Yes indeed!  If one feels an immediate pang of rage at the mention of something, there may well have been some conditioning involved.  Watch for it in oneself and others.

The trigger words 'God' and 'Christian' are several which have impacted me in the past.  I maintain my position as an atheist but for whatever reason my reaction to these two ideas is no longer a 'short sharp shock'.  This reaction seemed to have worn off rather than simply vanished, and some time actually pondering the sociological manifestations of religion generally seemed to have contributed to the wearing off effect.

I really noticed this phenomenon about 25 years ago when someone mentioned the Kennedy assassination.  I became immediately enraged or nearly so.  So much so that it caught my attention enough to really wonder if there might actually be something mysterious going on wrt conditioning.  I've always been a fan of alternate theories/hypotheses due to my interest in science and never had a lot of trust in the authorities so I really should not have had this reaction organically.  Even back then.

Sort of but not really.  Bernie, as a senile communist fossil, was supposed to be token opposition on the 'democrat' side in the laughable 2-party charade and easy opposition for the chosen one.  I imagine that the globalists were as surprised as I was that he caused so much grief.  We both underestimated the effectiveness of the conditioning which has impacted the sub-30yo crowd.  Unlike Bernie who is probably only now starting to figure things out, Cruz almost certainly is fully aware of the landscape and the role he is playing.

But we should try to stay on-track with the DNS thing on this thread even if we are on the 'politics and society' board.  I apologize and will try to resist deviating again.

If Cruz suggests anything I'm by default against it without significant research.  As far as I'm concerned Cruz is a globalist creation, and they choose such a disgusting little creep mainly to discredit the so-called 'conservative' resistance movement.  He was supposed to be the dedicated choke artist like Romney and McCain before him to get a Hillary installed.  'They' probably would have preferred someone like Kaisic for this duty, but using someone like Cruz who was cultivated in the depleated soil of the religious right at least provides an opportunity to further discredit the potential threat from that quarter.

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Back to DNS, I've for years deferred on working with some of the alternates.  I always meant to spend some time with DNSCurve one of these days, but doing anything more intellectually challenging than putting a filesystem on a disk is like burning cats to me ever since I bowed out of the industry.

I'd welcome suggestions about other developments in this category.  Bernstein is an impressive guy (to me as someone who is not put off by trolling) but he has a broad range of interests and a limited attention span and some of his efforts go unmaintianed/superseded.

It's interesting, delightful, and horrifying.  I recommend it for those who can.

I never said that my informants were not good people.  Generally speaking they were/are fine people.  One can be thoroughly indoctrinated and still be a good person, and indeed, sacrificing oneself 'for the greater good' can be argued to be quite a 'good' thing.

One of my current interests is in trying to figure out the intricacies of indoctrination, conditioning, brainwashing...pick your term...  I am myself one of my chief informants.  Certainly I was subject to successful indoctrination via the state efforts (and others) and I'm sure I still 'suffer' from some of this.  Others of it I've untangled myself from.  And, to my credit, I was unusually resistant to a lot of it at a fairly early age for whatever set of reason.

I know from my personal conversations that a decent fraction of mainland Chinese support their government's stance on these kinds of things for the protection of society at large.  Or at least the perception of this (which is in my opinion somewhat valid given the realpolitik.)  My sense from my conversations is that this sentiment has been conditioned in from early childhood.


Opportunity.  Mostly an opportunity make more money.

Many of the more wealthy Chinese are probably well aware of the desirability of diversifying in a general sense because of the multiple points of frailty of their society.  China has more challenges than most.  Even those individuals who do truly value freedom, liberty, etc, are probably and rightly terrified that it might actually happen.


...whatever that means.  I'm guessing that China will see a regression but it will not compare to what is seen in the West.  We simply have a lot farther to fall.

