REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, July 23, 2026 17:41
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 172546
PAGE 95 of 95

Monday, July 6, 2026 5:51 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:

That's a heartwarming story.

Fucking idiot.

Sounds like he was doing alright up through his late 20's. We were rocking just about the same amount of cash at that time in our lives.

One guy decided to never gamble or play the stock market again, and the other guy blew all of his money on stupid shit because he's a simple-minded retard.

Enjoy your empty lot, dummy. Your poor wife and kids.
Trump robs these dummies of their money, and so Trump is not to blame because they are dumb.

Alternatively, Trump should be removed from office and forced to repay what he stole.

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

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Thursday, July 9, 2026 9:46 AM

SECOND

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


The Zombification of America

By Stephen Marche | July 9, 2026
Mr. Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War.” He wrote from Toronto, where he lives.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/opinion/america-world-us-isolation.
html

The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected.

At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination. There’s an established principle in chess that applies to geopolitics as well: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” The possibility of U.S. abandonment of the world order was terrifying. The reality turns out to be a new beginning.

Canada, America’s neighbor, was the first to see it, naturally. Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, American bullying on trade has been ferocious. As a result, Canada has had to consider what American favor or disfavor is worth. The Bank of Canada recently ran a scenario in which the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States. Canada’s growth of its gross domestic product would slow by about 2.4 percentage points, which over a period of adjustment is well within Canada’s capacity. A disaster, to be sure, but not the end of the world. That’s the worst-case scenario.

A recent study by economists at the Canadian Shield Institute, commissioned for the podcast “Gloves Off,” which I host, found that Canadian merchandise exports to the United States last year fell by over 30 billion Canadian dollars, (21 billion U.S. dollars), or over 5 percent of exports to the United States. But that loss was offset by nearly 29 billion Canadian dollars in new demand from the rest of the world. When services were included, total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars. America can make whatever threats it likes, but if you have the aluminum or oil or potash, somebody will buy it.

It’s not just Canada. European equities outperformed American equities in 2025, and surged in the first two months of 2026. The European Defense Industrial Strategy, put in place in 2024, is keeping more of Europe’s rapidly expanding military spending within the continent. And after the threat of the European Union’s anti-coercion instrument, the so-called trade bazooka allowing rapid counter tariffs, forced Mr. Trump to back down from his early round of Greenland threats, the Europeans now know that they have their own Strait of Hormuz — their own pain point that can make America flinch.

American military threats have the same diminishing power. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that when the United States decides to achieve a geopolitical aim by means of military force, you can make a pretty safe bet that aim will not be achieved. Against all odds in a war with the United States, Iran’s corrupt and cruel regime has maintained its power and is now receiving sanctions relief. While the U.S. military invents whole new genres of defeat, the Gulf states, and their airports, have now learned during the Iran war exactly what an American security guarantee is worth.

At the NATO meeting in Ankara, where Mr. Trump berated allied nations — especially Spain — and repeated his call for U.S. control of Greenland, the leaders of Spain and Denmark took Mr. Trump’s comments as the idle threats they self-evidently are. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada may well say that Mr. Trump “won the argument” on NATO members raising their spending levels for defense. The reason they are spending more now may be that they know that American military power is in retreat. American support, whatever that even means anymore, guarantees nothing.

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

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Thursday, July 9, 2026 4:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Shut up, faggot.

Keep your stupid ass opinions in Canada where they belong. Nobody here gives one single fuck what you have to say about anything, Stephan.

Spell your name like a man with a V too, while you're at it.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026 8:47 AM

SECOND

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


Judge voids Donald Trump's 'improper' $1.8b IRS settlement that gave him immunity from tax audits

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8q0e8d4ego

A US judge has voided a legal agreement between President Donald Trump and federal agencies that granted him immunity from tax audits and allowed his administration to create a since-abandoned $1.8bn (£1.3bn) "anti-weaponisation" fund.

The fund, intended to compensate individuals claiming they were unfairly targeted by the government, was unveiled in May in exchange for Trump dropping his personal $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

But on Monday, US District Judge Kathleen Williams said the suit was filed for an improper purpose.

She also referred a Trump lawyer to state authorities to determine whether ethics rules were violated and disciplinary action required.

In the ruling, Williams cast Trump's lawsuit - which he, two of his sons and the Trump Organization filed in 2026 - as far from a dispute between two opposing sides. Instead, she described it as more of an action carried out by lawyers with ties to Trump and those who claimed to have been government targets.

Williams wrote the lawsuit "was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute" between Trump and the IRS, which he controls as president.

She also described the settlement as a bid to "provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law."

The decision also prevents those involved with the case - including Trump and his sons - from referring to the settlement or citing its terms in future legal proceedings. This, in turn, could mean that the IRS can move forward with future audits into Trump's tax claims.

In the initial lawsuit, Trump claimed that nothing had been done to prevent the leak of his private tax information by a former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn.

Just before the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost, the leaked information formed the basis of a New York Times investigation that revealed he paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won his presidency in 2016, and no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.

"President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' to prominent positions in the DOJ," Williams wrote, referring to the Department of Justice.

"These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel to reach a 'settlement.' It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties," she added.

One of Trump's attorneys, Alejandro Brito, was also referred to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary action, while a second lawyer, Daniel Epstein, will now be unable to join cases in the Southern District of Florida for at least a year.

In a statement to the BBC, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said the IRS "wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information" to the media.

"President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable," the spokesman added.

