REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, February 10, 2026 08:44
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Tuesday, February 3, 2026 6:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Is this what you didn't read?

The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.

Authoritarian rule would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be co-opted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.

The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.

But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.

As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,

Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary, if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.

The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:


It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.

I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc., think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.

The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.

The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.

Trump is now calling for “nationalizing” the midterms, meaning to put voting and the counting of votes under his administration’s control. He can’t do that, but his demand is a clear sign that he will not accept the public’s verdict in November.

So it’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me an alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-democracy-will-not-die-in

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

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 7:04 AM

SECOND

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


The Supreme Court’s silence says volumes

Paul Krugman

Feb 04, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/profiles-in-cowardice-tariff-editio
n

Donald Trump loves tariffs. Mainly, I believe, he loves them because they offer so much opportunity for dominance displays, allowing him to threaten other countries with economic ruin — usually via middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts — unless they bend to his whims. Economists may say that most of the damage inflicted by tariffs falls on American consumers and businesses, not foreigners, but Trump’s attachment to tariffs is doubtless strengthened by economists’ disapproval — he wants to show that he’s smarter than the so-called experts.

Furthermore, tariffs give him power without checks and balances. He can impose huge taxes on imports without having to go through annoying stuff like getting legislation through Congress.

Or can he? By any reasonable standard, most of Trump’s tariffs are plainly illegal. Two lower courts have ruled against them. The Trump administration appealed those decisions, and in early November the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case. Many businesses that have found it impossible to make long-term plans with the fate of the Trump tariffs in limbo eagerly awaited the Court’s ruling.

They’re still waiting. And I can’t see any plausible explanation for the delay other than Supreme cowardice.

Background: Most of Trump’s tariffs have been imposed by invoking a 1977 piece of legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Congressional Research Service describes as giving the president “broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.”

But we aren’t in an emergency. Trump himself keeps saying that everything is great — the economy is hot, there’s no inflation, we’re respected around the world. It’s not true, but that’s what he says. And he has been using IEEPA to impose or threaten to impose tariffs for many purposes that have nothing to do with economic policy. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil to punish Brazil for pressing charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like former president who tried to overturn an election loss. He threatened tariffs against European nations who stationed troops in Greenland as a precaution against a possible Trumpian attempt to seize the island from Denmark.

In the latter case Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pressed on the nature of the emergency that would justify tariff threats, declared that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.” Uh-huh.

I’m not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers, and this isn’t a difficult case on the merits. Trump is clearly wrong on both the letter and the spirit of the law. And when the Supreme Court held its hearing, the tenor of the questions, even from conservative justices, suggested that they recognized that the administration had no case.

So why have we had three months of silence? Well, this isn’t a difficult case on the merits, but it puts the six right-wing members of the Court between a rock and hard place, not intellectually, but personally.

For a right-wing justice, ruling in the Trump administration’s favor in such an open-and-shut case would amount to admitting that you’re a pure partisan hack. And even the right-wing faction on the court is trying to maintain the fiction that it’s still a deliberative body, not a MAGA rubber stamp.

But to rule against the administration would be to hand Trump a humiliating defeat on one of his signature policy issues. It might also be very expensive. Tariffs aren’t the revenue gusher Trump and his minions like to claim: Even after the Trump hikes in tariff rates, customs receipts are small compared with other sources of revenue and have made only a modest dent in the U.S. budget deficit. But losing that revenue and, worse, having to give it back would be a financial embarrassment.

And it’s hard to see how, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump, the government can avoid paying back the money it has collected to companies like Costco, which has sued for a refund. If the Court rules that the tariffs weren’t legal, can the administration say, “No backsies” and refuse to refund money it collected illegally?

Right-wing justices don’t want to humiliate Trump, and they’re surely afraid of what will happen if they do. So they’re damned if they do the right thing, damned if they don’t.

When I’ve made this point in the past, some readers have asked why Supreme Court justices would be afraid of crossing Trump. After all, he can’t fire them, can he?

But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.

Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.

To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.

And more than social estrangement might be at stake. Violent threats against judges and other public officials, especially those denounced by Trump and other MAGA figures, have soared. Are you sure that a judge perceived as having betrayed Trump — and his or her family — would be safe? More to the point, are judges themselves sure?

So the right-wing majority on the Court is surely afraid to rule on tariffs — afraid to rule for Trump, because that would destroy what’s left of their credibility, afraid to rule against, because that would anger both the MAGA elite and the MAGA base.

So they’re procrastinating, even though the longer the tariffs stay in place, the more Trump is emboldened to tweet out bizarre, destructive and illegal policies and the more economic damage is done by uncertainty.

Their paralysis is understandable. But it’s also utterly shameful.


Source: HBS Pricing Lab https://www.pricinglab.org/tariff-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm
_medium=email

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

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 3:03 PM

SECOND

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


Trump said that the economy is the “greatest economy in the history of the world”

Feb. 5 2026 11:52AM EST

Despite President Trump’s claims about a miraculous economy, planned layoffs reached their highest level for January since the Great Recession.

New data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas released on Thursday revealed that last month saw more job-cut announcements than in any January since 2009.

Trump repeatedly bragged about a booming economy under his stewardship, claiming in Michigan in January that it had been the “greatest first year in history.”

Whether or not people are buying the bluster, however, is a murkier matter. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, Trump praised his own policies, especially tariffs, claiming they had “created an American economic miracle, and we are quickly building the greatest economy in the history of the world, with other countries doing just fine!”

Karl Rove accused him of “making the same mistake” as Joe Biden by claiming people were doing better financially than they were.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/layoffs-under-trump-rocket-to-worst-janu
ary-levels-since-great-recession/

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

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 4:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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Friday, February 6, 2026 7:10 AM

SECOND

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


American Decency Still Lives
When pushed far enough, Americans will do the right thing

By Paul Krugman | Feb 06, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-decency-still-lives

If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.

Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.

Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.

And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.

While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.

But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.

There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.

MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerous activism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.

Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.

And the public is not on the side of the thugs.

Many commentators have, correctly, drawn parallels between current events and the way violence against protestors led to growing support for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. But that was a gradual process. Only a third of Americans approved of Martin Luther King in 1966, the last available polling before he was assassinated.

By contrast, the Trump/Miller assault on Minnesota has produced a huge, rapid backlash. Here, for example, is the latest Marist Poll:

No doubt Trump would claim that the polls are fake. But harsh criticism of ICE and its actions is cropping up in many usually nonpolitical spaces, from hobbyist forums to, yes, professional wrestling matches.

Most Americans are decent people. They intensely dislike seeing brutal repression in their communities, even if most of the targets of this brutality have brown skins.

And Democrats should, even as a matter of cynical politics — although I hope it’s more than that — honor this decency by standing against the Trump administration’s brutal lawlessness. Of course they should continue to talk about the economy. But Trump’s immigration policies should no longer be viewed as a distraction from kitchen table issues. They have themselves become a major driver of opposition to his regime.

Many pundits have made this point — G. Elliott Morris and Greg Sargent have been especially clear about it. I would add an additional reason Democrats should go all out in opposing Trump’s deportation policies: They are an issue that won’t go away, while some of the economic issues might.

Here’s what I mean: Trump is not a consistent economic ideologue. He may instinctively side with oligarchs against workers, but he’s sometimes willing to coopt progressive ideas — as he did in calling for a cap on credit card interest rates. I don’t think he can turn around negative perceptions of the economy, but he will surely try.

But hatred of and brutality toward people of color are fundamental to Trump’s identity. He and his minions have responded to revulsion against their ethnic cleansing efforts by denying the reality of that revulsion, claiming that all the protesters and resisters are paid activists, and by doubling down on the brutality. I don’t think MAGA will change course; I don’t think it can change course.

