Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "ReasonTV" channel.

  1.  @tedmarley4341  Republicans turned into Democrats on domestic spending and Democrats turned into Republicans on military spending. Uni-Party. Spend, Spend, Spend. Make war. Forever amen.
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  2. I still love teaching, but I'm on my way out, because the bureaucracy is so out of touch with the actual teaching and learning. And they put up barriers to best teaching and learning in the name of "success." And NOWadays, it's getting super-toxic and super-expensive, because of the multiculturalism and political correctness. If only I'd talk down to people of other races, I would fit right in. But I treat everybody the same, which is now considered politically incorrect, because of the wide variety of "lived experiences" in the classroom. Nobody ever cared about MY lived experience. They just expected me to perform, and expected me to KNOW what came before the next class, instead of "Oh, you're such-and-such color, so we'll just re-teach that last class that you forgot everything from (or more like, that your last teacher didn't cover, because it might impede your "success." One-size-fits-all education is no longer necessary, and it's terribly inefficient. We can teach directly to the skill level of the student, and keep them at that one lesson until they master it, before dumping them into the NEXT class on the NEXT level, with holes in their foundation. But that's how liberals define "success." Passing. Passing someone who doesn't have ALL the skills needed to master the next class just passes the buck to the next teacher, assuming the next teacher doesn't do what 90% of public school teachers do, and pass that kid (SUCCESS!) and pass the buck to the NEXt teacher. For years, it's been the college teachers who had to tell kids who were promoted inappropriately that they don't have the prerequisite knowledge. Now, even in college, they expect you to teach "down" to the students' level, instead of the (what used to be) strict standards adhered to in college. So now we pass the buck on up through college and into the workplace, and we wonder what's wrong, because everybody in sight is "successful." Liberals live on Lake Woebegone, where all the kids are above average.
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  3. Notice all their "honest mistakes" cut in one direction? So did I.
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  4.  @gorkyd7912  : A teaching certificate doesn't mean a whole lot, other than that the person took a lot of education courses that are NOT related to the disciplines they mean to teach. As a former college student, I saw the wash-outs who decided to get a teaching certificate because they weren't fit to compete in any major area of study. A master's only says you have some competence in the content area. A teaching certificate only says that you took a bare minimum of regular courses and a bunch of "education" courses. Neither says you're any good as a teacher. Only observing you in the classroom and seeing how students respond really tells you, and that's easy enough to do, unless it's a public school and administrators (and teachers) don't want to visit classrooms. In a private setup, if you suck, you're OUT. In a private setup, parents have real skin in the game, and if you suck, they're pullin' their kids out and spending that money somewhere else. There's no penalty for failure in the public schools. The worse you suck, the more money you get. And year after year, the number of staff and administration per actual working faculty member goes up and up, without end. And there are actually LESS staff supporting the actual faculty. The staff and administration do everything BUT anything related to the actual teaching and learning. And every time you TRY to implement something meaningful and really quality-control-related, the teachers' union or some state bureaucrat will obstruct you. Public education is a definite scam, and some of the worst scammers are the people always whining for MORE money. It's not a money thing. It's a product-quality thing. And nobody holds the public schools accountable. And NOWadays (and for the last 20 or 30 years), it's all been dumped on the COLLEGES to remediate all the damage done by k-12, instead of holding k-12 accountable. But "student success" means students pass. And the only way to guarantee that students pass is to lower standards, which they've been doing non-stop since I started teaching back in the 1980s.
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  5. The same people who cashed in on the original transcontinental railroad. Most of the money went into the pockets of politically connected thieves.
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  6. One flaw in libertarian philosophy is national borders. In a world where all countries are libertarian, that's fine. But our world is NOT a libertarian world, and borders of free nations must be guarded and immigration must be controlled. PJ's got a mild-ish case of TDS, I'd say. He spoke of no specific policies he didn't like. All he came up with was kind of an "everybody knows he's bad" and ends with the toddler-at-the-top-of-the-steps metaphor. Trump has done much better than expected. As with all presidents or generals, the key is in the people around him. He hasn't done all the best hirings, but how could he in that swamp? But somehow, with all the never-Trumpers supposedly working for his administration, he seems to kick the can in the right - or a better - direction. And I haven't seen ANY of the blatant weaponization of federal agencies for the benefit of himself or his cronies.
