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

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

The Trump Administration Is Violating the First Rule of Disasters

Good disaster management is premised on preparation.

By Zoë Schlanger | July 15, 2025, 7:24 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/07/texas-flood-respon
se-preparation/683528/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-trump-administration-is-violatin
g-the-first-rule-of-disasters/ar-AA1IDFg3

In the days since the Texas flash-flood disaster, the Department of Homeland Security has had a stock response to questions about delays in the federal government’s response, or about a recent rule requiring DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve FEMA expenditures over $100,000, including rescue teams. The response goes, over and over, like this: “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens … The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”

The Trump administration has been using this line for more than a month now, in response to criticism of its plans to remake, or perhaps disband, FEMA. And many people who study emergency response agree that, to some degree, the agency needs reform. Yet now the administration’s press to quickly strip down the agency is being tested against a devastating disaster for the first time. And it is violating a basic precept of emergency management: Be prepared.

In any disaster, responding quickly can help save people and salve the harm. Protocols should be well known and well practiced before an event. An active disaster that killed more than 130 people, with more than 160 still missing, is not the occasion to switch up the norms. “This is exactly what many of us are concerned about,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. However much FEMA might benefit from change, remaking it in an ad hoc fashion will just result in more devastation, he said: “In the context of a really complicated emergency where lots of people’s lives are at stake—that’s just not where you want to see experimentation happening.”

And FEMA’s response to the Texas flash-flood disaster has not been business as usual. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of urban-search-and-rescue teams—deployed in the past within hours during similar events—until more than 72 hours after the flooding had begun, per CNN reporting. The agency failed to answer thousands of calls from flood survivors after allowing contracts for call-center workers to lapse one day after the disaster, according to The New York Times. FEMA had fewer than 100 people on the ground in Texas within four days of the disaster, and 311 by day five; within a week of Hurricane Helene, during what Donald Trump deemed a failed response to the flooding, FEMA deployed 1,500.

The situation on the ground in these immediate post-event moments can create a fog-of-war atmosphere, and no complete assessment of the federal government’s reaction will be possible until later. “Like with any really catastrophic event, it’s hard to understand what’s happening at a micro level,” Rumbach said. Several non-FEMA rescue teams from other states and Mexico traveled to Texas to help, supplementing Texas’s own robust emergency-response apparatus. But each of the other state teams waited on FEMA to call them up, as is protocol; FEMA didn’t begin to activate any of them until last Monday, according to CNN. No missing person has been found alive since last Friday. “It’s clear that the initial response was much smaller and more measured than you would expect from FEMA,” Rumbach said. “It’s different from what you would expect a year ago, in terms of the number of personnel and the speed of response.” And FEMA is simply operating with fewer resources: About a quarter of the agency’s staff has left since Trump took office in January, according to the Times. Due to vacancies, there is currently no FEMA regional administrator in any state along the Gulf Coast, just deputies.

Right now, rather than “lean” and “deployable,” it might be more appropriate to describe FEMA as “starved and hobbled.” But ostensibly, a FEMA-review council assembled by the Trump administration is meant to offer a plan to overhaul the agency. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who praised the Trump administration’s response to the flooding as “swift and very robust,” sits on that council. At a gathering of the council on the Wednesday after the floods (at which Abbott was absent), Noem reiterated her desire to see FEMA “eliminated as it existed” and “remade.” The council’s recommendations are due in November.

The administration does seem to understand that its plans to rapidly remake FEMA have real drawbacks. Noem has retained FEMA employees who looked like they’d be let go; Trump said last month that he intends to phase out FEMA only after this hurricane season. But reporting in recent days suggests that the administration is softening its tone on FEMA even further, at least for the moment. The Washington Post reports that the promised dissolution may in fact look more like a “rebranding.” Reality sets in fast in a disaster.

