REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Monday, October 21, 2024 20:59
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Wednesday, December 15, 2021 10:57 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:

It would be interesting to see how this stacks up against the US in relative terms. We tend to think of countries with extreme wealth gaps as being places like ... Nigeria, for example. But the US could be just as bad, in relative terms.

In any case, I couldn't find equivalent figures for the US with a quick search, just for example, the minimum income one needs to squeak under the 10% threshold. It would be nice if someone did those calculations, or found them.
Someone did. For the USA see https://wid.world/country/usa

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

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Wednesday, December 15, 2021 3:12 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.




global inequality income
top 10% = 52% of income
US inequality income
top 10% = 46% of income
Canadian inequality income (second highest inequality of developed economies)
top 10% = 41% of income
Russian Federation
top 10% = 47% of income



global inequality wealth
top 10% = 75% of wealth
US inequality wealth
top 10% = 71% of wealth
Irish inequality wealth (second highest inequality of developed economies)
top 10% = 66% of wealth
Russian Federation
top 10% = 74% of wealth


https://wid.world/

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Wednesday, December 15, 2021 4:36 PM

SECOND

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



https://wir2022.wid.world/executive-summary/

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

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Friday, December 17, 2021 6:50 AM

SECOND

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


Robots Replace Roughnecks (Texas Roughnecks will be bitter about being replaced when they vote)

A new drilling rig put into service by the Houston company Nabors Industries recently completed its first well in the Permian Basin, drilling to a depth of nearly 20,000 feet.

That might not seem like a big deal. But in this case, the task was accomplished without a single worker on the rig floor.

Nabors’ Pace-R801 is the world’s first fully automated land rig, and its introduction in West Texas marks a milestone in the automation of the oil and gas industry. Robots, such as the robotic arm that lifts and connects drill pipe on the new rig, are transforming the industry, promising to save billions of dollars while further shrinking a labor force that has shed tens of thousands of jobs in recent years — particularly oil field laborers.

Nabors, the world’s largest land drilling contractor with 10,000 employees, began developing its autonomous rig technology about five years ago to improve drilling efficiency and safety. In 2017, Nabors acquired Robotic Drilling Systems, a robotic drilling company.

The rise of robots has raised concerns about the future of roughnecks on drilling rigs. Rystad estimates robotic drilling systems can speed the time it takes to drill a well by as much as 40 percent. The efficiency gains mean oil companies will need fewer rigs to drill wells and consequently, fewer workers.

The number of laborers on U.S. drilling rigs could decline by as much as 30 percent, or 140,000 workers by 2030, according to Rystad, saving U.S. oil producers more than $7 billion in wages.

“It will take time to replace the whole fleet of rigs,” said Audun Martinsen, Rystad’s head of energy service research. “Since these rigs still have to be proven, we don’t expect this technology to really take off until closer to 2030.”

Texas has about 183,000 oil drilling and production workers, below the 297,000 workers at their peak of employment in December 2014.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20211217030337/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/could-robots-replace-oil-drilling-roughnecks-gas-16707413.php




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

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Monday, December 20, 2021 6:14 AM

SECOND

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


Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says

If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own.

Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the United States, but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country.

Her bottom line: “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

Indeed, the United States has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first two phases of insurgency — the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases — and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters on Jan. 6.

Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the United States no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set — the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence — Walter writes that the United States is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.

U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the five years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”

Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war (six points in three years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes. “A country standing on this threshold — as America is now, at +5 — can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Others have reached similar findings. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the United States on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. “The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself," the report said. And a new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17 percent of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39 percent favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.

The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to. There is no more important issue; democracy is the foundation of everything else in America. Democrats, in a nod to this reality, are talking about abandoning President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda in favor of pro-democracy voting rights legislation. Republicans will fight it tooth and nail.

The enemies of democracy must not be allowed to prevail. We are on the doorstep of the “open insurgency” stage of civil conflict, and Walter writes that once countries cross that threshold, the CIA predicts, “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes.”

It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/how-civil-wars-star
t-barbara-walter-research/

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

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Monday, December 20, 2021 11:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says


You'd better settle down there, boy.

You're not going to want to see the outcome of that. Your side loses every in every alternate timeline.

It's time for you to just Netflix and chill, buddy. Don't poke the bear.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Tuesday, December 21, 2021 7:45 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Opinion: ‘We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe,’ new study says


You'd better settle down there, boy.

You're not going to want to see the outcome of that. Your side loses every in every alternate timeline.

It's time for you to just Netflix and chill, buddy. Don't poke the bear.
What could happen, without any provoking by Democrats, would be a series of Oklahoma City bombings of Federal Buildings. You do remember those, right?

The last Civil War started with a failed assassination attempt on Lincoln before he arrived in Washington D.C. and ended with a successful assassination. The path of the Civil War was decided by the bad guys. It is obvious in retrospect who the bad guys were, except to the bad guys who obviously believed they were the good guys. This bizarre confusion about right/wrong and good/bad in the heads of bad guys usually gets called hypocritical, but I think it is more serious. Calling them crazy would be more accurate.

Here is an example of bad women acting crazy rather than hypocritical (I strongly suspect 6ix can't understand who are the bad women in this story because 6ix is crazy):

A former abortion clinic employee says that there are 'tons of women' who 'claim to be anti-abortion' but come in to end their own pregnancies — and do a 'neat mental trick' to justify it.

Twitter user @AnnoyedCicada detailed her own experiences in an unspecified abortion clinic, recounting several stories of vocally anti-abortion patients who were nonetheless at the clinic for their own abortions.

She said that in addition to considering their own abortions justified and others' unjustified, many of the women were hostile, telling the doctors they were going to hell or should be in jail while ranting against the other patients.

'Anyone who has ever worked in an abortion clinic knows that tons of women who claim to be anti-abortion get abortions. They do a neat mental trick where *their* abortion is justified,' she said.

'At the clinic I worked at, we used to put a pink sticky note on their charts to give a heads-up to the back office staff. That way you'd be prepped for the hostility.'

She faced that hostility herself.

'I had a woman tell me I would burn in hell as I held her hand during her abortion,' she recalled.

'Another woman refused to wait in the same waiting room as the other patients because she didn't think she was "irresponsible" the way they were. We obliged to protect our other patients from her hostility.'

'Yet another woman laughed and told the doctor performing her procedure that she thought he should go to jail. After he had performed the abortion, of course,' she went on.

Another woman 'became furious when we told her we needed consent to perform the abortion'.

'She threw magazines from our waiting room at our staff after we told her we wouldn't do it without her signing consent forms. She tried to schedule with us several times. We kept referring her out.

'My years working in the clinic made me realize that a lot of "pro-life" people are willing to make exceptions for themselves or their loved ones. They just lack the empathy to understand that everyone seeking abortions has the same need that they do.' (In my opinion, it is not empathy they lack; it is sanity they lack.)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8769269/Former-abortion-cli
nic-worker-recalls-pro-life-women-justify-procedures.html

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

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Tuesday, December 21, 2021 7:50 AM

SECOND

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


I don’t know why Senator Joe Manchin apparently decided to go back on an explicit promise he made to President Biden. Naively, I thought that even in this era of norm-breaking, honoring a deal you’ve just made would be one of the last norms to go, since a reputation for keeping your word once given is useful even to highly cynical politicians.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/1
9/statement-from-press-secretary-jen-psaki-4/

The letter Manchin released to explain why he said what he said on Fox News doesn’t read like a carefully worked-out policy statement; it doesn’t even read like a coherent ideological manifesto. Indeed, it feels rushed — a grab bag of Republican talking points hastily trotted out in an attempt to justify his abrupt betrayal and to portray himself as a victim.
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-stateme
nt-on-build-back-better-act

Manchin is Manchin. But what kind of healthy democracy is structured in a way that can allow one man elected by 290,510 voters in one of the least populous states to thwart the agenda of his party and the President who was elected with 81 million votes??
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_West_Virginia
,_2018

Joe Manchin: A man you can’t trust.
"Look, I moved the goalposts a dozen times and you kept giving me what I asked for."
"At this point, I’m just going to have to say it’s due to secret reasons that I can’t discuss."
"That will make sure you can't find the goalposts and then meet my demands again!"

Joe Manchin accepted over $1,500,000 from GOP & corporate interests bent on killing Build Back Better.
He & his wife earn $1.1 million a year in coal dividends from his son’s coal company.
His daughter, former Mylan CEO, jacked up the price of EpiPens by 500%.
A family of grifters.
5:53 PM · Dec 19, 2021 from Philadelphia, PA·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/lindyli/status/1472716842942750728


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

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Wednesday, December 22, 2021 7:37 AM

SECOND

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


BBB was wildly unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever been done in American history.

There were three things that made it so.

1) First, depending on how you count, it created seven or eight big new programs in a single bill.
a. Child care.
b. Pre-K.
c. Climate.
d. Obamacare.
e. Paid leave.
f. Long-term care.
g. Expanded, work-free child tax credit.
h. Hearing and vision in Medicare.
In the past, any one of these would have been a major victory for liberals. The prospect of getting half a dozen of them in one go was breathtaking.

