Steve

Pre massive European immigration in the mid 1800s, teens were more or less treated like Adults. There were 1000s of unaccoustomed teens among the indentured servants that were 'sent' (forced) to the American colonies in the late 1600s and into the 1700s. Just like many were sent to Australia and a few other British colonies (west indies). These were British teens. In the 1800s, a huge influx of European immigrants happened as we all well know. They came in such huge numbers, unskilled mostly, largely rural, semi illterate, little or no Engish, with too many people, ,chasing too few jobs, that it decimated hundreds of thousans of families if not millions. Whole areas of large cities, New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimre were literally no go zones from thousands of gangs, many present day teens in age. There were no mandatory school and many had lost their fathers and/or mothers or simply abandoned. The Gangs of New York movie is one of the rare movies that hints at the size and scope of the issue. The US cities eventualluy developed the 'Juvenile' system to cope with this. Obligatory school was one of those things to keep kids off the street. The Juvenile detention system, to warehouse them away from adults for a myriad of reasons. Sunday School was also a way to try to keep them morally straight. Orphanages, and other charitable systems were set up for them. As a result, America changed its social view of teenagers. Benjamin Franklin, like many people of the UK was apprenticed at 12 years old in America just like 1000s others at a similar age in the UK. This became a thing of the past in America for logistical and cultural reasons. 12 years old was a fair age in the minds of his age to be sent from home to be apprenticed but 150 years later was deemed an age that needed to be in school and cared after. In the age of affluence of any nation, they tend to coddle their youth. This is true from the days of old. Roman empire, Persian empire, all the way down. America became a global financial power post WW2 and the youth became more and more coddlge for the lack of a better word.

Where are the teachers? Other adults? America is fucked. This seems like a middle class type of school. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=236084591949722&aggr_v_ids[0]=236084591949722&notif_id=1637641299793667&notif_t=watch_follower_video&ref=notif

The right wing has lost in this win. The public overwhelmingly doesn't like the decision. What this also will do is make protesters arm themselves all the more and will be on the look out for Rittenhouse types. More bodies, right wing bodies, will come as a result. It's a net loss for the right. PS: Can any of his supporters provide the gun license he legally would need to walk around with it? Im waiting.

The judge threw the case, he was working for the defense. He went there, with his mother's help (who should be in jail) to kill blacks or anyone helping blacks. He got it accomplished and he got off for it. Its that simple. I don't care to debate the obvious. Those who want to believe otherwise are obviously free to do so. We are at a state in America where primarily the right (although a few on the far left as well but vast majority on the right) no longer have faith in the constitution or laws because they are losing power (in their minds). So, all bets are off. Morals, ethics, the law, decency is out the window. The end game? Their own country or be like the Kurds in Iraq, unofficially autonomous rule in red states. For those outside America who may not be fully aware. The vast majority of those under 30 are far left. Socialism is good word to them. They are for the environment, gay rights, democratic socialism. Kyle Rittenhouse is just the latest salvo in what they deem an existential threat. For them, equal rights, equal treatment under the law, upholding the true meaning of the constitution is no good because it will render them on equal par with those they considered to be below their station/status in America. That's the white power sign our mischievous little Kyle is flashing for the domestic terrorits group, The Proud Boys.

Have the tourists come back in numbers?

I hear ya but I don't give a flying f*ck if it replaces money or not. Crypto has created scores and scores of millionaires of people who otherwise would have no chance and it created them quickly and in some cases without much money. They didnt have to rent a building, create a product or hire anyone. It has a trillion dollar market value. The only time in modern times that a trillion dollar industry has gone by the wayside is if something else replaces. I'm trying to think of a trillion dollar "business", "asset class" or whatever that has gone by the wayside. Billion dollar industries have (makers of VHS machines, etc) things that replaced by an improved product that replaces. Until something replaces cryptos, its here to stay and it won't be overnight. VHS tapes didn't go out of style overnight. The writing was on the wall months and months prior. All I know is that its been without question the best investment I've ever made. You guys have no idea...hehehe.

