Amerika

• Inside Westside Barbell, Powerlifting’s Most Exclusive and Controversial Gym

  Focus – The whole rest of the world doesn’t matter to him.
  Redemption – The people who train here are life’s failures until they discover this world.
  Selective Mentorship – He chooses who he deems worthy of teaching.
  Mannerbund – His gym is a brotherhood.
  An Old Man In A Hurry – He wants his proteges to accomplish everything before he dies.
  Loyalty – People move and change their lives just to train with this man. “You lift for the old man.”
  Renunciation – You don’t make a fortune. You are not known outside the brotherhood. You feel the burn.

  Louie Simmons is loved and hated. Some of his lifters juice. This has led to a split in USA Powerlifting. 7 US leagues test, 19 do not. This is what they belong to instead of Amerika.

• LANDSKNECHTS – most brutal mercenaries of the Renaissance

  Perhaps you’ve read The Black Company novels by Glen Cooke. Or perhaps have a background on how France and Italy rose armies in The Late Middle Ages. These were mercenary armies who formed a mannerbund of death. The ties that bound were the moral code of never leaving your buddy behind. Landsknechts were elite mercs hired by German Nobles of The Holy Roman Empire.

  The spread of firearms and the advent of nationalism rendered these mercs partially obsolete. But mercs still exist and continue to form what many believe are amoral bands of brothers. The French Foreign Legion and FDR’s Flying Tigers are modern examples. Maybe Blackwater is the modern Amerikan version of Cooke’s Black Company.

• KOMO News Special: Seattle is Dying

  Where do people go when they drop out? If they aren’t strong enough or tough enough to lift with Louie Simmons or work for Blackwater, they go where they don’t have to be. Many of them descend upon “Freeatle”. What happens when “Even Flow” and 8,000 of his buddies totally overrun a place?

  It’s about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle. It’s about parents who won’t take their children into the public parks they pay for. It’s about filth and degradation all around us. And theft and crime. It’s about people who don’t feel protected anymore, who don’t feel like their voices are being heard. This program is not about demonizing those who are struggling with addiction and homelessness and mental illness. On the contrary. Instead, it asks the question, “Why aren’t we doing more? Why don’t we have the courage to intervene in lives that are, in the face of a grave sickness, reeling out of control?”
  

  But even as the author sees Seattle being overrun and conquered, he is too cucked to understand. Not even St Paul would just feed these people in perpituity. One of the biggest fights that Early Christianity had was an internal battle to prevent it from just being a free lunch like modern “Freeatle”. Seattle will not be free of these people without a return to an older morality. One that inequivocably states the following.

  7 For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, 8 nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. 9 We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. 10 For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”
  

  Humanity follows Gresham’s Law. The bad will always drive out the good. Perhaps, “Freeatle” can only ultimately be worth what it costs to remain there and earn an existence.

• FBI joining criminal investigation into certification of Boeing 737 MAX

  The FBI has joined the criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, lending its considerable resources to an inquiry already being conducted by U.S. Department of Transportation agents, according to people familiar with the matter. The federal grand jury investigation, based in Washington, D.C., is looking into the certification process that approved the safety of the new Boeing plane, two of which have crashed since October.
  

  More out of Freeatle. It apparently isn’t just the Birkenstock Bolsheviks who are corrupt out there. Boeing is under investigation for having corrupted the test and approval process at the FAA. This investigation of Boeing is a good start, but only half the problem. So many of these government regulators gained their knowledge base by working with the people they are subsequently regulating. The question that the FBI doesn’t want to delve into too deeply is as old as Roman Satire. “Quis custodiat ipsos custodies?”

• Rep. Clyburn: Trump family is worse than Hitler

  Poor Hitler. He keeps dropping in the power rankings. “Adolf, you’re fired.” Trump’s whole family is worse than Hitler. Next month, his pet dogs will be worse than Hitler. They already call them “Frisco,” “Hiro,” and “Moose”.

• J.P. Morgan Replaces College Visits With Online Games To Recruit Aspiring Bankers

  So begins a new trend. The colleges and universities can no longer be completely trusted. J.P. Morgan is giving the equivalent of an IQ test to college graduates. Video games are becoming a replacement for college recommendations.

  J.P. Morgan is now using online behavioral science-based games in its quest to recruit college students who aspire to work for the banking giant, according to a new Bloomberg article. Beginning this year, the bank will be using the games, instead of in person campus recruiting and traditional college campus visits, to gauge and measure the interest and acumen of college students who seek to apply for jobs at the bank. The games will be in addition to video interviews that the bank has started using in recent years.
  

  Universities have compromised their standards. Organizations that seek excellence will no longer unquestionably look towards the Amerikan University system. Cheaters never prosper for long.

• First cousins in love with each other petition to get legally married in Utah

  We may be headed towards Utah’s version of Loving v. Virginia. Who are they to argue with the proposition that incest is best!

  Two cousins who say they are in love with each other have created an online petition calling for the state of Utah to allow them to get legally married. “My first cousin and I have been in love with each other our whole lives but we are prohibited from marrying in the state of Utah where we live,” Angela Peang writes in the petition. “We believe that the law is outdated and it needs to be changed so that we can socially legitimize our love.” The couple’s goal is to get 1,000 signatures; as of Wednesday morning, about 75 have signed on. Peang told CBS News she’s loved her cousin, Michael Lee, since she was in second grade.
  

  If the lead paint tastes good, who’s to say that Angela shouldn’t get to munch on all the paint chips she desires? The state can’t ban dysgenic behavior. That would interfere with !PROGRESS!

