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

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

How many people from the first Trump administration are working in the second?

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+from+the+first+Trump+a
dministration+are+working+in+the+second

Summarizing the AI results: only the nuttiest fruitcakes came back for a second Trump administration. Only loyalty to Trump is necessary. Competence is disqualifying.

Trump was careful to be sure that he didn't have a V.P. like Mike Pence, who knew what the words indecent, insane, and unconstitutional mean.

He nominated or appointed 23 former Fox News employees to his administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_cabinet_of_Donald_Trump

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 6:38 AM

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

Redstopgringo:
“Are Pinky and the Brain still trying to take over the world? Because at this point, I'm willing to hear the Brain's platform.”

the-other-sandy:
“At this point, I'm willing to hear Pinky's platform.”

DownvotesStarWars:
“A sentient turkey sandwich would make better decisions than Trump.”

https://imgur.com/gallery/sentient-turkey-sandwich-would-make-better-d
ecisions-baIgF3J

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 6:49 AM

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

Most Unpopular President in History is Losing His Coalition

Morris: I wrote a couple of data driven takeaways—well not a couple, seven of them—on the Substack which I can reference. Then I’ll also mention a couple things from the new data analysis. For the readers, we’re recording this on Thursday. So there’s been about a day to catch up on sleep and digest the findings.

The big thing is unsurprising, but it really bears repeating. This is an electoral repudiation of Donald Trump and an electoral verdict on his unpopularity. I have appeared on your interview show a couple of times now to say essentially that the polls show he’s the most unpopular president ever, save himself in his first term. Trump’s policy agenda is also one of the most unpopular policy agendas in American presidential history, at least since we have surveys, since 1936. In that context, it’s rather unsurprising that Democrats did so well in Tuesday’s elections. They swept all of the statewide races in Virginia, all of the New Jersey races, they picked up two utility offices in Georgia, a red state—or a purple state if you’re very optimistic there as a Democrat—which is surprising. In Pennsylvania, they hold like three partisan justices and they win a lower court race as well as statewide.

In that context, it’s rather unsurprising, but it does affirm what we’ve been seeing in other data, which as good Bayesians, is always important to us. It also gives hard data to members of Congress that might want to fight Trump on things like his tariffs, or immigration, which is very unpopular, either from the right or from the left. It gives them something to point to that’s not just survey data, which is increasingly poo-pooed in Congress, as we might say.

So that’s my big takeaway. There are some smaller things which I’ll mention now. The first is it’s not just that Trump lost, it’s that he lost with voters that he supposedly had a realignment with in 2024. This is Latinos and Generation Z voters in particular. He loses with voters who say the economy is very important to them, which is the single constituency that likely propelled him to victory in 2024 in the first place. So in my article I’m putting out on Friday, I’m going to characterize this as: Trump’s losing his winning coalition; because I think that’s really what’s going on here.

The voters that put him in the White House because they wanted lower prices have said, “he’s not holding up his end of the bargain.” He’s not lowering prices. The supposed Republican ideological gains among Latinos in Generation Z who have tended to lean to the left and who, by the way, still voted for Kamala Harris despite lower margins than they did previously has evidently, evaporated. That’s really worth digesting as well.

Krugman: At one level of dispute we’ve had Trump himself insisting week after week that the polls are fake and that he’s extremely popular. And it’s basically you can argue until you’re blue in the face that “polling, it’s not a perfect science, but it’s meaningful.”

But there’s nothing quite like actual elections to settle that dispute. This sort of says that the polling saying that he’s unpopular and his policies are unpopular is right.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/after-the-dem-sweep-talking-with

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 7:41 AM

He's not even close to the most unpopular President in history.

If you're going to continue saying stupid shit like that, then nobody is going to take you seriously.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 11:05 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's not even close to the most unpopular President in history.

If you're going to continue saying stupid shit like that, then nobody is going to take you seriously.

Trump is very popular with people who are fucked up in the head, but not so much with Americans who have a useful purpose in life and are functioning normally.

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 11:05 AM

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

DOJ Had Its First Big Hearing in a “Trump Enemy’’ Prosecution. The Judge Was Not Pleased.

Let’s recall why Comey made it to the top of Trump’s enemies list.

By Austin Sarat | Nov 08, 2025 10:00 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/doj-comey-hearing-trump-en
emies-list-judge.html

In the world of sports, there is an old maxim that captures the essence of competitive athletics: “Play the ball, not the person.” Play the ball, focus on the competition itself, honor the game, and don’t try to humiliate or hate your opponent.

This is one of the many lessons that our current president appears never to have learned or accepted. President Trump is the classic “play the person” kind of leader. He seems to take pleasure in making everything personal.

His approach does great damage to our culture and politics. It is also deeply destructive of our legal system.

The president doesn’t hide his everything-is-personal approach. In fact, he wants the American public to know who his enemies are and to understand his embrace of an “all’s fair in love and war” political ethos.

That’s why he has been clear about his desire to see people like John Bolton, Letitia James, and James Comey prosecuted. It will now be up to judges handling those cases to push back against the president’s weaponization of the Justice Department.

On Wednesday, Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, who is handling the preliminary phases of the Comey case, was the first up, and he gave a master class in judicial pushback. As the New York Times reports, he “repeatedly expressed his frustration—and at times his barely restrained annoyance—with [the federal prosecutor] during an otherwise procedural hearing in which he ordered the Justice Department to produce records from its investigation.”

Before saying more about Fitzpatrick’s pushback, let’s recall why Comey made it to the top of Trump’s enemies list.

Nine years ago, during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, no one would have predicted Trump’s vendetta against the former FBI director. In fact, but for Comey, Trump might not have ever been elected. ABC News notes: Comey announced in October 2016—less than two weeks before the presidential election—that the FBI was going to investigate Clinton’s private email server, months after federal investigators said it would not recommend charges. Trump praised the decision.

At the time, Trump said, “I have respect that the FBI has given it a second chance.”

The tone changed two days before the election, when Comey announced that he was not going to bring charges against Clinton. Never one to be bothered with evidence or the lack of it, Trump insisted, “Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it, the FBI knows it, the people know it.”

Things really went south in early 2017 when the president made it clear that he wanted the FBI director to pledge his loyalty, and when Comey demurred.

In March 2017, Comey got in more hot water when he went public with the fact that the FBI had been investigating suspected Russian interference during the 2016 election. Two months later, Trump claimed that “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds!”

In early May of that year, Trump took the unusual step of firing the FBI director. It turned out that this was after an aggressive campaign by Trump to push Comey into dropping an investigation of his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Flynn would eventually be convicted and then pardoned for lying to federal investigators as part of that investigation into Russia’s election interference.

Almost a year later, Comey got a measure of revenge when he told an interviewer that the president was “morally unfit to be president.” He cited in particular his response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“A person who sees moral equivalence in Charlottesville,” Comey explained, “who talks about and treats women like they’re pieces of meat, who lies constantly about matters big and small and insists the American people believe it; that person’s not fit to be president of the United States, on moral grounds.”

In September, Comey was “indicted on charges of making a false statement and obstruction related to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020.” It followed a social media post in which the president demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi bring charges against Comey and others.

To accomplish that goal, the president removed the federal prosecutor with jurisdiction over the Comey matter, but didn’t think there was enough to indict. The administration replaced him with a former Trump defense attorney, Lindsey Halligan, someone who the president said was willing “to get things moving.”

Getting things moving does not require playing by the rules. And Halligan has not been.

She has been dragging her feet when it comes to turning over evidence to the defense as is required under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Comey’s defense needs that information, especially emails between Comey and a close friend, Daniel Richman, who will be a key prosecution witness.

That failure constitutes prosecutorial misconduct. It is called a Brady violation, after the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose any evidence that is favorable to the defendant or could undermine the prosecution’s case.

