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

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.

How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.

How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.

How will Ukrainian Nazism end?

How will American imperialism end?

-----------
"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.

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 6:36 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.

How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.

How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.

1) How will Ukrainian Nazism end?

2) How will American imperialism end?

1) For one fact, Ukrainians are not Nazis, but that is the Russian propaganda talking point.

Quote:
Mr Putin has repeatedly made baseless claims about a "neo-Nazi regime" in Ukraine as a justification for Russia's invasion of the country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/64718139

2) For another fact, Trump is threatening to invade Canada and Greenland. He also throws around the idea of bombing Mexico. Trump is the emperor, and his American Empire falls with his death.

Quote:
Trump has been in a strikingly imperial mood since his election victory. He has floated acquiring Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, annexing Canada, and potentially invading Mexico — to the intense consternation of their leaders.

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/24/trump-buy-greenland-claim-panama-cana
l

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 6:43 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:

They were also Democrats or further left. Every single time.

Shut the fuck up and strike me down already, tough guy.

We're all through listening to you cry like a bitch all day every day. Leave that shit back in 2024 where it belongs, you perpetually impotent, soy-filled cunt.

6ix, you don't realize that Trump is following a path that is thousands of years old. In history, this path ends with the death of the Trump-like leader and his followers. In modern history, this time won't be different than ancient times.

The Philosophy of Tyranny

What a formative period in Plato’s life tells us about US politics today

By Nick Hilden | August 8, 2025

https://nautil.us/the-philosophy-of-tyranny-1229763/

Few figures loom larger over Western culture than Plato, whose The Republic has profoundly shaped Western thinking for centuries and is among the most assigned texts at English-speaking universities. In it, Plato describes his vision for a perfect society ruled over by what would later be described as a “Philosopher King”—an autocrat trained to wield total control with wisdom. For some 2,000 years, Plato’s notions were accepted by his acolytes with little pushback. But over the past century, his ideas have met growing criticism due to the totalitarian framework in which he situated his idealized Republic.

In his new book Plato and the Tyrant, Classicist James Romm explores a period in Plato’s life that many historians assert was influential to his conception of power. In his early 40s, before he wrote The Republic, Plato began visiting the Hellenic city-state of Syracuse in an effort to compel the first of two generations of authoritarian leaders toward just rule. By the time Plato arrived in Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder had already maintained decades of dictatorship, writes Romm, “not by turning weapons against his people but by exploiting their fears, their anger and their mistrust of traditional leaders, persuading them to vote away their own freedom.” Plato’s attempts to convince the elder to rule justly so angered him that he sold Plato into slavery, though friends later ransomed his freedom. When the Elder’s son Dionysius the Younger ascended to power, Plato tried again to influence a despot to rule with wisdom and temperance, but failed yet again. This time, his fraught relationship with the younger ruler nearly killed him. Romm argues that an intimate look at this period of Plato’s life can help us understand the man and his ideas in a more sober light, and offers insight into the ways autocracies and autocratic ideas take hold, even today.

Download a free copy of Plato and the Tyrant [2025] by James Romm from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=James+Romm+Plato

As Romm notes in his foreword, Sophocles once wrote that tyrants become wise through the company of the wise, but Plato’s story suggests the opposite: that, “The wise can become more tyrannical by the company of tyrants.” Nautilus spoke to Romm about Plato’s dangerous flirtations with tyranny, the process of revealing history once obscured, and the alarming relevance of a millennia-old monocracy.

In the foreword for Plato and the Tyrant you discuss how you were more enamored with Plato earlier in your life, until a new generation of students began questioning his vision. How did your view of Plato change?

The Republic is about an ideal society—ideal from Plato’s perspective—and I bought into the characterization that in some ways this society was the best that could be achieved. But my students were horrified, and I started to look at it more skeptically and recognize elements of it that really look nightmarish from our point of view.

It was really about the social structures of the Republic and whether to call it a utopia or a dystopia. The life of the military class—the guardians, as Plato calls them, who are “good”—are raised from a young age without access to most literature and art, have to be fed a strict mathematical and theoretical education, and are not permitted to have the kind of personal freedoms that we take for granted in a democratic society. Their sexual lives are strictly regulated as are their material lives—they’re not allowed to own much material wealth—and they’re raised essentially as automatons to serve the state. If you look at it from my students’ perspective, it’s a kind of brainwashing—the education that Plato prescribes.

What does the story you tell about Plato’s years in Syracuse have to teach us about power and regime change?

Well, I’m hoping we’re not in an era of regime change in this country. We may be, but that remains to be seen. But we are in an era of increasing authoritarianism and the desire of a huge cadre of people to shuck the norms of democracy and move to some other model—some authoritarian model. Plato was also convinced that democracy had failed and was not a viable system, and he wanted to try something new. He described the role of the authoritarian in The Republic as being that of a philosopher king. So he distinguished very clearly ordinary strongmen, whom he called tyrants, from true kings who rule with the benefit of philosophic enlightenment. And when he went to Syracuse, he was hoping that the strongman there—first the father, then the son—could be turned in a philosophic direction. Not necessarily made into philosophers, but at least their authoritarian impulses could be tempered. They could be made just rulers rather than despots. This turned out to be an illusion—a delusion—that he quickly realized was not only hopeless, but that his intervention actually made matters much worse by provoking a factional split in the court and sending the city into a civil war.

I don’t know if I can draw any specific lessons other than: It’s very dangerous to decide that your system has failed and you need something new. What you get may be very much worse than what you had. With all of its problems, the fantasy that you can just wipe away democratic traditions and get something in its place that will solve the problems of democracy is a very dangerous one that Plato fell victim to, and that caused terrible chaos in Syracuse as a result.

What do Plato’s maneuverings in Syracuse tell us about his legacy?

Plato is deeply revered in modern academia. He’s thought of as a kind of a godlike figure. And I think a close look at his interventions in Syracuse, his relations with Dionysius, his Thirteenth letter, his love affair with Dion—if that’s what their relationship was—it humanizes him. It makes him a more approachable figure, a more flawed figure, and also a more human figure.

In the 1940s, Karl Popper wrote a book called The Spell of Plato, and I discuss it in my introduction. Popper thought it was deeply dangerous and delusional for Western societies—Western democracies—to idealize Plato and not take a hard look at these more disturbing flaws and failings in his career. He wrote at the time of World War II, when fascism was very much threatening to take over the world, and he felt that if we can’t come to a reckoning with who Plato really was—where these ideas about autocracy really came from—then we risk going down the wrong path. I think he was right about that.

As you note in the book, modern technology has played a vital role helping us uncover previously obscured aspects of history. What role did it play in Plato and the Tyrant?

One of the documents that I rely on is a scroll by a man named Philodemus, who wrote a history of the Platonic Academy starting from Plato’s time, and that work is lost except for a scroll that was recovered from a house in Herculaneum that was destroyed in the volcanic eruption that also buried Pompeii. The library of that house was charred such that the scrolls looked like lumps of ash. They don’t look like anything you could read, but you can read them if you can unroll them—or at least this was always the case, that you needed to unroll them, which required just painstaking care, because otherwise they just fall to pieces. In the 18th century, a technique was developed to unroll a scroll very slowly and carefully, and this was used on the Philodemus scroll. It did damage the scroll, but enough of it was preserved that we could recover substantial amounts of text about Plato’s own life and the founding of the Academy.

In this century, a technique has evolved where, by using essentially a CAT scan coupled with AI software, you can get the text from the scrolls without unrolling them. So far, it’s a very slow and expensive process, and very little has been recovered, but it keeps advancing by leaps and bounds, and probably within my lifetime there will be whole texts recovered from these Herculaneum scrolls. There’s over 1,000 of them—or I think almost 1,000 of them preserved—that we don’t have any idea what the contents are. Perhaps there are many lost works in there—works of Sophocles, works of Euripides. There could be treasure troves of classical literature that can be recovered using these new techniques. So that’s very exciting.

Your book deals with themes of freedom versus authoritarianism, justice versus injustice, and the like, which are very much in the news these days. Do you think you were drawn toward these topics by our present day circumstances or did it happen incidentally?

It was incidental at first, because I began this book years ago, before the second Trump term was even a possibility. But as it became clear that we were under the threat of an authoritarian regime, I saw that this story really had a lot of relevance—not just because of Plato, but because of the way that the Dionysius regime got started in Syracuse. I devote a lot of my first chapter to exploring the ways in which a tyranny gets founded out of what was a functioning democracy.

Syracuse was quite a vital democracy in the late fifth century and had instituted various safeguards to preserve the democracy and keep strongmen from taking power. And yet, when a strongman came along—a charismatic demagogue who was able to breed mistrust among the populace, tell them that the rich and the elites were screwing them, were doing them dirty and colluding with their enemies, the Carthaginians—they bought it hook, line, and sinker. And then the tyrant Dionysius was able to build up his power base, install his loyalists, his troops, his security forces, and make himself impregnable. The financial angle—the fact that Dionysius was able to convince his countrymen to accept bronze coins at the value of silver, and those kinds of shenanigans, the use of cons and lies to build up power—it’s a fascinating process that has all too much resonance with what is happening around us today.

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 7:10 AM

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

New York Times columnist David Brooks alleged DOGE's USAID cuts of leading to the deaths of 300,000 people.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6373749173112

Trump global aid cuts risk 14 million deaths in five years, report says
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o

“It’s Unacceptable”: BU Mathematician Tracks How Many Deaths May Result from USAID, Medicaid Cuts
The impact trackers update in real time based on the loss of international aid programs combating HIV and tuberculosis
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/mathematician-tracks-deaths-from-usai
d-medicaid-cuts/

USAID deaths caused by Trump
https://www.google.com/search?q=USAID+deaths+caused+by+Trump

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 8:23 AM

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

Revenge of the Vibecession

Last year, Donald Trump exploited the perception that the economy was bad, even though many indicators were good. Is it possible to do the opposite? (If the economy enters an actual recession, or slows down, the vibes are all but guaranteed to be bad for Trump.)

By Jon Allsop | August 8, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/revenge-of-the-vibecession

During the Great Depression, William N. Doak, President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, told reporters that employment was going up across the country. The reporters, however, had been “fooled before by such cheery statements from politically-minded Secretaries,” Time magazine reported. They sought a second opinion, from Ethelbert Stewart, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this “white-crowned, white-whiskered old man telephoned Secretary Doak that the statistics given him warranted no such declaration.” Not long afterward, Hoover signed a law requiring the federal government to, among other things, part with workers who had reached retirement age. Stewart was in his mid-seventies; Doak could have recommended him for a Presidential exemption, but he did not, and so Stewart was out. According to Time, many observers in Washington smelled a rat. “Retired?” Stewart was quoted as saying. “Don’t put it that way. I’ve had a tin can tied to the end of my coat tail.”

As the media critic Jack Shafer recently observed, the question of job statistics has been a political football ever since a Bureau of Labor was created, in 1884, under the Presidency of Chester A. Arthur. According to an in-house history, the bureau “was the culmination of almost two decades of advocacy by labor organizations that wanted government help in publicizing and improving the status of the growing industrial labor force.” Samuel Gompers, the famed union leader, suggested that lawmakers wouldn’t be able to justify ignoring workers if they had access to hard data about them. Allegations of Presidential meddling have a history, too. Howard Goldstein, an assistant B.L.S. commissioner under Richard Nixon, was suspected of having undermined a reported drop in the unemployment rate in remarks to the press; Nixon privately raged against Goldstein, demanding that he be fired, and, as my colleague Fergus McIntosh noted earlier this week, subsequently set in motion a “Jew count” at the agency. When the B.L.S. reported a dip in unemployment ahead of the 2012 Presidential election, some Republicans suggested that the department had cooked the books to help President Barack Obama’s reëlection chances. These critics included Donald Trump, who, as McIntosh reported, would cast further doubt on official jobs numbers during the launch event for his Presidential candidacy, in 2015. (“Our real unemployment is anywhere from eighteen to twenty per cent,” he said, shortly after descending the golden escalator at Trump Tower.) Last year, after the B.L.S. revised jobs numbers downward, he claimed that the Biden-Harris Administration had previously covered up the true figures for political gain. If so, they did a pretty inept job, since the new numbers came out in August—two and a half months before the election.

