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The Candle Puzzle- Why Bitcoin is Misunderstood

Markets

By Soren K.Group 20h ago

The Candle Problem (Why Bitcoin Is Misunderstood)

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

 

Karl Duncker, that's who came up with it.The Candle Problem, that is.

If you haven't heard of the candle problem, here's the skinny.

In 1945, just as Hitler was murdering himself (thankfully), psychologist Karl Duncker was turning his attention to how humans solve problems. He came up with "the candle problem," a cognitive performance test measuring the influence of functionalfixedness on a participant's problem solving capabilities.

 

Here's the problem he presented...

Participants are given the following task: They have to fix and light a candle on a cork board that's attached to a wall in such a way that the candle wax won't drip wax onto the table below. To do so, they can only use the following objects:

A book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle

Here's what most do...

Oh, and by the way, if you think you're different... 

This has been tested on numerous "subjects" including MBA students. Odds are you're not.

Many subjects try all sorts of creative, but inefficient, methods such as trying to tack the candle to the wall. Nah, doesn't work. Others attempt to melt some of the candle’s wax and use it as an adhesive to stick the candle to the wall. Nope. Doesn't work either.

Here's the sneaky little kicker. When the task is presented with the tacks piled next to the box (rather than inside it). Like this:

Tacks... outside the box

Virtually all of the participants manage to achieve the optimal solution, which is...

Thinking of the box as something other than a mere receptacle, participants quickly find the solution.

A "box of thumbtacks" vs. a "box andthumbtacks". You'd think we homo sapiens are smarter. Proof if you ever needed it we're only a half chromosome away from chimps.

Which Brings Me Neatly to the Internet...

Grab your beanie babies and holster your Pokémon cards. We're stepping back in time to the 90's — you know when the internet was just cranking up. 1995 to be precise when famous astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote an op-ed for Newsweek stating:

"The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Around the same time, Nicholas Negropone, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicted:

"We’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet."

Ah... no.

And just one more for good measure.

"We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and we can all scoff and laugh now, but the truth is 99% of people who use the internet today don't know how it works. And guess what? They don't need to. The fact that it does is what matters.

 

The internet solved problems we never even knew existed with respect to communication, shopping, banking, trading, entertainment, authentication, education, marketing, finding out what the hell a tranny is, and a zillion other things.

 

The pieces necessary for it had existed for some time — the proverbial thumbtacks, candles, boxes, and matches if you will. But until it actually happened, nobody saw how to put it all together, let alone how thoroughly it would transform our lives.

 

And here's why it was so hard to understand what the internet was and how it would work.

Search and Retrieval Systems

That's what our brains are. If I'd never seen a pear before, how would you explain it to me?

You: "Well, Chris do you know what an apple is?"

Me: "Sure, of course. I'm working on one now. Only kidding. Yes, red, crunchy, sweet... got it."

You: "Well, it's like that only green and a bit fatter at the bottom than at the top. But it's quite similar."

My brain does the search and retrieve thing and comes up with this.

Ok, I say to myself, so a pear is basically a wonky apple... and green. I think I understand.

But as you can see, I don't really, though I've a better idea now thanks to your explanation, but I'm still unlikely to visualise this.

So when the internet came along, people used their search and retrieval databases (brains) to come up with what it was and what it could look like.

 

But there was nothing in there to retrieve. And so unless you'd taken way too much LSD as a teenager and seen things that the rest of us hadn't, you had nothing to go on. Which is why folks struggled to see the pear. Heck, it was like having no idea what fruit was.

And then bam! Along came a pear.

 

The reason I bring up the internet is because we all know about it now. And that's important because it's easily the best reference point we've got to understanding bitcoin.

Who Owns the Internet?

The answer to this is the reason Bitcoin is succeeding where E-Gold (shut down by the USG) didn't.

For reference, E-Gold was a gold backed digital currency. Its flaw? Centralisation.

Things which are decentralised are much tougher to kill. This is why the US army. despite being the world's largest, is still embroiled in places like Afghanistan fighting guerrillas (decentralised). It's the same reason that the stinger missile changed the power balance of warfare.

The internet is owned by everyone.

 

Ok, sure there are significant players in it, but there is no single party, rather hundreds, actually thousands of parties that make up the pieces that we today call the internet.

Should one or more of these significant players get taken down, rest assured the arbitrage and value gap that would open up would be filled faster than you can say "Darling, take a look, this site's not working anymore."

 

And this doesn't even get into mesh networks, IPFS, and an entire smorgasbord of fun stuff like that which is coming and will further decentralise the internet. The point is this: Sometimes there is push, and sometimes there is pull.

 

As we sit here today, we all know it. We can all feel it. The existing government and financial systems are creaking and groaning under their ever increasingly incompetent weight. The foundation cracked in 2008 but they all banded together to "solve" the problem.

The thing is instead of repairing the shonky foundations, they dug out more of the existing foundation and piled it on top of this creaking groaning mess. And that nearly non-existent foundation is what folks are relying on.