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 6:48 PM

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

Historian Tim Weiner: ‘Trump has put national security in the hands of crackpots and fools’

By Aaron Gell | Tue 15 Jul 2025 10.54 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/15/tim-weiner-cia-trump

It may seem perverse to pity the Central Intelligence Agency. The powerful spy organization’s history is rich with failures and abuses – from the Cuban missile crisis to the post-9/11 torture program to its role in the overthrow of a long string of democratically elected leaders. But among the many consequences of Donald Trump’s open hostility toward America’s intelligence community is that no less a CIA critic than Tim Weiner now sounds like a defender.

To understand why, Weiner – author of the unsparing history of the agency, the 2007 bestseller Legacy of Ashes – suggested a thought experiment in a recent interview: imagine spending years as an intelligence officer, working diligently to subvert the Kremlin, only to watch the US stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as it did in February when it voted against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. In that moment, Weiner said: “You come to the realization, if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis.’”

Download for free from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Tim+Weiner+Legacy+of+Ashes

Quote:
Legacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States.

Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it “a distasteful but vital necessity.” A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.

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 8:12 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The big problem with the CIA isn't its intelligence gathering ... altho that's been subverted to projects like "Saddam WMD" and "Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinfo".. but it's clandestine field ops and propaganda functions, done without Presidential authorization under cover of "plausible deniability".

-----------
"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 8:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love watching all the "intellectuals" being put to the test like they are right now.

They are?

Quote:
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
who?

Quote:
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 dunno that it's that difficult. I already predicted our proxy war with Iran via Israel. I already questioned what Trump, who sees himself as some kind of master negotiator, would do when meeting the immovable object of the Kremlin. I still predict Russia is going to win in Ukraine.

-----------
"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 9:11 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:
The big problem with the CIA isn't its intelligence gathering ... altho that's been subverted to projects like "Saddam WMD" and "Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinfo".. but it's clandestine field ops and propaganda functions, done without Presidential authorization under cover of "plausible deniability".

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Suddenly, you are pretending to be more knowledgeable about the CIA then Tim Weiner who wrote books about the CIA, FBI and Nixon. Signym, Weiner did NOT come to your conclusion about what is wrong with CIA. His conclusion was the problem is at the very top of the CIA, not the clandestine field operations, at the level of various Presidents who have major mental malfunctions. ALL OF THE STUPIDEST THINGS THE CIA HAS DONE WERE AUTHORIZED BY THE PRESIDENT, just not in writing. My least favorite President, excluding Trump, is the rich playboy/adulterer known as JFK, whose mouth lost the Vietnam War because of things he said to the CIA that weren't in writing until those involved published their memoirs years after JFK well deservedly got shot dead for being a goddamn jackass, but also a smooth talker, a talent which he used to become a frequent adulterer. Unlike Trump, JFK didn't have to either pay women or use violence on them or pay Epstein to procure teenagers for sex with Trump.

In 2008, Epstein made a deal to avoid Federal prosecution for his crimes.
Instead, the state would handle investigations and its attorney general handle the prosecutions.
That state was Florida. That AG was Pam Bondi.

Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend that Bondi is doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!”

“We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening,” he wrote. “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

https://thehill.com/media/5399802-tucker-carlson-blames-bondi-epstein/

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 9:11 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love watching all the "intellectuals" being put to the test like they are right now.

They are?

Yes.

Quote:
Quote:
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
who?

Look to 2nd's daily posts and you'll see a lot of them pop up regularly. Dead Kevin Drum was one of them.

Quote:
Quote:
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 dunno that it's that difficult. I already predicted our proxy war with Iran via Israel. I already questioned what Trump, who sees himself as some kind of master negotiator, would do when meeting the immovable object of the Kremlin. I still predict Russia is going to win in Ukraine.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

We all get some things right. Even those of us here who almost get nothing right. When you talk about stuff like this everyday like we do, the chances we get things right are going to increase just because we say more stuff.

Putin's always been an X-Factor and I don't think anybody has reasonably pinned him down. They sure as hell don't know what Trump is going to do... they haven't even learned not to buy into what he says he's going to do yet. And when they do realize that he says stuff that he doesn't end up doing, they insult him with stupid Ted-isms like "TACO". But at the end of the day, we've had a stellar month of tariff revenue and the first time we made money with them for a month in over a decade and the economy hasn't tanked.

