REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, May 1, 2025 08:29
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PAGE 21 of 36

Friday, March 14, 2025 7:09 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget—and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce—DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.

Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.

On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”

The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.

It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting. Musk reported that he was having difficulty tracing $4.7 trillion in federal spending because the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—a code that links payments to budget items—was allowed to be optional for years and often left blank.
WTF? Every lab I ever worked, whether research, pharma, govt regulatory, or private consulting, required us to attach our expenses to the equivalent of a program code. Or, if work not attributable to a specific program -example, repairing an instrument used for multiple programs - charge to indirect, or apportion the time.

Quote:
In response, Musk tweeted, the Treasury Department now requires “all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. ... All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”
I imagine this will discourage future waste and fraud

Quote:
At the Treasury’s usaspending.gov, which experts use regularly and consider valid despite the big topline errors, nearly $150 billion is slotted every year into an “unreported data” box.
While Musk’s team is reportedly using advanced artificial intelligence systems to comb federal records, it will face a different challenge when tackling the federal employee retirement system. DOGE will confront the “sinkhole of bureaucracy”: records still kept on paper and processed almost entirely by hand by some 700 workers who toil 230 feet below ground in an abandoned limestone mine in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Well, they'll definitely survive a nuclear attack.
I wonder if this is where that X-files scene was filmed? Miles and miles of file cabinets in an old mine....

Quote:
The government’s use of antiquated systems helps explain some of Musk’s team’s biggest mistakes so far. This month, they claimed that millions of deceased people—some listed as more than 300 years old—are receiving social security benefits. It turns out DOGE probably misread the data sets, which includes millions of dead people not receiving benefits, in the antiquated, 1960s-era computer system Social Security still used to disperse more than $1.3 trillion to some 68 million people last year.

Musk conceded errors will be made, but experts told RCI some are impossible to avoid when trying to get a visible net around the surging ocean of federal government spending.

...

“Federal government spending is nebulous and almost designed to be that way because no one person benefits from it being straightforward,” said Lydia Mashburn Newman, a managing director at the American Institute for Economic Research.

“No one is trying to get a holistic picture of what this or that agency is doing and the way money gets appropriated is very fragmented.”

Newman has seen the beast from two sides, as a congressional aide and federal worker, and she says the comprehensive nature of DOGE is something new under the sun for the Washington bureaucracy.

“There is no total view of the budget. Congress simply takes last year’s number and changes it, usually to a larger number,” she said.

“So the unique thing about DOGE is that it is providing a top-to-bottom audit. It’s not just asking if the books balance, but what is the money actually spent on.”

...

One of the biggest challenges DOGE might face involves its effort to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. As RCI reported last year, “Since 2003, when the government first started tracking improper payments, it is estimated that they have added up to more than $2.7 trillion, according to paymentaccuracy.gov, the public website where government agencies report their numbers.” That total is almost certainly a low-ball figure because the feds often rely on states, which also disburse money and often provide spotty accounting of their spending.*

That $2.7 trillion figure does include $764 billion in improper payments paid during the first three years of the Biden administration to the wrong recipients, for the wrong reasons, or in the wrong amounts. The federal government estimates that nearly 6 percent of its total spending went to improper payments during Biden’s presidency, according to OpenTheBooks.com. During its first four-year term, the Trump administration issued an estimated $673 billion in improper payments, which were about 5 percent of government outlays, the watchdog group said.


*Because if the Federal government provides grants to states, and the STATES don't track it properly, how can you tell how much of that money was wasted?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Friday, March 14, 2025 9:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget—and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce—DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.

Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.

On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”

The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.

It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting. Musk reported that he was having difficulty tracing $4.7 trillion in federal spending because the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—a code that links payments to budget items—was allowed to be optional for years and often left blank.
WTF? Every lab I ever worked, whether research, pharma, govt regulatory, or private consulting, required us to attach our expenses to the equivalent of a program code. Or, if work not attributable to a specific program -example, repairing an instrument used for multiple programs - charge to indirect, or apportion the time.


Trust me... This is VERY standard practice within the government, and when these politicians and bureaucrats go into the private sector after decades of training in government, the old habits die hard. They still have all of their former colleagues in the rolodex, they talk to them on the phone all of the time, and quite a few of them just pop in out of the blue to chat on your average Tuesday afternoon.

My first good job was working for a former politician. I was initially brought in as a temp to help them convert from some rinky-dink ass accounting system to QuckbooksPro. More or less a glorified data-entry position that I easily got with typing over 60wpm. After a week, I already had an offer for full time work at 19 years old for more money than I have ever made since if you factor in inflation.

I devised a job number system and over the course of around three months I poured through old documents and came up with $24,000 worth of bills that had never been collected, and I was able to recoup $16,000 of that easily, without any problems.

The owner and 2nd in command loved the system, and we implemented it on all jobs going forward... Except for when we didn't. Several others in the building basically considered me their enemy after I this, and at my boss's request, I hounded them on filling in ALL of the information. This wasn't laziness. This was about hiding things.

And boy... you should have seen political mailing season. We'd get so many contracts that I'd work 120 hour weeks for 3 weeks straight at the end, and everybody in production was put up in a hotel right down the street for that entire time.

But I knew we didn't actually deserve ANY of those contracts. How did I know? Because I knew what we charged private businesses, and if anything because of the sheer size of these mailers it should have been much cheaper per-piece to produce and distribute. But they'd sometimes come in as high as 10 times the going rate. Sometimes I had to pull some teeth and I even had one guy call me a little prick in front of my boss, but they always paid these stupid prices in the end. I was the guy who got all the checks and entered them into Quickbooks. More often than not, even in the good old days before the dotcom bubble burst, I only got those checks after harassing people until they made it their priority to pay off their debt.

There is supposed to be bidding on these things though, and they're supposed to go with the best offer. Not necessarily the lowest price because quality, timliness and reputation are VERY important when dealing with mailers on a strict timeframe. But certainly not the highest price, by far, just because of old alliances (and off the books debts, one should probably assume).

These were all ex-Republicans, btw.

I have never lived under any illusion this is purely a Democratic Party thing.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 7:13 AM

SECOND

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


Trump calls his opponents ‘scum’ and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department

For more than an hour, he delivered an insult-laden speech that shattered the traditional notion of DOJ independence.

By Irie Sentner and Josh Gerstein | 03/14/2025 06:42 PM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/14/trump-doj-speech-prison-oppon
ents-00231438

President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.

While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”

In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”

It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.

Trump charged the DOJ with spying on his campaign, raiding his home, persecuting his “family, staff and supporters,” launching “one hoax and disinformation campaign after the other” and breaking the law “on a colossal scale,” making clear the glee he has taken in undermining the department’s typical independence and wielding it to achieve the White House’s objectives.

“First, we must be honest about the lies and the abuses that have occurred within these walls,” Trump said. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations. They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”

Those days, Trump said, “are over, and they are never going to come back. He added that he would demand “full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”

While any presidential visit to the Justice Department is a rarity, Trump repeatedly breached other norms in his remarks as he slammed former officials, unleashed attacks on private attorneys, and touted his vote tallies in last year’s election.

“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. ... We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”

The president sought to recast his fraught history with the department — most notably the two federal criminal cases he faced last year, one on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the other for refusing to return a hoard of classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump also bragged about revoking the security clearance of “deranged Jack Smith,” the special counsel who indicted him in those cases. (Smith and the Justice Department abandoned both cases after Trump won reelection last year.).

Trump boasted about pardoning hundreds of “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated,” referring to the people convicted in connection with the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he said “there was no better day” than when he fired James Comey, the president’s first-term FBI director who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

“What they’ve ripped down is incalculable,” Trump said of the department’s leaders under the Biden administration.

Trump critics said his decision to come to the Justice Department to deliver such strident attacks was the real source of damage to the department’s traditions and its morale.

“No president has ever given a speech at the Department of Justice like that, where he railed against his political foes and summoned up an agenda for totally political, partisan prosecution,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said. “It was an absolute desecration of the culture and history of the Department of Justice.”

Raskin also ridiculed Trump’s description of those charged in the Capitol riot as political prisoners. “He called the insurrectionists today political prisoners, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Nelson Mandela. What a joke,” the lawmaker said.

Trump also used his visit to offer an effusive tribute to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a ruling that tossed out the classified documents case against him. Prosecutors were appealing that decision when Trump prevailed at the polls last November.

“The case against me was bullshit and she correctly dismissed it,” he said.

Noting that he had appointed her but did not know her personally, Trump praised Cannon as “brilliant” and credited her for standing her ground under withering criticism from the media and legal pundits. “She was very courageous and it only made her angry,” the president said. “They were hitting her so hard it was hard to watch. … She was the absolute model of what a judge should be.”

And he said the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices are treated “unbelievably badly” by Democrats opposing Trump’s agenda.

Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced Trump by pledging that she and others at the department are fully engaged in his mission.

“We will never stop fighting for him and for our country,” she said.

Before the president arrived, the audience heard from two other prominent Trump appointees at DOJ: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. Both did their best to fire up the crowd by declaring that DOJ is heeding Trump’s call to get tough on criminals and undocumented immigrants.

Despite Trump’s repeated and bitter denunciations of his critics, at times Friday he appeared to say that he does not intend to instruct his appointees how to target his opponents but instead plans to trust them to use their judgment to achieve his goals.

“I don’t do it. They do it,” the president said, adding later that he might not return to the department again during his presidency.

Toward the end of his speech, Trump quoted an unlikely source.

“Etched onto the walls of this building are the words English philosopher John Locke said: ‘Where law ends, tyranny begins,’” Trump said. “And I see that.”



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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 8:17 AM

SECOND

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


Attempts to boost US exports risk undermining the foundations of American exceptionalism

By Jeremy Warner | 15 March 2025 11:00am GMT

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/15/trumps-game-plan-for-d
evaluing-the-mighty-dollar/

Stephen Miran, who was confirmed last week as chairman of the US council of economic advisers, suggests that surplus countries should be forced to peg their currencies against the dollar at a beneficial rate to the US by threatening them with even higher trade tariffs should they refuse.

Yet even if this form of competitive devaluation via blackmail were initially successful, it wouldn’t necessarily stop the flow of foreign capital into US markets, and would therefore be hard to maintain.

Miran has got an answer for that, which is to tax the coupon on US treasury securities for overseas buyers so as to discourage foreign demand for them.

The same effect could be achieved, Miran argued in a paper last November, by forcing countries to swap their holdings of US Treasuries for 100-year bonds. In return they would receive security guarantees.

It scarcely needs saying that both these lines of attack would be regarded as a default, and would therefore play havoc with US debt markets and the federal government’s ability to fund its burgeoning budget deficit.

A further approach would be to require the US Federal Reserve to sell dollars for foreign currency without limit, though where that would leave the US’s domestic monetary system is anyone’s guess.

These are by no means fringe views in the Trump camp. Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, has separately pushed the idea of some kind of Bretton Woods-style realignment of global currencies that would put US producers at less of a competitive disadvantage.

The US is by far the biggest buyer of goods in the world; it’s about time, Bessent’s aides say, that the rest of the world started treating the US with the same respect that a business would reserve for its largest customer, and stop ripping Americans off.

As last week drew to a close, Trump’s trade war showed every sign of spiralling out of control. Both the European Union and Canada are seemingly up for a fight, with tit-for-tat retaliatory action against anything Trump throws at them.

As I say, there is nothing new in today’s world that hasn’t been seen before. The whole ghastly, divisive mess we see unfolding before us was perfectly foreseen by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, and is in a sense a direct consequence of the dollar’s global reserve currency status.

Without going into the precise mechanisms, this in effect requires the US to run big, compensating fiscal and trade deficits so as to supply the rest of the world with the dollars it demands.

Keynes’s solution was to establish a separate international reserve currency which he called the “bancor”, but it never flew.

And in any case, would Trump really want to give up the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege”? It’s a fair bet that he would not. Nor does he seem minded to run the balanced budgets that would help mitigate the trade deficit.

There’s no telling where this will end. Badly, would be a reasonable guess.

