REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Monday, October 21, 2024 20:59
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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 11:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

You need to devise a system with less friction when returning stolen wealth. Since Firefly is science fiction, can America do away with money completely to make that happen? I think it could be done, but the cheaters would fight that change even harder than they fight to hold on to money they steal under the present system, the one they have been building all their lives.


He's talking about Socialism.

Funny how rich people always talk about how bad they want it.

Super easy to virtue signal about it when they know it will never happen. It allows them to hold on to their riches and live with themselves at the same time.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The Vietnam War was fought because Republicans (and Democrats who would eventually switch to being Republicans) were fiercely against Communism. How did that war end for the U.S., 6ix? Just how Commie is Vietnam today? My answers are 1) Badly and 2) You wouldn't know they were Commies today. All it took to turn Vietnam around was for Republicans to get their dumb asses kicked out of Vietnam.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qIsN



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly





And there you have it.

Second is a Communist.

Thanks for playing.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 11:36 AM

THG


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.



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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 12:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

And there you have it.

Second is a Communist.

Thanks for playing.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Senator Joe McCarthy was famous for falsely accusing Democrats of being Communists. Who was Joe McCarthy's lawyer? Roy Cohn, who became Trump's lawyer after McCarthy drank himself to death. After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump and Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Work_with_Joseph_McCarthy

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 12:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

And there you have it.

Second is a Communist.

Thanks for playing.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Senator Joe McCarthy was famous for falsely accusing Democrats of being Communists. Who was Joe McCarthy's lawyer? Roy Cohn, who became Trump's lawyer after McCarthy drank himself to death. After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump and Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Work_with_Joseph_McCarthy

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




I'm not accusing you of anything.

You just said that you were.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 12:26 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not accusing you of anything.

You just said that you were.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You are doing exactly what Trump's lawyer was doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._David_Schine#Anti-communism_and_Army%
E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 1:53 PM

THG


South Dakota’s governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.

As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakota’s top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home.

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant ­pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/south-dakota-s-governor-resisted-ord
ering-people-to-stay-home-now-it-has-one-of-the-nation-s-largest-coronavirus-hot-spots/ar-BB12zTcc?ocid=msedgntp


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Tuesday, April 14, 2020 8:36 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I can see the logic in that SECOND. Regular oil production in the US might survive $20, but shale (fracking) oil for sure wouldn't. If shale oil craters, people will blame Trump (and not the fact that's its high production costs are only supportable with both near-zero interest rates and high oil prices at the same time). And that might cost him Texas. I know how unstable the Texas economy is, since it's been balanced on oil for many decades - 40 that I know of personally. As oil goes, so goes the Texas economy.

California is already gone. If Texas goes, it could cost Trump the electoral college.

Trump HAS to make the OPEC+ production cut work, even if it means guaranteeing that the cuts Mexico refused to make will be made by the US instead.

Well, maybe Texas is in play anyway as the OPEC++ deal collapses along with WTI (West Texas intermediate) prices ... but only if the dems get rid of Biden.

"Oil prices cratered today - completely shrugging off the OPEC+ deal as if it never happened - following IMF slashing global growth expectations and the Saudis launching a price war (heavily discounting crude). WTI broke below $20 and Brent below $30"

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Wednesday, April 15, 2020 6:50 AM

THG


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.


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Wednesday, April 15, 2020 10:49 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THG:
South Dakota’s governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation’s largest coronavirus hot spots.

As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakota’s top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home.

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant ­pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/south-dakota-s-governor-resisted-ord
ering-people-to-stay-home-now-it-has-one-of-the-nation-s-largest-coronavirus-hot-spots/ar-BB12zTcc?ocid=msedgntp


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.




Meanwhile, in reality...

You can count on two hands how many people have died in South Dakota.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 15, 2020 10:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I'm not accusing you of anything.

You just said that you were.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You are doing exactly what Trump's lawyer was doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._David_Schine#Anti-communism_and_Army%
E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




Don't say you're a Communist and people won't think you're a Communist.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, April 16, 2020 6:53 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I can see the logic in that SECOND. Regular oil production in the US might survive $20, but shale (fracking) oil for sure wouldn't. If shale oil craters, people will blame Trump (and not the fact that's its high production costs are only supportable with both near-zero interest rates and high oil prices at the same time). And that might cost him Texas. I know how unstable the Texas economy is, since it's been balanced on oil for many decades - 40 that I know of personally. As oil goes, so goes the Texas economy.

California is already gone. If Texas goes, it could cost Trump the electoral college.

Trump HAS to make the OPEC+ production cut work, even if it means guaranteeing that the cuts Mexico refused to make will be made by the US instead.

Well, maybe Texas is in play anyway as the OPEC++ deal collapses along with WTI (West Texas intermediate) prices ... but only if the dems get rid of Biden.

"Oil prices cratered today - completely shrugging off the OPEC+ deal as if it never happened - following IMF slashing global growth expectations and the Saudis launching a price war (heavily discounting crude). WTI broke below $20 and Brent below $30"

Trump All Over The Place On Oil Prices

Indeed, are we surprised? But he has reached a new level of hypocrisy on all this.

So a while ago when oil prices began falling sharply, Trump bragged about how much this was going to help consumers, and he should get credit for it, of course.

More recently, since WTI crude and even Brent fell below $30 per barrel (with WTI just over 20 right now, and Brent just over 30), he became worried about his pals in the oil patches of Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota, with Putin and MbS openly declaring they want to put US frackers out of business, oh dear. So Trump piled in to strong arm Putin and MbS into supposedly making a production cut deal, maybe 10 mbpd, although unclear either of them actually following through. This got about a day or two’s worth of a blip in the prices. https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/45

But now we find out that Trump has not agreed to any cuts in US production, and the prices have proceeded to plunge again, for better or worse.

