All I can say is that I have had to go through a background check for every gun I have ever purchased.  A huge number of people are, as best I can tell, not able to pass a background check for one reason or another.  If there even is a 'gun show loophole' or whatever I am dubious that it is a big problem.  As usual, reliable facts and figures on most of this stuff are not easy to come by.

I got a 22lr when I was 12 or so as a gift from my grandfather.  With minimal supervision I developed quite good safety practices.  The instruction I got was primarily of the form 'use the safety', 'never have a round chambered except right before firing', 'shoot in a safe direction', etc.  While a 22lr is probably closer to a pellet gun than it is to my elk rifle, it becomes quickly obvious that it can be a highly devastating thing to get shot with.  I've never had anything close to a close call and I've never shot in a direction that I regretted or later realized was unsafe.

Automobiles are, in my opinion, a much bigger threat guns.  A slight flick of the wrist on the part of the multiple people in the oncoming lane who I pass every time I go out will release vastly more energy against me than any firearm can muster.  I don't have any doubt that I am in much bigger danger from people with some combination of an automobile and an SMS capable cell phone than I am from my neighbors with whatever firearms they have kicking around.  Mix in the pharma products that in increasing use and which seem to be turning people into zombies with drivers licenses and the math becomes even more problematic.

I'll say again that all of my armed neighbors are the opposite of a danger to me in real life.  We all look out for one another and all but the most desperate and drugged out criminals know it and stay clear.  We happen to have what I believe to be relatively good law enforcement in the sheriff's department but they are highly under-staffed (I computed about 1 on-duty officer per 1000 square miles) and they are usually an hour away at best so we in our little community have no realistic option but to look out for ourselves.  I think that most of us like it that way.  I know I do.  It's an economical solution to an otherwise thorny problem.

Most Americans would probably say the same thing about citizens vs. motorized vehicles in many foreign countries.  For the most part it would be out of ignorance (associated with aspects of the second hand nature of information sources) and the lack of ability to think in a nuanced manner.

I live in one of the most heavily armed areas in the country and I rarely see examples of irresponsible use or hear reports of problems.  I hear neighbors shooting often but it doesn't bother me any more than when a vehicle goes by on the road.  One incident that made the news recently was where a homeowner held three home invaders at gunpoint and made them call the police to self-report the crime.  I would not call that irresponsible but rather just sort of funny.

'They' also know that at $15/hr a couple hundred 'protesters' can be called to beat up opposition supporters on the street.  For about the price of a cheap car a significant amount of terrorism can be purchased.  Now a law abiding citizen has a right to self defense and the 'protests', particularly in California, seem to be getting genuinely life threatening.  Furthermore the police seem to take very little interest in supporting victims who are being assaulted leaving self defense as the only option (aside from just staying home as I'm sure that some wish for.)

If the 'protesters' needed to worry about suffering injury as they try to dish it out it seems likely that even the more desperate of the hires would want more than $15/hr in compensation.  This would make 'protest' operations much more expensive for those who fund them.

When I was in the army the switch was made from full auto to three-round-burst for the standard issue weapon.  It's even difficult to train active duty soldiers to use full auto appropriately, and relatively uncommon to find oneself in a tactical situation where full auto is the best option.  At least that seemed to be the thoughts of the planners, and it made sense to me as well at the time.  The ArmaLite based weapon is actually a very comfortable form factor and the recoil is amazingly lite compared to larger caliber weapons.  Obviously these advantages are pertinent to both offensive and defensive use.

Bull.  Spendy doesn't personally believe the shit he's spewing.  If you 'respect' him it is almost certain that he doesn't respect you.  We are left to elucidate why he does what he does, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter much as this forum and Spendy and you and I and the rest of us are little specs of dust in a dusty corner of the net/matrix here.

I'm perfectly happy to defend Wakefield and the more I learn about the details of the medical and pharma industry and the humanitarians trying to mitigate the threats they pose, the more happy I am to defend the guy.

As for Wakefield's blood samples, yes I was aware of them and no, it doesn't strike me as a big deal as long as he didn't mis-represent any findings associated with them.  It also doesn't bother me that Hillerman got the mumps for his vaccine from his daughter.

What does bother me is that mumps is working less and less well and in order to keep their lucerative lock on the MMR market Merck had to flat out fabricate data.  This is especially pernicious because be using a defective vaccine a fairly begning childhood illness is being pushed into an older age catagory where it can cause real problems.  Of course it is true the 'thinkers' among us may not consider infertility among the masses as a 'problem' per-se.

Wakefield did an interesting missive on mumps as well if you are interested.  I find the science of general population ecology associated with vaccine regimes to be even more interesting than the science associated with individual response.  I also find 'meta-analysis' studies to be a rich in deliberate fraud.  Another good example is the '97% of scientists say...' one which is used ad-nauseam by the climate fraud crowd.