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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 9:44 AM

SECOND

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


No one has told me why I was fired. But the notice was delivered hours after I declined to recommend reinstating the gun rights of a famous friend of the president, the actor Mel Gibson, who has a history of violence against women. In 2011, Gibson pleaded guilty to battering his former romantic partner, who reported that he hit her while holding their baby and broke her teeth. Shortly after I informed the deputy attorney general's staff that I could not recommend rearming this particular bully, I received my termination notice.

On her first day in office, Bondi issued a memo putting the entire DOJ workforce on notice that we are all now the president’s lawyers.

We have since been warned, both explicitly and by example, that if we do not “faithfully” and “zealously” do the president’s bidding, we will be “rooted out” and silenced. -- Elizabeth Oyer
MARCH 14, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-justi
ce-department-fired-mel-gibson-guns-1235296311/

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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 12:22 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.

Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 1:01 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:
More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.

Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.
6ix, you deserve to be hit in the face with a shotgun blast, you goddamn Nazi who is hypnotized into believing he is not one. Same for RFK Jr:

Falsely Claiming Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’

Robert Kennedy spreading BS in an interview. This article does have a clip to it (MedPage Today on which you can listen to Mr. “irregardless” Robert Kennedy discuss his beliefs)

In this MedPage Today video, Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, responds to claims about measles and vaccines made by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in recent interviews.

March 14, 2025 3:27 pm

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/03/falsely-claiming-measles-vax-causes-
deaths-every-year

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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 2:35 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.

Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.
6ix, you deserve to be hit in the face with a shotgun blast, you goddamn Nazi who is hypnotized into believing he is not one.


Added to the list.

You really need to take that break. You're losing your shit now that the Democratic Party is dead and the news doesn't tell you what you want to hear anymore.




Come and get me. Show me what a man you are with that shotgun in your hand, faggot.




And I wonder what Kevin Drum would think about your behavior as he looks up at you from hell.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 6:59 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:

Added to the list.
6ix, do you remember what happened to the Nazis? Execution. 6ix, add that to your list, Nazi who insists he is not.

Elon Musk to CNN: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit," Musk said. "They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."
Empathy, he said, has been "weaponized."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empa
thy-doge/index.html

G.M. Gilbert was the chief psychologist who interviewed Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. His words are as valid today: "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining It: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
https://www.tumblr.com/wilwheaton/710866275687120896/in-my-work-with-t
he-defendants-at-the-nuremberg

Sieg Heil Mein Führer Trump



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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 7:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, this is the definition of sociopathy, and describes you to a "T":

Quote:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining It: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."


Not once have I seen you express empathy for anybody.

SIX, you also fail to express empathy for anyone not like you. But at least you have empathy for your family and friends.

Being empathetic doesn't mean turning yourself inside out to help. But at least don't harm. That's why my statement "I believe in solving problems". I don't believe in "helping" people when their problems can, and should, be fixed.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Saturday, March 15, 2025 7:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Added to the list.
6ix, do you remember what happened to the Nazis? Execution. 6ix, add that to your list, Nazi who insists he is not.

Elon Musk to CNN: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit," Musk said. "They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."
Empathy, he said, has been "weaponized."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empa
thy-doge/index.html

G.M. Gilbert was the chief psychologist who interviewed Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. His words are as valid today: "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining It: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
https://www.tumblr.com/wilwheaton/710866275687120896/in-my-work-with-t
he-defendants-at-the-nuremberg

Sieg Heil Mein Führer Trump



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



Thank you for continuing to document your daily descent into madness.

Endless source of laughs for me.

Might end up quite useful for others one day soon.

Sweet dreams.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 8:17 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 SIGNYM:
SECOND, this is the definition of sociopathy, and describes you to a "T":
I know you misunderstood how WWII was won. German families were firebombed rather than gently persuaded by the most articulate American philosophers to reconsider peace as the answer to Germany's material and psychological needs.

Germans were shocked, completely aghast, that the formerly admirable Americans would kill harmless women and tiny babies. Such a descent into barbarianism by the Americans! The United States Air Force must be full of nothing but psychopaths who care little about human suffering, death, and the sanctity of German culture.

Alternatively, the Germans should have realized that their own behavior was the cause of their suffering, not the psychopathy of American bomber crews. But the Germans never got that message. Until the end, the Germans saw themselves as good, not evil as they actually were. All the Germans could think about was their suffering. Germans had zero empathy for anyone but themselves. For being zeros, the Germans had to die.

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

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Saturday, March 15, 2025 8:25 PM

SECOND

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


I want to remind Trumptards that you do NOT decide if you are evil. The people you are evil toward will decide for you. Sometimes they will decide that the evil-doers shall die for what they did. This always, without fail, surprises the evil-doers, who cannot always see themselves for what they are:

Republican Representative Chuck Edwards decided to hold a town hall meeting in his district Thursday, and it went so badly that he had to call for security to escort him out.

Edwards was bombarded with angry questions from his constituents in Asheville, North Carolina, over President Trump’s disastrous policy decisions. One constituent asked the congressman some blunt questions that got support from the raucous crowd.

“Do you support Trump on annexing Canada or Greenland, and do you like the way he treats the premier or the president of Canada, calling him ‘governor’? Is that the way you’d do as a diplomat? Is that, is that the way the United States should act to our closest neighbors?” the constituent asked, drawing applause from the audience. He followed up with more direct questions.

“Do you enjoy the way he’s tried to extort minerals from the Ukraine? Do you like bullying people that need your help? Do you go for kicking the guy when he’s down? Do you support Trump in these things? This is a yes or no,” he pressed further.

holy shit this question at the Rep. Chuck Edwards town hall https://pic.twitter.com/Sh1V1bKNtC
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 13, 2025

Edwards managed to muster up a response, replying, “The short answer to that is no, I do not,” drawing his own small amount of applause. But then he lost the crowd when he backed Trump’s stance on extracting Ukrainian resources in exchange for military aid . . .

https://newrepublic.com/post/192757/republican-congressman-edwards-esc
ort-town-hall

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

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 12:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I want to remind Trumptards that you do NOT decide if you are evil. The people you are evil toward will decide for you.


I've never done anything to you, you simple-minded fuck.

I've extended olive branches to you before. When I first came out of my drinking coma, I remember giving Sigs shit about attacking you and Ted and Nilbog, not yet realizing just how fucking awful the three of you are.

You get the full end of my blunt verbal wrath these days because you've earned it.

Short of that, I don't give one single fuck who it is you think I am or what it is you think I've done you little fucking worm.

You sure as fuck don't get to decide who is and who isn't evil.

You can't even keep an opinion the same from one day to the next because you believe whatever the media tells you and that requires constantly shifting your core values to keep right on believing them after they've lied to you time and time and time again for so many years.

You're brain dead. You're a cultist. And you are an EXTREMELY bad representative for your cult.

Keep making death threats and hope nobody important stumbles upon them here.



And on that topic, The Critical Drinker just made a video about Firefly yesterday that's got just under 700k views. I wonder if anybody found our site after watching that video and got a look at the local banter in 2025.

Maybe somebody at FOX said "Oh yeah. I remember that show." and came here and saw all of the pirated links to Disney and Fox movies you've plastered all over the place too. That could be just as fun to watch play out on my end.

I know who you are. It will be really funny to see your name in the news one day.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 5:46 AM

SECOND

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


Was Lincoln’s Cabinet full of psychopaths when they unanimously disapproved of Lincoln’s peace plan? Or was Lincoln being naive for seeing good when the Confederates are utterly evil? You decide from this National Park Service story about the Hampton Roads Peace Conference:

Lincoln at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, Fort Monroe, VA, February 3, 1865

https://www.nps.gov/foth/hampton-roads-peace-conference.htm

Lincoln pledged to the Confederates that he would be generous in restoring property taken under the Confiscation Act. Specifically, he was willing to “renumerate the southern people for their slaves.” He was revisiting compensated emancipation, an idea that he had long supported. He had unsuccessfully attempted to use offers of compensated emancipation to end the war in the summer of 1861. Lincoln was successful at ending slavery in Washington, DC though this very method. The Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862 paid enslavers around $300 for each enslaved person in the capital. To Lincoln, this was a dollars and cents move. The cost to pay for the freedom of each enslaved person, by buying them from their enslavers, would be less than the staggering cost of the war. The United States spent almost $3 million per day on the war effort by February 1865.

Seward openly disagreed with Lincoln's offer. He said that the United States “had already done enough in expending so much money on the war for the abolition of slavery.” Seward paced the floor in anxious disapproval, while Lincoln reasoned that both sides carried some responsibility for slavery. “If it was wrong in the South to hold slaves, it was wrong in the North to carry on the slave trade and sell them to the South, the president said.” Lincoln could give no assurances on this offer. He insisted, though, that he was not alone in the support of compensated emancipation. He said that there were others willing to do this “if the war shall now cease without further expense, and with the abolition of slavery as stated.”

Lincoln went on to add the details of his plan. The states in rebellion would receive half of a proposed $400 million package, distributed in proportion to their enslaved population by April 1 if all resistance to national authority had ceased. The other half would be payable by July 1, if the states ratified the 13th Amendment by then.

Lincoln pursued compensated emancipation again in a specially scheduled Cabinet meeting on the evening of February 5. He defended his plan as a “measure of strict and simple economy” and wanted to send it to Congress for consideration. After some discussion, the Cabinet voted against the idea. Lincoln's advisors believed the rebels would mistake the offer as a “sign of Northern weakness and war weariness” which could infuse a new energy into their war efforts. They felt strongly that the “only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms.”

Lincoln was disappointed, saying “you are all against me.” He noted later that he had drawn up papers that were “submitted to the Cabinet and unanimously disapproved by 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, March 16, 2025 5:49 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:
I want to remind Trumptards that you do NOT decide if you are evil. The people you are evil toward will decide for you.


I've never done anything to you, you simple-minded fuck.

You sure as fuck don't get to decide who is and who isn't evil.
6ix, do you remember writing "Fuck Ukraine"? With only two words you revealed your depraved mind. Just like Trump with his and your millions of words, both of you have given a complete picture of how evil you are. The Trumptards harp upon the Second Amendment without realizing that it gives anybody, not exclusively Trumptards, the right to decide who is evil and do something to them without permission. The Fifth Amendment gives them the right not to explain why they used guns without the expressed permission of the person shot dead. The Future looks very dangerous for out-of-control Trumptards with predilections for evil and the belief that nobody can stop Trumptards. The Winds of Change will violently blow away Trumptards if they don't stop acting insane.

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

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 5:50 AM

SECOND

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


'Madness swirls': Ex-GOP insider says 'Trump’s presidency is incoherence'

By David McAfee | March 15, 2025 4:01PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-presidency-already-state-collapse/

Political strategist Steve Schmidt on Saturday turned to Trump's recent Justice Department speech.

"He went to the Justice Department, and pissed all over the rule of law with fevered declarations about revenge, conspiracies, locking up his opponents, and the illegal media that are a threat to America because they don’t worship the king," according to the strategist. "What is the sin of America’s broken media? What is the failure?"

Schmidt also blasts those he sees as enabling Trump, such as Marco Rubio and the Democratic lawmakers who confirmed him. Rubio defended Trump’s 51st state rhetoric while on Canadian soil.

"How many Democratic votes did he get for confirmation? The correct answer was all 47 Democratic votes. This moment demands coherence and guts. It demands integrity and fierceness," he wrote. "Something terrible is happening in America, and there are too many anesthesiologists working in media and politics."

"Donald Trump’s presidency is already in a state of collapse and crisis," Schmidt wrote. "His incoherence, lack of discipline, focus, basic competence and connection to the grassroots can be excused by his winged monkeys like Laura Ingraham on Fox News."

In his conclusion, Schmidt said, "Each day, madness swirls from dawn to dusk as Donald Trump produces his masterpiece."

"He sits in the center ring with a whip in his hand behind the most powerful desk in the world, but somehow, for so many fools whose job it is to see him, he remains a mystery," he said.

Steve Schmidt’s full remarks at https://steveschmidt.substack.com/p/seeing-trump

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

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 5:53 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump's Department of Justice stunned numerous experts on Saturday with a request in a court that some said is without precedent in the U.S.

"The DOJ is arguing that the President can unilaterally deport anyone he wants without ANY statutory authority, just on his inherent authority as President over national security."

