times of Senator McCarthy and mixed with the scenarios of the Cold War, in the development of which he took part.
And the mathematical genius turned out in a psychiatric hospital, flying over the cuckoo’s nest. And the first person to notice the strangeness in his behavior was Louis Nirenberg ..
Soon John Nash freed himself, but immediately fled to Europe and tried to renounce American citizenship and get the status of a political refugee. But after several European countries denied him and he was extradited to the US, the treatment continued and included insulin shock and psychopharmacology. Glory to God was done without lobotomy.
It is difficult to say whether the treatment was successful or the disease receded by itself, but after 10 years of intermittent hospital stay, Nash began to recover and returned to Princeton, where he completely recovered thanks to the complete absence of medical care.
And then he received recognition and he, like Perelman, began to receive all conceivable and inconceivable bonuses, as if some higher forces decided to interfere in his fate and try to compensate for the injustice committed against him.
Finca,
Nope. Didn’t read that one either. It’s possible that I may missing one of life’s great epiphanies, but I seriously doubt it. It may also mean that I don’t trust you. Oh well; feel free to return the sentiment.
If bitcoin or any other off the wall currency became the norm, the one thing you could be sure of is that the powers-that-be, would immediately pass laws that made bitcoin subject to regulation by the powers that be.
Nothing of any significance will be allowed to happen that isn’t controlled by any government agency somewhere. When Wilbur & Orville Wright invented powered flight, once it became seen as a significant advancement, it was taken over by the government. How long did it take to fire up the FCC? Anybody who thinks that bitcoin or any other system will be allowed to propagate without the government’s control, is kidding themselves. This is the age of control. Assisted by the computers, and all the other digital advancements that make everything you do available to the government and the financial world at large, nothing will be allowed to happen that might endanger the status quo. It’s already too late folks, but keep using those I phones, they’re just so damn handy!
Oops, forget that FCC reference.
FAA
https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/rise-of-the-cat-ladies/
Women often run their own lives with amazing cleverness, competence, and Machiavellian scheming. Their families lives as well, with amazing ability to get the best deals at the store with kids in tow and a million other things to do. Far beyond the average man’s ability to multi-task. Yet none of this translates into politics. There they become typically the most clueless of idealistic naïfs.
Welfare mothers are of course rational: they want more gibs. Rational, just not moral. And female entrepreneurs are often rational as they’ve seen many aspects of life on their way up from nothing. But careerists? No. They just want more Gibs for everyone – clueless idealists committed to a rotten and rotting system. And of course those IN Government want more clients, minority immigrants who are good at Needing and Demanding more Gibs. They’re rational too – just not moral. Basically such women are the same as Republicans who want immigrants for cheap labor. Rational and immoral.
Dark Money: how a secretive group of billionaires is trying to buy political control in the US…Focus on the Kochs, as if there are not
dozens? hundreds of Billionaires buying influence.
Green Algae is a bore
It’s an eye-opening book, malthuss.
“The only cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity,”–Dorothy Parker
“Welfare mothers are of course rational: they want more gibs. Rational, just not moral”
Janos,
A case in point. I have, several times, mentioned “Capt. Dave”, USA (ret)…he of Judge Judy fame, and otherwise. During one of the Major forest fires in Josephine County, the Silverlock Fire in the Kalmiopsis Range (less than 10 miles from my place) the military was called in to fight the fire. The Red Cross, also was present. As a matter of fact, the Red Cross, a full 5 miles away from the fire lines set up a food wagon on the edge of my property (it facing Hwy 199) and was giving away bag lunches to any who presented themselves. There was no displacement of population during this fire, no hungry firefighters, nor any people who’s houses burned…however, in this intensely rural area, a line formed with locals grabbing lunches… and Capt. Dave was one of them. I argued on the moral issue of taking one of the lunches…he was defensive.
I often have wondered how much the Red Cross bills the government for disaster relief? At what cost that bag lunch billed to taxpayers?
I don’t know of this Dave. Is he connected with the Sons of Roy Masters? Not a Roybot I assume – even Roy said don’t be a Roybot.
What kind of sandwiches? I’m getting hungry just thinking about it!
I used to watch Judge Judy. Maybe I saw him there. She’s pretty good most of the time, but she doesn’t like traditional Whites and will rule in favor of Blacks if they are contesting.
Janos,
I don’t know of the type of sandwiches, but there was a big red apple in the bag!
If you can search the old “cases” the name of both parties was “Kohout”…I was with him on the stage during the “trial”…I never saw the segment. While travelling in a taxi to the set of the program, the driver asked us which program we were on…when we told him “Judge Judy” he said…”…watch out, she doesn’t like men”. Neither Dave or myself had never before watched the show, and had no idea…the driver was correct.
Dave may have known one or several of the Masters clan…he was not a follower, however.
I never noticed a bias against men per se, but perhaps I missed it.
Judge Judy, highest paid TV personality in the world today at about $30 million per.
Is she really a judge?
brh
BRH,
Actually Judge Judy makes a reported $48KK per year. Her Bio states she once was a judge. The show is filmed in Hollywood, the “litigants” paid to appear(Capt. Dave did not want to appear, and they kept raising their “honorarium” from the standard $200 to the $1000 he finally accepted), all expenses paid. any awards/judgments passed from the bench are paid by the show…$5K maximum.
They always require the litigant to bring a second party…that was me. I was paid $100…but I didn’t get my ass reamed on national TV….
At the end of the show when they interview the litigants? Armed security in evidence.
What did Ahab say? My means are sane. My ends utterly mad. Elrond Alba’s means to break Conservatives are rational in that they are effective as per the last election in Virginia. But their end result is utterly mad – the destruction of White America. Of course some of them don’t realize or don’t care enough to realize. Elrond Alba both knows and cares – it loves it! Utterly mad and evil.
Dalhousie offers ’emergency hijab kits’ for women facing violence on campus
Dalhousie Student Union president says a number of Muslim women have had their hijabs yanked off
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/dalhousie-university-emergency-hijab-muslim-students-1.4421395
“Dalhousie University is now offering ’emergency hijab kits’ to women who need a replacement, amid reports of Muslim students being attacked for their religion and having their headdresses yanked off.
“The president of the Dalhousie Student Union said she knows a number of women on campus who have told her they were victims of such violence, although few decide to tell school officials.
“‘This is a proactive measure, but it’s not unfounded,’ Amina Abawajy said.
“Anyone who quickly needs a new hijab can call Dalhousie security services, which will deliver a kit to them anywhere on campus. The kits include a piece of fabric, pins, a small guide on how to wrap the hijab and important numbers for reporting such crimes.
“The Dalhousie Student Union and Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group are behind the project, which was launched after many students said they were concerned for their safety following the shooting earlier this year at a Quebec City mosque.
“‘We were hearing a lot of concerns, specifically from Muslim women wearing the hijab, so we responded by creating this emergency hijab kit,’ Abawajy said.”
—
Byline: by Aya Al-Hakim, CBC News
You’re welcome, as always.
This is a Muslima fantasy, Elrond. Part of them wants to be violated so they can feel self righteous – and destroy their violators much as women taunt men into violence and then feel superior and/or call the police to destroy the man, especially if he is their husband and this can be milked for great profit.
And the other part of the Muslima psyche may want to be violated in this manner as a symbol of being freed from Islam. Of course this a deeper level of the psyche than the first.
And as ever, If we are this evil, why are they coming here? To fit in? Into a Culture they see as evil and inferior? C’mon Elrond, wake up. The Hijrah (migration) works in tandem with the Jihad. But of course, hypocrisy is your strength. And you secretly (even to yourself?) see them as your instruments of vengeance against a Culture you hate, namely your own. You are Cicero’s “Enemy within”.
Just keep repeating to yourself “Emergency Hijab Kit”. If you are sane, you will suddenly realize that Elrond is a loon.
Actually, I’m a goose — I’m ill-tempered and make messes that get on people’s nerves.
Hey Elrod how about Christians and Jews in Muslim lands? How are we treated? Is the Cross, the Star of David tolerated, or even permitted to be carried on one’s person?
Or is it only supposed to work one way?
brh
The Golden Rule isn’t, “Treat others as poorly as the worst they ever treated you.” It’s “Treat others as you would want to be treated.”
The benefits of cooperation, even sometimes cooperating with people who betray you, have even been scientifically demonstrated using game theory. Screwing the other guy can be a winning strategy, but not always. Sometimes the best way to serve your own interests involves serving others’ as well. Look up the iterated prisoner’s dilemma sometime.
“The benefits of cooperation, even sometimes cooperating with people who betray you, have even been scientifically demonstrated using game theory”
Elrond
Worked for the Sonderkommando!
May none of us ever find ourselves in that position.
May none of us ever find ourselves in that position. And the prisoner’s dilemma assumes symmetry between the players in terms of their options to cooperate or defect. It hardly applies to the hell on earth the Nazis created, where one side utterly denies humanity of the other.
(This is where Janos is likely to chime in and proclaim that’s how Christians actually are treated in Muslim lands, so neener neener. That’s his bigotry talking. Don’t be fooled.)
Since women are so good at multi-tasking and running a household, why not managing a business. Same skill set, right? Yes and no. Some of the skills translate to the macro sphere but the personal stuff doesn’t. No one ever said Women are better with people, no sensible person anyway, though they think they are. And in any case, employees aren’t children or their husband. And if they don’t like their husband tinkering in the garage and feel the same way about the Engineering Dept, then there’s going to be trouble. Many women secretly think of their husbands as just big children, and if given power, this contempt will manifest.
Both men and women report that they’d rather work for a Man – less personal stuff and less grudges held. And of course HR departments are simply Orwellian feminist nightmares. Will we purify your House, the corrupt World you have built, yea we will make all things new in the Fire of our Imagination married with the Steel in our Hands.
As the Surveillance State, both so called Private or Capitalist, and so called Public (owned by the former) grows, people will take to being masked at all times. The Government will outlaw such disguises, and people will respond by wearing temporary or removable facial enhancements that change their appearance.
As Technology grows into being able to “pump” advertising or injunctions into the brain, people will take to wearing tin foil hats or more sophisticated defenses, perhaps even surgically implanted into the skull. Needless to say, if you get a Chip that makes it easy for them to control you, you will not see God.
More and more you will yearn for the Telepathic Barbarians outside the Bubble to come and save you from such a State, a State where the male erection is banned as a form of violence. They will give you orgasms via the chip so they’ll say you don’t need erection or indeed, any heterosexual relationship. Or homosexual. Or sexual. Or any. They will be all in all. Ready little man? How small are you? Believing Elrond Alba is the first step towards becoming the Incredible Shrinking Man. Soon you will fit in a doll house and be terrified of a house cat.
Janos: “People will take to being masked at all times.”
Sounds like a job for an emergency hijab kit. And you think my contributions aren’t useful!
” if you get a Chip that makes it easy for them to control you, you will not see God”
Janos, of course you will be able to both see and hear him…and he will be telling you to buy Doritos and subscribe to HBO.
“It’s okay to be a shithead.”
Line up to get chipped. They’ll geld you too, Zone. It’s good for you!
I’m more like THX1138. Even as the Elrond Alba entity computer voice comes over the monitor saying, You cannot survive outside – I keep climbing!
