The Whiteboard Pig

The fallacy of Nov. 3rd

Posted on October 29, 2020 by thewhiteboardpig

“We just gotta get through the election”

…yeah… and then what? What exactly do you think changes after the election? I see this myth being perpetuated and bought into by all sides – that after the election all will suddenly be well. Those voting for Trump and those voting against Trump both believe this myth. Keep dreaming.

Notice that I said “voting against Trump” and not “voting for Biden”. Unless you’re one of the seven people in the country voting for Jo Jorgensen, then your vote for “not Trump” is just that, a vote motivated to be for “not Trump”. Biden isn’t a serious candidate. He’s a senile, shell of a human that is just a warm body to fill a spot because the administrative state isn’t technically allowed to run the entirety of itself as a candidate. Kamala is just a lying, crooked cop that is so unlikeable she had to drop out of the Dem primary before it even began. Who the Democrat candidates are doesn’t actually matter, because almost no one is voting FOR them. So let’s keep this straight, because it’s a core premise of this post: almost no one is voting FOR Joe Biden, they are merely voting AGAINST Donald Trump.

So how does this tie into the idea that nothing will change after the election, regardless of who wins? Let’s look at each scenario.

Biden wins

Biden voters are operating under the myth that all things return to a relaxed “normal” after he wins, largely based on the belief that Trump is the root of all evil, the wellspring of all that is wrong in America, and the creator of deep societal divisions. This narrative has been created, nurtured, and propagated by Democrats and Biden’s campaign as almost the exclusive campaign platform. But how and why?

As radical elements within American society push the Democrat party further and further left, now deep into socialist territory, their policies lose increasing amounts of public support. They have become so radical, in fact, that their now overtly Marxist policies are supported by only 50-60% of their own party (depending what polls you look at).

With the above poll numbers in mind, how would you go about getting the other half of your party and the nearly 60% of independents who don’t support your agenda to vote for it? The same way The Party fostered compliance in Orwell’s 1984… a boogeyman.

Enter: Trump Derangement Syndrome

In 1984, The Party harnessed ever-present fear and hatred of the boogeyman Goldstein to keep the population in compliance… because to not comply would be to give Goldstein an in, he lurks around every corner, he is the omnipresent evil, lying in wait to capitalize on even your most simple questioning of the narrative the Party run media presents you with, destroying everything you love. Sound familiar?

In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Fear, loathing, hatred, and cult-like devotion to a false narrative about a fabricated boogeyman is how you get vast swaths of the American population not to accept your policies, but to ignore them and vote for you anyway. You don’t need popular or even good policy, so long as the population believes they’re voting for you because their lives depend on it. Policy isn’t even a consideration for them – survival is.

Vote for Joe Biden Like Our Lives Depend on It': Michelle Obama at Virtual DNC

But once they win, they get what they want, and we can all move on and get back to “normal”, right? Wrong. The Party in 1984 had complete, unopposed control of society, but still engaged in the daily Two Minutes of Hate against Goldstein and the constant pushing of the Goldstein boogeyman – precisely because the boogeyman was what kept them in control. It will be no different for America. As the Democrat Party moves further and further left, with increasingly unpopular policies, it MUST push the levels of fear and hatred in society ever-higher to keep the majority of the population “voting against” their rivals “like their lives depend on it”. Taking Trump out of the picture merely creates a vacancy in the boogeyman spot that MUST be filled immediately with someone or something new – with the most likely immediate candidate being Trump’s supporters, but it will not end with them either. It cannot end, ever.

This rotation of boogeymen is never going away regardless of who wins the 2020 election. The Democrat Party has plunged to Orwellian depths that there is no recovering from. Trump, COVID, Kavanaugh, systemic racism, Amy Coney Barrett, Russia, on and on. Their power, and thus their existence, now depends on keeping you ever-fearful, ever-angry, ever-hysterical towards whatever boogeyman they’re currently deeming flavor of the day. Your Biden vote isn’t removing this. It’s validating it.

Trump wins

Unfortunately, the “return to normal” myth is equally popular with those voting for Trump, but for much different reasons.

Without even getting into the absurdities of Q-tardism, there’s this misconception and sort of wishful, hopeful belief amongst Trump supporters that this Trump presidency is the final battle for America playing out before them. The first term was the battle that would decide the war – and a 2020 win seals victory with a nationwide rebuke of the administrative state.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump isn’t the end. Trump is the beginning. This presidency and the 2020 election are not the final battle, they are the opening shots in a now escalated and overt war for America and American freedom. A Trump win in this election doesn’t mean that the administrative state and the establishment Republicans that have been hiding their Trump hate in the closet for four years just all pick up their balls and go home. It means they bring out the big guns and they change their targets. If you think a bad cold, masks, lockdowns, impeachments, Russia Russia Russia, and CNN propaganda is the worst they have to offer, you’re deluding yourself. They aimed at Trump from 2016-2019 with only marginal success. In 2020, they came for you indirectly; they hurt your income, maybe cost you your job, closed your business or your employer’s business, prevented you from seeing friends and family, disrupted your life, etc. In 2021, they’re coming for you directly. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this in social media censorship, cancelation and destruction of anyone that goes against The Party narrative, demonetization of independent conservative influencers, vandalism of property and doxing of conservatives, firing of employees (even including doctors) that won’t bend to the narrative, and literal executions of Trump supporters in the streets. We’re also teeing up their ability to crush you more directly with things like going cashless, the upcoming COVID ID cards/chips, the establishment of a virtual “Ministry of Truth” via “Fact Checkers” to censor dissenting opinions, and the active closing down financially and digitally of websites and website hosts not directly controlled by socialist Big Tech.

