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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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 2:52 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
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



You won't hear me bitching when it happens.

I'm nothing if not adaptable when ya need to be.


Not really worried that he's going to kick 71 Million people off of medicaid though either. Unless somehow everything else under the sun gets fixed in America and we suddenly find ourselves in a new Golden Age, ending Medicaid would be immediate political suicide and the nearly dead Democratic Party would suddenly have 80/20 support on the very same day that it happens.

There's 330 Million or so people in the country. With 71 Million of them on Medicaid, that's at least 1 in 5 people on it. If you aren't on Medicaid, chances are very good that somebody you love is. And if you can actually sit back and say that you don't know anybody on it well... good on you and your rich family and your rich friends in your rich neighborhoods.

And if that's really the case, then I don't give a single fuck about your judgement of my healthcare situation.



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

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 3:03 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Another thing comes to mind while we're on the topic of healthcare...

"Hey Siri! How much would health insurance cost me out of pocket through the ACA if I were making $25,000 per year but I wasn't getting health insurance offered through my employer?"

Quote:
Income Eligibility:
To qualify for these subsidies, your income must fall within a certain range, generally between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level.
Subsidy Calculation:
The amount of the subsidy is determined by your income and the cost of the second-lowest-cost Silver plan in your area.
Income Limits:
For a single individual, the 2025 federal poverty level is $15,060, and the 400% of the federal poverty level is $60,240.
Subsidy Impact:
With a $25,000 income, you're likely to qualify for a significant subsidy, potentially reducing your monthly premium to a small percentage of your income (e.g., 2-4%).


"Hey Siri! How much is 2-4% of $25,000?"

Quote:
2-4% of $25,000 is $500 to $1000.


"Thank you Siri. You've been most helpful today."


Anybody telling me that I'm costing them more than useless federal employees do can go right ahead and get fucked.

There's no job I can get that wouldn't end up with me going through the ACA and paying in the vicinity of $500 to $1,500 out of pocket per year for insurance, and whatever the cost of the rest of that would be was already being fucking paid for everybody who was working and needed health insurance too.

My yearly cost for health insurance that is being paid above and beyond what a sub-contractor earning $30k per year and on the ACA is almost nothing. Even after fighting my property taxes, the last increase made those cost more per year than what I would be paying for health insurance if I was working.

You don't get to have these kinds of arguments with people who have a very deep understanding of things you've been privileged enough in life to never have to think about.



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

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 4:00 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.




Quote:
SIX

and if that's really the case, then I don't give a single fuck about your judgement of my healthcare situation.



You get all huffy about gummint employees suckin' on the gummint teat, but you get plenty defensive when the shoe's on the othe foot, don't you?

How about this, SIX ... instead of bitching and whining about poor little ole you, why don't you take that ginormous IQ you claim that you have, and DO something with it?

I know, it's not fair that you can climb out of the hole that youre in and others ... for lack of IQ ... can't. But instead of advocating for a better life for everyone, you insist that everybody be dragged down into the hole you insist on living in?

You remind me of a fable. There were two farmers, living side by side. One, by dint of hard work and a little good fortune, managed to scrape together enough to buy a cow.

The second farmer slowly grew consumed about his neighbor's good fortune.
One day, he heard a rustling in the leaves and came across a tiny creature trapped in a spider's web. So he carefully freed the little thing. The little creature, in a tiny voice, told him in return he would grant the farmer anything he wanted. Anything at all.

So the farmer thought about what he wanted more than anything in the whole world.

Select to view spoiler:

SO HE WISHED HIS NEIGHBOR'S COW WAS DEAD.



-----------
"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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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 5:55 AM

JAYNEZTOWN


dumbass Mayor says to the State and Nation how dare you say Emperor has no clothes
you must always cheer 'Greatest Ally'

maybe that works in Israel but in seems he never heard of 'The Streisand effect' in the USA?

Miami Beach cinema draws mayor's ire after showing controversial documentary "No Other Land"
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/miami-beach-mayor-vs-o-cinema-no-ot
her-land-oscar-winning-documentary/

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 6:06 AM

SECOND

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


Lawyers Can Slow a Trump Dictatorship. But They Have to Do Something Uncomfortable First.

By Frank Bowman | March 17, 2025 5:36 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/dictator-trump-lawyers-doj
-emil-bove.html

. . . Ho and his judicial colleagues confronting analogous cases need to stop thinking like single judges dealing with a single awkward case. Rather, they need to recognize that they are representatives of the justice system and the legal profession confronted with an unapologetic attack on the rule of law. When government lawyers misbehave, federal judges must be more assertive in the exercise of their powers as members of the judicial branch and as integral players in disciplinary mechanisms of the legal profession.

If confronted by apparent government attorney misconduct or apparent defiance of court orders, judges should first do the very thing Clement rejects—insist on determining the facts. Do not accept vague unsworn platitudes. Put the relevant witnesses, including lawyers, on the stand under oath. Let counsel adverse to the government ask questions. If the case is one like the Adams matter, where the government may be improperly colluding with the other side, judges should ask questions themselves. They should make factual findings. This alone would serve the immensely valuable purpose of advising the public of the judicial view of government misbehavior.

Second, when appropriate, judges should use their civil contempt powers promptly and sternly. As I have written elsewhere, there is, distressingly, some doubt that the Marshals Service would enforce contempt remedies against executive branch officials. But the test must be conducted. At the worst, direct executive branch defiance of judicial contempt orders will clarify for the public the true nature of the Trump regime.

Finally, if a reasonable basis exists to believe that government lawyers have misrepresented facts to the court or otherwise behaved unethically, judges should promptly refer offenders to disciplinary authorities of the court or the relevant state bar. As the Supreme Court held in Imbler v. Pachtman, the government lawyer “stands perhaps unique, among officials whose acts could deprive persons of constitutional rights, in his amenability to professional discipline by an association of his peers.” The organized bar should address judicial referrals of misbehaving government lawyers without hesitation and, when merited, with stringent punishment. Even amoral or timorous lawyers will hesitate to misbehave if it becomes clear that doing so endangers their livelihood.

The rule of law in America is in peril. The formal institutions created by the Constitution to ensure the survival of the rule of law are wavering. But the idea that law, not one man, should rule is older than the Constitution. That idea is, or should be, the bedrock commitment of the legal profession. Indeed, we lawyers tout it all the time, at least when our professed devotion has no cost. The question now is whether the legal profession will use its power over its own members to ensure that law survives.

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 6:19 AM

SECOND

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


Trump administration pulls US out of body investigating Ukraine invasion — essentially a unilateral concession to Russia with no Russian concessions in return because Trump is a giant asshole

Russia and allies were target of International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine

By Robert Tait | Mon 17 Mar 2025 10.49 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/trump-russia-ukraine

The Trump administration is withdrawing from an international body formed to investigate responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine in the latest sign that the White House is adopting a posture favouring Vladimir Putin.

The Department of Justice said it was pulling out of the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine (ICPA) two years after the Biden administration joined it with a commitment to hold Putin, Russia’s president, to account for the 2022 invasion and subsequent crimes committed by Russian forces.

An announcement by the justice department was expected later on Monday.

The centre was established to hold the leaders of Russia and its allies in Belarus, North Korea and Iran accountable for a category of crimes listed as aggression under international law for undertaking and supporting the attack.

That is not all the giant asshole Trump did for Putin:

The justice department also said it was reducing the work of its war crimes accountability team (WarCat), set up by Garland in 2022 to hold Russia accountable for atrocities committed following its invasion of Ukraine.

Garland said at the time that “there is no hiding place for war criminals” and vowed that the department would “pursue every avenue of accountability for those who commit war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine”.

The unit provided logistical help, training and direct assistance to overburdened Ukrainian prosecutors, who are investigating more than 150,000 possible war crimes, including the summary execution of prisoners, the targeted bombing of civilians and torture.

It is the Winds of Change Blowing from Hell, 6ixStringJack and Signym

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 8:57 AM

SECOND

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


Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? Blew in an opportunity to cheat small-time shareholders:

Texas Republicans want to curb shareholder lawsuits, like the one that blocked Elon Musk's $50B check

By Benjamin Wermund, Austin Bureau | March 17, 2025

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/musk-sharehold
er-lawsuit-texas-legislature-20220446.php

Elon Musk began moving his companies to Texas after a Delaware judge blocked a more than $50 billion pay package for the Tesla CEO last year.

Now Texas Republicans, who have welcomed the billionaire with open arms, are pushing legislation that business law experts say would make that court outcome next to impossible here.

Their proposal, a priority of House Speaker Dustin Burrows, would make it significantly harder for shareholders to file lawsuits in Texas against publicly traded companies, like the one that spurred Musk to ditch Delaware and urge other companies to follow suit.

Shareholders could only bring so-called derivative claims that allege wrongdoing by executives if they held a 3% stake in the company, which for Tesla, would shrink the eligible pool to only a handful of big financial firms.

Brian JM Quinn, a business law professor at Boston College, said if the proposal becomes law, there would be “no lawsuit against Elon Musk for anything in Texas.”

But the legislation would go far beyond the billionaire Tesla, SpaceX and X CEO. It would insulate all corporate directors and officers from most shareholder claims brought in the state’s new business courts, unless it could be proven that they committed fraud or knowingly broke the law. And the changes would shield executive’s emails, texts and other communications from shareholder inspection in most cases.

The bill would mark a significant expansion of protections for corporations in the state’s new court system that launched just last year and is a key piece of Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to convince more businesses to incorporate in the state. The Republican governor has yet to comment on the proposal.

State Rep. Morgan Meyer, a Dallas Republican who authored the bill, told a House judicial committee this month that the changes will shield businesses from “meritless, distracting lawsuits” and allow companies to “flourish, create new Texas jobs and contribute to Texas' soaring economy.”

The changes would only apply to publicly traded corporations or companies that opt into the new rules via the court.

Democrats fear the bill will open the door to political cronyism because of the close control the governor wields over the courts. Unlike most judges in the state, who are elected, Abbott appoints the 10 business court judges every two years. It’s a far shorter term than similar circuits in other states and a pace that experts have said could put political pressure on judges who want to keep their seats.

State Rep. Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat, said she opposed the business courts when they were created, not because she didn’t support the idea of having a specialized system for corporations, but because the judicial appointments took the courts out of the voters’ control. She said it is too soon to add fresh protections for those companies.

“We haven’t even gotten to see if this plays out,” she said. “We just did this, and now they want to expand the authority of it to bring more businesses into that fold of potential political protection. And that scares me.”

But business leaders say the legislation is not about appeasing politically active CEOs like Musk, who spent heavily to help President Donald Trump win the White House and is now carrying out aggressive cuts to the federal government. They say it will create a legal system in the state that is attractive to companies looking to relocate.

“This is well beyond SpaceX,” Glenn Hamer, the president and CEO of the Texas Association of Businesses, said during a hearing on the bill this month. “I guarantee there will be a lot of companies with directors and CEOs that have different views — very different views — than Elon Musk that will want to come here and incorporate in the state of Texas as a result of this legislation.”

Eric Lentell, the general counsel of Archer Aviation, a California company working on electric aircraft, told lawmakers that his company has spent tens of millions of dollars defending against a derivative action in Delaware courts. In that case, Lentell said, shareholders challenged a merger, even after the company hired outside counsel to confirm there were no conflicts among the board members that voted to approve the merger. The Texas law would shield them against such a case here.

