(Part 2) Best products from r/PoliticalHumor

Ima preface this with "im at a [7]"...

Taft and his fundamentalist ideals were a precursor to the modern day republican platform of religious piety above even government duties and other belief based politics. I don't recall if they shared any fiscal similarities but this was only a quick course so...

Sources: 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs--The Election that Changed the Country & Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America (Pulp History)

> Does anyone know what it's from?

Oh man, you're in for a treat!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)

This comic is incredible. This was from the late 90s, when Vertigo was in its prime. Garth Ennis, the author, won a Best Writer Eisner Award during it's run. If you've got Prime you can read it for free, too!

I’ve been reading Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJBYTB/) and he makes some plausible arguments for how inequality, while bad, is not the metric to measure the health of our society. Poverty, which has been ever decreasing, is the measure for how successful our programs and approaches are, with inequality as a secondary metric to measure and work on. So we can take heart that many of the programs and progress of the last 70 years have truly increased the quality of life for most Americans. A corollary to this is: don’t rail to pull money from the richest; instead, take steps to make the poorest less poor.

I’m massacring his point, I’m sure, but it is interesting. Thinking of it not in terms of a zero sum game is worthwhile. My take was: it’s not the whole “a rising tide lifts all ships” schtick; it’s more about fixating less on the Waltons and their ilk, and more focusing on everyone else. There will be peaks when some people make off with a vulgar amount of cash/wealth, but as long as overall quality of life continues to rise for everyone, we’re doing well.

Worth thinking about.

In what remains of the situation room, a group of T_D gather to strike back at the liberal elite:

"I have a picture of AOC, and it looks like she's wearing a watch."

"Zoom in. Enhance."

"Sir! It's a $595 Movado! This completely excuses Trump's concentration camps. It's no wonder CNN is covering it up."

"Are you sure it's the $595, and not the $189 Movado?"

"Of course we're sure. We've checked the pixels!"

"How about knockoffs? Have we ruled those out? We have to be sure; after all, we have to set an example of integrity for America."

"Son, how long have you been at T_D? Liberals are rich parasites, not like the hard working men and women of the Trump family. They would never wear a knockoff."

"Got it. Post it right away. I want to see this posted at least a dozen times before the Blagovest bells strike midnight."

Another fantastic book in the same vein is What's The Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank. Really does a great job explaining how conservatives have gotten people in the south and midwest to vote for them based on an ever changing idea of "conservative values" despite Republican economic policy being the opposite of what they should be voting for. Highly recommended.

Early Christianity was still pretty focused on egalitarian and communitarian principles. Once the Roman elite began adopting it, however, they had to find loopholes that allowed for Christians to be rich while their neighbors were poor. They made all manner of justifications (e.g. rich people are stewards of the poor like Adam was to the animals in the Garden of Eden, or the poor are necessary because they allow for others to act charitably and thus express their Christianity). Their mental gymnastics are pretty mind-boggling.

Source: Diarmid McCulloch's Christianity: The First 3000 Years.

It is an actual class for intelligence analysts. It’s pretty key. I highly recommend some readings.

This is like my bible (really anything by Heuer): https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/PsychofIntelNew.pdf

Love this one too: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/Tradecraft%20Primer-apr09.pdf

Can’t find a text but this book is good: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Thinking-Intelligence-Analysis-Second/dp/1780391188

If anyone is interested in a really good read about our current state of politics, check out Al Franken’s Giant of the Senate. It’s truly a very entertaining look at the inner workings of the Senate. Plus, lots of Cruz bashing.

Yes, but please do read about history too though. It’s important. I only countered the examples they laid out. There are many more parallels we can draw with our current state of being, and the path we are headed down.


It’s an insanely long book, but a fantastic place to start.