Calling the agreement a "sweetheart deal" for Trump that had given him "unauthorized and unprecedented" exemptions from tax audit rules, Tax Law Center Policy Director Brandon DeBot said it had gone against "the tax system's protections against political interference".

"The court's decision is important, but does not remove the need for congressional action to nullify the entire deal and to prevent any similar attempts at presidential self-dealing in the future," he added in a statement to the BBC.

Based at New York University, the centre provides legal analysis of tax and public policy.

Plans for the proposed "anti-weaponisation" fund were abandoned in early June, just one week after another judge temporarily prevented justice department officials from implementing it.

That order came down after two men who alleged the fund was discriminatory filed a lawsuit in Virginia. The plaintiffs said they had been targeted for political retribution by the Trump administration but believed they would not be allowed to file claims for compensation.

The widely criticised plan prompted alarm among Democrats - and some Republicans - who argued it could result in payment to people who were prosecuted over the US Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, including those convicted of assaulting police officers.

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

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026 4:49 PM

SECOND

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


Trump and DOJ spend 130 pages supporting Judge Cannon's 'discretion' in burying Mar-a-Lago secrets, as rivals hold up Mueller report as 'precedent'

Matt Naham | Jul 14th, 2026, 11:58 am

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-and-doj-spend-130-pages-sup
porting-judge-cannons-discretion-in-burying-mar-a-lago-secrets-as-rivals-hold-up-mueller-report-as-precedent/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-and-doj-spend-130-pages-
supporting-judge-cannon-s-discretion-in-burying-mar-a-lago-secrets-as-rivals-hold-up-mueller-report-as-precedent/ar-AA27TZkd

Attorneys for President Donald Trump, his former co-defendants, and the DOJ each filed lengthy briefs on Monday in support of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's "discretion" in permanently blocking the release of ex-special counsel Jack Smith's Mar-a-Lago report.

Oral argument had been tentatively scheduled for late September, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weeks ago removed the consolidated cases from the calendar, noting the appeals would be "reassigned at a later date."

In the meantime, lawyers for Trump, his valet Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira on Monday submitted a 75-page brief praising Cannon's decision to block the DOJ from "releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II of the Final Report or any drafts of Volume II outside the Department of Justice."
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28473950/trump-mal.pdf
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/cannon-buries-jack-smith-mar-a-la
go-report-on-trump-angry-that-special-counsel-had-the-audacity-to-create-it/

"At its core, this matter arises out of Jack Smith's brazen and failed attempts to unconstitutionally prosecute and imprison President Trump and those around him, including Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira," Trump's brief began. "Even after the District Court dismissed Smith's baseless charges on the grounds that his appointment and the funding of his office violated the United States Constitution, Smith unlawfully prepared and sought to release a two-volume 'Final Report' in hopes of vindicating his efforts through other means."

Cannon, a Trump appointee, controversially dismissed the classified documents prosecution against the then-presidential candidate in July 2024, finding after "careful study" that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. In February, the judge said that her ruling meant "all" of Smith's acts were invalidated, and thus he had no business producing the report in the first place.

Construing that as a "breach" of her order, Cannon stopped short of ordering the destruction of Volume II, but she made her injunction permanent — leaving two groups who attempted to intervene under the Freedom of Information Act out in the cold.

On Monday, Trump's team fully backed Cannon against American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University at the 11th Circuit.

"The District Court did not abuse its discretion in denying Appellants' motions to intervene, and that this Court should dismiss their appeals for lack of jurisdiction," the brief said, not mentioning that the 11th Circuit previously chided Cannon for her "undue delay" in ruling on the motions.

On the same day, the DOJ weighed in with a 55-page brief of its own, from the office of U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones.

The DOJ argued that Cannon's review of Volume II in her chambers did nothing to help the attempted third-party intervenors.

"And, even if the report were a judicial record, the district court was well within its discretion to deny intervention to access it. The district court found that the disclosure would expose non-public discovery material implicating grand jury and privilege concerns and would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice. While the proposed intervenors may disagree, that does not amount to an abuse of discretion," the government said.

The two groups aren't alone in the fight, however, as the 11th Circuit allowed Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to submit their brief on Tuesday as amici curiae, or "friends of the court."

Sens. Adam Schiff, Richard Blumenthal, Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker, Chris Coons, Peter Welch, Dick Durbin, Mazie Hirono, Alex Padilla and Amy Klobuchar countered that Cannon's order was "wrong" in a number of ways, but especially in her dismissiveness of Congress' interest in Volume II — all while Trump, Nauta, De Oliveira, and the DOJ are on the same side.

The senators told the 11th Circuit that Cannon's "purported concern about grand jury secrecy," for instance, "rings particularly hollow in the context of legislative disclosure."

Slamming the judge for making "inappropriate" accusations that "improperly cast aspersions" on the committee's ability to be trusted to conduct an "in camera" review of the report without leaking "all or part of Volume II," the brief said former special counsel Robert Mueller's report "provides especially instructive precedent."

"In ordering the release of grand jury materials from Special Counsel Mueller's investigation to the House Judiciary Committee, the court found that the need for continued secrecy was 'minimal' because the Justice Department had already made redacted portions of the Mueller Report available to certain Members of Congress and because the Judiciary Committee agreed to negotiations to prevent release of information that would harm any ongoing investigations," the amici said. "With respect to Volume II of the Smith Report, the Senate Judiciary Committee explicitly offered to accept in camera review, which further minimized any disclosure risk."