The derivative suit that blocked Musk’s Tesla pay package in Delaware was brought by a heavy metal drummer who owned just nine shares in the company. It would not have been possible under the 3% threshold in the Texas proposal, which would “kill off derivative suits for most large companies,” said Stephen Bainbridge, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Shane Goodwin, an associate dean at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business testified that the 3% threshold is a reasonable one.

“This provision ensures that only shareholders with a substantial financial interest in the company, rather than opportunistic litigants, can bring claims, reducing abusive and costly litigation while protecting legitimate shareholder rights,” Goodwin said.

The legislation comes as legislators in Delaware, home to the oldest business courts in the nation, are considering their own corporate law overhaul that experts say would bring the state more in line with Texas’s current framework.

Business law experts say the changes being considered in Texas would bring the state’s corporate law closer to Nevada — the nation’s laxest — than Delaware. They were skeptical that many major companies would be attracted to the newfound protections. Even as Nevada has sought to woo companies to its courts, Delaware is still home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies.

“The Texas legislation takes a long step towards the sort of lax corporate law that we associate with Nevada,” Bainbridge said. “In other words, legal rules that effectively insulate corporate managers from liability even for significant breaches of fiduciary duty.”

Quinn, the Boston College professor, said under the proposed legislation, Texas would be competing for corporations that are up to no good with “directors who say, ‘You know what, I need to be protected against anything other than fraud.’”

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 9:37 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:


Quote:
SIX

and if that's really the case, then I don't give a single fuck about your judgement of my healthcare situation.



You get all huffy about gummint employees suckin' on the gummint teat, but you get plenty defensive when the shoe's on the othe foot, don't you?

How about this, SIX ... instead of bitching and whining about poor little ole you, why don't you take that ginormous IQ you claim that you have, and DO something with it?

I know, it's not fair that you can climb out of the hole that youre in and others ... for lack of IQ ... can't. But instead of advocating for a better life for everyone, you insist that everybody be dragged down into the hole you insist on living in?

You remind me of a fable. There were two farmers, living side by side. One, by dint of hard work and a little good fortune, managed to scrape together enough to buy a cow.

The second farmer slowly grew consumed about his neighbor's good fortune.
One day, he heard a rustling in the leaves and came across a tiny creature trapped in a spider's web. So he carefully freed the little thing. The little creature, in a tiny voice, told him in return he would grant the farmer anything he wanted. Anything at all.

So the farmer thought about what he wanted more than anything in the whole world.

Select to view spoiler:

SO HE WISHED HIS NEIGHBOR'S COW WAS DEAD.



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

So, lets circle back to the original source of the dispute, SIX. It's not government employees.
It's your vengeful attitude.

If your REAL concern was the deficit, you'd be focusing on big ticket items, things that could make a REAL difference. But you're not. You want to grind government employees under your heel because they have job protections and bettrr pay and benefits than yiu.

Trump and Elon dismantling unions? Trump and Elon dismantling worker protections that unions fought for, and won, 100 years ago? Protections that YOU enjoyed? Believe me, without them, your jobs ... they could have been much, much woorse.

So far, that's what they're doing. They hobbled the National Labor Relations Board, dismantled the TSA union, and did away with Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. Their belief is that unions are the problem, when in reality its management. They could have achieved greater efficiency and savings by corralling the bureacracy of chiefs and directors and deputy executive officers and human resources departments, NOT the people who simply work in the conditions set for them. They could have fired inefficient, nonproductive workers and everyone would gave been happier, including the rest of the workforce who have to work extra hard to pick up the slack.

So, when did you start taking big business' side?

Your vengeful attitude is putting you on the wrong side. You think that all the low-wage employees that you worked with want to see a future low-wage America, with no unions and no way up? Everyone working towards Making American (Business) Great Again?

I'm all for reducing the deficit. I'm all for getting rid of programs and departments that aren't part of the government's core mission. I'm all for firing unproductive employees, and ineffective, wasteful bureaucrats who like to pad their budgets bc it makes them feel more powerful.

But I'm not for union busting.



-----------
"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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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 4:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Here comes the pushback

Quote:
Obama Judge Rules Against DOGE Shutdown Of USAID, Orders Employee Access Reinstated

Tuesday, Mar 18, 2025 - 12:27 PM

In the latest legal turn of events - since the United States is now governed by activist judges, an Obama-appointed federal judge on Tuesday found that Elon Musk and DOGE likely violated the constitution when it shut down deep state slush fund USAID, and has ordered them to restore access for current (remaining) employees.

US District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in favor of more than two dozen unnamed current and former USAID employees and contractors who challenged the Trump administration's efforts to shutter the organization.

In a 68-page decision, Chuang granted in part their request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that DOGE and Musk likely violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause and separation of powers.

Musk has been ordered to reinstate access to email, payment and other electronic systems for all current USAID employees and personal services contractors, while the Trump administration is now prevented from taking any further actions related to the shutdown of USAID - including placing employees on administrative leave, firing USAID workers, closing buildings, bureaus or offices, and deleting the contents of its websites or collections.

Of note - the order does not currently require the reinstatement of fired employees, after roughly 83% of USAID programs have been officially canceled according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

"After a six-week review, 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, and even harmed the core national interests of the United States," he said.

This latest judicial move to block the Trump administration comes days after DC District Court judge James Boasberg (who was in charge of the FISA court when the Obama administration was spying on Trump), issued a two-week halt on deporting illegal immigrant gang members. On Tuesday Trump called for Boasberg's impeachment, drawing a sharp rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who said it was "not an appropriate response."

The Trump administration is also in the process of reinstating over 24,000 federal workers after a different Obama judge, US District Judge James Bredar, ordered the mass reinstatement of employees at 18 federal agencies last week, determining that the administration’s justification for the firings—poor performance—was not supported by evidence. The ruling follows another decision by a federal judge in San Francisco, who also found terminations at six agencies to be illegal.


-----------
"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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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 5:32 PM

SECOND

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


“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday.

Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back against President Donald Trump and his allies’ calls to impeach judges who’ve ruled against the administration.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said Tuesday in a rare and brief statement issued just hours after Trump publicly joined demands by his supporters to remove judges he called “crooked.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/john-roberts-donald-trump-imp
each-federal-judges-00235742

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 6:16 PM

SECOND

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


Louisiana v. Callais, a case about whether Louisiana’s congressional maps are an illegal racial gerrymander, should be one of the easiest cases the justices have heard in many years. That’s because less than two years ago, the Supreme Court decided another gerrymandering case, known as Allen v. Milligan (2023), which by Louisiana’s lawyers’ own admission “presents the same question” as Callais.

The Court will hear oral arguments in Callais on March 24.

In Milligan, the Court — normally quite hostile to plaintiffs alleging violations of the Voting Rights Act, which is meant to protect minority ballot access — surprised most Court-watchers by reaffirming longstanding legal principles, first established in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), which are intended to prevent states from drawing legislative maps that weaken the influence of voters of color. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both Republicans, joined with all three of the Court’s Democrats in Milligan.

The dispute in Callais began with a Louisiana congressional map that included only one Black-majority district (out of six total), despite the fact that Black Americans make up about a third of Louisiana voters. In Milligan, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to redraw a similarly gerrymandered map to include a second Black-majority district.

That similarity means there’s really no question how the Callais case should be decided. Nevertheless, this case is complicated because it forces the Supreme Court to resolve a conflict between two different federal courts, each of which has weighed in on Louisiana’s maps. One faithfully applied precedents like Milligan, ruling the state’s original maps needed to be redrawn; the other outright defied precedents requiring new maps.

Also complicating matters is that this Court’s Voting Rights Act decisions often depart from the text of the law, they frequently are at odds with established precedents, and they almost always seek to narrow the scope of this landmark statute. Moreover, while Kavanaugh provided the fifth vote to retain preexisting law in Milligan, he also penned a brief concurring opinion suggesting that Congress’s power to enact laws that sometimes require “race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.”

These factors make every racial gerrymandering case that reaches the Supreme Court an alarming event for voting rights lawyers, because each case provides an opportunity for the Court to do great damage to the Voting Rights Act.

And that means though this should be an open-and-shut case, there is still uncertainty about whether the Court will maintain the status quo, or if it will choose to radically reshape the country’s voting rights protections.

https://www.vox.com/scotus/403144/supreme-court-voting-rights-louisian
a-callais-gerrymandering

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 6:29 PM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump apparently left one big point out of the readout of his call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that the United States and its allies end military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine in order for hostilities to end.

Putin reportedly made this point during his phone call with President Trump on Tuesday, and the detail was conveniently not mentioned in the White House’s readout of the call.

Regardless of why Russia would want military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine to end, it’s telling that the White House didn’t mention this demand.

Perhaps they thought it would be hashed out in negotiations, or that Russia wouldn’t mention it again. Either way, it doesn’t speak well of Russia’s intentions for a postwar Ukraine, and no one outside of the White House or Kremlin is going to like it.

https://newrepublic.com/post/192885/putin-demand-ukraine-intel-trump-c
all

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 9:03 PM

SECOND

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


Thanks to Trump, Germany Is Re-Arming For War With Russia. Here’s What Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars Will Buy.

Mar 18, 2025, 05:52pm EDT

Berlin wants to add 20,000 people to its current military payroll. The extra billets will help the German army stand up a mechanized brigade it plans to permanently station in Lithuania as a deterrent against further Russian aggression.

If Russia defeats Ukraine — possibly as a consequence of Trump fully abandoning Ukraine or even actively siding with Russia — this brigade and other European forces might be the only thing standing between a battle-hardened Russian army and the free countries of Europe.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/18/germany-is-re-arming-
for-war-with-russia-heres-what-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-will-buy/

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

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025 11:14 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Germany is incapable of rearming. It doesn't have cheap energy and it doesn't have the basic resources (except coal), so it can't reindustrialize.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 6:47 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Germany is incapable of rearming. It doesn't have cheap energy and it doesn't have the basic resources (except coal), so it can't reindustrialize.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, what you just wrote is equivalent to claiming that Germany can't build nukes to hit Russia because Russia won't allow it. If Germany doesn't rearm, or doesn't build nukes, it is because Germans choose to lounge around as cheese-eating surrender monkeys would. In America, the typical Trumptard is an angry, hungry surrender monkey who blames Democrats for not giving them enough cheese. It is imaginable that Germans would have the same screwed up mental picture of reality that Trumptards have. Look at 6ixStringJack. He could have everything but he has almost nothing because of his poor behavior. Look at Trump's terrible personal behavior that he and his followers deny he did. So it is with Trumptards all around me. They don't get what they want because the amount of self-control, discipline and personal energy is higher than they have.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:03 AM

SECOND

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


Smears, Sadism and Social Security

Why Elon Musk wants to make seniors suffer

By Paul Krugman | Mar 19, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/smears-sadism-and-social-security

We often think of Social Security as a retirement program, which it is; most Social Security beneficiaries achieve that status simply by reaching retirement age. But the program also helps Americans with disabilities that prevent them from working or limit their ability to work, and for millions of people these benefits are a crucial lifeline.

Now the Social Security Administration, following orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE, appears set to subject disabled Americans to immense hardship. And everything we know indicates that this act of cruelty is mainly motivated by a combination of ego and spite.

The story so far: On March 12 the Washington Post reported that the Social Security Administration was considering ending phone service for Americans filing retirement or disability claims. The SSA quickly backed off that idea — sort of. The day after the Post report, however, the agency circulated an internal memo — acquired by the newsletter Popular Information — laying out a plan that would be almost equally destructive.