2) Second, it was expensive. The initial version of the bill probably would have cost more than $500 billion per year, though that number depends a lot on what assumptions you make. Even the cut-down final bill, using realistic assumptions instead of smoke and mirrors, probably would have come to $300 billion or so. This amounts to 1-2% of GDP compared to less than 1% of GDP annually for FDR's New Deal during its first decade. So the plan was to pass a bill that was astonishing in scope and cost more than the New Deal.

3) Third, this was to be done in a Senate with precisely 50 Democrats, not FDR's 60 in 1933 (soon to be 70 in 1935). In the end, just as political science and common sense suggests, it was brought down by the two most conservative Democrats in the Senate. By any reasonable standard, if this bill passed, it would make Joe Manchin quite a liberal senator.

This was crazy! What on earth convinced liberals that they could pass something like this? Bernie Sanders understands this. After campaigning on the promise of a progressive revolution, he's been Mr. Pragmatic during the tortuous journey of BBB. He knew from the start that Joe Manchin would be the eventual bottleneck, and despite the occasional outburst it's obvious that he accepted this.

Long story short, we should all stop feeling like the world has collapsed around us—and drop all the circular firing squad crap while we're at it. Manchin says he's open to further talks in January, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally produce a compromise of three or four fully funded programs along with enough offsetting tax hikes to make the bill more-or-less revenue neutral.

And if this happens? "Only" three or four programs? Then pop the champagne. No other president in recent memory has done anything like this.

https://jabberwocking.com/bbb-was-always-unprecedented-its-no-surprise
-that-its-getting-cut-down/

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

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Thursday, December 23, 2021 8:02 AM

SECOND

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


Why is the US paying more for the military after the Afghanistan war is over?

In 2021, despite the US mostly leaving Iraq (2,500 troops remain) and Afghanistan, not even a slight peace dividend has materialized. “As we drew down from Afghanistan, we should have been having a real debate about whether there were opportunities to shift funding and make cuts,” said Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight.

A conflict with China will NOT take on the conventional forms of previous wars. Defense experts, like Smithberger, say that investment in education, technology, and supply-chain security will protect Americans much more from 21st century conflict than an arms race.

Congress last week approved what is by some measures the biggest defense spending bill in history, to the tune of $768 billion. It’s bigger than those passed during the Vietnam and Korean War years, and bigger than Ronald Reagan’s military buildup. The only time this bill has been larger, adjusted for inflation, was in 2011, at a moment when the US had a peak in troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

88 senators voted in favor of the defense authorization for fiscal year 2022, and only 11 voted against. Over the past 60 years, the defense spending bill has passed each year with bipartisan support.

The military-industrial complex has been shaping Washington for almost a century. “Contractors are the biggest winners,” says William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, who pointed out that about half the budget goes to contractors, who are outsourced to do everything from logistics to office support, intelligence work and private security. According to the Congressional Research Service, there are 464,500 full-time contractors working for the Defense Department.

Even those Senators acting in good faith could be swayed by persistent myths, like an overly strong belief in defense spending’s ability to create jobs. Yes, every dollar does create jobs somewhere. But because military investments are capital-intensive and much of the money is spent abroad, that defense spending creates fewer jobs than money going to other industries.

All of this, progressive critics say, leads to a budget process that looks like a Christmas Tree, with Congress members pinning on goodies to satisfy constituents that don’t fit into a larger, cohesive defense strategy.

“When something is set in motion it is often very hard to unseat that, and we have what I have called the military normal,” said anthropologist Catherine Lutz of Brown’s Costs of War Project.

One analyst explained in 1995: “The most glaring weakness of the Clinton administration is that it is living with the defense budget of the now-dead Cold War era.” Now, Biden is living with the defense budget of the now-dead war on terrorism.

More at https://www.vox.com/22840615/us-defense-spending-increase-afghanistan-
withdrawal

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

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Sunday, December 26, 2021 7:35 AM

SECOND

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


Democracy seemed to be advancing nearly everywhere, and this could be explained by the fact that democratic governments generally did a better job than military juntas, one-party states and charismatic dictators or demagogues.

Looking to the future, I’d still have some optimism if it weren’t for the situation in the US. Far-right parties have mostly stayed marginal in Europe, and those that have managed to gain power in Hungary and Poland are looking shaky. Putin and Xi look secure in power, but both have made big mistakes. Elsewhere, the demagogues and would-be dictators (Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Modi) have generally shown themselves to be incompetents.

But all of this relatively good news is canceled out by what’s happening in the US. As President, Trump handled the pandemic worse than any leader except perhaps Bolsonaro, but still came close to re-election. And he has paid no political price for attempting to overturn the result.

The Republican Party is now openly committed to overturning US democracy, and retains the support of close to half of voters. With a rickety and politicized electoral system and a partisan Supreme Court that’s sufficient to ensure control of the outcomes.

As far as I can see, Trump is virtually certain to be the next President, (whether by winning under the current Electoral College rules or by overturning the results in key states) and, once he is in, certain to establish some kind of dynastic rule. Even if Trump is somehow removed from the picture, the Republican party he has created has already committed itself to seizing and holding power by whatever means necessary. That includes violent insurrection, as we have seen, but it seems unlikely that anything so drastic will be necessary.

Republican state governments can entrench themselves forever, and guarantee that their electoral votes and the overwhelming majority of their congressional delegations will be Republican, whatever the voters (and disenfranchised non-voters) might think about it. That’s more than enough to entrench national Republican rule for the indefinite future.

Since about the 2020 US election, there been presidential elections in Bolivia, Equador, Honduras and Chile (among others). All of these are countries with a recent history of coups and authoritarian / dictatorial rule. (The Chilean right wing candidate Jose Kast openly endorsed Pinochet during the campaign). In Bolivia, Honduras and Chile, left wing candidates won, in Ecuador the right wing candidate. In each instance, the losing party quickly accepted the outcome and conceded defeat. I think on the same day or the day after the election. (Peru, where the left wing candidate also won, was an exception. Here, the election was extremely close, and the right wing candidate alleged election fraud.)

It is remarkable that the US GOP cannot be counted on these days to have even as much commitment to democracy than right wing authoritarians in countries like Honduras.

The current identifying ideology of the Republican Party is this and only this, that Trump Really Won. Belief that Trump Really Won both justifies and requires the overthrow of the current govt by any means necessary. There seems little prospect on the Ds agreeing among themselves to take any dramatic course of action, so it’s not as if we have to worry much that they will start another US civil war. The Ds will predictably do nothing and let events take their course.

Basically, if Republicans get what they think they want (which is far from guaranteed, still) they will inevitability preside over one or more historic disasters, whether Trump or some other figurehead is immaterial. The combination of laissez-faire economics and neo-Victorian enforced morality guarantees an unstable economy and society.

More at https://crookedtimber.org/2021/12/21/getting-it-wrong-on-the-future-of
-democracy/#more-49407

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

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Sunday, December 26, 2021 8:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


^

LOL. The hypocrisy is strong with this one.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, December 26, 2021 9:21 AM

SECOND

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


This is a good example of a situation where it’s better to bet than argue:

Yale prof thinks the “most likely” scenario in the 2024 election is that the loser of both the popular vote and the electoral college will win.

"All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States," Snyder says. "I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now."
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1474120478147194886

What is meant by “This is a good example of a situation where it’s better to bet than argue” ?

It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance, that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of his being in error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause. Sometimes it turns out that his persuasion may be valued at a dollar, but not at ten. For he does not hesitate, perhaps, to venture a dollar, but if it is proposed to stake ten, he immediately becomes aware of the possibility of his being mistaken - a possibility which has hitherto escaped his observation. If we imagine to ourselves that we have to stake the happiness of our whole life on the truth of any proposition, our judgment drops its air of triumph, we take the alarm, and discover the actual strength of our belief. Thus pragmatical belief has degrees, varying in proportion to the interests at stake.

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

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Tuesday, December 28, 2021 6:32 AM

SECOND

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


From Kyle Rittenhouse to Donald Trump, conservatives are obsessed with being the victim

By all accounts, the principal reason why omicron is causing such havoc in the United States is our low rate of vaccination. The United States, at slightly over 61 percent full vaccination, is among the lowest of the developed world. Cuba has over 84 percent fully vaccinated. Even Brazil, under anti-vaxxer President Jair Bolsonaro has almost 67 percent fully vaccinated. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has been skeptical of the threats of COVID from the start. Yet, he took Trumpian irrationality to a whole new level, claiming a year ago that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine "could turn people into crocodiles or bearded ladies" — and even his country is more vaccinated than the United States.

While there remains much to be learned about omicron and its consequences to public health, one thing is clear: The only reason why the nation is at such extreme public health risk is because the GOP weaponized the pandemic for political gain, convincing their supporters to distrust science and resist any policy, no matter how reasonable, if it came from a Democrat.

We've spent time analyzing the head-scratching right-wing ploy of sowing distrust in vaccines within the GOP constituency, a move which has literally killed off supporters and occasionally GOP leaders and pundits as well. But what we haven't done is recognize that the right-wing response to the pandemic is part of a larger political practice: Victimized Bully Syndrome.

