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

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So, SECOND ....?

Quote:
Texas man arrested for Trump death threats

A Texas man was arrested in the US on Thursday for allegedly threatening to kill President Donald Trump, making a reference to a prior assassination attempt, the Department of Justice has stated.

The alleged threat came ahead of Trump’s planned visit to the Texas Hill Country on Friday, as part of his tour of the state devastated by recent deadly floods.

Robert Herrera, 52, allegedly made the comment on a local news outlet’s Facebook page about the presidential visit, the DOJ wrote on Friday. Using the handle ‘Robert Herrer’, he wrote, “I won’t miss,” alongside a photo of Trump immediately after the 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.

https://www.rt.com/news/621386-man-arrested-trump-threat/

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:05 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Epstein is a leftwing psyop?

Wow, Trump is covering HARD for someone.

Mossad?
Wealthy donors?
Himself?

All of the above?

Trump should just come out and say ... "It's a matter of national sey. I can't talk about it" instead of trying to gaslight everyone. It's so unbecoming.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, July 14, 2025 8:49 AM

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

Promises of uncovering secret assassination files and naming powerful pedophiles kept the MAGA movement energized for years. Many supporters believed Donald Trump would finally expose government cover-ups once he returned to power. But more than six months into his new term, those much-hyped conspiracy theories have either been debunked or quietly fallen apart.

Much of his base has grown disillusioned with his failure to expose the dramatic government secrets they were promised, even as the White House says it is simply being transparent where other administrations have not.

The disappointment has been particularly acute around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files and the long-anticipated "deep state" disclosures, which have instead reinforced official narratives MAGA supporters once rejected.

Epstein, the deceased financier, sex offender, and friend to Trump, has been at the heart of a sprawling conspiracy theory about child sex-trafficking and the global elite since he killed himself in jail six years ago — a suicide that was reaffirmed by the FBI this month.

'We've Been Played': MAGA Faces Its Own Disappointment With Trump

https://www.newsweek.com/maga-donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-conspiracy-
theories-2097180

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 2:33 PM

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

Trump’s DOJ Won’t Let Go of One of His Biggest Losers in Court. I Know Why.

By Matthew Wollin | July 14, 2025 10:00 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-doj-bondi-biggest-lo
ser-explained.html

Late last month, the fourth in a series of lawsuits brought by law firms targeted by Donald Trump ended in a decisive court victory for the law firm, just as the three previous suits had done. This was no surprise: Legal scholars across the spectrum expected Trump’s executive orders targeting Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and my old firm WilmerHale would never stand up under judicial scrutiny.

Just three days after this final loss, though, the Trump administration appealed the first of those losses—the one against Perkins Coie, issued in May. Scholars are again confident that the Trump administration will lose on initial appeal. Which raises the big question: Why did they appeal at all?

Again, the specific order being appealed is the one targeting Pekins Coie. Even to the untrained eye, it is striking in how personal and partisan it is. For instance, it describes Perkins Coie’s activity as “dishonest and dangerous” and “egregious,” and name drops both Hillary Clinton and George Soros, just because.

But even more to the point: The order is legal trash, violating the Constitution in ways that are astonishingly obvious to anyone who has experience litigating these types of issues.

Most prominently, there is a First Amendment retaliation issue. This is the notion that government officials may not retaliate against individuals for engaging in “protected speech.” The legal analysis boils down to three elements: First, was there protected speech? Second, did the government retaliate against the speaker? Third, was the retaliation because of the protected speech?

All three elements are a slam dunk here for Perkins in a way that I have rarely ever seen outside of a legal textbook.

For the first element: Political advocacy counts as protected speech. And the executive order itself states that Perkins represented Hillary Clinton in 2016 and “worked with activist donors” in connection with the 2016 election. Done.

For the second element: To count as “retaliation,” the government had to do something “sufficient to deter a person of ordinary firmness in plaintiff’s position from speaking again.” It’s pretty safe to say that the president of the United States coming after you personally would be “sufficient to deter a person of ordinary firmness.” On top of that, there are also the examples of the many, many law firms that responded to these orders by capitulating and changing their behavior. It would be hard to come up with a better example of a speaker “of ordinary firmness” being deterred.

