Cryptocurrency

Our financial system is corrupt and oppressive. Cryptocurrencies represent an opportunity to route around that system, and make lots of money doing so.

Cryptocurrency is real, and presents the opportunity to make enormous amounts of money. Also, cryptocurrency scams are real, and present the opportunity to lose enormous amounts of money. Like the dot-com bubble in the 90s, you can add the concept of blockchain to just about anything and have a ‘business’ worth millions, no matter how idiotic the original idea. The vast majority of initial coin offerings are investments in businesses that are not providing anyone with any value, have no real customers and no obvious prospect of ever having any real customers.

The successful altcoin will be genuinely decentralized, as bitcoin was designed to be, originally was, and to some extent still is. Most of the altcoins, possibly all of them except the Bitcoins and Ethereum, are furtively centralized.

It will use, or at least offer the option, of Zooko type wallet names, as Bitcoin and Ethereum do.

It will be scalable to enormous numbers of transactions with low transaction costs, as Steemit and Ripple are, but Bitcoin and Ethereum are not.

It will support sidechains, and exchanges will be sidechained.

It will be a blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is, and will be a decentralized blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is not.

Every website reporting on the altcoin boom and the initial coin offering boom has an incentive to not look too closely at the claimed numbers. Looks to me that only Bitcoin and Steemit.com have substantial numbers of real users making real arms length transactions. Maybe Ethereum and Ripple also. The rest are unlikely to have any significant number of real, arms length, users. The white papers don’t tell you the qualifications of the people running the operation, or what they are going to do, what milestones they hope to reach.

The crypto coin business is full of scammers, and there is no social pressure against scammers, no one wants to look too closely, because a close look would depress the market. There is no real business plan, no very specific or detailed idea of how the coin offering service is going to be of value, how it is going to get from where it is now, to where it is going to usefully be. It is very hard to find out how many real users a crypto currency has, and how much stuff is available denominated in that crypto currency.

Most of the alt currencies are just me-too copies of bitcoin, not adding any substantial value, and/or they cannot scale, and they are deceptive about how centralized and how vulnerable to state attack they are. Nearly all of them are furtively centralized, as Bitcoin never was. They all claim to be decentralized, but when you read the white paper, as with Waves, or observe actual practice, as with Steemit, they are usually completely centralized, and thus completely vulnerable to state pressure, and quite likely state seizure as an unregulated financial product, thus offer no real advantage over conventional financial products. When you buy an initial coin offering, you are usually buying shares, usually non voting shares, in a business with no assets and no income and no clear plan to get where they will have assets and income, as in the dot com boom.

The numbers show that Bitcoin is number one, ethereum number two, ripple number four, and steemit.com number eighteen, but my wild assed guess is that Bitcoin is number one, steemit number two, ethereum number three. I have absolutely no idea where ripple stands. No one is providing data that would enable us to estimate real, arms length users.

Bitcoin exchanges are banks, and banks naturally become fractional reserve institutions. Bitcoin exchanges are furtively and secretly investing customer deposits, without reporting the resulting term transformation.

Genuinely free market banks, and bitcoin exchanges are genuinely free market banks, have a financial incentive to engage in term transformation – borrow short, lend long. Which is great for everyone until a rainy day comes, rains on everyone, and everyone withdraws their deposits all at the same time, and suddenly all those long term loans cannot be liquidated except at a loss, whereupon the banks exchanges turn to the state, and so begin the transition from a backed currency to a state currency, ceasing to be free market banks.

The trouble with fractional reserve is that free market banks, banks trading in a backed, rather than state, currency, tend to deny, understate and misrepresent the term transformation risk, making them slowly, and often unintentionally, drift into becoming scams. If the reserve fraction is visible to customers, then we could rely on caveat emptor. Right now, however, every bitcoin exchange is drifting into becoming a scam.

We need, and we could easily have but do not have, a system where the amount of bitcoins owed to customers by an exchange is knowable and provable, and the amount of bitcoins owned by an exchange is knowable and provable, so that the reserve fraction is visible, whereupon the exchange would have to provide information about the extent and nature of its term transformation, or else would likely lose customers, or at least would lose large, long term customers. This would involve the decentralized cryptocurrency making each exchange a sidechain operating a centralized cryptocurrency backed by the decentralized cryptocurrency. Which would also help mightily with scaling.

Bitcoin and ethereum is truly decentralized, in that it is a protocol that any entity can use, and that in practice lots of entities do use. If the government grabs some hosts, or some hosts do bad things, they can just be ignored, and the system continues elsewhere. They also use Zooko type identities, which in practice means your wallet name looks like line noise. This is outstandingly user hostile, and a reason so many people use exchanges, but it provides the core of resistance to state power.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin and Ethereum face scaling limits. Maybe ethereum will fix its scaling limits. Bitcoin does not seem to be fixing them. This makes Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions inherently expensive, which is likely to prevent them from replacing the corrupt and oppressive US government controlled financial system.

Steemit.com has a far superior design which does not result in scaling limits – although we have yet to see how its witness election system will perform at scale – as the system scales, money holders have less incentive to vote, less incentive to vote responsibly, and voting will inherently cost more.

Steemit.com is also highly centralized. The altcoin that will win will be the one needs to be scalable all the way to Visa and Mastercard levels, and needs to be visibly decentralized, visibly resistant to state seizure, and needs to have a mechanism that makes the fractional reserves of exchanges visible to exchange users.

Bitcoin was genuinely decentralized from the beginning, and over time became more centralized. Big exchanges and a small number of big miners are on the path to inadvertently turning it into another branch of the oppressive and corrupt government fiat money system.

The new altcoin offering are for the most part not genuinely decentralized. They have a plan for becoming genuinely decentralized some time in the future, but the will and ability to carry the plan through has not been demonstrated.

I like the steemit design. The witness system is scalable, the witness election system has problems which may be fixable, or may be inherent.

But I have a suspicion that investing in steemit is only going to profit whoever owns steemit.com, not the owners of steemit currency.

According to Steemit documentation, it looks like a well designed cryptocurrency that deserves to replace Bitcoin, because it is more scalable, more user friendly, and more immediately usable.

Well, that is what it looks like. Except its front end is the steemit.com website, and any one website can easily be seized by the feds. If actually decentralized, it should be a bunch of websites using a common crypto currency and a common identity system,

Remember usenet: A common protocol, and an internal name system. The particular host through which you accessed it did not matter all that much, because all hosts had to behave much the same. Steemit should be something like usenet with money, and it is not.

The way usenet worked, anyone (meaning anyone’s computer and his client program) could join as a client by having an agreement with a host, and anyone (meaning anyone’s powerful and well connected computer system) could join as a host by having an agreement with a few existing members.

A successful altcoin needs to be a blogging platform like Steemit, but it also needs to be a federation, like Usenet or Mastodon. Many of the blogs will be offering goods or services for cryptocurrency.

Then one could be more sure that success of the federation currency would benefit owners of the currency, rather than owners of a single central website.

Needs to be Mastodon with the ability to support a blog like post, and like Steemit, and unlike Mastodon, to send and receive money. Steemit.com is wordpress.com with the ability to send and receive money.

Bitcoin has a decentralized name system, rooted in Zooko style names that are not human intelligible. Its resistance to state power comes partly from the fact that there are several miners and anyone can be a miner, and partly from its decentralized name system.

Steemit has a communication and blogging system. But if I hold steemit currency, steemit.com connects that to my phone number, which the government connects to my true name. All that handy dandy data that the government would like all in one place that you can serve a warrant on or mount a raid on. Or just sell for profit.

Need a decentralized communication, identity, name, and blogging system, unlike Steemit.com’s centralized communication and blogging system, and a name system that is resistant to government intervention and control, like Bitcoin’s name system. Thus the blogs offering goods and services for crypto currency will be resistant to regulation or seizure by the state. When a ruler meddles as much as our state does, he gives dangerously great power to those dangerously close to him. The regulatory state inevitably drifts into anarcho tyranny, or, like Venezuela, into violent and chaotic anarchy.

But we also want human readable names. How can we square Zooko’s triangle? (As Aaron Schwarz famously asked, and then infamously gave a very stupid answer.) I will give my answer as to how a crypto currency can square Zooko’s triangle in a following post. (The answer being, much as namecoin does it.)