• The Philosophy of DARTH VADER – Wisecrack Edition

  The man who does not fear death wins the fight in the end… Anakin was turned into Darth Vader because he could not defeat his fear of death. He turned into the ultimate villian by being too much like an awful lot of the rest of humanity.

• The Psychology of The Joker ‘The Dark Knight’ Behind The Scenes

  The Joker. Not The Space Cowboy, nor even The Gangster of Love. He is the Anti-Batman. If Batman is the force for order, Joker is the God of Entropy. The fight is over what to do with a flawed and imperfect world. Batman believes you work to fix and repair. Joker believes you nuke it. Accelerate the entropy, and all the bad things would be sterilized along with the destruction. What fascinates here is that Batman and Joker both want to destroy unfairness.

• How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide

  Andrew Yang is offering to hand everyone $12K per year for a reason. Handing out prosperity has always been a popular platform. It appears to be working strongly in favor of one Donald J. Trump.

  Yale economist Ray Fair, who pioneered this kind of modeling, also shows Trump winning by a fair margin in 2020 based on the economy and the advantage of incumbency.

  “Even if you have a mediocre but not great economy — and that’s more or less consensus for between now and the election — that has a Trump victory and by a not-trivial margin,” winning 54 percent of the popular vote to 46 for the Democrat, he said. Fair’s model also predicted a Trump win in 2016 though it missed on Trump’s share of the popular vote.
  

  Of course Donald Trump had it easier than The Yang Gang. All he has had to do is repeal feckless Obama-Era regulations. All the freebies he has really handed out have involved taken some bureaucrat’s foot off of the average Amerikan’s throat. This makes his whole family worse than Hitler.

• Flawed analysis, failed oversight: How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system

  Back when Sci-Fi Author John Scalzi was a thing, he opined on the reality that different races of Amerikans lived in. He analogized this to a video game you could play at different levels. White Male, he opined, was the easiest. Apparently, failed Florida Gubernatorial Candidate Ron Gillum warns his fellow-failure, Robert Francis “Nacho Senator” O’Rourke, that he was playing in lame mode.

  “There’s no doubt that O’Rourke enjoys a set of privileges in his decision making that other candidates don’t,” Gillum told the New York Times. “Can you imagine it for any of the women that are in the race for president or considering a run? They probably could not muse out loud, or in the recesses of their mind have these sorts of conversations and then say them out loud, and think it would be taken seriously or they would be taken seriously.” Many black and female Democrats have pointed out that liberal journalists, most of whom are white males, gushed over O’Rourke’s potential presidential candidacy even before he lost to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) while they downplayed the presidential prospects of Gillum and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
  

  This would of course be news to anyone who followed the political career of Lieawatha Liz Warren. Or Kamala Harris. Oh, heck. Let’s toss Barack “Hussein” Obama into this discussion as well. He could have been Halfrican or emphasized the white half. Which level have all of these people chosen to play the video game of life on? It speaks volumes.

• High-Tax States Make It Hard for the Rich to Leave

  By setting a $10,000 cap on how much Americans can deduct in state and local taxes, or SALT for short, Washington created a pricey problem for the privileged in some parts of the country. Now that the first tax season under the overhaul is here, that reality is hitting home—and the thought of moving to a low-tax state may suddenly look more attractive. But even before the law, there were rich people in blue states trying this strategy. Some actually moved, while some just pretended to—and that’s where state tax auditors come in. Officials in places such as California and New York don’t make it easy for the rich to say goodbye…
  

  Well, well, well. Liberals always used to play gotcha by sanctimoniously criticizing “spending in the tax code.” That was their degenerative semantic to describe tax deductions. Of course, like all lying, dishonest #SJW types they meant other people’s deductions. Theirs are different. Now they are discovering parting from high-tax Blue States is sweet sorrow. It’s sweet for them when they get to keep the money, it is sorrow if the high-tax states come after them and try to recoup every dime they can get their hands on.

  Places like New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut have chosen to enlarge their governments beyond what they can afford. They depended on SALT deductions as a transfer payment of sorts from the federal coffers to the state ones. They were simply replacing an equal value of federal income taxes with their own levies. Now, once the taxes get past $10K, there is no Federal deduction. People like Chaquita Kruschev’s mom are now leaving these states.

• 2nd US jury finds Roundup weed killer caused cancer

  “As early as the 1980’s Monsanto was aware of glyphosate’s carcinogenic properties.” Hardeman’s suit claims. In 1985, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (“EPA”) Toxicology Branch published a a memo glyphosate as a “possible human carcinogens with limited evidence of carcinogenicity.” The lawsuit lists several studies linking glyphosate to cancerous behavior. The American Cancer Society lists the substance as a “probable carcinogen,” determining it is “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization.
  

  Bayer spent $63B to acquire Monsato. Monsato manufactures Roundup. Roundup has been repeatedly determined to cause cancer. Congrats to Bayer.

  Meanwhile, we continue to push the limits on how many useless people we can continue to feed. Roundup is used to remove competitive plants from agricultural lands. It then begins piling-up in the surrounding environment. Then it starts to kill the very people it was intended to help feed. Congrats to Bayer.

• Trump Didn’t Call Neo-Nazis ‘Fine People.’ Here’s Proof.

  CNN really nailed it on this one. Hit the ball clean out of the yard. Drove home exactly the point they were paid to make. Way to go CNN. You did exactly what you exist for. It was a lie? So what? Journalists exist to peddle narrative not truth.

• Boeing delays by months test flights for U.S. human space program: sources

  Boeing seems to have hit the wall on technical innovation. They are more concerned with getting on contract than they are with fulfilling contract. They are quickly becomming the Microsoft of the aeronautics industry. Too bad you can’t patch a defective system once it’s off the ground.

As The Joker once famously quipped. “Why so serious?”

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