So Trump’s war on immigrants is turning into a war against the decency of the American people. And it would be stupid as well as immoral to refuse to choose sides.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 3:49 PM

SECOND

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


Scott Adams died of prostate cancer, despite the fact that almost 100% of people diagnosed with prostate cancer survive past five years thanks to early screening and quick treatment. But Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments, announcing last May that he had chosen to treat his cancer with ivermectin and other anti-parasitics. This is how I learned that Scott Adams wasn’t just a grifter who parrotted everything MAGA idiots were saying: he actually believed that ivermectin was a secret wonder drug that Big Pharma was hiding as a flea and tick treatment.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2026/02/06/the-last-dilbert-
post/

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5404399/scott-adams-dilbert-prost
ate-cancer-biden

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 5:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer


Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 5:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American Decency Still Lives


Yup. We're taking out the trash as we speak.

The Legacy Media didn't breath a fucking word about it, but Minnesota has fallen.

The violence and the "protests" are over. People from Minnesota who were committing felonies on the streets and those saying out loud on Tick Tock the things that Second posts here nearly every day have been arrested and are facing 20 years in prison.

Walz... Silent. Omar... Silent. Frey... Silent.


We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.

We're just going to let New York fall on its own with a Communist Muslim mayor at the epicenter of it all.


Shut the fuck up, Paul. You've lost everything. You are a loser. You were always a loser. And now you're a loser with no voice or platform that matters because you destroyed any credibility you may have once had in a world that no longer exists.



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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:53 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer


Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments, announcing last May that he had chosen to treat his cancer with ivermectin and other anti-parasitics. This is how I learned that Scott Adams wasn’t just a grifter who parrotted everything MAGA idiots were saying: he actually believed that ivermectin was a secret wonder drug that Big Pharma was hiding as a flea and tick treatment, 6ixStringJoker.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:56 PM

SECOND

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're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.
Where did you get the trillions? Trumptard gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton alleged that less than $250 billion in taxpayer funds have been lost to fraud, waste, and abuse in California over the last five years, covering programs such as welfare, pandemic unemployment, and homeless initiatives. (It is legal for Trumptards to lie until either their heads fall off or they lose, which is why they lie constantly.)

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.
Where did you get the trillions?


Just wait.



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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Scott Adams died of prostate cancer


Kevin Drum died first.

Shut the fuck up, worm.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Adams refused his doctors’ suggested treatments


Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:04 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
What is your point? I've seen Trumptards drop dead all around me. Not surprising me, but life goes on smoother and smoother the more of them die. That is because Trumptards are sand in the gears; without sand, things are smoother.

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Kevin Drum died first, on a hospital bed, after all the suggested treatments failed.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
What is your point?



You're the one who brought up Scott Adams because news of his horribly painful death still keeps you hard all night.


Don't ask me that question.

That's a question you should be asking yourself every day.

You've lost everything forever and you're still too stupid to realize that.

The game is already over buddy.

You and your ilk are nothing more than footnotes in American History now.



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Saturday, February 7, 2026 7:30 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.


I can only hope


-----------

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

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 10:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We're now uncovering what will amount to Trillions in fraud in California, which will also see the end of every prominent California politician's you've ever hear of. Their careers are over as well.


I can only hope


-----------

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



You see Gavin Newsom out there looking like TEMU Patrick Bateman today with his eyeliner on and everything? Dude ain't looking too good these days. Looking like Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with all that makeup on his face.

This is one of the reasons why I'm telling people that any election polling they're hearing from either side means abolutely nothing right now, and nobody should even be spending any of their time or attention on them until after SCOTUS makes their June round of rulings and we start seeing the shape of what elections going forward are even going to look like anymore.

The Voter ID issue is a dead issue. Democrats (those in power) lost that hands down. A CNN poll just showed 84% of whites support it. 82% of Hispanics support it. And even 72% of blacks support it. When looking at party support, 71% of registered Democrat voters support it.

So people can show you all the election polling in the world, but this shift shows that either Democrat voters are seeing a seismic shift of their way of thinking on this issue, or MUCH more likely, they finally feel like they're free to speak out on issues such as these with common sense applied without feeling like everyone else in their bubble will attack or ostracize them for speaking out.

The worst of the violent offenders, both illegal alien and American Citizens are finally being arrested and facing the possibility of very long federal sentences for their crimes. Hollywood celebrities are being called on their bullshit and their hypocrisy immediately after they say something stupid. The DEI is being stripped away from all the companies, and likely will be making up the large majority of layoffs from the larger companies. HR Departments finally shrinking for the first time in 2 generations, and many positions that didn't even exist until 2020 disappearing altogether for good.

People are finally seeing reasonable reactions to things again on their shiny rectangles, after decades of nothing making any sense. Hints of a little order to the chaos forming.


This carries over into Independents and Republicans too. A lot of people are always afraid to speak their mind because they have a lot to lose.

So what the Voter ID issue amounts to is that it has always been WIDELY accepted as common sense has only been relegated to the sides as a fringe issue by the Left after they took over almost the entire Legacy Media, while they unleashed their internet bullies on anyone who dared say that requiring voter ID was not racist. It is unarguably Nationalist. But it's not racist. And those two words have two very different meanings.

So I got called a Nazi by Ted and Second and Wishy and Reaverfan and possibly even JO... and even got a LOT of pushback from Kiki on this particular issue when I would argue for it over the last 10 years, but it turns out that I was right all along.


This is EVERYWHERE. This is pervasive. It's snuck its way into literally everything like those weeds you're always fighting every year.

And we're finally doing lawn maintenance at home.

All this other bullshit is a distraction from that.


And the best part of all is that people just aren't paying attention to what the Legacy Media says anymore.


I haven't looked into it, but I'll bet that even Greg Gutfield is slipping in the ratings right now along with the idiot Network Lefty shows. I just don't find anything they have to say these days any funnier than dad jokes on the inside of a Laffy Taffy wrapper. And when they try to be edgy now, all it really does is make me wince and cringe a little.

I was never a major fan, but that show could be funny, especially back around the days of peak covid. But I don't find it all that funny anymore. And if a dude in his mid-40's doesn't find it funny anymore, I'm pretty sure the target demo who doesn't even know who Ed McMahon was didn't understand at all what was happening the other night when it appeared that one of the semi-regulars took it upon himself to start doing his best Ed McMahon to try to get the audience more involved when the jokes weren't landing weren't all that impressed either. And this comes after a few nights I've had it on in the background and it just appears that the show isn't anywhere near as good as it was just a year ago. Now the jokes need to be forced. They're running out of good material that living under an ever-increasingly oppressive Democrat distopia for the better part of two decades provided them, without anybody really having to work for any of it outside of just being one of the few brave enough to speak your mind. When the joke stops being on you, you've got to go look for the joke. Lazy gay jokes about co workers are only going to take you so far until you come off like boomers trying to do their best Beavis and Butt-Head impersonations.

Don't get me wrong. I love that we're living in the world where all that is even possible again because it means that we're focusing on real issues instead of everybody's heads floating in the clouds or planted firmly up their asses. But if I want to be around dick and fart jokes, I'll go see what my friends are up to and if they want to shoot pool. I don't need to watch 5 people I'll never meet deliver that.

But it's so great that we're all now speaking our minds again. Welcome home.