Aint gonna happen, Vlad. Imagine trying to chip Jo Bob from Baton Rouge, already half nuts and owner 3 AR15s.
another techno wet dream, like driverless cars and downloading your brainwaves into the web so you can live forever.
Then again in a place like Sweden it could possibly happen, the technology developed by Swedish scientists, but once the Muzzies take over in a few years all the white Swedes get chipped so the Imams can keep better track of them. That I can see.
brh
An device embedded in human could–
drive them insane
kill them
sterilize
—intentionally
the new President of Zimbabwe, called the ‘Alligator’ is a mass murderer. Still, the NYT is hoping for the best. It’s be like Stalin being deposed in the Soviet Union in 1939, and Beria taking over.
Hey Bono, if you’re looking in, about 30,000 whites still live in Zimbabwe; this would be a good time to fly in there with U-2 and join ‘The Alligator’ on a podium in Harare and lead chants like “Kill the White Man”, and “Bring me my machine gun”, like you did in SAfrica, resulting to the bloody murder of thousands of white farmers across the country. You are an influential man, my friend. Then you can fly back to Brussels and pick up your EU Humanitarian Award. The DNC in Washington has an award waiting for you too.
BRH
Follow the money. Who do you think is funding/backing him?
Follow the money.
And not the Bitcoin!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-17/why-people-will-happily-line-be-microchipped-dogs
So it begins. Right from Ozone’s favorite site.
Prince Hal to marry a Quadroon. The Fall of the House of Windsor. Once upon a time I had high hopes for Harry, urging him in my prayers to overthrow the Regime and take the Throne for God, England, Western Civilization, and the White Race. But alas, the dark powers were too strong. They just showed an English crone saying how happy she is that the Royal Family is “moving with the times”. This is the apogee of ignorance. Any Royal Family should be a bulwark Against Time and its corruption.
The Royals are monsters.
Harry will make a fine old drunk one day.
Well, a Bitcoin is now worth $10,000.
Something you will never be able to say about an ounce of gold in your lifetimes.
How do you know that Au wont hit 10k/ounce?
How do I know what food will cost in a year?
What does it say that you’re quoting Bitcoin valuations in US $$?
Nothing. USD is just another currency…
I could say that 1 bitcoin is worth one Hyundai Elantra, but that would also still be relative to some time or space.
How about Gold? Price of gold today is $1283.
Bitcoin is now worth 8.417 oz. of the yellow metal.
Yesterday it was worth 7.638 oz. at market prices
And Bitcoin is just another techno fad. When people start quoting prices in Bitcoin, then I’ll take it seriously.
old vs new?
Dollar is King, for now?
THIS IS WAR.
C
A
no it is peace
The similarity of the destinies of John Nash and Grigory Perelman, coinciding up to the main participants in all these intrigues, should not overshadow the differences of these destinies, the main one of which was the courage of Grigory Permman and the steadfastness of his moral principles, his non-conformism, brought up by a fundamentally different civilization – Historical Russia, which temporarily took on the face of the Soviet Union.
The drama of Grigory Perelman is one of many similar dramas that together make up the drama of Russian science in a Time of Troubles, and his victory is the victory of all who are confronted with the conformism of Western science that abandoned the principles of scientific solidarity and scientific ethics during the accursed 1990s.
Let’s hope that American scientists decide that it is not too late to restore these principles, because without them, it is impossible to count on the international solidarity of scientists during the forthcoming “reset” or, God forbid, “overload” of the relations of the two nuclear superpowers.
So, is Afghani hashish still “a thing,” or are they just producing opium poppy now? Haven’t heard anything about it in ages.
Science is mostly the problem these days, as humans have proven themselves to be too immature to harness it wisely. Someone needs to research weaponizing THC as a stable aerosol or water additive and then inundate the world’s political and financial capitals with it.
Pretty decent article and follow-on discussion of the mechanics of Bitcoin over at NakCap yesterday:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/bitcoin-energy-pollution.html
Bottom line: the whole mining process is exactly like a video game (except there’s no video), in that it’s nothing more than a very energy intensive means to create scarcity (and thus supposed “value”) and to rationally allocate the resulting bitcoins based on the computerized labor used to acquire them. In other words, it’s just another virtual scam, much like electronic HFT, which now rules the equities/debt markets. Both of which capitalize on the use of relatively cheap public utilities, effectively misallocating public resources for the use of a wealthy few in the private sector. It’s also dangerously close to legalized gambling, in that the mining process has now and certainly will in the future devolve into a monetary arms race to capture the remaining coins by use of ever increasing amounts of complex computing strategies and/or sheer computing power, thereby further creating artificial shortages by cornering the market.
But the kicker for me was that the underlying “work” used to mine these worthless digital 1’s and 0’s is exclusively digital and entirely consumptive: an obscene amount of “real world” electricity is consumed to produce an otherwise meaningless string of computer bits to produce a totally speculative digital “product,” which must then almost always be converted into a “harder” version of speculation (an actual legal currency) before it can be exchanged for actual real world commodities. And as has been said above many times already, all of this exists at the pleasure of an official governmental currency racket that could easily usurp all this or shut it down altogether at anytime by the mere stroke of a pen.
All of which reflects our current predicament “to a T”: too many people chasing too few resources due to resource shortages and (primarily, at least at this point) hoarding on the part of a wealthy elite, who can certainly read the handwriting on the wall.
In that respect, Bitcoin is indicative of the demise of western culture: just another digital get rich scheme (yawn!), with the added cache of being “new, edgy, and alternative.” So all the early adopters flock to it like the sheep that they are, the old heads like me will simply ignore it like the curmudgeons that we are, the bubble will continue to grow at exponential rates exactly as it’s pre-programmed to do before popping spectacularly at some future date, a handful of clever “entrepreneurs” will take all their digital winnings and go home, and the world will move on to whatever idiotic craze some fool comes up with next.
Excellent comment, OS.
How does all this affect Iowa’s farmland resource?
Just this: the mega-data companies–like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft–are building data centers in Iowa. They are building here because Iowa leads the nation in renewable wind energy, and the data companies can enhance their “green” image by using that energy.
Trouble is, each wind turbine destroys about two acres of land with its footprint and access road. Furthermore, the data centers are sprawling complexes with ample free parking for cars. They are built not in abandoned downtown buildings but out in the suburbs, on farmland.
As I have stated many times here, that Iowa farmland is a world-class resource that, once paved over or built on, cannot be replaced.
I always thought Iowans were the last ones with any common sense remaining. Looks like they’ve finally sold out too. Tragic!
Lol at you guys.
Bitcoin is software. With improvements it can be made vastly more efficient.
The computations aren’t “meaningless”. They secure the network against attack. Since its invention the concept of proof of work has been amended and improved. Alternatives are in place to replace it. I imagine as bitcoin dominance ascends in global markets rationality will prevail. There will be some resistance because its design depends on human consensus and that is always difficult. If consensus cannot be reached then it may be the case that some other software replaces it as reserve currency.
The computations are entirely “meaningless” in the sense that that burn actual scarce physical resources (abundantly!) to produce an entirely ephemeral electronic product whose resulting “value” is entirely notional and speculative, and need I say it, vulnerable in more ways than I can possibly count. Currency almost certainly will become software all too soon, but not for the reasons you evidently think. And both scarcity and demand can be manufactured much more easily and energy efficiently than this.
Ol’ Scratch, the very article you linked to references the fact that new approaches to electronic currencies are being developed. Whereas Bitcoin is based on “Proof of Work” (i.e. proof that a certain number of CPU cycles have been burned, hence the gonzo power consumption), other concepts including “Proof of Storage” and “Proof of Time” can also be employed, which presumably would not share the same problem.
That doesn’t mean that I will like the cryptocurrencies of the future any more than I do now; it just means that, on a technical level, the colossal waste of energy they currently represent can theoretically be overcome. My chief objection is something else, namely the power relationships embedded in them. Money does not exist except by consensus. Gold, paper and bits are all equally worthless unless people will accept them. But whoever gets to create the consensus that others accept gains enormous power. That’s why, if Bitcoin ever presents a genuine challenge to traditional currencies, it will either be co-opted or crushed. I don’t like the idea of someone creating a system designed to be used against me while denying me any possibility to opt out.
Good points Elrond!
“scarcity and thus supposed “value”
Nick-O-Demus,.
The thing that generates value is demand, not scarcity. Scarcity coupled with demand increases value perceived. Suppose I have the last and only can of lutefisk…if no one wants it, it is nothing more than the shit it smells like…,
Trust the old pawnbroker on this….
Semantics. Scarcity + demand then. But it should be noted that they normally drive each other in a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on your perspective, on the way up and back down again. But in Bitcoin’s case at least, scarcity was programmed in to the basic algorithm from the very start, with mining becoming ever more expensive and resource intensive the more is mined, with an ultimate hard cap of 20M (I believe that’s the figure) at the end of the road.
The last warning, and quite frankly, not from Chinese
About North Korea and its missiles.
I do not know why they launched this missile now, but I have no doubt that North Korea did not test the missiles since September 15 at the request of Putin, in order not to complicate the situation of Trump. And the whole battle is “old-fat” is a performance on a children’s matinee for American Clintonoid journalists.
And this launch is not a test; it’s a demonstration of the capabilities, so that no one has any doubts that in the case of anything they will get to any point in the US, and get something very heavy, a few megatons heavy. Suffice it to say that the warhead has risen to a height of 4000 kilometers, for comparison, the ISS flies at an altitude of 400 km.
This is a lot, and even if we assume that fear has big eyes and divide it by two, the city of New York is still in the dead zone.
Nothing like this was expected, and I have no doubt that there is panic in both the White House and the Pentagon, and they do not sleep there, not because they are looking for countermeasures against the “fat little man” Kim Jong-un, nothing they could do now but because they think what to say at press conferences in a few hours.
P.S. It is interesting, what will the intelligence community say in response to the question, why did they know nothing about this possibility? Trying catching Trump?!
Or it could all be a hoax to keep tensions suitably ramped up. I’m torn.
It’s been pretty serious since the Clintonoids arranged the sale of Soviet missile technology from Ukraine to N. Korea.
Congrats on successful export of Jeffersonian Democracy to Ukrainian shithole!
Bunkers for the rich, a healthy nuclear glow for the rest of us (Don’t run! Turn and embrace the light!). Wonder what sort of mutants will hatch out of the rubble?
It’s bad news. Anything North Korea has, Iran soon will as well. The Ukrainians that supplied the North Koreans with the Russian rocket engines should have the hammer come down on heads and smash their stupid skulls.
NBC – the Nonsense Broadcasting CHannel – just gave the big Exit Sign to none other than Matt Lauer for, oh no hold your ears you too delicate for hard news SJWs, innapropriate sexual conduct.
Heavens to Betsy, what is happening to the bedrock of TeeVee journalism, and morning happiness here in the U.S.S.A.?
After his decades in the spotlight, Lauer probably has some excellent connections in the porn and cryptocurrency arenas and all he need do is get creative and synthesize a great product for the internet. Who needs legacy TeeVee anyway.
Couldn’t believe it. Janos was right – for once – the damn femmes have officially declared war on masculinity! Or maybe he was just ready to step down and NBC paid him off handsomely to do it with a splash?
The damn femmes who have been putting up with shit for millennia are now refusing to put up with it any more, and it’s actually having an effect. Oh, the humanity of it all!