This has led to something almost unheard of in more than half a century, the Texas Railroad Commission. It has authority over how much oil can be pumped in Texas, and it and its equivalent in Oklahoma are apparently contemplating intervening and on their own reducing production in their states in order to try to prop up prices. There was a time, back in the 1950s, when the Texas RR Commission was effectively OPEC, controlling global marginal production. That has not been the case for many decades, but who knows, maybe they will be back.

But then maybe Trump will not like this, given his recent claims about having “absolute authority” over all state entities and actors. As it is, on this, he does not seem to know what he wants. But what can one expect from somebody who one minute is declaring himself free of “all responsibility” but the next is claiming “absolute authority”?

https://angrybearblog.com/2020/04/trump-all-over-the-place-on-oil-pric
es.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, April 16, 2020 10:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


lol. You of all people don't get to talk about hypocrisy until you fix your own.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 17, 2020 6:17 AM

THG


T

Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.


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Friday, April 17, 2020 8:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol. You of all people don't get to talk about hypocrisy until you fix your own.

We regret to inform you that Democrats are in array. It is only April, but Joe Biden is the presumptive presidential nominee, and nearly all of the major figures within the Democratic Party are aligning behind his candidacy. Actors from across the coalition are behaving rationally and refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, united in their shared focus on making Donald Trump a one-term president. How is this happening so smoothly? Where is the real Democratic Party hiding?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/joe-biden-endorsements-vp-
2020-election.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, April 17, 2020 10:24 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol. You of all people don't get to talk about hypocrisy until you fix your own.

We regret to inform you that Democrats are in array. It is only April, but Joe Biden is the presumptive presidential nominee, and nearly all of the major figures within the Democratic Party are aligning behind his candidacy. Actors from across the coalition are behaving rationally and refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, united in their shared focus on making Donald Trump a one-term president. How is this happening so smoothly? Where is the real Democratic Party hiding?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/joe-biden-endorsements-vp-
2020-election.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly





We all know that Democrats are all hypocrites at the core, but I'm talking about you specifically, Second. For every two posts you make on any given day you contradict yourself at least once.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Friday, April 17, 2020 4:01 PM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol. You of all people don't get to talk about hypocrisy until you fix your own.

We regret to inform you that Democrats are in array. It is only April, but Joe Biden is the presumptive presidential nominee, and nearly all of the major figures within the Democratic Party are aligning behind his candidacy. Actors from across the coalition are behaving rationally and refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, united in their shared focus on making Donald Trump a one-term president. How is this happening so smoothly? Where is the real Democratic Party hiding?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/joe-biden-endorsements-vp-
2020-election.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly



I love this post.

T


Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Friday, April 17, 2020 5:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

We all know that Democrats are all hypocrites at the core, but I'm talking about you specifically, Second. For every two posts you make on any given day you contradict yourself at least once.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You're doing what Trump is doing -- endlessly pointing out imaginary faults in your enemies. This headline cracks me up:

Trump Relents, says States will decide when to lift restrictions

Trump “relents.” Sure. Does anyone think for even a minute that Trump ever wanted total control over reopening the economy—or any other aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic? He spent two months telling us it was no big deal, and ever since then he’s done nothing but blame it on other people. He’s blamed China. He’s blamed WHO. He’s blamed Obama. He’s blamed the states. He’s blamed unnamed experts who failed to tell him anything was going on. He’s blamed the media. He’s blamed General Motors. He’s blamed hospitals.

In the meantime, the only concrete action he’s taken has been putting Jared in charge of a dodgy airlift operation that allows him to distribute medical supplies at his personal whim.

Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do about a pandemic that can’t be removed from the front pages by simply distracting everyone with some random, outrageous comment. So all that’s left is to make sure that someone else gets the blame for it. To that end, his “total control” comment worked great: it suckered everyone into being outraged and demanding that he acknowledge state control. Now he’s pretending to relent when that was almost certainly his goal in the first place. You wanted state control, you got it.

Animal cunning, boys and girls. Always remember that. Trump may not be book smart, but his animal cunning quotient is off the charts.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/04/trump-never-wanted-total-contro
l-over-the-pandemic
/

Trump's Odds of Winning Reelection: 51% which is pretty good considering how many people he killed with his incompetence and how bad he is at doing actual work, not the running off at the mouth, which is not part of his job description.
https://odds.watch/trump-2020

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, April 17, 2020 9:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

We all know that Democrats are all hypocrites at the core, but I'm talking about you specifically, Second. For every two posts you make on any given day you contradict yourself at least once.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You're doing what Trump is doing -- endlessly pointing out imaginary faults in your enemies.



Don't flatter yourself. You're not my enemy. You're just some anonymous idiot I know about on a long defunct website that 8 people still post on.

Quote:

This headline cracks me up:



Everything you post cracks me up.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, April 19, 2020 6:51 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump Has Done Almost Nothing for the Working and Middle Classes

If you’re wondering whose interests Trump considers important, all you have to do is look at his actions:

1) Given a chance to intervene in oil prices, he chose to raise them. This was good for the oil industry but not so good for American gasoline purchasers.

2) He tried to take away Obamacare without any kind of effective replacement. This would have reduced taxes on the affluent while denying the working classes one of their key sources of affordable health care.

3) His tax cut in 2017 was almost entirely aimed at corporations and the rich. The rest of us got close to nothing.

4) He promised he was the best thing ever for farmers, but his tariff war destroyed our agricultural markets in China.

