Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.

And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.

Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?

30 Sep 2022

At the ceremony on Friday, Putin said Russia has “four new regions”, calling the residents of Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions “our citizens forever”.

“This is the will of millions of people,” he said in the speech before hundreds of dignitaries at the St George’s Hall of the Kremlin.

“We will defend our land with all our strength and all our means,” he added, calling on “the Kyiv regime to immediately cease hostilities and return to the negotiation table”.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/30/putin-announces-russian-annex
ation-of-four-ukrainian-regions

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:51 AM

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

'Unethical as you can get': Experts decry Trump's latest 'naked quid pro quo'

By Erik De La Garza | April 23, 2025 7:37PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-coin/

A special VIP tour of the White House or even an exclusive dinner with President Donald Trump can be yours – for a price.

The Trump-owned company that unveiled the president’s official meme coin just before his inauguration announced Wednesday that top holders of the cryptocurrency would be selected to attend a private dinner with the MAGA leader, Mother Jones reported Wednesday. The 25 leading buyers, meanwhile, will be treated to a special VIP White House tour.

“According to the coin’s official website, its top 220 holders will be invited to a special May 22 dinner at Trump’s country club outside Washington, DC,” the Mother Jones report said.

“An even more special perk is in store for the 25 biggest holders, who ‘will be invited for an ultra-exclusive private VIP Reception with the President. And separately by us to a Special White House Tour,’” it added, noting that the coin’s website was riddled with grammatical mistakes.

While the news caused the price of the meme coin to surge more than 50%, according to media reports, an ethics expert criticized the move as “a naked quid pro quo."

“The closest situation I can think of was Bill Clinton hosting major donors in the Lincoln Bedroom, but that pales in comparison to this, said Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, told Mother Jones.

“This is about as unethical as you can get—essentially selling off access to the president and the White House,” he added.

While Libowitz slammed the action as unethical, he said it likely wasn’t illegal.

“There are, unfortunately, no laws that apply to the president that could be violated here, unless one of the top 25 holders was something like a foreign state’s wealth fund,” he said. Separately, Libowitz cautioned Mother Jones that “any staffer involved in selling access to the White House may have some issues.”

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 6:01 AM

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

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

You mirepresent what I posted, of course.
Signym, you are pure evil. I know it from your support for Russia murdering Ukrainians and stealing their land.

Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.

King of Hyperbole and Bullshit is what Second is.

Second is one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing, but he's not evil. He's just an asshole. A massive, gaping asshole.

In the following article, Trump is compared to Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, and now a prisoner for crimes committed while President.

Also, Putin revised Russia's Constitution to make Ukrainian land into Russian land: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/30/putin-announces-russian-annex
ation-of-four-ukrainian-regions

A Ticking Clock on American Freedom

By Adrienne LaFrance | April 22, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/america-trump-author
itarianism-global/682528/

It’s later than you think, but it’s not too late.

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.

I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”

The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.

The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

In the Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook fascism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)

Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.

The truth is, checks and balances work only when individuals are courageous enough to speak out. Many American citizens, though, have been conspicuously quiet in the early days of Trump’s second term. People like Kasparov and Ressa, who have lived through the flip to authoritarianism elsewhere, warn that this is a mistake, as do many scholars who have studied totalitarianism and dictatorships across history. At a time like this, hesitation can mean the difference between freedom and tyranny.

These are not uncertain times, not really. The trick of aspiring dictators is they tell you exactly what they’re going to do ahead of time. There’s a famous saying about propagandists—that they repeat the lie until it becomes true. But corrupt leaders use repetition effectively in other ways, too. An authoritarian repeats lies, yes, but he also repeats outrageous truths until they no longer sound outrageous, at least to some. Tell people again and again that you’re going to imprison political enemies or journalists, or otherwise take away basic freedoms, and the public becomes primed to accept the attack when it finally happens. The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.

Back in 2017, Duterte’s propagandists made the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa go viral—that was two years before he finally used a pretense to arrest her. By declaring his intent so far in advance, the president ensured that when he had his perceived enemies arrested, it would be shocking but not surprising. This is how dictators lead people to believe that something abnormal is normal, or that something illegal is permissible. This is how people come to find themselves “just following orders.” Sometimes, when you know what’s coming, that can be enough to let it happen.

Months before Duterte was elected in 2016, Ressa interviewed him for Rappler, the news organization she’d co-founded in the Philippines in 2012. Like Trump, who has sworn to root out “the enemy from within,” Duterte had taken aim at his own government. “I will stop corruption, I will stop criminality, I will fix government,” he told her at the time. He went on: “When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. And if I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally.” When an authoritarian tells you he’s going to do something, believe him. Each outlandish statement is a trial balloon, one step closer to action. And when people don’t push back—or, worse, when supporters cheer him on—the boundaries for acceptable behavior permanently shift.

This is why Trump calls journalists purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” It’s why he floats the idea of executing his perceived political foes, and doing away with the First Amendment. It’s why he has moved beyond simply wanting to deport people who are in this country illegally and now says “homegrowns are next” when he talks about his desire to send Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. And it’s why he is trying to take over universities and other once-independent institutions. In his first month back in office, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House because it wouldn’t agree to use only the words he liked. He seized control of the White House press pool, which previously operated independently, run by members of the press. And his Pentagon told journalists that it would end long-standing tradition and do away with the press pool that has the chance to travel with—and ask questions of—the secretary of defense. Trump continues to muse, as he has done before, about crushing the press and anyone who leaks information to reporters. Trump ranted in a social-media post about anonymous sources, saying that “a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty” and threatening to sue reporters and news outlets. He went on: “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”

Trump keeps moving the goalposts this way. Remember when he mused publicly that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? He wants people to believe that they deserve to be punished, and that he deserves to do whatever he wants, with impunity. More recently, Trump put it this way: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

One key difference between Trump and Duterte, at least so far, is violence. Duterte started carrying out the extrajudicial murder of citizens within hours of taking the oath of office. He was, he said, making good on his promise to crack down on crime. (He’d previously done the same when he was a mayor, with the help of vigilantes and even police officers.) His administration, human-rights groups say, ultimately killed tens of thousands of civilians. “I’m not really a bad guy,” one of Duterte’s supporters told Patricia Evangelista, one of the reporters who worked in Ressa’s newsroom. To this man it was simple: “Some people need killing.” Ressa remembers it as a surreal time. She learned quickly that once a dictator takes power, dehumanizing forces are suddenly all around. This is how an authoritarian changes a culture: by getting supporters to cheer on grotesqueries of all manner, including the cessation of the freedoms he’s telling you he is about to seize. This is why so many Americans are horrified by Trump’s indifference to due process. Due process is important on principle—it’s a constitutional right. But doing away with it also signals that the state believes it can do whatever it wants to people.

Ressa has some advice for Americans: If you’re in a leadership position, she says, you must demonstrate that you understand the seriousness of the situation, and that you’re there to protect the people who are depending on you. But also, you have to know that not everyone is brave. Not everyone is ready to stand up for their freedom; those who are fearful are easily manipulated, and can put others at risk. When the stakes are this high, she advises, there’s no time for weakness. Remember that a weak link—be it an individual, a university, or a law firm—is a point of danger for those who need to hold the line. As I’ve written before, capitulation is contagious. But so, too, is courage.

In January 2018, Rappler received its first shutdown order from the government. Ressa and her co-founder, Chay Hofilena, immediately held a press conference to make sure that people understood that Duterte was trying to intimidate their newsroom and silence its reporting, and that it would not work. Years later, Duterte would again try to shut down Rappler’s website. But the goal was always to keep publishing no matter what—and Ressa succeeded. Preparation was everything. Her leadership team had a shutdown plan. She and her colleagues ran drills on how to bring their website back online within 24 hours, relying on servers in other countries, if the government of the Philippines shut them down. (Funnily enough, she had already positioned Rappler’s servers in the United States as a safeguard—she figured that America, home of the free, would protect the right to free press. Today, she advises American news organizations to move their servers elsewhere.)

Rappler also created a buddy system for the newsroom. “We knew that our journalists might be framed for crimes, and we warned them about that,” she told me. “We reminded them that if any altercation took place with the government, the first thing they should do is to pick up their phone and start live-broadcasting what was happening.” They did drills so that “going live” would be muscle memory for them, so that when the time came, they could be frightened and flooded with adrenaline, and start broadcasting anyway.

This practice paid off. At one point, one of Ressa’s journalists, Pia Ranada, arrived at the presidential palace for a press briefing only to be told that she couldn’t enter. She wasn’t given a reason. But she remembered her training: Ressa recalled to me that you can see in Ranada’s footage that her hand was shaking as she turned on her camera and asked why she was being kept out. The president’s security team indicated that the order had come from above, but wouldn’t say why. Even then, Ressa recalled, she and her colleagues did not know how bad it would get. “I always knew Duterte would come after the press—he told us he would!—but I failed to imagine the worst of it,” she said. “I never thought I would actually be arrested. I was wrong.” Corrupt governments use lawfare to punish people. Legal battles are expensive, and can destroy people’s reputations and livelihoods. Not everyone has the financial resources to go up against the government.

Ressa was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day in 2019, charged with “cyberlibel” over a story published before a cyberlibel law had even taken effect. In a little over a year, Duterte’s government filed 10 arrest warrants against her with a cumulative maximum prison sentence of 103 years. (Every time Ressa got arrested, Rappler’s audience and friends would step up and donate generously. “I liked to joke that this was not a sustainable business model,” Ressa told me.) Now, nearly a decade later, Ressa has defeated eight of those criminal charges in court—and Duterte is in prison at The Hague.

You find out very quickly who your true friends are when the government tries to break you. But it’s lonely, too. When Duterte was coming after Ressa, she worried that any friends who stood up for her were placing themselves at risk. There came a time when she felt she couldn’t even go out to lunch with a friend, in case that friend’s business or family would then be targeted by the government. For a time, she wore a flak jacket on her commute—roads were a favorite hunting ground for death squads, who would shoot people from their motorcycles; getting to and from places was the most dangerous part of her day. Others knew this too: At one point, a good samaritan offered an armored car. But Ressa eventually drew the line. As a former war-zone correspondent, she had a high risk tolerance. She also had a sense of mission: No one could stop her from telling the truth.

Dangerous times call for high levels of both calm and courage. You need to assume the worst is going to happen, and work backwards from there. People like to join the pack, and that’s not always a bad thing. Strength in numbers is real. You need to create a community around you. Not just for your own protection, but for everyone else’s. Remember that facts still matter. Every individual who speaks out, every person who calls a lie a lie, demonstrates fealty to the truth. Do not assume that your voice does not matter. It does. You also choose truth by what you read, how you choose to spend your time. If people no longer care about reality, authoritarians learn that they can do whatever they want. Put another way: If you lose reality, you lose the rule of law. You lose democracy. You are no longer free.