The third element is often one of the most difficult elements to prove, because bad government actors are usually a little better at pretending that the retaliation isn’t really retaliation but some independently motivated action. (For example, think back to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ revocation of Disney World’s tax breaks after Disney came out against the “don’t say gay” bill—the government there kept up enough of a pretense of independent justification for the revocation that it became much more difficult to prove the causal connection.) That was not the case here: The Trump administration was so blatantly retaliatory that they forgot to include any non-retaliatory justifications, and the court said as much: “Neither the Order nor the accompanying fact sheet provide any basis to find that plaintiff threatens the public interest or national interest other than the stated disagreements with plaintiff’s First Amendment protected activity.”

And then there’s all the other claims.

Violation of the First Amendment’s right to free association, because the government directed government contractors to disclose their associations with Perkins? This might only be justifiable if the government provided a “sufficiently important governmental interest” and “narrowly tailored” the violation to that interest—and the government here made “zero effort” to do so.

Violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, because the government treated Perkins “differently from others similarly situated” without any “rational basis for the difference in treatment”? This was “plain on the record,” since the DOJ singled Perkins for extraordinary treatment with “no plausible explanation.”

Violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel on behalf of Perkins’ clients, because stripping away Perkins’ security clearances “interferes with the ability of [Perkins] to represent its clients”? Amply demonstrated by the fact that “government officials canceled two separate meetings in separate matters” with Perkins immediately after the executive order was issued.

Violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, because the executive order “deprived [Perkins] of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”? Clear on the record because the executive orders took away Perkins’ “liberty interest in petitioning in the government” without any process whatsoever.

Violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause (again) because the executive order was “impermissibly vague” and thus “fail[ed] to provide adequate notice”? Hard to deny, given that the government never provided “any actual evidence … that would make it clear what Firm employment policies or practices, in the government’s view, run afoul of the law.”

In total, there are six constitutional violations—two First Amendment claims, one 14th Amendment claim, one Sixth Amendment claim, and two Fifth Amendment claims—where Perkins’ victory was never really in doubt. This is—to use the technical term—a lot. All of these stand separately, and an appellate court would need to independently overturn every single one of them in order to find that the government did no wrong here.

If I were Perkins, I would not be worried about this appeal. It is as easy a win as you are likely ever to see. Which brings us back to the big question: Why did the government appeal?

I think they did it because they know they’re going to lose.

To my eyes, there are two motivations here. First is that the Trump administration has a very different relationship with legal action than any previous administration. They do not seem to view legality, or effective administration of existing laws, to be a primary or even desirable goal. Rather, they seem to view state action primarily as a means of political advocacy, in which an ultimate loss—or a few constitutional violations—doesn’t really matter as long as those losses manage to move the conversation. (This is a lesson that Democrats could stand to learn from.) Appealing this decision plays exactly into this strategy, because it allows the Trump administration to keep threatening lawyers representing political opponents because they get to keep talking about it.

Second is the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court lately has seemed almost radically predisposed to side with the government—this government, specifically—in all but the most extraordinary of circumstances. To be fair, I think it is highly unlikely that they would side with the government here—but who knows what could happen between now and an eventual Supreme Court appeal. The government could appeal an issue that they never argued in the lower court (despite the fact that they’re not supposed to be able to do that), and the Supreme Court could agree with them on that. The Trump administration might do something so new and crazy that OK’ing this executive order suddenly seems like a “moderate” decision. And even if the Supreme Court ultimately rejects the appeal or decides against Trump (and let’s be clear: Anything else would constitute the most egregious affront to the rule of law yet seen), that process will still provide the administration with an opportunity to keep illegally pressuring political opponents for the foreseeable future.

In short, the real answer to why the Trump administration would appeal a case they are almost guaranteed to lose? Unfortunately, it’s because they know that they will win in other big ways—no matter what happens in court.

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Epstein is a leftwing psyop?

Wow, Trump is covering HARD for someone.

Mossad?
Wealthy donors?
Himself?

All of the above?

Trump should just come out and say ... "It's a matter of national sey. I can't talk about it" instead of trying to gaslight everyone. It's so unbecoming.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

I'm still holding out that he's saving it for before the mid-terms or the next Presidential election.

If he hasn't released it by then, especially if it looks like Republicans will lose for some reason, then I will have a real problem on this issue.