5) He is currently supporting a Republican war against the Post Office. This will probably help private package delivery services but hurt rural areas far more than urban areas.

6) Manufacturing workers? When Trump took office they made up 8.5 percent of the workforce. Today they make up 8.4 percent and their hourly earnings have lagged the rest of the labor force. Meanwhile, corporate profits have jumped by 14 percent. That’s good for the rich but not so good for workers.

7) In the coronavirus bill, he was concerned almost exclusively with bailing out businesses. His only sop to the working and middle classes was a one-time $1,200 check that his Treasury Secretary seemed to think would tide a family over for ten weeks. Meanwhile, it was up to Democrats to provide real assistance in the form of increased unemployment benefits, help for hospitals, and help for schools.

8) Trump’s tariff war with China has cost middle-class families $500-1000 each. It’s not paid by China and it’s not a tax on corporations, who pass it along to consumers. It’s basically a tax on everyone who buys inexpensive things from overseas—which is mostly the middle class. The affluent escape most of the tax.

I understand entirely that rational arguments like this have only a limited effect in presidential elections. But surely they have some effect? There must be at least an appreciable chunk of the working and middle classes who are open to the argument that Trump has talked big but hasn’t really done much for them. When it comes to concrete campaign promises with a dollar sign in front of them, Trump has been great about keeping his promises to big business and the wealthy. It’s only his promises to the middle class that he’s broken.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/04/trump-has-done-almost-nothing-f
or-the-working-and-middle-classes
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 19, 2020 8:39 AM

THG


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

We all know that Democrats are all hypocrites at the core, but I'm talking about you specifically, Second. For every two posts you make on any given day you contradict yourself at least once.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You're doing what Trump is doing -- endlessly pointing out imaginary faults in your enemies. This headline cracks me up:

Trump Relents, says States will decide when to lift restrictions

Trump “relents.” Sure. Does anyone think for even a minute that Trump ever wanted total control over reopening the economy—or any other aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic? He spent two months telling us it was no big deal, and ever since then he’s done nothing but blame it on other people. He’s blamed China. He’s blamed WHO. He’s blamed Obama. He’s blamed the states. He’s blamed unnamed experts who failed to tell him anything was going on. He’s blamed the media. He’s blamed General Motors. He’s blamed hospitals.

In the meantime, the only concrete action he’s taken has been putting Jared in charge of a dodgy airlift operation that allows him to distribute medical supplies at his personal whim.

Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do about a pandemic that can’t be removed from the front pages by simply distracting everyone with some random, outrageous comment.



History will show...

T


Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.

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Sunday, April 19, 2020 11:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THG:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

We all know that Democrats are all hypocrites at the core, but I'm talking about you specifically, Second. For every two posts you make on any given day you contradict yourself at least once.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You're doing what Trump is doing -- endlessly pointing out imaginary faults in your enemies. This headline cracks me up:

Trump Relents, says States will decide when to lift restrictions

Trump “relents.” Sure. Does anyone think for even a minute that Trump ever wanted total control over reopening the economy—or any other aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic? He spent two months telling us it was no big deal, and ever since then he’s done nothing but blame it on other people. He’s blamed China. He’s blamed WHO. He’s blamed Obama. He’s blamed the states. He’s blamed unnamed experts who failed to tell him anything was going on. He’s blamed the media. He’s blamed General Motors. He’s blamed hospitals.

In the meantime, the only concrete action he’s taken has been putting Jared in charge of a dodgy airlift operation that allows him to distribute medical supplies at his personal whim.

Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do about a pandemic that can’t be removed from the front pages by simply distracting everyone with some random, outrageous comment.



History will show...

T


Deep state describes dedicated, educated professionals.



That I'm right again.

I usually am.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 8:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Liberal Catastrophe of American Democracy

The pandemic is about to collide with all the cynicism of a system veering toward unsustainable inequality.

http://watchingamerica.com/WA/2020/04/18/the-liberal-catastrophe-of-am
erican-democracy
/

The epidemic is devastating a country in which 30 million citizens cannot access medical care.

The image is unsettling even amid the surreal panoramas produced by the pandemic, scenes of a deserted world and ghost cities. In the parking lot of a disused conference center in the Las Vegas suburbs, a rectangular grid has been drawn.

They look like white lines for parking spaces, but they have been drawn on the tarmac to park human beings.

Every painted rectangle delineates the space allotted to a homeless person. Many of the spaces on the chessboard beneath the leaden sky are indeed occupied by figures lying supine or curled up against the cold, surrounded by a scattering of meager possessions. These people are among about 500 who have been relocated from a Catholic Charities overnight shelter, vacated after one of the guests tested positive for the coronavirus.

The photo, which has been shared around the world, has become a symbol of the head-on collision between the pandemic and the richest, most unequal democracy in the developed world. A nation with incredible levels of poverty even at the peak of what had been, up until a month ago, one of the longest economic booms in its recent history, and in whose cities, in the shadow of the cranes and building sites, more than half a million people sleep in the cold (586,000, according to the latest census).

After decades of intentional erosion of social safety nets, often all it takes is a larger utility bill or, as a typical example, an unforeseen health care cost, to face eviction. Then, the chasm of the street opens up - the edge of a slippery slope leading to the margins of society.

The plight of the homeless remains one of the most shameful aspects of a society structured around the enrichment of an oligarchy that now also holds executive power. But it is not only the structural weakness of liberal America, highlighted by the virus, that has led to the photo from Las Vegas.