Under this plan, beneficiaries would still be able to call the SSA. But they would have to verify their identity either over the internet or through in-person visits to field offices.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about older and/or disabled Americans, many of whom are unable to access the internet and physically unable to visit SSA offices — which would in any case be overwhelmed by the increased traffic, given that the agency is already facing large staffing cuts. So this would be a move of almost cartoonish cruelty and a nightmare for millions of Americans.

Why do this? The alleged justification is to combat fraud. But ProPublica has acquired audio of a closed meeting held with Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting administrator, in which he acknowledged that fraudulent benefit claims are not, in fact, a serious problem.

So what the Musk is going on here? This plan would save some money, not by eliminating fraud, but by effectively cutting off aid to Americans who are legally entitled to that aid, and specifically those who need it most. But I don’t think the savings are the point.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

After all, gratuitous, seemingly gleeful cruelty has been a hallmark of DOGE’s operations. Even if you think DOGE’s mass layoffs — some quickly reversed when it turned out that critical workers were fired — make sense, think of the way they are being carried out. In general, workers are being fired with no warning, no chance to make plans for the future, and often face insulting (and false) claims that they were poor performers.

It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?

Back to Social Security: There will, I expect and hope, be a huge backlash if the plan to effectively cut off millions from benefits goes through. But don’t count on Musk — or Trump — to change course. These are men with fragile egos, who never, ever admit being wrong.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:21 AM

SECOND

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


WHAT HAPPENED TODAY THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW - #47
Tuesday, March 18, 2025

https://govbrief.today/daily-posts/

1. Trump pledged during his campaign to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours, now admits achieving a ceasefire is "tough," after Putin agrees only to halt energy attacks.

2. No New Revelations Yet in JFK Files Trump Calls 'Fully Declassified’

3. Second judge blocks Trump's transgender military ban, final order Friday.

4. Judge rules Musk's USAID purge violated Constitution, restores computer access but agency remains gutted.

5. Chief Justice Roberts rebukes calls for judge's impeachment; Trump claims statement wasn’t directed at him.

6. Social Security tightens ID rules, forcing millions into offices as closures worsen rural access.

7. Judge blocks Trump’s EPA from seizing $14B in climate grants-Citibank holds the funds in limbo.

8. White House torches France over a single MEP's Statue of Liberty comment, botches history in the process: "It's only because of the U.S. that the French aren't speaking German."

9. Trump fires FTC's only two Democrats, violating Supreme Court precedent, ex-commissioners say.

10. Minnesota senator behind 'Trump derangement syndrome' bill arrested for child solicitation. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/18/minnesota-sena
tor-justin-eichorn-trump-derangement-syndrome/82523535007/

11. Trump's EPA moves to eliminate science research office, cut 1,000+ experts, critics call it illegal.

12. Trump administration shuts down war crimes database, blocks transfer of records on kidnapped Ukrainian children.

13. AG Bondi calls Tesla vandalism 'domestic terrorism,' vows severe penalties as left-wing protesters target showrooms.

14. Trump administration threatens NYC commuter funding over subway crime, despite 40% drop since 2020.

15. Trump administration considers drastic cuts to HIV prevention funding, CDC reorganization looms.

16. Trump guts DHS unit credited with disrupting 1,000+ domestic terror plots.

17. Trump's FTC erases four years of consumer protection blogs, scrubbing Al and privacy guidance for Amazon, Microsoft, and Big Tech.

18. Trump administration considers giving up permanent U.S. command of NATO forces, seen as step toward exit from alliance. - https://govbrief.today/daily-headlines/trump-administration-considers-
giving-up-permanent-u-s-command-of-nato-forces-seen-as-step-toward-exit-from-alliance/

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 7:42 AM

SECOND

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


As part of its evisceration of US international aid, the Trump administration is ending funding for its global TB programs.

More than 1 million people die of tuberculosis every year. They don’t have to.

By Dylan Scott / Mar 19, 2025 at 6:36 AM

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/404861/john-green-tuberculosis-trum
p-aid-cuts

Tuberculosis is no longer the threat it once was in the US and Europe, but the disease is still killing more than 1 million people worldwide every year.

Humanity’s battle against tuberculosis has been one of slow and imperfect progress. The disease no longer kills one in seven people in the US, as it did in the 19th century. But look elsewhere and its burden is still terrible: TB killed more than 1.2 million people in 2023, likely making it once again the deadliest infection on Earth, after it was briefly supplanted by Covid-19 during the pandemic.

And as John Green, the YA author, YouTuber, and author of the new book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, told me in an interview: “That number is about to go up.”

As part of its evisceration of US international aid, the Trump administration is ending funding for its global TB programs. The US is the world’s largest single funder of tuberculosis treatment, and the spending cuts quickly interrupted medical care for TB victims. And any delay in treatment can lead to worse outcomes for patients and makes it more likely the bacteria will evolve to resist antibiotics.

“All of this is a direct result of the decisions made by the US government,” Green told me. “Allowing tuberculosis to spread unchecked throughout the world is bad news for all humans.”

There may be as many as 10 million additional TB cases by 2030 because of the cuts, depending on how deep they ultimately are, according to one initial estimate. An additional 2.2 million people could die in that worst-case scenario.

It’s difficult to know what’s happening on the ground, as ongoing lawsuits try force aid funding to resume and the Trump administration itself has given conflicting information at times. One TB program director told The Guardian last week their funding had still not resumed despite receiving a reassurance from the administration that it would.

The funding freeze is not only a threat to people in the developing world who live with tuberculosis as an ever-present threat, Green told me — it also poses a risk to the US itself. Right now, Kansas has 68 active TB cases, one of the largest US outbreaks in recent history. One estimate from the Center for Global Development finds that US TB cases will rise in parallel with cases in the rest of the world. That won’t just increase health care costs — it will increase the risk that TB will become more drug-resistant and therefore deadlier to people around the world, including in the US.

I spoke with Green about the history of one of humanity’s oldest infectious diseases, the threat posed by the Trump administration’s cuts, and what concerned people can do in response.

Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.

What is the state of tuberculosis right now? Why do people in the US and other wealthy countries often think of it as a disease of the past, a problem that has been solved?

I used to think of it as a disease of the past as well. I thought of TB primarily as the disease that killed John Keats, and then we figured out a solution to it, so now it’s not a threat anymore.

But in fact, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest infectious disease. It kills over 1.2 million people per year. That number is about to go up. It sickens about 10 million people per year. Around a quarter of all living humans have experienced a TB infection.

Now, the vast majority of those people will never become sick. They’ll have what we call latent TB, where these clumps of white blood cells form what are called tubercles to surround the bacteria and keep it in check. But in about 10 percent of people who experience a TB infection, they will become sick.

We understand some of the risk factors for developing active TB disease. They include malnutrition, other health problems like diabetes, or HIV infection. But we don’t fully understand why some people develop active TB and others don’t.

You call the disease “weird” in your book. What is weird about TB?

The weirdest thing about TB is the cell wall that the bacteria builds. It builds this really thick, fatty cell wall.

That takes a long time to build, so TB has an extremely slow growth rate compared to other bacteria; in some cases, hundreds of times slower. That means that it sickens us slower because it takes a long time to overwhelm the body’s defenses.

This is one of the reasons why tuberculosis used to be a narratively convenient disease, a disease that was the subject of so many books. It was a narratively compelling disease because it tends to take a life slowly over the course of months or years, rather than all at once like a disease like cholera or the black plague.

Classically, we understood death as something that occurred very early on in life because about half of people died before the age of 5, or something that occurred late in adulthood, in your 50s or after. Tuberculosis killed so many people in their 20s and 30s that it was called the robber of youth. But it also killed people early in childhood and late in adulthood. It killed indiscriminately.

To some extent, it still does. I mean, 218,000 kids are going to die of tuberculosis this year.

What’s so frustrating to me is that all of those deaths are unnecessary because we’ve had a cure since the 1950s.

This disease has been with us forever. It was even glamorized to an extent in earlier generations. But then there was a transition when it became more stigmatized — it became associated with being dirty and poor. How did that happen?

Until 1882, at least in Northern Europe and the United States, it was generally believed that tuberculosis was an inherited genetic condition. But in 1882, the German doctor Robert Koch proved that tuberculosis was in fact caused by bacteria. The moment it became an infectious disease is really the moment that our imagining of the disease changed radically.

Instead of being a disease of wealth and civilization, it became a disease of poverty. The implications of this were huge because it meant that we could control tuberculosis by trying to control the bacteria that caused TB. But it also meant that we wanted much more control over the lives of people living with tuberculosis.

We started to understand them very differently. We started to see people with tuberculosis as a threat to the social order.

At the same time, by the middle of the 20th century, we developed vaccines and cures. How did our perception of TB continued to change — and how did race increasingly factor into it?

TB had long been understood by Europeans as a racialized disease. It was widely believed in Europe and in the US among white doctors that only white people could get consumption because it was a disease of civilization. To acknowledge that consumption was common among people of color and colonized people would have been to undermine the entire project of colonialism itself.

After we understood the disease as infectious, it became racialized in a different way, where it came to be argued that people of color were uncommonly susceptible to tuberculosis. Instead of believing that it was impossible for them to get tuberculosis, people started to argue that their susceptibility to tuberculosis was owing to some factor inherent to race.

Now, we knew this was hogwash from the beginning. There were lots of doctors, including African American doctors and researchers, pushing back against this notion. They argued, correctly, that the actual cause of tuberculosis was crowded living and working conditions, poor pay, malnutrition — all the stuff that today we know does cause tuberculosis.

But the racialization of the disease was so profound that it’s still shaping who lives and dies of tuberculosis.

Today, how does tuberculosis look in the United States versus a place like Sierra Leone, which you cover extensively in your book?

Starting in the 1940s, we began to develop treatments for tuberculosis that were very powerful. We created combinations of multiple antibiotics that, given over the course of several months or even years, could cure tuberculosis. This disease that had always been one of the leading human killers suddenly became curable.

Unfortunately, we did a really poor job of distributing this cure to the places where it was most needed. As a result, we’ve seen the development of extensive drug resistance for tuberculosis, and we’ve seen a huge amount of ongoing suffering from the disease. The Ugandan HIV researcher Dr. Peter Mugyenyi said of HIV drugs in the year 2000: “Where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not. And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.” And that’s very much the case with tuberculosis as well.

If you or I got tuberculosis tomorrow, even if we had a complex drug-resistant case, we would get access to the best personalized, tailored treatments of antibiotic cocktails we would need in order to cure our TB. But for someone like my friend Henry living in Sierra Leone, when he got really sick in 2019 and 2020, those drugs weren’t available to him.

So even though his TB was very curable, his life was at risk — not ultimately because of a lack of technology, but because of failure to get the technology to the places where it’s most needed.

In the book you called TB both a form and an expression of injustice. It seems to me that TB is one very striking example of a pattern of injustice that applies across a lot of diseases.

Yeah. I think it’s really important to acknowledge that tuberculosis is not the only disease of injustice. Hepatitis is a disease of injustice. Malaria, HIV, cancer are diseases of injustice. When my brother got cancer, one of the first things he said to me was that there was a 94 percent cure rate if you have access to treatment, and about a 5 percent cure rate if you don’t.

It’s very hard to grapple with the fact that the real cause of a huge percentage of human death is injustice — the failures of human-built systems.

