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I think Bard's stimulant is really kicking in today.

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one of the lesser known benefits of never fly coach is access to kmele's adderall stash

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It got right on top of him.

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Jul 8, 2022Liked by Matt Welch

Juwanna Man 2 starring a Russian Warlord would be a box office smash

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What about Eddie 2 where whoopie ends up coaching the Russian Olympic team?

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Was / am SO confused about the Boris thing.

The first time I recall seeing him was on this Aussie show that used to be good called "Q and A". He was pretty goddamn hilarious, and looked EXACTLY like that loud and chubby brit drunk you come across at "soccer nights" at various pubs around the US.

Then, he was (in my eyes) suddenly PM. I thought he was actually an Aussie, who knew. I remember everyone calling him like the "Brittish Trump" and I was like "Hold on there! This guy is a funny drunk, Trump is a speed and 'Who-ers' type guy... is it the hair?"

Anyways, I was vaguely paying attention over the last year, and was thinking "Soooo he had a party?... and they have been talking about it for a year...?" Like my assumption was, as Bill Burr would say: "Some kinda 'eyes wide shut' party" but it turns out it was like a guy having some booze with friends or whatever. I did see one pic of him all white-girl-wasted, and it looked like a party I wouldn't mind being at even now at 45. But when I heard he resigned I was like "Jesus, now that is some fuckin party! Shit toppled a government." Then I really felt that whatever they callit "FOMO" or something.

Did they parade all the guests in public and finger wag, jowel wobble at them? It all had the feeling of the Jan. 6th trial thing. Obviously they are entirely different events, but the ratio of comparison is about the same as people saying Boris is brittish Trump. Everytime I infrequently looked at the news over the last like year I saw "the party" and "Jan. 6th" in the news, and each time I was like "how the fuck are they still going on about this?". Did they crib each other's notes or something? Just keep the clown(s) in the news long enough to methadone their ratings until the next election / riot / satanic panic takes over the nation?

I am not saying Boris was like idk "a good guy" or even a guy that should be in public office. But he was from my limited exposure not an idiot, and often funny enough to prove he understood the topic at hand as all good comics do. \

Anywho, nother good show. I like that it is all in the new platform has both the Subscriber AND Free episodes in the same place. I missed a lot of the free ones before, because I just couldn't be bothered to go to the other place.

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He had multiple parties, during national lockdown when other people doing the same thing were being fined up to £10,000 for doing so.

When people couldn’t visit their dying relatives in hospital or go to their funerals. All because of rules that he made. Whether you agree with them or not.

And that’s without the bits of the constitutional mess we live under in the UK that he has been ignoring, mangling or dismantling. The latest being that the right to protest has been seriously curtailed just because they didn’t like the noise near Parliament.

Comedian he may be, good writer possibly, but this is not a good guy, not someone with any grasp of detail or respect for rules. He is pathologically incapable of telling the truth. If you can be bothered, go and look into the Downing Street wallpaper scandal, Eoin Pattison, or the latest concerning Chris pincher. Look into the two ethics advisors he has lost because he ignored their findings of malpractice by him and his ministers.

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I don't doubt you have a point there, as I have not been following it all. But most the things you listed there are like "business as usual" over here in the states.

If you made a list of political leaders over here who created tight lockdown regs, and then were caught doing shit that violated it you would prolly only be left with Biden, but that is because Pudding Night at the home was just too good pass up.

I am seriously NOT here to defend ANY political person at this point. They seem largely, as ever, incompetent, belligerent, and so uncoupled from reality that they might as well be aliens. But I feel like its not nothing that he resigned. It signals some form of idk awareness of the people he governs, or at minimum when its time to leave the party. That whole resignation thing over here is reserved for performative gestures when someone's boss shits the bed on twitter or you get offered a position in the private sector. :D

All that said, thanks for the considered response, it will be a great starting point for me to unravel this ball of yarn when I am so inclined.

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Thanks. Historically I am generally inclined to the view that politicians are well meaning fools, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number that I truly despise and he is top of that list.

If you are going to do any unravelling, I would start with the last two days and just how frantically he was clinging on to power. It took 50 people to resign from his government before he got the message. Very few of our prime ministers leave office through elections, resignation is much more common owing to the lack of any personal mandate.

The truth is that, whilst what I said above is the reason he was no good, his downfall was far more to do with ordinary politics in that the coalition that gave him the job is fundamentally flawed.

The core of his Parliamentary party is of the low tax, low spend type whilst those from my end of the country want more money for their constituencies to head off the effects of inflation and so on. The tension which this caused made many of his MPs, of both types, realise they were about to become unemployed.

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Roger that. As a guy who still gets confused about the UK / England distinction I appreciate the hand holding here. Every time I see anything about politics in your country I feel like I am comparing cricket and baseball. I know there is a stick, and that there are a lot of brown people around the equator who feel passionately about it, but my understanding will never go past "guys getting hit in the nuts" videos on youtube.

