The two-party system should ideally have parties that take conflicting sides on all major issues and thus hopefully eliminate the demand for mainstream third parties. This is pretty much the only way democracy can ensure minority views are heard in a two-party system.

So our Paleocons and Paleodems were pretty well-defined if we remember: liberal economics, isolationism, and conservative social vs regulated economics, interventionism, and liberal social. Clinton pretty seriously upset the balance, IIRC, when he put the democrats on a more liberal economic policy, but that pretty much was reverted by 2004. Dubya upset things when he got all big-government with businesses and interventionist abroad. In spite of attempts by McCain to be mavericky through Bush's reign, he and all the other Republicans (except Ron Paul) toted the Bush Doctrine in their 2008 campaigns. So then Ron Paul got all popular because the interventionist capitalist opinion was not represented in 2008.

The point is that Dems and Reps are the same right now in most issues except social policy and Iraq (though both seem to be interventionists), which is really a small piece of the political pie. However, I think that in four years you will see a return to Paleocon principles as the Reps try to get their act together.

Futurama is a terrific series that produced great, solid seasons. But it had only four of them.

The Simpsons had a time of greatness that, in my opinion, spanned seasons 1-10, with core at 3-6. The greatness in the core far superceded that of Futurama's run, as one was hard-pressed to find a lesser episode at that time, while Futurama had a couple of weak ones. For the Simpsons now, it was really the Al Jean takeover that spawned the downturn of quality (not blaming Jean himself, but the overall change in humor focus).

And if we look at the place the show has in popular culture, there is simply no argument. As much as The Simpsons has abandoned many of us who were hardcore fans from day one (I was part of and helped run several fan clubs), just looking back at my peak-season DVDs made me remember how perfect that show was.

I'm not sure you all understand what happens when someone in government is indicted. They still have Constitutional authority to do whatever their office permits (except pardoning themselves), including appointing a Senator. Now, the Illinois GA still has to approve any appointments, and they probably will shoot them all down. But there is plenty of damage Blag can do without GA oversight. Impeachment or resignation are the only surefire ways to keep him from doing damage. It's not our responsibility to find out whether he is guilty or not - it's our responsibility to look at the evidence that has been released and find out whether he is fit to continue in office or not. And since the people and probably most of the GA are already convinced he's not (bleepin' tapes), he should resign or else we'll kick his ass out.

One of my old teachers wanted Ryan pardoned in 2003 for declaring a moratorium on the death penalty soon after being indicted. She was all like, "he's so courageous", and I (who was interviewing her for the school paper) was like, doing something controversial on your way out of a tarnished career right before going to prison isn't courageous - it's the same psychology as the crazy guy who, instead of killing himself quietly, decides to shoot a bunch of people from a belltower first.

Okay, apparently I can't make a post supporting the view that "this is a stupid false dichotomy".

Moore's Law describes exponential growth, same with all similar computer/AI growth models. Exponentials DO NOT HAVE SINGULARITIES. So Moore's Law doesn't predict any kind of singularity, period.

Even if there was some kind of technological growth model that is singular (which I've seen in a minority of human energy use models), it will not necessarily correspond to the point of developing "Strong AI". So let's just separate all this out a bit.

Now, I believe that we will eventually develop Strong AI, and that singular models of human development do exist and have been and will be surpassed (one singularity we already passed is that of weapon lethality: the superbomb has an infinite theoretical yield - we raced the Russians to build it in the 50s and 60s - both sides won by different measures).

The notion that humans can't create something "smarter" or with "more knowledge" than themselves is absurd. Every time we take a digital photograph, it stores "more knowledge" than us (that can be read intelligently by a machine), and every time we use a calculator we are exploiting a tool that is "smarter" in a computational sense. We make things that are better than ourselves all the time, and it doesn't violate any sort of cosmic logic. We've even created systems of logic that are better than our own, for crying out loud.

In conclusion, you're all wrong about something.

Some scientific debate requires philosophical investigation. For example, the Anthropic Principle has been used by physicists in the last 50 years to support various cosmological models, notably bubble nucleation. It is becoming a heated debate whether or not such arguments are in any way valid, pursued through mathematics and philosophy together (which are essentially the same thing).

