Consider bear spray, just be careful to avoid blow-back and be sure to also get some Sudecon or other decontamination wipes -- just wiping your face with soap and water to get that stuff off makes it worse, I hear.
bubble_bursts: reading over my last response, I noticed more than one instance of needless snark.
My sincere apologies. I was mortified to see it because I'm really enjoying our exchange.
Snark is a character flaw I've not fully exorcised (although I've made progress on it over the years). Still, when I don't spend significant time editing something longer than a 2-line email, it sometimes creeps in. I'll take more time crafting my responses in the future.
~ Narg
Private sector will NEVER do things correctly unless they can be held accountable, and that can only happen with a limited government.
This is absolutely wrong; completely backwards.
It is government's POWER that attracts corrupt individuals, psychopaths, and sociopaths running large corporations -- who then purchase, expand, and corrupt that Power, as we see all around us today.
Yes, that takes some time, if you're starting with a truly limited government.
No, it cannot be stopped.
Perhaps if we called a voluntaryist society's court, legislative, and executive branches a "government" we'd not be arguing here. We're talking about the difference between 95% free and 100% free, after all -- my stance is that the 5% does not NEED to involve forced taxation and other coercive power structures, and that only when that kernel of power to initiate coercion is REMOVED can people actually be free -- and stay that way.
With initiation of coercion FORBIDDEN instead of GRANTED to a small group, there IS no POWER to be bought, expanded, and corrupted.
Everyone has an incentive to keep things honest because, for one thing, people like having society run smoothly and safely and honestly, and for another, those attempting to add corruption (such as taxation and other staples of government Power) are seen and treated as criminals. And if you think that means "we'd need a government to deal with criminals" then you really need to read some more voluntaryist literature, or simply open yourself up to thinking about HOW an actually free society would handle such things.
Start with the Amish, perhaps; they're a very small group (or set of groups) and of course they do exist inside the boundaries of unfree nations, but as a society, they handle things competently, firmly, and without Statist coercion. A nation needs more than what the Amish provide but -- just as even a relatively free market does a better job with, well, pretty much everything it does compared to government, a nation CAN do "government's work" with market solutions and organizations, and do it BETTER, safer, and cheaper than government does -- and WITHOUT the growing corruption that sneaks in everywhere government operates.
In an earlier America, a good deal of "government work" WAS done by the private sector. The vast growth of technology and wealth in the first 150 years of this country make direct comparisons difficult, but there is no question that every government service, from courts to national defense, CAN and to some extent HAS BEEN provided here (and elsewhere over the centuries) without the aid of government coercion.
I'm enjoying this conversation, bubble_bursts. You're an interesting thinker and writer.
After Great Depression, the generation that lived through it, and their children spent their entire lives never getting into debt and valuing saving money. It took 100 years before this lesson could be undone.
The precipice we are headed to is going to be experienced by 90% of the people and the pain will be a million times worse than the Great Depression, and the awakening will be a million times more powerful than anything before. No doubt this will hold until we can reach the next spiritual level.
I'm not young: My father was about five when the Great Depression began. During his childhood, Americans still used actual gold and silver coins, with $20 = an oz of gold and $1 an ounce of silver. Americans were patriotic, well educated, understood what the Founders did for this country, had a strong work ethic, and while there were plenty of people with emotional damage, there was none of the Woke nonsense we suffer from today.
It didn't take long for things to go to Hell from the early 1900s. (Yeah: 1913 was a BAD year, and so were plenty of others). And it took even less time, only a few decades, to go from the end of the Great Depression to Nixon's closing of the gold window and the serious acceleration of America's corruption.
I'd like to think the Great Awakening will birth something new, something better than just another "limited government" -- I'd like to think we'll begin a genuinely free society.
Maybe you're right that we'll NEED a small government, but I'm not seeing it. I'll keep thinking on the topic though.
This is perfect! Great meme, DCSucks; simple, easy to read, impossible to argue with.
I'll add some detail:
You cannot create a good society by criminal means.
Initiating coercion IS a crime, no matter how you dress it up. That includes taxation, the taking of people's money by force, which (of course!) makes "customer satisfaction" almost impossible and eventually leads to citizens having to pay for atrocities.
