is "assault rifle" a red herring?

[gepr]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/24/boulder-ban-assault-rifles-mass-shooting

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9njz/atlanta-shooting-suspect-bought-his-gun-the-same-day-he-allegedly-killed-8-people

According to the Vice article, the massage parlor shooter used a 9mm handgun. I have a 9mm Beretta and I can fit 10 rounds in the mag. It seems rifles can be unwieldy at close range. The only benefit I can see, if you want to murder lots of people, is the rifle has some stability that helps with targeting. So my question is whether banning "assault" rifles is of any use at all?

I do get that the styling appeals to machismo. But so do handguns. We met a guy at the pub last weekend who brought his dog. A friend wanted to take the dog inside to visit another dog who'd just arrived. The dog owner nearly shouted at the friend: "Left side!", meaning the leash should be held in the left hand. I asked, "Why?". The dog owner explained that he always carries his handgun on the right hand side and wants to train the dog to stay on the left, you know, so he can always be ready to whip out his gun and kill people.

That macho paramilitary, camo-wearing, pseudo-tough, stockpiles of Mountain Dew in the basement [⛧] attitude seems to play some role in those to whom the AR-15 appeals. I suppose the trick is teasing out which ones are actually dangerous from those simply LARPing. Removing the macho styling also, I suppose, targets the material cause. But it seems too weak to matter much.


[⛧] https://youtu.be/QUHoFotHj9k?t=225

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[Prof David West]

Granting all you say, there is one other aspect — rate of discharge. You can empty your Beretta in the time it takes my to fire 3-4 shots from my 357 revolver. A legal AR can probably discharge a full 250 round mega-clip in the time it takes you to empty, reload, and empty your Beretta. An illegal, full-auto, AR can get close to a single instance of your pistol being emptied.

Mr Macho would eschew most long guns for the same reason as most pistols — too slow to fill the air with lead. Also does not need to worry about skill. In WWII the ration of bullets to causalities was 25,000/1. Because of closed and highly compacted spaces your average mass shooter does better 200-500/1 but still relies on luck rather than skill.

Assassins (mob hit men, etc) prefer a 22 and achieve pretty much a 1/1 ratio. Effectiveness, not posturing, is what matters to them.

davew


On Thu, Mar 25, 2021, at 9:28 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

>
> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/24/boulder-ban-assault-rifles-mass-shooting
>
> https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9njz/atlanta-shooting-suspect-bought-his-gun-the-same-day-he-allegedly-killed-8-people
>
> According to the Vice article, the massage parlor shooter used a 9mm
> handgun. I have a 9mm Beretta and I can fit 10 rounds in the mag. It
> seems rifles can be unwieldy at close range. The only benefit I can
> see, if you want to murder lots of people, is the rifle has some
> stability that helps with targeting. So my question is whether banning
> "assault" rifles is of any use at all?
>
> I do get that the styling appeals to machismo. But so do handguns. We
> met a guy at the pub last weekend who brought his dog. A friend wanted
> to take the dog inside to visit another dog who'd just arrived. The dog
> owner nearly shouted at the friend: "Left side!", meaning the leash
> should be held in the left hand. I asked, "Why?". The dog owner
> explained that he always carries his handgun on the right hand side and
> wants to train the dog to stay on the left, you know, so he can always
> be ready to whip out his gun and kill people.
>
> That macho paramilitary, camo-wearing, pseudo-tough, stockpiles of
> Mountain Dew in the basement [⛧] attitude seems to play some role in
> those to whom the AR-15 appeals. I suppose the trick is teasing out
> which ones are actually dangerous from those simply LARPing. Removing
> the macho styling also, I suppose, targets the material cause. But it
> seems too weak to matter much.
>
>
> [⛧] https://youtu.be/QUHoFotHj9k?t=225
>
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[gepr]

Hm. If you have to pull the trigger for each round (no bump fire), I can see maybe doubling my rate with the Beretta, maybe even up to 50 rounds. But 240? I'd be amazed. Hell, I'd do well just to flex my index finger that many times, that fast, with nothing in my hand. Try it! I got to 250 flexes, but my hand was cramping. For a trained and fit soldier in their 20s or 30s, maybe.

Regardless, your point's well taken. Even at 100 rpm, that's a lot more inter-person damage than my little gun could do. And given that most people are incompetent (or don't really, deep down, want to kill anyone), lowering the fire rate may have some impact. But it still seems like such a weak gesture, more like a campaign slogan than an effective way to lower deaths by gun (which are dominated by suicides anyway - a glacially slow revolver works well enough for suicide).

Waiting periods and mandatory background checks (for every sale) seem to have so much more bite. I'd like to see a licensing process. You have to take a test to drive, why not require competence tests for gun ownership?