My theory is that in terms of material comforts, the rule of the CCP since Deng Xiaoping was probably the best for 'the people.'  More abstract ideas about 'liberty' and what-not are not as highly valued as in other systems.  Russell put his finger on it when he said that the people will be happy because the leaders tell them they are.  Many (but not all) mainlanders I know are fairly stead-fast in the basic belief that 'liberty' and 'freedom' are actually negatives.  Interestingly, many of the 'regressive left' Westerners I know are 'coming around' to seeing things this way as well.

Anyway, what was yesterday will not be tomorrow.  The Chinese people are living 'high' on borrowed time.  They are the beneficiaries of 'globalistic' transfers of wealth and content under this rising tide mainly because their fairly recent past has been so awful.  The 1,300,000,000 souls will undergo a plateau and steep plunge down the other side with the next global monetary re-implementation except...

...the globalists who've been using the nation as a plaint workshop and testing ground will depopulate it as severely as any other, and I'll bet that it will be with as much cooperation from the CCP as has been the case during the build-up.

I guessed that the volume of material coming in to Wikileaks has gone up dramatically of late.  Assange mentioned this the other day and complained that the team was swamped.

In addition to the now dated 'insurance.aes256' file and it's follow-on which everyone has, a lot of other packages will probably float up into the ether should Assange depart from the living.

If I were Assange, I would make a series of base packages customized with unique auxiliary information.  The idea would be to create a post-Assange world where the original Wikileaks continues to chug along while a variety of newly born leak sites with few connections to the parent sprout up.  Those which find a foot-hold and tread carefully in an increasingly dangerous environment will continue on.  Many will fall of course, and that is the point of sowing many seeds.

Hillary and Bill were by their own admission 'dead broke' when they left the whitehouse.  It was the excuse they used for stealing the furniture when they left the place.  Now most estimates are their personal net worth exceed $100-million.  And the 'non-profit' they control has Billons of dollars pass through it.

It's very telling that the speaking fees Bill commanded doubles when Hillary moved to head up the State Department.  The Secretary of State can make big things happen quickly and globally, and especially if the Justice Department is running cover for them.  That seems to be exactly what happened.

It seems a very fair conjecture that Hillary agreed to let Obama take on the POTUS in exchange for her having Secretary of State and the cover she needed to make some real money.  The next POTUS was also promised to her.  It would follow the Democrats plan of POTUS puppet moving through 'black' -> 'woman' -> 'homosexual' which is what Glen Greenwald described.

It just hit me, I wonder if Greenwald had 'insider information' and been talked to personally about this?  Some years back he was considered a hero of the Left, was about the right age for grooming, and is himself homosexual.  I wonder...

I hate to defend the woman, but I don't think that this and the balloon one which is widely used are necessarily anything more than the woman goofing around.  No big deal in the real world, but this is politics.  Using these puts Hillary on the defensive and she now has to think about everything she does which adds stress.  That is 'fair politics' in my own code of ethics, and it's been very effective.

OTOH, there have been things which I do find bizarre and troubling, and I think there are strong reasons to suspect that the woman really is quite ill or at least not medically fit for the job.  Among these, mixing up 'husband' and 'opponent' when talking about Trump.  Probably the main one was freezing up due to some supposed protester at a speech and having a handler/personal trainer/nurse passing himself off as secret service rush the stage to rescue her by talking her down.  The same dude is noticed lending other assistance, and it looks to me like he might have even injected her with something to snap her out given the way she jumps just before getting back into reality.

Just recently Wikileaks released some more mails showing that 5 years ago Hillary and her top staff were worried enough about her mental issues and 'decision fatigue' to talk about what she might be afflicted with (Parkinson's was mentioned) and what kind of meds she might use to get her out of a funk.

Equally interesting to me, it seems that Hillary avoided modern meds in practice opting for dated varieties to help with thyroid deficiency problems and blood coagulation problems.  It almost seems to me that Hillary and/or her doctor may harbor a dis-trust of the pharma industry and what they are pushing these days.

