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This is the second half of my list for Florida's execution roster. As stated in the first part, I split it into two halves in order to follow reddit's character count limitations. Link to part 1.
The currently 105 executed offenders, cases 53 to 105:
53. Aileen Wuornos (~1974-2002, lethal injection): Wuornos murdered 7 men between the ages of 47-65. She was a street prostitute that enticed her victims with promises of sexual favors. After a victim was entrapped, Wuornos shot them dead, and robbed them of their money and their vehicles. Although Wuornos initially claimed that she killed the victims in self defense, she later admitted that they were murdered for their valuables. Her criminal history was extensive, and she had several convictions for armed robbery, assault, DUIs, reckless discharge of firearms, and disorderly conduct. She was also accused of domestic violence by an ex husband, and he placed a restraining order on her within weeks of their marriage.
54. Linroy Bottoson (~1971-2002, lethal injection): In a robbery of a post office, Bottoson stole $14,000 in money orders and $100 in cash, and abducted the post mistress, 74 year old Catherine Alexander. After holding her captive for 3 days, Bottoson stabbed Alexander 16 times, and ran her over with his car. He had several robberies on his criminal record.
55. Amos King Jr. (~1972-2002, lethal injection): After he escaped from a minimum security prison, King broke into the home of 68 year old Natalie Brady and assaulted her. She was raped, stabbed, and savagely beaten in the attack. King then set her house on fire, and returned back to the prison. At his arrival, the prison counselor confronted him about his absence and bloodied clothing. He was stabbed 25 times by King, but managed to survive his injuries. Despite her injuries, Brady managed to crawl out of her burning home, but succumbed to blood loss shortly before help could arrive. King had a previous conviction for robbery.
56. Newton Slawson (1989-2003, lethal injection): Slawson went over to the home of the Wood family (consisting of parents, 23 year old Gerald and 21 year old Peggy, and their children, 4 year old Jennifer and 3 year old Glendon) to buy some cocaine. During an argument over the transaction, Slawson shot and killed Gerald, Jennifer, and Glendon, and wounded Peggy. Slawson then stabbed Peggy (who was 8 months pregnant) with such force that he tore her unborn child out of her womb.
57. Paul Hill (1994-2003, lethal injection): During an attack on an abortion clinic, Hill shot and killed John Britton, a 69 year old abortionist, and his bodyguard, 74 year old James Barrett. Britton’s wife, 68 year old June, was also wounded in the shooting. Hill was a hardline pro life activist and Christian fundamentalist, and saw ending abortion by any means necessary as his personal divine mission.
58. Johnny Robinson (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): Robinson and his teenage accomplice picked up 31 year old Beverly St. George when they found her broken down on the side of the road. They then raped St. George and shot her to death. He tried to claim that they had consensual relations and St. George was hit by an accidental discharge during intercourse. If Robinson's "recollection" was to be believed, he then shot her again to cover up an "accidental" shooting of a white woman. The courts weren't convinced by the defense, and the accomplice admitted that the murder was entirely deliberate and calculated from the beginning. Robinson had several rape convictions and accusations before St. George's murder.
59. John Blackwelder (~1970s-2004, lethal injection): While incarcerated for molesting a 10 year old boy, Blackwelder tied up his cellmate, 39 year old Raymond Wigley, under the alleged pretenses of a bondage session and strangled him to death with makeshift rope. According to Blackwelder, Wigley had been sexually harassing him, and he wanted to put a permeant end to the unwanted advances. Blackwelder had several sexual assault convictions dating back to the 1970s, and was also previously convicted for threatening former vice president Dan Quayle. His victim was the accomplice of another executed offender, John Marek, and was serving a life sentence for assisting him in the torture murder of a woman [for more details on Marek and Wigley's crimes, please see section 68] at the time of his own death.
60. Glen Ocha (1999-2005, lethal injection): Ocha picked up 28 year old Carol Skjerva from a bar and they had sex in his home. However, Skjerva allegedly made mocking remarks towards his genitals and threatened to tell her fiance of their encounter. In a drunken rage and under the influence of ecstasy, Ocha hung her with rope from his kitchen door.
61. Clarence Hill (1982-2006, lethal injection): During an attempted bank robbery with an accomplice, Hill engaged in a shootout with the responding policemen. One of the officers, 26 year old Stephen Taylor, was killed and another was wounded.
62. Arthur Rutherford (1985-2006, lethal injection): Rutherford was hired by a widow, 63 year old Stella Salamon, to do odd jobs around her home. He then drowned Salamon in her bathtub and tried to cash in a check of $2,000 from her account. Salamon's nude body was found with a broken arm, bruising all across her face, and three head wounds.
63. Danny Rolling (~1960s-2006, lethal injection): Rolling murdered a total of 8 people between the ages of 8-55. In 1989, Rolling stabbed 55 year old William Grissom, William’s 24 year old daughter Julie, and his 8 year old grandson Sean to death in their home. Julie’s body was ritualistically mutilated and posed during the attack. A year later, he shot his estranged father, 59 year old James. Although James survived, he was left permanently blind. Rolling then burglarized several student dorms in a week long rampage. Five students, 23 year old Tracy Paules, 23 year old Manuel Taboda, 18 year old Sonja Larson, 17 year old Christa Hoyt, and 17 year old Christina Powell, were bound, raped, and stabbed to death. Only Taboada was spared from any sexual abuse. As with Julia Grissom, Rolling posed the female victims into provocative positions and mutilated their bodies. Roiling decapitated Hoyt and placed her head on a cabinet shelf for the sole purpose of shocking witnesses stumbling across the scene. He had a long history of robberies, assaults, and voyeurism, and some of his earliest convictions occurred when he was a teenager.
64. Ángel Díaz (~1960s-2006, lethal injection): In his native Puerto Rico, Díaz stabbed an unidentified man, who was a director of a local drug rehabilitation center, 19 times while the victim was asleep. Díaz was sentenced for second degree murder, but he escaped after beating a guard near death, and fled to Florida. During his stay in Florida, Díaz and his accomplices robbed a strip club at gunpoint, and shot and killed the manager, 49 year old Joseph Nagy. After Nagy’s murder, he and his accomplices relocated themselves to Connecticut. However, they were arrested for a possession of illegal firearms charge. Díaz and 3 other inmates briefly managed to escape by beating up a guard and threatening another at knifepoint, but were quickly recaptured. After a cellmate testified that Díaz confessed to Nagy’s murder, he was deported back to Florida and sentenced to death. His execution sparked controversy, as it took him 34 minutes to succumb to the lethal drugs. Díaz’s other criminal convictions include shooting and injuring an officer during an armed robbery and several drug possession charges. Authorities also suspected him of being involved with several Puerto Rican nationalist insurgent groups.
65. Mark Schwab (1987-2008, lethal injection): Schwab lured 11 year old Junny Rios-Martinez into a motel room by posing as a photographer for a surfing magazine. He bound Rios-Martinez, anally penetrated him, and smothered the boy to death with a pillow. Schwab also had a conviction for the sexual battery of a 13 year old boy, and he was released after serving 3 out of an 8 year prison sentence months before Rios-Martinez's murder.
66. Richard Henyard (1993-2008, lethal injection): Henyard and his teenage accomplice carjacked 35 year old Dorothy Lewis, and her two daughters, 7 year old Jamilya and 3 year old Jasmine. The pair raped Dorothy, and shot and killed both of her daughters. Dorothy was also shot in the head, but was able to survive. Dorothy recounted that she tried praying for her and her children's safety, and Henyard taunted her by mockingly claiming to be Satan himself.
67. Wayne Tompkins (~1980s-2008, lethal injection): While helping his girlfriend move from their home, Tompkins made sexual advances on her 15 year old daughter, Lisa DeCarr. When she rejected him, Tompkins raped and strangeld her to death with a bathrobe, and tried to report DeCarr as a runaway. Tompkins also had several sexual assault convictions and accusations prior to the murder. One incident involved him abducting and abusing a gas station clerk.
68. John Marek (~1980s-2008, lethal injection): Marek and his accomplice, Raymond Wigley, picked up 47 year old Adela Simmons. They forced Simmons to perform oral sex on them, burned her fingers and pubic hairs, and strangled her to death with a bandana. The pair then dumped her body near a beach. Marek was sentenced to death for Simmons' murder, while Wigley was given a life sentence. While in prison, Wigley himself was strangled to death by the above mentioned John Blackwelder.
69. Martin Grossman (1984-2010, lethal injection): Grossman was given probation after a spree involving the burglary of an ex girlfriend's home and stealing cars. While out shooting a stolen handgun with a friend, they were confronted by Margaret Park, a 26 year old wildlife ranger. Wanting to avoid being arrested and put back into prison for violating his parole, Grossman and his friend attacked Park with a flashlight. They wrestled her service pistol away from her and shot and killed Park with it. Due to Grossman being Jewish, his death sentence outraged several Jewish organizations across the globe, and they petitioned ceaselessly for his clemency.
70. Manuel Valle (1978-2011, lethal injection): While driving a stolen car, Valle was pulled over by Louis Pena, a 41 year old police officer, for a traffic violation. In the confrontation, Valle shot Pena and his partner. Although Pena was killed in the shooting, his partner's life was saved by a bullet proof vest.
71. Oba Chandler (~1960s-2011, lethal injection): Chandler enticed a woman, 36 year old Joan Rogers, and her two daughters, 17 year old Michelle and 14 year old Christe, with the promise of a boat ride. On board, he bound the family with rope and raped all three of them. Chandler then tied concrete blocks around Joan and her daughters' necks and tossed them into the ocean to drown. He also raped and strangled 20 year old Ivelisse Berrios–Beguerisse after abducting her from a mall, and was linked to the murder by a 2014 DNA test 3 years after his execution. Chandler was an inveterate sexual predator with a very long criminal history, and was first arrested for car theft in his early teens. Many of his other crimes include several convictions of armed robbery, burglary, rape, counterfeiting, and kidnapping. In one incident, he broke into a couple’s house, and sexually assaulted the wife in front of her husband. One surviving victim, a 24 year old Canadian tourist, helped investigators tie Chandler to the Rogers’ murders with her reports.
72. Robert Waterhouse (~1966-2012, lethal injection): In 1966, Waterhouse snuck into the home of 77 year old Ella Carter, and raped and strangled her to death. He was paroled after serving 8 years of a life sentence. A few years later, Waterhouse picked up 29 year old Deborah Kammerer from a bar and assaulted her on a nearby beach. He stabbed and violated Kammerer with a broken bottle, shoved a tampon down her throat, and drowned her in the ocean waters.
73. David Gore (1981-2012, lethal injection): Gore and his cousin abducted and murdered 4 teenage girls (17 year old Ying Hua Ling, 17 year old Lynn Eilliot, 14 year old Angelica LaVallee, 14 year old Barbara Byer) and 2 grown women (48 year old Hsiang Huang Ling and 35 year old Judith Daley). The victims were kidnapped through force, picked up while hitchhiking, or tricked into thinking that Gore was a police officer detaining them. They were then tied up, raped, and shot or strangled to death. The cousins dismembered the bodies in their attempts to destroy them and buried the scattered remains in shallow graves. Two of their victims, Ying Hua Ling and Hsiang Huang Ling, were a mother and daughter pair of Taiwanese immigrants, and the cousins murdered them together. A 7th victim, 14 year old friend of Eilliot, was also abducted and sodomized, but she managed to escape with Eilliot's help.
74. Manuel Pardo Jr. (1986-2012, lethal injection): Pardo was a corrupt cop heavily involved in the drug trade. After his department fired him for his abuse of power and suspected tampering of investigations, Pardo went on a crime spree. He shot and killed at least 9 men and women in robberies and interpersonal disputes. The victims he murdered in robberies were 39 year old Ulpiano Ledo, 37 year old Luis Robledo, 33 year old Mario Amador, and 28 year old Roberto Alons. In every robbery incident, he stole the victims’ credit cards. Pardo killed 28 year old Fara Quintero in an argument over a ring he pawned to her and 30 year old Sara Musa for refusing his demands of buying him a VCR set with a credit card stolen from one of his previous robberies. Another victim, Michael Millot, a 38 year old Haitian refugee that took up work as a gunsmith, was slain out of Pardo’s fears of him being a police informant. His last murders were 40 year old Ramon Alvero, a drug dealer that he work for, and Alvaro’s girlfriend, 38 year old Daisy Ricard. Pardo turned on the couple after Alvaro stiffed him of a meeting. He shot Alvaro dead, but Padro’s gun jammed when he tried to shoot Ricard as well. As he was beating Ricard to death with his gun, it discharged and hit Pardo’s foot. On death row, Pardo tried to fashion himself as a vigilante trying to rid Florida of all drug related crimes.
75. Larry Mann (~1970s-2012, lethal injection): Mann ambushed 10 year old Elisa Nelson while she was biking from school to a dentist appointment. He raped Nelson and beat her to death with a pipe. Authorities also initially suspected Mann in the murders of several girls in the area, such as 16 year old Janie Sanders and 13 year old Rose Levandoski, but the current thinking is that another (still unknown) predator was likely responsible. Although he had convictions against adult women, Mann was a pedophile with a history of mostly preying on young girls.
76. Elmer Carroll (~1972-2012, lethal injection): Carroll broke into the room of 10 year old Christine McGowan. He raped and strangled the girl to death, tucked the body underneath the bedsheets, and stole her stepfather's construction truck. McGowan's body discovered was by her stepfather when he came to check on her. At the time of the murder, Carroll had two separate convictions (including one against his then 5 year old niece) for child molestation and was first accused of rape at the age of 16.
77. William Van (~1971-2013, lethal injection): Poyck Van Poyck and another man, Frank Valdez, ambushed a prison van that their incarcerated friend was being transported in with the intent of freeing him. The pair shot and killed a guard, 40 year old Fred Griffis and wounded another. Despite overtaking the van, they were forced to retreat without their friend with the arrival of police reinforcements. Both were captured after a brief shootout with the police and were given death sentences for Griffis’ murder. The case sparked controversy when Valdez was beaten to death by other prison guards in his cell. The officers involved were all fired but acquitted for murder in their trials. Van Poyck had several convictions of armed robbery on his record.
78. John Ferguson (~1960s-2013, lethal injection): Ferguson was the mastermind of the Carol City massacre that his above mentioned accomplices, Marvin Francois and Beauford White, participated in. He also committed a series of murders on his own. Two of his other victims, 17 year old Brian Glenfeldt and 17 year old Belinda Worley, were a couple that were ambushed in the parking lot of an ice cream shop. Ferguson raped Worley, shot her and Glenfeldt dead, and ran off with her jewelry and Glenfeldt’s wallet. Another couple, 82 year old Katherine and 75 year old Raymond Perry, were assaulted by Ferguson in their motel room, robbed, and shot dead execution style. Authorities also believe that Ferguson was responsible for the murders of James Ward, a 40 year old runaway from a mental institution, and Joseph Walters (age unknown), but was never convicted of them in court. Ferguson had a troubled upbringing, was stealing cars at the age of 13, and convicted for the attempted murder of an officer. Due to allegations of him being a schizophrenic, his execution was delayed numerous times, which is why he was put to death decades after his accomplices.
79. Marshall Gore (1988-2013, lethal injection): Gore abducted and murdered two women, 30 year old Robyn Novick and 19 year old Susan Roark. Both women were last seen in his company, and they were raped, beaten, and stabbed to death. He also carjacked 32 year old Tina Coralis while she was driving with her 2 year old son Jimmy. Gore raped Tina, beat her with a rock, slit her throat, dumped her on the side of the road, and drove off with her car while Jimmy was still in it. Tina survived the attack and notified the police about her kidnapped son and stolen car. The police were able to rescue Jimmy unharmed and capture Gore without incident.
80. William Happ (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): Happ dragged 21 year old Angela Crowley out of her own car window in a convenience store parking lot. He anally raped and strangled Crowley to death with her pants. A corner's report mentioned that Crowley received over 20 blows to her head during the assault. Happ had several convictions of armed robbery, one of which pertained to an abduction incident.
81. Darius Kimbrough (1991-2013, lethal injection): Kimbrough climbed into the apartment window of 28 year old Denise Collin with the help of a ladder. He raped and repeatedly slammed her head against the wall. She was found bloodied and nude by the paramedics called to the scene. Collin died of her injuries in the hospital a day after the attack. Her murder went unsolved until samples of Kimbrough’s DNA were collected from another one of his rapes. With the presence of additional pubic hairs found in Collin’s room, at least two other men were also certainly involved, but they remain at large to this day.
82. Thomas Knight (~1960s-2013, lethal injection): Knight began his string of murders by abducting his former employer, 64 year old Sydney Gans, and Sydney's wife, 60 year old Lillian. After her forced them to withdraw $50,000 from their bank accounts, Knight shot the Gans' dead. He was apprehended and, but he managed to escape from jail while awaiting trial. While on the run, Knight gunned down a clerk, 54 year old William Culpepper, while holding up a liquor store, and $640 from the cash register. A month later, Knight was recaptured following an armed standoff with police, and sentenced to death for the Gan killings. On death row, he stabbed a correctional officer, 48 year old Richard Burke, to death with a sharpened spoon over the prison allegedly barring him from seeing his mother. Knight had numerous theft and burglary convictions that date back to when he was 9 years old.
83. Juan Chavez (1995-2014, lethal injection): Chavez accosted 9 year old Jimmy Ryce when the boy was dropped off at a stop by a school bus, and abducted him at gunpoint. He took Ryce to a trailer on his employers' property and raped him. When Ryce tried to signal a passing helicopter for help, Chavez shot him in the back of the head, and muffled his cries as he died. The body was then decapitated and dismembered, and Chavez buried the remains near his trailer.
84. Paul Howell (~1990s-2014, lethal injection): Howell was part of a drug smuggling gang. One of the members had a falling out with the ring and made an agreement with law enforcement to testify against them. Howell constructed a microwave bomb to assassinate the witness in her home, and he assigned an associate to carry out the hit. As he was transporting the bomb to its intended destination, the associate was pulled over and detained by deputies. While being processed, the bomb detonated prematurely, and killed a deputy, 35 year old James Fulford, Jr.
85. Robert Henry (1987-2014, lethal injection): As part of his plan to assault the gas station that he worked at, Henry tricked his co workers, 53 year old Phyllis Harris and 35 year old Janet Thermidor, into thinking that a robber was holding him hostage. He duped the women into allowing themselves to be tied up and gagged, as Henry claimed to them that the fictitious "robber" was forcing him to do it. Both women were beaten with hammers as Henry ransacked the station’s store. After he stole a total of $1,269 from the register, he poured gasoline all over the building, and set it on fire. Thermidor and Harris were burned alive in the blaze and died of their injures, but Thermidor survived long enough to identify Henry as the assailant.
86. Robert Hendrix (1990-2014, lethal injection): To prevent his cousin, 25 year old Elmer Scott Jr., from testifying against him in a then upcoming burglary trail, Hendrix broke into the home that he shared with his wife, 18 year old Susan, with an accomplice. He shot Susan and Elmer, beat them with the butt of his rifle, and slashed their throats. In the case that he was about to be tried for, Elmer and Hendrix burglarized a home together, and Elmer agreed to testify against him in exchange for a reduced sentence.
87. John Henry (~1975-2014, lethal injection): In 1975, Henry got into an argument with his first wife, 28 year old Patricia Roddy, while they were driving with her daughters. Henry pulled over and stabbed Patricia to death in front of her children. After he plead guilty, Henry was given a 15 year sentence for second degree murder, and was released in 1983 after serving 8. Shortly after his release, he married 28 year old Suzanne Overstreet. As what happened with his first wife, he fatally stabbed Suzanne during an argument in 1985. He then took his stepson, 4 year old Eugene Christian, to a chicken farm and stabbed him to death as well. Henry also had several convictions for the possession of drugs and illegal firearms.
88. Eddie Davis (~1980s-2014, lethal injection): Davis kidnapped his ex girlfriend's daughter, 11 year Kimberly Waters, from her home and gagged her with a rag. He took the girl to a trailer that he used to live in, and raped and strangled her to death. His criminal activity before the murder included several arrests for burglary and autotheft.
89. Chadwick Banks (1992-2014, lethal injection): Banks shot his wife, 30 year old Cassandra, in the head while she was sleeping on their couch. He then crept into the room of his stepdaughter, 10 year old Melody Cooper, and sexually assaulted her. Melody was also shot dead during the abuse.
90. Johnny Kormondy (~1989-2014, lethal injection): Kormondy and his two accomplices invaded a house that Gary McAdams, a 38 year old banker, shared with his wife, 38 year old Cecilia. The couple were ambushed after they returned home from a high school reunion. Gary was shot and killed by Kormondy, while Cecilia was forced to orally copulate the other intruders. Several items were stolen in the robbery, but my sources didn’t disclose any specifics. Kormondy had several previous convictions of robberies and auto thefts, and the earliest occurred when he was 14.
91. Jerry Correll (1985-2015, lethal injection): Correll shot and killed his ex wife, 25 year old Susan, their daughter, 5 year old Tuesday, Susan's sister, 29 year old Marybeth Jones, and their mother, 58 year old Mary Lou Hines. All four victims were murdered in a home they shared together.
92. Oscar Bolin (~1977-2015, lethal injection): Bolin was sentenced to death for the abductions and murders of 26 year old Teri Matthews, 25 year old Natalie Holley, and 17 year old Stephanie Collins. All 3 victims were kidnapped while they were getting off from work, raped, and killed in beating and stabbing attacks. He raped and strangled a fourth victim, 30 year old Deborah Stowe, to death in Texas, but wasn't charged due to already facing the death penalty in Florida. Bolin also took part in the non fatal abduction and gang rape of a waitress in Ohio, was charged for kidnapping his girlfriend (which were later dropped by the courts), and had several theft convictions that started when he was 15.
93. Mark Asay (1987-2017, lethal injection): Asay shot and killed a black man, 34 year old Robert Booker, during a racially charged fight that he picked at a bar. After Booker's murder, Asay, his brother, and their friend went cruising for prostitutes. They encountered a cross dressing sex worker, 26 year old Robert McDowell, they were acquainted with and picked him up. McDowell was also shot dead by Asay when they got into an argument over payment for an oral sex act.
94. Michael Lambrix (1983-2017, lethal injection): While intoxicated, Lambrix beat one of his friends, 35 year old Clarence Moore, to death with a tire iron, and fatally strangled another friend, 19 year old Aleisha Bryant, with a t-shirt in their trailer. He was previously arrested for welfare fraud and was detained for an unspecified "unrelated charge" during the murder investigation.
95. Patrick Hannon (1991-2017, lethal injection): 27 year old Brandon Snider vandalized the bedroom of his ex girlfriend while she was away on vacation. The ex girlfriend's brother was friends with Hannon, and he convinced him to launch a revenge attack on Snider with the help of another friend. They broke into Snider's apartment, stabbed him, and slit his throat. Snider's roommate, 28 year old Robert Carter, witnessed the murder, and tried hiding underneath his bed. Hannon dragged Carter out and shot him to death.
96. Eric Branch (1991-2018, lethal injection): In 1993, Branch abducted and carjacked 21 year old Susan Morris. He raped, beat, and strangled her to death, and then buried Morris' body in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Branch used Morris' car to flee back to his native Indiana, but was captured for a traffic violation. A registered sex offender, Branch had previous convictions for sexually abusing a 14 year old girl, and raped an unidentified woman 10 days before Morris' murder.
97. José Jiménez (~1990-2018, lethal injection): Jiménez fatally strangled Marie Debas, a 32 year old French woman who was allegedly in a relationship with a Medellin cartel drug runner, during a burglary of her apartment. Two years later, he burglarized the home of 63 year old Phyllis Minas, and stabbed her to death.
98. Bobby Long (~1990-2018, lethal injection): As the “Classified Ad Rapist”, Long raped over 50 women. He was given that epithet due to contacting and luring his victims through classified ads. After one of his victims sought charges that initially convicted him (though were later dropped on appeals), Long’s pattern of sexual violence escalated to murder. Long murdered at least 10 women and teenage girls between the ages of 18-28 and non fatally assaulted a 33 year old woman, Linda Nuttall, and a 17 year old girl, Lisa McVey. The victims were picked up through hitchhiking, forcibly grabbed while walking alone on streets, or were prostitutes lured with promises of payment for sexual favors. Long’s sparing of his last victim, McVey, provided to be his downfall, as it was her meticulously detailed reports that led law enforcement to him.
99. Gary Bowles (~1970s-2019, lethal injection): Bowles lured 6 men, 72 year old Milton Bradley, 59 year old John Roberts, 47 year old Walter Hinton, 47 year old Alverson, 39 year old David Jarman, and 38 year old Albert Morris by prostituting himself to them. Once a victim was enticed, Bowles strangled them, and stole their credit cards. He also had several convictions for armed robbery, hospitalized his stepfather in his early teens, and served a 6 year prison sentence for sexually assaulting his girlfriend.
100. Donald Dillbeck (~1979-2023, lethal injection): In 1979, Dillbeck stole a car, and was pulled over by a deputy, 31 year old Dwight Hall. After a prolonged chase and scuffle, Dillbeck shot and killed Hall with his own gun. He was then given a life sentence for Hall's murder. Dillbeck escaped from prison in 1990, and stabbed 44 year old Robbie Vann to death while trying to seize her car. The pursuing officers recaptured him shortly after the killing, and he was sentenced to death for Vann's murder.
101. Louis Gaskin (~1986-2023, lethal injection): Gaskin started his burglary spree by breaking into the home of couple, 56 year old Robert and 55 year old Georgette Sturmfels. He shot them both dead, and stole their lamp, VCR set, and some jewelry and money. His second target was a house owned by 38 year old Joseph Rector and his wife Mary (age unknown). Although Gaskin shot Joseph, the couple both managed to escape him with their lives. Due to him wearing a ninja costume as a disguise during the robberies, he was dubbed as the "Ninja Killer" by media outlets. Gaskin also had a few robbery convictions at the time of the murders.
102. Darryl Barwick (1983-2023, lethal injection): Barwick stalked 24 year old Rebecca Wendt as she was sunbathing in a pool, followed her to her apartment, and forced himself inside to rob it. He stabbed Wendt 37 times and raped her. At the age of 16, Barwick had committed a similar act of rape and burglary against an unidentified woman, and was released from prison 3 months before Wendt's murder.
103. Duane Owen (1984-2023, lethal injection): Owen raped 14 year old Karen Slattery while burglarizing a home she was babysitting at, and stabbed her to death. A few months later, Owen burglarized another home owned by 38 year old Georgianna Worden. She was sexually assaulted and fatally beaten with a hammer. He was captured while breaking into another house on the same day, and confessed to Worden and Slattery's murders
104. James Barnes (~1988-2023, lethal injection): In 1988, Barnes invaded the home of 41 year old Patricia Miller, and tied her up with her own shoelaces. She was sexually assaulted, beaten to death with a hammer, and Barnes set her bed on fire to destroy any evidence of the crime. 9 years later, Barnes strangled his estranged wife, 44 year old Linda, to death in her home, and stuffed the body into a closet. He stayed in the house until he was arrested by police officers. Barnes also admitted to the shooting deaths of Chester Wetmore, a 14 year old runaway, and Brenda Fletcher, a 50 year old prostitute, but was never charged for their killings. According to Barnes, he killed both victims for stealing from him.
105. Michael Zack III (1996-2023, lethal injection): Zack befriended two women, 40 year old Laura Rosillo and 31 year old Ravonne Smith, while hanging out at bars. He lured Rosillo to the beach with the promise of drugs, and assaulted her with a tire iron. Rosillo was raped, strangled to death, and he buried her body in a sand dune. A day later, he tricked Smith into letting him inside her house. She was smashed in the head with a glass bottle, raped, and stabbed to death. Zack then fled with her car, television set, VCR, and her purse. On a different note, when he was a child, Zack’s older sister dismembered their mother with an ax over an argument regarding the sister’s boyfriend. He used that story to gain the sympathy of his victims. His sister (who was simply institutionalized rather then incarcerated for the murder) also testified about their stepfather’s alleged abuse of them at his trial, though the prosecutors debunked most of her stories.