And if that were not bad enough, the prosecution had revealed text exchanges between Comey and Richman without giving the defense a chance to review them and challenge their release.

Fitzgerald took the unusual step of ordering Halligan to turn over to the court grand jury materials that involved Comey and Richman. The New York Times was right to characterize this as “a significant development.”

It will permit Comey’s lawyer, the Times adds, “to scrutinize exactly how Ms. Halligan characterized the evidence against Mr. Comey when she showed up for what was her first-ever appearance in front of a grand jury.”

But even more significant was Fitzpatrick’s characterization of the case against Comey as an example of an “indict first, investigate second” kind of prosecution.

Right from the start, Comey has labeled the decision to indict him as a “vindictive prosecution,” a prosecution brought in retaliation for someone’s exercise of a constitutionally protected right. The prohibition of such behavior, SCOTUSBlog’s Rory Little explains, “is founded in constitutional due process. So too is the idea that a person may not be selected for prosecution purely as a matter of revenge—vindictive prosecution. In this sense, vindictive prosecution is simply a subset of improper selective prosecution.”

As Comey’s lawyers put it in a filing seeking dismissal of the indictment, the prosecution “arises from multiple glaring constitutional violations and an egregious abuse of power by the federal government … President Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute Mr. Comey because of personal spite and because Mr. Comey has frequently criticized the President for his conduct in office.”

“Indict first, investigate second” is virtually a synonym for vindictive and selective prosecution. That is why what Judge Fitzpatrick said is so significant in the Comey case.

But it is more than that. Fitzpatrick is telling the president and the world that he will not let the administration use Comey to stage a “show trial,” the kind familiar in authoritarian regimes where guilt is predetermined and the prosecution is staged for propaganda purposes and to intimidate political opponents.

That is good news, not just for Comey, but for all of us who still cling to the idea that we can criticize the president and the government he leads without being afraid that we will become a target of the president’s personal pique.

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 4:31 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's not even close to the most unpopular President in history.

If you're going to continue saying stupid shit like that, then nobody is going to take you seriously.
Trump is very popular with people who are fucked up in the head, but not so much with Americans who have a useful purpose in life and are functioning normally.

Throw out all the insults you want, it doesn't change the fact that your article is lying to you.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 6:38 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Throw out all the insults you want, it doesn't change the fact that your article is lying to you.

Who are you kidding? Only yourself. You believe Trump isn't unpopular because Trump is validating your life as purposeful rather than wasted.

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

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Saturday, November 8, 2025 6:48 PM

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

Throw out all the insults you want, it doesn't change the fact that your article is lying to you.
Who are you kidding? Only yourself. You believe Trump isn't unpopular because Trump is validating your life as purposeful rather than wasted.

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

We have vast records dating back to at least the 90's on most of this stuff now.

Even in that time, Trump is far from the least popular President in history.

You're just saying stupid shit, and that's because you read stupid shit.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 10:27 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:

We have vast records dating back to at least the 90's on most of this stuff now.

Even in that time, Trump is far from the least popular President in history.

You're just saying stupid shit, and that's because you read stupid shit.

6ix and Trumptards in general need a bullet in the back of their heads to fix what is wrong with them: On constitutional matters of war powers and tariffs, Republican lawmakers have abandoned the field to Trump.

By Rachel Oswald | November 7, 2025, 5:42 PM

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/07/congress-war-powers-tariffs-trump
-republicans-venezuela-boat-strikes/

As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of executive power in the matters of trade and military action further and further, Congress’s conspicuous absence in pushing back against the president’s bold usurpation of authorities that the U.S. Constitution explicitly delegates to the legislative branch has become all the more glaring.

Recent votes in the Senate have highlighted just how far afield the Republican Party has traveled from its own previous long-standing stances in support of free trade. On other key votes in recent days on the permissibility of the Trump administration’s expanding regional maritime strikes on alleged drug-running vessels and the legality of any military action against the Venezuelan government, Republican lawmakers have overwhelmingly accepted the administration’s assertions that it is targeting “narco-terrorists” and have declined to preemptively put limitations on a potential effort to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro regime.

The Senate held votes last week on three separate measures to end a series of tariffs that Trump imposed this year, including his sweeping global tariffs; tariffs on Canada that the White House controversially justified by claiming a national fentanyl emergency existed on the northern border; and tariffs on Brazil that the president said were a response to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s criminal case against Trump ally and former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted of attempting a coup after his 2022 election loss.

Though each of the resolutions narrowly passed the Senate after a couple of Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats, the measures face steep procedural hurdles in the House, where Republican leaders have more tools to preemptively block them from being voted on.

“I think we’ve seen probably for the last half-century an ebbing of congressional authority to the executive,” said Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, a lead sponsor of two recently rejected war powers resolutions related to the military’s maritime attacks on alleged drug smugglers and the growing U.S. naval buildup near Venezuela.

“You could probably add up the sum total of that accretion of executive power in the last several decades, and it will be less than what’s happened in the last several months. Congress needs to reinsert itself, its control over the power of the purse and certainly its war power,” Schiff added.

With Congress under full Republican control and largely absenting itself from imposing any meaningful check on Trump, it will be likely the Supreme Court that acts first on the tariffs question. During oral arguments in a case before the high court this week, a majority of justices sounded skeptical about the administration’s contention that it has essentially unfettered powers to interfere with the U.S. economy through the mercurial imposition of tariffs.

“The legal basis for Trump’s use of tariffs is extremely weak,” said Jordan Tama, a professor at American University who specializes in congressional oversight of U.S. foreign policy. “The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Trump administration has cited as the basis for the tariffs, authorizes the use of sanctions in the event of a national emergency that [constitutes] an unusual and extraordinary threat.”

Tama argued that long-running trade deficits could hardly be viewed as unusual under the definition of the law and that the prosecution of a politician in a foreign country such as Brazil didn’t represent an “extraordinary” emergency to the American people. A group of leading economists made a similar argument in an amicus brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case.

“Every member of Congress should recognize that Trump’s use of tariffs is inconsistent with laws that have been passed by Congress, and therefore all members of Congress should be opposing Trump on that,” Tama continued. “It is sad and distressing to see the vast majority of Republicans voting against these bills. I would say, though, that the bills are not necessarily insignificant even if they are not going to become enacted into law.”

On war powers, just two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, voted with Democrats this week to forbid the administration from conducting military operations inside Venezuela or against the Maduro regime without explicit congressional authorization. The Nov. 6 procedural motion on the joint resolution failed, 49-51, amid strong opposition from the White House.

The outcome of this week’s failed vote to ban unauthorized military action against Venezuela was virtually identical to a vote on a similar resolution on Oct. 8 that attempted to order an end to Trump’s unauthorized military strikes in the Caribbean. That measure was rejected, 48-51, with Democrat John Fetterman joining Republicans in the vote and Murkowski and Paul voting with Democrats.

Republican Jim Risch, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke in opposition to the legislative effort to block unauthorized military strikes against the Venezuelan government. But his floor remarks focused on the attacks against the alleged drug smugglers, and he did not touch on the growing question of whether Trump aims to overthrow Maduro.

“President Trump has taken decisive action to protect thousands of Americans from lethal narcotics. He’s kept drugs off the streets, kept children alive, and eliminated narco-terrorists, who have been profiting off of the deaths of members of our communities,” Risch said on Thursday. “These people have been transmitting drugs into the United States via a lot of different ways. One of them was by shipping vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean.”

In the weeks between the two war powers votes, as the number of those killed in the boat strikes steadily ticked upward (now estimated at 70 people), concerns have only grown about the legality of Trump’s actions.

Even though the administration and its Republican backers insist the military is attacking narco-terrorists, when there have been survivors of the strikes, they haven’t been treated the way that other captured terrorists are generally treated by the United States: with imprisonment and prosecution. Rather, survivors have been returned to their home countries—and in at least one of those cases, one of the alleged drug smugglers was released by the Ecuadorian government, which said it did not have legal grounds to detain him.