If you think you just cast your 2020 Trump vote, then go back to enjoying life… you’re going to be in for one hell of a 2021.

We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing…The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.

Fingerprinting the not-so-invisible hand

Posted on July 21, 2020 by thewhiteboardpig

“I’m so confused these days.” “I have no idea what’s going on anymore.” “Everything is up in the air.” “Everything changes day to day.” All general sentiments we’ve heard uttered in hopelessness and confusion many times, by many people in 2020. This is by design. Understanding how we got here isn’t hard, but it does take some… understanding. Peering through the manufactured fog of faux-chaos isn’t all that hard either, and when you do, you realize the “invisible” hand that is at work… is actually quite easy to see if you know what to look for.

I want to keep this as concise and to the point as possible, because I know attention spans are dropping by the day, but having a well-rounded enough understanding of what’s going on does require a brief history lesson to set the stage.

Back in the 1950s the newly christened CIA (formerly the OSS during WWII) was coming off of WWII and the Korean War with a profound problem that was a major obstacle in the fulfillment of its mandate: the realization through experience that old-school, brute force interrogation techniques don’t actually work for providing good intel. Contrary to what we’re typically shown in action and spy movies, beating your captive senseless or drilling their knee caps produces hardened resolve and resentment at best, lies and misinformation at worst. This is fine if you’re conducting witch trials or a religious inquisition, in which your ultimate goal is a confession – truthful or not being of no relevance. But under the shadow of a developing Cold War and the deep seeded (and present to this day) extreme paranoia that the Russians were perpetually one step ahead of them, the CIA stepped back from medieval torture instruments and instead, launching Project MKUltra, looked to the medical and scientific fields for what they hoped was a magical key to unlock or control the minds of interrogation suspects. MKULtra was an umbrella term under which many projects, experiments, and studies were conducted. Research conducted under MKUltra ranged from the horrific McGill University studies (link), to the incredibly bizarre Stargate Project (link) which the Stranger Things show is loosely based on, to ones we’ve actually come to accept as pretty normal today, like Operation Mockingbird (link). MKUltra was officially (“officially”) terminated in the 1970s, culminating with the CIA director, in a fit of panic, ordering all files and related documents destroyed – something that was done with near, but not quite complete success.

One of MKUltra’s greatest known contributions is the KUBARK Counter-intelligence Interrogation manual (which can be read only mildly redacted in its unclassified form here: link). Understanding what the CIA learned through its decades of experiments (and their subsequent trail of lawsuits and dead bodies) about controlling the human mind is the key to being able to see the “invisible” hand – and also understanding who it belongs to.

It would seem from the manual that the CIA never found the magic key it was looking for, but it did walk away with a very detailed, scientifically supported system to control the human mind that boiled down to one thing: regression. The name of the game was to cause a subject or captive to regress mentally to a point at which they lost willingness and/or ability to resist, while not regressing them so far that their mental damage turned them into a completely useless vegetable (the MKUltra experiments are littered with the bodies of people this happened to). As it turns out, inducing regression isn’t difficult or complicated – it might even start sounding a bit familiar.

The manual outlines the necessary steps and techniques to produce mental regression in a subject. These steps begin with the arrest of the subject. Arrest methods are chosen to produce maximum shock and disorientation. Disorientation remains a theme throughout. The CIA’s research showed that one of the most effective methods of disorientation is sensory deprivation.

The chief effect of arrest and detention, and particularly of solitary confinement, is to deprive a subject of many or most of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed.

…

The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself.

If you’re one of the awake ones, don’t get ahead of me. If not, don’t worry, we’re just scratching the surface.

With external stimuli cut off, the subject grasps at other means to orient himself in a confusing world. One foundational form of reorienting is found in predictable daily routine. The manual warns against the development of even the most seemingly inconsequential routine for subjects and insists they be kept in continuous change.

Control of the source’s environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern, and other fundamentals. Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disoriented, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.

…

In short, the prisoner should not be provided a routine to which he can adapt and from which he can draw some comfort – or at least a sense of his own identity.

Sounding any more familiar? Disrupt routine, cut off contacts, remove the familiar, isolate – leave people alone to sit in their houses all day, without work, without play, without travel, without friends, with their only source of external stimuli being the fear mongering news casts they sit in front of day in and day out.

At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject’s tendencies towards compliance.