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90 Responses to “Cryptocurrency”

  1. […] That’s not to say that some decentralized IT currency meme can’t be interesting, but BTC definitely isn’t it. You want something that you can run on a rooted phone, and be self contained there. You need hundreds of GB and lots of time for confirmations to verify transactions yourself with Bitcoin. Storage footprint and latency need to be improved by orders of magnitude. Then UX also needs to be vastly improved. But that will all be to get a product that is still vastly inferior to cash in terms of security and reliability. […]

  2. Cavalier says:

    I’ve discovered a steel frame building that collapsed after a fire.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPGr4D1-zDI

  3. Alrenous says:

    Same-coin sidechaining seems best. Create a subchain treating the quarantined coins as a genesis block, and the amounts accounted for originally assigned to their original owners. Perhaps include an invitation to some specific miners, because not all miners will want to bother trying to hash a small subchain. As long as the general pool verifies the hash, you retain byzantine fault tolerance. Essentially allows on-chain banking.

    Also, the gestalt wallets would be good for compressing the chain. Make a gestalt every 500 megs or so, that simply takes all wallet amounts and redistributes them to their original owners. The history can then be read as a summary of these checkpoints. Further, the full chain would still be compatible, as it includes the checkpoints, and a few versions of it floating around would help keep the summary honest. Not that it’s necessary. At some point transactions become of only archaeological interest, and in any case BTC’s chain already has plenty of data for that.

    As a bonus, the subchains form backups in the case of overwhelming miner dominance. If the 50%+ hasher decides to start committing fraud, owners can roll back to a subchain and restart the coin from there.

    I see sidechaining as a distinct coin loss risk. If you want to be on another chain, then simply sell your BTC in exchange for the whatever coin. If you insist on hedging against volatility, call options exist.

    What you want is some sort of chain merging protocol, to deal with the fact eventually wallet loss will remove all BTC from circulation, which simultaneously allows sidechains in a defrauded pool to find each other and initiate trade. Or perhaps a meta-coin exchange?

  4. Glenfilthie says:

    Do you prefer cryptocurrencies to stackable precious metals, Jim?

  5. Cavalier says:

    Nothing could be more relevant: https://xkcd.com/538/

    Governments cannot govern technology, but they can govern people — and do.

    • jim says:

      Their capability to govern people is easily overwhelmed if they try to meddle too much, and in fact is being overwhelmed right now.

        • Iviking says:

          I spent years saying its impossible in an open country to have conspiracies like 911 etc, In short contemptuous of particularly this theory. Then started looking into it and it actually does look pretty damn suspicious, if it didnt sound so crazy Id go farther.And build 7 is the most damning of all. Certainly if you decided you needed an excuse to turn a nation with constitutional anti surveillance into a police state this would be how to do it. And if you actually thought muslims did it you wouldn’t increase their immigration. One thing I used to say to those who believed this is that if you truly think your govt did this you have a duty to immediately destroy them.THis may be why this and other open secrets continue to be denied the implications are too apocalyptic. HBD is a good example at least for me, once I went back to bell curve and the follow ups including NRX work, I immediately grasped if this were true it was the end of the world as we understood it.It took a couple years to really accept it, yet oddly I had always been a race realist, when bell curve first came out it didnt surprize me of course we didnt realize whites would be don to 60% in a couple decades.
          It occurs if you were planning to flood western nations with a majority of non whites you might anticipate needing a police state to keep the opposition in line.

          • Cavalier says:

            Yeah, 7 is pretty damning, but not as much as you’d think — because nobody knows about it. Funny, ain’t it? Total memory-hole.

            And there’s always this bizarre video.

            And La Wik:

            https://web.archive.org/web/20040619055803/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

            >The extremely rapid collapse of the World Trade Center surprised many people, not least the emergency personnel caught in the buildings. The reason lay in the way that the WTC had been designed, held together by vertical steel columns, bound to each other using ordinary steel trusses. The strength of the steel drops markedly with prolonged exposure to fire, and it becomes more elastic the higher the temperature. In both cases this eventually weakened the structure to the point of collapse. However, the two towers collapsed in markedly different ways, indicating that there were in fact two modes of failure. See main article for details.

            >Larry Silvertstein, who held a seven-week-old lease on One and Two World Trade Center, claimed in a documentary that aired on PBS, that he, jointly with the New York Fire Department, made the decision to deliberately demolish Seven World Trade Center, also known as the Solomon Building, which he also owned, and which was then the headquarters of the crisis and disaster command center for the mayor of New York City. FEMA’s report on the demolition contradicts this public admission by Silverstein.

            Pre-converged Wikipedia?? To compare it to today’s article I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

            God, I often wish I’d been born in 1823 and died in 1913.

          • Cavalier says:

            Partially pre-converged, I guess. An exercise in interest nonetheless.

          • Cavalier says:

            Finally, I differ on one critical point. The nature of 9/11 makes it less a duty for one to rebel, for his sovereign, faceless and nameless though it is, is all the more terrifying.

            • Iviking says:

              I worked in the trade centers several times and well rembered their different construction technique which was one reason i bought the story for so long. They used open trusses instead of drwn steel beams, now they like all skyscrapers at least in ny are heavily fireproofed all steel and the underside of the 5″ concrete decks that make the floors.But I once did an embassy that had been bombed in the mid 80s and remembered how even heavy steel bms can be deformed by the bomb and I suppose fire, we know coal burns at a low temp but in a blast furnace it make enough heat to melt steel I reasoned the elevator shafts might have acted as a bellows.

              But to take a building down by explosion takes months of planning and studying the structure designing the charges the cordite burning placements etc, theres no wy they did that the day of while it was on fire and now they deny they did, silverstein I doubt was in on it or if was would let it slip. I think that tape was him meaning letting it burn down as opposed to trying further to save it.It seems like if they had put cordite in there and the plane that was supposed to hit it got sidetracked lol then that would be embarrassing so they just blew it and hoped to play it off.

              Even the other towers seem to be proven they fell so fast that it could only be if they had nothing resisting the fall beneath them imn other words they couldnt have benn collapsing the floors from the weight above because that would have slowed the collapse and it collapsed almost as fast as if dropped from the sky. Another thing is the sparks coming from the sides of the towers, decades in construction and I only know of one thing besides cordite that does that and thats using a bow torch even them a couple of feet of sparks in calm air.Yet they are right the films clearly show showers of sparks as if the plane blew out the skins of the building that was supposed to mask the cordite cutting the beams.oops.

              Its almost understandable that we have let this go unnoticed its just too impossible to believe so no one does and the few who do are easily dismissed. I wouldn’t have thought that possible but I think i was wrong because theres certainly enough reason to do a much better inquiry and even thats not done. If deep state did this then they there is nothing they wouldn’t do and the implications of that are, well they mind blowing. If they did this I doubt theres any record but while they probably killed most of the grunts they couldnt have killed the big shots who would have had to have approved it, did the president know? I actually think we only get to vote on compromised candidates but maybe trump got them off guard

              • Cavalier says:

                Yes.

                And:

                >If deep state did this then they there is nothing they wouldn’t do and the implications of that are, well they mind blowing.

                Yes^2.

                >did the president know?

                Bush, Sr. was the head of the CIA, so yeah. And if you look at the footage from right after Trump first met with Obama, you can see an enormous burden weighing him down. I think Trump already knew about 9/11 specifically — he was on media programs talking about bombs before the narrative was fully “normalized” — but he probably learned a whole lot of other crazy shit. Obama always struck me as a decent guy, impotent for the most part, effete, and an Alinskyite faggot, but affable.

                I was too young and too extremely skeptical even at the youngest ages to be irrevocably affected by the propaganda, but when even Jim denied the physical impossibility of the Official Story of 9/11, I realized that we’re all just well and truly fucked. “””They””” can literally override people’s understanding of the world in the rawest, realest, most physical sense. This is a power I don’t fully understand. I can only say that it doesn’t align with forming a “landing team”, waltzing into Washington, and expecting to thereupon assume direct control.

                I’m probably going to punch out pretty soon. Jerking off on the Internet has made me world-class at rhetoric, but given little else.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  What’s the long term plan behind 911? Right now everyone blames Saudi and some even blame Israel. Not sure that the deepshit state wants that.

                  Also, if the plan was to get Americans behind the surveillance state (American panopticon), pretty sure the CIA has fucked up with 911, but succeeded with other projects – I’d say they control about 5% of the whole internet, and that’s a conservative estimate.

                  Perhaps there was no long term plan, only short term. Would like to hear Jim’s take.

