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never stop bettering yourself quotes - win

I hate the romanticization and misrepresentation

EDIT: I want to clarify some things
  1. Honestly no matter what symptoms you have you’re still valid. Quiet and mature? You’re valid. Screaming and angry? Still valid. My only problem is when the media decides to ignore some parts of what mental illness can really be like. This can create an expectation for how traumatized people are supposed to act. This can be dangerous because nobody has to act a certain way to be valid. Nobody has to be a certain way to be valid. There is no such thing as “correct” symptoms or a “correct” way of having mental illness. I wish there was more visibility on all the symptoms of mental illness and not just where somebody matures
  2. I am not gatekeeping. As I said before, no matter what your symptoms are you are valid. My problem is when people start to think people who suffer mental illnesses are all supposed to act and behave in the same/a similar manner to how people with mental illnesses are portrayed in the media. For example, it’s dangerous to expect somebody suffering from mental illness to be mature even if that person is not. It sets an expectation and basically tells the person “you’re supposed to be a certain way” when there is no certain way. You don’t owe anybody a certain way of acting
People reading this: please do not gatekeep in the comments. This post is not about gatekeeping and that was never my intention. I was pointing out how the media can set a expectation/assumption of how people with mental illnesses are supposed to behave and how that could be harmful. Are all and any symptoms, traumas, and mental illnesses valid? Yes. They are. And everybody deserves to have representation and validation. There is no such thing as a correct way to act. You do not owe anyone a certain way of how you behave. I cannot stress that enough.
I hope this cleared some things up
EDIT NUMBER TWO: and yes there is a problem that goes the other way too where people use their trauma as an excuse to hurt others/as an excuse for bad behavior. We should all strive to be good people. And we will make mistakes. We all make mistakes. Every single one of us are human. We should all try to learn from our mistakes and do better next time. Trauma nor mental illness is not an excuse to hurt other people. It is not an excuse to have bad behaviors. It can be an explanation yes, but not an excuse. We should all try to focus on our healing and through that become better people. I have hurt people because of how I acted due to mental illness and trauma. I have been hurt because of how people acted due to their mental illness and trauma. Most people took accountability for their actions though and I have worked on improving myself as well. It’s okay to make a mistake; there is always time to improve and do your best to fix it
Here’s the actual post:
I hate the narrative that people who have went through trauma are mature, kind, quiet, etc. It is true that people who have suffered trauma have those traits but not everybody has them. The media almost always portrays people who suffer trauma, especially teens, as these super mature and grown up people
What about the angry outbursts? Isolating yourself from people? Crying every day and wanting to scream? Being frustrated about not knowing how to communicate to others? Never feeling safe, not even with friends or family? Always being paranoid? It’s so frustrating that only the “convenient” or “ideal” symptoms are portrayed
This also feeds into the problem of people romanticizing mental illness. Nowadays it’s cool to have depression and trauma because of (and I quote) “✨character development✨” and it’s so frustrating to see people who want to experience mental illness just to appear “cool” or “quirky”. Mental illness isn’t always being mature, being “mysterious”, having “character development”, having people care about and worry about you all the time, having a cute bf/gf/etc. holding you in their arms, etc.
I wish there was more accurate portrayal of mental illness in the media. I want people to see the truth behind what mental illness can be like. People seriously need to stop glorifying mental illness.
submitted by secretinblue to CPTSD [link] [comments]

The cult control tactics of online "social justice" activism

I know I'm far from the first person to say that toxic online "social justice" activism is like a cult. But hopefully I have something new to say as someone who lived through religious right cult stuff in childhood, and later on got into critical social justice before that whole scene got really weird. It has been strange seeing the same coercive mind control and emotional abuse tactics emerging on the "left." Not just outliers on Tumblr or fringe campus stuff, not just anonymous false flag trolls, but defended by established institutions, mainstream media, and public figures.
These are some of the methods of cult control and how they play out.
Pathologizing personal boundaries and defense mechanisms. If someone insisted your firewall and virus scanner are evil and you needed to disable them indefinitely in order to fix your computer, you'd know they're up to no good. But cults routinely succeed in mind control by pathologizing natural defense mechanisms. There's that part of you that starts to think, "Hey, I'm not being treated right" but you suppress it because the cult has taught you that saying "no" is selfish, and that your natural intuition is a sign of brokenness. The entire concept of "fragility" is that any hesitation or questioning of the dogma comes from a place of selfishness and entitlement. Leaked documents from Seattle Public Schools used quotes about the "lizard brain" and false fear from the amygdala in order to pre-emptively head off objections. The accusations of "self-hatred" and "internalized oppression" are lobbed at people who disagree with the activists who claim to speak for them. Similarly, the old right-wing groups were fond of condemning disagreement with spiritual authorities and insisted on "giving up rights."
Gavin DeBecker's The Gift of Fear, in contrast, stresses the importance of listening to one's gut feelings even if it's considered impolite. Denigrating the mark's potential hesitation also fits with the "Typecasting" and "Discounting the Word No" parts of DeBecker's pre-incident indicators. Ironically, a movement that champions feminism and #metoo is using sleazy pick-up artist tactics.
How do people fall for this stuff to begin with? Well, cults rarely start with insulting their marks. They often say the decadent outside world is already hopelessly evil -- something people are much more likely to relate to and believe -- and from there they persuade you that you have been already compromised by the world system, and that the cult is the only way to heal from the oppressive system and return to your "real" self. The catch is that the "healing" requires access to your most personal and private thoughts, and you're not allowed to say "no" to it.
So, once your personal boundaries have been pathologized and dismantled, and the decadent outside world has been denigrated as an evil that can only be resisted by the cult's dogma, you're open to let the cult control every aspect of your personal life -- and your mind itself.
The pettiness is the point: micromanaging personal lives and thoughts. In a healthy church or activist group, people are given general moral principles and then allowed to use their own judgment for what that looks like in their daily life. If strict rules are part of the faith, then the rules are consistent -- not ratcheting up the goalposts. There is room for "adiaphora," which is the idea that some aspects of life -- with rare exceptions -- are morally neutral, such as one's personal preferences in food or music or hobbies. Not so for right-wing cults or the woke left. Smurfs are Satanic. Paw Patrol is racist. Hallmark Movies are fascist. Beethoven is problematic. Unpack your Spotify playlist, decolonize your gardening, and interrogate your knitting. Only watch shows that "give glory to God." Critically examine your favorite TV characters because "the personal is political." If you like the wrong thing, you might be betraying your community. The idea of "art for art's sake" and "let people enjoy things" is judged as a complicit or sinful or privileged take. You don't have the right to self-determination anyway, since you are living on stolen land.
This is an endless feedback loop: You further hand over your judgment and autonomy to the cult, the cult's morality system is always on your mind, you never get to just relax and enjoy things, you continue to think your ordinary likes and dislikes are sinful and problematic, and you don't trust yourself for the most trivial choices let alone major life decisions. The cult takes over all aspects of your life -- and most of it has nothing to do with actual faith or justice. In addition, you are socially isolated from people with less strict tastes, and therefore more psychologically dependent on the cult.
Christian Scripture points out that this kind of life isn't even effective in resisting the oppressive world system -- it is actually playing right into it: (Colossians 2:20-23).
You'd think people would not want to waste their time obsessing over trivial matters, but part of why they do is:
Magical thinking. I remember when leftist activism was more grounded to the real world and material cause-and-effect. To the extent that "social justice" made any demands on people's private lives and hobbies, it was more like: Try not to accidentally fund genocides or child labor with your consumer purchases. Beyond that, policing other people's personal likes and dislikes was not on the radar.
But something changed in recent years -- and I've actually seen comments justifying harassment campaigns over hobbies where they actually believe doing fanart and fanfiction wrong will be butterfly-effected to real-world violence down the road. While the Left has postmodern fairy dust, conservative Christian cults believed cabbage patch dolls were demon possessed and that a mystical "umbrella of protection" would keep you safe as long as you obeyed the authority figures.
For some cult followers, this intense scrutiny of everyday life is a feature, not a bug. They are drawn to the idea that their boring office job, domestic life, and mundane hobbies are actually a cosmic battle of good and evil -- especially if they get to hassle other people's mundane lives. The argument of "Let people live their own lives, as long they're not harming anyone" doesn't work on them, because their definition of "harm" is meaninglessly broad. The idea of "mind your own business" doesn't work on them, because getting into other people's business is considered heroic evidence of how much they care.
This magical thinking, when tied in with the other elements I described before, has a profoundly unhealthy effect where people lose their sense of self-awareness in a strange combination of low self-worth and overbearingly high self-certainty. Believers are told, for reasons I described above, that the little personal things which are part of being human are toxic -- but these things never go away, they're just outsourced to the spiritual world. This Twitter and Tumblr attitude of "My personal likes and dislikes are more critically pure than yours" has become the new "God told me to do this thing (that I was going to do anyway)."
Personal story time: this was the point where I realized I was getting burnt out and dangerously close to the left end of the horseshoe -- and that I needed, for my own mental health, to step back a bit from the social justice thing. (Mind you, this was years before there was this creepy totalitarian push for "social justice" to take over every aspect of your personal life. Nobody was asking me to be this way. I was self-radicalizing without the outside social pressure that young people have today.) I didn't want to become simply the left-wing version of the right-wing legalism I had earlier rejected. I had to stop trying so hard to be a Good Person and accept that it was okay to spend time on things solely because I enjoyed them. (I suppose this is what you all call the Grill Pill? Or, as it was called in the old days, a chill pill.)
Anyway, the magical thinking that outside influences and normal lifestyles are inherently harmful also gives justification for isolating people who offer different views. So...
Cutting off contact from outsiders. When a believer cuts someone out of their life for being too "worldly" or too "problematic," it is primarily the believer who is being isolated. The cancelled or cut-off person at least has the chance to find freer and healthier friendships. The believer, meanwhile, is stuck in the suffocating authoritarian circle, having burned their bridges with normies.
You may say, "That's still not what a cult is. A cult is a unique religion and standalone institution with a central authority figure and a formal initiation rite." That's what they thought back in my day, too, which didn't take into account:
Social contagion and institutional takeover: Things happen very quickly. My family's lifestyle changed overnight, even though we never formally joined the main cult we were affected by, or any of the other right-wing organizations that influenced us. These authoritarian fundamentalist groups weren't even acknowledged as cults until recent years. It is obvious in hindsight, but back then people thought only new standalone religions could be cults. In reality, cult dogmas got into mainstream evangelical churches and even a few secular institutions.
So, once the cult worldview has become widely accepted or the social circle has become an echo chamber, people start trying to outbid each other for moral authority, becoming a purity spiral rewarding the strictest interpretations.
The Twenty Mattress Fallacy. In Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea," a house guest is proven to be real nobility -- not just an ordinary commoner -- because she was sensitive enough to feel a pea placed at the bottom of the bed even with twenty mattresses on top of it. Similarly, cults and echo chambers believe delicate sensitivities and extremist opinions are signs of purity and nobility of thought. This leads to constantly moving the goalposts. Back in the heydey of Christian Right purity culture, it wasn't enough to save one's virginity for marriage: if you were really committed, you saved your first kiss for your wedding day. Or better yet, didn't touch each other at all. Then they started saying you were ruined if you even had a crush.
The online left has a similar dynamic: you're never good enough and the work is never done. You have to go above and beyond the "bare minimum" on things that are performative and inconsequential to begin with. Something that was okay five minutes ago is worthy of cancellation now, so you are always kept on your feet. It is considered a sign of empathy and insightfulness to see covert fascism in everyday life (and thus to treat everyday people as fascists).
This is also part of:
Dichotomous thinking. You're either completely with them, or you're "of the devil" or "a literal Nazi." If you criticize spiritual abuse, it's the same as criticizing Christianity itself. If you are a civil libertarian or class-first leftist, it can only be because you secretly want to oppress people or benefit from oppressors. If you don't agree with the people who claim to speak for you, you must be self-hating. If you are against cancel culture, you must be against social justice itself. Persuasion doesn't get immediate results, so coercion is virtuous. If you don't publicly agree with their exact worldview, you're "lukewarm" or "complicit." (By the way, one "tell" of this dichotomous thinking pattern is the rigid and easily recognizable vocabulary. If someone unironically accuses random nobodies of "complicity" it's time to run for the hills.)
Since the real world has nuance, truth gets chucked aside in favor of:
Image more important than reality. Cults and individual abusers are notorious for making their apathetic or unwilling victims go along with the motions and pretend to be happy in order to make the movement appear more popular than it really is, or to make the relationship look better than it really is. The toxic "left" has a trend of trying to coerce random people into repeating slogans or putting pronouns on their social media bio. This defeats the purpose of real safety. Coercing random people to pretend to be allies -- when some of these random people could be actual racists, misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes -- what could possibly go wrong?!
Part of the false image aspect is not only coercing others, but constructing a false image of one's own self as being always right... and projecting their flaws onto dehumanized scapegoats. They are often fond of harassing others and lecturing their targets that they can't have real problems... while they are harassing them.
And so, because there's no such thing as being oversensitive, and there are no shades of gray, and image is more important than reality, this all leads to...
Punishment disproportionate for the alleged offense. This is an abuse tactic where the bully's escalated anger is somehow supposed to reflect badly on you. It is also part of the abuser's desire for validation and catharsis. When I was elementary age, my adult abuser berated me frequently, threatened to ruin my life, wanted to make me feel as sinful as possible for normal distractible kid behavior, claimed I was deeply harming and offending others left and right, pried into my private thoughts, forced me to make confessions and dramatic written or spoken apologies (over tame jokes or even nothing in particular), felt entitled to hold me accountable for things that were none of her business, accused me of centering myself when she succeeded in getting the emotional reaction she wanted all along, and made herself out to be the real victim when I tried to reach out for help. So now, watching online "left" circles check all the boxes above has just been wild. They claim cancel culture doesn't exist -- but if it does, then it is okay if they are doing it.
Which is an example of...
Morality based on who you are, not what you do. It's a huge red flag that speaking out against abuse and harassment is considered "both sides-ism", and thought leaders can get away with mistreatment as long as they call dibs on "the right side of history." In conservative patriarchal cults, there are explicit double standards for men and women, and criticizing authority figures is frowned on. On the authoritarian left, people only exist as extensions of their Census demographics -- I get an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe when there are news articles like: "Officer Thao exists, so we Asians have to repent of collective racism" or "White women who voted for Biden need to feel guilty because other white women voted for Trump" or, of course, any reference to "black and brown bodies." Your individual actions matter less than your role in society.
This "us and them" dynamic tends leads to escalating abuse, as described by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: Thoughts On the Nature of Mass Movements. People who consider themselves "good" while mistreating their "bad" targets know they are wrong somewhere deep down -- but the pain of their guilty conscience is further projected to their target. This is consistent with what happens to targets of online harassment and doxxing -- when they try to defend themselves, the perpetrators just get angrier and escalate things further.
Because abusers like this believe they are righteous victims not needing limits and not capable of doing wrong, this also leads to the conclusion that...
The most vulnerable are considered acceptable collateral damage. When the righteousness of a cause and protecting the reputation of its thought leaders is prioritized over actually treating all people well and respecting their boundaries, it is inevitable that abusers will be empowered and the most vulnerable will get hurt. Authoritarian ideologies also tend to attract predators who may or may not actually believe in the cause itself. Some of these are sex offenders. Others are just bullies who seek soft targets and put their desire for validation and release above basic decency, honor, and reality itself. After all, they are the ultimate victim -- there is no such thing as stooping too low.
Give it another ten or so years -- as long as people are free to speak out at all, there are going to be stories about how bad it is now, especially from kids who were not given a choice but to grow up under the suffocating and soul-sucking "right side of history."
The authoritarian Left, however, has unique issues that don't have any parallels to the right-wing cults I grew up with. Reactionary religious groups never took over large, mainstream, secular institutions in a way that the average person would have been affected. And the flak that people may get for leaving a Christian cult's lifestyle tends to stop at the cult itself -- I've never heard of campaigns to get people fired from their secular, outside job. As far as I know, that extreme sense of entitlement to all the employers and universities in North America is exclusive to the illiberal left.
As mentioned earlier, I am (or was) the old-school version of "woke," trained in the basics of social justice theory before it went mask-off with the cult dynamic. To me, it makes a difference whether the cancel culture and thought control "always has been" the end goal of these theories -- or whether it was something that was cynically co-opted by corporate political interests which have the most to gain by making useful idiots of authoritarian activists.
Either way, there is a disturbing trend of pushing invasive self-interrogation on ordinary people -- just like the biblical image of a hypocrite trying to remove a speck of dust from someone else's eye when they have a whole-ass plank in their own.
submitted by horseshow_throw to stupidpol [link] [comments]

