He doesn't have the power to do that. If he does and gets away with it, don't complain when that power is abused by other presidents in ways you disapprove.
But new immigrants will need a vibrant economy they can assimilate into and pay taxes. If not, we will just be swamped and become another shithole country. That helps no one.
This isn't a dem/repub issue. If you can't see that, you are falling for it just as much as anyone else. Its that kind of thinking that is forestalling reasonable measures that could be taken now instead of fear-mongering that the other side is going to leave old people eating catfood.
I'm not saying they aren't posturing. Im saying that an R congress did this twice during Obama, at least once during clinton, and they are doing it now.
I never seen a D congress try to stop the debt ceiling being raised.
Both sides will go dirty over budgets, but this specific detb ceiling thing has a pattern. Show me how I'm wrong, don't just throw nonsequiturs at me that aren't about the thing I actually said.
No one cares about any of that political posturing. We can argue back and forth about who is going to get the blame, but eventually its got to be addressed or its going to bite us even harder than it already is.
Like it or not, the debt limit is the only time where we end up talking about it. As soon as its over, they are back to planning another infrastructure spending package. I'm still waiting to see what we got from the one in 2008 that was supposed to change everything.
If that was remotely true, if it was anything other than a lie, why does it only come up when there is an R congress and D president? There are plenty of times in the last 30 years where there's an R congress and an R president, but it never was an issue.
If it was actually a concern, it would come up then too.
Maybe because the congress is the place the budget gets written? The president has little to do with it. Democrat congresses tend to initiate larger spending packages.
Regardless, that still doesn't address the debt problem.
Democratic congresses also raise revenues. Republicans congresses are all about driving wealth inequality and cratering social benefits through taxes, and starving agencies and programs of funding.
Then why has every single debt ceiling crisis, starting with the 1995 abandonment of the Gephardt Rule raising the ceiling with the budget. been instigated by a Republican Congress during a Democratic Administration?
It would be hard to find a more definitively Republican/Democratic issue.
Maybe because that's the only way we end up talking about it? Would you prefer they keep the Gephardt Rule and keep lifting it and go on to start planning another massive infrastructure package?
People are sick of the finger pointing. No one cares. Something has to be done about the debt or its going to end up biting us even harder than it already is.
The Debt Ceiling is likely unconstitutional and irrelevant. Republicans use it to cut benefits to the poor or middle classes. Getting a hand on debt is what Democrats do. Year after year we get more evidence of this through reductions in our deficits under Democratic administrations. You know what we get under Republican administrations? Massive debt and growing deficits.
This is a Republican issue full stop. The debt ceiling isn't about debt. It never was and it never will be.
Congresses set budgets. Presidents have little to do with it. The last time the budget came into balance was in the late '90s (Dem president, Republican congress). Due to gridlock and some real spending restraints that were put in place.
It's only a Republican issue, because the only time they can make it an issue is when they have control of the Congress. You basically just admitted that Democrats don't care about the debt. You think it can just keep going up forever? You don't think eventually this thing is going to pop? The sooner we deal with it, the lesser the repercussions.
The Debt and The Debt Limit are vastly different things. Republicans can bring up the Debt Limit at any time. They only do it when a Democratic Administration is present. They have no problem massively bloating budgets. The Debt Limit is an unconstitutional artificial crisis to approve borrowing of debt already accrued. If you want to solve debt you do it when you set the budget not when the credit card bill is due.
I'm still waiting to see the results of the massive infrastructure package that was passed in 2008. We've had a few more rounds of such spending, supposedly because of outdated infrastructure. You have to wonder how many more times they are going to get away with that trick.
Whenever they pass massive spending, its clear they are not talking to American people. They are talking to the corporations that are going to benefit.
This heavily decayed rusty bridge support [1] is under the Chicago Metra Union Pacific Track UP-N line that has 34,000 passengers riding across this bridge on 70 scheduled trains at 50-70 mph each weekday.
While it is admittedly just a single example, everyone else's experiences seem equally as anecdotal.
The issue is not whether we reach a sovereign debt crisis, it is when we reach it. Sure, we've been able to avoid it up to now. But eventually something's going to give.
What are you talking about? He is refuting the doomsday claims that the entire reef was dead. He is pointing to its regenerative capacity after mass bleaching events. He never claimed it had completely recovered.
But crying "its the end of the world" is also an outrageous claim used by the modern left to generate attention and raise funding.
-Over the past 36 years of monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), coral reefs in the GBR have shown an ability to begin recovery after disturbances.
-In 2022, widespread recovery has led to the highest coral cover recorded by the LTMP in the Northern and Central GBR, largely due to increases in the fast-growing Acropora corals, which are the dominant group of corals on the GBR and have been largely responsible previous changes in hard coral cover.
One crying-wolf person? That's "the environmentalists"?
The data (not hyperbole) was that the reef was in trouble and in decline. It continues to be in trouble and in decline.
