FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
And every gimmick hungry yob
Digging gold from rock n roll
Grabs the mic to tell us
he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this
And it's been tested by research
He who fucks nuns
Will later join the church
User ID: 195
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Eddie started classical piano at 6. And, for that matter, had a paper route as a kid.
Jimi worked as an usher in a local theater, as a stage hand at a local music club, and as a construction laborer before he joined the army.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
9hr ago
It's a common strategy for picking a VP. Obama and first term Trump utilized similar strategies, despite their own talent and charisma. I'm curious to see if Vance has the balls to push Trump out on that ice flow.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
It depends who they're being racist against.
Antisemites, you are normally free to call them Jewposters or accuse them of obsession with "da Joos."
If anyone tries anti white racism the tradition is to accuse them of trolling and bad faith, because surely they don't actually believe it.
East Asians are normally where we see a real fight, posters will land half and half on whether it's justified or not.
But blacks, south Asians, any Muslims, the expectation is that you calmly engage with the meat of their argument, such as it is.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11hr ago
Might have been, I just know it wasn't a factor in 2003
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
...Wut?
This is pushing whataboutism in new and interesting ways.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
The paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a known hive of TurboLibs.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
13hr ago
That was after 2003, when the letter appears to have been written. I wanna say 2007?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Nah the funniest conclusion would be that 2003 Trump didn't actually know Epstein all that much, had met him in passing, but knew he was rich and connected (he's such good friends with Bill Gates AND Bill Clinton!) so he wrote this note off rumors he heard to appear in the know.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Assuming Trump doesn't run for president, he could still run for something else, Welcome to Moosewood style, and then lose.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I've seen and read the play before. I'm hoping to look at it with new eyes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
36 was what I got the second time. I think it's all old wives tales.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Nobody is popular enough to win a major party nomination without pretty particular circumstances coming together. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
He took saliva samples to test hormone levels before and after the races. A number of psychological questionnaires were also administered, designed to gauge self-esteem, ‘sociosexuality’ (willingness to engage in casual sex), ‘self-perceived mate value’ and mating behaviour (e.g. the likelihood of approaching attractive women). Crucially, Longman and colleagues then manipulated the results of the races.
The men who believed they had won received an average testosterone increase of 4.92%, while those convinced they had lost dropped by an average of 7.24%. Overall, men who thought they were winners had testosterone levels 14.46% higher their deflated opponents.
It seems intuitive that such an effect could also increase sperm production in the short term.
As for edging, study compliance is probably an issue.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Did you wait a week or a few days from your last "emission" so that it would be a larger quantity?
They recommend three days, that's apparently optimal. I got that the first time (15mm) we tried it, but the second time (29mm) they scheduled it last minute so I only got one day of abstinence, so I don't think it makes too much difference. I edged extensively both times to increase the quantity of the sample, though I haven't tested it not doing that so idk.
I will say: the day before the second sample I had an absolutely killer run at BJJ, so maybe there's something to the idea that winning dominance/athletic competitions increases testosterone production.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
My wife is really hoping for twins for the economies of scale. Quadruplets would be a bit much though, I don't think I can come up with 4 precisely equal names.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
That jeopardy clue is going to hit so hard one day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
As I suspect that none of us has done a formal survey, we're probably literally talking about one or two local fast food franchises, which might be a case of a particular owner with a preference for hiring hispanics (easier to schedule full time, not as flighty so I'm not retraining all the time, less likely to slack off) vs one with a preference for hiring white teenagers (easier to keep them on short hours making your labor pool more flexible, better customer experience, don't seek advancement).
I know in my hometown, the Taco Bell is all local teenagers, the Burger King is the most busted methhead trailer trash you've ever seen, and what's left of the Wendys is all black women from the local city, must be on a bus route.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I Read It So You Don’t Have To
Jake Tapper’s Historic Misnomer in Original Sin
How do you come clean without coming clean? How do you take your team out of a tremendous, historic, catastrophic failure and yet manage to convince everyone involved to change absolutely nothing? How do you protect the power and position of yourself and your personal friends, while letting everyone know that you’re Taking Responsibility? How do you present yourself to society and strongly say Mea Maxima Culpa while avoiding any consequences?