Aside from management issues related to federalism (at least while the White House is home to a national populist demagogue and his incompetent dynasty of unsightly minions), the global epidemic is sweeping across a country in which 30 million citizens do not have access to health care. In which there is no public health care coverage, nor is health care considered a right of citizenship. Instead, it is accepted that hospitals are health care businesses governed by budgetary demands, and under other circumstances, such an influx of paying patients would be a plus for their balance sheet.

However, as many health directors openly lament, epidemics, with their huge demands and the stress they place on equipment and personnel, do not conform to this business model. Not only that, but they damage the “core business” of health care: operations and billable visits. The other side of this disastrous system is private insurance – a hypertrophic $900 billion colossus of an industry with a turnover dependent on citizens’ illnesses, sustained by a massive lobby that ensures it political favor in Washington. The insurers have already announced that, beyond the possibility of delaying payment, there will be no discounts for health care – every patient will have to pay their premiums and deductibles.

The death of a 19-year-old from Lancaster, California, that seemed at first to have occurred after he was turned away from the hospital for not having health insurance, now appears to have happened in the ambulance en route. But every American knows that it’s a matter of time that similar cases will occur throughout a country in which the first bedside visitor in the emergency room after the fever subsides is often the financial specialist, who assesses the patient’s bank account.

Privatized health care was, therefore, already a horrific emergency before the pandemic hit. The average life expectancy for someone living on the street is 45 years. The health care crisis is bound to be intensified by a social catastrophe. We are only at the beginning of a phenomenon that will challenge the “social Darwinism” that views health in relation to a twisted meritocracy.

It’s not unusual to hear Fox News commentators or Republican politicians express the idea that excessive social and health care assistance will encourage those who are weak (of character) to take advantage. This reflects an ideological system imbued with supremacist and eugenic reasoning that is today openly expressed through the idea of herd immunity and a willingness to sacrifice the old and weak.

As predicted, the pandemic is about to collide with all the cynicism of a system veering toward unsustainable inequality, a system that has found in Trumpism the culmination of a war on the poor and whose disastrous effects are becoming apparent.

A system which, like private industry must optimize its profits and minimize expenditure, will predictably produce effects such as those revealed by the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the recorded infection rate is much higher in well-off areas than in black and Hispanic ghettos. That’s because in West Hollywood or Beverly Hills, wealthy patients can buy testing swabs that are unavailable in public clinics.

In many American cities, the homeless are the only people walking the deserted streets, but the pandemic has created numerous other orphans: street vendors, daily workers, the micro-economic workforce and the entire melting pot of marginal and marginalized citizen-consumers that form the necessary complement to the digital financial boom of liberal capital.

If, on one hand, COVID-19 is destined to reveal beyond any doubt the structural inequalities of a system predicated on growth and profit at the expense of the powerless, the Orwellian briefings of public self-celebration from the White House show that nothing will be spared to exploit this crisis and turn the disaster to the government’s advantage.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 20, 2020 9:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm not going to quote that novel you posted in a re-post.

I'll just say that maybe California should be giving more money to the homeless instead of to illegal aliens.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 10:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not going to quote that novel you posted in a re-post.

I'll just say that maybe California should be giving more money to the homeless instead of to illegal aliens.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You don't want to quote this paragraph because it describes you and the GOP? "It’s not unusual to hear Fox News commentators or Republican politicians express the idea that excessive social and health care assistance will encourage those who are weak (of character) to take advantage. This reflects an ideological system imbued with supremacist and eugenic reasoning that is today openly expressed through the idea of herd immunity and a willingness to sacrifice the old and weak."


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 20, 2020 11:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not going to quote that novel you posted in a re-post.

I'll just say that maybe California should be giving more money to the homeless instead of to illegal aliens.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You don't want to quote this paragraph because it describes you and the GOP?




Nope. Because it's TL;DR and more bullshit from your left-wingnut idiots and not worth the time to read.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 12:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not going to quote that novel you posted in a re-post.

I'll just say that maybe California should be giving more money to the homeless instead of to illegal aliens.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You don't want to quote this paragraph because it describes you and the GOP?




Nope. Because it's TL;DR and more bullshit from your left-wingnut idiots and not worth the time to read.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

One sentence is enough to describe 6ix and Trump and GOP Senators and even many millions of GOP voters: "This reflects an ideological system imbued with supremacist and eugenic reasoning that is today openly expressed through the idea of herd immunity and a willingness to sacrifice the old and weak."

"Sacrifice the old and weak" is an idea 6ix and Trump have been promoting as far as Covid-19.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 20, 2020 5:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I'm not going to quote that novel you posted in a re-post.

I'll just say that maybe California should be giving more money to the homeless instead of to illegal aliens.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

You don't want to quote this paragraph because it describes you and the GOP?




Nope. Because it's TL;DR and more bullshit from your left-wingnut idiots and not worth the time to read.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

One sentence is enough to describe 6ix and Trump and GOP Senators and even many millions of GOP voters: "This reflects an ideological system imbued with supremacist and eugenic reasoning that is today openly expressed through the idea of herd immunity and a willingness to sacrifice the old and weak."

"Sacrifice the old and weak" is an idea 6ix and Trump have been promoting as far as Covid-19.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




Sure buddy.

I seriously doubt that Eugenics is a "GOP Thing".

But I AM certainly down with it. I don't give a shit who else is.

Weak and stupid people shouldn't be breeding any taking up my oxygen. Sadly for you, a majority of the weak and stupid people in this country happen to be Democrats. That makes no matter to me. I can see why it bothers you though.