"In short, any legitimate concerns related to sensitive information contained within Volume II of the Smith Report can be resolved with proper redactions, not the suppression of Volume II in its entirety," the senators concluded, emphasizing that the public has a right to know about the "serious crimes, including willfully retaining classified documents and obstruction," Trump and his aides were charged with.

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

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026 9:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026 11:59 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:
He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.
The Trumptards are rapists. To prove that point, you will explode when you learn that the writer E. Jean Carroll has collected over $5.6 million that a jury awarded in her sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, court records and her lawyers said.

The payment — representing the $5 million jury award, plus interest — was made Monday from an account where it had been held in escrow since the 2023 verdict, according to court records. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, confirmed the payment Tuesday.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-e-jean-carroll-lawsuit-award-payment-
c02b153cdc88fe0dafbf5146a1be6be2

Democrats kick rapists out of the party. Trumptards do the opposite.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 12:26 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.
The Trumptards are rapists. To prove that point, you will explode when you learn that the writer E. Jean Carroll has collected over $5.6 million that a jury awarded in her sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, court records and her lawyers said.

The payment — representing the $5 million jury award, plus interest — was made Monday from an account where it had been held in escrow since the 2023 verdict, according to court records. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, confirmed the payment Tuesday.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-e-jean-carroll-lawsuit-award-payment-
c02b153cdc88fe0dafbf5146a1be6be2

Democrats kick rapists out of the party. Trumptards do the opposite.

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




Also E. Jean Carroll telling Anderson Cooper that everyone has Rape Fantasies. That Rape is Sexy and she was leaking all over her chair while Anderson Cooper was desperatly trying to cut to commercial:



These are your heroes of the Democratic Party. You're a bunch of losers.

You are a Shit Golem, Shit Golem.




FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE, LOSER.

NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK WHAT TRUMP IS DOING.

NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ONE MORE FUCKING WORD OUT OF YOU ABOUT TRUMP.


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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 12:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.

All of this that you've done has meant NOTHING.

NOBODY is listening to you anymore.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now because it's even more real now than it's ever been before... YOU work for Trump for free. There are people who will vote for Trump simply to spite shit golems just like you and braindead Ted over there in the corner.


Trump's approval rating right now is 3 points higher than Joe Biden*'s was at the same time in his single term.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 8:41 AM

SECOND

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


President Donald Trump’s businesses and top executives have faced major legal penalties for tax-related fraud, and his personal tax practices remain highly controversial. Donald Trump paid zero federal income taxes in 11 years between 2000 and 2020. Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes for 2016 and 2017.

The characterization of Trump regarding his taxes generally falls into three distinct categories based on legal rulings, investigative reporting, and political debate.

1. Corporate Convictions and Executive Guilt

While Donald Trump has avoided personal criminal tax charges, entities under his direct control have been convicted in court:

• The Trump Organization Conviction: In December 2022, a New York jury found two corporate entities of the Trump Organization guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. Prosecutors proved a 15-year scheme to compensate top executives with off-the-books perks (like luxury cars and rent-free apartments) to evade payroll and income taxes.

• Executive Pleadings: Longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts of tax fraud and testified that the company benefited from the scheme.

• Trump's Awareness: During the trial, prosecutors argued that Trump signed documents explicitly approving elements of the off-the-books perks. However, Trump's defense attorneys argued he was unaware of the improper accounting, and Trump himself was not personally indicted in that case.

2. Aggressive Tax Avoidance vs. Fraud

When a House committee released six years of Trump's personal federal tax returns, it revealed that he paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and zero dollars in 2020.

• The Critical View: Investigative reporters and critics point to these documents as evidence of "brazen" tax manipulation. They highlight massive, questionable deductions—such as writing off millions in personal estate expenses as business costs, or utilizing complex shell companies to pass down family wealth via inflated transactions.

• The Defense: Trump and his supporters maintain that his tax practices represent standard, legal, and highly aggressive "tax avoidance" utilized by major real estate developers. They argue that real estate tax laws allow for large depreciations and write-offs to offset income legally. Trump has previously described avoiding high tax burdens as making him a "savvy businessman."

3. Civil Fraud History and Developments

Trump has faced extensive civil litigation over how he presents his finances to authorities:

• Asset Valuations: New York State previously brought a massive civil fraud lawsuit against Trump for artificially inflating his net worth on financial statements to secure favorable loans and insurance terms. While a lower court issued a $355 million penalty against him, an appeals court later threw out the massive fine. While the fine was eliminated, the court upheld the underlying finding that Trump and the Trump Organization committed fraud. As a result, non-monetary punishments were kept in place, including: 1) A three-year ban preventing him from taking out loans from New York banks. 2) A ban on serving as a director of any New York company.

• Recent IRS Settlement Dispute: In July 2026, a federal judge threw out a controversial $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service. The administration had attempted to finalize an agreement granting Trump and his family broad immunity from tax audits. The judge voided the settlement, ruling that the lawsuit was filed in "bad faith" and lacked a real legal dispute.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 10:30 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Let's see your tax returns, Shit Golem.

Go fuck yourself. Nobody cares except for you and Rachel Maddow.

Clowns.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 12:53 PM

SECOND

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


The Forever War Gets Scary

But I'm not talking about bombs and drones

By Paul Krugman | Jul 15, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-forever-war-gets-scary

Transcript

The war with Iran has just reached a very scary phase, and I’m not talking about the bombs and the drones. Hi, Paul Krugman here, doing a brief podcast instead of a full post, because I actually spent the day with friends and doing other things, and this is a quicker alternative.

