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.

Three words: Pit toilet splashback.

Hahaha, that's what I love the most! The downvotes come flying fast 'n furious on driving-related posts. It's so consistent, across any social media or forum site. I can only speculate, but I think it's the cognitive dissonance, because know from extensive real-life observation that driving makes people miserable and angry, even while they claim to enjoy it. Thus, it's really easy to make observations that puncture the illusion.

Our criminal "justice" system sucks, period. It's about vengeance, and racism, not about rehabilitation. We should reform it from top to bottom for every crime, not simply exempt one in particular because folks wanna zoom-zoom.

Agreed. The best solution, as always, is to design streets and roads so that driving unsafely feels unsafe, so that everybody naturally slows down. Until that happens, this is a good program.

This scheme would reduce ticket revenue, though. And if criminal scofflaws have to pay, good, fuck 'em. The New York taxpayers shouldn't take on the burden. The scumbags could avoid the cost trivially.

The frustration here is that the common refrain whenever somebody proposes a bike lane anywhere is, "It's bad for business! Where will their customers park?!"

It's completely bogus, which a snowstorm makes manifest: Without the snow, we can pretend that these cars belong to the drivers allegedly stopping to patronize local businesses. With the snow, we see the truth that space is here used by three people to store their private property for a week. This example illustrates why experience shows, over and over, people walking and biking are better for business than people in cars. Hundreds, or even thousands, of potential customers who can easily stop in, versus drivers (non-customers) who are so close, but so far away.

In short, it's not that people did what the city intended, it's that the city is kneecapping itself.

Bend the knee to the fascist regime, still get laid off. Awkward!

But that is exactly what happened, and it's what the article is about. "Hunt down" is an idiomatic phrase in English, and it would be not at all unusual for me to, say, hunt down a USB adapter in my office. Leaving that detail out of the headline would be burying the lede.

It's not normal or proper for the DHS to subpoena information about citizens who express an opinion to government officials. This is transparently an action undertaken to intimidate. The language used in the headline conveys the meaning much more clearly than a "neutral" (read: complicit) phrasing would.