Never worked for me, or at least they never fulfilled my requirements to the point where a long term commitment was what I deemed advisable.  It's probably as much a problem with my requirements as it is with the general theory though.  I've got a lot of friends who had better results using dedicated algorithms which sometimes promulgated long distance relationships.  I know others who had good results going the old-fashioned way(*).

*Actually, the 'old fashioned' way has historically been that life-long relationships are arranged by elders for tribal and political reasons.  What most people these days as 'old fashioned' means that two people make contact in the real world and form a relationship based on some sort of mutual affection.

Lots of the threads here on bitcointalk.org are textbook studies in 'brainwashing' and really valuable to a researcher/analyst for that reason. 

Considering that Bitcoin as a technology probably has appeal which skews toward the 'free-thinker' end of the scale, the observations are even more interesting.  And alarming.

I do not (because I cannot) rule out the existence of bots here, much less put a metric on it, but it certainly could be a factor.  A twitter-trained human on a cell phone is pretty indistinguishable from a bot a lot of times.

Some percentage of people are born sociopaths who will victimize a large number of people in the course of their life.  There is no point in trying to train or educate them, or to try to appeal to their sense of ethics.  In the way normal people understand ethics a sociopath or psychopath really doesn't have any.

What holds people like this in check is fear of revenge.  What they would love would be a pool of sheep-like victims who will tolerate repeated victimization without complaint.  Unfortunately this attitude about never seeking revenge and always 'choosing peace' will result in a vast increase victimization rather than less.  We've been trained (largely by sociopaths I suspect) to always forgive and forget, but it's actually socially irresponsible.

In the U.S., the wealthy and powerful tend to have armed guards around them whenever they go out and about.  The upper-middle class tend to live in well patrolled and/or gated communities where their minions have guns and where they don't have to go out into any part of the real world unless they choose to.  Normally their chosen coffee-shop is also in the protected zone.

Nowhere in all this talk about getting rid of the 2nd amendment is anyone talking about depriving these controlled protector class guard ants of their guns.  It's the woman who's enraged ex-boyfriend has promised to show up at her place at 2:00am and kill her who has to go back to her house and hope for the best.  Such problem are a whole different world than the gun-grabber class is familiar with.  And if the ex-boyfriend lives up to his promise, oh well...there are to many people anyway.

If I do someone wrong I've got no problem with them getting even.  If I forget to lower my high-beams and someone flash me with theirs, I've got no problem with that.  I do the same thing so this is exactly the 'Golden Rule.'  You know; the 'do unto others...' thing.  It serves society at large well since people then remember to be paying attention with their high-beams.

(Bringing things back to being Bitcoin related to a degree):  Jesus didn't 'turn the other cheek' when there was something important going on.  When his peers were being taken advantage of by the money-changers he took action.

I'm not religious so I don't think it's going to happen, but it would be hilarious if some of you peace-nic brainwash victims showed up at the Pearly Gate and Saint Peter told you guys to take a hike because Heaven doesn't need a bunch of spineless pussies who are basically caused a lot of persistent problems on planet earth.

Not allowed by whom?  I would submit that it is primarily the entities who may wish to do you badly and would like to avoid a retribution who are the ones making the rules here.

I think it was Machiavelli who observed that if you kill a guys father, he will forget about it in a year.  If you take a person's property they will remember it for life.  I'm sure it was Machiavelli who counciled that a ruler (the prince) should not steal from his subjects.  I suspect that the Pavlovian response to 'forgive and forget' we see over and over on this thread is being conditioned in to the population to make certain kinds of theft less risky.

Ya, I was just skimming a story about a guy who's kid, along with a few friends, broke into someone's house to steal shit or whatever.  The homeowner killed them all, and the kid's father is suing the homeowner because his gun gave the homeowner an 'unfair advantage' over the home invaders.


In my observation and experiance, even having 1/100 people perhaps packing heat with a CCW licence contributes a lot to 'civility'.

Of course having a gun owner in 90% of every rural home also does wonders for the rate of attempted home invasions of occupied or suspected occupied residences.  I can say with a high degree of certainty that that is the case in my area which is crawling with meth-heads who otherwise steal anything within sight and who have no morals about beating up or killing anyone who gets in their way.  Especially old and weak females. Meth is a terrible drug.

Latest acquisition:



Just picked it up today.  Just for plinking and playing around.  I should get to be a better shot with a pistol.  Unfortunately I had three failures to cycle and a rimfire fail with cheap ammo.  No failures with the 20 rounds of name brand I sent down-range.  Now I gotta clean the fucking thing.  That's the major down-side of guns.  I guess that 'gun-nuts' love that shit, but I hate it.

