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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Surviving the Happiness Explosion
Steve SailerJuly 06, 2022
With institutional momentum for awarding vast reparations to African-Americans accelerating, it occurs to me that during the pandemic and racial reckoning we have already run a massive national experiment in what the likely society-wide outcomes would be from giving reparations and apologies to blacks.
The results are now in: not just more liquor and Escalades sold to joyous crowds, as in Dave Chappelle’s notorious reparations day sketch from two decades ago, but more murder and mayhem on the streets and highways.
I got to thinking about this while reading Scott Alexander’s Substack essay “What Caused the 2020 Homicide Spike?” in which he concludes that the main reason for the record increase in murders in 2020 was the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police demoralization.
I largely agree with Scott’s conclusions, although, having thought hard about this longer than he has, I’d phrase them more carefully. For example, there wasn’t a “spike” in killings because a spike on a time series graph implies both a sudden rise and sudden fall, whereas shootings went up and have since stayed up in our violent New Normal.
Let’s compare Gun Violence Archive’s running count of gun killings year-to-date on July 4, 2019 (7,263), with July 4, 2022 (10,139). That’s a 40 percent increase. Similarly, year-to-date mass shootings with four or more victims killed or wounded, typically occurring at black social events, are up 52 percent from 206 on this date in 2019 to 313 today.
So, not a “spike” but a plateau.
Read the whole thing there.
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Word! Hence you can’t help but notice that the MSM (even Fox and the DM) are always running charts showing 2021 crime in relation to 2020 (but only after May) and now 2022 in relation to 2021. Because 2019? Who can even remember back that far.
2019 will be like the 1950s. Erased because inconvenient.
And what we can’t erase, we will reinvent.
I had to laugh at the line about demolition derbies and custom car culture. Not my cup of tea, but I can definitely see the appeal. You do you, boys!
By far the most incredible scenes of whole cohorts of young men feeling free of any fear of police was an early one in West Philadelphia on May 31st. How many rapes, assaults or murders did these guys end up committing that they otherwise wouldn’t have except a feeling of joyous triumph from that day?
The next logical step is to discuss solutions, but discussing solutions are even more frightening and risky than understanding the cause of the problem.
Discussing solutions requires one to actually consider the actions necessary in order to correct the current situation. That requires one to take stock in his own self, and for many people, especially here, self awareness isn’t a particular strength.
There is no political will for it though, as you well know.Replies: @Mike Tre
For the most part middle class whites have families, jobs, property, etc., and although they can see what's happening around them, a willingness - or hesitancy - to throw the first stone indicates that one has weighed the pros and cons of starting a revolutionary moment versus waiting out the storm.
To me that indicates an exceptional level of self-awareness.
First of all, that was well-organized, great writing, as in almost all your Takimag weekly columns.
From the first line on the “massive national experiment” I thought you were (without the “apologies” part) leading to discussing the stupidity of a UBI. If you all recall, that was bandied about by loads of people as the best thing since sliced bread during the time of the stupid and Totalitarian Flu Manchu LOCKDOWNs. I see you did get to this later on in the column, with your example of Jean Valjean.
Right, there! Instead of letting people make the money they can, people recommended preventing that but giving them a base amount from the taxpayers. Will that \$1,200 be spent on rent and food staples? Haha, yeah, right. Of course, I could have told you this before the lag time of 2 1/4 years too. I probably did.
Yes, the term “spike” is erroneous. Just “plateau” is not good by itself, as you need to describe the very significant rise. Engineers would say “big step increase”, but I’m sure some will argue on that.
Finally,
Nah, it’s probably not professional jealousy. It’s that you write a lot of other truth that can’t ALL be said by a guy who wants to be more famous.
(It's called "being cowardly".)Replies: @SFG, @Harry Baldwin, @AndrewR
Essentially, you can't fix stupid. OTOH, you can either discourage it (by penalizing it), or encourage it (by subsidizing it).
The events of 2014 and 2020 have led to less penalizing and more subsidizing. It was entirely predictable how this is turning out. Sadly, I don't think we've reached Peak Stupidity yet.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
It seems that the illuminati's current solution to the out-of-control deficit and debt in the US is to switch over to a new CBDC as part of a new technocratic (and totalitarian?) world order.
I don't think "They" will be able to pull it off easily, though.
Soon the social order will quake as normies begin to realize the mRNA vaccines have killed more people than COVID …
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/our-latest-polls-show-twice-as-many
… decreased the fertility of Western populations (permanently? unknown) …
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/hungary-most-vaccinated-counties
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/swedens-birth-rate-dropping-precipitiously
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/declining-birth-rates-post-covid
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/swedish-birth-rate-data-what-does
… and probably put ticking timebombs in the veins of billions.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
How about a splateau?
There’s another effect of the “money printer go brrrr” operation that has been policy for half a century, with a large Flu-Manchu-excused step function increase of a factor of 4 or 5: Inflation. Inflation has had a corresponding large step increase.* Nobody, but nobody… OK, just Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, 1,000 ZeroHedge commenters, and yeah, you’re lookin’ at him, could have seen this coming!
The Tom Wolfe anecdote is funny. On this happiness factor thing, many irresponsible black people are having a good time blowing the money, sure – they are on a roll in rolling the White man like Tom Wolfe couldn’t have imagined during those Mau-Mau times. If it stops, they will be very angry. Some dude warned us about this …
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* The BLS boys would say from 1-2% to 8.6%. (They know it to the nearest 0.1%, haha!) Nah, it’s from the last decade’s (at least) 4-5% up to, what, 25% yearly? It’s anybody’s guess. Even the wheelbarrow prices are up, so get yours now. Keep it clean…
You left out yours truly as well as Ray Charles.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
What's the rate of inflation? Items at the Dollar Store cost $1.25. Do the math.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
On May 30, 2020, there was no NBA playoffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_NBA_playoffs
Alexander used parallel construction to erase Steve from the picture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
With respect to the Highland Park July 4th shootings and the violence levels in big American cities the same weekend we must paraphrase the original Uncle Joe. Stalin, I mean. One mass shooting by a white crazy is a tragedy. Twenty black on black shootings with the same number of deaths is a statistic.
Let me correct my last sentence: “It’s that you write a lot of other truth that a guy who wants to be more famous not only can’t be connected with, but must explicitly and preemptively disavow.”
(It’s called “being cowardly”.)
But Scott Alexander can reach people Steve can’t, and there will be people who read him who will reach people Alexander can’t. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
But without Steve; I doubt Alexander would have gotten far as he did on this stuff.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
In this regard, Steve, like Trump, is someone about whom no nuanced view is permissible if one hopes to remain respectable. I listen to Joe Rogan's show when he has an interesting guest on, someone like Douglas Murray, Michael Shellenberger, Antonio Garcia Martinez, or Dr. Robert Epstein, to name a few. However disgusted they may be with the current state of affairs, almost all of them will make it a point to declare that they don't support Trump. It becomes embarrassing, a ritualistic denunciation. Joe himself constantly declares his disdain for Trump. Let's see: rich, family man, bodybuilder, former MMA fighter, loves fast cars, loves guns and hunting, hates Woke politics . . . right, no way a guy like that would support Trump. I really believe he's just afraid to cross that line.
Why am I bad? Because I proved almost in real time what he’s demonstrating with a two-year lag.
At least it’s only two years. In 2007, Peter Hitchens blamed Enoch Powell for being right about immigration 40 years earlier, when there was still time to do something about it. Evidently, Powell poisoned the discourse by being unforgivably blunt, as if things would not have progressed as they did were it not for his rudeness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-492847/Enoch-paddling-sewage-knew-it.html
I think of one of Lawrence Auster’s observations:Replies: @SFG, @Twinkie, @MEH 0910
Yes, well said.
Essentially, you can’t fix stupid. OTOH, you can either discourage it (by penalizing it), or encourage it (by subsidizing it).
The events of 2014 and 2020 have led to less penalizing and more subsidizing. It was entirely predictable how this is turning out. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve reached Peak Stupidity yet.
Sorry, for going even more O/T, Old Prude, if that's possible, but did you all hear about the Georgia Guidestones being blown up? I just wrote a post about the 2nd of the guides (per Peak Stupidity contract obligation) yesterday morning, and of all things, was planning on making another trip out there sometime.
Between this and my deciding not to go to Washington DC. for Jan 6th, '21 festivities last minute due to logistics, I am turning into a real life but day late Forrest Gump.
All things considered a lenient if not downright gracious response given that Alexander ripped you off, didn’t acknowledge it, and as you note, explicitly stated he wasn’t about to.
Does Scott Alexander work very minimally as a psychiatrist? He must, or how else could he churn out so much content?
Nothing to do with this article, Steve, but just a piece of news from the front lines of the hair wars.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/05/black-bbc-presenter-lukwesa-burak-natural-hair?ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com&utm_source=upstract.com
Apparently
I thought you only be racist towards people, but there you go, you live and learn…
Clearly has not noticed that Asian people have the straightest hair going…
(It's called "being cowardly".)Replies: @SFG, @Harry Baldwin, @AndrewR
Of course it’s professional jealousy. Steve is human.
But Scott Alexander can reach people Steve can’t, and there will be people who read him who will reach people Alexander can’t. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
But without Steve; I doubt Alexander would have gotten far as he did on this stuff.
Every time the subject of stimulus money causing anything comes up, I have trouble understanding it because: The individual amounts of the checks or deposits are so small, how can anybody use them to buy anything of significance, much less home improvement?
I’ve always thought the whole “let’s blow a few billion dollars to stimulate 350,000,000 Americans” thing to be like pissing in the Pacific Ocean to make it turn yellow. Economists might see microscopic results in their macro math, but does it do anything in the real world except devalue the dollar?
But you know what happened. Nobody invested intelligently, not that they really had enough to do so. We bought janglies and fast food, and so inflated prices.
Government can't stimulate: it can get out of the way, or inflate.
Obviously, you are not going to build a new wing on your house with a $1,400 check but you might go out and buy a new fridge or that 65" OLED TV or whatever. Since in a normal year only 8 million fridges are sold, if suddenly 5 million additional people decide that they want a new fridge, this could cause a shortage.Replies: @Prester John
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.Replies: @SafeNow, @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar, @Stan Adams
How many clueless Republicans even realize they are not The Establishment and that The Establishment openly hates them?
The same people who laugh at stories of some West Virginia hillbilly who wins the lottery and proceeds to rapidly blow it on a variety of toys and bad investments earnestly put forth the idea that the same policy applied to 40 million people with the nation’s worst track record at self-restraint would effect meaningful and long term economic and cultural change for the better.
Two anecdotes from the stimmy era: according to a good friend who is an executive at a national owner/operator of shopping malls, after the first checks went out, Foot Locker had the greatest surge in sales they had ever seen. After the second round in the winter of 2020, I was at our local mall (a high end one) doing a little shopping and while most stores were sparsely trafficked, the lines for Louis Vuitton and Tiffany’s were hundreds of feet long and almost exclusively black. I watched for a few minutes as harried and aggravated clerks and store security dealt with a parade of customers who were clearly feeling their oats with a newfound sense of wealth.
Anyway, I have often wondered how much of this splurge of spending resulted in additional crime once back in the hood and inevitable disputes broke out over who was wearing it best or a jealous neighbor decided to relieve someone of their new purchases.
The Highland Park story is such an unmitigated train wreck that eliminating the CIA accomplishes nothing to eliminate manipulation. The mayor just happens to have been a lifetime enemy of the Second Amendment and now she is the national hero of the movement. The father of the shooter not only sponsored the purchase of multiple firearms, after the incident where the police had to be called due to threats of killing the family, but in that incident he intervened to get the knives seized by police back, because he said he merely stored them in the son’s closet. It’s not clear if that closet was the cuck shed they made him live in.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/7/5/23195378/highland-park-mass-shooting-fourth-july-parade-gun-robert-crimo-rifle
Please help! My son is trying to kill me!
Also I need you to sign off on this permit to purchase. It’s for my son. The one who was going to kill me.
The knives he was going to kill me with are mine, he had access to them because even though I’m a wealthy business owner I have no place to keep my knives, so I have my crazy son watch them.
This is why you need to give up your rights.
Important clarification, regarding “the subject of stimulus money causing anything”: The one thing it causes is inflation, which I too and everybody else with a pulse predicted. My point is that I don’t think it causes much in the way of individual behavior, because the individual amounts are too small. They are so small, in fact, that I don’t see how they help anybody in any meaningful way.
It just:
a. Creates artificial demand, increasing prices (i. e. inflation)
b. Gets consolidated into the upper cohorts of the already wealthy making them more wealthy.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htmA transient like this will bump inflation but is easy to digest for a large productive nation.No the real problem is decades in the making. Essentially the middle men took control of America with a program of "let China build it, and we'll skim off a big slice as the cash flows by". Americans have been consuming about 5% more than they produce, with American asset sales and government issuing more debt and the fed more dollars to make up the difference. The real consumption vs. production gap more like 10% or so, because so much of the US economy is b.s. (Ex. "Diversity consultants" count in GDP.)Basically the Wa-Wa middle man parasites have been looting the physical, productive, social, genetic and reputational capital of America that our ancestors built up over 200 years.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Blacks in the hood were already disproportionately dependent upon direct and indirect government payments, so not much changed there when things got shut down. I recall noticing that you wouldn’t know there was a worldwide pandemic if you were in or near the hood in 2020 – young black guys still loitered in groups, and people were coming and going like before. The impression that you got was that urban blacks generally regarded COVID as a white people issue or obsession.
My guess is that the emptiness of the rest of the world was a sort of psychologically irresistible draw – while the hood was largely unchanged, vast swathes or white people land in the center cities/business districts and environs were more or less vacant at the street level. So this, together with withdrawn police presence, probably had a “while the cats are away” effect on younger blacks.
When that first happened AndrewR angrily and academically averred that alloting affluence was not automatically alike to inflation. He seemed wrong except in the strictest sense. If everyone put their helicopter leavings into (magically cheap) real estate and (normal) precious metals, all at the same time and properly spread in place so the prices had no chance to go up, and then retained their purchase as a kind of family wealth, then households would be better off and no inflation would result.
But you know what happened. Nobody invested intelligently, not that they really had enough to do so. We bought janglies and fast food, and so inflated prices.
Government can’t stimulate: it can get out of the way, or inflate.
Really? I’m sure people with less money could use it as described above, on sneakers or whatever.
I think this has been looked into and all of the UBI proposals, if adopted to replace the welfare state, would result in a substantial net decrease in benefits for the current dependents. And because the existing welfare state is somewhat targeted (housing vouchers, food stamps) and UBI is not, you’d likely have the problem of recipients buying luxuries and entertainment while getting evicted and their kids starving – you’d just have worse problems that you’d still need to account for while spending enormous sums.
Yes, fair enough (even if blaming Soros is just pandering) but if you are going to blame a lot of this on Exuberance, than President Trump needs to get his fair share of blame as well. I think we all remember who insisted on slapping his signature on every Economic Impact Payment check. And how the President called for \$2,000 checks over McConnell’s objections. Trump of course figured, corectly, this check would buy him a lot of goodwill with minorities and lower income whites, but now we are paying the price.
How so? Don't you think the Soros leftist DA program bears substantial responsibility for the crime explosion?Replies: @kaganovitch, @Peter Akuleyev
Did Alexander make any comments to how glad he was to be out of Berkeley and in Walnut Creek where there is a critical mass of gun wing-nuts in his new neighborhood?
It is beyond my attention span to read more than ten paragraphs of his unedited rambles.
essay “What Caused the 2020 Homicide Spike?”
Did you mention the need to get Trump out of office?
But Scott Alexander can reach people Steve can’t, and there will be people who read him who will reach people Alexander can’t. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
But without Steve; I doubt Alexander would have gotten far as he did on this stuff.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
SFG, I meant professional jealousy the other way. Steve may think (don’t know for sure) that Mr. Alexander is telling his readers he won’t give Mr. Sailer credit due to his wanting to toot his own horn, not Mr. Sailer’s (from stuff Steve wrote 2 years before him). He could use the PIC race realism stuff as an excuse, as in “I CAN’T link to that guy. I would, but I can’t.”
That could be, but isn’t it more likely he decided to disavow Mr. Sailer to pre-empt a bunch of trouble? That’s what these people really have a reason to worry about, if they aspire to be big-time pundits. Maybe it’s some of both, working out nicely for Mr. Alexander.
Yeah, I know. That’s a basic part of my point here.
Looks like NYC homicides are coming down somewhat:
This made me think of Richard Hanania on safetyism vs what makes life worth living. He’s glad that in America guns are allowed even though obviously they can kill people, and that we didn’t lock everything down in response to COVID like China (he even hates masks with a passion, which seem like a relatively minor hassle to me whose problem is low effectiveness relative to vaccines). To a lot of people, having bloc parties is the thing to look forward to, regardless of whether there’s a pandemic or risk that somebody might shoot it up. Steve himself wrote along those lines that COVID isn’t like AIDS penalizing the most deviant/risky behavior but instead what is best in life.
I’m eagerly awaiting Scott Alexander’s 12 million word column in which he finally explains the underlying cause of the collapse in production from the Red October Steelworks in Stalingrad in late 1942. I’m curious to see how he ties it to Trump’s botched covid response.
What’s important about the stimulus was not what it was spent on but that it was SPENT. The lower your income, the more likely it was that you were going to spend every cent of the stimulus money and spend it right away. For people of color, cash savings are abhorrent – having cash in your pocket is like having acid in there or poison. You want to get rid of it as soon as possible, before someone steals it or before your family realizes that you have some and demands that you spread the wealth. White people may be afflicted with “urgency” when it comes to working, but black folks have an even greater sense of “urgency” when it comes to spending \$.
Obviously, you are not going to build a new wing on your house with a \$1,400 check but you might go out and buy a new fridge or that 65″ OLED TV or whatever. Since in a normal year only 8 million fridges are sold, if suddenly 5 million additional people decide that they want a new fridge, this could cause a shortage.
Of the various arguments for reparations I’ve seen since the 1970s or so, what I haven’t seen since 2020 is anything along the lines of expecting better behavior from blax. Used to be a big one, but it disappeared.
(It's called "being cowardly".)Replies: @SFG, @Harry Baldwin, @AndrewR
(It’s called “being cowardly”.)
