That was pretty funny him complaining about "damn milleniums" being born in 1987.

Arms

Chins: bwx14, 8, 6, 5, 5 yikes this is hard when heavy
Tricep pushdowns: stackx21, 4 more sets failure
Hammer curls: 15kgx12,10,8,6
Rope triceps: 4 sets failure
ez curl: 20kgx12x3
Close pushups: bwx12x3
Hammer curls: 7.5kgx12x4
Hammer skullcrushers: 7.5kgx12x4

BW whopping 104.3kg with clothes+shoes+hydrated. I am around 99-102 in the morning.

Horseshoe theory also applies to the earnest/stupid vs aware/ironic dichotomy as well, apparently.

Damn son, getting thicc, as the millenniums say. My unintentional thickness definitely impacted my chins, but it's been a while since I've been 225+. Hopefully never going back, but different goals and all that.

Maybe I got got by elite range merging.

I'm trying to worry less about movements and more about muscles. If I'm getting worse at chinups but much better at rows, pulldowns, and deadlifts at any given bodyweight, my back is probably improving. I was 196lbs doing 27 pullups in 2017, then 196lbs doing only 19 this year during contest prep but with far stronger rows/pulling/deadlifts. If you want to get good at chinups, you need frequency but this won't necessarily build a back as well as training it twice a week but with a larger variety of lifts.

I don't feel uncomfortable at this bw either like I did in 2020 when I was around the same bw. Adding those 3 formal cardio sessions hitting average HR around 140-150 on the stairs in my apartment building has worked wonders and I feel like I can still push my BW without getting those uncomfortable feelings. 0 Sleep apnea or increased snoring either; these were big problems when I got above 98 or so before.

If my job permitted it, I'd do 30m of medium intensity cardio around 130-150hr 365 days out of the year fasted first thing in the morning. I've already ranted about how much it seems to be helping me handle training better.

I feel like I've made a bunch of breakthroughs in terms of training/nutrition/peds/otc supplementation and just my entire approach to this and I think if 2021/2022 school year was the year of busting through a bunch of barbell strength all time PRs at familiar BWs on sq/dl/incline bb and db presses, this is gonna be the year of hitting strength prs on other lifts, body composition PRs, and BW all time highs where I still feel really good as far as digestion/cardiovascular health goes.


Cardio is a facking panacea for health and performance, even if its fairly overrated for body composition (what I mean is that it hasn't "kept me lean" compared to last time I hit this bw, maybe it actually is more effective for fat loss in a deficit). So many dumb voices in bbing who say you should never do intense cardio and many who even say do 0 in the offseason. Awful advice. I'm curious to see what happens when I use fairly long duration around 45-60mins moderate intensity 130-150hr cardio as a fat loss tool. I went with the opposite approach of just progressively moving my step count up to 15k/day but not doing any "cardio" besides walking outdoors last contest prep and it was boring and tedious and I don't have anything to compare it to to assess if it is more or less effective for fat loss.

Biology is in its essence a simplification of physics, and most of its rules break down if you dig deep enough. So I try not to get too bogged down by labels and arbitrary rules. And the Covid vaccines certainly arent the first to not work as well as we would like, with flu vaccines being the obvious example. And no-one has objected to them being called vaccines for the last 80 years.


That being said, given our historical understanding of what vaccines are and what they do, for the mRNA "vaccine" specifically, calling it "gene therapy" would probably be more technically accurate.

I do appreciate the irony that primarily for partisan tribal reasons the Venn diagram of people who approve of mRNA vaccines being given to themselves and would pay extraorbinant prices for food that specifically was not modified in comparable ways has quite a bit of overlap. (and vice versa of course)

jdock just erasing the existence of the "We Love GMOs and Vaccines" Facebook community itt.

Seems I'm safe from the ill effects of these frankenfoods:

https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/defau...atoSummary.pdf

Yurop and poverty once again keep me safe. (Except for weird cheese that may kill me.)

MS,

That seems a bit of a stretch, but I can see the argument for the "gene therapy" designation. My main gripes are mostly associated with the fact that people can't simultaneously grasp this is the most risky vaccine they'll ever take and that they should take it.

Also the irony of the measles vaccine (for example) is that we've stopped giving a "more effective" variant and moved to a less effective one, like 50y ago, since the cost benefit is obviously superior. I think a lot of the antivax movement gets caught up in weird banal technicalities that don't even really grasp how we decide on vaccines and why strategies are changed (oral polio for example). It is a vastly complex subject and I probably read some of the dumbest things possible, since they're screenshots of ******s or other "lets lol at this ******" instead of trying to address reasonable arguments.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/medincell-...201000595.html

MedinCell Announces Positive Results for the SAIVE Clinical Study in Prevention of Covid-19 Infection in a Contact-Based Population

--A couple interesting notes from this news report.

First off, it is interesting how the title of the press release makes no mention of the therapeutic showing such great results (hint: the FDA derisively refereed to it as horse medicine).

Second, it will be a wild and unexpected turn of events (j/k) if the medical community decides Ivermectin is safe and effective to prevent and/or treat Covid after all, once they develop a (most likely unnecessary) propriety delivery technology allowing them to profit off said discovery.

