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

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THGR, you are definitely defaming me. But it's a question whether your character assassination is lawsuit- worthy since I'm anonymous here, so I incur no reputational harm IRL. In my mind, civil lawsuits follow the "no harm, no foul" rule. KIKI spoke to a lawyer who seemed to think otherwise. If KIKI had pursued that and found an avenue for a lawsuit, I might have tagged along, but I'm too busy to pursue that myself since it seems like a dry well.

But to reiterate: your posts are defamation. If anything should change, you're putting yourself potentially at risk. Look up 'the limits of free speech" bc you're way beyond those limits.

BTW you seem to think that the MAGA movement is full of perverts.

I have two words for you: Hunter Biden

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

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 12:49 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, you are definitely defaming me. But it's a question whether your character assassination is lawsuit- worthy since I'm anonymous here, so I incur no reputational harm IRL. In my mind, civil lawsuits follow the "no harm, no foul" rule. KIKI spoke to a lawyer who seemed to think otherwise. If KIKI had pursued that and found an avenue for a lawsuit, I might have tagged along, but I'm too busy to pursue that myself since it seems like a dry well.

But to reiterate: your posts are defamation. If anything should change, you're putting yourself potentially at risk. Look up 'the limits of free speech" bc you're way beyond those limits.

BTW you seem to think that the MAGA movement is full of perverts.

I have two words for you: Hunter Biden

You still don’t get it. Here comrade, here, you do not exist; period. Signym exists here. And Signym is a nonexistent fictional character, an imaginary person. How is it you don’t know this?

And MAGA is millions where Hunter Biden is one. Try thinking things through before putting pen to paper. And were talking pedophiles here. Do you have evidence Hunter is one? Because that's news to me.

Remember comrade, if you find a misspelled word you get a pat on the head. Don't let Gilligan beat you to it.

T

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 2:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THGR, you are definitely defaming me. But it's a question whether your character assassination is lawsuit- worthy since I'm anonymous here, so I incur no reputational harm IRL. In my mind, civil lawsuits follow the "no harm, no foul" rule. KIKI spoke to a lawyer who seemed to think otherwise. If KIKI had pursued that and found an avenue for a lawsuit, I might have tagged along, but I'm too busy to pursue that myself since it seems like a dry well.

But to reiterate: your posts are defamation. If anything should change, you're putting yourself potentially at risk. Look up 'the limits of free speech" bc you're way beyond those limits.

BTW you seem to think that the MAGA movement is full of perverts.

I have two words for you: Hunter Biden

You still don’t get it. Here comrade, here, you do not exist; period. Signym exists here. And Signym is a nonexistent fictional character, an imaginary person. How is it you don’t know this?

No, YOU don't get it. Must be bc your reading comprehension sucks worse than your spelling.
I made that very point, didn't I? I highlighted it for you to help your struggling brain.

But if something changes ... for example, in the unlikely event that I get doxxed, or I bump into a lawyer that says I have a case ... well, your words are here and will remain here unless you choose to scrub them out.

Quote:
And MAGA is millions where Hunter Biden is one.

Oh, so now you're defaming MILLIONS ... people you don't know, haven't met, know nothing about?
OF COURSE! That's your MO!
You stupid.

Quote:
Try thinking things through before putting pen to paper. And were [sic] talking pedophiles here. Do you have evidence Hunter is one? Because that's news to me.

Hunter Biden is alleged to have been diddling his 14 year old niece.
Is that news to you?
Maybe bc you were too busy claiming that the laptop was Russian disinfo?

Quote:
Remember comrade, if you find a misspelled word you get a pat on the head. Don't let Gilligan beat you to it.

Aw, c'mon, man. Don't be such a priss!
Look up the word morel.
Ya gotta admit, THAT was funny! And you're absolutely right: I have no morels. In fact, I'm gonna make that part of my signature, and I'm gonna keep it there until I stop chuckling over it.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 3:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Ya gotta admit, THAT was funny! And you're absolutely right: I have no morels. In fact, I'm gonna make that part of my signature, and I'm gonna keep it there until I stop chuckling over it.

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Go back to the very post where you point out I misspelled a word. Your grammatical fuckup is much worse than my misspelling a word using an e instead of an a. I'll point that out when I see your signature, too funny.

And it's funny beyond belief you are correcting me. Go ahead, go back and take a look comrade.

This is you in that very post. "but this .literally. made me laugh"

And I'd love to visit the garden thread and point this out whenever I see your signature.

T

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 4:18 PM

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

MAGA’s war on the American economy
The jobs report was okay. Trump’s reaction is disastrous.

By Matthew Yglesias | Aug 06, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/magas-war-on-the-american-economy

Last week was a real roller coaster of economic news. It started with MAGA taking an undeserved victory lap over second quarter economic data and ended with the president intemperately firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over some bad jobs numbers.

The irony of it, to the extent that one can find amusement in the torching of American institutions, is that just as the gross domestic product numbers weren’t particularly good, the jobs numbers weren’t particularly bad. By the same token, while the various trade “deals” the administration has been trumpeting aren’t nearly as good as they’re saying, it is true that they have successfully averted the worst-case scenarios that seemed possible in the immediate wake of Liberation Day.

The upshot of all of this is that Trump is obsessed with superficial indicators of success.

He’s avoided stock market backlash to his trade policies by ensuring that whatever else gets trampled amidst the tariff wars, the AI investment boom is still on track. He’s spinning economic numbers where he can and moving to suppress data where he can’t.

And in addition to political meddling, he’s continuing a pattern of funding cuts that make it hard for statistical agencies to function. The tariffs aren’t going to blow up America’s biggest and most successful companies, but they will exert an ongoing drag on all kinds of businesses that don’t have the clout to successfully beg for exemptions. America’s tax system and social safety net have become much less favorable for the poor. And termites are eating away at the long-term sources of American economic strength.

The economy is slowing down

MAGA world reacted with great excitement to the news that GDP rose at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter of 2025. But this good second quarter just offsets a terrible first quarter. Now, if you were alive in the United States of America back in March, you probably don’t remember any visible signs of a recession. People weren’t losing jobs in droves. There was a lot of freaking out about tariffs, but no actual economic calamity.

And that freaking out is exactly what you see in the data. In the first quarter, a lot of companies were importing stuff they didn’t actually use or sell in order to get ahead of the tariffs, and this showed up as GDP shrinking. Then in the second quarter, we got a bounce-back. But across the entire first half of the year, the economy grew at a slower pace than in 2024 — and at a slower pace than was predicted before Trump took office.

Last week’s bad jobs report, which showed anemic employment growth over the past several months, confirms this same trend: the economy is slowing.

I would note that there’s no big mystery about what’s happening here. If you ignore economic data and look at immigration data (which, unfortunately, is not measured as precisely or as frequently), the White House is happy to brag that it has transformed immigration from a major source of labor force growth to a slight drag. MAGA fans get defensive when you point this out. But slow growth in aggregate employment and a negative hit to GDP growth are obvious results of this policy choice.