Re: the last 2 days. Is there a talking head out there that has a youtube or substack that kinda breaks it down for me? Q and A used to be a great little slice of the rest of the world for me, but then the longtime host left and last time I checked it was a panel of like 5 indeterminant genitalia / ethnicity / occupation people vs. Some old white guy furiously flogging himself. Helpa brotha out?

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At the risk of causing outrage, I would start with the BBC which is actually pretty straight on political coverage despite what the extremists tell everyone. I’d guess that the newscast is available globally https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/newscast/id1234185718

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That also used to be the tone of most media coverage of him in the UK. When he was just Mayor of London and didn’t have much of a national impact then the press was happy to lean into it.

The tone immediately shifted when he chose to back the leave campaign. His support was arguably the deciding factor in the referendum, so anyone looking for someone to “blame” for Brexit needed look no further than Boris. At that point he ceased to be a figure the media loved to hate and instead became straight-up hated. That’s also largely where the “British Trump” thing came from, because of the widespread portrayal of Brexit as some sort of far-right populist backlash against the establishment.

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You know, I remember some of that! I remember thinking he looked like the dog that caught the car. I felt the same way with trump winning over here. Like there is no WAY that guy expected to win, and given the stage in his life, after a Bolivia of coke in his head and sluisgate of Mickey D's through his body there was no way he even wanted the job.

I keep feeling like at somepoint the world is going to wake up hung over from the last few years and be like "man, I am never drinking Tequila again", but we all know we will in fact be chasing that worm sometime in the near future and forever. :D

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Boris Johnson’s party was the UK’s January 6th.

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No, that was the time in 2019 when he lied in order to suspend parliament, as determined by our Supreme Court. It’s all been downhill from there.

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In my neighborhood in LA they’ve started cracking down on restaurants that dispense plastic cups for soda, but you are allowed to smoke meth on the bus, so I guess that’s a net positive for freedom.

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Why do you hate bus riders so much. Let them have their meth. They have so little. They’re not hurting anyone except everyone.

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Where is Michael getting his COVID numbers? The Google tracker says the 7-day average daily deaths is a tick over 300, and it looks like it’s been there since around April.

That’s still around 100,000 per year, though (if it stays at that number).

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Sometimes the cocaine does the math, sometimes the cocaine inflates the numbers, and sometimes—whores are included.

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...and sometimes the math does the cocaine.

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Jul 8, 2022·edited Jul 8, 2022

People don't believe that 60,000 people died of Covid in the last month because nobody is saying that! (Except Michael like 5 times in this episode). The death rate has been hovering a bit above 1/10th of that for months (far above the number of people being crushed by vending machines, for sure, but hardly the scourge that it once was, especially amongst the vaccinated population).

Regarding punishing reasonable dissent on Covid. Totally happens. But regarding the esteemed Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford, he actually did indeed do some fairly ratchet stuff from the beginning (like, had his wife try to recruit people from their kids' school into his original antibody study), and hasn't become any more reasonable (recently uncritically sharing stages with some real wingnuts). I'm sure there are better examples of victims of this phenomenon (Ioannidis comes to mind).

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Jul 9, 2022·edited Jul 10, 2022

There was a coordinated and ideological response by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins (now being paid directly by WH as as an advisor to Biden) on all doctors, scientist and media who dissented from the official Covid narrative. A small list of the the dissenters Jay Bhattacharya, Monica Gandhi, Scott Atlas, Marty Makary, Zubin Damania, Vinay Prasad, Peter Attia.

How do we know this? FOIA of Fauci's emails. On Jan 31, 2020 Zerohedge received a permanent suspension from twitter for posting about the "lab-leak hypothesis". On Feb 2, 2020 in an email about "damage control" between Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins they referenced the ZH post about the "Lab Leak Hypothesis". Fauci & Francis doing "damage control" is how the lab-leak hypothesis became a conspiracy theory. ZH eventually got their Twitter account back when the evidence for "lab-leak" became undeniable.

With respect to scientific dissent broadly, Fauci & Collins controlled the NIH budget. NIH is the single largest funder of scientific research in the USA. If one is a scientist in the USA, one can =not afford to be on the wrong side of these men (Collins stepped down as Director of NIH in December of 2021) - he is now a direct advisor to Joe Biden, Fauci remains Director of NIAID).

In 2020 approximately 2.5% of the $42 billion NIH budget went to fund Covid 19 research.

Exactly 4 studies on Covid transmission were funded. Meanwhile 257 studies on how Covid impacted social disparities were funded.

We don't actually know the effect Covid vaccines & boosters have on the hospitalization or mortality of people who catch Covid. Because we have NO RCT's on people who were vaxxed versus those who were not. For the record, i am vaxxed, boosted and have had Covid 2x.