Ngmi

cross-post from P&S forum

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798

Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination

--This article was recently published in Nature Immunology, a periodical with impeccable creditionals within the scientific community. It is hard to get through the technical jargon, but in layman's terms it is suggesting that after a 2nd and especially 3rd Pfizer mRNA booster shot most of the antibodies produced are IGG4, which is classically understood to inhibit immune responses. This is in contrast to the initial vaccine shot, which produced IGG1 and IGG3 antibodies, which are generally understood to be part of an effective immune response against a pathogen.

This study covers a lot, which I hope to expound on later, but a simple layman's takeaway is that it is entirely possible repeated boosting with mRNA vaccines (specifically Pfizer) may be priming the body to not fight Covid infection, so basically doing the opposite of what it is supposed to.

Using "yesteryear" and using the past tense in my statement makes all the difference. I was not talking about how things were in the recent past of 2008 and definitely not the even more recent past. Vaccines were given as a matter of course, and no one in charge cared to ask what randoms thought about it.

More recently than in yesteryear, exemptions for having feels about vaccines have been enacted in most states. It is very important that people who have little to no capacity to make an informed choice be allowed to choose.

don't deadname him, bro. You can deadname me b/c I was never banned tho.

Frankly, I'm okay with mandating cardio and diet instead of mandating vaccines. Like if you don't get your sessions in, you pay a heavy fine and can't go to the movie theatre or whatever. Eat too much mcdonalds/whipped cream on lattes/drink bourbon every day and whine about how you can't change? Euthanized.

I've heard this before. Can you explain more?

Yes, I'm also pretty interested in our mysterious stranger squaring that particular circle.

So, like most things in biology the definitions are a little fuzzy and fall apart at the edges (What is a woman anyways?), but general a gene is a segment of DNA that codes for a protein that your cellular machinery uses to to something. And it generally goes

a. DNA codes for
b. mRNA codes for
c. protein.

And gene therapy is general thought of as manipulating DNA (normally by inserting a DNA strand coding for a gene to be integrated into the host genome) to create a functional protein (oftentimes the hosts original gene is mutated so the proteins it makes naturally are not functional) towards a therapeutic end.

mRNA vaccines pretty much skip the step where you are inserting DNA into the genome to code for mRNA, and instead directly stick mRNA into the cell, which codes for the Covid spike protein, that your body makes and then has an immune response against, building immunity (in theory at least).

There is definitely some gray area whether this would qualify as gene therapy, and if you say it isn't I am not going to fight you on it.

That probably wasn't particularly helpful, but on a Friday night at 9 pm that is what you are getting.

No man, this is very helpful. What are some other examples of drugs or substances that act in a similar fashion manipulating DNA or mRNA directly to influence protein expression? Would certain types of AAS or PEDs qualify as these types of treatments?

What are some gene therapies in development that are showing promise and what might be possible in the next few decades that isn't possible now outside the realm of vaccination?

Yeah so obviously I knew all this, and obviously no sane person would think of this as gene therapy, given the generally accepted definition I'm aware of involves actually altering cellular DNA . Even the T cell base editing they announced in that British cancer patient is a step away from what most morons think of when they say "the jab" "alters your DNA" with "Satan's genome" so you "can't get into heaven anymore." And even that's a step away with germline gene therapy, which I have to admit to being more than a little leery of myself.

Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something other than a difference in terminology interpretation.

Old-N1,

Why were rates so much lower? You seem clueless about this subject.

Surely you knew MS was gonna edgelord this.

I'd call a viral vector vaccine "gene therapy" before an mRNA vaccine, but even that isn't strictly true because it doesn't actually change the host (i.e. your) DNA, it just follows step 1-3 that our stranger outlined above.

Re: other examples, I alluded to base editing above; there was a recent case where British scientists used allogeneic (i.e. not from the patient herself) T-cells to (maybe? hopefully?) clear a child's leukemia (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184).

They're already trying to adapt the mRNA platform to other vaccination types. One of the problems with the current flu vaccine is that you'll hear it "only protects against 50% of the variants this year" around needle time; this is because the traditional manufacturing timeline to make it at the necessary scale is quite long, so they have to guess what variants to include. Creating an mRNA vaccine is much quicker, as it's just chemistry, and the compressed timeline would allow you to be more accurate when choosing the variants to include because you're choosing closer to the actual flu season.

Eventually I'm sure the goal of gene therapy is to cure things like Huntington's where not only does it poz you, but it potentially pozzes your kids. With that said, messing with the germline is ethically very fuzzy, and has the chance to cause orders of magnitude more problems than just standard gene therapy, so I'd guess we're a ways away from that legally.

I thought there was a .1% chance I was missing something, and he did top out at a higher level of book and lab learnin' in this area than I did, so I figured I'd make sure, but yes - this is along the lines of what I guessed the answer would likely be.

Not sure who N1 is. I am old though. I ended up doing a deep dive on this late last night and it turned out that I was incorrect. It turns out that people (including me) just listen to one or two things that suit their preconceived notions and don't question those things too closely.

This (my mistaken understanding) does support my general thesis that people have opinions on things (vaccines, etc.) despite having little to no capacity to make informed opinions. They largely cannot even distinguish between good sources and bad sources of information, so they are kinda ****ed even if they put their best effort into learning.

Monte,

Self-loathing is a thing.

Brian,

Not a very N1 thing to say. I also find the general vibe of public health to be meaningfully distorted today and generally try to draw my conclusions from primary sources.

The whole gaslighting of aerosol spread was dreadful. Why would we want to equip public buildings with UV lights in their air systems which is effective against a whole slew of illnesses when we can instead support outdoor masking which has literally no scientific backing?