A hardwood refinishing story told in three photos

The three photos: https://imgur.com/a/vV7nclT
I had a thread on here the other day around trying to confirm if I was being lied to by my contractor. Long story short, I was. I fired the original contractor and hired a new one who did an amazing job at rescuing my floors. I'll keep the story to the end and put the tips/advice I learned from my experience first.
Some things to consider when hiring a refinishing contractor for your floors:
  1. Always ask the contractor if the crew working are his own or if he is sub-contracting out the work to another crew. If he is having difficulty scheduling his own crew, then take it as a warning sign they might not normally work for him.
  2. Always get the name of the products being used included in the contract. (edit: and almost as important, look up the datasheets for the products and learn about their preferred application methods, dry times, and cure times).
  3. Always have the complete work scope included in the contract (ie: sanding, filling, staining, buffing, and especially # of coats of finish).
  4. When sampling stain, the crew should be using named products straight from the can (like duraseal). Unless you are going super dark, avoid water-based stains. Oil-based stains like duraseal are relatively low VOC and tend to be standard. Avoid a custom stain mixture or color combo as it will prevent you from being able to reasonably match the look of the hardwood if you ever need to repair a smaller area in the future. If you go with a pre-mixed stain, then you know the type of color you need for any repair work in the future.
  5. For a good looking finished floor, the work scope should go something like: Day 1: major sanding work + clean up + stain samples, Day 2: finish sanding work + clean up + staining + if enough time is left after a long break, maybe 1st coat of water-based poly. Day 3: Buffing + clean up + last 2 coats of water-based poly. This will differ based on size of the project, so take just as general guidance on the steps.
  6. Except for really large jobs, stain should be wiped on by hand with rag, then almost immediately wiped off by hand with a clean rag. Finish varnish is applied with a applicator mop, but a good stain job should be done by hand.
  7. Be wary of offers for oil-based sealers. In my region, oil-based sealers and finishes over 275 VOC are not legal. Stains like Duraseal are oil-based, but within legal limits and allowed. The sealers typically are not. I was very specific on my want to have water-based finish products only for the finish due to the fact that my pregnant wife and I were still residing at the property. Contractor #1 installed a oil-based sealer without asking me if I wanted it, then lied to me about it, which is part of the reason why I fired him. Contractor #2 was aware of that fact and my strict want for water-based finish only. Yet Contractor #2's work crew still asked me if I wanted an oil-based sealer to better protect the stain. The worker said it would protect the stain work for significantly longer and make it look really good. I asked if it was legal in California for wood floor application and the worker admitted it was not, so I told them to pass and only do the work as described in the contract for 3 coats of water-based Bona Mega finish. They accepted, but a few hours later asked me to please not mentioned their offer for the oil-based sealer to their boss (the contractor) cuz he "doesn't like when we do that sort of stuff". These workers were good guys who did fantastic work, so I didn't hold it against them. It just seems that the oil-based sealer is a bit of a standard under the table practice to make the work last longer vs. with water-based products.
  8. Double check deposit limits in your state for licensed contractors. I've hired a number of contractors in the past, but never thought to question the varying deposits asked by them. For this project, contractor #1 asked me for a 50% deposit. Contractor #2 asked for nothing and told me it was because he could only ask for 10% max for a deposit per the state and the value was minimal, so he took the chance. I lucked out with the first contractor because he had a 50% deposit check in hand, but accidentally washed the check in his jeans and destroyed it. I put a stop order on the check for good measure the minute I fired the contractor, so no money lost, but it was pure luck he hadn't cashed it yet.
  9. If you've got finish work (like painting walls), maybe save it for after the floor is refinished. While you may be extra careful not to damage anything if doing the work yourself, a contractor won't. Accidents will happen. And if you don't want to live with small damage or marks on walls after, you're going to have to paint it again anyways. Sometimes it's best to wait for the floors to be finished before doing finish paint work. Just cover the floors to avoid spillage when painting.
To those looking for more detail, here's a description for the three photos of my hardwood floor refinishing adventure:
Photo 1 - starting point: The old floors were full of scratches, deep wear marks, and flaking/missing varnish. The floors are original white oak from the 1940's. I'm not sure if they were ever refinished. I'd planned to refinish them myself with the help of youtube, but timing issues and my wife's persuading led me to go with a contractor. I followed the good old 3 quotes rule, though with a bit of a change due to COVID. I got most of the initial quoting details virtually via phone calls with the contractors I picked. I then chose the company I thought would be the best fit for my need and had that contractor come out for an in-person inspection and formal quote. If anything seemed off, I would move on to my next choice. The meeting with contractor #1 went well and I went with them. They were mid-priced with a large online presence with positive reviews. I figured, no way the floors can look any worse than they are now...
oh boy...
Photo 2 - The journey begins: I should have seen the warning signs right away. For sake of brevity, I'll just summarize the issues, but if people want a play by play, I will gladly share the 3 day saga. In summary, the contractor repeatedly lied about work scope done and repeatedly lied about the products that were used. He did this even when I questioned him on it at several points in the process, with him insisting that work was done when it had not been. When I finally got the chance to look at the work, it was extremely poor quality with multiple issues (stain not taking, poor sanding work, heavy damage to some of my walls, floor stain color extremely dark and nothing close to the sample done). The photo I took for this stage of the process was claimed to be almost finished work. According to the contractor, his guys just had to put 1 more coat of finish on it and they were done. Truth was, they'd only put down the stain and 1 high VOC oil-based sealer. No finish coats at all. No buffing. Nothing. The contractor's claims began to fall apart only after I got the specific product names he claimed he was using and I started showing him how the work he claimed was done couldn't possibly have been done in the timeline claimed, per the product manufacturer's own instructions. The contractor never apologized or admitted fault, but he did say he would talk with his workers and offered to fix the work to my satisfaction, to which I told him I was done using him. It boiled down to the fact that either his workers were lying to him on work done or he was knowingly lying to me about the work done. Either way, there was no way I could trust the work to be completed correctly as originally quoted. He agreed to walk away and leave it at that.
Photo 3 - Floor Refinishing Redux: After that, I scrambled to find a replacement contractor. I went to what was originally my second pick and the guy came out next day to look at the damage done. He agreed that the work was poorly done, and couldn't promise he could fix it, but that he'd be willing to try. I got a formal contract and his workers were out two days later to start the work. The process with contractor #2 vs. #1 was night and day. Contractor #2 understood the difficulties I had with the prior contractor and offered me complete transparency. He laid out a very strict timeline for workscope and insisted I come through regularly each day to check on the work being done. His guys spent 1 whole day just sanding and applying filler. They then showed me swatches of stains I could pick and applied multiple stain samples from pre-mixed duraseal quickset cans to sections of the sanded floor, so I could review them overnight and the next morning. They even left the stain cans next to the samples, so I could see what was being used. Day 2 was more sanding work plus application of the chosen stain. Then long lunch break with a ton of fans blowing air through the space followed by vacuuming/cleanup and first application of the water-based finish. I was apprehensive around that step since it seemed kind of rushed from stain coat to finish coat, but it turned out great. Day 3 was a full-scale buffing, followed by clean up, finish coat 1, long lunch, and then finish coat 2. The photo shared here is the finished product, though the floor looked similar in general quality even after just the first coat of finish.
I'm incredibly relieved that everything worked out. There was a lot of stress around it all due to a tight timeline to get the work done, but we got through it. Main downside of it is I'm going to have to completely repaint most of my freshly painted walls again due largely to the mess of the first contractor, but that is a small price to pay. Ironically, contractor #2 was the lowest bid of the 3 initial quotes I got, which was one of the reasons I didn't go with him first.
If anyone wants more specifics on anything, let me know. For now, I'm going to go enjoy my new floors.
submitted by DigitalEvil to HomeImprovement [link] [comments]

I'm reading every Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award winner. Here's my reviews of the early 1980s (Vol 5)

Well, it’s been a moment or three, but it’s good to be back.
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg's
Timescape by Gregory Benford
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge
The Many-Colored Land by Julian May
No Enemy But Time by Michael Bishop
Sundiver by David Brin
Startide Rising by David Brin
The Uplift War by David Brin
Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea.\*
\The Incompleat Nifft,* which is the original and it's sequel.
Little, Big by John Crowley
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh
Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Foundation's Edge Isaac Asimov
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford
The Integral Trees by Larry Niven
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart
And a bonus! A fellow Redditor asked me to check out his book, and kindly sent me a copy:
Constructors by Russell Libonati
If you haven’t seen the others:
Any questions or comments? Fire away!
A truly massive thank you to u/gremdel for mailing me a bunch of books! People like you are what make this endeavor worth the effort. And some of these books are dang near impossible to find, so… invaluable aid!
Some of the above are a bit out of order to maintain series cohesion - it seemed silly to leave off The Uplift War, for example, while doing this batch.
I’ve been using this spreadsheet, as well as a couple others that kind Redditors have sent. So a huge thanks to u/velzerat and u/BaltSHOWPLACE
At the request of a number of you, I’ve written up extended reviews of everything and made a blog for them. I’ve included the links with the posts for individual books. I try to put up new reviews as fast as I read them.
Also, yes - these are only the books that won “Best Novel” and not any version of First Novel/Short Story/Novella or anything else. I might take a breather at some point and do some short stories, but that is a task for another day.
The Bechdel Test is a simple question: do two named female characters converse about something other than a man. Whether or not a book passes is not a condemnation so much as an observation; it provides an easy binary marker. Seems like a good way to see how writing has evolved over the years. At the suggestion of some folks, I’m loosening it to non-male identified characters to better capture some of the ways that science fiction tackles sex and gender. For a better explanation of why it’s useful, check out this comment from u/Gemmabeta
submitted by RabidFoxz to books [link] [comments]

The Silver Squeeze Stages (Speculation)

"The greatest wealth is created by being an early investor... Making that investment requires believing in something before the majority of people understand it.

You will be mocked, ridiculed and criticized for your non-consensus action. It is absolutely worth it!" - Cathie Wood, ARK Invest

​
I have been following the GME and Silver Squeeze phenomena and I wanted to share my DD and speculation with you. I believe that everything has been leading up to this, and I have used what I learned from Bitcoin, Tesla, and GME to make this DD. I present to you:

The Silver Squeeze - The Triple Squeeze - The Silver Crusade

Disclaimer: This is in NO way financial advice, nor am I suggesting or condoning for ANYONE to do this. This is what I am going to do, and simply MY SPECULATION.