America's Founders were brilliant and had the right idea: Smaller, limited government is better than bigger, more powerful government. As the quintessential American saying has it: "That government is best which governs least." America became an uplifting symbol of freedom to the world thanks to the small, severely CONSTRAINED republic the Founders bequeathed us.
So why is America now a Biden Administration Hellhole, a growing tyranny, and a bankrupt, war-mongering, world-straddling would-be empire?
Why? Because the Founders didn't go far enough. Henry David Thoreau got it right, in Civil Disobedience: That government is best which governs not at all.
Civil society instead of centralized coercion: This is the way.
For a glimpse of such a society, consider The Market for Liberty, and start seeing past the propaganda that says "We NEED at least a LITTLE BIT OF TYRANNY for our own good!"
We don't.
Because a little bit of tyranny always grows. Power is hellishly addictive and attracts sociopaths and psychopaths like iron shavings to an electromagnet. Check the last 5,000 years of history. Hell, check today's headlines.
Besides: as we all know, "everything government touches turns to shit." Do we really want to . . . live in shit? To live in a system that taxes and tyrannizes us? That creates war after war, and that shovels our wealth to an elite via corporatism and other methods? That corrupts and ruins everything it touches?
Freedom or tyranny.
You can't have both, because a little bit of tyranny is like being a little pregnant: it doesn't show at first, but as time goes on . . .
Thank you for the detailed response, bubble_bursts. I certainly agree with you that the Great Awakening is completely necessary. The Awakening now underway is (unless it should fail) a genuine turning point in human history; the importance and the level of change to come cannot be overstated -- IF we take this opportunity to destroy the Ring of Power, as Tolkien put it, instead of thinking we can finally control it and use it for good.
But Power NEVER leads to a good ending. You cannot create a good society by criminal means, and initiating coercion IS a crime, no matter how you dress it up. That includes taxation, the taking of people's money by force, which (of course!) makes "customer satisfaction" highly unlikely.
The process you mention -- the destruction of early free civilizations by roving hordes of bandits who found it easier to move in with their victims and become a "government" -- is well described, in detail, by Paul Rosenberg in Production versus Plunder: The Ancient War That is Destroying the West. Becoming a "Government" gave the bandits all the plunder with much better working conditions, and the victims were a never-ending source of wealth.
Yes, government attracts sociopaths and psychopaths, and there is no way to prevent that, OTHER than building a civil society and dealing harshly with anyone who attempts to add a criminal core (initiated coercion) to it.
I don't believe the generations going forward will remain AS awake as we hope (how quickly did Americans forget the lessons of the Revolution and of the cruelty of the tyranny of the Crown?). Immediately after the Cabal is taken down many (not all, even then) will be awake, but a generation or two or three down the line? Not so much. Nor do I believe they'll be protected from the dynamics of a growing, centralized coercive power. History shows otherwise, every damn time.
Unless people build and become accustomed to a CIVIL society, where market forces rule the land instead of a group granted the right to initiate Power over others, they will be taught from childhood (as you and I have been) that "Government" is necessary, that it is inevitable, and that it is good. We can't live without it! -- and naturally, since it is good, we don't resist having more of it, if each increase doesn't cost us too much. Those with something to gain, and those who simply want Power for themselves, will constantly push for MORE government. Compassion demands that we DO MORE for this or that reason. Our SAFETY demands that we do more; this new Federal agency is the only way to protect people from blah-blah-blah.
That's exactly how post Colonial America became Biden's America.
"Meet the new Boss, Same as the old Boss" is precisely what we'll get if we end up with a "restrained" coercive government INSTEAD OF a civil network of non-coercive organizations that regulate, protect, and provide other needed services -- the way the market provides FOOD better than the government does, and vehicles, and clothing, and every other damn thing people actually want and need and are WILLING to pay for.
This doesn't mean starting from scratch. It means transferring those few things that government does which actually NEED doing to the private sector (where they'll be done more efficiently and with less corruption and without the blatant tyranny that every Federal agency imposes). The rest of what government does -- those things that we don't need to do, that people don't WANT done, and that are actively harmful -- war after war, for starters -- we can let go.
We can save ourselves trillions of dollars a year, have far better "government services", and regain our freedom.