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

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, SECOND ....?

Quote:
Texas man arrested for Trump death threats

A Texas man was arrested in the US on Thursday for allegedly threatening to kill President Donald Trump, making a reference to a prior assassination attempt, the Department of Justice has stated.

The alleged threat came ahead of Trump’s planned visit to the Texas Hill Country on Friday, as part of his tour of the state devastated by recent deadly floods.

Robert Herrera, 52, allegedly made the comment on a local news outlet’s Facebook page about the presidential visit, the DOJ wrote on Friday. Using the handle ‘Robert Herrer’, he wrote, “I won’t miss,” alongside a photo of Trump immediately after the 2024 shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania.

https://www.rt.com/news/621386-man-arrested-trump-threat/

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Could be.

We've got plenty more information collected here if they need it.

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

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 3:49 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I see you made bail, SECOND.
J/K

Yanno, when Newsweek piles into the same narrative that Trump is pushing, I think something is wrong.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Monday, July 14, 2025 4:17 PM

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

Trump’s “Major Announcement” on Russia Is Good News for Putin

By Fred Kaplan | July 14, 2025 3:42 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-russia-putin-ukraine
-war-news-announcement.html

How seriously should we should take President Donald Trump’s threat to punish Russia with “very severe tariffs” if Vladimir Putin doesn’t make a deal for peace with Ukraine in 50 days? Here’s a key sign: Right after Trump’s announcement, the Russian stock market rose sharply.

It seems that investors in the Moscow exchange were expecting Trump to lay down harsher measures than he did.

The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house, Konstantin Kosachev, concurred. “If this is all Trump had to say about Ukraine today, it’s been much ado about nothing,” adding later on social media, “This doesn’t affect our moods in the slightest.”

Trump can thunder all he wants about how “very unhappy” and “disappointed” he is about Putin’s behavior, as he did once again on Monday at a White House meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “My conversations with him [Putin] are very pleasant, and then the missiles go off at night,” Trump added in a bewilderingly bewildered tone.

But the significant facts are these. First, Trump seems to have taken a ridiculously long time to notice Putin’s blatant hypocrisy. Second, Trump is still holding back on doing much about it; compared with the three-week notice he gave to the European Union and Mexico, two of our leading economic partners, for when they can expect 30 percent tariffs on all of their exports, his warning to Putin is generous.

In fact, given all the times that Trump has threatened to set deadlines on tariffs, then backed away, it’s hard to take seriously any threat he makes. Certainly it is hard for Putin to take them seriously. And Putin after all is the ostensible object of these threats—the man whose behavior Trump at least says he wants to sway.

Putin no doubt recalls, back in May, when Trump set a two-week deadline for Russia to get serious about peace or else. Two weeks passed; nothing happened. The European Union tried to nudge Trump into action. As an alternative, Trump opened up peace talks. The talks were scheduled; the Russians didn’t show up. Again, Trump did nothing.

A few times since then, most volubly at the meeting with European leaders on Monday, Trump has wondered out loud whether Putin is serious about peace. The real question we should all ask now: Is Trump?

The answer to both questions should be pretty obvious.

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 9:09 PM

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

Why Trump Can’t Make the Epstein Story Go Away

His brainwashing powers are finite.

By Jonathan Chait | July 14, 2025, 2:40 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/trump-epstein-fil
e/683525/

Donald Trump’s reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within the most gullible movement in American history.

Over the past decade, Trump’s hold on his fan base has been a fact of American political life. Any discomfiting fact is instantly dismissed as a lie coming from the “Radical Left” (Democrats), the “FAKE NEWS” (non-Republican-aligned media), the “Deep State” (any government statistic or official finding), or “RINOs” (whenever a Republican has the temerity to question him).

Trump himself defines what is true, and can alter the nature of that reality at his whim. A journalist or politician may go from Well Respected to Failing Loser and back again as many times as needed. Extravagant promises (to give everybody “terrific” health care, to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, to bring down grocery prices) could be issued and then memory-holed.