Seven
...
In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

8 carryover+14
Apr22 Amber Heard 3
Apr23 Sarah Banks 1
Apr24 skip
Apr25 skip
Apr26 Amber Midthunder 3
Apr27 skip
Apr28 Jessica Alba 3
Sarah Silverman free, Jenna Haze (Feb) 2, free lodge, home cinema, bigger kitchen
5 remain
Private Island
January: Cumslut wife Florence Pugh, headmistress Natalia Bryant, right hand Skilah Hurd, Lauren Cohan, Genevieve Padalecki, Skylar Vox, Nya Rivera, Natalia Dyer, Kyler Quinn, Dove Cameron, Kali Roses, anal girl Zooey Deschanel, Stacey Dash, Karma RX, Valkyrae, Lacy Lennon, Alicia Keys, Sasha Banks, Rosamund Pike, Ariel Winter, Heather Graham, Becky Lynch, fuckdoll Brooke Monk, Karlee Grey,
February: wife2 Deborah Ann Woll, wife 3 Elizabeth Olsen, headmistress Jeri Ryan, right hand Kate Mara, Shakira, Boze, Alice Eve, Kathryn Newton, Cumslut Chloe Grace Moretz, Natalie Dormer, Sophia Lillis, fuckdoll megnutt, Nata Lee, Gina Valentina, Sabrina Lynn, Olivia Rodrigo, Sophie Turner, Samara Weaving, Violet Myers, Rashida Jones, Teresa Palmer, Brianna Torres, Melody Marks, Elly Clutch,
March: headmistress Michelle Monaghan, right hand Brittany Snow, Kesha, anal girl Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Biel, Angela White, Milana Vayntrub, Olivia Wilde, Jodie Comer, Kaya Scodelario, Sasha Grey, Alex Daddario, Tania Raymonde, Jessica Chastain, Keira Knightley, Brenda Song, Blair Williams, Shaiden Rogue, Liza Koshy, Eliza Ibarra, Viola Bailey
April: Mackenzie Davis, Emma Myers, Hayley Atwell, Andrea Botez, Anastasia Knight, Nina Pink, Daisy Ridley, Saoirse Ronan, Krystal Boyd, Emma Watson, Anya Taylor Joy, Chloe Bennett, Alex Grey, Kirsten Dunst, Katie Kush,

Played this games since beta… I was 15y old at that time.
Nowadays I play for fun some random modes such as arena, urf and all that kinda games.
Now with Vanguard I uninstalled it until they decide to take it off. I can’t trust a game under Tencent company running an anticheat system under kernel mode. I won’t give a Chinese company total power on my pc.
And realistically… it does nothing as anticheat. You can still run cheat system won’t do anything until someone manually bans you. Ironic they decided to run an automatic “anticheat” to not ban automatically.
You feel secure opening your email, bank account, cloud system either Vanguard analizing everything in your pc? And I run a dual boot for games and for my stuff, but still can’t trust this company.

This is the second half of my list for Oklahoma's execution roster. As mentioned in the first part, I broke it in half to comply with reddit's character limitations. For the link to part 1, please click here.
The currently executed 124 offenders, cases 63-124:
63. Robert Knighton (~1960s-2003, lethal injection): In 1973, after being released from a 1968 armed robbery conviction, Knighton went on his first major crime spree. He stabbed and strangled several men and women during many robberies and home invasions. The only victim that was killed, 32 year old Coffier Day, was shot dead while Knighton was arguing with him in his home. Coffier's father, 53 year old Claude, was also injured in the shooting. Knighton's first crime spree ended when he kidnapped a married couple and their 6 year old daughter. They escaped when the wife and mother of the family attacked Knighton with a knife to protect her husband and daughter. The family then notified the police of their abduction. Knighton managed to secure a 30 year manslaughter conviction and a 10 year armed robbery conviction with a plea deal, and was released to a halfway house in 1989. There, he began dating a female addict and befriended a teenage boy. The trio embarked on a nationwide robbery spree together. In Missouri, they shot and killed 59 year old Frank Merrifield and his 40 year old stepson Roy Donahue while robbing their home, and stole guns and money from them. In Oklahoma, the trio fatally shot a couple, 64 year old Virginia and 62 year old Richard Denney, while carjacking them. Their rampage ended when a woman in Texas grow suspicious of them circling a neighborhood. Knighton had a long history of theft convictions dating back to his childhood, and joined the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Behind bars, he frequently attacked black and Native American inmates out of racial hatred for them.
64. Kenneth Charm (1993-2003, lethal injection): Charm and his teenage cousin lured a family friend, 14 year old Brandy Hill, into their car. They raped Hill and tried strangling her with a towel. When that failed, the cousins bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer.
65. Lewis Gilbert II (1994-2003, lethal injection): Gilbert and his teenage accomplice committed at least 4 robbery murders in Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma, but he was executed for the killing of 37 year old Roxanne Ruddell. They ambushed and kidnapped Ruddell while she was fishing alone. She was robbed of $3 and her truck, tied to a tree, and shot to death. The pair also fatally shot Ruth Loader, a 79 year old Ohioan woman, while abducting her from her residence, and gunned down a Missouri couple, 86 year old William and 76 year old Flossie Brewer, in their home. Gilbert was also sentenced to death for the Brewer murders by the state of Missouri, but was incarcerated in Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death row.
66. Robert Duckett (~1980s-2003, lethal injection): After breaking out of prison, Duckett was picked up hitchhiking by John Howard, a 53 year old store owner. Howard agreed to let Duckett stay with him until he could find a job. The pair soon had a failing out, and Duckett was evicted by his host. He retaliated by tying Howard up with wire and then beating him to death with a fireplace poker. Duckett made off with his car after he switched the license plates, and took several bank bags from his store. He had a long violent criminal history, which included several incidents of assault and robbery. One of the incidents involved the beating of an 83 year old man. Allegedly, Duckett was previously gang-raped by other inmates, and suffered from PTSD from the incident. His attorneys claimed that Howard’s sexual advances trigged those memories, and he was killed as a result of Duckett lashing out at them. However, the prosecution shot the argument down, citing that the murder happened after Duckett was evicted from the apartment.
67. Bryan Toles (1993-2003, lethal injection): Toles and his two accomplices forced themselves into the home of the Franceschi family, and shot and killed the family patriarch, 39 year old Juan, in a struggle. Juan's son, 15 year old Lonnie, was also murdered "execution style" out of fear that he could identify Toles and his accomplices. The only survivor of the attack was Norma, Juan's wife and Lonnie's mother, who escaped by hiding in her older daughter's bedroom.
68. Jackie Willingham (1994-2003, lethal injection): Willingham was a door to door salesman selling perfume in an office building. One women, 62 year old Jayne Van Wey, he tried to solicit rejected him despite his repeated offers. Angered by her "rude behavior", Willingham attacked Van Wey when they had a chance encounter near the building's restroom. He dragged Van Wey out of a stall after following her inside, slammed her head against the bathroom wall several times, and kicked her head. Reportedly, Van Wey choked to death on her own blood.
69. Harold McElmurry III (1999-2003, lethal injection): While under the influence of meth, McElmurry and his wife Vicki broke into a home that a WW2 veteran, 80 year old Robert Pendley, shared with his wife, 75 year old Rosa. Robert and Rosa were both quickly subdued and physically restrained by the couple. McElmurry clubbed Robert to death with a pipe in front of Rosa, who was forced to watch by Vicki. Vicki then held Rosa down as McElmurry stabbed her several times with scissors. After killing the Pendleys, the McElmurrys fled with $70 in cash, a pair of guns, and the victims' car. A few days after the murders, they were captured by border agents while trying to cross into Mexico.
70. Tyrone Darks (~1990s-2004, lethal injection): Darks rammed his ex wife, 26 year old Sherry Goodlow, off the road as she was driving with their 2 year old son. After Goodlow crashed, Darks pulled their son out of the wreckage, shot her to death, and then drove away with him. Just before she succumbed to her injuries, Goodlow managed to call and notify the police about her son’s abduction. The police confronted and arrested Darks at his home, and they found the boy unharmed in their search. Darks and Goodlow’s former marriage was marred with violence, and he was arrested on numerous occasions for assaulting her. On death row, Darks was involved in a scheme to defraud a foundation for 9/11 survivors.
71. Norman Cleary (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): While burglarizing an upper class home with an accomplice, Cleary shot and killed a housekeeper, 44 year old Wanda Neafus, and took her purse and a cane that her employers purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. Cleary had a long criminal history and was previously convicted of beating an 87 year old woman in her home.
72. David Brown (~1983-2004, lethal injection): For several years, Brown violently harassed his ex wife and her family. In one incident, Brown abducted his ex wife and 11 of her customers from a beauty saloon she owned, and held them hostage until he surrendered to police. He was able to leave custody on bond and went into hiding. A few years after the hostage crisis incident, Brown broke into his ex wife's family home and gunned down her father, 47 year old Eldon McGuire.
73. Hung Thanh Le (1992-2004, lethal injection): Le crept into the apartment of another Vietnamese refugee, 34 year old Hai Nguyen, and found him watching TV on the couch. He struck Nguyen from behind with a weightlifting bar, and continued stabbing him with a meat cleaver when he screamed his wife for help. Nguyen's wife phoned the police, and Le fled with the couple's safety deposit box that contained $36,000 and their wedding ring.
74. Robert Bryan (1993-2004, lethal injection): Bryan shot and killed his estranged aunt, 69 year old Mildred, dumped her body on his parents' property, and forged a $1,800 check to himself under her name.
75. Windel Workman (~1980s(?)-2004, lethal injection): Workman beat his girlfriend's daughter, 2 year old Amanda Holman, to death while babysitting her in their home. His ex wives reported that he had a history of child abuse and often violently spanked their children during their marriages.
76. Jimmie Slaughter (1991-2005, lethal injection): Fearing that she was going to tell his wife of their affair, Slaughter stabbed and shot his ex girlfriend, 29 year old Melody Wuertz, and their daughter, 1 year old Jessica. According to court documents, Slaughter mutilated both of their bodies, and he carved an "R" on Melody's stomach. He tried pinning the murders on a black man, but the investigators and the courts dismissed his allegations.
77. George Miller Jr. (1994-2005, lethal injection): During the robbery of a hotel, Miller attacked the auditor, 25 year old Kent Dodd, with a hedge shear and paint cans, and took $122 from the register. Dodd was severely beaten, had muriatic acid shoved down his throat, and was left to die. Just before he died of his injuries, Dodd gave a description of his attacker to the police that matched Miller. A massive amount of circumstantial evidence, such as wearing shoes that resembled the bloodstained footprints next to Dodd's body, a microscopic drop of blood found on his shoes that was tentatively linked to Dodd, his wife's testimony of his unaccounted absence from their home during the murder, and what appeared to be Dodd writing Miller's alias that he knew him by in his own blood, convicted him. Miller’s friends also reported that he was broke and begging them for money a day before the murder, and his wife mentioned him giving her the same amount of money that was stolen from the robbery a day after it happened.
78. Michael Pennington (1991-2005, lethal injection): Pennington shot and killed a clerk, 20 year old Bradley Grooms, while trying to rob a 7-eleven grocery store. He left empty handed when the register failed to open.
79. Kenneth Turrentine (1994-2005, lethal injection): Under the belief that they were stealing money from him for drugs, Turrentine shot and killed his sister, 48 year old Avon Stevenson, and his girlfriend, 39 year old Anita Richardson, during confrontations in their homes. He also gunned down Anita's two children, 22 year old Tina Pennington and 13 year old Martise.
80. Richard Thornburg Jr. (1996-2006, lethal injection): A month after he was shot by an unknown assailant, Thornburg and his accomplices sought revenge by abducting 5 men that he thought was responsible from a trailer. Three of the hostages, 51 year old James Poteet, 39 year old Tery Sheppard, and 24 year old Kieth Smith, were gunned down on the spot, and Thornberg forced the fourth to shoot the fifth with the threat of killing him if he didn’t comply. They then burned down the trailer with the wounded fifth victim still trapped inside, but he managed to escape with his life. Despite being forced to put all the blame on himself in exchange for being spared, the fourth hostage still went forward to the police.
81. John Boltz (1984-2006, lethal injection): To spite his estranged wife following an argument, Boltz attacked her son, 23 year old Doug Kirby, with a knife. Kirby was stabbed a total of 11 times, and he received several fatal wounds to his chest, stomach, and neck.
82. Eric Patton (1994-2006, lethal injection): Patton forced his way into the home of 56 year old Charlene Kauer after she refused his pleading for money. After dragging her around the house as he searched for valuables, Patton stabbed Kauer several times with many different blades objects at hand such as scissors, barbecue forks, and kitchen knifes. Although he confessed to the murder, Patton blamed it on alleged demonic possession and his cocaine addiction.
83. James Malicoat (1997-2006, lethal injection): Malicoat slammed Tessa Leadford, his 13 month old daughter, against a dresser. After she died from the beating, he tucked her into bed, and waited until his daughter's mother returned from work to take her to the hospital. The doctors found that Leadford had been dead for several hours at the time of her arrival, and discovered several injuries such as broken ribs, bite marks, abdominal bleeding, and facial bruising on her body. By his own account, he had abused Leadford on a daily basis. For her role in enabling her boyfriend's treatment of their daughter, Leadford's mother was convicted of first degree murder and given a life sentence.
84. Corey Hamilton (1992-2007, lethal injection): During the robbery of a restaurant, Hamilton shot and killed 4 employees, 26 year old Sandy Lara, 24 year old Stephen Williams, 19 year old Ted Kindley, and 17 year old Joseph Gooch, and made off with $2,000.
85. Jimmy Bland (~1975-2007, lethal injection): Bland shot his boss, 62 year old Doyle Rains, in the head over an argument regarding a borrowed car and dumped the body in a creek. He was previously convicted of killing a soldier, Raymond Prentice (age unknown), and abducting the man's wife and son at the age of 19. Bland served a 20 out of 60 year sentence, and murdered Rains a year after he was released.
86. Frank Welch (~1987-2008, lethal injection): In 1987, Welch attacked 28 year old Jo Cooper, who was 4 months pregnant with her second child, in her home. She was tied up with leather straps, raped and violated with plastic toys, and strangled to death. Cooper’s body was found laying near her infant son by her husband. Another woman, 32 year old Debra Stevens, was also bound, raped, and strangled to death in her home in a near identical fashion a few months later. Although both murders went unsolved for several years, Welch abducted and raped a woman in 1994, and he received a 45 year sentence for it. His DNA samples was collected and filed after his abduction conviction, and linked to both Cooper and Stevens’ murders in a 1997 test.
87. Terry Short (1995-2008, lethal injection): In an attempt to kill his ex girlfriend, Short blew up her apartment complex with a firebomb. She and her family managed to escape, but the blast killed Ken Yamamoto, a 22 year old Japanese exchange student. Yamamoto had no connections to the targeted ex girlfriend's family beyond him having the misfortune of residing in the same apartment.
88. Jessie Cummings Jr. (1991-2009, lethal injection): Cummings was a polygamist that had married and lived with two wives. Under his orders, Cummings’ wives shot and killed his estranged half sister, 46 year old Judy Mayo, and kidnapped her daughter, 11 year old Melissa. He bound his niece to his bed with handcuffs to be raped, and stabbed her to death.
89. Darwin Brown (1995-2009, lethal injection): While robbing a grocery store with three accomplices (including Billy Alverson and Michael Wilson), Brown tied up the clerk, 30 year old Richard Yost, with handcuffs, and then bludgeoned him death with a metal baseball bat. The killing was caught by security cameras, and the footage was used by the prosecution to secure the convictions of Brown and his accomplices.
90. Donald Gilson (1995-2009, lethal injection): Gilson routinely physically abused his live in girlfriend's 5 children (who were all between the ages of 8 and 12 years old). The youngest, 8 year old Shane Coffman, was beaten to death with a board for defecating on the living room carpet. He and his girlfriend then hid the body by stuffing it in a freezer. The body was kept inside it for 6 months until it was discovered by a sheriff's deputy investigating the family's abuse allegations. Gilson's girlfriend was spared the death penalty with a plea deal, and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her part in her son's abuse and murder.
91. Michael DeLozier (1995-2009, lethal injection): While camping with his friends, DeLozier ambushed another pair of campers, 60 year old Orville Bullard and 54 year old Paul Morgan, and shot them to death. They stole Morgan and Bullard's generator, pick up truck, and other camping gear. To cover up their tracks, DeLozier and his friends set their victims' campsite on fire, and severely burned the bodies.
92. Julius Young (1993-2010, lethal injection): For breaking off their relationship, Young beat his ex girlfriend, 20 year old Joyland Morgan and her 6 year old son Kewan, to death with a baseball bat in their apartment.
93. Donald Wackerly II (1996-2010, lethal injection): Wackerly and his wife ambushed and gunned down Pan Sayakhoummane, a 51 year old Laotian immigrant, while he was fishing in the Arkansas River. After he placed Sayakhoummane's body in the man’s own truck, he pushed into a river, and stole his fishing gear. A few months after the murder, Wackerly’s wife turned him in to the police.
94. John Duty (~1970s-2010, lethal injection): Duty was given a life sentence for abducting, raping, and non fatally shooting a female store clerk during a robbery. While incarcerated, he tricked a fellow inmate, 22 year old Curtis Wise Jr. into allowing himself to be tied up as a part of a hostage ruse, and then strangled him to death with shoelaces. At the time of his murder, Wise was serving a conviction for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Duty's execution caused some controversy for the use of pentobarbital, a drug more commonly utilized by veterinarians to euthanize pets.
95. Billy Alverson (1995-2011, lethal injection): Alverson assisted the above mentioned Darwin Brown and Micheal Wilson in the beating death of Richard Yost while robbing a convenience store.
96. Jeffrey Matthews (1994-2011, lethal injection): Matthews and his accomplice shot and killed his great uncle, 77 year old Otis Short, while robbing the man's home. In the robbery, they stole Short's truck, his .32 calibre pistol, and $500. The pair also slit the throat of Short's wife, but she survived her injuries.
97. Gary Welch (~1993-2011, lethal injection): During a fight over a drug shipment, Welch and his partner stabbed another dealer, 32 year old Robert Hardcastle, to death with broken glass bottles. He was previously convicted of battery with a deadly weapon, and was off on probation at the time of Hardcastle's murder.
98. Timothy Stemple (1996-2012, lethal injection): Stemple conspired with his girlfriend to murder his wife, 30 year old Trisha, for her life insurance policy. With the help of his girlfriend's 16 year old nephew or cousin [sources vary], Stemple beat Trisha with a baseball bat, and rammed her to death with his truck.
99. Michael Selsor (~1975-2012, lethal injection): Selsor and his accomplice went on a crime spree and robbed several convenience stores. During their robberies, the pair shot and killed two clerks, 55 year old Clayton Chandler and 20 year old Ina Morris, and injured two others in shooting and stabbing attacks.
100. Michael Hooper (~1992-2012, lethal injection): Hooper kidnapped his ex girlfriend, 23 year old Cynthia Jarman, and her children, 5 year old Timothy and 3 year old Tonya, from her boyfriend's residence. He shot all three of them dead, and buried the bodies in a rancher's field. According to court documents, Hooper was hyper-violent towards Cynthia in their year long relationship.
101. Garry Allen (1986-2012, lethal injection): Allen shot and killed his fiancee, 24 year old Lawanna Titsworth, during an argument at a day care she worked at. He fought with the responding officers trying to arrest him in an attempt to provoke a "suicide by cop" outcome. Despite the officers' best efforts to avoid harming him, Allen lost his eye from an accidental discharge. Due to claims of him having schizophrenia, Allen's execution was a source of controversy.
102. George Ochoa (~1993-2012, lethal injection): A Southside Locos gang member, Ochoa and another hoodlum shot and killed a couple, 38 year old Francisco Morales and 35 year old Maria Yanez, while burglarizing their home. The murders were witnessed by the couple's 14 year old and 10 year old children and stepchildren, who then phoned the police after the shooters' departure.
103. Steven Thacker (~1980s-2012, lethal injection): Thacker kidnapped 25 year old Laci Hill during a botched robbery of her home, and took her to a remote cabin to be raped. She was then strangled and stabbed to death. He fled to Missouri, fatally stabbed 24 year old Forrest Boyd while carjacking him, and used his car to hide out in Tennessee. After the stolen car broke down, Thacker called a tow truck to pick him up. When the driver, 52 year old Ray Patterson, found that he was using a stolen credit card, Thacker stabbed him to death as well. As a teenager, Thacker committed several acts of auto thefts and burglaries. He also engaged in inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, and was released from a Florida prison after serving time for a bad check conviction months before his murders.
104. James DeRosa (2000-2013, lethal injection): DeRosa and his accomplice tricked a couple, 73 year old Curtis and 70 year old Gloria Plummer, that he worked for on their ranch, into letting them inside their house. After they stabbed the Plummers and slit their throats, DeRosa and his accomplice stole $73 and drove away with their truck.
105. Brian Davis (2001-2013, lethal injection): Davis went searching for his girlfriend and their daughter when he found them missing from their home, and called his girlfriend's mother, 56 year old Josephine Sanford, about their whereabouts. Sanford dropped by the couple's residence after failing to find her daughter and granddaughter. At her arrival, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death by Davis. He then left the body in the house, drove off with Sanford’s van, and injured himself in a car accident. As Davis was high while driving, he was arrested for being under the influence. The detaining officers weren’t aware of the murder until Davis’ girlfriend returned to the home later that night, and called 911 after finding her mother’s corpse.
106. Anthony Banks (~1978-2013, lethal injection): In 1978, while robbing a grocery store, Banks shot and killed a clerk, 22 year old David Fremin. A year later, he abducted Sun Travis, a 24 year old South Korean immigrant, from a parking lot. He then sexually assaulted Travis in his car and shot her in the head. Although he was captured and convicted for Fremin's murder, Travis' killing went unsolved until a 1997 DNA test. Banks was originally sentenced to death for Fremin's murder, but it was lifted in favor of a life sentence. He was condemned for a second time after his conviction for Travis' murder.
107. Ronald Lott (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): A sexual predator of elderly women, Lott broke into the homes of 93 year old Zelma Cutler and 83 year old Anna Fowler after cutting off their power. They were tied up with cloth, anally penetrated, beaten, and suffocated to death with pillowcases. The case attracted controversy when another man was erroneously condemned for the murders, and he spent 11 years on death row until a 1997 DNA test linked the murders to Lott. At the time of the discovery, Lott was serving time for two rape convictions.
108. Johnny Black (~1984-2013, lethal injection): Black, two of his brothers, and two other men went looking for a man they feuded with for a fight. While they were crusing on the road, the group encountered a rancher, 54 year old Bill Pogue, and mistook him for their target due to them driving similar vehicles. They forced Poque off the road, pulled him out of his car, and stabbed him a total of 10 times. Pogue's son in law was also dragged out and attacked, but he managed to escape with his life. Black was previously convicted of manslaughter for shooting 49 year old Cecil Martin dead in an argument.
109. Michael Wilson (1995-2014, lethal injection): Wilson was the third participant in the above mentioned beating death of Richard Yost to be executed.
110. Kenneth Hogan (1988-2014, lethal injection): Hogan stabbed 21 year old Lisa Stanley to death while she was babysitting his children. According to autopsy reports, she was stabbed at least 25 times. Stanley had previously accused him of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors believed that she was killed during an argument over the allegations.
111. Clayton Lockett (~1992-2014, lethal injection): Lockett, his cousin, and another accomplice kidnapped 23 year old Bobby Bornt, 18 year old Summer Hair, and Bornt's 9 month son after burglarizing a home. After tying them up with duct tape, they forced their captives to lure a friend, 19 year old Stephanie Neiman, with a phone call. Neiman was also bound and initially survived getting shot multiple times. Out of frustration, Lockett buried her alive, and she succumbed to a combination of suffocation and her injuries. Lockett and his accomplices also gang-raped Hair and beat Bornt, but spared them on the forced condition of their silence. His execution was controversial, as Lockett convulsed for 45 minutes after being injected, and then died from a heart attack. He also had a long criminal history, and was first arrested for burglary as a teenager.
112. Charles Warner (1997-2015, lethal injection): Warner raped his girlfriend's daughter, 11 month old Adriana Waller, and shook her to death. His execution sparked outcry, as the wrong fatal drug was administered by mistake, and Warner complained of "burning pain" as he was being injected. With the botched executions of Lockett and Warner back to back, the state of Oklahoma delayed further executions until 2021.
113. John Grant (~1970s-2021, lethal injection): While serving a 130 year sentence for armed robbery, Grant stabbed a prison cafeteria worker, 58 year old Gay Carter, to death. He had a long criminal history dating back to the age of 11, had several previous convictions of theft and armed robbery, and frequently fought with and assaulted other inmates behind bars. Due to reports of "adverse reactions" to the lethal drugs, Grant's execution was scrutinized by a number of national media outlets.
114. Bigler Stouffer II (1985-2021, lethal injection): Stouffer shot and killed his ex girlfriend, 35 year old Linda Reaves, in her boyfriend's home for breaking up with him. Reaves' boyfriend was also seriously injured in the shooting.
115. Donald Grant (2001-2022, lethal injection): During a robbery of a hotel, Grant fatally shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned two employees, 43 year old Felicia Smith and 29 year old Brenda McElyea, and ran off with $1,500. He spent $200 of the stolen on paying for his girlfriend's bail.
116. Gilbert Postelle (~1998-2022, lethal injection): Postelle’s father was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and they suspected that 57 year old James Anderson, 56 year old Terry Smith, 49 year old Donnie Swindler, and 26 year old Amy Wright were deliberately involved. Out a desire for vengeance, he recruited Postelle, his other son, and another man to kill them. All four victims were fatally gunned down in what was described as a “blitz attack” on their trailer. He was an addict and had several arrests for drug possession and manufacturing dating back to the age of 12.
117. James Coddington (1997-2022, lethal injection): After robbing a grocery store, Coddington went to the home of a friend and co worker, 73 year old Albert Hale, to ask for money. When Hale turned him down, Coddington retaliated by beating him with a claw hammer. Coddington stole $525 and went on to rob 5 more grocery stores. Hale was left alone with his injures for nearly an entire day until he was discovered by his son, and died in the hospital a day later.
118. Benjamin Cole Sr. (2002-2022, lethal injection): Out of anger that her crying interrupted his Nintendo game, Cole beat his daughter from his second wife, 9 month old Brianna, to death. He was previously convicted of abusing his son from a different marriage in California.
119. Richard Fairchild (1996-2023, lethal injection): Fairchild got into a fight with his girlfriend’s 17 year old daughter after making drunken sexual passes at her, and was enraged that she left with a cab driver. He took his anger out on the girl’s younger brother, 3 year old Adam Broomhall, and scalded him with a wall heater. He then repeatedly hit the boy, threw him against a table, and fatally hemorrhaged his head. Bromhall received over 26 blows during the beating.
120. Scott Eizember (2003-2023, lethal injection): Eizember snuck into his ex girlfriend's house to lie in wait for her. However, her roommates, 76 year old A.J. Cantrell and his 70 year old wife Patsy, arrived home earlier then she did. He shot and beat them both to death and then fled the scene.
121. Jemaine Cannon (1995-2023, lethal injection): Cannon was put in prison for assaulting an unidentified woman. He managed to escape and stabbed his girlfriend, 20 year old Sharonda Clark, to death in her apartment.
122. Anthony Sanchez (1996-2023, lethal injection): Sanchez kidnapped 21 year old Jewell Busken from her apartment complex, and then raped and shot her to death. He amassed a following from the anti death penalty movement for claiming that his father was responsible, but such notions were debunked following a 2023 DNA test that concluded Sanchez’s guilt.
123. Phillip Hancock (~1982-2023, lethal injection): In 1982, Hancock shot a drug dealer, 27 year old Charles Warren, dead in a dispute over stolen jewelry and was given a manslaughter conviction for it. He was released after serving a 2 year term. About 17 years later, he shot and killed 58 year old James Lynch III and 37 year old Robert Jett Jr. in a drug house. Despite an eyewitness account describing Lynch and Jett begging for their lives, the case attracted scrutiny when Hancock's attorneys claimed that the shootings were done in self defense.
124. Michael Smith (~2002-2024, lethal injection): A member of the Oak Grove Posse gang, Smith was responsible for two separate fatal shootings on the same day. In one of his murders, he killed Sharath Pulluru, a 24 year old Indian immigrant that worked as a clerk, while robbing a gas station. The other murder occurred when he tried to confront a gang member that he thought was a police informant in his apartment, and gunned down the target’s mother, 40 year old Janet Miller-Moore, when she refused to give away her son’s location. Smith was also given a life sentence for delivering a gun to a shooter that carried out another gang killing.