 

Now, let me introduce a really radical monetary (Shatbit crazy really) experiment to you...

Imagine you're a little green alien just landed. You know nothing about the world but you understand that value needs to be transferred, thus money is needed.

Now, imagine a type of money. This money is issued by a cluster of central authorities. These central authorities determine what the price is to borrow this type of money, they issue it with wild abandon most regularly to their friends, and here's the mind blowing part:

 

More than 20 of these central authorities in control of this money have their interest rates at negative. It's never happened before in the history of mankind, though I'm sure it's ok because men with badges and letters and authority stand behind it.

And then you take a look at Bitcoin.

 

Which of these sounds like a radical monetary experiment to you?

So, you might ask, "well, if these incompetent sociopaths stand behind this monetary system, then who stands behind Bitcoin?"

 

Well, none of that. Mathematics and cryptology. Which would you trust more?

What is Money

Bitcoin as money? Sure, why not?

Money is anything that we believe is money. Heck, money is simply an abstract token of value. Humans have gone through 5 distinct phases of money.

1. Barter exchange
2. Things such as sea shells, salt, beads, etc.
3. Precious metals
4. Paper money, followed by plastic money
5. And now we're moving into the stage of using network based, cryptographically secure, programmable, digital money

Furthermore, prior to nation states and kings and queens, transactions were conducted using anything that was deemed to have value, which had nothing to do with a centralised authority or issuer.

Bitcoin takes us back to such a time, which is why most people can't get their head around it. They are still looking around for someone with a uniform or a badge (or both) to tell them it's OK and their government approves of it.

 

The world needs a global currency. Not one that is so deeply flawed as the one we have.

Have you ever asked yourself why should banks and intermediaries make money from you when you exchange dollars to yen, yen to baht, or any other currency?

Have you ever asked yourself why should they have the power to create wealth and distribute it to whomever they please?

 

Have you ever thought of the incredible friction caused and constraints placed on human progress by the inefficient and corrupt systems of central banking?

Now, if you'd asked me these questions 10 years ago, I would have shrugged my shoulders, nursed my beer, and acknowledged grudgingly that I could see your point but it all looked pretty hopeless. We're just destined to roll from one disaster to the next, and the best we can do is to navigate our way through it all.

 

Blockchain can actually solve this problem. Crazy to think about, sure, but true nonetheless.

It was crazy to think that a bootstrapped currency maintained by literally anyone who cares to code for "core-dev" on something called Bitcoin could be utilised to transact value securely and efficiently all around the world. But here we are today.

Looks like a bubble right?

Of course, if you're using your old search and retrieval system looking for that pear it does.

Let me show you something else.

Here's another chart showing the relationship between the number of users and price. I prematurely nicked this from some work we've been doing here at Capitalist Exploits HQ.

By the way, if you're on the mailing list, you'll get access to what I promise you will be a very cool report as soon as we're finished with it. To get on the mailing list just go here.

Bitcoin doesn't fit into anything we've seen before, aside maybe from the Internet, and so nobody's seen this before. And the easy thing to do is to compare it to something you've seen before.

I think that's a mistake.

 

Now, before you run out and mortgage the house to start buying frantically remember this: 90% of the crypto coins being issued will almost certainly vaporise and become worthless, taking with them all the dreams and hopes of those who invested.

Peter Brandt pointed this out the other day and I replied.

Come what may this is, I believe, the future of money.

Right now, there are thousands of very sharp geeks worldwide who are building the infrastructure of a completely new financial system. Much of what they're building and have already built requires looking at the box and thumbtacks — not the box ofthumbtacks.

If only to educate yourself, I believe everyone should learn the ropes. Because picking the 10% that make it will be next to impossible if you don't know where to start, and the odds are that the clutch of winners in this round will bring the world's first trillionaire.

Right now, this space is still wide open.

I think it'll be Bitcoin which acts as the final settlement ledger system for what will ultimately be millions of coins used for millions of applications, but I'm not so foolish to think I know the future. And so I'll be keeping my beady eye on what takes place regardless.

Best of luck and thanks for reading. Have yourself a great weekend!

- Chris

“Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.” — Marc Andreesen, inventor of the first browser, thought leader, and top VC

RussiaGate is moke and mirrors.

 

Russiagate De-Bunked

Politics

By Soren K.Group 1d ago

Russiagate Explained

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Michael Flynn is in the news again.

 

Russiagaters are gushing with excitement at the revelation that Flynn’s lawyers are no longer sharing information with the president’s legal team now that Robert Mueller’s investigation is looking more closely at the former National Security Advisor’s involvement in the production of a film about an exiled cleric from Turkey. The story goes that this separation means that Flynn has struck a deal with Mueller, which Mueller wouldn’t permit him to do if he didn’t have damning information on Trump.\

 

Of course this excitement is dependent on the false belief that Mueller’s job is to get the president impeached, and that he would only cut deals toward that ultimate end. It is also dependent on the false belief that there is any evidence to be found that Trump illegally colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election. And, like the rest of the Russiagate enthusiasm around Flynn, it is also somewhat dependent on compartmentalizing away from the fact the Turkey and Russia are two completely different countries.