And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

They're far too old to procreate and therefore, dead or alive, have zero effect on any attempt at Eugenics.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 5:54 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:

JACK:
And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

Though it's a very NAZI thing. But yanno, if you're going to make them die anyway, why not extract as much out of them as possible before AND after death! So JACK can get his sense of entitlement fulfilled.



arbeit macht frei

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Monday, April 20, 2020 5:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:
Quote:

JACK:
And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

Though it's a very NAZI thing. But yanno, if you're going to make them die anyway, why not extract as much out of them as possible before AND after death! So JACK can get his sense of entitlement fulfilled.



arbeit macht frei



Explain to me how it's a NAZI thing, Karen.

Because your knowledge of history sucks if you really believe that to be the case.




And "extract" what, BTW?

Fucking boomers ruined the economy and are dying with nothing to pass on to their children after squandering the wealth of the nation.

Good riddance. Can't come soon enough.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 6:05 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Isn't that you in a (heh heh) NUTshell? Work or die? Be productive or kick off?

arbeit macht frei - eh JACK?

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Monday, April 20, 2020 6:16 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Sure buddy.

I seriously doubt that Eugenics is a "GOP Thing".

But I AM certainly down with it. I don't give a shit who else is.

Weak and stupid people shouldn't be breeding any taking up my oxygen. Sadly for you, a majority of the weak and stupid people in this country happen to be Democrats. That makes no matter to me. I can see why it bothers you though.



And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

They're far too old to procreate and therefore, dead or alive, have zero effect on any attempt at Eugenics.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, let me help you out with the word eugenics:

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, and promoting those judged to be superior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

It happens that Republicans I know, maybe even you, think they are "superior" eugenically, while believing Democrats, especially the ones that look like Obama, are "inferior" eugenically. For my favorite example of a Republican joke: "What do you call a nigger with half a brain?" Sometimes the answer is "Gifted." Sometimes "Obama."

The Republicans I know hate Obama for going to Harvard Law School and unfairly taking the place that rightfully belonged to a white. #GOP_vehemently_denies_being_racist_LOL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama#Law_career

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 20, 2020 6:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Sure buddy.

I seriously doubt that Eugenics is a "GOP Thing".

But I AM certainly down with it. I don't give a shit who else is.

Weak and stupid people shouldn't be breeding any taking up my oxygen. Sadly for you, a majority of the weak and stupid people in this country happen to be Democrats. That makes no matter to me. I can see why it bothers you though.



And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

They're far too old to procreate and therefore, dead or alive, have zero effect on any attempt at Eugenics.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, let me help you out with the word eugenics:

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, and promoting those judged to be superior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

It happens that Republicans I know, maybe even you, think they are "superior" eugenically, while believing Democrats, especially the ones that look like Obama, are "inferior" eugenically. For my favorite example of a Republican joke: "What do you call a nigger with half a brain?" Sometimes the answer is "Gifted." Sometimes "Obama."

The Republicans I know hate Obama for going to Harvard Law School and unfairly taking the place that rightfully belonged to a white. #GOP_vehemently_denies_being_racist_LOL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama#Law_career

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




I didn't say anything about black people. You did.

Democrats are racist as fuck.

Would you like to talk about that again?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 20, 2020 8:17 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



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Tuesday, April 21, 2020 8:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

I didn't say anything about black people. You did.

Democrats are racist as fuck.

Would you like to talk about that again?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

HBO has a 6 episode show about a Republican winning the 1940 Presidential Election. It doesn't mention black people, either, because the GOP makes Jews their enemy. The new GOP President refuses to fight in WWII because that war is all the fault of Jewish European Bankers, at least according to the President. Actual GOP Senators and Dixiecrat Senators in our reality were just as bad as HBO's fictional Senators who refused to give permission for WWII, until Pearl Harbor made that position impossible for a Senator to maintain and still expect to be reelected.

HBO’s The Plot Against America
Freedom is never completely won.
But it can be lost.

We were having trouble with coming up with a line for the one-sheet. (“Freedom is never completely won. But it can be lost.”) And we tried a bunch of stuff, some of it was a little bit too much on the money, some of it was a little bit too abstract. And the one that eventually we went with is something that my father used to say at every Passover Seder, and it goes with what Ed is saying. On this liberation-themed holiday, my father used to say that democracy, and freedom, by extension, can never be completely won. Every day is a quotidian struggle. Every day you have to kill a few snakes. Every day you have to fight to try to extend the premise of freedom to a few more people, to those cohorts that are the most beleaguered. You’re never going to finish the job. There’s never a moment where you dust off your hands and say, “Well, there it is. That’s our republic. It’s perfected.” It’s struggle. It’s the hardest form of government there is, is to attempt self-governance, and it’s utterly imperfect. But freedom can be lost and lost quickly, and all you have to do is stop fighting for it. You have to stop working, you have to stop killing snakes. He said it every year to us. And I don’t think I ever understood the complexity of what he was trying to say, until I lived through these last three years.

https://slate.com/culture/2020/04/the-plot-against-america-finale-davi
d-simon-ed-burns-interview.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 21, 2020 11:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

Sure buddy.

I seriously doubt that Eugenics is a "GOP Thing".

But I AM certainly down with it. I don't give a shit who else is.

Weak and stupid people shouldn't be breeding any taking up my oxygen. Sadly for you, a majority of the weak and stupid people in this country happen to be Democrats. That makes no matter to me. I can see why it bothers you though.



And, FYI, letting the old die in homes because they're old is not Eugenics, stupid.

They're far too old to procreate and therefore, dead or alive, have zero effect on any attempt at Eugenics.



Do Right, Be Right. :)

6ix, let me help you out with the word eugenics:

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior, and promoting those judged to be superior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

It happens that Republicans I know, maybe even you, think they are "superior" eugenically, while believing Democrats, especially the ones that look like Obama, are "inferior" eugenically. For my favorite example of a Republican joke: "What do you call a nigger with half a brain?" Sometimes the answer is "Gifted." Sometimes "Obama."