Having recently decided that I have overall grown to dislike all of NewWho (some individual episodes and Doctors are excellent, but I've really turned the overall philosophy and approach to the show post-2005), I declined to watch the current series.
Still, I was curious to see some opinions and so came on here to have a look, spoilers be damned (also, my friends are watching it and discussing it, so I was gonna be spoiled either way) and I'm seeing some people discussing the silliness and camp of the episodes and how it feels off. In response, others are talking about how DW's always been silly and you should expect that, it can't be dark all the time, etc., which I agree with.
I can't speak for the current episodes, but I do understand where the people feeling bothered by the episodes are coming from and I'm going to throw out a statement for you: the problem isn't that the episodes are silly, it's that RTD is (and always has been) bad at being quirky and campy.
"Camp" is one of those hard to pin down things, a bit like porn: "I know it when I see it". Wikipedia puts it as "an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value." Drilling specifically into Doctor Who's brand of Camp, it's less bad taste (well, depending if JNT's leading or not) and more "ironic value".
See, Classic Who has a lot of Camp value but the trick to being Camp involves two facets: Being entirely unaware of it or knowing just where the "line" is to being knowingly Camp. Classic Who has plenty of examples of the first.
Off the top of my head, there's a bit in Frontios where The Doctor has to push a supposedly heavy and large boulder that's clearly just an inflated plastic ball and the Tractators have to fall over as though they were hit with something extremely heavy. This is Camp because the show is desperately trying to convince you that the "boulder" is heavy, when it quite clearly isn't, and the dissonance in the intensity of the reaction from both Peter Davison and the Tractators makes it funny.
Knowing Camp is a lot harder to do, because you need to know exactly where the "line" is so that it's exaggerated and artificial, but still funny. A great example of Knowing Camp are the works of David Lynch, who might be remembered for the darker moments in his movies, but those moments are usually surrounded with a lot of strange humour that's funny in a way that's hard to explain. I can't tell you why Jack Nance "There was a fish in the percolator" in that specific way is funny or why that bank tellers looking for one of his hands while his friend says "They sow them things back on!" in Wild at Heart is funny... It just is.
To get to the point, RTD is always trying to do Knowing Camp, but he's terrible at it because he overplays his hand every time. The premises for his "wackier" Doctor Who episodes don't feel like sincere weird or quirky pitches, they feel like someone TRYING to deliberately think of a weird or quirky pitch. There's this added layer of trying too hard to be strange or out there or funny, rather than something that comes naturally. This is why most of RTD's monsters (and, I'd argue, most NewWho monsters) don't necessarily stick in our minds as iconic in the same way that a lot of Classic monsters do. Classic Who tried to make them feel threatening but they sometimes looked absurd because of budget limitations. RTD purposefully goes for the absurdity, so it feels like the episode itself isn't taking the threat seriously.
One episode that exemplifies this well is Smith and Jones. The episode has one deliberate villain, The Plasmavore, and the Judoon as "We don't care who dies, we really just need to do our job". The Plasmavore is Anne Reid with a straw. That is absolutely non threatening and the character is written to be an "over the top" villain on purpose and you know that because of the straw.
It's not some alien gadget or threatening instrument, it's a fucking straw, with absolutely no disguise. In Classic Who, I 100% guarantee that, if they had used a straw, they would've done their damndest to glow some bits on, try to make it look threatening in some way. It probably would've failed, but that sincerity and effort would make it camp.
On the other side of things, are the Judoon, which are treated fairly seriously by the plot, even if their language is very exaggeratedly silly (though I think that's only really pushed in their cameo in Series 4). But I want to point out this line: "Have you seen them? There are these things. These great big space rhino things. I mean, rhinos from space. And we're on the moon! Great big space rhinos with guns on the moon."
Now, in the episode, that bit works, because The Doctor is trying to trick The Plasmavore into drinking his blood, so he plays the role of the beffudled and overwhelmed human. But it's indicative of a problem with RTD's attempts at Camp: If you point out how wacky things are, they lose their fun.
This is no more evident than in Partners in Crime, an overall good episode, where the line "I'm waving at fat" always takes me out of it. That line isn't Camp, it's self consciously camp and not even in a fun way. It's RTD stepping out from behind the script and going "Ah, yes, isn't this show strange and wacky and aren't we having fun?". Well... I was having fun, RTD, until you shook me by the shoulders and tried to convince me I was having fun, so now I'm not. Actually, this Christopher Isherwood quote kinda puts the whole thing into perspective (thanks again Wikipedia): "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance."
Since a lot of people here got in RTD's DW when they were kids, it was easy to paper over a lot of those cracks and, nowadays, have a nostalgic glint to it. But coming into his new stuff, now, that problem is noticeable. RTD is bad at camp... Although he does have a skill that I'd say is comparable, but that he doesn't use too often in Doctor Who.
RTD is one of the most successful and well known screenwriters in the U.K. and it's not just because he's a good writer (though he is, I'll say that). Every well known show or movie ever made has a "moment", by which I mean something that grabs the attention in a way that sticks with people who watch it. The Matrix, for example, has dozens of them, from the Blue Pill or Red Pill scene, to the Spoon scene, to Bullet Dodging, to the entrance hall fight. 300 only needed one.
RTD gets these moments by using shock.
A Very English Scandal COULD just have been a run of the mill "based on a true story" show about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal and still been a perfectly fine show. But the bit that makes it stick in the memory (or, at least, it did for me) is the bit where we see a tub of vaseline on the nightstand implying (and immediately showing) that Hugh Grant is going to have anal sex with Ben Whishaw. That bit is shocking because we're not "supposed" to see a tub of vaseline because movies don't show that, even most gay dramas I've seen (admittedly not many) tend to avoid that amount of frankness.
Or It's a Sin, which is a drama about gay youths dealing with the AIDS Epidemic (Plague, more like, but whatever...) in the 80s that also has a scene where a character admits to having pissed in Margaret Thatcher's coffee. Personally, I think he could've gone even further and shown the pissing scene.
Regardless, that's what he's GOOD at. He's good at shocking the audience through something that feels outrageous or daring, and he knows the line. In fact, he's used this tactic in DW before! I still think his best finale is the Series 3 finale because, despite the Deus Ex Machina at the end, he harnesses that ability for being over the top dark and shocking. There's morbidity in the ending, The Master kills half the people of the world and, of course, the moment that can skirt by a bit because of how overstuffed the finale is, the reveal of the Toclafane.
See, that's a case where I can imagine RTD gleefully laughing behind his desk knowing how fucked up and bleak it is to have this adorable little kid and making him into a deformed, disgusting, insane flying head that does genocides, and how that's probably gonna traumatize some of the kiddies. THAT'S the time where seeing the writer behind the episode is actually FUN.
Is RTD gonna harness more of that ability? I dunno, like I said at the top, I'm not watching the current series. Although, all of his statements do reveal a certain preciousness about the show that maybe precludes going that dark again. Still, if you've been feeling mixed on some of RTD's silliness, hopefully this might have given you food for thought.