Reichlin-Melnick added, "While of course deporting citizens is unlawful, I see nothing specific in the DOJ’s argument that would purport to limit that claim to noncitizens, since it's based on membership in a gang. But this is also a badly written brief with a stupid and unlawful argument at its core."

Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat also flagged the appeal, writing on social media, "Everyone who thought he was joking about being a dictator, are you waking up now?"

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-brief-terrifying-court-deport/

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

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 6:23 AM

SECOND

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


An article about euthanizing crazy pets. If your howling-mad local Trumptard can't be trained to NOT piss on your valuables, consider euthanizing them. The Trumptards act as badly as they do because they are mentally damaged beyond help.

https://slate.com/advice/2025/03/dog-young-euthanize-vet-issues-pet-ad
vice.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, March 16, 2025 7:38 AM

SECOND

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


Trump claims tariffs will make the U.S. ‘rich again.’ But 5 undisputed facts about how they work throw cold water on that notion

By Shawn Tully | March 16, 2025 at 4:00 AM CDT

https://fortune.com/2025/03/16/trump-tariffs-how-they-work-economy-rec
ession-predictions/

Boarding Air Force One on March 12, President Donald Trump quipped, “We’re going to raise hundreds of billions in tariffs; we’re going to become so rich we’re not going to know where to spend that money.” Despite hand-wringing from CEOs, the stock market tanking, and widespread condemnation from our trading partners, the President is forging ahead with his trade war. In doing so, he’s counting on big windfalls from these import taxes, along with the savings he boasts will flow from Elon Musk’s DOGE campaign, to fulfill his promise of sharply reducing America’s yawning fiscal deficits. But in examining five facts about how tariffs actually work, it’s clear that they will have a huge effect on the economy—just not the one the President is projecting.

Fact 1: Tariffs are a tax that will be mainly, if not wholly, borne by U.S. consumers

Trump has always insisted that other nations or foreign companies will pay the full cost of the tariffs that the U.S. collects on imports. During campaign stops in September, he stated, “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country,” and “It’s not going to cost you, it’ going to be a cost to another country.”

As a first step, it’s important to understand who actually makes the payment. When a Chinese or Canadian exporter ships components or finished goods to one of the 328 US ports of entry, the U.S. importer purchasing the goods—not the exporter or another nation—pays the tariff, also called an “import tax,” to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. The tariff is assessed as a fixed percentage of the price the exporter’s charges pre-tariff. That charge gets added to the price the U.S. importer pays.

The real cost of the tariff, however, can fall in part or whole on three parties. If the U.S. just increased tariffs on auto parts by 10%, the overseas producer could reduce its price by a like amount to maintain its sales to Ford or GM. Or, if the exporter tacks the 10% duty onto its selling price, the automakers could absorb the extra expense; they’d keep their car prices the same, and accept lower margins. In theory, if between them, the foreign exporter and the U.S. importer swallow the tariff, the cost won’t fall on the U.S. consumer. On the other hand, a U.S. importer shouldering the charge would be making a lot less money, and gain less earnings for building new plants and expanding its workforce.

But that’s not how it works in practice, according to studies of the real-world impact of past tariff increases. In a paper on the Trump tariff regime of 2018 and 2019 published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the four economist-authors analyzed the effect of the increase in tariffs during Trump’s first term from an average of 3.7% to 26.8% on almost 18,000 products including many types of steel, aluminum, and appliances, and covering $421 billion or over 18% of all U.S. imports. Their review found that for steel, exporters actually dropped their prices to U.S. importers—a group that would encompass builders, wholesalers, canners, and other customers, fully offsetting the tariffs—thereby ducking a big blow to their U.S. sales.

But that was an outlier. Overall, prices for the targeted goods rose 21.9% on average between the time the tariffs struck in 2018 and the close of 2019. The study found that, steel aside, “U.S. consumers have borne the entire incidence of U.S. tariffs.” Americans at the auto lots and supermarkets shouldered what’s known as a “one hundred percent pass-through” of the tariff tax. A second analysis of the first Trump wave from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Who’s Paying for the Tariffs?” (2020), reached a similar conclusion, noting: “We have found that in most sectors, tariffs have been completely passed on to U.S. firms and consumers.” The article doesn’t posit how much goes to consumer prices versus lower margins, but finds the U.S., not foreign companies, felt the full force of Trump’s first round to import taxes.

Fact 2: Tariffs don’t accelerate growth in output and employment, they throttle both

President Trump often trumpets that “tariffs are going to be the greatest thing we’ve ever done for our country.”

But the experience from his first term doesn’t confirm this confidence, according to “The Return of Protectionism,” as updated in January 2020. The paper details that tariff increases do indeed create winners and losers, but on balance, they hurt the economy more than they help. The authors estimate that domestic producers gained $24 billion in sales per year in 2018 and 2019, as tariffs raised prices for competing imports, making U.S.-produced goods more attractive to consumers and businesses. The duties also generated $65 billion in annual tax revenue. Downside: The tariffs raised prices to U.S. customers by $114 billion each year. Hence, according to the reckoning in the Journal of Economics, the U.S. economy suffered a net loss from the first big experiment of $25 billion (the $114 billion extra spent by consumers less the $89 billion from taxes and increased revenues by U.S. companies).

Domestic producers, the study estimates, would have benefited much more if they hadn’t lost $8 billion of their own export sales due to retaliation from abroad. All told, the authors estimate that tariffs shaved 0.13% from annual GDP in 2018 and 2019. Upshot: Sans tariffs, our output would have averaged 4.9% over the two-year span instead of the 4.75% the U.S. achieved. Keep in mind that a tariff increase that’s a fraction of what Trump’s envisioning drove this meaningful zap to GDP.

The most in-depth, historical analysis on the topic, an IMF working paper from 2019, appeared too early to assess the duties imposed in Trump’s first term. But they were a harbinger for what happened then—and what’s ahead. The four authors studied the impact of tariff increases from 1963 to 2014 across 151 nations. Their finding: a rise of 3.5% in import duties shaved 0.4% from annual GDP growth after five years, and led to a 1.5% increase in unemployment. And the authors didn’t calculate the extra pounding from our producers’ loss of exports triggered by retaliation.

Fact 3: Big tariffs will not reduce the Trump-hated trade deficit

Fact 4: Tariffs will do little if anything to shrink the federal budget deficit

Fact 5: We’re not getting fleeced by conniving, protectionist trading partners

Continued at https://fortune.com/2025/03/16/trump-tariffs-how-they-work-economy-rec
ession-predictions/

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

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 12:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
An article about euthanizing crazy pets. If your howling-mad local Trumptard can't be trained to NOT piss on your valuables, consider euthanizing them. The Trumptards act as badly as they do because they are mentally damaged beyond help.

https://slate.com/advice/2025/03/dog-young-euthanize-vet-issues-pet-ad
vice.html

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


Last time I checked, we're not the ones who start burning and looting every time we don't get our way.

Grow up.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 16, 2025 12:31 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I want to remind Trumptards that you do NOT decide if you are evil. The people you are evil toward will decide for you.


I've never done anything to you, you simple-minded fuck.

I've extended olive branches to you before. When I first came out of my drinking coma, I remember giving Sigs shit about attacking you and Ted and Nilbog, not yet realizing just how fucking awful the three of you are.

You get the full end of my blunt verbal wrath these days because you've earned it.

Short of that, I don't give one single fuck who it is you think I am or what it is you think I've done you little fucking worm.

You sure as fuck don't get to decide who is and who isn't evil.

You can't even keep an opinion the same from one day to the next because you believe whatever the media tells you and that requires constantly shifting your core values to keep right on believing them after they've lied to you time and time and time again for so many years.

You're brain dead. You're a cultist. And you are an EXTREMELY bad representative for your cult.

Keep making death threats and hope nobody important stumbles upon them here.



And on that topic, The Critical Drinker just made a video about Firefly yesterday that's got just under 700k views. I wonder if anybody found our site after watching that video and got a look at the local banter in 2025.

Maybe somebody at FOX said "Oh yeah. I remember that show." and came here and saw all of the pirated links to Disney and Fox movies you've plastered all over the place too. That could be just as fun to watch play out on my end.

I know who you are. It will be really funny to see your name in the news one day.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, do you remember writing "Fuck Ukraine"?


Absolutely.

Fuck Ukraine. Fuck you and your party's played-out appeal to stupid people's emotions. Fuck you.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 7:10 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:

Absolutely.

Fuck Ukraine. Fuck you and your party's played-out appeal to stupid people's emotions. Fuck you.
Yep. That attitude pretty much coincides with what I see from all Trumptards. I've seldom seen one of those Trump robots become conscious for a moment of what havoc their attitudes cause beyond their immediate vicinity. None of the following exists for a Trumptard because it is not happening to them, although they made it happen without being conscious:

Hundreds of Thousands Will Die

The writer, surgeon, and former U.S.A.I.D. senior official Atul Gawande on the Trump Administration’s decimation of foreign aid and the consequences around the world.

By David Remnick | March 15, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/atul-gawan
de-on-elon-musks-surgery-with-a-chainsaw

It is hard to calculate all the good that Atul Gawande has done in the world. After training as a surgeon at Harvard, he taught medicine inside the hospital and in the classroom. A contributor to The New Yorker since 1998, he has published widely on issues of public health. His 2007 article in the magazine and the book that emerged from it, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” have been sources of clarity and truth in the debate over health-care costs. In 2014, he published “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” a vivid, poetic, compassionate narrative that presents unforgettable descriptions of the ways the body ages and our end-of-life choices.

Gawande’s work on public health was influential in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, and, starting in November, 2020, he served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 Advisory Board. In July, 2021, Biden nominated him as the assistant administrator for the Bureau of Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked to limit disease outbreaks overseas. Gawande, who is fifty-nine, resigned the position on the day of Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency.

When we spoke recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande, usually a wry, high-spirited presence, was in a grave mood. There were flashes of anger and despair in his voice. He was, after all, watching Trump and Elon Musk dismantle, gleefully, a global health agency that had only lately been for him a source of devotion and inspiration. As a surgeon, Gawande had long been in a position to save one life at a time. More recently, and all too briefly, he was part of a vast collective responsible for untold good around the world. And now, as he made plain, that collective has been deliberately cast into chaos, even ruins. The cost in human lives is sure to be immense. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

President Biden appointed you as the assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., a job that you’ve described as the greatest job in medicine. You stepped down on Trump’s Inauguration Day, and he immediately began targeting U.S.A.I.D. with an executive order that halted all foreign aid. Did you know, or did you intuit, that Trump would act the way he has?

I had no idea. In the previous Trump Administration, they had embraced what they themselves called the “normals.” They had a head of U.S.A.I.D. who was devoted to the idea of development and soft power in the world. They had their own wrinkle on it, which I didn’t disagree with. They called it “the journey to self-reliance,” and they wanted to invest in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, to enable stronger economies, more capacity—and we weren’t doing enough of that. I actually continued much of the work that had occurred during that time.

Tell me a little bit about what you were in charge of and what good was being done in the world.

I had twenty-five hundred people, between D.C. and sixty-five countries around the world, working on advancing health and protecting Americans from diseases and outbreaks abroad. The aim was to work with countries to build their systems so that we protected global health security and improved global outcomes—from reducing H.I.V./AIDS and other infectious diseases like malaria and T.B., to strengthening primary health-care systems, so that those countries would move on from depending on aid from donors. In three years, we documented saving more than 1.2 million lives after COVID alone.

Let’s pause on that. Your part of U.S.A.I.D. was responsible, demonstrably, for saving 1.2 million lives—from what?

So, COVID was the first global reduction in life expectancy in seventy years, and it disrupted the ability across the world to deliver basic health services, which includes H.I.V./AIDS [medications], but also included childhood immunizations, and managing diarrhea and pneumonia. Part of my target was to reduce the percentage of deaths in any given country that occur before the age of fifty. The teams would focus on the top three to five killers. In some places, that would be H.I.V.; in some places that would be T.B. Safe childbirth was a huge part of the work. And immunizations: forty per cent of the gains in survival for children under five in the past fifty years in the world came from vaccines alone. So vaccines were a big part of the work as well.