Behind the scenes, there are signs that more Republicans are not wholly convinced of the administration’s assertions of sweeping legal authority to carry out its military attacks in the Caribbean and nearby Pacific. Democrat Mark Kelly, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was invited to just one classified briefing on the strikes.

“We got one brief, but to be honest, they [the Trump administration] didn’t share all of the information,” Kelly said. “It was fair to say there was bipartisan frustration on the amount of information they would provide us. They would tell us, ‘We’re not going to give you that,’ and in trying to explain to us the legal rationale for doing this, it was rather hard to follow, confusing. They were tying themselves in knots trying to explain this, and they had a lot of questions that they either couldn’t answer or refused to answer.”

For his part, Risch indicated that he was satisfied with the legal justifications that the administration had provided.

“Myself and many of my colleagues have sat recently through hours of briefings and legal analysis by government legal departments and attorneys who have studied this issue,” Risch said in his floor remarks. “Unanimously, they have concluded that the action taken by President Trump is absolutely lawful.”

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 11:26 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The Trump admin is so much better with internal policy!

Quote:
Brennan, Page, & Strzok Hit Today With Russiagate Grand Jury Subpoenas, Up To 30 More Pending

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/brennan-page-strzok-hit-today-russ
iagate-grand-jury-subpoenas-30-more-pending

So well deserved!

-----------

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 12:06 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The Trump admin is so much better with internal policy!

Fuck you to death, Signym:

"A death sentence"

November 9, 2025 9:22 AM EST

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/promising-clinical-trials-in-alzheimers-p
revention/

Jake Heinrichs is an electrician who carries one of the early-onset genes. The disease claimed his grandmother, uncle, father and brother, all within the same age range. "Symptoms in the 40s and, and dying in 50s," he said.

For Heinrichs growing up, the word Alzheimer's was "a death sentence."

He started getting treatment in Bateman's study in 2013. Though he's definitely getting an antibody called lecanemab now, for the first seven years, he did not know if he was receiving an antibody or placebo. "I was at an age where I should have been showing signs," Heinrichs said, "and I am now at an age that I should probably not even be alive."

His wife, Rachel Chavkin, says over the past three years, he will occasionally repeat a question, but otherwise has shown no cognitive decline since she fell in love with him twenty years ago. "Jake is now 51, which is the age that his father was when he died," she said.

The Trump administration's budget cuts have stopped or delayed millions of dollars in Alzheimer's research. The situation has already had an impact on Bateman's trials. "It's a precarious time," he said. "Research is not like building a building or painting a wall where you can start and then stop for a few years and then go back and resume what you were doing. It's much more like feeding a baby … if you stop doing that for a few weeks, it's irrecoverable."

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 2:43 PM

Fuck off, Second.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 3:08 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The first clinical trials were funded by the two pharmas, Eisai and Biogen, that first produced lecanemab, a monoclonal antibody. (Any treatment ending in "mab" is a Monoclonal AntiBody.)

FDA approved lecanemab in 2023.

Heinrichs is no longer in a clinical trial, he's being treated with an FDA-approved medicine.

Don't you like the way CBS news twisted their reporting?

Quote:
We started getting treatment in Bateman's study in 2013. Though he's definitely getting an antibody called lecanemab now, for the first seven years, he did not know if he was receiving an antibody or placebo. "I was at an age where I should have been showing signs," Heinrichs said, "and I am now at an age that I should probably not even be alive."

His wife is Broadway director Rachel Chavkin. She says over the past three years, he will occasionally repeat a question, but otherwise has shown no cognitive decline since she fell in love with him twenty years ago. "Jake is now 51, which is the age that his father was when he died," she said.

The Trump administration's budget cuts have stopped or delayed millions of dollars in Alzheimer's research. The situation has already had an impact on Bateman's trials.

But not on Heinrich's treatment

Quote:
"It's a precarious time," he said. "Research is not like building a building or painting a wall where you can start and then stop for a few years and then go back and resume what you were doing. It's much more like feeding a baby … if you stop doing that for a few weeks, it's irrecoverable."

The NIH IS funding research on leqanemab, but it's on people in different stages and with garden-variety Alzheimer's.

-----------

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 4:31 PM

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

We have vast records dating back to at least the 90's on most of this stuff now.

Even in that time, Trump is far from the least popular President in history.

You're just saying stupid shit, and that's because you read stupid shit.
6ix and Trumptards in general need a bullet in the back of their heads to fix what is wrong with them:

Any other platform in the world and Second would have been gone a long time ago.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 6:29 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

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

We have vast records dating back to at least the 90's on most of this stuff now.

Even in that time, Trump is far from the least popular President in history.

You're just saying stupid shit, and that's because you read stupid shit.
6ix and Trumptards in general need a bullet in the back of their heads to fix what is wrong with them:

Any other platform in the world and Second would have been gone a long time ago.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

No kidding.
He must be feeling extra butt-hurt today. Did you see his response to me?
Maybe he's been slipping cogs lately and is desperate for Alzheimer's research.
Maybe he's upset by Ukraine's defeat in Pokrovsk.
Maybe he lost $$$ on a bad investment.

Hey SECOND, I have an idea: If you're that concerned about Alzheimer's research, why don't you take that fabulous wealth of yours and kick some in? Yanno, follow Gates' example?

-----------

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 7:14 PM

Yeah. I saw his response to you... Now adding Rape to his Murder fantasies...

That was what prompted me to tell him to fuck off again.

Personally, I think he's drinking now.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 11:36 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Trump Urges GOP To Redirect "Democrat-Supported Insurance" Funds Directly To The American People

On Friday, the president posted on X that the insurance-industrial complex, aligned with the Democrats, has seen stock gains soar between 400% and nearly 1,200% since Obamacare was introduced. Meanwhile, the promise of lower healthcare costs under the ACA turned out to be an illusion, as Democrats pushed toward socialized healthcare while serving corporate interests first, not working-class families.

-----------

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

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Sunday, November 9, 2025 11:53 PM

It's exactly what happened when car insurance was mandated, and especially after technology got to the point that the government could easily deny you the sale of your yearly car registration if you couldn't prove you had insurance. Prices went through the roof and have continued to balloon out of control. You know all about that being in the first state where many of the homeowners insurance companies closed shop because it's just simply too expensive to insure people in California anymore.

I've said it 100 times before. Prices for healthcare would never have gotten anywhere near as high as they have if insurance was never a factor. You can simply look to how "relatively" cheap it is to go get glasses or have your teeth worked on compared to anything that takes place in a hospital and/or doctor's office. In most cases, Dentists and Optometrists have to charge what people can afford.

Government and Insurance cannot co-exist.

If the Government is going to ever fix healthcare, the only way for it to do that is to make major sweeping laws banning insurance and forcing hospitals and drug companies to charge reasonable rates for their goods and services. Short of that, the only way they're going to do it is if Government completely absorbs and takes over healthcare. But I sure as shit don't trust them to do it any better than it's being done now.

I hate to sound like a fucking communist, but when it comes to healthcare there shouldn't be trillionaire companies and billionaire CEOs. There shouldn't be any fucking profit in it except for money going back into R&D, and a reasonable salary being paid to the people doing the actual work.

And don't give me any of that bullshit about nobody would do that work without a profit motive. Of course the researchers and developers would be getting paid a reasonable wage for their work. But on top of that, they LOVE doing this work. A lot of them hung around college a lot longer than they needed to so they could continue to do this kind of work with the college grant backing while still eating Ramen noodles on their stipend.

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 12:03 AM

And really, at the end of the day, the entire stock market is what really needs to go.

That's what sucked all of the wealth out of the working man.

If you want to know why half the country can't find 40hr per week jobs with health insurance, it's because the money they should be getting paid is getting paid out to investors who aren't doing fuck all instead.