Well, Jake Tapper has gone back to an old standby in Original Sin: you find a goat, you put all the sins of the community on the goat, and then you drive the goat out of town never to be seen again. For Tapper and the Democratic Party, they want to put all the sins of the 2024 election loss on Joe Biden and his immediate subordinates, get rid of Joe, and ride off free of guilt or blame. Unfortunately, for all the promise of the title, Tapper fails to grapple at all with the earlier sins of the Democratic Party which lead them to the Biden presidency. It’s a fakakta head fake, a cheap attempt at a false accountability that leaves Tapper and the rest of the Democratic Party machinery safe to keep doing the same things they were doing before.
Personal opinion: This book was horrendous. I knew it would be bad going in, but my wife wanted to read it so I downloaded it off libgen and loaded it on our shared Kindle account, and we decided to read it together and discuss it. That part was fun. The book itself just made me mad.
What Tapper offers is a mostly-disconnected and somewhat confusing series of anecdotes that add up to what a lot of people around here were absolutely on top of years before Tapper: Biden was cooked. However cooked you think Biden was, you’ll see evidence that it was worse than you thought it was. I won’t bother going point by point, we’ve tortured every incident to death already. Tapper tries to throw Biden a bone here and there, but for the most part he adequately massacres his goat. In the process a few close Biden advisers come in for a bit of trouble. Tapper labeled them the Politburo, and they are the villain of the piece, lurking, a sinister and undefined presence. Everything is ultimately laid at the door of some decision maker in Politburo or with the last name Biden. Joe, Jill, Hunter, and a few close personal aides are responsible for the entire coverup: denying the obvious, blaming the lighting or a cold or a long night, pressuring underlings into silence, making never-specified decisions in the name of the president without his knowledge, and generally operating the entire process of Weekend at Bernies-ing the President of the United States.
What Tapper doesn’t offer is any in depth analysis of actual policy decisions or tactical choices in government. This book is pure politics. He doesn’t at any point question who was where and when during crises in the Ukraine or Palestine. He doesn’t look outside the standard West Wing cast of characters in the political circle of the President, what was going on in the State Department or the DoD, what did the kids get up to when it became clear that daddy wasn’t home? How was it that the SecDef was out of commission for weeks without the White House even knowing about it? Did people start metering what they told the President’s office? Did they feel more comfortable defying the President’s wishes? Well, you won’t find out about it here, instead you’ll get seventeen people telling you separately about how they couldn’t believe how OLD Biden looked when they met him…Except that time after time we get people telling us not that he looked old, but that he looked older. Meaning, it wasn’t a mistake to vote for Biden in 2020, when everyone with a calendar could tell you how old he would be in 2024; it just happened out of nowhere, and there’s no way you can blame the Democratic Party for it.
My disappointment stems from the title: Tapper promises to trace to the root cause of the problem. Everything was paradise until this, then after this everything went wrong. But ultimately, he seems to be aiming to skate by what, to me, seem the obvious candidates for Democrats Original Sin:
-- The Ratfucking of Bernie Sanders: The mainstream of the Democratic Party saw the momentum of the Bernie Sanders campaign, after he won the first three primaries in 2020. Biden wasn’t within 10% of Bernie in any of those primaries. Typically, after three straight fourth place finishes, a candidate drops out, that’s the purpose of primaries. Joe Biden, in fact, had some experience finishing poorly in early primaries and dropping out, having done it twice before. But the Dems needed someone to beat Bernie, and were stuck choosing in a bad field: Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Warren were all seen as too weak to step up and couldn’t agree on endorsing each other. Facing a split field among moderates, with COVID appearing on the horizon, and with no other unity candidate available, the rest of the field suddenly dropped out and rapidly endorsed Biden. Biden was seen as a compromise candidate because he was so old, he might only run for one term. This was a classic example of the Golem legend: they empowered Biden to protect them from Bernie, but Biden once empowered did not have to give that power up when it was time. The lesson being that you have to let the primary process play out, and that voters will punish you if you refuse to let them vote. The Republicans threw in with Trump in 2016, against their better instincts but to their long term benefit; the Democrats ratfucked Bernie in 2020 and the lack of a real primary left them with a reanimated corpse that finished 4th in competitive races. Tapper mentions Bernie only twice, for a moment, and pays no attention to how he played into the 2020 primary and the selection of Biden. The Original Sin was gutting the primary process and not forcing Biden to compete among voters.