But... we're all speaking our minds to the point where I'm left here, feet planted firmly in my cement shoes watching quite a few people pass me and keep walking to the Right and I'm just waiting for the whole fuckin' thing to start tumbling out of control the other way one day and even though I know better I'm just hoping this is the time that somebody is smart enough to apply the breaks when necessary and try to keep things centered and sane. It's either that, or we're all destined one day, maybe many decades from now, to go right back to where we were headed up until the election of 2024, and it will be even worse next time. And they'll be given a LOT more power that the other side accumulated for themselves, only to give it all away again...

It's loosely related to why I don't want Vance as our VP.

It's not that I don't like him. I do not trust him. I believe he has ulterior motives of his own that we would not be aware of until after he were elected, or possibly never know at all. I believe he's an extremely gifted person. I believe he's an excellent weapon when wielded by the right hands. But I do not want to see him running our country one day.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, February 8, 2026 5:54 AM

SECOND

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


A year ago, everyone was doing the “Trump dance.” Now the president is too scared to show his face at the Super Bowl

By Alex Shephard | February 7, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/206276/trump-super-bowl-kid-rock-decli
ne-maga-cultural-relevance

Donald Trump is trying not to make a big deal of the fact that he won’t be attending Super Bowl LX when it kicks off on Sunday. The game, which is being held in Santa Clara, California, is just “too far away,” said the president, who regularly flies across the world on a taxpayer-funded plane that solely exists to take him wherever he wants, whenever he wants. In the same interview, though, Trump did indicate another possible reason why he wasn’t attending: the Opening Ceremony and halftime show. The latter will feature a performance from Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny and the former will feature Bay Area punk rock band Green Day — both of whom have been sharply critical of the president, his administration, and, particularly in the case of Bad Bunny, ICE.

“I’m anti-them. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” Trump said.

It’s tempting to dwell on the delicious irony in Trump’s statement: There is no one in recent American history who has sown more hatred than the president. But it doesn’t matter. Trump wouldn’t be at the Super Bowl even if Kid Rock were performing alongside a host of country singers no one has heard of — which is, incidentally, the slate of the right-wing Turning Point USA’s “alternative” halftime show, which is sure to attract dozens of viewers. Trump isn’t going to the Super Bowl because he is, one year into his term, more unpopular than he’s been since the January 6 insurrection. He knows that when the cameras inevitably found him in his box, he would be mercilessly and loudly booed. Staying home and stewing — and posting incessant (and most likely racist) drivel on Truth Social—is preferable. It’s still humiliating, just less so.

Trump’s absence at Super Bowl LX, combined with TPUSA’s show, tells us where his second term is headed. A year ago, Trump had real cultural power, particularly in the sports world. He attended Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans and was applauded. Pro athletes celebrated goals and touchdowns by breaking out the “Trump dance.” There was wide concern that the right had achieved massive cultural power through influencers, popular YouTube shows, and comics. Now Trump is staying home, and the best counterprogramming his allies can come up with is a performance by one of the most talentless performers American culture has produced in the last quarter-century.

The rise of the “Trump dance” — seen everywhere from college football stadiums to international soccer — was, as I argued shortly after the election, a sign of the wider cultural normalization of Trump and the utter failure to make him societally radioactive. It also pointed to one of the more disturbing trends revealed by the 2024 election: Trump had gained ground with a lot of people who, not so long ago, didn’t like him at all. Young men, in particular — not just white men without college degrees, but from a wide array of social, racial, and economic backgrounds — had warmed to the president. They thought he was funny, someone worth imitating — and saw no social cost for embracing him. And Trump was winning over these people in part because American culture — particularly online culture, but sports as well — had gotten more right-wing and reactionary.

TPUSA’s show is amusing for a lot of reasons. One is that Kid Rock is terrible, not just musically but lyrically; his songs celebrating statutory rape have gone viral recently. “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage, see / Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory),” Kid Rock rapped on the soundtrack to the 2001 children’s movie Osmosis Jones. Kid Rock was a cultural force of sorts in 2001, but in 2026 he’s been a has-been for two decades. For the past decade, he’s been clinging to MAGA out of desperation to maintain some semblance of cultural relevance. And TPUSA, a nominally Christian organization, is happy to embrace a man who celebrates statutory rape because he’s a vocally pro-Trump artist and there just aren’t that many of those right now. TPUSA needs Kid Rock as much as, if not more than, he needs them. (Who was their backup option — Lee Greenwood?)

This is a familiar, lowly position for the right, which has spent most of the last half-century whining about how American popular culture is mean to conservatives. But what is surprising is that, a year ago, it seemed like that was finally changing. The right had made real progress, from podcasters (and comics) like Joe Rogan and Theo Von to comics (and podcasters) like Matt Rife and Tony Hinchcliffe, to the aforementioned athletes doing the Trump dance last fall and winter. Rogan recently called ICE the “gestapo,” and you don’t see the Trump dance very often anymore. Amon-Ra St. Brown, the Detroit Lions star receiver, apologized after doing it last fall during a game that Trump attended. Other than that, the two most recent examples of the Trump dance I’ve encountered both came from South American leaders: Javier Milei, Argentina’s extremely weird president, did it at a White House event last November. And Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did it in January to mock the president, who responded by sending Delta Force to kidnap him days later.

Instead, what you’re seeing is a fierce backlash to Trump everywhere. There are anti-ICE protests at the Winter Olympics in Milan (agents have been sent there to protect U.S. officials). Athletes and sports teams in Minnesota decried ICE’s presence in their state last month. Bad Bunny criticized ICE last week at the Grammys, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — who no one has ever called “woke” with a straight face — defended him for it. Even fans of All Elite Wrestling — admittedly a somewhat woker pro wrestling league than the WWE — chanted “Fuck ICE” at a recent match in Las Vegas. Trump is widely loathed. Supporting him, even by doing a silly dance, is reputationally suicidal.

The biggest story of the last year is that Trump has, in a very short amount of time, squandered most of his political capital by running a belligerent, unlawful, and fascist regime. But the second biggest is that the right has squandered all of the cultural capital his election brought them. A year ago, it seemed like the right was on the verge of total dominance throughout American society. Now they’re back to pretending to like Kid Rock, while everyone in the country gets to enjoy the real Super Bowl halftime show.

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

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Sunday, February 8, 2026 6:10 AM

SECOND

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


<< We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. >>

https://andrewtobias.com/handing-the-mic-to-david-corn/

I wonder if the United States is slipping into such a fog.

The Donald Trump regime, of course, is predicated on lies. His 2024 campaign was a crusade of disinformation. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs; criminal immigrant gangs have taken over entire cities; public schools were performing gender affirmation procedures; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the United States. And Trump, as you might recall, was clocked by the Washington Post during his first term as spewing more than 30,000 falsehoods and lies.

It’s no news flash that he’s prevaricating non-stop. But what’s most worrisome is how brazen he and the fellow fibbers in his gang are—as if there were absolutely no concern about being caught or found out. And not just regarding lying. They’re also brazen when it comes to racism, abuse of power, and corruption. In the quaint days before Trump, lying presidents and lying elected officials tried to make it seem they were not lying. Corrupt presidents and corrupt elected officials tried to make it seem they were not corrupt. With Trump and his banditos, there are no such games of pretend.

It leads to a disturbing dynamic in which Trump and his lieutenants display their atrociousness to such an extent that it can lead to inurement. We know their actions are outrageous, they know their actions are outrageous, we know they know, they know we know they know—and this circle swallows itself. Nothing changes.

Trump denies he’s vengefully weaponizing the Justice Department to take down his enemies. Yet we see this clearly happening in multiple instances, with the prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff and the criminal investigations of others, including former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA director John Brennan. These cases have been mounted over the objections of professional prosecutors and handled by political hacks—a true sign they are flagrant abuses of power. Yet Trump and his lackeys insist this is merely the Justice Department doing its job by the book. There has never been a more obvious perversion of the DOJ. They know we know.