TLDR:

God Tier: Physical silver
Top Tier: COMEX futures, $SLV OTM calls and shares
​ Great Tier: $PSLV and $USLV shares, $GME (I am with you!)
​ Good Tier (miners): $EXK $AG $SVM $FSM $MUX and many others
​ GME was the millenial uprising. The #Silversqueeze is the boomer rebellion!
​ Before you begin, I encourage you to read about John Law, the Banque Generale, and the Mississippi Bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist). History repeats itself... Jerome Powell, COMEX?

UPDATE ON THE SITUATION: Current Phase: 1 - Cutting off the Supply / Driving up Demand

- Prepare for the MSM disinformation campaign to ramp up
- Countless bots on social media are flooding all platforms with disinformation and fear:
https://seekingalpha-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/seekingalpha.com/amp/instablog/11442671-gerald-klein/3096735-anatomy-of-a-short-attack?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=16119453107704&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l928lobfuscation_misinformation_propaganda_and_gme/

UPDATE:

SLV changes prospectus as of Feb.13, effectively becoming a closed ended fund. Price skyrocketing is inevitable.
At this moment it seems like the reddit community has really antagonized the SLV argument, yet the calls sweeps indicate that there are big players that are betting on SLV. Personally, I am diversifying, to hit all venues. All power to you if you are getting silver while avoiding SLV, it all helps in the end. When nobody believes in something though, that is where the greatest reward is, IMO.
I have been contemplating the price action in the past few days and I see 2 possibilities at the moment:
  1. Institutions were not in position for the silver bull run, but now they are and we will fly. JPM themselves are long silver, and they may actually be the very ones behind this social media trend.
This possible end was brought up in another thread on WSB:
https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/
TLDR: JPM wins but SLV holders also win - The COMEX closes forever, and SLV ETFs become the de facto paper for silver - JPM's heist is complete. However, silver and SLV holders still benefit greatly.
  1. Institutions will hammer down the price again via futures and double down for a war of attrition.
We will see at 26.70 what they have in mind, that is they key price for either a hard rejection with stopping volume down to the 24s or back up to 30s.
I am leaning toward option 1. They are not stupid. They are not Melvin Capital. They saw what happened and they would much rather make money. They hold the most silver after all.
Social media is so very easy to control. We saw it with GME, we saw it with Bitcoin, we saw it with Tesla, we saw it with Trump, we saw it with the global riots. What's a few million from JPM or Sprott to push a movement on Reddit?

"Big Tech trades human futures" - Zuboff

PRICE ACTION MANIPULATION 101:

Their moves:

- They are scared: https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/1356354953221197824
- They fear the Mar. 21 contracts with 133,715 open interest. When you trade futures in a CFD trader, this contract is what you trade. This one contract controls the global price.
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver_quotes_volume_voi.html#tradeDate=20210201

Their current defense is trimming the shadow contracts to settle in March and adding to May, check the open interest yourself. They want to kick the can down the road. This could become a war of attrition.

- The effects of the #SilverSqueeze day 1: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver_quotes_volume_voi.html#tradeDate=20210201

They cannot make new contracts for March because they are coming up for delivery. They are already overleveraged. It is already over, as long as we hold.

- They will allow exuberant investors to pile in on market open to ride the wave, even bidding it up in the morning to lure in buyers, and as buy volume fades, they will hammer it down with naked shorts via COMEX futures each and every day, coupled with negative PR and bots spamming platforms
- They will bleed it into the night using algorithms to short ladder and wash trade the price down on low volume (Trading with themselves beneath the lowest bid price), so that investors in Asia and Europe believe it is a pump and dump.
- They will pounce on any weakness as they grow more desperate. Sudden rallies may be countered with "dream-crusher" shorts and blow-off tops, and any bounces will be blocked off with massive sell-order walls. This is manipulation 101. Watch for sudden volume in spam, shilling, FUD on ST, Telegram, or whatever platform you may use.
- After consecutive days of punishment, many retail traders will lose interest, be shaken out, or wiped out from being overleveraged. Tight stop losses will be hunted.
- What they can do to counter us is to flood the market with silver to nip this movement in the bud and cover their overleveraged positions. However, in their greed - they will never ever choose this option and will attempt to manipulate through futures price action, naked shorting, and outdated media attacks.
- Another possibility is that a major actor with a large stake may reverse their short position and may in-fact become our biggest ally. They would stand gain while the others are liquidated.
- Another option is to divide and conquer - misdirect attention and cause FOMO elsewhere - while silver is pinned and bleeding, the next big thing might be pumped. The market is in a maniacal frenzy right now, this seems likely - Uranium, space travel or crypto are candidates.

Silvergang's moves:

- If there is no volume while the price bleeds, it is a short-ladder. No one is selling except their algorithms to themselves. Don't fall for this.
- Short attacks are are opportunities to buy aggressively to counter their move. This will make them bleed and think twice about using the same strategies.
- Be skeptical of the MSM - the sentiment seems to be positive as of now, but after building trust, they will flip the script once their masters instruct it. They will say it is over when it is not.
- The price action of the ETF does not matter at this point. Watch the spot price of physical!
- Physical suppliers have already stopped selling, in anticipation of the coming winter. This is a sign of success. Follow the MONEY, the POLICIES, and the PHYSICAL. Be prepared to HOLD and weather the onslaught of FUD and price manipulation.
- Remember that before we had computers, algorithmic trading, and quant shops, it was just Supply and Demand! For the majority of traders, intraday price action exists only to hurt you.
- It is very simple. Just do what they dont want you to do!

They are the End-Boss. They will not go down without a fight. Don't expect it to be easy.

​

Litany Against Fear:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
​
- While pooling our money is illegal and market manipulation, and this post is not financial advice, this could be a possibility: https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1354206025297973250?lang=en
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CREDITS:

Some of this is compiled info from other great posts such as:
https://gsiexchange.com/how-jpmorgan-is-manipulating-investors-to-hand-over-their-silve
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l6novm/the\_real\_dd\_on\_slv\_the\_worlds\_biggest\_short/
https://www.reddit.com/Wallstreetsilvecomments/l9ijq6/silver_25_to_1000_silversqueeze/
https://www.reddit.com/Wallstreetsilvecomments/l9f26x/biggest_short_squeee_in_the_world_silver_25_to/
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l68ill/the\_biggest\_short\_squeeze\_in\_the\_world\_slv\_silve
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l8uu76/the_gme_squeeze_will_bring_down_melvin_the_silve
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m02666PE9Ic
(Boomer experts)
https://www.desogames.com/shadowcontracts-and-a-history-of-comex-manipulation-in-2020/
https://www.desogames.com/a-letter-to-wsb-how-to-fight-a-financial-wa
Warning - Long read ahead. I ask you to read it fully with an open mind and offer your opinion, because I believe that we are on the verge of societal level change. I will keep updating this if there is demand.
​
What do you think? Roast it for the sake of discussion:
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KEY POINTS:

- A Squeeze of silver and paper silver is possible. There is a critical market inefficiency in SLV. This is not just a short squeeze, but also a supply squeeze and a gamma squeeze. A Triple squeeze if you will.
- Key is that the supply of underlying is only a fraction of the future contracts being traded.
- If enough contracts are physically settled, there will not be enough underlying, and this will squeeze the price
- In essence, the silver market will be cornered
- Up against JPM & co. Tough competition.
- They fear the Mar. 21 contracts with 133,715 open interest. When you trade futures in a CFD trader, this contract is what you trade. This one contract controls the global price.
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver_quotes_volume_voi.html#tradeDate=20210201
- The way Comex works is simple: On the final day of the previous trading month, whatever open interest is left on the next month has to indicate they will stand for delivery
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/gold_quotes_volume_voi.html?foi=O#tradeDate=20210128
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/gold_quotes_volume_voi.html?foi=O#tradeDate=20210129

The system is already broken. It is ALREADY OVER. The FRAUDEX is held up only to keep draining you as long as they can before they EXIT SCAM.

- COMEX inventory data: https://www.cmegroup.com/clearing/operations-and-deliveries/nymex-delivery-notices.html
- If you open Silver Stocks, you can see that there’s 2 categories: Eligible and Registered.
- The last report says there’s 248,082,103.16 ounces in there. At $30 an ounce, that’s $7,442,463,094 to buy out all silver on the COMEX - so they claim.

49,617 x 2 = 99,234 contracts. Total open interest on Mar 21 alone nevermind the rest = 133,715

Total naked shorts right now = 34,481 naked shorts, or x 5000oz = 172,405,000 ounces of silver they can’t deliver but might have to. And this is PHYSICAL silver! They can’t print it, they’ll have to find it on the open market, or.. close the shorts

Naturally the same thing applies as GME: If they want to close shorts, they need to buy them back first.

If 50,000 contracts stand for delivery…. Well that means EVERYTHING ELSE IS A SHORT DOESN’T IT?! 100% OF THE FLOAT! Not to mention on a delivery failure the price of PHYSICAL silver will just 10x while the futures go to 0. We might not even be able to determine the price of silver anymore on any sort of global scale!

This is the Infinite Squeeze

- I love this play because it is also a hedge against a market crash and declining dollar

This is a gap trade - a wealth gap trade - and we are filling the gap.

- Silver has been manipulated for nearly 100 years
- true value of silver with adjusted for inflation is $1000
- Gold and silver are the only commodities in which the paper value reflects the price of the underlying commodity- They have been accumulating for 100 years
- The Hunt brothers had already performed this same play in the past, but the banks did not learn their lesson. They were only 2, but how many millions of regular people hold physical silver?
- The Hunt brothers eventually lost, when the Federal government stepped in and Federal commodities regulators introduced special rules to prevent any more long position contracts from being written or sold for silver futures. This is similar to what we are seeing with Robinhood and GME.

This is why it is imperative to buy the far OTM calls now.

- The Hunt brothers were over-leveraged, which was their downfall. Don't make this mistake. They were also 2, while we are millions.
- Through fake sell orders (shadow contracts), the banks have $2 billion in naked shorts on the physical market, and $70 billion on the paper market
- All fronts must be hit, physical, futures, ETFs, options
- For a $1 rise in silver, $200 million worth of short positions are liquidated
- After $50, the gamma squeeze begins, the gamma ramp should be built above 50
- At $480, JP Morgan and the Big 8's full position of naked shorts are liquidated
- After seeing GME, it is clear that they will lie, spread FUD, use level-headed fake allies to try to dissuade us, distract us, say that it is over when it is not, break the law and laugh about it on national television
- After 100 years of manipulation, over 90% of gold, and a significant amount of silver has been accumulated by the institutions. While they print worthless paper money, true wealth has been robbed from us. Who will help us against this manipulation?

Why SLV?

- As an investor why would you want SLV to get diluted? Why would you buy SLV when JPM is custodian is this ETF is most at risk of fraud? How do you make money on calls? Let's say you squeeze to infinity. SLV doesnt move because 1 billion shares were issued as a result?

The ultimate goal is to pressure them until they are unable to issue any more shares because we know they do not have the underlying silver in the vault.

They must issue more shares as demand for the ETF rises, to keep the price fixed to the spot price of physical silver. When they issue more shares, they must also buy the proportional amount of physical silver to store in their vaults, but if demand for physical silver rises and avenues for obtaining physical close, the ETF and its subcustodians become the only way to get physical silver.
Industry will demand silver from their vaults through the ETF.

Silver that we know they do not have. This is their Achilles Heel. This is what they truly fear. This is why there is so much FUD surrounding SLV.

It is not silver that is being squeezed to infinity. Silver is only returning to its true value of 1000-7000. That is only phase 1. My speculation is that the in the later phases of this movement, the ETF will be squeezed to infinity, because it will be the only way big tech and EV companies can obtain silver - or it will be closed and cash settled for shareholders.

In other words, the endgame is to reveal the fraud and destroy it. This is the case for buying SLV. Their fraud is an unsustainable bubble and while it is effective at controlling the market, if it grows too large, it will burst.

What can be done to help expose the fraud:

https://www.cftc.gov/Contact/index.htm
Scroll to the bottom to "Submit Tips & Complaints" and detail the illegal naked shorting of the COMEX futures, manipulation and spoofing if evidence arises.
If you are paranoid, or just want to return the price of silver to its true value, or ride the wave for some profits, by all means go for PSLV or miners instead. It all helps in the end. If you really want to lay the hurt on JPM, a supply squeeze, followed by a gamma squeeze on SLV would do it.

SHOULD a $480 price be achieved. There will be severe consequences to the market, and probably the economy. Plan accordingly.