What was the case against this kind of work? It just seems like an absolute good.

One case is that it could have been more efficient, right? Americans imagine that huge sums of money go to this work. Polls show that they think that a quarter of our spending goes to foreign aid. In fact, on a budget for our global health work that is less than half the budget of the hospital where I did surgery here in Boston, we reached hundreds of millions of people, with programs that saved lives by the millions. That’s why I describe it as the best job in medicine that people have never heard of. It is at a level of scale I could never imagine experiencing. So the case against it—I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money laundering, that this was corruption.

Where would he get this idea? Where does this mythology come from?

Well, what’s hard to parse is: What is just willful ignorance? Not just ignorance—it’s lying, right? For example, there’s a statistic that they push that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s dollars actually got to recipients in the world. Now, this is a willful distortion of a statistic that says that only ten per cent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding went to local organizations as opposed to multinational organizations and others. There’s a legitimate criticism to be made that that percentage should be higher, that more local organizations should get the funds. I did a lot of work that raised those numbers considerably, got it to thirty per cent, but that was not the debate they were having. They’re claiming that the money’s not actually reaching people and that corruption is taking it away, when, in fact, the reach—the ability to get to enormous numbers of people—has been a best buy in health and in humanitarian assistance for a long time.

Now the over-all agency, as I understand it, had about ten thousand people working for it. How many are working at U.S.A.I.D. now?

Actually, the number was about thirteen thousand. And the over-all number now—it’s hard to estimate because people are being turned on and off like a light switch—

Turned on and off, meaning their computers are shut down?

Yeah, and they’re being terminated and then getting unterminated—like, “Oops, sorry, we let the Ebola team go.” You heard Elon Musk say something to that effect in the Oval Office. “But we’ve brought them back, don’t worry.” It’s a moving target, but this is what I’d say: more than eighty per cent of the contracts have been terminated, representing the work that is done by U.S.A.I.D. and the for-profit and not-for-profit organizations they work with, like Catholic Relief Services and the like. And more than eighty per cent of the staff has been put on administrative leave, terminated, or dismissed in one way or the other.

So it’s been obliterated.

It has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean, at this point, it’s six weeks in. Twenty million people with H.I.V., for example—including five hundred thousand children—who had received medicines that keep them alive have now been cut off for six weeks.

A lot of people are going to die as a result of this. Am I wrong?

The internal estimates are that more than a hundred and sixty thousand people will die from malaria per year, from the abandonment of these programs, if they’re not restored. We’re talking about twenty million people dependent on H.I.V. medicines—and you have to calculate how many you think will get back on, and how many will die in a year. But you’re talking hundreds of thousands in Year One at a minimum. But then on immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths.

I’m sorry, Atul. I have to stop my cool journalistic questioning and say: This is nothing short of outrageous. How is it possible that this is happening? Obviously, these facts are filtering up to Elon Musk, to Donald Trump, and to the Administration at large. And they don’t care?

The logic is to deny the reality, either because they simply don’t want to believe it—that they’re so steeped in the idea that government officials are corrupt and lazy and unable to deliver anything, and that a group of young twentysomething engineers will fix it all—or they are indifferent. And when Musk waves around the chainsaw—we are seeing what surgery on the U.S. government with a chainsaw looks like at U.S.A.I.D. And it’s just the beginning of the playbook. This was the soft target. This is affecting people abroad—it’s tens of thousands of jobs at home, so there’s harm here; there’s disease that will get here, etc. But this was the easy target. Now it’s being brought to the N.I.H., to the C.D.C., to critical parts of not only the health enterprise but other important functions of government.

So the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other such bureaucracies that do equal medical good will also get slammed?

Are being slammed. So here’s the playbook: you take the Treasury’s payment system—DOGE and Musk took over the information system for the Treasury and the payments in the government; you take over the H.R. software, so you can turn people’s badges and computer access on and off at will; you take over the buildings—they cancelled the leases, so you don’t have buildings. U.S.A.I.D.—the headquarters was given to the Customs and Border Protection folks. And then you’ve got it all, right? And then he’s got X, which feeds right into Fox News, and you’ve got control of the media as well. It’s a brilliant playbook.

But from the outside, at least, Atul, and maybe from your vantage point as well: this looks like absolute chaos. I’ve been reading this week that staff posted overseas are stranded, fired without a plane ticket home. From the inside, what does it look like?

One example: U.S.A.I.D. staff in the Congo had to flee for their lives and watch on television as their own home was destroyed and their kids’ belongings attacked. And then when they called for help and backup, they could not get it. I spoke to staff involved in one woman’s case, a pregnant woman in her third trimester, in a conflict zone. They have maternity leave just like everybody else there. But because the contracts had been turned off, they couldn’t get a flight out, and were not guaranteed safe passage, and couldn’t get care for her complications, and ended up having to get cared for locally without the setup to address her needs. One person said to me, as she’s enduring these things, “My government is attacking me. We ought to be ashamed. Our entire system of checks and balances has failed us.”

What’s been the reaction in these countries, in the governments, and among the people? The sense of abandonment must be intense on all sides.

There are broadly three areas. The biggest part of U.S.A.I.D. is the FEMA for disasters abroad. It’s called the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and they bring earthquake response; wildfire response; response in conflicts, in famines. These are the people who suit up, and get assistance, and stabilize places where things are going wrong.

The Global Health Bureau, which I led, is the second-largest part of the agency, and that does work around diseases and health threats, as well as advancing health systems in low- and middle-income countries around the world. There’s coöperation on solving global problems, like stopping pandemics, and addressing measles outbreaks, and so on.

The third is advancing countries’ economies, freedom, and democracy. John F. Kennedy, when he formed U.S.A.I.D. in 1961, said that it was to counter the adversaries of freedom and to provide compassionate support for the development of the world. U.S.A.I.D. has kept Ukraine’s health system going and gave vital support to keep their energy infrastructure going, as Russia attacked it. In Haiti, this is the response team that has sought to stabilize what’s become a gang-controlled part of the country. Our health teams kept almost half of the primary health-care system for the population going. So around the world: stopping fentanyl flow, bringing in independent media. All of that has been wiped out completely. And in many cases, the people behind that work—most of the people we’re working with, local partners to keep these things going—are now being attacked. Those partners are now being attacked, in country after country.

What you’re describing is both human compassion and, a phrase you used earlier in our conversation, “soft power.” Describe what that is. Why is it so important to the United States and to the world? What will squandering it—what will destroying it—mean?

The tools of foreign policy, as I’ve learned, are defense, diplomacy, and development. And the development part is the soft power. We’re not sending troops into Asia and Africa and Latin America. We’re sending hundreds of thousands of civilians without uniforms, who are there to represent the United States, and to pursue common goals together—whether it’s stemming the tide of fentanyl coming across the border, addressing climate disasters, protecting the world from disease. And that soft power is a reflection of our values, what we stand for—our strong belief in freedom, self-determination, and advancement of people’s economies; bringing more stability and peace to the world. That is the fundamental nature of soft power: that we are not—what Trump is currently trying to create—a world of simply “Might makes right, and you do what we tell you,” because that does not create stability. It creates chaos and destruction.

An immoral universe in which everybody’s on their own.

That’s right. An amoral universe.

Who is standing up, if anyone, in the Administration? What about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whom you mentioned. What’s his role in all of this? Back in January, he issued a waiver to allow for lifesaving services to continue. That doesn’t seem to have been at all effective.

It hasn’t happened. He has issued a waiver that said that the subset of work that is directly lifesaving—through humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and so on, and the health work that I used to lead—will continue; we don’t want these lives to be lost. And yet it hasn’t been implemented. It’s clear that he’s not in control of the mechanisms that make these things happen. DOGE does not approve the payments going out, and has not approved the payments going out, to sustain that work.

The federal courts have ruled that the freeze was likely illegal and unconstitutional, and imposed a temporary restraining order saying that it should not be implemented, that it had to be lifted—the payment freeze. Instead, they doubled down. And Marco Rubio signed on to this, tweeted about it earlier this week—that over eighty per cent of all contracts have now been terminated. And the remaining ones—they have not even made a significant dent in making back payments that are owed for work done even before Trump was inaugurated.

There’s always been skepticism, particularly on the right, about foreign aid. I remember Jesse Helms, of North Carolina, would always rail about the cost of foreign aid and how it was useless, in his view, in many senses. I am sure that in your time in office, you must have dealt with officials who were skeptical of the mission. What kind of complaints were you getting from senators and congressmen and the like, even before the Trump Administration took over in January?

It was a minority. I’ll just start by saying: the support for foreign-aid work has been recognized and supported by Republicans and Democrats for decades. But there’s been a consistent—it was a minority—that had felt that the U.S. shouldn’t be involved abroad. That’s part of an isolationist view, that extending this work is just charity; it’s not in U.S. interests and it’s not necessary for the protection of Americans. The argument is that we should be spending it at home.

They’re partly playing into the populist view that huge portions of the budget are going abroad, when that’s not been the case. But it’s also understandable that when people are suffering at home, when there are significant needs here, it can be hard to make connections to why we need to fight to stop problems abroad before they get here.

And yet we only recently endured the COVID epidemic, which by all accounts did not begin at home, and spread all over the world. Why was COVID not convincing as a manifestation of how a greater international role could help?

Certainly that didn’t convince anybody that that was able to be controlled abroad—

Because it wasn’t.

Because it wasn’t, right. And COVID did drive a significant distrust in the public-health apparatus itself because of the suffering that people endured through that entire emergency. But I would say the larger picture is—every part of government spending has its critics. One of the fascinating things about the foreign-aid budget, which has been the least popular part of the budget, is that U.S.A.I.D. was mostly never heard of. Now it has high name recognition, and has majority support for continuing its programs, whether it’s keeping energy infrastructure alive in Ukraine, stabilizing conflicts—whether it’s Haiti or other parts of the world—to keep refugees from swarming more borders, or the work of purely compassionate humanitarian assistance and health aid that reduces the over-all death rates from diseases that may yet harm us. So it’s been a significant jump in support for this work, out of awareness now of what it is, and how much less it turns out to cost.

So it took this disaster to raise awareness.

That’s human nature, right? Loss aversion. When you lose it is when you realize its value.

Atul, there’s been a measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and R.F.K., Jr.—who’s now leading the Department of Health and Human Services—has advised some people, at least, to use cod-liver oil. We have this multilayered catastrophe that you’ve been describing. Where could the United States be, in a couple of years, from a health perspective? What worries you the most?

Measles is a good example. There’s actually now been a second death. We hadn’t had a child death from measles in the United States in years. We are now back up, globally, to more than a hundred thousand child deaths. I was on the phone with officials at the World Health Organization—the U.S. had chosen measles as a major area that it wanted to support. It provided eighty per cent of the support in that area, and let other countries take other components of W.H.O.’s work. So now, that money has been pulled from measles programs around the world. And having a Secretary of Health who has done more to undermine confidence in measles vaccines than anybody in the world means that that’s a singular disease that can be breaking out, and we’ll see many more child deaths that result from that.

The over-all picture, the deeper concern I have, is that as a country we’re abandoning the idea that we can come together collectively with other nations to do good in the world. People describe Trump as transactional, but this is a predatory view of the world. It is one in which you not only don’t want to participate in coöperation; you want to destroy the coöperation. There is a deep desire to make the W.H.O. ineffective in working with other nations; to make other U.N. organizations ineffective in doing their work. They already struggled with efficiency and being effective in certain domains, and yet they continue to have been very important in global health emergencies, responding and tracking outbreaks. . . .

We have a flu vaccine because there are parts of the world where flu breaks out, like China, that don’t share data with us. But they share it with the W.H.O., and the result is that we have a flu vaccine that’s tuned to the diseases coming our way by the fall. I don’t know how we’ll get a flu vaccine this fall. Either we’ll get it because people are, under the table, communicating with the W.H.O. to get the information, and the W.H.O is going to share it, even though the U.S. is no longer paying, or we’re going to work with other countries and be dependent on them for our flu vaccine. This is not a good answer.