In this regard, Steve, like Trump, is someone about whom no nuanced view is permissible if one hopes to remain respectable. I listen to Joe Rogan’s show when he has an interesting guest on, someone like Douglas Murray, Michael Shellenberger, Antonio Garcia Martinez, or Dr. Robert Epstein, to name a few. However disgusted they may be with the current state of affairs, almost all of them will make it a point to declare that they don’t support Trump. It becomes embarrassing, a ritualistic denunciation. Joe himself constantly declares his disdain for Trump. Let’s see: rich, family man, bodybuilder, former MMA fighter, loves fast cars, loves guns and hunting, hates Woke politics . . . right, no way a guy like that would support Trump. I really believe he’s just afraid to cross that line.
Why am I bad? Because I proved almost in real time what he’s demonstrating with a two-year lag.
At least it’s only two years. In 2007, Peter Hitchens blamed Enoch Powell for being right about immigration 40 years earlier, when there was still time to do something about it. Evidently, Powell poisoned the discourse by being unforgivably blunt, as if things would not have progressed as they did were it not for his rudeness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-492847/Enoch-paddling-sewage-knew-it.html
I think of one of Lawrence Auster’s observations:
Nonetheless I applaud him for airing unconventional view on his podcast and having unusual guests.Replies: @J.Ross, @middle-aged vet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWupqKcr9zI
Jul 4, 2022
https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1543948165841387521
I took Scott’s comment about Steve to be more like “I am avoiding reference to Steve because (a) I want to independently confirm his work if possible, e.g., in case he has accidentally been cherrypicking stats, and (b) I don’t want to unnecessarily trigger the culture-war crazies here.” I didn’t take it to mean “I, Scott, think Steve is a bad person or someone whose work is generally untrustworthy.”
Spike
There’s a certain pleasant feeling I get when I learn that at least one other person in the world shares one of my pet language peeves. The description of a sudden increase in a frequency of a phenomenon as could be depicted on a time series graph- without a similarly sudden decrease when the frequency of the phenomenon reaches its apex – is one of them.
Why is the text here, quoted above, easier to read than the same text in Taki’s Magazine?
Hypothesis: Because the text in Taki’s Magazine is sans-serif, while the text here is in a serifed font.
It might be thought that sans-serif script, being simpler, would be easier to read, but in practice that seems not to be the case. (Am I the only one noticing the better readability of serifed script over sans-serif script?)
That serifs improve the readability of text--apparently giving your eye a more "holistic" one-shot grasp of letters/words--is well known. That's why they continue to be used.
It’s pure vote pandering.
Federal dole-outs do not come from the taxpayers. This is deficit spending that no one expects will ever be repaid (to any significant extent) by future taxpayers.
It seems that the illuminati’s current solution to the out-of-control deficit and debt in the US is to switch over to a new CBDC as part of a new technocratic (and totalitarian?) world order.
I don’t think “They” will be able to pull it off easily, though.
Soon the social order will quake as normies begin to realize the mRNA vaccines have killed more people than COVID …
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/our-latest-polls-show-twice-as-many
… decreased the fertility of Western populations (permanently? unknown) …
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/hungary-most-vaccinated-counties
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/swedens-birth-rate-dropping-precipitiously
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/declining-birth-rates-post-covid
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/swedish-birth-rate-data-what-does
… and probably put ticking timebombs in the veins of billions.
(It's called "being cowardly".)Replies: @SFG, @Harry Baldwin, @AndrewR
You’d think that he wouldn’t care about being “respectable” after what the JYT did to him
Misanthropes rejoice (if that’s possible); the happiness explosion is definitely over. Thanks to Biden and his accomplices, we may experience nuclear explosions as a substitute.
OT, Fields medals are out
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/05/fields-medal-kyiv-maryna-viazovska-oxford-expert-james-maynard-winners
The obligatory (these days) female winner actually has two kids.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/05/fields-medal-kyiv-maryna-viazovska-oxford-expert-james-maynard-winners
Well, up to a point. I’m no Fields Medallist, but I’m not sure about the practical application of this:
Next time I need to pack cannonballs or any other sphere in 24 dimensions I must give her a bell.
Truly LOL-worthy.
Reinforcement of Cathedral Narratives continue unabated.
In this regard, Steve, like Trump, is someone about whom no nuanced view is permissible if one hopes to remain respectable. I listen to Joe Rogan's show when he has an interesting guest on, someone like Douglas Murray, Michael Shellenberger, Antonio Garcia Martinez, or Dr. Robert Epstein, to name a few. However disgusted they may be with the current state of affairs, almost all of them will make it a point to declare that they don't support Trump. It becomes embarrassing, a ritualistic denunciation. Joe himself constantly declares his disdain for Trump. Let's see: rich, family man, bodybuilder, former MMA fighter, loves fast cars, loves guns and hunting, hates Woke politics . . . right, no way a guy like that would support Trump. I really believe he's just afraid to cross that line.
Why am I bad? Because I proved almost in real time what he’s demonstrating with a two-year lag.
At least it’s only two years. In 2007, Peter Hitchens blamed Enoch Powell for being right about immigration 40 years earlier, when there was still time to do something about it. Evidently, Powell poisoned the discourse by being unforgivably blunt, as if things would not have progressed as they did were it not for his rudeness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-492847/Enoch-paddling-sewage-knew-it.html
I think of one of Lawrence Auster’s observations:Replies: @SFG, @Twinkie, @MEH 0910
And a radical recognizes it the moment it appears and welcomes it.
Yes, fair enough (even if blaming Soros is just pandering)
Why pandering? Soros and his affiliated foundations have provided more than \$29 million in campaign funds to soft-on-crime district attorneys in major cities all over the country. These races normally would not involve high campaign expenditures, so Soros’s money can make all the difference. He’s gotten progressive DAs elected in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, San Francisco, Phoenix, St. Louis, New York, Baltimore, Albuquerque, and Orlando, among other cities. The extremely lenient attitude of these officials has contributed significantly to the rise in crime.
TheAnother scary thing is that in some cities, they don't need his help to elect such goons. Apparently Milwaukee is one of them, and a boy in Waukesha paid the ultimate price.Can he be sued? Perhaps class-action? Drain his estate. Spend it on its opposite.There is also his US citizenship to go after. However, on the cusp of 92, he won't be needing it for much longer. How about renaming things for him? County dumps, drug alleys, and the like.Now he's going after Cuba, forcing a perceptive lady named for the Blessed Virgin to resign:Soros takeover: Conservative radio star Lourdes Ubieta quits iconic Radio Mambi ahead of sale to liberal groupThe Tom Wolfe anecdote is funny. On this happiness factor thing, many irresponsible black people are having a good time blowing the money, sure - they are on a roll in rolling the White man like Tom Wolfe couldn't have imagined during those Mau-Mau times. If it stops, they will be very angry. Some dude warned us about this ...
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* The BLS boys would say from 1-2% to 8.6%. (They know it to the nearest 0.1%, haha!) Nah, it's from the last decade's (at least) 4-5% up to, what, 25% yearly? It's anybody's guess. Even the wheelbarrow prices are up, so get yours now. Keep it clean...Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @Old Prude, @SunBakedSuburb
Nobody, but nobody… OK, just Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, 1,000 ZeroHedge commenters, and yeah, you’re lookin’ at him, could have seen this coming!
You left out yours truly as well as Ray Charles.
“Every time the subject of stimulus money causing anything comes up, I have trouble understanding it because: The individual amounts of the checks or deposits are so small, how can anybody use them to buy anything of significance, much less home improvement?”
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.
Did you get 3 as well as 1 and 2? If so, nice going. Anyway, I am guessing you are not in California, or just “expertly” would be very hard to achieve. The fellow who came to give you the estimate would be John Smith. But the fellows who came to do the painting and carpentry would not likely be traditional, skilled, conscientious tradesmen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Grandpa would have said the same thing.
Egregiously OT (addressed to you yet again):
Speaking of optics, today I brought my long effort to digitize the photographic record of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to substantial completion. There are still gaps I’d like to fill but none longer than six months or so. I now have a pretty good idea how I looked at various times over the years.
Naturally, I feel a strange compulsion to share a few images with you.
(If you find all of this rather boring and pointless, then just think of my commenting oeuvre as a brilliant parody of millennial vapidity, narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-absorption. I am the prototypical smartass kid with his head jammed firmly up his posterior, babbling about the minutiae of his trivial existence in blissful ignorance of the extent to which nobody gives a crap.)
I downloaded an app that allowed me to make photos directly from negatives. The image quality is marginal but it’s good enough.
One of the key questions I wanted to answer was, when did I become ugly? (Yes, I am beautiful in my own way and my soul is radiant and yadda yadda yadda.) I knew it happened toward the end of middle school but I wanted to nail down the date.
The turning point was 1998 (seventh/eighth grade). That was the year when I lost the last tattered remnant of childhood cuteness and began my existence as a fat, bespectacled, acne-ridden ghoul.
Something went terribly wrong with my physical development during eighth grade. I suspect that I had a bad reaction to the SSRIs my mother practically forced down my throat. (I took several over the years. I can’t even remember all of the names. My diagnosis was obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Maybe the drugs messed up my system. Maybe my hormones went screwy and my metabolism just crapped out. Maybe I was just a lazy glutton.
Whatever the cause, feast your eyes on the ruination of Stan:
January 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/TmGCc99/297-DD65-E-FFE6-42-B0-A4-ED-D9710002-A096.jpg
June 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/4d96rZG/6-AB37-B30-4-F3-D-4912-8-D9-F-6533069496-D0.jpg
December 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/bXhMcNh/F6-C2-F1-B2-B609-4-F62-A364-1-CAC1-F9-AFD2-D.jpg
February 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/5n5nT6V/A2-A4340-C-9723-48-F6-9-FF6-085-DC32829-F4.jpg
July 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/k15825m/96-CC7950-93-D1-48-DC-9545-AA60552-BA75-B.jpg
December 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/dQ8RB38/F45-B8-CB0-A719-458-D-9-A93-B829-AAC58-DE9.jpg
In that last picture I am a 14-year-old high-school freshman, but with that gut and those glasses I could pass for someone in middle age.
And that was not the lowest point.
This picture is, by far, the least flattering photograph of me ever taken. Note that, at my mother’s behest, I am wearing tons of makeup in a vain effort to hide the acne. She insisted on applying it herself.
October 2000:
https://i.ibb.co/ThrC5Fs/6-A067-F63-553-F-42-A4-9-F24-1-F1-F82-BF1-F52.jpg
Accutane was a Godsend.
December 2001:
https://i.ibb.co/pWJ994N/C8-F5-E567-F5-BE-41-FC-8-F6-F-F17-C87-CD481-D.jpg
I like my early pics the best. Neoteny for the win:
https://i.ibb.co/2KyhLN7/6473-F8-EF-C905-47-EC-BF08-A696-D8-DF8-D55.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/xsrnSz3/FE52002-C-6-E07-496-B-85-F8-3-D24-A9043899.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/ZhkNx1p/BB2-B1-A65-563-D-4-F08-A153-FFB78-ACB2384.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/TBYL1JQ/5-BC1-F5-DB-082-D-4-F53-B2-F2-CF18-DD123040.jpg
That’s quite enough, I suppose.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @YetAnotherAnon, @Buzz Mohawk
https://twitter.com/FOX29philly/status/1267186742207164423Replies: @International Jew, @Buzz Mohawk, @Fluesterwitz
Reminds me of that unfortunate Russian tank column at the beginning of the war.
The Tom Wolfe anecdote is funny. On this happiness factor thing, many irresponsible black people are having a good time blowing the money, sure - they are on a roll in rolling the White man like Tom Wolfe couldn't have imagined during those Mau-Mau times. If it stops, they will be very angry. Some dude warned us about this ...
.
* The BLS boys would say from 1-2% to 8.6%. (They know it to the nearest 0.1%, haha!) Nah, it's from the last decade's (at least) 4-5% up to, what, 25% yearly? It's anybody's guess. Even the wheelbarrow prices are up, so get yours now. Keep it clean...Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @Old Prude, @SunBakedSuburb
Oh, Hell, Newman; Why did you have to open the inflation rate can of worms? Talk about hijacking the thread.
What’s the rate of inflation? Items at the Dollar Store cost \$1.25. Do the math.
The stimulus checks were a gimmick, but the Payroll Protection act was political genius. I think it really staved of a catastrophic collapse. My own company used it to retain all its employees. Sure, we spent the time painting the walls of the factory due to lack of orders, but it was nice to know we’d have a job for the next three months.
That kept a lid on the panic during the mass hysteria at the start of the Cooties.
https://twitter.com/FOX29philly/status/1267186742207164423Replies: @International Jew, @Buzz Mohawk, @Fluesterwitz
I like how one cop steps out of the way and smacks the passing, empty car with a baton.
I looked up the old Chappelle skit Steve mentioned and hoo boy the things you could say in 2003! The few obligatory “whites racist” joke lines inserted paled in comparison to the huge body blows landed that affirmed all the crazy things you see in the hood. Until the last decade, public humor was multi valenced enough that a pretty wide swath of America could find something to laugh in it.
Inflation was inevitable given the huge payouts to everyone, which the lower classes spent, but I’m at the point where the laissez faire- corporations-are-good crowd can shut right up. There has to be a way to give working and middle classes real wage increases. I’m not sure how but the old neocon/libertarian well has run dry for me.
The Tom Wolfe anecdote that Steve referenced had a cameo by the leftist German poet Gunther Grass, who actually came to Wolfe’s defense, saying those kids had no idea what fascism was. It was quite a pithy line for Grass, who could be inscrutable in his public talks. I heard him give a talk in Germany thirty years ago and couldn’t make out a thing he was trying to say. When I told my host family that, they nodded and said he was hard for all Germans to understand too, so it wasn’t a language thing. Then again this was a couple years after the wall fell and these were former DDR (communist) citizens, so they were pretty weary of leftist lies. I wonder now if they’ve tired of the center- rightist lies too.
Rinse, Lather and repeat.
“In reality, the anecdotes and the murder and road wreck data suggest we are in the middle of a black happiness explosion straight out of a Dave Chappelle skit about reparations day.”
Yup, ain’t that the stone-cold truth. The sad calculus of this is that lax police enforcement + “free” government money = black anarchy. It appears that that demographic needs greater supervision, almost as what you would do with an unruly toddler. You would think that the cause-and-effect of this would be too great for those in control of the government to notice, but here we are today. If blacks ever got reparations, then what we’re seeing today would be considered nothing but spring training in preparation for the regular season.
By the way, I think much of the anarchy that we are seeing can and be traced back to the rejection of the “broken windows” style policing that started in New York. Blacks complained long and loudly enough about being harassed such that the courts agreed with them and pulled back proactive policing. That, in addition to the George Floyd moment, is really the foundation of what we’re saying today.
I remember they emptied at least a few jails or prisons early in the Covid panic, but I’ve heard absolutely nothing about that since from anyone. If iSteve covered it or mentioned it since 2020, I missed it. Has anyone tracked the number of people in jail/prison over the last 3 years and plotted it with crime stats?
When the food shortages come, the lawbreakers will steal brazenly, and the law-abiding will go hungry. Then the violence will really kick in.
Next summer, it might get ugly.
Baring some really bad weather or drought, you won't be starving next year.Replies: @Hodag
1. The results are NOT fully in, because we have not yet seen the more important result: what the destruction of the suburbs looks like.
2. Another experiment exists, which is the effect upon society, the culture, and work ethos of massive immigration. California is of course the experiment’s petri dish.
Stimulus took many forms. In addition to the direct stimulus payments everyone got, there was the liberalized unemployment, the increased child tax credit, and virtually everyone in poorer areas got at least one PPP loan. It adds up.
Steve, reparations have already begun in NYS. Gov. hochul previously had dropped \$240 million for infrastructure and business improvements on Buffalo’s east side. Including turning a long stretch of the Kensington Expressway into a tunnel, because it cuts through the east side. Two weeks ago she came back to Buffalo with an additional \$50 million for the residents of the east side. The money will be distributed in this manner…1000 residents will receive up to \$10k for repairs or remodelling for their houses. Four thousand will checks for \$5000 to pay their taxes, water and sewer bills. A lucky 150 will be gifted \$30k as a down payment on a house. If this doesn’t qualify as reparations what does?
Don’t underestimate the butterfly effect.
ProPublica has an interesting article on how lockdowns, stimulus checks and greedy shipping companies, like Hapag-Lloyd, led to the explosive rise in prices all over the world:
https://www.propublica.org/article/ocean-freight-shipping-costs-inflation
It’s known as the trickle up theory. It doesn’t stay in their hands for very long because it’s too small to do anything substantial with.
It just:
a. Creates artificial demand, increasing prices (i. e. inflation)
b. Gets consolidated into the upper cohorts of the already wealthy making them more wealthy.
Obviously, you are not going to build a new wing on your house with a $1,400 check but you might go out and buy a new fridge or that 65" OLED TV or whatever. Since in a normal year only 8 million fridges are sold, if suddenly 5 million additional people decide that they want a new fridge, this could cause a shortage.Replies: @Prester John
Reminds me of when I was a kid and my family drove down south on a vacation trip. In South Carolina and Georgia we passed miles and miles of cotton fields and run-down sharecropper shacks (this was in the early 60s). Every shack, however, had a television (you could see the aerial poking up from the roof) and a late-model car (primarily cadillacs) parked in the driveway.
Wow, that is mighty impressive for a Sharecropper. Wonder what was he cropping and how much was he sharing? Are you sure it was not a poppy or coca related 'business' in the guise of cropping? South Carolina and Georgia are suspiciously close to Florida!Replies: @Rob
Inflation was inevitable given the huge payouts to everyone, which the lower classes spent, but I’m at the point where the laissez faire- corporations-are-good crowd can shut right up. There has to be a way to give working and middle classes real wage increases. I’m not sure how but the old neocon/libertarian well has run dry for me.Replies: @Prester John
One of the reasons why Chappelle is persona non grata among many members of the Coalition of The Fringes.
It seems that the illuminati's current solution to the out-of-control deficit and debt in the US is to switch over to a new CBDC as part of a new technocratic (and totalitarian?) world order.
I don't think "They" will be able to pull it off easily, though.
Soon the social order will quake as normies begin to realize the mRNA vaccines have killed more people than COVID …
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/our-latest-polls-show-twice-as-many
… decreased the fertility of Western populations (permanently? unknown) …
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/hungary-most-vaccinated-counties
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/swedens-birth-rate-dropping-precipitiously
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/declining-birth-rates-post-covid
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/swedish-birth-rate-data-what-does
… and probably put ticking timebombs in the veins of billions.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
OK, the taxpayer’s children now. Not that they will actually have to pay it, but they will have to pay for it via the financial chaos that is to come ruin their world.