There are many deaths that we simply don’t have the technology or the tools to prevent. But there are many, many, many, many deaths that we do have the technologies and tools to prevent. It’s important to understand that as a justice problem, as an equity problem, as a failure to appropriately apportion the resources that we as a human species have developed.

It breaks my heart. It’s devastating. I’m often asked whether I think people are good. Like, at the end of this book, do I think people are good? And I can’t answer that question.

What I can say is I think people are capable of extraordinary generosity and compassion and sacrifice. When people are proximal to suffering, they show an extraordinary capacity for giving. And when people are not proximal to suffering, when people don’t let themselves become close to the suffering of others, they can act monstrously.

There has been imperfect progress on global health, but progress nonetheless. But now the US government is pulling back from the global health commitments that have helped make that progress possible. What does this mean for TB specifically?

The United States has long been the most generous donor when it comes to fighting TB, and now essentially all tuberculosis-related funding has been cut. That’s catastrophic on a number of levels. To my Republican friends and congressional representatives, I try to compare it to the 2008 financial crisis when the capital markets just froze, and it was very hard to get them to start working again.

In many communities, that’s what’s happening as a result of this sudden, chaotic, very unpredictable, haphazardly rolled out funding freeze. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen their treatment interrupted, and we know that’s a catastrophe, not only for those individuals, many of whom will die, perhaps most of whom tragically will die, but also because it means that they will develop drug resistance.

Even a couple of weeks without getting access to your medication means a skyrocketing chance of drug resistance. Even if they’re able to get back on treatment, the relatively inexpensive treatment that worked before may no longer work. That means more cases of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis circulating in communities.

It’s also a threat to the United States. We have 10,000 cases of active tuberculosis in the US every year. We have a tuberculosis outbreak right now in Kansas. Tuberculosis anywhere is a threat to people everywhere and allowing tuberculosis to spread unchecked throughout the world is bad news for all humans. It’s bad news for human health.

We’ve made so much progress in human health during my lifetime. The year I graduated from high school, 12 million children died under the age of 5. Last year, fewer than 5 million did.

It’s easy to feel like that progress is inevitable or natural or somehow it was always going to happen. But it wasn’t always going to happen. It happened because millions of people worked together to make it happen, because we decided collectively to value children’s lives more and to work hard to protect them.

Now what we’re seeing is the first regression of my lifetime when it comes to overall human health. We’re seeing it in the United States where life expectancy has been going down. We’re about to see it globally where tuberculosis cases, by one estimate, will increase by 30 percent over the next couple of years, leading to 13 million people getting sick every year instead of 10 million and leading to hundreds of thousands more people dying.

All of this is a direct result of the decisions made by the US government.

I feel like it’s hard for people to understand the feedback loop that’s potentially in play here that can put our health at risk because diseases are spreading elsewhere. I think it’s also hard for us to take the long view.

I’m curious where you think that failure comes from? And have you seen anything that’s sort of effective in overcoming that?

I think we have to bridge the empathy gap. There’s always an empathy gap between every person, right? I don’t know what it’s like to be you. I don’t know about your joys and sorrows. And even when I do, I can only kind of situate them in my own experience. I can only relate to it through my own eyes because those are the only eyes I get to see through for the whole time that I’m here.

And so there’s always an empathy gap, but that empathy gap grows or shrinks based on how close you allow yourself to be to the suffering and joy of others. And so you know when my uncle gets sick, I’m going to respond to that very differently than if I hear through the grapevine that someone else’s uncle is sick. And for me, the empathy gap is also a social justice gap.

The further the rich world feels from someone’s life, the less likely the rich world is to intervene. So for me, it’s about shrinking that empathy gap everywhere we can so that we understand that the lives of other people, even other people whose lives may feel distant from ours are just as real and just as important as ours, that their joy and grief and longing and loss is as real and profound as ours is.

I try to do that in the book by telling Henry’s story because you can talk all day about what a great investment tuberculosis response is, and it is a great long-term financial investment. You can talk all day about how many people are dying of TB every year. All that just boils down to statistics. And the statistics don’t decrease the empathy gap, at least for me. And so I wanted to tell a human story at a human scale because I feel like that’s what really changes our perspective.

What options are available to people like Vox readers, who want to contribute in some small way to making these problems better?

It sounds meaningless and everybody says it, but it’s true. When you reach out to your congressional representatives insofar as you’re lucky enough to have some say in your governance, it really matters. What funding we’ve been able to claw back for USAID is a result of people reaching out to their senators and representatives and those senators and representatives in turn reaching out to Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio and saying, “This is ridiculous. This can’t happen.”

It’s really, really important that people in power hear that it is unacceptable for the United States to walk away from its long-term commitments to global health and human health, and that it’s unacceptable for the United States to break its promises. They need to hear it’s also bad for America. It’s bad for farmers who provide food aid. It’s bad for overall human health in the United States. We’re seeing our own numbers of tuberculosis cases go up every year, and that will accelerate now.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 8:55 AM

SECOND

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


‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE

By Vittoria Elliott | Mar 18, 2025 4:04 PM

https://www.wired.com/story/federal-auditors-doge-elon-musk/

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the first six weeks of the new Trump administration turning the federal government upside down. It has moved from agency to agency, accessing sensitive data and payment systems, all on a supposed crusade to audit the government and stop fraud, waste, and abuse. DOGE has posted some of its “findings” on its website, many of which have been revealed to be errors.

But two federal auditors with years of experience, who have both worked on financial and technical audits for the government, say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like. Both asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

“Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” says one of the auditors who spoke to WIRED. “None of them are auditors.”

In September, in a speech during the presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump said that he would create a government efficiency task force, headed by Musk, which would do a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Musk initially said that he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, more than the entire 2023 discretionary budget of $1.7 trillion. Musk has since tempered his ambitions, saying he’d aim to cut $1 trillion in government spending. Still, he has alleged that much of this money can be cut by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse, and has continued to claim DOGE’s cuts of agency staff and resources are all part of an audit.

While there are certainly instances of government money siphoned off to fraud—a Government Accountability Office study published in 2024 estimated that the government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud each year—even recovering all that spending wouldn’t amount to the $1 trillion Musk hopes to cut from the budget.

The auditors who spoke to WIRED allege that not only is Musk’s claim not true, but also that DOGE appears to have completely eschewed the existing processes for actually rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.

“An audit that follows Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), also known as a Yellow Book audit, is conducted in accordance with the standards issued by the US Government Accountability Office,” says the first auditor. Audits can focus on the finances, compliance, or performance of an agency. “That is the gold standard for how you audit the government.”

There are generally five phases of a GAGAS audit, the auditors tell WIRED: planning, evidence gathering, evaluation, reporting, and follow up. Auditors work to define the scope of an audit, identify all the applicable laws and standards, and come up with an audit plan. Next, auditors conduct interviews with staff, review financial records, and comb through data, reports, and transactions, documenting all the way. From there, auditors will assess that information against policies or procedures to figure out if there’s been some kind of alleged waste, fraud, or abuse and issue a report detailing their findings and offering recommendations. Often, those reports are made available to the public. After an audit, the auditors can follow up with the agency to ensure changes are being made.

There are also very technical definitions for what constitutes waste, fraud, or abuse. Waste could mean that there are inefficiencies in a program that might lead to purchasing more of something that goes unused, or paying more for a service than is necessary. Fraud involves intentional deception—for instance, bribery or falsifying business records. Abuse means doing things that aren’t necessarily illegal, but that are unethical. This could look like nepotism or favoritism in hiring, or spending excessively on travel.

In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk said he believed that the government was “one big pyramid scheme” and alleged that “entitlements fraud” is a “gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here.”

The two auditors told WIRED that going through the technological and financial minutiae of even just a single project or part of an agency can take anywhere from six to 18 months.

“You can’t coherently audit something like the whole Social Security system in a week or two,” says the second auditor. It’s exactly this rush to crack systems open without full understanding, the auditors say, that has led to Elon Musk’s false claims that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits. “It could be that DOGE didn’t de-dupe the data.”

“In no uncertain terms is this an audit,” claims the second auditor. “It’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.”

Federal workers who have spoken to WIRED say they are worried that their own data could be used to surveil and target them for firings based on their identities or political views. There are also concerns that DOGE could access contracts and procurement data that contain sensitive information that companies provide in order to work with the federal government. DOGE has also deployed an AI chatbot within the General Services Administration (GSA) and appears to want to expand the use of such tools, bolstered by access to government data. New court documents also indicate that Marko Elez, the former DOGE representative at the Treasury Department, shared a spreadsheet with personally identifying information outside the agency.

And without time spent for auditors to understand a new data system—like interviewing agency staff or learning the coding language—the first auditor believes it’s likely the DOGE team is flying blind. “When they collect a dataset, they don't get it with any sort of description, I imagine,” they say. “There are no terms of use for any government systems … There's no supporting testimony from data system owners, from data system experts. They don't even know the language and the database systems that they're working in. That’s why they keep messing up.”

The auditors described a lengthy vetting process that allowed them to get the permissions necessary to dive into an agency’s data and systems. In addition to going through the initial vetting process, the auditors say that they are required to engage in continuing education.

“None of them have any auditing background, none have any certifications, none have any clearances,” says the first auditor.

Federal workers who have spoken to WIRED expressed concern that DOGE’s operatives appear to have bypassed the normal security clearance protocols in order to access sensitive systems. WIRED found that many of DOGE’s youngest members, all of whom were 25 or younger, have very limited work experience, and none in the government. One, Edward Coristine, who goes by “Big Balls” online, appears to be a 19-year-old high school graduate. Despite this, they were given high-level access at places like the GSA, the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury. Others, like those at the Federal Aviation Administration, come directly from Musk’s own companies and were not fully vetted before their start dates.

The auditors also noted that even canceling contracts, as DOGE has done, can add to costs, rather than reduce them, in the long run. For instance, often the government negotiates deals on large purchases where it gets discounts for bulk purchases. Canceling a contract likely not only means the government needs to pay some kind of fee to compensate for the contract cancellation—maybe 10 to 15 percent of the contract amount—but if some or part of that purchase needs to be reinstated later, that initial bulk discount will likely be gone, making it more expensive overall. This was the case with many of the software licenses that DOGE said it wanted to cut.

Since sweeping through the government, DOGE has canceled thousands of government contracts, including 10,000 specifically for humanitarian aid. According to reporting from the Associated Press, 40 percent of those canceled contracts through late February will likely not save the government any money.

“They'll end up costing more in some way, whether it's time, inconvenience, or money,” says the second auditor.

But the auditors say that there are ways DOGE could get it right. “If DOGE wanted to be the good guys, they could,” says the first auditor. “I’d start by looking at existing Inspector General recommendations.” On the website for the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, there are more than 1,200 recommendations that have yet to be implemented that could potentially save the government hundreds of millions of dollars.

In an interview on FOX Business with Larry Kudlow, when asked about how his team was identifying what to go after in the government, Musk replied, “We look at the president's executive orders, and we also just follow the money.”

The auditors say they aren’t necessarily against bringing in people from outside the government to help streamline government processes—something that the government was already doing before Trump was sworn in for his second term. For instance, 18F, the digital services agency within the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, was explicitly designed to serve as an in-house consultancy that would allow federal agencies to leverage private sector expertise. As part of DOGE’s sweep of the government, however, it has gutted the group, putting a pause on several ongoing projects to make government services more efficient for users.