-- Obsession with Identity Politics: Biden, of course, didn’t actually lose the 2024 race, that honor was passed to Kamala Harris. Why was she there? Because she was (marginally) black and a woman. Tapper is pretty clear on this one, and states it directly, but never pauses to question whether a better VP candidate might have been able to salvage the shit sandwich they were handed. Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak. It’s the lack of a talented VP who could be president, or at least win an election, forced everyone to Ride with Biden until it became obvious that he couldn’t win. And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent, leaving you in a position where you couldn’t be seen to skip over a Black Woman, but because she had to be a Black Woman she had no chance in the election.
-- Trump Derangement Syndrome: The refrain from Biden and his handlers throughout the process was monotonous. We need to beat Donald Trump, Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous, Joe Biden is the only one to beat Donald Trump in an election (there’s a good chance he retains that honor forever). Democrats convinced themselves that Trump was so uniquely evil that they had to throw out all sense of decency to beat him; this kept them from beating him. Democrats convinced themselves that voters would reject Trump so thoroughly that it didn’t matter they were running an empty shell of what was left of Joe Biden; this destroyed voter trust in the Dems as a whole and cost them the election across the country. The Dems lost the plot completely due to TDS, and started to think they could or should do things they never would have thought of otherwise.
But Tapper doesn’t address any of these actual deep sins of the Democratic worldview, because that would require actual change by the Democratic Party, and change might lead to Tapper and his friends being disempowered. Equally, Tapper mostly ignores the great question of the Biden presidency: Why did everything basically run just fine? There is very little in the way of actual policy outcomes that is easily traced to Biden’s senescence. It pretty much felt like all the other presidential administrations I’d seen. What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
Instead he just blames it all on ol’ Scranton Joe, who will shuffle off to the great used Corvette dealership in the sky and leave the Dems to keep right on sinning just as they always have.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
This week you're all getting a break from all the uninteresting things I'm doing with kettlebells or jiu jitsu to talk about fertility treatments.
I know I'm not supposed to worry about it at all, that anything can happen at this stage, but I have to tell someone and I'll tell y'all because you I can't tell anyone who matters in my real life: after a little over a year of trying, my wife got a positive pregnancy test.
We'll have to confirm it, and hopefully it all works out, but I'm very excited.
We had what our doctor called "unexplained" fertility issues. Which is to say we were making love often enough, and individually our tests were coming back good, but no baby resulted. I guess its good the tests came back clean, but it was a little disappointing, in that when you go in for tests you hope for the doc to say something like "Oh, you actually have a very obvious, simple, and treatable common problem. You aren't doing anything wrong, you just need to do X and then it'll all work out." Sperm testing stressed me out, in that I feel like all versions of that are equivalent to "You're not really much of a man." Where female infertility, while surely bad, is so multifarious and complex, that it seems a little less bad. Like, where male infertility is "your engine doesn't have enough horsepower to move the car;" female infertility is "the wire harness came loose and the starboard vacuum sensor borked itself." Given, I'm sure Mrs. FiveHour felt the opposite way, that have slow sperm is better than being a woman who can't have a baby. At any rate, neither occurred, we were just stuck there with no baby for no particular reason. And hitting the age where while we could probably have a decent chance of getting it done, we might be under pressure pretty quickly.
Our insurance covered IUI, which is basically just optimizing the fertilization process. Mrs. FiveHour took some drugs to precisely trigger and optimize her cycle, then I was to jerk off into a cup, the facility would "clean" the sperm to optimize the sample, and then the nurses insert it directly into her uterus. We elected to give it a try.