The "intellectuals" are being tested now like never before because they don't have an establishment candidate in there, or even somebody who they could dream of considering friendly to their ideology. Not only are they completely incapable of making their bullshit models work in real-time right now, but they are also incapable of admitting they were wrong when things are working after screaming to you for 6 months that the sky is falling.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 9:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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.

That's not a prediction. That's just a stupid thing that an "educated" person says to a stupid person like you to get you to click on their article and give you a hit of dopamine for believing that you're morally superior to everyone around you without having to put in any effort whatsoever. Stupid.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 9:14 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
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.

No. He's not. And no. You're not. He was nothing but a no-good thieving pirate like you, just an obscenely successful one by comparison in the end.

You're just a bunch of pretenders and whiners. And your time is up.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 11:10 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The "intellectuals" are being tested now like never before because they don't have an establishment candidate in there, or even somebody who they could dream of considering friendly to their ideology. Not only are they completely incapable of making their bullshit models work in real-time right now, but they are also incapable of admitting they were wrong when things are working after screaming to you for 6 months that the sky is falling.

Though I don't know enough Ken Langone him to consider him an intellectual, and I'm aware he's prominent enough to have said things that people have listened to before, it would appear the Home Depot founder is one of the exceptions to the rule. They do exist.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/07/15/ken_langone_trump_h
as_a_good_shot_at_being_one_of_the_best_presidents_ever.html

Quote:
"Home Depot" founder Ken Langone told MSNBC on Tuesday morning that he believes Trump could be shaping up to be one of the best presidents ever:

KEN LANGONE: I can name you all the cars we drive, most of them are foreign now. They sell a hell of a lot more cars here than we do there. Our tariff was 2.5% -- that’s wrong.

CNBC HOST: Well, right now it’s 25% on top of the 2.5%.

LANGONE: Because he started—but I’m saying before. Look, I think it’ll settle in.

What he did in the Middle East with these deals. He’s making $3 trillion. These are real numbers. Look, let me tell you right now—I am sold on Trump. In fact, I’ll say this: I think he’s got a good shot at going down in history as one of our best presidents ever.

CNBC HOST: That is a real turnaround, because you didn’t want to vote for him.

LANGONE: I told you the reason. I want to tell you—I’m a believer. What I’m seeing happening is absolutely nothing short of a great thing. And there’s a beat, people are walking with more bounce in their step—it’s all around.

CNBC HOST: I gave you quite a bit of grief when it was a binary choice. You were still complaining about Trump, and it was a binary choice. I was like—are you kidding me?

LANGONE: Knowledge implies one thing: when you made a mistake, admit it. I think this guy is turning out to be a president. One of the pilots on that miraculous trip to Iran—where we wiped out whatever the hell we wiped out, right?

He said, “You’re the only guy in the presidency that would have done what you did.”

One of the pilots said that. And you know what? He’s probably right.

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

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

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Tuesday, July 15, 2025 11:30 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:
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.

That's not a prediction. That's just a stupid thing that an "educated" person says to a stupid person like you to get you to click on their article and give you a hit of dopamine for believing that you're morally superior to everyone around you without having to put in any effort whatsoever. Stupid.

This is how Trumptards are, 6ix: Told that cigarettes cause cancer, the Trumptard won't stop smoking. Time passes, and cancer kills the Trumptard. When a Trumptard is told to behave better at work, they won't. Then they get fired. If America is fortunate, the Trumptard will kill himself quickly rather than let time slowly pass, as in the slow progression of a case of cancer. But whether the Trumptard dies fast or slow, the solution to the Trumptard's life struggles is death, since Trumptards never learn.

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

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 2:29 AM

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

That's not a prediction. That's just a stupid thing that an "educated" person says to a stupid person like you to get you to click on their article and give you a hit of dopamine for believing that you're morally superior to everyone around you without having to put in any effort whatsoever. Stupid.
This is how Trumptards are, 6ix: Told that cigarettes cause cancer, the Trumptard won't stop smoking.