By a disappointingly high number of otherwise intelligent people, being analytical is automatically 'hatred' if any thought patterns can be construed as being at all negative toward any aspect of Zionism.  The phenomenon is a fairly obvious result of a dedicated and long running campaign of conditioning both within the 'Jewish' community and without.

It is disappointing to see this conditioning shut down coherent analysis of anything.   It is disgusting to see a person try to leverage the conditioning in order to try to win/shut down an argument or manipulate the behavior of others.

Or some pictures of those who's parents to 'succeeded'.

---

BTW, since the common cry when the guy's name is brought up is that he is a fraud, Dr. Wakefield's co-author was a wealthy individual who had half a million spare kicking around to 'clear his name.'  He did just this and in the process thoroughly humiliated the interests which demonized the research team.  Funny that this isn't reported so much.

http://www.ebcala.org/areas-of-law/vaccine-law/co-author-of-lancet-mmr-autism-study-exonerated-on-all-charges-of-professional-misconduct

According to this article the funding for Walker-Smith's defense was his insurance company, but the results were as described.

http://canadianliberty.com/?p=15347

Don't forget to have your newborn hit with with a Hep-B shot on their first day of life just in case they start shooting up and/or start having unprotected sex with street hookers as soon as they get home.  It may protect some kids all the way up to their teens...or may not.

Actually, you won't have to worry about forgetting;  usually the health care industry, at least here in the land of the free/home of the brave, will take care of this for you unless you are quite pro-active.

Good advice.  Should not be necessary to communicate it in this day and age, at least to those who control a pile of BTC, but probably doesn't hurt.


I'm not in agreement with this.  Even in mainstream-land there is quite a lot of information about 'mind scanning.'  Basically pulling information out of people's thought patterns using increasingly capable sensor technology and massive data crunching.  Trying to memorize a necessarily complex passphrase seems like one of the things which would make such technology even more effective, especially when coupled with the kinds of more base techniques of psychological manipulation available to those who hold a victim in captivity.

I would suggest engineering a solution whereby control of BTC is simply not available to the owner unless he/she are demonstrably free of influence from attackers.  There are many methods of doing this depending on the resources available to a given individual and threats to be protected against, and we can thank the real scientists/engineers in the community for developing them to the point of usefulness (e.g., Maxwell.)  It would be unwise to talk much about whatever selection of methods one has chosen for their own use.

I'm fond of the idea of making California more of a honey-pot for budding collectivists and U.N. 'sustainable' playground than it already is and encouraging a lot of people whom that appeals to to move there.  Maybe even advertise it as a 'Trump-free zone.'  Then at some point 'lose' it to Mexico or Aztlān or whatever.

Of course I don't live in California any more and when I did I considered myself a migrant worker and sent most of my excess earnings up North.  Not as far North as the Soviet of Seattle however.  My hopes for that and Portland is that it would similarly be 'lost' to Canada.  Betwixt the two (and right were I live now) I hope to become the sovereign nation of Jefferson (vs. the 'Jefferson State' which is an idea that has been bandied about for a while.)  As a legal framework basis we could borrow the United States constitution since it's not really being used any more.

I decided to mentally put in no more fiat than I was prepared to walk away from.  I decided that if I hit 10x, I would get my fiat money back, and this would allow me to hodl through thick and thin.  I decided to sell about half if I hit about 100x.  Most importantly, I decided that like almost any investment, speculative and otherwise, it was a decades long play and was always prepared to sit on my hands for years (as well as to lose it all.)

I'm not suggesting anyone do any one thing in particular, but I will say that having a plan that I had put some thought into has made it much easier to navigate the fairly volatile environment.   And also more lucrative in my case.

I've been around wood stoves all of my life and use one now.  No wood stove I've ever seen has melted.  Nor have even the thin steel stove pipes we used back in the day.  Considering that stoves are built to induce a draft when the damper is open, the hydrocarbon fuel is seasoned and of significant quantity compared to the steel by weight, the only sink for excess thermal energy is the air in the room, and fires are effectively indefinite in duration, that seems pretty amazing.  Wouldn't you say?

Some of the Saudis are claiming, basically, that elements within the U.S. 'did' 9/11 as a tail to pin on whatever donkey became a desired target.  And they already did so with Afghanistan (directly), Iraq (effectively through media), and the so-called ISIS (insofar as they are marketed as 'radical Muslims' and thus generally to blame.)

The Saudi outburst was spawned by the law working it's way through congress allowing lawsuites against them (which has already been spiked by Chuck Schumer not surprisingly.)  I don't dis-agree with the Saudi thesis though I've always felt that they played a minor role in supplying some patsies at least.