If you’re following the news, you know that the sort-of ceasefire with Iran has been called off. Trump has reinstated the blockade. The Iranians are back to hitting things with their drones and missiles.

The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen.

And yet, this is extremely scary. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to seriously try to occupy Iran. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all.

But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give up on the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to spin the story about this was truly, this was actually an American victory and the economy is great and look at the stock market.

And, you know, it was just a little bit — more than a little bit — stupid and doomed. It was also kind of amazing because a serious attempt to end the conflict would have required facing up to reality, saying, OK, this war didn’t go well, but America remains great. Sorry about that.

But that was apparently not something Trump could emotionally bring himself to do. He just cannot admit that this venture failed. He can never admit that anything failed. We’re going to be searching for the saboteurs of the reflecting pool for the remainder of his presidency.

This is a change in strategy that is ominous because what is Trump’s plan for the midterm elections? Here the idea presumably was that there would be enough economic success and people would have sufficiently short memories that they would possibly give Trump credit for opening the Strait of Hormuz, but in any case have put the gas price shock and the whole disruption surrounding the war behind them. And be ready to start admitting that this is the golden age that Trump and company keep on claiming it is.

Now that’s all off. Now it’s just that we’re going to bomb Iran. No clear strategy there, but we’re not going to even pretend that things are okay. We’re going to blockade them, which actually has a little bit more leverage, but no hint that anything might be resolved in a way that would help Republican chances in the midterms. So what is going to happen?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just as Trump essentially gives up, not gives up in the sense of abandoning his war, but gives up on trying to achieve anything he can even spin as a positive outcome, that we now have an announcement that this Thursday he’s going to have a primetime speech, which reports say is going to be about election fraud in 2020. Some reports hint that he might try to declare the two Democratic senators from Georgia somehow illegitimate.

Okay, that’s not going to actually work. And nobody’s going to be convinced by the claim that he actually won the 2020 election. But what is happening is that effectively he’s setting up the pretext, the groundwork for massive interference in the vote this November. That we’re basically seeing the stage set for some kind of attempt to block fair elections, maybe block elections entirely.

I don’t know how this is going to play out. But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that some combination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward.

And don’t say they wouldn’t do that. That has been famous last words every step of the way. The proposition that there were some things that even Trump and company would not do has been the best way to be wrong about everything, every step of the Trump administration.

So in a peculiar way, the fact that Trump is back to bombing Iran is really bad news, not because of the bombs. Yes, it’s terrible and all that, But not because I have any real fear that America is going to be at risk from a foreign power, but because I think it signals an enormous risk to us from our own president, our own government.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

And take care.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 1:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.

All of this that you've done has meant NOTHING.

NOBODY is listening to you anymore.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now because it's even more real now than it's ever been before... YOU work for Trump for free. There are people who will vote for Trump simply to spite shit golems just like you and braindead Ted over there in the corner.


Trump's approval rating right now is 3 points higher than Joe Biden*'s was at the same time in his single term.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 5:38 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:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 5:39 PM

SECOND

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


Confession proves Trump insiders know the reckoning is coming | Opinion

By Thom Hartmann

Jul 15

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/confession-proves-trump-inside
rs-know-the-reckoning-is-coming-opinion/ar-AA27XTlb

Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.

Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.

They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.

The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.

The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t.

More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.

These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.

If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.

Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “Everybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.

A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:

“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”

Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.

He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.

He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy-filled deal with Ghislaine Maxwell for keeping her mouth shut.

Now he presides over a Justice Department that he and Trump have remade into a personal instrument of vengeance, complete with a Hitler-like 60-foot banner of Trump’s leering face on its façade, and the president has just nominated him to hold the office permanently.

So when Blanche says out loud that he’s afraid, he isn’t being paranoid. He’s being a good lawyer, reading the room, and the room he’s reading is called “history.”

It reminds me of two lawyers I learned about when we lived in Germany, because the men doing Trump’s legal dirty work today are walking a road that better-dressed men walked 90 years ago, and, as a result, we know exactly where it leads.

The first is Hans Frank, who started out as Adolf Hitler’s personal attorney, defending Hitler and his Nazi thugs in court all through the 1920s the way Blanche once stood behind Trump at the defense table.

When Hitler took power, Frank was rewarded. He became the Reich’s chief jurist, president of the Academy for German Law, and eventually Governor-General of occupied Poland, where he presided over ghettos, mass plunder, and slaughter on a scale that’s still hard to grasp.

Frank was the respectable face of the regime, the man who insisted there was a legal theory for everything. At the Nuremberg trials he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and on October 16, 1946, the respectable lawyer was hanged.

The second man is Roland Freisler, and if Frank shows you what happens to the enabler, Freisler shows you what happens to the judge who decides — like Blanche has argued and John Roberts went along with — that the law is simply whatever Dear Leader wants it to be.

Freisler ran the Volksgerichtshof, the People’s Court, a tribunal stood up outside Germany’s constitutional structure for the express purpose of producing the verdicts the regime demanded. He handed down thousands of death sentences in three years.

He screamed at defendants from the bench, ordered their microphones cut, condemned the young students of the White Rose resistance to the guillotine for the crime of printing leaflets, and sent the officers of the July 20th plot to be hanged within hours of their show trials.