Now I need a better CCW, and I've almost decided that a mini-14 is the carbine class rifle I want.  Unfortunately the 'rancher' style doesn't seem to be made in SS in my brief research on the matter.

Edit:  Forgot to add that I was basically forced to kill a skunk that got into my house and showed no signs of leaving a few days ago.  Stunk the place up good, but it's a second house and only my cat lives there at this time.  Unfortunately my pistol had not arrived yet so I had to use my rifle with shot-shells.  The moral of the story is, again, that guns have broad usefulness to a great number of rural dwelling people that have nothing to do with humans.  If you urban-dwelling folk don't take that into account in your plans for how the world needs to work there will probably be trouble.

The Philippines was one of the three countries where the WHO was caught using sterilizing agents in the tetanus vaccine which made women's immune system attack a hormone necessary for pregnancy.  They hit a female doctor who didn't particularly want to be sterilized and she, having the scientific background to figure out what was going on, dug into it.

The above happened not very long after development of the technique (using tetanus vaccine as a carrier.)  Much later (and fairly recently) it looks (to me) very probable that they tried it again in Kenya.

At this point anyone who puts any confidence in anything U.N. related basically gets what's coming to them whether it be 'conservation' measures which lock up what little water their country has or 'help' with health care which causes the people to be childless.  Wake me up when these scum offset the disadvantages of being a childless oldster in the developing world.  Unless a bullet in the head constitues 'help'.  There seems to me a fair chance that at the top and middle of this organization these people are 'Lucifarian' insofar as they take their ethics from derivatives of the Talmud.

In a quick sanity check, it looks like prior to vaccination the rate of deaths from small-pox were averaging around 200-per-100,000 and measles around 10-per-100,000 (presumably per-year, but few organizations seem to be able to properly key a chart for some odd reason.)  That puts rough numbers of the magnitude of the problem we are discussing here, and it should be remembered that medical care and methods have evolved extensively since that time so such treatments as an IV for a few days would likely reduce the mortality rate significantly.

OTOH, autism rates are on a trajectory that would see every other U.S. born male be clinically diagnosed in a few decades.  South Korea is hit even harder.  Somehow nobody can figure out what's up with that so, 'oh well.'  I mean it's not like having 1/3 of the population be unable to cope with life and at least partially dependent on the rest (administered through the state of course) for survival would be a problem or anything like that, right?

Bull.  Firstly, the Mumps part of MMR, at least, is undergoing vaccine failure with dismal efficacy.  Merck was caught red-handed trying to deal with the situation through blatant fraud.  Thanks to a couple of insiders we know this (as if the outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations were not enough.)  Of course it will be several decades if ever before the problem is even acknowledged by the CDC, much less anyone getting in trouble.  That's why the revolving door is kept well lubricated and in a high state of function.

The above is just 'vaccine failure' and says nothing about the damage that may be occurring.  'Vaxxed' documents in detail how the CDC threw data in the trash (literally) about the vaccine/autism connection and has not done another study since.  If vaccines were found to be associated with autism by 'science' and the victims were compensated, it would cost Trillions.  I bought 10 copies of the DVD and hand it out to people I give a shit about.  Especially if they have kids.

To be perfectly honest, it looks to me as though the vaccine program is a eugenics program, and it's just that simple.  Bankrupt and disable Western societies (and the U.S. in particular) so there is less resistance to a global technocratic takeover.  That hypothesis fits best with observations as far as I'm concerned.

Vaccines are not 'tried and tested' as are other pharmaceuticals.  Their is an exemption so they don't have to meet the same standards.  Not only that, but the manufacturer is absolved of legal responsibility for harm that vaccines may cause unlike most other medications.  When someone is harmed AND navigates 'vaccine court' (usually doctors and scientists who's kids got harmed are the only ones who make it all the way) then the taxpayers pick up the tab.  Look it up.

Worse still, the companies who manufacture (or license) the vaccines typically do what testing is done and the CDC mostly just takes there word for it, especially if they have the right person running CDC.  That's why the head of the CDC revolves right through the door to become the top dog in Merck's vaccine division (e.g., Jewly Gerberding.)

For every crime stopped by firing a gun, 99 are stopped by a would-be criminal knowing that you have one either by seeing it, seeing evidence of it (like a target full of holes), or hearing about it though various neighborhood channels.

Even when there is an actual confrontation such incidents are almost never reported.  This element of American civic reality is judiciously ignored by the gun-grabber contingent who, generally speaking, have no ethics and honest, and no interest in actual crime rates.  They have a different agenda.