And they give all of you juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust enough of a taste where you all have a vested interest in seeing those numbers grow as your wallet grows threadbare. All for promises of a future that very well might not work out the way the "experts" have predicted your retirement would go if you did the right thing.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But it's not as if seniors haven't been worried about their retirement funds in retirement for going on 20 years now. Yeah... We've had some good times and things have more or less worked out so far for anybody who didn't panic sell in the bad times and screw themselves, but with $38 Trillion in debt and things getting worse economically every presidential cycle that passes, why should anybody in their mid-40's believe that all the money they put in a 401k is going to be worth anything in 20 years?

In my mind, the 401k is just another tool they use to instill fear and manipulate behavior on a mass scale.

To the young who could afford it but would have to make a choice, buy the house. Don't put off buying a house so you can fund your 401k. If some international travesty occurs in the future where the USD gets undermined by a foreign currency or a digital currency, the house and the land under it are going to be worth something tangible when those old US notes you're banking online might not buy you toilet paper.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 7:53 AM

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

Why didn't Trump do this mass pardon in January? What next? Pardons for Ghislaine Maxwell when the time is right? Pardons for Prince Andrew and pedophiles in general? Pardons for all wealthy tax cheaters? Charles Kushner, the father of Ivanka Trump's husband Jared Kushner, was pardoned by Donald Trump in December 2020. He had pleaded guilty to charges including tax evasion and making illegal campaign donations. Kushner is now the ambassador to France because why not make a criminal an ambassador?

GRANTING PARDONS FOR CERTAIN OFFENSES RELATED TO THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA A PROCLAMATION

This proclamation ends a grave national injustice perpetrated upon the American people following the 2020 Presidential Election and continues the process of national reconciliation.

Acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, do hereby grant a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all United States citizens for conduct relating to the advice, creation, organization, execution, submission, support, voting, activities, participation in, or advocacy for or of any slate or proposed slate of Presidential electors, whether or not recognized by any State or State official, in connection with the 2020 Presidential Election, as well for any conduct relating to their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Mark Amick
• Kathy Berden
• Christina Bobb
• Tyler Bowyer
• Joseph Brannan
• Carol Brunner
• Mary Buestrin
• Darryl Carlson
• James "Ken" Carroll
• Brad Carver
• Robert Cheeley
• Kenneth Chesebro
• Hank Choate
• Jeffrey Clark
• Vikki Consiglio
• Nancy Cottle
• James DeGraffenreid
• John Downey
• John Eastman
• Jenna Ellis
• Boris Epshteyn
• Amy Facchinello
• Bill Feehan
• Carolyn Fisher
• Harrison Floyd
• Clifford Frost
• Kay Godwin
• Edward Scott Grabins
• Stanley Grot
• Rudolph Giuliani
• John Haggard
• Scott Hall
• Misty Hampton
• David G. Hanna
• Mark Hennessy
• Mari-Ann Henry
• Durward James Hindle III
• Andrew Hitt
• Jake Hoffman
• Burt Jones
• Anthony T. Kern
• Kathy Kiernen
• Timothy King
• Trevian Kutti
• James Lamon
• Cathleen Latham
• Jesse Law
• Stephen Lee
• Michele Lundgren
• Meshawn Maddock
• Michael McDonald
• Mark Meadows
• Shawn Meehan
• Robert Montgomery
• Daryl Moody
• Samuel I. Moorhead
• Loraine Pellegrino
• Sidney Powell
• James Renner
• Eileen Rice
• Mayra Rodriguez
• Mike Roman
• Rose Rook
• Kelly Ruh
• Greg Safsten
• David Shafer
• Marian Sheridan
• Ray Stallings Smith III
• Robert F. Spindell Jr.
• Shawn Still
• Ken Thompson
• Pam Travis
• James Troupis
• Kent Vanderwood
• Kelli Ward
• Michael Ward
• C.B. Yadav

This pardon does not apply to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
The Attorney General, acting through the Pardon Attorney, shall administer and effectuate the issuance of certificates of pardon to eligible applicants.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this seventh day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

9:54 PM · Nov 9, 2025
https://x.com/EagleEdMartin/status/1987730498374828252

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 8:09 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:
It's exactly what happened when car insurance was mandated, and especially after technology got to the point that the government could easily deny you the sale of your yearly car registration if you couldn't prove you had insurance. Prices went through the roof and have continued to balloon out of control. You know all about that being in the first state where many of the homeowners insurance companies closed shop because it's just simply too expensive to insure people in California anymore.

Trumptards find the concept of setting things right with insurance after doing wrong (in a car accident for example) as anathema. Trumptards also don't understand the concept of unacceptable risk. Building wooden houses in a forest doesn't seem like a fire risk to them. Building on a steep slope in an earthquake zone doesn't seem like a building collapse risk to Trumptard, but insurance companies see that those unacknowledged risks will bankrupt the insurance company.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 8:43 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:
Yeah. I saw his response to you... Now adding Rape to his Murder fantasies...

That was what prompted me to tell him to fuck off again.

Personally, I think he's drinking now.

It never crosses the mind of Russians or people like Signym and Trump that they are completely fucked up in the head. When Russian soldiers get shot by Ukrainians, for example, the Russian population blames Ukrainians for being easily offended rather than Russians realizing the soldiers deserved to be killed for what they are doing, saying, acting, and being. It is like in the movie Noah, where none of the evil people were even slightly aware that they were fucked up in the head and God would drown them without asking permission from the evil people for killing them. The evil people had used up all of God's infinite patience and understanding, leaving nothing but the Wrath of God, which the evil people in the movie found completely incomprehensible. The attitude of evil people is: "What? Me do something wrong? It's not me, it's God did something wrong to me." Evil people never understand why they deserve to die, whether in Noah's Flood or in America or Russia. That inability to see what a crazy asshole Trump is explains why Trumptards act the way they do and suffer for it the way Trump never will because he is rich.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 8:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. I saw his response to you... Now adding Rape to his Murder fantasies...

That was what prompted me to tell him to fuck off again.

Personally, I think he's drinking now.
It never crosses the mind of Russians or people like Signym and Trump that they are completely fucked up in the head.

Don't forget me!

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 8:53 AM

Yanno... the most offensive part of your stupidity, Second, is how you take every single person you've ever had a disagreement with and threw them all in a trash bin called "Trumptard". Every one of them are all the same to you.

I know that Democrat voters vote Democrat for an extremely wide variety of reasons. They're all buying one lie or another.

It's not any of those at the bottom that I begrudge. Those that believe they're better off voting the way they do when their back is always against the wall and they can't save a nickle. They vote Democrat out of desperation, ignorance of the issues, and a high propensity to buy somebody's bullshit because of how bad they've got it.

It's you rich and rich wannabe liberal white people I've got a problem with. The ones running the shit. The cult recruiters and the cult leaders that are always getting the desperate to vote against their own long-term self-interests for short-term gains.

Ya'all can go fuck yourselves.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 9:32 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. I saw his response to you... Now adding Rape to his Murder fantasies...

That was what prompted me to tell him to fuck off again.

Personally, I think he's drinking now.
It never crosses the mind of Russians or people like Signym and Trump that they are completely fucked up in the head. When Russian soldiers get shot by Ukrainians, for example, the Russian population blames Ukrainians for being easily offended rather than Russians realizing the soldiers deserved to be killed for what they are doing, saying, acting, and being. It is like in the movie Noah, where none of the evil people were even slightly aware that they were fucked up in the head and God would drown them without asking permission from the evil people for killing them. The evil people had used up all of God's infinite patience and understanding, leaving nothing but the Wrath of God, which the evil people in the movie found completely incomprehensible. The attitude of evil people is: "What? Me do something wrong? It's not me, it's God did something wrong to me." Evil people never understand why they deserve to die, whether in Noah's Flood or in America or Russia. That inability to see what a crazy asshole Trump is explains why Trumptards act the way they do and suffer for it the way Trump never will because he is rich.