 

This is all par for course in the interminable dance of soaring excitement followed by thinly veiled disappointment that Russiagaters have been engaged in for over a year. I’ve been receiving some complaints that I don’t recap enough on the specific details of why I reject the establishment Russia narrative so aggressively, so if you’re just tuning in, what follows is a quick synopsis of how this weird thing has been going so far.

 

At the beginning of 2015 Hillary Clinton was already scaring people with her intensely hawkish positions on Russia, long before she went all-in on her horrifying support for a no-fly zone in a region where Russian military planes were conducting operations. Coincidentally this same nation Clinton wanted to fight happens to be the nation everyone in her political party is supporting new cold war escalations with today.

 

When WikiLeaks began releasing Democratic party emails, those ever-trustworthy truth angels collectively known as the US intelligence community began asserting that the leaks were provided by Russian hackers, a claim WikiLeaks denies. Clinton, still widely expected to win the presidency, used that opportunity to call for “military responses” to cyber intrusions, saying as president she would “make it clear that the United States will treat cyber attacks just like any other attack.”

 

In a debate with Trump in October of 2016, Clinton asserted that “17 intelligence agencies” had all concluded that Russia was behind the WikiLeaks releases, which this year we learned was actually four agencies, which was actually three agencies plus Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which was actually two dozen agents from the CIA, FBI and NSA that Clapper hand-picked himself.

 

James Clapper is a known Russophobic racist who has said that Russians “are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,” and that “It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States and to Western democracies.”

 

Clinton has continued to repeat the “17 intelligence agencies” lie long after it was conclusively debunked, and Democratic party loyalists continue to repeat it to this day. They do this to manufacture the illusion that this is something agreed upon by the entire US intelligence community and not two dozen analysts picked by a man with a seething eugenicist hatred of Russians.

To be clear: Donald Trump, president of the United States, does NOT believe the 17 American agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community re Russian meddling in the election. But he DOES believe former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. Let that sink in. https://t.co/FR2oY4Pk21

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) November 11, 2017

Russia, incidentally, functions with regard to the United States as the right arm of China, the chief rival of the US power establishment Clinton has spent her career immersed in.

In January Clapper’s ODNI released its much anticipated intelligence report on the Russian hacking allegations to the public, which spent much of its space bizarrely talking about the fact that RT America covers third party presidential candidates and Occupy Wall Street. It ties Guccifer 2.0 to the WikiLeaks releases on very shaky grounds, despite an abundance of evidence that “Guccifer 2.0” is in fact an US establishment psyop and not a hacker at all.

 

To this day we’ve seen no hard evidence of Russian hacking the Democratic party emails despite assurances from NSA veterans that if such evidence exists it can surely be found on NSA records and safely shared with the public without exposing any sources or compromising any methods that aren’t public knowledge already. And yet the anti-Russia sentiment that assertion sparked has been used to manufacture support for sanctions, troops along Russia’s border, NATO expansionism and proxy conflicts. This is simply unacceptable in a post-Iraq invasion world. When it comes to assertions which lead to war, including cold war, the US intelligence community must be considered guilty until proven innocent. They have lost the trust of every sensible person forever.

The many, many gaping plot holes in the Russian hacking narrative are likely why as 2017 has worn on, establishment loyalists have been opting to focus more on allegations that Russia used a pervasive propaganda campaign to get Trump elected.

 

This includes RT America, which has the temerity to air the anti-establishment opinions of Americans whom mainstream media outlets refuse to platform, Pikachu-gate, and a narrative about $100,000 in Facebook ads somehow influencing a $6.8 billion election despite the fact that the ads in question rarely mentioned the election and most of them not being seen until after it was over.

Most disturbingly, the “Russian propaganda” angle has led to a large percentage of the US population supporting and promulgating the narrative that Americans need to be protected from ideas or information, which has led to enormous increases in corporate censorship across all major social media platforms. Which of course works out nicely for the unelected power establishment which has a vested interest in manipulating the ideas and information that Americans consume.

 

So that’s the narrative about Russia’s half of Russiagate. The story about Trump’s half is even more absurd.

The notion that Democrats may be able to get Trump impeached for colluding with Russia really took hold in January with the release of the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier, which alleges that Russians have been blackmailing Trump into compliance with their agendas using a video they took years prior of Trump paying a bunch of prostitutes to urinate on a bed the Obamas once slept in. Apart from the obvious fact that nothing about this is even remotely believable, the dossier itself is riddled with significant errors and mostly unverified, and Steele himself has been distancing himself from parts of it. Some of the more high-octane Russiagaters have claimed that since some small parts of the Dossier have been confirmed to contain accurate basic information it must therefore all be true, which is the same as claiming that since Alex Jones was right about Iraq WMDs he’s definitely right about everything else he says as well.