Freisler never faced a Nuremberg of his own, but only because an American bomb fell on his courthouse in February 1945 while he was reportedly clutching a defendant’s case file. The defendant lived; the judge did not. There’s a grim justice in the fact that the one man who most weaponized the law against his fellow citizens was killed holding the very file he was using to destroy one of them.

I stood in the small plaza at the University of Munich back in 1988, the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, named for Hans and Sophie Scholl, where the two of them were caught scattering their leaflets from the gallery before Freisler sent them to die. They were the Renee Good and Alex Pretti of their time.

The university has since pressed bronze replicas of those scattered leaflets right into the pavement, so that today you walk over them and have to stop.

You think, standing there, about how ordinary the machinery of all this was. It wasn’t run by monsters in uniform alone. It was run by men like Todd Blanche and John Roberts, men with law degrees, men who told themselves they were just interpreting the statutes, just following the orders, just serving the head of state.

And every honest accounting that came afterward, from Nuremberg onward, rejected that excuse and established the principle that a directive from above does not protect the man who carries it out.

That principle is precisely what must be keeping Todd Blanche awake, because we’re already watching the American version, as Mark Twain once said, rhyme.

When Trump wanted his enemies prosecuted, the career professionals balked, so the administration installed Lindsey Halligan, another former Trump personal lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whatsoever, as a U.S. attorney, and she promptly indicted James Comey and Letitia James.

In contrast with Germany in 1933, a federal judge threw both cases out, ruled her appointment unlawful, and other judges in the district were so disgusted that one of them now puts an asterisk beside her name on every court filing.

Thankfully, at least so far, these are not the actions of a legal system that’s fully surrendered (although Aileen Cannon may soon have a word). They’re the actions of one that’s still fighting back, and that fight is the whole ballgame.

But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls.

If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas.

The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls.

Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside.

That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.

When the Reichstag finally voted itself out of existence in March 1933, uniformed storm troopers lined the walls of the chamber so the legislators would understand the price of voting no.

That’s the tradition these men are drawing from, and we’d be fools not to be clear-eyed and ready for just about anything between now and November. After all, we all watched what Trump and his lickspittles did on January 6th, 2021, killing four police officers as they tried to “hang Mike Pence.”

But here’s the difference between Germany in 1933 and America in 2026 and, as Wendy Lawrence argues in a brilliant recent essay, it comes down to timing.

The Germans got their decisive vote after the seizure of power, when a newly seated Reichstag rubber-stamped the Enabling Act and handed Hitler everything. We get ours before. Which is why they’re so frantically trying to suppress the vote.

The November midterms will arrive while the courts are still ruling against this administration, while subpoenas can still be issued, while the power of the purse still belongs to whoever controls the House.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling shields the president’s official acts, but it shields no one beneath him. The agents, the contractors, the lawyers who signed the unlawful papers, all of them remain fully exposed, and a future attorney general can act on that.

Trump understands this perfectly, which is why he told House Republicans that they have to win the midterms because otherwise “they’ll find a reason to impeach me.” It’s why his people muse about ICE at the polls and write rules to choke off the mail. It’s why Stephen Miller is reportedly pushing to suspend habeas corpus. It’s why Trump promised to “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval [Office].”

These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible, the same reckoning Hans Frank met at the end of a rope and Roland Freisler escaped only by dying.

The coming reckoning — unless they can stop it this fall — isn’t vengeance. It’s the rule of law standing back up after being knocked down, and in this country that recovery still runs through a ballot box which the members of the Reichstag of 1933 no longer had.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 6:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.

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


You guys voted for Platner.

Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.

You fucking loser.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 7:28 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.

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


You guys voted for Platner.

Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.

You fucking loser.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
When the Democrats found out Platner was a Nazi and rapist, they curb-stomped him. When Trumptards found out Trump was a Nazi, a rapist, a tax cheat, and being bribed, they voted for him. Simultaneously, they said everything is Fake News, including climate change.

Trump is $4 billion Richer Than He Was Before The 2024 Election Because Of Bribes He Has Received As President.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-profiteering
-hits-four-billion-dollars

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 7:32 PM

SECOND

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


A tale of two Trump flip-flops

The president undid everything the Logoff wrote about this week.

By Andrew Prokop
Jul 15, 2026, 5:45 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/495780/trump-flip-flop-ice-stops-strait-h
ormuz

What happened? On Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump said he would charge a 20 percent fee to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

But he reversed course on that yesterday morning, posting on Truth Social that he’d “replace” the fee with trade and investment deals that Gulf nations would purportedly make in the US.

Yesterday afternoon, after two recent deadly shootings, ICE had been ordered to temporarily stop making traffic stops nationwide.

But this morning, Trump declared that traffic stops were back on, posting: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”

Why did Trump flip-flop? The Hormuz fee was a Trump whim that many of his own aides had deep logistical and political qualms about. For one, they believed the move could push gas prices higher. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said just last month that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway.”

As Monday stretched on, Trump was deluged with lobbying from Gulf nations who rely on the strait — such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and ultimately decided to back down.

The ICE traffic stop pause followed the opposite trajectory. This was a decision made by administration officials without Trump’s knowledge — and when he watched press coverage and heard right-wing criticism of it, he was irate, per CNN.

What’s the takeaway? The reversals show whose criticism and feedback Trump actually cares about.

Wealthy Gulf leaders and the spectre of higher gas prices helped talk him down from his Hormuz fee. And on traffic stops, he ultimately cared less about tamping down national outrage over deadly shootings than he did about preserving his “tough on immigration” reputation and agenda.