This behavior culminated, last week, in Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the current B.L.S. commissioner, after the agency released a jobs report that showed pretty anemic growth for July, and sharply lower figures for May and June than the agency had initially reported. Trump’s advisers did their best to put a rational gloss on an irrational decision, but Trump himself, as he always does, roared the quiet bit out loud, suggesting that McEntarfer was a Democratic partisan who had rigged the numbers to make him look bad. McIntosh described the firing as “the next step in Trump’s project of making the federal bureaucracy, and the information it produces, into a tool of his own authority.” Other observers agreed, stressing the increasingly authoritarian nature of this authority, and the feeling that McEntarfer’s ouster had compounded a dark moment for those who value the truth. On ABC, Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, described it as “way beyond” anything Nixon ever did. “Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.”

All true enough. (Well, in the absence of a “Jew count,” I think one could make a case that what Nixon did actually was worse.) But McEntarfer’s dismissal also struck me as by far the most self-defeating of Trump’s recent authoritarian maneuvers. Even if the jobs report doesn’t turn into Pravda overnight—the process of putting it together, experts suggest, is hard to blatantly rig—the perception that it has been altered to massage Trump’s ego, or feasibly could be, might undermine confidence in the economy, making bond markets jittery, for example, or lowering U.S. leverage in international trade negotiations. (Already, Trump’s conduct has led to the publication of this incredible sentence, in the Wall Street Journal: “Efforts to estimate economic data in China, which publishes famously unreliable government statistics, could provide a road map for U.S. firms if the integrity of domestic data comes into question.”) All this risk to mask the supposed embarrassment of a jobs report that, while not great, was hardly catastrophic.

The firing is harmful for other reasons, too: as one observer put it to the Times, “Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure.” In a less lofty sense, it also strikes me as a politically pointless act from the President’s perspective. Often, when Trump has undermined confidence in America’s shared epistemology, doing so has rebounded to his advantage. Now that he’s back in office, however, he’s finding that this isn’t always the case. (Exhibit A: the somehow still ongoing Epstein imbroglio.) Casting doubt on official macroeconomic data doesn’t seem likely to work for him either; as Trump should know better than anyone, having ridden this wave back to office, how people feel about the economy matters most. Trump, with his absolutist approach to Presidential power and majorities in Congress, owns the economy now. Increasingly, it looks like the tin can tied to his coattails.

In 2022, Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator, coined the term “vibecession,” which she would later define as the “idea that economic data is telling us one story and consumer sentiment is telling us another.” The concept quickly took off in media coverage as evocative shorthand for a puzzling phenomenon: by many traditional metrics, the economy of the Biden years was strong, especially by the second half of his tenure, when high rates of inflation started to slow. And yet many people were unenthusiastic about the economy as a whole.

There have been different interpretations of this apparent discrepancy. A popular one held that the media was overemphasizing negative data points (inflation, mostly) and unrepresentative anecdotes (a CNN segment about a family of eleven that went through twelve gallons of milk a week, for example), and failing to communicate the bigger picture. White House officials were among those pushing this idea, including Biden himself, who suggested, in increasingly tetchy terms, that the press wasn’t covering the economy in “the right way.” Others blamed the Administration for not doing enough to sell its economic accomplishments. (Biden would later express regret that he didn’t put his name on newly finished infrastructure projects or pandemic-era stimulus checks.) Either way, surveys consistently showed that even people who felt pretty good about their financial situation, or that of their state or local area, thought the national economy was going in the wrong direction. Last year, in the spring, a majority of respondents to one poll said that the U.S. was in a recession. It definitively was not.

A different school of thought held that voters were not misinformed about the economy, and that it was patronizing to suggest they were. According to this view, the high inflation of the Biden years had left both psychological scars and a lasting imprint on prices, even after the rate of increase tailed off. And the top-line numbers reported by entities like the B.L.S. failed to communicate the struggles of lower-income families, particularly after early Biden-era programs, such as an enhanced child tax credit and a moratorium on evictions, were struck down or weren’t extended. Even those who said in polls that their personal financial circumstances were fine might have had very legitimate grounds to look around and see an economy that appeared to be skewed, broken—rigged, even. In a country with such a ragged safety net, you didn’t have to be a diehard Biden skeptic to think so.

There are aspects of truth in both of these views. But, however legitimate the bad vibes were, Trump clearly benefitted from them; he won the election, in no small part, based on oversimplified promises not only to end inflation but to bring prices back down. Trump has often proved adept at harnessing vibes, as I explored in a recent column, certainly much more so than Biden and many other top Democrats. (Toward the end of his first term in office, for instance, Trump did put his name on stimulus checks.) And he has managed to remain the tribune of many who think the economy is stacked against people like them, if not necessarily against them personally—part of a broader anti-establishment appeal built on doing things like, say, firing technocrats who run government statistical agencies. Last year, on the campaign trail, he seemed also to tap into a latent nostalgia for the strong pre-COVID economy that he oversaw. After he won the election, optimism about the economy soared, at least among his voters. The vibecession was declared over.

Now that Trump is back in office, however, his economy needs to perform to keep the good vibes going, and while its over-all health is, for now, uncertain, he has done a lot to maximize that uncertainty, not least through the whiplash execution of his tariff policies, which, as Kyle Chayka wrote in this magazine, in April, has turned “recession indicators” into a widespread meme. The tariffs have been widely expected to drive an increase in consumer prices, and there are early indications that this might be happening, along with some warning signs in recent growth and jobs data. Wherever we go from here, Trump yelling about macroeconomic data—made-up or real—doesn’t seem likely to change how most people feel. Ironically, he seems to be repeating the mistake that Biden made, even if Trump’s version of urging the press to report data “the right way” is brazenly firing an official for doing just that.

If last year’s election suggested that voters’ subjective impressions far outweigh high-level economic statistics, it’s tempting to see this as yet another step into a post-truth age. Trump—a man who has said that his “feelings” affect how he assesses his own net worth, and who said that it was his “opinion” that the recent B.L.S. data was B.S.—is a compelling avatar for the idea that vibes are increasingly winning out over facts. But most people do tend, still, to be tethered to their daily realities—and if the bottom falls out of Trump’s labor market, or inflation bites again, those facts will be keenly felt. The logic of the vibecession surely cannot work in reverse. If the economy enters an actual recession, or just slows down, the vibes are all but guaranteed to be bad for Trump.

B.L.S. jobs reports have never been gospel truth. As McIntosh noted, the methodological decisions that inform data collection reflect political priorities; in recent years, that collection has been hampered by declining response rates in the surveys that the B.L.S. sends out to businesses, in addition to budgetary constraints. To acknowledge this isn’t to lapse into some postmodern view that the numbers are all fake anyway, and that Trump’s attacks thus don’t matter. But it is to say that the reality they reflect is a complicated one. If, in the Great Depression, a time traveller had told Ethelbert Stewart about the “vibecession,” he’d surely have thought they were from Mars. But he’d have understood the basic idea. “The only things that make human life human do not lend themselves readily to the statistical method,” he once said. For decades, he added, he had struggled “to put some flesh upon the bony skeleton of mere tabulations—it’s about human lives.”

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 8:35 AM

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

The Economics of Smoot Hawley 2.0, Part II

This trade war is really a class war

By Paul Krugman | Aug 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-economics-of-smoot-hawley-20-cf
7

There is a special court, the Court of International Trade, which has jurisdiction over tariff issues, and it ruled the tariffs illegal on May 28. However, the ruling was stayed while the administration appealed the decision to the Federal Circuit Court. Those following the deliberations mostly believe that this court will uphold the trade court’s ruling. But then the case will go to the Supreme Court, and almost everyone expects the Supremes to rule (6 to 3) that Trump can do whatever he wants.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/trump-tariffs-and-c
ourts-round-2

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 8:55 AM

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

America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy

On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” thanks to Trump

By Zoë Schlanger | August 8, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/08/us-climate-liabili
ty/683797/

Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.

A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.

The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees.

The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair. “The court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,” Leicht said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability.

The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary—was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to uphold them.

In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a climate treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the climate harm that country is enacting, that state is still legally liable, thanks to customary law—well-established fundamental legal principles that all countries must comply with, such as the general duty to protect basic human rights.

An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding. But the international laws it is meant to interpret are. In some countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In others, it can take precedence over domestic law; elsewhere, it may become domestic law through an act of legislature. Reisch told me that she expects this opinion to be used to support climate lawsuits against countries and companies going forward, and to justify new legislation in statehouses and local governments. Leicht, who is also the chair of the Council of the European Center for Constitutional Human Rights, told me the opinion would figure in one of the organization’s cases: It is representing four residents of Pari, a tiny Indonesian island, who are suing Holcim, a major Swiss cement company, arguing that its outsize share of greenhouse gases is contributing to Pari’s disappearance.

The U.S., famously, does not make much of international laws. In prior international climate negotiations, America has tried to minimize its responsibility as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases. Margaret Taylor, the U.S. legal adviser to the State Department under Joe Biden, presented commentary at the ICJ in December in which she argued that current human-rights laws do not provide for a right to a healthy environment, nor should countries be financially responsible for past emissions, both of which the ICJ ultimately disagreed with in this new opinion. The State Department has said it’s reviewing the opinion; whether or not the country acts on it, it does open the U.S. to new climate lawsuits and will strengthen those already under way, including two separate suits brought by youth in Montana and California, arguing that the Trump administration’s actions on the environment threaten their rights. (The State Department did not reply to a request for comment.)

The Trump administration, meanwhile, seems ready to simply ignore, if not outright reject, any responsibility the U.S. might have for climate change. Its intent to roll back the endangerment finding is at odds with recent domestic legal opinion. After the EPA announced its intentions, various legal experts spoke, almost in chorus, about the slim chance this plan had of making it through the likely court challenges. Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar and professor at William and Mary Law School, said in a column that he agreed with it on policy grounds but called the move legally “foolish”—the Bush administration tried a similar strategy in 2007, only to have the Supreme Court affirm that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants. The EPA, in an emailed response to questions, acknowledged the 2007 decision, but noted that it “did not require EPA to make an endangerment finding and did not review the logic or conclusions of the 2009 Endangerment Finding because it hadn’t been issued yet.” It also added, hopefully, that there have been two more recent decisions in which the Supreme Court pulled back aspects of the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases.

By attempting to abdicate any legal responsibility to provide for a healthy environment, the U.S. is running in the opposite direction as the global legal community. Last month, prior to the release of the ICJ opinion, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also declared that the climate crisis qualifies as a human-rights violation, triggering rights-based obligations for countries and companies in that region. And last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea issued an advisory opinion qualifying greenhouse gases as marine pollution, triggering similar legal obligations for countries to mitigate them. This trend, Leicht reminded me, will likely outlive the current American political moment.

I found myself struck by the clarity of the final paragraph in the ICJ’s opinion, which reminds lawyers that climate change is bigger even than the law. “A complete solution to this daunting, and self-inflicted, problem requires the contribution of all fields of human knowledge, whether law, science, economics or any other,” the court wrote. “Above all, a lasting and satisfactory solution requires human will and wisdom—at the individual, social and political levels—to change our habits, comforts and current way of life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet to come.”