And I'd rather work with raw data and apply my own corrections rather than with 'homogenized' data where the 'corrections' are made by 'change agents' who have agendas and motivations which are blindingly obvious when viewed from a few steps back.

I doubt that Trump was 'a big fan of Obamacare'.  Even I could see what a train-wreck it was going to be before it went in, and at the time I was a proponent of 'single payer.'  One of the problems with the problem/reaction/solution theme from a humanitarian perspective is the collateral damage it creates both when it fails and when it succeeds.

Health care was to me and is still something I consider to be fundemental aspect of a functional state.  Like a road, it is something which needs to be universally available in order that everyone has an opportunity to succeed in other aspects of life if they choose to try.  The double-edged sword is that like education, it can be 'weaponized' against citizens by the corp/state apparatus as well, but this is drifting off topic.  Suffice it to say, I personally don't equate 'universal health care' to 'socialism' in a simplistic and direct way and Trump may not either.  You are of course free to do as you please but don't blame me for the failures of the Libertarians to gain any traction.

If in some Libertarian economic theory a segment of the population needs to be deprived of health care (or roads or whatever) in order for market forces to perform their voodoo, you are in luck;  even with 'universal access' there are some people who won't use it anyway.  Crazies like me, for instance.

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vokian in the post above provides a fairly obvious explanation for the tweet if it is not a hoax.  Trump has never been shy about how he played the game in his pre-politician days  I thought about pointing this out but doing so would have been out of sync with the content.

An understanding of 'climate change' involves about 2% physical science with the remaining 98% being a combination of political science, economics, history, etc.

In my observation, the 'skeptics' or 'deniers' who focus on the traditional 'hard science' aspects make quite a good account of themselves.  They have an easier task in this because it is to their benefit to reduce and simplify which is a key to starting the process of understanding.  Their counterparts on the 'consensus' side need to obfuscate and confuse in order to achieve their goals and this puts them at a disadvantage in head-to-head conflicts which, increasingly, the 'consensus' crowd seeks to avoid.

I'll speak for myself, but in some of the things I've heard Trump say, I suspect that he is somewhat in the same boat:

Back when Obama was first elected not a lot was known about him.  I think that the instinctive sentiment of most people was that he at least wished for the country to succeed in the way success was most commonly understood.  It was a rational expectation that Obama would have leveraged his status as 'the first black president' to foster improved cohesion.  When he at best neglected this task I suspect that a lot of thinking people were surprised.

In my observation it became clear very quickly that Obama was going to be a two-term president based on his activities which strongly favored the oligarchy class.  Only later did it start to dawn on me that even if it wasn't his idea to 'destroy be design' the U.S. and he was probably not himself an engineer in the task, he was perfectly willing to do whatever was asked in support of this project.  At that point a thinking person starts to ask 'why?'

One possible contributing factor in understanding Obama's disposition is that he is 'not born here.'  I don't know, and unlike others, I don't care that much.  There are many U.S. born people who 'hate America' just as there are many foreign born people who love it.  So, it's simply not an important factor in trying to unravel the mysteries of Obama's behavior as POTUS.

MS could not have come up with a better list of things which the Democrats are heading AWAY from.  And fast!

That is why I sense that a goodly number of Democrats, and especially us older ones, could find such a platform so appealing that we finally get around to trashing our voter's precinct card and getting another.  Until fairly recently there was no real hope for a preferable option because the alternative was equally repugnant.  IMHO, the 'drift' is more like a water-slide lately and it's carrying both parties in basically the same direction.

BTW, I'm not going to exclude 'radical evangelicals' from my comments about MS's list.  Using that term to describe the eco-fundies and scientismists (both those who hold Dem cards and those who do not) is stunningly appropriate.

Was reading Machiavelli last night.  A simple sounding strategy such as 'Divide, and Conquer' is easier said than done and there are a variety of pitfalls to watch out for.  "Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.'