Letting it all hang out was Liberalism, El. Christian discipline meant restraint for both. Obviously female misbehavior was far more policed, but many men took the discipline seriously as well, at least in many quarters.
If women must work with men, they deserve to be left in peace. But people work so much, they end up having no life outside so it gets complicated. The whole System is wrong in so many different ways it just needs to be scratched.
I think it’s much simpler than that. Women are smart enough to know that trading on their sexuality is a viable strategy to get to the top. They’re also opportunistic enough to figure out that they can now apparently have it both ways.
I have no doubt that there are professional male sexual predators out there, but I have no doubt that there are also professional female sexual victims, and it sounds like the latter are now ascendant.
Long term, neither side like the results. Men will gradually learn how to play the victim card too and/or they’ll just crack down hard on personal relationships in the workplace. Attractive women like to be noticed. I see an inevitable backlash coming.
That is one arrogant prick/punk. He destroyed what’s her name, his genuinely nice former co-host who looked like a half Asian Elf. I rejoice at his downfall. More women are going to be coming forward!
Can we dare to dream that little George will fall too?
Ann Curry, I presume? I heard the rest of the cast had it out for her as well. Too “bleeding heart” and all that. They also wanted to continue to dumb down the show to reach out to their primary audience: bored young big city femmes with too much money on their hands and not enough worthless bullshit to spend it on.
Lauer was their grownup “boy toy,” of sorts. Kind of ironic then that they ended up throwing him under the bus. Still think this might all be a publicity stunt. Lauer was probably bored with the grind, so NBC said let’s make your departure memorable in order to gen up some ratings among those bored femmes. They’ll be berating him loudly in public, while working the ol’ hairbrush furiously in the bathroom stalls in private.
in order to gen up some ratings – OS
=========
gin
Always been torn on that one, Q. I realize that “gin” is the accepted form, but in this case for instance, when “gen” is my intended short form of “generate,” I think either term is appropriate.
Yeah, her. There was another nice one too, that a lot of people liked as well. The got rid of her of her in favor of the boring, unpleasant, unattractive Katie Couric. Their ratings took a hit after that.
Curry was no intellectual giant, but neither are any of them. They were already mostly entertainment at that point. Anything else was just pretension. She got it – and was funnier, nicer, and more genuine than any of them.
Sounds like Janos had a little Ann Curry crush! Who knew?
Let the pig pile begin!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/media/nbc-matt-lauer.html
No doubt our god-damned janet-bot will be chiming in before long about her forced encounter with the lecherous Lauer too.
“Heavens to Betsy”
Who is Betsey? Is she hot? Any naked pic’s?
Might BitCoin be the normality bias run wild? A chapter in the future history: Conceits of the Post-Moderns?
Nevertheless in theory a compelling replacement for SWIFT. But we wonder, along with Martin Armstrong, why it was positioned as a security? An asset class of high volatility?
Personally, I’m quite sure the usual dark ops suspects are at the very least knee deep in it after the fact, and they might very well be the driving force behind it altogether. It resembles nothing so much as a real life lab experiment in the effects and ramifications of digital currencies specifically and crowd sourced behavior in general. As such, I’d expect it lead and signal the advent of a possible dollar crash, as the major players are no doubt plugged into both economies, and then possibly be resuscitated and federalized in the aftermath, albeit likely with a different name and operating rules.
Poland’s state-owned oil and natural gas company signed a 5-year deal to import liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States. My guess they be paying in US Dollars and nor Russian Rubles.
My guess they be paying in US Dollars and nor Russian Rubles
They might as well since the “american shale gas” will be the liquified Russian gas from Siberia, as now the “american shale oil” is the ISIS oil from Iraq and Syria.
Polish suckers – they prefer to pay through their nose just to remain Russophobes.
The American-Russian tag-team strikes again 🙂
Polish suckers – they prefer to pay through their nose just to remain Russophobes.
Albeit likely with a quasi-metaphoric American gun to their heads.
The System is showing signs of reaction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-11-29/joseph-stiglitz-bitcoin-ought-to-be-outlawed-video
A newsletter I get said that the IRS quietly fired a warning shot across the Bow the other day: Of the hundreds of thousands of “miners”, only about five hundred filed their profits. And if these are now going to be taxed, the IRS does not accept bitcoin as payment. A big sell off may be in the offing next year if not this.
Or its a sign of desperation, that Gov inc wont yet accept BC.
Who knows?
It shall be prolonged and painful to the woefully uneducated, unprepared, and unprincipled.
…….and it starts now.
C
A
It starts with realizing that, since Kunstler wrote about it, its increased in value by $1000.
Bitcoin is now worth $11,000
Oops! And now it’s back to 10,065 again. Easy come, easy go.
$9711.11 this morning. Speculative much?
Aaaannnnnndddd it’s at $9320.
Who’ll give me 9400?
Oh my lord Elrond, so much gobble-de-gook.
What scientists do is observe, ie they use their eyes. They can formulate theories and hypotheses until the end of time but observation is where the rubber meets the road.
But, in order to observe, the scientists has to trust his own eyes. And in order to reason things out, he has to trust his own head, his own powers of reason. If neither of these conditions apply, the whole scientific enterprise is dead in the water.
IOW the scientist has to have confidence and courage ie the balls to say this is what I saw and this is what I think. AND he needs the guts to buck so-called “settled science”.
And oh yeah, don’t dismiss common sense. It’s the most potent tool in the scientific arsenal. As for you, YOU have to have confidence in your ability to observe and reason or you are useless to yourself and everyone around you. To put it slightly differently, trust your bullshit detectors.
People knew a long, long time ago the earth is round. How did they know? They used their eyes and their heads. For example, they stood at the shore of a large body of water and watched ships disappear over the horizon and they saw the ship come back. They stood at the edge of a mountain range and, as they walked away, they saw the mountains dip below the horizon.
The ancient Greeks (Eratosthenes) took a decent stab at calculating the earth’s circumference. The Polynesians knew the earth was round, ie that they wouldn’t fall off the edge. They made it from Asia across the Pacific islands and there’s good evidence they made it to South America.
Where did Einstein come up with his ideas? It wasn’t just thought experiments, it was because of OBSERVATION, for example, that the speed of light does not vary no matter the direction or speed of the object from which the light originates. And Einstein used his powers of reason to reconcile this seeming anomaly with other observations of the universe around us.
You and I aren’t Einstein. Not many people are. That said, don’t be a ninny, trust your eyes and trust your head. And don’t over-complicate things and don’t listen to the bullshit artist that overcomplicates things, that tells you stuff and then tells you it’s “counter-intuitive”. Unless the speaker is Einstein or someone in his field, your BS alarms should be screaming. This is a tool charlatans use to their own advantage, to pull the wool over people’s eyes, to accrue power to themselves. They say leave it to the “experts”. But, too many times the “experts” led us down the garden path and fucked us right in the ear.
Where courage breaks down, when it’s just easier to go with the consensus, no matter how much the consensus violates observational fact, that kills the whole deal too.
I would only add to this admonition that scientists, technicians, doctors, aviators, and mariners, among a host of others, must also trust their instruments ( when properly calibrated) because sometimes one cannot believe one’s own eyes.
Good point. That said, instruments are an extension of the senses and you have to use your eyes to read the instruments.
Even if you don’t see evidence of climate change you can still comprehend the retention of free energy in the molecular structure of carbon dioxide and understand the physics of the greenhouse effect.
Volodya, you have used this website as a platform to press the point that scientists observe things. That questioning the status quo is important. All well and good.
But what I really want to know is, what is your explanation for the apparent warming of the planet?
Who sez I don’t see evidence of climate change? Read this through without blowing a gasket.
The big kahuna of climate change is glacial advance and recession ie big time global cooling and warming.
For the past 2.5 million years there’s been a recurrence of glacial advance and recession. Millions of cubic miles of glacial ice encasing major land areas. And then after tens of thousands of years, millions of cubic miles of ice melting over a few thousands of years. But the causes are not well understood according to what I’ve read, Milankovich cycles being the leading theoretical explanation.
If the Milankovich theory is valid, then we ought to know when will be the next cycle of cooling and glaciation. In any case we better figure it out because when it arrives it will be a disaster.
Here’s the thing, and maybe you’d like to do a bit of research on this too. Given that we’re in a warm period between glaciations, and given that a period of intense cooling would otherwise be in our future with the catastrophic implications that has for global food production, MAYBE anthropogenic global warming is a GOOD thing compared to the alternative because MAYBE AGW either eliminated or will blunt the next glacial advance.
Now, given the hypercharged, politicized nature of the issue of climate change I wouldn’t give snowball’s chance in hell of having a rational discussion.
I gave up years ago trying to find out when is the next expected cycle of glaciation. Because if climate scientists know their business then they ought to be able to tell us that, especially if Newtonian mechanics ie Milankovich cycles, is behind the phenomenon. But dammit, I couldn’t find squat.
Like I said I gave up. If there’s something on-line, do tell. Because if there isn’t anything on the problem, that tells me that either climatology isn’t the science they tell us it is ie “settled” or the facts of the matter are not being discussed and who knows what idiocy is behind that.
You are very smart.
What about recent volcanic activity?
Have you read, ‘When Live Nearly Died?’
MAYBE anthropogenic global warming is a GOOD thing compared to the alternative because MAYBE AGW either eliminated or will blunt the next glacial advance.
I was watching the tube. Probably PBs [which may be BS].
Boohoohoo the ice caps are melting.
I was shown a few penguins and rocks.
I thought, if it gets warm there, more plants can grow.
The ice and rocks looked desolate.
volodya, I was responding in the context of your post above. In part, you admonished GreenAlba as follows:
“I would be wary of what you call ‘genuine science’. Scientists are like other people, they’re egotists and careerists and money grubbers and group-thinkers.
“‘Facts and evidence’ – when selectively massaged or distorted or ignored by a ‘scientist’ with a career or position to protect or who is ideologically motivated or motivated by corporate sponsorship money – can be worse than worthless, they can do harm.
“This especially applies to emotionally charged, culture-war fields like economics, climate science, anthropology, sociology. With practitioners in these areas, it’s man-the-barricades.”
All of that is both superficially plausible and largely beside the point. Scientists are fallible; science itself is also fallible. But in all the world, the least fallible results we have to work with are, in fact, the products of science. It’s not just an opinion that the speed of light is constant in all reference frames (as you point out), or that life on earth is the product of evolution driven by natural selection. These claims have been rigorously tested and validated to a high degree of reliability.
As such, I don’t take kindly to people undermining the value of science and equivocating between controversies. If you’re speaking up in defense of the idea (a crock) that global warming is a fraud conjured up by the Rockefellers, or that any scientific claim can be dismissed with the handwave that ‘scientists are self-interested’, them’s fighting words in my opinion.
What warming? Have the glaciers disappeared?
Well said. Stage magicians say children are the hardest to fool because they just look without all the assumptions the rest of us have built up.
Scientists? The amazing Randi made fools of them, showing them how people like Uri Geller could easily fool them. They are the easiest to fool because the most conceptual: they look the Least!
Sathya Sai Baba.
On (((you tube))) he fakes a miracle.
Sean Coleman, yeah, ideally knowledge is “objective”, and it is objective when it’s divorced from human motivation.