Indeed, rights apply not just to the people who exist now, but to future generations. As the U.S.’s climate liability comes into sharper focus, so does the fact of its growing burden on that group. The question is how long the country will disavow that charge.

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 9:40 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How did American slavery end? By killing slave-owners and burning their plantations.
How did Nazism end? By killing Nazis and burning their cities.
How did Japanese Imperialism end? By killing Emperor worshipers and burning their cities.

SIGNY:
How will Ukrainian Nazism end?

SECOND:
For one fact, Ukrainians are not Nazis, but that is the Russian propaganda talking point

Not all Ukrainians are Nazis, but some are. They're specifically concentrated in the Azov ~~Regiment~~ ... ~~Battalion~~ ... Brigade, which is similar to the SS in Germany's WWII army. The Azov Brigade is likely responsible for most of the atrocities committed by Ukrainian troops, and in addition to fighting on the front is also used as "anti-withdrawal" troops. i.e. they shoot Ukrainian troops attempting to flee the front line or surrender. Zelensky has to consider them as a serious threat to his safety if he attempts to cede territory.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/azov-battalion-neo-nazi/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-azov-battalion
-mariupol-neo-nazis-b2043022.html

Quote:
SIGNY:
How will American imperialism end?

SECOND:
For another fact, Trump is threatening to invade Canada and Greenland. He also throws around the idea of bombing Mexico. Trump is the emperor, and his American Empire falls with his death.

YEP! Trump is responsiible for our wars with Spain and Mexico ... and our toppling of every Central and S American government except Costa Rica, Iran, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc etc..
You stupid if you expect me to believe your TDS spew.

-----------
"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.

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 9:57 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:

You stupid if you expect me to believe your TDS spew.

Signym, you are both verbose and silly-in-the-head, traits you share with Trump and nearly all Trumptards I know. (There are very few Trumptards who are modest about their intellect. Most claim they are above average, but the tangible product of their lives proves they are far below. See their children, for example. Or their health. Or their finances. Or their boss's opinion of their work.)

The One Trump Flaw Most Americans Can’t Tolerate

By Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. | August 10, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/08/trump-incompetenc
e/683779/

Tens of millions of Americans voted for President Donald Trump in the belief that he would be competent. They convinced themselves that Trump would be an effective chief executive, that under his stewardship their lives would get better and the country would prosper.

A little more than half a year into Trump’s second term, however, the public’s confidence in his skill as a chief executive is shattering. In a recent AP/NORC poll, only about one-quarter of U.S. adults said that Trump’s policies have helped them. Roughly half report that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them, and about two in 10 say his policies have “not made a difference” in their lives. Trump failed to earn majority approval on any of the issues in the poll, including the economy, immigration, and cutting government spending.

Americans are now coming to believe that Trump is inept. In American politics, that is an unforgivable sin.

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 10:14 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

I specifically wanted to address the bullshit in this narrative:

Quote:
By Daniel Hannan
No US president has done more to make the West weak again than the current incumbent. It will take decades to repair the damage

What is strength? Is is rampaging around the world, knocking over weaker nations like bowling pins? Attempting "full spectrum dominance" of the entire globe? If so, one can only hope that it's ending.

Quote:
This is a straightforward defeat. A defeat, not just for Ukraine, but for the values which the Anglosphere and its allies have upheld since 1941,

What are those "values"? Democracy and prosperity? Where has the USA brought those lately? Afghanistan? Iraq? Syria? Libya? Any place in Africa?

Quote:
... but also by making aggressive territorial claims against Denmark and threatening Canada with annexation.

HOW does that benefit Russia? Does that even make any sense??

Quote:
His tariff policies have caused as much disruption to Western economies as his sanctions have to Russia.

of course, Britain isn't suffering from a deindustrialization of its own making, and isn't feeling the pinch of expen$ive non- Russian fuel?
Sounds like a Brit not wanting their "special relationship" with USA to end. They saw themselves as the intelligent ones guiding the mighty, but stupid, USA to Britain's financialist purposes.

Quote:
To understand the scale of the West’s defeat, we need to remember why we were backing Ukraine in the first place. Not because we thought that Zelensky was brave or handsome or even particularly democratic. Not because we believed that Ukrainians were kinder or more amusing than their Russian cousins. Not even because, long before 2022, Russia had been buzzing our airspace and overseeing cyberattacks against our infrastructure [RUSSIA!RUSSIA!] and had, on two occasions, committed acts of war against us when it [allegedly] ordered its operatives to carry out lethal attacks on British soil (against Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and, unsuccessfully, against Sergei Skripal in 2018).[who has conveniently disappeared]

No, we are backing Ukraine because it is the wronged party. We are sending it weapons because it was attacked without provocation

If you believe that, I have a bridgevto sell you.

Hannan is so high on his own rhetoric, he only thinks in swirling phrases. None of it has any relevance to the real world. It even lacks internal logic (Pretty much like SECOND, who spews one contradiction after another.)

Quote:
blah blah blah

Thankfully, our "special relationship" with Britain, which authored the Iraq (nonexistant) WMD War, and the RUSSIA! TRUMP! COLLUSION! hoax, appears to be coming to a long awaited end.

The rest is just whinging and thrashing around.

-----------
"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.

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 1:23 PM

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

They were also Democrats or further left. Every single time.

Shut the fuck up and strike me down already, tough guy.

We're all through listening to you cry like a bitch all day every day. Leave that shit back in 2024 where it belongs, you perpetually impotent, soy-filled cunt.
6ix, you don't realize that Trump

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.

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

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

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Sunday, August 10, 2025 5:15 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy

On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” thanks to Trump

First of all, I don't care what "the rest of the planet" believes. What I think, and what YOU think, should be tested against the real world to see if true.

Secondly, I think MOST of "the rest of the world"... Africa; S and C America; east, south, and central Asia ... are too busy trying to overcome poverty to devote any REAL effort to climate change.

Third, if "the rest of the world" (i.e. EU, N America, Australia) was really interested in climate change, it would collectively end its drive for data centers/AI, cryptocurrency mining, and WARS OF CHOICE.

But I agree with you: most of the world, including the western world, is living in a climate denial fantasy.

When TPTB ... politicians, financiers, the MIC, the super-elite .... actually adopt policies that hurt THEM and their interests, then I'll know that they're serious.

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Monday, August 11, 2025 5:30 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy

On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” thanks to Trump

First of all, I don't care what "the rest of the planet" believes. What I think, and what YOU think, should be tested against the real world to see if true.

Secondly, I think MOST of "the rest of the world"... Africa; S and C America; east, south, and central Asia ... are too busy trying to overcome poverty to devote any REAL effort to climate change.

Third, if "the rest of the world" (i.e. EU, N America, Australia) was really interested in climate change, it would collectively end its drive for data centers/AI, cryptocurrency mining, and WARS OF CHOICE.

But I agree with you: most of the world, including the western world, is living in a climate denial fantasy.

When TPTB ... politicians, financiers, the MIC, the super-elite .... actually adopt policies that hurt THEM and their interests, then I'll know that they're serious.

How did slavery end in the USA? By killing the slave-owners. The Confederates were quoting you: I don't care what "the rest of the planet" believes (about slavery). What I think, and what YOU think, should be tested against the real world to see if true. The extremely violent and unreasonable end of slavery forced technological changes that Confederate cotton growers adamantly did not want to pay for. With change, the world no longer needs millions of slaves picking cotton by hand. The end of fossil fuel burning will force technological changes that people don't want to pay for, either. With forced change, the world will no longer dump a billion tons of waste CO2 into the atmosphere every week.

Human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached a record high of 54.6 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2-equivalent in 2023.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+CO2+equivalent+is+released+ye
arly

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 5:37 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:

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.

6ix, if you continue being a completely evil asshole, you will end up like Confederate slave-owners: dead and their plantations burned to the ground.

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 5:37 AM

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

New Offshore Wind Study Confirms The Obvious: A Malevolently Incompetent Clown Is Steering The US Clown Car

By Tina Casey | 10th August 2025, 03:27 pm

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/08/10/new-offshore-wind-study-confirms-
the-obvious-a-malevolently-incompetent-clown-is-steering-the-us-clown-car/

The US has devolved from a widely respected global powerhouse into the personal self-dealing tool of a convicted felon with astonishing speed, so it’s no surprise to see the promise of a thriving domestic offshore wind industry kneecapped by the White House. Along with direct job losses from canceled projects, the supply chain fallout will bleed thousands of jobs from more than three dozen states, and that’s not even counting missed opportunities for the concrete industry. Yes, the concrete industry.

. . . In yet another in a series of anti-wind measures, on Friday, US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced a complete overhaul of his agency’s offshore wind regulations.

“We’re taking a results-driven approach that prioritizes reliability, strengthens national security and upholds both scientific integrity and responsible environmental stewardship,” Burgum said in a press release that also included a reminder that Burgum didn’t mean any of it.

“This effort also supports Executive Order 14315, which directs agencies to identify and eliminate favoritism toward unreliable energy sources,” DOI reminded everyone.

“The Department has paused new approvals for offshore wind projects—including leases, permits, rights-of-way and loans—in compliance with the Presidential Memorandum on wind energy, while it conducts a review of offshore wind energy projects and their impact on the environment, national security and the economy,” they added.

Who Voted For This Guy Anyways?

If you caught that thing about “unreliable,” that’s where everything circles back around to personal self-dealing. As helpfully explained by the Interior Department, the White House has adopted a specious definition of energy security in which domestic energy resources are separated into intermittent availability and non-intermittent. That made sense back in the 20th century when both wind and solar power were just a speck on the horizon. However, “reliability” is a poor measure of energy security in the 21st century environment of new energy storage and grid management technologies.

The reliable/unreliable separation does fulfill one key goal. It helps provide US President Donald Trump with cover to pursue his widely reported and highly personal vendetta against wind turbines, without singling out wind alone as a matter of public policy. The “unreliable” canard leaves the US solar industry twisting in the wind, so to speak, alongside the wind industry, while three other significant domestic renewable energy resources — hydropower, biomass, and geothermal — have been left largely untouched, simply because they fit neatly into the 24/7 baseload power generation silo of Trump’s “American Energy Dominance” plan.

On the other hand, Trump ditched many norms of public policy during his first term in office and his 2024 campaign for another turn around the Oval Office foretold of a more thorough trashing of public resources and systems to come. That has all materialized, in spades. Thanks to whoever voted for this guy, the entirety of federal policy is mere putty for his fevered brain to manipulate, with the Republican majority in both the US House and Senate marching happily along in lockstep.

Still, US Presidents come and go, and this one will leave office as scheduled on January 20, 2029 — peacefully, one hopes, this time.

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 6:08 AM

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

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.
6ix, if you continue being a completely evil asshole, you will end up like Confederate slave-owners: dead and their plantations burned to the ground.

You keep making threats. Do something.

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

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 6:38 AM

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

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

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.
6ix, if you continue being a completely evil asshole, you will end up like Confederate slave-owners: dead and their plantations burned to the ground.

You keep making threats. Do something.

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

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

6ix, all you fucking Trumptards talk like goddamn Nazis. Hitler (Germany's version of Trump) was riding high and very confident in 1933, but by 1945 he was dead and so were millions of Nazis. That is where Trump and his Trumptards are headed if they don't stop deluding themselves about their capabilities. 6ix, what is the probability you will be alive 12 years from now, considering how stupidly you have lived and how much damage you have done to your health?