“We’ll let you out of the house to experience a bit of the familiar… but you’ll have to wear this mask, inject this vaccine, carry this COVID ID card.” Yes Papa.

Side note here for the Stranger Things fans… I always found it appropriate, given the above, that Eleven refers to her CIA psychologist caretaker as “Papa”, in spite of the fact that she hates him. Not sure if this was coincidental in the writing or intentional.

Barring any external stimuli, including routine, the subject’s mind withdraws inward, seeking identity and orientation from internal sources.

…the circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange.

I’m guessing this sounds familiar to everyone now. Onward!

If the interrogatee is especially proud or neat, it may be useful to give him an outfit that is one or two sizes too large and to fail to provide a belt, so that he must hold his pants up.

…or not allow him/her to get a haircut or nail grooming for months at a time.

…man’s sense of identity depends upon a continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, actions, relations with others, etc. Detention permits the interrogator to cut through these links and throw the interrogatee back upon his own unaided internal resources.

And what are those resources? When forced out of routine and disoriented, what do people grasp for internally to provide identity, orientation, and the familiar? Ask anyone to tell you about themselves and what are the primary things they bring up… Career. Business they own. Religion. Sports. Patriotism/national identity. Heritage/history. Hobbies. All things currently under direct assault or curtailed across the country. History isn’t being removed because it offends people. Patriotism isn’t being relabeled as racism and xenophobia because it actually is. Churches aren’t closed because they spread virus more easily than widely permitted mass protests. These things are being done systematically because we’re witnessing the removal of both external and internal sources of identity from an entire country. When these are gone, no straws are left to grasp at and the population’s mental regression is complete.

…the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man: the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to meet new, challenging and complex situations, to deal with trying interpersonal relations, and to cope with repeated frustrations.

What’s most amazing about all this, to me, is that, as also prescribed by the manual, society is doing it to itself.

…whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself… When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself. The motivational strength of the individual is likely to exhaust itself in this internal encounter. As long as the subject remains standing, he is attributing to his captor the power to do something worse to him, but there is actually no showdown of the ability of the interrogator to do so.

This is why governors, mayors, and town councils don’t actually care whether their unconstitutional mandates and orders are legal or not. They aren’t the ones enforcing them. Local businesses are enforcing them as “private property rights” or “right to refuse service”. Citizens are enforcing them on each other through peer pressure and, sometimes, very public psychotic episodes on non-compliers. Local businesses are shutting themselves down. People are keeping themselves in the house. The pain being inflicted to aid in the regression is almost entirely self-inflicted, and it has the additional benefit (as in the interrogation scenario) of establishing the uncontested dominance and power in society’s eyes of politicians who are giving, but not themselves enforcing, these orders. There is an additional side benefit. The manual repeatedly states that in nurturing feelings of guilt, subjects must be provided with a source of rationalization to overcome their objections – an “excuse” for complying, if you will.

The subject’s primary source of resistance to confession or divulgence may be pride, patriotism, personal loyalty to superiors, or fear of retributions if he is returned to their hands. Under such circumstances his natural desire to escape from stress by complying with the interrogator’s wishes may become decisive if he is provided an acceptable rationale for compliance.

“It’s for the greater good.” “It’s to save grandma.”

This is why it’s so effective to make businesses, not government, the enforcement arm of illegal mandates and rights grabs. “I’m just doing this because the business requires it” is the perfect rationalization for the masses of people that would otherwise resist a mask order that was enforced by the actual police. “I’m saving grandmas” is the perfect self-inflicted lockdown rationalization for people that would otherwise strongly resist actually being held in their houses at gun-point by the government. Give people an out that allows them to shift responsibility for their capitulation… and you’ll have more capitulation.

So what then? What is the purpose of putting a captive (or the entire US population) into this helpless, regressed state of anxiety, confusion, and straw-grasping? When a person is in a regressed state, their mind is a “blank slate”. This result is the holy grail of mental manipulation the CIA spent decades searching for. The mind isn’t just a blank slate on which an interrogator can paint their own narrative to ensure compliance, the mind actually begs to be given a new narrative. To return to some routine. To be reoriented. To create a new familiar… a “new normal”. This new normal is whatever the interrogator… or politician… wants it to be.

The worthlessness of Bitcoin – a real world usage case

Posted on December 9, 2017 by thewhiteboardpig

I’ve been involved in Bitcoin for a very long time. These days, when normies and all those social media pumper, overnight crypto experts hear that, they think “oh, like back when it was $3000.” No. Like back when it was $2.50. Back when you’d tell normies about it and they’d (correctly) identify it as a scam or totally unworkable, for all the same reasons it’s still a scam and totally unworkable: the inherent insecurity of money that only exists on a hard drive, the recourse-less nature of transactions, the lack of regulations, the inability to scale over time, and the fact that the biggest real-world users are drug cartels, hackers, gun runners, and child traffickers. I was involved back before MTGox (the original Coinbase) just up and disappeared with tens of millions of dollars of people’s real money and fake money (Bitcoin). Oh… you haven’t heard about that? The pumpers didn’t tell you? You might want to look that up.

