I have a very strong preference to the silicone triple-flange ear tips. They help block outside noise and fit comfortably. Unfortunately, they also don’t work with many ear buds. Shure is one of the few brands that they work with for certain.

Wut.

Susan Collins IS NOT A DEMOCRAT. She is a REPUBLICAN. I don’t mean that she’s a DINO, she’s literally a Republican.

Yeah, no. The religious nutter part is utterly irrelevant.

What IS relevant is that the ATF entrapped the dude; they wanted him as an informant, so they spent a long time cajoling and threatening him into cutting a shotgun down for them (“short barrel shotgun”, a National Firearms Act of '34 violation), and when he did, they immediately fucked his life. He ended up getting arresting him, he bonded out, and then got multiple differing dates for a court hearing. He didn’t trust the courts because he thought the gov’t was out to get him (spoiler: they were), and so skipped court. The judge issued a warrant improperly, and then the US Marshalls showed up, and everything went downhill.

It was a very, very clear case of entrapment, and what the gov’t did was inexcusable. It doesn’t matter that they wanted him to spy on the Aryan Nations, what they did to try and bend him to their will was evil.

Don’t minimize that shit.

The gov’t can, and will, crush every single person that they can get away with crushing.

Generally speaking, precious metal commodities are a hedge investment; they aren’t a primary investment themselves, but they’re a hedge against a loss in value of other investments, like stocks or bonds. If you are investing in gold as a hedge against inflation wiping out stock market gains, then yeah, it’s pretty solid. You probably don’t want to hold on to it forever though; if you’d bought gold just prior to Carter taking office and the stagflation of the late 70s, you be pretty much break-even with things like index funds.

As far as total societal collapse, you would need to have the physical bullion, not just have precious metals in your investment portfolio. And even then, gold might not have a ton of value in a subsistence society. People might trade for it, but if I had food to trade, I don’t think I’d be trading for gold, since I can’t eat gold. The people that will clean up in a subsistence environment? The Amish.

But if a cop says you’re doing a sobriety test, you don’t have a choice.

Not correct. Field sobriety tests are ‘voluntary’ in all states in the US, although refusing to take one may be used as evidence against you in a trial, depending on the state. Likewise, you can refuse breathalyzer tests, although that may carry significant civil penalties.

It depends on the state; you aren’t required to take a breathalyzer in all states, nor are your required to submit to field sobriety tests in all states, although refusal can have different results depending on the state. It would be best to check the laws in your state. source

Actually, no, there aren’t. As of this moment, there’s no way to know if you’re intoxicated by marijuana, and, since that’s legal in a number of US states, that’s a ‘problem’. (Although, let’s be real, stoned people tend to drive reeeeeeaaaaaalllllllllly slowly, not exactly hugely dangerous.) You can detect the metabolites with a urine or blood test, but that doesn’t tell you how long ago you used it, or if you’re still under the influence.

Dermatologists are worried about cancers, buuuuuuuuuuuut the cancers have very low mortality rates, and the effects of not getting sun tend to be pretty drastic. I’ve got a lot of tattoos, so I keep them pretty well covered, but I am usually vit. D deficient as a result.

Eh. Mostly right. Given that pedophilia is, by definition, sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and given that any sexual contact with a prepubescent child is sexual assault, a pedophile sexually assaulting a child is probably about sexual attraction. But not necessarily.

But yeah, most child molesters aren’t pedophiles per se, but are assaulting children because they’re vulnerable. I don’t think that we can make any absolute claims about most pedos not assaulting children, simply because we don’t have a good grasp on how many people are pedos. I’ve heard that up to 25% of men (!!!) might have some level of sexual attraction to children, which is disturbing as fuck. (And no, I couldn’t give you a citation for that, I’m sorry. Just a weird claim that stuck in my head.)

TBH, I’m not sure I would have recognized that as a Nazi symbol prior to a group of people I knew arguing about Death In June. Some were arguing that the band was fine, some were arguing that the band was pro-fash. The second group was using the band’s iconography–including a totenkopf–as part of their evidence. The first group was claiming that it was satirical. (FWIW, Death In June had a long history of collaboration with Boyd Rice, who is an out-and-proud fascist, which is pretty strong evidence all on its own.) That was around 2010 or so.

If I hadn’t been part of that, I can’t say when it would have broken my threshold of consciousness.