 

Oh, and the position on Ukraine that the dossier alleges Trump was blackmailed into espousing? It’s virtually identical to Obama’s, and arguably more anti-Russia.

You’ll also hear a lot of talk about how Trump has “financial ties to Russia”, meaning he is necessarily therefore financially beholden to the Kremlin.

 

This story of course requires that you ignore the many, many other foreign countries with which Trump has financial ties in order to view this as significant. Why would Trump exclude Russia from his map of business deals when the arm-waving hysteria about that country didn’t start until last year? In order to make Russian business ties look significant amid a sea of other foreign business ties you need to make the case that Russia is uniquely nefarious among nations, and few Americans saw it that way until the anti-Russia propaganda campaign began last year.

There’s talk about how some campaign officials met with Russians, which is only suspicious if you ignore all the other foreign nationals they met with and doublethink your way into believing that Russia has always been viewed as uniquely malicious among nations. Manafort and Gates were indicted for stuff that had nothing to do with Trump or Russia, and back in August the Washington Post ran a story explicitly stating that Papadopoulos was a very low-level aide whose attempts to arrange meetings between campaign officials and Russians were consistently rejected by the Trump campaign.

 

Taken individually, parts of Russiagate look like they could maybe possibly somehow lead somewhere plausible. Taken together, it’s obvious that the American people are being manipulated toward an anti-detente agenda by the Democrats who just want Trump impeached and the US power establishment which wants to secure geopolitical power by aggressively undermining its potential rivals.

 

The term Gish gallop refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which one barrages one’s opposition with a deluge of individually weak arguments which take far too long to debunk individually in a way that sustains the audience’s interest. This is all Russiagate amounts to. When Russiagaters tell you that there’s “too much smoke for there not to be fire”, they are unwittingly telling you “I’ve been won over by a Gish gallop fallacy.”

 

Every single aspect of their argument can be easily debunked without exception, but since there’s so much of it and since pundits are assuring them of its reality so confidently, they believe.

Since the first day I took office, all you hear is the phony Democrat excuse for losing the election, Russia, Russia,Russia. Despite this I have the economy booming and have possibly done more than any 10 month President. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 26, 2017

Every few weeks there’s some major new “bombshell” revelation which Russiagaters get all excited about, only to have people read the actual information in the “bombshell” and find out it’s not actually anything incriminating or particularly remarkable. Take all those “bombshells” together, though, and you create the illusion of something real. That’s all this nonsense is.

Judicial appointments: another Trump accomplishment.

President Donald Trump should give special thanks to two U.S. Senators this Thanksgiving weekend. One is still serving in the Senate, the other recently retired. One is a Republican. The other a Democrat. And what should President Trump be thanking them for? Quite simply they have handed him one of the biggest victories any president could claim in the past 45 years.

Yes, this has happened even as one of the most widely covered stories of the past year has been President Trump's difficulties in working with Congress. The growing rift between him and Republican Senators John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker alone has made headlines for months. For a U.S. president to have this many public feuds with senators from his own party this early in his presidency is really unprecedented and makes for hot news copy.

But that story ignores a bigger and longer-lasting development in the federal judiciary. That brings us first to naming the Republican gift giver: Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa. The longtime member of Congress has big time clout as the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Grassley has just used that clout to eliminate one of the final hurdles in the already furious pace of Trump administration judicial appointments to the federal bench.

Late last week, Grassley decided not to honor a Senate tradition of holding up hearings for judicial nominees who aren't cleared by their own home state senators. That tradition is known as the "blue slip courtesy" born out of time before nationwide communication technology when a given state's senators had access to much more information about nominees than their colleagues from the rest of the country. Grassley correctly noted that Democrats were now trying to use the blue slips tradition to replace the filibuster, and he's having none of that. As recently as last month, the Democrats and much of the news media's punditry were expecting Grassley, who is no fan of the president, to keep the blue slip tradition in place. But Grassley gave Trump this very special gift instead.

And that brings us to the Democrat who provided the initial generous source of President Trump's solid triumph: Former Senate Majority Leader, and Democrat, Harry Reid. Reid is a major reason this good fortune has befallen President Trump because Reid was the one who killed the filibuster rule for judicial nominees in 2013. And when he killed it, it was gone for good.

Republicans were powerless to stop a series of President Obama's judicial nominees after that. That is, until they won control of the Senate in the 2014 elections. The GOP may have failed at using that majority to achieve much, especially making even a dent in Obamacare. But they were able to freeze the Obama nomination process in its tracks, most notably by delaying and eventually killing Merrick Garland's nomination for the Supreme Court.

That long period of confirmation obstruction has given President Trump a huge number of seats to fill; twice as many as President Obama's also large number of vacancies when he took office in 2009. The Christian Science Monitor reports this is likely the most vacancies for a president to fill in 40 years. And the Trump team hasn't been wasting much time.

For those who believe President Trump won the 2016 election thanks to a series of Democratic Party errors, this is cut from the exact same cloth.