A very interesting element to this Saudi thesis is that there were very many conspicuously reported 'flags' implicating Zionists if not Israelis and/or Jews.  I've long felt that the design goal here was to make it clear to the mainstream media that they should clam up and run the other direction when it came to investigation and reporting on the event...and that that worked extremely well.  Another element that I didn't consider until the Saudis said it was that it would allow the cross-hairs to be leveled at Israel herself if need be at some point in the future.

FWIW, I believe that a variety of people with Zionist sympathies did play a variety of much more important roles in the event than did any Saudis.  I don't believe that Netanyahu himself had anything more than a vague idea that something was cooking, and probably not even that.  Several reasons for this.  1) it would be dangerous and stupid for him to have, and 2) he seemed unprepared to produce an appropriate response to the event immediately after it happened.  GW Bush same.

After studying it with some diligence I saw more than enough for my tastes.  Your credibility on such things is bouncing around zero thanks to the performance on the 9/11 thread.

Ah, Sheldon Adelson.  Who would have thunk it?

Perhaps Trump is reading both this forum and my posts and took my advice to 'never pick a VP who is more desirable to the establishment than himself' if he values his life and wants to get certain things accomplished for the United States and it's people.  Definitely not Newt (Johnson incarnate) Gingrich!  Of course it doesn't take a rocket scientist to come up with that formulation.

After a most unusual convention (I'm stockpiling popcorn) we'll see the Dem's fielding a Biden/Warren ticket.

That is a fine-tuning of my earlier predictions.  I stand by my prediction that if the Repubs cannot figure out a way to get rid of Trump we have a damn good chance of seeing some mixture of next 911, war, and economic collapse and will be damn lucky to have elections at all.  For my part, I'm trying to analyze Trump's leadership abilities more generally than as a 'traditional' president.

I just ran across a clip which gives me as much hope as just about anything that Trump is 'good people' in my own way of looking at things:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72wM6cqPS-c

When Donald Trump throws a big juicy steak in front of his adversaries (collectively, the mainstream media, Dems, Repubs, etc) they may someday learn to bite into it with some care.

Consider the case of the honorable judge Thor White-Mann.  He was selected to find justice in the the Trevon Martin - George Zimmerman case (as I recall.)  Some cretins thought he would not be able to produce a fair trail 'just because he was white.'

Judge White-Mann was born in South Africa (to white parents working fervently for PW Botha's regime, but of course that doesn't matter.)  Being born in Africa makes him default to be fair to Africans.

Judge White-Mann is quite active in efforts to help white youth integrate into mixed neighborhoods and get the ethnic ratio up into a more 'fair' number.  So interested in this project was Judge White-Mann that he was a leading member of 'The Aryan Brotherhood Lawyers Assn'.  Of course it is totally absurd to suggest that said organization has any 'affiliation' with 'The National Aryan Brotherhood Council' and anyone goes against the unassailable research of the mainstream media to suggest such an association is crazy...even if they find screen caps of links on the lawyers association web pages.

edit: wrong Botha

The way I remember things, Gore didn't get serious with his climate scammery until after he was robbed for the presidency.

The main diff between the Gore types and the Cheney types is how many cycles before we had one-world govt.  Clinton(both)/Gore/Obama seem to be ready for it yesterday.  Cheney et-al in their PNAC paper were arguing that the U.S. could have another hundred years of uni-polar dominence after which a one-world govt would likely be unavoidable.  That is to say, the 'New American Century' was the last window where anyone could pull off such a thing.

My best hope for Trump is that he is on the side of those of us who believe that a one-world govt is extraordinarily risky, simply not necessary at all, and that a multi-polar world where friendly competition is the norm is possible and perpetually sustainable and provides the best results for the highest number of ordinary people.  And a much more interesting and durable world to boot.

Actually, Silverstein could rightly be construed as a decent and humane guy if he got as many people out as possible and minimized the fatalities encountered in the event.

As bad as the reported 2500-ish fatalities of the event, it was amazingly low considering the size and nature of the buildings.  And it seemed to be mostly just lower-end people like fire-fighters and janitorial staff who ate the big one.  Oh ya...and the people from the interesting firm 'Marsh & McLennan' who were instructed to be in the offices for a meeting while their boss teleconferenced in.  Sometimes being stuck in traffic works out OK.

I remember from back near the start of this thing, before the memory hole made it's giant sucking sound, word of the 'Odigo' Israel based instant messaging platform sending out a warning to it's patrons to get the hell out some hours before the event.  I even remember that there was to be some investigation of who sent the IM, but I never did hear how that work panned out.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading that miraculously no Israeli citizens were killed in the buildings when they did a count by nationality of the victims.  I do remember one individual purportedly killed on one of the planes who was, IIRC, an Israeli national.  Head of Akamai Technologies which was an organization that was a quasi-competitor of a company I was working for at the time.  That is mainly why I remember it.