One fine day, America will have a Noticer Hall of Fame.
It may very well be called the Steve Sailer Noticer Hall of Fame.
Because Steve is really good at “noticing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/jul/05/black-bbc-presenter-lukwesa-burak-natural-hair?ref=upstract.com&curator=upstract.com&utm_source=upstract.com
ApparentlyI thought you only be racist towards people, but there you go, you live and learn...Clearly has not noticed that Asian people have the straightest hair going...Replies: @Jet
Probably referring to south Asians. (I.e. Indians and or Pakistanis)
Biden carried Contra Costa County with 71% of the vote and all four Republicans running for U.S. Congress lost by at least 20 points. Where are those gun nuts suppose to be around there?
Yeah but what about Nancy Pelosi’s boob-gate episode? Get on top of the important stuff, Steve.
Next summer, it might get ugly.Replies: @Old Prude, @AnotherDad
The food stealing has already started. I check the garden this morning and all the cabbages were gone along with the peas and the tops of a few carrots and beets. Bastards!
a late-model car (primarily Cadillacs) parked in the driveway.
Wow, that is mighty impressive for a Sharecropper. Wonder what was he cropping and how much was he sharing? Are you sure it was not a poppy or coca related ‘business’ in the guise of cropping? South Carolina and Georgia are suspiciously close to Florida!
For black sharecroppers in the South, buying property was (probably) not an option, so they spent money on other things.
Finally, Prester John is likely exaggerating the number of caddies the sharecroppers had.
In this regard, Steve, like Trump, is someone about whom no nuanced view is permissible if one hopes to remain respectable. I listen to Joe Rogan's show when he has an interesting guest on, someone like Douglas Murray, Michael Shellenberger, Antonio Garcia Martinez, or Dr. Robert Epstein, to name a few. However disgusted they may be with the current state of affairs, almost all of them will make it a point to declare that they don't support Trump. It becomes embarrassing, a ritualistic denunciation. Joe himself constantly declares his disdain for Trump. Let's see: rich, family man, bodybuilder, former MMA fighter, loves fast cars, loves guns and hunting, hates Woke politics . . . right, no way a guy like that would support Trump. I really believe he's just afraid to cross that line.
Why am I bad? Because I proved almost in real time what he’s demonstrating with a two-year lag.
At least it’s only two years. In 2007, Peter Hitchens blamed Enoch Powell for being right about immigration 40 years earlier, when there was still time to do something about it. Evidently, Powell poisoned the discourse by being unforgivably blunt, as if things would not have progressed as they did were it not for his rudeness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-492847/Enoch-paddling-sewage-knew-it.html
I think of one of Lawrence Auster’s observations:Replies: @SFG, @Twinkie, @MEH 0910
Joe Rogan is not a former MMA fighter. He has a 10th Planet BJJ black belt and was a US/domestic Taekwondo competitor, but he’s never fought in MMA. He is an MMA commentator.
He disdains woke politics, to be sure, but his politics seem to be mostly conventional limousine liberal – he is hostile to religion (Catholic Church in particular), is pro-drug use and pro-abortion. He basically wants to be able to say offensive and/or dumb stuff and be left alone to do whatever he wants without the latter-day Puritanical Wokism getting in his way.
Nonetheless I applaud him for airing unconventional view on his podcast and having unusual guests.
Discussing solutions requires one to actually consider the actions necessary in order to correct the current situation. That requires one to take stock in his own self, and for many people, especially here, self awareness isn't a particular strength.Replies: @Twinkie, @Rob Lee
Pretty much everyone knows what the solution is: heavy police presence and aggressive law enforcement in black and Hispanic areas and bringing back mass incarceration of criminal elements with long sentences for violent/narcotics crimes.
There is no political will for it though, as you well know.
OT — long read but necessary. Cartoons and movies of a certain era frequently had geneaological montages summarizing the careers of Great Anglo Saxon Families (normally fictitious and the protagonist’s), and you never see that any more. Of course, in the time when you did, you also saw the real-life descendents of real-life GASF, so audiences had an expectation. It’s redolant of how we live in the world designed and effected by the decadent bastard last generation of the people whose so-and-so knew Rhodes, corresponded with Shaw, got in a fight with Whitsler, mediated with Blavatsky, refused to give Joyce a bed for the evening, and called Disraeli a credit to his race.
https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/the-origin-of-two-spirit-and-the
tldr “Two-Spirit,” the fakest of the fake and gay identities, doesn’t come from Chippewa, it comes from a WASP larval-pseudo-baronet, two of whose ancestors slaughtered reds at Wounded Knee, who went gay at School, communist while working out west, and whose gay resentment of his father combined homosexuality, communism, and Native mystic societies into a non-starter social movement. Now piously kowtowed to by the Canadian government. Should be a movie.
What's the rate of inflation? Items at the Dollar Store cost $1.25. Do the math.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Been there, done that, Old Prude. Let’s not get too carried away- remember the 5 and 10 store such as Ben Franklins and Woolworths? The 5 and 10 will be back, I am told by Jerome Powell.
Nonetheless I applaud him for airing unconventional view on his podcast and having unusual guests.Replies: @J.Ross, @middle-aged vet
Every clumsy, inorganic, alien, rule-violating and ineffective thread on 4chan’s pol board risks being accused of coming from our useless government, but the signature of “Messing With The Enemy” self-defeating tax waste, in the best tradition of Kim, Stalin, and Hussein, is the over-large “popular outpour,” say, twenty new threads about the same lie or non-story and all started at the same time. Pol lately has been crowded filthy with the narrative thus spammed, “It’s Over For Trump, Joe Rogan has Withdrawn His Endorsement” (x20). Rogan never endorsed Trump and was only ever politically notable because the completely worthless and collossally destructive morons, who think of themselves as “the adults” or “the professionals,” so utterly eliminated their credibility that a clown like Rogan (who besides his tumbler dabbling and fanboyism was a reality show host and a stand-up comedian) could sound like a voice of reason, say, by not considering the milquetoast Marxist academic Jordan Petersen to be Adolf Hitler himself, or by refusing to tell easily refuted lies about a Nobel-prize-winning medication. Rogan’s credibility is not to our credit but to our leadership’s discredit.
There were, apparently, 15 homicides that same weekend in Chicago, to illustrate your point.
I have a big problem with the way this whole thing is being presented.
First of all, the fact that you’re even looking at these statistics gives the lie to the idea that a lack of policing is directly responsible for an increase in crime rates. None of these incidents would have ended up in the crime statistics if the police had not taken the report in the first place. So the police are there, they are doing their job; but like everyone else, their resources are limited. They cannot escalate force to match a summer of riots that the politicians seem unwilling to control.
Secondly, riots, almost by definition, involve a lot of burglary, assault, and altercations that can lead to someone getting killed. This is not a cause followed by an effect, it’s one and the same the thing. The George Floyd riots didn’t cause a bump in the crime rate, they are a bump in the crime rate.
I’ve noticed this same pattern happening a lot in many of the topics that Alt-Right people like to talk about. They identify two facets of something and arbitrarily separate them into two distinct concepts, A and B. Then they assume the existence of some dynamical process by which A causes B, and they use the concurrence of A and B to “prove” the existence of the dynamical process, which was their goal all along. It is an invalid form of argumentation that results from making undischarged assumptions.
Evolution is a classic example of this. Many evolutionists seem to be stuck in a lazy loop of thought that distills down to something like “If evolution occurred, then organisms would be adapted to their environment, and organisms are adapted to their environment, therefore evolution occurred.” Note that this is also affirming the consequent and that this type of argument would also be formally invalid for that reason alone, but never mind that now. The evolutionist would simply say that he is making an inductive inference; the grand power of the evolutionary idea is held to smooth over such formal difficulties. The more important point here is that organisms being adapted to their environment does not prove anything about evolution, one way or the other. Being adapted to the environment is just what an organism is; you have to be somewhat adapted to the environment or you cannot live in it at all. When something only exists as such, there is no motivation to separate its existence from its habit.
There is here a tendency to say that “something becomes thus” or “something causes thus” when in reality that something merely is thus. But saying that something is thus would not allow Steve to fabricate and name an “effect” and take credit for discovering it. It’s a bit like taking credit for discovering that your stove gets hot when you boil water.
You are missing a step. They first note that prior organisms, once here, are gone, and that organism absent from the historical record, are now present and that sufficient similarities exist between the two to posit that one is an continuation of the other in slightly or greatly altered form, that form being amenable to change based on the laws of differentiated trait reproduction influenced by competitive survival (or failure at competitive survival) on a mass scale over time. This is what is meant by adaptation, and it is an reasonable hypothesis that fits all the known evidence.
Without the lockdowns in 2020, Floyd's death would have resulted in a single protest in Minnesota and there would not have been thousands of protests across America with the resulting increase in crime. People with jobs and school and active social lives are not attending BLM protests because they have better things to do, but in 2020 they had nothing else they could do because of the lockdowns. It was the first opportunity they had in weeks to socialize with their friends or have a social gathering.
You know antibodies? You make them, biopharma companies make monoclonal ones. You know how nature makes antibodies? Each naive B cell produces one antibody, and it’s different from most every other B cell’s antibody. How does the cell do that? There are two genes with conserved regions and multiple versions of variable pieces of the antibody all lined up like V1, V2, ...(D1, D2, ...) J1, J2, ... for 6-40-odd choices. Then there’s the enzyme that adds some random bases (with some biases) — terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase — to each segment (maybe not in every case, though)So, that’s the variation part of evolution by selection. Where does the selection come in? When the B cell - is covered in antibody-ended molecules embedded in the membrane, B cell receptors, bind a particle with multiple copies of the epitope on it — pretty necessary given naive antibodies bind weakly — the B cell will internalize the antigen-covered thing, break it apart, and present protein pieces to CD4 (helper) T cells on the B’s MHC II molecules. If a T cell receptor (generated from multiple segments much like B cell receptors (alternative splicing of the antibody mRNA) recognizes its own epitope presented on an MHC II will activate the B cell or inactivate it (a state called anergy) in an inflammatory or non-inflammatory context, respectively.Here’s where more selection happens. Bunches of B and T cells (and other APCs?) gather in germinal centers in lymph nodes. The B cells reproduce (asexually, ofc) and mutating — but they don’t mutate willy-nilly. They mutate the antibody complementarity-determining regions. On average, one mutation per B cell receptor (antibody) gene per cell, per generation. The follicular helper T cells stimulate B cells to reproduce if the cell is bound to antigen. How does the cell bind to antigen when all these sister cells bind the same pathogen? They compete for antigen. The winners reproduce. Wanna say that affinity maturation can up antibody affinity several fold. My Google-fu is so weak I couldn’t find by how much. So, strong binders amplify (positive selection) but there are still all those weak B cells. Wouldn’t antibodies be better if poor binders were killed? Yup. And die they do. Suicide from lack of T cell approval, negative selection.Variation, selection, and amplification.In B cell (and T cell) maturation, there is also negative selection for cells that bind self-antigens. This selection is harsher for T cells, because it’s more important. Accordingly, evolution has created the AIRE gene, which codes for autoimmune regulator protein. In seto al cells in the thymus, this protein ups the expression, from none to a bit, of genes that are silenced without increasing expression of housekeeping genes in the cells. These otherwise cell type specific proteins are then cut up and presented to “educate” T cells. Cells that react properly to self proteins continue maturation, those that don’t, die. This selection has two phases, positive, to eliminate cells that don’t bind self protein, and negative, to eliminate T cells that do . In realty, there’s likely a range that passes both.A quick googling suggests a human can produce about 12 billion antibodies, but i’ve seen trillions from non-ncbi bookshelf sources. I’ve seen trillions, but that might be theoretical, lots of combos of segments won’t mesh.I have to thank you for your comment, Intelligent Dassein. In refreshing my memory on some of this, I saw that fish and bird antibody diversity generation works “very differently.” I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to find out. I had assumed they work like the mammalian system. Never would have thought there were other, sure to be interesting, ways.
At least Scott Alexander allows comments, and real discussion. The entire thread is worth reading. In response to “Why not cite Steve Sailer?”, Steve replies, and then commenter alwaysrinse adds:
Yep. Often the “libs” can be pwned, simply by stating the facts that they prefer not to know. A deadpan statement of such facts appears to the “libs” to be “confrontational”.
Thank you for your work.
The Tom Wolfe anecdote is funny. On this happiness factor thing, many irresponsible black people are having a good time blowing the money, sure - they are on a roll in rolling the White man like Tom Wolfe couldn't have imagined during those Mau-Mau times. If it stops, they will be very angry. Some dude warned us about this ...
.
* The BLS boys would say from 1-2% to 8.6%. (They know it to the nearest 0.1%, haha!) Nah, it's from the last decade's (at least) 4-5% up to, what, 25% yearly? It's anybody's guess. Even the wheelbarrow prices are up, so get yours now. Keep it clean...Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein, @Old Prude, @SunBakedSuburb
“The Tom Wolfe anecdote is funny.”
When is Steve going to get cracking on his LA Bonfire of the Vanities? He’s the only writer in this town who could actually accomplish such a task (creatively). But it’ll require real work and discipline. He needs to put away the marijuana and stop living like a college kid. Although I may be talking to myself here.
In the 80s maybe; in the current mess, consequential and unforgivable. This sort of thing should always be placed against good liberal denunciation of non-violent anti-Semitism, ie, refusal to congregate, shake hands, give platform to; Gorky’s “skunk” heckler, etc.. Everything in the liberal project is a convenient lie and if you live long enough (or read widely enough) you locate the lie.
excellent!
Essentially, you can't fix stupid. OTOH, you can either discourage it (by penalizing it), or encourage it (by subsidizing it).
The events of 2014 and 2020 have led to less penalizing and more subsidizing. It was entirely predictable how this is turning out. Sadly, I don't think we've reached Peak Stupidity yet.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
Thanks for bringing up that important and trending concept of Peak Stupidity, Technite.
Sorry, for going even more O/T, Old Prude, if that’s possible, but did you all hear about the Georgia Guidestones being blown up? I just wrote a post about the 2nd of the guides (per Peak Stupidity contract obligation) yesterday morning, and of all things, was planning on making another trip out there sometime.
Between this and my deciding not to go to Washington DC. for Jan 6th, ’21 festivities last minute due to logistics, I am turning into a real life but day late Forrest Gump.
Yes, fair enough (even if blaming Soros is just pandering)
How so? Don’t you think the Soros leftist DA program bears substantial responsibility for the crime explosion?
How so? Don't you think the Soros leftist DA program bears substantial responsibility for the crime explosion?Replies: @kaganovitch, @Peter Akuleyev
I see Harry beat me to it.
……..how do you know that?
I disagree. One instance where a white inconveniences a negro is a hate crime, and it triggers dozens of imaginary white on negro genocide claims, but 20 negroes killing twenty negroes may not be a statistic even, unless reported.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/05/fields-medal-kyiv-maryna-viazovska-oxford-expert-james-maynard-winners
The obligatory (these days) female winner actually has two kids.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jul/05/fields-medal-kyiv-maryna-viazovska-oxford-expert-james-maynard-winnersWell, up to a point. I'm no Fields Medallist, but I'm not sure about the practical application of this:Next time I need to pack cannonballs or any other sphere in 24 dimensions I must give her a bell.Replies: @quewin
“Kyiv-born” reads the headline.
Truly LOL-worthy.
Reinforcement of Cathedral Narratives continue unabated.
OT — When did it all get so based?
So the only thing more deadly than a poor dejected black man is a happy rich black man?
Let the check writing begin! Why did it ever stop?
If you are living hand to mouth on a week by week basis and the rent that consumes 40% of your income goes away, your disposable income after food, phone, Purple drank and other necessities probably quintuples.
However, the whole thing has been like handing a bag of peanuts to a starving man two or three times a year. It will not sustain him or even keep him alive for more than a short time. It is a nice gesture at best. (Virtue signaling?) It is a very expensive gesture when done at this scale, while simultaneously worthless at the small scale. It is stupidity made manifest.
The starving individual will eat momentarily and then go on starving. Perhaps a stimulus check will last a month for bills or necessities for some people, but anecdotes here certainly do not suggest anybody used the money for bills or necessities, so what was the point? Oh yes, simply to get people to spend! "To stimulate!" To spend money that doesn't really exist! Money those of us with incomes will have to pay back via taxes and inflation. Wonderful.Replies: @Bill Jones
It may very well be called the Steve Sailer Noticer Hall of Fame.
Because Steve is really good at "noticing."Replies: @Whereismyhandle
Can we have a separate wing for when Steve wages war on noticing? Like when he inexplicably thinks Russia is going to lose a land war on its border or that shutting down society, the economy, childrens development, etc. because of the cold is a good idea?
It's not impossible though highly unlikely. While I want the war to be over quickly (which will only happen with a Russian victory), stuff like HIMARS and other weapons may be prolonging the agony (the 'bleed Russia' strategy). New missiles rendered Snake Island untenable for troops or their supply ships, and there seem to be a lot of ammunition dump hits around Kherson. What if US missiles, with targeting info from the US, take out the bridge to Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet base?
The answer to that is almost certainly Russian mobilisation and a much increased risk of a nuclear exchange.
At this very moment there are at least 3 US spyplanes in the area, a Bombardier Challenger 650, a P8 Poseidon, P3 Orion. And of course there are satellites.
And fell hook, line and sinker for the Green Lies.
Rinse, Lather and repeat.
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.Replies: @SafeNow, @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar, @Stan Adams
There’s an old saying: “ (1) Good; (2) Cheap; (3) Fast. Pick any two.”
Did you get 3 as well as 1 and 2? If so, nice going.
Anyway, I am guessing you are not in California, or just “expertly” would be very hard to achieve. The fellow who came to give you the estimate would be John Smith. But the fellows who came to do the painting and carpentry would not likely be traditional, skilled, conscientious tradesmen.
Interview: Herbie and His 1963 AC Shelby Cobra
He was afraid to drive it, the first car he ever bought. (Dad had given him a jalopy to get to college.) Bandmate Donald Byrd, who alerted him to the car in the first place, had a minor accident with it, and after that baptism-by-dent, Herbie drove it to gigs everywhere, but otherwise babied it.
He still has it, and it's now worth $2m.