I must ask you this, more generally: You’re watching a President of the United States begin to side with Russia over Ukraine. You’re watching the dismantlement of our foreign-aid budget, and both its compassion and its effectiveness. Just the other day, we saw a Columbia University graduate—you may agree with him, disagree with him on his politics, but who has a green card—and ICE officers went to his apartment and arrested him, and presumably will deport him. It’s an assault on the First Amendment. You’re seeing universities being defunded—starting with Columbia, but it’ll hardly be the last, etc. What in your view motivates Donald Trump to behave in this way? What’s the vision that pulls this all together?

What I see happening on the health side is reflective of everything you just said. There is a fundamental desire to remove and destroy independent sources of knowledge, of power, of decision-making. So not only is U.S.A.I.D. dismantled but there’s thousands of people fired—from the National Institutes of Health, the C.D.C., the Food and Drug Administration—and a fundamental restructuring of decision-making so that political judgment drives decision-making over N.I.H. grants, which have been centralized and pulled away from the individual institutes. So the discoveries that lead to innovations in the world—that work has a political layer now. F.D.A. approvals—now wanting a political review. C.D.C. guidance—now wanting a political review. These organizations were all created by Congress to be shielded from that, so that we could have a professional, science-driven set of decisions, and not the political flavor of the moment.

Donald Trump’s preference, which he’s expressed in those actions and many others, is that his whims, just like King Henry VIII’s, should count. King Henry VIII remade an entire religion around who he wanted to marry. And this is the kind of world that Trump is wanting to create—one of loyalty trumping any other considerations. So the inspectors general who do audits over the corruption that they seem to be so upset about—they’ve been removed. Any independent judgment in society that would trump the political whims of the leader. . . . The challenge is—and I think is the source of hope for me—that a desire for chaos, for acceding to destruction, for accepting subjugation, is not a stable equilibrium. It’s not successful in delivering the goods for people, under any line of thinking.

In the end, professionally organized bureaucracies—that need to have political oversight, need to have some controls in place, but a balance that allows decision-making to happen—those have been a key engine of the prosperity of the country. Their destruction will have repercussions that I think will make the Administration very unpopular, and likely cause a backlash that balances things out. I hope we get beyond getting to the status quo ante of a stalemate between these two lines of thinking—one that advances the world through incremental collective action that’s driven around checks and balances as we advance the world ever forward, and one in which a strongman can have his way and simply look for who he can dominate.

Right now, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is the head of H.H.S. His targets include not only vaccine manufacturers but the pharma industry writ large. But he’s talked a lot, too, about unhealthy food in the American diet—to some extent, he’s not wrong. Do you see any upside in his role in pushing this so-called Make America Healthy Again idea?

Of course there is good. I mean, we as a country have chronic illness that is importantly tied to our nutritional habits, our exercise, and so on. But for all our unhealthiness, we’ve also had an engine of health that has enabled the top one per cent in America to have a ninety-year life expectancy today. Our job is to enable that capacity for public health and health-care delivery to get to everybody alive, I would argue, and certainly to get it to all Americans.

What’s ignored is that half the country can’t afford having a primary-care doctor and don’t have adequate public health in their communities. If R.F.K., Jr., were taking that on, more power to him. Every indication from his history is that this is an effort to highlight some important things. But how much of it’s going to actually be evidence-driven? He’s had some crazy theories about what’s going to advance chronic illness and address health.

I’d say the second thing is the utter incompetence in running things and making things work. They’ve utterly destabilized the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A.

Explain that destabilization—what it looks like from inside and what effects it’ll have.

One small example: DOGE has declared that all kinds of buildings are not necessary anymore. That includes the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. They’re saying, “Oh, everybody has to show up for work now, but you won’t have a building to work in anymore.”

No. 2 on the list is F.D.A. specialized centers around the country. There’s a laboratory in St. Louis where they have specialized equipment for testing food and drugs for safety. And so that whole capability—to insure that your foods and your medications are able to be tested for whether they have contaminants, whether they are counterfeit—that’s a basic part of good nutrition, good medicine, that could be pulled away.

Whether it’s maintaining the building infrastructure, maintaining the staff who are being purged sort of randomly left and right, or treating them not like they’re slaves but actually bringing good work out of everybody, by good management—that is what’s not happening.

I have the feeling that you, even in a short time, loved being in the federal government. What I hear in our conversation is a sense of tragedy that is not only public but that is felt very intimately by you.

I did not expect that going into government would be as meaningful to me as it was. I went into government because it was the COVID crisis and I was offered an opportunity to lead the international component of the response. We got seven hundred million vaccines out to the world. But what I found was a group of people who could achieve scale like I’d never seen. It is mission-driven. None of these people went into it for the money; it’s not like they’ve had any power—

I assume all of them could have made more money elsewhere.

Absolutely. And many of them spent their lives as Foreign Service officers living in difficult places in the world. I remember that Kyiv was under attack about eight weeks after I was sworn in. I thought I was going to be working on COVID, but this thing was erupting. First of all, our health team, along with the rest of the mission and Embassy in Kyiv, had to flee for safety. But within a week they were already saying, “We have T.B. breaking out, we have potential polio cases. How are we going to respond?” And my critical role was to say, “What’s going to kill people the most? Right now, Russia has shut down the medical supply chain, and so nearly a hundred per cent of the pharmacies just closed. Two hundred and fifty thousand H.I.V. patients can’t get their meds. A million heart patients can’t get their meds. Let’s get the pharmacies open.” And, by the way, they’ve attacked the oxygen factories and put the hospitals under cyberattack and their electronic systems aren’t functioning.

And this team, in four weeks, moved the entire hospital record system to the cloud, allowing protection against cyberattacks; got oxygen systems back online; and was able to get fifty per cent of the pharmacies open in about a month, and ultimately got eighty per cent of the pharmacies open. That is just incredible.

Yes, are there some people that I had to deal with who were overly bureaucratic? Did I have to address some people who were not performing? Absolutely. Did I have to drive efficiency?

As in any work . . .

In every place you have to do that. But this was America at its best, and I was so proud to be part of that. And what frustrated me, in that job, was that I had to speak for the U.S. government. I couldn’t write for you during that time.

Believe me, I know!

I couldn’t tell the story. I’ve got a book I’m working on now in which I hope to be able to unpack all of this. It is, I think, a sad part of my leadership, that I didn’t also get to communicate what we do—partly because U.S.A.I.D. is restricted, in certain ways, from telling its story within the U.S. borders.

If you had the opportunity to tell Elon Musk and Donald Trump what you’ve been telling me for the past hour, or if they read a long report from you about lives saved, good works done, the benefits of soft power to the United States and to the world and so on—do you think it would have any effect at all?

Zero. There’s a different world view at play here. It is that power is what matters, not impact; not the over-all maximum good that you can do. And having power—wielding it in ways that can dominate the weak and partner with your friends—is the mode of existence. (When I say “partner with friends,” I mean partner with people like Putin who think the same way that you do.) It’s two entirely different world views.

But this is not just an event. This is not just something that happened. This is a process, and its absence will make things worse and worse and have repercussions, including the loss of many, many, maybe countless, lives. Is it irreparable? Is this damage done and done forever?

This damage has created effects that will be forever. Let’s say they turned everything back on again, and said, “Whoops, I’m sorry.” I had a discussion with a minister of health just today, and he said, “I’ve never been treated so much like a second-class human being.” He was so grateful for what America did. “And for decades, America was there. I never imagined America could be indifferent, could simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together: O.K., you are going to have big cuts to make. We will work together and figure out how to solve it.”

That’s not what happened. He will never trust the U.S. again. We are entering a different state of relations. We are seeing lots of other countries stand up around the world—our friends, Canada, Mexico. But African countries, too, Europe. Everybody’s taking on the lesson that America cannot be trusted. That has enormous costs.

It’s tragic and outrageous, no?

That is beautifully put. What I say is—I’m a little stronger. It’s shameful and evil.

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 7:32 AM

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
An article about euthanizing crazy pets. If your howling-mad local Trumptard can't be trained to NOT piss on your valuables, consider euthanizing them. The Trumptards act as badly as they do because they are mentally damaged beyond help.

https://slate.com/advice/2025/03/dog-young-euthanize-vet-issues-pet-ad
vice.html

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


Last time I checked, we're not the ones who start burning and looting every time we don't get our way.

Grow up.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Libtards and Trumptards have got the same problem of not understanding the proper use of violence. Both can see a Hollywood movie where the bad guy dies in the end and good guy is triumphant but they fail to understand the message, which is so obvious: direct your fire at your enemy. Hollywood directors know this because to use violence in the incoherent way that rioters use it means the movie is incoherent.

I guess it is easy to understand when the movie is less than 3 hours and extraordinarily difficult to understand when the violence extends over months or years. The rioters lose the plot thread after only a few hours, which is why their violence fails to achieve a worthy goal, one that is so obvious in a movie. Real life wars lose the plot. See for examples the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the second Iraq War, the American war in Afghanistan.

For counterexamples, see WWII, except right at the end when FDR died and that damn fool Truman took over and nuked Nagasaki. Truman was too fucking stupid to see the inevitable nuclear arms race that would cause. If America would nuke undamaged cities full of civilians rather than exclusively target the Japanese Army, America would nuke anybody. Truman couldn't imagine that "anybody" might then want nukes because of what Truman did to Nagasaki. To repeat the lesson Truman couldn't understand from the movies, direct your fire at the enemy, not at random people who happen to be in the area.

If you read Oppenheimer, it is clear Truman was dumb as hell but he got the job as Vice-President because he was highly articulate. Apparently, FDR was not thinking about the consequences of a very talkative yet unsuitable VP making decisions. Same with Lincoln and his Vice President Andrew Johnson. There never was a worse choice for a successor to Lincoln. Andrew Johnson completely misunderstood the plot of the violent movie called The Civil War, causing the sequel, Reconstruction, to be an incoherent movie with poor ticket sales. The third movie in the trilogy, the one by President US Grant, was almost as bad and twice as long as the movie directed by Andrew Johnson.

In a Hollywood movie, the villains do NOT make a comeback, triumphant after the heroes leave, but in Reconstruction Part I and Part II, that is what happened because the Presidents for Part I and II forgot the plot from Civil War where the bad guys died and stay dead, not rebuild and rise again.

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 8:15 AM

SECOND

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


How much will military sales shrink now that foreign governments know that America can’t be trusted? Given some time to find replacements, the likely answer is “a lot.”

Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada without any justification and demanded that Canada become the 51st state. Every time Trump or his minions repeat that demand, they strengthen Prime Minister Carney’s hand.

One of Carney’s first policy moves as PM was to order a review of Canada’s plan to buy a substantial number of U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets. This means that Canada is joining European nations that are similarly reconsidering their dependence on U.S. weapons.

This turn away from military dependence on the U.S. is understandable. America is no longer a reliable ally to the world’s democracies; indeed, between Trump’s turn toward Putin and his talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, we don’t look like an ally at all. Rumors that U.S. jets have a “kill switch” that would allow Trump to disable them at will are probably false, but sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/teslafying-us-exports

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 8:37 AM

SECOND

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


U.S. debt owed to foreigners amounts to more than $18 trillion. A rise in borrowing costs, driven by talk of forced conversion of short-term into long-term debt, would significantly increase the cost of servicing that debt. Winds of Change, 6ixStringJack.

To be exact, $18.2972 trillion.
https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/intinv324.pdf#page=6

Wall Street can’t stop talking about the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord.’
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wall-street-cant-stop-talking-about-
the-mar-a-lago-accord-heres-how-the-currency-deal-would-work-f8fbbda0

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 9:43 AM

SECOND

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


Trump says the economy ‘went to hell’ under Biden. The opposite is true

By standard measures such as job and GDP growth and the stock market, the US economy was in excellent shape

By Steven Greenhouse | Sun 16 Mar 2025 10.00 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/16/trump-biden-economy

Donald Trump keeps saying he inherited a terrible economy from Joe Biden and many Americans believe him, even though that’s not true. During his White House marketing event for Tesla on Tuesday, Trump said the US and its economy “went to hell” under Biden. Last week, in his national address to Congress, Trump said: “We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.”

But the truth is that by standard economic measures, the US economy was in excellent shape when Biden turned over the White House keys to Trump, even though most Americans, upset about inflation, told pollsters the economy was in poor shape.