This required me, of course, to jerk off into the cup, then immediately drive it across town to meet a very precise appointment time. I have never had a more stressful masturbation in my life. So much pressure! I really put a lot of effort into optimizing the production. I needed a good sample, I needed it to all go into the cup. And it's so weird carrying around a cup of my own splooge. I felt like such a bizarre pervert, in the car, then sitting in the waiting room. Not that I had much odds of getting into such a situation, but I would sooner be searched by a cop and have him find a gun or a half ounce of weed than I would have him find a cup of my own sperm. And the whole time I'm looking at the brown paper bag thinking, well that didn't seem like very much, I bet this was a miss.
I will note that according to my wife, as a personal achievement, that the doctor commented to a visiting med student who joined her for the procedure that the sample was "ridiculous" and that this was "definitely going to work;" they look for 5mm and I managed to hit 29mm. God I hope we don't have to do this again, because I'll have to try to top that. The natural male high-scoring instinct applies to everything with a metric.
I don't know if this will happen or not. We might not get a confirmed positive, it might not make it to term, or who knows.
But I'm praying this is our child. If for no other reason than I don't know how much more I can optimize my jerking off.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
That's not my primary aim, though it may be a secondary benefit. I think the major benefit of working a job is developing independence early on in teenagers. They get money of their own, they have obligations outside the home, they have the necessity (and therefore the right) to travel outside the home.
Below, and always, we are talking about the problems of young people dating. Summer jobs are the number one solution! Give them money, get them out of the house, encourage them to have independence from their parents outside of structured and scheduled "day cares." Give them the means and the reason to get a cheap used car. Give them the ability to take someone on a date without asking mom for the money.
That said:
Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.
I don't think a part time summer job excludes hobbies and interests outside of work. Spending part of your day stacking boxes, or mowing grass, or hanging drywall doesn't exclude going home and playing the violin for an hour. The tiny, hyper-talented fringe minority of 14 year olds who have the kind of talent that has been identified for nurture by that time, sure, give them a scholarship to some music program. But that's maybe a few dozen kids across the country that we're talking about, they're completely irrelevant to the question of "should kids get summer jobs?"
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind.
So I guess my question is, how large should that class be? Because it seems intuitively obvious that it should max out at the 2-5% of the population easily identified by standardized testing regimes.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Are you really comparing becoming president to getting a job as a cop, teacher, or forklift operator?
It absolutely matters for people to have decent lives, but I'm not sure what that has to do with who gets access to the best million women in the country.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I mean the difference is that the standard you were looking to reach (impress girls at parties, maybe play in a rock band) is very different from the standard of virtuosity that is required to play violin at a level that an ivy league school cares about. The former can be self-taught as a teenager, the latter pretty much requires that one begin formal instruction as a child. The average concert violinist begins instruction between four and six years of age, and by 14 the wheat has been thoroughly separated from the chaff in terms of those with the talent to take it anywhere interesting.
Tiger Moms aren't pressuring their teenage success-daughters to learn guitar so they can found a local version of the Linda Lindas. Though, maybe they should.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
I don't care if all men can do it, I care if any man can do it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
I'm thinking in terms of various camps, fake "research opportunities" to pretend your kid is doing science and shit, expensive non credit non graded college summer programs that pretend to be classes at a school, travel programs abroad that masquerade as charity work programs with no deliverables to help you write a college essay. That's more the kind of stuff gunner kids do in high school rather than get a job.
I don't think the time when Asian kids are made to learn violin overlaps much, if at all, with the time kids get summer jobs in high school. If you haven't learned the violin by 12, you probably aren't going to learn it very well if at all.
And for that matter, while I agree that music is a good thing to do with one's time, I genuinely think having a job is a better more enriching experience. I think a warehouse job will teach a kid more than a summer biology program at Brown will.
Is Donald Trump an inner city kid who got into trouble, the way you're blaming society for his crimes?
Seriously, bro, what are you doing here? You could have just ignored this thread if it didn't interest you, if you think the whole Epstein obsession is tinfoil-hat stuff. Instead you've jumped in to say "It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is lying about a bunch of stuff because, you know, there was this one thing that happened in a different country on the other side of the ocean, and as a result you're not allowed to care about anything else until I say you can" followed up with "actually Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong because it was society that was set up the wrong way or all this never would have happened."
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