                • Iviking says:

                  There seems to be a fair amount of evidence that they might have had the goods on both mccain and obama i dont see why they would ever tell anyone about shit like that rather kill as many as possible but have presidents you can manipulate by having been behind them from the beginning and have the goods on them in case they decide to get heroic.I do increasingly wonder if the explanation for why why why would elites do things like population replacement may go back to the 40s and maybe we are actually a communist country if so they seem to have resolved to be a semi communist world govt probably because soviet collapse so definitive. more likely theyre just assholes who think they know best and are pretty well compromised by progressives and jews who are not too far apart on policy.
                  say its the 80s and your a big shot and the rand corp and 17 intel agencies etc tell you all this malthusian stuff and you say hmm well its not nice to just release a virus and kill off the third world but the whites will never put up with the alternatives just have to manipulate everything and steer this ship the way its supposed to go according to my thinking because i can do that cause the rand corp and world bank report to us. I can see that sort of thinking leading to 911 especially if in the meantime you had jews and commies infiltrating you since the 30s and they too want a world order so why not get you to do their bidding while they continue to pwn you. If thats the case I think the jews and progs have at this point through obama taken complete control of the deep state because while trumps a dunce he was pretty much right about what should be done and only evil people are going to continue to insist on third world immigration, outsourcing all tech and industry to our enemies, etc.
                  I have been trying to stay off these blogs myself but its a bit addictive and I lurk then come back, Im about to start a new business so I will have to soon anyway though past few days has about done it. I gave up on Land I don’t really think moldbug has it figured out and alt right not smart enough we will see maybe something will work out people are ready I can live in chaos Im prepared I just want the nigger immigration to stop you cant recovr from that.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  To explain what I mean by my claim about them controlling the internet, I’d that the majority of conspiracy websites — UFOs, Illuminati, and the like — are CIA honeypots. Actually, the correct term is distractions. Btw, the CIA has great sense of humor, see:

                  https://www.thedailyplane.com/wp-content/gallery/n30/jBTvgjB.jpg

                  (“CIA internet disinfo unit”)

                  The Daily Plane is likely a CIA distraction centered around (heh) Flat Earth. In fact, the CIA folks come up with conspiracies about plenty of subjects. They run websites, blogs, they have bots, they have shills – most of the conspiracies surrounding the CIA itself are maintained by the CIA. When you can no longer tell truths from falsehoods, they win. And indeed, it’s difficult to disentangle the lies from reality. Kurt Nimmo the “conspiracy” writer is right about some things and wrong about others, but I think he too understands that the disinfo runs very deep. You should check out his stuff.

                  The CIA also run some nazi sites, btw. But they stay away from the alt-right, because the alt-right is exactly the kind of “nazism” they don’t want to see. Rather, they attack the alt-right and counter-signal it. They also hate NRx and the Manosphere. Interestingly, I’ve seen them targeting Ramzpaul, yet Ramzpaul himself appears to be some kind of plant. Perhaps he’s FBI, like David Duke. Huh.

                  Mostly though, they control the conspiracy section of the internet, and who knows what else. I think Lasha Darkmoon and John Kaminski are on their payroll. The entire Rense crew are suspicious. Not sure about Henry Makow. And of course, I’ve already made my stance about pizzagate being a CIA psyop known. The aforementioned Kurt Nimmo sorta agrees with me on this one. Above Top Secret and /pol/ are full of disinfo shills.

                  The drug trafficking stuff should get more exposure, IMO.

                • jim says:

                  That the 9-11 conspiracy theories are sponsored by the CIA would explain a great deal.

                  By generating a pile of absurd and easily falsified claims about plots, they obfuscate real plots.

                  Thus, for example “Jet fuel cannot melt steel” (indeed it cannot, but it can make steel as soft as butter)

                  And “Building so and so free fell straight down on its own footprint” – no it tilted to one side, then it free fell, and destroyed a pile of stuff in its vicinity.

                  And “Building so and so was not hit by a plane, and yet it fell” (Building so and so had huge holes in it, had bits of human bodies shot into it like shotgun pellets, had massive structural damage, and was on fire.)

                • Cavalier says:

                  >no it tilted to one side, then it free fell, and destroyed a pile of stuff in its vicinity

                  The top half tilted. The bottom half melted vertically into the ground. “Half” meaning not really “half” but “above impact” and “below impact”. This is not evidence that a plane caused it to collapse, but evidence of how hard it really is to demolish a building in a controlled manner: straight down. The impact of the plane was not sufficient to itself take down the building (lol) (watch the buildings as the planes hit; they don’t move; they don’t even shudder), but evidence that the plane did have an effect: the slight disruption of the perfect simultaneous blowing out of the building’s structural support that takes place in any controlled demolition, without which the demolition is a failure and catastrophe ensues.

                  >(Building so and so had huge holes in it, had bits of human bodies shot into it like shotgun pellets, had massive structural damage, and was on fire.)

                  I don’t know the exact strength or durability of WTC 7, nor any other steel frame building in particular, but my normally quite good mechanical instincts suggest to me that, in general, a steel frame building can lose half of its support columns and remain standing, unperturbed. The worst imaginable failure mode to bring down a steel frame building is that so many support columns are severed (75%?) in such a concentrated pattern that the entire building tilts to one side, as on a lever or axle or something, and tilts fully over, like a falling tree, crushing everything underneath. You have never seen a tree melt into itself vertically into the ground, nor can imagine the thought of that event occurring, but it is in fact more physically possible than a steel frame building doing the same.

                  I assert with absolute confidence that no open-air fire has ever brought down a steel frame building. Why? Poster girl principle. I went looking for one, and I couldn’t find one. I looked in the WTC 7 NIST whitepaper (a perfect, perfect example of your “consensus” theory of peer review/committee/modern “science”) and the examples they gave literally made me laugh out loud in their absurdity. I also found a to-my-knowledge comprehensive survey of building collapses for the past roughly 30 years, and there was not a single instance of any steel frame building collapsing in upon itself, except for three on 9/11. Finally, I found a very interesting website dedicated apparently to collating the effect of fire on steel frame buildings, and while some of them were severely warped, none of them spontaneously melted into the earth, and none of them toppled. I am also aware of a scale model done of WTC 1/2 done to test its failure mode; the results were either never published. I have posted these links before; please feel free to review them.

                  >That the 9-11 conspiracy theories are sponsored by the CIA would explain a great deal.

                  The CIA created and sponsored the very idea of “conspiracy theory” itself. I have no doubt that the CIA, and likely other organizations as well, sponsors disinformation campaigns.

                  There is of course this famous quote>: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” — Director of the CIA

                  Somebody was undoubtedly behind this guy, for example (same guy? (I just stumbled upon this one)). And then there’s the UFO thing. And the “no planes” thing. And the missile thing (except for the Pentagon). And the “crazy physics superweapon” thing. All bullshit. And others, unrelated to 9/11, like the “flat Earth” thing, or the HAARP thing. All bullshit. Though at least the HAARP thing is highly interesting.

                  But, I have to tell you, maan, my reasoning is free of CIA (or others) propaganda, because, as I explained to Alrenous a little bit earlier, the “base” of my reality is jiggling molecules in three-dimensional space. The material world is my prior, and I fact-check everything against it, and I’ve been doing this (in combination with impromptu controlled experiments) for as long as I can remember.

                  So…

                  Was 9/11 a conspiracy?

                  Sure.

                  Was it a conspiracy of two dozen bumfuck Moslems masterminded by a guy with a sat phone in a cave on dialysis?

                  Nah, brah; nah.

                • jim says:

                  > > By generating a pile of absurd and easily falsified claims about plots, they obfuscate real plots.

                  > > Thus, for example “Jet fuel cannot melt steel” (indeed it cannot, but it can make steel as soft as butter)

                  > > And “Building so and so free fell straight down on its own footprint” – no it tilted to one side, then it free fell, and destroyed a pile of stuff in its vicinity.

                  > The top half tilted. The bottom half melted vertically into the ground.

                  Again, you are just barefaced lying. The half below the impact did not collapse, rather the part above the impact collapsed, and as it fell, crushed the part below the impact to rubble.

                  The top half falls exactly as one would expect of a building that has had its supports smashed and burned primarily on one side, the bottom half is crushed from the top down as though a mighty hammer comes down on it. The supposedly strange things about the fall of the towers simply did not happen. They collapse as one would expect from the the events.

                • peppermint says:

                  Did you see the CIA meme warfare unit plan?

