A small quibble: for as often as people love to talk about big pharma, prescription drugs are less than 10% of total healthcare spending in the US. Hospital expenditures are a far bigger issue, and any talk of reining in healthcare spending that primarily focuses on drug prices is not going to be effective.

Unless Jill Biden is secretly running the DNC, why would her message not just be representative of the Biden campaign? Seems like a simpler explanation than another massive DNC conspiracy.

The DNC is given way more credit than it deserves. Biden was VP for 8 years - name recognition is why he is ahead. He has been losing ground to Warren and others for a while now, and that looks like it will continue. It’s the same reason Clinton was massively up over Obama in 2008 and over Sanders in 2016 until the…

I think you hit it on the head with the identity - if “America is the best” is your strongest identity, any suggestion of criticism turns into a personal attack. When people feel personally attacked, they don’t respond with reason, they dig in.

How has he not been banned yet?

*fart sounds*

Camp Century, near Thule. There was also a B-52 that crashed in the 60s near Thule with a nuclear bomb onboard that wasn’t completely recovered.

Adam Serwer got it right - the cruelty is the point: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

Don’t you cut vegetables with a handgun? I’m pretty helpless in the kitchen without a firearm.

A tricked-out Volvo on the cover of a NFS game is something I never expected to see.

He probably heard the backwards satanic messages on a Black Sabbath album.

You shouldn’t have your spine messed with unless absolutely necessary - chiropractors don’t use research-based methodology, and somewhat regularly paralyze people. See a physical therapist or an SMT if you need your back adjusted.

A funny part of the “but the Autobahn” thing is that it was actually started before the Nazis came to power, and they stole the idea for propaganda.

I’m going to the Caucasus in a couple weeks and renting a Dacia Logan, which I expect to be the worst rental I’ve ever had. Driving up the highest mountain passes in Europe in a gutless Romanian shitbox should be entertaining at least.

for those of you that are gonna say, ‘Guns, guns’ — Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the United States, okay?

Fair enough - I guess I should have said “in Europe,” since that’s where my experience is.

Hilariously, a nearly-indistinguishable group of beers all of lowish quality would be much more like the USSR than a wide selection of craft beers.

Outside of the US, anthems never get played outside of the World Cup and Olympics. They play it here on National Day, and the only other time I’ve heard it is seeing the national football team.

Well, his twitter feed is a pretty bad place to get the nuanced discussion - a lot of his feed is not serious (the Yang thing, for instance). The longer articles and discussions actually include real back-and-forth, where the twitter feed is just quick responses to individual things.

If you read his twitter or listen to his podcast, it’s absolutely on brand. Fivethirtyeight isn’t a polling aggregator, it’s a polling commentary site.