BTW, this is one of those Mandela Effect things. The actual brand name is singular: Depend®

It helps to imagine them as the “I am very smart” guy from that webcomic/meme template.

That’s great advice. I’ve joined a few hobby groups, made some good friends, and uhh, enjoyed doing hobbies with friends. No romantic success, but I did get out of the house and do fun stuff.

Not real great. I’ve always taken the advice to “just treat women like people,” and have had a lot of great friendships with women as a result. Then, for a few months some years ago, I decided to follow the “just be confident” advice, and forced myself to behave in ways that felt to me very transgressive and boundary-breaking. It worked stunningly well, but I just can’t keep it up. That’s not my personality, or my romantic style. I need some indication that a woman is interested in me, and pushing past her initial resistance makes me feel queasy. But, I’m not attractive enough to get those kinds of signals often, so, the single life it is.

True, but the acceptable how varies greatly by the attractiveness of the who.

I know a guy who’s an attorney, and he’s worked for DoD, GSA, and SSA. That’s just how they do it. That draft press release is very clearly a Word document, and while Word has templates and auto-update fields, well, lawyers are not tech people.

If you do it well enough.

Gin is basically alcohol flavored with various botanicals. Juniper berries are most prominent in the traditional gin flavor profile, so that may be what you don’t like. Some craft distilleries now make gin with other flavorings. For example, there’s one around here (Vikre) that makes a spruce gin which I quite like.

Check with the craft distillery, and find out what botanicals they use, then look for gins flavored similarly.

Fun fact: Anybody can type any date they want into Word. They could have dated it March 15, 44 B.C., since that string of characters isn’t document meta-data. When I worked at a law firm, it was common to create a new document by opening an older file, editing it, and saving it as a new one. Quite possibly, the legal assistant edited an August 9th press release to create the draft, and forgot to change the date before saving. Further, this press release comes from the U.S. Attorney’s office, which is a different location, with entirely different staff, from the corrections center. It would make exactly zero sense to get the U.S. Attorney, much less the legal assistants, in on a conspiracy. Keep the number of conspirators to a minimum; that’s like Conspiracy 101.

There’s are a lot of odd circumstances around his death, but as evidence of something fishy, this is super weak.

That’s exactly what I mean. They know they’re into the most depraved shit, and they like it because it’s a way to break taboos and demonstrate their power. (Power is the real paraphilia.) I feel like it’s literally incomprehensible to them that somebody with the connections and influence to do it (e.g. Hunter Biden), too, just… wouldn’t. Because of course everybody wants to! So if Biden wasn’t in Epstein’s orbit, it must have driven them mad wondering what he was doing that was so much better (by their taboo-breaking standards) than what they were doing.

It all makes sense to me now: The Grand Old Pedophiles were obsessed with Hunter Biden because, if he wasn’t in the Epstein files, he must’ve been into some real shit, right? Their minds just can’t process the idea that a powerful man would be satisfied with vanilla stuff like sex with consenting adults.

Ground-rolling cars as mass transportation. The engineering superb, but the technology inherently can’t scale. The storage requirements alone push many cities past the limits financial sustainability, and the spatial requirements for operation lead to massive network congestion as a matter of course. And yet, we keep throwing good money after bad trying to make the system work.

Indeed, it seems plausible. The background of my comment is that the lab-leak dipshits are the ones who push the idea with a subtext implying that the lab created the virus, or cultivated it for bioweapon purposes. But genetic studies show that it clearly came from wild animal populations, so I very strongly doubt the lab was the first and only introduction into the human population.

It wasn’t the vaccine, that was just a cursed year. Everybody born in 1798 has died, too.

Yup, I believe that’s what I said, with some thoughts on how to tell the difference.

Well, oil companies did put a poisonous additive in fuel for decades, but they did it right out in the open. They advertised it on gas station signs, and said it was for anti-knock purposes. They still put it in some general aviation fuel. Why should we presume they’d have to do it secretly?

Throwing this out there: What if he really did kill himself, partly as a way to get back at the people who let him take the fall, because he knew it’d look super sus?

That document is laughable. In only the first few paragraphs, I ran across reliable indicators of pseudoscience scams, like asserting that there’s some “scientific establishment” that he’s up against. Not a very powerful mafia then, because there are tons of dipshits pushing the lab leak hypothesis. Then, there’s the Absence of Evidence Fallacy. (It is not evidence of absence.) That’s as far as I got.

Go ahead and call me closed-minded, but c’mon, Ken should put his best evidence up front. If he has it, which I doubt. Especially when the alternative explanation is so damn plausible: The Wuhan Institute for Virology was put in Wuhan to study the viruses in local wildlife because Chinese authorities recognized the potential for human transmission, and so they built a lab to study the viruses. And that’s why the lab would’ve had the virus in it. Maybe it did have a leak, and some infections came from there, but biological systems are messy and imprecise; the virus probably jumped to humans many, many times over many years, and set up the conditions for a pandemic.

Consider the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North America. We used to think that it all traced back to Patient 0, a flight attendant who liked to get busy around the world. Then, researchers found the virus in stored blood samples going back to the 1950’s. The virus had been in the human population for decades before blowing up.

Reality is often complex, without intuitively-clear lines of cause and effect. The abstract thinking needed to understand it is beyond many people, so they latch on to simple, obvious, and wrong explanations, like the lab leak theory.

Seriously, though, there’s a key difference: Conspiracy theories require an ever-growing legion of circumstances and co-conspirators to make them work. Like for chemtrails. A secretive government plot to poison us with chemicals sprayed from airliners? Seems simple, but: Pilots have to be in on it. Airline mechanics have to be in on it. Chemical companies have to be in on it. There has to be a transport network and storage facilities, so truck drivers have to be in on it. The tanks have to be loaded onto aircraft, so airport workers have to be in on it. Et cetera.

Real conspiracies, by contrast, reduce down to simpler explanations. You can take moving parts away, and it still makes sense. Tax havens? Shell corporations? Corrupt prosecutors? Corrupt courts? Sex trafficking? Pedophiles? That’s lots of specifics that all point to one thing: Rich and powerful assholes doing rich and powerful asshole things because nobody can stop them.

I was briefly tempted by a winterover job there. It’d be a pay cut, plus a year and a half of continuous winter, and I’m not totally convinced that the U.S. would still exist by the time they’re supposed to pick us up.