The MAGA-endorsed conspiracy theory that Epstein was blackmailing powerful people with tacit government support was not crazy. (Unproven, yes. Impossible, no.) The crazy part was that this theory had been assimilated into the pro-Trump worldview. Epstein had been Trump’s buddy. Trump had publicly acknowledged more than 20 years ago his awareness of Epstein’s preference for young girls. Epstein came into the custody of the Justice Department and died in prison in 2019, while Trump was president. Trump said “I wish her well” of Epstein’s lieutenant, Ghislaine Maxwell—an odd thing to say of an alleged child sex trafficker. In a rational world, the Epstein saga would have been an obsession of Trump’s enemies, not his supporters.

And so Trump naturally must have assumed that his promises to release Epstein’s records would go the same way all his other promises had: straight into the memory hole. Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in February that she had the fabled Epstein client list on her desk, and that she would release it. After the Department of Justice claimed that there was no client list at all, Trump instructed his followers that the issue was now dead. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he scolded a reporter after the DOJ announcement. “This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.”

When his supporters continued raising questions, Trump floated a new line on Truth Social: The files did exist, but they were anti-Trump disinformation created by the Democrats.

“Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, ‘THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,’ and more?” he wrote. “They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?”

Not only did this new line blatantly contradict the repeated promises to release the files that Trump’s allies had made, but it was not even internally consistent. Barack Obama had concocted the Epstein files to smear Trump … but Democrats had refused to make them public, for some reason? And because the “Radical Left Lunatics” had kept them secret, Trump needed to do the same thing?

But whatever. Trump’s lies often lack even the veneer of plausibility. His devotees have generally not made him work very hard to maintain their trust. You could almost picture Trump lazily mouthing the same tropes—“fake news,” “Russia, Russia, Russia”—expecting the same result.

Except this time, Trump pushed the buttons, and nothing happened. Trump fans just grew angrier; how could Trump pretend that a pledge to uncover a sinister cabal had never mattered at all?

Why, exactly, this reversal dismayed his followers when a thousand previous reversals had bounced right off them is hard to say precisely. One possible reason is that, compared with promises about normal policy issues, the Epstein saga is both easier to understand and generates unusually strong feelings; the sexual abuse of underage girls is more visceral than more abstract harms of, say, taking away peoples’ access to health insurance, and this subject is central to the QAnon movement. The Epstein saga also seems to hold a load-bearing place in the populist mythology, explaining why the “deep state” is out to get Trump. Casually retconning the narrative, so that the Epstein files cease to be the secret document that will expose Trump’s enemies but rather become a libel written by those enemies, is too wrenching a shift for even them to accept.

It is too much to expect that Trump’s base will all defect together. But after years of complete impunity, Trump has discovered that his power to brainwash his idolaters is finite.

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

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Monday, July 14, 2025 10:05 PM

Don't worry about Epstein, Second. You didn't care one iota for the last 5 years, there's no need for you to pretend to now.

We'll deal with it.

You and Ted can go back to worrying about Bill Gates' imaginary 300,000 dying kids half a world away that you already forgot about until I just reminded you of them right now.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 12:28 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s “Major Announcement” on Russia Is Good News for Putin

By Fred Kaplan | July 14, 2025 3:42 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-russia-putin-ukraine
-war-news-announcement.html

How seriously should we should take President Donald Trump’s threat to punish Russia with “very severe tariffs” if Vladimir Putin doesn’t make a deal for peace with Ukraine in 50 days? Here’s a key sign: Right after Trump’s announcement, the Russian stock market rose sharply.

It seems that investors in the Moscow exchange were expecting Trump to lay down harsher measures than he did.

The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house, Konstantin Kosachev, concurred. “If this is all Trump had to say about Ukraine today, it’s been much ado about nothing,” adding later on social media, “This doesn’t affect our moods in the slightest.”

Trump can thunder all he wants about how “very unhappy” and “disappointed” he is about Putin’s behavior, as he did once again on Monday at a White House meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. “My conversations with him [Putin] are very pleasant, and then the missiles go off at night,” Trump added in a bewilderingly bewildered tone.

But the significant facts are these. First, Trump seems to have taken a ridiculously long time to notice Putin’s blatant hypocrisy. Second, Trump is still holding back on doing much about it; compared with the three-week notice he gave to the European Union and Mexico, two of our leading economic partners, for when they can expect 30 percent tariffs on all of their exports, his warning to Putin is generous.

