I don't need to explain anything.

I guess that more of my attention has been drawn to the hacker matter in recent times, including that I am reading through some of the posts and I have been noticing that if some member(s) seems to have put work and research into providing evidence and logic that attempts to explain that evidence, then in my view that seems to deserve some merit(s).  So, yes, I have been moved to give some merit to some posts based on evidence, logic and sometimes what seems to be some compiling work..... and sometimes i will also give merit, and it might not agree with the conclusions that are argued in the post, but instead seems to deserve merit for raising, highlighting or clarifying some points.... hey I might not even conclude that the evidence as a whole or overall is compelling, but the post still raised a clarification or another or caused me to reconsider my thinking on some matter. 

You do seem to want read a lot into the sending of smerits... and maybe even attribute more weight to the sending of smerits than they deserve, anyhow... by the way, if a member such as myself might have only so much time that he can spare online for that day, or maybe during a window period, he might give smerits for posts that he is able to read during that window period that he is on for that day.. .or maybe he does not have any smerits to send during the window period... so he might NOT have time to be able to read some other posts that might be better on the same topic or he might not be able to give smerits because he does not have any.

In terms of substance, I do tend to believe that there are a lot of contradictions that hacker seems to be making himself, but I still have not really taken any specific kind of advocating step, beyond what I had already stated earlier, which would be that hacker might muster up to either help himself better, or maybe just move on from some of the battles and figure out ways to contribute substance to the forum in order to attempt to rebuild his credibility in those kinds of rebuilding ways, if that is possible or wanted by hacker.  I had seen one or more posts from hacker that had seemed to show that he wanted to rebuild some credibility for his account, so it seems to me that sometimes his fighting some of the matters seem to cause more contradictions, even coming from his own keyboard, rather than really working on building credibility.

By the way, I do sometimes feel that I need to attempt to apologize to other members because I understand that the topic is not about me (and frequently not about me nor about my practices or my rationale for my practices at the time of my posting the response), and so in that sense, I don't necessarily know enough about the topic, yet I end up allowing members like bonesjones to drag me into responding into an area that is almost completely off topic, and maybe it would be better if I did not say anything rather than to start out my response by saying that "I do not need to respond" and then to end up responding with an area of discussion that is largely irrelevant to the topic of the thread.