On 3/28/21 2:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Granting all you say, there is one other aspect — rate of discharge. You can empty your Beretta in the time it takes my to fire 3-4 shots from my 357 revolver. A legal AR can probably discharge a full 250 round mega-clip in the time it takes you to empty, reload, and empty your Beretta. An illegal, full-auto, AR can get close to a single instance of your pistol being emptied.
>
> Mr Macho would eschew most long guns for the same reason as most pistols — too slow to fill the air with lead. Also does not need to worry about skill. In WWII the ration of bullets to causalities was 25,000/1. Because of closed and highly compacted spaces your average mass shooter does better 200-500/1 but still relies on luck rather than skill.
>
> Assassins (mob hit men, etc) prefer a 22 and achieve pretty much a 1/1 ratio. Effectiveness, not posturing, is what matters to them.

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[Prof David West]

Once upon a time, Regan era if I remember right, there was an NRA sponsored legislation to require a gun license ala a driver's license. It foundered and was abandoned for multiple reasons, among them: 1) The test, including a firing range component, was to be devised devised and administered by the NRA; 2) debate over the proper age for obtaining a license — ranged from 6 to 21; 3) scope of license, i.e did you need special endorsements for different types of gun (analogous to needing a CDL to drive semis or single/multi engine airplanes; and 4) inter-state reciprocity.

davew


On Mon, Mar 29, 2021, at 9:52 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> Hm. If you have to pull the trigger for each round (no bump fire), I
> can see maybe doubling my rate with the Beretta, maybe even up to 50
> rounds. But 240? I'd be amazed. Hell, I'd do well just to flex my index
> finger that many times, that fast, with nothing in my hand. Try it! I
> got to 250 flexes, but my hand was cramping. For a trained and fit
> soldier in their 20s or 30s, maybe.
>
> Regardless, your point's well taken. Even at 100 rpm, that's a lot more
> inter-person damage than my little gun could do. And given that most
> people are incompetent (or don't really, deep down, want to kill
> anyone), lowering the fire rate may have some impact. But it still
> seems like such a weak gesture, more like a campaign slogan than an
> effective way to lower deaths by gun (which are dominated by suicides
> anyway - a glacially slow revolver works well enough for suicide).
>
> Waiting periods and mandatory background checks (for every sale) seem
> to have so much more bite. I'd like to see a licensing process. You
> have to take a test to drive, why not require competence tests for gun
> ownership?
>
> On 3/28/21 2:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Granting all you say, there is one other aspect — rate of discharge. You can empty your Beretta in the time it takes my to fire 3-4 shots from my 357 revolver. A legal AR can probably discharge a full 250 round mega-clip in the time it takes you to empty, reload, and empty your Beretta. An illegal, full-auto, AR can get close to a single instance of your pistol being emptied.
> >
> > Mr Macho would eschew most long guns for the same reason as most pistols — too slow to fill the air with lead. Also does not need to worry about skill. In WWII the ration of bullets to causalities was 25,000/1. Because of closed and highly compacted spaces your average mass shooter does better 200-500/1 but still relies on luck rather than skill.
> >
> > Assassins (mob hit men, etc) prefer a 22 and achieve pretty much a 1/1 ratio. Effectiveness, not posturing, is what matters to them.
>
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[gepr]

There are examples to follow:

https://polisen.se/en/laws-and-regulations/firearms/weapon-licence/

Obviously, it's part of our machismo that we'd have to come up with our own Exceptional way of doing things. Copying the successful techniques of other people is so basic: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Basic

On 3/29/21 4:09 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Once upon a time, Regan era if I remember right, there was an NRA sponsored legislation to require a gun license ala a driver's license. It foundered and was abandoned for multiple reasons, among them: 1) The test, including a firing range component, was to be devised devised and administered by the NRA; 2) debate over the proper age for obtaining a license — ranged from 6 to 21; 3) scope of license, i.e did you need special endorsements for different types of gun (analogous to needing a CDL to drive semis or single/multi engine airplanes; and 4) inter-state reciprocity.

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I got my first .22 when I was eight.  My nine year-old grandson is too impulsive and hyperactive to even take out for target practice.  When I tell him "don't do that" he often doesn't listen.  I was much more inhibited.  As I mentioned recently at a vFriam meeting, he constantly plays first-person shooter games in which he slaughters lots of people.  I don't think he would confuse reality with gameland but he's too frenetic.  

People who justify AR-15 ownership by invoking home defense are incorrect, I think.  A better choice is a short semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun .  It poses a much smaller threat to your neighbors and you don't have to aim accurately.  You will likely kill the home-invader, however.

On Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:10 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Once upon a time, Regan era if I remember right, there was an NRA sponsored legislation to require a gun license ala a driver's license. It foundered and was abandoned for multiple reasons, among them: 1) The test, including a firing range component, was to be devised devised and administered by the NRA; 2) debate over the proper age for obtaining a license — ranged from 6 to 21; 3) scope of license, i.e did you need special endorsements for different types of gun (analogous to needing a CDL to drive semis or single/multi engine airplanes; and 4) inter-state reciprocity.

davew


On Mon, Mar 29, 2021, at 9:52 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> Hm. If you have to pull the trigger for each round (no bump fire), I
> can see maybe doubling my rate with the Beretta, maybe even up to 50
> rounds. But 240? I'd be amazed. Hell, I'd do well just to flex my index
> finger that many times, that fast, with nothing in my hand. Try it! I
> got to 250 flexes, but my hand was cramping. For a trained and fit
> soldier in their 20s or 30s, maybe.
>
> Regardless, your point's well taken. Even at 100 rpm, that's a lot more
> inter-person damage than my little gun could do. And given that most
> people are incompetent (or don't really, deep down, want to kill
> anyone), lowering the fire rate may have some impact. But it still
> seems like such a weak gesture, more like a campaign slogan than an
> effective way to lower deaths by gun (which are dominated by suicides
> anyway - a glacially slow revolver works well enough for suicide).
>
> Waiting periods and mandatory background checks (for every sale) seem
> to have so much more bite. I'd like to see a licensing process. You
> have to take a test to drive, why not require competence tests for gun
> ownership?
>
> On 3/28/21 2:41 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> > Granting all you say, there is one other aspect — rate of discharge. You can empty your Beretta in the time it takes my to fire 3-4 shots from my 357 revolver. A legal AR can probably discharge a full 250 round mega-clip in the time it takes you to empty, reload, and empty your Beretta. An illegal, full-auto, AR can get close to a single instance of your pistol being emptied.
> >
> > Mr Macho would eschew most long guns for the same reason as most pistols — too slow to fill the air with lead. Also does not need to worry about skill. In WWII the ration of bullets to causalities was 25,000/1. Because of closed and highly compacted spaces your average mass shooter does better 200-500/1 but still relies on luck rather than skill.
> >
> > Assassins (mob hit men, etc) prefer a 22 and achieve pretty much a 1/1 ratio. Effectiveness, not posturing, is what matters to them.
>
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[Steve Smith]

Frank wrote:

I got my first .22 when I was eight.

A .22 varmit-gun/plinker was pretty standard issue to pre-teens in my time too, though my more "progressive" parents started me with a classic Daisy spring-BB followed by a .22 caliber air rifle.  Either could blind someone and the latter might (at a long stretch) open a surface vein but not penetrate deep enough to interfere with most bodily functions, or generate the kind of hydrostatic shock/cavitation attributed to ballistic ammunition designed to have "high stopping power" against aggressive animals (e.g. bears) or more aptly aggressive humans (read about the motivation for the development of the classic model 1911 .45 automatic handgun).

  My nine year-old grandson is too impulsive and hyperactive to even take out for target practice.  When I tell him "don't do that" he often doesn't listen.  I was much more inhibited.  As I mentioned recently at a vFriam meeting, he constantly plays first-person shooter games in which he slaughters lots of people.  I don't think he would confuse reality with gameland but he's too frenetic. 

I haven't met a contemporary (even from my 40 year old children's generation) preteen I'd trust with anything more than a spring-bb gun, and being a vegetarian pacifist, I have no strong reason to want to encourage children to grow up to kill animals or people.   I think "first person shooters" are a lot more risky than the lame "cowboys & indians" or "WWI/WWII" re-enactments some of my friends enjoyed ("bang bang, Kew Kew!, yer dead!  Am not! Are so!") growing up.   Paintball seems a lot better "practice" for thoughtful skill building and self-control than first-person shooters where the consequences are highly virtual and the victims/enemies can be highly abstracted.   I find it all questionable in our culture/day-n-age...   but others don't.  Clearly... and I call many of them "friend", but I still find it disturbing and contra-indicated for a healthy society. 

People who justify AR-15 ownership by invoking home defense are incorrect, I think.  A better choice is a short semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun .  It poses a much smaller threat to your neighbors and you don't have to aim accurately.  You will likely kill the home-invader, however.

In my day that was what a "salt load" was for...   a fraction of the delivered kinetic energy... usually used at a distance to "leave a mark" but not risk (much) killing anyone. Remember the black swan event of dick cheney's friend who suffered a heart attack from a (single?) lead shot lodged near the heart muscle after he got caught in the peripheral blast of Cheney's ?accidental discharge?   Rock salt might be dangerous in that mode too, but would assimilate much more quickly than Pb)... 

I find the lack of will/focus to renew the 1994 AWB a significant contributor to the severe problem we have today with the proliferation of such weapons and ammunition.   I don't expect that to change anytime soon, but it would be great if we could slow down the creep that has occurred over the decades such as the weapon used in Boulder:

I couldn't find a single source for the Ruger AR-556 pistol that *didn't* have a rifle-barrel, 30 round mag, and stock, effectively making it an "assault rifle", thus skirting any "Assault Rifle" ban.   Scope and bipod are usually add-on items.

you can see the "pistol" hiding down in there somewhere...