​
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Part 1 - Reducing Supply, Increasing Demand / Cornering the Market (See Bitcoin):

- Buying Physical Silver to reduce supply
- COMEX futures settling for delivery
- I will buy underlying shares of SLV, PSLV and physical silver
- Physical silver - dealers are already sold out, but this means nothing. They can claim to be "sold out" and have a stockpile in anticipation of the squeeze. They are simply not selling it to you.
- SLV shares - according to SLV prospectus, when SLV issues shares, they are forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount daily
- however, there are concerns about their integrity, be prepared for legal/media actions
- SLV is ran by JP Morgan themselves, and there is a concern that there is no proven metal, and only a few big banks have access, and can pay cash only in case of a default. Spoofing is inevitable and widely known. This is a legitimate concern.
HOWEVER, the whole point of this squeeze is to force them to PHYSICALLY DELIVER ON A SILVER RALLY ON UNDERLYING ASSETS THAT THEY DO NOT POSSESS! THIS IS THE REAL SQUEEZE!
- Silver futures - this is where some whales could really turn the tide
- the COMEX vaults only contains 1 ounce of silver for 100-500 ounces traded via futures
- the principle purpose of the future contracts is to actually deliver the underlying commodity, but because of traders settling with cash, the futures market has become 500x leveraged
- Once physical silver becomes scarce, and more future contracts are settled for physical delivery, the demand will overwhelm the supply. SILVER FUTURES ARE 500x LEVERAGED!
- They cannot lie if big companies need physical silver and they do not possess it in the vault
- Many are advocating that it is impossible to squeeze a commodity
- however, see the 2010-2011 short squeeze of silver (JP Morgan was short at the time as well): 481% gain
- It seems that JPM is covering their short positions already. Yes, JPM is custodian of SLV, but it means little, as SLV is managed by Blackrock. This is not a huge concern.
- The goal remains to short squeeze, if it becomes more profitable for JPM to indeed reverse their position, they could become our greatest ally against the Big 8.
- Miners - this doesn't actually do anything, but this is a way you can take profits without touching the SLV shares until the victory has been achieved.
​
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Part 2 - Gamma Squeeze (See TSLA):

- First of all - what is a gamma squeeze? https://www.reddit.com/options/comments/hxe3i0/can_someone_explain_a_gamma_squeeze_to_me_please/
- SLV OTM calls - buying far OTM strike calls forces the Market Maker's algorithms to "gamma hedge", buying the underlying asset to hedge risk for the OTM calls. A steady ramp is better than a large wall of interest at a specific strike
- I will be buying April SLV calls 50c
- if it begins to move, I will add higher OTM strike calls to build a gamma ramp
- holding to expiry and exercising will force shorted shares to be bought back to sell to the calls should a squeeze occur (See GME)
- At this point, the MSM will go all out with attacks using Obfuscation, Misinformation, Propaganda, in order to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l928lobfuscation_misinformation_propaganda_and_gme/
- While GME is seen as "oh look at those lovable idiots, I'm rooting for the underdog!" History may not be kind to the Silvergang if they do manage to crash the economy. This a different ball game. Understand what you are getting into.
​
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Part 3 - Short Squeeze (See GME):

- SLV, PSLV shares, HOLD while they struggle to meet industrial demand
- When there is no more silver available on the market, the only way to get silver will be through futures and ETFs
- 50%+ short interest on COMEX futures will be squeezed
- With rapidly rising spot price of silver, institutions and enterprise companies that need it may rush to hoard it, causing a steep increase in value along with the short squeeze
- If GME liquidating a hedge fund could threaten to take down the market, what could liquidating a bank or two do? https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/l7bpf5/30_seconds_from_triggering_market_nuclear_bomb/
- They WILL change the rules if they start losing. All you can do is hold and weather the storm.
​
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Part 4 - Destroying the Fraud, Infinite Squeeze (ENDGAME):

"Do you see it now? Or should we finish this on the board?"

- Settle SLV shares for delivery once spot prices rises to critical levels, decouple the ETF price from spot price
- Physical and COMEX futures, especially settling for delivery of futures is damaging
- However, the ENDGAME is to perform a gamma squeeze + short squeeze like what we are witnessing with GME on SLV, ONCE the silver market is cornered
- PSLV is a closed-end fund and while Sprott will deliver, they do NOT need to buy more silver to replenish their vault
- SLV must. While they are most at risk for fraud, the price MUST follow the spot price, and as demand rises, they MUST issue more shares to keep up with demand
- The mechanism in which they issue shares is such that they MUST BUY more underlying shares proportional to the ETF
- While they are expected to be fraudulent, we already know that there IS NOT ENOUGH SILVER IN THE VAULT
- You can settle for delivery with SLV if you hold 50k shares
- When the prices of silver rises from the COMEX and physical short squeeze, the FAANG and EV companies that need it will be forced to settle for delivery either at SLV, or at their subcustodians, causing a ripple effect
- Eventually, if enough shareholders settle for delivery, they CANNOT DELIVER because they DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH SILVER IN THE VAULT
- Then the ETF price must decouple from the spot price. This is when the gamma squeeze can occur. Rapidly raising the price of the ETF
- As long as shareholders do not sell, and hold, like we are witnessing with GME, this can squeeze INFINITELY. THIS IS THE ENDGAME. THIS IS THE SQUEEZE.
- They are a major bank, directly linked to the FEDERAL RESERVE, they MUST DELIVER
- Silver bulls have been waiting for decades for this moment
- The system traps us in an endless rat race with circumstances that already doom us. Debt based fractional reserve fiat currency enslavement system. They exist to profit off of us, not help us. Creating booms and busts w/ interest rates destroying families livelihoods
- At this point, the Fed will get involved. It will get political. https://www.reddit.com/Wallstreetsilvecomments/l98bws/the_eye_of_sauron_shall_fall_upon_silve
​
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The Final Phase - Liquidation of the ETF - Blood Moon for the Big 8 - Taking Down the Beast (The End of COMEX):

- Bad End: Closure of SLV - SEC steps in - shareholders would be forced to sell at a time not of their choosing. Game Over.
- Another Bad End: JPM dumps everything below spot price. Weakhands sell everything for a loss. Banks win. Unlikely - Silver bugs have been holding for decades. There are many that will never ever sell.
- Should March Silver fail - April Gold is a good target: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/gold_quotes_volume_voi.html?foi=O#tradeDate=20210201
- Neutral End (brought up by this post on WSB: https://new.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/): JPM wins but SLV holders also win - The COMEX closes forever, and SLV ETFs become the de facto paper for silver - JPM's heist is complete. However, silver and SLV holders still benefit greatly. This would be the greatest exit scam in history... 100 years in the making. Trading COMEX for JPM.
- Good End: Closure of SLV - settled for cash. The strangehold is broken and silver returns to true value. JPM's heist via shadow contracts as custodian is investigated when they fail to deliver on physical to big tech. This is a possible outcome with good chances. Justice.
- Complete Victory: shareholders hold and squeeze the ETF shares and control the price as they please, physical, miners, and PSLV shares have skyrocketed. The world is changed forever. Silvergang now controls the ETFs and big tech must buy Silvergang's ETF shares at an incredible premium for the precious metal. Elon Musk must pay tendies as tribute to Silvergang for silver for his SpaceX rockets.
​
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Looking Beyond - Hyperinflation:

Here are 3 freebies for you Silver Surfers and Silverback Gorillas:

Understand this - IF this works. YOU will be the ONLY ONES not holding the bags. YOU will be the bank. YOU will make the rules.

- Jeff Bezos sold $7.2 billion worth of his shares in 2020. All the Eligible Silver in COMEX’s vaults is worth 238,447,113.735 Oz x $24.065 = $5,738,229,792.03. Assuming the COMEX actually has the title to it all. Jeff Bezos is not a nice person, but he is very smart person

Feb. 2 Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO from Amazon

- MORTGAGE, let inflation pay off the mortgage
- Companies with a firm asset base with no debt
​
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​ ​
#SILVERSQUEEZE #SILVERGANG #SILVERSURFERS #SILVERBACKS \@darkpooltrade
I like the commodity. Alot. Good Luck To All!

“We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard." - JFK

​

(FYI: The manipulation of PLTR angered me to the point that I sought to make the manipulators pay, and this eventually lead me to silver)

submitted by margintraderxyz to Wallstreetsilver [link] [comments]