DISCLAIMER: I'd like to note that I do not consider myself an expert on many of the topics he talks about or even economics in general but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty easily verifiable and basic, and I'll try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so. Given my lack of expertise, none of what I say here should be considered as the final authority on these topics, it's a reddit post for fucks sake, I encourage everyone to search up the relevant data and information on the topics they are interested in or claims they find dubious. It's really not that hard and all the links and data I'm gonna cite here took me less than five minutes to find for each piece of information. If you're not familiar with where to find this data it might take you longer but I promise that anyone with access to the internet can do the same thing I'm doing. Finally, for those looking for some opinionless, academic argument, that's not what this is, this is gonna sound like a rant because it is, I'm posting this for nothing more than my own satisfaction, take from it what you will.
Ok I'm writing this after I finished the whole thing and I said that I'd try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so and the basically entire second half of this is my opinion and I don't make that very clear so sorry about that.
Honestly I'd love to be wrong because I really do think that younger people are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations at the same age but the arguments he makes and the data he uses throughout his talk just sound like such bullshit to me.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott\_galloway\_how\_the\_us\_is\_destroying\_young\_people\_s\_future?
https://www.profgalloway.com/war-on-the-young/
Scott Galloway recently did a Ted talk titled "How the US is destroying young people's future", as well as an accompanying blog post. He's made some fair points about how young people have been put at an inherent disadvantage and that they have it harder than previous generations. That's most likely true and I personally support that point of view, but the a lot data and numbers he makes this argument with seem to be cherry picked, misleading, or just straight up wrong. So let's break his talk down. u/JustTaxLandLol made a pretty good post about him comparing median wages to the S&P500 (https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott\_galloway\_compares\_median\_wage\_to\_sp500/) but I think that Galloway's mistakes are much more comprehensive than just that particular slide.
The first slide with data makes a claim about how pre-tax income, adjusted for inflation, has decreased across generations from grandparents to parents to kids, and that cost of public colleges and home prices have increased significantly across generations too. First of all, categorising generations by whether they have children or grandchildren is kinda nuts. That's a very wide, overlapping, range of ages. If he has actually fixed age ranges for each generation that don't overlap and just made these categorisations for the sake of understandability to a nonacademic audience, I still think that's the wrong choice but fine. However, his claim that real income has decreased across generations is weak at best. This working paper (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap.pdf) from the Fed Reserve was published February 2024, and from the figures that start at page 35, shows that by almost every categorisation they could think of, GenZ earns more at the same age than every previous generation before them. There's some conflict here with Raj Chetty's work but I don't have the time or knowledge to reconcile the two perspectives but at best, the pre-tax income numbers Galloway presents are questionable at best. Furthermore, he doesn't provide anyone a chance at even checking the sources he gets this information from. Not once in his entire talk does he cite a single source. He couldn't even have some tiny text at the bottom of his tables or diagrams saying what organisation he got this data from. Ok so that crossed out bit is wrong, he does have sources they're just very very faint and you can see them if you squint hard enough at the bottom left corner of his graphs. But the source he gives for this slide is a joke. Here's the link https://www.profgalloway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Table-01.png
His "source" is his own analysis. Ok so by his analysis, the average cost of public college is 56000*0.43 = 24080. I'm gonna use numbers from this US News page (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic), which might not be the most reliable source in the world, but it's probably somewhere in the ballpark. So according to US News, average tuition for the 2023-2024 school year for out of state students going to a public school is 23,630 and 10,662 for in state students. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the only conclusion I can draw is that Galloway has cherry-picked his data by only including the cost for out of state students in his analysis. First of all, public schools in the US are there to provide affordable access to higher education FOR RESIDENTS OF ITS STATE. Using only out of state numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Secondly, even if he used only the in state numbers, 10662/56000 is approximately equal to 19%. So if I use his very very questionable pre-tax income numbers, cost of public college for in state students has still increased across his categorisation of generations. It's not like his point would have been invalidated if he had used the in-state numbers, a trend of tuition increasing as a percentage of real income across multiple generations is still very bad. This is my opinion but I guess that he just wanted to find a nice shocking number. I didn't catch this but in their post, u/JustTaxLandLol notes that later on Galloway says "real median income from labor is up 40% since 1974" so he's also contradicting himself in the same talk.
I couldn't be bothered to look into the house price to income column he has so I don't have any comments on that.
His next slide is a point about how the percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did at 30 has been decreasing very significantly over time. This is from a paper in 2016 by Raj Chetty (link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617). I've seen some counterarguments about the methods used in the paper but there are counterarguments for basically every inequality paper in existence so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Those points are more complex than the scope of this post and I lack the expertise to be making them anyways so I believe this slide. I'll admit that Galloway makes a good argument for this slide.
Right after this slide he says "As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary, righteous movement...". He supports this with data on the percentage of US adults who feel "extremely proud" to be American.
Before I talk about the data on this slide, I'd like to be a little anal about things and pick apart his wording and causal claims he makes. When Galloway says "as a result" he's making a causal claim about the relationship between a young person's earning ability and their national pride. Leaving aside the econometric issues of making random causal claims, this is a ridiculous marginalisation of all the other critically important issues in the US. It seems pretty clear to me that reduced national pride amongst younger individuals is a combination of a lack of social mobility (or however you want to word your version of the fading American dream), the continued existence of systematic racism and sexism, US response to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, bodily autonomy (abortion), and many other issues. Not to say that the economic disadvantages of young people doesn't play a role in causing this lack of national pride but come on. He also says "this creates an incendiary righteous movement...". Ok if the "as a result" from the last sentence could be interpreted as the economic disadvantages of young people play some part in their dissatisfaction with the government, it should be obvious to anyone not living under a rock that many of the political conflicts and movements that have erupted in the US over the past few years have little, if anything, to do with earning ability. In the slide after the poll data he shows three photos, one of a MeToo protest, one of a BLM protest, and another of a pro-Palestine protest. I can only interpret this as him making the claim that the younger generations economic difficulties are causally linked to those movements, which is totally bananas.
Now lets talk about the data. He got this from the Gallup polls (link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx, there's a link to download the pdf with the poll numbers at the end of this article). There are 5 options for the Gallup poll: "Extremely proud"; "Very proud"; "Moderately proud"; "Only a little proud"; or "Not at all proud". So Galloway is cherry-picking again. To be fair, it's true that even including the rest of the answers, a quick glance at the data suggests (very strongly) that young people are less proud than older people. There are also more young people who choose "Not at all proud" (11% for 18-34 and 1% for 55+). Though there is probably some argument to be made about whether "extreme" pride is a good thing. Furthermore, "pretty good" and "very good" do not reflect the extremity of choosing, well, the most extreme option.
As an introduction to his next slide he says that "a decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage". I've never heard of this before and am very very skeptical but I'm willing to attribute this to my own ignorance so I'll leave that sentence alone. So on this slide there's a graph with two lines, one is minimum wage across time adjusted for inflation, the other is whats supposed to be minimum wage if adjusted for productivity (also adjusted to inflation I assume). Galloway got this data form the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/), which shows that this gap between productivity began around 1979. This was when Carter was president and right before the Reagan administration. Those who know about the economic history of this time probably won't be surprised since a lot of the policies of this time were rather inegalitarian and heavily favoured the wealthy. I agree that many of the policies of the time contributed heavily to the inequality America faces today and though I haven't read any studies about how this affects minimum wage workers, I believe that minimum wage workers or low income workers in general today have significantly lower purchasing power relative to a few decades ago.
What I have a problem with here is the idea that productivity and minimum wage should increase in tandem. According to the EPI, "Productivity measures how much total economywide income is generated (i.e., for workers, business owners, landlords, and everybody else together) in an average hour of work" and "pay is defined as the average compensation (wages and benefits) of production and nonsupervisory workers. The pay for this group is one appropriate benchmark for 'typical worker pay' because production and nonsupervisory workers have made up roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce over the entire period shown in the figure and because the data for production and nonsupervisory workers exclude extremely highly paid managerial workers like CEOs and other corporate executives". Before I try to break down my complaints with the measures used, my immediate reaction when I saw this was that it seems rather stupid to compare the relationship between average productivity and minimum wage in an industrial economy against the same relationship in a service oriented one. There are just more jobs now that let you make an impact on the economy far beyond what you are paid and it is so so difficult to quantify this change. Using a similar argument, I really have no clue how macro people make models or do estimates for things like productivity but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of using such a measure of productivity because of the increased prevalence of second, third, or n-th order effects that would be present in a measure of something like total gdp but pretty much impossible to identify for any employer. For those who want to read more about this difference between productivity and compensation I think this is the most relevant paper from EPI (https://files.epi.org/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf). There are some points I'm not satisfied with in this paper like them attributing the entirety of the difference between median hourly compensation to average consumer hourly compensation but that would take more time than I want to spend on this.
Now we're still on the same slide. Galloway says "we've kept it [minimum wage] purposely pretty low" twice in three sentences. Now he's suggesting that there's some collective out there that has the political power and desire to keep minimum wage low. By "we" I think he means to suggest that the old-timers have banded together to screw the young people over. Ok buddy. I'm stepping outside the bounds of what's considered strictly economics here a little but pinning the injustices of society on some ethereal enemy whose existence can never be disproven is the same as taking "advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology" (Galloway's words, same TED talk) to me. Maybe there really is some cabal of scheming geezers out there who have some twisted desire to keep the minimum wage low, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of these "injustices" are a result of our existing political and societal institutions being poor and inefficient aggregators of our desires as a society, rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. This certainly makes the problem harder to solve than if there were just some evil 'others' we could get rid of and be done with. Having a target to direct our outrage at, believing that I am good and they are bad, is easier than facing the reality that everyone is born with the selfishness that creates the injustices we live with but that's not gonna make people more agreeable. As an economist, I study the theory of incentives to use the same human selfishness that creates all the problems Galloway talks about to create solutions that hopefully improve our quality of life. This is what I believe is the beauty of being human, all the good and bad that happens stem from the same desires, it is our job to create institutions and systems that allow us to channel our desires in a way that benefits everyone, but I digress. The point is, this enemy that Galloway creates is an effective tactic at convincing people of his argument, but I don't believe such a perspective benefits society at all. Mistakes should be corrected, that doesn't mean they're always the result of ill intentions.
His next slide compares the difference between percentage increase in median household income against percentage increase in median home price, as well as a comparison of the median monthly mortgage between 2019 and 2024. I have nothing to say about the graph, I agree that over time, home prices have increased to an unacceptable level. The Fed funds rate went from 2.4 percent in Feb 2019 to 5.33 percent in Feb 2024 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds). To his credit, Galloway does attribute this increase in mortgage payments to "an acceleration in interest rates" but what's the alternative? Don't increase interest rates? Then if I was Galloway I'd make the same TED talk and talk about how the continued low interest rates contributed to rampant inflation that made all the poor people even poorer. It seems like he's decided to take whatever bad economic event that seems somewhat relevant and made it to be the result of some group's dogged determination to keep the younger generation down. Why is the increase from pre- to post-covid prices on anything surprising. I'd like to meet the genius who saw covid coming and intentionally created this increase in home prices.
He also says "the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits...". I have no idea what point he's making here. Based on what metric, median home price? Monthly mortgage payments? Why do I care about Vancouver, a Canadian city, being number three? Then he talks about how "the incumbents that own assets have weaponized government". Either he's switched to talking about oligopolistic lobbyists in general without saying so or he's still talking about Canada. I dunno. Someone please explain. Then he says "this is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about". Also, everything he just said is talking about how there exists a group of people trying to PREVENT transfers of wealth to new entrants. And there was huge applause after that sentence. Nutsos, all of them.
Ok next slide. Galloway presents two pie charts, comparing the share of household wealth by age in 1989 to 2023. So he's talking directly about inequality in wealth now. Inequality in the US is really really bad, that's a fact. I'm a big fan of the work of Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. These people have been at the forefront of research on inequality for many years now and though their work is not flawless, I'm convinced by the data they present and the methods by which they have aggregated the data and what they show is that inequality is worse than even what the pie charts Galloway presents suggest. However, this is not to say that Galloway makes a valid argument. Please note the grey bits in the pie chart. If Galloway has shown the numbers for everyone under 40 and above 70, the group that's excluded are those between 40 and 70. So those in the age range of 40-70 owned 100 - 19 - 12 = 69% of household wealth in 1989 and 100 - 30 - 7 = 63% in 2023. I could probably go and find how the age demographics of the population have changed over time and I think that with declining birth rates, the percentage change in age demographics would be pretty close to the percentage change in household wealth but I'm tired of beating every slide to death so I'll leave that to someone else if anyone's motivated enough to do that (if my hypothesis is wrong here just comment and I'll make that change). My first thought when I saw this though was again, this guy has paid no regard to structural change in society. Given the increased accessibility of buying stocks over the past three decades is it really that surprising that older people who have had more time and cash at the start of the digital age to invest in companies that are now massive mega-corporations have experienced a higher return on their capital. This is not to say that none of this change in the share of wealth held by those under 40 is due to some inherent unfairness in our society and I have neither the time nor knowledge to separate these effects out but to say that this was a "purposeful" effort to cut their wealth in half is complete and utter bullshit. Also, this guy makes another causal claim WITH NOTHING BUT A CHANGE IN SHARE OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH. Congratulations everyone Scott Galloway has just made every econometrician in the world redundant, I always knew my professors were just trying to confuse me with funny symbols and Greek letters, someone get this guy a Nobel Prize.
Then while introducing his next slide Galloway says that his analyst's presence in the audience "brings the average age of the entire conference down in 11 days". So he's saying that TED knows exactly who's showing up to their event before it happens and that they have the exact birthdates of everyone in the audience too and that they've given this information to one of their speakers. A friend of mine has told me he's just making a joke and that I should let this point go because I'm being too anal about things but yeah I become anal about things when someone suggests sweeping institutional changes in a talk viewed by millions of people so thought I'd include it anyways just as another example of the bullshit this guy has been spewing.
When he moves on to the actual content in the slide the first point he makes is about lower acceptance rates in schools. So I don't have data on this because I couldn't be bothered to go find any so again, I'll change my statement if anyone has reliable data indicating otherwise but I think its pretty safe to say that way less people used to apply than before and combined with an increase in international student applications and enrollments the competition is just way higher than before. The most obvious explanation would be that higher education institutions have made the mistake of not increasing enrollments at a rate quick enough to meet demand. However, according to US News (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing) there were 3982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US. and UCLA is ranked 15th in national universities. So why is it surprising now that university education is becoming more popular that higher ranked universities are harder to get into. So instead of expanding enrollment I think that a well thought out plan of affirmative action would be a much better option of giving "unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable" (what this well thought out plan may be I don't know, I honestly didn't even search up any statistics about affirmative action this was just the first solution I thought of that didn't involve ignoring the crowning achievement of statistics). To his credit, Galloway does include a point about income-based affirmative action at the end of his talk, though he overwhelmingly emphasises increasing enrollment in schools. I don't have any data about that but I think that class sizes at public universities are large enough as it is.
The rest of the slide gives numbers on college debt of house price compared to first year income. College debt is ridiculously high and many people struggle because of it. I don't have the solution and neither does Galloway because he doesn't really mention it. I think that house price-to-first year income is a poor comparison because it doesn't take into account average rate of income increase and no normal person from any generation is looking to buy a house with first year income but there's probably a more appropriate metric out there that shows a similar change anyways so I'm ok with that.
Then he talks about him and his "colleagues" who "artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity". I would like to meet the professors who have control over enrollment rates because none of mine did. Then he says "to my colleagues in higher ed: we're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags". The marketing professor from NYU says he's a public servant...ok.
The slide after that compares Harvard's increase in endowment compared to their increase in enrollment and he calls them a "hedge fund offering classes". I see no issue with this point, he made a great argument, can't really criticise anything here.
Don't worry though he makes up for it by immediately making one of the most egregious statements in this whole talk. We're looking at his next slide, the one titled "Grand Bargain" now. He says that the government should take some of the money that's supposed to be used to forgive existing loans to about 500 of the top public universities to reduce tuition by 2% and year, expand enrollments by 6% a year, and increase vocational programs to 20% of the degrees granted. Then the slide after that, claims this will double freshman seats and cut costs in half in just 10 years. Ok so he thinks that most of the money "earmarked to bail out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn't" should go to future students instead because, I assume from the tone of his words, he doesn't think they need or deserve all that loan forgiveness. So why bring up the increase in college debt previously (the slide I talked about three paragraphs ago)? Anyways that's not the crazy thing. Let's see what happens if you reduce tuition by 2% a year for 10 years. So the calculation goes like this 0.98^{10} is approximately equal to 0.81. So with the number he puts up, tuition decreases by 19% in ten years. If everything before this slide could be attributed to cherry-picking, stupidity, or lack of good data, then fine he's just ignorant even though he shouldn't have been if he went up there to make that talk. But now this is just a FUCKING BAREFACED LIE. I cannot think of a greater insult to the audience's intelligence than the fact that this guy didn't think anyone would pull out a fucking calculator and do the calculation themselves. I won't blame the audience for not saying anything because I'm not sure I would have wanted to do that either but at least from youtube and reddit comments there are a decent number of people who didn't realise this. A similar calculation shows that expanding enrollment by 6% per year increases seats by about 80% total (1.06^{10}). Not sure how that translates in terms of freshman seats but at least this is closer than the tuition claim.
Then his next slide compares wages to the s&p500. This is the point of u/JustTaxLandLol's post and I think his post and the discussion in the comments covers most if not all of my thoughts so you can just read that. https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott_galloway_compares_median_wage_to_sp500/
Ok next slide, "The Transfer: Purposeful". Oh yay he's about to make another causal claim with nothing but a graph on the change in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals. And if we skip ahead to the next slide we'll realise that this claim is that the gradual decrease in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals results in lowered senior poverty and child poverty either remains constant or increases. Yes everybody the newest advancement in economic research has just been released. Lowering top tax rates decreases senior poverty and increases child poverty. And Scott Galloway made that argument in 24 seconds (transcript on TED website has time markers).
Man I really set out with the intention to keep the tone of this post as neutral as I could but I'm just writing out my internal dialogue with less swearing now. I apologise to those who would have preferred a more careful and less emotional knee-jerk response of an analysis but this is a reddit post, its not like there are standards.
Now he moves on to talking about social security. Galloway says "it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill". So zero explanation about why it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit, why not more or less, no comment about how many children it would affect, how much money it would mean for each child or family, just some number that you have to accept. Most of the time there's no why to the amount of funding that the government allocates to policies but at least there's some breakdown to how its going to be used, Galloway doesn't even have that. This is before we even consider the fact that child tax credit was expanded this year (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-tax-credit-2024-who-qualifies/). Maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm not aware of but I don't think so. He says he got the social security spending data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank. I don't want to sort through their website to fact check so I'll accept it as the truth but as far as I know the actual social security administration releases their facts and figures for the year August of next year so I'm not sure why he didn't just use the 2022 numbers from a more reliable source.
His next few couple slides are about the increasing age of politicians. I think this is a great point but he probably should have used a better example of a younger politician than Justin Trudeau.
Then at around the 10 minute mark, using his slide titled "Generational Theft", Galloway claims that "we pumped the economy" during covid so that the Nasdaq would gain value, causing "intergenerational theft". I don't know if he thinks it was intentional or not but how is he going to completely ignore the fact that the stimulus checks were primarily for households that were struggling due to the greatest unemployment rate we have seen in our lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession/). I'm really kind of tired of this so I'll let those at the CBR make my argument for me. "Within the first 10 days, households spent an average of 29 cents from every dollar received. The bulk of this spending was on food, rent, and bills" (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-effective-were-stimulus-checks-us). Damn so turns out struggling families did need these stimulus checks pretty urgently. Shocker. I also think that most people in finance would agree that tech stocks surged over covid because people needed fucking technology... People built PCs to play video games, used online shopping services because they couldn't go to malls, all that.
The next slide is supposed to support his point that the increase in stock prices doesn't allow young people to find "disruption". What. The only thing that matters to any investor is the percentage increase in value of the stock price after you've invested. It doesn't matter if 7 dollars is 1 share of apple or 0.04 of a share of apple. Its stock price going up by 100% means you get 14 dollars either way. I think this guy's arguments are getting dumber as the talk goes on, I actually had to go and find data to refute his points earlier on. Now arithmetic does the work for me, I should have hired a grade schooler to do my analysis.
His next point is about how algorithmic content selection is bad. Yeah its bad. Its bad for everyone, turns everyone into psychos. Though I think there's a very good argument to be made about how such content could affect developing brains. He makes a point about age-gating social media at the end of the talk. This is actually the only drastic measure he proposes that I agree with so I'll leave this alone too.
After a couple slides about Zuckerberg and TikTok (which I agree with, though I think Zuckerberg's damage probably leans more towards older people than young now), he gives a bunch of graphs showing upward trends in all sorts of terrible things happening to young people. Every single one is an issue of critical importance in the US, but importantly, no comparison to older people. For all we know, the trend on every graph could be the same or even worse for older generations. If I had written about this first then I'd go and find the data for it but at this point I just want to be done with this but can't stop without getting to the end so I'm just gonna slap this slide with lack of comparisons and move on.
His next slide shows the difference in 30 to 34 year olds who have at least one child, some of that is probably due to family planning but I still think its a great indicator of people not wanting to have children because its not affordable. Great point, I believe in it.
Next slide, oh god it's a happiness report. I think happiness reports are a fun conversational tidbit but I see no way for it to be reliable enough to be used as an argument in any semi-serious setting. That said, I have no idea how they do these measurements so maybe I'm wrong.
As if the happiness report wasn't bad enough, Galloway is gonna compare the biggest one-day market cap gain (in an unspecified time frame) to the budget of several policies implemented by the government. Oh man. This is too stupid, there's so many things to pick from it'd take too much effort to sort through them. Someone else please make the argument for me.
Then he says universal basic income should have been called negative income tax. Wow the frequency of good points is going up, though I think this is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of absolutely idiotic arguments.
Then he says we should eliminate capital gains tax deduction. The issue of taxing capital gains is a very serious one, but I don't think it actually matters that much how much we tax realised capital gains. Again, not an expert but here's my understanding. If you have a high net worth with a lot of it in stocks and you need cash, you don't have to sell them and get taxed on the realised gains. You go to the bank and say I want to borrow money, I'm going to put these stocks up as collateral so if I can't pay you back you can take these stocks which are somewhere around the value of the principal amount plus total interest over the course of this loan. Because the bank is now convinced they'll get the money back regardless of if you make the payments or not, they say ok here's the money you asked for at a nice low interest rate. Then you take the money, you keep your stocks, which will probably gain value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate by a pretty decent margin, and you can probably make your interest payments pretty easily because hey, you were rich to begin with. If you're really strapped for cash a couple years down the line, you can sell some of the stocks that are now worth more than they were before and cover your payments and not have to pay taxes on the rest that you don't have to sell. Free money. There's plenty more ways to avoid taxes if you're rich but you get my point by now. Now that's a lot of problems without a solution. Luckily we have some economists far more skilled than I am who work very hard to find solutions to these problems. Here's one example of a policy that may help (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html). This is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Zucman (famous economist), for the New York Times. If you don't have an NYT subscription, sorry for giving a link you can't read but if you search Gabriel Zucman billionaire tax, you could probably get a decent idea of what this talks about. Here's Zucman tweeting his proposal for his suggestion (https://twitter.com/gabriel\_zucman/status/1763253132572729623). It probably requires a little more thinking than the NYT article but he did present this at the G20 so that might sound more exciting to you than some news article.
Then Galloway says "we need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content". Zero mention on what 230 protection is so here's an explanation (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230). Basically that was a fancy way of saying that companies should be held accountable of the content on their platform, even if it's posted by an unrelated third party. I'm not sure getting rid of it in its entirety is a great idea (though I have no arguments against that except Orwellian ones) but I certainly agree that most if not all social media platforms have abused this protection and it should be at the very least restricted. To what extent? Again, I have no clue.
Then he goes "break up Big Tech". That's the whole suggestion. This is a terrible idea but the fact that he doesn't elaborate more on how to do this, the ramifications of doing so, or really provide any explanation at all makes me automatically ignore this. Then he makes his point about age-gating social media, like I said before, I agree with it.
His next suggestions are universal pre-K, great idea, then "reinstate the expanded child-tax credit". Not sure what he's going on about here, child tax credit exists and like I said before, was just expanded. Then it's income-based affirmative action. I don't know what kind of affirmative action is best and that sounds like an interesting idea so I won't criticise it. I think the rest of his suggestions are pretty normative arguments so I'll leave those alone too.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall theme of his talk. I believe that young people in the US (and many places worldwide) are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth, buying homes, inter-generational transfers, etc. But you cannot go up on a popular platform like this, make claims as sweeping as he has, and make suggestions as radical and drastic as he has, with garbage arguments and data like this. Saying the right things for the wrong reasons is arguably worse than just saying the wrong thing because it makes it easy for those who want the status quo to remain to make counterarguments. Given how divisive opinions have become over the past decade or so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people are eating this up but it kinda scares me how easily people will eat up this shit as long as its for a cause that sounds like its going for some kind of radical change for the good of all and has some imaginary "them" as the common enemy to everyone.
So that's it, I've finally covered all his points. I'm free, thank fuck. I should really proofread this but this has been my past eight hours and my back is breaking from all this sitting, I'm just gonna post this and read it over tomorrow. Maybe do a tl;dr, fix some formatting.
EDIT: As u/myphriendmike and u/Mordoci have pointed out, my dummy corp example was just tax fraud, that's illegal and so it's a bad example, I've removed it. Zucman has some estimates on the "real" tax rate wealthy people (mostly billionaires) pay, maybe I'll include that at some point.
I also corrected my wording in some places.