And it’s these actions, the second auditor says, that best show that DOGE’s intentions may not be geared toward “efficiency” at all. “It’s a con,” they allege.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 10:16 AM

SECOND

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


Putin Trolls Trump with Power Station Strike After ‘Ceasefire’

The Russian president agreed to halt the targeting of Ukrainian energy infrastructure in a Tuesday call with Trump. That apparently didn’t last long.

By Julia Ornedo | Mar. 19 2025 9:34 AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/putin-trolls-trump-with-power-station-st
rike-after-ceasefire/

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 1:56 PM

SECOND

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


The Common Genius of Lincoln and Einstein

The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about Moral Genius. Like high-achieving individuals in science or the arts, moral geniuses are willing to stand against conventional opinion. Trump and Musk are also willing to stand against conventional opinion about morality and seek to overthrow it, making them Immoral Geniuses.

By Andrew O’Hehir | October 2, 2014

https://nautil.us/the-common-genius-of-lincoln-and-einstein-235125/

Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of slavery. Albert Einstein would still be the most famous physicist of the 20th century, and the author of the most famous equation in history, had he not called on his fellow scientists to address the moral consequences of their discoveries, speaking out against war and nuclear weapons. But both men possessed a quality that went beyond their immense talents in politics and science and elevated them to world-historical stature: an ambiguous but distinctive quality that scientists, historians, and philosophers have begun to call moral genius. By suggesting that morality can, like math or chemistry or musical composition, admit of genius-level contributions, the phrase challenges us to reconsider the nature of genius itself.

Columbia University philosopher Elliot Paul observes that at first glance a great moral leader does not appear “creative” in the same sense as a revolutionary artist or a brilliant scientist. The ideas represented by Lincoln or Einstein or Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., in their capacity as moral leaders, were not necessarily new. A great many 19th century Americans were deeply uncomfortable with slavery and understood that it conflicted with the nation’s alleged ideals on a fundamental level. Einstein was hardly the only person, or the only physicist, to notice that the immense scientific advance of splitting the atom threatened the human race with extinction. King and Gandhi personally experienced racial discrimination and saw it as a corrosive moral wrong that sickened entire societies, but they were certainly not alone.

What these people did that was creative and distinctive was to seize the moment—to recognize a great moral wrong and embrace the idea that they had a unique responsibility, and ability, to do something about it. Psychological theory on the subject of unusual creativity has often focused on the idea that genius is a self-created phenomenon. In the words of the late psychologist Howard Gruber, genius is best understood as “an organization that was constructed by the person himself in the course of his life, in the course of his work, as needed in order to meet the tasks that he encountered.” (Gruber’s gendered pronouns reflected standard usage at the time, highlighting the fact that women have historically been excluded from the category.)

Like high-achieving individuals in science or the arts, Paul suggests, moral geniuses are willing to stand against conventional opinion, often within their own nation or community, and seek to overthrow it. That kind of individual courage, we might say, becomes the subject or the text of the moral genius’s greatness. While the specifics vary greatly, we could describe a moral genius as someone who rejects the innate caution and the hypocritical compromises of normative social morality. (King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” his most sustained accomplishment in rhetorical prose, addresses precisely this issue.) “To become a moral leader is a demanding and inherently risky thing to do,” says William B. Irvine, a professor of philosophy at Wright State University and author of the forthcoming book Aha! The Moments of Insight That Shape Our World. “And moral leadership is most important in a situation where everybody is going to look down on you as a social traitor.” Gandhi opposed not just British imperialism but also Hindu nationalism; Einstein was a lifelong Zionist who opposed the notion of Israel as a Jewish state; Lincoln’s decision not to arrest or prosecute the Confederate leadership was derided by Northern radicals, and remains controversial among historians.

Irvine’s book focuses on the moments of insight or clarity or special revelation that often seem to accompany history-shaping individual breakthroughs, whether in science, the arts, or the moral domain. Among numerous other examples, he considers the case of 18th-century British reformer Thomas Clarkson, who first adopted the anti-slavery position for strategic reasons, in an effort to win an essay contest as a Cambridge University student. Once he was rationally convinced of the rightness of the cause, Clarkson became consumed by the issue at a profoundly personal level, suffering from repeated nightmares about the horrors of slavery. “He tried to ignore it and push it off to one side, and it wouldn’t let go of him,” Irvine says. “The only way I can have peace in my life, he decided, is to become a moral warrior. Otherwise my conscience will never leave me alone.”

In Lincoln and Einstein, we see both the striving, self-created individual that Gruber describes and some evidence of Irvine’s “aha” moments. Years afterward, Einstein remembered the 1939 letter he wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging the United States to consider developing nuclear weapons, as the worst mistake of his life. It was certainly defensible in the context of the time, faced with the evidence that Hitler’s scientists were also pursuing the A-bomb. Einstein had been a pacifist and an activist for social justice throughout his life, but his sense of personal responsibility for Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly drove him to become a leading spokesman on the dangers of nuclear war and a founder of the anti-nuclear movement, which would grow to a global scale decades after his death and ultimately compel the American and Soviet superpowers to step back from the brink of Armageddon.

Similarly, Lincoln had opposed slavery his entire life on moral and philosophical grounds. But well into the war years he continued to view the subject in pragmatic, political terms, repeatedly stating he was willing to tolerate the evils of slavery in order to preserve the Union. Tony Kushner’s screenplay for the film Lincoln offers a fictionalized “aha!” moment for Lincoln as he witnesses the carnage on the battlefield at Gettysburg and holds conversations with African-American soldiers. It’s a pretty good guess, insofar as Lincoln seems to have arrived, over a short period of time in 1863, at the understanding that the only way to make the dreadful slaughter of the Civil War bearable was to attach it to a great moral cause. What you might call the second “aha!” moment lay in his realization that “preserving the Union” without uprooting the moral evil that had poisoned the nation was not a goal worth pursuing, and perhaps not possible.

Highly creative people excel at “recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

In any event, the famously terse speech that Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg—quite likely the shortest speech ever delivered by an American president, and certainly the most far-reaching—was a work of immense moral and rhetorical genius. It recast the terrible, exhausting war as a purposeful struggle to redeem the promise of America, and it did more than that: It recast the entire history of the nation to that point as a revolutionary thought-experiment that had not quite reached its logical fulfillment. From that day forward Americans have thought of 1776 as the beginning of our nation’s history (rather than the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783) and the high-flown philosophical language of the Declaration of Independence as central to our national identity. That speech was the work of someone with the peculiar ability to see history as if from the outside, seize its reins and change its course—and also someone willing to pay a grievous personal price for that historical role. It displayed intellect and openness in counterpoint, and a tremendously creative intelligence at work. We may attribute such an act of moral genius to unusual synaptic processing powers or to an invisible entity called the conscience. In either case it looks obvious and inevitable in hindsight, but required an extraordinary individual at the time.

Some researchers now suspect that this ability to stand outside of one’s immediate context and take a longer historical view, like other forms of genius, may have physical correlates in the brain. Neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen recently wrote that her study of the brains of highly creative people suggests that they excel at “recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.” In objective terms, this shows up as much stronger activations (compared to a control group) in the association cortices, extensive regions on the outer surface of the brain that “interpret and make use of the specialized information collected by the primary visual, auditory, sensory, and motor regions.”

Andreasen’s initial research has primarily focused on prominent writers and other figures from the arts, but she supports the idea that unusual creativity is likely to be a similar neurological and biochemical phenomenon across fields and disciplines. Intriguingly, she also says that her research supports the age-old connection between exceptional creativity and certain varieties of mental illness, especially depression and other mood disorders. This cultural stereotype goes back at least as far as the Greeks, and it would seem to fit the examples of both Lincoln and Einstein. The former was well known for his melancholic disposition, and today would likely be diagnosed with clinical depression, while the latter had a family history of schizophrenia and (in Andreasen’s judgment) appeared to manifest some mild or borderline symptoms. (Martin Luther King suffered from depressive episodes, and attempted suicide at least once, and some evidence suggests that Gandhi also suffered from depression). Whether this connection is also rooted in brain activation patterns and processing speed is an unanswered but fascinating question.

Mental illness aside, three of the four people I have mentioned were assassinated by political opponents. If Einstein looks like a universally revered figure in the rear-view mirror, it did not always seem so during his life: He was the subject of extensive FBI surveillance and harassment, and consistently depicted as a traitorous or unpatriotic Communist sympathizer by right-wing critics. In this and many other respects, the moral genius reminds us of other genius tropes, like the misunderstood artist or the persecuted astronomer—such a person faces fierce opposition, and is not unfamiliar with suffering.

Andrew O’Hehir is a senior writer at Salon.com

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:05 PM

SECOND

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


Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order

By Erin Alberty | Mar 17, 2025

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talk
ers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled "DEI."

Why it matters: From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo Code Talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

They were critical to securing America's victory at Iwo Jima.

Driving the news: Axios identified at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers that had disappeared from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense websites as of Monday.

How it works: The Defense department's URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump's executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The Internet Archive shows the deleted Army pages were live as recently as November, with many visible until February or March. None are shown with error messages until Trump took office.

The other side: Asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot replied in a statement: "As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. ... We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms."

The statement did not address whether the Code Talkers are considered divisive DEI figures that "erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution." Indigenous Americans have enlisted in the U.S. military at a rate five times the national average, per Trump's own proclamation in 2018. That proclamation has also been removed.

More at https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talk
ers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:22 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
It’s bad for farmers who provide food aid.
So?

Quote:
It’s bad for overall human health in the United States. We’re seeing our own numbers of tuberculosis cases go up every year, and that will accelerate now.
Our TB cases are mostly imported. If we control our borders this won't be a problem.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:24 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
If Einstein looks like a universally revered figure in the rear-view mirror, it did not always seem so during his life: He was the subject of extensive FBI surveillance and harassment, and consistently depicted as a traitorous or unpatriotic Communist sympathizer by right-wing critics.


So, I guess when I'm called a Russian troll Einstein is right beside me.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:44 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


For all the "auditing" that's been done, the Federal government is $35 trillion in debt.

The government needs more than an audit. It needs a severe trimming, with an eye to furthering our core missions but eliminating non-essential spending i.e. spending that doesn't help America and Americans.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:46 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:
Quote:
It’s bad for farmers who provide food aid.
So?

Quote:
It’s bad for overall human health in the United States. We’re seeing our own numbers of tuberculosis cases go up every year, and that will accelerate now.
Our TB cases are mostly imported. If we control our borders this won't be a problem.
Did I tell you that Trumptards can't tell the difference between reality and imagination? At least all the ones I know can't and it causes endless trouble for them, troubles that they don't blame on their mental handicaps. They never blame themselves for the crappy lives they live.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 2:46 PM

SECOND

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


How Oklahoma’s superintendent set off a holy war in classrooms

Even for the devout, Ryan Walters’ mandate requiring that public school students learn from the Bible goes too far

By Linda K. Wertheimer | March 17, 2025

Walters’s pitch is a play for national attention, given his abundance of social media posts praising Donald Trump, who campaigned on returning prayer to schools and as president has established a White House Faith Office and a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias.” In September, Walters proposed spending $3 million to buy 55,000 copies of the Bible that has been endorsed by the president and for which he receives royalties.