Anywho…

Before you make a run on Coinbase to remove all your real money, finish reading this post I put so much effort into – then run.

So back in the earlier days of Bitcoin, anyone with enthusiast/gamer level computer hardware could easily “mine” several Bitcoin a week (even a day, if you go far enough back). Mining was how you originally got Bitcoin, not by giving up your hard earned US Dollars. I was part of a mining pool – a large group of folks that all worked as a collective and then distributed the Bitcoin to members. This helped members get more regular payouts than mining on their own. None of that is actually important though. What is important is that I found myself sitting on quite a few Bitcoin that were rising in price (to a whopping ~$20, still nearly a 10x increase), yet I had no way to turn them into the real dollars they were supposedly worth. I didn’t trust MTGox (and look at how that turned out) and other scam exchanges. Plus, even if you trusted those Chinese teenagers running these rigged “exchanges” in their mom’s basements, selling your Bitcoin to someone for USD wasn’t the end of your hassle. You still had to deal with giving boat loads of personal information to ultra-sketchy “banks” and wire transaction outfits to finally, after many fees and much time, get USD in your hand, or so you hoped. I opted for the easier, but equally sketchy, route of simply sending some guy that had a website that looked like it was designed in 1991 large chunks of my Bitcoin stash, and he’d eventually mail me Visa gift cards full of real dollars. Totally legit. But I do still like that guy. Never once screwed me. Hopefully he’s a fake millionaire now.

Fast forward many years and Bitcoin had its first major run – up to $1000. This caught the attention of normies and the media. The media coverage caught my attention, because I remembered that buried on an old hard drive somewhere was my wallet file that still contained several bitcoin (Visa guy didn’t accept less than 10 at a time, so I had residual when I stopped mining). I checked around the ‘net and the cashing out issues remained the same. After getting proven right about MTGox, I certainly wasn’t going the exchange route. Sketchy Visa guy was long gone, probably dead from a cocaine and hooker fueled rager to celebrate his new billionaire status. The only option seemed to be to spend it. Since the early days when only illicit sites like Silk Road accepted direct Bitcoin payment, it seemed a few more had caught on to the fad, most notably Overstock.com. This isn’t terribly surprising as Patrick Byrne has always been a goofy dude that loves to be anti-mainstream, so being the first major retailer to accept Bitcoin seemed natural for him.

SIDEBAR FOR NORMIES: Do not be confused. Retailers that “accept” Bitcoin don’t really accept Bitcoin. They use payment systems powered by Coinbase or another exchange which immediately converts Bitcoin back to their native, real currency. They never handle a cent of Bitcoin. This isn’t acceptance. This isn’t a new paradigm. This is a front.

So what did I do? With Bitcoin already losing 20% of its value just since I started my research on how to spend it, I went on an Overstock.com shopping spree… and what a glorious one it was. Thanks Patrick. I still had some fractional Bitcoin left over after, which I once again decided to hold onto, just in case.

Bitcoin got decimated after that and traded at a few hundred dollars for years afterward. Everyone but the die-hard pumpers forgot it existed.

Now, here it is again, shooting towards the sky. Again, it caught the attention of the normies and the media – thus also catching my attention. I still had some left. Surely the cashing out situation had improved. Once again I began the internet research to see how I get real dollars with Bitcoin in 2017. Guess what? Not much has changed.

Coinbase is semi-legitimized these days and requires no where near the personal information of an actual online broker/exchange (yay fake trading scam!!), so I did sign up for an account. But with MTGox still in the back of my mind, I decided to see what options existed beyond scam exchanges. Looks like good old Patty is still taking Bitcoin… oh… and so is Newegg! I love Newegg! Alright, time for another shopping spree! This will be a case study in Bitcoin’s real-world effectiveness and usefulness in 2017. Where to begin?

I need to find my wallet.dat file. No problem, I know exactly where I kept that.

Wallet resurrected. Now I need to download the original Bitcoin client program. Easy download and… wait, what? 8 days to download the entire 9 years worth of blockchain??? I don’t have 8 days to wait!

Frantically scour the internet looking for a solution. Turns out a million and one other Bitcoin wallet programs have been created since I was last involved. Some of them let you spend money without downloading the entire blockchain. Cool. That’s what I need. They’re “less secure”. Whatever, this whole thing is insecure.

Download new wallet program… doesn’t read old wallet. Download Wallet Spender XYZ… doesn’t read old wallet. Download Bitcoin Fucking Rocks Wallet…. doesn’t read old wallet. Download Crypto Child Trafficker Plus… doesn’t read old wallet.

This is a problem. Do some more research… OHHHH, now it makes sense. Even though I have this super awesome, currency of the future that’s going to make the dollar obsolete, because the wallet that contains it was made with program A, I can’t actually get any of this awesome currency of the future out of the wallet with programs B-Z. Think about that for a second and ponder that level of real-world practicality. You have dollars in a wallet that’s made by Ralph Lauren (because you’re fancy). Those dollars can only be spent if pulled from that exact wallet or another wallet made only by Ralph Lauren. If Ralph Lauren ever discontinues that exact model of wallet, you’re up shit creek and your money might as well not exist. Very practical. Very usable.