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-Third-Reich-History/dp/B003X4R6GQ/ref=sr_1_2?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3pjkpZLR5AIVWyCtBh247wUTEAAYASAAEgI6SfD_BwE&hvadid=338649877853&hvdev=t&hvlocphy=9031181&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1t1&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17995404492957581662&hvtargid=kwd-417427715499&hydadcr=15337_10336200&keywords=rise+and+fall+of+the+third+reich+book&qid=1568492616&s=gateway&sr=8-2

Eventually, yes.

These components are available already:

• Coarse motor skills (Boston Dynamics has many other examples)
  
• Fine motor skills
  
• Voice recognition (e.g. Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.)
  
• Visual feature identification, which is accomplished by training machine learning algorithms on image data.
  
  What has not yet been developed is an artificial general intelligence, or AGI. This is different from a "narrow" AI that uses machine learning to solve specific problems within narrow parameters. Here's a lengthy paper on the subject, though I would recommend you read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom because he's able to more succinctly describe the pros and cons of the unfolding automation revolution.

Maddow wrote an amazing book about the military, but I tell you, I cannot stand her show. She once showed like a minute's worth of chrome porn (shots of chrome ore, processed chrome, etc) when talking about something before she got to the point.

But check out the book. Fantastic read.

You didn't respond to any of the documented bits about Hillary's campaign ('henchmen' in Trump's language) spreading the birther and 'dressed' obama photos -- which she did. So either you're conceding that point or don't believe it, you'd have to choose to ignore many mainstream (liberally-biased I might add) reported exactly that. So which is it? It's not revisionist when you admit that Mark Penn, Hillary's chief strategist during the 2008 presidential elections, wrote a strategy memo that blatantly tried to push the fact that Barack Obama was Un-American.

So let's go over this line by line:

> Even the MSNBC Show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton's henchmen who first raised the issue, not Donald J. Trump

That's factually true, here's the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLEy_hJaNEI -- John Heilemann, the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics, and a polytical analyst for MSNBC confirmed it on air. Even Snopes manages to admit this! "That Hillary Clinton supporters circulated such an e-mail isn't in question"

> In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate.

That happened.

> Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and the country by bringing closure

Being that being born in the United States is a requirement for being the United States President, it was a great service. This is a government for the people, by the people. We deserve to know.

> to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised.

Here's where I think you and others start getting upset. Snopes claims that Andy Martin started it in 2004. I don't buy it, because that was in 2004, and nobody in America knew who the hell Barack Obama was in 2004. I follow news very closely, I have for my entire adult life, and I didn't hear about Barack Obama in the national light until 2008 when he ran for president. No one outside of Chicago or Hawaii had probably ever heard of him other than the most connected and/or informed. Joe Sixpack didn't know who Barack Obama was in 2004. When he decided to run for president, most people started hearing about him at that time, probably right before the Iowa caucases, and definitely right after when he won it (IIRC). This is precisely the time in which Hillary Clinton moved in and according to every resource I've cited above, her campaign started spreading this birther controversy, while she herself stayed out of it to create plausible deniability. THAT, I would argue, is more sick, vile, and non-virtuous than what Trump did. Trump owned it, he's always been his brash self. Hillary's campaign at that time, and even now, is baced on deception. She says one thing and her campaign does another. THAT's revisionism. Her gaping flaw, however, is that she's not savvy enough to realize that the alternative media that she does not control will call her out whenever she tries shit like this. And that happened -- although people like you still refuse to admit it.

> Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not,

That happened, Barack Obama did eventually produce a birth certificate, the guy is a closer. He knows what he has to do in order to get the action he wants out of someone.

> Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

Here's where I start rolling on the floor laughing. Donald Trump knew that CNN wouldn't cover his one-hour event in Washington with a bunch of veterans and war heros endorsing Trump, in Trump's newly opened hotel. When the Trump campaign tweeted that he'd be releasing "something big" and started spreading rumors that it was about the birther controversy, guess who showed up and filmed the entire 1-hour event live. CNN. I listened to it live on the radio, it was 95% an endorsement for Donald Trump by some of the most highly decorated service men this country has. The last thirty seconds of the event, Donald Trump comes out, says Hillary started it, I closed it, Mr. Obama is born in the US, let's move on. Boom, done.