Once in a while, these stories work out. Also, Herbie is more responsible a person than the run-of-the-mill professional musician. He made it into an investment.
https://retromotiv.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/26.jpgReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Let’s just remember that the stimy checks are not the cause of inflation.
I’d have preferred that we had serious public health authorities giving reasonable non-hysterical advice and we never nuked millions of jobs. But given that we did, people still had to eat. (I did not qualify, but i don’t have a big issue with the program.)
The checks themselves were < 1 trillion and hence < 1/4 of even the direct "money printer go brrrr" that the Fed did for the pandemic:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm
A transient like this will bump inflation but is easy to digest for a large productive nation.
No the real problem is decades in the making. Essentially the middle men took control of America with a program of "let China build it, and we'll skim off a big slice as the cash flows by". Americans have been consuming about 5% more than they produce, with American asset sales and government issuing more debt and the fed more dollars to make up the difference. The real consumption vs. production gap more like 10% or so, because so much of the US economy is b.s. (Ex. "Diversity consultants" count in GDP.)
Basically the Wa-Wa middle man parasites have been looting the physical, productive, social, genetic and reputational capital of America that our ancestors built up over 200 years.
OK, that’s funny.
Steve:
Do you know you are brought up on about 1/3 of the Red Scare podcasts?
I am new to this particular podcast, because of my age. It is two Manhattan art hoes (one of which is an actress) drinking wine, vaping and talking about culture. These girls are fun and you should totally hit them up to have you on. They just had Moldbug on so they already nuked their careers. Why not have Sailer?
There is no political will for it though, as you well know.Replies: @Mike Tre
It’s a start, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that.
Steve:
Do you know you are brought up on about 1/3 of the Red Scare podcasts?
I am new to this particular podcast, because of my age. It is two Manhattan art hoes (one of which is an actress) drinking wine, vaping and talking about culture. These girls are fun and you should totally hit them up to have you on. They just had Moldbug on so they already nuked their careers. Why not have Sailer?
On edit:. They love Lana also and flew to Vegas this weekend to see Morrissey. Please.
Maybe the problem is too many negroes tend to be horrible people, by modern Western European standards. Remember back in the 1940’s, while we were administrating WII, most of subsaharan Africans were still running about their country… stark naked. Many boomer boys remember clamoring for their grade school National Geographic to catch a glimpse of the naked negro women that Nat Geo routinely photographed. Nat Geo finally relented after “civilized” blacks complaints about showing Africans as the were.
To suppose we could take a race out of the Stone Age, and… teach… them to conform to modern civilization in just a few generations is crackpot social science at best, and summarily evil at worst.
That premise has unleashed unspeakable misery for them as a race, and unrelenting pain and frustration for their host. Whomever continues to advocate for Western Europeans to socially integrate en masse with these poor people have endlessly dark hearts. The horrific lives of so many of them while incarcerated for simply being who they are is potent testimony.
One day we flaky millennials will tell our grandkids about the joys of logging on to the World Wide Web and launching Netscape Navigator on our spiffy 75-MHz Pentiums with 14.4 kbps modems (we were glad to have them!) to access grainy GIFs of busty cheerleaders performing various unspeakable acts with one another.
(If we have any grandkids, that is.)
Next summer, it might get ugly.Replies: @Old Prude, @AnotherDad
My uncle sent some pics from my cousin’s farm on the 4th and the corn looks great. When AnotherMom and I journeyed through the Midwest and stopped in Iowa last month, we noticed the corn was unimpressive/behind. My uncle–quite knowledgeable–said the same. He thinks on average about 10 days. But looking really good now.
Baring some really bad weather or drought, you won’t be starving next year.
Discussing solutions requires one to actually consider the actions necessary in order to correct the current situation. That requires one to take stock in his own self, and for many people, especially here, self awareness isn't a particular strength.Replies: @Twinkie, @Rob Lee
Everyone here is quite self-aware… it’s self-risk that’s the problem. The tallest blade of grass gets cut first.
For the most part middle class whites have families, jobs, property, etc., and although they can see what’s happening around them, a willingness – or hesitancy – to throw the first stone indicates that one has weighed the pros and cons of starting a revolutionary moment versus waiting out the storm.
To me that indicates an exceptional level of self-awareness.
Hypothesis: Because the text in Taki's Magazine is sans-serif, while the text here is in a serifed font.
It might be thought that sans-serif script, being simpler, would be easier to read, but in practice that seems not to be the case. (Am I the only one noticing the better readability of serifed script over sans-serif script?)Replies: @AnotherDad, @The Last Real Calvinist
I had not noticed this was the Unz/Taki issue, but you’re correct.
That serifs improve the readability of text–apparently giving your eye a more “holistic” one-shot grasp of letters/words–is well known. That’s why they continue to be used.
Do you know you are brought up on about 1/3 of the Red Scare podcasts?
I am new to this particular podcast, because of my age. It is two Manhattan art hoes (one of which is an actress) drinking wine, vaping and talking about culture. These girls are fun and you should totally hit them up to have you on. They just had Moldbug on so they already nuked their careers. Why not have Sailer?Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Jenner Ickham Errican
The Sailer connection?
Baring some really bad weather or drought, you won't be starving next year.Replies: @Hodag
The American people will never, ever starve. All those woke books about the past famines in America? They don’t exist because we live on the most fecund land by nature and engineering. Agriculture is amazingly easy in the US (dead flat central Illinois, begging for row farming).
Steve’s original Takimag piece mentions “kustom kar kulture” as an example of the happiness explosion. Avant-garde fim-maker Kenneth Anger picked up on that mid-sixties fetish. Gotta the Paris Sisters.
My understanding is that PPP loan fraud was rampant and money from that is underlying a lot of the extravagant new purchases poor/middle-class people are suddenly making. LOTS of people where I live bought new SUVs/trucks within the past 2 years.
OT: Robert Crimo, the Highland Park shooter, wore women’s clothing during the attack, the police say.
Apparently so he would not attract suspicion and could easily escape. Not clear whether he has the autogynephilia fetish.
Do you know you are brought up on about 1/3 of the Red Scare podcasts?
I am new to this particular podcast, because of my age. It is two Manhattan art hoes (one of which is an actress) drinking wine, vaping and talking about culture. These girls are fun and you should totally hit them up to have you on. They just had Moldbug on so they already nuked their careers. Why not have Sailer?Replies: @Harry Baldwin, @Jenner Ickham Errican
Harry Baldwin wrote:
This was classic:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htmA transient like this will bump inflation but is easy to digest for a large productive nation.No the real problem is decades in the making. Essentially the middle men took control of America with a program of "let China build it, and we'll skim off a big slice as the cash flows by". Americans have been consuming about 5% more than they produce, with American asset sales and government issuing more debt and the fed more dollars to make up the difference. The real consumption vs. production gap more like 10% or so, because so much of the US economy is b.s. (Ex. "Diversity consultants" count in GDP.)Basically the Wa-Wa middle man parasites have been looting the physical, productive, social, genetic and reputational capital of America that our ancestors built up over 200 years.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money and an unpayable debt that will only be reduced by inflation. You’re preaching to the preacher here about multivariate problems, Dad. This was another straw, nay log, on the camel’s back, along with screwing up the oil market by both restricting extraction and “standing with Ukraine.” Plus your analysis. It’s as if somebody is deliberately breaking us.
Yes. Yes to you and to every other replier who explained the obvious: Yes, one can buy a few things for a little while with that money.
However, the whole thing has been like handing a bag of peanuts to a starving man two or three times a year. It will not sustain him or even keep him alive for more than a short time. It is a nice gesture at best. (Virtue signaling?) It is a very expensive gesture when done at this scale, while simultaneously worthless at the small scale. It is stupidity made manifest.
The starving individual will eat momentarily and then go on starving. Perhaps a stimulus check will last a month for bills or necessities for some people, but anecdotes here certainly do not suggest anybody used the money for bills or necessities, so what was the point? Oh yes, simply to get people to spend! “To stimulate!” To spend money that doesn’t really exist! Money those of us with incomes will have to pay back via taxes and inflation. Wonderful.
One even wonders if it might be genetic or something.
TheAnother scary thing is that in some cities, they don’t need his help to elect such goons. Apparently Milwaukee is one of them, and a boy in Waukesha paid the ultimate price.Can he be sued? Perhaps class-action? Drain his estate. Spend it on its opposite.
There is also his US citizenship to go after. However, on the cusp of 92, he won’t be needing it for much longer. How about renaming things for him? County dumps, drug alleys, and the like.
Now he’s going after Cuba, forcing a perceptive lady named for the Blessed Virgin to resign:
Soros takeover: Conservative radio star Lourdes Ubieta quits iconic Radio Mambi ahead of sale to liberal group
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.Replies: @SafeNow, @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar, @Stan Adams
I am glad you were able to get good work done with that money. I wish America had more Kylies and terrific home improvement guys.
Did you get 3 as well as 1 and 2? If so, nice going. Anyway, I am guessing you are not in California, or just “expertly” would be very hard to achieve. The fellow who came to give you the estimate would be John Smith. But the fellows who came to do the painting and carpentry would not likely be traditional, skilled, conscientious tradesmen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
In 1963, Herbie Hancock spent nearly half his first royalty check to buy a new Cobra, one of the first six ever made. (And the only one with its particular carburetor.) Which he probably wouldn’t have done had the dealer treated him decently on his first visit. He said he’d be back, and in the meantime word got around, and he was treated like royalty at the sale.
Interview: Herbie and His 1963 AC Shelby Cobra
He was afraid to drive it, the first car he ever bought. (Dad had given him a jalopy to get to college.) Bandmate Donald Byrd, who alerted him to the car in the first place, had a minor accident with it, and after that baptism-by-dent, Herbie drove it to gigs everywhere, but otherwise babied it.
He still has it, and it’s now worth \$2m.
Once in a while, these stories work out. Also, Herbie is more responsible a person than the run-of-the-mill professional musician. He made it into an investment.
According to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/, $6,000 in 1963 would be $57,312.94 today. $2m is a good return.
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.Replies: @SafeNow, @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar, @Stan Adams
I had never paid attention to Suze Orman, and didn’t have great hopes when I saw her headline about how to use your check. But it turned out to be pretty solid advice, and the opposite of the check’s ostensible purpose: stick it away for a rainy day.
Grandpa would have said the same thing.
Interview: Herbie and His 1963 AC Shelby Cobra
He was afraid to drive it, the first car he ever bought. (Dad had given him a jalopy to get to college.) Bandmate Donald Byrd, who alerted him to the car in the first place, had a minor accident with it, and after that baptism-by-dent, Herbie drove it to gigs everywhere, but otherwise babied it.
He still has it, and it's now worth $2m.
Once in a while, these stories work out. Also, Herbie is more responsible a person than the run-of-the-mill professional musician. He made it into an investment.
https://retromotiv.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/26.jpgReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Correction: Hancock spent nearly all his first royalty check. It only paid for just under half of the Cobra.
According to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/, \$6,000 in 1963 would be \$57,312.94 today. \$2m is a good return.
Another terrific column.
“To suppose we could take a race out of the Stone Age”
Most sub-Saharans were an Iron Age farming population for the last couple of thousand years. That’s a big reason enslaving them as agricultural workers was profitable.
Hypothesis: Because the text in Taki's Magazine is sans-serif, while the text here is in a serifed font.
It might be thought that sans-serif script, being simpler, would be easier to read, but in practice that seems not to be the case. (Am I the only one noticing the better readability of serifed script over sans-serif script?)Replies: @AnotherDad, @The Last Real Calvinist
That serifed typefaces are easier to read, especially at smaller point sizes, is well-known. Sans serif typefaces look fine as headings, but sticking to serifs for blocks of text makes for much more comfortable reading.
This is purely my impression, but I got the sense back in the 1990s that sans serif typefaces started being used much more often for ordinary text simply because they looked better (‘cleaner’ was the term often used) on that period’s low-resolution CRT computer monitors.
But with today’s monitors, serifed typefaces generally look good, even at small point sizes, so it seems there’s little point in putting text blocks in sans serif typefaces if you actually want people to read them.
You left out yours truly as well as Ray Charles.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
• Sorry bout that: @ Achmed E. Newman
.
.
Wait, what? Ray Charles?
Boomers like to recall the days when they thrilled to the sight of naked Negresses in Nat Geo.
One day we flaky millennials will tell our grandkids about the joys of logging on to the World Wide Web and launching Netscape Navigator on our spiffy 75-MHz Pentiums with 14.4 kbps modems (we were glad to have them!) to access grainy GIFs of busty cheerleaders performing various unspeakable acts with one another.
(If we have any grandkids, that is.)
“Many evolutionists seem to be stuck in a lazy loop of thought that distills down to something like “If evolution occurred, then organisms would be adapted to their environment, and organisms are adapted to their environment, therefore evolution occurred.”
You are missing a step. They first note that prior organisms, once here, are gone, and that organism absent from the historical record, are now present and that sufficient similarities exist between the two to posit that one is an continuation of the other in slightly or greatly altered form, that form being amenable to change based on the laws of differentiated trait reproduction influenced by competitive survival (or failure at competitive survival) on a mass scale over time. This is what is meant by adaptation, and it is an reasonable hypothesis that fits all the known evidence.
I used my stimulus checks for badly needed home improvements. Got exterior painting done, replaced rotten fascia boards, etc. Of course I lucked out by having a terrific home improvement guy do the jobs expertly and reasonably. Those checks that seemed small to you were a big help to me.Replies: @SafeNow, @Buzz Mohawk, @Reg Cæsar, @Stan Adams
I’m glad you were able to put the money to good use. Best wishes for your upcoming eye surgery.
Egregiously OT (addressed to you yet again):
Speaking of optics, today I brought my long effort to digitize the photographic record of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to substantial completion. There are still gaps I’d like to fill but none longer than six months or so. I now have a pretty good idea how I looked at various times over the years.
Naturally, I feel a strange compulsion to share a few images with you.
(If you find all of this rather boring and pointless, then just think of my commenting oeuvre as a brilliant parody of millennial vapidity, narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-absorption. I am the prototypical smartass kid with his head jammed firmly up his posterior, babbling about the minutiae of his trivial existence in blissful ignorance of the extent to which nobody gives a crap.)
I downloaded an app that allowed me to make photos directly from negatives. The image quality is marginal but it’s good enough.
One of the key questions I wanted to answer was, when did I become ugly? (Yes, I am beautiful in my own way and my soul is radiant and yadda yadda yadda.) I knew it happened toward the end of middle school but I wanted to nail down the date.
The turning point was 1998 (seventh/eighth grade). That was the year when I lost the last tattered remnant of childhood cuteness and began my existence as a fat, bespectacled, acne-ridden ghoul.
Something went terribly wrong with my physical development during eighth grade. I suspect that I had a bad reaction to the SSRIs my mother practically forced down my throat. (I took several over the years. I can’t even remember all of the names. My diagnosis was obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Maybe the drugs messed up my system. Maybe my hormones went screwy and my metabolism just crapped out. Maybe I was just a lazy glutton.
Whatever the cause, feast your eyes on the ruination of Stan:
January 1998:
June 1998:
December 1998:
February 1999:
July 1999:
December 1999:
In that last picture I am a 14-year-old high-school freshman, but with that gut and those glasses I could pass for someone in middle age.
And that was not the lowest point.
This picture is, by far, the least flattering photograph of me ever taken. Note that, at my mother’s behest, I am wearing tons of makeup in a vain effort to hide the acne. She insisted on applying it herself.
October 2000:
Accutane was a Godsend.
December 2001:
I like my early pics the best. Neoteny for the win:
That’s quite enough, I suppose.
Let's start with Jack D.Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous, @Stan Adams
Are you the one who sometimes refers to himself as "the resident fattie?" Anyway, it seems that body fat is one of your issues, and that is a tough one for anybody.
You indicate that you have taken various SSRIs, as I have, plus perhaps some other things I have too. I can tell you they mess with your body, fat and all. Also, I don't think they help very much.
No matter. You are very intelligent, as most of us here are, and that smartness makes you more aware of the absurdity of your own life. I know. Why go on, right?
Well, you will. I first tried to kill myself when I was 15, because OCD had permanently ruined my life. I say permanently, because I still live with it and its consequences, so there. You have some fat and skin issues, and I can't use my whole, considerable intellect and contribute anything to life. You pick.
Have you ever tried anything to improve your physical fitness? Do you spend any significant time outside in the sun? Do so if you don't now. It makes a difference.
This place is conducive to the kind of heartfelt-and-frankly-angry "sharing" you have just done. You are not alone, just today more bold and naked than the rest of us. Continue on. Life is very short. As one obviously older than you, I can tell you this with certainty. Do the best you can before it is over.Replies: @Stan Adams
Sailer is bad because he brings up black ladies pulling hair videos. We all watch them but only a few dare call them what they are. Of course that’s just one example of Sailer saying what we all know to be true out loud. The funny thing is that Sailer is pretty un-racist comparatively. He’s just about the only public intellectual though to describe black culture for what it is.
Thank you for your work.Replies: @Chrisnonymous
This is why lefties like the author of “Neoreaction a Basilisk” call Scott a gateway drug to the Alt-Right–he allows people like Sailer to post and then if you search for Sailer, you find this place.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/07/nancy-paul-pelosi-Italy-04.jpgReplies: @duncsbaby, @MEH 0910
I got to admit I never noticed Pelosi’s pendulous melons until this pic was put out there. Oh boy.
Egregiously OT (addressed to you yet again):
Speaking of optics, today I brought my long effort to digitize the photographic record of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to substantial completion. There are still gaps I’d like to fill but none longer than six months or so. I now have a pretty good idea how I looked at various times over the years.
Naturally, I feel a strange compulsion to share a few images with you.
(If you find all of this rather boring and pointless, then just think of my commenting oeuvre as a brilliant parody of millennial vapidity, narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-absorption. I am the prototypical smartass kid with his head jammed firmly up his posterior, babbling about the minutiae of his trivial existence in blissful ignorance of the extent to which nobody gives a crap.)
I downloaded an app that allowed me to make photos directly from negatives. The image quality is marginal but it’s good enough.
One of the key questions I wanted to answer was, when did I become ugly? (Yes, I am beautiful in my own way and my soul is radiant and yadda yadda yadda.) I knew it happened toward the end of middle school but I wanted to nail down the date.