So what to do?

I guess I need to call Comcast and get a lot more bandwidth, then I just use the original Bitcoin Core program and download the entire blockchain onto my laptop so I can access my wallet.

18 hours later I have an error and a full laptop hard drive. Apparently the full blockchain is over 200GB of data.

Time to start over, on the desktop with a completely empty 320GB harddrive.

32 more hours later I have the entire blockchain downloaded and the ability to FINALLY (a total of three days later) spend my currency of the future that’s going to make the dollar obsolete. SHOPPING SPREE TIME!! I want a camera, let’s look at Newegg.

Newegg doesn’t accept Bitcoin for marketplace transactions, only for items sold by Newegg itself. Bummer. Newegg only sells computer hardware and the only computer hardware I need is more RAM, but DDR4 is laughably overpriced these days. No worries, Patty has me covered.

Overstock.com cart full, time to check out. Select Bitcoin as payment method (this is cool!), receive wallet address to send money to… oh that’s fancy, it links right to Bitcoin Core now. Nice upgrade after eight years. Patty gives me 15 minutes to send him the money before he cancels my order.

Ok, so now I just send this… wait a minute. “Transaction fee”? I do remember those. Like 0.000001 bitcoin. Used to be fractions of a penny. It’s a fee that ensures your transaction gets processed by the network in a timely manner. But why is the Core program recommending a transaction fee equivalent to $55 on my $141 order? That’s absurd.

Back to the internet I go.

Turns out the Bitcoin network doesn’t scale well (who could have seen that coming? *eyeroll*) and transaction fees and processing times have gone through the roof. Even if I spend the $55, my estimated transaction approval time is 60 minutes. I have only 15 minutes to get Patty his money – same story on Newegg and any other site that accepts Bitcoin. This 15 minute window is in place because Bitcoin’s value is so comically unstable. In 20 minutes the vendor could be getting stiffed if the value drops or you could be getting stiffed if the value rises. But alas, back to the problem… spending $55 to get a transaction approved in an hour that MUST be approved in 15 minutes. This makes actually spending Bitcoin at these sites an impossibility. Do I chance it anyway with the recommended transaction fee? Maybe I get lucky and it gets filled early? If it doesn’t and Patty cancels my order, I’ve lost that $55 and still have no products.

I don’t want to risk $55. I guess I’ll just send it through with the default 0.000001 transaction fee and hope I get lottery-win lucky.

Not a chance. Of course I missed the 15 minute window and now have no new goodies. But 15 hours later the transaction still isn’t confirmed. I now have $141 floating out in the ether for days, weeks, months, only Bitcoin god knows how long before it finally (if it ever does) make its way to Patty so that he can then issue me a refund (maybe), probably less the recommended transaction fee on his end and I’m out $55 with nothing to show for it… or maybe the default transaction fee and I wait another six months to get my currency of the future that’s going to replace the dollar back.

So here’s the fun part. The part that the normies, who are so demanding and impatient, are really going to love. While my $141 floats through network space, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t call Bitcoin customer service. I can’t start a live chat. I can’t write them an email. They don’t exist. I can’t file a dispute. I can’t put a stop payment on it. All transactions are final. You have zero recourse. That money is gone forever – or until Patty receives it in six months and refunds it to me six months after that. Who knows what it’ll be worth then (likely nothing at all).

This is only $141 of fake “currency” I never really had – because I never actually spent a penny to acquire my Bitcoin. Multiply this by many times and imagine you acquired it with your hard earned US dollars. What do you do?

You want to get rich quick and “invest” real money in these scam exchanges and this scam product? You think this hilariously unusable and unstable “currency” is viable to replace the dollar or even be useful as a payment system for anything but child sex slaves? Just image this same scenario with larger amounts of your own money. Go do some real research and talk to people with no vested interest in Bitcoin before spending a penny on this scam.

This public frenzy pump and dump strategy is as old as markets themselves. These parabolic chart patterns have repeated tens of thousands of times with the same end results. Bitcoin isn’t practical. It isn’t the currency of the future. It’s a totally unworkable joke and these parabolic price rises are nothing but a classic pump and dump.

You know what the currency of the future is? Plastic – credit cards. They’re portable, fast, easily tracked, full of recourse options, secure, sustainable, offer cool rewards points, they’re accepted nearly everywhere, and you don’t need to invest a week of internet research and jumping through hoops to spend your money.

Flying drones instead of being one

Posted on September 5, 2017 by thewhiteboardpig

Drone

noun

1. the male of the honeybee and other bees, stingless and making no honey.

2.

an unmanned aircraft or ship that can navigate autonomously, without human control or beyond line of sight:
the GPS of a U.S. spy drone.