If you think this tradeoff is worthwhile because you believe having fewer immigrants creates benefits elsewhere on the ledger, then fine. But it’s genuinely absurd to get mad at the Bureau of Labor Statistics for pointing out that immigration cuts and mass deportation show up in the jobs numbers.

One way of looking at this is that the robust job growth during the Biden years didn’t have the political benefits you might expect because a large share of those jobs went to non-citizens who couldn’t vote. And the anemic job growth of Trump’s second term hasn’t collapsed his political standing because, again, this is mostly a question of people who can’t vote no longer getting hired.

But flipping this around raises the question of why the Trump administration is so convinced that the Fed should lower interest rates.

Inflation is still running above the Fed’s 2 percent target level and has, in fact, gone up recently. Even if you think monetary policy should ignore the impact of tariffs, it’s hard to see the case for a cut.

It’s true that job growth is slowing down sharply, but that’s not because of weak demand; it’s because the administration is strangling labor force growth. It’s never been clear to me what Trump’s team thought would happen if they pulled off their immigration policies. Grandma’s going to come out of retirement to pick up day labor gigs? Residents of depressed former manufacturing towns are going to move to coastal metro areas and work as nannies?

From my baseline of pessimism toward their policies, I’d say that things are working out okay. But a slowing economy with upward pressure on prices and interest rates is what “okay” looks like.

Trump’s tariff deals are bad

During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s platform included a 10 percent tax on all imports. This was a dumb idea, a massively regressive tax that would have a negative impact on American exporters, and it was widely criticized at the time. The Trump administration’s business community supporters would often claim that it was just a negotiating tactic — Trump was going to “escalate to de-escalate” and win big market access concessions for American companies.

Once in office, he began imposing tariffs that were actually more draconian than the 10 percent campaign pledge. But he did say that he was going to try to negotiate deals.

Now, as the text of some of those deals is coming out, we’re seeing a few things. One is that Trump is securing some market access wins for American companies. But another is that he is not interested in negotiating “zero for zero” deals where trade ends up freer than it was before. Typically, Trump is reaching asymmetrical agreements where the United States will, for example, impose higher tariffs on EU exports than the EU imposes on us and the EU agrees not to retaliate. This is pretty impressive as a feat of negotiating, and I do think it serves as a reminder that it’s dangerous to underestimate Trump. He is credibly willing to engage in tit-for-tat escalations that are bad for everyone, and this gets other countries to make settlements with him that are in some sense “unfair” or “lopsided.”

But this success just raises the question of why the United States would find the arrangement desirable.

I think the answer, from Trump’s perspective, is that tariffs concentrate a lot of power in his hands personally. Trump is able to grant exemptions to politically connected companies, and this is good for his personal quest for power and enrichment. But it’s still a bad dynamic for America.

Take this guy from the Montana Knife Company, who initially reacted with enthusiasm to tariffs because they would boost his made-in-America products … only to discover that his costs are rising due to tariffs because he relies on imported equipment and supplies. And Montana Knife Company is almost certainly not in a position to lobby for exemptions.

The initial freakout over Liberation Day tariffs represented a concern about a total breakdown of global trade. What Trump has secured with his deals is a guarantee that big successful American companies such as NVIDIA, Meta, Alphabet, and Netflix won’t be torn apart by retaliatory measures. This is the dominant consideration for the stock market, which is mostly driven by the prices of the biggest and most successful companies. But I do have to note the irony that the endgame of this entire “populist” arc is to skew the American economic model even more sharply toward companies offering intangible services in tech and finance and away from manufacturers, whose competitiveness will be hurt by disrupted supply chains.

Tariff policy as tax policy

One concern I’ve heard lately is that even if tariffs are bad trade policy, the sheer revenue impact will make them difficult for future administrations to repeal. I think it’s way too soon to make a forecast like that — the politics of the next few years are too hard to predict.

But I do think it’s worth talking through the merits. Tariff revenue is now a non-trivial piece of the economic pie. It is also, per this Yale Budget Lab analysis, incredibly bad for poor people.
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-28-2025

If Democrats want to make economic policies that are good for poor people, I think this makes tariff repeal a compelling agenda item. On the revenue point, it’s true that offsetting tariff repeal with some new tax will be politically challenging, but raising taxes is always hard. And this one seems like an easier political win than fighting poverty with new spending.

Political speculations aside, though, I think we need to understand clearly what it is Trump’s doing here.

There’s no great boom in American manufacturing jobs or championing of the working class. Trump passed a regressive tax cut and offset part of the cost by cutting Medicaid and nutritional assistance. Now, he’s offsetting another part of that cost by raising taxes on the poor. After the initial tariff rollout was panned by financial markets, he put a lot of time and energy into negotiating deals that have safeguarded the interests of big technology and financial services companies, while continuing to harm lower-income consumers, small businesses, and manufacturing. And it only gets worse from here.

Eating America’s seed corn

Firing the BLS commissioner over a couple of unfavorable downward revisions would be bad enough, but of course, Trump can’t help but also smear the work of the commissioner and the agency as he does it.

The whole idea that releasing timely information and then revising it as more data becomes available represents “incompetence” is absurd. If Trump has ideas about how to make the estimates more precise, I’m sure they’d be welcome.

But he doesn’t.

Back in June, the Trump administration proposed huge cuts to the budgets of BLS and other statistical agencies. These are distinct issues, but in both cases we see an administration that fundamentally has no appreciation for the value of credible and timely economic statistics.

I know a lot of people questioned whether Trump would cook the books during his first term, and the answer from knowledgeable sources was always that the statistical procedures were hard to meddle with politically and that you’d see clear evidence of meddling if it happened. Today, I’m worried this is what the start of that meddling looks like. I don’t think we can say that next month’s numbers are going to be cooked, but how about three or four months from now?

And this is the pattern across the board. Decisions about everything from tariff policy to merger approval to the targeting of immigration enforcement to who runs federal statistical agencies are being made on a nakedly partisan basis.

There’s an old Adam Smith line about how “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” and a prosperous country like the United States can survive a lot of bad policies. I don’t think Trump’s approach to trade and immigration is good, but I am optimistic that it won’t cause long-term damage to the country. Hopefully, a future administration will establish an immigration regime that is more humane and growth-friendly than Trump’s, but also more orderly and secure than Biden’s. It’s normal for policies to ping-pong a little as we try to reach sensible outcomes.

What’s not fine is if the president reacts to the news that shrinking the labor force slows job growth by wrecking the integrity of the jobs report. Or if foreign countries decide to re-evaluate the view that the United States of America is a friendly hegemon relative to the People’s Republic of China. In the short term, demand for data center construction can keep powering the economy forward one way or another, but investment booms always come to an end, and the wreckage Trump is making is going to be very hard to fix.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 4:43 PM

No Ted. You are an idiot.

You have always been an idiot, and you have a 3rd level handle on the English language.

English either isn't your first language and you're not American, or you are 40 IQ at best.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 5:14 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No Ted. You are an idiot.