Trump denies he’s a racist. Yet he has a long history of racist statements and acts. I don’t need to run though all that again. But a few days ago, when he was on Dan Bongino’s podcast—to which the former FBI deputy director has returned to resume his conspiracy-mongering career—Trump said, “Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there…I won three times but I got no credit for it…It’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft…These are people that don’t work…We gotta get ’em out, most of them. And it’s most of them. Ninety-two percent don’t work…Many of them drive Mercedes-Benzes.” In December, he exclaimed, Somalis “are garbage” and “contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country…We don’t want ’em in our country…Let ’em go back to where they came from.” Pure, unadulterated racism. On Thursday night, Trump put up on his money-losing social media site a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—which was later removed, though the White House defended it. And the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor have been routinely posting memes and messages that promote images and slogans used by white supremacists. In modern times there has never been such undisguised and explicit racism purposefully propagated by an administration. They know we know.

Trump engages in the most overt corruption. His wife accepted a $40 million payment from billionaire Jeff Bezos and Amazon for a mediocre (at best) film—a way-above-market-value licensing fee—while Bezos and Amazon have multiple interests before the government that Trump controls. (Amazon Web Services depends on billions of dollars in contracts with the NSA, the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon.) It was recently revealed that an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates invested $500 million in Trump’s crypto company and pocketed a 49 percent stake in the firm. This is just one sleazy deal of many within Trump’s wonderful world of graft and grift. (To get a fuller picture of Trump’s supersize swamp, check out this graphic.) Out in the open, Trump has turned the presidency into a cash-generating business for him, his family, and his cronies, creating a mess of conflicts of interest that previously would never have been tolerated. They know we know.

And back to the lies—just the recent ones. Acquiring Greenland is a “national emergency.” The economic numbers are “spectacular” and “inflation has stopped.” Vladimir Putin wants a peace deal. Housing costs “are way down.” ICE is mainly rounding up criminals. Trump has ended eight wars. The 2020 election was “rigged.” The January 6 rioters were “patriotic” Americans entrapped by the FBI. Renée Good was a domestic terrorist. Alex Pretti was an “assassin.” All bullshit. They know we know.

In fact, the Trump mob, so used to skating by, figured it could say whatever it wanted about Good and Pretti to vilify them and justify their murders by out-of-control federal agents. Yet, finally, there was a burst of blowback, with popular opposition to the smearing of American citizens killed by Trump’s secret police force.

The revulsion triggered by the efforts to demonize Pretti and Good showed that Trump’s factotums—Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance—could not pull off over-the-top, Trump-style lying as well as the grandmaster, but it has not caused Trump and his crew to ratchet back on the prevaricating. And they’re sticking with the audacity of awfulness. The racism, abuses of power, corruption, and lies are not ebbing. Trump has learned the lesson that while one outrage may stand out and cause political trouble, a flood of outrages can be numbing.

Excess has always been the key to Trump’s success, and that includes excessive wrongdoing, from the petty (placing his name on the Kennedy Center) to the grand (pocketing billions in shady deals). The question is whether his tsunami of transgressions will continue to spur shrugs among many Americans or come to trigger more widespread disgust. Trump and his band of racists, profiteers, scoundrels, and flunkies seem high on their shamelessness. They defiantly flaunt their brazenness. They revel in their exploitation of power and their embrace of violence, dishonesty, intimidation, and brutality. Look what we can get away with. This has always been a favorite fix for Trump: conning the suckers.

In despotic and corrupt societies, rulers and their favored elites rely upon popular acquiescence and apathy—people becoming accustomed to all the lies and corruption. Trump and his stooges are counting on the same occurring in the United States so they can turn this nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy. They know that’s the plan. Do we?

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

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Sunday, February 8, 2026 11:05 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
<< We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. >>
By Phillips P. OBrien

Feb 08, 2026

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-171-the-week-tru
mp

There was another whopper of a lie this week about India buying Russian oil. The US and India are hammering out a new trade deal, and terms are being reached. When Trump announced that the two sides were close to an agreement, he added that as part of the deal, the Indians had promised to stop buying all Russian oil. Trump said that the Indians had “assured me today that they (India) will not be buying oil from Russia”. Then, to reinforce the point, Trump described the (nonexistent) Indian pledge as a “big step.” To finally show how amazing he was, Trump claimed that not only would the Indians stop buying Russian oil, they would replace those purchases with US oil.

Immediately the press started reporting this claim as fact.

US to cut tariffs on India to 18%, India agrees to end Russian oil purchases
By David Lawder and Aftab Ahmed
February 2, 2026 5:06 PM GMT • Updated February 3, 2026

The sole source for this headline was Trump’s claim that India had agreed to this.

It was a lie. The Indians two days later released the entire text of the agreements reached so far between the US and themselves. You can access it here.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-us-t
rade-deal-read-full-text-of-joint-statement/articleshow/128021368.cms

There is not a single word about India stopping the purchase of Russian oil, of replacing such purchases of Russian oil with American oil, etc. Indeed, even the discussion of India purchasing oil (and other products) from the USA is very vague. There is no commitment to do so, just a statement of intention.

Here is the key text: “India intends to purchase $500 billion of US energy products, aircraft and aircraft parts, precious metals, technology products and coking coal over the next 5 years.”

So actually, India is not committed to buying more US oil at all. Btw, in exchange for this non-commitment, the Indians seem to get access to advanced US processors. Hey ho.

I can assure you now that India will not stop purchasing all Russian oil—and it was wildly irresponsible of the press to say so. We heard the same things in October, when the Trump administration first announced their “sanctions” on Russian oil sales. Actually at that point through the end of November, Indian purchases went up. Since then, Indian purchases have modestly reduced (though continued at high levels), but overall the Russians have been able to sell far more to China than they have lost in sales to India.

It's clear now that Trump is defending Russia and protecting Russia. It would be far better that this is how his ridiculous lies, and they are lies, are reported next time.

For assuredly there will be more deceit in the future.

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-171-the-week-tru
mp

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 8:59 AM

SECOND

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


This Is So Much Bigger Than Pete Hegseth or Mark Kelly

A decision against the senator could affect all military retirees.

By Missy Ryan | February 9, 2026, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/02/pete-hegseth-mar
k-kelly-court/685911/

Of the many questions posed by those gathered in U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s courtroom last week, the most obvious one of all never came up: Why on earth was anyone here in the first place?

Until now, the military has pursued only a tiny number of criminal cases against retirees for actions that occur after military service has ended. Until now, the idea that the secretary of defense would accuse a lawmaker of treason simply for disagreeing with him would be laughable. Until now, any free-speech debates concerning sitting members of Congress have led to the conclusion that lawmakers ought to have—to borrow from former Chief Justice Earl Warren—the widest possible latitude to express themselves.

And yet there we all were anyway, gathered to see Mark Kelly—the fighter pilot turned astronaut turned U.S. senator—defend his First Amendment rights against an attempt by the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, to silence him and knock down his military retirement rank and pay.

As someone who’s covered 10 secretaries of defense, I’ve never seen anything like what Hegseth is doing—not even close. If Hegseth gets his way, he won’t just be punishing Kelly; he will succeed in dramatically curbing the First Amendment rights of all military retirees, some of the very people who have fought to defend such freedoms.

At the heart of the case is a November video in which Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers—all veterans of the military or intelligence agencies—address U.S. troops, reminding them that they “can and must refuse illegal orders.” Their goal with the video was to push back against the president’s domestic troop deployments, a trend his critics feared might lead to clashes with ordinary Americans or be used to interfere in upcoming elections. At the time the video was posted, Democrats were also assailing the administration over the legality of its air campaign against suspected Latin American drug boats. The lawmakers did not specify which problematic orders they had in mind.