All you can do is hold the line. Hold the line to the standards of your industry’s ethics. Hold the line to what the Constitution says. The minute you step back, or voluntarily give up freedom, it is gone for good. Dissidents do not always win. Garry Kasparov spoke out against Putin and ultimately fled his country for America because he faced persecution at home. In the Philippines, the people were able to beat back Duterte democratically—but democracy is still extremely fragile there, certainly more so than when Duterte first won the presidency.

Basic American freedoms are already far more vulnerable today than even one month ago, even a week ago. The United States has long been a bulwark for democracies everywhere. Not so at the moment. But it is not too late. Find your people. Fight for your values. Collaborate with those who still believe in truth, and humanity, and the inalienable rights of the people.

“When I hear people ask if they should flee to some other country, some faraway land, I want to shake them. You want an escape plan? To where?” Ressa said to me recently. “If the United States of America falls, it’s the ball game.”

It is easy to dismiss warnings about the demise of American freedoms as hyperbole, or the darkest pessimism. But there’s a paradox here. Those who have the greatest sense of urgency about the need to protect democracy in the United States, those who have seen firsthand how bad it can get and how quickly freedom can be snuffed out—they are optimists in their own way. We should listen to them not only because they may be right, but because they recognize what Americans know in their bones to be true: This nation, these freedoms, they are sacred. They are ours. And it is not too late. Not yet, anyway.

About the Author

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 6:38 AM

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

Chaos is about to take its toll

By Paul Krugman | Apr 24, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-virus

Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll. The Fed’s Beige Book, which looks what businesses are saying, says that “uncertainty around international trade policy was pervasive across reports.” And this uncertainty will have dire effects on the real economy.

Many forecasters now expect a recession. But the impact of erratic tariffs and tariff threats may occur even before the economy has time to slump.

Preliminary data suggest that imports from Asia, after surging as importers tried to front-run tariffs, are now collapsing. See the chart at the bottom of this post.

The CEOs of Target and Walmart reportedly warned Trump that we may be seeing empty shelves within weeks. And foreign trade won’t be revived by hints dropped at closed-door financial conferences. Companies need some certainty about policy, which they won’t get.

In other words, we may soon see a disruption of supply chains reminiscent of what happened during and after the Covid pandemic. But this time a virus won’t be responsible. It will all be about Donald Trump. And this time there won’t be a vaccine coming to our rescue. We’re stuck with this chaos agent for three years and three months.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 7:20 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I think Trump feels that he needed to "blitz" the first few months to accomplish his agenda before resistance could be organized. Unfortunately for him, and us, reindustrialization can't happen in a couple of months, and setting off a trade war with China isn't the way to make it happen.

On other issues, he's at the point where resistance is having an impact, and some problems are just complex.

For example, how can you cut waste and fraud if nobody has been following accounting principles and it's impossible to see who was paid and for what? I just hope that the DOGE team are persistent and detail oriented.

It's no secret I'm for deporting ALL illegal aliens. They can't be described as "law abiding" if they broke the law to sneak in, and they're breaking our law by living here. But I'd certainly start with violent criminals and work my way down, whether they belong to a gang or not. And any illegal alien who passed thru Mexico or other countries on their way here can hardly claim asylum, since they could have asked for asylum from their transit nations. I don't think Trump needs to invoke the Alien Enemies act, and doing so just tangled up his deportation program in perfectly legitimate challenges.

AFA "ending the war in Ukraine" ... no matter what Trump does, whether he continues to support Ukraine or not ... whether the Europeans keep supporting Ukraine or not ... the war will end in a Russian military victory as long as Zelensky keeps fighting. The only difference will be how long the war lasts, how much of Ukraine will be destroyed, and how many men on both sides will be killed.

Anyway, Trump needs to think things thru at this point, and start planning for contingencies, instead of hoping he can bargain or bully his way out of any messes. I know it's not his style .... give the man some Adderall for chrissakes and hope he takes advice from the more level headed people on his team, because he's in a new phase of his Presidency. Time for a scalpel, not a chainsaw.

-----------
"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, April 24, 2025 10:12 AM

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

The US has quietly gotten into another war in the Middle East

With near daily strikes against Yemen’s Houthis, is there an end in sight?

By Joshua Keating | Apr 24, 2025, 6:00 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/410186/trump-yemen-houthis-rough-ri
der

Is the US on the verge of entering another Middle East War?

A little more than a month in, it’s still too soon to declare a quagmire.

But the resources devoted to the conflict have been significant. The Pentagon has moved a second aircraft carrier group to the region to join one already there. It has also relocated at least two Patriot missile batteries as well as a THAAD missile defense system — one of the most advanced systems in the US arsenal — from Asia to the Middle East.

The New York Times has reported that in just the first three weeks of the campaign, the US used $200 million worth of munitions, and that military officials are concerned about its impact on stocks the Navy would need in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

Contrary to the hopes of many in the Trump administration — including Vice President JD Vance — who argue the US should be shifting its focus from the Middle East to prepare for a potential conflict with China, the US is shifting resources from Asia to the Middle East.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 2:20 PM

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

If Trump’s hatred of Zelensky feels personal, that’s because it is

As the US president lashes out at the Ukrainian leader once again, it can sometimes feel as though personal hostility is clouding his judgement. Sam Kiley examines a long-held grudge against Zelensky – and how it may be getting in the way of defending democracy against tyranny

By Sam Kiley | Thursday 24 April 2025 18:59 BST

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-zelensky-putin-u
kraine-peace-deal-b2739023.html

Donald Trump has already cast himself as a “great man’ of history. His influence is felt not only now, but will likely endure for decades. Yet, as he stands astride Europe, upending nearly a century of alliances, he finds himself eclipsed by a man of smaller physical stature. And it’s getting to him.

Yesterday, America’s ‘big man’ once again lashed out at the diminutive Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Warning that Zelensky would “lose his country” if he refused to accept a peace deal, Trump accused him of prolonging the “killing field” after Zelensky declined to cede Crimea to Vladimir Putin as part of a potential settlement.

Claiming the territory had been lost for good in 2014 and was not up for discussion, Trump reserved his harshest criticism not for the aggressor who invaded a neighbouring sovereign state, but for the leader defending it. And if it all feels personal, that’s because it is.

The narcissism of America’s 47th president has long been one of Vladimir Putin’s greatest assets. As a former head of the Federal Security Service – successor to the KGB and expert in personality profiling and manipulation – Putin understands that the fragile ego behind the resolute desk is a potent weapon for the Kremlin.

In his latest attack on the widely respected Zelensky, Trump echoed Russia’s claims to Crimea – once the headquarters of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, ceded to Ukraine in 1954.

Trump likes to imagine himself in the 19th-century mould of the “great man” – a history-maker. It explains his fascination with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un during his first administration, and his repeated and blatant oiling up to Putin today. But while Trump revels in membership of the “great man” club, he resents true heroes. To him, even American soldiers who gave their lives in service are “losers”.

Zelensky, by contrast, has captured the global imagination as a symbol of underdog courage against the Russian bear – and Trump detests him for it. The standing ovations and roars of praise that follow the Ukrainian leader, even on Capitol Hill, must make Trump’s ears bleed.

And Trump has form when it comes to Zelensky – and his infuriating insistence on principle. The Ukrainian president, elected by a landslide, was first painted as a traitor to Trump’s cause when he refused to assist in digging up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden – then the likely Democratic candidate.

Trump viewed Zelensky as an ungrateful recipient of American aid for failing to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine in July 2019. Trump was later impeached by Congress over allegations he had threatened to withhold nearly $400m in US military aid unless Zelensky helped his re-election campaign. Although acquitted by the Senate, the damage was done – and the grudge was born. Since then, we have witnessed its ugly expression time and again.

It is hard to imagine another world leader subjected to the kind of personal and vicious public attack Zelensky endured in the White House.

So the question remains: has this personal animosity pushed America to the brink of choosing tyranny over democracy?

Trump’s ties to Moscow stretch back to 1987, when he first visited the Soviet capital to explore investment opportunities. Although he never completed any deals in Russia, his enterprises have reportedly received backing from Russian financiers. Putin was in east Germany in 1987, but it is certain that Trump was of considerable interest to his colleagues in the Soviet regime that first invited him to Moscow. The KGB/FSB are among the most skilled at secret surveillance in the world.

Given his long history of friendship with Russia and his personal hatred of Zelensky, Trump’s claim that “I have nothing to do with Russia, but have much to do with wanting to save, on average, five thousand Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week, who are dying for no reason whatsoever”, rings hollow.

Trump supports Russian G7/8 membership. He refused to put tariffs on Moscow this month. He has adopted every one of Russia’s initial negotiating principles as his own when it comes to Ukraine, and said he thought that the country may “be Russian one day”. He wants to get back into doing business with Russia, too.

His latest so-called “peace plan” offers carrots to the Kremlin and a stick to Kyiv: Ukraine must cede 20 per cent of its territory (including Crimea), abandon Nato ambitions, and give the US half its natural resources – all in exchange for a “peace” with no guarantees against future Russian invasions. Someone ought to explain to him the difference between a peace deal and a surrender.

Trump labelled Zelensky a “dictator, without elections”, and claimed he had just 4 per cent approval. In fact, Zelensky was elected by 73 per cent of the Ukrainian electorate – a figure that clearly irritates Trump, who has never reached that level of support and whose popularity continues to slide. Zelensky’s current approval rating stands at around 57 per cent – that must hurt.

Ukraine, a Western democracy seeking EU membership, is a sovereign nation. Putin has openly declared ambitions to reclaim it for a new post-Soviet empire, and has also set his sights on the Baltic states, Moldova, and Romania.

Support for Ukraine is a necessary condition of Europe’s defence. America’s network of allies in Nato and beyond has been the weft of Washington’s tapestry of alliances that has made it a global superpower.

To Trump, though, it’s getting in the way of turning the world into spheres of influence in which the US, Russia, and China carve up the planet. That just so happens to be Putin’s vision, too.

That’s “big man” thinking. And a little guy in khaki? He’s just in the way.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 3:02 PM

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

The Huge, Crucial Difference Between Neville Chamberlain And Donald Trump

By Andrew Tobias | April 24, 2025

https://andrewtobias.com/huge-difference/

Ukraine’s fate echoes Czechoslovakia’s in Chamberlain’s appeasement

In September 1938 . . . Adolf Hitler had massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the border of Czechoslovakia to reinforce a low-intensity war designed to force Prague to cede the Sudetanland. In an effort to preclude great power war, Chamberlain, in collusion with France and Italy, forced Prague to sign the Munich Agreement which provided for Hitler’s annexation of that territory.