When Biden left office, the unemployment rate was a low 4.1%, and during Biden’s four years in office, the average jobless rate was lower than for any president since the 1960s. Trump has repeatedly railed against the high inflation under Biden, but the fact is that by the time Biden left office, the inflation rate had fallen to just 2.9% – down more than two-thirds from its peak and near the Federal Reserve’s inflation goal.

Not only that, the nation’s GDP growth has been impressive, rising at a solid 3.1% rate at the end of Biden’s term. Ever since the pandemic ended, economic growth in the US has been considerably stronger than in the UK, France, Germany and other G7 nations. Shortly before election day, the Economist magazine ran a story saying the US economy was “the envy of the world” and had “left other rich countries in the dust”.

Trump often says job growth under Biden was terrible, but the fact is that the US added 16.6m jobs during Biden’s presidency, more than during any four-year term of any previous US president. Under Trump, job growth was far worse – during his first four-year term, the nation lost 2.7m jobs overall, making Trump’s presidency the first since Herbert Hoover’s during which the nation suffered a net loss in jobs. The pandemic was largely responsible for this, but even during Trump’s first three years in office, before the pandemic hit, job growth was only half as fast as it was under Biden.

Recently, Trump has repeatedly boasted how his tariffs will bring back manufacturing. Trump fails to note, however, that Biden had considerable success in bringing bring back manufacturing and factory jobs. Under most recent presidents, the US lost manufacturing jobs, but under Biden, the nation gained an impressive 750,000 factory jobs, the most under any president since the 1970s. A big reason for this was that as a result of Biden’s green jobs legislation and the Chips Act to boost semiconductor production, manufacturing investment boomed, more than doubling during Biden’s four years in office.

Biden took considerable pride about how the economy performed under him, even though he failed to persuade most Americans that the it was doing well. In December, Biden wrote: “Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation [since he took office], and unions have won wage increases from 25% to 60% in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking. We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3% per year on average the last four years – faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high.”

Many economists vigorously disagree with Trump’s claim that he inherited a poor economy. Paul Krugman wrote that in January, when Biden left office, the US had what was “very close to a Goldilocks economy, in which everything is more or less just right”. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, had even more glowing words. “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” he said. “The US economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than pre-pandemic.”

Trump pays attention to one measure of the economy above all others: how the stock market is doing. During Biden’s four years, Wall Street did very well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 39% and the S&P 500 soared by 55.7%, including a 28% jump during 2024. In contrast, the stock market is down overall since Trump took office as investors have grown alarmed about the president’s tariff war against the US’s trading partners.

To be sure, there were some serious economic problems under Biden. Housing affordability was a major problem, and inflation rose to uncomfortable levels. The spike in prices was caused largely by two factors: the pandemic, which gave rise to worldwide supply chain problems, and Putin’s war in Ukraine, which pushed up food and fuel prices. But Trump, in denouncing Biden on inflation, ignores all that.

As Trump’s trade war spooks the markets and makes nervous CEOs rethink their investment plans, many economists are saying it’s more and more likely the US will stumble into recession this year.

Trump has a long history of refusing to accept blame for mistakes and problems, and by repeatedly claiming he inherited a horrible economy, he seems to be laying the groundwork to blame Biden if the country slides into a painful recession.

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 10:00 AM

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


How American Bureaucrats Became Public Enemy No. 1

The McCarthy era gave DOGE its blueprint for culture war.

By Clay Risen | March 17, 2025 5:40 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/doge-elon-musk-trump-gover
nment-cuts-money.html

On April 28, 1948, a physicist named Edward U. Condon took the lectern at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington. Condon’s speech focused on a dark vision about America’s future.

“There is growing in this country a wave of anti-intellectualism which is violently opposed to free speech and free expression,” he said. Thousands of government scientists, economists, and other experts were being investigated, and in many cases fired, in the name of anti-communism and national security—a campaign that Condon compared to ideological purges by the Nazis in the early days of the Third Reich.

“The last decade alone provides for us too many examples of nations where the people ignored the symptoms of totalitarianism until it was too late,” he warned. “Anti-intellectualism precedes the totalitarian putsch, and anti-intellectualism is on the upswing here.”

As his audience undoubtedly knew, Condon spoke from painful personal experience. A year earlier, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had begun a sustained campaign against him, first in magazine articles, then in a March 1948 report that called him “one of the weakest links in our atomic security” and accused him of “knowingly or unknowingly” maintaining ties to Soviet spies. In Thomas’ telling, Condon was part of a cabal of liberal, technocratic elites who ran the inner workings of the federal government and, out of naivete or treachery, were now fatally undermining their country in the face of the Soviet threat.

Thomas’ attacks were baseless, and both Condon and his boss, Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman, resisted them. But the assault continued, and in 1951 Condon decided he had had enough. He quit the Bureau of Standards to take a job in the private sector. Still the attacks came: In 1954, when his employer, Corning Glass Works, submitted a bid for him to work on a sensitive military project, the Navy revoked his security clearance. (This also reportedly came at the urging of Vice President Richard Nixon, who wanted to undermine Harriman, who was running for governor of New York.) Rather than continue fighting, Condon left his job at Corning and spent the rest of his career teaching.

The Condon Affair, as it was known, has been largely forgotten. But it bears all the hallmarks of the worst of the Red Scare era: knee-jerk anti-intellectualism; a baseless conviction that an elite, anti-American conspiracy was pulling the strings in Washington; and a willingness to abuse the levers of political power with little foresight about the unintended consequences. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to dismantle the federal government in the name of rooting out the so-called deep state and the supposed horrors of “woke,” they are drawing on a line of thinking that has long animated the Republican hard right. It goes back to the founding of the modern federal bureaucracy in the 1930s. Far from being a new phenomenon, paranoid anti-elitism in America has a long and surprising pedigree.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/doge-elon-musk-trump-gover
nment-cuts-money.html

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 12:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
An article about euthanizing crazy pets. If your howling-mad local Trumptard can't be trained to NOT piss on your valuables, consider euthanizing them. The Trumptards act as badly as they do because they are mentally damaged beyond help.

https://slate.com/advice/2025/03/dog-young-euthanize-vet-issues-pet-ad
vice.html

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


Last time I checked, we're not the ones who start burning and looting every time we don't get our way.

Grow up.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Libtards and Trumptards have got the same problem of not understanding the proper use of violence. Both can see a Hollywood movie where the bad guy dies in the end and good guy is triumphant but they fail to understand the message, which is so obvious: direct your fire at your enemy. Hollywood directors know this because to use violence in the incoherent way that rioters use it means the movie is incoherent.

I guess it is easy to understand when the movie is less than 3 hours and extraordinarily difficult to understand when the violence extends over months or years. The rioters lose the plot thread after only a few hours, which is why their violence fails to achieve a worthy goal, one that is so obvious in a movie. Real life wars lose the plot. See for examples the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the second Iraq War, the American war in Afghanistan.

For counterexamples, see WWII, except right at the end when FDR died and that damn fool Truman took over and nuked Nagasaki. Truman was too fucking stupid to see the inevitable nuclear arms race that would cause. If America would nuke undamaged cities full of civilians rather than exclusively target the Japanese Army, America would nuke anybody. Truman couldn't imagine that "anybody" might then want nukes because of what Truman did to Nagasaki. To repeat the lesson Truman couldn't understand from the movies, direct your fire at the enemy, not at random people who happen to be in the area.

If you read Oppenheimer, it is clear Truman was dumb as hell but he got the job as Vice-President because he was highly articulate. Apparently, FDR was not thinking about the consequences of a very talkative yet unsuitable VP making decisions. Same with Lincoln and his Vice President Andrew Johnson. There never was a worse choice for a successor to Lincoln. Andrew Johnson completely misunderstood the plot of the violent movie called The Civil War, causing the sequel, Reconstruction, to be an incoherent movie with poor ticket sales. The third movie in the trilogy, the one by President US Grant, was almost as bad and twice as long as the movie directed by Andrew Johnson.

In a Hollywood movie, the villains do NOT make a comeback, triumphant after the heroes leave, but in Reconstruction Part I and Part II, that is what happened because the Presidents for Part I and II forgot the plot from Civil War where the bad guys died and stay dead, not rebuild and rise again.

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


Says SECOND, who threatens and defames ... and incites violence and civil war ... from behind a wall of anonymity.
Dox yourself.


*****

Oh, and I see you're gaslighting us again about the economy.

Quote:
By standard measures such as job [growth]
whuch went to illegals

Quote:
and GDP growth
Unequally shared

Quote:
and the stock market,
Same problem

Quote:
the US economy was in excellent shape
For some.

Yeah, the economy under Biden*. It was great. /snark




-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 1:03 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


What does the Library Institute do?


Quote:
Expand services for learning and access to information and educational resources in a variety of formats (including new and emerging technology), in all types of libraries, for individuals of all ages... ;
Provide grants for libraries to buy computers, DVD players, connect to the internet, or make available books, movies, magazines and reference publications in digital (DVD) or other (microfiche) format

Quote:
Establish or enhance electronic and other linkages and improved coordination among and between libraries and entities, as described in 20 U.S.C. § 9134(b)(6), for the purpose of improving the quality of and access to library and information services;
Grants to help libraries find and request books and other resources from other libraries. This requires libraries to digitize their "card catalogs" and place that information on a central server in a standard format

Quote:
(A) Provide training and professional development, including continuing education, to enhance the skills of the current library workforce and leadership, and advance the delivery of library and information services; and (B) Enhance efforts to recruit future professionals, including those from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, to the field of library and information services;
Train librarians in electronic recordkeeping, computer maintenance and digital security (We can skip Part B)

Quote:
Develop public and private partnerships with other agencies, tribes, and community-based organizations;
Help libraries find funding

Quote:
Target library services to individuals of diverse geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, to individuals with disabilities, and to individuals with limited functional literacy or information skills;
Make entryways and aisleways wheelchair or scooter accessible, provide audio resources for the blind or semi-literate etc.

Quote:
Target library and information services to persons having difficulty using a library and to underserved urban and rural communities, including children (from birth through age 17) from families with incomes below the poverty line (as defined by the Office of Management and Budget and revised annually in accordance with section 9902(2) of title 42) applicable to a family of the size involved;
Those who need libraries most are usually poor, rural, and/or those who don't have access to things like office software, printers (for resumes and formal letters, legal notices etc, for example) and the internet.
Run mobile libraries.
Where libraries are needed most is where they are least-funded. National-level funding helps.


Quote:
Develop library services that provide all users access to information through local, State, regional, national, and international collaborations and networks; and
Carry out other activities consistent with the purposes set forth in 20 U.S.C. § 9121, as described in the State library administrative agency's plan.
Nationwide resource sharing.


https://www.imls.gov/find-funding/funding-opportunities/grants-to-stat
es/purpose-and-priorities-of-lsta

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 1:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I doubt very much that libraries are going anywhere. 1/4 of Team Trump's messaging is how stupid we've become as a nation because the Department of Education made everyone retarded. I don't see how closing all the libraries down two weeks later is going to help that messaging. I believe this is just more Legacy Media fearmongering.

My prediction, and though I've been wrong before but I'm usually not, is that they're just unearthing everything right now and when they put the pieces back there will be a new agency in charge of this or it will be in the purview of a new or already existing agency where those systems and money will be streamlined and all the waste will be cut out.

This is SixSigma. This is what our government has needed for generations.

It sucks when you're on the receiving end of it, I know. But I don't feel sorry about it when we've been employing people for decades that we can't afford to employ. We're $37 trillion in debt and it now costs us nearly $75,000 in debt per second to keep up this illusory world we're living in.

Our government spends nearly 10 times per second in debt that it costs me to pay for everything I need to live in a year.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 2:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Our debt didn't accrue from Federal workers or libraries. You're being distracted by chaff being thrown into the air.

Maybe Trump and Elon are working on big-ticket items in the background (military, Medicare, Social Security, ACA etc) and just tossing out meaningless red meat "victories" to keep rabid antiDems happy. But so far, the only meaningful victories are

Closing the southern border (deportation needs more $$$ to be effective)
Closing USAID
Ending DEI policies
Dismissing and revoking security clearances of high level deep state operatives

NONE OF THAT IS DIRECTLY BUDGETARY.