Some of you will be familiar with DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack and reverse victim and offender. DARVO describes the behavior of psychological abusers when they are being held accountable for their behavior. Donald Trump and his supporters clearly exhibit DARVO habits. Rather than accept blame for anything they do, they turn around and accuse those blaming them of creating the problem. Victimized Bully Syndrome (VBS), as I'm describing it, though, is slightly different from DARVO. With DARVO the abusive behavior comes first and DARVO only emerges if the attacker is asked to take responsibility. But with VBS the cries of being victims come first and are used to justify the underlying bullying behaviors. The bully under VBS is always already acting in self-defense.

Take this example: In a recent interview with Fox News, Dr. Mehmet Oz, candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania suggested that Americans had been victimized by President Biden's "one-size-fits-all" COVID-19 "rules that limit our freedom." According to Oz, U.S. citizens "want government to get out of their way to stop scaring them into submission."

If we set aside the sheer stupidity of a doctor suggesting that we need "as many different approaches as possible" to the pandemic, the critical takeaway is Oz's claim that Biden's policy is designed to victimize the public by scaring them, taking away their freedoms, and destroying their dignity. According to this logic, refusing to wear a mask, get vaccinated, or support public health policy is a valid defense, rather than bullying behavior that puts everyone in peril.

And lest there be any doubt, the right isn't just refusing to be vaccinated and to follow public health guidelines; in the face of the pandemic they have chosen to respond with aggressive bullying: engaging in violent confrontations over masking policies, attacking teachers, threatening school board members, violently trolling scientists who speak to the media about COVID, and more. In fact, the violent far-right has exploded in the United States along with COVID-19.

Similar to the "sore winner syndrome" we saw emerge in the wake of former President Trump's election, VBS posits that those on the right are all the time being victimized by their government and that it makes perfect sense to respond aggressively.

It is this exact same logic that was the backdrop to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and we can see the same logic in play in right-wing responses to the House investigation into the attack. Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich claimed, "Democracy is under attack. However, not by the people who illegally entered the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, but instead by a committee whose members walk freely in its halls every day." That's right, according to Budowich the real threat to our democracy are those elected officials investigating what happened on January 6, not the actual people who attacked the Capitol. Those people were, according to this twisted logic, simply victims of election fraud.

It gets worse.

The victim card was at the heart of the Kyle Rittenhouse case as well. Rittenhouse claimed he shot three men, two fatally, with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle in self-defense. In his testimony, Rittenhouse stated the only reason he even went to Kenosha, Wisconsin on the night of the shootings was to provide first aid to people in need. Rittenhouse, then, was no average vigilante. Instead, he was an already victimized one, prepared to claim self-defense if he attacked anyone. In a post-verdict statement issued by the victims' parents, they nail the dangers of Rittenhouse's VBS. The verdict, according to them, "sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.

VBS, then, isn't only being used by the right to foster a public health catastrophe, it is literally being used to justify armed murder and armed insurrection. As long as we allow the right to continue to describe themselves as victims who have been harmed, injured, threatened and therefore need to act aggressively in self-defense, the closer we get to civil war. In fact, a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll showed that 30 percent of Republicans believe that "true American patriots" might need to resort to violence in order to save the country. Nearly 40% still think the election was stolen.

So as long as the victimized bully syndrome pandemic is transmitted across the right-wing community, it will continue to surpass any threats to our nation from any new variants to the COVID-19 pandemic. Until we address the real threats to our nation, we not only won't stop COVID-19; we will allow the true risks to our health and the health of our democracy to continue to spread.

https://www.salon.com/2021/12/27/the-conservative-urge-to-be-a-victim-
why-right-wing-victimhood-is-spreading-so-fast/

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

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Wednesday, December 29, 2021 9:31 AM

SECOND

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


We want, as the X-Files movie once told us, to believe.

“When someone sees a hairy eight-foot-tall apelike man walking through their yard it makes legends real.” Jason Offutt writes in Chasing American Monsters. “It brings the unknown into our homes, and makes the impossible seem all too possible.”5 If cryptids exist, why could the Red Sea not have parted? Why could Jesus Christ not have come back from the dead? A world with Loch Ness monsters and Mothman and Momo and the Jersey Devil is a world where singular things happen, where things more complicated, more joyful, and above all else more incarnate can and do exist. It is a world where folklore is true, and where your grandmother’s reminiscences are as authoritative a source on All That Is as the Journal of Zoology. It is a world that confounds human logic and reveals “natural law” as the boundaries of human cognition. It is a world that is not just enchanted, but also — in its potential for chaos — subordinate to a God who wills things into being, that makes something from nothing, that has fashioned the limbs of the chupacabra. Things exist that should not exist, and that renders our sense of should meaningless. The absurdity of these singular beings, benignly monstrous, makes their existence all the more precious, all the greater a gift. Whatever law governs the birth and death of these rough beasts cannot be contained within the pages of The Botanic Garden.

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/monsters/articles/desperately-seekin
g-mothman

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

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Friday, December 31, 2021 12:43 PM

SECOND

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


Deaths of despair: the unrecognized tragedy of working class immiseration

By David Introcaso, Dec. 29, 2021

Given the socioeconomic effects of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it should have come as no surprise that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, a 28.5% increase over the prior year. Most of these deaths were attributed to the use of synthetic opioids by middle-aged white men. The question immediately begged is: What is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) doing about these so-called deaths of despair?

The answer is sobering.

The term deaths of despair comes from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56% and 387%, depending on the age cohort, over the past two decades, averaging 70,000 per year.

Case and Deaton learned that these deaths disproportionately occurred in white men who had not earned college degrees. In their 2020 book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” they argued that a key driver of these deaths is economic misery.

The phenomenon was first examined more than a century ago. In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined these deaths as “anomic suicides” — anomic meaning alienated — in his book “Le Suicide.” These deaths, he argued, result from a breakdown in social equilibrium or social norms, or when individuals believe there is a lack of communal spirit or conclude the government is indifferent to their needs.

This psychological state is largely the result of economic hardship or the loss of work or wages, something that today is disproportionately experienced by approximately 66 million white workers without college degrees between the ages of 25 and 64 years, or 38% of working-age people. As Case and Deaton showed, this population has seen the purchasing power of their wages decline by 13% since 1979 while per capita income increased 85% over the same period.

The resulting health effects are altogether predictable. Insecurity, deprivation, the loss of possibilities, the lack of belonging, hopelessness, and social maladjustment lead to negative emotions including loneliness, unhappiness, worry, and stress that in turn lead individuals to, in part, experience more pain and pain sensitivity both physical and psychological. Over approximately the past three decades, survey data show that Americans, particularly middle-aged white people, report more pain than respondents in 30 other wealthy countries. Pain, especially chronic pain, can become a gateway to opioid use and addiction.

Factor in the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s no wonder that 911 calls for opioid-related use increased 250% between 2019 and early 2020.

Echoing Durkheim, Case and Deaton concluded, “Jobs are not just the source of money; they are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life. Destroy work and, in the end, working-class life cannot survive. It is the loss of meaning, of dignity, of price, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community that brings on despair.”

Brian Alexander’s recent account of a hospital in Bryan, a small town in Ohio’s northeast corner, offers a glimpse into how destructive anomie can be. Particularly noteworthy is Alexander’s discussions of Keith Swihart, who experiences the worst outcomes from uncontrolled diabetes, including blindness and amputation; his wife, Stephanie, dead at age 46 from cervical cancer; and several of his friends who kill themselves by handgun, rifle, rope, or overdosing on fentanyl and amphetamines. One friend, Zach Rhinard, before fatally shooting himself in the head, wore a baseball cap that read, “ich bin innerlich tot.” Translation: “I am dead inside.”

As sobering as Alexander’s account is, the reality of deaths of despair is far more insidious.

Steven Woolf, a physician and lead author of the 2013 landmark Institute of Medicine report, “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” has for several years documented that U.S. life expectancy has not kept pace with that of comparable countries since the 1980s, about the time wages began stagnating. Life expectancy stopped increasing in 2010 and has fallen since 2014. This decline has not been caused just by epidemics in drug and alcohol abuse and suicides. Woolf and his colleague Heidi Schoomaker also found significant increases in excess deaths among white men and women in their midlife years from 35 other causes of death. These include infectious, neurological, and organ system diseases, mental and behavioral disorders, obesity, and injuries. In sum, the all-cause mortality rate, which should never significantly increase for a large population, increased for working-age white men without college degrees by approximately 25% over the past two decades.

While there are nuances to the relationship between economic conditions and mortality, the fact remains that the health status of 38% of working-age Americans has been significantly compromised over decades of economic hardship. The response to this fact by HHS has been beyond muted, something that is hard to understand since there is a well-documented correlation between income and health. This means health care policy and economic policy are inseparable.

As Woolf bluntly stated in opening his testimony before Congress on the 2013 “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health” report, “The lower people’s income, the earlier they die and the sicker they live.” To pretend otherwise is like, as Atul Gawande has analogized, treating a bullet wound with a pressure dressing.