I'm not sure that Australia's society suffered from their significantly more restrictive than ours, yet far from "confiscating all weapons" that the NRA/GOP claims is in the offing.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Agreement.

oh well, they are 2nd Amendment/NRA-promoted/GOP-endorsed  "tools"  so what kind of pinko commie f@ghat am I to question such a thing?  cold dead hands, all that...

Grumble,

 - Steve

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[gepr]

Nah. A .410 is best. Something short and sized for women as well as men, maybe:

  https://www.mossberg.com/category/series/youth-500-505-510/

But I've wanted a .410 pistol for awhile. E.g.:

https://www.taurususa.com/revolvers/taurus-judge-series/judge-public-defender-45-colt-410-ga-matte-stainless-2-50-in

I just can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on something I'll never use. It boggles me why the gun nuts are so afraid of everything and everyone.

On 3/29/21 6:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> A better choice is a short semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun .  It poses a much smaller threat to your neighbors and you don't have to aim accurately.  You will likely kill the home-invader, however.

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[Prof David West]

my 357 is loaded with shot shells, when loaded. used to be able to get different guages, but now just bird shot. Marginally more impact than salt loads.

davew


On Tue, Mar 30, 2021, at 7:42 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> Nah. A .410 is best. Something short and sized for women as well as men, maybe:
>
>   https://www.mossberg.com/category/series/youth-500-505-510/
>
> But I've wanted a .410 pistol for awhile. E.g.:
>
> https://www.taurususa.com/revolvers/taurus-judge-series/judge-public-defender-45-colt-410-ga-matte-stainless-2-50-in
>
> I just can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on something I'll
> never use. It boggles me why the gun nuts are so afraid of everything
> and everyone.
>
> On 3/29/21 6:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> > A better choice is a short semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun .  It poses a much smaller threat to your neighbors and you don't have to aim accurately.  You will likely kill the home-invader, however.
>
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[gepr]

What a great idea! Clearly I don't spend enough time trolling the ammo shelves:

https://www.academy.com/shop/pdp/cci-pest-control-38-special-357-magnum-109-grain-centerfire-handgun-shotshells

My mom *gave* away my dad's beautiful .357 right after he died. She didn't even ask me if I wanted it. She asked me if I wanted his stupid ostrich boots. [grrr] But we've struggled to find a .357 that'll fit Renee's hand. The Lady Smith worked, which I guess would also fire those shells:

https://www.smith-wesson.com/firearms/model-642-ls-ladysmith-0

On 3/30/21 7:07 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> my 357 is loaded with shot shells, when loaded. used to be able to get different guages, but now just bird shot. Marginally more impact than salt loads.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Sheesh, could buy a good monitor for that or half a terabyte of RAM.  Some people have messed up priorities!

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 6:43 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] is "assault rifle" a red herring?

Nah. A .410 is best. Something short and sized for women as well as men, maybe:

  https://www.mossberg.com/category/series/youth-500-505-510/

But I've wanted a .410 pistol for awhile. E.g.:

https://www.taurususa.com/revolvers/taurus-judge-series/judge-public-defender-45-colt-410-ga-matte-stainless-2-50-in

I just can't bring myself to spend that kind of money on something I'll never use. It boggles me why the gun nuts are so afraid of everything and everyone.

On 3/29/21 6:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> A better choice is a short semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun .  It poses a much smaller threat to your neighbors and you don't have to aim accurately.  You will likely kill the home-invader, however.

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[Prof David West]

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

davew


On Tue, Mar 30, 2021, at 8:48 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:

> What a great idea! Clearly I don't spend enough time trolling the ammo shelves:
>
> https://www.academy.com/shop/pdp/cci-pest-control-38-special-357-magnum-109-grain-centerfire-handgun-shotshells
>
> My mom *gave* away my dad's beautiful .357 right after he died. She
> didn't even ask me if I wanted it. She asked me if I wanted his stupid
> ostrich boots. [grrr] But we've struggled to find a .357 that'll fit
> Renee's hand. The Lady Smith worked, which I guess would also fire
> those shells:
>
> https://www.smith-wesson.com/firearms/model-642-ls-ladysmith-0
>
> On 3/30/21 7:07 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > my 357 is loaded with shot shells, when loaded. used to be able to get different guages, but now just bird shot. Marginally more impact than salt loads.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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[Steve Smith]

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal!  How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   If only I had some cold hard steel to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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[gepr]

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

> Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -
>
>> When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.
> And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).
>
> And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 
>
> And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.
>
> Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public
> duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?
>
> Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was
> usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?
>
> I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel
> to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).
>
> The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!
>
> Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.
>
> Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 
>
> ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,
>
>  - Steve
>
> <disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

--
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[jon zingale]

Ditto. Potent and inspired.



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[Steve Smith]

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

<shucks>  "don't let me get off on a rant here..."  Dennis Miller  <establishing that I have my own inner toxic-masculine>

As long as I'm on an toxic-masculine (and technophilic) anecdotal romp.... 