Chamberlain returned to London declaring the achievement of “peace for our time.” The reality was that instead Munich catalyzed the dynamics that unleashed World War II. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s approach to ending that unjustified attack echoes eerily . . . Chamberlain’s mistaken response to violent aggression.

Trump risks becoming Neville Chamberlain to Putin’s Hitler.

The huge difference being that — unlike Chamberlain — Trump likes autocrats, has no problem seeing democracy die, would kinda like to maybe do a little annexation of his own. So that in his third term* — who knows? — maybe he rules Canada and Greenland, too.

The author, Ian J. Brzezinski, continues:

. . . Like Hitler in 1938, Putin presents Russia as a country unfairly treated by history and, like Hitler, he is determined to reconstitute its great power status through territorial expansion. The central focus of this imperial campaign is Ukraine, which he falsely asserts is “not a real country” but rather an off-shoot of Russian culture and history. Hitler likewise asserted to Chamberlain that Czechoslovakia was not a real nation. Both Hitler and Putin conducted aggressive campaigns of subterfuge and violence to weaken their targets. Each accused Prague and Kyiv, respectively, of extremist actions against German and Russian minorities, respectively.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 3:52 PM

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

Fight Fiercely

By Scott Aaronson | April 24th, 2025

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8820

I opened the lecture by saying that, while obviously it would always be an honor to give the Yip Lecture at Harvard, it’s especially an honor right now, as the rest of American academia looks to Harvard to defend the value of our entire enterprise. I urged Harvard to “fight fiercely,” in the words of the Tom Lehrer song.

I wasn’t just fishing for applause; I meant it. It’s crucial for people to understand that, in its total war against universities, MAGA has now lost, not merely the anti-Israel leftists, but also most conservatives, classical liberals, Zionists, etc., with any intellectual scruples whatsoever. To my mind, this opens up the possibility for a broad, nonpartisan response, highlighting everything universities (yes, even Harvard) do for our civilization that’s worth defending.

For three days in my old hometown of Cambridge, MA, I met back-to-back with friends and colleagues old and new. Almost to a person, they were terrified about whether they’ll be able to keep doing science as their funding gets decimated, but especially terrified for anyone who they cared about on visas and green cards. International scholars can now be handcuffed, deported, and even placed in indefinite confinement for pretty much any reason, including long-ago speeding tickets, or no reason at all. The resulting fear has paralyzed, in a matter of months, an American scientific juggernaut that took a century to build.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 5:27 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.

And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?

No, I haven't forgotten.

But you keep on pushing the ridiculous idea that it's bc Russia "wants more land".

WTF do they want more land for? They have more than enough land and resources for their people. That's why WE want Russia!

Russia's original intent was to stop the neo Nazi anti-Russian ethnic cleansingin the Donbas. The point of Minsk I and Minsk II was to protect the Donbas, settle the civil war, and keep Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine . Even when these two provinces (oblasts) declared themselves independent, Russia refused to recognize them. Why wouldn't Ukraine honor the UN-approved Minsk II?? Why didn't France and Germany, both guarantors, press Poroshenko to live up to the agreement? Minsk II would have been SO much better than today's catastrophe! Obviously, neither Ukraine, Germany, nor France were interested in peace.

And thanks to NATO, the EU, and the USA, Ukraine has become a recognizable security threat on Russia's border.

Remove the threat, the war stops.

But thanks for trying to rewrite history.

-----------
"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, April 24, 2025 9:32 PM

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:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Russia doesn't want Ukrainian land, ya mental gimp.

And actually, I feel ashamed and distressed that we armed Ukraine, and aimed them at Russia in an unwinnable effort to overthrow the Russian government. I knew right away that Ukraine was never gonna win bc the vulnerability of American convoys to Russian submarines made the logistics of a full- scale American mobilization impossible.
Surely this is not so long ago that you have forgotten Russia changing its Constitution to make Ukrainian Oblasts into Russian property?
No, I haven't forgotten.

But you keep on pushing the ridiculous idea that it's bc Russia "wants more land".

WTF do they want more land for? They have more than enough land and resources for their people. That's why WE want Russia!

Russia's original intent was to stop the neo Nazi anti-Russian ethnic cleansingin the Donbas. The point of Minsk I and Minsk II was to protect the Donbas, settle the civil war, and keep Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine . Even when these two provinces (oblasts) declared themselves independent, Russia refused to recognize them. Why wouldn't Ukraine honor the UN-approved Minsk II?? Why didn't France and Germany, both guarantors, press Poroshenko to live up to the agreement? Minsk II would have been SO much better than today's catastrophe! Obviously, neither Ukraine, Germany, nor France were interested in peace.

And thanks to NATO, the EU, and the USA, Ukraine has become a recognizable security threat on Russia's border.

Remove the threat, the war stops.

But thanks for trying to rewrite history.

Signym, your writing is an absurd fable. Meanwhile, China called Trump a liar:

Trump keeps claiming he’s working on a deal with China. Beijing says that it is all in his mind

‘Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis,’ a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce said

By Kelly Rissman in New York, Andrew Feinberg | Thursday 24 April 2025 12:39 EDT

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-
china-deal-tariffs-trade-war-b2738764.html

President Donald Trump touted that the United States and China were at the negotiating table to reach a resolution to the trade war — but Beijing says that’s not true.

Washington was “actively” having discussions with Beijing this week, and Trump said he planned to be “very nice” to reach a deal. He also called his 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods “too high” and vowed it would “come down substantially.” Two Chinese officials on Thursday contradicted the U.S. president’s claims.

He Yadong, China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesperson, said Thursday: “Any claims about the progress of China-U.S. trade negotiations are groundless as trying to catch the wind and have no factual basis.”

Similarly, Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China is prepared to negotiate only under certain conditions. “China’s attitude is consistent and clear: if you want to fight, we will fight to the end, if you want to talk, the door is open,” he said.

Yet Trump, when pressed to respond on China’s denial, continued to claim there were talks taking place during a brief availability with reporters alongside Norway’s prime minister Thursday afternoon.

“Well, they had a meeting this morning, so I can't tell you. It doesn't matter who ‘they’ is. We may reveal it later, but they had meetings this morning, and we've been meeting with China,” he said.

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

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Thursday, April 24, 2025 10:08 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND
Signym, your writing is an absurd fable.

Oh yeah? Bring the goods. Not your usual lies and hysteria, show us all that you're right with actual evidence, or STFU.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 12:10 AM

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:
SECOND
Signym, your writing is an absurd fable.

Oh yeah? Bring the goods. Not your usual lies and hysteria, show us all that you're right with actual evidence, or STFU.

Signym, check your English-Russian dictionary for the meaning of bogus. You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere. If I don't give the proof, the Earth must be flat. If I don't refute all bogus arguments originating in Russia, repeated by Signym, Russia must be deserving of awards, praise, and victory.

Former US Ambassador to Russia: "Shows How Bad Trump's Negotiating Team Has Been Performing"

https://2paragraphs.com/2025/04/fmr-us-ambassador-to-russia-shows-how-
bad-trumps-negotiating-team-has-been-performing/

The deal that Vance refers to, according to the New York Times, "closely mirrors long standing Russian demands” as it would require Ukraine to accept Crimea as a Russian territory.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul shared his opinion on this week’s developments on X. He wrote: “Putin was never asking for recognition of Crimean annexation before. That it has entered the discussion now, shows how bad Trump’s negotiating team has been performing. Offers of appeasement, without asking for anything in return, just fuel new demands for more concessions.”

Ambassador of Ukraine to the US Oksana Markarova shared photos and reported that last night: “terroristic Russia launched a massive attack on Kyiv. At least 9 people killed, 63 injured, 42 hospitalized (including 6 children). Residential buildings hit and fires broke out. Rescue teams are working through debris in five districts of the capital. Pure evil.”

McFaul amplified Markarova’s post and wrote; “Putin is a terrorist. Why can't Trump and Witkoff recognize this obvious fact?”

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 12:18 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere.

So, when challenged to bring evidence to the table, you try deflection?

You clearly don't have a scintilla of facts to backstop the torrent of lies and shit that you spew every day.

But I guess it's too much to hope that you'll slink away in embarrassment. If you had any respect for the truth, or yourself, you would have checked yourself ages ago.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 3:50 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Poroshenko on the Minsk Agreement

Quote:
"We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.

Notice he didn't say anything about removing troops and heavy weaponry from the line of contact, stop shelling civilians in Donetsk, or establish local control in the Donbas which were the agreed-on aims of Minsk II.

Merkel, on Minsk II.

Quote:
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong [for that time]. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time [to be ready to join NATO].

Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.

Nothing in there about enforcing a ceasefire, withdrawing troops and weapons from both sides of the contact line, stopping Kiev from shelling Donetsk, developing local governance for local issues, or respecting the rights of the Russian speaking majority in that region. Apparently, SHE had no intention of enforcing Minsk II.

Hollande on Minsk II

Quote:
"Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point," he told the Kiev Independent media outlet, while commenting on Merkel’s remark that the Minsk agreements allowed Kiev to gain time, but by no means prevented further hostilities in the Donbass. "Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity."

Nope! Nothing in there about enforcing the provisions of Minsk II either!

Zelensky on Minsk

Quote:

Zelenskyy admitted that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were "impossible" and he did not plan to implement them.

"As for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: we will not be able to implement it like that," Zelenskyy said in an interview with Spiegel published on Thursday.

This backs up my point that Germany, France, and Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk II agreements, that the MAIN purpose of signing was to give Ukraine time to build up its military.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 6:25 AM

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:
You are like a flat-earther demanding I prove the Earth is a sphere.

So, when challenged to bring evidence to the table, you try deflection?

You clearly don't have a scintilla of facts to backstop the torrent of lies and shit that you spew every day.

But I guess it's too much to hope that you'll slink away in embarrassment. If you had any respect for the truth, or yourself, you would have checked yourself ages ago.

Signym, you were born without hands, but are trying to get a job requiring dexterity. That describes Trump. He has prosthetics made of plastic, but when shaking hands, anyone with real hands would know he has fake ones. It is so obvious, but not to Trumptards because they were born without hands, too. They cannot feel the difference between plastic and real flesh. No amount of words will ever convey the difference to Trumptards. And words won't give them the dexterity needed for success in America.

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 6:26 AM

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

Trump lacks dexterity:

Trump’s Ukraine Peace Plan Gives Russia Everything It Wants. What Is He Trying to Do?