In late October 2021, likely in anticipation of the CDC’s update on overdose deaths, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra announced a “new overdose prevention strategy.” The department’s new, reactive strategy mirrored its old, reactive strategy, both of which ignored context. To his credit, Becerra attempted to express support for harm reduction via safe consumption sites. The department, however, immediately walked backed the comment.

Leaving aside what 38% of the workforce population with horrible health markers means relative to nativist politics and an ability to secure the nation’s defense, one might think that HHS would be concerned regarding labor-force effects on health care funding, spending, and staffing, as well as health care’s own contributory effects.

Even before the pandemic, approximately 20% of men between their early 20s and early 60s, or roughly 20 million men, had left the labor force. That is three times the percentage in 1960, and worse than the depths of the recent Great Recession in the late 2000s. Beyond excessive rates of illness and death, working-age men also have high rates of disability, with about 20% of men ages 25 to 54 saying they are disabled.

Add to this the Great Resignation that includes the health care labor market. Over the past two years, 18% of health care workers have quit their jobs and 31% are considering doing so. The cost of this economic time bomb is currently estimated at roughly $1 trillion in gross domestic product. This economic hit will worsen because of a rapidly aging workforce which, in turn, means that demands on Medicare and Medicaid, already on unstable financial ground, will be even greater.

The indefensible excessive cost of health care is largely absorbed by employer-based plans that insure approximately 160 million Americans. That these health plans are funded by employees’ lost wages (“lost” because this money would otherwise be paid to workers), Case and Deaton argue, substantially explains decades of lost jobs and stagnant wages particularly hard felt among lower-wage workers. Beyond the negative effect excessive costs have on care, the burden on low-wage workers constitutes a reverse Robin Hood effect that exacerbates already substantial economic inequality. As Case and Deaton conclude, “the industry that is supposed to improve our health is undermining it” and “our government is complicit.”

It would be encouraging if HHS leadership, along with the White House and the Congress, would publicly recognize deaths of despair, however they want to define them. But it appears that federal health care policy makers can neither bring themselves to use the phrase nor investigate the problem. A search of HHS’s website for the phrase yields no results. Searching the website of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services similarly yields no results. The Biden White House has yet to use the phrase in a speech, remark, statement or release. Woolf has not been invited to testify before Congress since 2013. Deaton, a Nobel Prize economist, did testify in 2020 but before the House Budget Committee, where he discussed Covid-19. None of the four Congressional health committees have addressed deaths of despair.

The federal government’s public acknowledgment of the existence and impact of deaths of despair would be good. Better still would be for HHS leadership to recognize the relationship between socioeconomic stratification and health or sociomedical status. Still better would be for Becerra to borrow a page from Rudolf Virchow, the founder of social medicine, and recognize that “disease is an expression of individual life under unfavorable conditions,” and that epidemics, by which I mean here deaths of despair, “must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.”

Becerra and the rest of HHS need to put the social back into medicine and combat deaths of despair broadly defined using both medical and social policy. The lives of 38% of working-age Americans are in the balance.

David Introcaso is a vice president for regulatory policy at Strategic Health Care in Washington, D.C., and host of The Healthcare Policy Podcast.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/29/deaths-of-despair-unrecognized-tra
gedy-working-class-immiseration/

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

https://getcomics.info/other-comics/firefly-35-2021/

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Monday, January 3, 2022 8:39 AM

SECOND

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


Our fondness for narratives is driving us mad - The Boston Globe

By Jonathan Gottschall

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20220101161112/https://www.bostonglobe.com
/2021/12/30/opinion/our-fondness-narratives-is-driving-us-mad/

Stories are celebrated by great artists, thought leaders, and scientists as our best hope for reducing bigotry, building empathy, and ultimately encouraging us to behave more humanely. But how does this match up with the current state of the world?

We are living inside a digitally driven big bang of storytelling — a stunning expansion of the universe of stories across all media and genres. A 2020 Nielsen study reported that average Americans now consume a whopping 12 hours of media per day, much of it in narrative form, including hours upon hours of fiction. Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? Are we doing a better job of understanding each other across ancient divides of race, class, gender, religion, and political orientation? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection?

First, the good news. Well-publicized studies have shown that empathy is a bit like a muscle: The more we flex that muscle by consuming fiction, the more it swells. Research conducted around the world has repeatedly found that merely watching television shows or listening to radio dramas featuring diverse protagonists reduces a variety of viewer prejudices with more power and durability than do more conventional approaches to prejudice reduction like diversity training. Moreover, in an age of furious polarization, a 2021 study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that humble personal anecdotes can bridge fraught moral and political divides even when factual information can’t.

But there’s bad news too. Classically told stories tend to divide the world into good people (protagonists) and bad people (antagonists), which means they generate a unit of callousness for every unit of empathy. The act of generating empathy can also produce empathy’s inverse: a kind of moral blindness to the humanity of whoever is forced into the villain’s role. Fiction, as Fritz Breithaupt explains in his 2019 book “The Dark Sides of Empathy,” conjures not just empathy but “empathetic sadism,” which he defines as “the emotional and intellectual enjoyment that most people feel in situations of altruistic punishment” — for example, when the hero kills, captures, or humiliates the villain.

Empathetic sadism can spill over tragically from fiction to reality. A classic example is “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that spread the mythology of the KKK. But its effects are most destructive in the narratives we label as nonfiction. Research in the emerging field of narrative psychology shows that people don’t come equipped with two narrative modes — one to cope with the neverlands of fiction and another to cope with the complexity of real life. Regardless of where stories sit on the fact-fiction continuum, they have a tendency to divide people into a moralistic trinary of heroes, villains, and victims. The same narrative psychology that allows us to pleasurably suspend disbelief for “Game of Thrones” or “Star Wars” is precisely what draws people into similarly rousing fantasies of good against evil laid out in the overlapping plots of QAnon, COVID-19 dis/misinformation, and the Big Lie of Donald Trump.

The rampant spread of powerful narratives of dis/misinformation is the most disturbing example of the awesome power of stories to drive a whole civilization mad in both senses of the word — to push us into epidemics of intense irrationality while revving up our rage and hostility. Here’s the question: In a world where new technology is making storytelling ever more powerful and weaponizable, where debunked conspiracies reliably out-compete truth in the marketplace of narratives, and where an American cold war of rival narratives is escalating toward something hot, how can we tell stories that build empathy and connection while weakening their capacity to provoke divisive us-vs.-them thinking?

We need to move past any simple, naive intuition that storytelling must be a net good in human life. We have to recognize how our political narratives lure us into fantasies where “we” are good guys and “they” aren’t. These stories not only make us angry and judgy; they make us feel triumphantly virtuous for being so angry and judgy. It’s true that the most febrile narratives of wicked conspiracy, invented or elaborated by the most dangerously talented political storyteller in American history, are boiling up on the American right. But narratives on the left, for all the empathy they claim to champion, are also guilty of villainizing and thereby dehumanizing people on the other side.

We are storytelling animals, and we will no more give up our dependence on stories than our dependence on breathing. But that doesn’t mean we are doomed to tell stories only in the “bad” old ways.

When constructing narratives about reality, we should remember that over the last century, in an increasingly determined effort to hold the mirror of truth up to human nature, sophisticated novelists and filmmakers have challenged the cartoonish morality-tale structure of heroes against villains. “Moral ambiguity,” as Jonathan Franzen recently put it, has emerged as “a central artistic principle” in serious fiction. The irony is that by stripping away the caricatured villains from our political narratives and embracing the principle of moral ambiguity, we can make our stories of reality not only as empathetic and socially productive as great fiction but perhaps even as true.

Jonathan Gottschall, a distinguished fellow in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College, in Pennsylvania, is the author of “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down.”

You can download that book and also “The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human” from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.tv/search.php?req=Jonathan+Gottschall+Storyte
lling

Gottschall also wrote a book about the World of Homer “juxtaposing the activities, behaviors, and mental states of men and animals; Homer anthropomorphizes animals and he zoomorphizes humans.” https://libgen.unblockit.tv/search.php?req=Jonathan+Gottschall

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

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Thursday, January 6, 2022 8:05 AM

SECOND

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



“Remember,” John Adams wrote in December 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”

In the 207 years since, we came close to proving our second president right.

The United States barely survived a terrible civil war in the 1860s, when 2.5% of the population was killed, the equivalent to losing about 8.25 million Americans today.

Civil war in the United States is far more likely than you think. America’s far-right extremists fit the mold of those who’ve started insurrections in other countries.

There have been some 200 civil wars since 1946. What’s eye-opening here is that when you look at the civil wars since 1946 and their root causes, it sounds eerily like America right now.

People have a false impression that it is the most down-trodden, the poorest, the most discriminated against who tend to start civil wars. In reality, that’s not true. The people who tend to start civil wars are what experts call ‘sons of the soil.’ These are citizens who had either been dominant politically and culturally but were now in decline, or who had once had power and had lost it. (Think Trump and his lost reelection)

This group believes that the country belongs to them, that they have the right to be in power, and when they lose it, they find it incredibly disconcerting. (Think Trump’s ongoing Stop the Steal campaign)

They’re very resentful of groups that are ascendant, and they’re the ones who tend to mobilize and fight to try and re-establish control.

