Good for you dude. I'm actually building a workout bench for myself this weekend. I know a lot of people are feeling demoralized, but I've never been more motivated in my life. Chads rise up

I'll check both out!

I liked my first bottle of Botanist a lot better than my second. Just didn't hit me right.

Grats on the job!

What's your gin of choice? I do love Hendrick's, but Beefeater is cheap as dirt and actually pretty damn good with a little lime and a slice of cucumber.

It's very easy for comfortable people to become complacent and pathetic. Enlightenment principles aside, I think the American obsession with independence largely stems from our frontier days when we had to build an entire country from scratch. The more gaps on the map we fill in the less independent we need to be. Hard times create hard men, etc etc etc.

I expect we've got some very hard times coming. When push comes to shove the people best equipped to survive, say, a global economic collapse, are rural, and they don't have much patience for liberal bullshit. Their kids are the future.

In fairness to Apple they probably forgot where DC is

As someone who had the misfortune of working for the Republican Party during the Tea Party wave, I think they were largely destructive. The candidates they put forward were motivated by blind, righteous indignation toward the establishment, which is fine, provided you have some philosophical underpinnings to offer an intelligent alternative. They didn't. So, a lot of actually good Republicans got primaried by nutjobs, who in turn lost their seats to Democrats two years later.

I'm totally for tossing out the establishment, it clearly isn't working. I'd love to see everyone who voted for the stimulus to get primaried ASAP, but once again, we need viable alternatives rather than blind rage. All that energy was misspent, and I think the same energy exists today, so we should be more thoughtful about what we do with it.

My hope is some day, a lot of kids are going to grow up to resent how faggy and uptight their liberal parents are, and things will gradually straighten out.

I've lived all over the states. Tennessee is pretty based.

We will not go gentle into that good night.

Okay, I'm 30 minutes into this, and I'm done. I don't hear anything incriminating from Trump, and even if you were to assume he's corrupt he's not fucking retarded enough to demand Georgia find extra votes for himself on a call where nobody is willing to back him up to start with. If he says what the media claims he says, I haven't heard it.

However, I'm completely unimpressed with the case he's making on this call for voter fraud in Georgia. Before everybody jumps on my ass, I'm not saying it didn't happen, but he's just failing to make a case here, no one is backing him up, he's all alone when he should have an army of lawyers on every call he makes. Trump's biggest flaw is his inability to build strong teams, and he needs a strong coalition here.

Redlettermedia, of course, for pure entertainment.

Viva Frei for their weekly/biweekly legal/political discussions with Robert Barnes.

Woodworking for Mere Mortals if you like to build shit.

Sideways for music analysis

I'm Not Norm for Norm MacDonald videos, the greatest comedian that ever lived

BarelySociable/Nexpo/JCS for weird, criminal, creepy shit

Jim Browning for slaying Indian callscammers

Home RenoVision if you're into DIY and want advice from a based Canadian general contractor

Isaac Arthur for science futurism

ChristopherOdd for Let's Plays that don't make me want to fucking kill myself and take everyone down with me

The Dick Cavett Show for oldtimey civility

Forgotten Weapons if you like guns

Trying to get through this but I'm short on time. Anyone have a summary of the offending quotes or a timestamp?

Thank you! I'll have to go over the study a little more carefully, but first pass they even acknowledge that mask mandates largely went into effect alongside other social distancing procedures, meaning you've already got a high causal density and parsing out single-item effects is impossible. Which doesn't even matter since 2% is abysmal in terms of gains and not statistically significant anyway. Yikes.

I'd like to see your sources for the 2% figure. That's just noise, not even a measurable result.

Frankly I don't think there is any good mask efficacy study out there. You can't intuit it from disease spread by state or county, since there are just too many other factors that could contribute. You can't do it ethically in a lab. You can't control for people "wearing them right" or using "the right kind".

And further, I remember when the American medical societies (pre-COVID) told us mask wearing countries like China and Japan actually see zero benefit. The whole thing is a farce.

Eh. Not ashamed to admit in college I'd pop over to a black church for lunch on Sundays when I was especially hungry. The fried chicken was outstanding. The green beans were fine.

I'm not a fan of homeschooling. But you can definitely tell the difference between kids whose parents take an active role in their education, and those whose don't. Best you can do is arm them with the Socratic method and hope for the best.

Sounds like you've been reading too much Homer.

I’ve got a lot of writing background, though not as a novelist. But I’d be happy to take a look at what you’ve got and provide feedback.

Dude. The media is a joke. The only people who trust media narratives are beyond hope. I guarantee you that Trump's decisions are not at all influenced by how he'll be treated by the news.

I believe all charter schools are funded with public monies.

Seriously? It's all downside for him if he signs, all upside if he doesn't.

Sign: Your signature is your approval and your complicity. Your supporters will think you've betrayed them. Your enemies still hate you. Another crack has formed in the foundation of your future campaign.

Don't sign: Your supporters appreciate that you signaled your dissent against this heinous bill. You might actually get normies on board, because the optics of the bill are so fucking bad. Your enemies still hate you.

Who cares about media spin at this point. It doesn't matter if he dies for the sins of man, the media will always shit on him. His supporters know that. Signing is the wrong move, regardless of how it plays in the news.

They need to actually provide an alternative. Looking at who voted for the stimulus makes my stomach turn.

There are some good ones out there. Actually pay attention to voting records and support the guys you like.

I'm not normally an optimist but I am when it comes to big tech monopolies and censorship. I'm convinced more people are discontent with the behavior of Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc, than there are people happy with censorship, and that is creating significant market pressure to develop alternatives. There are many, they just all suck.

Online privacy is another example of big tech and the government quietly fucking you without your knowledge or consent, and the marketplace for privacy protecting alternatives is developing quite well. DuckDuckGo, Protonmail, Startpage, certain Linux distros, Android ROMs, VPNs, Signal, Tor, anonymous debit cards, all were built in response to privacy invasions, and many are polished, full-featured alternatives to the tech giant offerings.

We'll get there with censorship. It'll be a harder fight, because free speech always means defending unpopular speech, and all the alternative platforms are populated by the deplorables who left the usual social media sites. That just means you have a whole bunch of normies who hate Twitter, Reddit, etc, who don't have a place to land yet.