The turning point was 1998 (seventh/eighth grade). That was the year when I lost the last tattered remnant of childhood cuteness and began my existence as a fat, bespectacled, acne-ridden ghoul.
Something went terribly wrong with my physical development during eighth grade. I suspect that I had a bad reaction to the SSRIs my mother practically forced down my throat. (I took several over the years. I can’t even remember all of the names. My diagnosis was obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Maybe the drugs messed up my system. Maybe my hormones went screwy and my metabolism just crapped out. Maybe I was just a lazy glutton.
Whatever the cause, feast your eyes on the ruination of Stan:
January 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/TmGCc99/297-DD65-E-FFE6-42-B0-A4-ED-D9710002-A096.jpg
June 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/4d96rZG/6-AB37-B30-4-F3-D-4912-8-D9-F-6533069496-D0.jpg
December 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/bXhMcNh/F6-C2-F1-B2-B609-4-F62-A364-1-CAC1-F9-AFD2-D.jpg
February 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/5n5nT6V/A2-A4340-C-9723-48-F6-9-FF6-085-DC32829-F4.jpg
July 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/k15825m/96-CC7950-93-D1-48-DC-9545-AA60552-BA75-B.jpg
December 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/dQ8RB38/F45-B8-CB0-A719-458-D-9-A93-B829-AAC58-DE9.jpg
In that last picture I am a 14-year-old high-school freshman, but with that gut and those glasses I could pass for someone in middle age.
And that was not the lowest point.
This picture is, by far, the least flattering photograph of me ever taken. Note that, at my mother’s behest, I am wearing tons of makeup in a vain effort to hide the acne. She insisted on applying it herself.
October 2000:
https://i.ibb.co/ThrC5Fs/6-A067-F63-553-F-42-A4-9-F24-1-F1-F82-BF1-F52.jpg
Accutane was a Godsend.
December 2001:
https://i.ibb.co/pWJ994N/C8-F5-E567-F5-BE-41-FC-8-F6-F-F17-C87-CD481-D.jpg
I like my early pics the best. Neoteny for the win:
https://i.ibb.co/2KyhLN7/6473-F8-EF-C905-47-EC-BF08-A696-D8-DF8-D55.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/xsrnSz3/FE52002-C-6-E07-496-B-85-F8-3-D24-A9043899.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/ZhkNx1p/BB2-B1-A65-563-D-4-F08-A153-FFB78-ACB2384.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/TBYL1JQ/5-BC1-F5-DB-082-D-4-F53-B2-F2-CF18-DD123040.jpg
That’s quite enough, I suppose.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @YetAnotherAnon, @Buzz Mohawk
I just want to say, I appreciate your efforts to be personable and honest about yourself. I think every regular commenter here needs to do the same thing. If they did, I’m sure a lot of the individual mythmaking would go away. There are a lot of people here who hide behind anonymity and hint at personas too good to be true, while engaging in some very suspicious posting activity. They need to come clean, because I don’t think they are who they say they are.
Let’s start with Jack D.
There is a long tradition in America, going back to at least young Benjamin Franklin, of anonymous pen names that give the author freedom to speak. If you don't think I am who I say I am, feel free to project your fantasies onto my identity.
Are you in any way related to this guy?
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi1.wp.com%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv73%2FFlamsterette_X%2FMajesticMapp.png&f=1&nofb=1
Over the years I've given certain people a fair amount of crap online. Not so much on iSteve, but on other sites in the past I've really gone after a few individuals. So it's only fair that I expose my flaws to everyone. I can take it as well as I can give it.
One of the people I went after was a (self-proclaimed) expert on an unpleasant social phenomenon that has drawn Steve's attention on occasion. He wrote a best-selling book about a fairly prominent crime. At one point he was a semi-regular on CNN. (He might still be; I avoid that channel like the plague.)
I wasn't overly fond of his book - I disagreed strongly with his depiction of one of the perpetrators. But what really got me was his incessant media-whoring. He received glowing reviews in all of the major media organs - the aforementioned CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian - and his book became required reading in many schools. He flew all over the country giving lectures.
And the thing is that he was so ... gay. Fruitier than a jumbo-sized gift basket. He didn't look effeminate but as soon as he opened his mouth you knew he wasn't interested in girls.
At the time that his book was published I was fairly active on a true-crime forum. I began mocking him constantly. People loved it and kept egging me on. In response I kept upping the ante.
Naturally, much of my mockery centered around his being gay.
One time he blogged about Christmas shopping. He wrote about visiting the Abercrombie & Fitch store at his local shopping mall and drooling over all of the homoerotic pictures of buff muscle boys on the walls.
Then he Tweeted "[Book] for Christmas!" (This was when Twitter was first becoming popular.)
So I made a mockup of his book cover with a picture of a nude Abercrombie model with the author's head spliced on top. I created a fake Amazon page for the "Special Abecrombie & Fitch Christmas Edition" of his book. Under the "People who bought this book also bought" section I put titles such as Anal Fisting for Dummies and NAMBLA: One Man, One Boy, One Dream. Then I created fake reviews of the book: "Astonishing, amazing, truly engrossing. I couldn't put it down, even when my thirteen-year-old neighbor escaped from my basement. (Don't worry - I captured him before he could go for help.)"
Another time he gave an interview about being suicidal when he was in high school. Naturally he inserted the standard boilerplate about gay bullying. In response, I wrote something like, "Oh, the torment of an adolescent closet case! When the captain of the wrestling team slammed you against the locker, how you longed to reach around and grope him through his snug little singlet! How you longed to go to the wild parties with the popular kids so he could put a roofie in your drink!"
Then, as a "birthday present," I posted a picture of a bunch of wrestlers and asked, "Which one is your favorite? I'll bet you like the big beefy one in the middle."
This went on for quite a while.
Eventually I learned that he was extremely offended by my mockery. (He told someone I knew and she told me.) We had a brief correspondence, in which I made a polite apology and pledged to discontinue my insults. (I resumed my antics shortly thereafter, but at that particular moment I did mean it.)
Interestingly, it turned out that he was most offended by the intimation that he might be a pedophile. He said something like, "It's very upsetting that people always assume gay guys are pedophiles. I know a guy who teaches in a high school, and he's always worried that someone might think he's into boys."
My ultimate mocking project came when I wrote an epic "fanfic" about the crime featured in his book. In the story the author pledges his soul to Satan in exchange for becoming rich and famous. Satan orders the author to write a tawdry book about a notorious crime. When the book reaches the top of the New York Times bestseller list, public fascination with the case grows to an insane level.
Flush with cash, the author moves into a swank Manhattan penthouse. He finds that having money and fame does nothing to make him happy. He spends long sleepless nights staring at a copy of his book, muttering darkly to himself.
"I'm a talentless hack," he repeats in an endless monotone. "I'm a talentless hack. I'm a talentless hack. I'm a talentless hack."
Satan decides that the time is ripe to resurrect the criminals. First he will have them make various short appearances (much like the reported sightings of Elvis over the years) during the author's nationwide book tour to arouse the public. Then he will have them "descend from Heaven" (in reality, ascend from Hell) on national television during the Super Bowl halftime show. They will claim that they were given salvation by "Jesus," who will then appear at the Super Bowl. This will appear to be the Second Coming. But in reality "Jesus" will be the Antichrist.
To assist the criminals, he assigns them a bodyguard (a gay neo-Nazi bodybuilder) and a lawyer (a nebbish Woody Allen type).
Rolf Lundgren, the 6'5", 250-pound neo-Nazi bodybuilder, has just arrived in Hell after blowing his brains out. Satan summons him to his office and introduces him to the lawyer, Maury Feldstein. (Maury is 5'2" and about 90 pounds soaking wet.)
"So I guess all Jews really do go to Hell," Rolf says.
"No, not really," Satan says. "Only the ones who murder their ex-girlfriends, dismember them, and feed them to the dog."
"On behalf of the Jewish people, let me say that I appreciate the disclaimer," Maury says.
"I'm sure you do," Satan says.
Satan orders the Jewish lawyer to pose as the Nazi's gay lover. (The lawyer is not pleased, to put it mildly.) Much hilarity ensues as the lawyer attempts to resist the temptations of the well-endowed Nazi, who has a vigorous libido.
Satan chooses the author to act as the vessel for the Antichrist. Satan impregnates the author and the baby Antichrist ... emerges from one of the author's orifices. (I won't go into details here.)
In response to Satan's shenanigans, God sends two of the victims of the infamous crime (who have become angels) to Earth to fight the forces of darkness.
The angels block Satan's power to the extent that he cannot stimulate the baby's growth (to allow him to grow to the level of a 30-year-old man). The author is forced to take care of the evil child. Much hilarity ensues as the gay guy finds himself stuck changing diapers for an infant whose poop is literally radioactive.
In the end, the author makes a heroic sacrifice to save humanity. He takes the baby Antichrist and boards a flight to Rome. Unbeknownest to him, all of the other players in the drama are aboard the aircraft, as well.
The author tries to escape but the flight is already taking off from JFK.
A furious battle erupts. The pilots attempt to return to the airport, but in the chaos they end up flying directly toward Manhattan. The military scrambles jet fighters to shoot the aircraft down. A missile strikes the cockpit and the pilots are killed. Unfortunately, the heroic transmale pilot makes a slight miscalculation and the trajectory of the plane is altered by the explosion. Instead of spiraling down toward the East River the aircraft makes a beeline straight toward Park Avenue. (More specifically, it is heading directly toward the author's swank penthouse.)
The author realizes that the flight is about to crash. He accepts his fate with dignity, knowing that upon his death his soul will descend to the netherworld.
His fellow passengers are screaming in terror and the baby Antichrist is shrieking, but he is serene. He speaks softly to himself: "In life, I was a talentless hack, a tedious joke, an insufferable bore. In death, I am ... a soulless talentless hack, fit only to be cast into the hellfire like a steaming dog turd plopping out of a canine's s**t chute. But even a turd can function as manure. My death will serve a higher purpose. It is my proper function to die in disgrace. Goodbye, cruel world."
Just as the plane slams into the building, the author is enveloped by a blinding light. For a split-second he imagines that perhaps he might yet go to Heaven. He is swallowed by the light ... and then he awakens in his crappy old apartment to the sound of a ringing phone. He answers it. It's his agent, telling him that his book has been accepted by the publisher and that the contract is more generous than anyone could have dreamed.
He reacts quietly and calmly, thanking his agent for the good news. After hanging up the phone he stumbles into the bathroom. He splashes some cold water on his face ... and looks in the mirror to see Rolf Lundgren standing behind him. Rolf's head is split open (from the gunshot) and his eyes are glowing red.
"Bend over," Rolf barks. "You're Satan's bitch now, but he asked me to warm you up a little. I hope you enjoy receiving pain as much as I enjoy inflicting it."
The author shouts with glee. "Thank you, Lord of Darkness! You've made all my dreams come true! Thank you!"
THE END
In a postscript I added, "After all the crap I've written about the guy, the least I could do was give him a happy ending."
So, yeah, I can be kind of an asshole.
He probably makes significantly more money with his substack these days.
How so? Don't you think the Soros leftist DA program bears substantial responsibility for the crime explosion?Replies: @kaganovitch, @Peter Akuleyev
I think the right pays far too much attention to Soros, it’s just become a meme at this point. He may be an old man handing out money to dubious causes, but he is not a mastermind. He is for the right what the Koch bros are for the left, and it isn’t particularly helpful to understanding where we are to focus on Soros.
You can't expect people to have a wholistic understanding of everything that is going on. But focusing on this one left-wing billionaire and expose he is doing, perhaps that can penetrate their ignorance. From there, they might be motivated to look into all the other left-wing billionaires, or perhaps not.
The left understands the propaganda value of picking out one person, such as Emmett Till, and endlessly repeating his name and story. It's basic Alinsky: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."
Russia is losing, and fairly badly considered where they started and what Putin’s original aims were. That is what “noticing” is all about – seeing what is actually happening and not buying into media stories.
https://twitter.com/FOX29philly/status/1267186742207164423Replies: @International Jew, @Buzz Mohawk, @Fluesterwitz
All a necessary part of racially reckoning as well as GDP growing. Win-win.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1544731632778854401Replies: @Bill Jones
Obviously the Republican recognizes the KKK as a Democratic Party operation.
Given the Communists managed to starve a few million Ukrainians to death on some of the best soul in the world, I wouldn’t be so sanguine. Leftists can be quite incompetent, malicious, or both.
Did you know the biggest (some say only, outside Arctic areas) desert in Europe is in southern Ukraine?
https://discover-ukraine.info/uploads/i/i/4eb7fcf54c6302.95131999.59.jpg
https://discover-ukraine.info/places/southern-ukraine/kherson/59
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleshky_Sands
“when he inexplicably thinks Russia is going to lose a land war on its border”
It’s not impossible though highly unlikely. While I want the war to be over quickly (which will only happen with a Russian victory), stuff like HIMARS and other weapons may be prolonging the agony (the ‘bleed Russia’ strategy). New missiles rendered Snake Island untenable for troops or their supply ships, and there seem to be a lot of ammunition dump hits around Kherson. What if US missiles, with targeting info from the US, take out the bridge to Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet base?
The answer to that is almost certainly Russian mobilisation and a much increased risk of a nuclear exchange.
At this very moment there are at least 3 US spyplanes in the area, a Bombardier Challenger 650, a P8 Poseidon, P3 Orion. And of course there are satellites.
The best soil in the world is useless if it doesn’t rain. The Sahara was once green.
Did you know the biggest (some say only, outside Arctic areas) desert in Europe is in southern Ukraine?
https://discover-ukraine.info/places/southern-ukraine/kherson/59
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleshky_Sands
Egregiously OT (addressed to you yet again):
Speaking of optics, today I brought my long effort to digitize the photographic record of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to substantial completion. There are still gaps I’d like to fill but none longer than six months or so. I now have a pretty good idea how I looked at various times over the years.
Naturally, I feel a strange compulsion to share a few images with you.
(If you find all of this rather boring and pointless, then just think of my commenting oeuvre as a brilliant parody of millennial vapidity, narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-absorption. I am the prototypical smartass kid with his head jammed firmly up his posterior, babbling about the minutiae of his trivial existence in blissful ignorance of the extent to which nobody gives a crap.)
I downloaded an app that allowed me to make photos directly from negatives. The image quality is marginal but it’s good enough.
One of the key questions I wanted to answer was, when did I become ugly? (Yes, I am beautiful in my own way and my soul is radiant and yadda yadda yadda.) I knew it happened toward the end of middle school but I wanted to nail down the date.
The turning point was 1998 (seventh/eighth grade). That was the year when I lost the last tattered remnant of childhood cuteness and began my existence as a fat, bespectacled, acne-ridden ghoul.
Something went terribly wrong with my physical development during eighth grade. I suspect that I had a bad reaction to the SSRIs my mother practically forced down my throat. (I took several over the years. I can’t even remember all of the names. My diagnosis was obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Maybe the drugs messed up my system. Maybe my hormones went screwy and my metabolism just crapped out. Maybe I was just a lazy glutton.
Whatever the cause, feast your eyes on the ruination of Stan:
January 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/TmGCc99/297-DD65-E-FFE6-42-B0-A4-ED-D9710002-A096.jpg
June 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/4d96rZG/6-AB37-B30-4-F3-D-4912-8-D9-F-6533069496-D0.jpg
December 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/bXhMcNh/F6-C2-F1-B2-B609-4-F62-A364-1-CAC1-F9-AFD2-D.jpg
February 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/5n5nT6V/A2-A4340-C-9723-48-F6-9-FF6-085-DC32829-F4.jpg
July 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/k15825m/96-CC7950-93-D1-48-DC-9545-AA60552-BA75-B.jpg
December 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/dQ8RB38/F45-B8-CB0-A719-458-D-9-A93-B829-AAC58-DE9.jpg
In that last picture I am a 14-year-old high-school freshman, but with that gut and those glasses I could pass for someone in middle age.
And that was not the lowest point.
This picture is, by far, the least flattering photograph of me ever taken. Note that, at my mother’s behest, I am wearing tons of makeup in a vain effort to hide the acne. She insisted on applying it herself.
October 2000:
https://i.ibb.co/ThrC5Fs/6-A067-F63-553-F-42-A4-9-F24-1-F1-F82-BF1-F52.jpg
Accutane was a Godsend.
December 2001:
https://i.ibb.co/pWJ994N/C8-F5-E567-F5-BE-41-FC-8-F6-F-F17-C87-CD481-D.jpg
I like my early pics the best. Neoteny for the win:
https://i.ibb.co/2KyhLN7/6473-F8-EF-C905-47-EC-BF08-A696-D8-DF8-D55.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/xsrnSz3/FE52002-C-6-E07-496-B-85-F8-3-D24-A9043899.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/ZhkNx1p/BB2-B1-A65-563-D-4-F08-A153-FFB78-ACB2384.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/TBYL1JQ/5-BC1-F5-DB-082-D-4-F53-B2-F2-CF18-DD123040.jpg
That’s quite enough, I suppose.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @YetAnotherAnon, @Buzz Mohawk
Were you OK with the Accutane? I know a dermatologist whose 15 year old patient killed himself while taking it – with some people it can trigger depression/psychosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotretinoin#Psychological_effects
A relative had terrible (worse than the picture) acne in his teenage years, but it vanished when he grew up – I hope yours did the same.
As I mentioned, my mother had me on a succession of SSRIs - Prozac, Risperdal, Luvox, Zoloft, and maybe another one. She kept insisting that our constant arguments were the result of my mental illness. (After all, teenagers always get along perfectly with their parents.)
Risperdal was my sleeping pill - within 15 minutes I’d be out cold. It’s a good thing, too, because all through high school I had to get up at 5 a.m.
When I started taking Accutane my then-psychiatrist - a hectoring Karen type - dumped me as a patient because she didn’t want to be responsible if I killed myself. (I never liked her. She seemed more than a little nuts herself.) My mother then started taking me back to the gruff-but-likable older Jewish guy I’d seen in middle school.
I refused to take them after I turned 18. My mother yelled and screamed but I told her I’d walk out the door if she kept pushing. Almost immediately I started losing weight.
Before I started taking Accutane looking in the mirror was enough to trigger depression and psychosis.
(I’m no fan of Big Pharma, believe me. I’m mostly agnostic on the vax. I got the initial J&J shot when it first became available, but no boosters.)
My face was bad but my back was much worse. My entire upper torso was covered with huge boils.