The Republicans I know hate Obama for going to Harvard Law School and unfairly taking the place that rightfully belonged to a white. #GOP_vehemently_denies_being_racist_LOL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama#Law_career

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




I didn't say anything about black people. You did.

Democrats are racist as fuck.

Would you like to talk about that again?

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 22, 2020 8:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


An anguished question from a Trump supporter: ‘Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?’

THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/tru
mp-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002
/

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hotel-paid-millions-in-fines-for-u
npaid-work


That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list-trumps-accusers-allegations-sexua
l-misconduct/story?id=51956410


That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/11/22/donald-
trumps-outrageous-claim-that-thousands-of-new-jersey-muslims-celebrated-the-911-attacks
/

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you exclaimed, “He sure knows me.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/23/president-dona
ld-trump-could-shoot-someone-without-prosecution/4073405002
/

That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!”
https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was funny.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-criticized
-after-he-appears-mock-reporter-serge-kovaleski-n470016


That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/americas-first-po
st-text-president/549794
/

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/19/what-trump-has
-said-central-park-five/1501321001
/

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-campaign-protests-2016031
3-story.html


That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-orders-proteste
rs-coat-is-confiscated-and-he-is-sent-into-the-cold-a6802756.html


That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/why-cant-trump-ju
st-condemn-nazis/567320
/

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-insult-foreign-countries-leaders_
n_59dd2769e4b0b26332e76d57


That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/12/29/138-trump-policy-chan
ges-2017-000603


That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-05/how-is-donald-trump
-profiting-from-the-presidency-let-us-count-the-ways


That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was in the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/09/26/the-very-bi
g-ocean-between-here-and-puerto-rico-is-not-a-perfect-excuse-for-a-lack-of-aid
/

That you have seen him start fights with every ally from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jon
g-un-vladimir-putin/index.html


That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/more-5-400-children-split-border-
according-new-count-n1071791


That you have witnessed all the thousand-and-one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2018/06/04/4
51570/confronting-cost-trumps-corruption-american-families
/

What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.

Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.
– Adam-Troy Castro
https://andrewtobias.com/why-do-liberal-voters-feel-this-way/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: ‘Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?’

THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:



Majority based off of what polling model?

lol Just kidding. Nobody gives a shit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: ‘Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?’

THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:



Majority based off of what polling model?

lol Just kidding. Nobody gives a shit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

What polling model? You voted for Trump, a well-known criminal. That's the model. Rich Republicans knew why they voted for a crook -- Trump would make them richer. But the rich think carefully about Trump's ulterior motives and they read the small print on contracts. Poorer Republicans don't read before they sign. That inattention to crucial details about who Trump is and what he will be motivated to actually do once in office keeps them poor. 6ix wrote, "Nobody gives a shit." Correction: Poor Trump voters don't give a shit. Vote for Trump, 6ix, because I will benefit.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:45 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: ‘Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?’

THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:



Majority based off of what polling model?

lol Just kidding. Nobody gives a shit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

What polling model? You voted for Trump, a well-known criminal. That's the model. Rich Republicans knew why they voted for a crook -- Trump would make them richer. But the rich think carefully about Trump's ulterior motives and they read the small print on contracts. Poorer Republicans don't read before they sign. That inattention to crucial details about who Trump is and what he will be motivated to actually do once in office keeps them poor. 6ix wrote, "Nobody gives a shit." Correction: Poor Trump voters don't give a shit. Vote for Trump, 6ix, because I will benefit.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly




The polling model for this:

Quote:

THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:


But like I said, nobody gives a shit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, April 23, 2020 8:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The federal vetocracy

That the US government has become a dysfunctional vetocracy is obvious. In short: America’s system of checks and balances requires unusual and even extraordinary levels of consensus to pass legislation. First, you need the agreement of the House, the Senate, the White House, and, increasingly, the Supreme Court.

More granularly, congressional power is diffused across committees. The Senate has built in a supermajority requirement, known as the filibuster, which effectively raises the threshold for passage from 51 votes to 60 votes.

This raises the question: If the problem is embedded in the structure of the US government, how did the US ever do anything big? The short answer is that for most of our political history, two unusual conditions held. First, the parties were ideologically mixed, which made compromise easier. Second, one party was usually electorally dominant, which gave the party in the minority a reason to compromise: If you can’t win, you may as well deal.

Both those conditions have dissolved. America’s political parties are more ideologically — and demographically — polarized than ever before. We’re also in the most competitive period American politics has ever seen. In a system like that, both sides utilize the system’s bias toward inaction to foil their opponents. You can see this in the rise of the filibuster over time. The rule has been around almost as long as America, but it’s only been deployed as an omnipresent veto in recent decades.

The result is a system biased toward inaction. The left can’t remake American health care. The right can’t voucherize American schools. The left can’t pass a climate bill. The right can’t privatize Social Security. Neither side can rewrite our immigration laws, hence the turn towards oscillating executive orders. Neither side can pass their infrastructure packages. Neither side can reform social insurance.

In the midst of a pandemic, a financial crisis, or a terrorist attack, emergency measures can pass, for a little while, but absent some kind of crisis, paralysis is the rule.

At the federal level, I’d get rid of the filibuster, simplify the committee system, democratize elections, and make sure majorities could implement their agendas once elected. We should prefer the problems of a system where elected majorities can fulfill the promises that got them elected to one where elected majorities cannot deliver on the promises that the American people voted for. The latter system, which is the one Americans live in now, drives frustration and dysfunction.