A citizenry that lives in such a society, and that is taught why it functions as it does, will rebuff any effort to poison it with tyranny.
How long will that last?
I don't know, but I'd certainly like to find out. And no matter HOW long it lasts, if it should eventually fail, it will at least be a powerful, shining example to freedom-seekers in the future, as the memory of an earlier America is today (I think of someone in Hong Kong holding a sign a few years back, begging America to "Please be the America we Think You Are" or something like that).
It is time to try something different -- time to END coercive Power instead of constantly trying to reform it. Reforming slavery will never work, because it is still tyranny no matter how you dress it up or modify it. As long as initiating coercion is allowed, then the system is a crime.
I'll again recommend The Market for Liberty for an engaging and thorough look at how market forces can be used to create a workable, healthy, and prosperous society without initiating coercion (but with plenty of incentives to behave properly, from insurance companies, bond companies, security firms, and the simple refusal of others to deal with you if you aren't trustworthy, for instance).
I hadn't thought about -- didn't actually know about -- the rapid hardware changes you mentioned. Software yes, hardware, no. That DOES sound like a problem.
I have a nephew with a Tesla and he loves it. I don't have a problem with electric vehicles (although I don't want one personally) but rather with the government and the entire Cabal team pushing them down our throats while telling us we MUST give up internal combustion vehicles, including the EPA and CA making rules that require automakers to move quickly to a mostly and then fully electric fleet.
SOME EVs on the road are fine, but there are many reasons that this full-court press to REPLACE gas-powered vehicles with electrics is a disaster and, as you know, is being done as part of the Great Reset: make travel harder and give the Authorities, including your banker, a say in when and if you CAN travel. You can't pay to "fill up" at an EV station with cash, you need a bank card. "Oops, you made a social media post we don't like; no gas for you!"
Thank you! I re-wrote that paragraph to reflect your correction:
It would take 50,000 20MB drives to equal the capacity of a single Terabyte drive (really: Imagine a pile of 50,000 5.25" hard drives). EDIT: At this point, I wrote a correction, thinking I'd got the number wrong, but u/enough_of_the_racism pointed out that . . . my numbers were right the first time so I've over-written the original Edit here. 50,000 20MB hard drives per TB it is. Thank you, u/enough_of_the_racism/.
I understand your point, bubble_bursts, and it's by far the most common fear of a free society, thanks to relentless Cabal propaganda: Without Government forcing people to be nice to each other, how would we survive? But the wild west is what we have right now; civil society is much calmer and safer. (Also, the "wild west" is typically portrayed as far more violent than it actually was; that makes for better movies, perhaps, and of course there WAS violence but there was also much freedom, community, and honest commerce).
Government can't do anything without screwing it up. Why do we think that government, the most violent and least efficient institution on Earth, would do a good job of creating and maintaining a civil society?
The people THEMSELVES do that, or don't; insurance companies, private security companies, and other market entities that have a stake in an honest and civil society do a better job of taming crime and maintaining civilization than corrupt, psychopathic politicians running a coercive government.
I will point out that I said:
Both civil society AND small, sort-of-workable government REQUIRE a population that is itself civil, meaning emotionally healthy.
and I'll add that by "emotionally healthy" I didn't mean "perfectly healthy" (extremely rare, if even that) but simply people not so damaged as to be a walking problem for those around them, or worse.
WITH a government, though, the WORST and most dangerous people (sociopaths and psychopaths) gain access to the coercive power of government, just as happens throughout history -- including here in "the land of Freedom", the United States.
Everything honest and positive comes from the civil, non-coercive parts of society. Is ANYTHING the government does (usually with coercion and always with stolen money) better than what you'd get from honest people and institutions? Consider Underwriter Laboratories (founded in 1894), the NFPA (founded in 1896), and other non-government regulatory agencies verses the FDA, the EPA, and every other government "regulatory" agency.
UL in particular has become more entwined with government in recent decades, because as government grows, those civil, honest, market elements shrink and what remains becomes tainted and corrupted by government power, either directly or tangentially -- but still, even UL is far more benign AND effective (including cost-effective) than government agencies ever are. No one ever has armed UL agents knocking down their door or confiscating their property because of a BS violation of some rule, for example.