You have always been an idiot, and you have a 3rd level handle on the English language.

English either isn't your first language and you're not American, or you are 40 IQ at best.

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

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

THGR says his family has been here for 5 generations, or something. If his whole family really has been here that long, they must be inbred as all hell.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 6:01 PM

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

Teen Disillusionment

By Eli Thompson | August 6, 2025

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2025/08/06/trump-jeffrey
-epstein-gen-z-republican-voters/85513159007/

Going to an all-boys high school, where I graduated this spring, I understand why many young men voted for President Donald Trump.

My peers are not your rich country club conservatives. They are scrappy guys who liked Trump because he wasn’t polished or predictable. To them, he was a rebel outsider who would fight “the swamp” with all he had. I remember heated lunchroom debates where they’d argue about whether or not he could truly upend our system and its backers.

Even if he couldn’t remake Washington, they said, Trump would at least cause the unseen power brokers to sweat by releasing the Epstein files and making public the names of the disgraced financier’s clients.

Fast-forward to now, and that looks like a fever dream.

My friends who supported Trump and were holding on to the promise that he’d stay true to his word of fighting the elites are now scratching their heads.

Trump declined to release the Epstein files because he said it would falsely incriminate innocent people. But that has left them wondering: Is Trump just the swamp?

Young male conservatives, like my friends, are starting to wonder if their anti-establishment hero has joined the swamp he swore to fight.

They’re wondering if he is giving harbor to the people he promised to expose. Or worse, was he one of the elites who committed crimes with Epstein?

This whole turnabout is a personal one for my friends. They didn’t like Trump because he was a Republican; they liked him because he would be a “disrupter in chief.”

Now they've got someone they think might just be another “swamp creature.”

They wonder: Is Trump just a showman who lied to us and deceived us this whole time?

I hear many of them saying that their president has now cozied up to the establishment and abandoned people like them in the process.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 6:22 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I think Trump is either suffering from PTSD/ paranoia, or someone's got his balls in a vise.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 6:27 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Ya gotta admit, THAT was funny! And you're absolutely right: I have no morels. In fact, I'm gonna make that part of my signature, and I'm gonna keep it there until I stop chuckling over it.

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Go back to the very post where you point out I misspelled a word. Your grammatical fuckup is much worse than my misspelling a word using an e instead of an a. I'll point that out when I see your signature, too funny.

And it's funny beyond belief you are correcting me. Go ahead, go back and take a look comrade.

This is you in that very post. "but this .literally. made me laugh"

It wasn't a fuckup, it was on purpose. For emphasis. I could have done

*literally*
or LITERALLY
or literally
or literally
or - literally -
or ... literally ...
or ,literally,

but I chose .literally. bc it was easiest.

Stop being so literal.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 4:22 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Listened to another interview of Alex Krainer, and he's still a firm believer that Trump is adhering to his agenda.

What he's saying is that if you stop paying attention to what Trump SAYS, and ignore the zigzags, and only look at the results...

Trump is still, in fact, disengaging from Ukraine, from NATO, and from the EU. The flow of weapons at this moment depends on EU nations paying for them, and has basically stopped.

Trump doesn't want war with Iran, and he doesn't want Israel to war with Iran either. Since Iran's nuclear program was the excuse for war with Iran, and Trump said their nuclear program was "obliterated" ... POOF! There goes the excuse for a war.

Tariffs are in place, despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

According to Krainer, Trump doesn't have the full support of the GOP and DEFINITELY not the support of the deep state. According to Krainer, Trump is having to do a lot of broken field running just to get 10 yards.

Now, Trump IS acting as if the Senate is able to pressure him into doing things like sending arms to Ukraine and levy secondary tariffs. It appears that some Senators have significant leverage on him, and perhaps by coincidence that leverage looks like Epstein.

But maybe this is all just a big circus to distract the deeper state while Gabbard comes up on them from behind?

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 4:30 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listened to another interview of Alex Krainer, and he's still a firm believer that Trump is adhering to his agenda.

What he's saying is that if you stop paying attention to what Trump SAYS, and ignore the zigzags, and only look at the results...

Trump is still, in fact, disengaging from Ukraine, from NATO, and from the EU. The flow of weapons at this moment depends on EU nations paying for them, and has basically stopped.

Trump doesn't want war with Iran, and he doesn't want Israel to war with Iran either. Since Iran's nuclear program was the excuse for war with Iran, and Trump said their nuclear program was "obliterated" ... POOF! There goes the excuse for a war.

Tariffs are in place, despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

According to Krainer, Trump doesn't have the full support of the GOP and DEFINITELY not the support of the deep state. According to Krainer, Trump is having to do a lot of broken field running just to get 10 yards.

Now, Trump IS acting as if the Senate is able to pressure him into doing things like sending arms to Ukraine and levy secondary tariffs. It appears that some Senators have significant leverage on him, and perhaps by coincidence that leverage looks like Epstein.

But maybe this is all just a big circus to distract the deeper state while Gabbard comes up on them from behind?

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

There we go. Now you're starting to think like a General.

I said a couple of weeks ago something along the lines of conventionality needing to be thrown out the window of this presidency, and I don't think you understood what I was saying when I said it. This post makes me think you get it now.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 8:10 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listened to another interview of Alex Krainer, and he's still a firm believer that Trump is adhering to his agenda.

This is also Trump's agenda: RFK Jr. defunds a medical miracle

mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives. RFK Jr. is attacking them anyway.

By Cameron Peters | Aug 6, 2025, 4:05 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/422666/rfk-jr-mrna-vac
cines-defund-pandemic-bird-flu

In a blow to US pandemic preparedness, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Tuesday evening that he was slashing $500 million in federal mRNA vaccine contracts.

What is HHS cutting? Twenty-two mRNA vaccine projects, intended to combat respiratory viruses like bird flu, are set to be wound down following the announcement.

What is mRNA? mRNA, or messenger RNA, is the reason the US had safe, effective Covid-19 vaccines available as early as it did. A promising but still unproven technology prior to the pandemic, mRNA allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop effective vaccines far more rapidly and more adaptably than was once possible.

Beyond respiratory viruses like Covid, researchers hope mRNA could even be effective in treating cancers.

What’s the context? Kennedy has long made false claims about mRNA vaccines, including describing the Covid-19 vaccine as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” On Tuesday, he falsely stated that mRNA vaccines “don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” such as Covid. In fact, by one estimate, the Covid vaccines saved some 2.5 million lives.

What are the implications of the cuts? Tuesday’s announcement is bad news for two distinct reasons.

As far as Kennedy is concerned, this is just the latest reminder that he is who he always appeared to be, and only partially covered up while seeking to be confirmed as the secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services: not a fair “skeptic” but an anti-vaccine advocate who will use his power to impose unscientific beliefs on US public health infrastructure.