You may have heard of this, the whole debate of when humans first migrated to the Americas. For a long time inquiry was stifled because of the consensus that the “Clovis People” – “Clovis” being short-hand to describe a toolmaking culture in the Americas – were the first.
It was “Clovis First” and an archeologist or anthropologist risked his academic career to suggest otherwise. Archeologists would literally stop a dig at the level of strata that contradicted Clovis First. If there were artifacts indicating earlier origins, or a culture older than Clovis, you didn’t go there. That’s it folks, it’s a wrap, go home because otherwise it was the end of your career.
But the evidence contradicting “Clovis First” continued to build and it took no small balls to come out with it. But for a long time it was Clovis First, end of discussion. It was “settled science” IOW.
When I hear “alternative facts” I hear that maybe there are FACTS that have been suppressed by Oligarchical interests through their mouthpieces in establishment media and law-enforcement and academies.
When I hear “settled science” wrt climatology I hear echoes of the Clovis First debacle. IMO NO science should be “settled” that is, beyond the bounds of further investigation or revision or debate. It was the founder of Greenpeace that pissed all over the current discussion on global warming arguing that the planet was actually in a state of carbon starvation compared to earlier epochs in earth history, that of we’re dumping carbon into the atmosphere, it’s GOOD thing and not a bad thing.
As for this issue, I see enforced conformity, if you’re “enlightened” than it’s “settled science”. Bullshit, is what I say.
And the Clovis is almost identical to the European Cro Magnon Culture in of the time. In other words, Whites may have been the first, coming across the ice from Europe.
Here’s a reply to an article (Naked Capitalism) about the increased demand for cash. I happen to think it’s directly a trust issue involving the banks (as with any “medium of exchange”).
“The Rev Kev
November 29, 2017 at 7:03 am
Without any proof whatsoever, I am beginning to suspect that perhaps a lot of people are hoarding sums of cash at home or within easy reach as people’s confidence has been severely shaken in the past decade or so. This may explain in part the anomaly in the data seen here. What could not be ignored over the past decade is solid proof that in an emergency, the government will absolutely throw most of the people under the nearest bus in order to protect a few select institutions – even when it was these same institutions that caused the emergency. For some people, being used to foam the runway to further protect these institutions did not exactly help people’s confidence about what would happen in a further emergency. But why the retreat to cash?
I think that a prime attribute of cash is that it is “fail-safe”. It needs no external externalities to work. You can drive a truck over it, pick it up and it will still work. You can throw it into the water and it will still work. You can bury it, fold it, twist it and yet it still works. Now here is where the externalities come into play. To have digital cash that works, you need computers and server farms, you need internet connectivity and secure connections, you need a technological infrastructure as well as a banking infrastructure and especially high levels of trust – or at least insurance!
However, if net connections go down, you’re out of luck. If your area or whole state loses power, you’re out of luck. If the government declares a bank holiday, you’re out of luck. If there is a hack done of your card or even the whole network, you’re out of luck. As you can see, there are multiple points of failure that are part and parcel of the system and there are other as well that I have not listed. Perhaps enough people have noticed this and decided to go into physical cash as a reserve which has led to the increase of cash. People are using it but from reserves at home and not reserves kept in banks.
As to how this has played out in the past using Australia as an example (pop. 25,000,000), in the 10 weeks after Lehman crashed and burned, Aussie households pulled out 5.5 billion dollars out of the banks as trust was being eroded. In 2008 the Australian Reserve Bank had to order another $4.6bn in $100s and another $6bn in $50s to be printed as its strategic bank holdings were being run down. Also, It came out later that one official was going on TV saying how solid the financial system was but afterwards getting on his mobile to his wife and getting her to go the local ATM and pull out the cash limit as fast as she could. I just think that enough people were paying attention and that there are now household reserves of currency being built up that explains the size of cash circulation as they are using these home reserves instead of banks.”
Although it’s quite likely that the military and it’s many tentacles of civilian “contractors”, toadies and minions to these “heroes” will be chipped (one and all, as a condition of employment) to create a normalcy bias, I believe there will be strong resistance to such an obvious control methodology.
Celebrities lining up to get chipped and the convenience will be powerful motivators for most. Cell Phones may cause brain cancer – did anyone hesitate when it became a “thing” to do? And once the culture changes, it becomes almost mandatory.
It’s not just solid proof that in an emergency that governments will throw most people under a bus to save a few select institutions.
Over the past two generations a consensus took root among the rich and powerful that American workers made too much money. And so, to remedy what was seen as an unjust division of wealth and income, a initiative was developed to send overseas and to Mexico the backbone of American industrial might.
In short, in a non-emergency the High and the Mighty – those being the relative handful that control the Fortune 500, Wall Street institutions, people that go to Davos as well as their academic and bureaucratic enablers – threw American workers and a great swathe of the American interior under the bus.
I mention the High and the Mighty and who they are because there are people that apparently don’t see that dread thing – conspiracy – even when it’s carried in in full light of day and with full public discussion. I hate to belabor the obvious but sometimes it must be belabored.
As that blurb most astutely points out, cash needs no externalities, like a byzantine web of facilities and technology with multiple built in failure points. We should al keep a stash.
Rest assured, TPTB have noticed too. Cash represents the last means of holdout against total control. They’ll do away with it for all official transactions eventually.
“TPTB”… in places like Zimbabwe have declared Bitcoin illegal.
So you couldn’t be more right, Scratch.
Bitcoin will continue to rise as the rotten eggs in the global basket of currencies continue to dissolve.
Bitcoin’s merely another flash in the pan. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Does that prognostication speak to the dynamic I just mentioned (the transfer of value to bitcoin from fiat currencies)? No it does not.
Predicting bitcoin’s demise isn’t brilliant. Its stupid.
No, it’s just a common sense observation. Bitcoin’s just one more speculative bubble among many.
“I think that a prime attribute of cash is that it is “fail-safe”. It needs no external externalities to work. ”
Wow, now that is using the old “canoodle”.
Year to date, that cash has lost 5% of its purchasing power against other paper currencies.
I won’t even bother comparing it to Bitcoin
I can’t find Bitcoin on this list . . .
could they have possibly changed its name?
To . . . Devil Creme????
This list . . .
http://kitchenette.jezebel.com/little-debbie-snack-foods-ranked-1550941828
Talgat Tadzhutdin: “Russian Muslims already have a caliphate; the name of it is Holy Rus (Russia)”
http://islamreview.ru/news/talgat-tadzutdin-u-rossijskih-musulman-uze-est-halifat-ima-emu-svataa-rus/
Putin spoke about the introduction of the grant for the birth of the first child and the extension of the financial aid program to the mothers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU0sdDFaaOk
In my opinion this is the beginning of the election campaign, which means that he has already decided to go for a fourth term, but for some reason finds it inconvenient to declare it now.
Trump America seriously took up against the Clinton media – which means that I have a chance to find a job in the US.
I thought you had a thriving grow operation going on the finca? :O
Here is an operation I’d love to Finca-in:
Attempt to lure Washington Post into reporting a false story underlines media distrust
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/attempt-to-lure-washington-post-into-reporting-a-false-story-underlines-media-distrust
Elrond,
I’m repeating for you what I just wrote for Lil Debbie above with minor variation:
Who sez I don’t see evidence of climate change? Read this through without blowing a gasket.
The big kahuna of climate change is glacial advance and recession ie big time global cooling and warming.
For the past 2.5 million years there’s been a recurrence of glacial advance and recession ie millions of cubic miles of glacial ice encasing major land areas, and then after tens of thousands of years, millions of cubic miles of ice melting over a few millennia. But the causes are not well understood according to what I’ve read, Milankovich cycles being the leading theoretical explanation.
If the Milankovich theory is valid, then we ought to know when will be the next cycle of cooling and glaciation. In any case we better figure it out because when it arrives it will be a disaster.
Here’s the thing, and maybe you’d like to do a bit of research on this too. Given that we’re in a warm period between glaciations, and given that a period of intense cooling would otherwise be in our future with the catastrophic implications that has for global food production, MAYBE anthropogenic global warming is a GOOD thing compared to the alternative because MAYBE AGW either eliminated or will blunt the next glacial advance.
Now, given the hypercharged, politicized nature of the issue of climate change I wouldn’t give snowball’s chance in hell of having a rational discussion.
I gave up years ago trying to find out when is the next expected cycle of glaciation. Because if climate scientists know their business then they ought to be able to tell us that, especially if Newtonian mechanics ie Milankovich cycles, is behind the phenomenon. But dammit, I couldn’t find squat.
Like I said I gave up. If there’s something on-line, do tell. Because if there isn’t anything on the problem, that tells me that either climatology isn’t the science they tell us it is ie “settled” or the facts of the matter are not being discussed and who knows what idiocy is behind that.
End.
I hope that’s clear enough for you. Elrond. Maybe you’d like to answer the above questions. Like I said, I gave up.
As for the scientific-academic community, tell me, do you enjoy Kool-Aid? Don’t get me wrong, you can drink all you like.
See, I don’t care if my skepticism doesn’t suit you. Your faith is your own. As for me, I’ll judge things for myself.
So, you acknowledge CO2 drives global warming. But, some other millennial-scale cycle might have been pushing us toward global cooling. So CO2 might be useful in preventing global cooling.
The problem in terms of immediate or shorter time scale issues is relevance.
Global cooling is a problem with a solution (CO2).
Global warming is a problem with a solution (ecosystem balance).
If equilibrium is what we require we should be aiming for more of the latter and less of the former. So nothing you’ve written is convincing for a case against science or even the agenda of limiting carbon dioxide pollution as an obvious means to ameliorate what the facts are screaming at us.
(Unless of course, those pesky glaciers threaten to pounce on us again!)
So nothing you’ve written is convincing for a case against science –
I wasn’t making a case against “science”. Read what I actually wrote.
OTOH, my words aren’t graven in stone. Do what the hell you want.
So, you acknowledge
‘CO2 drives global warming.’— –Did you post that?
Global cooling isn’t our problem- Global warming is.
Science is concerned with the problems of global warming because it appears imminently more damaging. Science is concerned because the research has been solid and the effects known for about 3 decades and no comprehensive strategy by policy makers or the general population has stopped it.
No one should be concerned about global cooling. It is absolutely ludicrous in the face of the problem being the very mechanism which neutralizes global cooling.
The real problem is the proliferation of anti-scientific rhetoric giving cover for ideologues and fools to spout nonsense and disinformation. Your writings here are a good example of such baseless slander.
“MAYBE anthropogenic global warming is a GOOD thing compared to the alternative because MAYBE AGW either eliminated or will blunt the next glacial advance.”
For example… “Maybe a good thing.” A sentiment shared by virtually no scientists. A fact you will dispute, no doubt.
Define ‘scientist.’
Why is warming BAD?
Have you seen how much of the earth is above 45 Parallel North? Canada, XUSSR, etc.
Warm is good. Oh, my op doesnt matter. I am not PhD.
I’m no scientist, but I know everything begins and ends in Eternity. – the Man who fell to Earth
LOL! Now they’ve got Garrison Keillor TOO!!! Can another Inquisition be far off now? Men, gird your loins! The fucking femmes are coming for your junk with knives drawn!