                  They experienced the same hollowing out that the rest of the establishment experienced.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  Lately they’ve been pushing the “subliminal sexual messages in Hollywood films” meme (spoiler alert: penises) – and now everyone is looking for that stuff, whereas the Hollyjews are — quelle surprise — doing exactly as they are told by the very same CIA, re:

                  “… long standing relationship between the government and Hollywood. Specifically, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency and their influence over the film and television industry. […] investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker […] is calling foul on the upcoming Hollywood production American Made. The Movie American Made is allegedly based on the true story of the famous drug runner Barry Seal who allegedly worked for the CIA, the DEA and Pablo Escobar. Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker is an expert on the illegal drug trade, the CIA and Barry Seal.”

                  https://www.newsbud.com/2017/09/07/american-made-cia-hollywood-join-forces-to-spin-the-one-of-the-biggest-u-s-drug-lords/

                  That’s their modus operandi – whenever people start noticing that, gee, look who’s writing the scripts all over here, the CIA memes some bullshit irrelevant uninteresting fake theory about subliminal and pedophilic messages in random YouTube videos (as they’ve been pushing on /pol/, seen it in real time) and in sundry Hollywood films, so now your brain has been conditioned to look for this shit and worry about it, while the deep state propaganda continues uninterrupted to flow into your mind.

                  If lately you have been finding yourself thinking (“spontaneously” no doubt) about “subliminal messages in popular media,” this is not a coincidence – you’re being psy-op’d by the CIA. The CIA has always been obsessed with brainwashing, that’s what they know best, so it always takes center in their disinfo schemes, which are themselves a form of brainwashing. This latest meme is really same old, same old.

                  Go ahead, sheeple, keep looking out for those “subliminal messages in the videos” while the actual message — lies, deception, falsification of history, etc. — safely occupies your distracted mind.

                  Their memes are stronger than your realize, Peppe.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  In case my point isn’t clear: the “messages” you should be looking for are not weird and ambiguous symbologies in some random youtube vids, but pro-Cathedral Official Narrative propaganda disguised as “entertainment of the free world” in high budget movies.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  Expect Russians and Putin to be portrayed as villains in the next Hollywood productions – that’s CIA brainwashing right there. But no, the sheeple will instead look for “subliminal sexual messages.” Pathetic.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  I’d argue that if they actually put those “subliminal messages,” it’s for the sole purpose of distracting you — the supposedly skeptical viewer — from the actual propaganda right in front of you.

                  And just to be clear, there are tons of sexual messages and especially CIA-spawned sexual messages in the media – they are obvious, blatant, explicit, and straightforward, not at all “subliminal.” Whenever you hear talk of subliminal messaging, you’re being distracting from something real.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  You better start believing in CIA manufactured psy-ops…

                  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170925/16401838283/sesta-is-being-pushed-as-answer-to-sex-trafficking-epidemic-that-simply-doesnt-exist.shtml

                  Article is good. But, last paragraph it where he misses the mark:

                  “Human trafficking in the US does exist. No one’s denying that — and no one’s denying that it’s devastating for those victims and their families. But it’s not the multi-billion epidemic it’s portrayed as by politicians and SESTA supporters. The problem should be addressed, but there are plenty of laws on the books already that allow for the pursuit and prosecution of actual sex traffickers. Throwing third-party service providers into the mix does nothing more than allow the government to attack third parties (because it’s easier) rather than engage in the more difficult work of targeting traffickers themselves.”

                  No, there is no “sex trafficking,” and the government’s onslaught on “third party service providers” is not a means to an end – it is the end itself.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Again, you are just barefaced lying. The half below the impact did not collapse, rather the part above the impact collapsed, and as it fell, crushed the part below the impact to rubble.

                  >The top half falls exactly as one would expect of a building that has had its supports smashed and burned primarily on one side, the bottom half is crushed from the top down as though a mighty hammer comes down on it. The supposedly strange things about the fall of the towers simply did not happen. They collapse as one would expect from the the events.

                  Weak.

                  Your brain is not seeing what your eyes are seeing. You are lying to yourself and to your readers. Your blindness bores me. History as written down by our Chinese historians will attest to my position made here today.

                  If you have a serious argument, feel free to make it. Make sure to include any precedent or postcedent for the spontaneous, complete, free-fall collapse of any steel frame building, ever. Make sure to include Building 7. Make sure to mention Barry Jones Otherwise, yawn.

                  P.S. https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf

                • jim says:

                  This is absolutely typical of debates with 911 conspiracy mongers. The conspiracy monger makes argument A. But argument A is exposed as a total lie. So without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument A, he immediately presents argument B, which is then exposed as a total lie. So, without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument B, he then presents argument C.

                  Which behavior implies he knew perfectly well all along that arguments A and B were total lies.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >The conspiracy monger makes argument A. But argument A is exposed as a total lie. So without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument A, he immediately presents argument B, which is then exposed as a total lie. So, without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument B, he then presents argument C.

                  In this short interchange, here are the various points I’ve raised:

                  1. There has never been a steel frame building felled by fire on any date but September 11th, 2001, on which date there were three;

                  2. Larry Silverstein is on video saying that he gave the order to demolish Building 7;

                  3. I speculate that the average steel frame building can withstand losing half of its support;

                  4. It is literally physically impossible for a steel frame building to “melt” into the ground unless it is very carefully demolished;

                  5. In the past I provided a link to many examples of steel frame buildings completely consumed by fully uncontrolled fires, and in all cases after extinguishment the steel frame remained standing;

                  6. A primary source interview of a person inside Building 7 who almost died after being trapped by explosions in that building;

                  7. I vaguely recall reading about a scale model a group made to test how WTC 1 & 2 collapsed, and the results were never released;

                  8. A link to an article which addresses many other apparent inconsistencies of 9/11, though I cannot speak authoritatively as to their reliability.

                  And here are the points you have addressed:

                  Number 4: Nuh uh, it obviously happened, just look at the footage of WTC 1 & 2. I mean, just look! The building spontaneously started to collapse from the point of impact and just kept on going! Obviously it happened, because it did!

                • jim says:

                  > > The conspiracy monger makes argument A. But argument A is exposed as a total lie. So without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument A, he immediately presents argument B, which is then exposed as a total lie. So, without acknowledging any shift in position, or making any argument relevant to Argument B, he then presents argument C.

                  > In this short interchange, here are the various points I’ve raised: …

                  But you silently abandoned the earlier points you raised, such as the building falling straight down on its own footprint, and you will silently abandon these as well and proceed to proclaim new points, should I waste time addressing them.

                • Cavalier says:

                  > > But you silently abandoned the earlier points you raised, such as the building falling straight down on its own footprint, and you will silently abandon these as well and proceed to proclaim new points, should I waste time addressing them.

                  > Okay. I’ll repeat:

                  You are not repeating your earlier abandoned points but issuing new lies when I call you on old lies.

                  > 9. As one of the Twin Towers began to collapse (or both, but I don’t remember and haven’t checked), the spire very clearly tilted slightly to one side and the top “half” (the part above impact) could be seen to be slightly askew before it was fully ensconced in falling dust and debris. Nevertheless, the bottom “half” went straight downwards.

                  Your new point, like your old points, is a lie, and you know full well it is a lie, and will silently abandon it when I call it like all your previous points. The bottom half does not fall, does not go downwards, but is crushed from above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft2uIYucsXo&feature=youtu.be&t=3m00s

                  You issue a bunch of barefaced lies that are easily disproven, and when I present disproof, you make no attempt to defend them, but instead issue an even longer bunch of new lies that are also easily disproven. We could go on like this forever, but if one lie, all lies.

                • Cavalier says:

                  I have described what I see with my own eyes in the video. You call me a liar for describing what I see: the top half tilted slightly as the bottom half went straight down, without any toppling whatsoever. Fine. Let’s converse about the remaining eight points. Knowing you, and your wonderful dissection of such congenital bullshitters as pass through this small slice of teh interwebz, I think that you do not because you can not, because you are fatally inhibited by CRIMESTOP, as I once was.

                  I’ve made several easily falsifiable claims, notably: there has never been a steel frame building felled by fire except for three on the day of September 11th, 2001. I will not so much as budge from this claim unless you can find a counterexample. When I went looking, I could not find one; nor, I noticed, could NIST, as evidenced by their failure to include one in their comedic masterpiece on the collapse of Building 7; I suspect that you cannot either.

                  If you can oh so easily disprove my barefaced lies, then stop jerking off about disproving them, and disprove them. You’ve never been so coy before.

                • jim says:

                  > The bottom half went straight down, without any toppling whatsoever. Fine. Let’s converse about the remaining eight points

                  No let’s not converse about the remaining eight points.