For the country, vaccine experts say Tuesday’s news is a real blow to efforts to prepare for the next pandemic, the arrival of which is a question of when and not if. mRNA vaccines have proved to be one of our best tools for saving lives, and the US will now be further behind in developing new vaccines than it otherwise would be. The consequence is likely to be measured in human lives.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 12:05 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

First of all, the "m" in mRNA stands for "modified", not messenger. There is substituted nucleoside to make it last longer in the body

Quote:
Long-lasting, biochemically modified mRNA, and its frameshifted recombinant spike proteins in human tissues and circulation after COVID-19 vaccination

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11169277/

Secondly, out of the 5 proteins that surround the viral RNA, the protein that they picked to trigger the immune system - the spike protein- is responsible for nearly all of the negative effects of SARS COV2 including tge formation of drug resistant clots.

Third, some of that research, which I posted about, involves CREATING NEW SUPERVIRULENT bird flu viruses, all in the name of vaccine development. Where have I heard that story before?

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 12:28 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:
First of all, the "m" in mRNA stands for "modified", not messenger.

Wrong, Signym: mRNA — or messenger RNA — is a molecule that contains the instructions or recipe that directs the cells to make a protein using its natural machinery.

https://www.pfizer.com/science/focus-areas/vaccines/mrna-technology

And the rest of your message seems to be siding with Trump and RFK Jr, that vaccines are evil.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 12:29 PM

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

The Emperor’s New Trade Deal

By Paul Krugman | Aug 07, 2025

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

On Tuesday Donald Trump went on CNBC. The Europeans, Trump asserted, had agreed to cough up $600 billion, which he described as a “gift,” not a loan. And he emphasized that this is “$600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.”

Trump apparently believes that the European Union has agreed to provide him with a personal $600 billion slush fund. In fact, the EU agreed to no such thing. In fact, it literally couldn’t have made such an agreement. European nations aren’t command economies in which government can tell the private sector where to invest, and in any case the European Commission, which negotiated with Trump, can’t tell the governments of member states what to do.

So think of it as the emperor’s new trade deal: Trump is strutting around, feeling very impressed with himself, but in substantive terms he’s stark naked.

Does it matter? I’ve seen some commentary to the effect that it doesn’t. Hey, it’s just another Trumpian self-aggrandizing fantasy, like his belief that we have zero inflation, he has a 71 percent approval rating and “people love the tariffs.”

But what will happen if and when Trump realizes that Europe hasn’t actually promised what he thinks it has — or, as he’s likely to see it, that the EU has gone back on its promise? He’s already given us an answer: He’s going to put the tariff on Europe back up to 35 percent.

He may not be able to carry out that threat. In fact, there’s a very real possibility that the courts will rule many of the tariffs Trump has already imposed illegal (which they surely are) and order the administration to refund the money it has already collected.

But assume that the Supreme Court does its usual thing and decides that the Constitution allows Trump to do whatever he wants. How afraid should Europe be of the possibility that Trump will put the tariffs back up, higher than before?

Well, I’ve been trying to do the math, and as far as I can tell putting U.S. tariffs up from 15 to 35 percent would do less damage to Europe than many people imagine. Yes, it would hurt, but not all that much. By making a 15 percent tariff the baseline — what countries pay even if they do make “deals” — Trump has used up a lot of his trade war ammunition, greatly reducing the effectiveness of any further threats.

After all, Europe has never been all that dependent on access to U.S. markets. In 2024 the EU’s exports of goods to the United States were slightly less than 3 percent of its GDP — not a trivial sum, but not enough to make European prosperity dependent on U.S. goodwill.

Trump’s tariffs will make the EU even less dependent on the U.S. market. In Sunday’s primer I explained that the crucial number is the “Armington elasticity,” which measures how sensitive trade flows are to tariffs, and that a reasonable estimate of that elasticity is 3. If we go with that number, we would expect the 15 percent tariff currently in place to cut EU exports to America by roughly a third, to around 2 percent of GDP.

That’s a palpable hit, but not a huge one. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Milne tells us that reports from European companies are showing surprising resilience. Furthermore, the loss of U.S. business will be partially offset by higher government expenditure in Europe, with Germany in particular boosting spending on both infrastructure and defense.

That’s with a 15 percent tariff. But what happens if Trump pushes tariffs up to 35 percent? My back-of-the envelope calculations say that this would reduce Europe’s exports to the United States by another 0.7 percent of GDP. That is, the hit to Europe if Trump makes good on his threats would be smaller than the hit he has already imposed with the tariffs he plans to keep in place regardless.

This makes sense if you think about it. The higher the tariffs Trump imposes on imports, the less other countries sell to America. And the less they sell to us, the less they have to lose if we push the tariffs even higher.

And that argument doesn’t even take into account the strong possibility that another round of Trump tariffs would provoke retaliation from Europe and other trading partners. The EU has so far chosen not to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs because its officials decided that making a deal, or at least seeming to make a deal, was better than getting into a tit-for-tat trade war. But if it turns out that Trump sees a deal not as the end of the story but simply as the jumping-off point for new demands, I suspect that even the timid bureaucrats in Brussels will eventually decide that enough is enough.

But again, at this point the math of the trade war matters less than the madness that lies behind it.

There has always been a whiff of megalomania about Trump’s tariff policy — a belief that he can use the threat of tariffs to compel other countries to do his bidding on multiple fronts, from promising not to move away from the dollar as a reserve currency to abandoning the prosecution of wannabe dictators who tried to overthrow democracy.

However, by making 15 percent tariffs the new normal — by keeping tariffs high even when countries make, or pretend to make, concessions to the United States — Trump has used up much of whatever trade ammunition he had.

However, Trump will be the last person to recognize that there are limits to his ability to bully the world, on trade or anything else. And that lack of awareness should worry us all.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 1:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

No Ted. You are an idiot.

You have always been an idiot, and you have a 3rd level handle on the English language.

English either isn't your first language and you're not American, or you are 40 IQ at best.

What is 3d level handle? OH, you must mean 3rd grade level. Then it should be, understanding of the English language, not "on the English language."As you wrote. Too funny...

You wrote, “you are 40 IQ” I think you meant to say you have a 40 IQ. Again, too funny.

You make me laugh Gilligan.

T

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 1:50 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Ya gotta admit, THAT was funny! And you're absolutely right: I have no morels. In fact, I'm gonna make that part of my signature, and I'm gonna keep it there until I stop chuckling over it.

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Go back to the very post where you point out I misspelled a word. Your grammatical fuckup is much worse than my misspelling a word using an e instead of an a. I'll point that out when I see your signature, too funny.

And it's funny beyond belief you are correcting me. Go ahead, go back and take a look comrade.

This is you in that very post. "but this .literally. made me laugh"

It wasn't a fuckup, it was on purpose. For emphasis. I could have done

*literally*
or LITERALLY
or literally
or literally
or - literally -
or ... literally ...
or ,literally,

but I chose .literally. bc it was easiest.

Stop being so literal.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Bullshit comrade.