6ix, you Trumptards should not be confident about your victorious future. Learn from the sad example of Hitler and his Nazis about what happens to people like you. Or if Germany is too far away for your imagination, what happened to the Confederates? They were hyper-confident about their future but it was all burned down in less than 4 years.

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 7:48 AM

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

The Political Economy of Incompetence

How Hannah Arendt (who wrote the book about the Nazis) predicted Stephen Moore

By Paul Krugman | Aug 11, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-political-economy-of-incompeten
ce

On August 1 Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report, claiming — without a shred of evidence — that the numbers had been rigged to damage him politically. On Thursday he held a White House briefing, together with economist Stephen Moore, in an attempt to convince the media and the public that the economy is actually doing great. The photo above is a scene from that briefing.

What’s wrong with this picture?

First, look at the chart. The second line claims that it shows “medium income” — a term unknown to economics. Clearly it was supposed to say median income.

OK, speling misteaks hapen. But not, usually, in charts prepared for a presentation by the President of the United States.

Beyond that, Jared Bernstein, who has looked at the data Moore presented in that chart and others, says that the numbers appear to be all wrong. Which is no surprise given the source.

For the big problem with the picture above isn’t the embarrassing misspelling of “median,” or even the factual errors. It’s the fact that Trump gave a presentation about the state of the economy along with Stephen Moore — who may be the last person on the planet you’d trust to tell you the economic truth.

I don’t mean that Moore is extremely right-wing, although of course he is. I don’t even mean that he’s a dishonest hack, although again of course he is. I mean that even among dishonest right-wing hacks Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right.

And the fact that Moore was the right’s go-to guy on economics even before Trump tells you a lot about the people who now rule America.

Before I get there: Some readers may think I’m being hyperbolic when I say that Moore’s problem with facts is pathological. But read this report from the Columbia Journalism Review:

Why one editor won’t run any more op-eds by the Heritage Foundation’s top economist
https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/stephen_moore_heritage_found
ation_paul_krugman_kansas_city_star.php

You see, the Kansas City Star had reprinted a Moore column, originally written for Investors Business Daily, that cited a bunch of employment statistics as part of an attack on, well, me. One of the paper’s regular columnists happened to notice that some of Moore’s numbers looked wrong; when she checked them out it turned out that all of his numbers were wrong, in many cases bafflingly so.

Incidentally, Moore cited these bad numbers to support the “Kansas experiment,” then-governor Sam Brownback’s attempt to create an economic miracle by cutting taxes. The experiment was a disastrous failure:

https://www.cbpp.org/research/kansas-provides-compelling-evidence-of-f
ailure-of-supply-side-tax-cuts

Moore’s jobs debacle wasn’t an isolated incident. For example, in 2015 he published an op-ed attacking Obamacare in which not a single alleged fact was true. I’m not going to waste my time going through Moore’s collected writings, but it seems safe to assume that his bizarre inability to get any facts right, culminating in Thursday’s Oval Office debacle, has been consistent.

What’s Moore’s problem? I don’t know and I don’t care. The interesting question is why someone so incompetent — apparently he can’t even copy numbers correctly — has consistently failed upward. Trump even tried to put him on the Federal Reserve Board in 2019, and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t also turned out to be a grotesque misogynist and a deadbeat dad who had been held in contempt for failure to pay child support.

Looking at the trajectory of Moore’s career, it’s hard to escape the impression that the political movement with which he is aligned — MAGA at this point, but his rise predates Trump — sees his surreal incompetence not as a liability but as an asset. After all, you never know when a competent economist, especially one with a good professional reputation, might balk at being asked to say ridiculous things.

I speculated about this briefly some years ago, but thought it was an original insight — and worried whether I myself was over the top. But it turns out that it was all in Hannah Arendt. In her classic book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” she explained why totalitarians — I know, Trump isn’t a full-on dictator, yet, but he’s clearly a wannabe — promote the incompetent:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Arendt also explained, in advance, the Trump administration’s extraordinary hostility to research, the extraordinary speed with which it is destroying America’s scientific base:

The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life.

Which brings me back to that Trump/Moore event. Why am I spending time on a farcical show that surely did nothing to help Trump’s cratering polling on the economy?

Source: G. Elliott Morris

The answer is that Trump/Moore was a symptom of a deep sickness in our body politic. And I have no idea when or how we’ll recover.

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 8:31 AM

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

Trump said foreign countries would ‘eat’ tariffs—but U.S. consumers and businesses will actually pay 75% at best

By Eleanor Pringle | August 11, 2025 at 6:15 AM EDT

https://fortune.com/2025/08/11/trump-foreign-countries-eat-tariffs-pas
s-through-consumers/

Goldman Sachs estimates U.S. consumers now shoulder two-thirds of President Trump’s new tariff costs, with more companies planning to pass them on in the future and foreign exporters refuse to “eat” the price hikes. The bank expects the measures to lift core PCE inflation to 3.2% by year-end, adding pressure to the Fed’s 2% target.

When President Trump announced his tariff agenda, he said it would be foreign companies and consumers that would “eat” the price hikes. That’s a take which may be proved optimistic at best, and misguided at worst.

While tariffs have yet to significantly shift the dial on inflation—prompting individuals like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to label them the “dog that didn’t bark”—analysts are widely expecting the hikes to ultimately be paid for by the U.S.

So far the sharpest end of the tariff regime has yet to be felt. President Trump delayed his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs by three months in order to agree deals with trading partners.

Some negotiations have proved successful, with framework deals done with the U.K., the E.U. and Japan to name a few, drastically lowering tariff rates from Trump’s initial threats back in April. Yet countries which haven’t yet agreed to a deal (who received letters informing them of their new tariff rate) saw their effective export rate rise on the deadline of August 7.

That includes nations like India, which is facing a rate of 25% that may double on August 27 as punishment for buying Russian oil. Likewise, while the Trump administration has touted a deal near-done with China on many occasions, nothing beyond an agreement to delay tit-for-tat price increases until this week has been confirmed.

With a slew of tariffs now effectively in place, Goldman Sachs believes that the cost absorbed by foreign exporters will grow over time, but will remain low.

Economist Elsie Peng wrote in a note yesterday seen by Fortune that Goldman believes exporters absorbed 14% of the costs of all tariffs in June, which will rise to 25% by October if the sanctions follow a similar trajectory to the price hikes administered by the Trump administration in his first term.

But the portion consumers can expect to pay is also on the rise. Peng noted that around 36% of the 2025 tariff costs were passed onto consumer prices after three months of implementation and around 67% were passed on after four months.

The economist added that “although the passthrough rate appears to be increasing rapidly over time, it still remains somewhat below the passthrough rate that we estimate at the same point in time during the 2018-2019 trade war.”

One portion of the economy which intends to reduce its share is U.S. businesses. The Conference Board released its U.S. CEO Confidence report for the third quarter last week, which revealed 64% are certain they’d be passing the price hike onto consumers, and a further 16% said they’re still considering.

This is a higher rate than previously identified (following the prediction of Goldman Sachs) as only in June the New York Fed reported a smaller 45% of services firms were intending to pass on the full extent of their tariff-related increases.

Peng noted that her maths “implies that U.S. businesses have absorbed more than half of the tariff costs so far but that their share would fall to less than 10%. This net impact on U.S. businesses likely masks that some companies have absorbed a larger share of tariff costs, while some domestic producers shielded from import competition have raised their own prices and benefited.”

Inflation passthrough

Of course, if consumers are paying higher prices for goods and services then the Federal Reserve’s job of keeping inflation to 2% will only get more difficult.

Goldman Sachs believes this will be the case, writing: “Our analysis implies that tariff effects have boosted the core PCE price level by 0.20% so far.

“We expect another 0.16% impact in July, followed by an additional 0.5% from August through December. This would leave core PCE inflation at 3.2% year-over-year in December, assuming that the underlying inflation trend net of tariff effects is 2.4%.”

Reflecting on the June CPI report (the latest available at the time of writing), Macquarie’s North America economists David Doyle and Chinara Azizova commented that the data was already showing hints of passthrough inflation.

They wrote last month: “Notable price pressures were apparent in household furnishings and supplies, apparel, video and audio products, sporting goods, and toys. This list suggests impacts from tariffs on the data. One measure that reflects this is core goods ex used cars and trucks. This accelerated to +0.3% MoM, its strongest pace since Feb-23. It also shows an accelerating monthly trend.”

Many economists are hoping Fed chairman Jerome Powell will see through this inflation and lower the base rate, in part to offset an alarming jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics a matter of weeks ago. But analysts can’t hold their breath—after all, Powell made the point at his last press conference that by not raising rates (a move which truly would have upset markets) he is already seeing through such pressures.

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 3:17 PM

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

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.
6ix, if you continue being a completely evil asshole, you will end up like Confederate slave-owners: dead and their plantations burned to the ground.

You keep making threats. Do something.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, all you fucking Trumptards talk like goddamn Nazis. Hitler (Germany's version of Trump)

Shut the fuck up, you stupid, whiny cunt.

Nobody wants to hear out of any of you anymore.

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

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 3:37 PM

The only way that Democrats come back from the dead is if they start a very long and very difficult path to redemption. And they have no clue how to do that. Most of them haven't even realized yet that THEY are the problem.

If they decide they want to continue to behave like our two resident Democrat-voting cunts here, that's never going to happen. All they do is name-drop Trump 100 times per day and insult everyone who disagrees with them, and Americans have had it up to the gills with you people.

Stop talking about Trump and fix your fucking party.

You don't get to bitch and whine your way out of this anymore. All of your previous guilt and emotional manipulation tactics are falling completely on deaf ears. You've ruined the country and that is clearly obvious to everyone now.

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

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 4:08 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:
The only way that Democrats come back from the dead is if they start a very long and very difficult path to redemption. And they have no clue how to do that. Most of them haven't even realized yet that THEY are the problem.

If they decide they want to continue to behave like our two resident Democrat-voting cunts here, that's never going to happen. All they do is name-drop Trump 100 times per day and insult everyone who disagrees with them, and Americans have had it up to the gills with you people.

Stop talking about Trump and fix your fucking party.

You don't get to bitch and whine your way out of this anymore. All of your previous guilt and emotional manipulation tactics are falling completely on deaf ears. You've ruined the country and that is clearly obvious to everyone now.

The Only Thing Wrong with the Democratic Party is its opposition to the Death Penalty, especially the Democrats' aversion to killing goddamn Republican politicians. An equivalent silliness would be an aversion to killing Nazis in WWII or a refusal to hang Confederates for treason after the Civil War. I just realized that the Confederates were all pardoned. Such a mistake can't be corrected.

December 25, 1868.- Granting full pardon and amnesty to all persons engaged in the late rebellion.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-179-granting-fu
ll-pardon-and-amnesty-for-the-offense-treason-against-the

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 4:09 PM

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

How to screw up forest firefighting: Fire Your Firefighters.

The government is literally telling firefighters “help is not on the way”

US wildfire firefighting workforce shortages

By Kylie Mohr | Aug 11, 2025 at 5:50 AM

https://www.vox.com/climate/422853/the-government-is-literally-telling
-firefighters-help-is-not-on-the-way

Every spring, Forest Service fire leaders meet to plan for the upcoming fire season. This year, some employees were shocked by the blunt remarks made during a meeting with forest supervisors and fire staff officers from across the Intermountain West. “We were told, ‘Help is not on the way,’” said one employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job. “I’ve never been told that before.”