I believe the original vaccines may have benefitted people over the age of 50, with various comorbidities, but i don't know because there are no RCT's. The CDC and most other "national public health organizations" have stopped publishing raw data on people who are vaccinated or unvaccinated and hospitalized and/or died from or with Covid.

With respect to excess mortality i haven't looked at some of the RAW US data in a while.

UK publishes much better and more timely data. UK is still recording an average of 1500, non-Covid related, excess deaths per week.

The IFR of Covid for the first year of the pandemic was approximately 0.68% with CFR being 0.0000000001% for <18 year old and 20% for over 80.

The IFR now is approximately 0.12 (on par with the Flu). The CFR again is heavily skewed to the upper age & multiple comorbidities cohort.

The corporate media, unethically spread "Covid Doom Porn" to such an extent, that in a poll from September 2021, 30% of Democrats thought the IFR from Covid was 10%. Over 60% of Democrats thought 50% of people who caught Covid ended up in the hospital.

This poll was done 18 months into the pandemic.

At a minimum it will take a generation for Public Health and "science" to win back the public's trust. Corporate media will never win back the public's trust. Too many lies, too little accountability. Meanwhile, masked PMC in NY and SF will continue to smear anyone who dissents from their scientism.

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Vinny Prasad is my dude. Check out his Substack

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Prasad is great and not afraid to dissent, with data.

Two best pods on Covid where both on Peters Attia's pod.

Brilliant medical minds with self-awareness and humility.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

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Yes. I think Michael mistakenly added a zero to the daily numbers. That puts the death rate from COVID now roughly equivalent to a bad flu year, especially as (given still prevalent testing) about 20% if those deaths are probably "with" not "from" COVID.

Thus, the reason people have stopped treating COVID as a big deal is that it is now just another endemic risk and should probably not be of more concern than other threats to health. The best evidence of this comes from the CDC's excess death numbers, which have been basically 0 since mid-March. See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

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Jul 8, 2022Liked by Matt Welch

40 minutes into the episode and it is like falling in love all over again.

You guys are the best

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Guys, I must admit the following:

I don’t love adderall. In fact, I looked at my adderall this morning and said, “Senator, you’re no opiate.” Then I slapped him hard across the face and cursed his mother.

Nonetheless, I ate it. I went to a job interview, I was amazing, I was offered two jobs—and marriage (from a crazy in the ER, but still—big commitment).

Yet, there is an emptiness inside of me…should I increase my dosage?

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Yep. When’s the wedding?

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"California--where you can be trans AND homeless" is very funny.

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Moynihan's frustration on covid messaging matches everything every conservative I know has been saying for two years. Not red state stolen election cons, embittered blue state conservatives who know their shit. It doesn't take advanced studies to know what we have known for a long time about covid. Reporting has been bullshit for a long time and simply fueled my distrust for media and the left for shutting down any conversation about actual science in the name of science.

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What's the most dated thing in the 2002 Spider-Man movie?

(a) Peter Parker's homophobic insult to BONESAW!!!!!!!!!

(b) A big crowd at a Macy Gray concert

Last time I remember Macy Gray in the news, it was because of her appearance at the infamous Jamie Kennedy New Year's Eve special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lzWmDIY9Zk

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Macy Gray OWNED the VH1 top 10 countdown shows in 1999.

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I don’t know. These three transphobes are even more dated than my grandma who thought “black” was an actual race.

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I would like to suggest that the idea that "learning loss" is measurable is very much a meaningless statement. What "learning" has been lost? The "learning" based on the arbitrary standards of conventional, government schooling. Kids have been learning this entire time. Have they forgotten the useless stuff that school shoves down the throats of children since the beginning of schooling? Who cares? School is bad at knowing what to force kids to do (public, private, it's all fois gras trivia farmers, but the kids are the geese) because everyone is bad at forcing kids to "learn" things.

Someone smarter than I said that trying to understand human "learning" by watching kids in school is like trying to understand the behavior of orcas by watching them at Sea World.

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One of the best ways to hear the Song of the South tunes is to ride Splash Mountain. That it's one of Disney's greatest rides is a bonus. But hurry, because the gutless morons who run the company will be removing the Song of the South theming pretty soon to appease some squeaky wheels.

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Thank you so much for booking David French! I'm looking forward to the discussion!

-A question I'd like to ask David: in the self-describing Pro Life movement, what is the mood around shooting for a more consistent abortion-at-request cut off date? Is it thought of as an unacceptable middle ground? Wouldn't it be a major step forward compared to the pendulum swing we're facing post Roe?

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DAVID FRENCH!!! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼

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Hell yeah!!!

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Also, not sure if you listen to Persuasion (Yascha Mounk). Latest episode https://www.persuasion.community/p/french?r=7cwz2&utm_medium=ios

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Oooh! I think I've heard Yascha as a guest only. Thank you!

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So good!

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I adore him!

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Gay for pay during the pandemic puts you more or less on par with Medal of Honor recipients.

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