Of course our two-party political system is a fraud and a sham and a puppet show evolved over many years with 'divide and conquer' as a key element.  On the other hand so are various other charades as expressed in other 'democratic' nations.  The two party system does produce a certain efficiency which has contributed to our 'sole superpower' status...for better or worse.

I would not rule out the possibility that mistakes have been made by the oligarchy in the frantic struggle against a usurper.  And again, it seems possible to exploit these and cause one of the families of failure that Machiavelli describes.  Seems worth a shot and especially so since the future of our nation really does seem to be on the line...



This would be a very solid foundation upon which to build.  I like simple and straightforward.

Yes indeed!

The Democratic party has shown itself as a honey-pot for all of the slimy neo-cons, crony corporatists, war profiteering leaches, etc from the Republican party.  To a degree these scum, who caused me to never even consider being a Republican, are neatly packaging and labeling themselves 'Never Trumpers'.  This would be a golden opportunity for the Republican party to be re-born since the bottom feeders are self segregating and flocking to the Democratic side on their own.

On top of that, I'm certain that the Democratic party contains a lot of decent people who are very disenchanted.  A 'rebirth' of the Republicans who tried to document and adhere to a better set of principles could probably attract many of these folks.

I think if that were true in a technical sense, I would have heard about it.  It is clear that Trump is quite 'liberal' in a lot of technical ways as am I and as are a lot of his friends.  The modern left have not let go the term 'liberal' and have dragged it behind their politics which are increasingly regressive in practice.

Trump and Sanders are, to me, in the same category: Insurgents.  Both attempted to capture and ride the machinery of the Republican and Democrat parties respectively.  Unfortunately for Sanders, his skill levels did not rise to the level necessary to win his battle.  Trump's did.  Sanders had a somewhat tougher struggle as well since the Democrat machine was more corrupt (e.g., Wasserman-Shultz), more rigged (e.g., 'superdelagates') and generally more efficient.

While Sanders and Trump both had the advantage of popular support in their respective insurgencies, Trump's was much more overwhelming and it includes Dems, Liberals, and Progressives who label themselves as such under older and more technically and logically consistent definitions.

At the end of the day, Sanders runs out the clock in his newly acquired third home on the lake and is unlikely to be heard from again.  Trump (hopefully) goes on to save our nation from it's near-death close call and I hope will also forge the Republican party into a lean, mean fighting machine with elements of real liberalism and progressivism when these are of use in Making America Great Again and trying to keep it that way.

(or Trump turns out to be a phony which is also possible.)

Sort of.  Pro-Jewish and Pro-Israel are not a completely overlapping set, and even then different people have different ideas of what 'pro-' means.

I've read that 'Well, ya, Soros did help round up a Jew or two for the Nazis but his heart wasn't in it and he quit after a few days.'  I wasn't there so I don't know, but he and his organizations are of enough importance to have more complete information if you have it.

A more interesting thing I think I recall reading about Soros was that he was picked up as something of an indigent waif by the Rothschild fam after the war and sent on to school.  I guess there was something they saw in him which they thought may be useful.  If it were that he was a Jew who had no compunction about rounding up other Jews for the gas chamber, that would be interesting to know.  I mean, it would tell us something about both Soros and about the Rothschilds.

Since you are into this sort of thing, what do you think of the current spate of stories that Soros is very much 'against Israel'?

One hypothesis I have is that he is not, but 'the joos' don't want him to give them a black eye as the world wakes up to his games.

Another (favored) one is that he is, or simply doesn't care.  That he's a genuine 'peak oligarch' and Israel is just another entity to use when/where it is useful and discard when it's no longer.  In this way, not unlike Kissinger.  Basically if people can at least assume that these two and others like them (ostensibly Jewish) would have Israel's back when the shit hits the fan, they could leverage the disproportionate power that 'jews' are supposed to posses in various countries.  If it is at some point advantageous to play Israel and it's potential destruction in the process of high priority goals, they would do so.