But legislators on both sides prefer the status quo because it gives them power when they’re in the minority, and because they’re more afraid of what their opponents might do than committed to what they’ve promised to do. The allure of what they could build isn’t as powerful as the fear of what the other side may build.

More at www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-corona
virus


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, April 24, 2020 7:28 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Capitalism Is Killing Us

In their new book, Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue that suicides, overdoses, and income inequality are consequences of capitalism.

Despair may sound like an abstract phenomenon for economists to study, but using education as a dividing line—which for them is a close proxy for class—Case and Deaton’s data illustrates just how despair has creeped into the lives of many. Over the last 20 years, representative national surveys show, white people without a bachelor’s degree have reported greater difficulty shopping, watching a movie, relaxing at home, and socializing with friends. They also have reported higher levels of pain, mental distress, and ill health. The percentage of white people ages 45–54 without a bachelor’s degree reporting they’re unable to work rose to 13 percent in 2017 from 4 percent in 1993. For Case and Deaton, the deterioration of conditions of daily life is one of the “background” causes of deaths of despair.

As feelings of physical pain and social isolation have made life harder to bear, manufacturing jobs have been replaced by service jobs, which have fewer benefits and lower wages, a central issue in the authors’ “upheaval” narrative. The primary upheaval experienced by the white working class today, according to the authors, is the power imbalance between capital and labor. This imbalance has been a “slowly unfolding calamity,” according to Case and Deaton. “Rising economic and political power of corporations, and the declining economic and political power of workers, allows corporations to gain at the expense of ordinary people, consumers and particularly workers,” they write. Meanwhile, those at the top of corporations have seen their wealth soar.

“Among America’s 350 largest firms, average CEO earnings in 2018 was $17.2 million, 278 times average earnings.” In the 1960s, the difference in compensation “was only 20 to 1,” and nearly a third of workers had a union job. Today, union density hovers at around just 10 percent. Union halls were once the “center of social life,” according to Case and Deaton, but work life today is more lonely and atomized, and low-wage work, with few benefits, feels impersonal and unfulfilling. Low-wage work has also led to the stagnation of real wages and purchasing power for the working class, all while the cost of health care has skyrocketed, largely because of effective lobbying and government capture. The very structure of the financial system in this country, Case and Deaton argue, is largely responsible for the “deaths of despair” crisis they warned about in 2015.

Of course, these conditions aren’t experienced only by middle-aged white people. But long protected by a governmental and societal safety net, the white working class is now, in Case and Deaton’s telling, in free fall: “Our main argument in this book is that the deaths of despair reflect a long-term and slowly unfolding loss of a way of life for the white, less-educated, working class.”

Case and Deaton appear much more comfortable identifying the deadly rot in America’s economy than they do in calling for its excision. Rather than ending corporate “plunder” for good, they call for “reducing” it; rather than ending rent-seeking, the accumulation of wealth without creating any new wealth, they call for “limiting” it. “We do not argue for higher taxes on the rich,” they write, because, curiously, they do not see inequality itself as “the fundamental problem,” even though earlier in their book they observe that despair, death, and inequality are all linked. Rather, they conclude, “the fundamental problem is unfairness.”

The path out of despair favored by Case and Deaton—tweaking capitalism to be more fair—is in contention with the alarm bell they’re ringing. If the estimated 150,000 deaths this year from suicide, alcohol, and overdoses combined didn’t already make this clear, the threat of Covid-19 means that now is no time for half-measures.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200424034154/https://www.thenation.com/a
rticle/culture/case-deaton-deaths-of-despair-book-review
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 26, 2020 8:48 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways.

Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/thinking-about-the-poor/articles/fal
ling


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 26, 2020 9:37 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
The rich are all alike, to revise Tolstoy’s famous words, but the poor are poor in their own particular ways.

Any reasonably intelligent reader could blow that generalization apart in the time it takes to write it. But as with most generalizations, a truth lies behind it. Ultimately, what binds the rich together is that they have more money, lots more. For one reason or another, the poor don’t have enough of it. But poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets. One hears mutterings, but the chains have not yet been shed.

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/thinking-about-the-poor/articles/fal
ling


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly





So did you pay them $25 for a subscription, or was reading the first paragraph enough for you?

Quote:

To read the full article online, please login to your account or subscribe to our digital edition ($25 yearly). Prefer print? Order back issues or subscribe to our print edition ($30 yearly).


Links at archive.org don't show any more than that either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:08 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:

So did you pay them $25 for a subscription, or was reading the first paragraph enough for you?

Quote:

To read the full article online, please login to your account or subscribe to our digital edition ($25 yearly). Prefer print? Order back issues or subscribe to our print edition ($30 yearly).


Links at archive.org don't show any more than that either.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

The rest is at https://getpocket.com/explore/item/falling

Falling by William McPherson

"There are a lot of people like me, exiles from the middle class who suddenly find themselves on Grub Street."

Wanna know what happened to him next? McPherson, 84, died March 28, 2017, at a hospice center in Washington of complications from congestive heart failure and pneumonia.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181013052536/https://www.nytimes.com/201
7/03/29/books/william-mcpherson-dead-novelist-critic.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 27, 2020 8:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Reaganomics was quite open about the fact that the benefits of growth would come at the cost of some inequality. The idea was that the rich would benefit first but the poor would eventually benefit. This is the famous trickle-down theory, never better described than by Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who claimed this was what used to be called the “horse and sparrow” theory in the 1890s: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

Reaganomics holds that the work habits of the American people are tied irrevocably to their income, though in a curiously perverse way. The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more.

