Two things I think are frequently lost in these discussions:

1. When Fauci made his statement about people not needing to wear masks, people tend to forget the context of the situation. At the time, mask manufacturers were caught off-guard and there was a huge run on masks. They were extremely hard to find to buy. Hospitals were running out and having a very hard time procuring the masks that they needed to perform operations. They were actively trying to discourage people from hoarding masks so that medical providers could have "dibs" on acquiring them first.

Once the supply line caught up with demand and they were more easily obtainable, they changed their position—but not because the facts or evidence of their effectiveness changed.

It wasn't just masks to which this flawed logic was applied. When the COVID vaccines first became available, people who were over the age of 65 were given priority on getting them. A bunch of people willfully ignorantly took that to mean that people who were younger just plain didn't benefit from having the vaccine. Nothing could be further from the truth; it benefits them greatly. But with a highly limited supply, we necessarily had to prioritize who got the shots first.

2. When you wear a mask, it isn't particularly effective in protecting you from COVID. Its purpose is to protect everyone else if you have COVID, especially since in the initial stage of infection many people were asymptomatic. As mentioned in comments above, it prevents a 10-foot plume of aerosolized infected saliva from projecting forth from your sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing. The idea is that if everyone is wearing a mask to protect everyone else, then you'll have a much higher level of protection also.

Living in the South of the US, I can't count the number of times I heard chuckleheads explain to me how those masks still let particles through. They couldn't wrap their brains around the point being that those particles for the most part won't be there if everyone is wearing masks. And it's not just COVID that controlled by masks. Did anyone notice that cases of the flu dropped to a fraction of its normal rate of infection where people consistently masked up?

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.

Democrats DO have a platform. Unfortunately, while Republicans hold the state houses, Congress, presidency, and now the Supreme Court, they are utterly powerless to make anything on that platform come to fruition. Any bills they propose just get squashed, never even coming to the floor to be voted down, even simple, stupid stuff that has wide national bipartisan support. (Such as DACA, since you rather helpfully brought it up.)

In such a circumstance, about the only thing they CAN do productively is to keep Republicans from passing yet more stupid legislation undermining our economy and freedoms, which is what they've been much more successful at doing these past couple of years than I honestly expected.

Nevertheless, there is still a clear Democratic platform. Seriously. They even publish it on the web so that anyone who wants to can go out and see it. There's even a section specifically on immigration.

Of course, that doesn't mean that every Democrat is in lockstep on every issue in that platform. We're not a hive mind, and there is sometimes ardent disagreement within the party over the nitty gritty details of how things can best be accomplished. For example, Bernie Sanders wants to have the federal minimum wage immediately go up to $15 everywhere. Hillary Clinton wanted to immediately increase it to $12 per hour, and allow individual cities where the cost of living is higher have the option of raising it higher as appropriate. Which way is better? I honestly don't know, I can see merits and downsides to both plans. But one thing I can say for damn sure is either plan would be better than the "Let's just leave it where it's been since 2009," or "Let's do away with the federal minimum wage completely!" plans that Republicans have embraced.

By the way, that Republican "Contract With America"? Very, very few of the items in that agenda actually got implemented. The dirty little secret that they didn't bother to tell anyone while they were hyping it is that the vast majority of the things on it would never get past the senate, let alone past a presidential veto. That whole thing was just a marketing gimmick. Yes, it was effective—if you define "effective" as getting people elected. But if instead you define "effective" as actually getting stuff done? Not so much.

Like it or not, that crown in recent history has to go to the Democratic Congress and Obama, who got the ACA passed. Like it or not, it was one of the most major overhauls of the health care system in our country's history. It was a huge undertaking, and even after it's been repeatedly undermined and gutted by Republicans, it's actually still helping people.

I'm not going to even try convincing you of how idiotic you are, but for others who might read that post...

1. The whole "neoliberal" accusation is a catch-all slur hurled at anyone who has the audacity to not want to go whole-hog down the road to communism. Socialism is fine for things that the private market cannot or should not provide, such as health care. And in fact, Hillary Clinton has been fighting for universal health care since the early 1990s--it's one of the reasons that right-wingers hate her so badly, because as first lady, she was doing that instead of being a nice, demure housewife. For everything else, the free market is the best way to go. The best systems of government in the world are a healthy mix of both, but the trick is in finding the right balance. Bill Clinton did a great job starting us down that road from Reagan's/Bush's deregulate everything strategy, and Obama did a great job pushing us further, as evidenced by the improvement in our situation today. This notion that anything short of turning the US into a communist country is "neoliberal" is idiocy pushed by the Tea Party of the left. It's also a great way to turn off the public-at-large. As a famous man once said, "if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."

2. Clinton's "superpredator" comment wasn't racist. It was an offhand comment that she admits she shouldn't have used in referring to how gangs at the time were no longer just groups of kids innocently hanging out. And in that respect, she was right--at the time crime was skyrocketing and there was a massive public demand that actions be taken to bring it down. And actions were taken. And it was brought down.

