When I was in the army, I could deadlift 400 pounds. That’s a lot for someone my size and my bodyweight at the time (174 pounds, 8% body fat). But it’s all I could do. I don’t think I could have ever lifted much more because that’s just about the limit of my frame. Maybe if I trained really hard for many more years I could’ve gotten to 450.

So watching these World’s Strongest Man competitors deadlift nearly 1,000 pounds is humbling.

I am going to get back into weightlifting in the very near future. It was the form of exercise I enjoyed the most in the army and if you do it right, you are only competing against yourself. I routinely lifted with guys who could deadlift 600+ pounds and they were ecstatic when I hit 400 for the first time.

It’s also one of the few forms of exercise with well-done and valid scientific studies that show both quality of life and longevity increases, so it’s beneficial to everyone. (And no, women won’t “look like men” if they start weightlifting. Unless you take steroids or work out 8 hours a day, it’ll feminize your shape more than anything. Jessica Biel is a gym rat. Think she looks like a man?)

Deadlifting 1,000 pounds. Damn. That’s half a small car.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about the pastries and baked goods I’ve eaten in Germany, Italy, China and other places and get angry. Like burn down the building kind of angry. Except the building’s this whole country of atrocious food.

I appreciate that Matt Taibbi’s article spends so much time refuting the “no one could have known” narrative that was firmly established by propaganda during and post-Great Recession.

The blog “Calculated Risk” spoofed this even at the time with their “hoocoodanode?” taunt (fuck I miss Tanta to this day*) and it seemed obvious to me — who at the time was only vaguely paying attention to this — that the inevitable housing crash was going to cause problems of some type.

This colorful language – dominoes, a confidence game, an “iceberg,” a “storm” – artfully disguised reality. This wasn’t weather coming at them, but the consequences of years of untrammeled criminal fraud.

One of the most successful propaganda efforts in all of history was that poor little babies, just no one could have known that all of the criminal fraud, money laundering, and financial “engineering” was going to lead to trouble. Really, that probably kept a few thousand bankers, mortgage lender CEOs and other similar slimeballs out of prison.

And I was amazed how well it worked! I had friends explaining to me confidently that the callow delicate CEOs who only had access to every blatantly criminal activity and had explicitly approved everything undertaken by their organization could have had just no idea the wild speculative fraud and swindling their companies were up to.

I’d write or say, “You know, that’s not how companies work, right? No one puts $50 billion on the line and the CEO and top execs don’t know every detail about it?”

And they’d say,”But I read in the NYT that they didn’t know!” Or something very similar.

“Oh, ok then. That makes it true.”

As I said, one of the largest criminal conspiracies in history was followed up by one of the most well-organized and successful propaganda efforts of all time. Taibbi is one of the few who refutes that revisionist history every chance he gets. As the propaganda effort was to the benefit of most journalists and others, most didn’t bother to say a word against it and never will.

*I am puzzled how I can intensely miss someone I never met in person, never did anything but read words on a page, heck never even knew what she looked like until after she died. But I do, and so do a lot of other people. One of the best non-fiction writers ever to live.