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/29/567241644/garrison-keillor-accused-of-inappropriate-behavior-minnesota-public-radio-says
We’re expecting Stephen Hawking any day now.
Yep. That mind fucking can be very traumatic!
Tell it not in Gath. Whisper it not in Ashkelon. Woe to the Great Lake, the Great Lake Wobegon, for her Bard has fallen.
“the Great Lake Wobegon”
Where all the women are beautiful, and all men’s junk above average….
Now HERE’S a TRULY disruptive use of technology that all the unemployed techie millennials will be flocking to before long. No doubt it will even accept Bitcoin, provided it lasts that long. Who knows, perhaps even used Lil’ Debbie Snack wrappers, if the developers are really smart?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fki0fNe2sA
via Julian Assange:
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/935781258512224256
Bob Dylan in 1964 calling Time Magazine and Newsweek Fake News. The dynamics remain the same. Large institutions cannot tell the truth about the establishments they are socially, logistically and financially integrated with.
As Western power structures continue to fray due to the post-primacy of the US empire & dislocating effects of the internet, which has liberated cities & regions to deal with each other directly, are we seeing the invention of foreign & domestic enemies to bolster the old order?
The only thing surprising about that statement is that Asange is even posing it. All that’s been going on in earnest throughout the 20th century and most of the 19th at the very least. But I realize he was also speaking for effect to a wider audience, most of who need to be exposed to the truth very slowly, for fear of traumatizing them completely.
Keillor says it was an accident. One time my hand just went right into the magnificent V of my Co-Worker’s Jeans. I apologized and she was cool about it. Shit happens. It probably meant that we were supposed to be fucking, but oh well.
Dollars to doughnuts that they were “mom” jeans.
I would listen to him on NPR and I didnt get it.
I thought maybe it was a joke.
It was kitschy. I was Minne-sot-ans way of making fun of themselves. They have a VERY DRY humor up that-a-way. Think Fargo.
Bitcoin seems like a great natural place for thieves to launder or hide their money, or for people to simply get their money away from a government.
Bingo! Which will be big government’s – no stranger to theft or money laundering itself – excuse for shutting it all down. My take is more innocuous: it’s mostly just another bubble blowing machine in creating the ever-elusive and ephemeral “value” that people have been Pavlovian conditioned to seek these days. And likely an officially sanctioned dark-ops experiment in the totally irrational behavior of human guinea pigs in the wild as well, of course.
I think the Harvey Weinstein-ing of men is going to backfire on women. The more men who are accused of sexual abuse the sooner the law of diminishing returns will set in. Many, if not most, of us already don’t give a shit. The next step is, if you haven’t sexually abused a woman you’re basically a wuss and no woman wants anything to do with a wuss.
Agreed. This will all “blow over” soon enough, literally and figuratively. It all reeks pathetically of yet another pro-Hillary femme-bot attack on masculinity as a thinly veiled passive-aggressive attack on Trump.
Toxic masculinity. Male toxicity.
Let the fires of this inquisition keep burning.
Next, and last, in line are the career politicians.
The old wood of this country is rotted and needs to burn.
Here speaks the anarchist, the nihilist, the ranter, and the leveler. The “underground man” of whom Dostoyevski wrote. The hater of all that is good and decent, who defends himself by claiming the name of reformer or revolutionary.
Well, I could be original like you and blame Jews, blacks, Muslims, and women.
All of those groups bear much blame. White Men must be supreme in their own Lands.
And everyone else’s apparently
Garrison the French Bulldog’s impersonation of a man Keillor had his smug drained.
“Be well, do good work, and.. it was just a touch”
Matt Lauer was a machinating creep from day one.
Knew something was wrong with him when he dragged old cheery Willard Scott and his centenarian and club down just to get himself up.
Palace intrigue brought him all the way to the top, but he confused himself for royalty.
Just a chump with expensive suits and gloves, and besides, the women hated him for backstabbing Ann Curry.
I won’t argue with most of that, but the anti-Ann Curry club had more members than just Lauer. She didn’t fit the profile they were looking for: young, dumb, incessantly upbeat and happy, and compliant. She asked FAR too many inconvenient probing questions during her hard news interviews, although Lauer eventually turned into quite an argumentative pain in the ass himself, as well. With Lauer it always felt transparently scripted, though. And for the record, I liked Ann Curry too and felt she got a raw deal at the time. But what can you say? Lie down with dogs and all that… The show has long been nothing more than 3 hours of targeted advertising to upscale young urban femmes. Pure garbage.
Are we forgetting due process for Men? And for Whites as well? Read this article if you have any doubts about the persecution of the White race by the Establishment. In short, White Men are negative twofers, discriminated both for their race and sex.
The rule of law is fading for white advocates.
The bodies of the victims were barely cold, and most of the people in the colony wanted to see the British soldiers hanged. But John Adams believed there was a principle at stake: “Council [sic] ought to be the very last thing that an accused person should want in a free Country,” he wrote. “That the Bar in my opinion ought to be independent and impartial at all times, And in every circumstance. And that persons whose Lives were at Stake ought to have the Council they preferred.” The Massachusetts lawyer went on to defend the men accused in the “Boston Massacre;” this took impartiality and courage that became part of his legend and for which he is honored to this day.
Adams’s actions were based on English law, knowledge of the “rights of Englishmen,” and precedents established in the Common Law over centuries. John Adams wasn’t rebelling against his Anglo-Saxon heritage; he was acting in its finest traditions.
Today, the Anglo-Saxon legacy of American law is seen as a badge of shame. “Critical race theory” has infected the legal profession, and is gradually stripping whites of legal protections even King George III’s subjects took for granted.
Already, lawyers are being targeted simply for defending those who are “far-right.” The American Civil Liberties Union has long been known as principled defenders of free speech. In the run up to the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the ACLU stood up for the rights of demonstrators, even joining a lawsuit against the city for trying to move the rally location at the last minute. Leftists on Twitter responded by fiercely attacking the
The rest of the article
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2017/11/no-counsel-white-men/
Who will but Dale Carnegie classes and books when the white male is gone?
Cargo shorts?
Maker’s Mark?
AngloSaxon legacy is one of pirateering, peerage, colonialism, and war mongering.
A di f***ing os
What a creep. Who let this swamp creature in? Close the effing door before more follow.
Y’know, that’s what the cockroaches say when the light comes on
Croatian Hero who fought to drive Muslims out of Croatia, kills himself after his conviction. One is reminded of Herr Goering who cheated the hangman in a similar fashion. And of Wolfe Tone, denied the honor of a military firing squad, attempted to cut his own throat with a dull knife, dying after several days of agony.
Here, they use fetanyl, bud light tall boys, and meth after the scratch-offs dont come through.
Slow suicide tambien
I realize that “gin” is the accepted form, but in this case for instance, when “gen” is my intended short form of “generate,” I think either term is appropriate. – Ol’ Scratch
===========
If you insist, we’ll credit you with a neologism but note, the definition of the phrase ‘to gin up’ includes the word generate.
Noted, my fine grammatical friend.
To Elrond and all other Canucks monitoring these boards:
I am planning a trip into Ontario along the Ottawa River in the vicinity of Westmeath, Canada to relive some adventures of my youth in the years 1954, 1955 and 1957. This will happen sometime in the summer of 2018. I will be getting there on a 2015 Suzuki Burgman 650 cc motorscooter (don’t let the term ‘scooter’ fool you, this bike has an alleged top end of 110 mph.). I just purchased it, barely used (429 miles), this past Friday (in the Bronx, NY) from a character who could pass for a soldier in Tony Soprano’s gang of henchmen. As you might expect, being in the heart of the Bronx, Ralph took umbrage for my “axing” too many questions.
I took advantage of the warm weather today (high temp of 72F) to take my first practice drive. My wife and daughter are really pissed since I just turned 77 a week ago but I figure it’s now or never.
But, let me get to the point. What are the procedures (hassles?) one must undergo when crossing into Canada at, say, the Thousand Islands near Watertown, NY? I am wanting to be packing a ‘concealed carry’ handgun for my personal protection but I have been advised by a gun shop employee to “forget that idea.” When pressed for reasons, he said nothing.
Sooo, what I’m asking you dear Canucks is, how strict or lax are gun laws in Canada. Do they search your luggage at the border? Does one have to pass through a metal detector? etc. etc.? If they catch you with a gun do they lock you up and throw the key away?
You may recall, a couple of months ago I was asking for advice on handguns. (Yesterday I finally got my permit to purchase a handgun plus a little yellow ID card that allows me to buy ammo. The vetting process for these docs ran two months.) I have my eye on a Smith & Wesson 9m semi auto with a 10 cartridge clip for $363 which was described by the gun nut behind the counter as a poor-man’s Glock 9m.
BackRowHeckler, Elysian, Ozone, Seawolf, Capt Spaulding and Stelmosfire, chime in here if you are so disposed.
Who are they to tell you what to do? We should have annexed them. It’s up to you now: Attack!
You could hit and run, escaping over Niagara Falls. The Bike doesn’t make it and you are considered drowned. But you’re not: with your Yogic breath retention you survive to start a new life for yourself with money you have stashed away, free at last from the wife and kids. Watch “Shawshank Redemption”.
Where is all this coming from? Is this a long delayed 2nd adolescence? Great idea!
Q,
It is my understanding that no handguns can be brought into Canada, unless job related. However, if you dare an attempt, you will probably be successful if you appear a kindly grandfather archetype, well dressed, well presented, no facial hair.
This, of course, will entail covering all tattoos, well -conceal your crack pipe, remove the “Kanuksuck” bumber sticker from the scooter, and be sure to run the VIN number on the bike beforehand to assure that “Vito” did not sell you a boosted machine.
My recommendation is…nooo.
Aha haha ha…
What do you think of this system?
https://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/practical-marksmanship-lesson/
Q. Shtik: Leave the fucking thing at home and respect our laws when you visit. That is all.
Respect their laws and their culture.
Don’t idle your car in the Timmy Ho’s drive-thru, throw your toque onto the ice only with a natural hat trick, and keep the lap dancing in the Canadian Ballet in the “piggy” room.
Darn right. Also, I demand tribute: your choice between back bacon, Bloody Caesars, Tom Cochrane tickets — or if you really want to get on my good side, you can go over to my dad’s and shovel his driveway.
Q. Shtik–I’m imagining you on your motorcycle, packing heat, with the tune “Born to be Wild” playing in the background!
Jen in San Jose
Packing the “heat” of an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus, of course! Those damn Hell’s Angels have mellowed in the senior years.
And another contestant wins today’s newest and most hysterical “uniquely American” game show craze: Celebrity Perv.
Garrison Keilor gets the boot from NPR !?
He brought them more listeners than “Morning Edition,” Terry Gross’ “Asphyxiation” program, “All Things Considered” and the downright painful-to-listen-to “Diane Rehm show.” Combined.
He touched a woman’s back? He didn’t get to fuck the shit outta her on stage in Minneapolis Minn. during a sold-out Praire Home Companion live event, in front of an S.R.O. crowd, in January, after a bawdy tune, Powdermilk biscuit ad, and skit about Eno and Toyvo ice fishing?
Damn. 40 years of quirky yet wholesome, pure Americana vaudeville entertainment down the shitter.
Just goes to show that the old military maxim that “One oh shit wipes out a thousand attaboys” continues to stand the test of time.