Read: ‘An example MUST BE SET’

The Trump administration’s response was swift. Adviser Stephen Miller called the video an attempted “insurrection.” Donald Trump declared that the “traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” and reposted suggestions that they be hanged. Hegseth ordered the Navy to look into Kelly’s “potentially unlawful” comments, something he was able to do because Kelly is the only one in the video who receives benefits as a military retiree. (Although some 18 million military veterans are living in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, a much smaller share of those people reach retirement status.) Kelly now receives lifelong retirement pay and is subject to rules, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In early January, Hegseth issued Kelly a letter of censure over his “seditious statements and his pattern of reckless misconduct,” which, Hegseth said, had harmed military discipline and undermined the chain of command. He also asked Navy Secretary John Phelan (a Republican donor and billionaire art collector with no naval experience) to begin a review of Kelly’s retirement rank and pay.

The Trump administration’s attempts to go after Kelly are, several legal experts told me, straightforwardly outrageous and without merit. But even if the judge rules in Kelly’s favor, it’s worth paying attention to this fight, because it underscores the degree to which the Trump administration is seeking to expand executive power in novel ways. Far more is at stake than the retirement benefits of one man.

The U.S. military has sought legal action against its own retirees only in a rare few cases—and those cases have typically involved egregious crimes, such as sexual assault. And although the military can prosecute sitting service members for prohibited speech—to make sure troops stay in line and follow orders, the military has strict rules prohibiting them from insulting public officials or making statements that undermine “good order and discipline”—several former military lawyers told me that no cases have previously been brought against a military retiree for something said after they hung up their uniform. “It’s important for the public to understand the extraordinary power that the administration is asking the courts to bless,” Ryan Goodman, a former Pentagon lawyer who teaches at the NYU School of Law, told me.

If the government prevails against Kelly, it will establish a precedent for punishing retirees for statements perceived as out of line by whoever is in charge at the time. (The Trump administration denies that this case has any First Amendment issues to consider, saying that even as a retiree, Kelly has no right to undermine military discipline by encouraging others to question orders.)

Even before the Kelly episode, I had heard from numerous veterans about the chilling effect that Hegseth has had. The defense secretary—who insists on being called the “war secretary”—has used social media and speeches to vilify opponents, including former service members. Those who have worn the uniform are now less likely to criticize the administration’s policy or personnel moves, because they fear for their benefits or worry about getting in hot water with current employers skittish about backlash from the administration.

Read: Hegseth is seriously testing Trump’s ‘no scalps’ rule

During his first term, Trump mused about bringing senior officers whom he disliked, including Stanley McChrystal and William McRaven, back onto active duty and court-martialing them, but Pentagon officials talked him out of it, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote in his memoir. Trump once insinuated that retired General Mark Milley, who served as his second chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed. Shortly after taking office, Hegseth stripped Milley of his security detail.

Expanding the military’s ability to control veterans’ speech would be a major and historic reversal of basic freedoms. Retired service members turned public officials have a long history of criticizing Pentagon leaders in ways those leaders might find objectionable. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the corruption that would come from the unchecked growth of the military-industrial complex, focusing on the power of the people in mitigating “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” John F. Kennedy beat back the A bomb–loving generals he believed were as dangerous as Nikita Khrushchev. Veterans have often been some of the harshest (and most clear-eyed) analysts of the military’s shortcomings.

I was thinking about this history as I watched Kelly stand at attention when Judge Leon entered the courtroom on Tuesday, a combat veteran who was doing just as new recruits are taught: holding his spine ramrod straight, fists curled back, thumbs aligned with the seam of the pants.

Leon, who kept his eyebrows positioned in a skeptical V for much of the hearing, seemed to be focused on that history too. How are veterans on Congress’s Armed Services Committees, he asked, supposed to do their job if they can’t criticize the military without fear of prosecution? Leon was visibly wary of the government’s arguments, at times tipping into what appeared to be barely contained bewilderment. At one point, when the Justice Department attorney John Bailey conceded that there were “a few unique things” about the government’s First Amendment–related claims, Leon barked back, “You think?”

Dan Maurer, a former Army lawyer and combat engineer, told me that Hegseth’s decision to pursue administrative disciplinary steps against Kelly—rather than an attempt to court-martial him—was likely because a trial would leave Kelly’s fate to a military jury. When I asked whether such a jury would convict Kelly, he laughed dismissively. “Absolutely not,” he said. Maurer, who teaches law at Ohio Northern University, said he believes that the administration’s objective is more about demonstrating punitive action and appealing to the base than winning in court. “They don’t care what the courts say, because they’re going to depict them as liberal, woke courts,” he said. (Judge Leon was appointed by George W. Bush.)

Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer who now serves as an adviser in his office, suggested that the Pentagon might not pursue a criminal case against Kelly, because doing so would require him to be called back to active duty in the executive branch. This would effectively remove Kelly from his Senate seat and force litigation. “The Constitution prohibits somebody from holding office in two branches at the same time,” he told the Trump ally and Joseph McCarthy enthusiast Laura Loomer in December.

This brings up a second way that Hegseth’s orders would expand Pentagon leaders’ powers over military retirees. According to Maurer, who signed a letter from a group of retired military lawyers expressing concern about the actions against Kelly, the administrative procedure for reviewing and possibly reducing a retiree’s rank and pay has never been understood to apply to actions that occur after retirement.

Read: Hundreds of generals try to keep a straight face

Hegseth, who did not attend the hearing, has long expressed his disdain for the military justice system, advocating for lenient treatment of troops convicted of war crimes and deriding judge advocate generals, or JAGs, as pencil-necked “jagoffs.” The Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson said in an emailed statement that can only be interpreted as a non sequitur that Hegseth and his team would “do everything in our power to stop those who seek to harm Americans and the brave men and women defending our Homeland.”

But the government’s lawyer seemed to stumble at times, struggling to defend Hegseth’s actions. Leon noted that the cases the government had cited as precedent weren’t a perfect fit; they were either First Amendment cases involving currently serving troops or cases about other kinds of crimes involving retired military personnel. (Bailey argued that they were relevant because retirees can be recalled to active duty to be court-martialed.) Bailey asserted that retiree speech could still undermine good order and discipline, and denied that Hegseth’s actions would extend the reach of the military’s punitive powers over retirees. (“I know you don’t view it that way, but that’s what you’re doing,” Leon responded.)

Kelly’s attorney, Benjamin Mizer, urged the judge to shut down the Navy’s review because Hegseth’s public statements had put his thumb on the scales. “He’s not a decision maker who has kept an open mind,” Mizer told Leon. Federal courts have had a history of deferring to the military on national-security matters. Leon will issue a decision by Wednesday.

If the government prevails, the silencing of longtime service members would be like barring retired doctors from opining on health policy, Maurer said. When debating matters of war and peace, he said, it serves the public to hear from the very people who have served on the front lines—and lived through the consequences.

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 10:43 AM

SECOND

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


Trump started saying, “My father was so healthy; he had no problems. His heart couldn’t be stopped.” “He did have one problem though,” Trump told me. And he said, “Late in life, he had, what’s the word for it?” And he pointed to his head. And Caroline Levitt, the press secretary sitting next to me, she kind of rescued him in that moment and said, “Alzheimer’s.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer’s thing. Well, well, I don’t have it.”

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/477956/trump-health-age-issues-mind-hand-
bruise-dozing

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 12:11 PM

SECOND

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


What is 6ixStringJoker thinking? Trump isn’t pleasing 6ix:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=52126&mid=12382
26#1238226

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack: Monday, February 9, 2026 2:40 AM

I think we're all fucked unless we find Jesus.