That's how human beings are, retard.

I don't give a single fuck that you know about my vices because I'm man enough to admit my failures and flaws.

Nobody believes anything you have to say about yourself, and nobody recognizes any false pretense of moral superiority you think you exhibit simply by remaining completely anonymous online and never actually having a real conversation with anyone.

You are psychotic. And on the off chance you're not 400lbs or suffering from some other "normalized" vice or flaw, it's only because you're likely a serial killer and you've got a crawl space full of dead hookers or young men.

You've used this bullshit line 10,000 times here before and it never means any more than the first time you said it, which is nothing, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me. Sorry he turned out to be a Trumptard. I know how disappointing that must have been for you to find out like that.

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”

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

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

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 4:12 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love watching all the "intellectuals" being put to the test like they are right now.

SIGNYM
They are?

SIX
Yes.

[continues...] 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

SIGNYM
who?

SIX
Look to 2nd's daily posts and you'll see a lot of them pop up regularly. Dead Kevin Drum was one of them.

[continues...] i7 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.

SIGNYM
I dunno that it's that difficult. I already predicted our proxy war with Iran via Israel. I already questioned what Trump, who sees himself as some kind of master negotiator, would do when meeting the immovable object of the Kremlin. I still predict Russia is going to win in Ukraine.

SIX:
We all get some things right. Even those of us here who almost get nothing right. When you talk about stuff like this everyday like we do, the chances we get things right are going to increase just because we say more stuff.

Putin's always been an X-Factor and I don't think anybody has reasonably pinned him down.

SIGNY~
That's bc like most Americans you don't pay the slightest attention to what he says. He's very predictable.

SIX:
hey sure as hell don't know what Trump is going to do... they haven't even learned not to buy into what he says he's going to do yet. And when they do realize that he says stuff that he doesn't end up doing, they insult him with stupid Ted-isms like "TACO". But at the end of the day, we've had a stellar month of tariff revenue and the first time we made money with them for a month in over a decade and the economy hasn't tanked.
The "intellectuals" are being tested now like never before because they don't have an establishment candidate in there, or even somebody who they could dream of considering friendly to their ideology. Not only are they completely incapable of making their bullshit models work in real-time right now, but they are also incapable of admitting they were wrong when things are working after screaming to you for 6 months that the sky is falling.

SIGNYM
I only mentioned those three things bc they were the ones I was probably not going to like. I was OK with tariffs and border control/ mass deportation, and killing DEI. I was pretty sure Trump was gonna get those done.
Another thing he'll probably tackle? Investigating the big fat official liars who pushed the RUSSIA!COLLUSION! hoax. And finally ... I did say that Trump was loose cannon. Something DC needs, even if they don't know it.
But in the end, no matter how Trump bobs and weaves, I think he's being "herded" by neocons and zionists.

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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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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 7:24 AM

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

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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.

That's not a prediction. That's just a stupid thing that an "educated" person says to a stupid person like you to get you to click on their article and give you a hit of dopamine for believing that you're morally superior to everyone around you without having to put in any effort whatsoever. Stupid.
This is how Trumptards are, 6ix: Told that cigarettes cause cancer, the Trumptard won't stop smoking.

That's how human beings are, retard.

I don't give a single fuck that you know about my vices because I'm man enough to admit my failures and flaws.

Nobody believes anything you have to say about yourself, and nobody recognizes any false pretense of moral superiority you think you exhibit simply by remaining completely anonymous online and never actually having a real conversation with anyone.

You are psychotic. And on the off chance you're not 400lbs or suffering from some other "normalized" vice or flaw, it's only because you're likely a serial killer and you've got a crawl space full of dead hookers or young men.

You've used this bullshit line 10,000 times here before and it never means any more than the first time you said it, which is nothing, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me. Sorry he turned out to be a Trumptard. I know how disappointing that must have been for you to find out like that.

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.”