Consider that as of November 3rd, 13 Trump nominees to the courts have been confirmed this year. The big name is Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, but we also have eight new federal appeals court judges, and four new U.S. district court judges. President Trump has now already surpassed the last four presidents' records for first-year judifical confirmations. And he's even tied President Ronald Reagan number of appeals court confirmations in year one.

But this isn't just about sheer numbers, it's about ideology too. While President Trump and conservatives have diverged in matters of policy several times over the past year, the judicial nomination process is decidedly not one of them. The nominees sent to the Senate from the White House are more conservative and even younger than what we saw during President George W. Bush's two terms in office.

In case the importance of making an impact on the courts is lost on anyone, just note the many setbacks the Trump administration has suffered this year alone thanks to the courts. Delays and changes to the White House-imposed travel and immigration bans have grabbed the most attention. But the administration is also dealing with judicial push back and other potential hurdles on everything from its opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger to its transgender military ban.

Now fast forward a couple of years where the Trump judicial appointment surge will have set in across the federal system. Just for this administration alone, that could make a huge difference. And for conservative causes and cases over time, it will be even more significant.

Sure, the tax reform and Obamacare repeal bills may be jeopardized by internal spats between the GOP and the White House. But real history is being made in the courts all thanks to a bad bet made by Senator Reid and remarkable cooperation between the Trump team, Senator Grassley, and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. While the fights with other senators like Flake et al may grab headlines, these judicial confirmations will have a much bigger impact.

And unless the Democrats win control of the Senate in 2018, there's nothing they can do about it.

So on this Thanksgiving weekend the most grateful person in America should be President Trump. An unlikely set of benefactors has truly given him the political gift that will keep on giving.

Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.

Accusations against Roy Moore falling apart.

From Breitbart News.

"

Court documents involving Leigh Corfman, who says that Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore tried to engage in a sexual encounter with her when she was 14, raise questions about the timeline and narrative of Corfman’s accusations against the politician.

Those accusations were first publicly disclosed in a Washington Post story citing Corfman and her mother, Nancy Wells, as saying that in early 1979, Roy Moore, then a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, allegedly asked Wells to watch her fourteen-year-old daughter while Wells went into a courtroom for a custody hearing.

Corfman claims that Moore asked the young Corfman for her number. “Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden,” the Post story states, referring to her mother’s home in Gadsden. Corfman’s parents were divorced.

The first private meeting was arranged after Moore called Corfman on her home phone at her mother’s house, Corfman alleges.

Corfman says that Moore took her to his home, put his arm around her, and kissed her. Corfman told the Post that she had asked Moore to drive her home because she was feeling nervous and he obliged.

“Soon after, she says, he called again, and picked her up again at the same spot,” the Post story reports, without providing an exact timeline.

That is when Corfman says that Moore drove her back to his house, touched her body, and guided her hand to his underwear. Corfman says that she yanked her hand back.

“She says that after their last encounter, Moore called again, but that she found an excuse to avoid seeing him,” the Post story continues.

Regarding the original court hearing where Corfman says that Moore asker her for her number while Wells went inside the courtroom, the Post reported that it “confirmed that her mother attended a hearing at the courthouse in February 1979 through divorce records.”

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A thorough search of court documents finds one court case in February 1979—a case that took place on February 21, 1979.  The Post failed to tell readers that at that February 21, 1979, court case Wells voluntarily gave up custody of Corfman to Corfman’s father, Robert R. Corfman.  The two had been divorced since 1974.  The custody case was amicable and involved a joint petition by both parents.

The Post further did not tell readers that as a result of the joint petition to change custody, the court ordered the 14-year-old Corfman to move to her father’s house starting on March 4, 1979.  Court documents show the father’s address in Ohatchee, and not in Gadsden, where her mother lived and where Corfman says the meetings with Moore took place.

This would mean that from the court hearing on February 21, 1979, until Corfman was ordered to move to her father’s house, Moore would only have had 12 days, including the day of the court hearing, to have repeatedly called Corfman at her mother’s Gadsden house, arrange two meetings, and attempt another. Moore has strenuously denied the accusations.

While that timeline is theoretically possible, the Moore campaign stressed in a press conference today it is unlikely.

Ben DuPre, Moore’s former chief of staff on the Alabama Supreme Court, spoke today on behalf of the campaign. DuPre noted that “as best as we can tell” the February 21, 1979, case was the only court movement to have taken place that month. Breitbart News also could not find another court document from that month in 1979.

The disclosure raises questions about why that twelve-day window was not mentioned in the Post story or by Wells or Corfman in subsequent interviews.  Neither Corfman nor Wells publicly mentioned the change in custody during the critical period where Moore was said to have arranged meetings with Corfman outside her mother’s home.

Earlier this month, Breitbart News interviewed Wells and she discussed Moore’s alleged calls to Corfman as taking place at her home.

Breitbart News reviewed the custody and divorce documents in full. The custody arrangement allowed for “reasonable rights of visitation” for Wells, including on alternate weekends and full custody for one week starting on December 24.  However, that one week of custody in December does not fit into the timeline of Moore allegedly arranging meetings days after the February hearing.