(loosely) any unmanned aircraft or ship that is guided remotely:
a radio-controlled drone.

3. a person who lives on the labor of others; parasitic loafer.

4. a drudge.

The saved draft for this post is over eight months old at this point. I hit the “add post” button way back then to write about my idea of starting a business. Then the business got rolling and though I had every intention of returning to this post and… actually writing something… there was always something more pressing to do. I think maybe 3-4 months in I came here and added that definition of “drone”. Then it sat idle again, while I did anything but. Now I find myself racking my brain to figure out how to properly recap an extremely hectic eight months.

Going way back to when I started this blog, I had made clear that the way forward to getting what I wanted out of life was to cut expenses. The blog itself was about living cheaply and not worrying about the typical American mentality of “keeping up with the Joneses”. That mentality hasn’t changed, but somewhere along the way I decided to also pursue another avenue as well. At this point it’s lost to me exactly when, where, or how I came to the decision to pursue a drone services business, but in retrospect I can now see that the building blocks were being laid for years.

This business idea was something I had had in the back of my mind for years, back 3-4 years ago when multi-rotors were coming into common use, but before “drone” had become a household word. It was obvious that a ripe market for diverse uses was ready to be tapped, but I was busy working 60 hour weeks and doubted my abilities to successfully run a business. Fast-forward to late last year and there is at least one strong catalyst to this endeavor that I can clearly point out. I’ve had the book Good to Great by Jim Collins sitting on my bookshelf for at least five years now – anonymously inter-officed to me by someone at work. The title made it sound gimmicky and self-helpish, exactly type of book I don’t like, so there it sat on the shelf for quite a long time. I actually nearly threw it out a few times when cleaning. Then one day I needed some reading material while relaxing in the pool, so I brought it and read the preface and immediately realized that the book was not at all what I had pegged it as, and that I had been missing out on something genuinely great (pun maybe intended) all these years. The book contains a lot of very in-depth research about what makes great companies great, but one observation that Collins made really stuck in my mind. It was the idea of what he called the “hedgehog concept”. Put simply, Collins said that all companies that sustained greatness had a very solid understanding of what they could and, equally importantly, could not be the very best at. It was also something that excited them, something that was worth getting out of bed for and something they felt strongly about. Equally importantly, it was something that made economic sense – something there was a market for. This idea stuck with me and remains clear and present to this day.

Sometime late last year I decided to dive in. I spent a few weeks studying for my Part 107 sUAS pilot certificate and passed with a 97% in mid January. In the meantime, I had ordered a couple of DJI drones to get things started. That’s right around the point at which I started this post with nothing more than title. Things progressed rapidly from there and there’s no reason for a play-by-play recap, nor was that ever the intention of this post. What is worth mentioning is the one theme that has stood out along the way. When running your own business, you are your own everything: marketing department, sales department, social media coordinator, operations manager, financial controller, customer service, etc. I have had to learn website building, search engine optimization, online marketing, social media management and many other aspects that go with running almost any business nowadays. More important though, is what I haven’t had to learn and how it ties into my belief that the groundwork for this venue has been slowly being laid for years. Thanks to exceptionally diverse professional experience as well as years spent in personal study, I already had a thorough understanding of outside sales, market analysis, operations management, managerial accounting, and operations efficiency techniques – and I knew how to fly RC aircraft. These skills and areas of knowledge became a significant competitive advantage in what turns out to be a very supply-flooded market.

At least in Colorado, drone service providers are a dime for ten dozen. The Part 107 test is easy to pass and relatively cheap to take. Combine this with low startup costs (literally all you need is a $499 refurb Phantom 3) and suddenly there’s someone on every block becoming a drone services provider. However, a certificate only makes you legal and owning a drone only gives you potential to fly. Combining those two things does not automatically give you a viable drone services business, let alone a successful one. Through social media and professional groups, I’ve watched myriad other operators flop and flounder trying to make headway in a flooded market. The market may be flooded with “providers” who have a certificate and a flying camera, but the vast majority lack direction and the necessary business acumen to create something successful. It was this observation that brought me back to Collins’s hedgehog concept. I may not have the startup capital to have the equipment necessary to shoot commercials for BMW. I have neither the time nor desire to become a professional enough video editor to compete with video production companies that also utilize drones. But I do have the business skills, knowledge, and experience necessary to be the very best at providing high-value, basic drone services.

As Collins recommended, I have stuck to that hedgehog concept religiously, taking only actions in line with it for the purpose of furthering it. It has been incredible to watch, over the course of only half a year, the business go from doing freebies, to doing sub-contractor work, to having a few organic jobs per month, to having a few organic jobs per week – which at this point is essentially the capacity I can handle while still working a full-time job. Feedback from customers continues to validate my business approach and my hedgehog concept, as does the rapid increase in work we’re receiving.

Now I find myself rapidly approaching a crossroads. If I want to fly drones for a living rather than be one, I have to make the leap to a full-time business. But when is the right time? Hopefully it won’t take me another eight months to update this blog and answer (or at least mull over) that question.