I had to channel my hidden Coss

So, what's the latest news about getting back into LOS without quarantine, etc.?

Most investors who trade stocks lose money, most people who open a restaurant go out of business within a few years. Crypto is still the best thing out there for the little guy to make decent money. You dont trade bitcoin, you buy and hold it, it has always gone up...eventually...significantly. The orginator of this thread is likely a multi millionaire in any currency you like and if he reads this thread is having a nice laugh. Cryptos has the most skeptics for those over 40 or 50 and creates a lot of wealth for those below it. The big boys are in it, they just aren't saying it. You dont have a trillion dollar market cap just by the masses, its from billions invested in it from the big banks, the 1 percent. What do they know that you don't?

The market will always find its level. My guess is if there are a lot of sanukers, high prices initially then it comes down. If not as many as expected or needed, a buyers market. Overall, in time, it will sort itself out.

I can't wait to go back to Thailand. I'm guessing a lot of pent up 'energy' from prior visitors. I'm further guessing that getting people back won't be a problem. The cases of Covid19 is. Fully vaccinated may be a requirement. If not, I'd be surprised.

Pizza is spanish?

I'd love to have an update from Stonesoup if anyone knows him.

Prediction. Dems will lose big in 2022 off year elections. It will be the lowest black turnout in decades. It will be a low turnout anyway, off year elections have low turnouts for Dem races but I think it will be even moreso. Women will turn out less, etc. Biden will lose a repeat of the 2020 election as well if Trump runs. Trump owns the Republican base. The long term problem for the GOP is its a one person personality cult and what happens when Trump dies? Maybe Desantis. He has the potential to take over. If he ran for President if Trump doesn't, he'll win. He'll pull a lot more of the latino vote on his being Cuban alone.

