im fine with spending cuts if it cuts the right things (cough defense cough)

and social security basically mathematically need to be reformed no? am open to seeing analysis both ways on this issue, havent dug into it deeply

One could argue that you either need to raise taxes or decrease benefits. Raising (or eliminating) the cap on the payroll tax seems like the common sense fix to me.

think it might be time to face reality, rank and file suburban GOP voters are horrible human beings

There are lots of true believers at this point, especially in the house.

which is what happens when the supreme court won't do **** about gerrymandering

but yes, there are like 100 people whose stupidity is beyond the comprehension of the average forum poster currently sitting in congress

The group of faux populist money men is a very small group. All evil to the core. How much would we have to raise for Black Cube to uncover their dirty laundry? Kickstarter?

Direct democracy in action. This is going to be a fist fight.

Very interesting, thanks for the link, ordered Andy Clark's book (doesn't look simple but majored in this stuff in college and read some of his stuff back in the day).

Yeah, thanks. It was like in the FACK when Clark was talking to someone who believed the earth is flat. "It should take longer to fly, but only the pilot knows how fast he's going." And, I mean, on top of...everything...so like, the pilots are in on this thing now? And their families and keeping their stories all straight for...?

Like, what an incredibly disturbing vision of the world.

if you are interested in some more applicable uses of the kinds of info, this guy is a professor that has developed 'deep learning' methods that incorporate some of the theories talked about in that book. obviously it's a different arena, but the fact that those kind of theories about the brain do seem to correspond to actually useful methods in computer science is pretty cool (however, it raises some suspicions that applying the model too broadly runs some 'overfitting' risks)

along those lines, i do think the book review oversells the applicability of the theory - especially for some of the higher level stuff. it's kind of amazing how we still know basically **** all about how the brain works, and have to just come up with theories that still could be lolwrong even if they seem promising

so the Senate will likely pass that joke of a tax (cut cut) cut bill tonight, even though no one knows what's in it, because they're literally still writing it

good stuff

or maybe? i doubt it

i mean "Maverick" McCain already pledged his support this morning, as did that supposed part of the GOP resistance from Alaska a couple days ago

pretty clear they don't care what it ends up looking like

Them working on that right now is an absolute joke. It's amazing how they keep raising the bar on how BLATANTLY they can lie.

The parliamentarian threw out the trigger some republicans wanted in the bill and they're scrambling to rewrite it to keep those guys supporting it. Also told them to fix/remove the arctic drilling that was put in to buy murkowski off. (she'll still vote for it tho)

Not that any of them know anything about it other than who it helps and who it screws but that's all they need at this point.

Flake/Corker/McCain/et all giving Trump a billion dollars after the **** he said about all of them; that's their legacy.

this country is truly a complete disgrace

Trump has to be officially WOAT president by now, yes? Just look at the headlines today, he's tweeting out Muslim hate videos, publicly and childishly taking shots at the SECRETARY OF STATE (who holds a fairly important position), he's garbage. I fear checking the news in the morning.

Presidential history has always been something of a hobby of mine, so I take GOAT/WOAT conversations seriously.

The Harding/Coolidge/Hoover trifecta was pretty bad, but my pick for WOAT goes to James Buchanan. Basically tried to play both sides as the country faced a truly existential crisis, and ended up pissing everybody off and making the Civil War inevitable and worse.

Thankfully the GOAT Lincoln came right after him.

One of my favorite blogs wait but why has a pretty fun read about presidents.

Point is, though, the founders anticipated weak or dangerous leaders, and hoped the institutions would lay the groundwork to overcome that. We've had good presidents and bad presidents, but the idea that is America has endured.

Of course, Trump is threatening all that, and undoing it all as much as he can. And there's still plenty of time for a nuclear war or existential crisis.

Still, I'll hold off on WOAT for now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/b...n-tax-cut.html

makes sense

call your reps etc i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hey remember when Emperor Cheeto kicked off his campaign by saying that a wall was needed because Mexico was sending rapists & murderers rather than their best people some stuff about economic anxiety? what fun, innocent times those were...

Richard Nixon is a candidate for WOAT and I have deep misgivings about anyone who doesn't put him in the bottom five. I could argue that the Trump is really just a symptom of the institutional damage caused by Richard Nixon and the failure to prosecute him. Nixon should have died in a jail cell.

The Founding Fathers were naive idealists who actually thought that they were creating a system which would not have political parties. We are reaching an era of potential constitutional crisis because one faction has decided to maximize exploitation of the weaknesses of a system that assumed there would be no partisanship.

I still got Andrew Jackson ahead of Trump, and George W. Bush. Trump is the most incompetent and the stupidest, but he hasn't caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people yet. Yet.

Jackson used to be a consensus top ten president, but his stock has been dropping in recent years. He has blemishes on his record, but I have a hard time sticking him in the bottom ten right now.

if by "one faction" you mean the Rich Uncle Pennybagses of the world, then yeah

fairly safe to say that these dudes who died hundreds of years ago failed to anticipate the extent to which money would completely corrupt the system they drew up, and that maybe, just maybe, strict adherence to super old stuff like that (and interpretations of said stuff) is probably not ideal

Jeff Flake is a thoughtless yes

Good thing the media elite fellated him for giving a useless speech

yeah i mean Flake voted yes on some Drumpf BS that very day he gave that pointless speech

they're all thoughtless yes men (and women)

their only objection is that he's a real jerk, other than that they have no issue

Always love the WOAT President discussion. Lot of great candidates with Buchanan, A. Johnson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Nixon, and Trump. Lot of other potential candidates if we don't excuse certain things as being a product of their time.

I'm a strong believer that the Kennedy assassination marked the death of the US presidency. Post-Kennedy has been a string of mediocre at best presidents, with the only potential top tier President long term being Obama. The two 20th century events likely to go down in history as leading to the downfall of the US imo are the screwing of Henry Wallace and the Assassination of Kennedy.

In retrospect, we may view the corrupt presidency of Ronald Reagan as the turning point in American history where decline became more likely than not because that is where the morally bankrupt philosophy that government is the problem seemed to become too deeply ingrained in too much of the electorate for anything good to be done.