You know that he covered up the tattoo within a day of revealing it, right? And that he was the one that revealed it first? The ‘scoop’ from large news outlets came after he spoke about it–and released videos and photos–on Pod Save America.

So he’s not a dude with a Nazi tattoo. He’s a dude that had a tattoo that he may or may not have known was a Nazi tattoo at some time in the past.

I would very strongly suggest that you reconsider your stance on guns. You may not want to hurt other people to protect yourself, but there are surely other people in your community that need someone to stand with and for them. I think we all hope that the day never comes that it’s necessary, but I think that the quote I heard was, “si vis pacem, para bellum.”

I know a few people in the north Georgia area that are quite welcoming to new people. I can suggest at least one trainer out in Rome. There are a few gun stores that don’t seem to be full of Trump shit. Unfortunately, I didn’t ever get south of Atlanta, so if you’re in e.g. Macon or Savannah, I don’t know anyone directly.

BTW - I’ve heard him speak in person. I’ve seen how Platner dealt with MAGA hecklers. I think that his solutions are simplistic, because the system is wildly complex, but I think he’s got the right ideas. If he’s undercover as a Nazi, he sure as shit as me fooled.

The tattoo dates to roughly 2009, IIRC. The Daily Wire and a few other far-right shitrags have published hysterical pieces about him–via his Reddit account–talking about training the Maine chapter of the Socialist Rifle Club in firearms use and safety in 2020. Or, as they said, “antifa”. And the SRA IS notably anti-fascist in their ideology (I’m sure that some percentage of them are tankies, but the org as a whole doesn’t seem to be authoritarian), and very pro-LGBTQ+. The turned up photos of one of the events that these publications are saying he’s in. (I can’t tell, TBH; the photos aren’t that good. He could be, but I can’t say for certain.)

So the problem you run headlong into here is, if he secretly has/had Nazi beliefs at one time, sufficient to get a tattoo signifying such, why would be be training SRA members?

In addition to that, everything he was posting on Reddit appears to say he’s not a Nazi. Some of the stuff is questionable (slurs, for instance, although those are probably still commonly used in the military), but most people that are fascists don’t hide that shit when they’re posting “anonymously”. And the account was deleted in 2021, four years before he declared for a Senate run. If he was planning a con, that’s a looooooooong time to be building an anti-fascist online persona before it gets any kind of payoff.

Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is what you want. It comes with a grand total of zero drivers, so you’ll need to download them to a USB drive before installing, otherwise you won’t even be able to get online because there’s no driver for the ethernet or WiFi. You can even uninstall Edge! (Which you should definitely do.) I think that massgrave.dev is considered reputable for downloading and activating, which is done by shell scripts. You should be able to turn off pretty much all telemetry on it.

this at least has real links to tangible asset worth,

Well, kind of. But the worth of those assets is largely due to perception, rather than real utility value. Like, real estate is stupidly expensive in many places, but it’s expensive because people believe that it’s expensive. When real estate bubble burst, you see the ‘worth’ of that real estate drop sharply. The utility value is having a place to sleep, but it’s often treated as an investment. So you would still see currency value fluctuations. Currency issue by gov’ts largely has worth because the gov’t says that it has worth; it’s not tied to anything. (BTW - tying currency to a tangible asset limits your ability to add currency when necessary. It will tend to lead to depreciation–the value of the currency rising–which is usually a bad thing.)

The other problem is that corporations and banks go bust; if they were issuing currency, that would mean all your money would instantly be worthless.

Ideally, no one controls it. It’s just exists as a medium for exchange.

There are both good and bad points to currency have value that can be adjusted by gov’ts; crypto currency solves one set of problems, but has it’s own, inherent issues.

Probably something like, “found dead in his bedroom when the nurse went to check in on him in the morning”. My MiL died in hospice, at home; she wasn’t hooked up to a ton of machines, so we don’t know exactly when she died. She was dead when my spouse woke up from napping.

Assuming that your backup isn’t also infected.

Doesn’t have to be in the bank either; if you’re traveling with your life savings in cash, then if you get pulled over cops are likely to seize that money. Just because fuck you, that’s why.

No, the “entire planet” has decided that states ultimately own your property–and you, since you don’t have absolute, individual bodily autonomy–and we use an incorrect shorthand in the way we verbally talk about property rights.