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  7. Your tiny country is about the same size as one of our states. Many states in the USA have "land-grant colleges" that are very cheap. When you have a mono-culture society, where everyone conforms to the same values and norms, "state-run" institutions can work very well. But in any one of our states in the USA, there's more diversity than in all of Norway. What works for homogenized cultures on a small scale does not work for a country our size and diversity. Plus the USA is a bunch of irreverent assholes who fled every other country. We're pretty unruly and pretty obnoxious. We will not conform to something GOOD because we hate conformity so much. The only thing that keeps us in line is the knowledge and tradition that you can't take from others by force. You have to offer VALUE to receive value. And that makes us pretty well-behaved on the big stuff. But not so much for kids raised in the public school system to be entitled socialists.
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  8. @Liberation Sarcasm. But a kernel of truth in it, too, because the Chinese are always one local uprising away from nationwide rebellion, and the criminal communist party lives in terror of revolution, or, as they call it, "counter-revolution," because 70 years later, the entrenched establishment still calls itself "revolutionary."
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  9. Robber barons and rich con men were first in line for the transcontinental railroad in the 19th Century. Most of the rails had to be re-built, because they skimmed so much of the money for themselves. These government-sponsored projects are ALWAYS hijacked by robber-baron types. The same kinds of people are salivating over the green-tech revolution, lining up for subsidies that they can qualify for before anybody trying to do green tech, honestly. That's why Elon Musk was so pissed off when the USA pulled out of Paris Accords. He had billions in subsidies headed his way, and Trump snatched them away. Trump (and millions of open-eyed voters) saw through the Paris Accords as a scam that did more to empty people's pockets than affect climate change.
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  10. And that would be just fine by me. When you KNOW that this would result in better outcomes for more students, you MUST conclude that the teacher unions and the bureaucracy are in it for themselves. And that's fine. It's human nature. But in a free market, those who didn't perform would simply go out of business. Be as selfish as you want. But serve your selfishness by being COMPETITIVE, so you can keep that nice gig you've got. Only free markets and competition put your selfishness in line with the greater good. If you want to prosper, you must do good things. In a bureaucratic system, you just have to learn to play the game, and the product quality and price are a distant 2nd.
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  11. Buy a self-driving car for a cool quarter million or hire a driver for YEARS. You decide.
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  12. CORPORATE WELFARE = FASCISM.
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  13. We get trapped into voting Republican only because the Democrats are more insane. There is room for a broad middle, but the history of politics suggests the 2 major parties will mutate to represent opposing principles more in line with the will of the people. All the corruption and stupid stuff we see in the system is our fault. Not the fault of the politicians we tell what to do. We're just dumb-asses about what we ask for. We - most of us - think that politics is about get a rule set that favors us over someone else. If we're farmers, it's crop subsidies and land bank scams (I mean "schemes."). If we're in business, it's tax breaks for business. If we're poor, we vote for Free Stuff. And we all come out losers in the end. We just can't see past our own short-term self-interest, and we let fears associated with a pretty tragic human condition to vote our responsibilities over to someone we kid ourselves has more money than the people whose money supports the dad-blamed enterprise.
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  14. This feature of The Dole existed in similar programs, pre-Great Society. They just hadn't been working their toxic magic for very long, but there were husbands hiding in the closet when the social worker came, before Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson added free/cheap housing and other programs. Also, the programs were administered locally, so if Miss Ginny had a man hangin' 'round, the welfare lady found out about it. But this isn't all they did. Urban renewal - replacing "slums" with character into impersonal, high-rise apartments. Why am I saying this? Amity Schlaes is on, talking about it, and girl knows chapter and verse.
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  15. "I don't feel safe" = "I'm a bully and a bigot."
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  16. I knew a mother-daughter team who made careers of waitressing. The daughter started at age 14. She bought a house for cash when she turned 18. Both lived very comfortably.
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  17. "I'm libertarian. I freely offend both sides."
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  18. Meh. Just give parents vouchers equal in value to what the public spends per pupil. That'd be a good start. But eventually - especially if you're libertarian - education should become a high-quality, low-price product that we purchase for ourselves, as needed, just like food, clothing and shelter. Going to "public school" should be a pretty rare occurrence, only engaged in by a miniscule fraction of the population in utterly terrible circumstances. Or maybe just a temporary thing after a flood or other natural disaster. But to think that the vast majority of Americans send their children to these worthless (and expensive) institutions is one of the saddest things about America. We could turn it all around in a few years, just with vouchers and a little competition. But ultimately, it needs to be something that parents just buy for their kids like they buy shoes.