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

SECOND, you're making even less sense than usual.
You posted something about using up God's infinite patience.
BUT If patience was infinite, it couldn't be used up, could it?

Something has seriously gone wrong in your world.
Did you get bad news from your doctor?
That WOULD put kink in your plan to live forever, wouldn't it?

-----------

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 4:40 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:
Yanno... the most offensive part of your stupidity, Second, is how you take every single person you've ever had a disagreement with and threw them all in a trash bin called "Trumptard". Every one of them are all the same to you.

I know that Democrat voters vote Democrat for an extremely wide variety of reasons. They're all buying one lie or another.

It's not any of those at the bottom that I begrudge. Those that believe they're better off voting the way they do when their back is always against the wall and they can't save a nickle. They vote Democrat out of desperation, ignorance of the issues, and a high propensity to buy somebody's bullshit because of how bad they've got it.

It's you rich and rich wannabe liberal white people I've got a problem with. The ones running the shit. The cult recruiters and the cult leaders that are always getting the desperate to vote against their own long-term self-interests for short-term gains.

Ya'all can go fuck yourselves.

My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".

On the other hand, every fucking Trumptard I have gotten downwind from smells like they are not human. The stink of decay and evil surrounds all the Trumptards that I have gotten close enough to catch their rotten scent. My opinion about Trumptards is not shared by any Democrats I know. Democrats still think, despite all evidence accumulated over decades, that evil people can be persuaded with words to behave better. I don't think Trumptards get better; they only get rottener with time, like unrefrigerated meat.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 4:51 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND, you're making even less sense than usual.
You posted something about using up God's infinite patience.
BUT If patience was infinite, it couldn't be used up, could it?

Something has seriously gone wrong in your world.
Did you get bad news from your doctor?
That WOULD put kink in your plan to live forever, wouldn't it?

-----------

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

Signym, you support Russia. Your signature means the opposite of what Kissinger meant because you clipped out words. There is nothing I hate more than a goddamn lying sack of shit like you who makes fake facts, and can't or won't understand their own lies. Signym, you have never understood what is wrong with your signature. Never, because you are completely fucked up in the head, from the very first time I read anything you wrote. You ooze fuckedup-ness.

Henry Kissinger did use a version of the phrase, but it was a specific internal warning taken out of context, not a general public statement of his own opinion. The full quote, from a private phone call to William F. Buckley Jr. in November 1968, before Nixon's inauguration, was:
"Word should be gotten to Nixon that if [South Vietnamese President] Thieu meets the same fate as [his predecessor] Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

Context and Meaning:

Kissinger was warning against abandoning allies, not stating his belief that being a U.S. friend was inherently a bad idea.

He argued that the U.S. needed to protect its allies (specifically Thieu) to maintain its international credibility and prevent the perception that aligning with America led to ruin.

The widely circulated, truncated version of the quote "To be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal" reverses his original intent.

So, while he said the words, they were part of a conditional statement about the perception of U.S. reliability, and not the definitive, cynical epigram it is often portrayed as.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 4:53 PM

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

Trump is pushing us toward a financial crash. It could be 1929 all over again

By William A. Birdthistle | November 9, 2025

https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/11/09/trump-is-pushing-us-toward
-a-financial-crash-it-could-be-1929-all-over-again/

President Trump’s Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, set to the theme of “The Great Gatsby,” re-enacted the decadence of that story’s licentious era: befeathered flappers shimmying in the crowd; gilded and onyx décor; scantily clad women posing in an enormous champagne coupe. The revelatory moment says so much about where we stand today — and what we could be lurching into next.

Published a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” captured the culture of an overheated economy on the brink of demise. Just as Jay Gatsby fell from the height of fortune to an ignominious death, the 1920s roared with financial overindulgence until the markets drowned in the Wall Street crash of 1929. The Great Depression followed, and the consequences for the global economy proved calamitous.

Today we find ourselves again dancing toward new highs in the stock market. Speculative money is once more pouring into risky investment schemes, with staggering sums of money being thrown at artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. But rather than heed a century of hard-won lessons, the Trump administration’s financial regulators are embracing dissolute policies to keep the punch flowing.

The financial excesses of 100 years ago teach us how high the costs of negligent oversight of our markets can be. When sentinels sleep, fraudsters flourish; their frenzied celebration of unreal profits pumps froth into the market; ultimately, with panic and pain, bubbles will burst. As stages of that cycle are recurring, we must decide whether to intervene now — or to mop up the mess later.

The parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s are numerous — and ominous. The 1920s economy boomed while America recovered from a deadly pandemic, the flu of 1918. Americans used installment plans — the precursor to today’s ubiquitous “buy now, pay later” plans at online checkouts — to spend liberally on consumer products, and they poured money into speculative new investments. Automobile and telephone stocks were the high-flying tech investments of their day; Tesla and Apple are two of ours.

The prevailing interest rate was around 5 percent, as it is today. And as with today, masses of Americans took advantage of easy credit and ubiquitous stock brokerages to speculate in finance. In 1929, a New York Times editor quoted a major newspaper’s financial expert who said that the “huge army that daily gambles in the stock market” had come to include, in the editor’s words, “the woman nonprofessional speculator,” whose share of market trading grew by one estimate from less than 2 percent to 35 percent. That influx of buying from 1919 to 1929 drove the stock market up more than sixfold over the decade — a growth rate our market has actually surpassed over the past three years.

Nick Carraway, the narrator of “The Great Gatsby,” was a bond salesman. Today he might work for a crypto exchange or Robinhood, the popular app that allows neophytes to bet on financial options like a game on their smartphones. Robinhood makes a good deal of money from the interest its users pay to borrow money to buy yet more investments. Investing on margin, as this practice is known, was a major source of the surge that drove markets to perilous heights in the 1920s. And when stocks began to fall, margin calls — the demands for loans to be repaid by selling the stocks, if necessary — were a major accelerant of the crash.

In the ’20s, America did not have any federal securities regulators, offering irresistible temptations to charlatans.

It was the era of Charles Ponzi, whose last name became synonymous with the classic pyramid scheme in which outlandish returns are delivered only by pilfering the funds of new investors. Today’s analogous innovation is the cryptocurrency “rug pull,” in which investors are lured by stories of stratospheric returns on new tokens, only to be left with little or nothing when the promoters disappear with the assets.

Without federal rules to force financial advisers to disclose essential facts about their offerings, they could easily dupe mom-and-pop investors into buying worthless investments at inflated prices. Another racket involved advisers buying a stock, directing their fund to invest in it and profiting from its rise in price. A rising tide lifted even the least seaworthy financial tubs.

Ultimately, the unsustainable cannot be sustained. Between 1929 and 1932, the stock market dropped 77 percent, and the global economy staggered into the Great Depression while unemployment and malnutrition spiked. In 1932, suicide rates soared to their highest in recorded history.

Financial failure on such a massive scale taught America important lessons, including the need for prudent regulation. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who swept into the presidency with 472 of 531 electoral votes and a mandate to launch his New Deal, signed waves of legislation to restore confidence in the American financial system, including the securities laws that created federal rules and an agency — the Securities and Exchange Commission — dedicated to their enforcement.

The chief mandate of those rules was to ensure that anyone soliciting investment from the public told the world about their operations — and was held responsible if they omitted crucial information or materially misstated the facts. Any companies that chose not to release such information would have to limit their pitch to small numbers of investors or to sophisticated investors who could fend for themselves. This policy has worked spectacularly well for decades, pulling America’s capital markets out of the smoldering ruins of devastation to become the largest, deepest and most efficient in the world.