   I used to like to chide my Liberatarian friends when we'd have a beer or meal by offering to pay, but then with the caveat:

        "but only if they accept Gold or Bitcoin or will barter for a Chicken"... 

    leaving them to take the check since they were on oldSkool *fiat currency* or worse *unsustainable credit* cards which were pretty much the only fungible modes of payment at the time.

I certainly didn't believe anyone would be prepared at any level to accept either as payment... maybe a server *might* have a digital wallet ready to broker the transaction, but I felt pretty safe.  Nobody was likely to have an assay kit on hand.  In either case they'd have had to impose a large transaction fee to facilitate that exotic exchange.

As of few weeks ago, I could at least buy a Tesla (Cybertruck anyone?), and it looks now like I can soon buy a GM product (all Electric Hummer?) with Bitcoin!

https://www.gmc.com/?evar25=gm_com_our_brands

But *now* my bluff is called:  

    https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

Is paying with Crypto going to be the 2020s equivalent of bellying up to the bar with a big ole bluetooth earpiece and projecting your voice into the room so everyone knows what a big swinging d0rk you are in your world?  

GenX Alice:   
    "Here, let me pay with my ฿ " <gestures phone toward touchless pay-terminal>

GenZ Bob:       
    " No, No!, Let ME pay... "  <makes a show of checking smart-watch> "my  Ξ  just went up by more than the price of the meal since we've been sitting here!"

Millenial Server:  
    " Kewl!   But that new article on Salon.com came out 7 minutes ago on Cardano, and my   ₳ went *exponentially ballistic* since I brought you your check and I just completed a transaction to buy this dump from the #$%#@%@$  bourgeoisie owners.   Everything is on the house today!

Boomer: 
     "doh?"   "I dunno what you just said, but at least I got the Vax! Nya Nya Nya!" 

- Sieve

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public
duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was
usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel
to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

The calculations on the energy use and servers that will need to be built  have been done, and we can be assured that cybercurrencies worldwide will hasten the collapse much quicker.  I say, "Bring it On!"

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 2:55 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

<shucks>  "don't let me get off on a rant here..."  Dennis Miller  <establishing that I have my own inner toxic-masculine>

As long as I'm on an toxic-masculine (and technophilic) anecdotal romp.... 

   I used to like to chide my Liberatarian friends when we'd have a beer or meal by offering to pay, but then with the caveat:

        "but only if they accept Gold or Bitcoin or will barter for a Chicken"... 

    leaving them to take the check since they were on oldSkool *fiat currency* or worse *unsustainable credit* cards which were pretty much the only fungible modes of payment at the time.

I certainly didn't believe anyone would be prepared at any level to accept either as payment... maybe a server *might* have a digital wallet ready to broker the transaction, but I felt pretty safe.  Nobody was likely to have an assay kit on hand.  In either case they'd have had to impose a large transaction fee to facilitate that exotic exchange.

As of few weeks ago, I could at least buy a Tesla (Cybertruck anyone?), and it looks now like I can soon buy a GM product (all Electric Hummer?) with Bitcoin!

https://www.gmc.com/?evar25=gm_com_our_brands

But *now* my bluff is called:  

    https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

Is paying with Crypto going to be the 2020s equivalent of bellying up to the bar with a big ole bluetooth earpiece and projecting your voice into the room so everyone knows what a big swinging d0rk you are in your world?  

GenX Alice:   
    "Here, let me pay with my ฿ " <gestures phone toward touchless pay-terminal>

GenZ Bob:       
    " No, No!, Let ME pay... "  <makes a show of checking smart-watch> "my  Ξ  just went up by more than the price of the meal since we've been sitting here!"

Millenial Server:  
    " Kewl!   But that new article on Salon.com came out 7 minutes ago on Cardano, and my   ₳ went *exponentially ballistic* since I brought you your check and I just completed a transaction to buy this dump from the #$%#@%@$  bourgeoisie owners.   Everything is on the house today!

Boomer: 
     "doh?"   "I dunno what you just said, but at least I got the Vax! Nya Nya Nya!" 

- Sieve

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public
duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was
usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel
to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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--

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

https://consensys.net/blog/ethereum-2-0/proof-of-stake-is-coming-to-ethereum-sooner-than-we-think/

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 2:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] CryptoCoins go mainstream

 

The calculations on the energy use and servers that will need to be built  have been done, and we can be assured that cybercurrencies worldwide will hasten the collapse much quicker.  I say, "Bring it On!"

 

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 2:55 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

<shucks>  "don't let me get off on a rant here..."  Dennis Miller  <establishing that I have my own inner toxic-masculine>

 

As long as I'm on an toxic-masculine (and technophilic) anecdotal romp.... 

   I used to like to chide my Liberatarian friends when we'd have a beer or meal by offering to pay, but then with the caveat:

        "but only if they accept Gold or Bitcoin or will barter for a Chicken"... 

    leaving them to take the check since they were on oldSkool *fiat currency* or worse *unsustainable credit* cards which were pretty much the only fungible modes of payment at the time.