From the research I've been doing recently (trawling a lot of 'revisionist' scholars among other sources) it looks like you are almost inverted.  (No surprise if you are a Western educated individual, see below.)  Looks to me as though the earliest Bolshevik government was in the 'almost 100% Jewish' character while that character faded over time.  It's said that in the early days there were a lot of people who didn't even speak Russian and they needed translators for the Yiddish speakers, but this was not documented and could be bullshit.

What is fairly clear is that Trotsky (born Bronstein) was bumming around in America just prior to the Bolshevik revolution and went over with a lot of people and money.  The people seemed to be the 1900 equiv of today's antifa (Jewish academics and meth-heads) and the money via Jacob Schiff (who himself was earlier sent over by the Rothschild dynasty for various exploits including instantiation of a privately owned central bank which was eventually successful and which we still have today in the Federal (so-called) Reserve.)

Lenin was supposedly chosen (in full agreement with Trotsky) for leadership because he was not Jewish, or not known to be.  A lot of 'revisionist' scholarship is focused on elucidating how true this may have been.  Stalin (born Dzhugashvili) was similarly not considered Jewish but today's revisionists try to make the point that his name translates to 'son of a Jew' and most/all of his wives, concubines, and children were Jewish.  Not unlike Donald Trump, interestingly enough.

Khrushchev was the first Soviet leader who is not really suspected of being a Jew by almost anyone, but he didn't last.

Prior to a week ago I'd vaguely known that Solzhenitsyn wrote 'The Gulag Archipelago' and won a Nobel prize.  What I didn't realize was that he got a Nobel for a much earlier short story released in a brief but of relative openness under Khrushchev.  Due to this thread I've been trying to piece together the Jewish animosity to our 2nd amendment here in the U.S., and ran across this piece:

  http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Solzhenitsyn-Chap16.html

I was confused about how in the Hell Solzhenitsyn could ever get a Nobel since that organization are notable politically correct and 'pinko'.  The answer is that Solzhenitsyn's legacy of brutal honesty was yet to be established.

What happened was that the strong contingent of people sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution (and hoping to arrange the same thing all over) really could not deny the nightmare aspects of the USSR, and the Jewish nature of the Bolshevik revolution was also cumbersome to deal with.  What they could do, however, was to blame all of the 'bad' on Stalin, and they had made significant progress in academia and society.  Solzhenitsyn's work hurt because it exposed the lie.  'Counter-revolution' started right away and was horrific from that time onward.  Stalin was particularly awful though.

Solzhenitsyn makes the point that the Soviet leadership of Russia actually harbored a hatred of the Russian people themselves.  This was interesting to me because for a few years I've explored the hypothesis that American leadership actually harbors a hatred the American people themselves.  (Cannot blame them really since the feeling is fairly mutual.)  From that perspective a lot of the 'failures' of the health care system, education system, quagmire wars, etc, etc, really make a lot of sense.  When a hypothesis fits well with observation it is worth exploring further.

---

Whether true, half-true, or utter BS, this is certainly 'heretical' to Western educated masses of 2018:

  http://www.heretical.com/miscellx/bolshies.html

Revenge to 'feel good' is stupid.  At least it is to me.  I personally do it mostly out of duty, and that sometimes can feel good.  Someone or some entity who has wronged you is likely to continue to do so to others.  If they can be slowed or stopped through 'revenge', is doing a favor for other future victims of your category and possibly yourself as well.

Revenge against an individual is usually not worth the hassle although there are exceptions.  I was wronged by a government official some years ago.  To this day I continue to work to sap the effectiveness of this useless bureaucratic agency as a whole, and do so in multiple ways.  Very often it is 'revenge' that tips me over the edge to get off my ass and write something or vote a certain way or financially contribute to a certain cause.

As with the gun thread here, it seems like 80-90% of the respondents are parroting a philosophy that I recognize from 40 years ago in public grade school (and to a degree, from what I know about certain religions, what I see in the media, etc, etc.)  I would suggest that to a reasonable degree some of this is indoctrination specifically by and for the 'ruling classes' and primarily for the efficient functioning of their own operations.  This indoctrination takes many forms but the mainstream media and public education systems are primary vehicles.

The standard arguments for 'gun control' which we see regurgitated on a daily basis on this forum are absurd enough that we can be fairly sure that something else is going on here.

