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Just look at the way crime sorts itself out, and it's pretty obvious. People robbed banks, got away with murder, disappeared and took up new lives in the circus.

Now? The really pent up people just snap, shoot a bunch of people, and kill themselves, because they know they can't get away with anything anymore.


Reminded The gold rush era song. "Oh what was your name in the states?"

What was your name in the States? Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates? Did you happen to draw on your mother-in-law? Or sink the old lady with weights, my friend, Eh, What was you name in the States?...Oh!


I couldn't find a great source of data on bank robberies but just looking at this indicates bank robbers who successfully get away are pretty rare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_robbers_and_robbe...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Mark_Rifkin

He actually _did_ get away with the initial heist, but screwed it up by trying to do it again. Did a few years in prison, but from the sounds of it, the banks only recovered a few million dollars, not the whole amount!

I thought that was an interesting story :) Mild-mannered programmer, biggest heist ever!


I was reading this article earlier: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-15/brisbane-man-charged-a...

TLDR, today police arrested a man for a bank robbery in 1991, 26 years ago.


How would I have to interpret this list to come to any conclusion?


Like I mentioned, I couldn't find a definitive set of data concerning unsolved/total bank heists versus unsuccessful heists or arrests.

So I invite you to do what I did, which is look at the list and note how many were either shot, arrested, or otherwise eventually 'failed.'

The post I'm replying to makes it sound like folks got away all the time and that doesn't appear to be the case.

And if nothing else, you can find some interesting details in there. NYC burglaries in the 1850s and 1860s were patronized by a female German-immigrant while she simultaneously hob-knobbed with the society set.

My main point is that I don't think folks 'got away with it' as much as we might like to romanticize.


Interesting, though, that the concepts expressed in this narrative, had they been written in 2010, and promptly rejected, might have provided all the more grist for the paranoia mill.


Watching the whole video, you can safely overdub everything Steve Jobs said with the phrase "My words are meaningless, because by the time any of these ideas represent credible threats, I'll be long dead."

Seriously. Everything Steve Jobs says, whatever point he argues in favor of, listening to it is like letting the dead sell you cigarettes.

"Here, try this amazing thing! Yes it's bad for you in all the ways described by critics, but so what?! I need to live an incredible life right now, before a terminal disease kills me (just as the bad times begin), so give me as much money as possible."


What the fuck?


Everything about this says dead spy caught by other spies. The interesting part won't be her real identity, even though that would be a critical window into the things that are actually interesting.

No theft, no sexual abuse, no emotional yarns, bloodless, no noise yelling or fighting, drugged and burned, and obscured identity, effective for decades. The murderers were professional state operators, so whoever did it, collects a paycheck for killing people like this woman, above all ordinary law and order. Some of the rival operators may have been women, staving off sexual transgression, since that doesn't always remain professional on its own.

What was she trying to do? How did her cover blow? Whoever killed her, they had clear understanding that she wasn't who she claimed to be, and no one knew who she really was. Once they discovered mystery girl, if they weren't ordered to take her out, all they had to do was phone home and ask if they were supposed to have peers in the vicintity, if not, she's the enemy.

Based on this, you can assume by geography that she was a cold war spy, attractive, with money heading into Eastern Europe, not westbound out of Europe. If she were sourced from Eastern Europe, she wouldn't have been caught and erased so quickly while still mainland. Closer into Eastern Europe, she'd have had more protection. Operating alone like this, she may have been a canary. Bait, doomed from the start, but unaware of her role in the operation she proved as hazardous.


I'm totally speculating of course but is not necessarily execution (she had all their fingers still and the tooth). The poisoning could happen also accidentally (in a militar laboratory for example). There is not post-mortem revenge or killer names annotated in a suicide note, maybe because there was nobody to blame for her death except herself?

The victim knows that is doomed in some time, no mather what she does; and goes voluntarily to a far and solitary place to commit suicide and clean its remains for the investigators. She whore jewels and exclusive clothes and is probably worried by her aspect after the suicide. She takes painkillers to assure the death.