Agency leaders already knew it might be a bad wildfire season, made worse by having fewer hands available to help out. According to the employee High Country News spoke to, the Forest Service lost at least 1,800 fire-qualified, or “red-carded,” employees through layoffs, deferred resignation, and retirement offers. In total, 4,800 people left the agency.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-trump-administration-is-trying-to-fir
e-the-backbone-of-wildland-firefighting/
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/06/forest-chief-says-losing-50
00-employees-wont-impact-fire-season-response-many-federal-firefighters-disagree/406010/

“We were told: Don’t commit to an attack thinking the cavalry is going to come,” the employee said. As fire activity continues to pick up across much of the West, that warning rings true.

The Forest Service claims it recently reached 99 percent of its firefighting hiring goal, with almost 11,300 wildland firefighters. But a recent ProPublica investigation and internal communications obtained by High Country News paint a grimmer picture than what the public is seeing.
https://www.propublica.org/article/forest-service-staff-fire-season

ProPublica’s review of internal agency data found that more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — over one-fourth of all the agency’s firefighting jobs — were vacant as of July 17. The Guardian also reported that vacancy rates were highest in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain Regions, at 39 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/us-firefighter-shortage-
wildfires

The Department of Agriculture, which houses the Forest Service, disputes this. “ProPublica’s analysis doesn’t reflect our current fire response capacity,” spokesperson Cat McRae told High Country News in an email. “Their numbers likely come from outdated org charts and unfunded positions.” In an email, ProPublica confirmed that their data excluded unfunded positions. According to McRae, “the Forest Service is fully prepared and operational to protect individuals and communities from wildfires.”

But in a memo shared with HCN, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told agency leaders on July 16 that “as expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging.”

“We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability,” Schultz wrote. He requested that all red-carded employees, including IT and human resource staff, be made available for fire assignments. “We have reached a critical point in our national response efforts, and we must make every resource available.”

Much of the Western US is expected to experience above-normal wildfire activity over the next few months. Already, the Forest Service has asked at least 1,400 people with fire qualifications who had resigned to come back. After all, firefighting is a group effort.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/06/forest-chief-says-losing-50
00-employees-wont-impact-fire-season-response-many-federal-firefighters-disagree/406010/

“All those people matter,” said Dave Whittekiend, formerly the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache forest supervisor. “Once it goes beyond an initial attack, it takes all the logistics. It’s like setting up a small city.”

Whittekiend, who retired in May, had also attended this spring’s planning meeting for forest leaders in Nevada, Utah, and parts of Idaho and Wyoming, where he heard the same warning about limited help. “It was creating a sense of urgency,” he said. “It was pretty direct: ‘We are seeing changes, and so be careful about how you choose your strategies and what you think you might be able to do with a fire.’”

“We were told: Don’t commit to an attack thinking the cavalry is going to come.”

Whittekiend pointed out that — even before all the layoffs and resignations this spring — the Forest Service sometimes struggled to get through busy fire seasons. Firefighters have been called in from Canada, Mexico, and Australia when resources are stretched too thin, and sometimes National Guard or military troops are deployed.

“We’ve never had all the people that we needed in some fire years,” he said. “That’s been an ongoing trend. It probably accelerated when a whole bunch of us said, ‘All right, we’re out of here’” — including employees in overhead positions, like the people who buy food and organize shower trailers and outhouses for fire camps, as well as staffers who take weather forecasts and do safety checks on firefighting operations. More than 10,530 people are currently assigned to wildfires; as of August 1, there are 35 large fires nationwide.

Meanwhile, just last week, the Department of Agriculture announced a widespread reorganization to further slim down and consolidate the workforce. Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, were designated as two of the five new “hub” locations and the only offices that will be located in the entire West. The Forest Service will “phase out” the nine regional offices that currently exist, six of which are in the West, over the next year. Standalone research stations will be consolidated into one station in Fort Collins, while the Fire Science Lab in Missoula, Montana, will remain as is.

The elimination of the Forest Service regional offices throughout the West, which divided the territory into the Pacific Northwest, Northern, Rocky Mountain, Southwestern, and Intermountain regions, is expected to cause even more employees to leave. “I’m going to guess that there will be people who will leave rather than move,” Whittekiend said. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said that up to half of staff may not relocate, according to Politico.
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2025/07/senate-agriculture-
committee-hearing-usda-reorganization-vaden-00477082

It’s a familiar scene, echoing the lackluster response when the Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, in 2019. Only three out of the 328 employees who were supposed to relocate to the new headquarters actually did so — despite the millions of dollars the reorganization cost.
https://www.hcn.org/articles/south-bureau-of-land-management-9-numbers
-that-explain-the-blms-headquarters-boomerang-back-to-dc/

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 6:02 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The only way that Democrats come back from the dead is if they start a very long and very difficult path to redemption. And they have no clue how to do that. Most of them haven't even realized yet that THEY are the problem.

If they decide they want to continue to behave like our two resident Democrat-voting cunts here, that's never going to happen. All they do is name-drop Trump 100 times per day and insult everyone who disagrees with them, and Americans have had it up to the gills with you people.

Stop talking about Trump and fix your fucking party.

You don't get to bitch and whine your way out of this anymore. All of your previous guilt and emotional manipulation tactics are falling completely on deaf ears. You've ruined the country and that is clearly obvious to everyone now.
The Only Thing Wrong with the Democratic Party is its opposition to the Death Penalty, especially the Democrats' aversion to killing goddamn Republican politicians. An equivalent silliness would be an aversion to killing Nazis in WWII or a refusal to hang Confederates for treason after the Civil War. I just realized that the Confederates were all pardoned. Such a mistake can't be corrected.

This type of shit right here is exactly what I'm talking about and isn't helping you at all.

Everybody outside of your ever-shrinking bubble hates you and everything you stand for.

Keep doing free campaign work for Trump, MAGA and Republicans in general, dipshit.

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

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 6:13 PM

Trump is finally cleaning up your our shithole Capitol which has been a crime den ever since the days of you goofballs electing crackhead Marion Berry as mayor and making sure that law abiding citizens couldn't carry a weapon.

Once he gets that done, you're fucked again because every big city in the country run by Democrats is going to wonder why they can't have safe streets.

All roads of American Destruction lead back to Democrats.

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

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 8:08 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:
Trump is finally cleaning up your our shithole Capitol which has been a crime den ever since the days of you goofballs electing crackhead Marion Berry as mayor and making sure that law abiding citizens couldn't carry a weapon.

Once he gets that done, you're fucked again because every big city in the country run by Democrats is going to wonder why they can't have safe streets.

All roads of American Destruction lead back to Democrats.

6ix! That didn't happen:

The nation's overall violent crime rate was the lowest since 1969 after declining 4.5% from 2023 to 2024, while property crime fell 8.1%, the lowest since 1961, according to a recent report from the Center for American Progress. In Washington D.C., violent crime also reached a 30-year low in 2024, with 35% fewer violent offenses than the previous year.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/nationwide-2024-crime-data-de
monstrate-the-value-of-violence-prevention-and-local-law-enforcement/

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Monday, August 11, 2025 8:09 PM

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

George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social
Ignorance is how we got here. Sigh.

BornInPoverty • 1d
No it's worse than that. My brother in law thought that if a Chinese item cost $100 and there was a 30% tariff say, China would pay $30 and he would only pay $70. So, he thought everything imported would cost less.

August 10, 2025 at 11:23 AM
https://bsky.app/profile/georgetakei.bsky.social/post/3lw2owvaate2c

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 9:09 PM

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The Staggering Amount Trump Is Profiting From the Presidency Revealed

The New Yorker pieces together how much Trump and his family have pocketed since his first term.

By Ewan Palmer | Aug. 11 2025 5:02PM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-staggering-amount-donald-trump-is-pr
ofiting-from-the-presidency-revealed/

Donald Trump has leveraged both terms of his presidency to pocket billions of dollars, according to a bombshell report.

A lengthy investigation from The New Yorker estimates Trump and his family will have enriched themselves by more than $3.4 billion by the end of his second term, much of it from deals, transactions, and investments that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if he’d never been president.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/18/the-number

The haul includes lucrative commercial projects in the Persian Gulf overseen by the Trump Organization, such as hotels and golf courses in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates; a luxury Boeing 747-8 gifted by the Qatari royal family; and a flood of Trump-branded merchandise and other low-grade souvenirs flogged by the president and his team.

Trump’s foray into the world of cryptocurrency and NFTS has also been extremely lucrative for the president and his family. The New Yorker estimates the president has raked in at least $320 million from his $TRUMP memecoin, in no small part due to the president encouraging investors to buy in order to be invited to a gala dinner at his members’ clubs in D.C. in May.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-buyers-for-trumps-eyebrow-raising-me
mecoin-dinner-to-be-revealed/

First lady Melania Trump’s $MELANIA memecoin has reportedly pulled in $65 million in sales and trading fees. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm, who scored a $2 billion investment from a fund led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is also said to have contributing at least $320 million to the family’s presidential profits.

A private members club in Washington D.C. set up by the president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., with an eyewatering yearly membership fee of around $500,000 is cited as a potential addition to the Trump family pot. Trump’s Jr’s work with online gun retailer GrabAGun and venture capital firm 1789 Capital, and Trump Jr. has brought in nearly $20 million.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-tries-to-shake-up-dc-par
ty-scene-with-members-only-club/

The New Yorker dryly suggested it’s “unlikely” Trump Jr. would have landed a similar gig in venture capital if his father hadn’t been president.

Elsewhere, Trump is reported to have earned $125 million in extra profits since he first became president from Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and second home, which frequently hosts events and fundraisers for the president. This includes bumping up initiation fees from around $100,000 in 2016 to $1 million today.

In response to the report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast: “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read. Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”

Fred Wertheimer, a longtime government ethics reform advocate, told The New Yorker that when it comes to “using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.”

He added that Trump’s brazen attempts to use his name for profit while in office also raised concern that the president is offering several opportunities for people to buy influence with him.

“The way he pursues every possible avenue for money gives people who provide that money a clear sense that they are going to get something in return,” Wertheimer told the New Yorker. “Almost anyone who sees what’s going on has to assume that this money is buying the President’s favor.”

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

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Monday, August 11, 2025 10:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump is finally cleaning up your our shithole Capitol which has been a crime den ever since the days of you goofballs electing crackhead Marion Berry as mayor and making sure that law abiding citizens couldn't carry a weapon.

Once he gets that done, you're fucked again because every big city in the country run by Democrats is going to wonder why they can't have safe streets.

All roads of American Destruction lead back to Democrats.
6ix! That didn't happen:

Yes. It did.

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

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 7:40 AM

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

The ‘greatest con artist in American history’ cashes in on the presidency. How much has he made?

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/08/11/the-greatest-con-artist-in
-american-history-cashes-in-on-the-presidency-how-much-has-he-made/

David D. Kirkpatrick writes:

At a press conference on January 11, 2017, President-elect Donald Trump explained for the first time how he would handle the many conflicts of interest that his business empire posed for his new role. His company, the Trump Organization, collected money from all over the world for luxury condos, hotel rentals, development projects, and club memberships, and he had made deals that put his name on everything from mail-order steaks to get-rich-quick courses. Could citizens trust him to put the common good ahead of personal profit? How would he assure Americans that payments to his business weren’t doubling as payoffs?

A journalist asked Trump if he would release his tax returns, as Presidents had done for decades. Trump said no, and then explained just how unconstrained he felt by such conventions. He’d recently learned that the President, being beholden only to the voters, is subject to none of the regulations that restrict subordinate officials from conducting private business on the side. He called the loophole “a no-conflict-of-interest provision,” as if it were a perk of his employment contract.