When you hear the term “civil war,” images of Union and Confederate forces slaughtering each other on blood-soaked battlefields like Antietam and Gettysburg come to mind. Twenty-first-century civil wars aren’t like that. Civil wars today tend to be fought by multiple factions, militias, paramilitary groups. Sometimes they work together and are coordinated, sometimes they’re not. And their preferred methods are terror and sometimes guerrilla warfare. They’re not planning to meet the U.S. military in a conventional war.

You can think of prominent examples like the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, failed kidnapping plots two years ago involving Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and, of course, last year’s attack on the Capitol.

But beyond these high-profile events are countless groups that individually may not seem like much, but in the aggregate constitute a genuine national security threat. So much so that in October 2020, the Department of Homeland Security reported that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists (WSEs)—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.” 

What do these groups want? The groups know they can’t create a white America (“that ship has sailed”) but they could try and create white ethno-states by targeting synagogues and black churches, in a campaign of terror designed to intimidate non-whites and convince them to not vote.

The overturning of a free and fair election was nipped in the bud on January 6th. Kidnapping the Vice President failed. But for a few brave police officers here, a few seconds there, things might have gone very different.

More at https://web.archive.org/web/20220106020135/https://www.marketwatch.com
/story/civil-war-in-the-united-states-is-far-more-likely-than-you-think-in-fact-it-may-have-already-begun-11641418149

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

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Thursday, January 6, 2022 8:14 AM

SECOND

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


2021 has taught me so much. Like if aliens started invading Earth, half of America would be like "no they're not." Actually, half of the country would be like "No there not"

Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy

Mr. Carter was the 39th president of the United States.

One year ago, a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians, stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power. All four of us former presidents condemned their actions and affirmed the legitimacy of the 2020 election. There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.

However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems. These forces exert power and influence through relentless disinformation, which continues to turn Americans against Americans. According to the Survey Center on American Life, 36 percent of Americans — almost 100 million adults across the political spectrum — agree that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 40 percent of Republicans believe that violent action against the government is sometimes justified.

Politicians in my home state of Georgia, as well as in others, such as Texas and Florida, have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes. They seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed. I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally — the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power — has become dangerously fragile at home.

I personally encountered this threat in my own backyard in 1962, when a ballot-stuffing county boss tried to steal my election to the Georgia State Senate. This was in the primary, and I challenged the fraud in court. Ultimately, a judge invalidated the results, and I won the general election. Afterward, the protection and advancement of democracy became a priority for me. As president, a major goal was to institute majority rule in southern Africa and elsewhere.

After I left the White House and founded the Carter Center, we worked to promote free, fair and orderly elections across the globe. I led dozens of election observation missions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, starting with Panama in 1989, where I put a simple question to administrators: “Are you honest officials or thieves?” At each election, my wife, Rosalynn, and I were moved by the courage and commitment of thousands of citizens walking miles and waiting in line from dusk to dawn to cast their first ballots in free elections, renewing hope for themselves and their nations and taking their first steps to self-governance. But I have also seen how new democratic systems — and sometimes even established ones — can fall to military juntas or power-hungry despots. Sudan and Myanmar are two recent examples.

For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.

First, while citizens can disagree on policies, people of all political stripes must agree on fundamental constitutional principles and norms of fairness, civility and respect for the rule of law. Citizens should be able to participate easily in transparent, safe and secure electoral processes. Claims of election irregularities should be submitted in good faith for adjudication by the courts, with all participants agreeing to accept the findings. And the election process should be conducted peacefully, free of intimidation and violence.

Second, we must push for reforms that ensure the security and accessibility of our elections and ensure public confidence in the accuracy of results. Phony claims of illegal voting and pointless multiple audits only detract from democratic ideals.

Third, we must resist the polarization that is reshaping our identities around politics. We must focus on a few core truths: that we are all human, we are all Americans and we have common hopes for our communities and our country to thrive. We must find ways to re-engage across the divide, respectfully and constructively, by holding civil conversations with family, friends and co-workers and standing up collectively to the forces dividing us.

Fourth, violence has no place in our politics, and we must act urgently to pass or strengthen laws to reverse the trends of character assassination, intimidation and the presence of armed militias at events. We must protect our election officials — who are trusted friends and neighbors of many of us — from threats to their safety. Law enforcement must have the power to address these issues and engage in a national effort to come to terms with the past and present of racial injustice.

Lastly, the spread of disinformation, especially on social media, must be addressed. We must reform these platforms and get in the habit of seeking out accurate information. Corporate America and religious communities should encourage respect for democratic norms, participation in elections and efforts to counter disinformation.

Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220106034919/https://www.nytimes.com/202
2/01/05/opinion/jan-6-jimmy-carter.html

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

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 8:21 AM

SECOND

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


The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche can be downloaded for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.how/search.php?req=Stephen+Marche+Civil+War

In this deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction, a journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds.

The book begins with Lincoln’s speech on lynch mobs:

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

—Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:130?rgn=div1;view=full
text

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

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 9:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


He'd just love a Civil War. Makes for great TV.

Go fuck yourself, Second.

None of you Che Guevara LARPing douchetards are going to start a war.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 9:29 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
2021 has taught me so much. Like if aliens started invading Earth, half of America would be like "no they're not." Actually, half of the country would be like "No there not"


Nice self-own, Second.

You're right.

Ted would be like "No there not. Your just two stoopid. OPPS, I hope the coal minors are OK".

Then he'd quickly lose interest in that and start telling us about the upcoming 2021 mid-term elections.



--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 9:55 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:
He'd just love a Civil War. Makes for great TV.

Go fuck yourself, Second.

None of you Che Guevara LARPing douchetards are going to start a war.
Since you won't read the book, I figured that Stephen Marche, who wrote The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future probably would have also written an article. He did. It is pretty clear that it is not leftists that started a war. Rather it is the Confederate flag waving Trump voters who say Trump won. I know this will confuse you, mostly because all the Trump voters I know get causes and effects backwards. It is funny and sad how much trouble they cause for themselves without understanding what they did.

6ix, there is no need to even type TL;DR. Ignore reality, 6ix. All the Trump voters I know ignore reality and get angry and turn to someone like Trump or Reagan or Nixon when reality kicks them in the head because they weren't attentive. Why should you be any different?

The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it
by Stephen Marche
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-alread
y-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

Nobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.

On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.

In Washington, in the winter of 1861, Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, declared that “not one man in America wanted the civil war or expected or intended it”. South Carolina senator James Chestnut, who did more than most to bring on the advent of the catastrophe, promised to drink all the blood spilled in the entire conflict. The common wisdom at the time was that he would have to drink “not a thimble”.

The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.

The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.

The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.

Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.

The United States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.

You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.

Two things are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.

An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.

The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.

Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”

Anti-government patriots have used the reaction against Black Lives Matter effectively to build a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting the blue lives matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if anti-government patriots had uniformly decided not to target police any more. But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.

Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times.

At this supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc – becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves powerless faster than their enemies can.

What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.

The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.

There will be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent; their ends were not.

It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.

The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to work for living people, rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their ghostly constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit people, not the other way around.

Does the country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work? Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so. America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.

Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans. But it is time to face what the Americans of the 1850s found so difficult to face: The system is broken, all along the line. The situation is clear and the choice is basic: reinvention or fall.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220107154342/https://www.theguardian.com
/world/2022/jan/04/next-us-civil-war-already-here-we-refuse-to-see-it

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

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Sunday, January 9, 2022 10:11 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You couldn't pay me to read his book. I'm not going to read his article either.


There's no reason to go to war with you Leftist retards. You're eating your own right now and destroying the Democrat party for a generation to come... At least.

Why do anything when we can just sit back and let nature take its course.

You are insignificant.



Keep talking about Trump though, as if anybody fucking cares.

If they did, the Legacy Media wouldn't be getting worse ratings than CW Superhero shows now.



And how is non-funny grifter douche Greg Gutfeld and his lame-ass Dad Jokes the fucking king of late night in 2022?

That's how much America hates you and your opinions.
--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, January 10, 2022 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:
You couldn't pay me to read his book. I'm not going to read his article either.


There's no reason to go to war with you Leftist retards. You're eating your own right now and destroying the Democrat party for a generation to come... At least.

Why do anything when we can just sit back and let nature take its course.

You are insignificant.



Keep talking about Trump though, as if anybody fucking cares.

If they did, the Legacy Media wouldn't be getting worse ratings than CW Superhero shows now.



And how is non-funny grifter douche Greg Gutfeld and his lame-ass Dad Jokes the fucking king of late night in 2022?

That's how much America hates you and your opinions.
The Confederates said the same as you about the Abolitionists. For years into the Civil War, the Confederates were winning, which proved to themselves they were superior to Abolitionists. The Confederates had a superiority complex that killed about as many Americans as Covid-19, which 6ix says 'Nobody dies of Covid-19.'
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties

Superiority complex is a term coined by Alfred Adler in the early 1900s, as part of his school of individual psychology. A superiority complex is a defense mechanism that develops over time to help a person cope with painful feelings of inferiority. Individuals with this complex typically come across as supercilious, haughty, and disdainful toward others. They may treat others in an imperious, overbearing, and even aggressive manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_complex

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

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Monday, January 10, 2022 8:12 AM

SECOND

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


What it will take to save American democracy?