The amount of $ being saved right now is trivial. I expect that, in future, once peple are required to start filling out those forms about who they're paying, and why, they'll be a lot less willing to splash money around.

Stop being so rabidly pro-Trump. Not everything that he does is golden, and some of the stupid stuff is to satisfy people like you, who expect to see Big Things every day.

BTW, Trump (or Elon, hard to tell) is deliberately targeting unions. But in my experience as an upper level supervisor in a government agency, dysfunction was a MANAGEMENT and POLITICAL problem (we were run by a Board of politicians)..

You read any agency contract, and the first thing spelled out is MANAGEMENT RIGHTS, including the right to determine programs, budget, and hire and fire.

We all knew who was pulling their weight, and who wasn't.
We all knew which manager was padding their staff budgets.
We all knew which programs were doomed to fail, set by political agendas that had nothing to do with our essential mission. (Pollution trading comes to mind.)

I think that we could have run the place better than management.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 2:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Our debt didn't accrue from Federal workers or libraries. You're being distracted by chaff being thrown into the air.


It absolutely did. Not the libraries, but the Federal workers. There are 10 times as many people working for the government than we need to be employing. Employee pay is one of the largest shares of government waste because of the sheer number of people that are on the payroll. They are all paid twice as much for the work they'd get in the public sector, they have the absolute best benefits packages on the planet, and they have retirement plans that we can't pay for.

That ends now.

They'll be fine. They can come work with us plebs and downsize they way they live.

We get laid off all the time in the private sector, so 90% or more of us under 50 years old have already been laid off at least once if not many times. This is just the way nearly everyone who isn't a government employee lives in America.

Ain't nobody going to shed any tears for them no matter what they choose to do now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 3:25 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 SIGNYM:

Says SECOND, who threatens and defames ... and incites violence and civil war ... from behind a wall of anonymity.
Dox yourself.


*****

Oh, and I see you're gaslighting us again about the economy.

Quote:
By standard measures such as job [growth]
whuch went to illegals

Quote:
and GDP growth
Unequally shared

Quote:
and the stock market,
Same problem

Quote:
the US economy was in excellent shape
For some.

Yeah, the economy under Biden*. It was great. /snark
Signym, you and 6ix, Trump and Putin, don't stop lying. I know how people like you came to be this way because Trumptards are common in Texas and I watched many grow from obnoxious children into untrustworthy and dishonest adults. (Many with money problems because they are untrustworthy and dishonest . . . They can't see the connection between what they are and what happens to them.)

Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, never feared for his life while ripping off the IRS or, earlier in his destructive life, working with Senator Joe McCarthy to wreck the government. But what if an anonymous killer had hit Cohn with a shotgun blast for being a horrible person? Fast-talking Trump would not have a real-life example to emulate that in America you can say and do whatever you want if your lawyers are glib.

The small-fry Trumptards I know are like Roy Cohn and Trump, misbehaving because they do not fear society’s disapproval or the law. If Anonymous could help these depraved souls to see a connection between their bad behavior and their one fear, they wouldn’t defecate on decency as openly as they do. They might stop embezzling. They might stop cheating on taxes. They might not be as horrible as their habit. But it would require gut-gnawing fear to civilize them, the kind of fear that deer have of anonymous hunters.

Roy Cohn’s Disbarment and Death (Trump learned nothing from two impeachments because his relatives were on the jury. He won’t be inhibited by Libtards’ legal maneuvers. What method does that leave?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Disbarment_and_death

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 3:59 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Our debt didn't accrue from Federal workers or libraries. You're being distracted by chaff being thrown into the air.


It absolutely did. Not the libraries, but the Federal workers. There are 10 times as many people working for the government than we need to be employing. Employee pay is one of the largest shares of government waste because of the sheer number of people that are on the payroll. They are all paid twice as much for the work they'd get in the public sector, they have the absolute best benefits packages on the planet, and they have retirement plans that we can't pay for.

That ends now.

They'll be fine. They can come work with us plebs and downsize they way they live.

We get laid off all the time in the private sector, so 90% or more of us under 50 years old have already been laid off at least once if not many times. This is just the way nearly everyone who isn't a government employee lives in America.

Ain't nobody going to shed any tears for them no matter what they choose to do now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ixStringJack is calling for the firing of 90% of Federal employees. If you want to fire 90% of government employees, start with the local government, then move to fire state employees.

State and local governments employ 19.6 million people nationally, with the majority (14.2 million) working in local government. The U.S. federal government employs around 3 million people in total, with workers in departments like the Armed Forces, Postal Service, and the Department of Justice.
https://www.ringover.com/blog/largest-employers-us

How many people work for the federal government?

The federal government employs around 3 million people, making it the nation's 15th largest workforce.

Updated December 19, 2024 by the USAFacts team

As of November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people. The number of federal employees has topped 3 million since September 2024. The last time the government could claim that many employees was in September 1994.

Federal employment numbers peaked at 3.4 million in 1990 and the most recent low was in 2014, with 2.7 million.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-gov
ernment/

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 4:00 PM

SECOND

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


We’ve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trump’s Dictatorship Era

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | March 17, 2025 1:04 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/king-donald-trump-dictator
ship-deportations-court-orders.html

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 4:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Our debt didn't accrue from Federal workers or libraries. You're being distracted by chaff being thrown into the air.


It absolutely did. Not the libraries, but the Federal workers. There are 10 times as many people working for the government than we need to be employing. Employee pay is one of the largest shares of government waste because of the sheer number of people that are on the payroll. They are all paid twice as much for the work they'd get in the public sector, they have the absolute best benefits packages on the planet, and they have retirement plans that we can't pay for.

That ends now.

They'll be fine. They can come work with us plebs and downsize they way they live.

We get laid off all the time in the private sector, so 90% or more of us under 50 years old have already been laid off at least once if not many times. This is just the way nearly everyone who isn't a government employee lives in America.

Ain't nobody going to shed any tears for them no matter what they choose to do now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ixStringJack is calling for the firing of 90% of Federal employees. If you want to fire 90% of government employees, start with the local government, then move to fire state employees.

State and local governments employ 19.6 million people nationally, with the majority (14.2 million) working in local government. The U.S. federal government employs around 3 million people in total, with workers in departments like the Armed Forces, Postal Service, and the Department of Justice.
https://www.ringover.com/blog/largest-employers-us

How many people work for the federal government?

The federal government employs around 3 million people, making it the nation's 15th largest workforce.

Updated December 19, 2024 by the USAFacts team

As of November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people. The number of federal employees has topped 3 million since September 2024. The last time the government could claim that many employees was in September 1994.

Federal employment numbers peaked at 3.4 million in 1990 and the most recent low was in 2014, with 2.7 million.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-gov
ernment/

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


Great idea.

We can do both. Let's do it.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 4:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We’ve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trump’s Dictatorship Era

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | March 17, 2025 1:04 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/king-donald-trump-dictator
ship-deportations-court-orders.html

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

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


Yes. We are going to put Fauci in prison.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 4:53 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:

Great idea.

We can do both. Let's do it.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There really is no reliable way to get through to Trumptards without being brutal: hit them in the face with a shotgun blast. Or firing them. Or canceling their contracts. Or their wives kicking them out. Trumptards can only weakly understand and more words seldom bring fuller enlightenment to a Trumptard. But someone else wrote the words for me. Maybe this time 6ix will comprehend.

Park Service Employees at White House Were Exempted from Mass Firings

Park rangers for me, but not for thee

By Jimmy Tobias | Mar 17, 2025

https://www.publicdomain.media/p/park-service-employees-at-white-house

As the Trump administration fired hundreds of probationary Park Service employees in February, it spared a special subset from the purge — it exempted from the mass firings National Park Service staffers that help manage the White House and President’s Park.

Records viewed by Public Domain show that at least three NPS probationary employees at the White House, including park guides, received exemptions from the mass firings specifically on the grounds that they worked at the White House. The records were corroborated by an Interior Department source familiar with the matter, but who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.

The National Park Service maintains the White House property and President’s Park. The NPS workforce there includes gardeners, guides, painters and maintenance staff. The Park Service, in a statement, said it does not comment on personnel matters. It did note, however, that NPS employees at the White House have security clearances.

In mid-February, in what has come to be known as the Valentine’s Day massacre, the Trump administration eliminated roughly 1,000 NPS probationary employees across the country. These employees served as rangers, guides, visitor center staffers, scientists, and more. The firings spanned the nation, from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to California’s Yosemite. Particularly hit hard were places like Everglades National Park, Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, all supremely popular destinations that reportedly lost a dozen or more employees each. These firings were part of the broader effort, driven by Elon Musk’s DOGE, to decimate staffing at federal agencies in all parts of government.

But while the general American public was witnessing the sudden loss of large numbers of staff members at their favorite Park Service locations, the President and his visitors were spared the same experience at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The directive to exempt the NPS probationary staff at the White House came down to NPS from higher up in the Interior Department, according to the source.

The DOGE-driven mass firings may have been illegal. A federal judge in Northern California last Thursday ordered the Trump administration to immediately reinstate thousands of probationary employees across government, calling the administration’s justification for the terminations a “sham.” The Trump administration is appealing the order.

“It is a sad, sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup of President Trump’s actions. “That should not have been done in our country.” Among those to be reinstated are Park Service probationary staff.

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 4:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Great idea.

We can do both. Let's do it.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
There really is no reliable way to get through to Trumptards without being brutal: hit them in the face with a shotgun blast.


I can't figure out why you still haven't figured out who I am or where I live. All I used to hear about back in the day was you hiring private detectives to find out who Kiki and maybe others were. I've known who you are and where you live for probably 4 years now.

If ever you figure that one out, big scary tough dude guy man, come on over and we'll sort this out in person.

I'd say BYOB, but I don't reckon you'll be needing it where you're going.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 5:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SIX

.. absolutely did. Not the libraries, but the Federal workers. There are 10 times as many people working for the government than we need to be employing.[THAT'S SIX, PULLING NUMBERS OUT OF HIS ASS] Employee pay is one of the largest shares of government waste because of the sheer number of people that are on the payroll.[MORE ASS-GENERATED NUMBERS] They are all paid twice as much for the work they'd get in the public sector, they have the absolute best benefits packages on the planet, and they have retirement plans that we can't pay for.

That ends now.

They'll be fine. They can come work with us plebs and downsize they way they live.

We get laid off all the time in the private sector, so 90% or more of us under 50 years old have already been laid off at least once if not many times. This is just the way nearly everyone who isn't a government employee lives in America.

Ain't nobody going to shed any tears for them no matter what they choose to do now.


Wow. Instead of wanting meaningful, stable, fairly administered jobs for Americans you want everyone to be just as miserable, uncertain, and angry as you?

That's fucked up.

I reiterate: if there is waste in Federal employment, it's a MANAGEMENT problem. You have an ignorant view of government employment.

You think that government employees can't be laid off? When our agency faced a serious budget crunch, it laid off 300 of 1,000 employees.

If there is one flaw in government employment, it's the difficulty of firing employees. You have to prove you're firing for cause. It's a huge multi-step process that requires reams of documentation.

But, strangely, you won't find that requirement in any union-negotiated contract. It's an HR requirement... once again, a management problem.

*****
But if you want to know where REAL waste comes from....

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial-report/st
atement-of-net-cost.html

What does HHS (RFK's new bailiwick) do with its $1.9 trillion budget? I dunno... you tell me
https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2024/index.html
Waste comes from Medicare ($1.4 trillion) being prohibited from bargaining for best prices for prescription medicine.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/fy-2024-budget-in-brief.pdf

Social Security ($1.5 trillion)
Raise the threshold so that wealthy people pay more into the system. Social Security payments ... they're not extravagant. But the database seriously needs to be cleaned up.

DoD ($1.1 trillion)
The F35, for example, cost $400 billion... and counting. The DoD has failed every one of its last 7 audits. Thats $ to the MIC, not soldiers or staff.

Interest ($1 trillion)

Anyway, poke thru the budget. I'm sure you'll see a lot of pork.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 5:36 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I can't figure out why you still haven't figured out who I am or where I live. All I used to hear about back in the day was you hiring private detectives to find out who Kiki and maybe others were. I've known who you are and where you live for probably 4 years now.