By Fred Kaplan | April 24, 2025 4:03 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/donald-trump-ukraine-russi
a-ceasefire-peace-plan.html

It’s no coincidence that President Donald Trump caved to the Kremlin’s demands for peace-through-surrender, and insisted that Kyiv do the same, on the same day that Russia launched its deadliest attack on Ukrainian civilians in nearly a year.

Then, one day later, deepening the delusions that he has long displayed about the war and his own power to affect its course, Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to his senses and stop the killing.

“Vladimir, STOP!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing.”

Quite aside from the bone-chilling familiarity (has Trump ever addressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by his first name?), there’s the presumption that the Kremlin leader has ever regretted blowing up civilian apartments or cared what Trump or anyone else might think about his murderousness. Trump had complained once before about Russian bombing—and then, just minutes later, he resumed blaming Ukrainians for starting the war (and, of course, Joe Biden for failing to stop it). Certainly the “peace plan” that Trump had just laid on the table should have signaled that the Russians can get away with whatever levels of violence they’d like to commit.

Trump’s plan, according to European sources who have seen the one-page outline, calls for the following:

• Russian and Ukrainian troops cease fire at their current positions on the battlefield. That means Moscow would control about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, including the bulk of its four easternmost (and, before the war, industrial-rich) provinces in Donbas.

• The U.S. also lifts all economic sanctions that it imposed on Russia as a result of the February 2022 invasion.

• Russia is recognized as controlling Crimea (which the Soviet Union had handed Ukraine as a gift in 1954, until Putin reannexed the peninsula in 2014).

• The U.S. is barred from stationing peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the ceasefire, and Ukraine is forbidden from ever joining the West’s NATO military alliance.

• In exchange for all this, Russia is obliged to concede … well, it seems, nothing. In fact, Russian spokesmen continue to demand that even a temporary ceasefire be preceded by a settlement of all the war’s “root causes,” which it blames entirely on Ukraine.

As one NATO official told a reporter from Politico when asked what he thought of Trump’s proposal: “Did Putin write this for him?” Another diplomat responded with an “exploding head” emoji.

Russia’s state-controlled media certainly understood the gist of the deal, writing, “It’s practically a foregone conclusion the U.S. will pull out of Ukraine talks,” and “The unity of the West is gone. Geopolitically it’s no longer an alliance. Trumpism has destroyed the Atlantic consensus confidently and quickly.”

If that isn’t Trump’s aim as well, then one can only ask: What is his aim?

A case could be made that some of these elements might be woven into a peace deal after both sides—Russia and Ukraine—are ready, or can both be pressured, to stop fighting. However, to accede to Russia’s position at the start of negotiations, with pressure only on Kyiv and no concessions from Moscow, amounts to Ukrainian surrender.

Short of such pressure or desire, a ceasefire, under Trump’s terms, would simply give Putin’s army a chance to regroup, remobilize, and at least threaten to resume an offensive toward Kyiv. Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact.

As for NATO, shortly after the 2022 invasion, Zelensky said he had “cooled off” on membership in the West’s military alliance as a trade-off for peace. He repeated the point this week. However, on both occasions, and several times in the interim, he has demanded some form of security guarantees from Western countries, asked what they might entail in the absence of a NATO slot, and heard nothing in return.

Zelensky also pointed out that, whatever Crimea’s checkered history, Ukraine’s constitution prohibits just letting it go. Trump waved away the legal niceties. If the Ukrainians want Crimea, he asked, “Why didn’t they fight for it 11 years ago” when Russian troops stormed and annexed it “without a shot being fired?”

There are a few good answers to this question. First, it’s worth noting that Zelensky wasn’t president until 2019, five years after the Crimean annexation and the subsequent incursions into eastern Ukraine by Russian special forces. Second, at the time of the annexation, Ukraine’s army had pretty much dissolved. (It would begin to rebuild, with the help of U.S. assistance and some European armies, during the Donbas wars preceding the 2022 invasion.) Third, the annexation seemed, at the time, to be a one-off event—Putin’s attempt to halt Kyiv’s pro-democracy movements from making an alliance with any Western organizations, especially the European Union.

As Putin stretched his war into an invasion of all Ukraine, the terms and stakes of the war changed. Even in the early part of the war, many residents in Donbas and Crimea regarded themselves as Russians; in a hypothetical war, they might have sided with Moscow. But once Moscow started bombing their apartments, hospitals, and other targets, sympathies shifted. Ukrainians have fought over Donbas and Crimea in the battles since.

It is worth noting that, back in 2018, during his first term as president, Trump said the U.S. would not recognize Crimea as Russian territory. As a Republican active on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marco Rubio also called for a similar policy. Now he has joined Trump on the switch to Moscow. So have most of the Republicans who were on Zelensky’s side not so long ago.

Rubio was scheduled to attend the next round of peace talks along with Trump’s all-purpose emissary and fellow real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff. But when Zelensky rejected the offer out of hand, they copped out. There would still be a U.S. delegation, but one consisting of midlevel officials who would have—and be seen as having—little to no influence on the proceedings.

This is what Rubio meant when he said earlier this week that, if one side or the other rejected peace talks, the U.S. would just “move on.” Two things stand out in that still-somewhat-ambiguous comment. First, Trump has inveighed against only Zelensky for rejecting the specific deal. (To Putin, who not only rejected it but killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians as a sign of showing what he thought of it, Trump sent only a beggar’s plea—“Vladimir, STOP!”)

Second, will Trump now “move on” by taking a merely passive stance toward the war, turning his attention to diplomatic possibilities elsewhere? Or will he take further steps toward a geostrategic alliance with Moscow, in the course of which he will likely halt further military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, possibly letting Kyiv fall and the U.S.-European alliance, which is most challengingly focused on the fate of Ukraine, crumble?

This is probably a distinction without a difference. Trump’s favoritism toward Russia has been clear for a long time. His hostility toward Ukraine has taken on a darker intensity. The events of the past 48 hours may have hardened these trends irreversibly, making the days of even-handedness, much less a return toward alliance with Ukraine, impossible.

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 8:14 AM

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

Trump's vendetta against paying taxes and fees continues:

Trump admin strategy to end NY congestion pricing is a losing battle, unintended filing says

By Anthony Izaguirre | April 24, 2025 at 9:24 pm

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/manhattan/trump-strategy-end-ny-congestion-
pricing-losing-battle/6237740/

The federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan accidentally filed an internal memo that poked holes in the Trump administration's strategy to kill New York's toll on driving in Manhattan — arguing the government should change tactics if it wants to block the nascent program.

The memo, intended for a U.S. Department of Transportation attorney, was inadvertently filed Wednesday night in New York's lawsuit against the administration over its efforts to shut down the fee.

The blunder came days after the Trump administration gave New York a third ultimatum to stop collecting the toll, which started in January and charges most drivers $9 to enter the most traffic-snarled part of the borough.

In the memo, three assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York wrote that there is “considerable litigation risk” in defending Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's decision to pull federal approval for the toll and that doing so would likely result in a legal loss.

Instead, the three attorneys wrote, the department might have better odds if it tried to end the toll through a different bureaucratic mechanism that would argue it no longer aligns with the federal government's agenda.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Thursday that the filing was “a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way."

The Transportation Department, meanwhile, took aim at the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office and said it was pulling the Southern District off the case.

"Are SDNY lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST? At the very least, it’s legal malpractice," a spokesperson for the agency said.

The statement comes after several top prosecutors in the office resigned and defiantly criticized their bosses in Washington, saying they were asked to handle a now-dismissed corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams in a manner they concluded was unethical, improper and wrong.

Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the office, was sworn in this week.

Trump, whose namesake Trump Tower is within the “congestion pricing” tolling zone, has been a vocal critic of the program and had promised to kill it once he took office.

His administration in February ordered the state to shutter the program, saying it was revoking federal approval for the toll. Duffy has described the program as “a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners."

Within minutes, New York filed suit in federal court to keep the program alive and said it would continue to collect the toll until ordered to stop by a judge.

The Transportation Department repeatedly has urged New York to shut down the toll and has threatened to pull funding and approvals from various transportation projects if it fails to comply.

The toll amount varies on the kind of vehicle and time of day. It has drawn some pushback from suburban commuters in the metropolitan area because it comes on top of existing tolls for crossing bridges and tunnels into the city.

Most drivers end up paying $9 to enter Manhattan south of Central Park on weekdays between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m. and on weekends between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. The toll costs $2.25 during off hours for most vehicles.

New York officials have argued the program is helping to reduce traffic in the city and will eventually bring in billions of dollars for its subways, commuter trains and public buses.

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 10:32 AM

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

Trump said “Crimea will stay with Russia. And Zelensky understands that, and everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”

Is this legal?

No.

If the Trump administration recognized Russian sovereignty over Crimea, it would be breaching international law as well as multiple declarations and agreements made by the United States, including by the first Trump White House.

“In terms of international law, such a pronouncement would be null and void,” said Sergey Vasiliev, an international law expert and professor at the Open University in the Netherlands.

“That territorial acquisitions that result from the use of force shall not be recognized as legal is basically one of the bedrock principles of international law,” Vasiliev told CNN.

Recognizing Crimea as part of Russia would put the Trump administration in breach of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the US made a commitment to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders, in exchange for Kyiv giving up its nuclear weapons.

In 2018, during the first Trump administration, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement reaffirming the US’ refusal to recognize the Kremlin’s claims of sovereignty over Crimea.

Recognizing Crimea as Russian would also be illegal under Ukraine’s constitution – which is one of the reasons why Zelensky said it was out of the question.

But Vasiliev said that even if Ukraine changed its constitution and signed some sort of agreement handing sovereignty of Crimea to Moscow, this could be considered invalid if Kyiv was coerced into it.

Since any recognition of Crimea as part of Russia would be in breach of international laws and norms, it is unlikely that other countries would follow in Trump’s footsteps.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/world/trump-ukraine-crimea-explainer-in
tl/index.html

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 11:37 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Poroshenko on the Minsk Agreement

Quote:
"We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.

Quote:
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong [for that time]. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time [to be ready to join NATO].

Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.

Quote:
"Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point," he told the Kiev Independent media outlet, while commenting on Merkel’s remark that the Minsk agreements allowed Kiev to gain time, but by no means prevented further hostilities in the Donbass. "Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity."

Nope! Nothing in there about enforcing the provisions of Minsk II either!

Zelensky on Minsk

Quote:

Zelenskyy admitted that he had previously told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that the Minsk agreements were "impossible" and he did not plan to implement them.

"As for Minsk as a whole, I told Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel: we will not be able to implement it like that," Zelenskyy said in an interview with Spiegel published on Thursday.

This backs up my point that Germany, France, and Ukraine never intended to implement the Minsk II agreements, that the MAIN purpose of signing was to give Ukraine time to build up its military.

Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND
Signym, you were born without hands, but are trying to get a job requiring dexterity.

I bring quotes to the table showing that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Zelensky were acting in bad faith, and you bring up prosthetic hands???

Must be because you're a lying sack of shit too.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 11:46 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I bring quotes to the table showing that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko, and Zelensky were acting in bad faith, and you bring up prosthetic hands???

Must be because you're a lying sack of shit too.

I am absolutely and positively sure neither you nor Russian diplomats can convincingly prove bad faith with short quotes, Signym. But it is instantly knowable when someone with artificial plastic hands tries to convince you that her hands are made of flesh and bone. Signym, your falseness is very apparent, as is the Russians', as soon as they are touched.

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 11:52 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Chaos is about to take its toll

By Paul Krugman | Apr 24, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-a-virus

Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll. The Fed’s Beige Book, which looks what businesses are saying, says that “uncertainty around international trade policy was pervasive across reports.” And this uncertainty will have dire effects on the real economy.

Many forecasters now expect a recession. But the impact of erratic tariffs and tariff threats may occur even before the economy has time to slump.

Preliminary data suggest that imports from Asia, after surging as importers tried to front-run tariffs, are now collapsing. See the chart at the bottom of this post.

The CEOs of Target and Walmart reportedly warned Trump that we may be seeing empty shelves within weeks. And foreign trade won’t be revived by hints dropped at closed-door financial conferences. Companies need some certainty about policy, which they won’t get.

In other words, we may soon see a disruption of supply chains reminiscent of what happened during and after the Covid pandemic. But this time a virus won’t be responsible. It will all be about Donald Trump. And this time there won’t be a vaccine coming to our rescue. We’re stuck with this chaos agent for three years and three months.

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

Oh wow! Oh no!

It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!

We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.

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

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 12:20 PM

THG

Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory

Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.

The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.

TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20

Yup, the winds of change are definitely in the air. Hey Jack, have you stocked up on supplies? I've picked up at least $1200.00 in supplies; as a brace against what's coming in as early as two weeks.

tick tock little buddy, tick tock

T

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Friday, April 25, 2025 1:07 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory

Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.

The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.

TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20

I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.

Good Luck. You'll need it.

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

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 1:27 PM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Wall Street stock rally falters as Trump touts 50% tariff victory

Wall Street stock markets wobbled Friday after President Donald Trump indicated he envisages stiff US tariffs even after reaching trade deals.

The pullback came after a three-day rally based in large part on hopes that the United States would reach trade deals with its major partners.

TIME Magazine wrote Friday that Trump said in an interview he was still convinced tariffs were necessary and that he would "consider it a 'total victory' if the US still has tariffs as high as 50 percent on foreign imports a year from now."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/wall-street-stock-rally-falter
s-as-trump-touts-50-tariff-victory/ar-AA1DzN3B?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=474e99d17888485ba75e3291db61352c&ei=20

Yup, the winds of change are definitely in the air. Hey Jack, have you stocked up on supplies? I've picked up at least $1200.00 in supplies; as a brace against what's coming in as early as two weeks.

tick tock little buddy, tick tock

T

I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.

Good Luck. You'll need it.

" ~Paul Simon

Supply Shortages Loom as U.S. Shipments from China Plummet

President Donald Trump’s tariff war is sharply slowing traffic on a major shipping route between China and the U.S. The pain of a near-standstill in goods shipments could spread from trucking companies to retail shelves in a matter of weeks.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/supply-shortages-loom-as-u-s-s
hipments-from-china-plummet/ar-AA1Dyu8J

Says the guy with no job. Who do you think believes you're going to be fine? Is daddy helping you? Too funny...

T

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Friday, April 25, 2025 1:38 PM

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:

Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll.

Oh wow! Oh no!

It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!

We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.

China plays Trump card: curbs on exports of rare-earth minerals

Senior administration officials are scrambling to stem economic damage from China’s restrictions on rare-earth exports, as President Donald Trump’s trade war risks cutting key industries and defense contractors off from supplies of metals crucial to production, according to three people familiar with internal deliberations.

While companies search for alternative suppliers and urge the White House to cut a deal that will keep the materials flowing to U.S. manufacturers, the Trump administration is finding there are no easy solutions. China has a lock on the supply of certain elements that are essential to making such things as military drones, consumer electronics and battery-powered vehicles.

“China knows this is a very strong bargaining chip, and it is why they are playing it,” said Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, who was a deputy director for batteries and critical materials at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “This is fast emerging as our Achilles’ heel. What makes these bans particularly dangerous is oftentimes one of these materials is a single point of failure for entire supply chains, and its production rests solely in China.”

The restrictions, imposed by Beijing in response to Trump’s steep new tariffs, have provoked deep consternation at high levels of the administration. Aides at the White House National Security Council, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Commerce Department, Energy Department and Office of the Trade Representative, among other agencies, have been involved, said the people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal matters.

Beijing curbed exports to the United States this month of the rare earths, a group of 17 metals critical for industry. Amid deepening concern over potential economic fallout from the trade war, Trump has softened his tone in recent days, saying the U.S. is eager to make a deal and floating substantial reductions in the import duties.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/04/24/u-s-agencies-alarmed-after
-china-plays-trump-card-curbs-on-exports-of-rare-earth-minerals/

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 2:16 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm always ready for everything, pussy. I'm the last person you have to worry about if things go south.

Good Luck. You'll need it.

April 25, 2025 | 10:38 a.m. ET

Donald Trump has made a new promise to end the Ukraine war by Wednesday. (April 30th.)
Tick Tock.

https://newrepublic.com/post/194412/donald-trump-privately-freaking-ou
t-ukraine-war

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 3:42 PM

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

On the eve of his second inauguration, Donald Trump did something no U.S. president had ever done: He launched a meme coin.

April 25, 2025

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/25/briefing-podcast-trump-crypto-meme
-coin/

These tokens, that are not tied to any real world assets, have proven lucrative for Trump and his family. Last month, the Financial Times estimated Trump made upwards of $350 million from the project. While small traders have lost big, the Trump Organization and its affiliates — controlling 80 percent of the token supply — have made hundreds of millions in just trading fees.

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto-empire/
https://www.ft.com/content/cb1def8f-53a6-478e-9b3e-33c383b29629
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2025/04/24/trump-meme-coin-p
rice-surges-after-top-holders-are-invited-for-dinner-with-president/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/trumps-meme-coin-made-nearl
y-100-million-trading-fees-small-traders-lost-money-2025-02-03/

From meme coins, which usually refer to a fun internet or pop culture meme, and stablecoins, whose values are pegged to a real-world asset, to a new government-backed bitcoin reserve, Trump, once a crypto skeptic, is now the industry’s most powerful advocate.

“He went to a big bitcoin conference in Nashville last July. That’s where he declared he would make the U.S. the crypto capital of the planet,” says Intercept reporter Matt Sledge. “And the crypto industry started showering money on him. They saw somebody who would be friendly to their industry.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Sledge, who covers crypto’s political reach, discusses how investing in the president has paid off for the industry and for the Trump family.

“So far in Trump’s presidency, things have gone great for the crypto industry. Even as the rest of the economy is on pretty perilous footing, a bunch of crypto companies have seen the SEC and other regulatory agencies drop investigations or lawsuits. Trump has created a ‘bitcoin reserve,’ and in general, regulators and Congress are behaving much more friendly toward the industry.”

On Sunday, a filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that Trump received a record $239 million in donations that went toward his inauguration. According to reporting from Fortune, the crypto industry gave about $18 million alone.

The meme coins are just one aspect of the president and his family’s growing crypto empire — an empire that includes Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., taking a stake in a new bitcoin mining firm called American Bitcoin. Trump Media is also partnering with Crypto.com and a newly formed investment firm to offer financial products, including crypto to retail investors.

“Just a few weeks ago, the SEC dropped an investigation into Crypto.com,” Sledge points out. “This is something that would’ve been really astonishing under any other president, regardless of their party. You go from a company being under investigation just a few weeks ago to it having this partnership with the president’s publicly traded company.”

For more on how Trump is reshaping the crypto landscape and what it means for the rest of us, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-intercept-briefing/id1195206
601
https://open.spotify.com/show/2js8lwDRiK1TB4rUgiYb24?si=e3ce772344ee41
70

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 3:44 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 4:12 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?

Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic, and anyone except Trumptards could tell he is fake, but Trump wants him confirmed:

Trump’s Top D.C. Prosecutor Apologizes for Lauding Nazi Sympathizer as ‘Extraordinary Man’

Ed Martin has been a long-time supporter of the Jan. 6 rioters, including Timothy Hale-Cusanelli

By Nikki McCann Ramirez, Andrew Perez | April 24, 2025

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ed-martin-apologiz
es-lauding-timothy-hale-cusanelli-1235324617/

Ed Martin, Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., claimed he had no idea that a Jan. 6 defendant, whom he once praised as “an extraordinary man,” was a known Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist. It is bullshit, not only because Hale-Cusanelli extremist history is both public and well documented, but because Hale and Martin have directly interacted in the past.

Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a former Army reservist and Navy security guard, gained notoriety as a Jan. 6 defendant convicted on charges related to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. While the charges against Hale-Cusanelli were non-violent, his public persona and social media presence were littered with racist and extremist statements and views. In one now notorious selfie, Hale-Cusanelli sports a Hitleresque mustache with a hand to his chest in the first motion of a Nazi salute. According to court documents, former Navy service members who spoke to investigators said that Hale-Cusanelli had once said that “Hitler should have finished the job,” and that “babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”

In September, Martin described Hale-Cusanelli as an “extraordinary man” and “leader,” while presenting an award to him at an event at Trump’s Bedminster golf club. In an interview with The Forward, Martin said that he was “sorry” for his praise of Hale-Cusanelli.

“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin told The Forward. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”

“I certainly didn’t know all the terrible things that he said and how he had acted. I think that’s terrible, and I denounced it completely. I hate it. I hate that it happened,” he added.

It’s hard to see how Martin could have been unaware of Hale-Cusanelli’s history, as he himself represented Jan. 6 defendants — and Hale-Cusanelli’s case was one of the most prominent at a national level.

The apology comes as Martin, currently Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, seeks Senate confirmation to lose the interim moniker and hold the role permanently. Senate Democrats have urged Republicans to hold a confirmation hearing — which is uncommon for U.S. attorney nominees — given Martin’s track record so far.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who announced he was putting a hold on Martin’s nomination, recently told Rolling Stone that when Democrats “outlined all of the list of horribles that [Martin’s] been engaged in, Republicans seem genuinely surprised.”