T

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 2:00 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
First of all, the "m" in mRNA stands for "modified", not messenger.
Wrong, Signym: mRNA — or messenger RNA — is a molecule that contains the instructions or recipe that directs the cells to make a protein using its natural machinery.

https://www.pfizer.com/science/focus-areas/vaccines/mrna-technology

And the rest of your message seems to be siding with Trump and RFK Jr, that vaccines are evil.

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

Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.

SECOND, I know far more about this than you.

The SARS CoV2 virus is a single- stranded RNA virus surrounded by 5 proteins. (Spike, envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, nonstructural). Very early on, Israeli scientists found that MOST of the disease effects were caused by one protein, the spike protein, and nothing has changed since that original finding.

AFA vaccine safety: ALL vaccines have side effects, and it's my considered opinion that in many (but not all!) cases the vaccine is much safer than the disease. I got the vaccine on Dr advice bc I was about to get chemo. I and family also wore N95s, and we never got Covid that we were aware of. (There is the possibility that we got Covid very early on bc we were all sick as dogs, but that was before tests were even available.)

But bc the vaccine didn't PREVENT infection and transmission, it wasn't a matter of public health, just a matter of personal risk.I would not have mandated vaccination.

As with all medical decisions, you must weigh "the risk of doing nothing v the risk of doing something".

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 3:19 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

But some things never change.

Quote:
Netanyahu Hosts 20 House Republicans In Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he hosted a delegation of House Republicans who were in Israel on a trip organized by the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, as members of Congress are flocking to the country amid their August recess.

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday evening, met with an AIPAC-organized delegation of Republican members of the US Congress," Netanyahu’s office said in a statement. "The Prime Minister briefed the members of Congress on the war in the Gaza Strip and commented on the issue of the humanitarian assistance and the mendacious campaign being waged by Hamas against the State of Israel."

MORE AT https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/netanyahu-hosts-20-house-republ
icans-israel
ORIGINALLY FROM https://news.antiwar.com/2025/08/06/netanyahu-hosts-20-aipac-sponsored
-house-republicans-in-israel/

Oh yeah, bc everyone is lying about Israel doing to Palestinians what Nazis did to them.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 4:04 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
First of all, the "m" in mRNA stands for "modified", not messenger.
Wrong, Signym: mRNA — or messenger RNA — is a molecule that contains the instructions or recipe that directs the cells to make a protein using its natural machinery.

https://www.pfizer.com/science/focus-areas/vaccines/mrna-technology

And the rest of your message seems to be siding with Trump and RFK Jr, that vaccines are evil.

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

Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.

SECOND, I know far more about this than you.

The SARS CoV2 virus is a single- stranded RNA virus surrounded by 5 proteins. (Spike, envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, nonstructural). Very early on, Israeli scientists found that MOST of the disease effects were caused by one protein, the spike protein, and nothing has changed since that original finding.

AFA vaccine safety: ALL vaccines have side effects, and it's my considered opinion that in many (but not all!) cases the vaccine is much safer than the disease. I got the vaccine on Dr advice bc I was about to get chemo. I and family also wore N95s, and we never got Covid that we were aware of. (There is the possibility that we got Covid very early on bc we were all sick as dogs, but that was before tests were even available.)

But bc the vaccine didn't PREVENT infection and transmission, it wasn't a matter of public health, just a matter of personal risk.I would not have mandated vaccination.

As with all medical decisions, you must weigh "the risk of doing nothing v the risk of doing something".

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Nuh uh... Vox said it, so it MUST be true.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 4:39 PM

New census to be taken now, which will remove all illegals.

Democrats lose even more house seats now.

Not only that, but blue states with sanctuary cities are all going to have to massively raise their tax revenue by getting citizens to subsidize the illegals through state and local taxes.

That's going to go over really well with their base.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 4:43 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:

Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.

SECOND, I know far more about this than you.

Signym, your "real scientific paper" has a list of abbreviations. The list says you are wrong, Signym, but even more wrong of you, you insist you are right despite being wrong:

Abbreviations

2H-D deuterium

mRNA messenger RNA

Pol? polymerase theta

SARS-CoV severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus

WT natural wild-type

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11169277/

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 5:32 PM

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

Trumpworld Knows Epstein Is a Problem. But They Can’t Solve It

Unmet expectations have pushed some of the president’s allies to the brink. “Honestly, like, fuck Trump,” a Trumpworld source who works in conservative media tells me.

By Jake Lahut | Aug 6, 2025 11:00 AM

https://www.wired.com/story/trumpworld-epstein-problem/

Privately, some of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies have come to a sobering conclusion. There’s simply nothing that can be done, they’ve come to believe, to salvage the ongoing catastrophe that is the MAGA base fraying over the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

People aren’t jumping off the Trump train yet—at least not in significant numbers, though polling shows at least 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the Epstein case in recent weeks—but the damage has been done with supporters.

“Honestly, like, fuck Trump,” a Trumpworld source who works in conservative media tells me. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s obviously something nefarious that went on.” (The White House did not return a request for comment; Trump in recent months has repeatedly called the Epstein case a hoax.)

The Epstein story has been a viral content machine on the right for years, and it has too much momentum behind it to simply be shut down and stopped in its tracks. The problem runs deeper than Trump’s name reportedly appearing in the so-called files that his campaign and new administration repeatedly promised to release and then didn’t. It even runs deeper than the fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed a relationship for years, the full dimensions of which remain unknown and about which the president has not been especially forthcoming. (Epstein was asked whether he’d “socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18” when being deposed in March 2010; he declined to answer, citing his Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. For years, the president has claimed he fell out with Epstein around 2004. Recently, though, he implied the falling out had happened earlier, a date which has been alleged in court records to have occurred in 2000. This uncertainty complicates things, especially since some of the most infamous links between the two are subsequent to that date. It was in a 2002 New York magazine article, for example, that Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” and said he “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”)

The Trump-Epstein saga is in many ways best understood as a cautionary tale in setting expectations too high. Trump put himself in an untenable position once he got back in office when he campaigned on using the powers of the federal government to declassify the Epstein files. The anti-establishment sentiment and deep distrust in institutions that resonated so deeply with his voters are now working against him, day after day—and there’s no easy fix.

“Our base will never be satisfied until there is a document released that is, like, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff raped a baby and then ate it on a fire. Well, that's not going to be there, either,” says the Trumpworld source.

?“To deny them the Epstein list,” they add, “is essentially to deny them their worldview, and essentially their raison d’être for being involved in politics.”
Great Expectations

One of the main reasons Trump is in a worse bind around Epstein than he was in his first term is that he has staffed the top levels of federal law enforcement with conservative media personalities like FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy director, Dan Bongino, who spent the last few years enthralling audiences with allegations of the shadowy wrongdoings of the deep state.

“The problem is that now you have a bunch of conspiracy theorists who would normally be pointing fingers at the people in power, but now they’re in the coalition of people in power,” says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who quite literally wrote the book on American conspiracy theories.

As much as Trump has been trying to deflect from the Epstein controversy, “the Bonginos and the Kash Patels have been raising expectations on this, and now they’re not delivering,” says Uscinski. “And it looks really bad.” (Patel and Bongino did not return requests for comment.)