First Contact - Third Wave - Chapter 401

[first] [prev] [next]
General No'Drak stared at the holotank that showed the disposition of all of his forces on planet. Precursors were recalling their machines, performing a fighting retreat, trying to get off planet with as many resources as they could while exposing themselves to as little fire as possible. In three places as soon as Third Armor started moving in on them the Precursors abandoned their resources and ancillary machines and just lifted off, running hard for orbit.
General No'Drak changed the orders to let Space Force handle any vessel that lifted off, sparing the planet from debris falls that were registering in the megatons in some places.
A meme popped up on the holotank window showing Third Armor morale and he shook his head. It was an old one, but put together by one of the logistics personnel that were finally coming off shift after refitting and reloading Great Herd armored units.
It showed a burning Balor with another Precursor staring at it thinking "On one hand, it represented fifteen years of resource gathering, on the other hand, I'm pretty sure there was a human dancing on the hull."
A spin on the spider in the cockpit or house meme, the big Treana'ad thought to himself.
His conscious gaze went to the icon for the burrowing mining machine, now four miles down and making a beeline for the junction of the mountain ranges in the middle of the supercontinent.
If, somehow, you blow that mountain up, my determined little Telkan officer, you'll start a chain reaction that eventually separate the continental plates into different continents rather than the super continent that has been there for billions of years, he thought to himself. However, having witnessed what your people are capable of, how determined your people can be, I'm sure the planet will break before First Telkan.
He lit a cigarette, watching the busy command center, only Ge'ermo'o keeping him company as the Terran Confederate military fought through the night.
To what are you heading toward with my men, you metal monster? No'Drak wondered silently. What horrors are they being subjected to?
The icon didn't answer, just kept moving at a steady 100 miles per hour on its five thousand mile journey.
"...so the kid, right, he gets top grades all the way through 3rd grade. We're talking top marks across the board, blows away testing scores, everything," Casey said, sitting on the edge of a scaffolding and chewing a piece of stimgum. "The end of the school year comes and the Dad says: 'son of mine, first of my line, what shall I bequeath upon thee for such outstanding marks in regards to your schooling?'" Casey idly pulled a small device out of the creation engine attached to his heavy gun and attached it to his frame as he kept talking.
Sergeant Addox looked up and shook his head, then went back to watching the device Casey had pulled off his loading frame. Vuxten made sure his Marines were comfortable, making sure that the platoon was relaxing, not letting the stress of their trip dull their edge. Half of them were sleeping, some were playing cards, and about a dozen of the greenies were playing a complex turn based multiplayer 4X game that looked like it had been going on for at least years.
"The kid looks at his dad and says: 'I wish for thee to gift unto me a pink golfball, patron of my familial line. One, not more, not less, of the shade of pink. I wish for this simple thing, mine pater, for I do not desire to view the House Mouse Planet, nor do I wish to gaze upon vast worlds you offer me through virtual reality. Nay, father mine, gift unto me just a simple pink golfball," Casey said, waving his hands around, the loading frame whining as he did so. "The father, knowing his son has indomitable will, concedes to his beloved offspring's demands and gifts the lad with a single pink golfball."
"Did the kid's language change?" Second Lieutenant Plunex asked, frowning. "My Confederate Standard is not the best, but I feel his language changed."
"Shh, you'll mess up the joke," Casey said, grinning.
"Your communication thingy is blinking, Casey," Addox said.
"Boojums never fail ya," Casey said. He moved up and knelt down next to it. "It's slow, but reliable."
"Why don't we use it for our standard communication?" Plenux asked. "I've heard there's problems with some of the quantum devices out in the Hesstla Theater."
"Because it's spooky particles," Casey said. "Boojums can suddenly decide they don't want to work, or might decide they're going to pretend to be a different particle, or ignore the flux of the other boojums they're mated to. They're the strange matter of normal particles and like a purrboi or a Treana'ad clan matron do what they want."
"How do you know this, Sergeant?" Plunex asked. "I thought you were Ordnance."
Casey looked up, grinning behind his clear face mask. The eye patch made it look decidedly villainous, Vuxten thought. "Wasn't born old, kid."
"Seriously?" Addox said. "Tell the kid."
Casey laughed. "All right. Boojums are the only thing that can reliably send communications out of a Nivenring or Doom Tube," he said. "Damn, long message. Not a template, though. Looks like text."
"Doom tube?" Vuxten asked, sitting down on a blank console. He'd queried his datalink, but all he had gotten back was an human in gray metal armor with a green cape standing next to water park slide staring at a small child saying "You find yourself in the Doom Tube, child."
It didn't make sense to him.
Addox looked up. "Imagine a tube, walls a hundred miles thick, five thousand miles wide, two hundred thousand miles long. Imagine it's full of mountains, lakes, rivers, the like. The atmosphere is prevented from spilling out by walls a thousand miles high. A fusion reactor travels down the length over a period of twelve hours before it exits the tube, moves to the outside, and travels the length back charging the solar panels."
Plunex gave a slow whistle. "What's the point of it?"
"Well, it's a non-planetary habitat. Usually they move at about point two C between stars on a careful path to avoid being captured by stellar systems," he said.
"Humans make them?" Plunex asked. "Why, aren't there enough planets."
Addox shrugged. "Nobody knows who makes them, kid."
The lights stopped blinking, only three green ones burning.
"Welp, better check my text messages," Casey said, squatting down. The frame hissed and thumped and Addox had to turn his head when a piston released steam.
"Really, dude, you're gonna do me in the face?" Addox said, mock coughing.
"I'm demanding on a first date," Casey said, touching the box with a finger. Vuxten saw the lights come on on Casey's datalink. Casey stood there for a moment, closed his one eye for a moment, then opened it.
"All right, my buddy in 108th MI let me know that this thing is heading for the junction of the mountain ranges," Casey said. He turned his palm over, projecting a map up with the holo-emitter in his palm that was Confederate Military standard. "We've got another fifty hours at current speeds to reach the junction range. Precursors are withdrawing, looks like we broke their morale."
"They're machines," Private First Class Shutruk said. "How can you break a machine's will?"
Casey gave a snort. "Pretty easy, actually. Their coding is obvious once you think about it."
"Bullshit," Shutruk said. Casey looked at him and he flushed. "Bullshit, Sergeant," he said in a much more even tone.
Casey chuckled. "OK, the Precursors are all: there's only enough ice cream for one, right?" He asked. Shutruk nodded. "So, it's all about resources, all about resource consumption and resource allocation. They view the universe as a zero sum game, like most races who never get too deep into spooky particles. So, if Trucker's out there gutting Precursors like Christmas turkeys
--turkey is delicious-- 471i said.
"then the Precursors have to decide if the amount of resources it takes to take a planet away from us is more or less than what they will reap once they own the planet," Casey said. "Since we're shredding the Precursors out there, ripping them apart probably faster than they can produce them, it mechanically and logically breaks their will."
Shutruk nodded and stayed silent except for a small embarrassed sounding 'oh'.
"Never be afraid to ask me a question, kid. All privates are stupid, a private is made up of being young, dumb, and full of cum, it's up to men like me and Addox to educate you, train you up right, so you don't fuck up and blow the Lieutenant here's leg off," Casey said, grinning. "He might find that a bit disconcerting."
Shutruk nodded.
"Oh, and you're more than five steps from your weapon. You're dead," Casey said, and closed his eye again. "You were my troop, you'd be beating your face."
Vuxten checked Shutruk's anxiety metrics, noticing that he'd relaxed despite the Terran NCO pointing out he'd walked too far away from his weapon.
After a few more minutes Casey straightened up, picking up the device and slapping it into an empty spot on the loading frame.
Vuxten had noted that the closer he looked at that loading frame, the further out of spec it seemed to be. He'd compared it to the other loading frames he'd seen around and noted it was a different model and its serial number indicated it had been run off by one of the big creation engines. Created piece by piece and assembled by hand. He had watched Casey attach over a dozen pieces of equipment he'd fabbed up from the nanoforge attached to the gun, never mentioning what the pieces did or what they were for.
"What's the plan?" Addox asked Vuxten.
Vuxten had known that question was going to get asked so he was ready.
"It's confirmed at least fifty hours till we get there. There will probably be maneuvering and wait list checking, then it'll dock with a facility," Vuxten said. "We use the nanoforge to keep our atmosphere tanks topped off, run up something besides Space Force standard nutripaste, let everyone get some sleep. Weapons check, ordnance check, officers and NCO's do WAG planning."
Addox nodded, his face shield transparent. "Sounds good, sir. I'll draw up a guard shift, assign quick reaction force, make sure that it's all smooth till we get there in two and a half days."
Vuxten pinged Plunex, telling him to pay attention as he spoke. "Make it happen, Sergeant."
"Hooah," Addox said, then moved away.
-------------
Vuxten watched as Casey came in through the airlock, followed by three Telkan Marines. He was off shift finally, having eaten nutripaste, taken a drink, and sat down. Plunex was taking over on shift and Vuxten felt tired even though he hadn't done anything for almost twelve hours but sit in the command center for the vehicle.
The three Telkan Marines moved over and sat down, keeping close together, as Casey moved up and sat down next to Vuxten. The Terran troop looked as fresh as ever in his loading frame. The black armor plates he'd put on over his adaptive camouflage were unmarred, his armored boots were shined, and he took off his face mask, exposing that he wasn't even sweaty.
"How is she?" Vuxten asked.
"Ready to come to our rescue if things go south of a hooker's backside," Casey said.
"You know, you don't talk like a religious person," Vuxten said. He held up his hand, even though Casey just snorted in amusement. "I've met a few of the guys from the Crusade, seen the Sisters in action, they talk a lot different than you."
"Fifth Reformation," Casey shrugged. He grinned. "I've been in the military for over nine hundred years, sir, joined the Planetary Guard at sixteen as a big dumb farm boy from the Black Range Plains. Transferred to Space Force and saw combat by the time I was seventeen," his grin got wider, and again Vuxten found himself wondering just how many teeth a Terran had in their mouth. "The war didn't end until I was almost forty," the grin somehow got wider. "The Elders, they had... well... they had changed my life path for me, in accordance to what they saw my destiny to be. Informed me that I was to stay in Space Force."
Vuxten frowned. "Why?"
Casey closed his eye and was silent for a moment. He opened it, sat down slowly, and waved his hand to encompass the sleeping Telkan Marines.
"They decided that this was where I belonged. Right here. Leading others," he said.
"I don't know much about Terrans, much less your people," Vuxten said. He reached out and laid his hand on the heavy gun he'd set down beside him. "The first time I saw your people, I was woken up after a shift of hosing out the interrogation cells. I'd been informed I was now Corporate Security and was going to have to fight the Precursors."
"Yeah, I get that, sir," Casey said. "Kind of how I ended up in Space Force," he made a buzzing sound. "Citizen Casey, you are now Space Force and fined fifteen credits for unauthorized wear of Planetary Guard uniform."
There was silence for a long moment.
--be careful-- 471 transmitted, taking a quick break from arranging his manufacturing queue in one of his city states. --touchy touchy--
"I once got fined a half day's pay because an Overseer got blood on his uniform leaving a cell that he had shot a Telkan female in the head only moments before," Vuxten said quietly. "I hadn't cleaned the cell yet, I was waiting outside. He fined me as he walked out."
"Oof, that's rough," Casey said. "Now the Marine Corps gave you a gun and told you not to let that happen to any other being."
Vuxten nodded.
"Why do you stay in?" Vuxten asked. "Nine hundred years? Aren't you tired?"
"You feel tired sometimes, sir?" Casey asked. He was running one finger up and down one of the barrels of his rotary minigun.
"Sometimes. Like now. I feel tired and wonder if I've gotten in over my head," Vuxten admitted. "Can't let any doubt show," he gave a wry chuckle and nodded at where Shutruk was sprawled out, his foot twitching as he dreamed. "Could you imagine how Privates like him would react if I showed doubt in the middle of everything?"
Casey gave another chuckle, this one with an ugly edge. "Nothing lets you know everything's gone sideways when the Lieutenant starts screaming about how we're all going to die."
"That happen?" Vuxten asked.
Casey nodded. "Sixth drop. My seventeenth birthday. Left the cake in the mess hall. Dropship took heavy bioplasma hits, one of the engines exploded and we starting spinning in. The Looey blew chunks into his helmet and started screaming we were all going to die."
"At least he was wrong," Vuxten said.
"He was SUDS'd, like everyone but me," Casey said. His voice got hard. "I was fighting from the wreckage of the dropship, using it as a fighting position, while him and everyone else were gettting SUDS'd out and decanted."
Vuxten shifted slightly, not sure if he preferred that long ass pink golf ball joke to what they were talking about now. "How long were you there?"
"Two months," Casey said. "Stripping rations from dead men till I got the dropship's nanoforge working," Casey gave a chuckle, reached up and touched his datalink.
Vuxten saw the incoming data request from Casey and allowed it. It was creation engine templates, all cracked and jailborked.
"What's this?" Vuxten asked.
"Telkan and battle buddy rations. Loaded it while we were on top of Gobbler here," he said. "Main nutripaste, standard Space Force troop transport flavor array, basic medicine kits including multivitamin, water additives. Basically everything you need to keep your men in fighting condition if you're sitting in the wreckage of a dropship with only a Class I Nanoforge you hotwired," he patted the nanoforge mounted on his gun's smartframe. "Have your greenie doublecheck it."
471 sighed and passed on his turn, eyeing 442's icon and wishing he'd been able to launch the amphibious attack to take 442's turkey farms away from him. He ran a quick check on the templates and saw that they were standard space force, just the serial numbers filed off and able to be run off of any creation engine. 471's antenna twitched when he saw that there were jailbork codes to break open any nanoforge and print out whatever was needed rather than what the nanoforge was designated as.
471 checked the nanoforge attached to his Telkan Marine's armor and saw that they'd load in just fine.
--checks out-- he said, then went back to nervously nibbling on the tip of his bladearm as one of 442's ocean units passed close to his hidden fleet during the other's turn.
"Think we'll need it?" Vuxten asked. He watched as Casey checked the status of some complex device the nanoforge on his weapon was slow-printing.
"I did," Casey shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe, maybe not. Hopefully you'll never need it and it'll just sit there in your implant's long term archive storage, compressed and cold, for your whole career."
"Proper preperation prevents piss poor performance," Vuxten quoted.
"Exactly, sir," Casey said. "If you don't need it, you're that paranoid officer who stresses over everything and tries to micromanage everything. If you do need it, you're lucky and probably stole the idea from a superior officer."
Vuxten smiled at that.
"Get some rest, sir," Casey said. He tapped one armored fingertip against the barrel of his minigun. "It's another forty hours till we get there."
-------------------
"...so then the kid, the kid, right, the kid gets like mondo great grades and junk, and like totally rocks all of like fourth grade, becoming, like, the top grade person and junk," Casey said, his voice slightly high pitched and he waved his hands around. "So, like, his like dad says: 'male child, you are allocated one desire unit' and junk. The kid, he goes like totally: 'I respond with gratitude of your acknowledgement, parental unit. I would like to requisition one pink golf ball for my desire unit.' and the dad like totally gets it for him and junk, totally like wondering what his kid could want a pink golf ball for because it's like totally weird and junk that his kid like totally wants like a pink golf ball and..."
One of the attachments on Casey's loading frame started beeping and he cut off, touching his datalink. Vuxten noticed, again, that it looked like Casey had added more armor to the loading frame. Now a lot of the pistons, gears, and chains were covered by armor.
"We changed direction," the Terran said.
Addox nodded.
"Are you sure, Sergeant?" Plunex asked.
Casey shrugged. "Unless the magnetic field of the planet decided to shift by thirty degrees over a five minute period, then we changed direction, sir. Who knows, sir, might have happened."
"At ease that shit, Casey," Addox said.
The same device beeped again and Casey tapped his datalink. "Huh, we're shifting back onto course. Wonder what we moved around?"
"Something stupid, I'm sure," Addox said, then leaned back and closed his eyes. "And shut up about that damn pink golf ball. I'm pretty sure the kid's just shoving them up his ass."
Vuxten barked out a laugh.
-------------------
"Sergeant Addox?" Vuxten asked over the private command channel, making sure that Plunex wasn't paying attention and was asleep.
"Go ahead, sir," Addox said, not bothering to make his face shield transparent.
"I think I figured out why Casey keeps going back to check on Glory," Vuxten said.
"Let's hear it, sir," Addox said.
"He got left behind a lot during his career. Kept getting dropped and left behind," Vuxten said. "He doesn't want Glory to be left behind."
"Notice what else he's doing, sir?" Addox asked.
"Mapping and reconing the machine," Vuxten said. "That way he's covered and everyone doesn't notice him checking on Glory because he's reconing around us."
"Know why he's checking on Glory?" Addox asked. Vuxten noted the intensity of the human's voice.
"Because Glory isn't a machine, she's a person. A digital sentience, not a machine without feelings."
"Exactly, sir," Addox said.
"That's why I keep giving him permission," Vuxten said. "I don't want her left alone in the dark in that ore gathering bay."
"Good man, sir," Addox said.
Vuxten sat quietly in the darkness of the Precursor machine's automated command center.
---------------
"The last of the Precursor machines are down, General," the voice said from the operations bay below. "Space Force is reporting all enemy destroyed. Ground side is just mopup of machines that didn't get away."
"Thank you, Major," General No'Drak said. He shifted his attention. "Status of the Great Gobbler?"
"It's moved under the edge of the junction of the mountain ranges, sir," the Major said. He tossed it up on the holotank. "The fighting has eased up enough we can get seismic on it now. It's slowed down as it's come closer to the surface and no longer moving in a straight line."
"Does 108th MI still have a line to Sergeant Casey?" General No'Drak asked.
"Specialist Grade Five Peak has reported for duty. Her commander said she's examining the messages right now. Apparently it's some kind of back channel system Casey keeps in operation," the Major said.
"Why?" Ge'ermo'o interrupted.
"Do you want the real reason or the excuse she gave to her commander?" the Major said.
"Both?" Ge'ermo'o suggested, wondering why she would lie.
"Officially, it's because Casey works Ordnance and needs to feed 108th MI ammunition consumption levels in his sector," the Major said. "That's the official reason."
Ge'ermo'o shook his jowls in slight confusion. "That sounds like a likely reason. Althought I do not understand why he would need a discrete channel and hardware devoted solely between the two of them. What is the real reason?"
"Tit pics," No'Drak guessed.
Ge'ermo'o queried his implant on the nature of a 'tit' and was flooded with lewd pictures of Terran female mammary glands as well as a bunch of pictures of small birds as well as a handful of explicitly drawn Rigellian females sporting impossible bare mammalian mammary glands.
"Well, I wasn't going to put it so crudely. I was going to call it 'inter-personal video, text, and image correspondence'," the Major said. "She's known Casey about sixty years, they've got some history."
"Why send pictures of mammary glands?" Ge'ermo'o asked, frowning. "That seems like a lot of effort, to create and conceal a private message device in order to just send images of mammary glands."
"It's a Terran thing," No'Drak said.
Ge'emo'o suddenly put it together as all the pieces suddenly matched together. "Oh! I suddenly understand!"
No'Drak raised an antenna, his specie's version of cocking an eyebrow. "Go on, Most High."
"They are involved in a sexual relationship and they send pictures of body parts to one another as a method of sexual enticement and amusement!" Ge'ermo'o felt proud of himself for putting it together."They cobbled together their communications device in secret so their commanders did not know they intended to carry out a long distance quasi-sexual relationship based on text, pictures, and videos in order to ensure sexual delight despite distance."
The Major, to his credit, didn't snicker.
No'Drak carefully took out a cigarette to avoid busting up with laughter.
"Right you are, Most High," No'Drak said.
"I am a most observant commander. It is why my men trust me so highly," Ge'ermo'o stated, folding all four arms. "If I were their commander, I would look the other way, as improved morale results in improved performance."
It took everything General No'Drak had not to spit out his cigarette in surprise.
"It's slowed to the point we can't detect it," someone called out.
"They've arrived," No'Drak mused.
-----------------
"Ready?" Vuxten asked.
Everyone signalled with their icons they were ready, standing at the single double door that was an approximation of an air lock that would lead out of the vehicle.
Casey triggered the door and it slid open, the tracks already lubricated.
Beyond was an endosteel hallway, big enough for a suited warrior caste Mantid to move around comfortably in, with runners up by the ceiling for green mantids to move down the hallway without getting underfoot.
The passageway ran for about a hundred meters and ended in another door.
"If anyone sees a hobbit with a ring in here, don't steal the ring," Casey said.
"At ease that shit, Casey," Addox said almost absently.
"Platoon, move out," Vuxten ordered.
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GME Gang: On the Subject of the Golden Bridge and Its Inevitable Destruction By Fire 🚀🚀🚀

Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.
Sun Tzu, Art of War
Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge.
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
I was wrong! Blow the bridge! Blow the fucking bridge!
Tugg Speedman, Tropic Thunder
Hello again GME Gang! It’s been a while since I last ranted at you, but I know we’ve been in some very good hands here at WSB with all the great DD folks have posted over the past few weeks. So no need for CPT Hubbard to go for 11 again on the Thumbscroll Dial (until today, that is). I’ve enjoyed a lot of these posts very much, so thank you on behalf of myself and the attention-deficient Rocket Children for continuing to deliver that 100% Chaff-Free GME-grade Wheat at such a feverish clip.
Now, I am going to get to Hong Kong’s Lamest Outlaw and his disconcertingly vacant eyes here shortly. But first I want to take you on a journey back to Christmas Eve, in the year of our lord 2020—a heady time in all our lives. We were all so young and innocent then, weren’t we? Fresh off the run up to 22. Blissfully oblivious that we were living in the last moments where the question What is The War of 1812? was the only acceptable Jeopardy question for the answer: The Last Time the Goddamn U.S. Capitol Was Stormed. This was also before we all became irresponsibly overleveraged in Cathie Wood’s Ornamental Gourds ETF. It was a wondrous, confusing time.
But before we get too off topic, let’s all hop in my 1985 DeLorean (purchased with proceeds from my Jan 15 calls – thanks RC!), fire up the ol’ Flux Capacitor, and get that shit to 88 because something happened that evening that is Worth Pondering—particularly in light of recent events. And just as a friendly reminder: even though you’re going back in time in a DeLorean, no one here has to deviate funds away from GME shares to Save the Clock Tower and you are under no obligation to fulfill a scenario where you wind up making out with your Mom (unless your Mom is Cathie Wood like mine—in which case maybe just some quick over-the-clothes stuff).
On the Subject of How It Once ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas
So what in the holy fuck happened on the night before Christmas, Captain? Well, while all you Gentiles were sleeping soundly after lying to your children about benign home intruders and before gorging yourself on the teat of late-stage capitalism, me and the rest of the Chosen People were up late eating Chinese food and thinking about tendies (self-hating Jew Joke! Ba-zing!). But then: when out on the electric twitter machine there arose such a clatter, I sprang to my phone to see what was the matter. And what to my wondering eyes did appear, a mysterious tweet from a Rich-Ass Viking who had a lot of fucking interesting things to say about this whole GME situation that’s what.
This tweet, buried as a reply to a tweet sent by Mr. Rod Alzmann (@RodAlzmann or u/Uberkikz11), simply said: “Merry Christmas. Shhh.” But it included this screen shot:
[**Image Deleted Due to the Mods - check the link below where someone transcribed it - I'll try to add later**]
Now, this tweet to Rod, sent late at night and likely after a strong Mead or three, was very promptly deleted. But your intrepid cub reporter saw this here tweet that night with his own two eyes—seeing as I am a degenerate GME addict and devoted follower of Mr. Rod Alzmann (Hi Rod!). And I took screenshots, of course, like any responsible records custodian might. And so did the dude who wrote a somewhat-overlooked WSB post on this, which included the most pertinent text of the message if you are having trouble reading it here:
https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/kk0omp/christmas_miracle_gamergate_2020_gme_shorts/
Now, what are we to make of this? At the time, I thought it was very interesting. But I did not give it too much attention seeing as how the internet is overcrowded with anonymous weirdos claiming to know more than they do about all sorts of subjects (and now I feel your judging eyes…). Also, there was some very good commentary in that WSB post from some sharp folks about the screenshot author’s questionable use of the shorthand PE/IB—given that private equity and investment banks wouldn’t apparently be involved in a behind-the-scenes transaction with the short funds like what was being discussed there (don’t ask me, I just string together silly words here). But maybe you poke around his Twitter a bit and see for yourself.
Still, plausibility assessments based on preferred nomenclature aside, it seemed to me that some version of that conversation had to be taking place behind the scenes in a situation like this—given the batshit insane short interest, the funds supposedly involved, and the rapid rise in SP coinciding with RC’s share accumulation, December 21st amended 13D filing, and new status as a GME Insider and Board member (just love saying all that in a row, don’t you?).
So the Viking’s screenshot tweet, and the very likely possibility that shorts are in so deep that they’re attempting to negotiate peace with large shareholders behind the scenes, stuck in my tiny little baby brain as a pretty plausible set of scenarios. And from the look of it, it seems like some funds were at least willing to discuss offering these shorts a Golden Bridge away from Certain Fucking Destruction on the open market. And if the words on the screenshot are at all aligned with reality, these short funds have no good options.
Yet it seems like they are still playing hardball to negotiate the carat on this generous bridge offer they’re getting. Why? Maybe they’ve been getting high on their own supply for so long and they don’t know how to see this situation for what it is. Who knows? Maybe there is no Ryan Cohen and we’re all living in a simulation. But if the recent low-rent anti-GME articles and market manipulation efforts we’re seeing are any indication, these overleveraged short fuckers seem to think they’re going to be able to spin out of this hold and drive the SP back down to even smaller peanuts than it’s at now by sheer force of will (and some deployment of well-honed tricks of the trade amirite?) to emerge unscathed. Or even victorious? I dunno—it’s their delusional fantasy sequence.
But do you know what this scenario reminds me of? And this is just coming to me so please bear with me as I’m not showing this to my editor before we print (I haven’t seen this movie in ages – don’t know what made me think of this!). Fuck it, I’m just gonna start riffing here. The shorts trying to thread this needle, against all odds and logic and common sense, reminds me of that hilarious scene in Dumb and Dumber where haplessly delusional Jim Carrey thinks he has a chance with Mary Samsonite Swanson. But the scene is funny because he really doesn’t. Have any chance. At all.
Now, I know this is a 1990s movie originally released on VHS that we haven’t seen it or even seen it referenced in ages. But now that you’re thinking of it again after all this time, doesn’t it remind you of this too? I know, I get it: You’d have to have fucking peanuts for brains for it not to.
(https://twitter.com/ryancohen/status/1350877969816956934?s=20)
On the Subject of the Continued Internet Bumbling of Mr. Justin Dopierala
Now that screenshot came to mind this past week when something kind of weird happened while we were all enjoying our quick rocket ship ride. And yes, we are briefly going to talk again about Seeking Alpha’s second finest pro-GME author (always been more of a Dmitriy man myself) and recurring CPT Hubbard character, Justin Dopierala (and no, Angela, I do not want to have like 10,000 of his babies).
Last Thursday, after we were all virtually high-fiving one another and counting our future Lambos, Mr. Justin Dopierala, head of Domo Capital and longstanding uber-bull GME shareholder and author at Seeking Alpha (last seen arguing pithily with our own Rod Alzmann about the conservative nature of Rod’s holiday earnings projections. Hi again Rod!), made it known that he sold all of Domo Capital’s 500,000 shares for around $42.50—at the very top of the run up last Thursday morning.
Now, Domo Capital’s business decisions are none of my goddamn business. And there are plenty of market opportunities right now. Shit, I hear there is even a new Cathie Wood Gourd ETF coming online soon that people are really excited about and that I’m sure Justin’s clients would find intriguing. But Domo’s decision to sell seemed curious given a few things: (1) on Wednesday, when the rocket is mid-flight, he got a twitter follow from Gabe Plotkin, head of Melvin Capital, which he promptly tweeted about with a “get a load of this fuckin’ guy” vibe (oh the sweet, intoxicating arrogance of tendie victory, I too love it so); (2) he had also tweeted that day comparing GME’s rise to Apron’s short squeeze that lasted 4 days—where he also stressed to his followers that Apron had a much lower SI than GME; and (3) he then promptly deleted all of these tweets and almost everything else GME-related on Thursday after apparently introducing 500,000 shares of liquidity into the height of a stressed market up and through the Thursday reversal and down into his own personal tendie town.
Now, after seeing all this, I mouthed off a bit to Justin on the electric twitter machine because that’s kind of my thing. And if you are familiar with my prior ramblings, you know that he and I go way back. In response, Justin talked a bit of shit about your intrepid cub reporter here in a comment on Dimitry Kozin’s October 21, 2020 article about a possible sony revenue share deal or something, the comment section of which has become the preferred SA water cooler over there. (And I can’t link that because Thems The Rulez). And Justin hurt my little feelings a bit with his very sharp denial. And by all means have at it over there to check out his comment about why he sold if you give a shit. That is if Justin hasn’t deleted it yet. Free country and all.
But to summarize, on the subject of treacherous coordination with Melvin Capital, Justin said he would not could not in a boat and he would not could not with a goat. And I for one believe him. And do you know why? Because even though Justin seems like a very smart guy in some ways, he’s also a well-known internet bumbler who blurts out things to his internet friends that a person with better self-control would keep to themselves. And so I do not think he is capable of pulling that off or keeping a secret like that. Also: he said he didn’t so I am more than willing to give someone the benefit of any doubt in that area and you should too. I think we keep Hanlon’s razor firmly in mind here about never attributing to malice that which is explained by stupidity. That is unless, of course, you’re Andrew Left and you’re actually trying to convince people that you didn’t realize there was a US presidential inauguration planned for the same time you announced your Super Important TeeVee Yammerfest ‘21 about GME not being a good candidate for an imminent short squeeze no way no how not if my name isn’t Andrew Left short seller expert extraordinaire and Hong Kong’s Most Misunderstood Ethically-Minded Businessman. You can ascribe the fuck out of malice to that one.
No, even though I really have no idea, I think the most likely thing that happened there was that Gabe Plotkin, Master of the Universe, Head of Melvin Capital, and Acolyte of Perennial Most Ethical Business Man MVP candidate, Steven Cohen—got into Justin’s head when Plotkin followed him on twitter during the 57% (at one point 94%) day last Wednesday and then Justin got a bit chippy about it.
And this is the real reason I’m bringing this up.
Because I honestly care very little about the Nervous Investing Habits of the Wisconsin hedge fund voted most likely to prompt a Mr. Roboto reference. No: I think that Gabe Plotkin sent a message with that follow. Without even ever having to say it directly. And I think that after GME’s huge run and getting a little overexcited while working the twitter machine, Justin maybe had a chance to relax with a warm glass of milk that night and reflect on that message. Which I believe was: I’m watching you, motherfucker. And the only reason I’m paying any attention to some shitstain Wisconsin pseudo-fund on a day like today when I am getting my ass fucking torched is because I want you to know that if this GME shit blows up on me, I’m going to fuck your ass up. I will remember the name Domo Capital forevermore. And when you least expect me, I’ll be there. Now: your move, motherfucker.
And once I realized what might have happened there, that made me feel kinda bad for Justin if he felt that way. Definitely a puss move because fuck you Plotkin I drink your fucking milkshake, right? But bad because that’s a mean message for a business colleague to send, Gabriel. Shame on you if that's how you roll like a big New York bully and scaring our poor Justin like that. And if you just wanted to follow him to shoot the shit or swap listicles and Star Wars Prequel memes with a respected contemporary—even in the very midst of getting fucking annihilated while short GME—well Justin has a totally different account for that and he’s not allowed to access it during work hours.
On The Likelihood That The Most Heavily Shorted Stock in History Is Not Being Subject to Continued Market Manipulation When A Steve Cohen Acolyte Is Losing His Fucking Shirt
Have you heard about Steve Fucking Cohen? The guy who looks like he’s tip top of the list of the premier Hollywood casting agency’s rolodex for Saddest Dipshit Still At the Strip Club After Everyone Else Has Already Gone Home? I’m sorry, that’s mean and my mother told me to always be kind to the truly hideous looking because they’re probably still beautiful on the inside (spoiler alert: he’s not!).
Get a load of this guy:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-02/why-sac-capitals-steven-cohen-isnt-in-jail
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-09-02/controversial-hedge-fund-billionaire-steven-cohen-takes-on-hollywood
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/steven-a-cohen-among-the-million-dollar-donors-to-trump-inauguration-2017-04-19
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/steve-cohen-trump
https://nypost.com/2015/06/17/billionaire-steve-cohen-bros-out-with-guy-fieri/
Are you back? I’ve missed you. That was scary, wasn’t it? But allow me to TL/DR all that for you who decided to avoid all that unpleasantness: the dude just has all this bad luck and keeps finding himself into these really awkward situations where someone could potentially question his commitment to ethical business and life practices as well as adherence to the laws of the United States and it’s just not fair and nothing’s fair and Nice Guy Steve Cohen Is The Victim Here So Just Stop Right There Mister I See What You’re Doing. He's also bros with Guy Fieri. Cool.
But why am I talking about a guy who would so clearly pass Billy Madison’s Final Question about Business Ethics without even breaking a sweat?
Because Steve Cohen once had a young Ace Protegee that he loved very much. With the name of an Archangel, so tender and pure. And one day this young man decided he wanted to Prove Himself and Leave Steve’s Nest. And thus was born Melvin Capital, seeded financially by Steve Cohen but named after famed Crooner Melvin H. Tormé, which Gabe’s esteemed mentor Steve would play in his office, over and over, all those years ago.
Now let’s fast forward a bit because I’m boring myself with all that fucking Cohen reading (the bad Cohen—don’t you dare get anyone confused here). As I was saying: Gabe Plotkin, head of Melvin Capital, has by all accounts gotten himself into a bit of a pickle here being so deeply short GME. Lots of people have analyzed and overanalyzed it, and I’m not going to do it again here; that dead horse is well and truly beaten. But to bottom line it: we’re all just staring down what is essentially an unprecedented math problem that will, at some point, resolve itself. And if it revolves itself in favor of the Good Guys, then the Bad Guys will lose a Fuck-ton of Money. That’s your money block quote, WSJ, so fuck off and stop calling me.
Now: picture yourself as a Steve Cohen acolyte that just bought a $44M Miami Compound and who cannot stop talking about how co-owning the Charlotte Hornets is worth it just for the courtsides alone bro once basketball is a thing again and so what if Michael Jordan keeps calling him Gary it’s close enough. Are you feeling the most financially secure that you have ever felt in your young rich life right about now? Or might you be a wee bit worried that you’ve pursued an investment thesis so reckless, so irrationally and intentionally destructive of equity, that even Melvin H. Tormé himself must be rolling in his fucking grave that you would ever dare put at risk your ability to continue being Michael Jordan’s Gary?
And so here is when I again link my good buddy Jim Cramer’s Great Unveiling of the Tactics Deployed by Short Sellers hoping to change the narrative and construct a “new truth” to suppress the SP in the face of, oh, let’s just say: a very promising turnaround story in a high-growth industry by an e-Commerce Canadian Genius who does not fuck around and who knows what he’s fucking doing and aims to sell more and better video games experiences to crackhead video gamers and there’s a million things he wants to do but just you wait, just you wait.
Is this plot that hard to follow?
And I’ll also say this: I know fuck-all about monitoring order flows or how funds continue to create synthetic shares to short shit into oblivion. But I’m just stepping back and thinking of the broader narrative and tactics on this. Spit-balling here again—bear with me. Now, if you were massively short a security while paying out your ass in borrowing fees for the privilege of entering the most crowded short trade in the market and you’re now opposite a massive business turnaround story, Ryan Cohen, numerous institutions, funds, retail whales, Norwegian HNW Freemason Consortiums, and the energy behind the Finest Rocket Children Ever to Grace Planet Fucking Earth—and you’re taking it in the ass week after week here—Do you then play this straight? Do you set aside all of these illegal and deceptive short tactics Jim Cramer candidly outlines in that video even though they’re impossible to enforce and are in fact not enforced? That Jim basically says you’d be professionally negligent if you were short and didn’t do this shit because fuck it whosgonnastopyou? And now you fucked up and that steamroller is barreling down upon you and there are all these things you could theoretically do try to get yourself out of this jam if you were That Kind of Person? Do you set this all aside and, at least in Jim’s view, tie one hand behind your precious ethical back? On the most heavily shorted stock off all time where you are bleeding Real Life Big-Boy Money? Just buying and selling you know, just a job, honest living, nothing much to it, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, can't get too carried away with it.
Or is it something a little bit fucking different than that?
I don’t know. I’m not in the industry myself. And I would never accuse anyone of doing anything so clearly contrary to the values upon which their professional career as Master of the Universe was built. So Gabe: chill. Don’t follow me or something on twitter man, since for all I know that’s Plotkinese for I Hope You Don’t Mind Sleeping With This Severed Horse Head in Your Bed Motherfucker. It’s just money, dude. You seem pretty well taken care of. But man would I be sweating if I were short right now staring down the barrel of your new neighbor Ryan Cohen’s whims and patience and polite Canadian manners and ambiguous emojis that we all lose our shit for. I mean, fuck man: are you ok? Don’t forget to exercise and eat well during all this. Maybe switch to green tea or something. And remember: you’ll always—always—be Michael Jordan’s Gary.
But here is where we return to our good friend Andrew Left from Citron Research.
Do you remember the excitement you felt this past weekend? I’ve never seen WSB so jacked. People were coming out hot on Tuesday—an uptick day! The new phone book’s here! The new phone book's here! What luck to be free of Gary’s tomfoolery for one fine day. And then GME spiked right away—reaching a high of over $45 that morning.
But then something happened. We all know what it was. But here is where any SEC lookie-loos need to close those Pornhub links and pay closer attention. Because in the moments before the Citron tweet that morning about Andy’s upcoming BuzzFeed Listicle call on Why GME is Scary Investment GRRRR, total short shares available dropped from 1.2M to 0. And a $300K put bet was placed on a weekly with a strike price well over 10% out of the money at the very moment that GME’s price was accelerating rapidly. (H/t u/FatAspirations). That’s some WSB-level shit right there.
And yet they pull it off! GME immediately shoots down nearly 30% intraday, and eventually climbing abck up above 10%, making us all feel a little weird and like ungrateful millennial brats for feeling so shitty about a 10% day. But we all know what fucking happened, now don’t we?
So what can we say about ol’ Andy? Now, many of you know Andy as the dumbshit who shorted TSLA until he was ground into little bits of dumb dumb dust and made to look ever so foolish over and over again until he finally cried drunk uncle and flipped to being long TSLA and now he’s cool to you or whatever. Or you might know him as the guy who puts out really shoddy research that often, by pure happenstance, drives a new narrative to control the orderflow and SP on a WSB-beloved security like PLTR? You know the guy I’m talking about. Once in hot pursuit by Hong Kong fuzz, an International Man of Obviousness with a face that says: why yes, I will have another vodka tonic thankyouverymuch. That’s him.
Well, just like future call-back candidate for the role of Frightened Inmate #2, Mr. Steve Cohen, Andy is also but a Caveman—frightened and confused by your modern concepts of “ethics” and “rules.” No! No!—He’s a straight shooter! Devoted to rooting out obvious frauds, like Lukin Coffee and TSLA (Do not fuck with Elon or my Hot Mom’s ETF, Andy). And like the aspirations of Antoine Bugle Boy when he entered the blue jeans market, Andy saw an overcrowded short trade here based on an overly simplistic and obsolete short thesis about GME and said: “Me Too!” And as this thing is ripping to the stratosphere, Andy starts ringing his dumb dumb twitter bell and saying hear ye, hear ye—Inauguration Day and time it shall be for all my Big Brain thoughts about GME!
Nothing weird about that. No sir.
So Andy Citron or whatever the fuck his name is will be putting out some dumbshit video or something today in what seems to be a pretty clear attempt to scare my poor Rocket Children and get those pesky computers to high frequency this shit to drive the SP down to more acceptable loss levels (cause let’s be honest: they’re still taking a fucking bath here) for Mel Tormé’s namesake hedgefund and all the other cretins that are dug into short position here. And they’re gonna try to scare ya’ with the color red! And they know that no one here likes the color red.
But do see what’s going on here and who we’re dealing with. This really ain’t rocket science, Rocket Children. The dude actually tried to claim he forgot about the Inauguration. In 2021. He has not been in a coma, to the best of my knowledge. But you do look a little bleary eyed, Andy. Must have been all that staying up super late working on those last few bullet points to fill out the powerpoint on that GME listicle of yours, eh sport?
Conclusion: On the Subject of Patience and The Arc of The Universe Bending Toward Ryan Fucking Cohen
In my youth there was a period of time where I went out on boats that would drop crates into the waters of the Arctic. Bundled inside them were raw pieces of meat. In the coming days the boats would head back out to the frigid seas, hook the floats bobbing upon the waters, and pull the crates up. Packed inside would be many crabs. They were so delicious & made a good price at market. The difference between the crate that was empty and the create full of bounty was a mystery even the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger pondered at much length.
But the hearty fishermen of my youth already knew the answer long ago. Why did the trap fill up? Time. In time, all traps fill. In time, all things pondered shall be revealed.
--The Fucking Viking, That’s Who
Now look, you all know I have a soft spot for Ryan Cohen. Hell, we all do. He’s a good dude. And the man has played this flawlessly so far. He really has. The fact that we are all sitting here with Ryan Cohen having successfully negotiated three seats on the Board—a bloodless coup as my man Rod Alzmann says—here in January? It’s amazing. His vision for GME is dialed-the-fuck in and extremely exciting. This misunderstood business is on the threshold of an exciting turnaround with Ryan Cohen at the helm. And though I was very much looking forward to the potential repercussions of a vote being called at the annual meeting and what that might mean for the short-term share price, this result is infinitely better. Whatever their motivations, that Board and George Sherman saw the writing on the wall here and accepted the Golden Bridge that Ryan offered them. And Ryan Cohen has done everything he’s set out to do here. And he’s clearly been having fun while doing it. Read up on the guy at some point if you haven’t–there’s lots of good DD out there on him, obviously. And while you’re reading and thinking about Ryan Cohen, think also about guys like Steve Cohen (no fucking relation) and Gabe Plotkin and Andy Left and how lucky we are that we get to roll with RC against that motley crew of fuckwads.
And do you know what? I’m guessing that RC, and maybe even the funds being discussed in that screenshot, have been very patient with Mr. Plotkin et al in recent weeks. You don’t go around bankrupting hedge funds willy nilly, you know--bad form and all that old chap. People tend to remember that. And guys like Steve Cohen and Gabe Plotkin seem like they play for keeps. So now you try to build them a Golden Bridge to cross—maybe not their preferred route of travel, but could be worse and all that, right guys? But for whatever reason it seems like the natural instinct here on the short side is fight over flight. And these short FUD tactics are getting increasingly ridiculous to help slow down the inevitable march toward the detonator right next to that bridge. So relax everyone! And let’s not fool ourselves: All those Masters of the Universes are well aware of the math problem they’re all facing here and they must have a vague grasp of the odds that this goes off in one direction over the other. And what that could mean for the size of their money pits and how many sports teams they can buy this year. Shit, I assume Steve Cohen is counseling his young acolyte about how many sads he himself felt deep down in his man heart on that fateful day in 2008 when he lost $250M on a short when Volkswagon squeezed to infinity—a sadness that he will continue to draw on when his agent finally finds him a role that calls for it.
But my point is: the longs here can afford to be patient and let this play out. When this thing moves, the Viking’s Schrödinger crabs will only be in one pot. And I’m guessing that pot is the one being held by the guy who is actually in total control here: Ryan Goddamn Cohen.
So enjoy the show today. If you’re anything like me, you’re feeling relaxed after gorging yourself on lucky space peanuts all week.(https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/10022/lucky-peanuts/)
And though these silly wabbits with their cumbersome FUD efforts can get a bit tiresome, I’m still very much enjoying this GME show at this point and almost do not want it to end—what with all these Sorkin-esque twists and turns and my Cohen Tweet Decorder Ring getting all this sweet action.
But just remember who Ryan Cohen is, what he cares about, and what, so far, he has told us he intends to do here. And then you might realize, as I have, that Ryan Cohen has had the Gray’s Sports Almanac here all along. This story has already been written. He’s already won. And Melvin Capital’s Schrödinger-ass crabs are dead as fuck. The only question now is: what causes that Golden Bridge to blow? I, for one, am content to wait on RC while counting my good fortune that I can continue to accumulate until whatever happens here happens. So pass the rocket peanuts.
It’s just money after all. Right Gabe?
TL/DR: Psst: a Mysterious Viking once told me about behind-the-scenes Golden Bridge negotiations that are likely taking place that give shorts no chance but the shorts seem to think they’re saying there’s a chance but there really is no chance; Gabe Plotkin, Steve Cohen and Andy Left are misunderstood Straight Shooters who probably answer typical interview questions about their own perceived weaknesses by saying “Sometimes I just care too much about doing the right thing”; and Ryan Cohen is the Goddamn Man so we can all relax and not worry so much about all this dumb short FUD bullshit, ok? OK. 🚀🚀🚀
**If you construe any of the above as investment advice without doing your own DD or at least Googling Ryan Cohen then you are a fucking idiot and may God have mercy on your soul. You too, Andy.
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Part 2: Manipulation Techniques in the CES Letter & How to Avoid Them