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Want to actually check out the business? Our website can be found here: www.adventureuav.com

Why the orange guy is the right choice

Posted on October 3, 2016 by thewhiteboardpig

No witty or funny title, just straight to the point – like this post will be. This election has brought unprecedented levels of empty rhetoric and irrelevant bullshit to public discourse. It’s an age-old propaganda strategy called “muddying the water”. Spam so much bullshit into public discussion that people either no longer know or no longer care what is actually relevant and what is actually true. Allow me to briefly cut through it all, because there are some major issues we face in this election that are at the heart of the more often talked about issues, and none of them are getting airtime. Once you recognize these root issues and weigh out how the candidates will actually affect them (not how they say they’ll affect them), Trump becomes the obvious choice of the person capable of critical thinking. Here’s why…

#1.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that this election is likely to be a referendum on free speech. It is without a doubt the most critical issue facing Americans in this election.What? Most critical issue, yet you haven’t heard it mentioned at a debate or obsessed over on a cable news talk show? That’s because the corporate owned media propaganda machine (notice I didn’t say “liberal” or “conservative” – they’re all the same) wants you to stay blind to this one. Within only the past several years, and especially with the emergence of “black lives matter” and the idea of “safe spaces” there has a been a veiled, but very concerted attack on free speech in this country. This country that only a few, short years ago valued this right above all others is rapidly transforming into a place where speaking your mind is very dangerous. Make no mistake, this is not a left and right issue. Both sides of the aisle do it, they simply have different ideas of what free speech they want to suppress. The right wants to remove your ability to criticize authority (see: anything negative about police, military, the flag, patriotism, ‘Merika, etc.) and the left wants to remove your ability to criticize… pretty much everything else (anything negative about blacks, Muslims, feminists, liberal leaders, or, if you’re white and male, nearly anything that comes out of your mouth). As they advance this agenda together, we’re rapidly losing our ability to do or say anything other than simply heading off to work every day with our heads down and mouths shut to be a good, corporate money making drones – exactly what our wealthy masters want.Liberals never miss a chance to call Trump Hitler and claim he’ll bring fascism to American, but what could be more fascist than them using cries of “racism!” and “hate speech!” to shut down any opinion that disagrees with their own? The First Amendment doesn’t exist to protect statements that people enjoy hearing or the act of saluting the flag. It exists to protect the triggering, controversial, nasty speech on the margins of society – because those people deserve to voice their opinions too, whether you like it and agree with it or not. It exists to protect those that want to sit out the national anthem, yell “fuck the police”, and shit on the flag before burning it. It exists to protect people that want to say all lives matter, that black people commit the vast majority of violent crime, and that feminists are just angry ugly girls. Attempts from both sides to suppress this free speech are anathema to everything America is supposed to stand for. And, in an ultimate irony, these suppression efforts are done in the name of FREEDOM!!!! Because no one can argue against FREEDOM!!!! Freedom for who? “Freedom” for the people the speech offends. I’m sorry, but free speech is protected by the First Amendment. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights that guarantees you a right to not be offended.

So, on this issue, why Trump? Whether intentional or not, Trump is returning free speech to America. All those “deplorables”? It’s their speech the First Amendment is protecting. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to agree with it. They have a RIGHT to say it. With Trump in the public eye saying controversial and outrageous things on almost a daily basis, people are again feeling comfortable speaking their minds publicly as well – as they should. He has changed national discourse and returned marginalized voices that had been beaten down by the speech suppression machine. He has fueled the rise of free speech advocates like Milo Yiannopoulos. His public antics and his supporters’ awakening has been the first real challenge to speech suppression since its inception. Of course, it has resulted in the escalation of speech suppression rhetoric as well. Cries of “racism!” and “bigot!” are at all time highs. Think illegals don’t belong here? You’re a racist. Think we shouldn’t import terrorists? You’re a bigot. Think the disproved gender-based wage gap is… disproved? You’re a sexist. But people aren’t having it anymore. They’re fighting back. And if we’re being honest, it’s because Trump set the ball in motion. Regardless of what Trump’s policy may be in this area, his own disregard for political correctness sends the message to the nation at large that it’s once again acceptable to speak your mind. The stuff coming out might not be pretty and it might trigger your sensitive self, but that’s exactly the type of stuff we need to ensure is always free to be said.

As in all other cases, Hillary will provide us more of the same – in this case: speech suppression. Her campaign’s and supporters’ constant cries of racism and sexism against statements and actions that are not remotely either is easy proof of this. The DNC went to extraordinary lengths to ensure Bernie supporters were not heard at the convention or the voting booth, and that dissenters were hidden away behind a massive wall. Voting is the very pinnacle of free speech. The DNC ran a biased, rigged election and did everything in their power to making voting difficult. This is not a group of people who value your speech rights. As much as the GOP hated Trump, they ran a fair election even knowing it would likely result in him being the nominee.

A vote for Hillary is a vote for more speech policing, more election rigging, and more voter suppression. Whether you agree with what he’s saying or not, a vote for Trump is a vote for you to be able to continue to say what you want.