And I don't even necessarily mean that in the Biblical sense.

It was nice not ever having to be the Dad or the Manager.

The only problem was, all the Dads and Managers started retiring. Then somewhere along the way most of them got sick and died on us.

And nobody competent was around to take over for any of them.

And one day everything stopped working right.

And nobody knew how to fix any of it.

And one side has spent generations pretending to care and spending a lions share of the tax revenue and racking up the debt with absolutely nothing to show for it here, or anywhere else in the world other than their own very impressive net worth, and the other side wants to ultimately take every single form of social safety net away from everyone indiscriminately, only to turn around and raise the yearly military spending to $1.5 Trillion, and ultimately spending what I'm pretty sure will be the most expensive yearly bill we've had so far when the official numbers come out. Cook the books all you want, but I'll be investigating any claims to the contrary if and when that time comes.

We have nobody in power but process people. Smile for the camera and give us a good vibe. That's what the job is about. Not doing things like taking care and making sure that we don't fuck up the HUMAN ecosystem through the Public Education Department for a few generations so nobody knows how to fix anything anymore when it breaks. Hell... even if there was a will by these politicians to fix everything that's broken, they probably couldn't even find enough people now who knows how to fix or properly rebuild a lot of it. Between the nepotism and the DEI quotas, you don't have anybody in the unions under 55 years old that know a fucking thing or do anything but work as slow as humanly possible, just as they are directed to do, so everybody can be eternally miserable and not even enjoy the summer anymore because they were stuck in more construction traffic on the expressway they just ripped up last year needed to be ripped up again this year.

Everything sucks so much now and everyone knows it.

Sidewalks look like shit. Parking lots look like shit. Even in the suburbs were they didn't just 20 years ago.

Can we just acknowledge that?

Can we just agree that people used to get things done and keep things working so much so that none of you even noticed they existed because nothing hardly ever fucking broke long enough for you to notice it?

Gotta find Jesus, or something...

Maybe a Childhood's End reference here instead of posting the Pets video again... bah.. why bother.


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

Be Evil. Be a dick.


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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 3:36 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Stalker.

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.




And yeah. That's what I do.

EXACTLY what I've always told you two stupid fucks that I do.

I don't mindlessly defend my "side" like you two to the point that you've both totally discredited yourselves, as has the Legacy Media, all of your "Experts" and anybody else who sucks on the Donkey dick all day and repeats every word the Media tells them to repeat. All while whoring yourself out to people like Liz and Dick Cheney, and now Ted is even turning to Russia to suck some of their dicks because he just doesn't have enough of them left to suck here in America.

This is why your party and ideology is finally dead and won't ever be coming back. It's why CNN has to admit that even 71% of Democratic Voters want Voter ID and an even larger share of black people do at 76% (with Mexicans at 80% and whites at 84%).

All of your Party's lies are coming undone. They're all unraveling. We're laughing our asses off at Hollywood shit celebs who say the stuff that make you cum and we're dragging them through all that cum and shit and filth.

You're all going to shut the fuck up.

This country isn't yours anymore. You will NEVER run it again.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, February 9, 2026 3:43 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Stalker.

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
I keep track of all Trumptards. The fat ones. The suicidal ones. The ugly ones. The crazy ones. The ones dying because of their depravity, lifestyle, or excesses. I no longer track the incompetent ones at work because they are either dead or terminated.

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 5:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

You just can't get enough of me.

You'd better let Haken know that if this website goes and you can't be with your true love you won't be able to go on living.



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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
I keep track of all Trumptards.



We know. You're a fucking creep.

That's no secret to anybody.




Meanwhile, I just keep hearing about people who sound exactly like you being arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for saying out loud what you've written here. And I've got it all archived for you.



Though you're probably too stupid to ever figure out that YOU are the bad guy, everybody else knows that now and everybody hates you.

Whether it ends in a long prison stint, or in the confines of your own dark little joyless hovel, enjoy the rest of your sad little miserable life alone, unloved and unwanted.

You deserve it.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Monday, February 9, 2026 8:03 PM

SECOND

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 know. You're a fucking creep. That's no secret to anybody. Meanwhile, I just keep hearing about people who sound exactly like you being arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison for saying out loud what you've written here. And I've got it all archived for you. Though you're probably too stupid to ever figure out that YOU are the bad guy, everybody else knows that now and everybody hates you. Whether it ends in a long prison stint, or in the confines of your own dark little joyless hovel, enjoy the rest of your sad little miserable life alone, unloved and unwanted. You deserve it.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, you have claimed you will lose healthcare because of Trump. Besides that, Trump has cost you money, even if you don't pay income taxes:

President Donald Trump's tariffs cost the average American household $1,000 last year, according to new research from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The cost is expected to rise even higher this year to $1,300 per household, assuming the existing tariffs remain in place, the research said. But that is too complicated for any Trumptard I know to understand. I talk to them, but none of them can connect their misfortunes to their choice of President and their smaller choices, such as their tobacco consumption, their gluttony, their alcoholism, their profligate spending, etc.

Trump's tariffs cost American households $1,000. The Tax Foundation said the cost may be even higher in 2026.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-tariffs-cost-american-household
s-1000-year-research/story?id=130003484

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

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Monday, February 9, 2026 11:06 PM

SECOND

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


Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.

https://www.newsweek.com/mary-trump-reveals-one-thing-donald-trump-has
-always-feared-11402964

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

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 3:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.


Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 7:30 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.


Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump announced his theft of Canadian property yesterday evening:

"I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve," Trump said in a social media post on Monday. "With all that we have given them, we should own, perhaps, at least one half of this asset. The revenues generated because of the U.S. Market will be astronomical." The $4.7 billion bridge was financed by the Canadian government.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-threatens-block-opening-new-brid
ge-us-canada/story?id=130008492

Canada paid to build the bridge and the U.S. customs plaza. See photos at:

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2026/02/09/trump-threa
tens-to-block-gordie-howe-international-bridge-from-opening-michigan-ontario-canada/88597688007/

Trump is telling the world that he intends to steal the ownership of a $4.7 billion suspension bridge. It is one step along the way to making Canada the 51st state with threats and violence.

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

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 7:34 AM

SECOND

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


The U.S. government added $696 billion to the national debt over the past four months, the Congressional Budget Office reports. That is $2.1 trillion for 12 months. Trump will keep going at that rate until he doubles the National Debt pretty damn quick.

https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/cbo-estimates-696-billion-deficit-
first-four-months-fy-2026

But what about the DOGE promise to cut spending by $2 trillion per year? The cut didn’t happen!

https://www.cato.org/blog/doge-produced-largest-peacetime-workforce-cu
t-record-spending-kept-rising-0

Verified DOGE budget cuts stood at just $2 billion. That is a long way from $2 trillion.

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-actual-math-behind-doges-cuts

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

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 7:53 AM

SECOND

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


During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised not just to end inflation but to reduce prices. He has failed to deliver.

His response to failure has been to gaslight the public. Reuters reports:

In five speeches on the economy since December, Trump asserted that inflation had been beaten or was way down almost 20 times and said prices were falling almost 30 times, assertions at odds with economic data and voters’ daily experiences.

It isn’t working: 52 percent of Americans say that Trump’s policies have made the economy worse, while only 28 percent say that he’s made it better.

And plunging approval ratings for the economy aren’t the only way stubborn inflation, currently hovering close to 3%, hurts Trump. It also undermines any case for the Federal Reserve to deliver a big cut in short-term interest rates, which Trump constantly demands. Granted, the Fed cut rates in 2024 and 2025 in response to a steep decline in inflation from its 2022 peak. But there’s little justification for further cuts, especially big ones, with inflation stubbornly above the Fed’s 2 percent target.