To illustrate just how glaring a conflict the law allowed him, Trump volunteered that, during the transition, he’d entertained a two-billion-dollar offer “to do a deal in Dubai.” The offer had come from Hussain Sajwani, an Emirati real-estate tycoon with close ties to his country’s rulers. Trump emphasized that he “didn’t have to turn it down.” Nevertheless, he’d passed, because he didn’t “want to take advantage of something”; he disliked “the way that looks.” Therefore, he continued, his eldest sons, Donald, Jr., and Eric, would assume daily management of his businesses until he left office.

Trump then turned things over to Sheri Dillon, one of his tax lawyers, who argued that he could hardly be expected to do more than the temporary handover. Trump would not “destroy the company he built.” Since Trump’s star turn on the NBC reality show “The Apprentice,” the Trump Organization had mainly sold the use of his name. Most of its profits came from developers who flew the Trump flag over buildings that he didn’t build or own, or from businesses that used his name to sell shirts, mattresses, or pizza. If Trump tried to off-load his whole company, Dillon explained, a buyer might overpay in order “to curry favor with the President,” or, just as worrisome, might demean the highest office in the land by crassly cashing in on the President’s name. Trump and his family, Dillon declared, would never do anything that might “be perceived to be exploitive of the office of the Presidency.”

That was a different era. Dillon’s firm stopped representing Trump in 2021, after the mob he stirred up attacked the U.S. Capitol. And in Trump’s second term the President and his family have paid no mind to their lawyer’s promise. During Trump’s first term, they pledged to abstain from any new deals overseas. That’s out the window. The Trumps are now cashing in on five major deals in the Persian Gulf alone. Donald, Jr., on a recent visit to Qatar, said that the family’s restraint during the first Trump Administration had not stopped his father’s critics from constantly accusing the family of “profiteering.” So the Trumps would no longer lock themselves in “a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn’t matter—they’re going to hit you no matter what.” (A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization told me that it employs an outside ethics adviser—currently, Karina Lynch, a lawyer and a lobbyist who previously worked as a Republican Senate staffer and has represented Donald, Jr.—to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”)

Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his Presidencies: a two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto; fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch. Fred Wertheimer, the dean of ethics-reform advocates, told me that, “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Yet the public has largely shrugged. In a recent article for the Times, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent, wrote that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But Baker noted that the brazenness of the Trump family’s “moneymaking schemes” appears to have made such transactions seem almost normal.

How much money does it all amount to? What’s the number? In March, Forbes, known for ranking the wealth of billionaires, estimated that Trump’s net worth had more than doubled in the previous year, surpassing five billion dollars. In July, the Times put Trump’s wealth at upward of ten billion. Yet both estimates included billions of dollars in paper profits that would almost certainly disintegrate if the Trumps pulled out of certain investments. (What’s Truth Social worth without him?) These estimates also included assets untainted by any obvious exploitation of the Presidency, such as properties that Trump owned before entering office, or fees paid by resort customers who simply want to play golf or book a hotel room.

Although the notion that Trump is making colossal sums off the Presidency has become commonplace, nobody could tell me how much he’s made. Norm Eisen, a government-ethics lawyer and a vocal Trump critic, said, “We don’t know the full amounts.” Robert Weissman, a co-president of the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, said, “We will never really know.” Wertheimer noted that for decades Trump had boasted constantly, and in detail, about how rich he was. “He doesn’t talk about it anymore,” Wertheimer said. “He may be the greatest con artist in American history.”

A more considered accounting seemed in order. I decided to attempt to tally up just how much Trump and his immediate family have pocketed off his time in the White House.

Trump’s Tally:
https://x.com/NewYorker/status/1954992076065738932

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 7:47 AM

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

Which brings us back to Trump’s claim that he’s seizing power in DC because the city is descending into lawless chaos. Anyone who either lives there or looks at crime data knows that this is malicious nonsense. But we can’t take it for granted that the rest of the country will understand that he’s lying.

And if I may say, it’s the responsibility of the news media to make that clear. Don’t say “Trump makes contentious claims about DC crime.” Don’t say that there’s “dispute over DC crime data.” Just say that he’s lying.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-plays-the-carnage-card

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 12:49 PM

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‘A Guy Who Never Dies’

For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality.

By Fintan O’Toole | August 12, 2025

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/12/a-guy-who-never-dies/

On July 26 Donald Trump played a round of golf at his own Turnberry course in Scotland. Over footage of the event from Sky News, we hear a reporter shouting, “Mr. Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis?” At that point in the clip, the volume surges on the song Trump’s large entourage is blasting: “Memory” from the musical Cats. The tinny playback of the singer’s voice envelops Trump as he gets back in his golf cart and drives away: “It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun.”

Trump does not look like he’s enjoying the memory of the days when he and Epstein were close friends. But the president’s staff know this song is an aural comfort blanket for their boss. In her memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham writes that “when he was in a bad mood or a scary rage, we’d send for a staffer he referred to as ‘the Music Man.’” This aide would switch on “the president’s favorite songs—‘Memory’ from Cats, the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ and others—and the staffer would go in and play the music to distract or calm him down. It was sort of like soothing the savage beast.”

What is it about “the Jeffrey Epstein crisis” that triggered the urgent need for this auditory pacifier? Ten days before the Turnberry incident, Trump uncharacteristically vented his scary rage on those of his loyal fans who were demanding the release of all official files on Epstein, ranting on Truth Social:

My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will…. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Trump does not normally disavow support from anyone, however vile or extreme. For him to consign a large body of the MAGA base to a PAST (when presumably he and they knew what happiness was) suggests that something about the Epstein story gets under Trump’s very thick skin. It places him, for the first time in his astonishing political career, at the center of a cognitive maze from which he can see no exit.

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.

*

Paranoia persists through every era of the history of the American republic. We can, for example, recall President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1961 of the far-right fringes of the Republican party: “They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.”

He could be talking about Trumpworld. But not exactly. For not all conspiracy theories work the same way. They can take one of two distinct shapes. The first is a false “explanation” for real events. This is what Kennedy was referring to in 1961:

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British, or tricked by the French, or deceived by the Russians. It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sellout at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the Free World, it was treason in high places.

This is the classic form of the conspiracy theory. There is a genuine and undisputed fact—China going communist, a financial crisis, a military defeat, fluoride in the water, wildfires devouring the land. What is hidden is the surreptitious motive force: Communists, Freemasons, Jews, Jewish Communists, Jewish space lasers.

Yet Trumpian paranoia doesn’t quite take this form. Conspiracy theories are crucial to Trump’s appeal but his are indifferent to the reality or otherwise of the phenomena they seek to explain. They may relate to external facts. Immigration happened because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris connived to bring “more than 20 million criminals into the country.” An apparently sluggish economy is an illusion created by a “rigged” set of official job creation figures. They can also be pure fabrications: Barack Obama was not born in America. Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. (“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot…. I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death?”) Hillary Clinton was involved in an “unthinkable plot” to rig the 2016 presidential election by linking Trump to interference by Russia. To adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trump’s “imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,…/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Unlike the first, more basic kind of conspiracy theory, Trump’s version does not rely on agreed-upon public facts to generate emotions—fear, distrust, anger. As a federal judge put it in 2023 while dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others in relation to their alleged plot, the suit was “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” “Immaterial events” is an apt phrase: in Trump’s conspiracy theories, there is no genuine surface to go behind. Both the “event” and its “explanation” are cut from whole cloth.

Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them. It is striking, indeed, that when Trump had to provide alleged facts to support his most important conspiracy theory—the stealing of his victory in the 2020 presidential election—he was risibly helpless. He pursued over sixty law cases and all of them were thrown out (some by judges he himself had appointed) or withdrawn because he could not present the courts with anything other than outlandish concoctions.

*

For the most part, though, Trump has been able to operate in that world of immaterial events. He has been greatly assisted by the potency within his base of a conspiracy theory that is even further removed from the idea of evidence: QAnon. It is not his creation but it overlaps with his own conspiratorial strategies. It has the same free-floating freedom from any agreed reality, the same fictive exuberance.

QAnon, like Trump himself, is a comic provocation that became an American truth. As James Ball showed in his excellent The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence and subsequent publication of a trove of e-mail archives belonging to Clinton’s adviser John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. The Podesta e-mails were disappointingly dull—they disclosed no crimes or conspiracies. But, as Ball explains, they served as the template for a word game played on the Internet forum 4chan:

Whether as a joke, a troll or some sort of political act, a few 4chan users jumped on the Podesta emails and decided to try to stoke up some interest in them. One technique worked beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone involved. A group of users decided that the seemingly innocuous emails were in fact a code. “Hotdog,” they decided, meant “boy.” “Pizza” meant “girl.” “Cheese” meant “little girl,” while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute.” The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by key aides of Hillary Clinton—and they had cracked the code used to discuss their crimes.

By 2020 fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos for NPR definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” with 37 percent unsure and 17 percent in agreement. In 2022 Trump semaphored his endorsement of QAnon by reposting an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin bearing the words “The Storm is Coming.” (In QAnon’s arcane lexicon the “storm” is Trump’s version of the Last Judgment, when his satanic opponents will be tried, and perhaps executed, live on television.)

QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016 and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals.

*

Trump could exploit QAnon because it functions in the way his own conspiracy theories do—in the absence of any agreed reality beyond itself. But only up to a point. That point has a local habitation and a name: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “The real world provided a tantalizing way into the madness of QAnon.” And also the other way around: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites.

And there really are, as the investigative journalist Barry Levine recently noted in The New York Times, unanswered questions about Epstein’s ability to prey on children for so long with such impunity. How did he amass an estimated $600 million? How was he able to traffic girls and women into the US from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan without apparent interference from the immigration authorities? Why was Alex Acosta—who as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida gave Epstein an extraordinary lenient plea deal—told, as he later claimed, that “Mr. Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”? What is contained on the forty computer and electronic devices, twenty-six storage drives, more than seventy CDs, and six recording devices gathered by the FBI from Epstein’s properties?

And what exactly do all of these records say about Epstein’s close friendship over almost fifteen years with Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his pal was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”? In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who did the most to expose the Epstein scandal, recounts claims made in a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims:

Once, Epstein took the girl to Mar-a-Lago, where he introduced her to Donald Trump. She was fourteen at the time and recalls that upon meeting Trump, Epstein elbowed him and said: “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded in agreement, the suit says.

Brown also writes that “in early 2016, an anonymous woman filed a civil complaint in federal court in California, under the pseudonym ‘Katie Johnson.’ She alleged that she was sexually abused and raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period from June to September 1994.”

Such allegations may well be untrue, and of course Trump denies any knowledge of, much less involvement in, Epstein’s crimes. At the time of the Katie Johnson lawsuit Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told the Miami Herald that its claims were “unequivocally false.” (A federal judge dismissed the first Johnson suit in May 2016; two subsequent suits were withdrawn.) Brown notes that “there has never been any evidence that [Trump] had inappropriate sexual relations with minors.” Many people have many reasons to want to smear him by association with Epstein, and it is important not to fall into the trap of believing allegations because they chime with established preconceptions.

Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”

When he retweeted that post Trump clearly felt that Epstein really was safely dead and that questions about their long friendship had died with him. But in reality he was breathing life into Epstein’s corpse. To suggest that Epstein was murdered to silence him is to give him a vigorous afterlife of proliferating mysteries. In his current rage at the resurrection of this unfinished story, Trump railed against those who, instead of basking in the glory of his administration, keep talking about “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” This is a strange echo of one of the celebrity tributes received by Epstein on his sixty-third birthday in 2016 and recently published by The New York Times. Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.