                  Let’s settle this point:

                  Your one point about the lower part of the building falling, if true, is sufficient to prove your case, proves that 9/11 was an inside job.

                  If false, sufficient to discredit everything you say.

                  The bottom half did not go “straight down”. It was crushed, pulverized, from the top down. It did not fall. It did not move at all, except after being reduced to tiny little pieces.

                  If the bottom half had fallen, that would indicate explosive charges at the base of the building. But that is just not what happened. The bottom half does not fall, does not go downwards, but is crushed from above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft2uIYucsXo&feature=youtu.be&t=3m00s

                  If you won’t retract and explain why you said something that was obviously false, you are a bare faced liar, and if one point is a barefaced lie, all your points are barefaced lies.

                • Cavalier says:

                  Squid ink, kiwi.

                  I know the truth of 9/11, and I know that you know the truth of 9/11, because you are acting exactly as a progressive does when confronted with empirical evidence that Africans are literal retards by whitey man standards.

                  The prog MO: duck, dodge, evade. What is the consequence of failing to do so? “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” A fatal wrench of sensibility to the noggin, that’s what.

                  Just like the prog, you point to the one subjectively weakest point and mischaracterize it to the exclusion of all others. Just like the prog, you disregard the subtleties of fact and reason. Just like the prog, you switch with blinding speed from diversionary tactic to ad hominem.

                  I have presented the tip of a small iceberg of evidence of which I am aware. I have a veritable blizzard of primary, secondary, historical, and physical sources in reserve. I show the 8 strongest, most easily comprehensible ones, and you won’t even address them. I want to have a reasoned, rational debate informed by empirical evidence, of which there is a wealth, and you latch on to a peripheral, highly subjective side point and just won’t let go, like some borderline-retarded mutt with his first bone. Honestly, I find it offensive.

                  I know how you argue. I’ve learned a lot from you, too. You are capable of a lethal combination of logical dismemberment and rhetorical device. But, here, you engage in nothing but rhetoric with the thinnest veneer of empiricism, because once a commie, always a commie — you never fully killed your doublethink mechanism, only disabled it in some places.

                  If you for one moment could allow yourself to entertain the notion that the Cathedral is lying to you, to approach the “incident” from the skeptic’s point of view, as I did, you would come to understand as I came to understand — but you cannot allow yourself to do so, because deep in your bones, though you daren’t admit its existence to any part of yourself, however slightly, you know: apostasy is forever.

                • jim says:

                  One lie, all lies. If you will neither argue, nor concede, this point, you will not argue, nor concede one hundred similar points similarly pulled out of thin air. If I go to the trouble of similarly demolishing each of your eight other points, you will promptly conjure up another twenty points. Should I demolish each of your twenty points, you will come up with another eighty.

                  The one point, if true, proves your case, if false, proves that nothing you say can be believed.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >The one point, if true, proves your case, if false, proves that nothing you say can be believed.

                  I would never ask you to simply believe anything I have to say. I would ask you to disprove it. I have no interest in having my word taken as gospel. I want you to take my ideas and rip them to shreds, point by point.

                  I’m challenging you to falsify my statements where they are falsifiable, and where my statements, by their nature, are not falsifiable, disprove them to a threshold of reasonable doubt. That was how it worked in the olden days, wasn’t it? Someone (a scientist or a historian or whatever) would make an outrageous claim, and the validity of his argument wouldn’t be taken on the basis of his reputation, but would be “fact-checked” against reality: replication of experiment, primary sources, historical evidence, etc., and that validation process would extend to the whole of the argument, not just to one specific, tangential point. That’s what I want you to do.

                  My understanding of 9/11 is almost entirely independent of the subjective appearance of the falling of a Tower. It just simply is a peripheral topic. I stand by my earlier comments in that they reflect my direct visual observation, but the reason that it’s peripheral is because it just isn’t good, solid, objective evidence either way… which is why I can’t believe that you A) first brought it up yourself, and 2) are hinging your entire “argument” on it. If the whole weight of my argument rested entirely on the subjective interpretation of footage of the Tower(s) falling, then like everyone else I would still be a Belieber. Nor, beliebe it or not, am I wedded to the idea of being a “tin-foil” nutcase; I would much prefer to be talked down from the metaphorical ledge than continue to suffer under the conviction that the Cathedral is capable of quite deliberately, and in a highly sophisticated manner, cold-bloodedly killing nearly three thousand of its own subjects, many of them financial elites.

                  With regret, I cannot compel you to engage my ideas in a rational or empirical manner. Until or unless you choose honorably to duel with me, honestly and unburdened of rhetoric, on the eternal physics of a steel frame building, Larry Silverstein’s video, or some other similar low-hanging fruit, please consider this the termination of our pointless back-and-forth.

                • jim says:

                  > > The one point, if true, proves your case, if false, proves that nothing you say can be believed.

                  > I would never ask you to simply believe anything I have to say. I would ask you to disprove it.

                  I have linked to the disproof repeatedly. The bottom half does not fall, does not go downwards, but is crushed from above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft2uIYucsXo&feature=youtu.be&t=3m00s

                  You make lots and lots of quite remarkable assertions. It is not my job to disprove them. It is your job to prove them. And you just do not bother doing so. When one of your claims is challenged, you just issue half dozen new claims, claims equally remarkable.

                  > I’m challenging you to falsify my statements

                  But this rule works to the advantage of the shameless barefaced liar and the disadvantage of the person interested in empirical truth.

                  You need to prove. I don’t need to falsify. You can issue fresh lies a lot faster than I can do investigations that falsify.

                  Further, every single 9/11 conspiracist works like this. The only evidence ever given by a 9/11 conspiracist is to link to another 9/11 conspiracist saying the same thing, also without any evidence.

                • peppermint says:

                  Could CIA have done 9/11? Yes. Would CIA have done 9/11? Yes. Could CIA do 9/11 now? No, they aleady won, and victory has defeated the left.

                • Oliver Cromwell says:

                  If one accepts that the US government is evil enough to destroy the buildings, why does one reject that the US government is evil enough to do it by actually hijacking planes.

                  It is not that hard to hijack planes, especially if you have all the resources of the US governments. Plenty of utter yahoos have done it. It is rather hard to rig a building for controlled demolition in total secrecy in the centre of New York.

                • jim says:

                  Or by quietly sponsoring a group of genuine Muslim fanatics, in the same way it is rather openly doing to murder Syrians.

                  Indeed, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are subject states of the American Empire, and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia sponsored the people who hijacked the plains.

                  Villainous enough for me.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >If one accepts that the US government is evil enough to destroy the buildings, why does one reject that the US government is evil enough to do it by actually hijacking planes.

                  I can’t speak for Peppermint or Jim, but I accept that it is entirely possible for the US government to be evil enough to do either, or both. For me, however, there simply is not evidence enough to say for certain whether or not the US government hijacked any planes; however, I find it hard to believe that the Moslems were competent enough to do it alone (incl. taking control of the aircraft from the pilots, crew, and passengers; actually flying the plane; flying wildly off-course without being intercepted by an F-16 (which is something they can scramble in minutes, to your great sorrow should you happen to accidentally stumble into, for example, a Presidential TFR or the SFRA/FRZ around KDCA; and actually successfully hitting the Towers, something that’s much harder than you would imagine, especially flying at 400-ish mph (or whatever), especially especially for someone who had never flown a large plane before). Simulators can help a little bit, but they simply cannot replicate real-world experience. And remember: this was in the days of Flight Simulator 2000, which I played as a tyke — and to be honest, it kind of sucked.

                  On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the US government employs anyone dedicated enough to kamikaze a plane into a building.

                  A third possibility is that the planes were “hijacked” and thereupon flown remotely; the technology to do so had been tested for a decade at that point, if I recall correctly. However, without hard evidence, there is no way to say with any confidence — it may well have been unusually competent and lucky Moslems.

                • Cavalier says:

                  My comment has vanished.

                • Cavalier says:

                  Alright, fine. Forget everything I’ve ever said before. Complete clean slate. Okay?

                  Points and their standards of evidence:

                  1. There has never been a steel frame building felled by fire except for WTC 1, 2, and/or 7 (though whether 1 and 2 were in fact felled by jet-fuel-fueled fire varies by source and time of day);

                  1a. The definition of “felled” is as follows: total collapse into the ground into a pile of rubble à la WTC 1, 2, or 7; please refer to the respective photographic evidence for reference;

                  1b. Standard of evidence: find literally, literally any counterexample and I will concede the 9/11 argument entirely, become a Belieber once more, and, if I’m ever in your corner of the world, bring you a whiskey of your choice.