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 8:33 PM

SECOND

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


[America’s first Nazi President speaks tomorrow night about “saving” Democracy]

Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment It Doesn’t

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark.

By Thom Hartmann | July 15, 2026

https://hartmannreport.com/p/midterm-elections-the-con-always-4c5

Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit; the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind Thursday’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faces his Senate confirmation hearing today, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor with biweekly phone calls. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for fifty years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether Thursday night marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Congress is voting this week on whether to bolt the SAVE Act onto the national security spending bill, so call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative where you stand, and don’t forget to mention Todd Blanche to your senators.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org, because purges are already underway in Red states, and track what your own legislature is doing to protect or restrict your ballot at openstates.org.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark. As Jefferson told us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…”

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

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Wednesday, July 15, 2026 8:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.

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


You guys voted for Platner.

Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.

You fucking loser.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
When the Democrats found out Platner was a Nazi and rapist, they curb-stomped him.


No. They didn't. They all circled the wagons and protected him and said that it was more important for Republicans to lose than to worry about who they were voting for.

(You really should look at more than just what I post in the Garden, and you would have known about the dozens upon dozens of Left-wing shit sites that were blowing Platner even after the tattoo thing, and maybe you wouldn't look like a fucking idiot again right now).

It was only after one of yours came out and claimed that he raped her that they curb stomped him.

Being a Nazi was never a disqualifying issue as far as Democrats were concerned about Platner. Even the Jews that vote straight-ticket Democrat rallied behind him. Being an alleged rapist was never an issue for Democrats either, until it was a woman who voted Democrat that came out and claimed he raped her.

And it is just another in a very, very long list of reasons that nobody takes a fucking thing you say on any topic seriously anymore.


Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.

You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.

All you care about is the destruction of everything good.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Friday, July 17, 2026 7:31 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


Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.

You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.

All you care about is the destruction of everything good.
I'm gonna make this as blunt as possible: Trumptards are evil. Nazis were evil, too, but at least they tried to hide their evilness by keeping silent about their plans to exterminate all inferior people. Trumptards? They talk about it. Trumptards can't shut up about their plans. Last night, Trump told the world about his plans. Hitler would have been aghast to see how talkative America's Nazi leaders have become, but way back in the 1930's Germans were much smarter than Trumptards are. Americans can be told and shown what Trump's plans are, and yet they are too dull-witted to understand.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-cant-get-no-respect

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

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Friday, July 17, 2026 7:33 AM

SECOND

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


[Trump is obviously a lying sack of shit: The Reflecting Pool Edition]

Reflecting Pool peeling probably caused by application flaws, experts say

President Donald Trump has blamed vandals, but a Washington Post analysis finds that the peeling tracks closely with stages of the renovation process.

By Jarrett Ley, Meg Kelly, Klara Auerbach and Maura Judkis

July 16, 2026 at 10:17 a.m.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2026/07/16/r
eflecting-pool-peeling-likely-caused-by-application-flaws-experts-say/

The lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool peeled away in at least seven places along seams that were created when the material was applied in large rectangular sections, indicating likely problems in how it was installed, according to a Washington Post analysis of visuals and interviews with experts.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said vandals are to blame for the damage that appeared just two weeks after the $14 million renovation was completed in early June. “The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday. On Tuesday, photos emerged on social media that showed the pool had been drained in preparation for repairs.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made similar claims in television interviews in early July, saying on Fox News that vandals left gashes totaling 350 feet. “[The lining] didn’t peel off,” he said on CNN, adding that people were “literally trying to destroy part of a monument.”

Post reporters visited the Reflecting Pool on June 25 and identified seven locations where the lining — a waterproof membrane that was painted onto the concrete basin — had partially or entirely peeled away. The peeling occurred in irregularly shaped patches that stretched alongside the long edges of the pool. The pieces ranged in size from a few inches to as long as six feet. In one case, the concrete was visible underneath. (Reporters could not see the condition of the lining in the middle of the basin.)

By comparing the seven locations with satellite imagery, photos and videos taken during the renovation process, the analysis found that all of the failures occurred at the seams — lines between two areas that were painted at different times.

Four experts in waterproofing materials — who have decades of experience and have served as educators and expert witnesses in pool-related construction lawsuits — reviewed The Post’s findings and said the failure pattern strongly suggested errors in the application process. They said that while a precise cause cannot be determined without on-site examination and lab testing, such seams require careful attention and are especially prone to failure.

When The Post shared its findings with the White House and the Interior Department, spokespeople disputed that the surface had been improperly applied. “There were no missteps during the initial repairs to the pool,” said White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers. “Unfortunately, deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool and destroyed over 300 feet of the pool’s siding. Once the necessary repairs to fix the vandalism are complete, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory.”

An Interior spokesperson said that “the National Park Service team has walked every foot of the Reflecting Pool, and unlike the exorbitant Obama renovation, the Reflecting Pool is now leak-proof. This project was executed after consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Design Center and other leading experts who have experience working on the Reflecting Pool.” Interior said “gashes” are located along the edge of the pool on its perimeter expansion joint, which is where the coating is soft enough to be cut. Officials provided no evidence to support the administration’s assertion that the pool was vandalized.

After the concrete basin was emptied, cleaned and dried, the Reflecting Pool was painted in sections. The sections were coated with two products, both made by the San Diego-based company Rhino Linings, according to the imagery, government records, and public statements by the company and contractors. The process began with Rhino 406, a light blue epoxy base coat applied on the concrete to seal surface irregularities and establish a protective barrier. Next, a thick, sprayed layer of Pipeliner 5000 — a dark blue hybrid polyurea — was applied to complete the waterproof membrane.