I certainly didn't believe anyone would be prepared at any level to accept either as payment... maybe a server *might* have a digital wallet ready to broker the transaction, but I felt pretty safe.  Nobody was likely to have an assay kit on hand.  In either case they'd have had to impose a large transaction fee to facilitate that exotic exchange.

As of few weeks ago, I could at least buy a Tesla (Cybertruck anyone?), and it looks now like I can soon buy a GM product (all Electric Hummer?) with Bitcoin!

https://www.gmc.com/?evar25=gm_com_our_brands

But *now* my bluff is called:  

    https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

Is paying with Crypto going to be the 2020s equivalent of bellying up to the bar with a big ole bluetooth earpiece and projecting your voice into the room so everyone knows what a big swinging d0rk you are in your world?  

GenX Alice:   
    "Here, let me pay with my ฿ " <gestures phone toward touchless pay-terminal>

GenZ Bob:       
    " No, No!, Let ME pay... "  <makes a show of checking smart-watch> "my  Ξ  just went up by more than the price of the meal since we've been sitting here!"

Millenial Server:  
    " Kewl!   But that new article on Salon.com came out 7 minutes ago on Cardano, and my   ₳ went *exponentially ballistic* since I brought you your check and I just completed a transaction to buy this dump from the #$%#@%@$  bourgeoisie owners.   Everything is on the house today!

Boomer: 
     "doh?"   "I dunno what you just said, but at least I got the Vax! Nya Nya Nya!" 

- Sieve

 

 

 

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public

duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was

usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel

to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @merle110

 

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[Merle Lefkoff-2]

Marcus, my laptop will not let me go there.  Suggestions?

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 4:01 PM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://consensys.net/blog/ethereum-2-0/proof-of-stake-is-coming-to-ethereum-sooner-than-we-think/

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 2:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] CryptoCoins go mainstream

 

The calculations on the energy use and servers that will need to be built  have been done, and we can be assured that cybercurrencies worldwide will hasten the collapse much quicker.  I say, "Bring it On!"

 

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 2:55 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

<shucks>  "don't let me get off on a rant here..."  Dennis Miller  <establishing that I have my own inner toxic-masculine>

 

As long as I'm on an toxic-masculine (and technophilic) anecdotal romp.... 

   I used to like to chide my Liberatarian friends when we'd have a beer or meal by offering to pay, but then with the caveat:

        "but only if they accept Gold or Bitcoin or will barter for a Chicken"... 

    leaving them to take the check since they were on oldSkool *fiat currency* or worse *unsustainable credit* cards which were pretty much the only fungible modes of payment at the time.

I certainly didn't believe anyone would be prepared at any level to accept either as payment... maybe a server *might* have a digital wallet ready to broker the transaction, but I felt pretty safe.  Nobody was likely to have an assay kit on hand.  In either case they'd have had to impose a large transaction fee to facilitate that exotic exchange.

As of few weeks ago, I could at least buy a Tesla (Cybertruck anyone?), and it looks now like I can soon buy a GM product (all Electric Hummer?) with Bitcoin!

https://www.gmc.com/?evar25=gm_com_our_brands

But *now* my bluff is called:  

    https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

Is paying with Crypto going to be the 2020s equivalent of bellying up to the bar with a big ole bluetooth earpiece and projecting your voice into the room so everyone knows what a big swinging d0rk you are in your world?  

GenX Alice:   
    "Here, let me pay with my ฿ " <gestures phone toward touchless pay-terminal>

GenZ Bob:       
    " No, No!, Let ME pay... "  <makes a show of checking smart-watch> "my  Ξ  just went up by more than the price of the meal since we've been sitting here!"

Millenial Server:  
    " Kewl!   But that new article on Salon.com came out 7 minutes ago on Cardano, and my   ₳ went *exponentially ballistic* since I brought you your check and I just completed a transaction to buy this dump from the #$%#@%@$  bourgeoisie owners.   Everything is on the house today!

Boomer: 
     "doh?"   "I dunno what you just said, but at least I got the Vax! Nya Nya Nya!" 

- Sieve

 

 

 

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public

duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was

usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel

to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @merle110

 

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--

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Thumbnail:  Ethereum 2 (and other cryptocurrencies) have explored so-called “proof of stake” protocols where there is not an energy-intensive overhead.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 3:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] CryptoCoins go mainstream

 

Marcus, my laptop will not let me go there.  Suggestions?

 

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 4:01 PM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://consensys.net/blog/ethereum-2-0/proof-of-stake-is-coming-to-ethereum-sooner-than-we-think/

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Merle Lefkoff
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2021 2:45 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] CryptoCoins go mainstream

 

The calculations on the energy use and servers that will need to be built  have been done, and we can be assured that cybercurrencies worldwide will hasten the collapse much quicker.  I say, "Bring it On!"

 

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 2:55 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Effin' Epic, Steve. Well done!

<shucks>  "don't let me get off on a rant here..."  Dennis Miller  <establishing that I have my own inner toxic-masculine>

 

As long as I'm on an toxic-masculine (and technophilic) anecdotal romp.... 