The Market for Liberty is a good introduction to the workings and benefits of a voluntaryist society, and plenty of other writings by voluntaryists exist also.
We need to quit trying to "reform" something inherently evil (tyranny) – and abolish it instead. The BEST, most carefully limited tyranny -- a very small, Constitutional republic, as with the United States of the late 1700s -- BECOMES a corrupt and violent nightmare. It becomes exactly what we are fighting today.
I started my comment with:
I don't like the rather pushy assumption that "I should be tipped just because I'm here at my job" any more than the next person does
and I thought that was clear, but to expand on it: the various ways the businesses and workers are pushing the assumption that NOT tipping is a faux pas is incredibly irritating to me. And no, I don't tip grocery (or other) clerks.
A different perspective:
I don't like the rather pushy assumption that "I should be tipped just because I'm here at my job" any more than the next person does, but . . . I stopped donating to charities when I became convinced that nearly all of them are frauds (with much or most of the money going to those who RUN the "charity") and some of them (Red Cross for a one example; the Clinton Foundation for another) are involved in child trafficking and other horrors -- or at least to harmful "progressive" BS.
A local church's food bank is one thing, but national charities are another.
Until that point, I had a hard and fast rule of not giving cash to the homeless, and I rarely tipped more than 15%.
Both of those things changed, partly because I didn't have any reason to send money to "charities" anymore and partly because the economy was tanking, and for the first time I was seeing people who had obviously just fallen from the middle class camping out in their vehicles or living on the street. Also, I knew that earning a living was harder than ever; prices of nearly everything are outpacing paychecks and that's if you can find a job -- not everyone can, given the zillions of small-business bankruptcies and layoffs at big corporations.
So I sometimes hand out money to people on the street (most of whom, in the small-town area near where I live, are not drug addicts pooping on the sidewalk -- something I've NEVER seen, btw, other than in photos) and I tip well -- extravagantly sometimes -- because I remember how hard it was for ME when I was young and working at crappy jobs -- despite the economy being MUCH better than it is now.
I don't expect this to last, but for now I'm fairly well off, and as long as I can afford to do this, I will.
I don't know what to say about the first two concepts, other than the Precipice idea makes sense but I have NO idea exactly how bad, and bad in what WAY, the Precipice will be. As for fake vs reality: I don't believe I can really know what happened here on the street where I live earlier today for certain, much less what's going on thousands of miles away with professional propaganda organizations fielding nearly all the "information" we see about it.
As for the third: You and your family ARE safe, unless you took the COVID "vaccine" or have been eating a typical toxic American diet or die in a home invasion robbery, or unless the umpty-nine million illegal alien males of military age from countries that hate us decide to (or are ordered to by their taskmasters, whoever THOSE may be) form armed guerrilla groups and attack your neighbood, or unless Homeland Security decides to round you and yours up and send you to a FEMA camp for disposal, or . . . well, you get the idea.
"You and your family are safe" is bullshit; it's the equivalent of telling a nervous person "Everything will be OK" -- even though it obviously isn't. We do things like that to calm people down, and by now I am certain that THAT is what the famous Q "You and your family are safe" is all about.
And -- because I know that sounds cynical (one of my character flaws) -- I appreciate the hell out of it. Seriously.
Remember when it looked like Hillary would win the Presidency in the 2016 election? I do. I also remember how stressed and depressed about it I was. I was truly miserable, because it seemed hopeless: freedom was doomed and a thousand years of global tyranny was all we had to look forward to.
I mean, do you have ANY IDEA what a 2016 Hillary administration would have meant? The horrors it would have caused? Hillary would have implemented the second half of the famous 16-year Plan to Destroy America. That's not hyperbole, it's a short name for turning America into a Communist tyranny with death camps and the whole nine yards of Communist crimes.
So yeah: THANK you, Q, for calming me down. "You and your family are safe" was always a lie, but it's a white lie with good intentions -- and it has worked for millions of us. We can get through this, in large part, because you made it feel survivable. Thank you so much. I mean that sincerely.
BTW, "You are safe" appears several times in the Q drops, but "YOU and YOUR FAMILIES ARE SAFE." -- with "families" plural -- appears only once:
Jan 13, 2018 10:59:16 PM EST
Q !UW.yye1fxo ID: 000000 No. 16
YOU and YOUR FAMILIES ARE SAFE.