                  Done.

                  Things to consider:

                  1a. The first steel frame building was the Home Insurance Building. It was built in 1885, demolished in 1931, and Wikipedia, well, this is what she has to say: “[It is] generally noted as the first tall building to be supported, both inside and outside, by a fireproof metal frame.” There have been many thousands of steel frame buildings built in the last 132 years, and in those buildings there have been as many fires as there are anywhere else, some of them in trash cans, some of them in bank HQ bathroom toilets, and others which engulfed literally the whole of the building and burned completely uncontrolled for many hours;

                  1b. Please note the Historical Survey of Multi-Story Building Collapses Due to Fire conducted under the purview of NIST, the organization responsible for all (I believe) official reports of the WTC collapses, which themselves are available here;

                  1c. Please feel free to consult any shitty “conspiracy theory” website you like for compilations of factual and photographic evidence regarding buildings which did or did not burn to a crisp and did or did not collapse, as these are easily verifiable matters of public record;

                  1d. Please feel free to search “failed demolitions” on Youtube to viscerally see what happens when the carefully coordinated destruction of literally all of the support structure of a building fails to go according to plan.

                  “Why are the collapses of WTC 1, 2, and 7 absolutely without precedent in all of the last 132 years and many thousands of steel frame buildings all over the world?”, you should ask yourself. I will, in no way, shape, or form, back down from, or equivocate over, any points I’ve made here, nor will I distract from them with, or be distracted by, irrelevant, tangential, peripheral, meaningless, trivial, or subjective bullshit. I cannot disprove a nullity, nor can I provide evidence for something that does not exist.

                  And so I rest my case.

                  https://youtube.com/watch?v=WvweJ1lLcZc

                • jim says:

                  You point to a survey that reports no steel frame collapses caused by fire – but the survey would have excluded the 9/11 disaster because there were other major causes of collapse in addition to the fire. The survey excludes collapses where there were other major causes contributing to the collapse.

                • Cavalier says:

                  My second comment has vanished.

                • jim says:

                  I have not deleted any of your comments, but the spam filter inappropriately classified two of your comments as spam.

                  I have restored them.

                • alf says:

                  Cavalier, you misunderstand your position.

                  If you are correct, if there has been some mass conspiracy, your job is to show us the sleight of hand, e.g. like Jim’s pic of a farmer woman who was touching herself. Same pic, totally different context. THAT is persuasive.

                  Jim is even handing you the possibility: here is the video of the WTC collapsing, show us the sleight of hand!

                  But you’re doing nothing of the sort. You bring us endless laps of text with no substantive argument, just the usual ”’they”’ have got to you and only ”’I”’ see the truth. I mean seriously, you’re on a blog that discusses the literal collapse of the West yet your argument is that a skyscraper is so all-powerful that it can never collapse because of plane impact/fire? Come on.

                • Cavalier says:

                  Jim, please delete or ignore or otherwise prevent the botched post from appearing publicly. This next one will be fixed.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >But you’re doing nothing of the sort. You bring us endless laps of text with no substantive argument, just the usual ”’they”’ have got to you and only ”’I”’ see the truth. I mean seriously, you’re on a blog that discusses the literal collapse of the West yet your argument is that a skyscraper is so all-powerful that it can never collapse because of plane impact/fire? Come on.

                  Correct.

                  First, WTC 1, 2, and 7 could not have collapsed due to fire, as that is a physical impossibility — fire doesn’t get hot enough to melt, or sufficiently weaken steel — and has absolutely no peer, ever, before or since. Either the laws of physics were different on one day in 2001, or something else was afoot.

                  ===

                  Digression:

                  Plus, you know, 1 and 2 were specifically designed to withstand a 707. I can’t vouch for the veracity of that article, but I suspect it is probably factually correct. Of especial note:

                  Not only were the towers designed to survive crashes of large jet aircraft, but they were designed to potentially survive multiple plane crashes. This assertion is supported by Frank A. Demartini, the on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, who said on January 25, 2001:

                  “The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid—and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”

                  Demartini appeared to be so confident that the towers would not collapse that he stayed behind, after the airplane impacts, to help save at least 50 people. As a result of his actions, he lost his life on 9/11.

                  Link to video of Demartini.

                  He was just a construction manager, though; probably he didn’t know anything about buildings.

                  ===

                  In any case, once we acknowledge that these buildings didn’t come down of their own accord, the trail goes cold. We can speculate about remotely hijacked airplanes (which was within technological feasibility at the time), or other CIA involvement, or “Bush [Cheney] did it”, or read news articles like this one, or watch videos like this one, or notice this early report showing no evidence of a crashed plane into the budget analyst office of the Pentagon, or really it was just every single Eternal Jew on the planet engaged in typical devious kikery-conspiracy! GTKRWN etc.!!! — but really, there’s just no way to say for certain. We can only speculate (except for the last bit, which seems unlikely). And I do enjoy a good bit of speculation, but it isn’t a good way to make an argument, and it doesn’t do us a lick of good to pretend we know things without actually knowing them.

                  So, yes, all I really know about 9/11 is that shadowy “deep state” (whatever) forces were responsible, because even if Moslem Arabs were competent enough to fly two jets into three steel frame buildings on their first time at the controls, it wouldn’t have brought the buildings down.

                  So, yes, that really is my argument. Sorry it’s so disappointing. I really do wish I had more evidence of something, whatever it was.

                • jim says:

                  First, WTC 1, 2, and 7 could not have collapsed due to fire, as that is a physical impossibility — fire doesn’t get hot enough to melt, or sufficiently weaken steel

                  The first time you said this, it might have been an error. The next hundred times you said it, it was a lie. That fire gets hot enough to greatly soften steel is the basis of blacksmithing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrN6rEKCEac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA

                  If fire does not drastically soften steel, what the hell are blacksmiths doing?

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Jim is even handing you the possibility: here is the video of the WTC collapsing, show us the sleight of hand!

                  I don’t believe in subjective evidence. I much prefer to reference known scientific laws, scientific replication of experiment, or historical (or lack of historical) evidence. If I pretended to believe in subjective evidence, however, I would tell you to go compare the video footage of the collapse of WTC 7 with the video footage of known demolitions; there’s this great new thing called “Youtube”. WTC 1 and 2 were clearly nonstandard operations, but if 7 was demolished and then lied about by NIST, one’s Bayesian priors must be re-evaluated.

                • Cavalier says:

                  Because, Alfred, if you let the Cathedral define your null hypothesis, well then… good luck and have a nice life.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  Just to be clear, Cavalier: what’s your position on Sandy Hook aka “false flag Sandy Hooknose?”

                • Cavalier says:

                  >Just to be clear, Cavalier: what’s your position on Sandy Hook aka “false flag Sandy Hooknose?”

                  I am of the opinion that “the government” is willing and able to pull off a Sandy Hoax, and that pulling off a Sandy Hoax in which no one dies and a few low-grade actors are employed for a few days is one of the more innocuous things that “the government” does on a regular basis, including but not limited to: wars, coups, assassinations, drug trafficking, wars on poverty, Obamacare, income taxes, mass surveillance, private prisons, drug wars, drone strikes, and wars on emotions.

                  I have seen some mighty persuasive circumstantial evidence, most notably the Robbie Parkie fellow laughing and joking immediately before very clearly and obviously psyching himself into the demeanor of a grieving father, but nothing conclusive.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >what the hell are blacksmiths doing?

                  Using a different fuel source, and not using an open-air fire.

                  Charcoal burns roughly 4 times hotter than jet fuel, perhaps twice as hot as the melting point of steel. A smith quite deliberately funnels all of the produced heat into one highly concentrated location; it’s the whole point of the forge and, in some cases, ladle.

                  The first video is irrelevant.

                  The second video would be at least worthy of consideration had the man then taken his pinky finger and crushed the steel rod lengthwise down into the bench. He didn’t, because no one is that strong, much less the weakest of forces. Furthermore, you can look as hard as you like at any photo or video of any WTC tower or its rubbly remains and you won’t see any intense neon-red glowing like you see in this video, nor flowing metal everywhere.

                  Finally, there was no jet fuel in Building 7, but it collapsed anyway.

                • jim says:

                  > > what the hell are blacksmiths doing?

                  > Using a different fuel source, and not using an open-air fire.