There is another detail in the custody documents that raise questions about Corfman’s story.

The Post strongly implied that the alleged encounter with Moore caused Corfman to exhibit reckless behavior in her teenage years.

The Post reported:

After talking to her friends, Corfman says, she began to feel that she had done something wrong and kept it a secret for years.

“I felt responsible,” she says. “I felt like I had done something bad. And it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad.”

She says that her teenage life became increasingly reckless with drinking, drugs, boyfriends, and a suicide attempt when she was 16.

The Post failed to mention that the very reason for the February 21, 1979, court hearing where Moore allegedly met Corfman was because, according to the court documents, Corfman had exhibited “certain disciplinary and behavioral problems.” In other words, Corfman evidence behavioral problems prior to the alleged encounters with Moore.

Indeed, those stated “disciplinary and behavioral problems” were cited in the joint petition to change custody as the cause for both Wells and Corfman’s father agreeing that Corfman would be better served living with her father.  The parents signed a “consent decree” going along with the change in custody.

Over one year later, on May 5, 1980, which would have been after any alleged encounters with Moore, Wells filed a new petition to take back custody of her daughter. That petition stated that Corfman’s “disciplinary problem has improved greatly.”  The stated change in behavior is important since Corfman’s “disciplinary and behavioral problems” were cited as the reason for the father taking custody.

The improvement in behavior described by Wells seems to conflict with Corfman’s claim to the Post that after the 1979 encounter her “life became increasingly reckless with drinking, drugs, boyfriends, and a suicide attempt when she was 16.”

The judge apparently agreed with Wells’ assessment of Corfman’s improved behavior and granted Wells custody on October 15, 1980.

At today’s press conference, DuPre also mentioned Wells’ interview with this reporter in which Corfman’s mother contradicted a key detail of Corfman’s story.

Speaking by phone to Breitbart News, Wells, 71, says that her daughter did not have a phone in her bedroom during the period that Moore is reported to have allegedly called Corfman—purportedly on Corfman’s bedroom phone—to arrange at least one encounter.

The Washington Post cited Corfman as remembering that she provided Moore with her number when she was 14. She said that she spoke to Moore from what she described as the phone in her bedroom.

In yet another detail called into question at today’s press conference, DuPre referred to the exact spot mentioned in the Post story as the alleged meeting place for Corfman’s claimed encounters with Moore.

The Post cited Corfman as saying that Moore, according to the newspaper’s characterization, “picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden.”

The Post mentions the specific intersection where Corfman says that Moore picked her up around the corner from her mother’s house.  The Post reports, “She says she talked to Moore on her phone in her bedroom, and they made plans for him to pick her up at Alcott Road and Riley Street, around the corner from her house.”

DuPre said that intersection was almost a mile away from her mother’s house at the time and would have been across a major thoroughfare.

Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Written with research by Joshua Klein."

 

There is another instance of dubious "fact" in another alleged encounter. This is the note that Roy Moore put in another accuser's yearbook. Moore's Attorney requested that an expert be allowed to examine the signature (allegedly it is copied from a court order). Gloria Alread denied the request.

 

I would bet that Alread will produce a friendly "expert" just a day or two before the vote in Alabama so the finding  can not be examined. That is how these people operate.

 

The Democrats are eager to steal a Republican seat in the Senate.

Putin is Orthodox - hence the hatred of American Liberals toward him.

This is a bold statement. Can I document it? Yes. What I need to document is that Putin is a Believer. American Liberals are dedicated to serving Satan and hate Christians. So, here is the proof of Putin's beliefs:

President Putin's Christian roots. And he worships in cathedral.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3d_yxJhmjk

Putin receives communion and participates in Easter celebration.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GiTF2vAvKQ

A mélange of things. Putin declaring that Russia was saved by the orthodox church. Canonization of the last tsar.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqlPK3Vdqzk

The importance of the church. The rebirth of orthodoxy and its defense of the family.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjWYmBF2T94&spfreload=10

Russia's economy has recovered, it's population is stabilized and its church is thriving. That is why America's Liberals hate Russia and they hate Putin.

Checking Edelson cycle prediction on gold.

 

Predicted

 

 

Actual

The Edelson prediction underestimated the size of the rally in September. It predicts a drop in November, but the Market is rising. The big rally is to start in December and intensify in January 2018.

 

Take a knee....my ass.

The cultural and political divide between the Left and the rest of us grows wider every day. Take the Kaepernicking players of the NFL. But, we fight back:

https://twitter.com/TrumpTrain45Pac/status/931706302941638656

Social commentary.

Poems expressing the same thing...see Roy Moore's poem. These words were written at a terrible time, anticipating the evil Obama regime.

            Lo-Ruhamah.

 

I sit by the fire, perfectly at ease,

There is a great quiet, a sweet earthly peace.

My heart is not troubled in these troubled times,

The tree frogs are chirping a melody devine.