This is part 2 of my list for Virginia's post Furman execution roster. As mentioned in part 1's opening paragraph, character count limitations forced me into splitting my Virginia's execution roster into two separate posts. For the link to part 1, please click here.
59. Kevin Cardwell (1991-1998, lethal injection): Cardwell intercepted Anthony Brown, a 15 year old drug carrier, while he was at a bus stop. He lured Brown into his apartment and searched his belongings for any drugs. Brown was then dragged into the woods, shot to death, and stripped of the cocaine strapped to his legs.
60. Mark Sheppard (~1980s-1999, lethal injection): Sheppard and his accomplice Andre Graham were invited by their dealers, 40 year old Richard and 35 year old Rebecca Rosenbluth, over to their home to buy cocaine. However, an argument broke out during the transaction, and Sheppard shot the couple to death. The pair then drove away from the scene with the couple's car and a few undisclosed stolen items. Sheppard had a long history of violence that dated back to when he was 9 years old.
61. Tony Fry (1994-1999, lethal injection): Fry and his partner shot Leeland Jacobs, a 42 year old car salesman, while robbing his Ford Dealership. The pair tied Jacobs to a car they stole while he was still alive, and dragged him to death.
62. George Quesinberry Jr. (1989-1999, lethal injection): Quesinberry shot 63 year old Thomas Haynes while breaking into his office with an accomplice. When Haynes survived the initial shooting, Quesinberry hit him in the head with the gun and fractured his skull. The pair stole a total of $200 in the robbery.
63. David Fisher (~1970s(?)-1999, lethal injection): Fisher was paid $7,000 by an associate to kill 18 year old David Wilkey in retaliation for abandoning a murder scheme. Originally, Wilkey was part of a conspiracy to seduce and marry a young woman in order to kill her for an insurance policy, but backed out when he genuinely fell in love with the would be victim. He was tricked into going on a hunting trip with Fisher and shot to death by him. Fisher had 25 previous criminal convictions and was involved with organized crime. He was in the witness protection program at the time of Wilkey’s murder.
64. Carl Chichester (1991-1999, lethal injection): During a holdup of a Little Caesars, Chichester shot and killed the manager, 30 year old Timothy Rigney, for refusing to open the cash register. He and his two accomplices ran off with a total of $110.
65. Arthur Jenkins III (1991-1999, lethal injection): Jenkins and his teenage brother shot and killed their uncle, 72 year old Floyd, and their uncle's friend, 69 year old Lee Brinklow. They then stole their wallets and sacked Floyd's home for any money and valuables.
66. Eric Payne (~1980s-1999, lethal injection): Payne broke into the residences of two women, 61 year old Ruth Parham and 57 year old Sally Fazio, and raped them. Both women were beaten to death with a hammer, and he took money from their drawers and pocket books. He had a history of drug possessions and exposing himself to women.
67. Ronald Yeatts (1989-1999, lethal injection): Yeatts and an accomplice invaded 70 year old Ruby Dodson's home and stabbed her to death. The pair grabbed her purse during the burglary and divided up the money they found in it.
68. Tommy Strickler (1989-1999, lethal injection): Strickler and his partner kidnapped 19 year old Leann Whitlock from a mall and crushed her head with a 70 pound boulder. Whitlock's car and credit cards were stolen during the attack.
69. Marlon Williams (~1980s(?)-1999, lethal injection): Williams was paid $4,000 to murder 44 year old Helen Bedsole by his dealer, who was also her estranged husband. The couple were in the midst of a bitter divorce at the time, and the dealer wanted to both collect a life insurance policy and prevent Helen from dividing up their assets. He suck into the couple’s home, and shot and killed Helen in the kitchen. Williams had an extensive criminal history, which included cutting the throat of his ex girlfriend’s grandmother, 71 year old Virgina Parker, during a bungled attempt on her life.
70. Everett Mueller (1990-1999, lethal injection): 10 year old Charity Powers was dropped off at a skating ring by her mother. She was supposed to be picked up by her mother's friend, but they didn't show up due to failing asleep in their home. While Powers was waiting outside the ring in vain for her ride, she was abducted by Mueller. He raped the girl, slashed her throat, and dumped the body in a nearby forest.
71. Jason Joseph (1992-1999, lethal injection): While robbing a Subway with an accomplice, Joseph shot and killed one of the clerks, 22 year old Jeffrey Anderson.
72. Thomas Royal Jr. (~1991-1999, lethal injection): Royal and 3 other gang members fatally shot a police officer, 29 year old Kenneth Wallace, while he was sitting in his patrol car. Wallace was killed as part of the gang's campaign to target law enforcement agents. Royal and his fellow gang members were also suspected in the shooting of James Smith Jr. (age unknown), a Vietnam veteran, outside his trailer, but the charges were dropped from the lack of sufficient evidence.
73. Andre Graham (~1993-1999, lethal injection): Graham assisted the above mentioned Mark Sheppard in the Rosenbluth murders. He also shot and killed a waitress, 20 year old Sheryl Stack, and injured a 23 year old man while robbing a restaurant on his own, and is suspected in a total of 10 murders.
74. Douglas Thomas (1990-2000, lethal injection): The parents of Thomas' 14 year old girlfriend, 33 year old James and 33 year Kathy Wiseman, barred her from seeing him. In a bid to continue their relationship, Thomas and his girlfriend shot them to death in their home.
75. Steve Roach (1993-2000, lethal injection): Roach shot and killed 70 year old Mary Hughes on her doorstep and stole her credit card. He was caught on tape trying to use Hughes' stolen cards to pull money out of an ATM machine in North Carolina.
76. Lonnie Weeks Jr. (1993-2000, lethal injection): Weeks was pulled over by a state trooper, 50 year old Jose Cavazos, for speeding while driving a stolen car. In the confrontation that followed, he shot Cavazos dead after climbing out of the car, and fled the scene. He was captured hiding in a nearby motel after an hour long manhunt.
77. Michael Clagett (1994-2000, electric chair): Clagett's girlfriend was fired from her job as a hotel waitress by the management, and the couple decided to retaliate by robing the establishment. They shot and killed the owner Lam Van Son, a 41 year old Vietnamese refugee, a waitress, 31 year old Karen Rounds, two other employees, 31 year old Karen Rounds and 32 year old Wendell Parish Jr., and a customer Abdelaziz Gren, a 34 year old Moroccan immigrant, and took $400 in cash from the register. Van Son’s 3 year old son was sleeping in the backroom during the attack, but the couple left him unharmed.
78. Russel Burket (1993-2000, lethal injection): Burket snuck into the home of 30 year old Katherine Tafelski while her Navy SEALs husband was deployed overseas, and sexually assaulted her. Katherine and her 5 year old daughter Ashley were both beaten to death with a "rusty" crowbar.
79. Derek Barnabei (1993-2000, lethal injection): Barnabei seduced a fellow Old Dominion University student, 17 year old Sarah Wisnosky, into a relationship with him and kidnapped her. She was raped, partially strangled, beaten to death with a hammer, and dumped into a river near campus grounds. Due to him being of Italian ancestry, his death sentence and execution sparked outrage in Italy.
80. Bobby Ramdass (1992-2000, lethal injection): Ramdass was condemned for the shooting death of Mohammed Kayani, a 34 year old Pakistani immigrant working as a clerk, during a convenience store robbery. He also shot dead 19 year old Darrell Ferguson in an alley and wounded a cab driver in other robberies.
81. Christopher Goins (1994-2000, lethal injection): Goins broke into the home of his 14 year old girlfriend (who was 7 months pregnant with his child). He shot and killed her parents, 35 year old James and 29 year old Daphne Jones, and her siblings, 9 year old Nicole and 4 year old David. The girlfriend and her youngest sibling, 21 month old Kenya, were also shot in the attack. Both of them survived, but the unborn child was lost in the shooting.
82. Thomas Akers (1998-2001, lethal injection): Akers and his accomplice were driving with their friend, 24 year old Wesley Smith. When they pulled over on a road to urinate, they pounced on Smith. In the attack, he was strangled with a belt and beaten to death with a baseball bat. They pair then grabbed $200 from his wallet and dumped his body in a creek. While on death row, Akers demanded his execution and made threats against the judge who sentenced him if it wasn't carried out.
83. Christopher Beck (1995-2001, lethal injection): Out of anger for being fired, Beck invaded the house of his former employer, 52 year old William Miller. He waited for him and his two roommates, 54 year old Florence Marks and 34 year old David Kaplan, to return home and shot and stabbed them all to death. Marks was also raped in the attack. Although Beck claimed that he "only" staged a sexual assault on her, a medical examination confirmed that she was abused in that manner. Beck stole several guns, bicycles, and money in the robbery.
84. James Patterson (1987-2002, lethal injection): Patterson held his friend's mother, 56 year old Joyce Aldridge, in her home at knifepoint. Enraged that she only had a few coins in her purse, he raped Aldridge, stabbed her 3 times, and left her to die. When Aldridge managed to crawl to a phone to call her son for help, Patterson returned and stabbed her 14 more times. Although Aldridge's murder was left unsolved for years, Patterson was later imprisoned for raping an 18 year old girl, and DNA found at the murder was traced to his samples filed in the inmate database in 2000.
85. Daniel Zirkle (1999-2002, lethal injection): Zirkle's girlfriend broke off their relationship due to his violent behavior and filed protective orders against him. He was arrested for violating them and sentenced to a few months in jail. After his release, Zirkle went to his ex girlfriend's home without her permission to visit their daughter, 4 year old Christina. However, the ex girlfriend's other daughter, 14 year old Jessica Shifflett, blocked him from coming inside. He stabbed her to death and kidnapped Christina. He then drove Christina to the George Washington National Forest, slit her throat, and stabbed himself in a failed suicide attempt.
86. Walter Mickens Jr. (~1974-2002, lethal injection): Mickens ambushed and sodomized 17 year old Timothy Hall, and stabbed him 143 times. He stripped the boy of nearly all of his clothing, and left him to die in an abandoned apartment. A long time sexual predator and career criminal, Mickens had several robbery and sodomy convictions dating back to the 70s. One of his previous incidents involved breaking into an elementary school, and coercing a teacher of her purse by threatening the life of a 7 year old student. He also had a conviction for sexually assaulting a cellmate.
87. Aimal Kasi (1993-2002, lethal injection): In his efforts to fight against American foreign policy regarding Islamic nations, Kasi attacked the Langley CIA headquarters with a Type 56 assault rifle. He shot dead 2 CIA employees, 66 year old Lansing Bennett and 28 year old Frank Darling, and wounded 3 others. Kasi then fled to Afghanistan, but was lured into his native Pakistan to be captured in a joint FBI-CIA led operation, and extradited back to the United States to face trial.
88. Earl Bramblett (~1970s(?)-2003, electric chair): Bramblett had molested 11 year old Winter Hodges and feared that her parents, 41 year old William and 37 year old Teresa, were planning on reporting him to the police. In an attempt to prevent that from happening, he attacked the family in their home. Teresa was strangled, while William, Winter, and another daughter, 3 year old Anah, were shot dead. Bramblett then set the house on fire to destroy any evidence of the murders. He had several abuse allegations and was also suspected in the 1977 disappearances of two 14 year old girls, Tammy Akers and Angela Rader, that worked for him, but was never charged for any of them.
89. Bobby Swisher (1997-2003, lethal injection): Swisher abducted 22 year old Dawn Snyder from her flower shop at knife point and raped her. He slashed Snyder's throat and dumped her into a nearby river. Despite managing to swim back to shore, Snyder succumbed to her injuries on the river bank.
90. Brian Cherrix (1994-2004, lethal injection): Cherrix ambushed 23 year old Tessa Van Hart while she was trying to deliver a pizza. He sodomized and shot Van Hart twice in the head, and left the body in her car. The crime was left unsolved until Cherrix was arrested for shooting and wounded his brother two years later. In an attempt to secure leniency, Cherrix disclosed some details of Van Hart's murder, but tried pinning it on a deceased cousin. He only confessed when investigators learned that the cousin couldn't have possibly done it.
91. Dennis Orbe (1998-2004, lethal injection): Orbe fatally shot Richard Burnett, a 39 year old clerk, while robbing a grocery store, and seized $90 from the register.
92. Mark Bailey (1998-2004, lethal injection): Bailey shot and killed his wife, 22 year old Katherine, and their 2 year old son, Nathan, while they were laying in bed. He claimed to investigators that the murders were done out of anger for Katherine's alleged infidelity.
93. James Hudson (2002-2004, lethal injection): In a feud over a driveway, Hudson broke into the home of the Cole family (consisting of brothers, 64 year old Thomas and 56 year old Walter, and Thomas' wife, 64 year old Patsy) to confront them with a shotgun. He shot all three of the Coles dead and drove away from the scene. Hudson was captured after nearly a day long manhunt.
94. James Reid (1996-2004, lethal injection): Reid stabbed 87 year old Annie Lester 22 times with a pair of scissors, beat her with a can of milk, and strangled her with the cord of a heating pad. He left the body in her bedroom and fled her house. Although the evidence for his guilt was overwhelming (which included the blood on his clothes matched Lester's DNA, several of his fingerprints were discovered on the murder weapons, samples of his saliva were found on a cigarette butt in her house, and his handwriting was identical to the writing of a death threat sent to Lester), Reid's death sentence and execution was contested on the grounds of him allegedly having brain damage from a car accident, seizures, and alcoholism. The motivations behind Lester's murder remain unknown, but prosecutors suspected that it might have been part of a bungled robbery or rape attempt.
95. Dexter Vinson (1997-2006, lethal injection): Vinson attacked his ex girlfriend, 25 year old Angela Felton, near her home. Felton tried to escape by driving away, but he rammed her car with his, and forced her inside it. She was then dragged into a vacant house, raped, beaten, and stabbed in the face, neck, arms, buttocks, stomach, and vagina. The body was left in the house as Vinson fled the scene.
96. Brandon Hedrick (1997-2006, electric chair): Hendrick kidnapped a sex worker, 23 year old Lisa Crider, while he was cruising for prostitutes. Initially, Crider and Hendrick had engaged in paid consensual relations, but the situation turned violent when he robbed her of $50 at gunpoint. She was then raped, shot in the face, and dumped into a river.
97. Michael Lenz (~1990s-2006, lethal injection): While serving 29 years for a burglary and weapons possession conviction, Lenz stabbed a fellow inmate, 41 year old Brent Parker, to death. Both were part of a Nordic Neopaganism sect, and the killing was committed over Parker allegedly not expressing enough devotion to their deities. Parker was serving a life sentence for killing a friend during a drunken rage at the time of his own murder.
98. John Schmitt (1999-2006, lethal injection): During a holdup of a bank, Schmitt shot and killed the guard, 39 year old Shelton Dunning, and took $35,000 from the vaults.
99. Kevin Green (1998-2008, lethal injection): Green and his teenage nephew stormed a convenience store, and forced the owners, 68 year old Lawrence Vaughan and his wife, 53 year old Patricia, to hand over $9,000 in cash. They then shot the couple, killing Patricia and wounding Lawrence.
100. Robert Yarbrough (1997-2008, lethal injection): Yarbrough and his accomplice tied up 77 year old Cyril Hamby while robbing his grocery store. They subjected Hamby to beatings and nearly decapitated him with a pocket knife. The pair then stole beer, wine, cigarettes, and an undisclosed amount of money.
101. Kent Jackson (2000-2008, lethal injection): Jackson and an accomplice attacked 79 year old Beulah Kaiser in her apartment, and raped her. She was stabbed several times in the neck, beaten, and her cane was shoved down her throat after she was anally penetrated with it. A cigarette butt found at the crime scene was traced to the pair.
102. Christopher Emmett (2001-2008, lethal injection): Emmett was staying at a motel room with a coworker, 43 year old John Langley, while they were working on an out of town roofing job. The pair played cards until Langley went to bed. As he slept, Emmett bludgeoned him to death with a lamp, and stole $100 from his wallet. He used the stolen money to buy crack cocaine.
103. Edward Bell (~1990s-2008, lethal injection): While running away from officers trying to arrest him for a parole violation, Bell shot and killed one of his pursers, 32 year old Sergeant Ricky Timbrook. Bell had a long criminal record, which included several felony and misdemeanor convictions of assault, burglary, carrying conceal weapons, and was found to have stolen a car during the investigations of Timbrook's murder.
104. John Muhammad (~1999-2008, lethal injection): The so called “D.C. Sniper”, Muhammad shot and killed 17 random people between the ages of 21-76 with the help of a teenage accomplice in mostly sniper attacks. The killings took place in the national capital, hence the epithet, and across several states. Due to his affiliation with the Nation of Islam and the accomplice’s accounts of planning terrorist attacks and training camps, Muhammad’s murder spree are often considered to be acts of Islamic extremism in the media. However, experts believe that his real intentions was to kill his estranged wife using the sniper attacks as a mask. Muhammad had a long history of domestic violence, and had abducted his children from his estranged wife on numerous occasions. His accomplice had also accused him of sexual abuse a few years after his execution.
105. Larry Elliott (2001-2008, electric chair): Elliott, a former military counterintelligence agent, was in an online "sugar daddy" relationship with a much younger woman. At the woman's request, Elliott sent her over $450,000, which she used to pay for a home, credit card, car, breast enhancement surgery, and enrolling her children in a private school. The woman was also involved with a bitter custody dispute with her children's father, 30 year old Robert Finch. In an attempt to win the woman's devotion, Elliott shot and killed Finch in his home, and beat Finch's girlfriend, 25 year old Dana Thrall, to death with the butt of his gun.
106. Paul Powell (1999-2010, electric chair): Angry that his friend, 16 year old Stacie Reed, was in an interracial relationship, Powell made an attempt to rape her in her home. When she fought back, Powell stabbed her to death. He also tied up Stacie's 14 year old sister to be raped, stabbed, and strangled, and left the girl to die in the family's basement. The sister managed to survive with the timely arrival of their stepfather, who called the police and the paramedics to the scene. On the mistaken belief that the death penalty was off the table, Powell sent letters flaunting the lewd details of the murder to taunt the prosecutors, judge, and the victims’ family.
107. Darick Walker (~1996-2010, lethal injection): In 1996, Walker walked up to the door of 36 year old Stanley Beale, and angrily accused him of showing up at his home despite the fact that they were complete strangers. He then shot Beale dead in front of his children and girlfriend, and ran away from the scene. A year later, Walker forced himself into an apartment, and shot 34 year old Clarence Threat seven times while he was laying in bed with his girlfriend. Walker had a history of violence and frequently stole from his friends and family. In one reported incident, he kicked the stomach of a pregnant woman in an act of rage.
108. Teresa Lewis (2002-2010, lethal injection): Lewis conspired with two men that she had a sexual relationship with to kill her husband, 51 year old Julian, and her stepson, 25 year old Charles. Charles was about to be deployed to participate in the then upcoming invasion of Iraq, which gave him a $250,000 life insurance policy that Lewis wanted to collect from both him and his father. She let her accomplices inside their trailer, and shot Julian and Charles while they were sleeping. Charles was killed immediately, while Julian, who witnessed Lewis pay the attackers, survived long enough to notify the responders of his wife's involvement.
109. Jerry Jackson (2001-2011, lethal injection): Jackson broke into the apartment of 88 year old Ruth Phillips, and woke her up while he was rummaging through her room. Despite Phillips' pleas for her life, Jackson raped her and suffocated her to death with a pillow. He stole her car and a total of $60 in the break in, and spent the stolen money on marijuana.
110. Robert Gleason (2007+(?)-2013, electric chair): In 2007, Gleason shot and killed 54 year old Michael Jamerson, in order to prevent him from testifying about his drug trafficking activities, and was given a life sentence for the murder. While incarcerated, he tied up and strangled his cellmate, 63 year old Harvey Watson (who serving a life sentence for a mass shooting). Prison officials then transferred him to a high security prison to await trial for Watson’s murder, but he managed to strangle another inmate, 26 year old Aaron Cooper (who was serving 34 years for robbery), to death with the wire that separated their cages. Gleason demanded the death penalty, which was given to him by the courts. He also claimed that he committed several other killings before Jamerson, but his additional confessions currently remain unverifiable.
111. Alfredo Prieto (~1984-2015, lethal injection): Prieto was both a serial killer of young women and a member of the Pomona Northside street gang. His sexual crimes involved the abductions, rapes, and shooting deaths of at least 4 females, 24 year old Tina Jefferson, 22 year old Rachael Raver, 19 year old Stacey Siegrist, and 15 year old Yvette Woodruff. Raver and Siegrist’s partners, 22 year old Warren Fulton III and 21 year old Anthony Gianuzzi, were also murdered during their kidnappings. The other known victims, 27 year old Manuel Sermeno, and couple, 71 year old Lula and 65 year old Herbert Farley, were shot dead during robberies. In the home invasion that killed Woodruff, Prieto and his fellow gang members also abducted her 17 year old friend and the friend’s 33 year old mother. The mother and daughter pair were gang-raped, shot and stabbed together, but they managed to escape with their lives. Prieto was sentenced to death in both California and Virginia, but stayed in California’s San Quentin until his death warrant was signed in Virginia. He had also shot and injured 3 gang members over his suspicions of them sleeping with his wife, but was lightly sentenced due to the victims' gang affiliations.
112. Ricky Gray (~2005-2017, lethal injection): Gray and his similarly aged nephew murdered at least 9 people, which composed of a lone woman, 35 year old Treva Gray, and two entire families, the Harveys (consisting of parents, 49 year old Bryan and 39 year old Kathryn, and their daughters, 9 year old Stella and 4 year old Ruby), and the Baskerville-Tuckers (consisting of 21 year old Ashley, her 46 year old mother Mary, and Mary’s 55 year old husband Percyell) in a week long burglary spree. Almost all of the victims were tied up and gagged in their homes, and beaten to death with hammers or had their throats slit. Before she was killed by them with her parents, victim Ashley Baskerville had assisted Gray and his nephew in several of their robberies. The pair stole any items and valuables they could carry, and were reported to have taken money, computers, television sets, wedding rings, and even cookies. They were also linked to several non fatal assaults, one of which involved a 26 year old man being beaten into a coma.
113. William Morva (~2005-2017, lethal injection): Morva, a son of Hungarian immigrants, and an accomplice were arrested while trying rob a grocery store at gunpoint. While awaiting trial, he badly sprained his ankle and wrist in prison, and was transferred to the Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment. He overpowered a deputy guarding him with a metal toilet-paper container, stole his gun, fatally shot Derrick McFarland, a 25 year old hospital security guard, and escaped. Morva then fled to Virginia Tech’s campus, and shot and killed 40 year old Eric Sutphin, one of the police officers chasing him.