                  To destroy my damaged chicken coop, preparatory to building a new one, I set it on fire. The steel in it crumpled up like wet toilet paper.

                  Not all of the steel, not most of the steel, but quite a substantial part of the steel.

                • jim says:

                  You can see stuff glowing yellow hot, which is hotter than the steel in the video, which was merely red hot.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >To destroy my damaged chicken coop, preparatory to building a new one, I set it on fire. The steel in it crumpled up like wet toilet paper.

                  lol.

                • Cavalier says:

                  >You can see stuff glowing yellow hot, which is hotter than the steel in the video, which was merely red hot.

                  >charcoal gets steel red-hot
                  >jet fuel, 1/4 the temperature, gets “stuff” yellow-hot

                  Brilliant argument.

              • J says:

                You are right that steel trusses and beams are normally insulted against fire but NY state environmental protection people forbid the use of asbest, and the substitutes available at that time were inferior. Probably there was no protection at all.

                Regarding sparks, when a metallic body hits a steel truss, well, there will sparks and kerosine drops all around.

                Regarding the velocity of the collapse, there was nothing to stop the upper decks falling and the fall was accelerating as Newton said.

                I think not even the terrorists expected the total destruction of the buildings. You have to be a lunatic to imagine that your government is trying to blow up New York skyscrapers.

                • peppermint says:

                  Do we have to be lunatics to believe that “our own government” would do such a thing? It was a conspiracy, and it’s unclear whether Cheney was in on it.

                  It is clear, however, that the Republican administration didn’t rock the boat by asking questions, because the Democrats would win if they did, like how Seth Rich’s parents refused to investigate their son’s death.

                • Steve Johnson says:

                  It’s true they didn’t look too hard but that’s more than adequately explained by:

                  1) EVERYONE in DC is on the Saudi payroll
                  2) American intelligence has tentacles everywhere and no one wanted to explain why this guy who knew that guy did this. Look at Evan McMullin’s pathetic display on twitter – “How dare you say we worked with Al Qaeda?!?” “My job at CIA was to work with Al Qaeda”. Although it seems like they could have investigated all they wanted and no one would care – McMullin still has both tweets up on his account.

                  https://twitter.com/evan_mcmullin/status/906514497585770496?lang=en

                  https://twitter.com/evan_mcmullin/status/765322182054383616?lang=en

                  What would a 9/11 probe realistically turn up that’s more damning than that?

                  These people are psychotic and insane but they’re insane in a group think way – they’re not Bond villains.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Then started looking into it and it actually does look pretty damn suspicious, if it didnt sound so crazy Id go farther.And build 7 is the most damning of all. Certainly if you decided you needed an excuse to turn a nation with constitutional anti surveillance into a police state this would be how to do it. And if you actually thought muslims did it you wouldn’t increase their immigration.

            So they did it intentionally because it serves their interests and we know that Muslims didn’t do it because then they’d have restricted Muslim immigration because Islamic terrorism doesn’t serve their interests. Got it.

            I suppose all the other Islamic terrorism since then has been faked as well.

            • peppermint says:

              Obviously CIA and Mossad were involved. Also obviously the CIA has become totally incompetent.

              You say the entertainment industry is pushing poz. That’s been happening since before the progressives started liking poz, just ask Henry Ford, who instead blames Jews. High art is garbage and money laundering whether it’s CIA, Jews, or Rockefellers.

              The Jews, the CIA, the Rockefellers, the university men, they don’t understand Whites. They have their retarded theories, and they used to be able to convince intelligent men to work for them. The major reason for our success is that no one likes them anymore.

              • Your Wife's Son says:

                Take modern feminism. Jews push it because they hate goyim. CIA pushes it because they want to control society – feminism is the surveillance state’s best friend. While the Jews are stuck in Tumblr-tier bullshit a la Ezra Klein, CIA promotes various hoaxes which “conservatives” can get behind e.g the human trafficking aka “child sex” trafficking hoax. Obviously, Jews are idiots and will likely get pogromed eventually; the spooks are way more sophisticated.

                • peppermint says:

                  Sounds great, CIA are turbojew immortal lizardmen and can’t possibly be stopped.

                • Your Wife's Son says:

                  And here I thought 1984 was supposed to be a dystopia, not utopia…

                  C’mon, wouldn’t it be better if it was only Jews and their metaphorical mind control rays, not an organization so powerful that it may as well have literal mind control rays?

    • Oliver Cromwell says:

      I thought the left believed torture didn’t work.

      • peppermint says:

        The Left understands that, while torture can extract specific information from one specific person once, the major effect of torture is to change how the individual tortured and his faction see the war.

        Thus they torture any enemy they can get their hands on, while demanding that not a hair on the heads of their guys be touched.

  6. Cavalier says:

    Cryptocurrency represents the technological breakthrough of a perfectly legible currency, and thus economy, conducted entirely via a chip in the hand or the forehead, without which one will find himself unable to buy or sell. You are a fool if you think it won’t happen, because if I were in “””their””” position I would mandate it myself — it’s the only sensible thing to do.

    • Your Wife's Son says:

      You have no reason to worry about a cashless society, goyim. And a government-operated database containing your fingerprints and facial metrics will never, ever be used for sinister purposes – we promise. It’s all for your own good. *rubs hands*

    • Garr says:

      This (the 666 stuff) is only a serious problem if God doesn’t like it. He probably doesn’t like it because it’s weird to put little machines into your body. (Except for Pacemakers; those are okay.) Tattoos are weird too, so he probably doesn’t like those either. (But as far as I can tell “weird” just means “bugs God.”) But almost all prole Whites have them now, and an increasing percentage of SWPLs. (I saw a SWPL couple in Carroll Gardens today, the guy with almost full sleeves of tattoing; I imagined complimenting him on his pretty tattoos.)

      Oh, wait — I just realized that God doesn’t like it mainly because he doesn’t want people other than your wife (and him) to be able to keep track of what you’re doing. So he doesn’t like cell phones either, but he’s not as intensely against those because you can always throw them away.

      Okay, now I get it. Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to have tracking devices implanted in my flesh. I’m not sure why I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t. I used to feel that way about carrying a cell phone around, though.

      There’s an eternal order of things, i.e., how God wants things to be, and it was basically figured out and half-realized in 13th Century WestEurope, so we just need that plus flying cars and space-colonies and we’re okay.

      • Cavalier says:

        I’m not really into the supernatural bullshit, but I acknowledge the possibility that the elite are. I think Jim once called it “demonic possession because they believe in demons”, not because there are literal demons but because ritualistic group sin, such as human sacrifice, is demonic in its “cohesion” generation. It’s hard otherwise to explain why “they” would conduct simulated cannibalism dinners and bizarre tunnel ceremonies.

        Tattoos will always be the indelible mark of trash.

        • Garr says:

          Yeah — but The Frightening Genius is right that those code-words refer to drugs; it’s obvious once it’s pointed out.
          Anyway — dig it; Drudge headline says that Saudi Arabia is gonna let girls drive, so Islam is now to the left of Western Reaction! (Female drivers are psychopathic — everybody knows this.)
          Sorry Spandrell banned you — that comment was funny but, dude, come on, those are very cute kids in that video, not just “an agglomeration of differently sized muddies” or however you put it.

  7. ilkarnal says:

    The main and so far only practical use of cryptocurrency is getting around financial system countermeasures. This means primarily muh weed &c.

    You send bitcoin, they send you weed in the mail. PROBLEM: If you can send weed in the mail, you can just send fucking cash. And people do send cash, including overseas to other countries, in exchange for weed and other illegal shit.

    Why the do you want to do this transaction over the internet? We must understand that all the networks are compromised right down to the bone, and that throttling or delaying or cutting off connections is pretty damn trivial? Meatspace is so so SO much more secure it’s unbelievable. Cash is amazing compared to cryptocurrency for shady or criminal doings, compared to any online transaction! The internet is a great way to find sellers and instructions, I don’t see how it is or has to be a great way of carrying illegal transactions.

    If you want the new cash, you can literally just print it. You’re allowed to print your own currency. Here is an example not far from me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BerkShares You’re just not allowed to print or mint anything with ‘$’ on it and/or that look like normal currency when you squint.

    People are way too infatuated with information technology. Information technology is good for communicating. That’s mostly it. It’s for jabbering. Which now includes sending hyper-HD 360 3D videos, which isn’t much of a practical upgrade. It doesn’t really matter that much. Never will.