At that point, CNN realized that they got punk'd. Donald Trump literally baited CNN to cover an event FOR FREE that they didn't want to cover (they hate him and do not want him to win, that's been admitted -- they have clearly been campaigning for Hillary this entire time). He did this under budget and ahead of schedule. They were expecting him to bring the issue back up, but he closed it.

4D chess.

now, literally, you've got Don Lemon tweeting out that it was a stunt (it was). And this makes CNN look bad. Lemon is insulting Trump for getting free publicity, and you've got Don Lemon and CNN calling people deplorable, racists, xenophobes, etc, which sounds MUCH mroe insulting to me. That's ammo Trump will use later.

Like him or not, he knows how to play the media. Which is exactly what he did.

Note that he does not always say the truth but rather what the media will pick up on. That's not 1984 level revisionism. That's just a clever tactic he uses to get free publicity as an underdog who is not as politically connected as Hillary Clinton is (who, by the way, was discovered to have been feeding CNN talking points for favors, to make her look better -- this was discovered in the DNC Leaks). You've got Donald Trump, a media outsider, going up against a very corrupt Washington insider who uses money and power to get the media to make her look good and others bad. What the fuck else is this guy supposed to do? Just cry and lose?

How do I know all this about him lying to the media for publicity? He literally wrote the book on it. He's been using that same tactic for years.

You cannot call what he's doing 1984 because he DOESN'T WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT. He's not hiding the misdeeds of the government. He's playing the crooked media like a fiddle -- and even so, he WAS STILL CORRECT about Hillary's campaign being the first to bring it up in 2008.

So there you go, QED. You're respectfully wrong, this isn't funny, it's not 1984-anything. Refute my reply or concede.

This is an excellent comment, I wish I could give you gold. I just downloaded a sample of the book, the first essay is supposed to be one of the better ones so maybe most of it will be in the sample for now, ha.

Here's a link if anyone is feeling lazy:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Lost-Cause-Civil-History-ebook/dp/B00866HAI0

Depends on largely on the size of the safe, obviously, but they're not as expensive as they sound. I recently bought my father one as a birthday gift and I seem to recall about a $125 handgun safe.

Edit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EXQW672/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1487425964&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=biometric+gun+safe&dpPl=1&dpID=41Qx313%2Ba-L&ref=plSrch

Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an excellent read for anyone interested in wealth inequality, the data behind it, and its effects.

I'm still reading this book but it is an eye opener.


CGP Grey did this video based on the book

It pretty much lays out why we're never going to see changes for the better (until the people rise up)

He's actual a beautiful poet, check out this book of his poetry The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump (Canons) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1786892278/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_0FndBbSSZZYAB

> Even at the highest levels, in the House of Representatives and the Senate, it seems like there is less reaching across the aisle than there used to be.

simple answer, the extremists have taken over both parties.

I am old enough to remember when the Democratic AND Republican parties were not insane like they are today.

I suggest people read Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked if you want an inside look at a time when things still worked, despite political differences.

Please please please please read a book before asking such questions. Here: https://www.amazon.com/Team-Rivals-Political-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/0743270754

That will start to answer your questions, and it will then start make sense.

You can follow that up with: https://www.amazon.com/Path-Power-Years-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0679729453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1523289285&sr=1-1&keywords=path+to+power

That is the first of the LBJ series and describes in detail what changed and what Southern Democrats were.

There are other books in the LBJ series which will almost fully give you understanding.

You also read this one: https://www.amazon.com/Unfinished-Life-John-Kennedy-1917-ebook/dp/B000Q67H36/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1523289385&sr=8-6&keywords=john+f+kennedy

After that you will know:

> How does this make any sense?

Or that book that both those videos are based on