So what can Trump’s yes-men do?

Trump hasn’t made a rational argument for lower interest rates. Instead, he seems to believe that rate cuts should be his reward for overseeing a “hot” economy. Understanding that this makes no sense, Trump’s economic policy minions have converged on a different, ostensibly more economically rational reason to cut interest rates: AI.

Recently Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Stephen Miran, who Trump appointed to the Federal Reserve Board, and Kevin Warsh, his choice as Fed chair, have all argued that the coming AI-led boom in productivity justifies slashing interest rates now. The script goes like this: AI will lead to a surge in productivity; higher productivity will reduce production costs and thereby reduce inflation; and the coming fall in inflation justifies much lower interest rates now.

I will admit that this story isn’t completely nonsensical, unlike what Trump has been spouting. Yes, AI could reduce production costs and, other things equal, reduce inflation. However, both theory and historical experience say that the supposed benefits of AI aren’t a reason to cut interest rates now and almost certainly won’t be a reason to cut them in the future.

The alacrity with which Trump officials have jumped on the argument that the Fed should slash rates because of AI is troubling for reasons that go beyond the fact that they’re wrong. Did Bessent, or Warsh, or Miran carefully consider the evidence and advocate an interest-rate policy based on what that evidence showed? Of course not. Their boss wants to slash interest rates, so they went looking for plausible-sounding economic arguments that might rationalize his whims.

More at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/no-ai-doesnt-justify-lower-interest

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

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 8:16 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Given the perfect storm of Trump's incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive and the physical), and the sense that he is losing control — over himself and the narrative — and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn.


Nobody wants to hear it.

You turned a complete blind eye to how hollowed out the core of your last literal puppet president's brain had been eaten away by dementia until he made a complete fucking ass out of you in the only debate that happened before your now-dead party threw him right under the fucking bus and you lost your own mind.

You still haven't figured out that all of your actions have backed you into a corner of which there is no way out for you.

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump announced his theft of Canadian property yesterday evening


Cool.

What now?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 8:38 AM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Cool.

What now?

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

Be Evil. Be a dick.
Trump is kind of like a bank robber who emails a threat to the bank: "Give me all the money!" Presidents should not attempt to rob Canada. Or banks.

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

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Tuesday, February 10, 2026 8:44 AM

SECOND

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


How America Got So Sick

The health of a nation reflects the health of a democracy.

By Vann R. Newkirk II | February 9, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/american-public-health-de
mocracy/685727/

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

In the winter of 168 C.E., the famed Greek physician Galen arrived in Aquileia, an Italian city on the northern edge of the Adriatic. The city had grown large since its founding as a Roman colony, but during the 200-year Pax Romana, its fortifications had been allowed to deteriorate. After an armed group of migrating Germanic peoples had crossed the Danube a year earlier, the Roman co-emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, had rushed to the city, raising two legions and rebuilding its defenses; they planned to use it as a base of operations against the invaders.

Galen had been summoned, however, to help fight a different kind of invader. A plague, likely an early variant of smallpox, had traveled to Aquileia with the troops, and held the city in its grip. The emperors fled, but Verus succumbed to the disease on the road to Rome. Galen tried to slow the wave of illness, but most of the people in Aquileia perished.

They represented just a sliver of the eventual victims of the Antonine Plague, also known as Galen’s Plague, which killed at least 1 million people throughout the Roman empire. It was possibly the world’s first true pandemic, and haunted the empire for the rest of the Pax Romana, which ended in 180 with Aurelius’s death. The details of the pandemic—the exact pathogen, the true number of victims—are subjects of debate, and might never be fully settled. But some research has cited the Antonine Plague as part of a vicious cycle that hastened Rome’s long fall. Food shortages, internal migrations, and overcrowding had already signaled a slippage in imperial power, and created a fertile environment for disease. The pandemic, in turn, spread panic and left behind mistrust, weakening faith in civic and religious authorities.

Men famously think about Rome every day, and political commentators have been nervously comparing Rome’s fall to a potential American collapse since before America even had a Constitution. But Rome’s example really does merit consideration in light of recent events. One of the better measures of a society’s vitality is its ability to protect its citizens from disease, and the two often move in tandem; a decline in one may produce a reduction in the other.

Infectious disease is probably not an imminent threat to the United States’ survival. Still, after nearly a century of existence, the American public-health apparatus, which has driven some of the most remarkable advances in global longevity and quality of life in human history, is teetering. The country has lost much of its ability to keep microbes from invading its body politic, and progress in life expectancy and other metrics is slowing or even reversing.

It is tempting to lay these changes all at the feet of President Trump and his current health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who together have shredded America’s global-health organizations, drawn back public-health funding, fomented vaccine skepticism, and begun to dismantle child-vaccination programs. But the “Make America Healthy Again” moment is in some ways just another step in the long retreat of the civic trust and communitarian spirit that have enabled America’s disease-fighting efforts. If this retreat continues, the public-health era—the century-long period of unprecedented epidemiological safety that has been the foundation for so many other breakthroughs—will come to an end. And that end will have dire consequences for this republic and its future.

In January 2025, a hospital in West Texas began reporting that children were coming in sick with measles. The cases were initially clustered in a Mennonite community, where vaccination rates had been low in recent decades. But soon the outbreak spread around the state, and to others; the reported number of cases reached more than 1,800 by the year’s end. As of this writing, the outbreak is still ongoing, and America is in danger of having its measles-elimination status revoked by the World Health Organization.

On August 8, as the measles outbreak continued to make headlines, a man named Patrick Joseph White entered a CVS in northeast Atlanta and fired hundreds of rounds from a rifle into the CDC’s headquarters across the street. According to Georgia investigators, White had been suicidal, and believed that COVID-19 vaccines were part of a conspiracy to sicken him and other Americans.

These were but two signs among many that something has broken within the systems that protect the population’s health. Despite all of our advantages, the coronavirus pandemic caused more confirmed deaths per capita in the United States than in any other Western country, and our mortality rate’s recovery has lagged behind others’. Life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than in other high-income nations, and the gulf is widening.

America is unique, and comparisons are difficult. The country easily outpaces the rest of the developed world in gun deaths and overdoses, both major mortality drivers here that have largely been accepted as the cost of being American. But even if you discount those peculiarities, plenty of other indicators are pointing the wrong way. Foodborne illnesses appear to be on the rise, including regular surges of norovirus. Deteriorating water-delivery and sewage systems have contributed to a growing number of outbreaks of legionella. Cases of tetanus, whooping cough, and hepatitis A have also risen in recent years.

Many problems contribute to these shifts—insufficient investments in infrastructure, budget cuts in state and local health departments, the growing drug resistance of bacteria. Yet underlying all of the outbreaks, and even gun and opioid deaths, is a common theme: a declining sense of mutual responsibility among Americans. If the population could be analogized to a single human body, then its immune system would rely on a concert of action and purpose between each cell. When that concert stops, the body dies.

In 1946, the year the U.S. Public Health Service founded its Communicable Disease Center, American life expectancy at birth was about 66 years. Malaria was rampant in the South, and fever diseases, tuberculosis, syphilis, and polio killed tens of thousands of Americans annually. Thirty-four out of every 1,000 children born in 1946 were expected to die before their first birthday, many from communicable diseases. America was moving toward modernity, but the risks people faced were of a different order than they are today.