With all their efforts—putting agents on round-the-clock shifts to comb through Epstein documents, arming conservative influencers with binders full of largely public information about the case, and continued promises from the likes of Bongino to get to “not ‘my truth,’ or ‘your truth,’ but THE TRUTH”—Trump administration officials have kept setting up the base for further disappointment. The much-touted release of “raw” prison surveillance video from the night of Epstein’s death, for example, turned into a fiasco when WIRED reported that it appeared to have been modified.

And none of this has been made better by the possible pardoning of Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor and several other related charges; in sworn testimony, numerous Epstein accusers say Maxwell was instrumental to Epstein’s charge of sex trafficking of minors.

David Oscar Markus, Maxwell’s attorney (and a protege of Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s lawyers), has requested that she receive either a pardon or immunity before she sits for a deposition remotely from prison in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. That hearing, previously scheduled for August 11, has been postponed until at least the fall.

Eric Bolling, the former Fox News anchor who regularly appears on One America News Network and identifies as “OG MAGA,” tells me in a text message that he currently puts the odds of a Maxwell pardon at “50%” because “she may have provided information useful to Trump and the FBI/DOJ.” Maxwell’s attorney did not return a request for comment.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s criminal defense attorney and now the deputy attorney general, met with Maxwell behind closed doors at a low-security federal prison in Florida on July 24 and 25. Maxwell then secured a move to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, which was reported on August 1, despite appearing to be ineligible for a transfer to that prison camp as a sex offender.

On Tuesday, CNN reported that the Department of Justice is considering releasing the transcript of a DOJ interview with Maxwell recorded in July. Trump, notably, told his supporters in a mid-July post on Truth Social to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”

Trump also, though, reopened wounds with the family of Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, when he alleged that Epstein “stole” her from his Mar-a-Lago club when she was working there as a teenager in 2000, and that this caused the break between the two men. (“She wasn't stolen, she was preyed upon at his property, at President Trump’s property,” her brother told CNN.)

Even if Trump’s administration provides the public with testimony and evidence exculpating him from Epstein’s crimes, or addressing Maxwell’s role in all of this, that may not be enough to address the core problem with his base.

Trump found a way to use conspiracy theories to win elections, “and now, he’s seeing the trouble in doing that, because some of the conspiracy theories he and his people have pushed are coming back to bite him,” Uscinski says.

“Since their beliefs aren’t based on evidence,” he adds, “you're not going to change their mind with appeals to evidence.”

What’s in David Sacks’ Crypto Portfolio?

David Sacks has a distinguished title as the White House crypto czar. He’s also the cofounder of Craft Ventures and a certified member of the PayPal mafia alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Sacks also appears to be a special government employee.

That’s what makes things tricky when it comes to any ability the public might have to find out whether he stands to personally benefit from cryptocurrency market structure legislation and other administrative actions.

WIRED obtained information released under a Freedom of Information Act request for Sacks’ financial disclosure forms, for which he received two waivers exempting him from releasing any materials. The White House told the left-leaning advocacy group that submitted the FOIA, Democracy Forward, that they had “no disclosures” from Sacks to provide. As an SGE, Sacks does not have to fill out the same OGE form 278 that other members of the executive branch are required to.

Sacks did have to submit an OGE form 450 as an SGE, which would reveal any potential conflicts of interest. However, that financial disclosure form is not subject to public records law.

In a waiver granted to Sacks by the White House counsel’s office, his crypto holdings were deemed “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity” of his government service. According to the ethics waiver, his firm Craft Ventures sold off $200 million of crypto assets at some point before Trump took office, with around $85 million directly attributable to Sacks. Craft Ventures also divested from its crypto holdings while holding onto other digital assets, according to the same waiver.

“Sacks submitted a confidential financial disclosure report, as he does not meet the criteria in 5 C.F.R. Sec. 2634.202 for being a public report filer,” a White House official tells me in an email. “Internally, the report and related information submitted by Mr. Sacks was reviewed and appended to the publicly available waiver. [The Office of Government Ethics] had no objection to the waiver.”

A spokesperson for Sacks and Craft Ventures declined to comment.

The Chatroom

How has the Epstein fallout been landing with Trump supporters in your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 5:54 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.

SECOND, I know far more about this than you.
Signym, your "real scientific paper" has a list of abbreviations. The list says you are wrong, Signym, but even more wrong of you, you insist you are right despite being wrong:

Abbreviations

2H-D deuterium
mRNA messenger RNA
Pol? polymerase theta
SARS-CoV severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus
WT natural wild-type

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11169277/

SECOND ... engage brain before arguing with someone smarter than you. This paper CLEARLY STATES that the mRNA used in the vaccine was modified

Quote:
Long-lasting, biochemically modified mRNA, and its frameshifted recombinant spike proteins in human tissues and circulation after COVID-19 vaccination

According to the CDC, both Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines contain nucleoside- modified messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding the viral spike glycoprotein of severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus (SARS-CoV-2), administered via intramuscular injections. Despite their worldwide use, very little is known about how nucleoside modifications in mRNA sequences affect their breakdown, transcription and protein synthesis. It was hoped that resident and circulating immune cells attracted to the injection site make copies of the spike protein while the injected mRNA degrades within a few days. It was also originally estimated that recombinant spike proteins generated by mRNA vaccines would persist in the body for a few weeks. In reality, clinical studies now report that modified SARS-CoV-2 mRNA routinely persist up to a month from injection and can be detected in cardiac and skeletal muscle at sites of inflammation and fibrosis, while the recombinant spike protein may persist a little over half a year in blood.

A brag rag from U Penn 2021

Quote:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the first full approval to a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, which uses modified mRNA technology invented and developed by scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, whose years of research in mRNA science laid a critical piece of the foundation for the largest global vaccination campaign in history.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/covid19-mrna-vaccine-that-uses-funda
mental-penn-technology-receives-fda-approval

AS I ALREADY POSTED, THE "M" USUALLY STANDS FOR MESSENGER IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS.

THE mRNA USED HAS CLEARLY BEEN MODIFIED. BUT YOU DON'T SEE THE WORD "MODIFIED" ANYWHERE IN ANY VACCINE BROCHURES OR GENERAL PUBLIC INFO, DO YOU? SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE "M" STANDS FOR THEN?

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 6:05 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Ya gotta admit, THAT was funny! And you're absolutely right: I have no morels. In fact, I'm gonna make that part of my signature, and I'm gonna keep it there until I stop chuckling over it.
THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right

THGR:
Go back to the very post where you point out I misspelled a word. Your grammatical fuckup is much worse than my misspelling a word using an e instead of an a. I'll point that out when I see your signature, too funny.
And it's funny beyond belief you are correcting me. Go ahead, go back and take a look comrade.
This is you in that very post. "but this .literally. made me laugh"

SIGNY:
It wasn't a fuckup, it was on purpose. For emphasis. I could have done
*literally*
or LITERALLY
or literally
or literally
or - literally -
or ... literally ...
or ,literally,
but I chose .literally. bc it was easiest.
Stop being so literal.