 

There is nary a whisper of faraway wind,

The crows are all waiting for evening to bring

A blanket of darkness and a time to sleep

And dream of the springtime of flowers and greens.

 

The sparks are still rising, like prayers they rise

And petition Heaven for Evil’s demise.

The Father is angry and judgment He seeks,

A Nation He blessed much He no longer heeds.

 

The blood of the children, those killed in the womb

Accuse the killers from beyond the tomb.

He turns people over to their desires,

And they pine for CHANGES, for theft they aspire.

 

They lust and they covet, they don’t want to work,

They take what’s not theirs, plant no seeds in dirt.

They want the government to tax all the rich

And spend all the earnings of their grandkids.

 

Even that’s not enough, they rob the whole world

By printing currency, till it’s worth like dirt.

In conceit they steal, feel there’s naught to it

Till some dreary day they wake in Detroit.

 

But if they repent and from evil ways part

The Father will send them a new Joan of Arc.

And their land will heal and they prosper again

And their country will be a light on a hill.

 

©.... aka Geezer Béla in Exile,

Nov 22, 2009, Mt Vernon, TX.

When is it safe for a man to grope a woman not his wife?

Answer: if he is a Democrat.

 

 

Members of the Stupid Party, who want to expel Roy Moore if he gets elected, are perfectly fine with Sen Al Franken having groped a sleeping woman. And having a picture taken of it.

Unequal/biased treatment by the Media.

1. UCLA basketball students suspended indefinitely. No, not after their crime came to light, but after they thanked Trump for getting them out of a ten year sentence.

 

2. The Media spends 40x the time on the alleged misdeeds of Judge Moore (groping and kissing girls) than the alleged misdeeds of Sen Menedez (having sex with underage hookers).

America the beautiful. By Judge Roy S More

America the Beautiful

By Judge Roy Moore

America the Beautiful, or so you used to be,
Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, I’m glad they’re not here to see,
Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand.
 

Your children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine,
Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain.
From sea to shining sea this Nation has turned away,
From the teaching of God’s Law, and a need to always pray.
 

So many worldly pastors telling lies about our Rock,
Saying God is going broke so they can fleece the flock.
We’ve kept God in our temples, how foolish we have grown,
When all the earth is but His footstool, and Heaven is His throne.
 

We’ve voted in governments that are rotting to the core,
Appointing Godless judges who throw reason out the door.
Too soft to put a killer in a well deserved tomb,
But brave enough to kill that child before he leaves the womb.
 

You think that God’s not angry, that our land’s a moral slum?
How much longer will it be before His judgment comes?
And how can we face our God, from Whom we cannot hide?
What is left for us to do, but stem this evil tide!
 

For if we who are His children, will humbly turn and pray,
If we seek His holy face, and mend our evil way,
Then God will hear from Heaven and forgive us of our sins.
He’ll heal our sickly land and those who live within.
 

But, America the beautiful, if you don’t then you will see,
A sad but Holy God withdraw His hand from Thee.
 

© Copyright 2007 Roy S. Moore

That is why Satan's newspapers are working so hard to defeat this man.

The latest attempt to hold back the tide. City bonds.

America's cities have a large minority population and are led by Democrats. Those who know what is going on expect financial chaos in these places. Sure enough. The more liberal (meaning leftist) an electorate, the closer it is to bankruptcy. Detroit, Chicago, Connecticut, Puerto Rico, California and Illinois are broke. Since, they are continuing to rack up deficits, their bankruptcy is only a matter of time.

The Democrat Party says it has a solution: have the Federal govt bail out these places. How? By printing the money. Granted that the Democrat Party is the home of the insane, it is quite obvious what they overlook. I. e. that the people of the world have some sense and know that by printing Dollars a US govt led by Democrats would reduce the value of the US Dollars that they hold as reserve currency.

In the meantime, Chicago plans to issue bonds that are guaranteed payment from sales tax revenues derived from the State of Illinois. Because payment is guaranteed, the bonds will have a higher rating and will cost the City less to service. The City will use the proceeds to pay off bonds with higher interest rate. Sounds good. Except that Chicago will continue to spend more than it takes in. So, these bonds only postpone the inevitable.

Casey's readers comment on bitcoin.