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  19.  @louiskruger6581  : Just because public schools suck doesn't mean that every other alternative doesn't. The key is to have plenty of alternatives. I just wish we'd implement a voucher system, so that the $9,300/student that is spent (for example) goes to the school of that parents' choice. Not all parents will make perfect choices. But that's still way better than ZERO choice, or just the ONE choice, based on the neighborhood in which you can afford to live, and the public schools that go with them.
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  20. Robert Goodman: Government already does too much. And once it starts doing something, that "industry" never ever goes away. It only grows. Now, if I thought Demublicans and Republicrats agreed that government needed to butt out, then maybe I'd get excited about "bipartisan agreement." But since I've been alive, "bipartisan" has meant "Let's get a little more fascist. Let's get a little more socialist. Let's kill strangers on foreign soil. Let's spend a lot more money." We doubled our national debt under Obama. Everything I hear from Democrats encumbers the economy and grows the government. It's unsustainable.
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  21.  @rustymaximus9179  True. But we're discovering some unintended consequences to chemical farming. Food that is less nutritious from soils depleted in trace minerals. We're going to evolve away from massive, industrialized monocrop farming. Small-plot farms for locally-grown produce are becoming a thing. It's more expensive to grow fruits in a greenhouse than outdoors, but you can only grow outdoors in a few places, when it comes to bananas, citrus and the like. And the middle-man cost (brokering and transporting) makes locally-grown much more competitive than it used to be, and increasingly competitive as fuel prices rise. Long term effects of Round-Up and other pesticides are only now being recognized. Then there's the GMO plants, where they're getting great yields, but the pesticide is in the food, itself, now. Then there's the effect on GOOD insects, like bees, from all the chemical spraying and possibly from GMO plants, not to mention how mono-crop farming reduces the variety and hence the nutritional value of the nectar and pollen on which the bees subsist. There are all kinds of unintended consequences.
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  22.  @rustymaximus9179  No. I just think you're a bit behind the times on small-plot market farming. You're also not forward-thinking on supply chain costs, which will go up as the cost of energy goes up. There's a real up-surge in small-plot market farmers. You should explore "NeverSink Farm" and see what they're doing, now. How they condition the soil. Also check out "oranges in the snow." There's a lot of exciting stuff going on in agriculture, right now, that's going to make the big, mechanized, mono-crop farms largely obsolete. You make the classical pro-chemical-farming arguments. But putting fertilizer on a field, year after year, doesn't replenish the trace minerals. You can keep getting plants to grow on it, but they won't be as nutritious as they would be if you farmed more like, say, the Amish or the Pennsylvania Deutsch. The longer THOSE folks are on the land, the better the soil gets. And the GMO stuff? They're basically putting the pesticide and pest repellant IN THE FOOD. We conservatives/libertarians like to preach about unintended consequences, but I think many of us don't think about the unintended consequences of brute-force, chemical farming methods. We see it so clearly when progressives want another damn program (pesticide) to fix the problem their LAST damn program created, even though they won't admit it... I worry we're shittin' where we sleep sometimes. Just because a lot of the lefties are crazy doesn't mean they're wrong about EVERYthing. Anyway, the way we do Ag right now is geared towards big corporate, from land use rules to subsidies to enviro regulations to 'government-approved' pesticides and everybody's getting seed from the same place, instead of doing it the old-fashioned way, with the seed from their crop, set aside for re-seeding. They get forced into it, because under the subsidy and global-competition framework, the profit margins are very small, and they'll fall below competitive production per acre if they don't buy the PATENTED seeds from the seed bank. Anyhoo, we're all fascist-ized in agriculture, thanks to all the "help" from USDA. But it turns out that if you grow for the LOCAL market, you have a HUGE transportation-cost advantage over everybody else. That Florida citrus grower only gets a tiny percentage of the wholesale price. The local grower gets every nickel. There's a paradigm shift a'comin' in the way we grow and deliver our food. Right now, the successful small-plotters are super-high-quality, reasonably-priced, and keen to spy out a niche vegetable that they can grow cheap and well. But I think in the long run, the culture will just trend that way, because people will prefer locally-grown.