#2.

American voters like to disavow any responsibility for the results of their government’s foreign policy actions. In reality, you are directly responsible for the results of the wars and violence perpetrated in your name, by your elected government. Americans have never showed sympathy for citizens of foreign nations with violent governments, be it WWII Germany and Japan or Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The reality they fail to recognize is that the rest of the world views them with equally little sympathy. When (not “if” or “should”) America falls from its premier world power status, our foreign policy chickens will come home to roost in a way far beyond anything we have seen. We will be held to our own standards. Vote carefully.

There are lots of claims being spammed out about Trump on foreign policy. One of my favorites is the paradox of him being both an agent of the Russian government and a tyrant hell-bent on starting a war with Russia. Surely Putin’s mind control drugs are making Trump want to go to war with Russia. Makes perfect sense… if you’re braindead. Most of the claims revolve around him being a violent, unpredictable nut that’ll nuke the world into the stone age. Cutting through the bullshit, the strong statements Trump has made are nearly all in regard to ISIS. Even though both Clinton and Trump have called for more war, it’s important to distinguish war with who and for what. Trump’s calls for war are specifically aimed at what he sees as a current, direct threat to US security: ISIS. He repeatedly calls for escalated war to eradicate ISIS – which, seemingly forgotten by everyone, was the exact same thing anti-war Bernie Sanders called for. No one called Sanders a warmonger or trigger happy. On nearly the opposite end of the spectrum, Clinton’s foreign policy is a continuation of Reagan, Bush, other Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama… more intervention, more illegal attacks on sovereign states, more imperialist wars, and the very real possibility of a war with Russia. As recently as the last debate Clinton has called for more illegal bombing in Syria. She has publicly supported a no-fly zone in Syria, which everyone with a brain recognizes as a slap in the face to Russia and a setup for an exchange of fire between our countries that would surely start a war. She has stayed silent about Obama’s increase of troops in Iraq (I thought liberals claim he ended that war?). A vote for Clinton is a vote for more of this, and their blood will be on your hands.

Clinton and her supporters repeatedly tout her support of the Iran treaty as evidence of her not being a warmonger. Unfortunately, this is merely nice window dressing on a career littered with warmongering and the blood of hundreds of thousands (possibly millions, depending on who you go to for numbers) of innocents. In reality, it’s a way to look diplomatic, while also securing an easy excuse to go to war with Iran in the not-so-distant future (did everyone so quickly forget those weapons inspections in Iraq that justified attack after attack on them for the past 20 years?). Clinton’s wars created ISIS. They fuel terrorism. They breed terrorists. After all, that’s the whole point: eternal war. It keeps your tax dollars lining the pockets of her offense contractor donors and friends, lives of those innocents on the receiving end of the bombs be damned.

#3.

If you want to know what candidate will be best for you, the lower class (middle class doesn’t even exist anymore) voter, just follow the money. If the candidate is liked and supported by big money, they aren’t your friend. It’s become even more obvious in the last few weeks that the establishment really does hate Trump. From the beginning I questioned whether Trump was a real candidate (and still sometimes do) or just a plant to force people to Clinton. Whether he is or isn’t a legit candidate, one thing is certain: he genuinely is hated by the establishment and nearly every power figure and entity in the country and even Western world. The media are running a concerted effort to destroy him in these final days, as Clinton fails to rocket ahead as the master plan must have stated she would. The New York Times was even desperate enough to illegally publish some of his tax returns today. Lies about him and his statements taken out of context are circulated 24/7. Republicans and conservatives are running to endorse Clinton in droves. Wall St. loves her enough to pay her thousands of dollars a minute for a speech. Despotic foreign governments have bankrolled both her campaign and her money laundering foundation. Clinton’s backers are a who’s who of the ruling class from across the planet. That alone should tell you were her loyalties lie. Even if items #1 and #2 don’t matter enough to you, the very fact that Trump is despised by the powers that be should at least tell you that, if nothing else, he’s closer to truly being on your side than Clinton will ever be. Even if he is just a plant, stick it to them harder and elect him anyway.

# etc.

Many other reasons Clinton is the greater of two evils.

Of course, someone is going to point out that I didn’t mention the third party candidates. There’s good reason for that. They both suck.

Johnson’s “free market” horse shit is the fantasy of the wealthy, redneck guys in high school (or their mom’s basements), and the economically clueless. You would have to be an absolute fool or very rich to even consider voting for him. Put that fedora away, pick up a history book, and grow up from that libertarian non-sense.

Then there’s Stein… oh Stein. Always there to catch a photo-op vandalizing something or trespassing, never around to accomplish anything useful. She’d be an utter failure on item #1, likely bringing on even more sensitivity and “safe space” garbage. I just can’t bring myself to like either of those fools. HOWEVER… big however… if you are not in a swing state and your vote doesn’t really matter anyway, please vote third party to at least help legitimize third parties and move us closer to the end of this two party joke.