*

It is the hybrid nature of the Epstein conspiracy theory—part rational demand for answers to legitimate public concerns, part QAnon fever dream—that stymies Trump’s response. It generates within the MAGA base what C. Wright Mills once called (in a very different context) crackpot realism, the belief that mad questions (in this case the truth about the satanic pedophile cabal) can be answered by sensible means (reading the trove of documents and examining the recordings that constitute the Epstein files). The word puzzle that began with the substitution of “pizza” with “girl” will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words—if only Trump would do what the Russians did with the Podesta e-mails and set them free.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

Trump’s great tactical mistake in the Epstein story was to keep playing into this belief. In September 2024, in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he went along with the suggestion that he would release the Epstein files alongside those relating to JFK’s assassination: “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

He ought to have known that, because of QAnon, anticipation of the release of the Epstein files is akin more to a millenarian religious fervor than to a documentary investigation. As Ball puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal? It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.

How could Trump find a way out of this maze? There are two threads he is trying to follow. One is to offer his base a substitute conspiracy theory: the whole Epstein story is a fiction, just another malicious invention. “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats…. It’s all been a hoax.” In this he is trying to switch the story from the first kind of conspiracy theory (the one with an objective correlative in real public events) to the second kind (his own practice of positing a conspiracy with no real-world referent). He is hoping to shift Epstein from the kind of ground where he loses his bearings onto the terrain where he feels more comfortable.

But this can’t work. Epstein can’t be turned into a product of the Democrats’ evil imagination because he is every bit as real for the MAGA people as he is for woke liberals. Perhaps, indeed, even more so: he is the tangible substance that gives credibility to their darkest visions of how the world works. In thinking that he can simply order his supporters to convert this substance into a mere shadow thrown by Democratic conspirators, he is succumbing to the dictator’s delusion that he can exert complete control over the thoughts of his subjects.

The second escape route is to offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19. If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along. If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map. And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.

Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function. If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 2:19 PM

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

Trump’s Use of Troops for Policing Hasn’t Been Seen Since America Was Ruled by a King

“The ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented.”

By Nick Turse | August 12 2025, 2:04 p.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/08/12/trump-washington-dc-national-guard
-deploy-federalize/

The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. Trump threatened to employ similar tactics in cities across the country as the Pentagon evaluates plans for a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops poised to surge into American cities.

The power grab in the District of Columbia, which bypassed the city’s elected leaders, follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and consistent tyrannical use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Monday, painting the city as a hellscape filled with “drugged out maniacs” and “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,” he declared.

As of Monday afternoon, Guard members had yet to be deployed. “They’ve got to muster in. They’ve got to do a little brief training and processing, and then they’re going to move out. But we do expect this to happen pretty rapidly,” an Army spokesperson told The Intercept. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that the Guard would be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week.”

The timeline for the troop deployment is hazy. According to a memorandum Trump issued on Monday, National Guard troops will remain deployed until the president determines “that conditions of law and order have been restored.”

Justice Department figures show violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.

“If we look at both practically the way the Trump administration is using the military around the country and also formally, in what they are asserting about their authority — the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military.

“The last person to assert that sort of boundless authority to deploy the military domestically and use it for law enforcement in this country was King George,” he told The Intercept, referencing King George III who lost the American Revolution.

“President Trump’s ever-expanding use of the military for domestic matters is beyond alarming,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement criticizing the deployment. “Our military is trained to defend the nation from external threats and assist communities during disasters or emergencies, not to conduct day-to-day domestic policing. This deployment is a serious misuse of the National Guard’s time and talent.”

Approximately 800 National Guard soldiers were activated as part of the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” with about 100 to 200 of them supporting law enforcement at any given time, according to a statement provided to The Intercept by the Army. “Hey, that’s a real thing, man. I double-checked,” the Army spokesperson told The Intercept when asked about the name of the task force. “I was like, ‘That can’t be real.’ But yeah. It’s real.”

The Army said that the National Guard forces operating in the capital would perform “an array of tasks from administrative, logistics and physical presence in support of law enforcement.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she did not believe it was legal “to use the American military against American citizens on American soil” at a press conference on Monday evening.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding Bowser’s remarks.

The National Guard deployment is one facet of Trump’s efforts to put the District of Columbia under federal authority; he also declared that he is temporarily taking control of the city’s police department. Hundreds of officers and agents from more than a dozen federal agencies — including the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the U.S. Marshals Service — have also fanned out across Washington in recent days.

The federal crackdown on Washington was precipitated by the attempted carjacking of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old software engineer and former Department of Government Efficiency staffer better known by his online sobriquet “Big Balls.” Police officers arrested two 15-year-old suspects, a boy and a girl.

Trump invoked a section of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act that grants him the power to temporarily seize control of the city’s police department. He said Attorney General Pam Bondi would oversee the federal takeover of the capital’s Metropolitan Police Department and, with Hegseth at his side, added that he was prepared to send the military into Washington “if needed.”

In a Monday memorandum, Trump directed Hegseth to coordinate with governors of states and “authorize the orders of any additional members of the National Guard to active service, as he deems necessary and appropriate, to augment this mission.”

Hegseth said that beyond the D.C. National Guard, the Pentagon was prepared to surge other military units into the capital.

“There are other units we are prepared to bring in, other National Guard units, other specialized units,” Hegseth said. “They will be strong, they will be tough, and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.” He added, “We will work alongside all D.C. police and federal law enforcement to ensure this city is safe. This city is beautiful.”

The Pentagon failed to respond to questions from The Intercept about which units might be deployed, what would precipitate that, and when.

This is the second time this summer that Trump has deployed troops to a Democratically governed city. A federal trial began on Monday in San Francisco to decide whether Trump violated the law by deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June without the approval of California Gov.r Gavin Newsom.

“President Trump is exploiting his power and testing it in ways that could lead to more U.S. troops deployed on American soil. As we saw in Los Angeles, President Trump is willing to deploy U.S. military forces on American streets for inflammatory and political reasons,” said Reed, the Rhode Island senator. “Normalizing the use of U.S. military forces for everyday policing risks eroding the very freedoms our servicemembers swear to protect.”

In his first seven months in office, Trump has overseen the deployment of around 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon. But the true number of troops deployed may be markedly higher. U.S. Northern Command has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed around the country.

These federal forces have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.

More than 10,000 troops are deploying or have deployed to the southern border, according to Northern Command. Under the direction of NORTHCOM, military personnel have deployed under the moniker Joint Task Force-Southern Border, or JTF-SB, since March, bolstering approximately 2,500 service members who were already supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission.

“Members of the National Guard should be under no illusions about what they’re being sent to do in Washington.”

One-third of the U.S. border is now completely militarized due to the creation of four new national defense areas, or NDAs: sprawling extensions of U.S. military bases patrolled by troops who can detain immigrants until they can be handed over to Border Patrol agents.

Around 5,500 troops — Marines and California National Guard members — have also been deployed to Los Angeles since early June. The forces were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and Newsom.

Experts say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the United States represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America.

“Though the rhetoric is sometimes different, from Los Angeles streets to ICE detention centers to our nation’s capital, President Trump is repeatedly acting to turn the National Guard into the first-choice implementers of his authoritarian agenda,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept. “Whether it is assaulting immigrant communities or seizing control of law enforcement in DC, his goal for these deployments is the same: using state violence to strip power, safety, and dignity from people. Members of the National Guard should be under no illusions about what they’re being sent to do in Washington.”

Many more troops, like the National Guard forces deploying to the capital, are operating under so-called Title 32 status, meaning they are under state, rather than federal, control, unlike deployments in Los Angeles and across the southern border. With no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general to the secretary of the Army to Hegseth to the president.

The plan for the Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force, which was first reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday, calls for two groups of 300 troops to be on standby for rapid deployment across the country, from military bases in Alabama and Arizona. The proposed force would also reportedly operate under Title 32.

The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” a defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”

“What worries me specifically is when you create a tool for a specific purpose you’re going to want to use it — in this case, inserting the military in routine law enforcement,” Nunn, the Brennan Center a attorney, said of the rapid response force. “Having a button you can push easily, so to speak, to deploy the military domestically will make domestic deployment of the military more frequent and more likely.”

Late last month, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions. The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information.

On Monday, Trump took aim at numerous cities led by Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors, threating authoritarian power grabs similar to his effort in Washington. “If we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,” Trump said. “You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore. They’re so far gone,” said Trump. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further.”

The June deployment of troops to Los Angeles did very little and has largely wound down. Newsom warned then that Trump would target other states. “Who else saw that coming?” he wrote on X on Monday.

Last month, Trump also threatened a federal takeover of New York City if Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is elected. “We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to,” Trump said in July. “Maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.”

Nunn pointed to the risks of inserting the military in routine domestic law enforcement. “The deeper and more fundamental danger is that you don’t want the people with guns, tanks, and bombers to be looking inward, at their own country, and thinking of themselves as a domestic political actor,” he told The Intercept. “The military is and should be a fundamentally outward-looking entity. You don’t have to look very far around the world to see what happens when the military sees itself as a domestic political actor.”

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 3:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

OMG! Trump criticized blacks who constantly play the race card!

Slavery can't be far behind!

Ghislaine Maxwell cleared to leave prison on work release

Convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has reportedly been cleared to leave prison on work release.

Podcast host Allison Gill obtained information about Maxwell's security score, sex offender waiver, and other details after the former partner of Jeffrey Epstein was moved to a minimum-security prison in Texas.

According to journalist Adam Klasfeld, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) raised questions about Maxwell's new prison accommodations in a letter to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The senator demanded to know if Maxwell received special treatment after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/ghislaine-maxwell-cleared-to-leav
e-prison-on-work-release-report/ar-AA1KorMX?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=c8c23b30812049898f5bbcb421b606c0&ei=127

Comrade Signym, are you a pedophile? It you cover for one you are every bit as guilty. So, I'll ask you again. Are you a pedophile?

And if you were to go through Jacks posts, you’d see again and again where Jack called all kinds of people pedophiles. Yet when all signs point to Trump being the pedophile it doesn’t seem to matter to Jack. I take it, it’s because Jack, who we all know to be a sexual deviant from his posts when he was drinking, is a pedophile as well.

T

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 3:12 PM

Memphis, TN
St. Louis, MO
Detroit, MI
Baltimore, MD
Kansas City, MO
Pueblo, CO
Tacoma, WA
Oakland, CA
Little Rock, AR
Denver CO

The ten most dangerous cities. I guess Trump is going to these cities next.

T

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 3:38 PM

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 3:42 PM

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

Shut up, pussy faggot.

You're cooked. Your party is dead. You are a whiny little bitch and you're finished.
6ix, if you continue being a completely evil asshole, you will end up like Confederate slave-owners: dead and their plantations burned to the ground.

You keep making threats. Do something.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, all you fucking Trumptards talk like goddamn Nazis. Hitler (Germany's version of Trump) was riding high and very confident in 1933, but by 1945 he was dead and so were millions of Nazis. That is where Trump and his Trumptards are headed if they don't stop deluding themselves about their capabilities. 6ix, what is the probability you will be alive 12 years from now, considering how stupidly you have lived and how much damage you have done to your health?

6ix, you Trumptards should not be confident about your victorious future. Learn from the sad example of Hitler and his Nazis about what happens to people like you. Or if Germany is too far away for your imagination, what happened to the Confederates? They were hyper-confident about their future but it was all burned down in less than 4 years.

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

There's no free thinking in Trumps kind of government. That's the first thing that goes. It's already happening.

T

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 5:03 PM

All of the sudden Ted cares about kids after 4 years of beating off watching trannies read books to them with the kids on their laps in Democrat run schools for years.

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 5:20 PM

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

We Asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if Women Should Have the Right to Vote. The Answer Was … Unsettling.

We really, really didn’t expect this.