As a teenager my mother had it as bad as I did. She inherited the tendency from my grandfather. Unfortunately she underwent a botched chemical peel in college that left her face badly scarred.
My face is somewhat pockmarked but not too bad. I get an occasional pimple every now and then but that’s about it.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
Last week the Washington Post did an in depth piece about the tragic death of Ty Sauer, age 18. He had been a normal teen, but soon after he began taking isotretinoin, he went schizo. He accused his parents of sending space aliens to his workplace. He reported conversations with his dead grandfather. Then it got worse. He stole the car keys and took off from NJ - he had shared his location on his phone with his parents and they caught up with him in Shenandoah National Park. He took off again when his parents approached the car at a rest area and then he crashed it into a stone wall. He survived the crash and took off into the woods and died of exposure (it was April) - it took 4 days to find his body deep in the woods.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/shenandoah-search-missing-teen-ty-sauer/
Nowadays if you take isotretinoin they make you sign a million waivers saying that you know it can make you crazy and are taking it at your own risk, so the parents had no one to sue.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Stan Adams
Why shouldn’t the right pay attention to Soros? Granted there are many other left-wing foundations and billionaires busily destroying our society, but most people have never heard of them. In fact I’m certain most undecided-type voters have never even heard of Soros.
You can’t expect people to have a wholistic understanding of everything that is going on. But focusing on this one left-wing billionaire and expose he is doing, perhaps that can penetrate their ignorance. From there, they might be motivated to look into all the other left-wing billionaires, or perhaps not.
The left understands the propaganda value of picking out one person, such as Emmett Till, and endlessly repeating his name and story. It’s basic Alinsky: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Let's start with Jack D.Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous, @Stan Adams
You first.
There is a long tradition in America, going back to at least young Benjamin Franklin, of anonymous pen names that give the author freedom to speak. If you don’t think I am who I say I am, feel free to project your fantasies onto my identity.
Thank you. Not sure how many Kylies the world needs or wants but our local Mr. Fix It is a treasure. Remodeler, builder and historical restorationist with a real reverence for history and tradition. Staunch conservative.
Let's start with Jack D.Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous, @Stan Adams
So Intelligent Dasein is your real name then?
Are you in any way related to this guy?
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi1.wp.com%2Fimg.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fv73%2FFlamsterette_X%2FMajesticMapp.png&f=1&nofb=1
I did okay. I wasn’t the happiest person in the world to begin with but I didn’t feel any sudden suicidal urges or anything like that. My lips got so chapped that they split open but otherwise no serious problems.
As I mentioned, my mother had me on a succession of SSRIs – Prozac, Risperdal, Luvox, Zoloft, and maybe another one. She kept insisting that our constant arguments were the result of my mental illness. (After all, teenagers always get along perfectly with their parents.)
Risperdal was my sleeping pill – within 15 minutes I’d be out cold. It’s a good thing, too, because all through high school I had to get up at 5 a.m.
When I started taking Accutane my then-psychiatrist – a hectoring Karen type – dumped me as a patient because she didn’t want to be responsible if I killed myself. (I never liked her. She seemed more than a little nuts herself.) My mother then started taking me back to the gruff-but-likable older Jewish guy I’d seen in middle school.
I refused to take them after I turned 18. My mother yelled and screamed but I told her I’d walk out the door if she kept pushing. Almost immediately I started losing weight.
Before I started taking Accutane looking in the mirror was enough to trigger depression and psychosis.
(I’m no fan of Big Pharma, believe me. I’m mostly agnostic on the vax. I got the initial J&J shot when it first became available, but no boosters.)
My face was bad but my back was much worse. My entire upper torso was covered with huge boils.
As a teenager my mother had it as bad as I did. She inherited the tendency from my grandfather. Unfortunately she underwent a botched chemical peel in college that left her face badly scarred.
My face is somewhat pockmarked but not too bad. I get an occasional pimple every now and then but that’s about it.
The government-imposed lockdowns in the Spring of 2020 resulted in civil unrest, increased crime and unemployment. The death of Floyd just added fuel to the fire, resulting in thousands of protests because protesting was the only social activity allowed by the authorities…going to parks or the beach was banned…sporing events and clubs and churches were all shut down. yet people were allowed to protest in the streets, resulting in hundreds of riots. The reason we had thousands of protests after Floyd was because it was the only activity allowed by the authorities and with millions out of work and out of school they had nothing else to do. In contrast to Floyd when Michael Brown was executed in the streets of Ferguson in the summer of 2014 we had one riot and a few protests, despite the media promoting the story of his death as a public execution of the Gentle Giant with his hands up.
Without the lockdowns in 2020, Floyd’s death would have resulted in a single protest in Minnesota and there would not have been thousands of protests across America with the resulting increase in crime. People with jobs and school and active social lives are not attending BLM protests because they have better things to do, but in 2020 they had nothing else they could do because of the lockdowns. It was the first opportunity they had in weeks to socialize with their friends or have a social gathering.
Wow, that is mighty impressive for a Sharecropper. Wonder what was he cropping and how much was he sharing? Are you sure it was not a poppy or coca related 'business' in the guise of cropping? South Carolina and Georgia are suspiciously close to Florida!Replies: @Rob
Not in the sixties. I guess opium would have been possible, but it seems unlikely that sharecroppers could manage opium farming on their own. Could be wrong though. Peasants and such cultivate coca and poppies in other countries. Maybe they lived somewhat like South African blacks. Being both adapted to and acclimated to the pretty mild climate, they spend money on cars and live in shacks.
For black sharecroppers in the South, buying property was (probably) not an option, so they spent money on other things.
Finally, Prester John is likely exaggerating the number of caddies the sharecroppers had.
Let's start with Jack D.Replies: @Jack D, @Anonymous, @Stan Adams
Thanks.
Over the years I’ve given certain people a fair amount of crap online. Not so much on iSteve, but on other sites in the past I’ve really gone after a few individuals. So it’s only fair that I expose my flaws to everyone. I can take it as well as I can give it.
One of the people I went after was a (self-proclaimed) expert on an unpleasant social phenomenon that has drawn Steve’s attention on occasion. He wrote a best-selling book about a fairly prominent crime. At one point he was a semi-regular on CNN. (He might still be; I avoid that channel like the plague.)
I wasn’t overly fond of his book – I disagreed strongly with his depiction of one of the perpetrators. But what really got me was his incessant media-whoring. He received glowing reviews in all of the major media organs – the aforementioned CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian – and his book became required reading in many schools. He flew all over the country giving lectures.
And the thing is that he was so … gay. Fruitier than a jumbo-sized gift basket. He didn’t look effeminate but as soon as he opened his mouth you knew he wasn’t interested in girls.
At the time that his book was published I was fairly active on a true-crime forum. I began mocking him constantly. People loved it and kept egging me on. In response I kept upping the ante.
Naturally, much of my mockery centered around his being gay.
One time he blogged about Christmas shopping. He wrote about visiting the Abercrombie & Fitch store at his local shopping mall and drooling over all of the homoerotic pictures of buff muscle boys on the walls.
Then he Tweeted “[Book] for Christmas!” (This was when Twitter was first becoming popular.)
So I made a mockup of his book cover with a picture of a nude Abercrombie model with the author’s head spliced on top. I created a fake Amazon page for the “Special Abecrombie & Fitch Christmas Edition” of his book. Under the “People who bought this book also bought” section I put titles such as Anal Fisting for Dummies and NAMBLA: One Man, One Boy, One Dream. Then I created fake reviews of the book: “Astonishing, amazing, truly engrossing. I couldn’t put it down, even when my thirteen-year-old neighbor escaped from my basement. (Don’t worry – I captured him before he could go for help.)”
Another time he gave an interview about being suicidal when he was in high school. Naturally he inserted the standard boilerplate about gay bullying. In response, I wrote something like, “Oh, the torment of an adolescent closet case! When the captain of the wrestling team slammed you against the locker, how you longed to reach around and grope him through his snug little singlet! How you longed to go to the wild parties with the popular kids so he could put a roofie in your drink!”
Then, as a “birthday present,” I posted a picture of a bunch of wrestlers and asked, “Which one is your favorite? I’ll bet you like the big beefy one in the middle.”
This went on for quite a while.
Eventually I learned that he was extremely offended by my mockery. (He told someone I knew and she told me.) We had a brief correspondence, in which I made a polite apology and pledged to discontinue my insults. (I resumed my antics shortly thereafter, but at that particular moment I did mean it.)
Interestingly, it turned out that he was most offended by the intimation that he might be a pedophile. He said something like, “It’s very upsetting that people always assume gay guys are pedophiles. I know a guy who teaches in a high school, and he’s always worried that someone might think he’s into boys.”
My ultimate mocking project came when I wrote an epic “fanfic” about the crime featured in his book. In the story the author pledges his soul to Satan in exchange for becoming rich and famous. Satan orders the author to write a tawdry book about a notorious crime. When the book reaches the top of the New York Times bestseller list, public fascination with the case grows to an insane level.
Flush with cash, the author moves into a swank Manhattan penthouse. He finds that having money and fame does nothing to make him happy. He spends long sleepless nights staring at a copy of his book, muttering darkly to himself.
“I’m a talentless hack,” he repeats in an endless monotone. “I’m a talentless hack. I’m a talentless hack. I’m a talentless hack.”
Satan decides that the time is ripe to resurrect the criminals. First he will have them make various short appearances (much like the reported sightings of Elvis over the years) during the author’s nationwide book tour to arouse the public. Then he will have them “descend from Heaven” (in reality, ascend from Hell) on national television during the Super Bowl halftime show. They will claim that they were given salvation by “Jesus,” who will then appear at the Super Bowl. This will appear to be the Second Coming. But in reality “Jesus” will be the Antichrist.
To assist the criminals, he assigns them a bodyguard (a gay neo-Nazi bodybuilder) and a lawyer (a nebbish Woody Allen type).
Rolf Lundgren, the 6’5″, 250-pound neo-Nazi bodybuilder, has just arrived in Hell after blowing his brains out. Satan summons him to his office and introduces him to the lawyer, Maury Feldstein. (Maury is 5’2″ and about 90 pounds soaking wet.)
“So I guess all Jews really do go to Hell,” Rolf says.
“No, not really,” Satan says. “Only the ones who murder their ex-girlfriends, dismember them, and feed them to the dog.”
“On behalf of the Jewish people, let me say that I appreciate the disclaimer,” Maury says.
“I’m sure you do,” Satan says.
Satan orders the Jewish lawyer to pose as the Nazi’s gay lover. (The lawyer is not pleased, to put it mildly.) Much hilarity ensues as the lawyer attempts to resist the temptations of the well-endowed Nazi, who has a vigorous libido.
Satan chooses the author to act as the vessel for the Antichrist. Satan impregnates the author and the baby Antichrist … emerges from one of the author’s orifices. (I won’t go into details here.)
In response to Satan’s shenanigans, God sends two of the victims of the infamous crime (who have become angels) to Earth to fight the forces of darkness.
The angels block Satan’s power to the extent that he cannot stimulate the baby’s growth (to allow him to grow to the level of a 30-year-old man). The author is forced to take care of the evil child. Much hilarity ensues as the gay guy finds himself stuck changing diapers for an infant whose poop is literally radioactive.
In the end, the author makes a heroic sacrifice to save humanity. He takes the baby Antichrist and boards a flight to Rome. Unbeknownest to him, all of the other players in the drama are aboard the aircraft, as well.
The author tries to escape but the flight is already taking off from JFK.
A furious battle erupts. The pilots attempt to return to the airport, but in the chaos they end up flying directly toward Manhattan. The military scrambles jet fighters to shoot the aircraft down. A missile strikes the cockpit and the pilots are killed. Unfortunately, the heroic transmale pilot makes a slight miscalculation and the trajectory of the plane is altered by the explosion. Instead of spiraling down toward the East River the aircraft makes a beeline straight toward Park Avenue. (More specifically, it is heading directly toward the author’s swank penthouse.)
The author realizes that the flight is about to crash. He accepts his fate with dignity, knowing that upon his death his soul will descend to the netherworld.
His fellow passengers are screaming in terror and the baby Antichrist is shrieking, but he is serene. He speaks softly to himself: “In life, I was a talentless hack, a tedious joke, an insufferable bore. In death, I am … a soulless talentless hack, fit only to be cast into the hellfire like a steaming dog turd plopping out of a canine’s s**t chute. But even a turd can function as manure. My death will serve a higher purpose. It is my proper function to die in disgrace. Goodbye, cruel world.”
Just as the plane slams into the building, the author is enveloped by a blinding light. For a split-second he imagines that perhaps he might yet go to Heaven. He is swallowed by the light … and then he awakens in his crappy old apartment to the sound of a ringing phone. He answers it. It’s his agent, telling him that his book has been accepted by the publisher and that the contract is more generous than anyone could have dreamed.
He reacts quietly and calmly, thanking his agent for the good news. After hanging up the phone he stumbles into the bathroom. He splashes some cold water on his face … and looks in the mirror to see Rolf Lundgren standing behind him. Rolf’s head is split open (from the gunshot) and his eyes are glowing red.
“Bend over,” Rolf barks. “You’re Satan’s bitch now, but he asked me to warm you up a little. I hope you enjoy receiving pain as much as I enjoy inflicting it.”
The author shouts with glee. “Thank you, Lord of Darkness! You’ve made all my dreams come true! Thank you!”
THE END
In a postscript I added, “After all the crap I’ve written about the guy, the least I could do was give him a happy ending.”
So, yeah, I can be kind of an asshole.
As I mentioned, my mother had me on a succession of SSRIs - Prozac, Risperdal, Luvox, Zoloft, and maybe another one. She kept insisting that our constant arguments were the result of my mental illness. (After all, teenagers always get along perfectly with their parents.)
Risperdal was my sleeping pill - within 15 minutes I’d be out cold. It’s a good thing, too, because all through high school I had to get up at 5 a.m.
When I started taking Accutane my then-psychiatrist - a hectoring Karen type - dumped me as a patient because she didn’t want to be responsible if I killed myself. (I never liked her. She seemed more than a little nuts herself.) My mother then started taking me back to the gruff-but-likable older Jewish guy I’d seen in middle school.
I refused to take them after I turned 18. My mother yelled and screamed but I told her I’d walk out the door if she kept pushing. Almost immediately I started losing weight.
Before I started taking Accutane looking in the mirror was enough to trigger depression and psychosis.
(I’m no fan of Big Pharma, believe me. I’m mostly agnostic on the vax. I got the initial J&J shot when it first became available, but no boosters.)
My face was bad but my back was much worse. My entire upper torso was covered with huge boils.
As a teenager my mother had it as bad as I did. She inherited the tendency from my grandfather. Unfortunately she underwent a botched chemical peel in college that left her face badly scarred.
My face is somewhat pockmarked but not too bad. I get an occasional pimple every now and then but that’s about it.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
“My face was bad but my back was much worse.”
Same with my relative – even down to his feet. Really worried his folks. It’s amazing how it all pretty much vanished once puberty ceased.
“I never liked her. She seemed more than a little nuts herself”
There’s a (mostly unspoken and certainly unwritten) consensus among medical professionals at all levels that mental health practitioners, from nurses to psychiatrists, are all “a bit that way themselves” 😉
Egregiously OT (addressed to you yet again):
Speaking of optics, today I brought my long effort to digitize the photographic record of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to substantial completion. There are still gaps I’d like to fill but none longer than six months or so. I now have a pretty good idea how I looked at various times over the years.
Naturally, I feel a strange compulsion to share a few images with you.
(If you find all of this rather boring and pointless, then just think of my commenting oeuvre as a brilliant parody of millennial vapidity, narcissism, self-indulgence, and self-absorption. I am the prototypical smartass kid with his head jammed firmly up his posterior, babbling about the minutiae of his trivial existence in blissful ignorance of the extent to which nobody gives a crap.)
I downloaded an app that allowed me to make photos directly from negatives. The image quality is marginal but it’s good enough.
One of the key questions I wanted to answer was, when did I become ugly? (Yes, I am beautiful in my own way and my soul is radiant and yadda yadda yadda.) I knew it happened toward the end of middle school but I wanted to nail down the date.
The turning point was 1998 (seventh/eighth grade). That was the year when I lost the last tattered remnant of childhood cuteness and began my existence as a fat, bespectacled, acne-ridden ghoul.
Something went terribly wrong with my physical development during eighth grade. I suspect that I had a bad reaction to the SSRIs my mother practically forced down my throat. (I took several over the years. I can’t even remember all of the names. My diagnosis was obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Maybe the drugs messed up my system. Maybe my hormones went screwy and my metabolism just crapped out. Maybe I was just a lazy glutton.
Whatever the cause, feast your eyes on the ruination of Stan:
January 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/TmGCc99/297-DD65-E-FFE6-42-B0-A4-ED-D9710002-A096.jpg
June 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/4d96rZG/6-AB37-B30-4-F3-D-4912-8-D9-F-6533069496-D0.jpg
December 1998:
https://i.ibb.co/bXhMcNh/F6-C2-F1-B2-B609-4-F62-A364-1-CAC1-F9-AFD2-D.jpg
February 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/5n5nT6V/A2-A4340-C-9723-48-F6-9-FF6-085-DC32829-F4.jpg
July 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/k15825m/96-CC7950-93-D1-48-DC-9545-AA60552-BA75-B.jpg
December 1999:
https://i.ibb.co/dQ8RB38/F45-B8-CB0-A719-458-D-9-A93-B829-AAC58-DE9.jpg
In that last picture I am a 14-year-old high-school freshman, but with that gut and those glasses I could pass for someone in middle age.
And that was not the lowest point.
This picture is, by far, the least flattering photograph of me ever taken. Note that, at my mother’s behest, I am wearing tons of makeup in a vain effort to hide the acne. She insisted on applying it herself.
October 2000:
https://i.ibb.co/ThrC5Fs/6-A067-F63-553-F-42-A4-9-F24-1-F1-F82-BF1-F52.jpg
Accutane was a Godsend.
December 2001:
https://i.ibb.co/pWJ994N/C8-F5-E567-F5-BE-41-FC-8-F6-F-F17-C87-CD481-D.jpg
I like my early pics the best. Neoteny for the win:
https://i.ibb.co/2KyhLN7/6473-F8-EF-C905-47-EC-BF08-A696-D8-DF8-D55.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/xsrnSz3/FE52002-C-6-E07-496-B-85-F8-3-D24-A9043899.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/ZhkNx1p/BB2-B1-A65-563-D-4-F08-A153-FFB78-ACB2384.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/TBYL1JQ/5-BC1-F5-DB-082-D-4-F53-B2-F2-CF18-DD123040.jpg
That’s quite enough, I suppose.Replies: @Intelligent Dasein, @YetAnotherAnon, @Buzz Mohawk
Stan, your comments have lead me to respond in an attempt to encourage you somewhat, as honestly and carefully as I can.