"Begin recovering after disturbances" is double-talk for "continues it's alarming decline." A bit of coral growing over the sterile corpses of hundreds of miles of dead reef is maybe romantic and hopeful. But not anything to justify the "recovery" word.
Mocking science for a sound-byte by one academic is corrosive nonsense.
"The article titled "How did climate doomsters get the Great Barrier Reef so wrong?" discusses the misreporting of the state of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) by environmental activists and media outlets. The article argues that the GBR is not, in fact, dead, as was claimed in a widely circulated obituary in 2016, but rather is still alive and thriving.
The article suggests that the doom-mongering around the GBR is driven by a desire to generate fear and promote political agendas, rather than an accurate portrayal of the state of the reef. It also notes that there are many other threats to the GBR, such as overfishing and pollution, which are often overlooked in the focus on climate change."
I asked chatgpt to summarise in two paragraphs, since it's at least not a climate doomster. "Alive and thriving" seems a strange conclusion from recent events, given that its health assessment was downgraded to very poor.
> "Alive and thriving" seems a strange conclusion from recent events, given that its health assessment was downgraded to very poor
The problem is it was downgraded by the same academics who
a. clearly don't understand the reef lifecycle
b. have been predicting that the entire reef will die completely, for decades
c. financially benefit from doing so
In 2019 they were saying the reefs would take 10 years to fully grow back and might never do so, in 2022 suddenly it's grown back completely and then got even bigger.
The problem here is inherent to academia. Scientists are funded via short term grants. If you can gather all the data you need within the scope of those grants by asking grad students to tick some boxes then fine, but to be able to understand the lifecycle of huge natural systems that have been around for millions of years you apparently need more data than what they have. But if you need to collect data for 100 years before you have sufficient data to make predictions, how do you get so many grants without papers to show for it? Would it even be funded at all if not for the predictions of doom? The only field that seems to have found solutions to this is high energy physics.
Strange how I suspected I was reading something from ChatGPT before I got to your last sentence. I think maybe we're already starting to rely on ChatGPT as an authority way too soon.
But do you believe it because of the science or because you really really want to believe it? That's a serious question. I don't expect a ready answer.
I started with really wanting to believe it, and personal experiences have made it more mixed. I keep believing because of science, but the antiscientific attitude of some of the psychedelic community makes me wary about the future.
How much time and how many countries are there in your definition of "now"?
And how on Earth the Pihkal has been published exactly 30 years ago if the research was "impossible"?
I did not notice that. So, then it really doesn't tell us anything new.
The article gives away the game here:
>> But Doblin still envisions treatment centres sprouting up around the world — he predicts that more than 6,000 will emerge in the United States alone — where people with PTSD and other psychiatric illnesses can safely and legally use MDMA and other psychedelics under the guidance of therapists. Beyond this, he hopes ultimately for full legalization that would allow anyone to take the drugs however they wish. “MAPS has been the beacon to kind of take on this work,” says neuroscientist Amy Kruse, who is chief investment officer at venture capital firm Satori Neuro and is based in Annapolis, Maryland. “There are many people that can benefit from this treatment, and I think it shows a pathway for the potential rescheduling of other molecules.”
They are breathless in anticipation of a billion dollar industry. They even include this link:
It's always good to go to the sources when looking at these potentially overhyped news articles. I would love this to be the answer to depression, but I'm somewhat skeptical. I'm also cognizant of the power of the placebo effect (and related psychological factors) in changing the brain, having fully recovered from ME/CFS and severe depression/anxiety myself.
During Covid pandemic, I found it quite remarkable how some research studies got thrown to the side, while others were promoted as the standard. I really don't know which ones were truly good studies, but the speed with which they were dispensed or upheld with little outside discussion revealed to me there is a lot of politics at work in deciding which ones are authoritative.
MDMA very realistically shouldn’t be lumped in with cocaine, heroin, etc. Hell, opiates as a whole! Just based on the effect profile and typical usage patterns, I baselessly posit that one is more likely to be a daily marijuana user than a daily MDMA user, even taking into account the number of people that use each drug in the first place.
Nobody is holding you up with a knife or gun, or stealing the coins out of your car, to get their next fix of MDMA.
Nobody is acting aggressively on the street or in a nightclub because they’ve had MDMA, or not gotten enough of it.
MDMA is certainly not without its risks / dangers. Someone can easily irresponsibly take too much and end up in hospital or dead. Someone can easily take the right amount of the right stuff and end up in hospital or dead just because they had an adverse reaction. You could ruin your relationships, throw your brain off-balance such that you never really enjoy anything again. There’s the whole ‘gateway drug’ argument. Blah blah blah.
Let’s really stop and think very carefully about whether these risks (which unlike say…meth, heroin, etc, have an absolutely negligible societal impact per capita compared to alcohol, tobacco, etc) should even show up on the radar when weighed up against the increasingly proven positive effects of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