But this one comment keeps coming up from Bernie Bros as "evidence" that Clinton is racist. The reason this one quote comes up every time is because in reality, Clinton has a consistent record of fighting hard against racism. That's why she was endorsed by virtually every civil rights leader and won the black vote in the primaries by over 50 points. The notion that Clinton is racist is a ludicrous lie invented and propagated by the right-wing nuts, and believed by gullible left-wing nuts who are looking for any excuse, no matter how farfetched, to hate her.

3. Yes, I flatly deny that her voting record looks like a money stuffed republican. As a senator, she consistently voted for policies that benefited the poor and middle class, not the rich.

4. No, Trump supported Bernie because it was a split in the vote among liberals. And Trump has this uncanny knack for appealing to stupid people. The fact that you listened to him means... well... there's no tactful way to say it. You're a stupid person. And Trump's tactic worked, creating this "I'm going to vote for Jill Stein" bullshit. To be fair, Democrats were doing the same thing, trying to exploit the "Never Trump" split in the Republican party. The difference is that unlike liberals who buy into the opposition's divisive rhetoric and propaganda, conservatives stick to their ideological guns with religious-like fervor. This will continue being a problem into the foreseeable future because while both sides have stupid people, one side's stupid people are malleable enough for this tactic to actually be effective.

5. Russia helping Bernie Sanders is fact. It's a particularly inconvenient one that Sanders is lying about to this day, but that doesn't make it any less true.

6. Regarding Sanders's biggest crime being arrested in a civil rights protest, I'll remind you that Clinton has never been arrested or otherwise found guilty of ANY crime. EVER. Of course she's been accused out the wazoo by right-wingers (and gullible left-wingers). But unlike Bernie Sanders, she has had every waking moment of her life scrutinized nationally under a microscope for almost 30 years and has been the target of national and international political attacks for every single one of those moments. She is probably the most investigated person on the face of this planet, and she has never been found criminally guilty of anything. NOT ONE DAMN THING.

Now I know, you're under the impression that it's because of some deep state conspiracy that she's been able to get away with murder. Why would you think that? I don't know, let's consider for a minute, who pushes narratives about deep state conspiracies that might be influencing you... who could that possibly describe...

You forgot to mention that the reason those voters were purged is because they hadn't voted in multiple elections leading up to the 2016 primaries and hadn't replied to attempts to verify that they were still legally entitled to vote in the district in which they were registered. You forgot to mention that many of these voters were registered in multiple districts because they had moved, and the registration information on record was out-of-date, or because they had died. You forgot to mention that those voters were actually returned to the voter rolls prior to the primary and could actually vote. You forgot to mention that the areas that were purged, including the Bronx, supported Clinton over Sanders, meaning that this "illegal purge" actually disproportionately helped Sanders, not Clinton.

I see you've bought into the right-wing political war machine's hype.

What's that? You don't remember Trump supporting Bernie in the primaries in the hopes of peeling away Clinton voters? Because I sure as hell do. And I also remember the recent news about how Russia was supporting Bernie as well.

Now, in the heat of the moment, I don't blame you for getting caught up in the battle and enjoying the poisoned fruits of people who are antithetical to your beliefs as long as it helped your cause. But what separates people who honestly and constructively criticize their own side from those who are the Tea Party of the left is that with the benefit of hindsight, the intelligent people realize that they were being played, used as tools, and learn from their mistakes. The sniveling idiots keep harping on the same idiotic false allegations invented by the right-wing and Russia that they embraced during the election that caused us to end up with Trump as president because they're too proud to admit that they couldn't think critically enough to see the drivel they were swallowing for what it was.

THEY'RE NOT FREE, you idiot.

All of these "free" IDs require you to supply a birth certificate. It wasn't until relatively recently that everyone born here was required to have a birth certificate. Often, birth certificates are lost, many times due to no fault of the person holding the certificate. (Fire, theft, etc.) Sometimes, they don't exist at all and never did. For many of these people, they can't get a birth certificate--and thus, no "free" ID for any amount of money.

For others, the cost of getting a birth certificate is prohibitively expensive. I just looked up how much it would cost me to get a copy of my own birth certificate. It would cost me $15 for a certified copy, plus another $10 if I want to have it notarized, which most places would require. While $25 may not sound like a lot to you, it's a serious hurdle if you literally had no money.

Oh, and the kicker? From the application form:

That's right, in order to get a copy of your birth certificate to get a "free" ID you can use to vote, you have to supply a valid ID that you could use to vote.

The truth of the matter is that prior to all of these voter ID laws springing up, voter fraud has never been a problem. The truth is that voter fraud, especially in-person voter fraud that voter ID laws are ostensibly trying to prevent, has never impacted the outcome of an election. The truth is that voter ID laws disproportionately impacts the poor, and especially disproportionately impacts African-Americans, who thanks to a history of systemic and systematic repression, are far more likely to not have birth certificates or other forms of state-issued identification.

