I'm about halfway through Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth (author of Day of the Jackal). It's flat out fascinating - a complete manual of how to overthrow a small African dictatorship, going into insane levels of detail over every facet of such an operation. For research the author met with mercenaries and arms dealers, posing as an interested party in throwing a coup of New Guinea. The balls on this guy.

There's a movie with Christopher Walken that's also pretty good, though it's less interested in the actual mechanics of throwing a coup.

I know most people here don't live in The Great State™ but there's a pretty comprehensive set of initiatives moving through our legislature aimed at protecting vaccine hold-outs.

Right now there at are at least six bills targeting this problem from different angles. At least one forbids the state (not private entities) from requiring vaccination as a condition of employment, others prohibit the government from coercing citizens by any means to get vaccinated. A couple provide unemployment benefits to those whose jobs were lost because of their vaccine status. There's one preventing school districts from taking adverse actions against students who refused vaccinations. And a couple attempt to prohibit private entities from discriminating on vaccine status, one of which would institute a civil cause of action against any discriminatory actor.

I don't know what will pass and what won't. The legislators I've talked to were broadly supportive of these initiatives, and the bills have diverse sponsorship which bodes well. I'm gonna keep track of the bills as they move along, so we'll see what happens. I'm hoping we join Texas and Florida as the holy trinity of based states.

Edit: Now that I look, some of these bills got introduced as early as last November. Nice to see some folks were ahead of the game.

Second Edit: A couple of these are stuck in committee, one is dead, some encouraging movement on others. I'm pretty confident we will see several of these pass.

Third Edit: I may start tracking legislation that pertains to resisting Biden's recent "ghost gun" bans and other gun control executive orders. EOs are overridden by legislation, and several states are already working on new laws to harden their 2nd amendment rights. Will have to check on this in the future.

Your employer's ability to coerce you into taking vaccines, or even collect information about your vaccine status is going to be dependent on your state's implementation of HIPAA and ADA laws. California (ironically) and Florida I know have greater protections against such employer medical questions, and whether they fall under HIPAA. From the ADA perspective, if you are compelled to provide proof of vaccination or an explanation as to why you haven't been vaccinated, that may result in an incidental disclosure of a disability, thereby violating ADA. This is what corporate legal teams are warning leadership of right now. Everyone is walking a fine line, trying to avoid a lawsuit, but pushing forward where they feel they can.

We need to be educating ourselves on our respective states' implementation of these laws and urge lawmakers to tighten those protections. You can request that your state rep or senator's policy staff conduct a policy analysis to determine what the present status of the law is. We're talking about minor tweaks to existing HIPAA language. Nothing grandiose. We cannot rely on lawsuits to give us justice in 10 years.

Employers are probably going to get sued no matter what they do. I'd be curious to know if there are any lobbying for greater right to violate your privacy and protections against litigation. I'm reaching out to Tennessee's House Research staff this week to run down what our legal landscape is. Will report back when I learn anything useful.

Because I would love a browser extension that automatically changes any headline that starts with "FACT CHECK" to "FUCKING LIE"

Me, I got this gallon of Bulleit Rye that I've rigged up through a firehose. Wife's got her usual boxed wine - we had it delivered by the pallet. There's a pretty good chance we're both going to be "working" from home tomorrow.

I always had a love/hate relationship with Drudge Report, going straight back to its inception. Super efficient news delivery, I know exactly what the big stories of the day are as they unfold, no fluff, no bullshit, but it was always sensationalist (by design of course). But man. Damn. This whole election cycle Drudge went so hardline against Trump and the quality of the site overall declined massively. It's been speculated before, but I think they got bought out and are being run by some Soros type.

Anyway, I have no idea where to get good news anymore. I literally just listen to a few lawyers on Youtube recap weekly events, but it's hardly concise.

What are we all using now? Who do you listen to?

I mean really, if anything would motivate actual nazis to instigate a race war, BLM is doing it. When's the whole race war thing supposed to kick off? I checked my mailbox earlier and didn't see an invite. Been looking for a while. Just don't want to get left out.

Isn't the national guard supposed to be mass murdering blacks in the streets? Isn't that what an oppressive, white nationalist, patriarchal regime does? I talked to my buddy in the national guard the other day. He hasn't been given any orders to massacre anyone at all for at least the past couple months. Sounded pretty broken up about it.

Any cops out there? How do you guys get your knees ready for a full day of collapsing tracheas? Knee pads?

Serious question - anyone think the left is butthurt that they've been baiting white people into mass violence for months and the best they've gotten is one hispanic kid defending himself?

For me it's Caves of Qud. I love roguelikes and games with impenetrable control schemes and UIs. Took me a long long time to get the hang of Dwarf Fortress, but once I did I fell in love. But of course, I was younger then, and had much more time available.

I am the worst person to organize something like this. The last game I played online was Battlefield 1942 for Christ's sake. But surely enough of us here have a shared interest in games to put together a server for something/somethings. Nonetheless, we're scraping together a community of gamers leftover from a community of gamers leftover from a community of gamers. We probably should unite with some games.

Here's my terrible, out of touch, way too busy, boring ass married man with a drinking problem suggestions. If someone has better ideas (literally anyone will), we should probably make a sticky post with the most popular suggestions and run with them.

Star Trek Bridge Crew. Fuck off. You don't know how fun it is until you and your friends are blasted off your asses, screaming at the engineer to boost shields while Klingons wreck your ship.

Duck Game. Probably the best game of all time. It's what every CoD wishes it could be.

Ultimate Chicken Horse. Are you seeing a trend yet? I'm bad at first person shooters and this is the kind of low effort garbage I really enjoy.

Command and Conquer Remastered. Randy, I am the liquor.

Don't Starve Together. Would love to know what the other side of winter looks like.

Wargame Red Dragon. Probably has a more redpilled chatroom than KIA2.

Warcraft III. I know there are ways to roll back the game and undo the damage Blizzard has done, but I don't know the state of custom servers from before The Bad Times™. I would absolutely love a 24/7 legacy WCIII server running the custom match classics (Tower Defense, DOTA, Dark Deeds, Etc.).

Terraria/Minecraft. Not for me, but for my nine year old godson.

7 Days to Die. It's pretty bad. But with friends it's only mostly bad.

Unreal Tournament. I'm talkin UT classic, babyyyy. Though... What was it... 2006? Was really good. Incredible mods. I never played another FPS that was so much stupid fun.

MoO2/Civ/Stellaris/Your Strategy Game Here.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

I don't even know what people are playing these days. I'm old and married. My wife only lets me play Bloons and Sudoku. Paper Mario? Let's boot up that Paper Mario server goddammit.

I've been diving back into Ghost Recon Wildlands after discovering just how damn enjoyable the game is at the highest difficulty levels. Suddenly sniper rifles and stealth are the only viable playstyles, and I feel like I'm actually being tested by the AI rather than watching all these paper narcos obligingly fall over and die for my amusement. I also love how unwoke the game is. Very America Fuck Yeah.

I also dusted off Master of Magic. Still haven't found a 4X that rivals it in my eyes, and it's not nostalgia talking. I actually never played it growing up (though I played MoO and MoO2 like my childhood depended on it). Good shit.