My dictionary gives the following definition of authoritarian: Relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority. Of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people. The questions about children were whether it's more imp...

Obama's approval ratings are about where many presidents have been in their second term, last time I checked, and in the 40-50% range. The original plan with the ACA included mandatory expansion of Medicaid by the states, and clearly if that had happened, the whole thing would look a bit different t...

These comments are fascinating to me, and remind me of the difficulty in predicting things (rather a PP idea, no?) Sanders is clearly to the left of Hillary Clinton (or Obama, for that matter), so I don't see any reason why a right leaning R Congress would work with him any better than with either o...

Actually, a quick google search finds that Sanders is opposed to open borders, and has said so on the record. The primary/general election thing isn't limited to D - it seems that more hard core folks in either party are more likely to vote in primaries, which drives primaries towards more extreme c...

charity navigator is a pretty good site for ranking charities, particularly by what percentage of donations are eaten up by administration.

Would anybody give a bunch of it to charity? Whenever we think about winning a lot of money in some very unlikely way, we always think we'd give a lot away to various charities and/or friends and family, and then live comfortably on the rest, perhaps invested in some very low risk way. Of course, we...

I think combining a broad stock market index fund with a long term treasury fund uses part of the PP philosophy, just not all of it. Those are assets that have very low correlation, and also both have long term expected positive growth.  And, one can combine their use with a band re-balancing strate...

Trump knows that raw testosterone is what the Republican primary electorate wants. I fully expect him to become significantly more Putin-esque during the general election. If Trump fails to make this switch, I will be surprised. Given Putin's authoritarianism and undemocratic nature, such a move wo...

Amen.

Republicans seem to tolerate plenty of bad behavior from politicians, as long as they're R politicians, as far as I can tell.

Fred. Stephen Mitchell wrote a book called "The Gospel according to Jesus", in which he believes the adultery story to be true, based on some interesting reasoning.

It's a pretty good, short book you might be interested in.

I take a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement, and it contains the RDA for iodine, which is quite low, 150mcg/day.

If you're using a lot of table salt, you're probably getting a lot more sodium than is generally recommended.

The birthing rooms at hospitals or doctor's offices seem like a very good idea to me, combining the more pleasant environment of a home birth with the easy availability of medical professionals if needed.

Well, if people cared about the facts, then they'd be relevant. And, then the representative government would be a different sort of entity. It may always have been like this to some degree, but I think it's gotten worse over time, and now people maintain ideological views even when presented with c...

That's why we're in trouble.

"The facts are irrelevant".

And there it is.

You want to convince me and others that your belief system is the correct one, and that we should adopt it.

That's the beginning of conflict and leads to things like "holy wars". 

It's really too bad it's not enough for you to believe it.

There are two ways to understand atheism/religious belief. One is that each group is making a "claim" about "factual" things/events.  In this case, each group could reasonably be asked to "prove it".  The other is that each group believes differently - atheists believe ...

Well, it seems obvious that if more money is moving around in the economy, that would mean that more goods and services are being sold/bought, and that sort of activity is generally good for an economy.

Unless I'm missing something.

Vanguard did an interesting study, and their results/conclusions were that re-balancing annually, but only if re-balancing bands were breached offered the best risk/reward outcomes.

I don't know about specifics.

But there are lots of other possibilities for investment, some of which might be more understandable for you.

I'd say if you really don't understand why you're invested the way you are, it's worth considering a different plan, one that you do understand and are more comfortable with over time.

The vast majority of legal scholars believe that the 14th amendment applies to children of illegal residents, as well as legal immigrants.

There are a few who take a different view.

That's from the politifact article in your link.

Well, suffering is just a part of life, for agnostics, most likely.

The difficulty is in reconciling suffering, especially what looks like needless suffering or the suffering of innocents, with a loving God.

Ehrman was raised Christian, and became a born-again fundamentalist, believing the Bible was all literally true, and only after learning ancient languages and studying more, came to understand it differently.  He went to Moody's and Wheaton, and then got both a masters in divinity and a PhD in New T...