It may be that we have exposed a flaw in the founders' Constitution. They believed that to create a political system, you did not need to ensure that people acted virtuously. "If men were angels," James Madison famously wrote, "no government would be necessary." Ambition would be made to counteract ambition -- and this system of checks and balances would preserve liberty and democracy.

But can a system work without human beings acting responsibly, even virtuously? One branch of government, Congress, is supposed to check the other. But today, for Republicans party politics trumps institutional loyalty. The real scandal of January 6 is not what happened outside the Capitol alone, it's what happened inside when a majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the valid results of a presidential election simply to curry favor with then-President Donald Trump. It is that vote, not the violence, that almost broke the American system.

More at https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-fight-to-sa
ve-american-democracy-op-ed/index.html

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

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Thursday, January 13, 2022 10:23 AM

SECOND

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


IRS is in crisis

Over the past decade, the IRS's budget has been slashed by nearly 20% including the adjustment for inflation. At the same time, the IRS has lost more than 33,000 full-time employees between 2010 and 2020, including 13,400 enforcement personnel.

The number of taxpayers the agency serves has increased 19% since 2010.

As of mid-December 2021, the IRS had millions of items still to address from 2020, including more than 6 million unprocessed individual returns, 2.8 million unprocessed business returns, a combined more than 2.8 million unprocessed amended individual and business returns.

Bills remain stalled in the Senate to increase IRS funding. Republicans are stalling the bills.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-tax-crisis-taxpayer-advocate/

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

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Friday, January 14, 2022 7:57 AM

SECOND

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


The Oldest Question in Politics

By Fareed Zakaria https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/07/10-ideas-fix-democracy/

Almost 25 years ago, I began to notice a disturbing trend in fledgling democracies. Countries in the former Soviet empire and elsewhere were holding elections, leaders were gaining power with considerable popular support—but these leaders were then acting in ways that undermined liberal democracy. They would intimidate the opposition and free press, bypass institutions and laws, and rule by executive fiat or decree. Sometimes these moves went unnoticed; often they were popular.

To describe this combination—a regime with popular support and participation that was eroding the constitutional and legal structures of good government—I coined the term “illiberal democracy.” It captured the current dilemma but also the historical reality that there have been two processes of political modernization. One process involves popular participation in politics through elections—democracy. But there has been another, deeper, and longer tradition of liberalism, which began with the Magna Carta in 1215 and aims at restraining the arbitrary power of the state to create space for individual liberty and autonomy. Britain was the most liberal state in Europe in the mid-19th century, when less than 10 percent of its population was allowed to vote. The two traditions merged quite recently in the Western world, creating liberal democracy. But the two had been historically distinct for many years.

At the time, illiberal democracies had taken hold in Russia, the Philippines, and Pakistan. I worried about the danger spreading to the West but in a much more low-key fashion. In my book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, I devoted several chapters to the United States, describing populist tendencies that were reshaping U.S. politics, culture, and society—such as the decline of political parties and the rise of political entrepreneurs unconstrained by party tradition and history. But I have to confess that I regarded these as slow and shallow trends eroding the strength and vitality of the country, not threatening its fundamental character. Today, however, it’s clear that the United States faces a serious threat to its political system—one in some ways more profound than any since the Civil War.

To put it simply, large parts of the U.S. electorate, mostly centered in the Republican Party, no longer accept the idea of a legitimate opposition and have convinced themselves that if that opposition wins, it is by fraud and that the election is thus null and void. This kind of mentality is fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy and dangerous to its survival. It suggests the future will be filled with contested elections, efforts to suppress votes, and fights to overturn elections. Even if they fail, as happened in 2020, the lasting effect will be to delegitimize the elected president and paralyze the political system.

How did we get here so quickly? There is much study needed for the rise and deepening of U.S. partisanship, which is now as much a cultural as a political divide. But what has struck me has been the inadequacy of one of the core ideas of the American founding. James Madison, the most important architect of the U.S. political system, was deeply enamored by the Enlightenment thinkers who saw politics as a science. They imagined a system of checks and balances producing good government almost as a machine with wheels and pulleys could produce motion or transfer energy. They did not expect people to be wise or virtuous. “If men were angels,” Madison famously wrote in the Federalist Papers, “no government would be necessary.” Madison built a system, he believed, that did not require virtue to function. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he urged, and from this conflict of interest would come ordered liberty and democracy. This American model became the template for much of the world.

In the United States and around the world, we are now witnessing experiments in politics without angels—and they aren’t working so well. Democratic institutions have weakened in many places, broken in others, and feel under stress where they are still functioning. Those countries that have not faced the full furies of populism and nationalism—Germany and Japan are the most striking examples—have escaped these dangers more because of their culture and history rather than some better democratic design. Everywhere, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s truth seems to hold: Institutions are merely lengthened shadows of men. If such men fail and act badly, venally, or irresponsibly, the democratic system is imperiled. We enter the 21st century asking one of the oldest questions in politics, much older than the Enlightenment ideas that democracy was built on. It is a question the ancient Greeks and Romans debated more than two millennia ago: How do we produce virtue in human beings?

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

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Friday, January 14, 2022 11:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


This thread has become my morning source of comic relief.

Thanks for the laughs, Second.



--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Saturday, January 15, 2022 6:50 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:
This thread has become my morning source of comic relief.

Thanks for the laughs, Second.
Then you will love this next one, which is about your kind and their weirdness:

We found the one group of Americans who are most likely to spread fake news.

Using statistical analysis, we found that the only reliable explanation was a general desire for chaos — that is, a motivation to disregard, disrupt, and take down existing social and political institutions as a means of asserting the dominance and superiority of one’s own group. Participants indicated their appetite for chaos by using a scale to express how much they agreed with statements like, “I think society should be burned to the ground.”

(Other questions probing a general desire for chaos:

“I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

“There is no right and wrong in the world”

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over” )

More at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/14/we-found-the-one-gro
up-of-americans-who-are-most-likely-to-spread-fake-news-526973


Researchers from Denmark's Aarhus University and Temple University were interested in why people spread "hostile political rumors" online. One explanation is that in an increasingly polarized age, partisans are more likely to share nasty bits of gossip—true or not—about their political opponents. But the paper's authors favor a much more disturbing conclusion: The impulse to share hateful rumors "are associated with 'chaotic' motivations to 'burn down' the entire established democratic 'cosmos'… This extreme discontent is associated with motivations to share hostile political rumors, not because such rumors are viewed to be true but because they are believed to mobilize the audience against disliked elites."

More at https://www.vice.com/en/article/evjzkn/a-shocking-number-of-americans-
want-to-just-let-them-all-burn

If I was running the survey measuring a general desire for chaos, the question I would ask is: How strongly do you agree that Armageddon, as foretold in the Bible, will happen soon, where God destroys all the wicked people and the only happy people left alive are like yourself? The stronger your desire/belief in Armageddon, the stronger is your general desire for chaos.

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

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Saturday, January 15, 2022 10:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


All I'm seeing is an article posted by you that is about you.



--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Saturday, January 15, 2022 12:34 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:
All I'm seeing is an article posted by you that is about you.
The most fake of all the fake news you have posted was "Nobody dies of Covid"
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63571&mid=11483
77#1148377

I cannot make you post truthfully, now that you know what you are being tested for, but you would rate very high on the scale measuring a general desire for chaos. These are real questions on that test and I already know your answers, 6ixStringJoker:

“I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

“There is no right and wrong in the world”

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over”

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

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Monday, January 17, 2022 6:16 AM

SECOND

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


Dilbert brings its comical insights to politics.

View the comic at https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-01-16 because it works better as captioned drawings than as a script.

The script for the comic:

Asok: I haven’t lost a debate since I learned to treat everything as a personal insult.

Dilbert: I doubt that method works every time.

Asok: Are you calling me a liar?

Dilbert: What? No! I’m just skeptical it works in every situation.

Asok: What data do you have to back up that opinion?

Dilbert: I don’t have any data. I just think it’s kind of . . . um . . . obvious?

Asok: So you’re calling me stupid.

Dilbert: No, no! Never mind. I don’t know what I’m talking about!

Asok: Works every time.

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

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Monday, January 17, 2022 8:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
All I'm seeing is an article posted by you that is about you.
The most fake of all the fake news you have posted was "Nobody dies of Covid"
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63571&mid=11483
77#1148377

I cannot make you post truthfully, now that you know what you are being tested for, but you would rate very high on the scale measuring a general desire for chaos. These are real questions on that test and I already know your answers, 6ixStringJoker:

“I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

“There is no right and wrong in the world”

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over”


We're living in chaos right now.

You can knock it off with your Joker bullshit again, you mindless dipshit.

All you're doing is trying to attribute your own POV on me.

There's not a single quote above that your BLM/Antifa rioters weren't chanting every day in 2020.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, January 17, 2022 8:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Dilbert brings its comical insights to politics.