But beyond Walter’s national aspirations, the Bible mandate also seems like an attempt at one-upmanship, with other states angling to infuse Christianity into public schools. Louisiana, for instance, is in a court battle over its push for Ten Commandments posters in schools. Texas fought off Democratic opposition to approve an optional Bible-infused curriculum and financial incentives for school districts that use the materials. A slew of states have passed or promoted similar measures, including ones allowing chaplains to act as counselors in schools. Unsurprisingly, Walters, too, has advocated for displaying the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

“He’s saying you can’t be a good American citizen if you don’t understand the Bible. It’s this merger of American and Christian identities, the idea that only Christians are true Americans.” 

More at https://hechingerreport.org/how-oklahomas-superintendent-set-off-a-hol
y-war-in-classrooms/

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 3:50 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
It’s bad for farmers who provide food aid.
So?

Quote:
It’s bad for overall human health in the United States. We’re seeing our own numbers of tuberculosis cases go up every year, and that will accelerate now.
Our TB cases are mostly imported. If we control our borders this won't be a problem.
Did I tell you that Trumptards can't tell the difference between reality and imagination? At least all the ones I know can't and it causes endless trouble for them, troubles that they don't blame on their mental handicaps. They never blame themselves for the crappy lives they live.

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


REALITY:

Quote:
* Nationally, 76 percent of TB cases in 2023 occurred in foreign-born patients.[4]
* Counties, states and metropolitan areas with high foreign-born populations have higher TB rates than those with lower foreign-born populations.[5]
* Some countries of origin for both legal and illegal aliens have TB rates as high as 60 times the U.S. rate.[6]
* The government’s health screening for TB in potential immigrants is deficient; some categories of aliens do not undergo health screening at all.[7]
* Latent TB is not grounds for inadmissibility, even though the progression of latent TB accounts for over 80 percent of active TB cases in the U.S.[8]
* Some U.S. border counties have TB rates exceeding rates in high-risk countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon.[9]
* The cost of treating each case of TB is over $20,000, and can reach over $500,000 if the case is extensively drug-resistant.[10]


https://www.fairus.org/issue/tuberculosis-mass-migration-drives-its-pr
evalence-united-states

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 5:37 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


FWIW ... you won't find me 100% for everything that Trump is doing. You won't find me 100% against, either. I'm not trying to take a "middle road", I'm trying to be realistic about how we can improve America FOR AMERICANS.

-----------
"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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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 6:20 PM

BRENDA


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Navajo Code Talkers disappear from military websites after Trump DEI order

By Erin Alberty | Mar 17, 2025

https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talk
ers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled "DEI."

Why it matters: From 1942 to 1945, the Navajo Code Talkers were instrumental in every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

They were critical to securing America's victory at Iwo Jima.

Driving the news: Axios identified at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers that had disappeared from the U.S. Army and Department of Defense websites as of Monday.

How it works: The Defense department's URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump's executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

The Internet Archive shows the deleted Army pages were live as recently as November, with many visible until February or March. None are shown with error messages until Trump took office.

The other side: Asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot replied in a statement: "As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. ... We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms."

The statement did not address whether the Code Talkers are considered divisive DEI figures that "erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution." Indigenous Americans have enlisted in the U.S. military at a rate five times the national average, per Trump's own proclamation in 2018. That proclamation has also been removed.

More at https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talk
ers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii

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


No surprise the code talkers are being erased. I saw this coming. Many historical Indigenous figures I am sure will be erased as well.

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 9:40 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 Brenda:

No surprise the code talkers are being erased. I saw this coming. Many historical Indigenous figures I am sure will be erased as well.
The Trumptards I know in Texas are all depraved racists who insist they are not racists, claiming they are the REAL Americans, and people who aren't precisely like them are not:

Jackie Robinson’s Army career wiped from military website in DEI purge

By Curtis Bunn | March 19, 2025, 3:24 PM CDT

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/jackie-robinson-army-history-dei-m
ilitary-department-defense-rcna197067

The military story of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball after serving as a 2nd lieutenant in the Army, no longer exists on the Department of Defense’s website as part of the Trump administration’s wiping out of diversity, equity and inclusion within the federal government.

The Pentagon was ordered by Trump to scan federal websites for articles, social media posts, photos, news articles and videos to remove any web pages that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Several websites under Pentagon jurisdiction have removed thousands of pages documenting the history of people of color, LGBTQ people, women and others from marginalized backgrounds and their contributions to the American military. Multiple pages about Robinson were taken down, including a page about Negro League players talking about serving in the military. But as of Wednesday afternoon, at least one page about Robinson, in a series about athletes who served in the military, was reinstated.

“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department," Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said Wednesday in a statement to NBC News. "Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed -- either deliberately or by mistake -- that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”

Robinson trained as an officer and was assigned to a tank regiment, but he still had to deal with harassment and the overall policy of segregation in the U.S. military. He faced a court-martial for refusing to sit in the back of a bus while at Fort Hood in Texas, according to Military.com. Though he was found not guilty of the six counts, including insubordination, the court-martial prevented him from deploying to fight in Europe with his battalion.

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 11:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:


Quote:
SIX

and if that's really the case, then I don't give a single fuck about your judgement of my healthcare situation.



You get all huffy about gummint employees suckin' on the gummint teat, but you get plenty defensive when the shoe's on the othe foot, don't you?

How about this, SIX ... instead of bitching and whining about poor little ole you, why don't you take that ginormous IQ you claim that you have, and DO something with it?

I know, it's not fair that you can climb out of the hole that youre in and others ... for lack of IQ ... can't. But instead of advocating for a better life for everyone, you insist that everybody be dragged down into the hole you insist on living in?

You remind me of a fable. There were two farmers, living side by side. One, by dint of hard work and a little good fortune, managed to scrape together enough to buy a cow.

The second farmer slowly grew consumed about his neighbor's good fortune.
One day, he heard a rustling in the leaves and came across a tiny creature trapped in a spider's web. So he carefully freed the little thing. The little creature, in a tiny voice, told him in return he would grant the farmer anything he wanted. Anything at all.

So the farmer thought about what he wanted more than anything in the whole world.

Select to view spoiler:

SO HE WISHED HIS NEIGHBOR'S COW WAS DEAD.



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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



I don't bother trying anymore because hard work and intellect amount to nothing in this country. Especially if you're a white male.

They've fucked me over all my life, and I'm going to get by the rest of my life doing as little as I possibly can for money to exist.

I feel no sympathy for anybody else in the same position. Especially when they were overpaid, they were hired based off of inherited traits we have no control over, and their job doesn't even need to exist in the first place.

The difference between me and them is that they HAVE to go find another job now. They were the same people bitching the last 4 years that they can't even live on 6 figures anymore.

Boo Hoo

Better figure it out quick.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 11:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Next stop. The shuttering of the Department of Education.


Trump to Sign Order Shuttering the Department of Education Tomorrow

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2025/03/19/trump-will-official
ly-sign-executive-order-closing-the-department-of-education-tomorrow-n2654109

You won't be missed.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 19, 2025 11:43 PM

BRENDA


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:

No surprise the code talkers are being erased. I saw this coming. Many historical Indigenous figures I am sure will be erased as well.
The Trumptards I know in Texas are all depraved racists who insist they are not racists, claiming they are the REAL Americans, and people who aren't precisely like them are not:

Jackie Robinson’s Army career wiped from military website in DEI purge

By Curtis Bunn | March 19, 2025, 3:24 PM CDT

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/jackie-robinson-army-history-dei-m
ilitary-department-defense-rcna197067

The military story of Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball after serving as a 2nd lieutenant in the Army, no longer exists on the Department of Defense’s website as part of the Trump administration’s wiping out of diversity, equity and inclusion within the federal government.

The Pentagon was ordered by Trump to scan federal websites for articles, social media posts, photos, news articles and videos to remove any web pages that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Several websites under Pentagon jurisdiction have removed thousands of pages documenting the history of people of color, LGBTQ people, women and others from marginalized backgrounds and their contributions to the American military. Multiple pages about Robinson were taken down, including a page about Negro League players talking about serving in the military. But as of Wednesday afternoon, at least one page about Robinson, in a series about athletes who served in the military, was reinstated.

“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department," Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said Wednesday in a statement to NBC News. "Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed -- either deliberately or by mistake -- that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”

Robinson trained as an officer and was assigned to a tank regiment, but he still had to deal with harassment and the overall policy of segregation in the U.S. military. He faced a court-martial for refusing to sit in the back of a bus while at Fort Hood in Texas, according to Military.com. Though he was found not guilty of the six counts, including insubordination, the court-martial prevented him from deploying to fight in Europe with his battalion.

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


It usually is people who have to declare that they aren't racists are the ones who are.

I am not surprised by this either and I should have seen this coming too.

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 1:21 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I hate to break it to everyone, but everybody is at least a little racist.

It's part of your genetic code.

And if you pretend that you aren't instinctively racist, than you are lying to yourself and everyone else around you, and you shouldn't be taken seriously.

You don't just wave a magic wand and remove that with ad campaigns and guilt.


Maybe one day if we all live in a true utopia and there is no more such thing as a scarcity of goods, it could eventually be bred out of people. But we don't seem to be going that way right now.

Prepare to see a lot of "racist" shit in the future. Not just here, but everywhere in the Western world. We're booting everyone out who doesn't belong. Not just here, but everywhere. And there's nothing anybody can do about it.

We're in a new age of Nationalism. Globalism is dead.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 4:18 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


You think you've been shit on because you're a white male?

Seriously??

Yanno what I think?

I think you've been propelled by Trump's candidacy. Now that he's been elected, you're in a SERIOUS slump. (Also, check that your blood sugar isn't averaging too low.)

Your life wasn't perfect, but it could have been worse. Hubby immigrated at 10 not knowing a word of English, but since nobody knew Hungarian he had to learn on his own. His dad was so abusive his mom had a breakdown and became catatonic for a while. He attended University for a couple of years but had to drop out for lack of money, and lived in an abandoned barn while he worked as a mason's helper and paid back his college debt. Got a job doing soldering for General Dynamics and got laid off. Self taught motorcycle mechanic. Self taught electronics designer. Self taught computer designer and programmer. Worked his way up from repair to designing and building research equipment for a major university.

But then, walking thru a minefield at 8 y/o kind of prepares you for doing what you have to do to stay alive, and indulging in emotion isn't it.

So try to get out of that rut that you seem to be in. Get out and see your friends. Take a class in something that interests you. Handyman. EMT (IDK why but I can see you in that role. It's very hands on and often exciting.) Welding. Programming. If classes boggle you, get some counseling to figure out why, bc you're certainly bright enough to learn the material.

But wallowing in that slump isn't gonna do you any good. Ya gotta deal with those highs and lows like a serious issue, because from this angle it looks like they are.

-----------
"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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Thursday, March 20, 2025 4:25 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Re: racism.

People who grow up among people of different colors are inherently less racist than people who didn't. One of our daughters caregivers was black, and as part of her employment her two daughters were at our house after school. Dear daughter is less racist than I am, bc I grew up in such a lilly-white neighborhood there were no black kids in junior high and two in a high school of 2000.

AFA taking down info about the contributions of women or minorities ... as long as their achievements are at the same level or better as white males who merit attention, they should be noticed. Code talkers did something that even white males couldn't: their language was, for WWII Japanese, an unbreakable code. They deserve attention.

-----------
"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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Thursday, March 20, 2025 7:30 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hate to break it to everyone, but everybody is at least a little racist.

It's part of your genetic code.

And if you pretend that you aren't instinctively racist, than you are lying to yourself and everyone else around you, and you shouldn't be taken seriously.

You don't just wave a magic wand and remove that with ad campaigns and guilt.