By Molly Olmstead | Aug 12, 2025 12:41 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/defense-secretary-pete-heg
seth-women-voting-christian-nationalism.html

His answer? Pete Hegseth won’t say women should have the right to vote. Instead, repeal the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Each state to decide whether or not women vote.

Asked about slavery, slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races.

Asked about the separation of church and state, Christians are to assert control over secular institutions where they can.

Hegseth has made it pretty clear where he stands on most issues. He hates Democrats; he is hostile to Islam; he thinks environmentalism is for the weak and foolish; he scorns the celebration of diversity; and he opposes allowing women to serve in combat positions.

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 8:01 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:
All of the sudden Ted cares about kids after 4 years of beating off watching trannies read books to them with the kids on their laps in Democrat run schools for years.

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

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

Trump will offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

Podcast host Allison Gill claims Maxwell received a rare waiver allowing potential work-release, despite rules barring sex offenders. The Bureau of Prisons hasn’t confirmed the claims, and the documents remain unverified by official sources.

https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/did-ghislaine-maxwell-ge
t-work-release-from-prison-heres-what-we-know-article-152455133

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 8:06 PM

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

Trump’s disastrous pick to oversee US economic data

Why Trump’s latest nominee has economists worried.

By Cameron Peters | Aug 12, 2025, 5:45 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/the-logoff-newsletter-trump/457844/trump-ej-antoni
-bureau-labor-statistics-jobs-report

President Donald Trump announced his new nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Monday evening, less than two weeks after firing the agency’s previous commissioner.

Who does Trump want to run BLS? E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, is Trump’s choice for the top job at BLS. Antoni will need to be confirmed by the Senate before taking the job.

What do I need to know about him? Antoni’s nomination has many economists seriously concerned. BLS, which provides data about the state of the US economy, is a traditionally nonpartisan agency, and Antoni is anything but nonpartisan: He’s a longtime critic of the agency who contributed to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration, and he’s widely considered to be underqualified for the job.

What do I need to know about him? Antoni’s nomination has many economists seriously concerned. BLS, which provides data about the state of the US economy, is a traditionally nonpartisan agency, and Antoni is anything but nonpartisan: He’s a longtime critic of the agency who contributed to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration, and he’s widely considered to be underqualified for the job.

Even more alarming, Antoni suggested on Monday that BLS could stop issuing monthly jobs reports, which provide a regular look at the state of the US economy and help guide economic decision-making. Instead, he suggested, the agency would release only quarterly data.

What’s the context for Antoni’s nomination? Trump needs a new BLS commissioner because he fired the last one, Erika McEntarfer, after the agency released jobs numbers that showed hiring at well below expected levels.

The decision raised concerns that Trump’s next pick would feel pressure to report better numbers, regardless of the true totals. Antoni’s background and comments do little to dispel that concern.

What’s the big picture? As my colleague Andrew Prokop has written, it’s unclear how much room the BLS head actually has to fudge jobs numbers — but if it happens, it would push the US into territory generally occupied by authoritarian regimes. It would likely also come with serious economic consequences, undermining both confidence in the US economy and the data that regulators and companies use to make major decisions, like setting interest rates.
https://www.vox.com/politics/422144/trump-jobs-economy-bls-fired

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

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025 9:16 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
All of the sudden Ted cares about kids after 4 years of beating off watching trannies read books to them with the kids on their laps in Democrat run schools for years.

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

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

Shut up, faggot.

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

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

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025 8:08 AM

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

Hackification

Arendt’s Law comes for economic data

By Paul Krugman | Aug 13, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hackification

On Monday I wrote about D.T’s disastrous press conference touting the economy along with Stephen Moore, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. As I noted, Moore is a dishonest partisan hack, which is only to be expected, but also bizarrely incompetent, incapable of ever getting his facts right. To explain the phenomenon, I invoked Hannah Arendt:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Let me call this Arendt’s Law: Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks.

So when D.T nominated E.J. Antoni, the current chief economist at Heritage, to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seemed safe to assume that he would be cut from the same cloth. But although Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the nomination declared that Antoni is a Highly Respected Economist, I and most of the economists I talk with knew nothing about him.

Fortunately, Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin, who actually is a Highly Respected Economist and whose blog Econbrowser has been influential for many years, has been on Antoni’s case for a while. And sure enough, Arendt’s Law remains undefeated.

Before I get to Chinn’s work, yesterday morning’s Antoni headline. I’ve argued since before Trump took office that this administration would eventually get around to cooking the economic books. But I didn’t expect it right away. The process of constructing a monthly jobs report is complex. You can’t just take a Sharpie and write in the numbers you want. Corrupting the data would require firing or intimidating a large number of people, which would, I thought, take time.

But one should never underestimate the audacity of hacks. On Monday Antoni went on Fox Business and suggested that the BLS should stop issuing monthly jobs reports until the “problems” at the agency are fixed.

I guess that would be one way to let Trump continue claiming that the economy is booming — just stop publishing the data showing that it isn’t.

True, Antoni did say that the BLS should continue issuing quarterly reports, but scrapping monthly numbers would give Trump’s people more time to corrupt the data — and wanna bet that if the next quarterly report looks bad, Antoni, if confirmed at the BLS, would find reasons to hold off on its release?

Incidentally, as Claudia Sahm reminds us, the BLS is legally required to issue monthly employment reports. So Antoni’s proposal, aside from being a transparently corrupt attempt to hide bad news, would be flatly illegal. I’m pretty sure that canceling publication of the Consumer Price Index, which will be next on the agenda once the full impact of Trump’s tariffs is felt, would also be illegal. But does that sort of thing matter these days?

But let me get to Menzie Chinn who, as I said, has been on Antoni’s case for a while. It turns out that for someone with almost no publications, who has been largely invisible from policy discourse, Antoni has been responsible for a surprisingly large number of bad economic analyses.

Chinn puts special emphasis on a 2024 paper circulated by Antoni and Peter St. Onge claiming that real GDP peaked at the end of 2021, and never recovered — that is, that the U.S. economy was in a deep recession for Joe Biden’s last three years in office.

Chinn tried to replicate their results, and even using what they claimed was their (weird) methodology couldn’t get anywhere close to their numbers. My guess is that a forensic analysis, should anyone bother (I don’t recommend it) would find that Antoni and St. Onge committed a Stephen Moore: They just made some math mistakes or copied some numbers down incorrectly.

But why bother? An economist who gets results completely at odds with every other piece of available evidence — remember, in 2024 The Economist described the U.S. economy as “The envy of the world” — owes it both to himself and his readers to provide a detailed, reproducible explanation of why his story is so different. Antoni didn’t.

I’d like to think that Antoni’s utter professional inadequacy for the role of BLS Commissioner will keep Congress from confirming him. But as I mentioned Monday, Stephen Moore already had a well-established reputation for surreal incompetence by the time Trump tried to install him on the Federal Reserve Board. Yet he would probably have been confirmed anyway if unsavory facts about his personal life hadn’t surfaced.

So there’s a good chance that Antoni will, in fact, take over the BLS. And the result will be the total destruction of one of the world’s greatest statistical agencies — an agency that has, among other things, been a crucial aid to business decision-making. It won’t even matter whether the Trumpists cook the books (although they will.) For from the moment Antoni takes full control, nobody will believe any numbers coming out of BLS.

Fortunately, the same thing won’t be happening to other government agencies providing crucial information, like the Centers for Disease Control. Oh, wait.

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

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025 8:30 AM

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

The thing Trump’s generals feared about him could now be arriving

By Aaron Blake | August 12, 2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/12/politics/trump-generals-national-guard-
analysis

Multiple top generals and military officials who served in Trump’s first term worried about – and warned about him.

For years, they’ve cast Trump’s desire to dispatch the military on US soil as one of his most troubling tendencies – and even case-in-point evidence of his authoritarianism.

This issue was raised in one form or another by two Trump defense secretaries (Jim Mattis and Mark Esper), his top general (Mark Milley) and his chief of staff (John Kelly, also a retired general). All of them have cast this as a line that is not to be crossed and indicated they feared Trump would indeed cross it. Some even recalled multiple instances when Trump tried to do so or suggested it.

The flashpoint for many of their comments was the scene in June 2020 when federal law enforcement cleared Lafayette Square near the White Houe of racial-justice protesters. They did so right before Trump strolled through for a photo-op featuring both Milley and Esper. (Both later expressed regret for participating.)

Mattis responded with a blistering – and unusual, for him – statement that warned of what the scene portended.

“Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, DC, sets up a conflict — a false conflict — between the military and civilian society,” he said. “It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.”

Mattis said the military should be used on US soil “only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors.”

(Notably, Trump’s deployments of the military this summer – in Los Angeles and DC – came without requests from the governor and mayor, respectively.)

Esper has described a scene in which Trump asked him and Milley why the protesters couldn’t simply be shot “in the legs or something.” And in his 2022 book, he said a large part of his job that summer was “making sure to blunt or redirect any efforts that could politicize the military, misuse the force, or undermine the nation’s security.”

In a CNN interview in October, Esper even invoked the Kent State massacre, where the National Guard killed four Vietnam War protesters.

“We don’t want to go back to that,” Esper said.

Kelly likewise has said Trump had to be told repeatedly why he shouldn’t use the military against American citizens, dating back to his first year in office. But he said Trump would just keep pressing the issue.

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly told the New York Times last year.

In the same interview, Kelly mentioned Trump’s penchant for this while saying he met the definition of a fascist.

That’s a description Milley, too, has applied to Trump. And at one point, he reportedly so feared Trump’s willingness to misuse the military that he worried Trump might launch a coup after the 2020 election. (Trump denied ever considering such a thing.)

In their 2021 book, “I Alone Can Fix it,” Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker reported that Milley believed Trump was stoking unrest with his false claims about voter fraud in possible hope of being able to call in the military. (Rucker is now senior vice president for editorial strategy and news at CNN.)

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley reportedly told aides, recalling the episode the Nazis used as a pretext to cripple the opposition and consolidate power.

Milley didn’t confirm the account in the book, but a defense official close to him suggested to CNN in 2021 that Milley was indeed quite concerned about Trump mobilizing the military for nefarious purposes.

“He’s not going to sit in silence while people try to use the military against Americans,” the official said.

Trump’s time in politics has featured no shortage of former administration officials who warn in pretty stark terms about his tendencies.
But what’s particularly notable here is the positions these men held. These are precisely the kinds of people who would be most aware of Trump’s desire to misuse the military.

And the fact that they’ve suggested he’s pushed for these things privately indicates it isn’t just bluster when Trump talks openly about calling in active duty military in addition to the National Guard in DC, as he did Monday.

That doesn’t mean all of that will come to pass. The guardrails have held before, even as they’ve clearly receded in his second term. And Trump’s legal authorities are more limited outside DC.

But the president appears more and more intent on pressing the issue. And that makes the comments of these four men more relevant than ever.

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

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025 9:08 AM

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

Pentagon drawing up quick reaction force of National Guard ready to quell civil unrest at any moment: report

Troops would be stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona under new 'reaction force' plan

By Morgan Phillips | August 12, 2025 1:44pm EDT

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-drawing-up-quick-reaction-fo
rce-national-guard-ready-quell-civil-unrest-any-moment-report

The troops, from the Army and Air Force National Guard, would be outfitted with weapons and riot gear and receive training for the mission.

Trump has already deployed the military for domestic purposes, first in Los Angeles in June, sending 5,000 National Guard members and Marines to tamp down anti-immigration enforcement riots. On Monday, he deployed 800 D.C. National Guard troops to support law enforcement in Washington, D.C., in cracking down on violent crime.

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

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025 9:45 AM