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

THGR:
Bullshit comrade.

Instead of just shutting up and letting this drop, you insist on showing everyone how stupid you are?
That's stupid.
And it's STILL funny!

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 6:39 PM

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

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

Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.

SECOND, I know far more about this than you.
Signym, your "real scientific paper" has a list of abbreviations. The list says you are wrong, Signym, but even more wrong of you, you insist you are right despite being wrong:

Abbreviations

2H-D deuterium
mRNA messenger RNA
Pol? polymerase theta
SARS-CoV severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus
WT natural wild-type

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11169277/

SECOND ... engage brain before arguing with someone smarter than you. This paper CLEARLY STATES that the mRNA used in the vaccine was modified

Quote:
Long-lasting, biochemically modified mRNA, and its frameshifted recombinant spike proteins in human tissues and circulation after COVID-19 vaccination

According to the CDC, both Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines contain nucleoside- modified messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding the viral spike glycoprotein of severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus (SARS-CoV-2), administered via intramuscular injections. Despite their worldwide use, very little is known about how nucleoside modifications in mRNA sequences affect their breakdown, transcription and protein synthesis. It was hoped that resident and circulating immune cells attracted to the injection site make copies of the spike protein while the injected mRNA degrades within a few days. It was also originally estimated that recombinant spike proteins generated by mRNA vaccines would persist in the body for a few weeks. In reality, clinical studies now report that modified SARS-CoV-2 mRNA routinely persist up to a month from injection and can be detected in cardiac and skeletal muscle at sites of inflammation and fibrosis, while the recombinant spike protein may persist a little over half a year in blood.

A brag rag from U Penn 2021

Quote:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the first full approval to a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, which uses modified mRNA technology invented and developed by scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, whose years of research in mRNA science laid a critical piece of the foundation for the largest global vaccination campaign in history.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/covid19-mrna-vaccine-that-uses-funda
mental-penn-technology-receives-fda-approval

AS I ALREADY POSTED, THE "M" USUALLY STANDS FOR MESSENGER IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS.

THE mRNA USED HAS CLEARLY BEEN MODIFIED. BUT YOU DON'T SEE THE WORD "MODIFIED" ANYWHERE IN ANY VACCINE BROCHURES OR GENERAL PUBLIC INFO, DO YOU? SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE "M" STANDS FOR THEN?

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

Let’s ask an AI whether Signym is full of bullshit.

Does mRNA stand for modified RNA or messenger RNA?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Does+mRNA+stand+for+modified+RNA+or+me
ssenger+RNA

Thinking
Kicking off 4 searches
Looking at 87 sites

mRNA stands for messenger RNA. (Signym is full of bullshit)

Here's why it's called "messenger":

• mRNA is transcribed from a DNA template during transcription and carries the genetic information from the DNA in the nucleus to the ribosomes in the cytoplasm.

• Ribosomes use the information on the mRNA to assemble amino acids into proteins, essentially "translating" the message carried by the mRNA into functional proteins.

While mRNA can be modified in various ways within cells, and synthetic mRNA used in vaccines often incorporates modifications to improve its stability or function, the fundamental meaning of the acronym "mRNA" remains "messenger RNA".

******
Getting back to the original subject, the one Signym is obfuscating:

This is Trump's agenda: RFK Jr. defunds a medical miracle

mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives. RFK Jr. is attacking them anyway.

By Cameron Peters | Aug 6, 2025, 4:05 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/422666/rfk-jr-mrna-vac
cines-defund-pandemic-bird-flu

In a blow to US pandemic preparedness, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Tuesday evening that he was slashing $500 million in federal mRNA vaccine contracts.

What is HHS cutting? Twenty-two mRNA vaccine projects, intended to combat respiratory viruses like bird flu, are set to be wound down following the announcement.

What is mRNA? mRNA, or messenger RNA, is the reason the US had safe, effective Covid-19 vaccines available as early as it did. A promising but still unproven technology prior to the pandemic, mRNA allowed pharmaceutical companies to develop effective vaccines far more rapidly and more adaptably than was once possible.

Beyond respiratory viruses like Covid, researchers hope mRNA could even be effective in treating cancers.

What’s the context? Kennedy has long made false claims about mRNA vaccines, including describing the Covid-19 vaccine as “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” On Tuesday, he falsely stated that mRNA vaccines “don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” such as Covid. In fact, by one estimate, the Covid vaccines saved some 2.5 million lives.

What are the implications of the cuts? Tuesday’s announcement is bad news for two distinct reasons.

As far as Kennedy is concerned, this is just the latest reminder that he is who he always appeared to be, and only partially covered up while seeking to be confirmed as the secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services: not a fair “skeptic” but an anti-vaccine advocate who will use his power to impose unscientific beliefs on US public health infrastructure.

For the country, vaccine experts say Tuesday’s news is a real blow to efforts to prepare for the next pandemic, the arrival of which is a question of when and not if. mRNA vaccines have proved to be one of our best tools for saving lives, and the US will now be further behind in developing new vaccines than it otherwise would be. The consequence is likely to be measured in human lives.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 6:53 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

New census to be taken now, which will remove all illegals.

Democrats lose even more house seats now.

Not only that, but blue states with sanctuary cities are all going to have to massively raise their tax revenue by getting citizens to subsidize the illegals through state and local taxes.

That's going to go over really well with their base.

Jack, like Trump, is caught up in a world of homoerotic gaydom. It’s why he is always calling people fagots when he is the fagot. He is a part of the LGBTQ community.

T

Trump PANICS Over Gay Remarks; MAGA Has HILARIOUS Meltdown Over South Park!!

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 7:21 PM

Okay faggot.

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

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 7:35 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Wrong, SECOND.
I even posted a link to a real scientific paper that refers to the "m" in the vaccine by its real name: MODIFIED.

But you may be forgiven for being confused, bc normally the "m" stands for "messenger“. DNA makes mRNA in the nucleus, the mRNA is transported to the ribosomes which are the protein factories that make proteins according to the RNA template. It's a way of preserving DNA from being degraded thru constant use.
SECOND, I know far more about this than you.

SECOND:
Signym, your "real scientific paper" has a list of abbreviations. The list says you are wrong, Signym, but even more wrong of you, you insist you are right despite being wrong:
Abbreviations
2H-D deuterium
mRNA messenger RNA
Pol? polymerase theta
SARS-CoV severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus
WT natural wild-type

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11169277/

SIGNY:
SECOND ... engage brain before arguing with someone smarter than you. This paper CLEARLY STATES that the mRNA used in the vaccine was modified
Quote:
Long-lasting, biochemically modified mRNA, and its frameshifted recombinant spike proteins in human tissues and circulation after COVID-19 vaccination
According to the CDC, both Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines contain nucleoside- modified messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding the viral spike glycoprotein of severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by corona virus (SARS-CoV-2), administered via intramuscular injections. Despite their worldwide use, very little is known about how nucleoside modifications in mRNA sequences affect their breakdown, transcription and protein synthesis. It was hoped that resident and circulating immune cells attracted to the injection site make copies of the spike protein while the injected mRNA degrades within a few days. It was also originally estimated that recombinant spike proteins generated by mRNA vaccines would persist in the body for a few weeks. In reality, clinical studies now report that modified SARS-CoV-2 mRNA routinely persist up to a month from injection and can be detected in cardiac and skeletal muscle at sites of inflammation and fibrosis, while the recombinant spike protein may persist a little over half a year in blood.