Maybe one day if we all live in a true utopia and there is no more such thing as a scarcity of goods, it could eventually be bred out of people. But we don't seem to be going that way right now.

Prepare to see a lot of "racist" shit in the future. Not just here, but everywhere in the Western world. We're booting everyone out who doesn't belong. Not just here, but everywhere. And there's nothing anybody can do about it.

We're in a new age of Nationalism. Globalism is dead.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
"everybody is at least a little racist." - 6ix

Everybody poops, but if you do it on the floor in front of others, you are fired. Trump takes an enormous dump on the White House floor in front of cameras several times per day.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 7:32 AM

SECOND

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


WHAT HAPPENED TODAY THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW - #48
Wednesday, March 19, 2025 https://govbrief.today/

Full links at https://imgur.com/gallery/what-happened-today-48-SdVkkKd

1. Trump pushes Ukraine to hand over nuclear plant in ceasefire talks.

2. White House fact sheet confirms Trump’s plan to eliminate Department of Education.

3. Pentagon calls removal of Navajo Code Talker content a mistake, vows to restore it.

4. Fed Chair Powell says Trump's tariffs driving price increases as rates hold steady.

5. Judge orders transfer of two transgender women back to women’s prisons after Trump's order moved them to men’s facilities where they faced abuse.

6. Trump administration drops lawsuit against Texas law letting police arrest migrants, following similar moves in Iowa and Oklahoma.

7. Musk ally who helped slash programs at USAID & CFPB appointed to lead USAID role.

8. Texas Senate advances bills mandating Ten Commandments in classrooms and allowing school prayer.

9. AP publishes list of 26 Social Security offices to close this year, with closure dates.

10. For-profit prison company GEO Group fights to keep paying ICE detainees only $1 a day as profits soar under Trump.

11. Judge denies emergency request to stop Musk’s DOGE Service from dismantling U.S. Institute of Peace after law enforcement-assisted raid.

12. Trump's JFK files dump exposes Social Security numbers of over 200 people, including his former attorney and a CIA agent’s file.

13. Trump administration considers using active-duty military to detain migrants in buffer zone at southern border.

14. DHS arrests Indian-born Georgetown fellow Monday night, moves him to ICE facility in Louisiana over alleged views on U.S.-lsrael policy.

15. Trump administration freezes $175M in federal funding to UPenn over transgender athlete policy, despite school following NCAA rules.

16. Judge warns of "consequences" as Trump administration resists disclosing deportation flight details, while AG Bondi attacks court's authority.

17. Trump vows to 'annihilate' Iran-backed Houthis as U.S. escalates airstrikes in Yemen.

18. Musk donates legal max to GOP lawmakers backing Trump's push to impeach judges.

19. ICC president warns Trump’s sanctions are crippling court: staff quitting, payments blocked, and war crimes cases at risk.

20. French scientist denied U.S. entry after CBP flagged private messages criticizing Trump’s science cuts.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 7:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I hate to break it to everyone, but everybody is at least a little racist.

It's part of your genetic code.

And if you pretend that you aren't instinctively racist, than you are lying to yourself and everyone else around you, and you shouldn't be taken seriously.

You don't just wave a magic wand and remove that with ad campaigns and guilt.


Maybe one day if we all live in a true utopia and there is no more such thing as a scarcity of goods, it could eventually be bred out of people. But we don't seem to be going that way right now.

Prepare to see a lot of "racist" shit in the future. Not just here, but everywhere in the Western world. We're booting everyone out who doesn't belong. Not just here, but everywhere. And there's nothing anybody can do about it.

We're in a new age of Nationalism. Globalism is dead.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
"everybody is at least a little racist." - 6ix


Yeah. Everybody. That inlcudes you.

You think you hide your racism through the racism of low-expectations, but it's still there. Democratic party racism is all about maintaining the ability to cheat by telling everybody that we can't have voter ids because black people are too stupid and lazy to go out and get one. Meanwhile, every black person I've ever known has a driver's license.

Democratic Party racism is putting up signs all over Gary, IN that just say "Vote Democrat" with voting day on it. I've never seen "Vote Republican" signs in white neighborhoods.

Democratic Party racism is bussing black and other minority kids into white schools and then dumbing down the cirriculm and test scoring so far that the valedictorian of the school doesn't even know she couldn't read until she got to college.

The Democratic Party is cancer.

Quote:
Everybody poops, but if you do it on the floor in front of others, you are fired. Trump takes an enormous dump on the White House floor in front of cameras several times per day.


Trump has done far more in 7 weeks than Biden* would have done in 8 years. 70% of that so far has just been undoing the damage that your party did over the last 8 years.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 7:59 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:

Yeah. Everybody. That includes you.

You think you hide your racism through the racism of low-expectations, but it's still there. Democratic party racism is all about maintaining the ability to cheat by telling everybody that we can't have voter ids because black people are too stupid and lazy to go out and get one. Meanwhile, every black person I've ever known has a driver's license.

Democratic Party racism is putting up signs all over Gary, IN that just say "Vote Democrat" with voting day on it. I've never seen "Vote Republican" signs in white neighborhoods.

Democratic Party racism is bussing black and other minority kids into white schools and then dumbing down the cirriculm and test scoring so far that the valedictorian of the school doesn't even know she couldn't read until she got to college.

The Democratic Party is cancer.

Quote:
Everybody poops, but if you do it on the floor in front of others, you are fired. Trump takes an enormous dump on the White House floor in front of cameras several times per day.


Trump has done far more in 7 weeks than Biden* would have done in 8 years. 70% of that so far has just been undoing the damage that your party did over the last 8 years.
6ix, you don't read Krugman and never heard of Adam Tooze, but Krugman and Tooze carefully showed that Trump is an ignoramus about the economy.

The Emperor’s New Philosophy
Of drunkards, lampposts and economic doctrines

By Paul Krugman | Mar 20, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-philosophy

Today’s post will be short, because I’m on the road — actually at a conference in Belgium — with very little free time. But I thought I might weigh in to support and enlarge upon an exceptionally clear post by the always very good Adam Tooze about the commentariat’s sanewashing of Trumpian economic policy. I especially enjoyed seeing the normally calm Tooze come across as a bit angry. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome

What got Tooze going were multiple news analyses that tried to portray the vague concept of a “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” an attempt by the U.S. government to restructure the world financial system supposedly to its advantage, as reflecting a serious rethinking of international economic policy. If the plan, or maybe concept of a plan, or whatever doesn’t seem to make sense, that must be because Trump officials are playing some kind of deep game.

But why would you think that? Everything we know about the Trumpists’ approach to economic policy, or policy in general, suggests both that Trump himself has no understanding of economics — that he has prejudices rather than ideas — and that he surrounds himself with people who cater to his prejudices, that as Tooze puts it, the policy visions we’re getting from Trumpland have more in common with “a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.”

Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing.

But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

We actually know what Trump and the people around him — people selected because they agreed, or pretended to agree, with his prejudices — believe about international economic policy. Before Trump first took office, Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro — who is still, as far as we can tell, the single most influential figure setting trade policy — put out a “white paper” centered on one simple fallacy. This was the claim that you can take this:

GDP = Domestic spending + Net exports

which is just an accounting identity, and conclude from it that trade deficits (negative net exports) shrink the economy. Why not say, instead, that they permit higher spending? In particular, since the trade deficit is equal to net inflows of capital from abroad — another accounting identity — why not see trade deficits as permitting higher investment and increasing growth over time?

But Navarro’s bad economics supported Trump’s crude mercantilist prejudices, which is why he was hired in the first place. And there’s no indication that Trump’s views have become any more sophisticated since then. He has repeatedly claimed that the bilateral imbalance in trade between the United States and Canada — an imbalance that he persistently overstates by a factor of three — means that we’re “subsidizing” Canada, which is straight out of Ross-Navarro. And Trump takes this nonsense seriously enough that he has become obsessed with the idea of a forced annexation of our neighbor and ally.

So yes, Stephen Miran, now the chairman of the Council of Economic advisers, himself wrote a white paper last fall about international finance that isn’t quite as crudely fallacious as Ross-Navarro. And this paper could be construed as lending some intellectual support to Trump’s tariff policy as a tool to force other countries to change their currency policies. This, presumably, is why Miran was hired.

But there’s no reason to believe that Miran’s views (which are muddled, but never mind) are actually influencing policy. Surely Trump’s team is using analyses like Miran’s, as the old saying goes, the way a drunkard uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination.

If you’re still determined to imagine that there’s some serious thinking behind Trump’s international economic policy, consider his views on other policy questions, like crime. After a bump during the pandemic, violent crime in major American cities has fallen back to historically very low levels. New York, for example, had 83 percent fewer murders last year than it did in 1990. Yet Trump insistently portrays our cities as crime-ridden hellscapes where people are afraid to go out. (When I had dinner with friends in Queens last week, my big problems were crowded subways and weaving through the hordes of pedestrians on Roosevelt Avenue.)

Or consider Trump’s continuing endorsement of Elon Musk’s assertion that Social Security checks are going out to millions of dead people — which you might think someone besides the DOGE kids might have noticed.

My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?

On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 8:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Yeah. Everybody. That includes you.

You think you hide your racism through the racism of low-expectations, but it's still there. Democratic party racism is all about maintaining the ability to cheat by telling everybody that we can't have voter ids because black people are too stupid and lazy to go out and get one. Meanwhile, every black person I've ever known has a driver's license.

Democratic Party racism is putting up signs all over Gary, IN that just say "Vote Democrat" with voting day on it. I've never seen "Vote Republican" signs in white neighborhoods.

Democratic Party racism is bussing black and other minority kids into white schools and then dumbing down the cirriculm and test scoring so far that the valedictorian of the school doesn't even know she couldn't read until she got to college.

The Democratic Party is cancer.

Quote:
Everybody poops, but if you do it on the floor in front of others, you are fired. Trump takes an enormous dump on the White House floor in front of cameras several times per day.


Trump has done far more in 7 weeks than Biden* would have done in 8 years. 70% of that so far has just been undoing the damage that your party did over the last 8 years.
6ix, you don't read Krugman and never heard of Adam Tooze, but Krugman and Tooze carefully showed that Trump is an ignoramus about the economy.


Krugman is an idiot who's predictions never come true.

I never said I didn't read him though.

I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.

I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.



In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 8:56 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.

I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.



In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism. The Mar-a-Lago Accord is, on its face, a far-fetched policy proposal and it is easy to pick holes in it.

By Adam Tooze | Mar 19, 2025

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome

What is the Mar-a-Lago Accord?

The US gives the rest of the world:
1. Security
2. Access to US markets/US consumers

The US gets from the rest of the world:
1. A weaker dollar
2. A bigger manufacturing sector
3. Existing US Treasury debt swapped to new Treasury century bonds (100 year maturity. The longest maturity for U.S. Treasury bonds currently available to investors is 30 years.)

Two tools to achieve such an outcome:
1. Tariffs to exert pressure on countries to sign the Mar-a-Lago Accord and to grow the US manufacturing sector
2. A US sovereign wealth fund that can be used to buy foreign currencies to depreciate the dollar

Q1: Why is a Mar-a-Lago Accord in the news?
President Trump aims to restructure global trade by addressing the overvalued dollar, seen as the root cause of U.S. trade deficits. Inspired by an essay by Stephen Miran (Trump’s economic advisor), the Accord proposes weakening the dollar, similar to the 1985 Plaza Accord.