Are you the one who sometimes refers to himself as “the resident fattie?” Anyway, it seems that body fat is one of your issues, and that is a tough one for anybody.
You indicate that you have taken various SSRIs, as I have, plus perhaps some other things I have too. I can tell you they mess with your body, fat and all. Also, I don’t think they help very much.
No matter. You are very intelligent, as most of us here are, and that smartness makes you more aware of the absurdity of your own life. I know. Why go on, right?
Well, you will. I first tried to kill myself when I was 15, because OCD had permanently ruined my life. I say permanently, because I still live with it and its consequences, so there. You have some fat and skin issues, and I can’t use my whole, considerable intellect and contribute anything to life. You pick.
Have you ever tried anything to improve your physical fitness? Do you spend any significant time outside in the sun? Do so if you don’t now. It makes a difference.
This place is conducive to the kind of heartfelt-and-frankly-angry “sharing” you have just done. You are not alone, just today more bold and naked than the rest of us. Continue on. Life is very short. As one obviously older than you, I can tell you this with certainty. Do the best you can before it is over.
People seem to be missing the point that the billionaires want trash cultures to thrive because they are so easy to exploit.
A useful indication of what reparations would accomplish would be statistics on what lottery winners do with their money.
What percentage of winners:
– Pay off all of their debt and then stays out of debt.
– Pay for getting a college degree from a high quality university, for themselves and for their relatives.
– Start a business that lasts for at least 3 years after the lottery money runs out.
– Buy a house small enough that they can afford to maintain it and pay taxes on it for the rest of their lives.
– Piss it away and make billionaires wealthier.
This would likely be an optimistic view because likely the average lottery winner has better socialization on leveraging money to improve their long-term prospects than the average black person does.
More useful information can be learned from statistics on what happens to lottery winners after the lottery money runs out.
After the lottery money runs out, how many people end up worse off than before they won the lottery?
My guess leans towards the “pissing it away” option, and their lives falling apart when the money runs out.
~
I live in a poor neighborhood, and there are some Escalade SUVs here. I would never buy one of these, even if I had 10 million dollars because there are far more useful long-term investments than a car like this.
For instance, if I was going to get a monster gas guzzling utility vehicle, with lots of passenger space, then I’d get a crew cab pickup truck that could do real truck chores in addition to hauling around 6 passengers.
I was socialized to think of money as a tool that can be used to create and accomplish useful things. This view is uncommon, particularly in black cultures. In an odd turn, this view now seems more common among Mexicans than whites (at least in my neighborhood).
~
As bad as things are in the US, the poor in the US are still affluent compared to Africa. This leads me to wonder,
>> Is there a psyops going on encouraging trash attitudes in both black and white cultures in the US?
While the percentage of black trash is larger than the percentage of white trash, the whites are working to catch up with the blacks in this area. That said, black culture seems far more trashy now than 50 years ago, so maybe whites won’t catch up to blacks in this regard.
Its very suspicious that all of the black run programs in the 60’s and 70’s, which were working to mitigate the dysfunctions of the black culture, have disappeared.
This psyop would be a useful tool for the globalists because it seems that the bulk of violent rioters comes from some kind of trash culture. I consider antifa to be a college educated trash culture because they share so many values with black trash and white trash.
In addition to that, trash cultures disdain the education and mental training that helps a person see thru the narratives to the propaganda behind them. The billionaires really hate it when their narratives are exposed for lies, and this exposure rarely comes from trash cultures.
On top of that, trash cultures see the status quo as written in stone, and are resistant to supporting efforts to change it because they see doing that as a waste of their time and energy.
Maybe the most valuable characteristic of trash cultures is its very easy to incite them into disturbing the peace, and then using that to justify additional government power and authority.
I’m sure there are other ways that trash cultures help perpetuate the status quo and power and wealth of the billionaires. So it seem highly likely there are psyops encouraging trash cultures in the US.
~
Back to the start of the thread – Reparations seems like a great idea, if you want to destabilize society and the economy to justify increasing government power and authority.
The same government that set free violent rioters, so they could steal and burn down some more buildings, could easily get behind reparations to accomplish the same goals.
The only real issue is that they have an image problem. Somehow an SUV brings to mind driving offroad thru a rocky desert and in a pickup you are driving across your ranch but a minivan brings to mind waiting in the pick up line for preschool. But this has worked so well that the actual pick up line today is full of nothing but SUVs.Replies: @RogerL
Name brand Accutane hasn’t been sold since 2009 because deep pocketed Roche got sick of being sued and generics had taken most of the market anyway. Probably a lot of people suing them bought the generic but sued them anyway. The age at which people get acne and need medicine for it is also the age at which they become schizo and sometimes kill themselves so any causal link is unclear. There are still generic versions (called isotretinoin) on the market.
Last week the Washington Post did an in depth piece about the tragic death of Ty Sauer, age 18. He had been a normal teen, but soon after he began taking isotretinoin, he went schizo. He accused his parents of sending space aliens to his workplace. He reported conversations with his dead grandfather. Then it got worse. He stole the car keys and took off from NJ – he had shared his location on his phone with his parents and they caught up with him in Shenandoah National Park. He took off again when his parents approached the car at a rest area and then he crashed it into a stone wall. He survived the crash and took off into the woods and died of exposure (it was April) – it took 4 days to find his body deep in the woods.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/shenandoah-search-missing-teen-ty-sauer/
Nowadays if you take isotretinoin they make you sign a million waivers saying that you know it can make you crazy and are taking it at your own risk, so the parents had no one to sue.
https://www.bioenabletech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Baby-Footprint-Scanning.jpgReplies: @Jack D
My dermatologist pooh-poohed the concerns - “Some senator’s son killed himself, so now we have to go through this rigmorale.”
My father is schizophrenic so I was considered fairly high-risk for that malady myself. (My mother is … something.)
I’m not exactly normal. (No doubt many of my comments make me seem more than a bit off.) But I’m not hearing voices or anything like that.
I’ve mentioned this before: I was in special ed from first through twelfth. I was such a disruptive student in kindergarten that the school district didn’t know what to do with me. They gave me an IQ test and determined that I was within the genius range.
At the time - early ‘90s - there was a Gifted/Behavioral pilot program. (The cutoff was 140. Supposedly I was 164.) I rode the bus every day and I had the same teacher all through elementary school. Eventually I was partially mainstreamed to “regular” Gifted.
In middle and high school I was in programs for kids with severe emotional disturbances. Quite a few of the kids were high-IQ. A couple of them had severe autism.
I joke about being a sperg but I’ve never been diagnosed with any spectrum disorder.
Before anyone reads my reply, please read Curle’s excellent, succinct reply.
I’d like to point out that biomolecules are being evolved by selection acting on biomolecules in the lab. As a basic example, aptamers are single-stranded oligonucleotides (DNA or RNA) that bind specific things with high affinity. There are aptamers that bind various proteins (not just oligonucleotide-binding ones) and small molecules like theophylline and cocaine.
Researchers do this by creating a random region of, say 40 nucleotides with 20 residue fixed regions at each end. There are 4**40 potential 40 nucleotide sequences. That’s 1.2 * 10^24 potential sequences. Researchers sample a tiny fraction of this space in each experiment. Each round consists of incubating the oligonucleotide pool with target molecules that are bound to a support or free in solution. Oligos that bind the target are separated from those that don’t and amplified with PCR. When there’s a solid (column wall or bead) support bound to the target, there’s a counter-selection selection against bare support. After as few as 4 (or one for capillary electrophoresis aptamer selection, but classically took like 15-17 rounds.
Regardless, they can select for enzymatic activity or structure change upon ligand binding (saw a sugar-binding one that did that) Aptamers to two proteins can be connected by a linker and get the proteins to interact…
DNA was never selected in nature to do these things! With the exception of ssDNA viruses, DNA is rarely single-stranded. It’s the magic of evolution: variation, selection, and amplification over successive generations acting on heterologous biomolecules.
You know antibodies? You make them, biopharma companies make monoclonal ones. You know how nature makes antibodies? Each naive B cell produces one antibody, and it’s different from most every other B cell’s antibody. How does the cell do that? There are two genes with conserved regions and multiple versions of variable pieces of the antibody all lined up like V1, V2, …(D1, D2, …) J1, J2, … for 6-40-odd choices. Then there’s the enzyme that adds some random bases (with some biases) — terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase — to each segment (maybe not in every case, though)
So, that’s the variation part of evolution by selection. Where does the selection come in? When the B cell – is covered in antibody-ended molecules embedded in the membrane, B cell receptors, bind a particle with multiple copies of the epitope on it — pretty necessary given naive antibodies bind weakly — the B cell will internalize the antigen-covered thing, break it apart, and present protein pieces to CD4 (helper) T cells on the B’s MHC II molecules. If a T cell receptor (generated from multiple segments much like B cell receptors (alternative splicing of the antibody mRNA) recognizes its own epitope presented on an MHC II will activate the B cell or inactivate it (a state called anergy) in an inflammatory or non-inflammatory context, respectively.
Here’s where more selection happens. Bunches of B and T cells (and other APCs?) gather in germinal centers in lymph nodes. The B cells reproduce (asexually, ofc) and mutating — but they don’t mutate willy-nilly. They mutate the antibody complementarity-determining regions. On average, one mutation per B cell receptor (antibody) gene per cell, per generation. The follicular helper T cells stimulate B cells to reproduce if the cell is bound to antigen. How does the cell bind to antigen when all these sister cells bind the same pathogen? They compete for antigen. The winners reproduce. Wanna say that affinity maturation can up antibody affinity several fold. My Google-fu is so weak I couldn’t find by how much. So, strong binders amplify (positive selection) but there are still all those weak B cells. Wouldn’t antibodies be better if poor binders were killed? Yup. And die they do. Suicide from lack of T cell approval, negative selection.
Variation, selection, and amplification.
In B cell (and T cell) maturation, there is also negative selection for cells that bind self-antigens. This selection is harsher for T cells, because it’s more important. Accordingly, evolution has created the AIRE gene, which codes for autoimmune regulator protein. In seto al cells in the thymus, this protein ups the expression, from none to a bit, of genes that are silenced without increasing expression of housekeeping genes in the cells. These otherwise cell type specific proteins are then cut up and presented to “educate” T cells. Cells that react properly to self proteins continue maturation, those that don’t, die. This selection has two phases, positive, to eliminate cells that don’t bind self protein, and negative, to eliminate T cells that do . In realty, there’s likely a range that passes both.
A quick googling suggests a human can produce about 12 billion antibodies, but i’ve seen trillions from non-ncbi bookshelf sources. I’ve seen trillions, but that might be theoretical, lots of combos of segments won’t mesh.
I have to thank you for your comment, Intelligent Dassein. In refreshing my memory on some of this, I saw that fish and bird antibody diversity generation works “very differently.” I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to find out. I had assumed they work like the mammalian system. Never would have thought there were other, sure to be interesting, ways.
Last week the Washington Post did an in depth piece about the tragic death of Ty Sauer, age 18. He had been a normal teen, but soon after he began taking isotretinoin, he went schizo. He accused his parents of sending space aliens to his workplace. He reported conversations with his dead grandfather. Then it got worse. He stole the car keys and took off from NJ - he had shared his location on his phone with his parents and they caught up with him in Shenandoah National Park. He took off again when his parents approached the car at a rest area and then he crashed it into a stone wall. He survived the crash and took off into the woods and died of exposure (it was April) - it took 4 days to find his body deep in the woods.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/shenandoah-search-missing-teen-ty-sauer/
Nowadays if you take isotretinoin they make you sign a million waivers saying that you know it can make you crazy and are taking it at your own risk, so the parents had no one to sue.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Stan Adams
Really, why don’t we just have newborn babies stamp their inked foot prints on a lifetime waiver? I mean for everything that might happen. Might as well.
Are you the one who sometimes refers to himself as "the resident fattie?" Anyway, it seems that body fat is one of your issues, and that is a tough one for anybody.
You indicate that you have taken various SSRIs, as I have, plus perhaps some other things I have too. I can tell you they mess with your body, fat and all. Also, I don't think they help very much.
No matter. You are very intelligent, as most of us here are, and that smartness makes you more aware of the absurdity of your own life. I know. Why go on, right?
Well, you will. I first tried to kill myself when I was 15, because OCD had permanently ruined my life. I say permanently, because I still live with it and its consequences, so there. You have some fat and skin issues, and I can't use my whole, considerable intellect and contribute anything to life. You pick.
Have you ever tried anything to improve your physical fitness? Do you spend any significant time outside in the sun? Do so if you don't now. It makes a difference.
This place is conducive to the kind of heartfelt-and-frankly-angry "sharing" you have just done. You are not alone, just today more bold and naked than the rest of us. Continue on. Life is very short. As one obviously older than you, I can tell you this with certainty. Do the best you can before it is over.Replies: @Stan Adams
Thanks. Best wishes for your own personal journey.
I’ve never attempted suicide. I haven’t taken any SSRIs since high school. Indeed, I haven’t taken prescription medicine of any kind for a very long time. I haven’t seen a doctor in years.
At some point I really need to get my teeth fixed.
I hate to jinx it, but lately I’ve lost a bit of weight. And I have our fearless leader to thank for it.
Traditionally I’ve tended to spend quite a bit of time in the sun. But lately I’ve been sticking close to home. Money is tight and I’ve cut out all non-essential expenses.
In the era of Bidenflation I find that one good meal a day is all I can afford. This month it might be a bit more than I can afford. After the latest round of bills and assorted mandatory expenses I’m pretty much broke until *next* Friday. (Who isn’t?)
Fortunately I have enough coffee to get me through the next week. Even the instant crap with boiled tap water is better than nothing.
Coffee suppresses my appetite fairly effectively. I just don’t feel hungry very often anymore. When I start to feel shaky I drink a big mug of java with a little bit of milk and I’m back to normal. When I do eat I feel full faster.
Believe me, I’m not complaining. I do worry about malnutrition. I should start taking a one-a-day.
Today I ate a late breakfast so I didn’t have lunch. I never eat both meals – if I do one I skip the other. But lately I’ve been skipping dinner as well.
My mother has been bugging me for days to make some tacos. I don’t care if I ever eat another taco as long as I live but I’m sick of hearing her whine about it.
On my way home I stopped at Aldi and bought one of those four-dollar frozen “rolls” of hamburger meat. The meat is fairly crappy but I didn’t feel like spending the extra bucks.
This evening I let the roll thaw but I didn’t feel like cooking anything so I just put it back in the fridge. I told her I wasn’t feeling well but the truth is that I just wasn’t hungry.
She worries if I tell her that I’m just not hungry. “Why? What’s wrong with you?” So I just make up some fake excuse – I tell her I’m sick to my stomach or I feel nauseous. A normal person would worry about someone who claims to feel nauseous almost every day but for some reason she seems to find it reassuring.
My mother qualifies for one of those elderly “meals on wheels” programs, so she’s getting by. She complains that the chicken is as tough as shoe leather but she doesn’t let herself starve. If she’s truly desperate she can go ahead and make the tacos herself.
As for the weight loss, my face is noticeably thinner but my manboobs are still bouncy. But if hamburger meat gets any more expensive I might just lose some of the jiggle. In a way I’m almost thankful for the price hikes – the inflation gives me an incentive not to overeat. An honest-to-God famine might do me a world of good.
My sleep schedule has gone to hell but that’s the way it is. I’m functioning, more or less.
Speaking of naked … let’s see how far I can push the envelope. I did a shirtless pic recently but here’s one where I sucked in my gut to the maximum extent. (I couldn’t suck in the boobs, unfortunately. You have been warned.)
I cropped the shot to remain within the boundaries of common decency, but you might be able to detect the presence of an unfortunate concentration of flab below the waist.
Steve likes to promote fitness … well, looking at this picture will give you a strong incentive to skip dessert. Hell, it might even cause you to lose your lunch.
I took this snapshot on the first day of summer. If things go well I’ll consider taking another one on the first day of fall and post it for comparison. (I can hear everyone screaming in unison: “NO! MAKE IT STOP!”)
Think of it as the iSteve Weight-Loss Challenge. I’m already the biggest loser around here, but can I become the Biggest Loser, as well?
(Useless trivia: Iceland has a Biggest Loser show. Icelanders tend to be pretty husky.)
Last week the Washington Post did an in depth piece about the tragic death of Ty Sauer, age 18. He had been a normal teen, but soon after he began taking isotretinoin, he went schizo. He accused his parents of sending space aliens to his workplace. He reported conversations with his dead grandfather. Then it got worse. He stole the car keys and took off from NJ - he had shared his location on his phone with his parents and they caught up with him in Shenandoah National Park. He took off again when his parents approached the car at a rest area and then he crashed it into a stone wall. He survived the crash and took off into the woods and died of exposure (it was April) - it took 4 days to find his body deep in the woods.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2022/shenandoah-search-missing-teen-ty-sauer/
Nowadays if you take isotretinoin they make you sign a million waivers saying that you know it can make you crazy and are taking it at your own risk, so the parents had no one to sue.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk, @Stan Adams
I had to sign several waivers back in 2001.
My dermatologist pooh-poohed the concerns – “Some senator’s son killed himself, so now we have to go through this rigmorale.”
My father is schizophrenic so I was considered fairly high-risk for that malady myself. (My mother is … something.)
I’m not exactly normal. (No doubt many of my comments make me seem more than a bit off.) But I’m not hearing voices or anything like that.
I’ve mentioned this before: I was in special ed from first through twelfth. I was such a disruptive student in kindergarten that the school district didn’t know what to do with me. They gave me an IQ test and determined that I was within the genius range.
At the time – early ‘90s – there was a Gifted/Behavioral pilot program. (The cutoff was 140. Supposedly I was 164.) I rode the bus every day and I had the same teacher all through elementary school. Eventually I was partially mainstreamed to “regular” Gifted.
In middle and high school I was in programs for kids with severe emotional disturbances. Quite a few of the kids were high-IQ. A couple of them had severe autism.