Diane Rehm! LOL! Has that ole croaker croaked? She had a voice reminiscent of a Hoover with a broken hose. Her panel always included 4 liberal females and a republican who could never seem to make it.
I’d rather listen to Yoko Ono sing than hear Diane Rehm talk!
Jen in San Jose
I almost prefered to hear her ashtray throat than listen to the obligatory compliments dished out by her sycophantic guests.
Another shameless vindictive bitch has her way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/garrison-keillor-ex-host-of-a-prairie-home-companion-dropped-by-minnesota-public-radio-after-allegations-of-improper-behavior/2017/11/29/5fa1256c-d52c-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.d532b93cbc59
I have a feeling there is more to the story.
Old men tend to be dirty old creeps.
Nature never intended them to live as long as they do.
All that testosterone and nowhere for it to go
Avatar,
…the videos….
Quite a bias you’ve got there, 100th. And I can personally assure you, one’s testosterone levels at 60 ain’t nothing like they were just a few decades back.
Not sure what videos
A routine of brief but regular sprint work followed by an evening ZMA supplement, and a commitment to alcohol abstinence will clear up your Low-T in no time.
Not much of a devil with a flaccid pitchfork
That’s the hype anyway. I workout like a demon and do every supplement know to mankind already. Don’t have low T for my age, but it naturally diminishes in everyone, no matter what. Focusing on estrogen suppression supplements at the moment, as there’s much more bang for the buck there, and don’t want to turn into a raving loon like janet.
Janet has fully committed to being Elrond.
The transition was a success… well, depending on your metric
On Western Rifle Shooters, one guy told about a friend who was jogging and then pulled over to take a leak. Unfortunately, he was spotted by some cat lady or someone, police called, and arrested. He’s now on a permanent public record with hardened sex offenders.
Ever watch the old Twin Peaks series? A delightful quirky view of bucolic small town America. The Good seems to be dominant, but in the End, Evil triumphs completely. One of most brutal endings I’ve ever seen.
But this world IS dark. Pain is stronger than pleasure. It took Michelangelo decades to paint the Sistine Chapel, but a maniac could destroy it in minutes. The Buddhists report that of 100 odd human states of mind, three quarters of them are negative. Any sensitive person can see this in themselves and others. The battle is always uphill. The bad times are more common and extreme than the good. And the struggle to stay even Even must be constant.
OK, now I’m piqued.
What bubble hits $25,000 first; Bitcoin or the Dow Jones Industrial Average?
One prognosticator, Stewart Thomson, believes that the premiere cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, could go to a criminally outer-space psychotic $2,000,000.
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/thomson_s/thomson_s_112817.html
I think an argument can be made that there is a strong correlation between sex scandals and the rise in price/index value. Can we call it the Viagra Effect?
(Idiot Matt Lauer making $25,000,000 a year and couldn’t follow the battle-tested iron-rule to not shit where one eats?)
Not only that, but the existence of Emergency Hijabi Kits and a White Canadian named Elrond who hawks them cuz he is a concern junky or for giggles or are these two even different?
I was trying sooooo hard to not reply to Elrond’s tres bizarre story concerning the Emergency Hijab Kits.
However, in order to better serve the LBGTQCUBINK (yes! I have been advised by impeccable sources that the latest addition to the perv letter string is “K” for klismaphilia: enema love) community, now Dalhousie U., as well as every other Canadian institution of higher learning, should be compelled to have on hand an “Emergency Colonic Kit.”
Do you not think that Matt Lauer or any other rich horn-dog perv,, celebrity or politician, could just rent a courtesan (or street hooker for that matter) for a discrete romp or kink fest?
“Honey, I am on assignment/we are filming in Bangkok for a week.”
How many C.B.Fs. can a person take?
Plus all that great Thai cuisine.
That would take most of thrill out of it for these boyos!
Sweden recently built its first center for male anal reconstruction. Somehow they didn’t need it till now. Werewolves of Islam again. Alba blames “men”… Such loyalty and patriotism!
At least now they’re equal with the lowest parts of the world where such things are common, seen as both a pleasurable fruit of victory and a way to crush the spirit of the opponent to keep him down. Great places like Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the American Prison System. Elrond smiles at the very sound of the word Equality. Equal to what though? Elrond replies, Oh whatever. Equal to the thing in itself. Which is? Whatever we say or need.
Winston: You would admit that 2+3=5?
Elrond: Sometimes, Winston, sometimes. Sometimes it might equal a million.
Winston: But why?
Elrond: It all depends on what the Party needs. If equaling five is useful, then it equals five. If it equal a million, it does so for the same reason. The Party is ALL, Winston. When are you going to realize that? If the Party needs it, I could float up the ceiling right now.
Visualize Elrond as Vladimir Harkonen floating and flying rapidly while chortling.
*****************
oligarchs and robots
………define the future shock of a brave new world, in a soylent green tinged old republic.
And we wish them well!!
Sent from the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
C
A
Mrtipsonelonghocaptainsteubingmurica?
This is a work of the Serbian artist Biljana Djurdjevic from the house of Tony Podesta, more recently – the main lobbyist of the Democratic Party of the United States, that is, a person who is a member of the American political TOP.
http://pizzagate.wiki/w/images/thumb/a/ac/Biljana_Strung_Up_Boy.jpg/400px-Biljana_Strung_Up_Boy.jpg
So, about the picture (there are whole series of this author, incidentally the favorite artist of Podesta, you look at them – and the hair stand on end).
Look at it carefully. Such pictures are not “invented”. They are written either from life or from memory. And then study the statistics of missing children around the world.
Where do they all disappear?
Hillary Clinton after NBC debate: “If that f—ing bastard wins[Trump], we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished… and if I lose it’s all on your heads for screwing this up!”
Well, one part of her prediction did come true – Matt Lauer’s fired from his job. When we get to see the second part?
She knew that Trump is the enema.
Let the cleanse continue
Great point! I forgot all about that connection. Shines a new light on recent events! The unholy wrath of the great HillaBeast is striking out everywhere now!
ALL PIZZA LEAD TO ROME
Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ chief financial adviser and the third most senior official at the Vatican, was charged with multiple “historical” sexual assaults.
Pell acknowledged during his testimony to the commission that the Catholic Church had made “enormous mistakes” in allowing thousands of children to be raped and molested by priests.
Caught kidnapping and trafficking over 100 little boys into the Vatican network, the Jesuit MEDIA is SILENT on the issue, preferring to serve others as a distraction to gay pederast romping in the pig house.
Caught kidnapping and trafficking over 100 little boys into the Vatican network
–Link?
Jesuits are the enemy of the church. Infiltrators.
the Catholic Church had made “enormous mistakes” in allowing thousands of children to be raped and molested by priests–with a billion members, there are bound to be quite a few bad apples.
You’re ignoring my main charge and complaint, and that is the absolute silence by the mainstream media regards the issue, which tells us who is running the show.
Don’t forget about the Hasidic Jews. Abuse of children is very common among them and allowed by the Talmud apparently.
In the 90s-00s the Media had a FUKKIN FIELD DAY OVER
THE CHURCH and all the billions? they paid out, yes.
This naturally raises the question: “Was Catholicism a kind of project of some lodge, as a congregation of people negatively related to Abrahamic monotheism due to some knowledge, commonly called gnosis, and not the result of an error made in the interpretation of the origin of the Holy Spirit?”
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/transparently/#comment-327214
Same lodge that stopped the development of science in the second part of the 20th century and replaced General Theory of Relativity with with Gauge Invariance crap.
https://youtu.be/GJQ6SusdREA
akmofo, if only the media would stay silent (or SILENT) in all this nonsense because they are the ones spreading it. As always look for facts not fantasy.
How about his story I came across this morning?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/norway-rape-child-sex-abuse-police-report/
In a small Sami community in the Arctic Circle outrageous sex crimes have been occurring over generations!!
“The youngest of the 82 victims identified by the police was 4, while the 92 suspected offenders were aged between 10 and 80. Some people were on both lists.”
It is theoretically possible that it all happened as described but how much would you bet on it. How about betting that not a word of it is true? I would if the odds were good. Madness has no frontiers.
It’s not about madness, it’s about institutionalized abuse of power. Allowing these arrogant fscks to get away with it is what breeds mass murdering monsters and their wars. These institutions should be dismantled and the unbelievably arrogant fscks running them should be hang upside down.
It is global, yes.
Jesus,
The private crypto currencies would seem to signal the end of the market as we have come to view it. Price discovery is now a ruse of course, but those with the desire can look at the movement in the market and make an educated guess. Privately traded cryptos in a “free market”, essentially invisible to the market, when used as leverage would distort the valuation process beyond recognition.
This does indeed seem to be a beta test for the “cashless society”. My question is this: How much skim will be allowed to keep the new system running? Mr. Kunstler’s view that the cryptos will not be beyond the reach of state security would be the logical conclusion.
“Mr. Kunstler’s view that the cryptos will not be beyond the reach of state security would be the logical conclusion.”
Nay, an absolute….
With Bitcoin we at least can now understand Trump’s rather prescient crusade to save the coal industry and its coked-out redneck workforce.
Bitcoin $12K? More like: Bitcoin should be illegal, according to Nobel Prize winner
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitcoin-12k-more-like-bitcoin-should-be-illegal-according-to-nobel-prize-winner-2017-11-29
:Bitcoin on Wednesday blew past the $11,000 mark just one day after it took out $10,000. Next stop, $12,000? Maybe. Or, if one Nobel Prize-winning economist has it right, perhaps the whole thing will collapse at the hands of the law.
“One function it has served in a big way is delivering massive profits to its investors. Bitcoin BTCUSD, -9.65% has exploded for a 12-fold gain so far this year, flying in the face of all the critics, like Joseph Stiglitz, who have consistently called for the rally to come crashing down.
…
“The Columbia professor warned that bitcoin is ‘smoke and mirrors’ and that there could be devastating government crackdown at any moment.
“‘It’s a bubble that’s going to give a lot of people a lot of exciting times as it rides up and then goes down,’ he told Bloomberg in an interview on Wednesday. ‘We ought to just go back to what we’ve always had.'”
—
It’s a video interview, so click away. Naked Capitalism highlighted this quote yesterday: “Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention, lack of oversight. So it seems to me it ought to be outlawed. It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.” Yup.
I listened to that video too. Don’t agree with him that it should be outlawed however. It will self-destruct of its own accord soon enough.
What the discussion on global warming on this site showed (once again) is rigidity in thought, the will to conformity, wilful ignorance, unwillingness to ask or answer questions.
The root of it (like other culture-wars issues) is Blue State vs Red State tribalism pure and simple.
What was behind past cycles of glacial advance and recession? Doesn’t matter. What do Milankovich cycles predict? Doesn’t matter. What about other factors in cycles of warming and cooling? Doesn’t matter. Will our dumping CO2 into the atmosphere blunt another ice-age? Doesn’t matter. Science doesn’t matter, facts don’t matter, the substance of issues don’t matter. Just shut up and stop asking questions.
The truth doesn’t matter. It never did. What people do is drink the Kool-Aid. When people start using the term “settled science” as a defense of their view, they’re out of the realm of science altogether and into the realm of enforced conformity.