Four years ago, the economist Robert Shiller expressed concern about the stock market’s lofty heights, but he concluded that there was “no particular reason” to expect a market collapse “as bad as the 1929 crash” because “the government and the Fed have shown themselves to be far more adept in staving off prolonged recessions than their predecessors.” Today, with the S&P 500 over 60 percent higher than it was the day Mr. Shiller issued his warning, we should be heeding the words of the former Federal Reserve chairman William McChesney Martin, who warned that market stewards must be willing to serve as the “chaperone” who can order “the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”

Mr. Trump has been ordering the chaperones removed. Since January, his administration has been firing regulators and vigorously tearing down the guardrails that have kept our markets thriving for nine decades.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 7:04 PM

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

Trump Admin Signals It May Not Pay Furloughed Workers After Shutdown Ends

A 2019 statute signed into law by Trump himself requires furloughed workers to be compensated when shutdowns end.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-admin-signals-it-may-not-pay-furlo
ughed-workers-after-shutdown-ends/

But today Trump has a very contradictory understanding of the law he signed because he is a fucking evil dumb ass who cannot read a pretty simple law correctly. But isn’t that typical of all Trumptards? Accuracy about simple ideas is far beyond them, and yet they inevitably pretend to understand what they actually don’t. It is not surprising how much trouble that trait will constantly cause for ordinary Trumptards. Nor is it surprising how stubborn Trumptards are about not correcting their misconceptions:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
All Air Traffic Controllers must get back to work, NOW!!! Anyone who doesn't will be substantially "docked." For those Air Traffic Controllers who were GREAT PATRIOTS, and didn't take ANY TIME OFF for the "Democrat Shutdown Hoax," I will be recommending a BONUS of $10,000 per person for distinguished service to our Country. For those that did nothing but complain, and took time off, even though everyone knew they would be paid, IN FULL, shortly into the future, I am NOT HAPPY WITH YOU. You didn't step up to help the U.S.A, against the FAKE DEMOCRAT ATTACK that was only meant to hurt our Country. You will have a negative mark, at least in my mind, against your record. If you want to leave service in the near future, please do not hesitate to do so, with NO payment or severance of any kind! You will be quickly replaced by true Patriots, who will do a better job on the Brand New State of the Art Equipment, the best in the World, that we are in the process of ordering. The last "Administration" wasted Billions of Dollars trying to fix antiquated "junk." They had no idea what they were doing! Again, to our great American Patriots, GOD BLESS YOU - I won't be able to send your money fast enough! To all others, REPORT TO WORK IMMEDIATELY. GOD BLESS AMERICA! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
Nov 10, 2025, 9:32 AM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115526123205979749

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 7:23 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Today we find ourselves again dancing toward new highs in the stock market. Speculative money is once more pouring into risky investment schemes, with staggering sums of money being thrown at artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. But rather than heed a century of hard-won lessons, the Trump administration’s financial regulators are embracing dissolute policies to keep the punch flowing.

The invisible tottering tower, bigger than the stock markets (altho those are scary enough) is the hedge fund tower, which is AFAIK completely unregulated. Both ends of a hedge are bought on money borrowed from investment banks. As long as both ends of a hedge don't collapse, all is well. But if one does something unexpected, then all of that borrowed money comes due and the speculator has to liquidate catastrophically.

The stock market itself is based on borrowed money. There has been chart after chart showing the parallel between the stock markets and the Fed's various stock market props like quantitative easing. It's a little known fact that, aside from lending money to various nonbank lenders, businesses, institutions, homeowners, and hedge funds, banks buy stocks and lend money to stock market speculators.

Crypto is just IMHO essentially another value-less house of cards.

There is one more potential cause of collapse and that's the huge, and growing, wealth gap. That causes many people to take on too much debt. Any loan... auto, home, credit card, etc. ... based on impoverished people's ability to pay risks another collapse.

But most of these debts sooner or later run thru our banking system one way or another.

Government (public) debt PALES in comparison to the level of FINANCIAL debt, which is mostly unregulated. As long as the government can't, or doesn't, control the amount of debt being piled up to drive hedge funds, stock prices, and crypto to the moon, we will always risk repeated collapses.

The only way I can think of to prevent this is to require much MUCH higher bank reserves, to regulate nonbank lenders, and to once again separate investment from retail banks to limit the contagion of bank failures once they occur.

-----------

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 7:56 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yanno... the most offensive part of your stupidity, Second, is how you take every single person you've ever had a disagreement with and threw them all in a trash bin called "Trumptard". Every one of them are all the same to you.

I know that Democrat voters vote Democrat for an extremely wide variety of reasons. They're all buying one lie or another.

It's not any of those at the bottom that I begrudge. Those that believe they're better off voting the way they do when their back is always against the wall and they can't save a nickle. They vote Democrat out of desperation, ignorance of the issues, and a high propensity to buy somebody's bullshit because of how bad they've got it.

It's you rich and rich wannabe liberal white people I've got a problem with. The ones running the shit. The cult recruiters and the cult leaders that are always getting the desperate to vote against their own long-term self-interests for short-term gains.

Ya'all can go fuck yourselves.
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".

On the other hand, every fucking Trumptard I have gotten downwind from smells like they are not human. The stink of decay and evil surrounds all the Trumptards that I have gotten close enough to catch their rotten scent. My opinion about Trumptards is not shared by any Democrats I know. Democrats still think, despite all evidence accumulated over decades, that evil people can be persuaded with words to behave better. I don't think Trumptards get better; they only get rottener with time, like unrefrigerated meat.

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

You are a sick individual. Get some help.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 7:59 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump Admin Signals It May Not Pay Furloughed Workers After Shutdown Ends

A 2019 statute signed into law by Trump himself requires furloughed workers to be compensated when shutdowns end.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-admin-signals-it-may-not-pay-furlo
ughed-workers-after-shutdown-ends/

But today Trump has a very contradictory understanding of the law he signed because he is a fucking evil dumb ass who cannot read a pretty simple law correctly. But isn’t that typical of all Trumptards? Accuracy about simple ideas is far beyond them, and yet they inevitably pretend to understand what they actually don’t. It is not surprising how much trouble that trait will constantly cause for ordinary Trumptards. Nor is it surprising how stubborn Trumptards are about not correcting their misconceptions:

You keep saying shit like this, but you're the loser who's losing every day, loser.

Cry some fucking more, you whiny little bitch.

You and your dozen TDS articles for over 7,000 days straight.

Go fuck yourself, idiot.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 8:57 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:

You are a sick individual. Get some help.

6ix, follow your uncle's example and botch your own suicide attempt. You also told us about your loony mother. You got really excited when the Joker in the movie Joker smothered his own mother with a pillow while she was hospitalized.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=63473&mid=11086
72#1108672 Very apropos entertainment for a little Nazi like yourself with a family where mental illness runs deep. It is your tradition, along with racism, alcoholism, smoking, drug use, sex crimes, tax cheating, and unemployment. You are an exemplary Trumptard. You should be made famous. Meanwhile, and I do mean mean:

Memorial to Black US Soldiers Who Died in WW2 Quietly Removed

Nov 10, 2025 at 10:22 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/memorial-to-black-us-soldiers-who-died-in-ww2
-quietly-removed-11020241

The White House, under President Donald Trump, has removed references to Blacks in the U.S. military.

The panel provided information on the "strict policy of segregation" in the U.S. military during World War II and the journey of many soldiers into postwar civil rights movements. The U.S. military officially desegregated in 1948.

What's next for Trump? Maybe closing the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, a memorial to commemorate the black victims of lynching? What would be Trump’s likely justification? This memorial only includes blacks who were lynched, making it completely unfair to whites. I could imagine Congressional Democrats saying that Trump has a valid criticism rather than telling him that Trump will be lynched if he closes the Memorial and then Trump’s name will be added to those who are memorialized. That is equal opportunity for whites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Memorial_for_Peace_and_Justice

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 10:06 PM

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

November 10, 2025

Over and over, Trump claimed overall prices have fallen since he returned to office in late January.