If ever you figure that one out, big scary tough dude guy man, come on over and we'll sort this out in person.

I'd say BYOB, but I don't reckon you'll be needing it where you're going.
Why would I bother with you? 6ix, there are ten times worse Trumptards than you living next door to me. I know the DIRTY SECRETs of dozens of Trumptards who are modern-day manifestations of all the wickedness of the worst Confederates from the 1860s.

What is more interesting is why these Trumptards sincerely believe with their whole hearts that they are "good" people, wholesome and pure on the outside, despite being nothing but evil on the inside, just like slave-owning Confederates once believed themselves to be righteous and deserving to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven. Here is a little explanation in the abstract:

Heather Cox Richardson | Feb 15, 2025

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—agreed that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. But not everyone was on board. Some big businessmen hated regulations and the taxes necessary for social welfare programs and infrastructure, and racists and religious traditionalists who opposed women’s rights wanted to tear that “liberal consensus” apart.

They had no luck convincing voters to abandon the government that was overseeing unprecedented prosperity until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision permitted them to turn back to an old American trope. That ruling, which declared segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, enabled opponents of the liberal consensus to resurrect the post–Civil War argument of former Confederates that a government protecting Black rights was simply redistributing wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving Black Americans.

That argument began to take hold, and in 1980, Republican president Ronald Reagan rode it to the White House with the story of the “welfare queen,” identified as a Cadillac-driving, unemployed moocher from Chicago’s South Side (to signal that the woman was Black). “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” Reagan claimed. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.” The woman was real, but not typical—she was a dangerous criminal rather than a representative welfare recipient—but the story illustrated perfectly the idea that government involvement in the economy bled individual enterprise and handed tax dollars to undeserving Black Americans.

Republicans expanded that trope to denigrate all “liberals” of both parties, who supported an active government, claiming they were all wasting government monies. Deregulation and tax cuts meant that between 1981, when Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democratic president Joe Biden did, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But rather than convincing Republican voters to return to a robust system of business regulation and restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations, that transfer of wealth seemed to make them hate the government even more, as they apparently were convinced it benefited only nonwhite Americans and women.

That hatred has led to a skewed idea of the actions and the size of the federal government. For example, Americans think the U.S. spends too much on foreign aid because they think it spends about 25% of the federal budget on such aid while they say it should only spend about 10%. In fact, it spends only about 1% on foreign aid. Similarly, while right-wing leaders insist that the government is bloated, in fact, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution noted last month, the U.S. population has grown by about 68% in the last 50 years while the size of the federal government’s workforce has actually shrunk.

What has happened is that federal spending has expanded by five times as the U.S. has turned both to technology and to federal contractors, who outnumber federal workers by more than two to one. Those contractors are concentrated in the Department of Defense. At the same time, budget deficits have been driven by tax cuts under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump as well as the unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Treasury actually ran a surplus when Democratic president Bill Clinton was in office in the 1990s.

More at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2025

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 6:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIX

.. absolutely did. Not the libraries, but the Federal workers. There are 10 times as many people working for the government than we need to be employing.[THAT'S SIX, PULLING NUMBERS OUT OF HIS ASS] Employee pay is one of the largest shares of government waste because of the sheer number of people that are on the payroll.[MORE ASS-GENERATED NUMBERS] They are all paid twice as much for the work they'd get in the public sector, they have the absolute best benefits packages on the planet, and they have retirement plans that we can't pay for.

That ends now.

They'll be fine. They can come work with us plebs and downsize they way they live.

We get laid off all the time in the private sector, so 90% or more of us under 50 years old have already been laid off at least once if not many times. This is just the way nearly everyone who isn't a government employee lives in America.

Ain't nobody going to shed any tears for them no matter what they choose to do now.


Wow. Instead of wanting meaningful, stable, fairly administered jobs for Americans you want everyone to be just as miserable, uncertain, and angry as you?

That's fucked up.

I reiterate: if there is waste in Federal employment, it's a MANAGEMENT problem. You have an ignorant view of government employment.

You think that government employees can't be laid off? When our agency faced a serious budget crunch, it laid off 300 of 1,000 employees.

If there is one flaw in government employment, it's the difficulty of firing employees. You have to prove you're firing for cause. It's a huge multi-step process that requires reams of documentation.

But, strangely, you won't find that requirement in any union-negotiated contract. It's an HR requirement... once again, a management problem.

*****
But if you want to know where REAL waste comes from....

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/reports-statements/financial-report/st
atement-of-net-cost.html

What does HHS (RFK's new bailiwick) do with its $1.9 trillion budget? I dunno... you tell me
https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2024/index.html
Waste comes from Medicare ($1.4 trillion) being prohibited from bargaining for best prices for prescription medicine.
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/fy-2024-budget-in-brief.pdf

Social Security ($1.5 trillion)
Raise the threshold so that wealthy people pay more into the system. Social Security payments ... they're not extravagant. But the database seriously needs to be cleaned up.

DoD ($1.1 trillion)
The F35, for example, cost $400 billion... and counting. The DoD has failed every one of its last 7 audits. Thats $ to the MIC, not soldiers or staff.

Interest ($1 trillion)

Anyway, poke thru the budget. I'm sure you'll see a lot of pork.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



I never said that government employees can't be laid off.

Just that a vast majority of them are unnecessary and work in departments that are unnecessary.

They will now simply be removed. Like it or don't like it.

And if the media didn't talk about it every day, I have very little doubt that you wouldn't even be aware it was happening because it wouldn't impact your life in the slightest.


And yeah. You're goddamned right. They can come down here with me and work for shit wages and zero benefits like the rest of us do. Nobody inside our government gave one single fuck when all of this happened to us, and some of them were even partially responsible for it.

Reality sucks. Like it or don't like it.

But don't ever ask me to shed tears for somebody else who gets their livelihood taken away in America. That shit is just your average Tuesday for the vast majority, after the American Baby Boomers had a real nice ride via the greatest standard of living that any race or nationality of people in the history or future of the world will ever know.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 6:54 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
SIX
yeah. You're goddamned right. They can come down here with me and work for shit wages and zero benefits like the rest of us do. Nobody inside our government gave one single fuck when all of this happened to us,


Wow, you pretend to mind-read all of those government employees??? You want everyone to be miserable?

That's stupid, and you're fucked up.

Stop pretending to be “righteous“. You're just petty and vindictive.

Quote:
and some of them were even partially responsible for it.
Politicians, son. Politicians of both parties. They're not "government employees". They're elected officials. Know the difference.


-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 7:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
SIX
yeah. You're goddamned right. They can come down here with me and work for shit wages and zero benefits like the rest of us do. Nobody inside our government gave one single fuck when all of this happened to us,


Wow, you pretend to mind-read all of those government employees??? You want everyone to be miserable?


I want everyone to be on the same playing field. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It sucks that the playing field not funded by $37 Trillion worth of debt is SHIT.

I didn't fucking make it that way.

Tough titty for everyone.

Anybody who hasn't already been through it once or ten times by now is in for some shit.

Buckle up.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 8:03 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:

Reality sucks. Like it or don't like it.

But don't ever ask me to shed tears for somebody else who gets their livelihood taken away in America. That shit is just your average Tuesday for the vast majority, after the American Baby Boomers had a real nice ride via the greatest standard of living that any race or nationality of people in the history or future of the world will ever know.
Life is hard for tens of millions of Trumptards because they are mentally unstable. Stephen Miller should be fired because he is ill, but his boss is even more sick, so Miller stays:

Stephen Miller Loses His Cool on Fox News
Miller is a key architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

Miller threw around insults after being challenged on Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which is intended for wartime.

By Erkki Forster | Mar. 17 2025 6:05PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-loses-his-cool-on-fox-new
s-absolute-moron/

Stephen Miller threw a veritable hissy fit on Fox News Monday after a host questioned whether Donald Trump’s invocation of wartime authority to deport migrants would hold up legally.

During an interview with The Story host Martha MacCallum on Monday, Miller was asked about MSNBC pundit Andrew Weissmann’s argument that the president should not be allowed to invoke an 18th-century law to deport migrants because it was intended for wartime use. Instead of addressing the point, Miller launched into a tirade.

“First of all, Andrew Weissmann is an absolute moron,” Miller fumed. “He is a moron, and he is a fool, and he’s a degenerate. Andrew Weissmann has devoted his career to putting innocent Americans in jail, taking away their civil liberties.”

Stephen Miller is a key architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies.

Forgetting the original question, Miller fixated on Weissmann’s record as a former prosecutor who worked on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“He was involved in the Mueller coup against a democratically elected president, Donald J. Trump,” Miller said, before shouting, “Weissmann should never be on TV anywhere! He should hang his head in eternal shame for what he’s done to this country!”

As MacCallum attempted to regain control of the conversation, Miller—a key architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies—continued railing against Weissmann and defending Trump’s legally questionable use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants over the weekend.

“You can call Weissmann names, and he can call you names, and that’s what’s great about living in America,” MacCallum interjected with an exasperated smirk, only for Miller to cut her off again.

“This is a tip for Weissmann!” Miller yelled. “I will defend American lives working for President Trump, and Andrew Weissmann can defend illegal alien rapists, terrorists, and predators! I’ve chosen my side!”

It’s the second time in a month that a TV anchor has grappled with an out-of-control Miller.

Last month, CNN host Brianna Keilar had to ask a hysterical Miller to “calm down” in a live interview after he blew up while trying to defend Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

On Monday, a federal judge ordered the White House to explain why it defied a court order by deporting the Venezuelan migrants, whom Trump claims are violent members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

In a direct challenge to the judiciary, the administration argued Monday afternoon that the judge’s orders were “not enforceable.”

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 8:50 PM

SECOND

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


March 17, 2025 in PC Magazine

The $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program is being shifted from fiber to Musk’s Starlink, which is a slower service at a higher price to the customers, but Elon Musk benefits so it is great.

Lawmakers have raised alarm bells about the revamp after The Wall Street Journal reported that Starlink could receive as much as $20 billion in subsidies, up from a mere $4 billion.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-official-blasts-trumps-broadband-funding
-shift-from-fiber-to-starlink

The Winds of Change are filling Musk’s bank account.

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

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Monday, March 17, 2025 9:04 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SIX, going after Federal workers is penny ante shit.

There are roughly 3 million Federal workers. Roughly half of them make appx $75,000 a year. A lot of those are nurses, technicians, doctors and so forth associated with VA.
Those are not astonishingly high wages for nurses, doctors, techs, and so forth.





By Department, the largest employer is VA, with about 486,000 employees. But the figures are misleading, bc if you combine the Army, Navy, Air Force, and DoD, which are listed individually, you get a total of appx 763,000 employees. Between obligations to past servicemembers and current servicemembers and military programs, the military takes up a whopping 38% of employees.

Total in wages and salaries is about $450 billion. Sounds like a lot, but not compared to the current $6.8 TRILLION budget. Thats 6.6% of the total budget, if I have my figures correct.

Quote:
The smallest Cabinet-level department, with 4,245 workers, is the Department of Education.
I agree that Dept Education has done a piss-poor job, and should be abolished.

But going after that, and not DoD ... that's penny ante shit. Low hanging fruit. The real savings are elsewhere.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-
about-federal-workers/#which-federal-departments-and-agencies-employ-the-most-people

Seeing as you're getting FREE MEDICAL CARE that my taxes pay for, you can hardly complain about poor benefits.

My advice, SIX, is that if you want to climb out of the low-wage/ no wage hole that you're in? Become a certified EMT, respiratory therapist, nurse, or something like that. Or medical IT.

But better brush up on your people skills.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Monday, March 17, 2025 10:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You're not paying for shit.

The $37 Trillion dollar lie you want to keep funding is paying for it all.

I'm just getting my property taxes and all the other taxes I've ever paid back before I die.

Get fucked Sigs.

They're all getting laid off.

Boo hoo.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Monday, March 17, 2025 10:38 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Yeah.

Thanks for doing your part in adding to the debt. You're more expensive than the average govt employee. AND we don't even get any work out of you.

Time to kick you off the rolls.



-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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