“While U.S. attorney nominees don’t generally get much scrutiny, this one really needs to,” Schiff says. “And if they end up confirming him anyway, we’re going to make sure that they own him, that they’re forced to wrap their arms around him as he’s wrapped his arms around Nazi sympathizers.”

As the interim U.S. attorney, Martin has spent his few months declaring himself a legal attack dog for the president. In February, Martin referred to himself and the prosecutors in his office as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” Martin has pledged to “protect” staffers working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

On Thursday, Martin was featured in a Justice Department press release touting misdemeanor charges filed against a man accused of vandalizing Teslas in Washington. The press release quoted Martin as calling the Tesla Takedown movement — a nonviolent protest campaign — “domestic terrorism.”
Trending Stories

Martin was previously an active figure in the “Stop the Steal” movement, which boosted Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election and sought to help him overturn the results.

Schiff and Sen. Alex Padilla, California’s other Democratic senator, recently said that “Martin’s record and deeply problematic conduct merit heightened scrutiny and more than justify the full [Judiciary] Committee questioning him under oath.”

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 5:03 PM

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

Focus on the real economy, where everything says that policy chaos will soon take a real toll.

Oh wow! Oh no!

It's an empty graph!!!!!!!!!!

We've just forced your fiction writers to do even less work now.
China plays Trump card: curbs on exports of rare-earth minerals

Senior administration officials are scrambling to stem economic damage from China’s restrictions on rare-earth exports, as President Donald Trump’s trade war risks cutting key industries and defense contractors off from supplies of metals crucial to production, according to three people familiar with internal deliberations.

While companies search for alternative suppliers and urge the White House to cut a deal that will keep the materials flowing to U.S. manufacturers, the Trump administration is finding there are no easy solutions. China has a lock on the supply of certain elements that are essential to making such things as military drones, consumer electronics and battery-powered vehicles.

“China knows this is a very strong bargaining chip, and it is why they are playing it,” said Ashley Zumwalt-Forbes, who was a deputy director for batteries and critical materials at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “This is fast emerging as our Achilles’ heel. What makes these bans particularly dangerous is oftentimes one of these materials is a single point of failure for entire supply chains, and its production rests solely in China.”

The restrictions, imposed by Beijing in response to Trump’s steep new tariffs, have provoked deep consternation at high levels of the administration. Aides at the White House National Security Council, National Economic Council, Council of Economic Advisers, Commerce Department, Energy Department and Office of the Trade Representative, among other agencies, have been involved, said the people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal matters.

Beijing curbed exports to the United States this month of the rare earths, a group of 17 metals critical for industry. Amid deepening concern over potential economic fallout from the trade war, Trump has softened his tone in recent days, saying the U.S. is eager to make a deal and floating substantial reductions in the import duties.

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/04/24/u-s-agencies-alarmed-after
-china-plays-trump-card-curbs-on-exports-of-rare-earth-minerals/

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

I guess Tesla will continue crashing.

Win/Win, right?

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

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 5:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic, and anyone except Trumptards could tell he is fake, but Trump wants him confirmed:

Nobody cares about Rolling Stone or the TDS suffering USAid-funded idiots working there or what they have to say on any topic in 2025.

But by all means, please do keep following them down the path they've been leading you down. You'll make sure that the Democratic Party never rises from the dead.

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

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 5:12 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Your focus on plastic hands is puzzling, SECOND.
Why?
Do YOU have plastic hands? Plastic feet?
Here is a US Attorney who is 100% cheap plastic,

What?

You have MORE plastic parts???

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 6:15 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Friday, April 25, 2025 8:20 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, I have never had a discussion, serious or frivolous, with a Trumptard because I cannot take you silly things seriously. The co-workers I knew to be idiots, who went about their jobs incompetently, became Trumptards, at least the ones that didn't die young from the foolish way they lived before Trump arrived on the ballot.

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

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Friday, April 25, 2025 8:22 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody cares about Rolling Stone or the TDS suffering USAid-funded idiots working there or what they have to say on any topic in 2025.

But by all means, please do keep following them down the path they've been leading you down. You'll make sure that the Democratic Party never rises from the dead.

One more thing for Trump retards to not care about:

Trump Just Did the Most Corrupt Thing Any President Has Ever Done

He’s using the White House to get rich from anonymous investors—and it’s hardly even a news story.

By Michael Tomasky / April 25, 2025/11:27 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/194420/trump-memecoin-dinner-corrupt-pres
ident

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Lots of details beyond the comprehension of Trumptards at https://newrepublic.com/post/194420/trump-memecoin-dinner-corrupt-pres
ident

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 7:03 AM

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

Greenland, trade wars and more

By Paul Krugman | Apr 26, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-to-yascha-mounk

It is a paradox how Trump talks about the world. On one hand, he doesn't seem to like the idea of American power projection. He doesn't seem to like the idea of America being a world policeman. He seems to actually want to step back from American power in the world.

So he doesn't care about the fate of Ukraine, and seems to think of the country effectively as part of Russia's sphere of influence. When it comes to a place like Taiwan, he has suggested in various comments that he doesn't really mind what China might do with it. In his inaugural address, he said he wants to be measured by the wars he doesn't start.

On the other hand, he has this incredibly bellicose rhetoric around places like Panama where he feels that the United States should get control of the Panama Canal and, of course, Greenland, which he said repeatedly, America absolutely must get control over. And I think that the way to understand that is he thinks of a world in terms of spheres of influence.

Ukraine is part of Russia's sphere of influence in his mind. Doesn't really matter what happens over there. Let the Russians do what they want. Taiwan? Part of China's sphere of influence, not really a concern of America. But the places that he thinks of as America's sphere of influence, the places that he thinks of as part of where America should rule the roost, he thinks America should just be much, much more brutal; much, much more ruthless in what we might do there. And so I think that we should take seriously when he repeatedly says America must get control of Greenland. That really is part of his mental model. And there's nothing really stopping him if he wants to go ahead.

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 7:03 AM

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

Trade wars and more

By Paul Krugman | Apr 26, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/talking-to-yascha-mounk

We've seen over the last decades that contrary to the expectations of protesters against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, who were saying “this is going to impoverish countries like China,” we've actually seen billions of people rise out of poverty in good part because of that international trade and those international investments over the course of the last few decades.

But of course, it has also given huge benefits to the United States, which is a phenomenally wealthy country to an extent that I think many Americans don't realize.

And one of the stories of my lifetime, I was born and raised in Germany at a time when German GDP per capita was pretty similar to America's GDP per capita in the 80s and 90s. And today, the United States has a GDP per capita that's about twice that of most European countries. The GDP per capita of West Virginia is now higher than that of the United Kingdom.

The US got many benefits from this international trading system. And one of the interesting things about the Trump administration is that it perceives all of the burdens that America's dominance of this global system has imposed on the country, but it doesn't seem to be able to recognize any other benefits.

I'm much more keen to European discussions than the great majority of American economists. While Trump feels terribly victimized and that everybody's taking advantage, I'm reading the Draghi Report, which is, “Oh my God, the Americans are pulling away from Europe. Why can't we compete?

It's a weird failure. If the system is so wrecked against us, why are we doing so well? I guess that's not how Trump sees it.

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 1:32 PM

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

The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to

By John Stoehr | April 26, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/maga-babies/

Recall that the week began with news that the US secretary of defense had been involved in a second Signal chat in which he shared the same war plans he shared in the first one. This time, Pete Hegseth set up the chat himself and included his wife, his brother and his attorney. Oh, and he used his own phone, not the government’s.

Last weekend, in an opinion piece for Politico, a former Pentagon spokesman warned that “there are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.”

And lo, a voice came:

• Wall Street Journal: “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon”;

• Associated Press: “Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to connect to Signal”;

• Times: “Hegseth’s Personal Phone Use Created Vulnerabilities”;

• National Public Radio: "Former Pentagon official on Hegseth turmoil: ‘It looks like they actually broke the law’”;

• CBS: “Hegseth orders makeup studio installed at Pentagon.”

Unfortunately, we are where we were at the beginning of the week. Hegseth isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he is “embattled,” as we say in the news, but every story about him says that Donald Trump has his back.

The closest we’ve come to accountability was in the Journal: “Trump has begun to ask people around him about Hegseth’s performance, and his advisers have closely watched his recent media appearances.”

Until he’s gone, there’s going to be lots more to say about Hegseth. I want to focus on an aspect about him and the maga movement that can be found in the opening scene from the Journal article above.

In it, he reacts after being “rattled” by the fact that someone had leaked word of his classified briefing on China with Elon Musk.

“I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth demanded proof that Grady hadn’t leaked news of the March 21 briefing.

Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, the Joint Staff director, whom Hegseth also threatened with a polygraph test.

I mean, I get it.

The secretary of defense is America’s highest ranking military official. In theory, Hegseth can talk to anyone at the Pentagon in any way he wants to, no matter how accomplished they are, no matter how much older they are. But we’re not talking about what you can do. We’re talking about what you should do among men of honor and distinction.

And there’s your problem.

Admiral Grady’s resume is so deep and long, and so full of achievement and military jargon, that it would be almost discourteous of me to copy and paste excerpts of it. (You can find his bio here, https://www.jcs.mil/Leadership/Article-View/Article/2022515/adm-christ
opher-w-grady/ ) He has seen some things and done some things, with the ultimate cost of failure being that someone under him could have died.

Meanwhile, Hegseth’s resume for the job is nearly as thin as mine.

He’s a 44-year-old former TV personality with a drinking problem and a history of indiscretion with women, shall we say, as well as no experience running anything of size, much less the planet’s biggest bureaucracy. Since taking the job, he has compromised national security, broken dozens of laws, conduct that would get anyone else at the Pentagon court-martialed if he were not Donald Trump’s No. 1 yes-man, and on top of all this, he feels justified in throwing fit with a man who was answering the call of duty when Hegseth was still in diapers.

Again, Hegseth has the right to say what he wants to Admiral Grady. He outranks him. No doubt Grady accepts that. But no man of honor would cuss out an admiral out, question his honesty, doubt his loyalty, impugn his character – and do it in front of witnesses, for God’s sake.

But if we leave it there, we’re missing the larger picture.

Hegseth’s dishonorable conduct is shared by the whole regime, including the president. There’s an attitude that respect is owed but not in return. This is borne of the belief that they have the right to rule by race and blood – not by law, not by merit, not by anything other than the accident of their birth. Indeed, anyone who has earned his authority, as Admiral Grady has, is a natural target of their contempt.

This attitude may seem invulnerable, but it’s not. It is weakness personified. When respect is not forthcoming in the way they expect, they fall to pieces. They get emotional, perhaps hysterical. They might even start accusing everyone around them of being against them. As it happens, that describes Hegseth to a T. NBC News reported Friday that he’s growing paranoid, “erratic” and “insecure.” When you act like you’re infallible, you can’t stand it when anyone anywhere disagrees.