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  23. This is cab companies and unions in an unholy alliance to eliminate their competition.
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  24. If you had a decent classical education, you'd have PRINCIPLES of freedom versus security, the individual versus the collective. All this stuff was hashed out, long ago in the Enlightenment writers, including our own Federalist Papers. With this understanding of government and human nature, you have a GENERAL approach to politics and the proper role and scope of government. Of course, public education does everything it can, these days, to prevent kids from learning these lessons, so they enter the adult world without any kind of rudder. Socialism sounds pretty good to an uninformed and indoctrinated young person.
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  25.  @ZacharyBittner  : You just explained why this (and other) city(ies) destroy themselves with beloved leaders. That's how it works. The popular guys only tell you what you want to hear and show you what you want to see. The city being in debt doesn't touch the locals, until the services start to decline. They can just go deeper in debt making sure the services appear to be OK, while leadership spends the community into penury. See a lot of this, nowadays. Liberal-run institutions with god-like ambitions building edifices they can put their names on, without really managing what goes on in those edifices. So, beautiful school building with crappy teachers, no books, and no gym equipment. A mahogany basketball court, but no basketballs or nets.
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  26. It's the closet racism raising its head again. "Those parents are too dumb to make their own choices." Got the same thing from these people on Voter ID: "Voter ID is racist, because 'those people' are too stupid and helpless to acquire a picture ID." By labeling people as helpless, they create helpless people. And that's what they WANT, because they get to lord it over them, due to their helplessness. Liberalism is a crippling mind-set, and it cripples EXACTLY the people it purports to help. From public education to the welfare state to you name it. "You're just too dumb to choose or do anything for yourself; therefore, we will choose and do FOR you, and you will just have to shut up and take it, because it's for your own good." Liberalism = condescension on steroids. ALL people want to be held to a high standard, and ACHIEVE that high standard. Liberals want everyone to achieve, and the way they get there is by lowering standards! It's an insult, and it makes no sense that people vote for the Democrats who embody this message and this approach to the body politic. You're too stupid to get a better job, so we'll fix things so you can get $15/hour for this shit job. MY first job, I wasn't worth anywhere NEAR a living wage. As an undersized 12-year-old, only my HEART was big enough to buck those hay bales. My body? Not so much. But I worked my ass off all day long stacking the bales that the bigger kids threw up from the wagon. I could at LEAST get those bales to chest level and stack them one tier above my head, with lots of body English. At the end of the day, I was heartbroken at how little I was paid for how hard I worked, and the bigger kids got paid double (or MORE than double), but I KNEW that they were WORTH double (or more than double), because they got a LOT more done. Throwing 60-pound bales up into the loft so that 70-pound weakling can stack them is way more work. And worth way more to old Hank Flower. He took the sting out by taking us all out to dinner and letting the midget order anything he wanted. Well, I wanted a large pepperoni pizza, and I ate every bite, to the amazement of old Hank. But that job taught me what hard work really was, and every job after haying was a cake walk. If Hank had had to pay minimum wage of $15/hr to ALL of us, he wouldn't have let me work at ALL. Couldn't afford it.
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  27.  @robtaylor1924  : It just shows how bad the schools are that there are people like you who are willing to pay TWICE, to see their kids get educated.
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  28.  @gamertimefriend1286  : Oh, you're getting plenty of propaganda, whether you realize it or not.
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  29. SweetLiberty01: Yeah. "Bipartisan" just means we get screwed comin' AND goin'.
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  30. I LOVE NFL Football. But it pisses me off no end that those billionaires take money from taxpayers. That's just wrong.
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  31. It's never been cheaper to deliver tailor-made, on-demand learning. even as public-education costs spiral out of control . They're doing it wrong. And they want MORE money for their failed paradigm.
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  32. It's already happening. I uphold standards and I'm treated like a dinosaur. Going to hang up my own private shingle, before long.
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  33. All they have to do is give parents vouchers that match what they spend, per pupil, and let the parents spend the voucher on the school of choice. Demokkkrats only believe in "choice" if it's the choice to kill babies.