Justin’s note: Today, Doug and I continue our conversation on why the U.S. could dissolve over time. Doug says the problems are all bubbling to the surface…and when the U.S. eventually breaks apart “it will not be peaceful.” (If you missed Part I, you can catch up right here.) Justin: What about political tensions? Because, as I’m sure you’ve seen, the far-left and far-right are becoming more and more antagonistic. In some cases, they’ve even become violent towards each other. Could radical political ideologies cause the country to break apart? Doug: Yes, I think so. In the late ‘60s and the early ‘70s, hundreds of bombings took place at universities, banks, and all kinds of places. The National Guard was in cities like Detroit during the riots, and they were raking buildings with .50 caliber machine guns. It was wild. I don’t think most remember this. At least, I don’t see it being brought up anywhere. Recommended Link Buy this top crypto pick now This crypto has a market cap well under $100 million... but it recently flashed the same buy signal as two other cryptos that soared 208% in three months... and 1,522% 8 months. For the next few days only, you can get all the details here. -- I lived in Washington DC then. It seemed like there was tear gas in the air half the time I went out on a date on a Friday or Saturday night. But as wild and wooly as things were back then, what we have now is much more serious. The racial element is still there, but the ideological element is even more pronounced. In those days, people at least talked to each other. You could have a disagreement, and it was a simple difference of opinion. It’s much worse now. Today, there’s a visceral hatred between the left and the right, between the people that live in the so-called red counties and blue counties. You add that to the racial situation. Then throw in the fact that the rich are getting richer at an exponential rate while the middle class is disappearing. And let’s not forget the large-scale subsidized migration of people from totally alien Third World hellholes. This is not what the U.S. was founded on. Before changes in the immigration law that were made in the ‘60s, immigrants were culturally compatible opportunity seekers that were coming to America to improve themselves. Now, people from all kinds of alien places are being imported by the hundreds of thousands by NGOs; they then go on welfare in enclaves in different places around the country. This is unlikely to end well. The U.S. is no longer a country. That said, I’m actually for open borders. But it’s only possible if, A, there is zero welfare to attract the wrong types. And, B, all property was privately owned, to help ensure everyone is self-supporting. Recommended Link You'll Never Guess What James Altucher Did LIVE In a New York Coffee Shop... When ex-hedge-fund manager James Altucher invited us up to New York City... and took us to one of his favorite coffee shops... we had NO idea what he would do. Suffice to say, it was incredible... even "magical." Watch the clip here. It involves a young professional... a computer... and a little "trick" he taught her, about generating huge wads of cash – in her case close to $650 – in the stock market. James reveals how he does it - live on camera - at this link. -- Justin: But Doug, aren’t you against large nation states? Would the Divided States of America be better? Doug: Absolutely. In my ideal world, there would be approximately seven billion little nation states on the planet, all of them independent. It would be excellent if the U.S. split into smaller entities, where the people that lived in these entities shared more in common with each other. And let me go further. I think it was a mistake for the U.S. to have come together with the Constitution of 1789. The Articles of Confederation should have stayed in existence, with a few modifications. The Constitutional Convention of 1789 was actually a coup. A successful, non-violent coup. Most people didn’t really care because the government was such a trivial factor in their lives in those days. I’m just afraid that when the U.S. breaks up, which inevitably it will, it may not be peaceful. The existence of the USA—which is now just one of 200 other nation states, no longer anything special—is not part of the cosmic firmament. The original founding ideas of America expressed in the Declaration of Independence have been lost, washed away. The absence of those principles is why I say it’s going to come to a bad end. Justin: Do you think the United States will dissolve over time? Or will something set this in motion, possibly a financial or economic crisis? Doug: An economic crisis always brings things to the fore. When the standard of living is dropping, the government inevitably finds somebody or something to blame…anything other than itself. Usually, they point the finger at foreigners. But if you get the wrong people in the government, they can point fingers at domestic enemies, the way the Germans did with the Jews in the ‘30s, or the way the Soviets did with the kulaks at the same time. Or the way the Chinese did with its enemies of the State under Mao. There are many, many other examples. Political power attracts the worst kind of people—and then brings out the worst in them. Economic turmoil causes social turmoil and political turmoil. And one of the things that scares me most is that if things get spooky within the U.S., people in the government will try to find a foreign enemy in order to “unite” the country. Incidentally, I don’t feel that uniting the country is necessarily a good idea. It all depends on which direction they’re united towards, and united against what. And do the people of the United States have enough in common anymore to even be united? I think not, in an age of multiculturalism. There are a lot of problems, and they’re bubbling to the surface. When the economy gets bad, which it will, I think the pot will boil over. Justin’s note: As Doug says, America’s problems are coming to a head. Unfortunately, most investors aren’t prepared for what’s coming. That’s why Doug and his team just released this urgent video that explains everything you need to know about the crisis that’s about to make landfall…and why you need to take action today. Click here to watch it now. Reader Mailbag Today, readers respond to Doug’s recent essays on bitcoin (here and here)… I can’t see any currency that is unregulated by government and open to trading manipulation and with no control for audit or to control money flow or enforce taxes and fees to exist for long. When necessary, government intervention will shut the door and the speculation will end with a thump. You will hear the whimper from the last in. I will stay with gold. I think your article essentially says this except you see us early in the bubble. So money can still be made by those accepting the risk. —David Bitcoin main value is as a transfer agent, as you said. But who knows how much that's worth? Is it over or undervalued now? Bitcoin is too volatile to use as a currency. And Aristotle was talking about currency, not money. There is a great distinction between the two. The distinction is irrelevant to the working man, but very relevant to people who study the economy and currencies. I don't know if bitcoin is a good speculation or not. Like the tulip mania, it depends on when you buy or sell. There's nothing that stabilizes bitcoin's value. That makes it too much of a risk for me to invest in it. —Tom