If this sounds childish, it is, and there’s a reason for it. It is rooted in the political tradition of venerating above all others the common folk of the American heartland, which is to say, the common white folk. Unlike multiracial populations in cities or on the coasts, where people get education, acquire skills and knowledge, and strive, these heartland folks are already God’s chosen. They are the most authentic, the most real of Americans.

And one way or another, they are always at the center of our time and our attention, as they are the main characters in tales of morality told about America, in which some kind of great sinner is forever trying to take advantage of them, cheat them out of their money and their hope, and these crimes against the blood and bone of the nation demand a champion to come forth and save God’s chosen from this villainy.

They are pure and innocent and just. They never do wrong, they are only wronged, because they are not asked to make choices. Choices are made for them as a consequence of being God’s chosen, which is to say, of being white in a country that was made for white people.

It should be no surprise that men like the secretary of state, or the president, who believe they have the right to rule by race and blood, not by law, not by merit, not by anything other than the accident of their birth, are also some of the most childish people. They inhibit a world in which they never had to grow up. They can be boys forever.

And when man-babies like Pete Hegseth encounter someone who did grow up, who did make something of himself through merit and hard work and determination – when they encounter men of honor like Admiral Christopher Grady – they seem to explode on contact.

For that small justice, I’m grateful.

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 8:45 PM

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

Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.

Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.

“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.

“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”

The statement was clearly aimed at Trump’s promise to build a wall between Mexico and the USA to halt illegal immigration.

It — along with many other Trump policies — was frequently criticized by the pope, who said anybody who thought of building walls rather than bridges was “not Christian” — which prompted Trump to call that statement “disgraceful.”

It’s unknown how Trump reacted to the homily.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pope-2671849474/

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 11:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.

Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.

“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.

“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”

The statement was clearly aimed at Trump’s promise to build a wall between Mexico and the USA to halt illegal immigration.

It — along with many other Trump policies — was frequently criticized by the pope, who said anybody who thought of building walls rather than bridges was “not Christian” — which prompted Trump to call that statement “disgraceful.”

It’s unknown how Trump reacted to the homily.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pope-2671849474/

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

He shrugged it off like it deserves to be shrugged off.

Fuck you, Vatican. Fuck you twice on Sunday, dead pope.

How's that?

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

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

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Saturday, April 26, 2025 11:15 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I no longer pretend to have serious discussions with SECOND.

It is truly pointless.

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

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

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Sunday, April 27, 2025 3:47 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump got a front row seat to his own humiliation Saturday as he was verbally attacked in a homily at Pope Francis’ funeral.

Trump, who traveled to Rome Friday, sat with world leaders at the service as his signature policy was rebuked to an audience of millions watching live around the world.

“Pope Francis incessantly raised his voice, imploring peace and calling for reason and honest negotiation to find possible solutions,” Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, who gave the homily, said.

“‘Build bridges, not walls,’ was an exhortation he repeated many times.”

I thought this was aimed at Zelensky.

-----------
"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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Sunday, April 27, 2025 4:26 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to

By John Stoehr | April 26, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/maga-babies/

Recall that the week began with news that the US secretary of defense had been involved in a second Signal chat in which he shared the same war plans he shared in the first one. This time, Pete Hegseth set up the chat himself and included his wife, his brother and his attorney. Oh, and he used his own phone, not the government’s...

blah blah blah ...

I want to focus on ... a drinking problem and a history of indiscretion with women

We have no idea how many Generals have drinking problems, indiscretions with women -or conflicts of interest with the MIC - but length of service doesnt mean competence or honor.

Quote:
... honor ... honesty ... loyalty ... character

race and blood ... [not] earned authority ... weakness personified.... fall to pieces... emotional, perhaps hysterical ...

childish ... common white folk... God’s chosen ... always at the center of our time and our attention

"Pure and innocent and just. They never do wrong... God’s chosen

If that sounds like anybody, that sounds like SECOND and the rest of the purple-haired liberals. Projection much?

Quote:
And when man-babies like Pete Hegseth encounter someone who did grow up, who did make something of himself through merit and hard work and determination

Like ... JD Vance? Tulsi Gabbard? Elon Musk?

Hegseth did something stupid, maybe illegal, and certainly not in the best interest of opsec.

Hillary did something similar while heading the State Dept, 33,000 times. Where was the outrage then?

And then the author goes off on a flight of childish... emotional, maybe hysterical... certainly paranoid ... name calling. He has NO IDEA whether Adm Grady is honorable. He has NO IDEA whether Hegseth, Trump, Vance, Gabbard, Musk, Rubio, Musk etc are driven by "race and blood". And as far as being "God's chosen person", well, I leave that to SECOND and the rest of the hardcore hate-driven Dems.

-----------
"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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Sunday, April 27, 2025 6:58 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

He shrugged it off like it deserves to be shrugged off.

Fuck you, Vatican. Fuck you twice on Sunday, dead pope.

How's that?

6ix, I expected you would take a shit on decency because Trump and his Trumptards routinely demonstrate the meaning of depravity without knowing yourselves. And I knew Signym would invert the truth by writing: "I thought this was aimed at Zelensky."

The Fatal Impact of Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts (Neither Signym nor 6ix care)

By John Haltiwanger

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/08/trump-foreign-aid-cuts-danish-ref
ugee-council-usaid/

The Trump administration’s drastic foreign aid cuts and effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have had rapid, rippling consequences across the world.

Foreign Policy recently sat down with Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council, to discuss the far-reaching effects of Trump dramatically slashing foreign assistance.

As the new administration in Washington axes more and more lifesaving programs, Slente warned that “people will be dying.” In a world where the U.S. is no longer seen as a reliable partner, Slente also discussed where aid groups go from here.

Foreign Policy: Where has your work been hit hardest by [U.S. President Donald] Trump’s aid cuts?

Charlotte Slente: The Danish Refugee Council is active in around 40 countries around the world—primarily countries where we see large humanitarian crises and displacement crises, because we are a displacement-mandated organization, which means that we work on these great, big contracts. And among the 40 countries that we are present in, we’ve been hit in 22. It’s across the globe in different environments and a little bit random, depending on where the U.S. funding falls.

The U.S. was our second-biggest donor—20 percent of our income was from the U.S. We’ve been hit in many countries in Africa, we’ve been hit in Latin America, we’ve also been hit in Asia, and in Ukraine. It’s been quite a bumpy road.

FP: What has the immediate impact of these aid cuts been on the ground? What kind of damage has already been done?

CS: In Afghanistan, for instance, we were supporting drinking water for thousands and thousands of people in a number of provinces. That was cut down immediately. So the effect is that these people will not get access to safe drinking water in these provinces.

That can have fatal consequences.

In Congo and Sudan, both countries where there are very severe humanitarian disaster situations ongoing, there were cuts to our ability to help people with support for livelihoods.

Humanitarian assistance saves lives, but we need people to be able to gain an income and be self-sustaining. That kind of support for people being able to grow food or work in agriculture, maybe work in other areas, that growth has all been cut off.

In Cameroon, we were delivering food assistance to pregnant mothers and their undernourished young children, and that has been cut off from one day to the next. In Colombia, a lot of our work on providing shelter, livelihood support, and activities related to mine clearance, which is one of the sectors we work with a lot in, has been stopped.

FP: So, all of this has really had rippling consequences across the world?

CS: In many different countries, it has had quite dramatic consequences.

FP: Is it fair to say that people are dying because of the Trump administration’s choices?

CS: People will be dying, and people will be losing possibilities to sustain their lives in the long term.

It is a very, very difficult moment because the number of displaced people around the world is over 120 million. The number of people requiring humanitarian assistance around the world is over 300 million people.

Humanitarian response plans, which are U.N. plans where basically you stipulate what is the bare minimum of necessity among the people who need humanitarian assistance in the country, were only partially being performed and funded to the degree necessary. The direct consequence of U.S. cuts could be that those response plans in general will only be funded to a degree of 25 percent, which means many people will potentially lose their lives because they depend on that humanitarian response.

The vast majority of this world’s refugees are actually hosted by neighboring countries who are themselves low-income or low-medium-income countries who need support from the international community to actually accept being hosts to refugees and displaced peoples.

FP: With U.S. funding drying up, where are you looking to fill the gaps?

CS: We’re basically looking everywhere, but these gaps are very difficult to fill.

U.S. development ODA [official development assistance] funding is less than 0.3 percent of U.S. GDP. But nominally, it is 40 percent of all humanitarian assistance provided throughout the globe.

It’s fair to say that it will be very difficult for any of the traditional donors that fund humanitarian assistance to replace that level of funding. But obviously, we are trying our best with a number of donors.

But we also need to look elsewhere—such as non-traditional government donors like the Gulf states. We’re looking toward Asia as well to seek more funding.

We also need to look toward the private sector—there’s no way of escaping that. We’ve been working for a number of years to attract private-sector and foundation funding packages, and creating products that could be interesting for the private sector.

If you look around the U.S., there are a number of very rich people who could potentially replace that funding if there is a willingness, vision, and ambition to actually support what you could call global public goods. I think it is a global public good to support the humanitarian needs of this world’s displaced and needy people, because it is a global challenge that we need to find global solutions for.

FP: What is the best case for why a country like the United States should be heavily involved in providing humanitarian aid?

CS: First and foremost is the altruistic part of it—saving lives around the globe. And supporting the countries that have been asked to host people who basically would not survive if they didn’t host them. These are people who, if they are not hosted by neighboring countries, would be coming to the U.S. and Europe for support. People want to stay close to their homes in order to see when it’s feasible for them to return.

Secondly, there is a security element, there’s a self-interest, which may not be directly transactional. It’s a broader self-interest in international security. There’s these very conflict-prone, fragile settings—where people live in very complicated situations in conflict—that are prone to becoming a problem for the international community. It’s especially in these fragile countries where armed groups enter and terrorism can thrive. A lot of violence will happen because people have a lack of access to resources. And that tends to not stay in these countries. It tends to not even stay in the regions, but actually spreads around the world. That is another very good reason for continuing to support.

The world doesn’t thrive if it’s too unprofitable. We need to eliminate inequality levels to the greatest extent possible. And we need to create the framework conditions for these countries to be able to build their businesses, grow their economies, have transparency in their trade systems, and be able to attract international financing. And that is also in our self-interest. The more open and transparent and trading the world is, the better everyone could be.

It’s counterintuitive to not support the world’s Colombias, Lebanons, Jordans, Ugandas—who really have been extremely generous in hosting many refugees. Colombia hosts millions of Venezuelan refugees and migrants. And many of those that are hosted in Colombia and supported there don’t continue the journey up north through the Darién Gap.