To quote 6ix, "That's how human beings are, retard." Wrong, 6ix. That is how semi-humans are. All my cousins, semi-humans, are dead. If any had lived long enough, they would have voted for Trump, so they aren't officially Trumptards. In the next generation, half of them are dead. These are formal and official Trumptards. The louder they were about the superiority of Trump, and the evilness of Democrats, the sooner they dropped dead. The survivors aren't in good health. All of that generation may well be dead before Trump is out of office, because they refuse to change personal habits. They will not adapt to their physical environment because they are hardcore Trumptards. The only thing they adapt to is the social environment, a sewer of Trump turds and falsehoods they see and hear on TV, radio, and from other Trumptards in East Texas. What is Trump telling them? That they are perfect as is. They should live that way if they want to live that way because Freedom means doing what you feel like, whether it is over-eating, drunkenness, pickup sex with strangers, wildly stupid business schemes, or simply driving while drunk, because how else will they get home from the party?

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

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 7:26 AM

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

Hawks, Doves and Lapdogs

Paul Krugman / Jul 16, 2025 at 5:39 AM

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hawks-doves-and-lapdogs

Yesterday’s CPI report looked fairly tame on the surface, but if you look at the details it showed clear signs that Trump’s tariffs are starting to drive up prices. And private surveys suggest that there’s a lot more inflation in the pipeline. For example, look at S&P Global’s Purchasing Managers’ Index for manufacturing, which shows the percentage of firms reporting higher prices. A higher number almost always points to higher official inflation ahead, and right now it’s definitely telling us that tariffs are about to hit hard:

Why aren’t we seeing the full effects of the tariffs in official statistics? For the record, I don’t believe Trump officials are cooking the books — yet.

That’s not to say that they won’t at some point, and there’s a good chance that they will. But so far what we’re probably seeing is a combination of ordinary lags and the temporary effects of the TACO (Trump always chickens out) narrative. Buyers get pissed off at sellers when prices rise, so sellers who don’t want to lose market share have an incentive to hold prices down despite higher costs if they think the Trump tariffs will come back down in a few weeks.

I, however, am a TACO skeptic. I think Trump really is a Tariff Man who will keep us at Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs indefinitely, and businesses will eventually realize that and raise prices accordingly.

And then what? Clearly, we shouldn’t expect Trump to admit that his tariffs are raising prices, or even to admit that prices are rising. What we can expect is that he will keep putting pressure on the Fed to cut interest rates. I don’t think he’ll manage to push Jerome Powell out before next May, but as I wrote last week, whoever he picks after that will do his bidding.

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

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 8:02 AM

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

Donald Trump says those interested in Jeffrey Epstein inquiry are ‘bad people’

US president faces Maga backlash over suspicion his administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect rich elite – including Trump

By Oliver Holmes | Wed 16 Jul 2025 07.18 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/16/donald-trump-dismisses
-inquiry-into-jeffrey-epstein-as-boring

Donald Trump has dismissed a secretive inquiry into the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as “boring” and of interest only to “bad people”, but said he backed the release of any “credible” files, as he sought to stamp out a conspiracy-fuelled uproar among his supporters.

The US president is facing a political crisis within his usually loyal Republican Make America Great Again (Maga) base over suspicion that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite he associated with, which included Trump.

One of the most dramatic theories circulating among supporters is that Epstein – who killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody – was murdered by powerful figures to cover up their roles in his sex crimes against children.

“I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday night when asked why his supporters are so interested in the case. “It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring, and I don’t understand why it keeps going.

“I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going,” he added. “But credible information, let them give it. Anything that is credible, I would say, let them have it.”

During his election campaigns, Trump fuelled multiple conspiracies by his Maga movement, including that the country was controlled by shadowy “deep state” elites. This has caused deep paranoia among his base, who are now, unusually, questioning their leader over the Epstein controversy.

Last week, the justice department and the FBI announced that a review of the case files had confirmed that Epstein had killed himself, and there was no list of his clients to be made public.

Conservative allies of the president have focused their anger on the attorney general, Pam Bondi, who was leading the case, as she had previously said Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”.

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

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Wednesday, July 16, 2025 9:03 AM