PROMISE.
Q
Government "regulation" isn't regulation at all . . . it is centralized and coercive control. Think of the FDA (or any gov't regulatory agency) versus UL or the National Fire Protection Association.
One corrupts everything it touches, raising prices, reducing choices (i.e., reducing freedom), adding red-tape, and diverting money to the fat cats that pay to influence the regulators.
The other improves safety while keeping costs down, working to keep corporations and relevant business generally HONEST (largely because competition means that if one free-market regulator becomes corrupt to favor somebody, both consumers and competing business will abandon it for a competitor, or create one from scratch).
The result is that both business and the public benefit from real, non-government regulation, while government agencies inevitably become corrupt and are, of course, inefficient in the manner of all government entities.
Great clip, Joys1Daughter, and a good reminder that we are up against a massive and powerful group of people who have corrupted nearly every large organization and millions of individual people to the will of [their] Cabal.
As you point out, humanity has been under the boot heels of a group -- multiple groups, really -- of psychopaths for centuries.
I do believe that the specific set of plans we are seeing unfold NOW were crafted and set in motion in the last hundred years or so, if only because so much technology has emerged recently that shapes the battle space. And tech becomes more powerful exponentially, which humans have great problems grasping; it is non-intuitive.
I read an article in PC Magazine back in the '80's titled The Miracle of the 20MB Hard Drive -- link is to a search that failed but which provides ample evidence that 20MB was a typical hard drive size then. And those drives were 5.25" monsters that weighed about as much as an entire MacBook Air.
Today, the drive on my LAPTOP is one Terabyte -- there are a thousand Gigabytes in a Terabyte (or 1024 of them, but let's not get picky) and a thousand Megabytes in a Gigabyte, so a Terabyte is a million Megabytes.
It would take 50,000 20MB drives to equal the capacity of a single Terabyte drive (really: Imagine a pile of 50,000 5.25" hard drives). EDIT: At this point, I wrote a correction, thinking I'd got the number wrong, but u/enough_of_the_racism pointed out that . . . my numbers were right the first time so I've over-written the original Edit here. 50,000 20MB hard drives per TB it is. Thank you, u/enough_of_the_racism/.
And there are 1 Terabyte CAMERA CARDS now, and they're cheap. Hell, there are 4 TB camera cards, and even THEY are cheap, unless you want one fast enough for saving real-time high-resolution video.
Here's a short tour through hard drive evolution, from the mid-'50s when a 5MB drive was bigger than anything in your house, to 2016 when the article was published.
And . . . now I'm suddenly aware that I've rambled on far longer than makes any sense. My apologies.
My point was that the PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE has taken even the Cabal by surprise, and that this may be one reason that NCSWIC.
Here's a computer-related post, from yesterday, that expands on that in an encouraging way: https://greatawakening.win/p/17rSxPr0k7/game-theory-and-ai--they-want-to/
Yes, vaccines and household chemicals and fire-resistant chemicals in children's clothing and chemtrails and fluoride in the water and plenty of other things -- they've all degraded our health. And of course the COVID bioweapons are an acute and immediate danger to health.
But Smith (the author of the linked article) is spot-on, in that the change in our diets since the 1950s has done more damage to our collective health than anything else until the COVID jabs showed up. I'm shocked when I see photos of people from the 1960s and earlier because they almost always look trim and fit; these days, people are much more likely to be pudgy, fat, or morbidly obese. Including even children, which is horrifying because obesity in childhood makes you much more likely to have health problems as an adult, even if you lose the weight.
Thanks for the head's-up, CasuallyObservant. I didn't see that there WAS a link; here's my response to OP's comment to me:
Ah! I didn't actually think there WAS a link, because the "People Are Collapsing In China! Soon This Will Be You!" line is in white, not blue. (I'm using GA in Night Mode, if that makes any difference). I thought it was just a line of text. Got it now . . . Interesting video. Good example of how bad governance can cause ruination in unexpected ways.
Sorry about the confusion.
And of course, bad governance in the West is ruining society as well, in many ways.
Things are falling apart more quickly now.
It'll be a day or three before I have a response to this; I haven't abandoned the conversation but have things going on.