At this moment in time we have a number of crises where people are extremely desperate. I just spoke to the [United Nations] Security Council about the situation in the Democratic Republic of [the] Congo. That is one of the areas where we see a big crisis. We see a country like Sudan being caught up in a crisis, and we see so many cases around the world where conflicts are actually tearing the world down for the civilian populations. We all know that there should be respect for international humanitarian law, which means that the negative impact for civilians should be avoided in any kind of warfare, in any kind of conflict.

We really need the world to step up to solve these crises, build peace, and do the utmost to stop the violence, stop the conflicts—from the Middle East and Africa to Asia and South America. We cannot, as an international community, avoid responsibility. That’s one of my very firm messages at this time.

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

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Sunday, April 27, 2025 7:07 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And then the author goes off on a flight of childish... emotional, maybe hysterical... certainly paranoid ... name calling. He has NO IDEA whether Adm Grady is honorable. He has NO IDEA whether Hegseth, Trump, Vance, Gabbard, Musk, Rubio, Musk etc are driven by "race and blood". And as far as being "God's chosen person", well, I leave that to SECOND and the rest of the hardcore hate-driven Dems.

Signym, you invert the truth about everything you have ever written. It is a reflex that you can't help doing. That's why you didn't get very far in life before running off the road, crashing and burning, leaving you without a vehicle, stuck for the rest of your bitter life.

PhD Timeline

https://xkcd.com/3081/

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

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Sunday, April 27, 2025 9:00 AM

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

Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet

The president’s appointees often appear to be acting out a made-for-television version of their jobs rather than actually doing them.

By Ashley Parker | April 26, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trumps-cabinet-co
splay/682601/

In Donald Trump’s administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem rotates through various costumes—firefighting gear for drills with the United States Coast Guard, a cowboy hat and horse for a jaunt with Border Patrol agents in Texas, a bulletproof ICE vest for a dawn raid in New York City. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posts photos of himself doing snowy push-ups with U.S. troops in Poland and deadlifting with them in predawn Germany. And FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino spars with agents on the wrestling mats of Quantico.

In Bongino’s case, his run-in with a skilled jiujitsu instructor left him with a swollen right elbow. But such are the risks of Trump’s Cosplay Cabinet, in which his underlings perform near-daily tone poems to a certain type of MAGA masculinity, publicly pantomiming their professional responsibilities.

Noem, who has earned herself several dismissive, Mattel-inspired nicknames—“Border Control Barbie,” “ICE Barbie”—is perhaps the most conspicuous offender. She has been photographed behind the controls of both a Coast Guard boat and a Coast Guard plane, donned a helmet and Border Patrol fatigues for an ATV tour along the southern border, and posed in cargo pants and an ICE vest. In a social-media video, she wielded a tricked-out automatic rifle, the M4 muzzle disconcertingly pointed at the head of the agent directly to her left.

“I’m old school, but I don’t think our Cabinet Secretaries should cosplay as armed agents,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X above Noem’s video of herself with the poorly placed gun. “You’re a politician, not one of our heroes.”

When I called Erickson this week, he told me Trump’s subordinates understand that the president is “an image guy” who looks to surround himself with people who appear to be out of “central casting.” But, he said, looking the part on TV also serves a useful purpose for Trump—it “distracts the voters from: Is stuff actually going well behind the scenes?”

“It’s like hiring the guy who plays a doctor on Grey’s Anatomy,” Erickson told me. “You don’t actually want that guy to do your heart surgery. He’s an actor. You hire the people who sound competent because they use the polysyllabic words. But can they actually do the job?”

Trump, of course, may be the ultimate cosplayer. His quixotic political rise was fueled, in part, by Americans who knew him as a successful businessman, not through any of his actual business exploits (or bankruptcies), but through the high-flying mogul he played in their living room every Thursday night on The Apprentice.

During his most recent campaign, he sported various working-class costumes to troll his political rivals. In October, mocking then–Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that, as a college student, she had spent a summer working at a McDonald’s, Trump tied on a navy-and-gold apron and served fries through a Philadelphia-area McDonald’s drive-through window. Later that month, in response to mumbled comments then-President Joe Biden made seeming to liken Trump supporters to “garbage,” Trump wore a neon-orange reflective vest and hopped into a white Trump-branded trash hauler in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“How do you like my garbage truck?” Trump crowed, as reporters looked on.

The ethos seems to have trickled down to his Cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whose public pronouncements and social-media posts sometimes give the impression that they view government work more as a game than as true public service. In 2022, Kash Patel, now the FBI director, shared a post featuring himself—chain saw in hand and “Bad to the Bone” thrumming in the background—lopping off chunks of a log emblazoned with images of alleged enemies, a group that included Biden, CNN, “Fake News,” and Representative Nancy Pelosi. Patel can often appear as interested in the public perks of his job as in the actual job itself. This month, he flew with Trump on Air Force One to Miami to attend a Saturday-night Ultimate Fighting Championship event, and he has also appeared in the owner’s suite at Capitals games, photographed alongside Hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky.

Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, is the administration’s designated disassembler of the federal bureaucracy. For the assignment, Musk has consciously cast himself into the role of a plucky IT guy, regularly wearing a Tech Support T-shirt under his blazer. No matter that his self-styled “tech support” has failed to deliver on the $1 trillion in government-spending cuts that he and his DOGE bros overpromised. He was still able to boast on X that he had spent an early-February weekend feeding USAID “into the wood chipper.”

“It looks like a lot of them are sort of showing up at a government costume party in which they get to wear the costume of being the secretary of defense or the costume of being the director of national intelligence, but they don’t have the qualification for those roles,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a Democrat, told me. “Part of it is they know the point of entry to the costume party is you have to suck up ferociously to Trump every minute, and to get on his radar, images help. He likes the fake macho imagery, and so that’s just part of the deal.”

Hegseth, who served as a U.S. Army National Guard infantry officer, has posted more than a dozen photos and videos in the past month alone of him working out with troops. “It’s not that long ago that I was right there with them,” Hegseth explained when asked in Germany about his early-morning workout. “I’ll probably connect more with those guys than I do with four-star generals.” Hegseth seems to naturally intuit that the rank-and-file troops generally respect a Pentagon chief willing—and able—to train with them.

But Hegseth’s constant posting of his athletic feats has given them an overly eager, thirsty quality. In some ways, he reminds me of my spy-obsessed 6-year-old, who, desperate to be a covert operative, is constantly whispering into her oversize spy-gadget watch and shouting staticky instructions into her walkie-talkies. But unlike my daughter, who is in kindergarten and is decidedly not a real-life spy, Hegseth is actually the defense secretary, making his constant performance of the role feel gratuitous.

“Every rep, every drop of sweat, reminds us of the toughness and tenacity that defend our nation,” he wrote last week, above photos and video of him and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard working out with troops at a Virginia military installation. (Not to be outdone, Gabbard, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, found time to fit in a Muay Thai training session during a recent stop in Bangkok.)

In an attack-planning Signal group chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was accidentally added, Hegseth again appeared like an excited boy—eager to show off his cool new tools of war to his important friends—as he prepared for an imminent military operation against the Houthis in Yemen. He wrote, “TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch,” before continuing with a series of jargony specifics:

•“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”

•“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME—also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”

•“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”

•“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”

•“1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts—also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth boasted—incorrectly, it turned out—in reference to operational security, before concluding: “Godspeed to our Warriors.”

This week, The New York Times reported that, in addition to last month’s Signalgate, Hegseth had also shared detailed attack plans on a second Signal group chat that included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer—again giving the impression of someone eager to brag about his important new job.

Here, Whitehouse warned, is where the real risk comes in. “If you’re not a serious person, and you’re in a serious job, there’s this enormous gap of competence through which terrible things can happen,” he told me.

Other cosplaying occurs on a lesser scale. In the first Trump term, the Santa Monica–raised, Duke-educated Stephen Miller—Trump’s point person on immigration—was photographed in aviator Ray-Bans and an Army-green U.S. Border Patrol hat during a visit to the border wall in Texas. More recently, early last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi sported an FBI jacket and a green camouflage cap when traveling with other senior officials to spotlight the arrest of the terrorist charged with planning the deadly suicide attack at the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who’d trained to be a teacher but never became one, emerged instead from the ultimate cosplaying world of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Even the more serious Cabinet secretaries sometimes appear to be playacting, if not cosplaying—all scrambling to embody whatever it is they think Trump wants them to be. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, seems to be masquerading as an isolationist, at least compared with foreign-policy positions he previously held as a senator. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager, is now playing the role of a tariff hard-liner who actually believes that Trump’s recent tanking of the stock market was all part of the art of the ultimate deal.

Hegseth’s wife, meanwhile, has prompted concerns and criticism by accompanying her husband to at least two meetings with foreign-military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, The Wall Street Journal reported last month.

But it’s clear that Jennifer Hegseth, a former Fox News producer, is not actually a Defense Department official; if she were, she likely would have advised her husband that perhaps he should spend less time publicly bench-pressing, and more time getting his fast-fraying department under control.

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

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Sunday, April 27, 2025 9:37 AM

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

What Happens When There Are No Trade Deals?

Trump's tariff fantasies are colliding with reality. Now what?

By Paul Krugman | Apr 27, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/terror-and-embarrassment

Trump’s trade negotiations are going badly if they’re happening at all. Yet Trump keeps insisting that big deals with other countries are just around the corner. Read his amazing interview with Time. https://time.com/7280114/donald-trump-2025-interview-transcript/

Q: Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We're now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There's zero deals so far. Why is that?

Trump: No, there’s many deals.

Q: When are they going to be announced?

Trump: You have to understand, I'm dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We're meeting with China. We're doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I've made all the deals.

Q: Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

Trump: I’ve made 200 deals.

Q: You’ve made 200 deals?

Trump: 100%

In case you’re wondering, China says that there are no negotiations. Who do you believe? This is a case of he said, Xi said. But given Trump’s long history of fantasies and delusions of grandeur, as well as Xi’s long history of being single-minded and indefatigable, I believe the Chinese.

Also, Japanese trade negotiators have gone home because they can’t get any clarity on what America wants. Among other things, Trump has berated the Japanese for testing American cars by dropping bowling balls on them — which they don’t. https://www.ft.com/content/b545d7cf-f5a1-4fae-8ff8-5fec262e91bc

At some point, Trump’s fantasy of trade dominance will become unsustainable. And he’s hitting the wall on many other fronts, including his other signature issues, the economy and immigration. Recent polling has been brutal: Trump has no strengths left.

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

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Sunday, April 27, 2025 11:49 AM