wern't they found innocent? 😒

Larry Elder, a black Trumper, long time gaslighter, lost in his bid to unseat the California governor. He lost badly but in a way he won. He was the leading candidate among the choices if the people recalled Newcom, the governor. Larry Elder is a piece of shit. One LA publication was fairly accurate when he was described as a 'white supremacist in a black body' or something to that effect. Some will say how can a black person be a white supremacist? How can a Jew help the Nazis and some did. The slave plantations had many who would happily help the master unseating plots to escape, knowing it would result in the person being tortured or killed. Even if it was someone he or she was related to. The movie Django was not all fiction. The character Stephen was common on plantations. I looked deeply as any layman could into Elder's background. He went to a famous LA High School called Crenshaw. They are famous for historically being a state power in basketball. Maybe the most state championships in that state, not sure but it wouldn't surprise me. Larry grew up hating his father for years and was estranged from him, his decision, for many years before they made peace. I have met people who were in HS there around the same time. Elder was by all accounts invisible. He literally had no friends, no girlfriends, nothing. By his own account and his older brother's account when he called in to his radio show, Larry came straight home, studied, read comic books and never really left the house at all. His brother talked him into playing little league for a season but that was it. He was either teased or ignored by the rest of the mostly black school. Larry left LA for Brown then Michigan law and only came back to south Los Angeles to see his mother only. Larry has been on tv literally condoning every single murder by police of blacks. No exceptions. Even Trump said Floyd's death was wrong. Truth is Larry has a visceral hate for his own kind because (and this is supposition), he was never accepted, ridiculed, teased, by other black kids in school so, playing amateur psychologist, he is subconsiously happy when other blacks suffer, especially males. The one thing I am glad about Trump is that they have made black conservatives like Elder either prove they are moral and ethical and live by the conservative dogma or they are hypocrites and Larry has proven it with the things he condone from Trump and his actions in the campaign. Larry is only comfortable around those that hate Blacks as much as he does, the far right. Every group has these types. I have met Thai women who will not date, marry or cross the street to spit on a Thai man due to the years of abuse they suffered at the hands of a Thai father, brother, others and they have never known kindness from a Thai man. We have met those types. Part of the reason they like the scene is because it brings them in contact with foreign men and they love flaunting foreign men in front of Thai men. When I was in HS in the suburbs, there were white girls in my class, nerds, who were teased by the cute cheerleaders, teased by the boys, and only had books and studying as their comfort who (now realized) wanted to date me after I showed them some intention, partly because they could flaunt me in front the boys and in others, teenage angst behavior to their fathers. I had a very good friend who was on our little league team. Great kid, crazy as hell, and to him, had your stereotypical 'overbearng Jewish mom' and the last thing he said he would do is marry a Jewish girl. I learned some Hebrew because his mother compromised that he could play baseball with us on Saturdays if he studied for his bar mitzvah. He took out his anger towards his mother on the religion. He ate more pork than the rest of us, he didn't want anything to do with religion at all. To this day I know some of the prayers, etc, because I had to help him study so we would have our 3rd baseman and lead off batter. Me being a nerd, I actually found it interesting and liked it, and his mom would derisively say to him "Steve is a better Jew than you are". He loved hanging in our neighborhood and I'm not sure if he was called Benny Black because he hung in a black neighborhood or his last name was Schwartz (meaning Black). I heard years later, he married the whitest, gentile girl he could find and changed his surname. If its so, my guess its partly to get back at his mother. She seemed nice to me and the rest of us. She always fed us, had a kind word, etc. but Benny swore she was the devil incarnate who would henpeck him to no end about whatever. Anyway, Larry Elder is kinda sorta like the others I mentioned. Has a deep hatred for his own due to painful childhood experiences. My first girlfiend in LA went to his High School. He was obviously many years her senior and when I started listening to him on the radio and then later saw that he was self hating, I asked her if anyone in her family knew of him. She had an older uncle around that age who went there, maybe a class above, can't recall but he had also confirmed that he was pretty much invisible. No interaction at all, at school. Nothing, his brother was fairly popular and guessed that Larry being his younger brother, was spared worse than what someone like him would have gotten. Finally, Elder is a trained lawyer. He's smart. Very smart. Knows how to expertly gaslight. He's been doing it a very long time. But when pressed he will do what other conservatives in that space do 'talk very fast, say a lot of various things' while avoiding the original assertion. Just to show you how totally incompetent the Democrat party is in the art of politics. In a state that is 30% latino and a vital vote. It was hardly mentioned that racist/bigot Stephen Miller, the one who talked Trump into separating children and babies from migrants as a deterrent, and putting them in cages was brouth to prominence on Larry Elder's radio show when he had a then HS student Stephen Miller on regularly to discuss immigration, etc. And even while in the Trump administration, Elder never disavowed him. How that wasn't made front and center in ads to the latinos of California is probably one of the most incompetent political non acts in history.

the coach of my HS track team now, brother died in the tower. He's since become very right wing.

I was getting ready for work when it happened and thought it was just a freak accident. On my way to work, the 2nd plane hit and I knew then, America will never be the same. We sat in the front of the tv all day to work, getting things half done. I felt badly for my nephews. My thought was that they were now going to live in a world similar to Israeli and Palestinian kids. This was going to be normalized. They wouldn't have the same happy childhood I had. A friend of mine wanted to literally make Afghanistan a parking lot. As the days went on I got some of the 'then' alternative media and gave some context to it all happening. Why bin Laden was doing it and against us and how we read him wrong, took him lightly and it could have been avoided.

Bitcoin retreated price wise for a few months and is now coming back. Mining uses up a lot of power. My guess is that technology will fix that issue if it grows. Solar? Wind? whatever. It's a problem waiting to be solved. Be that as it may, those that bought cryptos anytime before January is making out like a bandit and even if you bought at the previous run up (December 2017) at almost 20k and held it you are still well over 100%. If Stone soup kept even 1 of his coins judging from 2014 prices he's made out very good. No one is talking about that. He was right. And I hope he posts. Anyone know his whereabouts?

Yeah, for far too many, modern meds came too late. In LA I worked with a couple people who died of it and way back in the early 90s and I think they would be alive had the contracted it today.