Intro: In response to some comments from earlier installments, I wanted to get a few things out of the way up front. Yes, I will be addressing the content/questions of the letter in future installments. Be patient. No, I am not personally attacking Jeremy Runnells and no, reading his back-and-forth with the CES director in question would not change my opinion, because I never claimed that he didn't contact the CES director. My claim was that his public façade was belied by his private comments.
In Part 1, I used his own words and timelines to show that he was telling one story to the general public while telling quite a different story to his friends on the exmormon subreddit. I did that in order to show that the entire premise the letter, a public cry for help from a floundering member who desperately wanted to save his testimony, was false. In fact, Runnells was already mentally out of the Church, trying to devise the best way to lead away the rest of his family, and actively helping others push their own family and friends out of the Church, as well. That information is important because it sets the stage for what follows. When you know that the entire thing is based on a lie, and that it was specifically engineered to be as manipulative as possible, that helps you gauge the truthfulness of the document itself. I made no accusations or judgments on the man, only his contradictory words.
And lastly, I will not link to the letter itself, Jeremy's website, or the exmormon subreddit, and ask that others do not do so in the comments. As always, follow the sub's rules (which includes discussing these things from a faithful perspective and not applauding the letter, as well as treating others with civility), or your comments will be removed and you may potentially earn a ban. This subreddit is for believing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If you can't respect that, have the decency to stay out of the conversation. Thank you.
Previously, I explained what a "gish gallop" was and how the letter is a textbook example of that technique. This kicked off multiple threads in the exmormon sub about how it wasn't, which I admit amused me. (I'm occasionally petty; I'm working on it!) The fact is, when you look at the definition of the term, it matches the CES letter exactly.
To restate for anyone who missed last week's installment of this series, a gish gallop is a debate/manipulation technique in which one person overwhelms another with "a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute them all… In practice, each point raised by the 'Gish galloper' takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place."
RationalWiki elaborates on this technique: "Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of Gallop arguments), a refutation of the same Gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it's always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again)."
It's specifically designed to produce an emotional reaction and make the person being inundated by information panic. In German, this is called dokumentenschock, or "document shock." It's when you get so overloaded by information that your brain simply shuts down and stops processing, because you're so overwhelmed you can't concentrate and you just don't know how to proceed. Your mind blanks because it doesn't know what else to do.
Later in the article, RationalWiki also explains, "The strength of the Gish Gallop is in its ability to create the appearance of authority and control. The Galloper frames the debate and forces opponents to respond on their terms. The Galloper wins by making the point that their opponents have failed to disprove their arguments sufficiently or completely enough for their satisfaction. Their goal is not to win on the facts, but to minimize the time and effort they need to expend to achieve maximum apparent credibility, while ensuring that opponents expend maximum time and effort in rebuttal for inconsequential gains. They want to drop a bomb into your lap and run away, telling you it can only be disarmed when they say it is, and that it isn't their job to tell you when it's disarmed."
In a fantastic presentation given in 2019, René Krywult quoted an ex-LDS anthropologist named Manuel W. Padro, who explained, "This tactic of intentionally luring Latter-day Saints into a situation where they are bombarded with questions they don't know how to answer is a documented tactic used by these groups … and even before it was documented, it was clearly going on. … When I was a kid, the Lighthouse Ministry and CARM (the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry) were the two big groups using this strategy. Now Mormon Stories, the Life After Ministry, Mormonthink and a number of other groups are all relying on the same abusive tactic. They are trying to coerce you into a situation where they can bombard you with so many doubt-provoking questions that they can cause your resolve to collapse and your identity to fall apart. Inside of that vacuum, created by an act of psychological rape, they hope to impregnate you with their own belief system. … If that sounds abusive, it's because that's what it is. It's an extension of the cultural legacy of the Inquisition. They can't torture you, but they can humiliate you and pressure you with questions you don't have an answer to yet. They try to hit you up with too many of these questions to answer, because if they don't, it wouldn't work. That's how the CES letter works. It's garbage, but it's a common strategy in the anti-Mormon ministry.”
Krywult goes on to explain, "If you want to overwhelm someone with mass, each argument per se is irrelevant. As long as you have the word count and enough question marks, you will reach your goal. But if the reader really takes apart one argument after the other, nothing remains."
Another technique used in the CES letter is the fallacy of ad hominum circumstantial. It says that "unofficial apologists" and others responding to the CES letter from a faithful source can't be trusted because they believe in the Church's truth claims. Therefore, the only people equipped to properly respond to the CES letter are former members or those who have never joined the Church. No one who is a faithful member is unbiased enough to respond.
Obviously, this is a ridiculous premise. Who else can better understand our history and beliefs? We all hate it when someone tells us what we're meant to believe. You wouldn't go to a gardener to ask what an astronomer studies, so why would you go to someone who was never a member of the Church to explain what Latter-day Saints actually believe?
Other fallacies present in the document are the appeal to authority (defaulting to what scholars say, rather than addressing the actual evidence presented); appeal to the majority (also called the Bandwagon fallacy — "Most of the world doesn't believe this, so why should we?"); appeal to emotion (manipulating someone's emotions to win an argument); appeal to flattery ("Only the intelligent people will accept what we're saying," i.e., "If you'd only study the Church's history, you'd disbelieve it, too!"); appeal to ridicule (distorting someone's beliefs to make them seem more absurd, a favorite tactic of anti-Mormons everywhere — "Latter-day Saints think they'll get their own planet someday," "They believe that Jesus and Satan were brothers," etc.); accusations of contradiction (i.e., "Yesterday's doctrine is today's false doctrine. Yesterday's prophets are today's heretics"); wishful thinking (asserting that what the author hopes is true is actually true, i.e., "There's no evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon"); appeal to novelty (as if the CES letter was the first of its kind or unique from any other anti-Mormon tract of years past); argument from fallacy ("The CES director couldn't answer my questions, so therefore, the questions don't have answers and the Church is not true!"); argumentum ad nauseam (repeating the same things over and over again, as if that would make them true); false dilemma ("If you can't thoroughly explain every single thing we say, the Church can't be true"); double standard ("The Book of Mormon can't be the word of God because there were clarifications and corrections made in later editions!" despite the fact that the CES letter itself has been published in multiple versions with numerous corrections, additions, omissions, and clarifications); false premise ("The Book of Mormon introduction used to say that the Lamanites were the ancestors of all Native Americans, but DNA says they weren't, so the Book of Mormon can't be true!"); and allegations of cognitive dissonance (i.e., "There are intelligent people who believe in the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, but only idiots would believe that, so their testimonies must be the result of cognitive dissonance!").
In addition to all of these, the letter also employs a lot of charts and tables, because people tend to look at the entire list of entries on the chart, rather than the actual content and arguments being shown, and they think there must be some legitimate arguments if that list is so long.
However, that isn't true, as I'll outline in later segments. A prime example is the list of city and town names Joseph supposedly stole for the Book of Mormon from nearby cities and towns in his vicinity. This list has been debunked many, many times, and will be a pretty fun section when we get to it. In fact, Jeremy Runnells knows it's ridiculous, and asked the exmormon subreddit whether he should take it out, alter it with a disclaimer admitting that it's weak, or leave it as is. There is a screenshot of that here. He ended up leaving it basically as is, with a few of the most egregiously bad arguments removed, because other members of that sub liked it.
Another thing you often see in things like this is the overstating of credentials. We're all used to that. People show up on these subs and say things like, "I was born in the Church and served a mission and held these callings and married in the temple, and…" Runnells does that in his letter several times. How could he, someone who did all of those things, be blindsided by the information in the letter?
Well, that's simple. Everyone has different experiences and everyone studies different things and has different teachers. Some people were taught all of these things while growing up, and others weren't. I was taught in Primary that Brigham Young and Joseph Smith both had multiple wives. Others weren't. That doesn't mean the Church was hiding it, it just means their Primary teacher either didn't know about it or didn't think to teach them that the way mine did. Some people love reading history and theology, and others think that's boring. Someone who studies Church history for fun is going to find out a lot more of these answers than someone who only thinks about the Church's history while he's actually in Church meetings.
In his presentation, Krywult gave some tips for navigating this misinformation and manipulation:
When you're studying and you come across information you didn't know before, stay calm. If you're feeling overwhelmed and in shock, take a break. Find something that helps you restore peace, whether that's praying, reading your scriptures, or vegging out over Netflix or a video game, it doesn't matter. Just take a break until you can calm down and look at things rationally, rather than at the height of emotion. Krywult recommends not reading things like the CES letter when you’re tired, hungry, ill, or angry, because it'll just exacerbate your feelings of shock. Wait until you're in a good headspace to address the issues.
There's so much going on in the letter, and so many questions bombarding you, that the best thing to do is to approach it logically. Check the things you can easily check. While the letter has a lot of things in it that many members haven't heard before, some of it is familiar. Some if it is about things you already know. If you already know about something, you can go over that topic more easily and less emotionally than you would something else. That gives you a good foundation for proceeding with the rest of it.
Check the sources you've been provided. Are they valid? Are they all biased in the same direction? How does the letter address the sources? Are they quoted accurately, or does the author take some liberties? If so, how do those liberties alter the source material's take on the issue?
When you're overloaded with information, the best thing to do is to take it all one point at a time. List them out and rank them according to priority, and deal with the most pressing ones first.
Evaluate it — what about the claim is true or not true? What does it mean if it's entirely true? How does it affect my testimony if it is? This is exactly what I did when I was a kid and I first learned about Joseph putting his seer stone into a hat during the translation process. I realized it didn't matter in the slightest, because it doesn't change anything for me. I still believe the Book of Mormon was translated by the power and gift of God. I still believe that it's an ancient record of people who really lived. I still believe it's another testament of Jesus Christ. I still believe that the doctrine contained inside is true. Does the translation method really matter to me? Nope, it sure doesn't. If anything, it makes it even more impressive to me, for reasons I'll go into more when dealing with that section of the letter.
Analyze those claims — what is Runnells claiming? What are the known facts? What can you find about it? Hunt down everything you can find about that particular topic, and read about it from a variety of sources and slants. Then, pray and figure out what you believe about it. Don't listen to his opinion, or mine, or anyone else's. Listen to the Spirit. Don't move on to the next issue until the first is resolved in your mind. Krywult once had an issue that took him three years to resolve. I had one that took me six months, but in the end, I walked away with a stronger testimony, and so did he.
And don't allow yourself to be overwhelmed by this search. Make time for other things and prioritize your health and your family time. You have time. You don't need to find answers immediately. You don't have to make a decision right away. That's one of the manipulations of the letter, and of the Adversary: they make you feel like you have to make an immediate decision. That is not true. You can take the next 20 years to decide if you want. That pressure is imaginary. You can ignore it. You can bat it aside and buckle down and do your studying at your own pace. You can take your time and do it thoroughly.
Michael Ash gives some more things to remember:
It's okay to disagree about whether or not something is convincing. Different people have difference experiences, as I said. What's convincing to me won't always be convincing to you, and vice versa. That's okay. It's all part of the journey we're each on, to discover our testimonies for ourselves.
Consider the narrative: who's speaking, and what's their motivation? Are they trying to build up your faith, or tear it down? What does the speaker get out of it? What end result are they trying to help you achieve?
Remember the parable of the Sower. A sower tosses out his seeds without care, and some fall on the wayside with no soil. Some fall on rocky ground, some on thorny ground, and some on good soil. In three of the four cases, the seeds fail to grow because they weren't planted in the right soil. That's true of our testimonies. Make sure your testimony is planted in good soil. Make sure you have that firm foundation, and if you don't, search out the answers to the questions that are making that foundation wobbly. Search out that good soil, and plant yourselves there.
Develop your own emotional, intellectual, and spiritual maturity. Don't rely on what information someone else is feeding you. Search it out for yourself, and rely on your Father in Heaven and His Holy Spirit. Consider each question prayerfully, and search your scriptures. Lean on Him to help you through those mists of darkness, because that's what He’s there for. Learn to understand that things aren't always black and white, and history is messy and full of gaps in our knowledge. Ask God for understanding and clarification, and ask Him to point you toward the resources you need to find. I promise you that He will lead you to the answers. It might not happen immediately, but it will happen. He did it for me, and He'll do it for you. Just slow down, take your time, and work through it methodically and patiently. The answers will come.
Sources:
https://www.fairmormon.org/conference/august-2019/fear-leads-to-the-dark-side
https://www.fairmormon.org/answers/Logical_fallacies/Page_1
https://thirdhour.org/blog/faith/ces-lette
http://www.conflictofjustice.com/ces-letters-repetition-skepticism/
http://www.conflictofjustice.com/how-help-mormon-ces-lette
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never stop bettering yourself quotes video