I’m a VP and staffer at a large BS bank with ~decade of IB experience. I’ve done hundreds of interviews over the years and now that we’re in the lull between sophomore recruiting and internships starting… a few thoughts from me.
Summer 2025: This year’s recruiting cycle for Summer Analysts 2025 was far more competitive than the prior few years. Pretty much all IB class sizes are flat to down (with some being wiped off the map). I did a set of first round interviews at a target school a few months ago where everyone would have been better than some of the candidates we gave offers to 2-3 years ago. I had to find nitpicky reasons to not pass people on to final round.
Summer 2024: if you were lucky enough to secure your spot ~12 months ago, good luck. Sincerely. Show up early, leave late, network, make friends with the FT analysts. Bring a notepad and pen with you everywhere and take notes. Send notes around after calls. Ask when the person above you would like to see your deliverable. Print that deliverable out and double check it before you show it to anyone. There will definitely not be enough full time offers for everyone. But don’t get too hung up on having sharp elbows either. Which leads me to my next point…
FT 2024: Banks are still committed to keeping the fresh cycle of talent coming in the door, but the normal attrition isn’t happening after 2-3 yrs. If your bank just went through layoffs, it was likely to make room for you. And they’ll do it again in 12-18 months if market conditions don’t improve, but this time your class may be evaluated.
What about MBA? Summer Associate / MBA associate demand gets smaller each year. I have class of 2024 M7s reach out to me hoping to get an informational. Yikes.
Vibe in the bullpen? Open to what some junior bankers may have to say here but from what I can tell, deal flow being down means our jrs have less experience, which makes for harder promotion cases, harder high performance rating cases, and slightly better hours. (Unless you have some asshole VP/MD making jrs boil the ocean for prospects.) When there is something live or important it takes forever because the juniors don’t know how to do anything and the VPs and up are all hyper focused and anal around it. People will be disappointed with comp.
RIP my inbox. Excuse any grammar or typos… can’t sleep from combination of my stimulant habit and general anxiety (kidding…sort of)

I. Introduction: Consumption, Narcissism, and Mass Culture
Materialism and Mass Culture
…
Those who take a hopeful view of recent cultural changes disagree among themselves about the difficulty of the “transition” ahead and about the nature of the society to which it is leading. The only thing that justifies treating them as a group is that all of them reject the diagnosis of our society as “narcissistic.” As Yankelovich puts it, the “American quest for self-fulfillment” cannot be reduced to the “pathology” of narcissistic personality disorders.” Narcissism “is not the essence of the recent American search for self-fulfillment.” “Far from being its defining characteristic, narcissism is a betrayal of it.”
The controversy about narcissism, which revives in a new form earlier controversies about mass culture and the American national character, raises important questions and helps to call attention to the connections between social and economic changes and changes in cultural and personal life. Nevertheless, much of it is deeply confused. For one thing, the concept of narcissism remains elusive and obscure, even though it appears eminently accessible. Those who object to the description of advanced industrial culture as a culture of narcissism do not understand very clearly what the description implies, while those who accept it all too quickly accept it as a journalistic slogan that merely restates moralistic platitudes in the jargon of psychoanalysis. Narcissism is a difficult idea that looks easy - a good recipe for confusion.
Another source of confusion is the persistence of certain preconceptions derived from the controversy that divided critics of “mass culture” in the fifties and sixties from celebrants of cultural democracy and pluralism. Recent attempts to reformulate this debate - to salvage what was useful in the critique of mass culture by detaching it from an ill-conceived defense of cultural modernism - have been misunderstood as attempts to revive earlier positions in their original form. I have suggested elsewhere that the phenomenon of mass culture, too often treated from the point of view of its impact on aesthetic standards, raises questions about technology, not about the level of public taste. Advanced technologies of communication, which seems merely to facilitate the dissemination of information on a wider scale than was possible before, prove on closer examination to impede the circulation of ideas and to concentrate control over information in a handful of giant organizations. Modern technology has the same effect on culture that it has on production, where it serves to assert managerial control over the labor force. The study of mass culture that it has on production, where it serves to assert managerial control over the labor force. The study of mass culture thus leads to the same conclusion prompted by a study of the mechanization of the workplace: that much advanced technology embodies by design (in both senses of the word) a one-way system of management and communication. It concentrates economic and political control - and, increasingly, cultural control as well - in a small elite of corporate planners, market analysts, and social engineers. It invites popular “input” or “feedback” only in the form of suggestion boxes, market surveys, and public opinion polls. Technology thus comes to serve as an effective instrument of social control - in the case of mass media, by short-circuiting the electoral process through opinion surveys that help to shape opinion instead of merely recording it, by reserving to the media themselves the right to select political leaders and “spokesmen,” and by presenting the choice of leaders and parties as a choice among consumer goods.
This interpretation of mass culture and advanced technology may be wrong, but it is a different argument from the old accusation that mass culture lowers public taste or from the Marxist version of this accusation, according to which mass culture brainwashes the workers and keeps them in a state of “false consciousness.” Yet the terms of the earlier debate remain so coercive that new arguments are immediately assimilated to old ones. Criticism of the narcissistic elements in our culture strikes many observers as a lament for the “morally tuned, well-crafted self,” in the words of Peter Clecak. It is not my position, however, as Herbert Gans tries to summarize it, that “if commercial popular culture were eliminated, workers could and would become intellectuals.” Why should workers become intellectuals? I find it hard to imagine a less attractive prospect than a society made up of intellectuals. What is important is that working men and women have more control over their work. It is also important for intellectuals and workers alike to see that this question of control is not just a political or an economic question but a cultural question as well.
Mass Production and Mass Consumption
Still another source of confusion, in recent controversies about contemporary culture, is the failure to distinguish a moralistic indictment of “consumerism” - typified by Carter’s complaint about the obsession with “owning things, consuming things” - from an analysis that understands mass consumption as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control. Instead of thinking of consumption as the antithesis of labor, as if the two activities called for completely different mental and emotional qualities, we need to see them as two sides of the same process. The social arrangements that support a system of mass production and mass consumption tend to discourage initiative and self-reliance and to promote dependence, passivity, and a spectatorial state of mind both at work and at play. Consumerism is only the other side of the degradation of work - the elimination of playfulness and craftsmanship from the process of production.
In the United States, a consumer culture began to emerge in the twenties, but only after the corporate transformation of industry had institutionalized the division of labor that runs all through modern industrial society, the division between brain work and manual labor: between the design and the execution of production. Under the banner of scientific management, capitalists expropriated the technical knowledge formerly exercised by workers, reformulated it as science, and vested its control in a new managerial elite. The managers extended their power not at the expense of the workers. Nor did the eventual triumph of industrial unionism break this pattern of managerial control. By the 1930s, even the most militant unions had acquiesced in the division of labor between the planning and execution of work. Indeed the very success of the union movement was predicated on a strategic retreat from issues of worker control. Unionization, moreover, helped to stabilize and rationalize the labor market and to discipline the work force. It did not alter the arrangement whereby management controls the technology of production, the rhythm of work, and the location of plants (even when these decisions affect whole communities), leaving the worker with the task merely of carrying out orders.
Having organized mass production on the basis of new division of labor, most fully realized in the assembly line, the leaders of American industry turned to the organization of a mass market. The mobilization of consumer demand, together with the recruitment of a labor force, required a far-reaching series of cultural changes. People had to be discouraged from providing for their own wants and resocialized as consumers. Industrialism by its very nature tends to discourage homo production and to make people dependent on the market, but a vast effort of reeducation, starting in the 1920s, had to be undertaken before Americans accepted consumption as a way of life. As Emma Rothschild has shown in her study of the automobile Industry, Alfred Sloan’s innovations in marketing - the annual model change, constant upgrading of the product, efforts to associate it with social status, the deliberation inculcation of a boundless appetite for change - constituted the necessary counterpart of Henry Ford’s innovations in production. Modern industry came to rest on the twin pillars of Fordism and Sloanism. Both tended to discourage enterprise and independent thinking and to make the individual distrust his own judgment, even in matters of taste. His own untutored preferences, it appeared, might lag behind current fashion; they too needed to be periodically upgraded.
The Fantastic World of Commodities
The psychological effects of consumerism can be grasped only when consumption is understood as another phase of the industrial work routine. The repeated experience of uneasy self-scrutiny, of submission to expert judgment, of distrust of their own capacity to make intelligent decisions, either as producers or as consumers, colors people’s perceptions both of themselves and of the world around them. It encourages a new kind of self-consciousness that has little in common with introspection or vanity. Both as a worker and as a consumer, the individual learns not merely to measure himself against others but to see himself through others’ eyes. He learns that the self-image he projects counts for more than accumulated skills and experience. Since he will be judged, both by his colleagues and superiors at work and by the strangers he encounters on the street, according to his possessions, his clothes, and his “personality” - not, as in the nineteenth century, by his “character” - he adopts a theatrical view of his own “performance” on and off the job. Outright incompetence, of course, still weighs heavily against him at work, just as his actions as a friend and neighbor often outweigh his skill in managing impressions. But the conditions of everyday social intercourse, in societies based on mass production and mass consumption, encourage an unprecedented attention to superficial impressions and images, to the point where the self becomes almost indistinguishable from its surface. Selfhood and personal identity become problematic in such societies, as we can easily see from the outpouring of psychiatric and sociological commentary on these subjects. When people complain of feeling inauthentic or rebel against “role-playing,” they testify to the prevailing pressure to see themselves with the eyes of strangers and to shape the self as another commodity offered up for consumption on the open market.
Commodity production and consumerism alter perceptions not just of the self but of the world outside the self. They create a world of mirrors, insubstantial images, illusions increasingly indistinguishable from reality. The mirror effect makes the subject an object; at the same time, it makes the world of objects an extension or projection of the self. It is misleading to characterize the culture of consumption as a culture dominated by things. The consumer lives surrounded not so much by things as by fantasies. He lives in a world that has no objective or independent existence and seems to exist only to gratify or thwart his desires.
This insubstantiality of the external world arises out of the very nature of commodity production, not out of some character flaw in individuals, some excess of greed or “materialism.” Commodities are produced for immediate consumption. Their value lies not in their usefulness of or permanence but in their marketability. They wear out even if they are not used, since they are designed to be superseded by “new and improved” products, changing fashions, and technological innovations. Thus the current “state of the art” in tape recorders, record players, and stereophonic speakers makes earlier models worthless (except as antiques), even if they continue to perform the tasks for which they were designed, just as a change in women’s fashions dictates a complete change of wardrobe. Articles produced for use, on the other hand, without regard to their marketability, wear out only when they are literally used up. “It is this durability,” Hannah Arendt once observed, “that gives the things of the world their relative independence from men who produced and use them, their ‘objectivity’ which makes them withstand, ‘stand against’ and endure, at least for a time, the voracious needs and wants of their living makers and users. From this viewpoint, the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their everchanging nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”
The changing meaning of “identity” illuminates the connection between changing perceptions of the self and changing perceptions of the outside world. As used in common speech, identity still retains its former connotation of sameness and continuity: “the sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances,” in the language of the Oxford English Dictionary, “the condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” In the 1950s, however, the term came to be used by psychiatrists and sociologists to refer to a fluid, protean, and problematical self, “socially bestowed and socially sustained,” in the words of Peter L. Berger, and defined either by the social roles an individual performs, the “reference group” to which he belongs, or, on the other hand, by the deliberate management of impressions or “presentation of self,” in Erving Goffman’s phrase. The psychosocial meaning of identity, which has itself passed into common usage, weakens or eliminates altogether the association between identity and “continuity of the personality.” It also excludes the possibility that identity is defined largely through a person’s actions and the public record of those actions. In its new meaning, the term registers the waning of the old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative - a way of understanding identity that depended on the the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity, which outlasts an individual life and passes some sort of judgment on it. Note that the older meaning of identity refers both to persons and to things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations - a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role - but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves.
Now that the public or common world has receded into the shadows, we can see more clearly than before the extent of our need for it. For a long time, this need was forgotten in the initial exhilaration that accompanied the discovery of the fully developed interior life, a life liberated at last from the prying eyes of neighbors, from village prejudices, from the inquisitorial presence of elders, from everything narrow, stifling, petty, and conventional. But now it is possible to see that the collapse of our common life has impoverished private life as well. It has freed the imagination from external constraints but exposed it more directly than before to the tyranny of inner compulsions and anxieties. Fantasy ceases to be liberating when it frees itself from the checks imposed by practical experience of the world. Instead it gives rise to hallucinations; and the progress of scientific knowledge, which might be expected to discourage the projection of our inner hopes and fears onto the world around us, leaves these hallucinations undisturbed. Science has not fulfilled the hope that it would replace discredited metaphysical traditions with a coherent explanation of the world and of man’s place in it. Science cannot tell people, and at its best does not pretend to tell people, how to live or how to organize a good society. Nor does science offer the same check to the otherwise unrestrained imagination that is offered by practical experience of the world. It does not recreate a public world. Indeed it heightens the prevailing sense of unreality by giving men the power to achieve their wildest flights of fantasy. By holding out a vision of limitless technological possibilities - space travel, biological engineering, mass destruction - it removes the last obstacle to wishful thinking. It brings reality into conformity with our dreams, or rather with our nightmares.
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism - which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one’s own fears and desires - not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and to provide for their own needs. The consumer feels that he lives in a world that defies practical understanding and control, a world of giant bureaucracies, “information overload,” and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown, like the giant power failure that blacked out the Northeast in 1965 or the radiation leak at Three Mile Island in 1979.
The consumer’s complete dependence on these intricate, supremely sophisticated life-support systems, and more generally on externally provided goods and services, recreates some of the infantile feelings of helplessness. If nineteenth-century bourgeois culture reinforced anal patterns of behavior - hoarding of money and pullies, control of bodily functions, control of affect - the twentieth-century culture of mass consumptions recreates oral patterns rooted in an even earlier stage of emotional development, when the infant was completely dependent on the breast. The consumer experiences his surroundings as a kind of extension of the breast, alternately gratifying and frustrating. He finds it hard to conceive of the world except in connection with his fantasies. Partly because the propaganda surrounding commodities advertises them so seductively as wish-fulfillments, but also because commodity production by its very nature replaces the world of durable objects with disposable products designed for immediate obsolescence, the consumer confronts the world as a reflection of his wishes and fears. He knows the world, moreover, largely through insubstantial images and symbols that seem to refer not so much to a palpable, solid, and durable reality as to his inner psychic life, itself experienced not as an abiding sense of self but as reflections glimpsed in the mirror of his surroundings.
Consumption and Mass Culture
…
According to this view of the “modernization” process, it is the very abundance of choices to which people are now exposed that underlies the malaise of modern man. “Where complex alternatives are available in a society,” in the words of Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt, “it becomes necessary for the individual to direct his own existence without traditional supports, i.e., without class, ethnic, or kindship ties.” The need to make choices among a growing range of alternatives gives rise to “persistent feelings of discontent.”
…
The pluralist conception of freedom rests on the same protean sense of the self that finds popular expression in such panaceas as “open marriage” and “nonbinding commitments.” Both originate in the culture of consumption. A society of consumers defines choice not as the freedom to choose one course of action over another but as the freedom to choose everything at once. “Freedom of choice” means “keeping your options open.” The idea that “you can be anything you want,” though it preserves something of the older idea of the career open to talents, has come to mean that identities can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume. Ideally, choices of friends, lovers, and careers should all be subject to immediate cancellation: such is the open-ended, experimental conception of the good life upheld by the propaganda of commodities, which surrounds the consumer with images of unlimited possibility. But if choice no longer implies commitments and consequences - as making love formerly carried important “consequences,” for instance, especially for women - the freedom to choose amounts in practice to an abstention from choice. Unless the idea of choice carries with it the possibility of making a difference, of changing the course of events, of setting in motion a chain of events that may prove irreversible, it negates the freedom it claims to uphold. Freedom comes down to the freedom to choose between Brand X and Brand Y, between interchangeable lovers, interchangeable jobs, interchangeable neighborhoods. Pluralist ideology provides an accurate reflection of the traffic in commodities, where ostensibly competing products become increasingly indistinguishable and have to be promoted, therefore, by means of advertising that seeks to create the illusion of variety and to present these products as revolutionary breakthroughs…
Industrial Technology, Mass Culture, and Democracy
…..
Since both parties to this debate agree that “modernization” leads to the democratization of society and culture, the difference between them comes down to the issue of
As for the new “narcissism” and the “culture of selfishness,” they can be dismissed as “excesses,” “unavoidable byproducts,” “troubling side effects” of social and economic progress - “extreme instances of more salutary trends.” Intellectuals who see only the negative side of progress see American society through a framework of nostalgia. According to Wachtel, critics of contemporary narcissism obscure the “valuable features of the search for person fulfillment” by “tarring them with the same brush used to describe severe psychopathology.” “To gauge American character by means of a rising index of selfishness,” Clecak argues, “seems to me as unprofitable as assessing progress in cardiac surgery during the sixties and seventies by counting the number of patients who die in operating rooms.”
In the form in which it has been conducted now for the last forty years, the debate about what used to be called mass culture and is now called narcissism can never be resolved. The debate has turned on the controlling conception of cultural change as a balance sheet, in which material gains offset cultural losses. It turns on the question of whether material progress exacts too heady a price in the loss of cultural “excellence.” But who is to say whether the gains of social and economic democracy outweighs its cultural “side effects”?
Suppose the question is misconceived. What if we reject the premise behind this whole discussion, that industrialism fosters political and economic progress? What if we reject the equation of industrialism with democracy and start instead from the premise that large-scale industrial production undermines local institutions of self-government, weakens the party system, and discourages popular initiative? In that case, cultural analysis can no longer content itself with balancing the social and political gains allegedly attendant on indifferent on industrial progress against cultural losses. It will have to decide instead whether the invasion of culture and personal life by the modern industrial system produces the same effects that it produces in the social and political realm: a loss of autonomy and popular control, a tendency to confuse self-determination with the exercise of consumer choices, a growing ascendance of elites, the replacement of practical skills with organized expertise.
…
The point is that modern surgery, taken as a whole, has done very little, if anything, to improve the general level of health and physical well-being or even to prolong life. All medical technology has done is to increase patients’ dependence on machines and the medical experts who operate these “life-support systems.” The development of modern technology, not only in medicine but in other fields as well, has improved human control over the physical environment only in a very superficial way, by enabling scientists to make short-term modifications of nature, of which the long-term effects are incalculable. Meanwhile it has concentrated this control in a small elite of technicians and administrators.
Modern technology and mass production have been defended, like mass culture, on the grounds that although they may have taken some of the charm out of life, they have added immeasurably to the comforts enjoyed by ordinary men and women. “I have no quarrel with tradition,” Gans writes. “I am in favor of washing machines over washboards, and over river banks, however.” But it is precisely the democratizing effects of industrial technology that can no longer be taken for granted. If this technology reduces some of the drudgery of housekeeping, it also renders the housekeeper dependent on machinery - not merely the automatic washer and dryer but the elaborate energy system required to run these and innumerable other appliances - the breakdown of which brings housekeeping to a halt. As we have seen, modern technology undermines the self-reliance and autonomy both of workers and consumers. It expands man’s collective control over his environment at the expense of individual control; and even this collective control, as ecologists have pointed out again and again, is beginning to prove illusory as human intervention threatens to provoke unexpected responses from nature, including changes in climate, depletion of the ozone layer, and the exhaustion of natural resources. Nor can it be argued that advanced technology expands the range of options. Whatever its power to create new options in theory, in practice industrial technology has developed according to the principle of radical monopoly, as Ivan Illich calls it, whereby new technologies effectively eliminate older technologies even when the old ones remain demonstrably more efficient for many purposes. Thus the automobile did not simply add another form of transportation to existing forms; it achieved its preeminence at the expense of canals, railways, streetcars, and horse-drawn carriages, thereby forcing the population to depend almost exclusively on automotive transport even for those purposes for which it is obviously unsuited, such as commuting back and forth to work.
Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to a widespread feeling of powerlessness and victimization. The proliferation of protest groups, seen as an assertion of “personhood” in the arguments advanced by Clecak, Gans, and other pluralists, actually arises out of a feeling that other people are controlling our lives. The dominant imagery associated with political protest in the sixties, seventies, and eighties is not the imagery of “personhood,” not even the therapeutic imagery of self-actualization, but the imagery of victimization and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonized, and inhabited by alien forces. Angry citizens who find themselves living near poisonous chemical dumps or nuclear power plants, neighbors who band together to keep out schools for retarded children or low-income housing or nursing homes, angry taxpayers, opponents of abortion, opponents of busing, and minority groups all see themselves, for different reasons, as victims of policies over which they have no control. They see themselves as victims not only of bureaucracy, big government, and unpredictable technologies but also, in many cases, of high-level plots and conspiracies involving organized crime, intelligence agencies, and politicians at the upper reaches of government. Side by side with the official myth of a beleaguered government threatened by by riots, demonstrations, and unmotivated, irrational assassinations of public figures, a popular mythology has taken shape that sees government as a conspiracy against the people themselves.
The Decline of Authority
…
The decline of authority is a good example of the kind of change that promotes the appearance of democracy without its substance. It is part of a shift to a manipulative, therapeutic, “pluralistic,” and “nonjudgmental” style of social discipline that originated, like so many other developments, with the rise of a professional and managerial class in the early years of the twentieth century and then spread from the industrial corporation, where it was first perfected, into the political realm as a whole. As we have seen, managerial control of the work force created a passive work force, excluded from decisions about the design and execution of production. Passivity, however, created new problems of labor discipline and social control - problems of “morale,” of “motivation,” of the “human factor,” as they were known to the industrial sociologists and industrial psychologists who began to appear in the twenties. According to these professional students of “human relations,” modern industry had created a feeling of drift, uncertainty, anomie: the worker lacked a sense of “belonging.” Problems of labor discipline and “manpower recruitment” demanded an extension of the cultural reforms already inaugurated by the rise of mass marketing. Indeed the promotion of consumption as a way of life came to be seen as itself a means of easing industrial unrest. But the conversion of the worker into a consumer of therapies designed to ease his “adjustment” to the realities of industrial life. Experiments carried out at Western Electric by Elton Mayo and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School - the famous Hawthorne studies - showed how complaints about low wages and excessive supervision could be neutralized by psychiatric counseling and observation. Mayo and his colleagues found, or claimed to find, that changes in physical conditions of work, wage incentives, and other material considerations had little influence on industrial productivity. The workers under observation increased their output simply because they had become the object of professional attention and for the first time felt as if someone cared about their work. Interviews instituted with the intention of eliciting complaints about the quality of supervision, which might in turn have enabled management to improve supervisory techniques, turned up instead subjective and intensely emotional grievances having little relation to the objective conditions of work.
...
“Selfishness” or Survivalism?
In its liberal use of labels, its addiction to slogans, its reduction of cultural change to simplified sets of opposite characteristics, and its conviction that reality is an illusion, this simpleminded case for “cultural revolution” betrays its affinity with the consumerism it claims to repudiate. The most glaring weakness of this argument, however - and of the whole debate in which it is immersed - is the equation of narcissism with “selfishness of an extreme form,” in the words of Daniel Yankelovich. The terms have little in common. Narcissism signifies a loss of selfhood, not self-assertion. It refers to a self threatened with disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness. To avoid confusion, what I have called the culture of narcissism might better be characterized as a culture of survivalism. Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity. Selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and the future, a determination to live one day at a time - these techniques of emotional self-management, necessarily carried to extremes under extreme conditions, in more moderate form have come to shape the lives of ordinary people under the ordinary conditions of a bureaucratic society widely perceived as a far-flung system of total control.
Confronted with an apparently implacable and unmanageable environment, people have turned to self-management <““Freedom in thought has only pure thought as its truth, a truth lacking the fullness of life. Hence freedom in thought, too, is only the notion of freedom, not the living reality of freedom itself.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit>. With the help of an elaborate network of therapeutic professions, which themselves have largely abandoned approaches stressing introspective insight in favor of “coping” and behavior modification, men and women today are trying to piece together a technology of the self, the only apparent alternative to personal collapse. Among many people, the fear that man will be enslaved by his machines has given way to a hope that man will become something like a machine in his own right and thereby achieve a state of mind “beyond freedom and dignity,” in the words of B.F. Skinner. Behind the injunction to “get in touch with your feelings” - a remnant of an earlier “depth” psychology” - lies the now-familiar insistence that there is no depth, no desire even, and that the human personality is merely a collection of needs programmed either by biology or by culture.
We are not likely to get any closer to an understanding of contemporary culture as long as we define the poles of debate as selfishness and self-absorption, on the one hand, and self-fulfillment or introspection on the other. According to Peter Clecak, selfishness is the “deficit side” of cultural liberation - an “unavoidable byproduct of the quest for fulfillment.” It is a part of contemporary culture that must not be confused with the whole. “Though they are plausible to a degree, characterizations of America as a selfish culture typically confuse excesses with norms, by-products with central and on the whole salutary outcomes of the quest” for self-fulfillment. But the question is not whether the salutary effects of “personhood” outweigh hedonism and self-seeking. The question is whether any of these terms capture either the prevailing patterns of psychological relations or the prevailing definition of selfhood.
The dominant conception of personality sees the self as a helpless victim of external circumstances. This is the view encouraged both by our twentieth-century experience of domination and by the many varieties of twentieth-century social thought that reach their climax in behaviorism. It is not a view likely to encourage either a revival of old-fashioned acquisitive individualism (which presupposed far more confidence about the future than most people have today) or the kind of search for self-fulfillment celebrated by Clecak, Yankelovich, and other optimists. A genuine affirmation of the self, after all, insists on a core of selfhood not subject to environmental determination, even under extreme conditions. Self-affirmation remains a possibility precisely to the degree that an older conception of personality, rooted in Judaeo-Christian traditions, has persisted alongside a behavioral or therapeutic conception. But this kind of self-affirmation, which remains a potential source of democratic renewal, has nothing in common with the current search for psychic survival - the varieties of which we must now examine in some detail.