Q2: Key observations of the essay?
The U.S. trade deficit stems from dollar overvaluation driven by inelastic demand for U.S. Treasuries and Foreign Exchange interventions by trading partners. No viable alternative reserve currencies (e.g., eurozone fragmentation, China’s capital controls) exacerbate the issue.

Q3: Key recommendations?
Two paths: 1) Multilateral “Mar-a-Lago Accord” with allies to weaken the dollar via coordinated policies.
2) Unilateral measures (tariffs, security threats) if partners resist

Q4: How would the Accord work?
Key nations (eurozone, China, Japan) would sell dollars/Treasuries from reserves. Incentives include lower tariffs; challenges include reluctance from China/eurozone and market instability from reserve managers selling Treasuries.

Q5: Unilateral approach?
1) Impose a “user fee” on foreign Treasury holdings to drive out reserve managers. 2) Expand the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund or sell gold reserves. Risks include inflation and market dislocation.

Q6: Impact on Treasuries?
Forced swaps to century bonds could trigger defaults and rating downgrades. Voluntary swaps avoid default but face market skepticism. Treasury yields could rise, losing benchmark status to corporate debt

Q7: Sequencing of the blueprint?
Tariffs and security threats first to create leverage. Reciprocal tariffs in April 2025 signal intent Fed cooperation (post-2026 leadership change) may mitigate bond market fallout

Q8: Implications for the dollar?
Short-term dollar strength (to offset tariff-driven inflation), followed by long-term decline post-Accord. JPY (Japanese yen) could surge 20-25% due to undervaluation and safe-haven demand.

Q9: Opportunities for Europe?
Euro could gain reserve status if the dollar weakens. Requires eurozone joint debt issuance and Capital Markets Union to address fragmentation.

Q10: Other takeaways?
Higher financial volatility, reassessment of sovereign risk premia, and shifts to non-U.S. assets. Risks include destabilizing Treasury markets and counterproductive dollar strength.

More at https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:07 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
WHAT HAPPENED TODAY THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW - #48
Wednesday, March 19, 2025 https://govbrief.today/

Full links at https://imgur.com/gallery/what-happened-today-48-SdVkkKd

1.Trump pushes Ukraine to hand over nuclear plant in ceasefire talks.
Lie. And stupid. Ukraine can't "hand over" what it doesn't control.

Quote:
2.White House fact sheet confirms Trump’s plan to eliminate Department of Education.
Please justify its existence, based on the current srate of education.

Quote:
3.Pentagon calls removal of Navajo Code Talker content a mistake, vows to restore it.
Good. Navajo Code Talkers were important and unique contributors to the WWII effort.

Quote:
4. Fed Chair Powell says Trump's tariffs driving price increases as rates hold steady.
Looking for prices increases and not seeing any yet. Wish he had been more specific.

Quote:
5.Judge orders transfer of two transgender women back to women’s prisons after Trump's order moved them to men’s facilities where they faced abuse.
I hate to tell people this, but men's prisons are abusive, period.
Just OOC what happens to gays, and prisoners convicated of child abuse?

Quote:
6.Trump administration drops lawsuit against Texas law letting police arrest migrants, following similar moves in Iowa and Oklahoma.
Good.

Quote:
7 Musk ally who helped slash programs at USAID & CFPB appointed to lead USAID role.
I assume this means he won't expand USAID programs to "regime change" operations? If so, good.

Quote:
8. Texas Senate advances bills mandating Ten Commandments in classrooms and allowing school prayer.
Unconstitutional.
It's Texas. What can I say?

Quote:
9.AP publishes list of 26 Social Security offices to close this year, with closure dates.
one office, every other state? Doesn't seem like much.

Quote:
10.For-profit prison company GEO Group fights to keep paying ICE detainees only $1 a day as profits soar under Trump.
Why are we paying ICE detainees anything?

Quote:
11.Judge denies emergency request to stop Musk’s DOGE Service from dismantling U.S. Institute of Peace after law enforcement-assisted raid.
It hasn't done much good, has it?

Quote:
12.Trump's JFK files dump exposes Social Security numbers of over 200 people, including his former attorney and a CIA agent’s file.
Are those people alive? If they were 33 in 1963, that would make them 93 y/o now.

Quote:
13. Trump administration considers using active-duty military to detain migrants in buffer zone at southern border.
I know there is a law forbidding active duty in the USA to enforce state law and keep the peace, but that seems to conflict with the military's essential role, which is to DEFEND THE BORDERS OF THE USA, The writers of the law never seemed to have considered the idea that the USA might actually be invaded.

Quote:
14.DHS arrests Indian-born Georgetown fellow Monday night, moves him to ICE facility in Louisiana over alleged views on U.S.-lsrael policy.
Is he a citizen or legal permanent resident? What is his status?

Quote:
15. Trump administration freezes $175M in federal funding to UPenn over transgender athlete policy, despite school following NCAA rules.
If you get Federal funding, you have to follow Federal rules. It's been that way for ages, and was used to enforce DEI policies. I've seen the contracts. You weren't complaining then.
Deal with it.

Quote:
16.Judge warns of "consequences" as Trump administration resists disclosing deportation flight details, while AG Bondi attacks court's authority.
Judge is out of bounds.

Quote:
17.Trump vows to 'annihilate' Iran-backed Houthis as U.S. escalates airstrikes in Yemen.
Trump's mideast policies are dysfunctional and don't represent American interests.

Quote:
18.Musk donates legal max to GOP lawmakers backing Trump's push to impeach judges.
The impeachment process will presumably weed out the bad from the good.

Quote:
19. ICC president warns Trump’s sanctions are crippling court: staff quitting, payments blocked, and war crimes cases at risk

The USA is not a signatory to the ICC.

Quote:
20. French scientist denied U.S. entry after CBP flagged private messages criticizing Trump’s science cuts.
Oh, well. I'm sure there are othrr ways to communicate, and other scientists to hire.

People must be scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about. I really see only a few notable events.

-----------
"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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Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:22 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 SIGNYM:

Quote:
16.Judge warns of "consequences" as Trump administration resists disclosing deportation flight details, while AG Bondi attacks court's authority.
Judge is out of bounds.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday.

Chief Justice John Roberts pushed back against President Donald Trump and his allies’ calls to impeach judges who’ve ruled against the administration.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose,” Roberts said Tuesday in a rare and brief statement issued just hours after Trump publicly joined demands by his supporters to remove judges he called “crooked.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/18/john-roberts-donald-trump-imp
each-federal-judges-00235742

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:32 AM

SECOND

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


I Worked Myself to the Bone My Whole Life. Under Trump, Everything I’ve Saved Is Slowly Slipping Away.

Work Till You Die
Unlike many in my family, I have a small retirement fund. Now I might never be able to stop working.

By Bobbi Dempsey | March 20, 2025 5:45 AM

https://slate.com/life/2025/03/stock-market-401k-news-today-donald-tru
mp-elon-musk-social-security.html

I come from a line of poverty that goes back several generations. Many of my relatives—including my mother—lived in poverty for their entire lives. They could only focus on day-to-day survival and worrying about how they would get their next meal. For us, this meant that retirement planning was never something we discussed. In fact, I don’t ever recall hearing the word retirement mentioned at all. The idea of having a nest egg or a financial safety net felt like a totally foreign concept.

Now, because of recent economic developments in the United States, coupled with the potential threat to Social Security, I’m starting to worry that I might never be able to retire at all.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:53 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I Worked Myself to the Bone My Whole Life. Under Trump, Everything I’ve Saved Is Slowly Slipping Away.


Biden* already did that to all of us.

This guy must have had just enough money to only run out right now.

I lived off of $7k last year. I don't want to hear anybody bitching about money right now. Especially not those who denied that Biden* destroyed us.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 9:55 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.

I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.



In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism.


Excellent.

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

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 10:42 AM

SECOND

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


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

I read a lot of your lefty bullshit. In fact, I read far more lefty shit than anything else.

I'm sure Tooze is another grifter loser if you're a fan.



In the meantime, I'm enjoying watching Globalism die and watching your overpaid shills lose their shit about it.
Trump has a specific plan to kill Globalism.


Excellent.
The plan will work great if Trump conquers Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, South Korea and China. He can do one at a time or all of them simultaneously. If Trump doesn't invade, the plan fails but Trump does not yet realize he has to use force to make the plan work. Except, the US couldn't pacify Vietnam. Or any other place, so Trump's plan is gonna fail hard, just like Vietnam did. The White House will spend many years declaring success after success until the whole stupid Trumptard plan collapses once a new President (such as Gerald Ford replacing Richard Nixon) arrives.

Pulling this altogether, here is my point:

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. At the very least we need to explain how Trump 2.0 happened. Sometimes we will find a match between a strand of policy from inside MAGA and our own analysis and it is tempting to label that as “MAGA for thinking people” and to look for continuities with the Biden team etc. That mode of analysis is reasonable. To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it. Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

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

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Thursday, March 20, 2025 1:37 PM

SECOND

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


Why It’s So Outrageous That Trump Is Invoking This Obscure 200-Year-Old Wartime Law

By Shirin Ali | March 20, 2025 11:49 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/immigration-trump-news-ali
en-enemies-act-mass-deportations.html

The Alien Enemies Act was for a true all-out war. This meant that if Congress declared war, or France sent a ground invasion, that the native citizens, denizens, and subjects of France—people who were from France, who were born in France, who notionally owed allegiance to France in wartime—could be regulated, be put into internment camps, or be expelled or deported. One of the reasons that Congress felt this was appropriate is that there was basically no criminal or immigration law that existed at the federal level. There was very little national security law that existed at the federal level.

Obviously, that is very, very different today, where we have a proliferation of criminal and immigration and national security authorities. The other thing that’s worth noting about the context of 1798 is that the law of war, under the law of nations, allowed these noncitizens from the foreign belligerent to be treated as though they were prisoners of war. That is a legal artifact that is no longer true after the adoption of the Geneva Conventions. Today, under the law of war, civilians are supposed to have protections, including against citizenship- or identity-based detentions or internment, as well as against forced repatriation.

How many times has the Alien Enemies Act been invoked since its passage?

It’s been used in only three major conflicts.

1. In the War of 1812, which was fought with the British, the Alien Enemies Act was used to regulate British subjects who were not allowed to live within 40 miles of the coast. A U.S. marshal told them that they had to relocate to an inland residence.

2. Then, in World War I, this law was used to heavily regulate noncitizens from the foreign belligerent, which was Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. People from those backgrounds were subject to very intense regulation, ranging from limiting travel to preventing them from living in certain places. For example, if you were a German noncitizen, you could not live in Washington—so if you had lived in D.C. for decades but were simply not a U.S. citizen and were born in Germany, you had to get out, subject to internment.

3. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, we see another invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. That same day, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act and imposed draconian regulations on noncitizens of Japanese descent and, the following day, noncitizens of German and Italian descent. Those regulations controlled whether noncitizens could own flashlights, maps, certain books, and firearms. On top of that, they allowed the president or the attorney general to intern anyone who was deemed “dangerous.”

People are more familiar with the incarceration of Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, but we still do remember the Alien Enemies Act internments as a shameful part of our history. In fact, some of the internees from the act, those of Japanese descent, received monetary reparations, and Congress even passed an apology bill.

The only reason to use the wartime authority is to bypass due process and try to target Venezuelans more broadly when you know you can’t prove that they’re actually gang members. I think that that is a major threat to civil liberties and to our Constitution.

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

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