Britney Spears I'll never stop loving you lyrics - YouTube Don't Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People - YouTube Les Brown: NEVER LOOK DOWN ON YOURSELF (Powerful ... Never Doubt Yourself (Motivational Video) The Enemy Within Future - Never Stop (Official Music Video) - YouTube Never give up , Believe in yourself! - YouTube

― Jim Rohn – Self Improvement Quotes. Knowing who you are, how you tick, what makes you YOU, is the most powerful education you could ever give to yourself. 7- “You are essentially who you create yourself to be, and all that occurs in your life is the result of your own making.” ― Stephen Richards – Self Improvement Quotes Inspirational quotes to give strength and motivation Wednesday, April 29, 2015 never stop bettering yourself never stop bettering yourself. at 1:42 PM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Here are 12 quotes that’ll motivate you to work on yourself and improve your life, one small action at a time. 1. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be where you’ve ... Never Stop Bettering Yourself Quotes & Sayings . Showing search results for "Never Stop Bettering Yourself" sorted by relevance. 3832 matching entries found. Related Topics. Games Being Played Fool Bad Relationship Slavery Stop Hating Haters Better Than You Leave Me Alone Education Tolerance Worry Forget The Past Relax Live For The Moment Life Lesson Stop Caring Life Pain. Show more. Trying ... Work Quotes: QUOTATION - Image : Quotes Of the day - Description never stop bettering yourself Sharing is Caring - Don't forget to share this quote Bettering Yourself Quotes. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. Bill Cosby. Don’t compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to the person from yesterday. Anonymous. Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. If you make it a goal to never stop learning, you will remember that the journey is a series of new starts that make you wiser and stronger each time. Let these inspiring quotes from great achievers show you the value of continuing to learn throughout your life. Quotes to Help You Never Stop Learning “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” -Albert Einstein Bettering Yourself Quotes. Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them. Albert Einstein. There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. Aldous Huxley. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Amy Tan Bettering Yourself Sayings and Quotes. Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old bettering yourself quotes, bettering yourself sayings, and bettering yourself proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources. Sep 20, 2018 - Quotes and tips on how to better yourself, your view on life and even your relationship. See more ideas about life, quotes, how to better yourself.

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Britney Spears I'll never stop loving you lyrics - YouTube

About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... Motivational movie for kids, hopefully you learn from this video.The aim of this video is to provide some positive content for the younger audience as most v... If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm. -African ProverbDownload or stream the motivational speech "The Internal Enemy" here:iTunes... Summary below! This is Brendon freestyle, without notes or prompter.Get mp3/transcript of this episode: http://tmblr.co/ZTb1Dv1oi8q65Get Brendon's new book f... Les Brown: NEVER LOOK DOWN ON YOURSELF (Powerful Motivational Video)*CREDIT: Follow Les Brown:Website: https://lesbrown.com/youtube: https://www.youtube.co... Official video for “Never Stop” by Future Listen to Future: https://Future.lnk.to/listenYD Subscribe to the official Future YouTube Channel: https://Future....

never stop bettering yourself quotes

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