Bush was too weakened at the end to end the war. I'm not even sure he wanted to. The military-industrial complex is in the DNA of the Bush family. Obama ran on ending it and a combination of being completely lied to about the war by people within the military and government and him not having the political strength to end it, he left office with the war still going on but not to the same degree. Trump also wanted to end it in earnest, fair to him, and when he demanded it within to start the process, he was overtly lied to by the generals, CIA and depart of defense intelligence. Biden is an old hawk. He knew the bullshit because he was part of it. He was going to end it no matter what and he's paying a political price for it. The media, both sides, are making him pay a dear price. The fact of the matter (and James Carville says as much) is that we lost the war. The war was lost a few years ago in earnest. Afghanistan isn't called 'the graveyard of Empires' for no reason. No one has been able to conquer the place. Ah..er..I am wrong. Only one thing has been able to conquer Afghanistan and that is Islam. Islam took about 300 years give or take to convert them and the moslems going there and the ones staying there paid a very heavy price. They suffered a lot of kidnappings, deaths, etc. So, unless you are willing to fight ongoing for a couple centuries, you're going to win. These people live a very rough life generationally, so hardship is encoded in their genes. They can wait you out and while doing so, will hit you and when you counter that they figure out a new soft spot. And when you lose a war, the exit is never, ever smooth. You don't dictate how you leave a war you don't win. Saigon, the last Nazis trying to spirit away to Argentina, Brazil or where ever. The Japanese soldiers able to leave the many south Pacific islands after their comrades made suicide advances. Could the exit have been smoother? Absolutely. Could the exit been smooth. Absolutely not. How America leaves isn't nearly as important as leaving. In such exits there are always going to be a civilian population left hanging. Ask the French women who sold ass to the German officers in Paris.

I would be surprised if the America as we know it today is still the same America by the end of the decade. Definitely won't be by the end of the decade after that. Economically America will implode. There are systemic and endemic financial issues that will not be addressed because both parties will not agree on necessary things. Case in point, the present infrastructure bill. The Republicans know its desperately needed but won't support a Democratic run government for fear Dems will get the credit and secondly (and to some extent legitimately) Dems will add in things that they couldn't get passed with a straight vote such as things related to climate change. When the Republicans are in power and try and pass an infrastructure bill they throw in things that counter Dem ideologies, tax cuts for the wealthy, big oil, big pharma, type of goodies. Another main reason is that about 45% of the country no longer are willing to support the constitution, rule of law, fairness. America is a center left country. Gen Z and Gen Y are farther left, and so the future of America is leftist. Republicans know in a fair election they will not win. So, they want to pick up the ball and kick it out the yard. They see cheating as the only way to win elections. Furthermore, by 2040 and definitely by 2050, America will not look like them. So, they want either a coup, a separate nation or something where they can rule themselves or rule the masses if they can. They are desperate and reactionary and more fascist as a result. Texas and other states are now trying to rewrite history books that label the KKK as bad. Literally. And depicting slaves as 'foreign or imported workers'. This would also include how the Civil War is depicted. When the Republican party can't even bring itself to criticize the January 6th insurrection, its basically an admission they no longer have any iota of morality left. That they are more than willing to go on with a sham of being a Republic and since they practice the art of politics much better than the Dems, they are also more than willing to get in the mud and shit if thats what it takes to win. They often support hypocritical point of views and issues because when you are trying to lead with no regard to ethics or morals you are forced to contradict yourself. BLM marchers should have been shot, but the January 6 invaders were tourists. No supreme court justices in the final year of a presidency when a Dem is in charge but we will do our duty and confirm a justice close to the election when its our guy and we'll do so unashamedly, open and make no apologies for the hypocrisy. America is done. How will it likely look after? Still a power, still relevant but visibly no longer the global power it once was I'd somewhat like the UK in 1945 and 1965. By that time India, Palestine, and the colonies in Africa and the Caribbean lost to independence. And what is left of the commonwealth act far, far more independent of the UK.

Note to self, buy router related stocks.