In five of the spots, the dark blue Pipeliner 5000 coating had peeled off to reveal more of the same material. Experts said this appears consistent with an adhesion failure caused by an overlap of the dark blue over a dried layer of the same material at the seams. For any overlapping Pipeliner 5000 to adhere, the underlying layer would need to still be wet or, if not, steps would need to be taken to prepare the surface.

Pipeliner 5000 dries within four hours, according to technical documents, depending on temperature and humidity. The Post confirmed that in each of the five spots, five hours or more had elapsed between when adjacent sections were sprayed.

At a sixth spot The Post identified, the dark blue Pipeliner 5000 had peeled back to reveal the light blue Rhino 406 primer. The Pipeliner 5000 should be applied within 24 hours of the primer, according to technical specifications. Photos and a video of the renovation process showed that, at this location, it was applied more than 24 hours after the primer, which experts said made it less likely that the two materials bonded properly.

At the seventh spot, both the dark blue coating and light blue epoxy primer underneath had peeled away, leaving the concrete exposed. This was one of three failure points that occurred on top of visible expansion joints built across the concrete basin — which experts said would also strain the coating. The width of the perimeter expansion joint referenced by the Interior spokesperson is not clear from visuals, but at least one failure point appeared directly on the pool’s edge.

When applying the product, the goal should be to have the coating be “as monolithic as possible” and to lay down as much material at one time as possible, said Vito Mariano, president of waterproofing company Basecrete Technologies. “Anytime you have a stop [and] go, you’re going to open yourself up to a problem that might occur,” he said.

The experts agreed that the seams required special treatment, but their assessment of the best approach varied. After reviewing The Post’s timelines, photos and video of the peeling sections and the technical specifications of the sealants used, they said several techniques might have prevented the failures but stopped short of diagnosing a definitive cause.

“They have a window [of time] … to get the next layer down. Otherwise, it’s not going to adhere properly unless additional prep is done,” said Rudy Stankowitz, a pool operations expert.

If a section has already cured, its edges need to be sanded to rough up the surface and cut at an angle before a new set of coatings is applied next to it, otherwise they will fail to bond properly along the new seam, according to Michael Bushnell, a retired certified coating inspector for the U.S. Navy.

“If [the seams] are the only place where the failure is occurring, it’s strongly indicative of improper [edge] preparation,” Bushnell said.

Derek Downey, an expert in pool failure analysis who frequently testifies as an expert witness in construction defect lawsuits, recommends placing a separate material, such as tile and grout, between pool sections. That material would act as a physical barrier between separate coating applications, preventing adhesion failures when the coatings overlap.

The available visuals do not show workers applying special treatment at the seams where The Post found failure points, although it’s possible those steps were taken but not photographed. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor responsible for the project, and Mid-America Industrial Coatings, the subcontractor whose crews helped line the basin, did not respond to questions from The Post. Rhino Linings also did not respond.

On June 21, Atlantic Industrial Coatings said in a statement on its website that the company, along with the U.S. Park Service, had identified areas in the Reflecting Pool that needed repairs. “These areas are a very small part of the massive 7 acre project, and do not indicate a failure of the liner,” the statement said.

Rhino Linings, in a statement on its website, said the company is “aware of reports regarding localized areas of finish coat separation within portions of the Washington DC Reflecting Pool rehabilitation project.” The company added that, based on information provided by the project team, the condition “does not affect the underlying waterproofing membrane.”

New Canton, Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings was awarded a no-bid contract in April to repaint and waterproof the pool’s concrete floor. A March 31 Interior Department memo justifying the sole-source award said that “only a limited pool of contractors possess the qualification and equipment necessary” to complete the project in time for the 250th anniversary celebration.

In turn, Atlantic Industrial Coatings hired the Oklahoma-based Mid-America Industrial Coatings as a subcontractor to assist in the renovation. The company advertises its prior work with Rhino materials. Its website states that the company aimed to create “a seamless, protective barrier” for the pool.

The pool, which holds approximately 4 million gallons of water, has long had problems with algae and leaks. In 2012, it completed a two-year, $34 million renovation that shored up its floor support system to prevent the pool from sinking. For that project, contractors poured new, tinted concrete for the bottom of the pool and utilized a hydrophilic joint sealing strip, Hydrotite, from the New Jersey company Sika. In June, CNN reported that Sika declined to work on Trump’s renovation after being asked to do so, saying that the quick time frame and the color change made the project “unfeasible.” Sika did not respond to a request for comment.

In addition to the peeling paint, the pool experienced one of the biggest recorded algae blooms in years just days after its reopening.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” on July 5, Burgum said that the pool will be partially drained and that repairs will be completed by Atlantic Industrial Coatings. “We’ll use the same company, because they did a fantastic job,” he said, noting that the repairs could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Federal authorities have charged at least four people in connection with alleged vandalism, and three of them have pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges after allegedly peeling paint off the bottom of the pool and being caught in possession of pieces of liner. One person has been indicted, former Olympian David Hearn, and he has pleaded not guilty to a felony vandalism charge. At a news conference on July 2, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said National Park Service employees witnessed Hearn “forcefully and violently” pulling at the liner with both hands and turning belligerent when told to stop. No one has been accused of making gashes, according to charging documents.