View the comic at https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-01-16 because it works better as captioned drawings than as a script.

The script for the comic:

Asok: I haven’t lost a debate since I learned to treat everything as a personal insult.

Dilbert: I doubt that method works every time.

Asok: Are you calling me a liar?

Dilbert: What? No! I’m just skeptical it works in every situation.

Asok: What data do you have to back up that opinion?

Dilbert: I don’t have any data. I just think it’s kind of . . . um . . . obvious?

Asok: So you’re calling me stupid.

Dilbert: No, no! Never mind. I don’t know what I’m talking about!

Asok: Works every time.

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



Yup.

You're Asok. And I'm not Dilbert.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, January 17, 2022 9:26 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
All I'm seeing is an article posted by you that is about you.
The most fake of all the fake news you have posted was "Nobody dies of Covid"
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63571&mid=11483
77#1148377

I cannot make you post truthfully, now that you know what you are being tested for, but you would rate very high on the scale measuring a general desire for chaos. These are real questions on that test and I already know your answers, 6ixStringJoker:

“I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

“Sometimes I just feel like destroying beautiful things”

“There is no right and wrong in the world”

“We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over”


We're living in chaos right now.

You can knock it off with your Joker bullshit again, you mindless dipshit.

All you're doing is trying to attribute your own POV on me.

There's not a single quote above that your BLM/Antifa rioters weren't chanting every day in 2020.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
From where I am, looking at and working with Trump voters all day long, I can see very clearly how chaotic the typical Trump voter's personal and work life is. On the other hand, they see themselves as perfectly normal. Well, that is crazy on their part. They think they are being cheated out of what they deserve from life in America, but they don't do what they need to do to get what they think they deserve. (I am NOT reading their minds; Texas Trump voters say it out loud all the time. Maybe in other states Trump voters are reticent, but certainly not in Texas.) They cannot even understand what they need to do to get the life they want, let alone actually do it. If they did understand, I know they are too lazy to do it. They want a easy shortcut to all the things they think they deserve and if they don't get what they want, they are positive it is not their fault. The Joker handled that situation by going on a murder spree. The Trump voters are less aggressive than the Joker and they handle that situation by lying their heads off and cheating.

Joker's method didn't get the success he wanted and Trump voters' methods don't get the success they want, but the world gets a load of chaos from them.

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

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Monday, January 17, 2022 9:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Tell us again how everybody should rise up and murder their bosses and steal everything they own and how you are going to kill Trump and feed his body to the pigs.

The only crazy person left on these boards is you, Second, and Kiki and I have plenty of receipts to prove it.




I'll leave you to another miserable day in your miserable little life buddy. I've got shit to do.



--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Monday, January 17, 2022 10:47 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'll leave you to another miserable day in your miserable little life buddy. I've got shit to do.
The truth is you don't have any shit to do worth doing, 6ix. You know it and you always have known. Signym and 1kiki are as aimless in life as you. You're just wasting your lives and there is nothing that will change that. Somehow you hope Trump fixes it (Mister Only-I-Can-Fix-It!). In reality, life continues for you as it always has until you kill yourself with tobacco or a gunshot to the head or some other suicidal activity. By the way, you won't be in the first hundred Trump voters I know who killed themselves out of excessive stupidity, foolishness, inattention or stubbornness.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2016/07/21/trump-i-alone-can-fix-the-system
.html

Too late I realize you won't click the link, so I will give you the relevant quote from the first seconds of the video: “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves.” (The crowd cheers) - Trump at 2016 GOP Presidential Convention. I know Trump voters can defend yourselves, but they won't because of their highly defective thinking in all situations. Like the good salesman/conman he is, Trump completely understands his voters while they understand nothing about their real situation or about their real selves.

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-no
mination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974

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

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Monday, January 17, 2022 11:05 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted:
Dilbert brings its comical insights to politics.

View the comic at https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-01-16 because it works better as captioned drawings than as a script.

The script for the comic:

Asok: I haven’t lost a debate since I learned to treat everything as a personal insult.

Dilbert: I doubt that method works every time.

Asok: Are you calling me a liar?

Dilbert: What? No! I’m just skeptical it works in every situation.

Asok: What data do you have to back up that opinion?

Dilbert: I don’t have any data. I just think it’s kind of . . . um . . . obvious?

Asok: So you’re calling me stupid.

Dilbert: No, no! Never mind. I don’t know what I’m talking about!

Asok: Works every time.
Yup.

You're Asok. And I'm not Dilbert.
I've usually thought secondbot was Catbert. But, yeah, Asok fits also.

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Tuesday, January 18, 2022 6:30 AM

SECOND

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


Paul Ryan, Sen. Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election and a former Speaker of the House, received Social Security survivors payments for several years after his father died when Ryan was 16. He was so grateful that he spent his career obsessively trying to slash Social Security.

Ryan never agreed that life is full of risks that are largely outside one’s control, from a parent’s early death to living an unexpectedly long life. The point of a program like Social Security is to spread the costs of these risks across all of society rather than pile it on the shoulders of individuals who got a bad roll of the dice.

If you are worried about Social Security’s risk of a financial shortfall in the 2030s, don’t be. You may have noticed that the people telling you about Social Security’s impending doom are exactly the same figures who told us to be terrified about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction 20 years ago. The danger in both cases is exactly as real and frightening: i.e., effectively nonexistent.

You might assume that Democrats would constantly publicize how their party created Social Security and help voters understand how it works and why it’s an extraordinarily good deal. Instead, as recently as the Obama administration, they seemed embarrassed that they ever came up with it in the first place. President Barack Obama’s main focus regarding Social Security appeared to be finding politically palatable ways to cut benefits (although he did change course at the end of his presidency). But if top Democrats won’t educate us about why Social Security is a huge boon for Americans, we should educate ourselves.

The most important thing to understand about Social Security for retired workers is that it is an inflation-adjusted lifetime annuity.

A lifetime annuity means that once you start collecting Social Security’s retirement benefits, you will continue to receive the same amount (adjusted for inflation) every month until your death. If Social Security were eliminated, it is impossible to get anything similar from an insurance company.

• Annuities bought from insurance companies generally don’t offer any kind of inflation adjustment. Social Security’s COLAs were 9.9 percent in 1979, 14.3 percent in 1980, and 11.2 percent in 1981. No insurance company offer that kind of inflation protection.

• Social Security does not engage in any kind of underwriting: i.e., evaluating beneficiaries and charging them differently based on risk. But private insurance companies absolutely do. In particular, private market annuities are more expensive for women than for men the same age because women live longer on average.

More at https://theintercept.com/2022/01/16/inflation-social-security/

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

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Wednesday, January 19, 2022 6:19 AM

SECOND

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


. . . . The measure, which passed by a narrow margin, replaced party primaries in Alaska with a single open primary. The top four vote-getters will proceed to a November election with ranked choice voting, in which voters list candidates in order of preference for runoff rounds if none wins a majority.

Other states have adopted open primaries and ranked-choice elections, but Alaska is the first to combine them. Proponents say the reforms should boost politicians who work across party lines, since they no longer have to cater to their party’s base to win the primary. If adopted more widely, advocates say the system could serve as an antidote to partisan polarization and government gridlock.

“It encourages candidates to talk to all constituents and to build a broad coalition and to serve them,” says Robert Dillon, a Republican consultant who worked on the Alaska ballot measure.

Critics of Alaska’s reforms say they will weaken parties and confuse voters who rely on parties as identifiers to fill out their ballots. Alaska’s Supreme Court was scheduled to hold a hearing on Jan. 18 in an appeal case filed by plaintiffs who sued unsuccessfully last year to stop the changes on constitutional grounds. A ruling is expected by next month.

“Parties are an efficient way for people of identical or similar political beliefs to gather together. I think the political party system has to be made stronger rather than weaker,” says Kenneth Jacobus, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who include the Alaskan Independence Party.

Even reform advocates say it will likely take multiple elections to see the true effect on who runs for office and how the winning candidate governs, making a stampede to the political center somewhat unlikely for now. And analysts caution that the centrifugal forces driving Americans apart, and poisoning the political well, aren’t easily unwound.

“It takes many cycles to see what these things will produce,” says Alexander Theodoridis, an associate professor of politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “None are a panacea for party polarization.”

Alaska is just the second state after Maine to adopt ranked choice voting for general elections, joining dozens of smaller jurisdictions. But the state’s open, top-four primary, which expands similar measures used in California and Washington, may prove a more consequential reform. Several states plan to hold ballot initiatives this year to put similar reforms to voters.

Advocates say open primaries are essential to expanding voter choice, since most congressional seats are so politically lopsided due to geographic sorting and gerrymandering that only the primary matters. According to Unite America, a nonprofit that campaigns for electoral reform, 83% of congressional races in 2020 were decided by primaries in which only 23 million people voted.

More at https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2022/0118/Trump-wants-Lisa-Murk
owski-gone.-A-voting-reform-might-save-her

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

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 6:56 AM

SECOND

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


The latest Fox News lie is the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim. It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-viewers-dont-deserve-contempt-save-
it-for-the-folks-fleecing-them/

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

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 7:23 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The latest Fox News lie is the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim. It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-viewers-dont-deserve-contempt-save-
it-for-the-folks-fleecing-them/

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



Biden* doesn't say anything for himself.