In fact, given all the times that Trump has threatened to set deadlines on tariffs, then backed away, it’s hard to take seriously any threat he makes. Certainly it is hard for Putin to take them seriously. And Putin after all is the ostensible object of these threats—the man whose behavior Trump at least says he wants to sway.

Putin no doubt recalls, back in May, when Trump set a two-week deadline for Russia to get serious about peace or else. Two weeks passed; nothing happened. The European Union tried to nudge Trump into action. As an alternative, Trump opened up peace talks. The talks were scheduled; the Russians didn’t show up. Again, Trump did nothing.

A few times since then, most volubly at the meeting with European leaders on Monday, Trump has wondered out loud whether Putin is serious about peace. The real question we should all ask now: Is Trump?

The answer to both questions should be pretty obvious.

No, Trump is not interested in peace. He's afraid of another Vietnam/ Afghanistan- style withdrawal and/ or an obvious NATO/ USA defeat. The problem is, he doesn't have any cards to play. 500% tariffs on India, China, and Brazil? I don't think that's going to stop them from buying Russian oil, but it'll drive up the price of oil worldwide leading to inflation here.

Militarily, there's nothing Trump can throw at the Russians to stop their advance.

So Trump's options are to either throw in the towel and admit defeat (unthinkable) or just keep Ukraine limping as long as possible.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 12:40 AM

I love watching all the "intellectuals" being put to the test like they are right now.

Most of them, outside of pollsters, don't really have too difficult a life in their bullshit line of work.

History won't look back kindly on all of them who continue to put their names on bad predictions.

Most people won't remember the names of them, so it will only be the articles online that could be found showing all of their terrible philosophizing over the years, but I am interested in seeing how the media and those outside of it treat Alan Licthman when November of 2028 comes around. There will be plenty enough people who remember what a poor sport he was about it after getting this last election so wrong, but I'm wondering if the media is going to try to bump him up again or pretend he doesn't exist and that they never listened to anything he's ever said.

Unless it was just about the money and getting as much immediate interaction and attention, and I didn't care about my name being tarnished, I can't see why these people are so quick to put their names on predicting how current events are going to play out right now. They specialize on focusing on the past, and then trying to interpret actions of the past with their own current biases and getting them to fit in their narrow worldview.

I don't think that properly assessing exactly why events of the past went down the way they did is nearly as easy as people generally seem to think it does when they say things like "Hindsight is 20/20", and I don't imagine there are a lot of people who's job it is to do exactly that who aren't very good at it.

But to think you're so good at it that you can accurately predict what Trump or Putin are thinking and what they are going to do, let alone what it will mean for the economy or pretty much anything else when it's become very clear over the last 6 months that nobody is capable of predicting any of that is a fool's errand.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 7:34 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:
Don't worry about Epstein, Second. You didn't care one iota for the last 5 years, there's no need for you to pretend to now.

We'll deal with it.

You and Ted can go back to worrying about Bill Gates' imaginary 300,000 dying kids half a world away that you already forgot about until I just reminded you of them right now.

Bill Gates is famously generous, something Libtards are. Epstein is exactly like every wealthy Trumptard I know, the opposite of Libtard Gates. Epstein got rich by being a cheating, lying swindler, the same way Trump did, the same way Trump's cabinet of billionaires did. On the way to being wealthy, Epstein's sex life went in the same direction as Trump's did, but even further than Trump dared, which is why Epstein had to kill himself. If only Trump would follow Epstein, but that could only have happened if the dithering Biden had arrested Trump rather than let Trump run freely around America, expecting Trump would voluntarily go away without Biden forcing him to go. Biden expected voters to do what was Biden's job. Biden expected voters to act like they have an ounce of good sense, but if he spent more time in Texas, he'd know that good sense is in short supply.

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 7:55 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:
I love watching all the "intellectuals" being put to the test like they are right now.

Most of them, outside of pollsters, don't really have too difficult a life in their bullshit line of work.

History won't look back kindly on all of them who continue to put their names on bad predictions.

The "intellectuals" predicted correctly that angry poor white trash don't have an ounce of good sense. I don't have to predict because I have scientific observations of how Trumptards spend their days. Trumptards are fat because they are gluttons. Their marriages fall apart because they are ill-tempered and adulterous. They get laid off because they are lousy employees. They have the crappy lives that "intellectuals" can only be aware of by using complex equations to model the slothful, drunken, addle-brained, drug-addicted, sexually promiscuous, angry, dishonest behavior of Trumptards.