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  34.  @Justin_Beaver564  Kind of. The Republicans are better for the working class, to the extent that either party is. Union labor is still Democrat, but anybody with a skill would die before voting Democrat at this point. I'm just sick of the whole thing. People trying to use politics to plunder those who just want to work hard, build a life, and be left the hell alone.
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  35. Free ANYTHING means that the quality will decrease and the real cost (to taxpayers) rise. Inevitable. The people concerned are not the actual stakeholders. Public K-12 schools are obsolete, too. I can't tell you how many uneducated people I've seen complete the entire K-12 program in 2 or 3 years. You just have to want it and have enough talent. And with the Internet, it'd cost you next to nothing to do just that.
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  36. Big fan, Penn. I couldn't vote for Trump or Clinton, so I voted for Johnson, myself. I knew the Libs had no chance, but were closest to where I am. But yeah. Johnson wasn't a very good standard bearer.
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  37. Politicians love seeing their names on buildings.
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  38. Charter schools are an improvement. Private education - just like private sneakers, groceries and everything else - is the way to get the best education product for the most people. And for the people left over, we are taxing enough to give them gold-plated laptops. In the SHORT term, home-schooled and charter-schooled kids are my top performers in my freshman- and sophomore-level math courses.
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  39. No, Matt. Authoritarianism was always the endgame of your progressive beliefs. You want freedom AND a nanny government. You can't have both, idiot.
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  40. The Rams and the Chargers are now LA teams. The Charger games never fill the stadium.
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  41. Institutions are artificial constructs that take on a life of their own, and act in the institution's and the institution's administrators and staff's interests, instead of the people the institutions were created to serve. We see this in primary and secondary education, creeping upwards into and dominating postsecondary education. From Vietnam and the Cold War, to Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom, we see that these "experts" are frequently out of touch, and the longer the institutions persist, the more out of touch they become. Rarely does a government agency perform the tasks it was created to perform, over long periods of time. The incentives are all upside-down. When I see these institutions do as they do, I don't have to point to a bunch of people who wanted it this way. It's just the Life principle. Once something that's self-perpetuating, it tends to grow. That's why I don't have to believe in "intelligent design" for creation, to believe that what persists, tends to persist. Anything that acts to grow an "organism" will continue to grow that organism until something acts to stop it.
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  42. People give these asshats too much power and then bitch about how they abuse it. smh
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  43. My institution has added new staff over the last few years, for Title IX, FERPA, and Diversity offices. Not a bit of it has to do with providing knowledge to students. In fact, it steals time from already busy schedules, with mandatory trainings and new committees., It's making the production of the product MORE costly, RIGHT when technology can cut costs to the consumer/student to nearly ZERO! There's a lot of inertia, and lots of folks will turn to the same institutions, as in the past, but costs are spiking, right when the existing institutions need to hop on the new paradigm. I anticipate significant "die-back," myself. We'll see.
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  44. Crop subsidies are wrong-headed. Also, as long as the farmer gets their check at SOME point, they're untouched by this delay. They plan year-to-year. They live on no income most of the year, and get a couple BIG checks after harvest (or after the gummint cuts them their subsidy check (or props up the prices they get)).
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  45. Surprise! The Robber Baron is inviting the government to step in!
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  46. Big Tech will WRITE the regulations to protect THEIR asses and exclude competition from the market. This is the time-honored practice. Disgusting that people fall for it!
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  47. When they found one story was totally wrong, they just pivoted to the next "Orange Man Bad" and "Walls are closing in" story. To this day, they're still doubling down, despite getting it wrong every single time. Same with COVID.
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  48. I don't know that it's made the districts more competitive, but I can definitely see how it'd push candidates towards the middle, if you like that or think that's good. It is a more consensus kind of thing, so they are expressing the will of the people a little more, maybe. Ultimately, it appears that you're only going to get the best candidates out of a voting public that's more statesmanlike and less short-sighted than the voting public generally tends to be. We use pit-of-the-stomach thinking when making decisions that rebound down through the generations, without any real appreciation for consequences. Just fix the immediate problem by brute force and carry on.
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  49. Jen Psaki is a propagandist. She lies for a living. Nobody's buying it, except the 100,000 Americans who still watch MSNBC.
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  50. Sock of the minimum wage sophistry. Wave a wand and raise wages for everybody! UTOPIA! Bullshit.
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