Members of Biden*'s cabinet have called parents of grade schoolers terrorists.

If Biden* doesn't feel that way, then Biden* should have called out that behavior.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 7:43 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The latest Fox News lie is the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim. It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-viewers-dont-deserve-contempt-save-
it-for-the-folks-fleecing-them/

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



Biden* doesn't say anything for himself.

Members of Biden*'s cabinet have called parents of grade schoolers terrorists.

If Biden* doesn't feel that way, then Biden* should have called out that behavior.
CLAIM: The National School Boards Association is asking the Biden administration to label parents who protest school policies domestic terrorists.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The organization — the NSBA, for short — is not asking Biden to label parents who protest at school board meetings as terrorists.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-634580066208

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

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 8:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


AP is not a legitimate factchecking source.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 8:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The latest Fox News lie is the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim. It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-viewers-dont-deserve-contempt-save-
it-for-the-folks-fleecing-them/

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



Biden* doesn't say anything for himself.

Members of Biden*'s cabinet have called parents of grade schoolers terrorists.

If Biden* doesn't feel that way, then Biden* should have called out that behavior.
CLAIM: The National School Boards Association is asking the Biden administration to label parents who protest school policies domestic terrorists.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The organization — the NSBA, for short — is not asking Biden to label parents who protest at school board meetings as terrorists.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-634580066208

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



The NSBA didn't ask Joe Biden* to label parents who protest school board meetings terrorists.

THEY DID IT THEMSELVES.

Oh. You'd like to argue that fact? Well... Let's go straight to the source; the six page document written by the NSBA and put on their website here:

https://nsba.org/-/media/NSBA/File/nsba-letter-to-president-biden-conc
erning-threats-to-public-schools-and-school-board-members-92921.pdf

Oh. Funny. That's a 404 not found error today, huh? That's odd.

Archive.Today isn't very helpful either. It only grabbed a screenshot of the first page and you can't scroll down to the bottom of the page or pull up any of the other five pages...

https://archive.ph/dAIiA

(You ought to FIX that, Archive.Today.)


But what do we have here? Looks like Documentcloud.org has our backs...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21098209-nsba-letter-to-presid
ent-biden-concerning-threats-to-public-schools-and-school-board-members-929211

I'll refer you to page two, paragraph three, sentence one that states "As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes."



So not only are the parents domestic terrorists, but they are perpetrators of hate crimes too! OH NOEZ!!!!




Fuck the NSBA for deleting evidence.

And Fuck AP for trying to cover for them.

And Fuck YOU for being a dumbass Leftist muppet tool.

Liars.






P.S. Hey Jaynez. You might want to add this document to the collection since the Leftist Media seems to be trying its hardest to scrub it out of existence.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 9:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I see you abandoned this thread, dipshit.

Good move.

--------------------------------------------------

Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."

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Sunday, January 23, 2022 12:53 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:
Originally posted by secondbot:
The latest Fox News lie is the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim. It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-viewers-dont-deserve-contempt-save-
it-for-the-folks-fleecing-them/
The Bot lies yet again trying to claim Fox lies.

Another losing round of Liar Liar from sloppyseconds.

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Monday, January 24, 2022 7:30 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:

Fuck the NSBA for deleting evidence.

And Fuck AP for trying to cover for them.

And Fuck YOU for being a dumbass Leftist muppet tool.

Liars.
Wisconsin has an answer to that: Republicans vote to allow 18-year-olds and their parents to carry concealed weapons on school property

No reasonable person would say parents are terrorizing teachers when it becomes legal to bring a concealed gun to a parent/teacher meeting.

MADISON, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Republicans in the state Assembly passed a series of bills to expand gun laws in the badger state, including a proposal to allow some high school students and parents to have firearms on school property.

During the Assembly's return to the floor since the new year, Republicans passed legislation that would lower the concealed carry age from 21 to 18, allow legal gun owners to have their weapon in their vehicle when dropping off or picking up their child from school, and allow anyone with a concealed carry license from any state to be armed in Wisconsin.

With gun violence on the rise in Wisconsin and across the nation, Republicans believe more residents should be able to carry a gun legally to protect themselves.

State Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers), author of the bill to lower the concealed carry age, contends if 18-year-olds can vote, they should be allowed to arm themselves.

"They are mature enough, they are adult enough to make these decisions and yet we are going to deny them the basic human right of self-defense?" Sortwell said.

Democrats argue the measure would backfire and result in inexperienced gun owners.

When applying for a concealed carry permit, state law doesn't require someone to actually fire a weapon.

"Guns in these situations do not make people feel safer," said Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison). "In this state, you can get a concealed carry permit and never once get any hands-on firing a gun and that's terrifying."

State Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) called the GOP bills ridiculous because it would allow high school seniors with concealed carry permits to have a loaded gun in their car and at school events.

"This makes absolutely no sense, and quite frankly is scary to every parent with children," Andraca said.

Sortwell admitted his bill would lead to more guns on school property, but believes it's a "common sense" measure to avoid people breaking the law.

Currently, schools are specifically excluded from the state's concealed carry law, and individuals can face a felony if they possess a firearm on school property.

Republicans are looking to please their base this election year by introducing proposals like these, that are likely doomed for Governor Tony Evers' veto pen.

When asked, Evers said the GOP efforts to expand guns rights are "pretty bizarre," during a press event at the Capitol.

Evers and Democrats have long advocated for more gun control measures, such as universal background checks and red flag laws to allow judges to temporarily take away guns from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

Both measures have been rejected by Republican leaders.

https://www.cbs58.com/news/republicans-vote-to-allow-18-year-olds-to-c
arry-concealed-weapons-on-school-property

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

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Monday, January 24, 2022 8:11 AM

SECOND

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


Underfunded IRS lets tax evaders escape, costs taxpayers billions

Law and order advocates are demanding increased policing because bands of thieves have smashed and grabbed thousands of dollars from jewelry stores, but many of the same pundits have no problem hamstringing the IRS from recovering billions in unpaid taxes.

The Internal Revenue Service started income tax season Monday, but Commissioner Charles Rettig warned that the agency was buried in paper last year. The service relies on antiquated computers, too few staff, and too many paper forms that should have been automated long ago.

“In many areas, we are unable to deliver the amount of service and enforcement that our taxpayers and tax system deserves and needs,” Rettig said in a statement. “This is frustrating for taxpayers, for IRS employees and for me,”

Typically, the IRS begins the year with about 1 million leftover returns to handle. This year, though, it had 6 million unprocessed 2020 returns as of Dec. 23.

The agency’s shambolic condition is by design, not incompetence. Republicans in Congress have underfunded the agency for decades, blocked attempts to improve enforcement, and vilified agents for doing their jobs, which is to make sure everyone pays their fair share.

GOP lawmakers began their assault in 2010 when the IRS’s budget was $14 billion. By 2020, Congress had cut it to $12 billion, despite inflation and a growing population. The agency reduced the number of auditors by a third, down to 9,500, the same number the agency had in 1953.

In fiscal year 2010, the IRS completed 4,325 criminal investigations, but by 2021, that number dropped to 2,766, which was higher than the performance goal set by Congress.

The agency estimates corporations alone are underpaying $125 billion in taxes every year because they know the odds of getting audited are so low.

“Years of steady decrease in the number of special agents available to work cases (due to attrition and limited hiring) as well as (the criminal investigation division’s) focus on traditional tax case programs, continue to impact … overall performance,” the General Accounting Office said in its annual report.

Call me a misanthrope, but I suspect far more than 2,766 taxpayers committed criminal tax evasion in 2020. And I’m willing to wager the $75 billion the criminal investigators did recover last year is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Congressional Budget Office agrees. For every dollar Congress grants the IRS, the agency will return $7.10 from more vigorous enforcement. The additional spending would also correct a disturbing level of income inequality in who gets audited.

“Between 2010 and 2018, the audit rate for higher-income taxpayers fell, while the audit rate for lower-income taxpayers remained fairly stable,” Phillip Swagel, the nonpartisan CBO director, wrote. But increased spending “would return audit rates to the levels of about 10 years ago; the rate would rise for all taxpayers, but higher-income taxpayers would face the largest increase.”

The CBO analysis comes in a scorecard of President Joe Biden’s proposal to rebuild the IRS through the Build Back Better Act, which would provide $80 billion over the next decade to hire new agents and upgrade equipment. The IRS would then reduce the deficit by $400 billion.

Republicans, including Sen. John Cornyn, have promised to block the funding.

“People don’t have confidence that this new army of IRS agents the Biden Administration wants to hire will stay within its appropriate lane and collect taxes that are owed, but not target people who are maybe not of their political philosophy or orientation, or use the IRS to further harass and abuse the American taxpayer,” Cornyn said.

Honestly, though, the wealthy who cheat on their taxes are as bad, if not worse, than the robber smashing a jewelry case. They drain the treasury of funds needed for national security, health care, education and fair elections.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article
/Tomlinson-Underfunded-IRS-lets-tax-evaders-16775955.php



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

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