   I used to like to chide my Liberatarian friends when we'd have a beer or meal by offering to pay, but then with the caveat:

        "but only if they accept Gold or Bitcoin or will barter for a Chicken"... 

    leaving them to take the check since they were on oldSkool *fiat currency* or worse *unsustainable credit* cards which were pretty much the only fungible modes of payment at the time.

I certainly didn't believe anyone would be prepared at any level to accept either as payment... maybe a server *might* have a digital wallet ready to broker the transaction, but I felt pretty safe.  Nobody was likely to have an assay kit on hand.  In either case they'd have had to impose a large transaction fee to facilitate that exotic exchange.

As of few weeks ago, I could at least buy a Tesla (Cybertruck anyone?), and it looks now like I can soon buy a GM product (all Electric Hummer?) with Bitcoin!

https://www.gmc.com/?evar25=gm_com_our_brands

But *now* my bluff is called:  

    https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/crypto

Is paying with Crypto going to be the 2020s equivalent of bellying up to the bar with a big ole bluetooth earpiece and projecting your voice into the room so everyone knows what a big swinging d0rk you are in your world?  

GenX Alice:   
    "Here, let me pay with my ฿ " <gestures phone toward touchless pay-terminal>

GenZ Bob:       
    " No, No!, Let ME pay... "  <makes a show of checking smart-watch> "my  Ξ  just went up by more than the price of the meal since we've been sitting here!"

Millenial Server:  
    " Kewl!   But that new article on Salon.com came out 7 minutes ago on Cardano, and my   ₳ went *exponentially ballistic* since I brought you your check and I just completed a transaction to buy this dump from the #$%#@%@$  bourgeoisie owners.   Everything is on the house today!

Boomer: 
     "doh?"   "I dunno what you just said, but at least I got the Vax! Nya Nya Nya!" 

- Sieve

 

 

 

On 3/30/21 11:25 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Dave, Glen, et (gun-toting) alia -

When I bought the pistol, 1969,  I could get armor piercing, black talon, heavy grain, light grain, different gauge shot shells, flares, and a grenade launcher (bullet with screw in top that took a rod to which the grenade was attached). Best friend at the time was a genius savant in electronics (3M fellow while still an undergraduate) and full-bore survivalist. We had a lot of fun together. He was the "researcher" that wired up a modular computer the psych department received sans manual, and I was the "lab rat" in my first LSD experiments. You produce some interesting brain waves when on meditation and on LSD.

And this was during your SDS/Weathermen years, right?   At least nobody died (as you tell it).

And even more fascinating if you are fondling your .357 whilst on your LSD trip, jacked in to a jacked up TRS-80's?  /The heft, the grip, the caress of the cold metal! / How does that translate when inhibitions and conventions about reality are lifted?   Maybe complement that with a WWI Trench Knife or a Katana in the other hand!  Surely there are some such studies out there of how the brain lights up when you have the capability to "end" one or many people at the twitch of the wrist or an index finger?   And does it matter if it's loaded with snake-shot, mercury-filled hollow point, armor piercing, or a grenade (or one of each)?    Do some light up our sense of importance, power, domination more than others? 

And how about them Rods from God (nod to Marcus).  Does  any one check the payloads on SpaceX's  Falcon Heavy launches?   I think a full complement of Gods Rods comes in at the standard 6-shooter revolver cylinder load of tungsten telephone poles.    If you can't use them to excise Pence and those traitorous lawmakers from "the People's House", maybe take out Putin in his summer house, or Epstiens island,  or Khomanie or XiXhing or little Rocket Man and his sister, or ...  how *must* it feel to be Zeus or Thor hisself?  Oh the problems we could solve with enough ballistic dominance!   Just think how fast we could have cleared the Ever Given clog in the Suez?   <bwah ha ha!> <ha haaaa...>...  <ha!>.

Some of my lucid-dreaming as a pre-teen included carrying a fully automatic weapon of some kind (my father's era Tommy Gun, or the contemporary M16 ?)   I didn't watch many movies and no TV but somehow I knew the image/swagger of having a firestick in my hand that in principle could eliminate all foes just by waving it in their direction with the trigger held tight.   Unsurprisingly, the subjects of my attempted elimination were "deserving* of such, because  in fact they weren't just out to get *me* but to "get" innocent people and *I* was the only thing standing between the two.   Where did I get *that* image?  I was the proverbial "good guy with a gun"... what an archetype for my developing young male psyche!  Taken straight from the engraving on the barrel of Glen's own obje't d' desire is the phrase "The Judge".  Yes, it is compelling to be judge, jury and executioner!   After all we *individuals* know best right from wrong and Ayn Rant(sic) tole us that it was our public

duty to pursue our private interests to their fullest... and what greater proof of that is the willingness to take someone else's life with a flick of a wrist and twitch of a finger, for our idiosyncratic sense of greater-good!  I wonder what our last two mass murderers were fixing up?  Getting rid of those little exotic women he felt to be his temptation?   Getting back at the bullies from high school that *might* have been in the supermarket  (or school playground, or theater or ???) that day?