John Kenneth Galbraith. “Recession Economics.” New York Review of Books, February 4, 1982
www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/02/04/recession-economics/
https://web.archive.org/web/20180117212757/http://www.nybooks.com/arti
cles/1982/02/04/recession-economics
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, April 27, 2020 9:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.

Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.


Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Monday, April 27, 2020 11:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.

Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.


Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Have you ever heard of the idea of a wage-slave? How do you keep a slave working? Since American employers can't actually beat their slaves, employers implicitly threaten them with starvation, homelessness, and death from no medical attention. But if healthcare was cheap or free from the government, healthcare could not be used to threaten wages-slaves in order to make them obey. I'm pretty sure the American Medical Association's agenda is to make the maximum amount of money and certainly NOT to help wage-slaves avoid punishment. The system is run to discover how much higher prices American wage-slaves can be tricked into paying compared to the rest of the world:

www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compa
re-countries/#item-relative-size-wealth-u-s-spends-disproportionate-amount-health


www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/072116/us-healthcare-co
sts-compared-other-countries.asp


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 28, 2020 6:00 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

Before 2015, few people would have thought of not finishing college as a public-health issue. That changed because of research done by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton who are also married. For the past six years, they have been collaboratively researching an alarming long-term increase in what they call “deaths of despair” — suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism-related illnesses — among white non-Hispanic Americans without a bachelor’s degree in middle age.

Change any one of those attributes (race, nationality, education), and the trend disappears. Mortality has not increased among white Americans with a bachelor’s degree, nor American people of color, nor non-Americans without a bachelor’s degree. (Indeed, all-cause mortality among those groups has continued to go down, as usual.) Something about not having a bachelor’s degree in America, especially when white, can be deadly.

The term “deaths of despair” has taken on a life of its own, becoming ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and op-eds. It has been the subject of think-tank panels, conferences, and even government inquiry. “America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why,” proclaims a New York Times article that visualizes some of their research. This past fall, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee issued its own report on “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair.”

Case and Deaton’s new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press), takes their message even further. Capitalism itself, they argue, needs serious reform if it is to make good on its potential to improve the lives of all Americans. In particular, as Case pointedly observed in a lecture last year at Stanford University, "We don’t think American capitalism is working for people without a four-year college degree — and that’s two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64."

Since 1989, U.S. death certificates have collected information on the highest level of education attained by the deceased. Mortality from all causes among middle-aged white Americans appeared steady at first, but then, they realized, the fates of the more- and less-educated were actually diverging. When they separated the groups, they saw that white middle-aged college graduates’ mortality had dropped 40 percent from 1990 to 2017, while those without a college degree became 25 percent more likely to die in middle age. The result: By 2017, those who hadn’t finished or never went to a four-year college were four times as likely to die between age 45 and 54 as those who did.

Money alone, in the form of aid or wages, would not fix matters, although they did believe higher wages were a necessary step toward a remedy. Lack of social connections, a sense of purposelessness in one’s work, and doubt that the future would improve underlay the mortality trends. Unemployment, income inequality, and other ills might be part of that problem, but the center of their story had broadened into something like the slow unraveling of a way of life.

Case and Deaton argue in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism that capitalism requires serious reform if it is to make good on its potential to improve the lives of all Americans rather than just a privileged few. Education, particularly postsecondary education, plays an important, recurring role: Neither savior nor villain, it offers all manner of protections to those who have it, yet leaves behind those who don’t.

"The four-year college degree is increasingly dividing America," they write in the book. "A four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line."

Case and Deaton lament stagnant wages and lay much blame upon the American health-care industry — the book’s principal villain.

Health care soaks up money that could have gone to wages — nearly $11,000 per worker — and consumes 18 percent of the U.S. economy (Switzerland, at 12 percent, is a distant second), yet offers worse health outcomes per dollar than every other rich country’s health system. Deaton calls it "a very expensive system that’s not delivering much."

The American health-care system also conditions employees to feel grateful for securing health care at all. "Economists would say they’re ‘pinning [employees] to their participation constraint,’" Case notes with disapproving irony, using air quotes, "paying them as little as possible to get them to continue to show up."

Case and Deaton often cite the British sociologist Michael Young, best known for coining the term "meritocracy" in 1958 — which, they point out, was originally meant to describe a kind of dystopia. American life at present is, Deaton says, "the worst of Michael Young’s predictions in some sense. We’ve created an underclass, or what he called ‘the populists’ — and the rest of us he called ‘the hypocrisy.’"

"We would like to see a world in which everyone who can benefit from going to college, and wants to go to college, should be able to do so," they write. "But we do not accept the basic premise that people are useless to the economy unless they have a bachelor’s degree. And we certainly do not think that those who do not get one should be somehow disrespected or treated as second-class citizens."

"If people who get a B.A. think, ‘We’re the winners, and if we’re the winners, they’re the losers,’ that’s a really destructive setup," Case says.

More at https://bit.ly/3eXBPhA The Chronicle Of Higher Education

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, April 28, 2020 8:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The worst thing about the American system is how health insurance is tied to "good" jobs.

Even if people are financially responsible with their money (which most aren't), they're stuck working terrible jobs and kissing ass all day because losing that job could mean losing health insurance for their entire family.


Also, the rate of entrepreneurship in this country is pathetic compared to most other developed nations as a result.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

Have you ever heard of the idea of a wage-slave?



Yup.

Google my handle and "wage slave" and you'll probably see a lot of result here.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, April 29, 2020 7:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


How American Politics Went Insane – June/July 2016 The Atlantic

Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.

The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.

Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.

And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.

No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.

Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them. Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new, and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.

Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction. Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the etiology of a political disease: the immune system that defended the body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis and treatment.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20200219044343/www.theatlantic.com/magazin
e/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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