Mic Drop

Iran’s protests continue, and a university in Tehran was under siege by “security forces” who allegedly shot at the dorms. The Iranian Parliamentary Speaker, himself a veteran of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, admitted that the protests could destabilize Iran.

Update: 

Speaking of elections and Civil Wars, Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, appeared to exceed expectations in the October 2 election, forcing a 1v1 runoff election set for Sunday, October 30.

Fears remain that Bolsonaro may try to steal the election by legal pretext or even armed rebellion.

Either outcome may result in insurgent violence, corruption, and financial/social Collapse.

Bill Gates, formerly the world’s richest person-turned-world’s-“greatest”-philanthropist, is warning of another Civil War in the United States if political polarization is left unaddressed. “We’re going to have a hung election and a Civil War,” said Gates.

The next U.S. presidential election will be November 5th, 2024. Betting markets place Trump & Biden as the most likely candidates.

A suicide bomber in Kabul killed at least 43 people at a unisex private school 8 days ago, injuring dozens others.

Some women have protested in defiance of the Taliban insurgency-turned-government, but they were sprayed and beaten.

In the last year, Afghanistan has lost 10 years of economic growth.

Meanwhile, in Thailand, a court ruled that the ex-military Prime Minister, who took power in a 2014 coup, is allowed to legally stay in office...as if they were ever going to decide any differently.

The violent collapse of Burkina Faso is getting worse. Last week, their military leader was removed in a coup, but some of his forces were planning a counter-attack, allegedly with the support of French forces. Since the coup, the ex-leader has agreed to step down, and is reportedly hiding in Togo. Islamist insurgents have, for several years, deprived government forces of more than a third of the landlocked nation’s total land, and displaced over 1M people (over 5% of the total population).

The mob violence claimed more lives in a stadium event than any other since 1964. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63105945

Anyone can generate a bitcoin private key.

No one can generate your bitcoin private key.

There are somewhere on the order of 10^77 possible Bitcoin private keys. Guessing the right private key is much worse than trying to find a single grain of sand on earth. It's equivalent to trying to find a single atom in the known, observable universe.

They say jet fuel poured down the elevator shafts, to explain the near instantaneous basement explosion.

I distinctly remember that bullsh_t story. And for years, never questioned it. As you know, It falls apart when you consider a couple of things. The buildings were separated into three units, [seen in the image] designed to act as stop gaps, preventing the spread of fires etc. The scale of the buildings relative to the volume of fuel, pictured here, and lastly and most importantly those subfloor explosions happened seconds PRIOR to the planes impact.

explosions...from kerosene.
ok.

And of course most of it burned up in the giant fireballs outside of the buildings.

This visual guide serves to illustrate the absurdity that this volume of fuel [the majority of which would have been consumed in the impact's explosion] could possibly be responsible for causing the WTC to collapse.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180204193655/http://historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=pablo_lopez_1

Credit Suisse, $CS, executives spent the weekend reassuring large clients, counterparties and investors about its liquidity and capital position, the Financial Times reported.

Yes. They have that much power.