Of course, true to form (in such dreams), the more important a willful act was, the more ineffectual my ability to respond.   Most of us know how ff'ing hard it is to *run* in a dream, but in this case, that ineffectuality was extended to the bullets in the rifle...  they were definitely "ultra-light grain loads" and in fact the harder I squinched my eyes or ground my teeth, or thrust the weapon toward the target, the more lame the trajectory until the bullets were barely able to make it out of the barrel!   I vaguely remember in those dreams (paradoxically) having the fear that I would actually *hit something* with my limp waterhose of lead.   As I tried in vain to raise my aim enough for the pathetic stream of tracers (yes, somehow I knew about tracer rounds) to reach my targets, I had to ask myself the question "are these truly my enemies, and is complete annihilation by lead (and tracers) raining down from the sky (consider my trajectories) the best answer.   It was

usually at this point in my dream that I began to exert my will a little more effectually and quit picking at *that* Gordian Knot.    I think by then my enemies were usually bored enough with watching my pathetic attempts to "hose them out of existence" that they had quit whatever Snidely Whiplash activity they had been gesturing toward and I probably woke up out of my own boredom with the whole scene.   I don't think kids who play MMORPG FPS (massive multiplayer online role playing game first-person-shooters) have the same dreams I did... maybe if I'd had more encouragement in my hero-wannabe-ism I would have become a gun nut myself?

I should probably be telling all this to my therapist, not this crowd...   though i think while her code of ethics requires her to keep it all to herself (unless I or someone else is in imminent danger from my ideations and intentions)... and here, this just goes into the archives for all to read (including my neighbors who probably already know I'm a danger to their god-guts-n-glory 2nd amendment rights).  They are probably scared to death that I'm going to back my antique dump truck through the front wall of their house and hook a logging chain to their gun safe and yank it out of the wimpy little lead anchor-bolts holding it down to their 4" floor-slab...   come the apocalypse (only) of course.   <sidebar> Apocalypse rules: Might really DOES make Right!   Maybe if they hadn't seen me welding steel plates over the doors and windows of the truck cab, they wouldn't have thought of that?  Paranoia provides such a glorious endorphin rush!   /If only I had some cold hard steel

to fondle as I contemplate all the horrible things in the world that "a good guy with a gun" can fix up/ with just a little exertion of will...   and what better scenario than a world run amok where *everything* is an opportunity to "do good" (by some twisted logic).

The saying goes:  "You don't see any motorcycles parked in front of a therapists office".  I suspect you don't see many Diesel Duallies belching black smoke and sporting TruckNutz or NRA stickers either.   I suspect an inflated sense of power over others might be just the antidote to the existential angst and ennui those without the big-iron feel?  Maybe this is the answer to Marcus reflection on whether Rupublicans are happier than Democrats?   Go sit astride a 100 horsepower Iron Horse or in the cab of a 400HP coal-rolling pickemup (don't forget the TruckNutz!) and fondle the grip and finger the trigger of some of your good friends standing against the wall of the closet (or tucked between the mattress and box springs of your bed).  THAT will help relieve any self-doubt/self-loathing you might have!

Just pay it forward, you don't need to own it...  belch that exhaust, rip that sound out those 'murrican made cored out mufflers on your 'murrican made iron horse, wave those ('murrican made) weapons of war, spray some lead...   see, don't you feel better now?   Save that $100 and buy a round of drinks at the roadhouse for you buddies in patinated leather or denim but hold back enough to buy a dozen rounds for your best friend tucked down your pants like a phallic symbol.  He doesn't want to be left with an empty chamber.

Yup, I could probably go on forever...  thank Goddess I sublimated my red-blooded 'murrican love for hot lead into the hot lead of type, long since gone virtual/digital <fingers clattering on my keyboard, ratta tat tat!>.   Spraying my words indiscriminately over the crowd... fortunately they are easier to duck (or catch in your teeth and spit back as some here do so adeptly)... hitting <delete> is like my choosing to wake from lucid dreams when they got too boring or inane in spite of my best efforts to steer them right!   Beware the rain of lead and tracers from an ineffectual keyboard jockey! 

ramble, mumble, grumble, bramble,

 - Steve

<disclosure>   I own my Grandfather's WWI-issue .45 (but no ammo, armor piercing or otherwise), a Diesel pickup (sans NRA sticker and Truck Nutz and  programmed chip to belch smoke), and have owned a round dozen motorcycles (all rice burners) in my life...  oh yeah... a couple-a 1940's typewriters and full set of brass linotype slugs for making (literally) hot lead type on-demand ( forget which type-face, I've never put them in a hot-lead lino to test them out). I don't own any tungsten rods in orbit.

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Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @merle110

 

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--

Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  [phone]
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2

twitter: @merle110

 

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