THIS STORY TAKES A BDSM-INCESTY STORY AND TURNS IT TRANS! Dale hated his stepmom and caught her cheating. He blackmailed her into becoming his sex slave. The problem is—she grew to love it and now he's fallen in love with her. What will happen when Dad returns and learns what's happened between his son and his new wife??????
It was a perfect Friday morning as Mom and I lay together on the master bed. I had planned continue her overt slavery until Dad returned from his extended business trip tomorrow, but I had essentially released her from it only a few days after my old school chums and I had taken turns degrading her all night long.
The thing was, she seemed to love whatever nasty things we made her do, so it was no longer as hot as it had been. That night climaxed with the three of us pissing on her in the bathtub while she dildoed herself for us, and she had a massive orgasm.
More than that, I had fallen in love with my stepmother as much as she seemed to have fallen in love with me. Ever since then, she had gladly fucked whenever I wanted, did whatever I wanted, dressed as sexy as I wanted, and in general treated me like a Master or a king.
She’d become addicted to presenting herself as sexy as possible, both to turn me on but also because it turned her on. Every night she climbed into bed wearing a scandalous three-piece lingerie set: a garter belt with seamed stockings, a shelf bra that nestled but fully exposed most of her tits and her usually-hard nipples, and crotchless panties so I had instant access to her pussy and asshole.
My dick and my mouth spent much time down there.
Mom had just finished sucking off my morning erection and eating my jizz, which she shared with me. Ever since I freed her, she often made it part of the blowjob. I had to admit my own cum tasted sexy.
“You know, I had this whole list of degrading things I was going to do you before I changed my mind,” I said offhandedly after a kiss.
Her interest perked up. “Like what? We could still try them!”
“Well, that first night with Jake and Ted, when we peed all over you and then we made you suck the last drops of piss out of our dicks? I had been thinking of making you drink the whole thing. Use you like…”
“Like a urinal, Master?”
“You don’t have to call me that. I told you. Anyway, yeah.”
“And I told you, I like the way it sounds. You are the master of my heart, my darling Dale.” She bent down and kissed my cock before she looked me in the eyes. “Anyway… I’d like to try that with you.”
“You’re the most exciting woman in the world to me.” I heaved a sigh. “I only wish Dad would never come home.”
“At least we got an extra month!”
Dad had called a few days after that first orgy to say he was very sorry but his job demanded an extra month out of the country. Helen and I had celebrated with a long fuck in the backyard hot tub.
I bit my lip. “Maybe we should tell him we’re in love and it’s all my fault. And… I don’t know. Help me make up a story.”
She looked at me sadly, warily. “The story is going to be worse than you think. I missed my period last week. I bought a test kit last night and I used it just before you woke. I was going to tell you after we got up, but maybe now is the time. I'm pregnant with your baby, Dale. I hope you’re not angry.”
The emotions hit me like a football pile-up, everything from I’m too young to how deeply I loved my stepmom and how close it would bring us together. In the end that was what won out. I’d do anything—
“What the hell is this!” My father’s voice thundered in the room.
What happened next was a blur, but I remember Mom crying out in terror, Dad yelling, him pulling a gun out from the closet, a struggle, a loud bang, and a sharp pain on the side of my head just before I blacked out. My last thought was fear for my beloved Helen.
I came to sometime later. Helen was in fevered activity, stuffing three big suitcases on the bed. One was loaded with jewelry, cash from the floor safe, Dad’s guns, the others with designer dresses, shoes and handbags worth hundreds of thousands.
“He-Helen,” I gasped.
She stopped packing and came over to hug me fiercely. “Thank God you’re okay, my love,” she wept.
We clung together for long minutes until I asked what happened.
“I will tell you in a minute, baby. But right now I need to know something.” She went over a laptop PC on the dresser that I recognized as Dad’s. “I need your social security number.”
“What? Why, Mom?”
“Please! Just tell me!”
As she typed it in, she explained that I’d fought to take away his gun during the struggle and it had gone off. It killed him. She was transferring as much money as she could into a Mexican bank account near a city where she had relatives. It was the only way we could be free, she said. Or we could risk a murder trial here.
“But it was an accident!”
She hammered in some final keyboard strokes and exhaled in relief. She turned to me with dismay. “We’ve been fucking behind his back for almost two months. I’m carrying your child! If we wipe your prints off the gun it only looks worse. And when your friends tell in open court what you made me do, no jury will believe a thing you say.”
I suddenly felt like I might puke. “Oh… fuck!”
“Get anything you must have. Don’t worry about clothes, I’ll take care of that later. We have all the money we need for a new life.”
In a daze, I grabbed a few keepsakes, some cool boots I liked and a dozen books I wanted to have. We stashed it all in her Jaguar’s trunk and hit the I-5 for the Mexican border. She said not to worry: she’d help me learn all the Spanish I’d need and she’d make sure I’d have everything I wanted after we got there.
We were about an hour out of Tijuana and it was dark when she pulled over to a store for snacks and something to drink. She handed me an open bottle of icy, Mexican-brand Coke. Ten minutes after I drank it, I could no longer keep my eyes open. I passed out.
The nightmare seemed to go on forever—the worst kind where you feel like you’re almost awake but you can’t wake up—bizarre dreams mixed flashes of reality. It was accompanied by pains all over my body, especially my face and a tightness across my chest. At times I sensed that someone was feeding me with a spoon.
I woke with a start in a bright, cheery bedroom with strange bird songs out the window and the smell of Mexican cooking nearby. I tried to sit up and found I was handcuffed to the frame of a hospital bed.
“What the fuck!” I spouted.
Helen appeared a minute later, grinning over me. “Welcome to your new life, Dalia. This will be so much fun!”
“Where am I? Why do I feel so strange and achy? And what the fuck is this this?” I tugged the handcuff.
“It’s so much easier to show you.” She called toward the door. “Mom, I need a hand in here.”
A beautiful Mexican woman, a total MILF somewhere north of forty-years-old, glided into the room. It was then that I noticed they both wore white silk tunics that barely reached past their shapely asses and through which bra-less tits poked hard nipples.
As Helen reached down to my chest, I saw a wide elastic bandage cinched down where I felt a tight, heavy sensation. A hiss of Velcro exposed two very large, round breasts. As I looked at them and gasped, the two women held up and tilted a full length mirror.
I’m a girl with a dick!
Save my pubes and from my eyebrows on up, all the hair had been removed from my body. I had stripper-sized breasts and a slender waistline. My face was utterly smooth, as though no beard was below the skin. It was shaped differently that it was before—it was a girl’s face!
I screamed and passed out. When I came to, Helen explained I’d been kept sedated for the past three weeks while various doctors and specialists had visited here and I’d been taken to a nearby private clinic with an operating room.
“You’ve been getting electrolysis every day to remove your beard and body hair, waxing for your legs and arms. Obviously, you’ve had breast implants. The same surgeon did sort of a tummy tuck and removed the bottom floating ribs to give you an hourglass figure. A cosmetic surgeon made your nose and forehead much more womanly. Plus a filler to give you those fuckable lips! And of course the hair extensions until yours grows out.”
“Why would you do this to me?”
“You’re wanted for murder back in Los Angeles, darling. Not to mention you transferred ten million of your father’s money to a bank in the Cayman Islands. They’ll never find you now that you look like this!”
“You said you were transferring the money to Mexico!”
“I lied. I lied about being pregnant too.”
I gasped again. “You fucking—witch! Why?”
Her smirk was replaced by icy calm. “I can’t slap you until your face heals, but I have a long memory and other punishments.” Then she turned cheery again. “I did it to make you easier to manipulate. I also lied about when your father was coming home. I wanted him to catch us because I knew he’d go for the gun.”
“You planned his murder!”
“And I transferred your fingerprints to that gun that we left behind. If you even try to go to the authorities then will see only a tranny slut who’s the prime suspect in a highly sexual patricide case.”
“Why did you go through all of this? And turn me into this?”
“Tradition. My mama and I have a long history of selecting weak males, beguiling and making them love us. Then we force-transition to give us pliable sex slaves we can use to make more money.” She indicated the Latina MILF. “Dalia, meet Dolores Reina. Dalia’s your new name, by the way.”
She gave Dolores a deep, tongue-heavy kiss as she caressed her ass through the white silk. Helen caught me gaping and broke the kiss. She winked at me. “She’s my stepmom. A real hottie, isn’t she? She did to my dad what I did to yours.”
She cinched my new breasts back down with the binder, explaining it had to stay on until they fully healed. Now that I was conscious I could take over the exercise to keep them from turning painfully hard.
"Your face and tits are too sensitive to play with right now, but I can appropriately break you into slavery, anyway.”
“If you think I’m going to do a fucking thing you—OW!”
I cried out as she seized my balls and squeezed them. As I recovered from the pain she strapped a collar around my neck. It looked much like a dog collar and it had a rectangular plastic box that lay on the back of my neck underneath my hair extensions.
She held up a remote control and pushed the button briefly, making me scream from the electric shock on my neck. It was then a simple matter for them to guide me to their basement dungeon and lock my head and wrists into old-fashioned stocks that bent me over. Ankle cuffs on the floor spread my legs wide apart.
Helen held up a dildo ten inches long and two inches wide. “Here’s where I turn you into a real girl, Dalia.” She stripped off her tunic, exposing her stunning body. Her stepmom handed her a dildo harness.
“Please don’t, Mom!” I cried. The tears stung my lip-filler injection sites. “You don’t need to do this!”
Her smile turned wicked. “Of course I do, baby. It’s payback for what you did to me. Besides, I know that very soon you will come to beg for it, and not just for this toy. Real cock!”
I stared straight ahead in despair, waiting for them to take my anal cherry. That’s when I saw the wall in front of me and the one to my side was mirrored. I was shocked to see just how much mine was now the body of a sexy girl. I’d already been slender with shapely legs, but the big breasts and my new waistline—and my face—made me a sexpot.
I can’t believe my cock is tingling from this!
Dolores was now also naked and so intensely beautiful, looking like an even hotter version of 1960s sex symbol Raquel Welch, with bigger tits and ass. She smiled kindly she stepped up holding a bottle of sex lubricant and coating her finger.
“I specialize in mariconas. What you gringos call ‘sissies.’ I just love turning boys into slutty girls, Dalia.” She softly kissed my lips. “If you relax and give into this, it won’t hurt at all, baby.”
I couldn’t help moaning as she massaged my asshole with a slick digit, especially as she eased her forefinger all the way inside my now-horny butt. My cock got instantly hard. Within a few minutes she’d worked three fingers up into my rectal muscle. It gave me a boner as hard as I ever got and made me whimper like a sex-starved slut.
“Make your voice higher, sexy Dalia,” the Mexican MILF coaxed. “You are now a beautiful, sexy girl. You should sound like one!”
She purposefully grazed and jabbed my prostate, building a deep ache in my groin. My voice got higher as my P-gasm built, and I felt the precum flow down my straining cock shaft. Then it hit like a huge wave. I cried out like a girl in ecstasy.
“Your daughter is ready for you, mija,” the MILF said.
I actually wiggled my butt in anticipation as I felt Mom’s hands cup my ass. I couldn’t help doing it and I wondered why in hell this turned me on so much. Did I have this buried in me? Sure, I sometimes jacked off to shemale porn but always to a fantasy of fucking them. Never—
“Mami will make you a full girl now, Dalia. Try to push it out and it will go right in,” she said and then kissed me.
She was right: the huge dildo slipped right into me. It stung at first and I wanted to beg her to pull it out. Instead, I tried to relax and I breathed into it. Helen fucked me slowly and gently at first, letting me get used to it. I could tell she wanted me to like it, to like being a slut with a dick. She wanted me to like erasing every trace of normal American boy in me.
“Oh, I love that, Mom!” I whined in my new girl voice.
“Call me Mami,” she husked, picking up the speed of her thrusts. “You will learn Spanish quickly for your new life here, mija. That means ‘daughter’ in the informal.”
“Es hora de freír su cerebro,” Dolores chuckled.
Mom laughed. “She said it’s time to fry your brain.”
I wondered what she meant until the exquisite MILF’s lips closed around my leaking cock. Mom battered into me while her mom took me in her throat, sucking me into an explosive orgasm that made me briefly sag in the stocks from erotic exhaustion.
There was a sudden, heavy scent of ass as Mom pulled out of me and put the slippery, fouled dildo in my face. She looked down into my eyes, wondering if she’d have to order me. She didn’t need to. I was her slave now. I gladly opened wide and took it into my mouth.
“Muy bien, mija. Te amo.”
“Very good, daughter,” I purred between licks. “I love you.”
“Muy bien, my sexy girl.”
She pulled the cock away and gave me a deep, penetrating kiss. Her love for me was no act. It both heartened and worried me. I truly had no idea who she was or what she was capable of.
You know damn well what she’s capable of. She’s a Black Widow who killed your father, framed you for it, stole all of his money, and turned you into her own shemale sex slave. She could decide to kill you and nobody would ever know.
Yet still my cock stayed rock hard.
“Now we shall see how much you love me, Dalia. Hold her waist, Mami. It’s time to own her fully.”
I could barely breathe from the excitement when she pulled out the huge jar of Vaseline and began coating her right forearm. I had no idea what my ultimate fate was, but I hoped that as long as I went along with whatever perversion she came up with that she’d keep loving me.
What surprised me was how much I looked forward to pleasing her and surrendering to her every whim. It reminded me of those few times I’d gone skydiving and turned my fate over to the universe.
I cried out with joy as her fist slid deep into my rectal meat. My cock throbbed with pleasure and my heart filled with giddiness from the feeling to total abandon, especially as she fondly caressed my girlish ass with her free hand. I heard them whisper and giggle in Spanish, and I hoped they were planning something nasty.
My wish came true a moment later when Dolores dragged over a low table and climbed atop it. She spread her legs and shoved her spread labia in my face. She ordered me to drink.
As her hot piss filled my mouth and I gulped it down in heady exhalation, I reveled in a freedom I would never have known otherwise. I was now a shemale sex slave, a chick with a dick, owned by two sexy, evil women in a rich villa somewhere deep in Mexico, and I had no idea what would happen to me next.
And I didn’t care!
The above story is one I posted in a BDSM erotica sub and it had no sissy/trans elements until this chapter. Here's the next part:
https://www.reddit.com/transgenderfantasy/comments/1clxtmq/my_loving_mother_climax_forced_transbdsmincest/
If you'd like to read parts 1 and 2 of this story, here is part 1:
https://www.reddit.com/BDSMerotica/comments/1cbt0xmy_loving_mother_dubconm20f32incestanaldegradation/

TLDR: One of my credit card accounts has consistently showed on my credit report that I owe 16k even though I now only owe 7k. I called my bank and they said it takes time to show up on my credit report, but my other cards that I’ve paid off have showed up on my report right away(within a matter of two weeks). How long do I wait before I take action for them not updating my credit?
I have been meticulously checking my credit score in the chase app for the last few months and have always seen it change every 2 weeks, it hasn’t changed now in over a month due to one of my accounts not showing that it’s been paid down. When I call they say that it’s been reported but that I should wait a week more. This has never been the case before, has anyone else experienced this?
I normally would not be this anal but I really am trying to get the best deal on a home loan and paying this down would mean a significant jump in score. The last update was march 27th (it’s now April 28th).