A brag rag from U Penn 2021

Quote:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the first full approval to a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, which uses modified mRNA technology invented and developed by scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, whose years of research in mRNA science laid a critical piece of the foundation for the largest global vaccination campaign in history.

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/covid19-mrna-vaccine-that-uses-funda
mental-penn-technology-receives-fda-approval

AS I ALREADY POSTED, THE "M" USUALLY STANDS FOR MESSENGER IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS.
THE mRNA USED HAS CLEARLY BEEN MODIFIED. BUT YOU DON'T SEE THE WORD "MODIFIED" ANYWHERE IN ANY VACCINE BROCHURES OR GENERAL PUBLIC INFO, DO YOU? SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK THE "M" STANDS FOR THEN?

SECOND:
Let’s ask an AI whether Signym is full of bullshit.
Does mRNA stand for modified RNA or messenger RNA?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Does+mRNA+stand+for+modified+RNA+or+me
ssenger+RNA

blah blah blah ...

Yup! You continue to obfuscate.
In most uses, m stands for messenger. So of course, if you ask AI it will tell you it stands for messenger. But in vaccine brochures and adverts, it stands for modified.
Bc without that sleight of hand, Pfizer and Moderna could be accused of false advert, making no reference to the fact that their RNA was MODIFIED. Most doctors and educated laypeople reading those inserts/ brochures/ adverts will assume that mRNA just means "messenger", exactly what pharma was expecting.

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

THGR claims I have no morels, and he's absolutely right.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 7:47 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:

blah blah blah ...
Yup! You continue to obfuscate.
In most uses, m stands for messenger. So of course, if you ask AI it will tell you it stands for messenger. But in vaccine brochures and adverts, it stands for modified.
Bc without that sleight of hand, Pfizer and Moderna could be accused of false advert, making no reference to the fact that their RNA was MODIFIED.

The lie at the heart of Trump’s entire economic agenda

By Eric Levitz | Jul 16, 2025, 5:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/419844/trump-tariff-letters-medicaid-cuts
-mass-deportation

The president’s trade strategy reflects confusion about the needs of US goods producers. Trump’s policies are officially meant to boost American manufacturing. Yet he is imposing enormous tariffs on the industrial inputs — such as copper and steel — required by US producers of appliances, electronics, cars, and other valuable goods.

But Trump’s tariffs also rest on a somewhat more novel myth — one that under-girds his immigration agenda.

Let’s say that Trump was correct about almost everything: All of America’s trade partners have been conspiring to steal our jobs, and his tariffs will swiftly bring back copper mining, sneaker production, and the manufacturing of myriad other goods.

Even then, his policy would still be at odds with a fundamental reality: America does not have a large pool of idle workers eager to take jobs in new mineral mines or textile factories.

America’s unemployment rate sits at just over 4 percent, near historic lows. And the percentage of prime-age Americans in the labor force is 83.5 percent, just off all-time highs.

Therefore, if Trump’s exorbitant tariffs force us to supply a much larger share of our own copper, sneakers, steel, aluminum, and lumber, then we would need to produce less of something else: Since we don’t have a large pool of extra labor, existing US firms would have to forfeit workers to these new enterprises.

This would generate shortages and inflation, at least in the near term. To take just one example, the more American workers needed to sate our economy’s demand for minerals, the fewer available to meet its need for childcare, pushing the price of such care upward.

The administration’s solutions to this problem are all whimsical fantasies

The White House is conscious of this labor shortage problem, perhaps because it also bedevils its case for mass deportation: If you exile undocumented farmworkers en masse, their replacements need to come from somewhere.

Administration officials have offered a variety of (ludicrous) explanations for why America can dispense with the labor of foreigners and immigrants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested that our nation can staff its new factories with laid-off federal bureaucrats. It seems unlikely, however, that many former NASA scientists or ex-IRS agents will enter America’s hypothetical, future textile mills. It is also hard to conceive how this would be an economically sound use of their respective skills.

Bessent has also suggested that America won’t need to redeploy that many workers to manufacturing and mining, as automation and artificial intelligence will enable us to dramatically increase labor productivity. This answer is more coherent. But you can’t yet produce robotized copper mines or steel mills by snapping one’s fingers. And in any case, Trump himself does not actually seem to support accelerating automation. To the contrary, he backed US dockworkers’ fight against further roboticization of America’s ports.

But the administration has another answer to its agenda’s labor challenges: We can simply throw low-income people off their health insurance. Conveniently, Republicans have already done precisely that by appending work requirements to Medicaid.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins floated this vision for labor force expansion last Tuesday. “There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way,” Rollins told reporters in Washington, DC, saying that the nation would move to “100 percent American participation, which, again, with 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

The idea here is that tens of millions of Americans have been choosing not to work, since the government was giving them subsidized health insurance with no strings attached. After all, if you can get free blood tests once a year, what incentive do you have to hold a job?

As compelling as this argument might be in theory, it doesn’t hold up in practice. According to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation, only about 2 million prime-age, “able-bodied” Medicaid beneficiaries were jobless due to “retirement, inability to find work, or other reason” in 2024. Another 3.1 million were unemployed due to caregiving responsibilities.

Work status and barriers to work among Medicaid adults

It’s not clear whether conservatives think that all these caregivers should be working (often, the right suggests that mothers of young children should be staying home). But even if we posit that every parent on Medicaid belongs in the workforce, then that still brings the total number of jobless, nondisabled Medicaid recipients to just 5.1 million.

Furthermore, it is not actually true that taking health insurance away from persistently jobless Medicaid beneficiaries causes them to join the workforce. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported in 2023, state-level Medicaid work requirements have failed to increase employment or hours worked among enrollees.

Finally, even if imposing work requirements on Medicaid improbably forced 5.1 million Americans into the job market, there is no evidence that a substantial share of those people would be willing and able to work in agriculture, mining, or manufacturing. For one thing, these people don’t necessarily live near major US farms or promising sites for future factories and mines. For another, they don’t necessarily possess the requisite skills or physical aptitudes required for strenuous, manual labor.

The high price of post-truth policy

The notion that there are tens of millions of American workers ready to take the place of foreign workers or fill newly created manufacturing jobs, as soon as Uncle Sam kicks them out of their welfare hammocks, is fantastical. Yet this fiction serves to rationalize the administration’s trade, immigration, and fiscal agendas simultaneously. So we’re probably going to keep hearing about it.

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

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Thursday, August 7, 2025 9:37 PM