Over the last few days I've been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" (1973) which is a treatises on the USSR's system for political prisoners (of which the author was one.)  Early on in the book Solzhenitsyn elaborates on the methods of initial capture.  Clearly and armed population would have complicated these operations a lot, and I suspect that such a thing may have allowed the Russian people (and others) to avoid the 70 year Bolshevik nightmare.

Solzhenitsyn follows by outlining the various waves of prisoner classes which came into the system over the years.  The breadth of the groups is staggering, not to mention the shear numbers.  The state-sponsored terror which our liberal western democracies have been ramping up recently is nothing compared to what is possible (and, ominously, does seem to work as evidenced by the lifetime of the Soviet Union, the Chinese communist rule, etc, etc.)

An explanation for the extreme pressure and increasingly ridiculous lengths that certain people are willing to go to try to modify the U.S. constitution vis-a-vis the right of the citizenry to keep and bear arms might be that operations modeled after the Soviet system are being planned for the U.S., or at least dreamed of.  It is notable that certain groups have a history of being enamored of Bolshevik and Soviet methods.  To some degree these are the same groups who seem to be pushing the 'gun control' thing most vigorously here and now.

There are a bunch of really interesting documentaries about Edward Bernays and his work.  I highly recommend the one by Adam Curtis called 'The Century of the Self':

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

or reading Bernays work 'Propaganda' which, to be honest, I've not done yet.

'Brainwashing' is kind of like a piece of cloth in that once a tear gets started, it can continue and destroy the whole item.  Modern propaganda is aimed at trying to not let tears get started (by use of what I call 'information channels' and censorship mostly) and attempting the 'stitch in time' principle.  This by making people uncomfortable with certain thought patterns and thus reject them.  The term 'conspiracy theory' and weaving in 'guilt' into the fabric are two methods in common use.

In reading Orwell's work, it is almost inconceivable to me that he was not very familiar with the 'insiders' who've understood well Bernays' work and decided to use it systematically to their advantage for social control.

I think you got the it correct that most people will not, for a variety of reasons, ever really break out.  Probably more than meet the 'very strong' bar however, and probably enough to cause some real problems for the proverbial 'powers that be.'  Hope so.

The shit always hits the fan eventually.  These are events that cause a lot of un-noticed defect to turn into huge tears.  These are also the times when people who who've had some seeds of doubt germinating in the ground 'wake up' and make a difference.  It's not a total waste of time to try to plant some of these seeds when possible....though the results may not appear within one's own lifetime.

Edit: slight.

The 'county cop' (aka, Sheriff) is an elected office in the U.S.  In a city, the police chief is appointed.  I'm not sure it works this way in all cases, but that's how it is here in my area.  Any cop can and should protect lives which are in eminent danger.  In fact anyone should whether they are a cop or not.  It's a matter of citizenship, and it is possible (but rare) for a private citizen to get in legal trouble for not doing so.

The 'powers that be' are not especially fond of situations where citizens directly elect officials.  Normally it's not a problem to have a corrupt slimeball (like Sheriff Israel) 'win' in our current democracy, but it's an extra hassle and not a sure thing.  Look for efforts to degrade and get rid of 'legacy' offices such as county sheriff, local elected school boards, etc, and replace them with appointed positions, bureaucrats, or 'soviets' composed of hand picked 'citizens'.  The various 'committees' which decide what a person can build on their own property are good examples.

A believable story could be done around this formula, but the ones which are known to have occured in history are of the form:

  Poverty + Communism + guns under control of the party only = mega death

We see this in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, etc.

I personally don't think that Communism per-se has much to do with the equation other than that it is a totalitarian system and disfunctional economically which makes problems come to a head more quickly.  A simplified equation which I feel is more accurate (and so did, apparently, the founders of the U.S.):

  Totalitarian govt + un-armed population = mega death of own citizens

If the government (totalitarian or otherwise) is war-like then the mega death is more outwardly directed.  They want to keep the citizens healthy the better to kill citizens of other countries.  If the government is peaceful then they will focus inward on milking the herd and culling the population when it gets unwieldy.  An armed population complicates the culling options.

They could pass a raft of legislation mandating chronic costs and hassles.  Then any infractions could be used as justification for draconian punishments.  This is how I would 'get the guns' if I were designing a strategy.

The above strategy probably would get the guns out of the hands of most typical law abiding people, but not out of the hands of criminals who create problems for ordinary folks.  That is actually fine with TPTB.  Violent criminals are a very useful tool that TPTB can use for system control purposes and to justify 'official protection' in the form of paramilitaries.  Both the violent criminal classes and the state sponsored paramilitaries are more effective in certain kinds of operations, and cost effective, if the general citizenry are dis-armed.