“Every price is down,” he said Thursday. “Everything is way down,” he said at another Thursday event. “Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially,” he said Friday, adding, “Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down.”

None of that is true.

Specifics at https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/10/politics/inflation-trump-fact-check

Not that Trumptards care about specifics, but this one is special because I signed a 5-year contract at $0.093/kWh with MP Energy, which begat Shell Energy, which begat Discount Power, which decided to gouge the hell out of new customers because Trump is now President. Lucky me! I missed all that!

Trump claimed Friday: “Energy prices are way down from what they were last year.”

But the Consumer Price Index shows that household energy prices are up substantially over the last year – 6.2% higher in September 2025 than they were in September 2024.

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

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Monday, November 10, 2025 10:29 PM

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

You are a sick individual. Get some help.
6ix, follow your uncle's example and botch your own suicide attempt.

Gross.

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

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 10, 2025 11:48 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
SECOND:
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".

Which is funny bc I've been a registered Democrat almost as long as I've been voting.

IDK why you blew your stack at me all of a sudden. It was right after I responded to your article about Alzheimer's. Must be personal for you.
Very personal.

----------

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

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Tuesday, November 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 SIGNYM:
Quote:
SECOND:
My "values" don't closely match the Democratic party. For example, I am for guns and for the death penalty, but those are not widely held valuable beliefs among the Democrats, and yet I have never in my life felt, known, detected, seen anything that strikes me as crazy, sick, mentally defective, evil, or poisonous about any Democrat. There are some silly Democrats, but nothing about them is seriously objectionable. I never get the feeling that a Democrat even needs to be yelled at or punched in the face, and certainly never that America is being harmed by a Democrat who doesn't share my so-called "values".

Which is funny bc I've been a registered Democrat almost as long as I've been voting.

IDK why you blew your stack at me all of a sudden. It was right after I responded to your article about Alzheimer's. Must be personal for you.
Very personal.

----------

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

Signym and 6ix, you remind me of peeling paint. I got off the road last week and stopped the car near some natural gas processing equipment to get a closer look. One piece was peeling because there was no primer under the top coat of paint. The other was peeling because the paint was sprayed on rusty metal that should have been sandblasted and primed. Then I opened the door to get a closer look. There was lubricating oil dripping from gearboxes. When I walked to the other side, downwind from where I had been, I could smell hydrogen sulfide gas. It is poison. Signym and 6ix, you are poison. What you two write is the peeling paint, but there is far more wrong with you than what you write, your surface appearance. You should be shut down, as should Putin and Trump, the two biggest and most poisonous gas-emitting sources in the world.

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

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025 6:39 AM

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

How the Supreme Court Exposed the Most Obvious Hidden Truth About Trump’s Tariffs

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | Nov 10, 2025 2:44 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/11/supreme-court-truth-trump-
tariffs-equals-taxes.html

Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that were put in place to punish foreign countries running a trade deficit against the United States, against China and Mexico for alleged fentanyl smuggling, and against Canada just for being Canada.

The consolidated cases, Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. VOS Selections, challenge Trump’s claim that he has the power to issue tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, which permits the president to regulate transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or national thereof has any interest, in order to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat.

On this week’s Amicus podcast, co-hosts Mark Joseph Stern and Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Marc Busch, the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He’s an expert on international trade policy and law, and he signed on to an amicus brief on behalf of trade scholars explaining the history and context of the IEEPA. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1287/381040/2025102916200
0869_25-250%20Amici%20Brief.pdf

Dahlia Lithwick: These arguments were, in some sense, a very granular and fact-based parsing of statutory language. But they also played out at the highest level of questions about separation of powers and delegation. It doesn’t often happen that you have such a profound split-screen where you are seeing both micro-analysis of the verbs in IEEPA and at the same time profound questions about the limits of presidential power.

Marc Busch: Yes, but there was also no open, honest discussion about how absurd all of this is from an economics perspective. There was no discussion of that, with the exception of Neal Katyal mentioning that the U.S. has been running a trade deficit in goods since the 1970s, and they’re not persistent in a bad sense; they’re persistent in the sense that goods don’t reflect our comparative advantage. The government tried to cut services out of the calculation on Liberation Day when in fact, like all rich countries, we are a services economy. And that’s really hard to square with what is at stake, and leads us back to the macro perspective.

This case is so much bigger than trade. This is a separation of powers case, and it deserves to be taken very seriously precisely because of that. But there are some basics in economics that would have shed more light on what a power grab this is with respect to wanting a means of raising revenue.

As the plaintiffs pointed out, the DOJ’s submission was in fact the worst possible foot forward, inasmuch as we’ve been hearing since Liberation Day that these tariffs are a tax grab. We’ve heard they’re raising some crazy number of billions of dollars. We’ve heard that maybe we should have an external revenue agency. We’ve heard that maybe these can replace income taxes in the United States. Every deal has led to the president boasting about the haul of revenue he’s getting through tax collection. And that landed them in a morass, going out on a limb with respect to “regulatory” versus “revenue-raising” tariffs, and with the micro largely overshadowing the macro in a way that might have surprised many who listened in.

Mark Joseph Stern: It was so interesting, because a lot of economists who weighed in on this case, including you, through amicus brief, all made the same point, which is Econ 101: that a trade deficit is exactly matched by a country’s net capital inflow. So what the government is calling a deficit could also be described as a foreign investment surplus. It is a surplus that has existed for more than half a century, as Neal Katyal kept saying over and over again. The truth is that it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just the reality of a wealthy nation that buys more from overseas than it sells. There’s nothing about it that is a crisis, let alone a threat or an emergency. The justices didn’t really grapple with that.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1287/380468/2025102410370
3664_24-1287%2025-250%20ac%20Economists.pdf

Marc Busch: That’s right. Part of the frustration with the amicus brief is that we couldn’t do that either.

I got a Nobel laureate economist to sign off on our amicus brief, Joe Stiglitz, and his first email back to me was, Why stop there? Let’s tell them this doesn’t make any economic sense. Why aren’t you talking about the Constitution? A number of economists who signed our amicus brief begged for more because of the absurdity of the underlying economic logic.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1287/381040/2025102916200
0869_25-250%20Amici%20Brief.pdf

The one thing I haven’t heard in the media played up nearly enough was the logical conclusion of Solicitor General John Sauer’s argument. He said in defense of his spin that this is a foreign-facing tariff, not a revenue-generating tariff, that in the president’s ideal state of the world, there is no revenue collected. Why? Because every business has moved to the United States and is sourcing and doing everything domestically such that the tariff wall is irrelevant and not a revenue-raising mechanism.

Do you realize what that means? That is autarky, and I have to say again, Economics 101. That’s why you’ve never heard the president give a press conference or a speech about what his strategy is with respect to these tariffs, because that is the logical conclusion that Sauer laid out, and no American would vote for that.

The tariffs are not popular. Polls show that 60 to 70 percent of Americans are against them, but I could not believe that Sauer said that. I get logically why he had to concede it, but I wish more in the media would pick up on the fact that he did utter that, and that should be one of the scariest things coming out of this litigation.

Mark Joseph Stern: I think that at least some of the justices realized that, at bottom, these are taxes on American consumers. Did that hearten you at all? Did it make you feel like some of these guys are smart enough to understand that this whole smokescreen is obscuring the reality that the president is simply imposing a tax regime unilaterally on Americans?