People go through periods of craziness, the burning of Giordano Bruno, the silencing of Galileo, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the McCarthy Communist hunts, this Russia collusion hysteria and the long-running lunacy of this debate.
Are you a patriotic American? Are you an enlightened Progressive? It doesn’t matter. What did Galileo supposedly say in front of his tormentors? E pur si muove. IOW, reality doesn’t give a shit.
Yeah, what he said….
Losing battle Vol. I gave up arguing AGW when it became apparent that we weren’t going to do anything about anyway. Besides, it’s progressed far enough now that whatever is going to happen will happen whether we change our ways or not. Simply too many people alive now to turn our back on industrial culture anytime soon, so why fight the inevitable?
You’re right, this was never about science anyway.
As for the people that tell us we have to change our ways, they mean you and me and not themselves. They need their SUVs and minivans and jet-airliners.
Discussions based in fact and reason are few and far between.
1951 !!! … global warming floods NYC !!!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/19540634746/sizes/l/
Quite right. Did these people care when Bill Clinton was raping? Can Elrond prove that he did with some ancient post? Nancy wants the Old Black guy gone, but not the “White” guy! Hypocrites. Tribalists pretending to be universal even as they work their tribal networks, in this case Liberal and Jewish. Oh yes, Oh yes, Liberals are a Tribe – an Ideological One, something that Whites seem to be more into than any other People, even as they become extinct.
Yes, the Ice. Who can stand against His Cold? Nature itself will avenge us. We will ride Polar Bears into battle, lead by Vlad himself.
Are you referring to Vlad, your former handle?
Nobody cares you old flake.
Go wrap some more tinfoil around that empty dome of yours and howl at the moon.
It’s rather strange, although you can see the attempts at consistency, one of the writers that comprise the “Janos” character is clearly more talented than the others. The disparity is sometimes startling.
Who’re you talking too Lil Snack Pack?
Exactly my point: you don’t care that Bill Clinton raped women. What kind of monster are you?
the McCarthy Communist hunts,
The senator was right [no pun intended].
Janos, For one thing, Clovis First is pretty much dead in the water. Older remains have been found. Clovis is a distinct technology from Solutrean. As for DNA of ancient Amerindian remains (as well as modern) all of them point to Asian origins and not European origins.
Remember also that Cro Magnons were probably brown skinned and not white, and that European Ice Age hunters were mostly displaced by incoming white skinned farmers from western Asia. Think of Amerindians being displaced by incoming European colonists as the model of population replacement.
And the Solutrean hypothesis has got very slim evidence. If someone found the remains of an encampment or burials from 15,000 years ago in North America with Cro Magnon skeletons and technology and ideally DNA, then we’d have something. But such things have never been found. So far the DNA and archeological evidence points to Asia. If Cro Magnons did arrive via the Ice Age Atlantic ice pack, their DNA doesn’t appear in Amerindians. IOW they’re descendants went extinct in the Americas.
Better correct this before Q spots it: THEIR descendants went extinct…
Ahh, but then you forgot the period on the Q. He’s been a stickler on that lately too. Buy hey! That’s why he’s the board grammarian! What’re ya [sic] gonna do?
The original/real Q went without one.
They buried the Kennewick site under thousands of tons of rocks and dirt just in case there were anymore troublesome skeletons there. Of course the local tribe claimed him, though he obviously was of a different racial type. Not saying he looked like me, but perhaps some intermediate Caucasian/Mongolian type – or a paleo precursor to both.
I’ve heard they found a Caucasian down in Florida recently, some 15,000 years old. Of course the System is fighting this – they have to. Careers and patronage are on the line, as well as they whole PC ethos and worldview.
“I’ve heard they found a Caucasian down in Florida recently, some 15,000 years old”
Nah, turns out he was a Gainesville cracker with a real bad meth problem.
What we are witnessing today is a reflection of a religious war that has been going on for 2 years in the US, and two months ago it split the Western world – I mean Brexit.
And yesterday it turned out that even a traditional alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States was under question, and I would not be surprised if tomorrow the war between the United Kingdom and the City of London begins.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/30/evil-racist-how-the-uk-reacted-to-trumps-theresa-may-twitter-attack?CMP=share_btn_fb
It’s called Londonistan for a reason.
A foreign nation within a country.
You don’t need to commandeer the entire bus, only the driver’s seat.
Actually, I was not talking about London as British capital of London, but City of London Corporation –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
as part of the Roman Empire and still part of the Fourth Reich (EU).
The Mayor of London is some sort of Pakistani, not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of London.
English humor, you know – they still call themselves a Constitutional Monarchy without any Constitution.
There exists a movement to declare Barcelona independent from Catalonia. This is the future.
City-states.
Not clear who will hold the advantage.
The city, or the lands surrounding it.
Bitcoin down 20%.
Overnight
Sounds like a stable investment
A pitchfork for hay (and politicians) and a shovel for manure are stable investments.
Bitcoin is a phantasm.
Bitcoin is a phantasm, and it’s about to get forked.
Get ready for a wave of Bitcoin forks
Are Bitcoin Uranium and Super Bitcoin the future of cryptocurrency? Or a big joke?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/get-ready-for-a-wave-of-bitcoin-forks/
“On August 1, a dissident faction of the Bitcoin community created a new payment network called Bitcoin Cash. There are lots of Bitcoin-derived spinoff currencies, of course, but this was unusual because it branched off from the existing Bitcoin blockchain. The result was the cryptocurrency equivalent of a stock split: everyone who owned one bitcoin before the split suddenly owned a ‘cash’ bitcoin after the split.
“Today, the value of Bitcoin Cash in circulation is about $20 billion. That makes it the third most valuable currency, after only the original Bitcoin and Ethereum. And this appears to be newly created wealth. The value of vanilla bitcoins didn’t fall significantly on the day of the split, and it has since zoomed upwards so that the value of all conventional bitcoins is now around $150 billion.
“With that kind of money on the table, it was inevitable that others would try the same trick. In early November, another group of Bitcoin developers publicly launched the Bitcoin Gold network. This version of Bitcoin swaps out Bitcoin’s current mining process—where people compete for bitcoins by computing SHA-256 hashes using custom-designed mining hardware—with a memory-hard algorithm that, designers hope, will make it resistant to acceleration by custom hardware. The creators say they want to re-democratize Bitcoin mining, once again making it possible for anyone to earn Bitcoin Gold with their home PCs.
“Like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold split off from the main Bitcoin blockchain, so everyone who owned a normal bitcoin before the fork got a ‘gold’ bitcoin after the fork. But the Bitcoin Gold team added a controversial twist: after the fork, it rapidly mined approximately 100,000 bitcoins for itself before opening the network to the public.
“Bitcoin Gold is now worth around $270 per bitcoin, so the team essentially created a $27 million endowment for itself, which it says will support development of the Bitcoin Gold project. The Bitcoin Gold network as a whole is worth $4.5 billion, making it the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency after Ripple and Dash—and slightly ahead of the earliest successful Bitcoin fork, Litecoin.
“The question now is who is going to try this trick next. The answer is: a lot of people. In recent weeks, a bunch of different people have announced plans to create new currencies. There’s Bitcoin Silver, Bitcoin Platinum, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Uranium, Bitcoin Cash Plus, and Super Bitcoin.”
—
Soon to be followed by Diet Bitcoin, Sugar-Free Bitcoin Lite, Bitcoin After Dark, and Spicy Bitcoin a la Mexicana (con jalapeno). People have caught on to the fact that with a quick visit to GitHub and a few tweaks, they can seemingly summon millions or even billions of dollars of virtual value out of thin air. This type of scam has an even shorter half-life than we are used to seeing, so by the time you’re reading this it’s already too late. Better luck next time!
You’re posting less and less as “Janet” these days.
They are one?
Somebody didn’t buy the dip
Although someone was certainly willing to sell it.
And buy it
At the bargain price. $9,880 this morning.
from SIX CENTS TO 12K IS QUITE A CLIMB.
The government catches up:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/coinbase-ordered-turn-over-data-235635616.html
At first I thought tattoocoin was a joke. Far F—— out.
dogge coin.
America First! Britain First! Hail Trump! Hail Jayda Fransen!
The following is from Muslim lovers, diversity demons, and nation haters:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-britain-first-and-the-purveyors-of-racism-and-bigotry
Sarah Sanders was right. “The threat is real”.
Dhimmitude sucks. Dhimmitude is awful. Dhimmitude is evil.
Now, where is that disgusting Yzlamik Somali police officer from Minneapolis who murdered, in cold blood, that lovely Australian woman, Justine Damond, whose only crime was calling the cops and wearing pajamas?
Yes, silence in (((media)))…what if it was a White LEO and Trayvon or Freddie or someone of color?
Y’all just aren’t seeing the forest for the trees.
Broaden your gaze.
Look away from the conductor’s wand and watch the orchestra.
Lamenting the disintegration of social-biological norms, specifically, gender roles
This is all part of the big plan.
Blur, remove, replace.
Gender and sex are disposable traits.
Evolutionary dead ends with too much detrimental baggage.
When gender is weakened and eroded, biological, or assigned, sex weakens and erodes, when biological sex disappears a new form of reproduction is needed, is more palatable.
Engineered offspring is acceptable, and will be the preferred manner.
Beyon miscgenation of races. Way beyond.
The brave new world has landed.
Humanity is merely a blip on an evolutionary continuum.
As I’ve always said, the world will be better with less humans.
And we’re headed to that better world.
Like it or not.
UN projections say 12 billion by 2050, when do you reckon we start losing population?
The hominid population may increase
But
There will be less humans.
“The hominid population may increase
But
There will be less humans.”
True dat….
Hominid populations are already in full retreat due to deforestation. They won’t do well with AGW either.
Augmented/spliced/CRISPR’d/techno-enhanced humanoids will be hominids… in a sense.
Our evolutionary successor(s) are the hominids I am referring to.
A HuffPost reporter tweeted that McInsane is only supporting the tax bill on account of the death tax component soon benefiting his estate.
One must appreciate the utter contempt that politicians are rightly held in in today’s America.
Distrust by ordinary folks in the 60’s to outright hate by institutions today.
There is a season
Turn
Turn
Turn
A time to break down
John McCain. The GOP open sore that just keeps on oozing, and oozing, and oozing…
Can’t tell me the North Vietnamese didn’t know what they were doing when they kept that stupid cocksucker alive just so they could send him back to us again. Ho Chi Minh has been laughing his ass off on the other side ever since. Oh to be a fly on the wall at their reunion when that dipshit cocksucker finally crosses over too. Someone PLEASE shoot that fucking bastard just in case the cancer doesn’t finish him off proper!
Oozing is just another word for healing. McCain is going to live forever.
What else explains his ability to survive the swamp of Washington all these years?
More like festering. But yeah, the dumb bastard seems determined to live forever. Has I said, Ho Chi Minh is laughing hysterically as we speak.
Unfortunately, unification with the ROCA (Russian Orthodox Church Abroad) was a mistake.
If Nicholas II had been declared a saint in a normal way, then this question would simply not have arisen. First, miracles around the tsar’s remains would begin to happen, then the canonization commission would gather and consider the evidence of these miracles, and then Nicholas II on the basis of these testimonies would be declared a saint.