So seriously, shove your rationalizations up your ass, because voter ID laws are nothing but new implementations of poll taxes, and the arguments you just used to justify them are the same fucking arguments that people used to justify poll taxes.

I hate to burst your bubble, but Democrats aren't going to take back Congress in 2018. Hell, Trump will probably be re-elected in 2020. And I am most emphatically not saying that because that's what I want. I hate Trump and the Republican party with a purple passion you cannot measure.

But the sad fact is that collectively, American voters are dumb as dirt. I mean, we're really, really stupid. Sure, there are a lot of good, smart people out there, but not nearly as many as idiots. I used to be hopeful and optimistic, but the 2016 election irrevocably changed that. We had a man running who literally said that he could get away with anything, including sexual assault, and who was a cultural icon of the greed and excess of our most decadent decade of greed and excess. People lined up in droves to vote for him.

And on the left? We still have a contingent of people, our own version of the Tea Party, who insist that Hillary Clinton is "just as bad," embracing weird conspiracy theories posited by the crazy branch of the right-wing, such as her "rigging" the primaries or deleting thousands of incriminating emails, things there has never been any evidence of her doing.

Some people (including Clinton herself) chalk all of these woes up to misogyny or Russian interference. Yeah, that had some impact. But personally, I chalk it up to a more basic truth: We Americans are collectively as stupid as they come. While most of the world praises intelligence and experience, we have an active disdain for it. When someone excels at something, we look for ways to take them down a peg because they're "elitist." Instead, we bow to the cult of Trump, where you don't have to be smart, motivated, and have a proven track record of getting worthwhile things done. You just have to have a larger-than-life personality and willing to say literally anything, even if it contradicts something you said two minutes ago. We'd prefer electing someone who's openly lying to our face because the person who's telling the truth must be hiding something nefarious.

I know, you're probably thinking that now that Trump has steered our boat straight down shit creek, people are finally waking up. I'll remind you that just a week ago, the people of Montana elected a man who literally physically and deliberately harmed another person because he was "sick and tired" of being asked questions about health care, the most important domestic issue facing America today. We pay lip service to teaching our kids to play nice, share, and be good people, but then we turn right around and reward people like Gianforte with being elected to what used to be an esteemed office. Which lesson do you think they're learning?

And before that, when Democrats lost a mayoral election in Omaha, Nebraska, the Sandersesque contingent came out of the woodwork yet again to point fingers at the national Democratic party for somehow failing to win the seat, even though that election was much closer than the one four years ago. And why? Because the DNC leadership criticized the Democratic candidate for being anti-abortion. Gasp! Democrats had the audacity to vocally support women's rights? No wonder they lost!

I always get amused at people who want term limits for Congresspeople, or who say things like, "Throw them all out!" What exactly makes you think that anything would be any different? I mean, the idiots in Kentucky who keep electing Mitch McConnell, the man who plainly stated that his number one political goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president (and, incidentally, who spectacularly failed at even that number one goal) would just find some other jackass to line up behind in the following election. Maybe even someone worse.

So yeah, I'd like to think that Democrats are going to make a resurgence in 2018. I'd like to think that 2020 will see a wave of blue overtake the country and finally sweep out the assholes and villains of the right-wing that have been holding this country back for decades. I can't help but roll my eyes when I see pundits from the left on television acting all smug, like this is the final straw that will push people to finally get active and make a change for the better.

But the reality is that I'm glad that I don't have any kids, because we are currently on a course straight to hell and I just don't see anything changing anytime soon. It makes me slightly content knowing that when I check out, I'm not leaving behind progeny to suffer the fruits of our folly, to have to live through what's coming thanks to our gross stupidity and incompetence today. If you do have kids, well, that sucks. And if you ARE a kid or young adult, I wish I had some good news or advice. I'll just say that I am so, so sorry for what we've done to you. I hope you're a lot smarter than we are, because even our luminaries haven't been able to tackle this issue of not just climate change, but rampant stupidity that sits back and cheers it on.

Wow, that sounds almost unbelievable. I would have thought that the result would have been just the opposite. Oh wait, it was. As multiple studies have shown.

Unfortunately, it has become such common practice to request "kitchen sink" permissions that it's nigh impossible to find useful apps that don't do so. And the sad fact is that users have become so jaded to it that the money that app makers lose from people who value privacy is less than the money they make from people just clicking through on ever "OK" button they see to get their new shiny.

I wish I had an answer to this problem, but I don't. People are stupid, and there's not much you can do to fix that. Unfortunately, that means that people like you and I who do care about our privacy pay the price.

Maybe, but it was one particularly conservative Supreme Court overturning a couple of centuries of precedent. And even in doing so, that <sarcasm>bastion of liberal activism</sarcasm> Antonin Scalia had this to say in his majority opinion of the case you're using for reference (Heller v. DC):