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 7:57 AM

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

For MAGA, Ignorance is Strength
Research cuts aren’t about shrinking government, they’re about killing science

By Paul Krugman | Jul 15, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/for-maga-ignorance-is-strength

I start almost every morning the same way. First I start the coffee brewing. Then I feed Jack, our cat. Then I fire up the weather app on my phone, to help plan my day.

Of course, as someone who basically spends his life staring at a computer screen, I’m not nearly as affected by the weather as, say, a farmer, or someone who lives in a flood-prone area. But weather forecasts — and the research that leads to better forecasting over time — are extremely useful to almost everyone.

So why is the Trump administration making severe cuts in the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service? The Times had an excellent and alarming report on these cuts, which by all indications will go forward despite the disaster in Kerr County. But I had one quarrel with the report: Its attribution of the administration’s actions to “an effort to shrink the federal government.”

That’s not what this is about. This is an attack not on government but on science.

Traditionally, conservatives calling for smaller government want to see a less generous social safety net. Things like protecting Americans from economic hardship and guaranteeing health care, they argue, aren’t essential roles of government. And it’s true that those of us who want a stronger, not weaker safety net are mostly making a judgment about what kind of society we should be rather than an economic argument.

But weather forecasting and the research that supports it aren’t like retirement income or health care. They’re what economists call “public goods.” That is, they’re things provided by the government because they’re valuable to everyone but can’t easily be monetized, because there’s no good way to limit access to paying customers.

I say no good way advisedly. Republicans have long sought to restrict access to National Weather Service data to private companies like AccuWeather, which in turn would provide forecasts only to paying customers. And they may succeed. But this would be obvious profiteering, creating artificial middlemen for access to information generated at taxpayer expense. And it would at best support forecasting, not the research that makes forecasting better.

For now weather forecasting is, as it should be, a publicly provided service. And the federal government has provided that service for a very long time: The National Weather Service was created by U.S. Grant in 1870. Furthermore, it’s an immensely valuable service. Putting a dollar value to its payoffs is tricky, but there can’t be much doubt that money the government invests in weather prediction and analysis has a very high rate of return to America as a whole.

Yet DOGE’s depredations have already created serious staffing shortages at the weather service, which may have contributed to the Texas disaster. And the Trump administration is getting ready to effectively zero out the research that underlies improvements in weather forecasting. This includes shuttering the lab that sends teams of hurricane hunters into storms to collect data and drastically cutting a program that maintains river gauges to help predict floods. In this case Trump and company aren’t shrinking government, they’re basically dismantling it.

You’ve probably heard that the One Big Beautiful Bill will cause immense hardship via its cuts to Medicaid, which will amount to around 15 percent of the program’s spending. Well, the Trump administration wants to cut funding for NOAA by 40 percent.

Since NOAA is a tiny budget item compared with Medicaid, what’s this about? Actually, there’s no mystery. Among other things, NOAA research helps us understand and predict climate change, and America’s right is firmly committed to climate denial. So Trump officials want to end research that might tell them things they don’t want to hear.

Why not eliminate only research directly focused on climate change? Because that’s not how it works. When you have a pervasive phenomenon like climate change just about any research into the weather will provide evidence that it’s happening. So the MAGA/Project 2025 solution is to stop almost all research.

The same logic lies behind the drastic cuts at the National Institutes of Health: They aren’t about saving money, they’re about preventing researchers from discovering things — like evidence that vaccines work and are safe — that don’t match the prejudices of the people in charge.

So Trump’s cuts to scientific research aren’t about shrinking government and saving money. They’re about dealing with possibly inconvenient evidence by covering the nation’s ears and shouting “La, la, la, we can’t hear you.”

Will the war on science hurt America? Massively. As I said, estimating the benefits of NOAA research is tricky. But two first-rate economists, David Cutler and Ed Glaeser, have made a stab at estimating the impact of cuts at NIH. Their analysis suggests that these cuts might save $500 billion in federal spending over the next 25 years — while imposing more than $8 trillion in losses. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2834949

But don’t expect studies like these to change policy. America is now run by people who believe that knowledge is dangerous, and ignorance is strength.

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 9:41 AM