KKK Bigfoot
The first call from Melvin came in at 2:00 am on a Friday night. Seeing who it was, I decided to let it go to voice mail. Then the calls continued. First it was every 15 minutes, then every half hour. Finally I just turned my phone volume off completely. I had shit to do.
Early the next morning I was deep in a South Georgia cypress swamp hunting a large Sasquatch that had been stealing hogs from a nearby farm situated on the edge of the swamp. It was a hot and very humid morning. The air was heavy and thick. Thank God I had remembered my snake boots because the cotton mouths were thicker than pubic lice on a street whore.
As I made my way through the swamp I finally found a piece of dry ground. What a fucking relief that was. I needed a break. I got out of the water and onto dry ground, leaned up against a tree, and lit up a nice Nicaraguan puro cigar. By this time it was around 9:00 am, the sun was beating down, and I was sweating like a n!gger writing a love letter!
Now let me tell you, just as soon as I got my stick burning good I started hearing this hissing sound coming from behind me. “Oh shit”, I thought. I already knew what it was. But I did not know how big it was.
I slowly turned my head and scanned the land until I saw it. There it was: a Goddamn alligator no less than 12 feet in length laying at the waters edge, only 6 feet away from me. Not particularly eager to get back into the water I decided to waste this fucking lizard. My rifle was slung over my shoulder. I decided to pull my pistol.
As I was reaching into my waders to pull my .480 revolver I saw a huge black hand come up out of the water just behind the gator. I froze. I just stood there and watched. The hand grabbed the big alligator by its tail and with a sudden jerk it yanked it off the bank and into the water.
The water then literally exploded! The gator was going ape shit crazy, going into a death roll trying to get loose from whatever grabbed it. I backed away and shouldered my rifle, putting the nightmarish commotion in my reflex sight as I flipped off the safety. I was carrying my AR-10 this morning.
Then the unspeakable happened! The creature that grabbed the alligator by its tail stood up out of the water. It was a goddamn bigfoot!! The fucker stood a good 9-10 feet tall and was massive. The monster was holding the thrashing gator in a bear hug. Despite the size of the reptile and its enormous strength, the Bigfoot had it under control with what appeared to be a minimum effort.
Now all this happened very fast. In fact it happened too fast for me to even think about getting a shot off. The Bigfoot then took hold of the alligator’s head with one hand and in one quick move it opened its massive jaws and bit the gator’s head clean off!
“MOTHERFUCKER!!”, I thought to myself. This was one of the most aggressive and violent attacks I have ever seen from a Sasquatch. It was simultaneously frightening and exhilarating.
The Bigfoot then opened its hands and arms and let the lifeless alligator fall into the water with a giant splash. I was still in position and ready to fire. The Bigfoot then turned its attention on me. It was a big son of a bitch. It was sopping wet with solid black matted hair and it made a wheezing sound as it breathed.
Apparently, the Bigfoot crawled underwater up to the little island I was on when it attacked the alligator. I don’t know if it was hunting and I just happened to be there or what. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. What if I tried to communicate with the Sasquatch!
It stood only about 8 feet from me, still standing in the murky swamp water as it stared at me. I slowly lowered my rifle to my side, keeping eye contact with it. I then took my left hand off my rifle and raised it slowly and help up my open hand as is waiving hello.
The beast began to sway back and forth. Then it huffed at me. I lowered my left hand. It’s eyes slowly moved between me and the rifle I was holding at my side. Then I said “It’s ok, buddy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
It stood and stared at me a moment longer. Then, for whatever reason, it turned and started walking away from me through the water. Curiously, it made hardly a sound as it glided through the swamp muck. Clearly, it saw me as posing no threat. But it left the remains of the alligator. Was it hunting that gator, or did it attack and kill it because it was threatening me? I’ll never know.
I stood and watched as the large Bigfoot retreated into the swamp. Then I quickly raised my rifle, put my sight on the back of its head, and blew the fucker’s brains out all over the swamp in a glorious explosion of red blood and brains! The big fucker fell with a huge splash, creating waves in the water that reached the edge of the little island on which I stood.
I pulled out my phone to call the farmer that hired me to kill this creature and asked him to meet me at the back side of his property with his 4-wheeler. I notice that old Melvin had been blowing up my phone with calls and voice mails. “What a fucking asshole”, I thought to myself.
I pulled out my rope from my pack, tied up the fucking Sasquatch, and dragged it out of the swamp. It was not as hard as it sounds, though, since I was pulling it through the water. I got to the back end of the farmer’s property and met the guy. We pulled the rotten beast out of the swamp with his 4-wheeler.
We got that big bitch up to his barn. All wide-eyed, he asked me what we were going to do with the monster. I told him that he needed to bury it ASAP because the Sasquatch’s buddies would eventually smell it and would bring down hell on him and his farm. This caused him great concern. I then offered to haul off the corpse ... for an extra $500.00. He was none to happy with what he called a “hidden charge”, but fuck him.
I had already cut the farmer a deal. Instead of my usual $5,000.00 Bigfoot removal fee, I did it for him for $3,500.00 and a blowjob from his wife. He did not want to spend another $500.00, but he had no choice. So, he coughed up the cash. Then I said, “OK, Cletus, now go get Ethel down here to empty my ball sacks.”
The farmer said “Hell, General, I didn’t think you was serious about THAT!” I looked at him in silence for a moment. Then I reached for the pistol on my hip and started pulling it out of my holster. “OK, OK!! Put yer gun up!! I’ll go get Ethel!!”, he said.
I got my money then made the farmer sit there on a bale of hay and watch as his old lady sucked my dry. We then threw the dead Sasquatch in the back of my truck and I headed out. About a mile down the road I pulled over on the side of the road and dumped out the body. It was a smelly son of a bitch!! It got all wet in that stinking swamp water then simmered in the hot Georgia son. But fuck it. Buzzards got to eat too.
I arrived home at 5:00pm Saturday evening. I decided I would stay in for the evening. The hot, humid swamp had sapped all my energy. Plus I was covered in mosquito bites and a half dozen snake bites.
The first thing I did was take a long, hot shower to get the stink of the swamp and the muddy, stinky Sasquatch off me. That fucking wet Sasquatch stench lingers a long fucking time. That’s one of the reason I smoke cigars.
Finally I was able to retire to my recliner situated in my den. Wearing only my crimson velour smoking jacket, loosely tied, I sat down and relaxed. I was about halfway through an AF Opus X, and I had just poured myself a glass of Glenlivet 18. My faithful dog, Admiral Sasquatch, stood dutifully beside me as I reclined, and I stroked the fur on the back of her neck.
Suddenly I heard a female voice purr my name, “Geeeeeeeennraaaaal…”. Greatly startled, as I expected nobody else to be there but me and the Admiral, I instinctively grabbed my HK USP .45 acp from its holster sewn into the side of my La-Z-Boy, where it stays cocked and loaded, spun off the recliner, aimed in the direction of the voice, and opened fire.
I dumped the entire mag in less than two seconds. Before I realized who it was, one-half of the target’s head was blown off and hanging upside down off her shoulder by a narrow strip of flesh. Then the body collapsed in the doorway where it stood. “WHUMP!”
“Oh Shit!”, I said. It was that bar slut I took home last night! She had a liquor name... Brandy, or some shit. I forgot about her. Then a much more dreadful thought came to mind: what the fuck was she STILL doing at my house?!?! Proper etiquette dictates that bar sluts are to exit the house by 8:00 am sharp in a discreet and civilized manner.
Shit, I had really dodged a fucking bullet with this bitch! She was some kind of psycho bitch or something. Imagine, sitting here in my house all day waiting for me to get home. That’s some scary shit!
Oh well, I decided to sit back down and finish my drink. I needed to relax after all the excitement and stress of the day. I’ll clean up the mess that bitch made later. I laid my head back into my leather recliner and before I knew it I was fast asleep.
I woke up at around 2:30 am Sunday morning by my phone vibrating. It had been sitting on my armrest when I sat down and must have fallen onto my lap while I slept. Then I noticed I still had half a glass of Scotch in my hand. Fuck, I had been plum tuckered out when I sat down. I got up to take a leak.
I glanced over at Brandy, or whatever her name was. Amazingly, all the blood and brain was gone off the floor and walls. I looked over at the Admiral and in a high, cartoonish voice like you use to talk to dogs, said “GOOD GIRL!!” She was very pleased at the recognition and started wagging her tail.
I got me a little bite to eat, fed the Admiral, then sat down in my chair again. I decided to flip on the television news to see if Trump had issued the Kill Order yet to get rid of those BLM and Antifa vermin slithering all over America’s street. “Goddamnit!”, I thought to myself, “If Don would call me I would assemble my Sasquatch Operations crew and absolutely DESTROY all of those commie fuckers in under a week.
It took about 30 seconds to get disgusted with those leftist puddles of rat piss, then I turned off the TV. It was late, but I was not really sleepy at this point. I looked over at my coffee table and at my magazines laying there. “AHHHH...” I said to myself when I remembered that I had just received my monthly edition of “Anal Masters” magazine.
I was just just perusing mag, checking out the monthly columns and such, when my goddamned phone started vibrating again. Now, just so you will understand The General’s mindset, I hate people. I like a handful of individuals, but I generally have people. Therefore, each time my phone rings there is a 99% chance - minimum - that it will agitate me.
I picked up my phone and looked at it. It was Melvin...AGAIN!! This motherfucker has been blowing up my phone for 24 straight hours now. I sighed, knowing that it was probably important. Given that I once waived a loaded gun in his face for interrupting me during a game of chess with his grandkid, old Melvin would not interrupt me, let alone blow up my phone unless it was something VERY IMPORTANT.
I took mental note that something serious was troubling old Melvin and that apparently good old The General is the only one who can help. I also sighed at the inconvenience it may cause me. But then I recalled the saying that to all great men of wealth and power comes great responsibility. “OK”, I said to myself”, I’ll talk to old Melvin and see what I can do for him”. I was going to call him back...right after I finish my night’s sleep. I leaned back in my chair, reached over to turn off the lamp, and went to sleep.
I woke up around 2:30 pm Sunday afternoon. I was a little pissed at myself because I wanted to get to the firing range by noon. I got a shooting buddy I wanted to meet up with, and he shoots at 12-noon every Sunday. See, he has this super hot wife that I am trying to fuck and I figure hanging with the hubby will get me closer to her!
But my plans were blown to shit. But at least I got some rest. As I go to take a piss I notice the bar slut still laying there on the floor. I’m thinking “FUCK!”. Sigh ... I guess I need to get rid of the fucking body this afternoon before I do anything else. Then I remember old Melvin.
I decided the body can wait a little longer. I would make a cup of nice coffee for myself to enjoy, during which I will call old Melvin and see what the fuck he needs. And that’s exactly what I did. I made me a large K-Cup of medium roast, sat down at my kitchen table, and called old Melvin.
Now folks, before I get into my conversation with Melvin, you got to know a couple things. You need to know a little bit about Melvin, and you need to know about how Melvin and I get along.
The first thing you got to know is that old Melvin is the Grand Wizard of the South Ga KKK. I know, most of you folks just got triggered and are on the phone calling 911 to report a hate crime. Well, cool your jets and simmer down. The fact is, today’s KKK is not as bad as advertised. Hell, they raise money for crippled kids (white crippled kids) and to help little old (white) ladies bury their men. They even sponsored a recent trip sending a bunch of (white) school children to see the White House. The fact is they do not hate blacks any more. They just like whites a whole lot more.
Now, that said, The General does not get along too well with the KKK. Once a long time ago I was out in the woods squatch hunting late at night when a drunk group of these sheet wearing fuckwits came into my woods looking for a tree to use to lynch some negro they had with them and tied up.
I sat quietly, just a few yards away, and watched those crazy hooded f#ggots in secret. When they strung up the poor black guy and dropped him it kind of disturbed me, like it had gone way too far. So I raised my rifles, shot the rope, causing it to split, and the black man fell to the ground. He was obviously hurt, but he was still alive.
Now, I can’t confess to exactly what happened next. I’ll just say that the local KKK membership numbers dropped suddenly and significantly as the result of acute lead poisoning. Of course, that cannot be relied upon for 100% accuracy because none of the bodies were ever found.
The black guy was a 16 yr old kid named Lucious. I took him home with me and gave him a job on my farm doing chores and such. I even gave him a place to live - a little cabin out back with an earthen floor and a little cot in it. Lucious worked for food and board. The boy was a damn good worker too.
I ended up putting Lucious through college and helped him get a job with the Atlanta office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was a great job and he is pulling in big bucks. Hell, Lucious thought of The General as a father figure, what with his daddy leaving right after he was born.
But for all I did for that boy, I just could not clean all the darkness out of him. About 2 years after he went off to Atlanta he started dating this real militant black chick who was into BLM and the New Black Panthers. He changed, and not for the better. Not long after that I heard he was shot to death in a crack deal that went bad. And so goes that old saying, “You can take a black man out of the ghetto, but you cannot ever take the ghetto out of a black man.”
I reflect on this story now and again. Was saving Lucious from being lynched worth it? To me, yes. But to old Lucious, probably not. With my help he was able to reach heights he never dreamed of reaching. But in the end it just meant he had a longer way to fall. But I don’t form any judgment. A man has got to do for himself.
So after the sudden mass extinction of a bunch of KKK f#ggots, eventually the group started showing itself again, and old Melvin became the leader. After networking with other chapters he started getting real powerful, eventually Melvin was awarded title of Grand Dragon. In his world he is king. He is the lord of his domain. His kingdom is his, and his alone.
In my world Melvin is a half-assed heating and a/c repairman. In fact, I first met old Melvin when I needed someone quick to fix my heater in the middle of the winter. It was the weekend and we got hit with a cold front bringing unusually frigid air into the Deep South. Melvin was the only one I could get out to my house.
Well, old Melvin managed to get my heat back on, at least long enough for me to get a real tech out there. While Melvin was in my house he saw the two life size mounts of Sasquatch in my living room. He said “Damn! Then shore is sum big critters. What is they? Bears?” I explained to him what they were. “Shit fire! I thought them critters only existed out thar in the Specific Northwest!”, he replied.
The silly bastard then told me about some weird shit that had been going on out in the woods when he and his buddies got together on the weekends. He said trees would be pushed over, and small ones would be tied in knots. He even claimed to have seen large humanoid footprints. I asked if anyone cast them. He replied “Cast them? Nah, we was too tore up bout them to go fishin’”, he said.
Due to a momentary lapse of reason I asked “So, are these occurrences at you and your buddies’ hunting camp?” He said, “Nah, it where me and my Klan brothers meet”. I said “Klan? You mean the KKK?” Melvin nodded eagerly, then pulled out a card with “KKK” on it and identifying him as a “Grand Dragon”.
At this point I am ready to kick his silly ass out of my house. But, he was doing me a solid, so I let him finish the job. He went on and on with unsolicited information about his little KKK club and what they do. Finally he finished his work and got up his shit to leave. As he was walking to the door he invited me to their next rally. Looking him square in the eye I said “No thank you. I’m Muslim.” He got a funny look on his face then left. “Fuck him”, I thought.
A couple weeks later Melvin stopped by my house unannounced one evening all shook up. It seems that during the rally he invited me to they were harassed by what he said was two creatures. They had rocks thrown at them and heard intimidating vocalizations. One small group of the KKK boys were even bluff charged by a “large black creature” while making their way out of the woods.
Melvin said “Mr. General, you gots to help me! Them monsters is keeping us from a’holdin our rallies!” I asked why couldn’t they just hold their rallies somewhere else. He said they hold their rallies there because it was some kind of white Supremacist sacred ground that they had been using for years. I don’t know anything about all that, of course, but whatever.
I told Melvin, “Look, I hunt and kill Sasquatch for a living. I do it because nobody else can. I charge a flat rate of $5,000.00 per Sasquatch. So if you have two of them on your property I would need $10,000.00 cash up front, with a money back guarantee. If I only catch one, then I keep half of the fee and refund the other five grand. But I have been doing this a long time so if there are two out there, then I will get two of them. If there is more than two, then I get an extra $2,500.00 a head over two creatures.”
Old Melvin took off his greasy CAT hat, rubbed his head, and said “Well, gee, General, that thar is a lot of money. Do you think we can work out something where we pay ya in installment payments after you catch them critters?” I looked at him and said “Get the fuck out of my house! You think this is a fucking game? These sumbitches will rip your fucking heads off and eat your guts. They are dangerous monsters. You can’t call 911, and Animal Control will laugh in your face. If you want those beasts gone, then you have to pay the price.”
“Ok, General, Ok. Simmer down”, he said, “I didn’t mean to get you upset. “I’ll talk to the boys and see what we can come up with. I’ll give ya a call.” As he walked out the door I said “By the way, I got a couple n!ggers on my crew. I trust that won’t be a problem.” Melvin just sort of crinkled his brow in disdain and walked off. I laughed to myself.
A couple days later Melvin called me. He said he spoke to his KKK buddies and they want me to do the job. He said they were able to scrape up $5,000.00 and asked could I start with one Bigfoot. He reasoned that if I killed one, then the other one might “get the message” and leave. This irritated me.
I replied “Goddamnit, Melvin! Stop wasting my time! If I kill one, then chances are the other one will get pissed and try to kill me and my crew, dumbass!!! Taking on one Bigfoot means I am taking on all of the creatures there.” Melvin kind of stammered around, saying it would be tough for them to come up with the other 5 grand.
I asked him, “Melvin, let me ask you something, son. Are you fucking retarded? Because you are acting like you have shit for brains. I have already told you it is 10 grand to get me for this job, and not a fucking penny less!” Then, just to tick off Melvin, I told him to stop acting like a “n!gger” and get the fucking money. Otherwise, stop bothering me.
So, this past Friday was a week after Melvin’s phone call to me. And he is blowing up my phone again. I am thinking that either (1) he does not have the money and is wanting to make some kind of hillbilly deal, which would piss me off. Not wanting to get pissed off, I decided to just not answer his call. Or, (2) he had the ten grand. In the case of the latter I figured I would let him stew a bit. Besides, I had plenty of work lined up, and the thought of a couple bigfoots harassing those KKK f#ggots in sheets made me smile.
So, come Sunday morning, I sat down with a steaming cup of coffee and called Melvin. He answered after just two rings. I told him it was me. He got all excited, saying “General!!! Damn it’s good to hear from ya!!! I been trying to git hold of ya all weekend!! Damn, but you is a hard man to get in touch with!”
I asked why he has been calling me. He told me they were able to get the ten grand. “Me and momma had to take out a second mortgage on my lot and trailer, but I got the money”, he said.
Honestly, I was a little disappointed. I really did not want this job. My mind immediately started constructing excuses. Then Melvin got kind of quiet and said “There’s something else I got to tell ya, General. Me and the boys went out there the other night with our shotguns. We was gonna try and take care of them bastards ourselves.”
I interrupted Melvin. “You dumb fuck!! You could have got yourself killed. More importantly, you probably just pissed them off!”, I said. Melvin was silent. I then asked, “How many of your guys did the creatures get?” Another silence, followed by Melvin quietly saying “two”.
I asked if they were dead. Melvin said “General, them big Sasquatch dragged them men off in the woods .... then they .... {Melvin starts sobbing} they did ‘things’ to them. Horrible things!” I asked “Did the men survive?”Old Melvin said that “Roger” was in intensive care. They found him lying unconscious and naked in the woods then rushed him to the ER. He was rushed into surgery and had emergency anal reconstructive surgery.
I asked “What about the other one?” Melvin sighed then said “Bert. Poor Bert. We found his mangled corpse hanging from a tree. He was naked and covered in blood. His rectum was pulled inside out. We managed to get him out of the tree, then noticed he ain’t got his head on his body any more. They ripped his head off, General!!!!! THEY RIPPED OFF POOR BERT’S HEAD JUST LIKE YOU SAID THEY WOULD, GENERAL!!!!! OH SWEET BABY JESUS!!!”
At that point Melvin lost his shit and started crying hysterically. I hung up the phone and got another cup of coffee. A few minutes later Melvin called back. “I’m sorry, General. I just lost it”, he said. I replied, “Yeah, you did. Suck it up and try not to act like a total f#g, ok?”
I told Melvin to put the cash in a bag, bring it to my house, set it at my front door, ring my door twice, and leave. He asked if this was some sort of secret deal we can’t speak about. I told him no, that I just did not want to have to see him and talk to him again.
I further instructed Melvin and his KKK friends to stay home and stay away from the property. I would call them once the job is done to settle up. Melvin asked “So, once I drop off the money, when will you get started?” I told him if he got me the money within the next couple hours I would assemble my crew on the property that night.
Forty-five minutes later my doorbell rang twice. I found a grocery bag at my front door filled with cash. I took it to my kitchen table and counted it. All there. I then contacted my crew, gave them the coordinates of the property and instructed them all to be there at 8:30 pm, locked and loaded.
I arrived at the property at 8:10 pm. I was surprised to find that I was not the first one there. The newest member of my crew was already there, decked out in full camo and armed to the teeth. I could not help but smile.
You may remember from a prior story my good buddy, Boss N#gger. He is one bad motherfucker who runs a combination whore house - illegal cockfighting ring out in the back country. I did him a solid and put his nephew, Little N#gger, on my crew.
Little N#gger beat me to the property. I got out of my truck and said “Hello there, Little N#gger! You ready to go murder some fucking monsters?” He was ready to go. I inspected his rifle: an H&K AR-10. His sidearm was a Smith .460 revolver. His backup weapon - a fucking hatchet. I knew immediately that I liked this kid!
Big Dick arrived next, at 8:15 pm. He had his son, Little Dick, with him. They both arrived with grins on their faces and guns in hand. Murder and Scum rode together and got there at 8:25 pm. Finally, N#gger Finger came rolling in, late as usual, at 8:37 pm. I asked him why he was late. “Well damn, General, I was nostrils deep in sum that old tangy pussy from the fried chicken joint in town, know what I mean?”, he said.
With everybody present, I started to address the crew for the pre-assault briefing. I started out, “Look, guys, there are most likely 2 very large and aggressive Bigfoot in these woods. They have been harassing people and acting territorial. Our plan is to set up a fake camp site where others have been accosted by these creatures with snipers on the perimeter. N#gger Finger, you and Little N#gger will be the bait. Scum, Murder, Big Dick, and Little Dick will be on the perimeter. I will be on patrol and serve as backup once we engage. Any questions?”
There were no questions. I told the boys assigned to the perimeter to go get into position. I then escorted the bait to their position. We made a campfire and erected a tent in order to create the fiction of a camp site. I gave N#gger Finger 2 pounds of bacon to cook on the fire do we could get some scent in the woods.
Once the fake camp was set up, there was one more thing to do. I reached into my sack and pulled out a couple of white sheets with head holes cut out and KKK headwear I made before I left the house. I handed them to the boys and told them to put it on. “What da fuck is this shit?”, asked N#gger Finger. I said, “Look, dude, we need to put all our feelings aside and focus on the job. There are a couple of gnarly Sasquatch out here we need to terminate.”
N#gger Finger continued, “Yeah, but why the sheets? We supposed to look like ghosts er something. Why we gotta wear sheets?” I sighed, then came clean. I told them that the victims of these monsters were KKK and that they needed to look like KKK clowns in order to trick the beasts into thinking they were back.
N#gger Finger got upset, saying “Sheeyit! They ain’t no way I is gonna dress up like sum KKK cracker!” Sensing that Finger needed some more motivation, I got in his face and said “PUT ON THE FUCKING COSTUME NOW, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER!!! THAT’s AN ORDER!!!” Old N#gger Finger shrunk back and said “Ok, General, ok, you don’t have to get all upset. I’ll put on this cracker get-up. Damn!” I looked at Little N#gger and asked if he had any problem putting on the sheets. He said, “Hell no, Uncle General!!! I’m here to kill Bigfoots!!” I nodded in approval. “Good man”, I said.

CLL #2363 (feat. The Love Between The Two Hosts)10/19/2004 – Tuesday Night Show Source – Tucker Stream Recording (2004) This episode is 100% complete with a medium audio upgrade. LoveLineTapes cites this episode as the origin of ‘Ace’s Accordion Countdown’ as well Adam Adan tells his anal carbuncle story and rants about Boston Sports fans.
The Love Between The Two Hosts – CLL on Youtube, with Video for select episodes.
https://adamanddrdrewshow.com/1743-loveline-nostalgia-with-superfan-giovanni/

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Thought I'd share this tale, as I'm having a shit time and it feels good to get it out.
Life is tough right now, so I decided to treat myself, in a failed attempt to try and get some happiness. Traded in my beloved Octavia vRS (all bow pls), for a Golf R. In my excitement, I didn't ask the basics, and found out it had missed a service. Being an anal dullard, I wasn't happy with that, and they had a retuns policy, so I could get my cash back. Got the cash back and decided to buy a GTI from a main dealer, had buckets of history and tbh, interior was nicer than the R, even though the driving experience was worlds apart.
Picked up the GTI on Tuesday, and today I took my mum to a hospital appointment. On a dual carriageway and the car feels odd, so I slow, to about 40, and then a bang, and a metallic grinding. My mum hops out, and she says the tyres look ok, then, she hands me a wheel nut. I get us out the car, down a bank away from the dual carriageway, I then go back look at the wheel, and all 5 bolts are missing, and the disk has ground into the alloy.
AA recovered us speedily, and the dealer is taking it seriously, but what a load of shite.
Torque wrench being bought, I'll never trust them again!

Hi All, I have been a long time reader this year and this is my first post to the group.
Greetings, my name is Kim (34F) and I have an Anal Fistula.
I think the normal introductions are called for next, how I arrived here etc.
Christmas Day 2023 I experienced some perianal area pain and thought it was because I had been sat on the floor playing with my nieces and nephews! Fast forward to a few days later the pain was quite something - not being able to sit, walk or sleep as a result and the only ease was hot water - showers and baths. An appointment with a GP they diagnosed me with a fissure, gave me some cream and sent me on my way.
Over the New Year weekend the pain was the worse I have ever experienced and as it was a bank holiday weekend for the first time I visited A&E. The doctor there said my GP was correct, a fissure, prescribed more cream and off I was sent home.
The pain got progressively worse and one evening my partner nearly called an ambulance as I was pale, confused, not speaking, feverish - but we thought we were over reacting for a twice diagnosed fissure so decided I would instead call the GP again the following morning.
I will be forever grateful to the doctor that morning who called me back straight away and said to come to him now, and to bring someone with me as he thought I would need to go to the hospital. He took one look at my ballooned backside said I had an abscess and sent me to the hospital. Within hours I was rushed in for surgery with a perianal abscess. (I also found out recently that I had dangerous blood results indicating sepsis at that time).
After surgery I was told that I had the largest abscess the consultant had seen in his time - horseshoe shaped, my left side tunnel was 6cm and the right 8cm.
Following this I had 8 weeks of packing changes every single day (even those weekends!) I then went down to three times a week for 2 weeks and then twice a week for the last 2 weeks. After a recovery of 12 weeks on March 18th one of my nurses told me that both sides had now closed and I needn’t be seen anymore. I brought myself lilac wellies to celebrate but before they even arrived… the very next day I woke up in agony with leaking from my left side. I went back to my nurses at the local surgery and they immediately suspected a fistula; which made sense as I had been experiencing pain in my left side for a number of weeks compared to my “worse” side the right which was causing no apparent issues. Side note: this was the first time a medical professional had mentioned a fistula to me- I only knew of the very high chance of one from the internet and late night abscess reading!
Fast forward to now, after being told by a GP that I just had an infection and weeks of trying antibiotics I was sent to the hospital to be seen by a surgeon consultant who is certain he can feel a 7 o clock fistula. He has urgently referred me for an MRI which I have an appointment for next month. The MRI will be more for the confirmation of position/ degree/ tracts/ branches etc - as you all know too well. I know I will certainly be having surgery as soon as I am able to (NHS pending!) so I just wanted to share my ongoing story as I know whatever comes next you, Reddit threads, will still be in my life for a little longer!

honestly I never saw any advice to take note of this before. make sure your name on your airline loyalty programme matches up to the name of your credit card, or your points transfer may be rejected.
sounds really basic right? except that since banks now use singpass to fill up credit card applications, the name of my card - and that is registered with the bank - includes my chinese name. And because my parents filled out my birth cert as [surname] [chinese name] [english name], the bank has me as [first name = chinese name english name] [surname]. but when I created my airline loyalty programme accounts, I either didn't use my chinese name, or they classify my chinese name as a middle name. so to airlines I am either just [english name] [surname] or [english name] [chinese "middle" name] [surname]. and now the bank says it can't transfer my points to miles because the names don't match.
the ironic thing is, when i purchase things online and key in my card details, I can write my name as [english name] [surname] and they can process payment just fine. like they don't care about me spending money but gotta be so anal about a points transfer.
now I'm also not sure all banks are like this but when you're trying to transfer from Citi, they have a page for you to key in your airline programme account details - basically name and number of your airline account. except that they auto-populate the name field with the name they have registered and don't make the field editable.
and both banks and airline won't let you edit your name without submitting docs, which they then also say will take at least a week to process. and if you're trying to redeem flights, time is of the essence to snap up those saver tickets. so just throwing it out there as a word of caution. if you're signing up to a new airline loyalty programme, easiest thing to do is at the point you key in your name, make sure it's already matching the one with your bank.