I joke about being a sperg but I’ve never been diagnosed with any spectrum disorder.
A useful indication of what reparations would accomplish would be statistics on what lottery winners do with their money.
What percentage of winners:
- Pay off all of their debt and then stays out of debt.
- Pay for getting a college degree from a high quality university, for themselves and for their relatives.
- Start a business that lasts for at least 3 years after the lottery money runs out.
- Buy a house small enough that they can afford to maintain it and pay taxes on it for the rest of their lives.
- Piss it away and make billionaires wealthier.
This would likely be an optimistic view because likely the average lottery winner has better socialization on leveraging money to improve their long-term prospects than the average black person does.
More useful information can be learned from statistics on what happens to lottery winners after the lottery money runs out.
After the lottery money runs out, how many people end up worse off than before they won the lottery?
My guess leans towards the “pissing it away” option, and their lives falling apart when the money runs out.
~
I live in a poor neighborhood, and there are some Escalade SUVs here. I would never buy one of these, even if I had 10 million dollars because there are far more useful long-term investments than a car like this.
For instance, if I was going to get a monster gas guzzling utility vehicle, with lots of passenger space, then I’d get a crew cab pickup truck that could do real truck chores in addition to hauling around 6 passengers.
I was socialized to think of money as a tool that can be used to create and accomplish useful things. This view is uncommon, particularly in black cultures. In an odd turn, this view now seems more common among Mexicans than whites (at least in my neighborhood).
~
As bad as things are in the US, the poor in the US are still affluent compared to Africa. This leads me to wonder,
>> Is there a psyops going on encouraging trash attitudes in both black and white cultures in the US?
While the percentage of black trash is larger than the percentage of white trash, the whites are working to catch up with the blacks in this area. That said, black culture seems far more trashy now than 50 years ago, so maybe whites won’t catch up to blacks in this regard.
Its very suspicious that all of the black run programs in the 60’s and 70’s, which were working to mitigate the dysfunctions of the black culture, have disappeared.
This psyop would be a useful tool for the globalists because it seems that the bulk of violent rioters comes from some kind of trash culture. I consider antifa to be a college educated trash culture because they share so many values with black trash and white trash.
In addition to that, trash cultures disdain the education and mental training that helps a person see thru the narratives to the propaganda behind them. The billionaires really hate it when their narratives are exposed for lies, and this exposure rarely comes from trash cultures.
On top of that, trash cultures see the status quo as written in stone, and are resistant to supporting efforts to change it because they see doing that as a waste of their time and energy.
Maybe the most valuable characteristic of trash cultures is its very easy to incite them into disturbing the peace, and then using that to justify additional government power and authority.
I’m sure there are other ways that trash cultures help perpetuate the status quo and power and wealth of the billionaires. So it seem highly likely there are psyops encouraging trash cultures in the US.
~
Back to the start of the thread – Reparations seems like a great idea, if you want to destabilize society and the economy to justify increasing government power and authority.
The same government that set free violent rioters, so they could steal and burn down some more buildings, could easily get behind reparations to accomplish the same goals.Replies: @Jack D
They are terribly out of fashion (especially in the ghetto – this makes it a feature and not a bug since no one will want to steal it) but I highly recommend minivans. With the seats folded (or removed depending on the model) you can take 4×8 sheets of plywood with the gate closed – something that few pickups can do. You can take even longer lengths of lumber by extending them thru to the dash between the seats – 8′ is just the area behind the front seats. Whatever you carry is protected from the weather and theft. The load hauling capacity is in the vicinity of 1/2 ton, which is plenty for most. And then with the seats up you can take 7 passengers in comfort. Really a more versatile vehicle than a pickup truck.
The only real issue is that they have an image problem. Somehow an SUV brings to mind driving offroad thru a rocky desert and in a pickup you are driving across your ranch but a minivan brings to mind waiting in the pick up line for preschool. But this has worked so well that the actual pick up line today is full of nothing but SUVs.
I agree with you 110%. That was a big IF in my comment, and I think even contractors are going to have to rethink the gas guzzling part. Many contractors operate on a thin margin, and at today’s fuel prices a gas guzzler could drive them into bankruptcy.
Thanks for your descriptions of the advantages of minivans. Now I’m even more inclined to get one than I was before. The point, of hauling a full sheet of plywood inside a locked vehicle, was a telling point.
I bought a 4-wheel drive pickup truck to work on a high elevation tree farm, but the tree farm was sold, the truck is expensive to drive, and now is very old.
When I get some money from the VA, I’ve been seriously considering a minivan for the reasons you state.
More and more contractors are towing enclosed trailers because of the theft problem. A lot of them have moved to driving a used moving van to avoid the hassle of a trailer in urban traffic, and still be able to lock everything up.
It took me a long time to overcome my huge internal bias against minivans and accept that they really were the best answer for me. Repeatedly going thru different use scenarios, and repeatedly doing cost/benefit analysis, and repeatedly seeing a minivan end up at the top of the list of options, forced me to reconsider it.
Here are some more angles on rethinking transportation, which support choosing a minivan, even for contractors.
The minivan image would be more theft protection. You could have several hundred thousand dollars of equipment in an enclosed trailer behind a minivan, and nobody would ever steal it because they would assume there was just junk in the trailer.
Part of this camouflage would be buying a low-budget enclosed trailer and using an ordinary lock to lock up the trailer. An expensive lock would attract the attention of intelligent thieves. People can steal anything, if they really want to. So the big goal is to avoid attracting the attention of talented thieves, while adding just enough barriers to discourage the other thieves.
~
Using small, fuel efficient engines
No law says you must go up steep hills at 70 mph. With patience, small fuel efficient engines work fine on hills.
I had a 1951 12,000 lb GVWR step van that went up steep hills at 4 mph. Most of the time, it would eventually get up to the speed limit. An advantage of an ugly truck is that when you try to merge, most people get out of your way.
Probably most people would get out of the way of a minivan with a utility trailer, for fear of an impending accident next to them.
Besides the propaganda of the predatory billionaires that encourage over-spending, people’s egos are contributing to an escalation of standards that is driving many people into bankruptcy.
Real men can shrug off the disdain directed at owners of minivans, and do what is best for the financial future of their families. I hope I’m up to this challenge – its ridiculous that its a challenge, but that’s the reality of how my head is programmed LOL
~
Towing a medium capacity trailer, when more cargo capacity is needed
Utility trailers greatly extend the versatility of small vehicles. I pulled at 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer behind a small compact car.
Part of what made that trailer work out safely was it had electric brakes and I added an extra 8 feet to the tongue of the trailer.
There are a significant number of accidents caused by a trailer wagging the tow vehicle, the driver loosing control, and then crashing. The extra long tongue reduces the effect of the trailer on the tow vehicle. With the long tongue, the utility trailer was amazingly stable behind the compact car, and gave a very smooth ride.
I’ve seen even large pickup trucks being wagged by a badly designed trailer with a short tongue.
The extra long tongue also increases flexibility when maneuvering because the trailer and tow vehicle are separated by more than half the width of either.
In addition, in the state where I live, its illegal to have anything extending more than 8 feet behind the rear axle, but the limit for trailer length is huge. On my utility trailer the hitch is 12 feet in front of the axle, so with the 8 foot limit behind the axle, I can easily haul 16 foot boards on the trailer. I can haul 20 foot lengths of rebar, if they are centered on the trailer. Very few construction materials come in standard lengths longer than 20 feet.
Using a weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control also increase the safety when hauling a heavier trailer with a smaller vehicle. Even with these, a couple times I nearly lost control when pulling a recreational trailer that weighed as much as the pickup truck towing it. Going way over the speed limit was a major factor in those incidents. This gets back to the value of patience.
With the weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control, when being cautious about speed, the heavily loaded recreational trailer was very stable behind the pickup truck.
~
I’m thinking of pulling a 5,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer behind a minivan.
I would build an enclosed box for it, and then put camper jacks on the box. This way I could haul stuff, which is loaded with a fork lift on the flatbed trailer, then drop the box on it to haul around stuff that needs to be protected from theft and the weather. I already have an open box for the flatbed trailer, so I can haul bulk materials loaded with a loader.
More and more home improvement stores are offering low-cost or free delivery services. Taking advantage of this is far better than owning, maintaining, and insuring a vehicle capable of hauling huge loads.
Probably I will just rebuild my 4 foot by 8 foot, 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer, and then tow it behind a minivan. If I ever need a full pallet of plywood or concrete blocks, I should just have them delivered. By rebuilding the trailer, I mean replace the 40 year old tires on it and the corroded wiring.
I still have the option of building a 6 foot by 12 foot enclosed box with camper jacks on it, so I can drop it on the 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer. The trailer has a full width trailer axle on it, and the extra long tongue, so a box this size will work fine on it.
An advantage of the smaller trailer is that its not set up for a weight-distributing hitch or friction sway control. Hooking those up (and then disconnecting them) takes a significant amount of time, and greatly reduces the convenience of quickly hooking up a trailer and driving away.
The parts for a weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control are heavy, bulky, covered with road dirt, and are greasy, and need to be stored somewhere when not in use. All in all I’d rather avoid dealing with them.
https://www.bioenabletech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Baby-Footprint-Scanning.jpgReplies: @Jack D
I think waivers are a reasonable compromise for this issue. OTOH, you have people with severe acne for whom no other treatment can work and who need this medication. Not just a few teenage pimples but huge boils all over their body. OTOH you have drug companies who would like to sell you this medication which can be a miraculous cure for acne but they have been hit with lawsuits even though it is not at all clear that Accutane is really causing suicides. So you disclose the risk – hey patient this may or may not cause you to want to kill yourself but it’s your choice to take this so don’t blame us. We warned you of this risk.
The only other alternative would be to withdraw the product completely (even a rich company like Roche cannot afford to pay millions of \$ every time an American teenager decides to off himself) which would leave a lot of people suffering from severe acne.
At the time, a few decades ago, I remember that the manufacturers emphasis was preventing women from getting pregnant while taking the medication. Printed all over the packaging was warnings that your baby WILL have birth defects if conceived while taking it. There was nothing about potential psychiatric issues at all.
I took the medication several years back and it’s affect was truly miraculous. I had suffered a lifetime of cystic acne and had tried everything. I took it for a couple of months, had terribly dry lips and was checked for liver issues with a couple of blood tests. The results were quite miraculous as I have never had a single acne cyst since.
At the time, a few decades ago, I remember that the manufacturers emphasis was preventing women from getting pregnant while taking the medication. Printed all over the packaging was warnings that your baby WILL have birth defects if conceived while taking it. There was nothing about potential psychiatric issues at all.
Nonetheless I applaud him for airing unconventional view on his podcast and having unusual guests.Replies: @J.Ross, @middle-aged vet
Twinkie, nobody cares who you applaud, you half-hearted liberal troll.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/07/nancy-paul-pelosi-Italy-04.jpgReplies: @duncsbaby, @MEH 0910
In this regard, Steve, like Trump, is someone about whom no nuanced view is permissible if one hopes to remain respectable. I listen to Joe Rogan's show when he has an interesting guest on, someone like Douglas Murray, Michael Shellenberger, Antonio Garcia Martinez, or Dr. Robert Epstein, to name a few. However disgusted they may be with the current state of affairs, almost all of them will make it a point to declare that they don't support Trump. It becomes embarrassing, a ritualistic denunciation. Joe himself constantly declares his disdain for Trump. Let's see: rich, family man, bodybuilder, former MMA fighter, loves fast cars, loves guns and hunting, hates Woke politics . . . right, no way a guy like that would support Trump. I really believe he's just afraid to cross that line.
Why am I bad? Because I proved almost in real time what he’s demonstrating with a two-year lag.
At least it’s only two years. In 2007, Peter Hitchens blamed Enoch Powell for being right about immigration 40 years earlier, when there was still time to do something about it. Evidently, Powell poisoned the discourse by being unforgivably blunt, as if things would not have progressed as they did were it not for his rudeness.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-492847/Enoch-paddling-sewage-knew-it.html
I think of one of Lawrence Auster’s observations:Replies: @SFG, @Twinkie, @MEH 0910
Will Trump win in 2024? | Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman
Jul 4, 2022
However, the whole thing has been like handing a bag of peanuts to a starving man two or three times a year. It will not sustain him or even keep him alive for more than a short time. It is a nice gesture at best. (Virtue signaling?) It is a very expensive gesture when done at this scale, while simultaneously worthless at the small scale. It is stupidity made manifest.
The starving individual will eat momentarily and then go on starving. Perhaps a stimulus check will last a month for bills or necessities for some people, but anecdotes here certainly do not suggest anybody used the money for bills or necessities, so what was the point? Oh yes, simply to get people to spend! "To stimulate!" To spend money that doesn't really exist! Money those of us with incomes will have to pay back via taxes and inflation. Wonderful.Replies: @Bill Jones
All those involved in the transaction, except those bearing the cost, have a time horizon of about 20 minutes.
One even wonders if it might be genetic or something.
The only real issue is that they have an image problem. Somehow an SUV brings to mind driving offroad thru a rocky desert and in a pickup you are driving across your ranch but a minivan brings to mind waiting in the pick up line for preschool. But this has worked so well that the actual pick up line today is full of nothing but SUVs.Replies: @RogerL
Jack,
I agree with you 110%. That was a big IF in my comment, and I think even contractors are going to have to rethink the gas guzzling part. Many contractors operate on a thin margin, and at today’s fuel prices a gas guzzler could drive them into bankruptcy.
Thanks for your descriptions of the advantages of minivans. Now I’m even more inclined to get one than I was before. The point, of hauling a full sheet of plywood inside a locked vehicle, was a telling point.
I bought a 4-wheel drive pickup truck to work on a high elevation tree farm, but the tree farm was sold, the truck is expensive to drive, and now is very old.
When I get some money from the VA, I’ve been seriously considering a minivan for the reasons you state.
More and more contractors are towing enclosed trailers because of the theft problem. A lot of them have moved to driving a used moving van to avoid the hassle of a trailer in urban traffic, and still be able to lock everything up.
It took me a long time to overcome my huge internal bias against minivans and accept that they really were the best answer for me. Repeatedly going thru different use scenarios, and repeatedly doing cost/benefit analysis, and repeatedly seeing a minivan end up at the top of the list of options, forced me to reconsider it.
Here are some more angles on rethinking transportation, which support choosing a minivan, even for contractors.
The minivan image would be more theft protection. You could have several hundred thousand dollars of equipment in an enclosed trailer behind a minivan, and nobody would ever steal it because they would assume there was just junk in the trailer.
Part of this camouflage would be buying a low-budget enclosed trailer and using an ordinary lock to lock up the trailer. An expensive lock would attract the attention of intelligent thieves. People can steal anything, if they really want to. So the big goal is to avoid attracting the attention of talented thieves, while adding just enough barriers to discourage the other thieves.
~
Using small, fuel efficient engines
No law says you must go up steep hills at 70 mph. With patience, small fuel efficient engines work fine on hills.
I had a 1951 12,000 lb GVWR step van that went up steep hills at 4 mph. Most of the time, it would eventually get up to the speed limit. An advantage of an ugly truck is that when you try to merge, most people get out of your way.
Probably most people would get out of the way of a minivan with a utility trailer, for fear of an impending accident next to them.
Besides the propaganda of the predatory billionaires that encourage over-spending, people’s egos are contributing to an escalation of standards that is driving many people into bankruptcy.
Real men can shrug off the disdain directed at owners of minivans, and do what is best for the financial future of their families. I hope I’m up to this challenge – its ridiculous that its a challenge, but that’s the reality of how my head is programmed LOL
~
Towing a medium capacity trailer, when more cargo capacity is needed
Utility trailers greatly extend the versatility of small vehicles. I pulled at 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer behind a small compact car.
Part of what made that trailer work out safely was it had electric brakes and I added an extra 8 feet to the tongue of the trailer.
There are a significant number of accidents caused by a trailer wagging the tow vehicle, the driver loosing control, and then crashing. The extra long tongue reduces the effect of the trailer on the tow vehicle. With the long tongue, the utility trailer was amazingly stable behind the compact car, and gave a very smooth ride.
I’ve seen even large pickup trucks being wagged by a badly designed trailer with a short tongue.
The extra long tongue also increases flexibility when maneuvering because the trailer and tow vehicle are separated by more than half the width of either.
In addition, in the state where I live, its illegal to have anything extending more than 8 feet behind the rear axle, but the limit for trailer length is huge. On my utility trailer the hitch is 12 feet in front of the axle, so with the 8 foot limit behind the axle, I can easily haul 16 foot boards on the trailer. I can haul 20 foot lengths of rebar, if they are centered on the trailer. Very few construction materials come in standard lengths longer than 20 feet.
Using a weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control also increase the safety when hauling a heavier trailer with a smaller vehicle. Even with these, a couple times I nearly lost control when pulling a recreational trailer that weighed as much as the pickup truck towing it. Going way over the speed limit was a major factor in those incidents. This gets back to the value of patience.
With the weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control, when being cautious about speed, the heavily loaded recreational trailer was very stable behind the pickup truck.
~
I’m thinking of pulling a 5,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer behind a minivan.
I would build an enclosed box for it, and then put camper jacks on the box. This way I could haul stuff, which is loaded with a fork lift on the flatbed trailer, then drop the box on it to haul around stuff that needs to be protected from theft and the weather. I already have an open box for the flatbed trailer, so I can haul bulk materials loaded with a loader.
More and more home improvement stores are offering low-cost or free delivery services. Taking advantage of this is far better than owning, maintaining, and insuring a vehicle capable of hauling huge loads.
Probably I will just rebuild my 4 foot by 8 foot, 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer, and then tow it behind a minivan. If I ever need a full pallet of plywood or concrete blocks, I should just have them delivered. By rebuilding the trailer, I mean replace the 40 year old tires on it and the corroded wiring.
I still have the option of building a 6 foot by 12 foot enclosed box with camper jacks on it, so I can drop it on the 3,000 lb GVWR flatbed trailer. The trailer has a full width trailer axle on it, and the extra long tongue, so a box this size will work fine on it.
An advantage of the smaller trailer is that its not set up for a weight-distributing hitch or friction sway control. Hooking those up (and then disconnecting them) takes a significant amount of time, and greatly reduces the convenience of quickly hooking up a trailer and driving away.
The parts for a weight-distributing hitch and friction sway control are heavy, bulky, covered with road dirt, and are greasy, and need to be stored somewhere when not in use. All in all I’d rather avoid dealing with them.