And now the unfortunate tsar was first declared a saint for political reasons, without which the canonization procedure would have gone much longer (and this in itself is an outrage over the very concept of sainthood), and now his remains will be declared relics on the basis of genetic expertise, and this is the pure Arianism. And now it is already clear that this is the main goal of the first stage of the operation “Nicholas II”, and the next step is the gene of holiness and holiness which is inherited through sexual intercourse.
And then they will come up with something else – for example, Hitler will be declared a saint, as an outstanding fighter against the Judeo-Bolshevism. In the end, they prayed for his victory in 1941-1944!
The fact of the matter is that they do not care about the martyrs – they see a crack and will drive their peg into this crack and start water it until the stone is broken. And helpful idiots will help them, thinking that they are doing a holy work.
Saints and martyrs are two different things.
Nicholas II is both.
*************************************8
The target population for humanity is 500 million, as defined by the COLLECTIVIST NETWORK globalists.
And the accelerated destruction of humanity through the use of patsy snipers, induced climate events, induced wildfires, induced contagion, destruction of the family unit and patriotism, and pharmacological mind control is part of the program, until the remainder of humanity submits to the project.
This is termed “cultural enrichment.”
Y = career politicians x career lobbyists x globalist mainstream media x career unelected Deep State bureaucrats x Hollywood elites x unprosecuted corruption x globalist banking cartels x globalist technocrats x pharmacological reprogramming
“God integrates empirically.” – Albert Einstein.
Y = old republic COLLECTIVIST NETWORK globalism = THE SWAMP.
X = New Republic = REGENERATIVE Globalism = BREAKTHROUGH ENERGY.
C
A
Sent from the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
X = Cargo Cult.
There will be no “regenerative globalism” and there is no “breakthrough energy,” other than possibly at decidedly local and drastically smaller levels. But I seriously doubt that’s going to work out long term either. Humanity’s already played its hand for this go round and lost. We’ll simply ride the current paradigms right back into the dirt from which we sprang.
The American/Western “dream” has revealed itself to be a nightmare, and there’s no waking up from it at this late date.
” This is anti-science and if we followed this advice we’d consider the earth flat and the sun and moon to be revolving round it. ”
And this appears to be largely a self-flattering modern fairy tale.
If you stand at the seashore on a clear visibility day , and watch a ship sail away from you , it is a good bet you will eventually notice that the ship does not really fade from view , it rather sinks below the horizon.
But why would it sink below the horizon if the earth is a flat plain ?
Working class sailors made that observation , and asked that question , with or without state-financed scientists , and that the earth was round was well-known a long time ago.
As for Ptolemaic astronomy , it was known a long time ago that it was faulty , or just plain wrong if you prefer.
But, yes, they continued to use it .
Why ?
There was no better alternative.
No sense bitching about flint and steel , when Bic lighters HAVE NOT been invented yet.
” People go through periods of craziness, the burning of Giordano Bruno, the silencing of Galileo, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials ”
Giordano Bruno — I don’t know the guy .
Galileo — who was the astronomer Galileo working for ? Answer ; The Pope, Who printed his books ? Answer ; The Vatican printed his books.
Those two questions and their answers should clue you in that the inquisition of Galileo was not solely , or even primarily , about astronomy.
And it WASN’T.
The question put to Galileo was not whether his astronomy was correct or incorrect .
The question put to Galileo was whether he was a good Catholic , or an agent provocateur .
At the time of the inquisition of Galileo there were a lot of people running around bashing the Catholic Church in the name of science , but as you , yourself , suggest about the present ;
” this was never about science ”
Science was just a whore for a rather different and broader agenda.
the Spanish Inquisition — was set up by the Catholic Church , but very soon it was co-opted by the Spanish secular state , which there after blatantly ignored what Rome had to say.
The Spanish Inquisition as an example of bad old , mean-spirited religion is a farce.
It is an example of the bad old , mean-spirited secular state.
That having been said though , the highest number I have seen based on actual records is 20 ,000 victims.
20,000 victims would be an appalling number if that were for one month , or even one year.
But , no , that is 20,000 for four centuries.
Civilian casualties in the second Iraq war are already ten times that , and the war was hardly four centuries long.
If modern attitudes and practices are any clue , then most Americans today , and most posters here, from Janos to Elrond , would be bitching that a modern fair equivalent of the Inquisition wasn’t doing nearly enough ! ( with its pathetic 20,000 over four centuries. )
I guess that is why the Spanish inquisition is routinely blamed on the Catholic church, instead of the real culprit , the secular state.
It is projection.
the Salem witch trials — notice the time period , the context , the setting , of the witch trials.
This idea had just become mainstream that everyone should be their own Pope , and this was supposed to usher in a new era of greater freedom and peace.
Never mind that nobody gives a fuck about my peculiar religious ideas , or yours , or his , or hers. And that should tell you something.
The 500 year experience of this era of greater freedom and peace has been an ever greater ratcheting up and broadening of the witch trials .
” You’re right, this was never about science anyway. ”
You are correct otherwise.
” As for the people that tell us we have to change our ways, they mean you and me and not themselves. ”
That’s the idea of original sin.
If that is the notion you want people to adopt , disparaging it might not be the way to go.
The Spanish Inquisition as only Mel Brooks can tell it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZegQYgygdw
It’s funny in the same sense as if he had depicted Custer’s 7th cavalry as un-armed pacifists who just happened to be there when mean ole’ Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull showed up to commit an atrocity for no reason.
That is , worthy of a stale chuckle at best, and primarily only a chuckle to be polite.
29 out of 30 people are not funny , and even then , 9 times out of 10 , funny by accident.
That so many people pretend otherwise is likewise stale chuckle worthy at best.
Your kind of a stale old bitch, aren’t you? I find people with no sense of humor to be the funniest of all.
” Someone PLEASE shoot that fucking bastard just in case the cancer doesn’t finish him off proper! ”
That’s two felonies you just committed.
I know it is idiotic .
But I’m not the one claiming the Salem witch trials are past – tense , either.
I’m thinking your talent does not lie with the law.
Friday eve… when the bombshells that they want quickly forgotten are released. I wonder who is up next at the stake in the Nail-him Snitch Trials?
Gene Shalit?
Simon Scowl?
Bill Nye (he’s an eccentric creep-o for sure)
What is it about a bow tie that makes a man suspect?
Wellsir, the more I read of this mind-rape section of Jim’s blog, the more I’m utterly convinced that trusting very few ‘folks’ is the correct attitude. Keep it up, I see many more murders (1st and 2nd) and aggravated manslaughters in the near future! It’s gonna be “bloody” good fun. You thought that paranoia was a whispering and chuckling matter? Nope, a justifiable and deadly serious adaptation.
Selective quarantine is in effect. Don’t forget your shots; ugliness abounds (inside and out; governmental and societal).
Money and power are nothing. It’s all about Pride.
“Don’t forget your shots; ugliness abounds…” –ozone
Hey, you kids! Get off my property!
Thanks for noticing Lil Snack Pack! It really irritates you, doesn’t it? I’ll keep it up then.
Get off my LAWN is the phrase you were looking for, janet-bot. It’s a reference to back in the day when old men would sit on their porch (back when we still had those!) and yell at the insipid little janets who would wander the neighborhood creating youthful havoc, kind of like we have to shoo you away from time to time here. Those were the days!
“You’re posting less and less as “Janet” these days.” –100th avatar
Ol’ Scratch is probably the new version of Asoka, given the humongous number of posts he makes every week. He is legion, or some such nonsense.
Thanks for noticing Lil Snack Pack! It really irritates you, doesn’t it? I’ll keep it up then.
The crisis of the British monarchy provoked by Diana has been overcome
All the same, it’s not for nothing that Prince Harry studied the history of art – everything is fine with his sense of beauty.
https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/galleries/x701/223995.jpg
Well, why should the family limit Harry’s quest for beauty, if most of the kingdom, looking at these photos, long ago came to the conclusion that William and Harry have different fathers?
http://laestrella.com.pa/media/news/image/323304_800x600_crop_592ca2a7bc826.jpg
“shoot that fucking bastard” – Ol’ Scratch
Naw, let him remain a scapula for what’s left of the nation. We need to perform some type of penance for letting that fucking bastard elevate Mrs. (I can see Russia) Palin to the international stage.
The tax bill currently being jammed through the House and the Senate is a prime example of the differences between Republicans and Democrats.
The obscure parts of the bill that Republicans aren’t bragging about…well, these are some of the differences:
Students can no longer claim the interest on their school loans when paying their taxes.
You won’t be able to claim the interest on your home loan against your taxes.
You won’t be able to sell your home without a tax penalty until 5 years of purchase.
There will be a cap on what a state can spend on education.
There will be no deduction for school supplies purchased by a teacher for kids from financially challenged families.
The bill would kill the Obamacare individual mandate forcing 22 million people off health care over 10 years.
The bill would outlaw abortions by declaring that a fetus can be a ‘dependant’ and can be claimed on taxes ( a sideways strategy to remove a woman’s right to choose).
Those on Medicaid will be forced to pay a premium on health services as well as co-pays.
It will eliminate the Inheritance Tax (something that benefits .1 of 1 percent of American families…including the Trumps.)
Warren Buffet calls this bill ‘Tax Relief for the Rich’.
This list could be hours in the making and it still won’t cover all the cruel and despicable aspects of the bill. Republicans want this to re-pay big donors. That’s it.
There are no real tax breaks for the middle class, no benefits for the working men and women of America, nothing that will benefit children and families..nothing. A Trojan horse full of bullshit.
And that mantra about ‘both parties have big donors to satisfy..both parties are in it for political power (and themselves), they all do it… they all do it… they all do it…
No, they don’t.
This is purely a Republican beast. It has no heart. It will be the legacy of Trump, McConnell, and Ryan. They will have to live with the devastation it will levy on the poor, the aged, and the most vulnerable in our society.
And the cherry on the shit sundae… We will have a Republican pedophile in the Senate. And a sexual predator in the White House.
The Republican tax bill will be the biggest transfer of wealth for the very poor to the very rich in in American history. Redistribution the wrong way, from those who don’t have to those who have.
Students can no longer claim the interest on their school loans when paying their taxes. – janet
===========
I will guesstimate that not 1 in 100 students itemize on their tax returns. They have so little income and so few itemizable expenses that they just take the standard deduction.
The problem with our current system is basing taxes on income. I say base taxes on consumption.
I’m surprised nobody around these here parts gave notice that Jim “Gomer Pyle” Nabors got his exit sign.
Still speculating who is going to be the next
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TnkJ8_BmSI” contestant on Celebrity Perv.
for those tuning in late,
shabbaranks December 1, 2017 at 12:19 pm #
While America beats itself to death over mostly lightweight allegations of sexual impropriety (excluding Weinstein, Spacey and soon to be tried again Cosby), let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the sexual practices of our better angels in Africa:
Kenya:
cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/05/11/kenya.children.beading/index.html
South Africa:
huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/08/31/the-horrific-reality-of-south-africas-rape-problem-will-shock-you_a_…
Central African Republic:
theguardian.com/global-development/2017/oct/05/rape-instrument-of-war-central-african-republic-confl…
Nigeria:
globalcitizen.org/en/content/savemirabel-the-only-rape-support-centre-in-lagos/
Burundi:
hrw.org/news/2016/07/27/burundi-gang-rapes-ruling-party-youth
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