Marc Busch: I was elated to hear that line of questioning, perhaps best articulated by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. What a relief to hear them utter that line: “Tariffs are taxes.” In that regard, one of my favorite briefs submitted by anyone about how we pay the tariffs was by the Watch Association, representing those who both make and repair watches, both here and abroad, and they said: We pay the tariffs as a group. You could almost feel their plea, inasmuch as they didn’t engage with the law nearly as much as the other briefs, they just wanted to make that simple point, which Katyal opened with, and which several of the justices then echoed their attacks—there’s no mystery. And while Sauer wanted us to believe that the pass-through rate isn’t 100 percent, and he came up with this far-fetched notion that maybe 70 percent of the tariff is eaten by foreign exporters, which is absurd, the evidence we have both under Trump 1.0 and 2.0 to date is that the pass-through rate is about 80 percent to Americans, maybe 20 percent pricing to market by exporters abroad.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-1287/380530/2025102413364
9660_Tarrifs%20Amicus%20Document%20E%20FILE.pdf

There’s no way to misunderstand these as anything other than what they are, which is as a tax that disproportionately hurts American manufacturers. You have to keep in mind about half of what the U.S. imports includes intermediate inputs, which are then used for production, including to export. So this manufacturing renaissance that the administration likes to dangle in front of us is far-fetched because we’re handicapping precisely those that we wish to champion.

Dahlia Lithwick: It’s such an interesting problem because we talk all the time about the moments in which the justices substitute their own knowledge for what’s in the briefs and the submissions, or what’s on the record about science, about climate change, about epidemiology, and the justice’s freelance substitutions are so often wrong. You’re saying this was a situation where just having some rudimentary sense of who pays tariffs and how they work was an actual bonus because it got to pierce through what Sauer was saying. We don’t often laud the justices for knowing that which is knowable, but they don’t always find it out. They at least took the time to figure out the stakes of this case.

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

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025 7:04 AM

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

Republicans Are Damaged by Their Own Cruelty

They’re pathologically unwilling to help Americans in need — and Democrats should hammer this home

By Paul Krugman | Nov 11, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/republicans-are-damaged-by-their

Like almost all progressives, I was infuriated and disheartened by Senate Democrats’ cave on the shutdown Sunday. The party won stunning election victories Tuesday — and its leaders responded with yet another preemptive surrender? (Chuck Schumer may have voted no, but he didn’t manage, and may not even have tried, to prevent defections.)

Yet while the immediate politics displayed Democratic tactical weakness, the larger story highlighted a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty. They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power.

Consider the grounds on which the shutdown fight took place. Democrats made it about the enhanced subsidies that have kept premiums for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act fairly reasonable for millions of Americans — Americans who are now facing huge premium hikes that will create intense financial distress and force many to go uninsured.

Before the big cave, Democrats proposed a deal in which they would provide the votes to reopen the government in return for a one-year extension of those enhanced benefits. Republicans should have jumped at this deal. It’s true that Republicans are determined to destroy much of the social safety net. The One Big Beautiful Bill will impose savage cuts in Medicaid and food stamps. But these big cuts are set to happen after the midterm elections.

Drastically increasing health care costs at the beginning of 2026, causing millions to lose insurance, certainly looks like a massive political blunder. My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works.

And polling suggests overwhelming public support for extending the enhanced subsidies: 74 percent overall, including half of Republicans.

So Republicans should have been eager for a chance to postpone the pain. Instead, by rejecting Democratic proposals, Republicans have placed the onus for soaring premiums squarely on themselves.

But the thought of doing something decent, even cynically and temporarily, doesn’t seem to have crossed Republican minds. John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, immediately declared the proposed deal a “nonstarter,” insisting that his party would only negotiate about healthcare after the government is reopened — which everyone understands means that Republicans will agree to nothing.

Why reject a deal that could have protected Republicans from their own mistakes? Part of the answer is sheer ignorance. Here was Trump’s response:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare. Unrelated, we must still terminate the Filibuster!
Nov 08, 2025, 9:04 AM

Substance aside, think about the idiocy of the timing here. The health insurance crisis is happening right now, as Americans open letters from their insurers and discover that they are facing huge increases — more than 100 percent on average, much more in many cases — in the cost of coverage beginning in just a few weeks. This is not exactly the time to propose immediately scrapping our existing health care system, replacing it with … something.

And a vague promise to deal with an immediate crisis by totally revamping healthcare is especially lacking in credibility coming from a man who has been promising, and failing, to deliver a superior alternative to Obamacare for around 9 years.

On the substance, Trump’s post makes it clear that after all this time he still has no idea how health care works. We’ve always known that he didn’t and doesn’t understand Obamacare, and why it’s hard to come up with a better system other than single-payer health insurance. But it’s now clear that he doesn’t even understand why healthcare relies on insurance, why we can’t pay medical expenses out of pocket. Hint: You never know if or when you’ll need extremely expensive treatment, but should the need arise, only the ultra-wealthy can come up with the necessary cash.

Oh, and it’s especially rich to see Trump take a break from boasting about his new gold-and-marble bathrooms to pretend to hate “money sucking Insurance Companies.”

Anyway, Trump’s vague ideas are, as Thune would say, a nonstarter. But why not punt, postponing the health affordability crisis by agreeing to a temporary extension of the ACA subsidies?

The answer, I believe, is that doing so would involve giving help to people who need it — and that’s something that, at a deep psychological level, MAGA can’t bring itself to do.

Health care isn’t the only area in which Trump and company’s cruelty and lack of compassion are becoming major political liabilities.

The Trump administration rushed to cut off SNAP (food stamps) as soon as the government shut down, even though there was money available to pay those benefits — and the administration both defied court orders to pay and tried to stop states from helping the hungry.

Going beyond government programs, most Americans are very unhappy about the state of the economy. They see high grocery prices and a very weak job market. Consumers’ assessment of the current state of the economy is worse now than it was at the peak of the 2021-22 inflation surge, or the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:

The rational thing for Trump to do would be to say “I feel your pain,” while blaming the previous administration and promising that things will get better soon. But he can’t even fake empathy. Instead, he keeps insisting that things are great, in particular that “groceries are way down.”

This is factually false. More important from a political point of view, it contradicts what people — even Republican partisans — are seeing in their own lives. Here’s what Americans think about grocery inflation, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/tablet/2025/10/30/oct-24-28-2025-washin
gton-post-abc-news-ipsos-poll/

Has there ever been a case in which “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” was an effective political strategy? Last Tuesday’s elections clearly showed that it isn’t working now. But Trump and his minions seem unable to try anything different.

Let me add that MAGA still seems to believe that scenes of masked ICE agents beating up women and senior citizens work to their political advantage. Either that, or they just can’t help themselves.

The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. They need to make sure both that Americans know who’s responsible for surging premiums now and that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to savage cuts in both Medicaid and food stamps after the midterms.

MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology.

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

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025 7:33 AM

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

Fictional Intelligence: Imagining Trump and the Future of (Nuclear) War

I’ve just watched “A House of Dynamite”, the new suspense movie where the US gets attacked by an ICBM, that has drawn criticism from the Pentagon. The movie has been subject to some controversy in the nuclear nerd community as well, especially regarding the likelihood of the scenario. I thought it was a great movie precisely because it didn’t choose a scenario that we would commonly think likely, but one that asks the important questions: What if our adversaries don’t act and react at all the way we expect them to? What if our systems fail in the critical moment and nothing works as exercised? What if the decision-maker on the very top makes the wrong decision? Sort of what Vladimir Putin should have asked himself before marching into Ukraine in February 2022.

Perhaps the most ridiculous criticism I read somewhere was along the lines “Nuclear war? At a time like this, with everything else going on in the US? Really?”. I have to say I couldn’t disagree more. It’s precisely because of everything else that is also going on in the US that American voters should ask themselves next time they get to choose a president: Is this a person I would like to entrust the nuclear codes to wreak global havoc to? The same applies (to a somewhat lesser but not insignificant extent) to French and British voters as well. And the biggest elephant in the room is obviously that the movie features a professional US administration. My recommendation to Americans reading this is to watch the movie and imagine Trump and Hegseth in the respective roles. Makes the thriller even more thrilling.

More at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/fictional-intelligence-imaginin
g

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

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Tuesday, November 11, 2025 7:38 AM