The CDC (since renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) inherited much of its early mandate from a U.S. military campaign to control infectious diseases among soldiers fighting in World War II. The scale of the war effort had necessitated the creation of a health infrastructure on American soil—spraying for mosquitoes near the front lines in the Pacific wouldn’t mean anything if soldiers caught malaria at home before deployment. Responses to outbreaks near bases needed to be big and fast enough to account for car travel beyond military jurisdictions. When the CDC took over, it extended this paradigm—of coordination across long distances and disparate communities—to the civilian population.

The same year the CDC was created, the influenza vaccine reached the public, and international organizations, supported by the U.S., began a global push to eliminate tuberculosis. The agency worked to promote mass vaccination. It began a national disease-surveillance program, and shared intelligence with cash-strapped county health departments and state agencies. Wartime campaigns to coax and chide Americans into doing their part to conserve resources and volunteer for the war effort translated easily into pushes for vaccination and sanitation.

Before 1946, conquering disease would have seemed as much a subject of science fiction as putting a man on the moon. But since 1950, global life expectancy has risen by four years each decade. Smallpox has been eradicated, and polio and malaria cases have dramatically fallen. Within the past 80 years, there have perhaps been more significant advances in human health than there were in the previous 300,000.

On the home front, several generations have grown up on an American mainland without malaria, yellow fever, or typhoid fever; diseases like dysentery are medical rarities. Measles and polio, once routine scourges of childhood, were pushed back by millions of vaccinations. Life expectancy increased by more than a decade, to 78 in 2023. This was a public-health revolution, on equal footing with any of the great agricultural, industrial, or information revolutions that have punctuated the past few centuries.

Those other great revolutions are often considered to be the result of technological advances—the plow, steam power, fertilizers, the internet. And certainly, the development of vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines has played a tremendous role in the advance of human health. But vaccines for smallpox and some other diseases had been around for at least half a century before the 1940s, and had failed to create widespread immunity. The real public-health revolution was first and foremost a change in the way people thought about themselves and their relationship to one another.

Epidemiology made a new kind of thinking necessary. Pathogens respect neither individuals nor borders. Vaccinations and other preventatives against ever-evolving germs do not on their own guarantee personal safety—only eradication can do that. And eradication, it came to be understood, can be achieved only through local and global cooperation.

In America, where capitalist and individualist ethics have always predominated, public health nonetheless managed to carve out a large cooperative space. Before the 1940s, the United States was still reporting a relatively high number of smallpox cases compared with other similarly industrialized nations; it achieved total elimination in 1949. With the insistence of a growing public-health apparatus, it became common practice to wash our hands, to cover our mouths, to not smoke indoors, and to get tested—not just for our own benefit, but for the sake of the people around us. Parents waited in long lines to have their children inoculated, and enterprising physicians went to rural clinics to reach the last isolated clusters of unvaccinated people.

That is not to say America’s particular system of public health was ever perfect. Owing partly to the legacy of segregation, the country never developed a universal health-insurance program, and maintains a fragmented health-care system in which both class and race still dictate much of a patient’s access to care. Many people on the margins who have wanted to get screened for certain diseases or vaccinated against them have not been able to do so, because they cannot afford to or because no doctor will serve them.

And yet, sometimes through the insistence of those same people that America live up to the tenets of public health, the system has come closer to the ideal. As much as any other institution—schools, libraries, churches—the public-health system has helped propagate the idea of a commons, often working against historical inertia to curb the excesses of American individualism. That work has always required energy and effort from the people. And so it has always been vulnerable, because that energy and effort could dissipate at any time.

There is ample evidence that this is exactly what is happening. According to the health-policy organization KFF, in the summer of 2025 just 83 percent of parents kept their children up to date on vaccines, down from 90 percent four years earlier. Cases are surging for several of the diseases covered by the national vaccine schedule. Tuberculosis cases are higher than they have been in a dozen years, and meningococcal disease is rising as well. Measles cases have trended upward for years too, even before 2025.

Over the past 50 years, American trust in the medical system has declined, as has trust in government, science, and expertise in general. The coronavirus pandemic exploded those trends, creating the world in which we now find ourselves. Public-health agencies did themselves no favors: They often gave out confusing and sometimes conflicting advice. Conspiracy theories grew quickly on social media, and measures such as masking became subject to partisan polarization. According to Gallup, a bare majority—just 51 percent—of Americans now favors government requirements for vaccines, down from 81 percent in 1991 and 62 percent in 2019. Most of the slippage has been among conservatives, and studies suggest that political ideology is perhaps the biggest predictor of vaccine rejection.

Medicine has kept moving forward, with some truly great results. Deaths in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease are plummeting, and might see further declines with the advance of GLP-1 drugs. With the advent of better cancer-screening tools, survival rates are improving, and wonder-drug therapeutics for many conditions are now on the market. But personalized care of this sort is expensive, and does not keep us collectively safe from infectious disease.

Meanwhile, as viruses that once killed hundreds of thousands have receded from public memory, they have come to seem less fearsome. Owing to the near eradication of some diseases, there have been few real risks to the heretofore small portion of people who refuse vaccines. In this landscape, organizations such as the CDC, which once stood as unimpeachable examples of government competence, have become victims of their own success, appearing to skeptics to be inert or irrelevant.

This was the system as Trump and Kennedy found it last year, vulnerable and stripped of the halo of public trust. Kennedy slashed agency budgets and stocked a key vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, then this past January announced a new set of childhood-vaccine recommendations that excluded coverage for rotavirus, influenza, and hepatitis A, which all now cannot be administered to most patients without a doctor’s consultation.

Kennedy’s biggest threat to public health comes from what he symbolizes. The MAHA movement derides expertise, overemphasizes personal commitment and liberty, and has embraced pseudoscience. This stance, mingled with Trump world’s conspiratorial tendencies, has turned the CDC and other once-trusted institutions into targets. After the August shooting at CDC headquarters, hundreds of current and former Health and Human Services employees singled out Kennedy as a driver of the kind of rhetoric that had motivated Patrick Joseph White, referring to the secretary’s previous insinuations that the CDC itself was hiding information about the risks of COVID vaccines.

Marcus Aurelius, the surviving Roman emperor, is mostly famous in our time because of his Stoicism. His philosophy encouraged the embrace of duty, not because of the expectation of praise or other material benefits but because duty is in itself fulfillment of the human condition. In his Meditations, he offered a maxim: “Do your duty—whether shivering or warm, never mind; heavy-eyed, or with your fill of sleep; in evil report or in good report; dying or with other work in hand.”

It’s hard to psychoanalyze a guy who lived two millennia ago, but it’s easy to believe that this particular admonishment may have come from his time as a plague fighter. In the face of Galen’s “everlasting pestilence,” Marcus had to rally the public and improvise, stocking depleted armies with convicts and ordering the digging of mass graves. He saw that the state was held up not just by the military or territory, but by invisible webs of shared sacrifice and obligation. In the end, the fortifications that mattered most were those that strengthened Rome against the invaders that could not be seen.

If the American state disintegrates, future postmortems are unlikely to focus much on measles, or on rotavirus vaccination rates. But the ability to beat back our more routine pathological menaces is a good indicator of the country’s ability to take on bigger, more virulent threats. The thing about bacteria and viruses, our most ancient foes, is that they are always at the gates, waiting for lean times. Among them will be pathogens worse than the coronavirus.

In the main, the withering of public health might not anticipate a future apocalypse so much as it recalls a previous America, one where lives were cheaper and shorter, where good health was the province of a privileged few, and where epidemics regularly scoured the countryside and the city slums. What’s spurring the slide now isn’t a dearth of information or cutting-edge medicine. Rather, the precepts of a shared reality have been shattered, and with them the ability to act for a common cause.

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

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