I rarely look at what’s even on that channel these days. Or the History Channel. Everything that looks appealing I’ve seen several time before, and the rest is sensationalist or rubbish or both. Like Ancient Aliens.

On National Geographic channel.

I would nevertheless prefer a ‘Buddhist theocracy’ over an Islamic one.
Note that Judge Dee (from the incomprehensibly underestimated author Robert van Gulik) was scathing about Buddhism, and Buddhist priests in particular. They are generally painted as lying and cheating scoundrels, not unlike the priests in Boccacio. As a staunch Confucianist, Dee was bound to have a ‘mixed feelings’ about Buddhists, of course.

Yes, that is true, but not my point. My point was that even without global warming very ‘intense’ hurricanes are bound to happen sooner or later. We cannot -or it is at least extremely difficult to- attribute the intensity of a particular hurricane on climate change. We can only say they are projected to become more frequent.

The only president to leave office with no national debt was Andrew Jackson in 1837. Luckily for Clinton, the GOP won control of Congress in 1994 on their pledge to check Clinton’s spending. Gingrich, Clinton and the GOP Congress gradually reduced the deficit over the rest of Clinton’s term. (Luckily for everyone, an exuberhant stock market, fed by the dot-com bubble, produced fat revenues during this time.)

A similar scenario could have played out under Obama after the Republicans regained Congress in 2010. But Obama chose differently than Bill Clinton, and refused to go along with any semblance of spending reform. (He famously ignored his own Simpson-Bowles Commission.) Thanks to Republican efforts, the deficit did decline through fiscal 2015, only to increase again in the last two fiscal years of Obama’s term. But Obama’s stubborn ideologically-driven refusal to work the Republicans to control spending, as Bill Clinton had done, inevitably resulted in large deficits and a doubling of the debt over his term.

The stock market is up 16% since election day. Going into election day, the market was up only 3% for the preceding 12 months, and only 2% for the 12 months before that. Independent of any other data, it is pretty inarguable that something happened on November 8, 2016 that significantly disrupted the established trend at that time. Investors are more optimistic; this is consistent with the results of recent business and consumer sentiment surveys, as well as the increase in labor participation. Time will tell if this confidence is warranted. But it shows that confidence is there for now, contrary to your views of the president.

That fake news comedy clip is entertaining, but it doesn’t make any substantive points that would contradict the above. It notes that Congress hasn’t produced anything yet for tax reform, and that point is well taken.

There was no national debt when Clinton left office. It was GWB who created it, mostly because of the expensive and unnecessary war he embarked on in Iraq. You can’t blame Obama for that – he wasn’t a senator then. The deficit was reduced while Obama was president. The total kept increasing because of interest on Bush’s debt, and because although Obama reduced the deficit, he didn’t wipe it out completely. That would have been irresponsible in the economic conditions he faced when he came into office.

The current good conditions are a result of change made during the Obama administration. There was a tweet about that a few days ago: https://twitter.com/ErickFernandez/status/898220319449677824?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heatherhastie.com%2Fpicks-top-tweets-20-august-2017%2F

That’s what the video from Now This says – it’s the intensity that climate change can be blamed for, and also that there is more rain in the hurricanes. There isn’t enough data over a long enough period of time to conclude whether or not climate change can be blamed for increasing frequency. (That’s how I understand it anyway. I’m no scientist.)

Dreadful is not too strong a word: Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, Ukraine, Russia. Obamacare. More than twenty thousand new regulations, many of them purely ideological and anti-growth, for which you and I will pay $100 billion every year. Twice the national debt, now up to $60,000 for every American. Two-fifths of the federal bench packed with ideologues who recognize no check on their own power.

Anyway, we agree to disagree. That’s not the same as delusion or denial, let alone lying.

I have found that pretty much anything j.a.m. writes on Heather’s site “cannot be taken seriously”. But it does provide insight into the deluded mind.