Other problems in philosophy come right out of mathematical logic. Certain problems in the most widely-used formulation of mathematics are undecidable, so what if we're pursuing a line of thought that needs to use that problem? What do we assume to make it true? Some mathematicians still get pissy about assuming the Axiom of Choice - what is "true" in our world?

And finally, there's still plenty of room for political, economic, and social philosophy. Not everything is metaphysical BS.

Teddy Roosevelt was great without a major crisis - he was just an ass-kicking, trust-busting, diplomatic environmentalist with arms of steel and a heart of gold. Also I think there was some lead in his hip from Cuba... But he's not quite the best, though very deserving of his spot on Mt. Rushmore.

But I agree with the Big Three, with the exception of Lincoln. As a wartime president during a rebellion of all things, there is no way to fairly judge him compared with everyone else - especially because many things that got his stamp of approval would be appalling for any peacetime president. His great legacy, however, which is really, truly nothing short of great and is what made his death such a tragedy, is how he tried to set the stage for a post-war nation, one of forgiveness and compromise. Johnson attempted to carry out Lincoln's vision, but with a 90% radical Republican Congress eager for vengeance (and without a popular, trusted leader like Lincoln alive to rein them in), he was overruled on every step to the point of being impeached. This of course led to the South's counter-Restoration movement that basically implemented a long-standing racism and animosity for the North, expressed through such things as Jim Crow and Strom Thurmond.

So yeah, I don't think there's any fair way to compare Lincoln to any other President. He was great, but I see no reason to claim he's one of the greatest. I like Washington and Jefferson as per above.

Writing was dead-easy, as was grammar and everything, but for some reason in classes and standardized tests I always did poorly (relatively) in Reading classes. On tests it was the "reading comprehension" sections that I did badly in - I was a fast and competent reader, well above the crowd in how much I read and at what level, but apparently I didn't cut it in "comprehension". It led me to believe to this day that "reading comprehension" tests are fundamentally flawed, because for some reason I consistently did much more poorly on exclusively that section of general tests. As for classes, I probably did badly because I never read anything the teacher assigned - I was a bit rebellious, reading what I want when I want (fuck this R.L. Stein, I'm reading Jack London!), so naturally the pop quizzes were a killer.

The internet is a virtually unlimited repository of information. And yet very few people here actually bothered to look up Big Bang on Wikipedia. (Also look up the scientific definition of "theory" while you're at it.) Anyway, the Big Bang is a collection of enormous observational /fact/ combined with mathematical /theory/ that creates a history of the universe from nearly the beginning of cosmological time. So saying you don't believe in it is saying that you don't believe there's a tree behind you - if you turn around you'll see it.

Before the Big Bang, it is true that physics changes a lot, but it still follows laws. It is philosophically debatable (look up "Anthropic Argument") whether we can have empirical evidence to support mathematical theories of how the Big Bang occurred, but nonetheless there are models that create the Big Bang using proven physics without any preconditions of existence (so tried-and-true physics does show how something can come from nothing - look up "Chaotic Inflation" and "Quantum Fluctuation"). The universe doesn't behave like billiard balls - quantum mechanics, relativity, and chaos were the three revolutions of the 20th century that show that your intuition of how the world works is completely wrong, and the truth is far more elegant - and it's all /fact/.

I suggest a good browsing of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_inflation for understanding what the theory actually entails, as well as hypothetical models using accepted physics (no string theory) of generating a Big Bang and what exists outside the Universe.

Most people who say they "believe" or "don't believe" do so because they don't understand what they're talking about. Also, the definition of "theory" changes from discipline to discipline, so let me just state that the Big Bang itself is /fact/ - our mathematical understanding and historical extrapolations are part of a larger /theory/ which seeks to explain the factual observations we make. Chaotic inflation uses accepted and physically-factual mathematical /theory/ to make a /hypothesis/ as to the origins of the universe.

There is no consensus as to whether or not such a hypothesis can ever become part of the larger cosmological theory, as there are philosophical and mathematical questions still unresolved (one is the validity of Anthropic reasoning).