The case is associated probably with skin damage (eccema treatment) and maybe tooth decay, and the victim dines in public, and travel by several countries, so there is not a fear of contagious at least in this phase, this suggests that is not a biological live weapon (no waiters fell ill later)

Mushrom poisoning causes not eccema; therefore the killer agent would be probably of radioactive nature (Polonium?)

Should be relatively easy to check if the jawbone is radioactive and if gold and other metals in teeth are aplied in one or more than one time suggesting a beating or sudden tooth decay.

If tags are missing we could assume exclusive clothes. As we have a description of the colour and style of clothes exclusive could mean traceable materials, pigments and fabrics.


  fingers and teeth all there; clearly not foul play; maybe accidental overdose during interrogation?
You presume every strategic professional murder involves a torture session. Operating in hostile territory doesn't guarantee time, safehouses or personnel to cover every action every time. Norway clearly wasn't clued into the cloak and dagger games happening in their territory. Whoever did this, they weren't behaving with legal immunity. They may have had to organize a team on short notice, and act fast. Some people just don't have the stomach to cut off fingers and rip out teeth. If pressed for time, and blocking exfiltration is more important that learning details, and they were short on resources, a team might skip the dungeon.

  possible suicide, why not?
Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.

  latent poison as murder weapon; she did it to hasten a very slow death; she had bad skin;
Nope. Doubt it. Sedatives are a pretty classic complement to a professional murderer's toolkit. They packed her with barbituates to calm her down, and knock her out then took her some place quiet, and did her in. The skin cream, if anything, hints that maybe she was British. Eczema is a pretty common hereditary problem with the Brits, and this is a BBC story, after all.

  polonium, biological weapons, secret laboratories, tooth decay, dentistry, mushrooms...
I'm sorry but I think you should get over the Litvinenko assassination, put down the comic books and come to terms with the fact that many professional murders are not nearly so elaborate. This is from the 1970's and these kinds of things weren't trying to be tales of science fiction. A hit was a hit back then. Getting shot, stabbed, blown up or in this case, drugged and burned is pretty much how things went down.

  unmarked clothes, no giveaway
Makes a lot of sense. I agree this strengthens the spy narrative.


>> possible suicide, why not?

> Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.

Or just unmanaged mental illness, leading to suicide. A lot of the reason things are unexplainable or confusing might be that there is no logical or coherent rationale for them - they are simply the paranoid responses to delusional fantasies.


> You presume every strategic professional murder involves a torture session.

Not. I was thinking in a post-mortem "cleaning" of the corpse. Why to remove the tags in clothes but forget to distroy the fingerprints if they where professionals? It seems that badly damaged but partial fingerprints where recovered.


Why all the pills in the stomach AND set her on fire?


Takes her out of the game. The pills don't produce a conclusive casualty in under an hour. She might survive by incidentally vomiting, recover and fly home. There might be others, undercover, tailing the kidnapping, and waiting to rescue. Rescue might simply be incidental first responders. Since she wasn't rescued we might assess there were more layers of interference in the murder. Lookouts, participating as accomplices.

The burning kills quickly (minutes or less of smoke inhalation), and even if ineffective in killing due to interruptions, certainly produces scars that won't be easily hidden in the future and puts someone on the sidelines.

It also sends an unpleasant message to everyone who didn't bring her home, and we still don't know who that is. Given that she wasn't even recovered, one might presume her original identity was marked deceased in a contrived accident, conincidentally, thousands of miles away. Maybe her family already knows the real story, and remains quiet.


Pills to kill and fire to obscure?

Fire means it will be some time before forensics could pin down the chemical situation of the victim and by that time the perpetrators would be out of the country.


Maybe she was trying to commit suicide, but didn't do it soon enough.


And dead people, and destroyed cities.

And purges, and violent warlords siezing power, and military coups.

And refugees, and food shortages, and torture chambers, and sabotage.

And unprecedented political polarization, and oh maybe disappearances and murders that look like suicides...


As much as I would like to achieve Socialism via democratic reform within the system, various figures (Emma Goldman, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, even Engels himself) have noted that working within the existing system ("bourgeois democracy") would not be sufficient to bring about lasting change, as the system itself is built to serve the interests of capital.