    When you do things on computers, especially online, you leave indelible trails that are permanent, very shallow, very cheap to access. Meatspace trails are temporary, deep, expensive to access. What you send, what is delivered, what is handed off is impossible to detect and prove without expensive and time sensitive meatspace operations.

    That’s not to say that some decentralized IT currency meme can’t be interesting, but BTC definitely isn’t it. You want something that you can run on a rooted phone, and be self contained there. You need hundreds of GB and lots of time for confirmations to verify transactions yourself with Bitcoin. Storage footprint and latency need to be improved by orders of magnitude. Then UX also needs to be vastly improved. But that will all be to get a product that is still vastly inferior to cash in terms of security and reliability.

    Need a decentralizedd communication, identity, name, and blogging system

    Then you can’t rely on government controlled backbone… The only way I can really imagine it, in a low bandwidth and high latency way, is some sort of amateur Earth-moon-Earth comm network.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication

    If you communicate at very short wavelengths you can get high gain dish antennas that are cheap.

  8. Ludwig von Neetgenstein says:

    >When a ruler meddles as much as our state does, he gives dangerously great power to those dangerously close to him.

    Good argument for rule of law. It may be locally suboptimal (cannot be too fine grained, otherwise intractable) but beats discretionary rule globally because the latter doesn’t scale.

  9. Joe says:

    I don’t see how a cryptocurrency becomes truly free of government interference. If a government wants to ban its use, it can put large penalties on using it and then begin entrapping people by making purchases or sales of goods and services using it. A currency is of no use unless you can purchase goods and services with it, and almost all goods and services (except purely digital information like porn) have to be delivered in the real, physical world. And the government controls the real, physical world via law enforcement operations like entrapment. If the government banned Bitcoin, you would never dare to go take delivery of something you bought with it because you wouldn’t know if you were going to meet a government agent waiting to arrest you.

    The federal government could come out with its own cryptocurrency, which would be freely interchangeable with dollars at any bank, in person or online. This federal cryptocurrency would just be dollars in a crypto form. They would be legal to use, and would have all the advantages of instant electronic transferability, be immune to forgery, etc. Why would people then take the risks inherent in using Bitcoin, when a perfectly legal alternative existed that offered virtually all of the advantages of Bitcoin?

    • jim says:

      Yes, governments could do lots of stuff to prevent crypto currencies. And might well do so. But it takes a certain amount of effort, coordination, and competence, which the kind of government that fouls up its own official currency tends to lack.

      • Joe says:

        I’m not convinced the US government has fouled up its official currency. The government is doing what the people demand, giving them lots of “free stuff” partially paid for by inflating away the value of the currency rather than through taxes. Also, stepping in to print money to buy bad assets to prevent the 2008 collapse. Those folks running the Fed and the Treasury are pretty smart people. I wouldn’t assume that the currency is being badly run. You would only be justified in assuming that if you assumed a medium of exchange had to maintain its value in order to be considered well-run, and I don’t think that’s the case. (A store of value, yes, but you shouldn’t be saving your money in fiat dollars anyway.)

        Also, it doesn’t take much effort, coordination, or competence to declare something like Bitcoin a scam, a money-laundering conspiracy, etc, and to put the FBI to work prosecuting anyone caught using it. They chase down child pornographers all the time. They can do the same to cryptocurrency users if they want to. And the Chinese are already doing it.

        The Feds just have to release their own cryptocurrency, freely exchangeable to and from dollars at any bank or designated government website, while banning the use of Bitcoin and the like as being vulnerable to hackers, scammers, and the abuse of the 4% of the users that own 95% of the Bitcoins. People who want to use a cryptocurrency for practical purposes will prefer the legal, reliable Federal cryptocurrency, and if Bitcoin isn’t the Schelling Point cryptocurrency, it won’t be anything at all.

        • Andrew E. says:

          The government is doing what the people demand, giving them lots of “free stuff” partially paid for by inflating away the value of the currency rather than through taxes…

          Also by keeping those stock indices inflated through monetary policy thus protecting the 401K balances of the wealthy boomers. It’s not just the gibs who rely on the current system.

        • peppermint says:

          》(A store of value, yes, but you shouldn’t be saving your money in fiat dollars anyway.)

          This is where you’re wrong.

          I’m assuming you’re a GenXir and know social security doesn’t store anything but could theoretically be a system by which your generation pays for infrastructure that helps yourselves and your children in your old age, but isn’t that because the politicians prefer to use it to bribe niggers, and want to get rid of the niggers to have a Spencerstate.

          So you probably have a 401k, which is supposed to be a way for you to privately pay for some kind of infrastructure that will support you, and you’re probably going to blame buying off affirmative action niggers when you try to draw from it and find nothing there.

          Or maybe you stockpiled gold at a bank which will be confiscated, or at home, which will be ratted out and confiscated, or weapons, which will be confiscated or probably useless to you.

          The problem is that you fundamentally believe in what ((Einstein)) called the greatest force in the universe, compounded interest.

          • peppermint says:

            I can’t really blame Boomers and Xirs now, everyone knows stocks are overvalued, everyone knows the very idea of a pension bond is retarded, if you try to store value in your community the govt will feed that value to its voter base, if you try to store value in your house the govt will take it out in the form of property taxes, so the only store of value is your own children themselves, which, of course, you’re instructed to feed carbs at steak prices, communist propaganda, and pay for a worthless college degree for after which they compete with the rest of the world and lose because all the White male slots in the workplaces are taken by essential people with decades of experience.

            But the Boomers, whose generational slogan is “I got mine, fuck you”, and the Xirs, slogan “I didn’t get mine, fuck you”, are going to demand their gibsmedats after having, as generations, eaten their seed corn, and are going to do what they can to prevent the kind of change we need. They’ll double down on communism over and over before they accept that their money is gone and they’re never getting it back, ever, from anyone.

            It’s easier for Millennials who have lost years of their working lives directly to accept that they don’t have anything to show for it.

            • Glenfilthie says:

              We’re all going to get burned when that house of cards falls, P-Mint. And just so ya know… as a tail-end boomer or a leading Gen X, depending on who defines the demographics – I missed the Boomer gravy train too.

              Times will get tough for us all but we’ve been here before. Mom will keep the family money in a tin or stuffed in a sock under the mattress the way she did back in the Dirty 30’s. Us guys’ll drift from menial job to menial job to get by. Vibrants will go back to being niggers, merit will slowly re-assert itself, and hopefully we all survive. Let’s face it, Western Civilization needs a massive enema or at least a cull to get us back where we need to be.

              As for me, I am doing metals and currency although my money is tied up in RRSP’s and real estate (all paid for, thank God). I don’t trust cryptocurrencies one iota. I suspect the gov’t will shut them down on the premise “that only those who don’t want to pay their share are using it.”

              We have a moral duty to disobey unjust law, and you can bet noncompliance will go through the roof. Interesting times are in the offing.

            • Cavalier says:

              This whole generational warfare thing is retarded, and I’m younger than any of you.

              • Contaminated NEET says:

                >I’m younger than any of you.
                That’s OK, Cav. You’re older at heart.

            • Your Wife's Son says:

              Since this discussion has veered off topic, let me introduce you to a very interesting article which I’ve found:

              https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

              Just throwing this out there. It’s nothing new, to be sure. But having it all confirmed is still fun.

    • jackmcg says:

      Govts won’t ban cryptocurrencies. Crypto is useful for crooks, and govt. is full of crooks. It means unlimited political donations and bribes, and a place to transfer black market funds with no paper trail.

      If crypto wasn’t useful to western politicians, they’d have banned it already.

      • J says:

        Chinese politicians are even more corrupt, and they did ban cryptocurrencies. Maybe they are so but so corrupt that they don’t need to hide anything. Alternatively, there is no way to tap juice out of it so it is harmful.

        • Your Wife's Son says:

          You write on your blog: “the population is being sedated and manageable,” and you suggest chemicals in the bloodstream (oxytocin); but in fact it’s something bigger, much bigger. When Jim wrote however-many-years-ago about the metaphorical estrogen in the metaphorical water supply, he was exactly on point.

          Antidepressants are irrelevant, and obesity is irrelevant, and pornography is irrelevant. It’s all bullshit excuses meant to preserve the fundamentally rotten system – cosmetic aspects of society and nothing more.

          Occam’s Razor says that 300 years of escalating holiness is the meta-level culprit behind modern sexlessness, and right now, in the current year, seems like there’s no way out of it short of crashing it down altogether. Cthulhu only swims left? Let’s drop hydrogen bombs on him and see what happens. Nothing to lose, anyway.

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