I am wholly against the things you mentioned, of course, which is why it has been the task of current revolutionaries to plan and organise effectively to minimise these things.


> working within the existing system ("bourgeois democracy") would not be sufficient to bring about lasting change, as the system itself is built to serve the interests of capital.

I think the problem is more that when you do vote in socialism as in Venezuela the system sucks. Then it either gets voted out again or you get a violent dictatorship.


Venezuela is not a Socialist country, and I do not support dictatorships. In line with Marx and Engels, I support the gradual transference of power away from the state (which must be at once transformed into the complete and democratic control of the whole working class upon seizure) and into the hands of the people, as such the state "withers away".


They just never really read the Scottsman-scrolls right and how could they thus do a true implementation of the Scottsmann ideology!


There is a very simple test of whether a society is a Socialist one; namely, a society is Socialist if its predominant mode of production is the Socialist one. The Socialist mode of production is distinguished from all others by the following:

* Communal (worker) ownership of the means of production (land and machinery used to make goods for society)

* Government composed entirely of the workers, making decisions in the interest of the workers

* Goods are produced to be used rather than exchanged on a market

* Wage labour is not dominant in the economy

* The functions of private property have been abolished and thus there is no more private property.

Venezuela fails all of these criteria. It's not "no true Scotsman", it's the truth.

Someone called Angus, who calls himself a Scotsman, but who doesn't have Scottish citizenship, nationality, lineage nor has he ever lived in Scotland is not a Scotsman.


Who created your rules of socialism?

As far as Venezuela is concerned, the current government do see themselves as socialist (the Bolivarian revolution).

¡El unico camino para salvar el mundo es el socialismo | The only way to save the world is socialism! — Hugo Chavez

A few links:

https://venezuelanalysis.com/ http://www.correodelorinoco.gob.ve/


>Who created your rules of socialism?

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

>As far as Venezuela is concerned, the current government do see themselves as socialist (the Bolivarian revolution).

As I said, just because his name is Angus and he calls himself a Scotsman, it does not make him so. The DPRK calls itself democratic, too. Are we to hold it as the exemplar democracy, and claim that democracy is such a failure?


Do you think that the USSR where a communist country?


No, I do not. It helps to remember that "Communist country" is an oxymoron; a Communist society is a stateless one.


In this stateless society, who decides how the group gets what it needs, for instance food, clothing etc? And how do the group knows what is best for each member of that group?


Tail-call elimination - aka moderating compilers.

Usually the answer would be? The rules. Who applies the rules? The machine. Who made the machine? The party. Who rules the party? Most ruthless psycho-dick ever. Thus its profen that communism, basically is one big cooperation ruling the earth, and shall forth be called googlnism.

I really hate such discussions, they are so pointless, because they look at the state they want society to be in and just erect a cathedral.

While we should look at all the various failing members of society, catograph what is human, and from that we might be able to build a hut that is able to stand a thousand years.


Where has that not fallen into dictatorship? It's a nice idea, the problem is human nature gets in the way.


Billions of what? People? Dollars?


Not OP but title is from the ZeroHedge article, which clarifies "It could be billions in revenues". The link may have been changed by HN to be closer to the source, since ZeroHedge is mostly requoting it anyway: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-12/mysterious-antenna-...


Yeah, thanks for the downvotes everybody! The title is changed to the more accurate headline, but fuck me for voicing any criticism!

Here's another shitty comment you can downvote. Have fun. This is what you get for frivolous downvotes. More bile.

Fuck this karma-whore rating shitshow.


  How are they going to enforce that and
  guard against a revolution?
So, your telling me you want people to fly to Mars, under oath that they will always pay the rent, pay the tithe, and disavow ownership of the equipment their lives depend on, possibly letting others enable or disable it based on fealty and political alignment?

  Who owns the equipment sent from Earth?
The people riding it to Mars and using it when they land. Anything else is pretty much suicide. When you go to Mars, you might not come back. No one wants a EULA between them and their life support system.


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