Salvador Rizzo and Luis Melgar contributed to this report. Photos of the renovation process were shared publicly by the Interior Department.

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

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Friday, July 17, 2026 9:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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


Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.

You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.

All you care about is the destruction of everything good.
I'm gonna make this as blunt as possible: Trumptards are evil.


Rejected, Shit Golem.

Nobody gives a shit about your opinion.

Go fuck yourself.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Sunday, July 19, 2026 8:03 AM

SECOND

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


THE THREAT

By Andrew Tobias | July 17, 2026

https://andrewtobias.com/the-kings-speech-ii/

Jamison Firestone’s Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia is at once amazing, engaging, important, tragic, true — and highly relevant to USA situation today. [Free download from https://z-lib.sk/s/Jamison%20Firestone ]

It’s no coincidence Trump admires Putin and never says a bad word about him.

Russia’s path from democracy to kleptocracy — it briefly had one after Reagan got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” — and from a free press and the rule of law (at least somewhat) to jailing dissidents and the rule of lies . . . to a president for life surrounded by loyalists living, like him, lives of luxury while the masses struggle to get by . . . has so many parallels to the direction Trump has been taking us that it’s frightening.

It shows us how a murderous thug leading his country to ruin could remain popular among millions of his countrymen . . . and what could eventually happen here. Trump could eventually walk down Fifth Avenue shooting people and not lose support if we don’t succeed in restoring checks and balances.

I can’t recommend Rule of Lies highly enough.

It even has a (relatively) happy ending. As will, I think, the drama we’re living through.

From the Introduction
Quote:
While I’m American by birth, a great part of me is Russian. I founded the first independent foreign-owned law firm in Russia to help small businesses and entrepreneurs enter the market. I lived and worked in Russia for eighteen years. Most of my extended family and closest friends are Russian. I arrived in Russia in 1991 at the age of twenty-four and was living in Moscow when modern Russia came into existence. I have seen the country go from a land of infinite freedom, opportunity, and hope to a Mafia state, and from there to a dictatorship that attacks its own people, destabilizes our democracies, and wages war on its neighbors. For better or worse, I’m both a victim of Russia and one of its success stories.

So on that note, let me explain how a kid from New York founded a law firm in Moscow, had to flee for his life, and ended up in a pissing contest with the Putin regime. There’s a bit of family history in this story, but it’s there for a reason. It’s not something most of my clients or work colleagues have ever heard.


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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s War on the Future, Monetary Edition
Trying to punish Brazil for adopting a better payment system

Paul Krugman
Jul 20, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-the-future-monetary

Brazil introduced Pix, a digital payment system, almost 6 years ago. The system — which allows people to make payments on their phones, not very differently from Apple Pay or Google Pay, except that Pix payments are official currency rather than transfers from private companies — has been highly successful. The vast majority of Brazilians use it regularly, and by all accounts Pix — which is free for individuals and cheap for businesses — is hugely popular.

On Wednesday — as it happens, on the first anniversary of an article I posted praising Pix and suggesting that it may represent the future of money — the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter “unfair trade practices.”

Why is it unfair for a nation to offer its own citizens a better way to make purchases and pay bills? To some extent the Trump administration is still trying to punish Brazil for being a real democracy. Unlike the United States, Brazil put its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, on trial for trying to foment an insurrection when he lost the last election

Trump’s hostility towards Brazil’s Pix system is also an illustration of the same phenomenon we see in his energy policy: this administration is hostile to progress whenever that progress works against the interests and ideology of the oligarchs who have poured money into Trump’s campaigns and his pockets.

Pix is essentially a digital version of the real, Brazil’s currency. As a Federal Reserve report from 2022 said, a central bank digital currency — which is what Pix is — “is analogous to a digital form of paper money.” Brazilian banks are required to offer Pix, which the Trumpists claim gives it an unfair advantage over debit cards and other payment methods. But this requirement is similar, at a fundamental level, to the requirement that all U.S. banks accept dollar notes as deposits and disburse dollar notes on demand, which few people would consider unfair.

Who is hurt by the advent of Pix? Brazilians’ ability to cheaply make instantaneous payments from their phones certainly hurts the business of Visa and Mastercard, which are both U.S. companies. But since when is it an unfair business practice when companies lose business to a competitor that offers a better, cheaper product? For example, should we shut down the U.S. Postal Service because it offers better and cheaper mail delivery than UPS or FedEx? Should we shut down PayPal and Venmo because they compete with Mastercard and Visa?

Beyond concerns about Visa and Mastercard profits, Trump officials are reportedly concerned that Pix and similar payment systems elsewhere might challenge the international dominance of the dollar. In reality, Brazil is too small a player to make much of a dent in the world payments system. The dollar may, however, face a real challenge if the European Central Bank is able, as it hopes, to introduce a digital euro in 2029. If that happens, it’s not hard to imagine that a significant number of transactions that would otherwise have been made in dollars will be made in digital euros instead.

But let’s be clear: the reason people might switch to digital euros will be because the US won’t be offering an equally good means of payment. Why won’t there be a digital dollar? Not because it’s a bad idea — as Brazil has shown, it would be a very good idea. But there are powerful special interests that oppose any such move.

Last year Republicans in the House passed a bill that didn’t just forbid the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency; it prohibited any study of the issue by the Federal Reserve. “Don’t even think about creating a digital dollar.”

Proponents of this ban claimed to have concerns about how a central bank digital currency would work. But it’s obvious that their real concern is that it would work too well. Crypto interests, in particular, are very worried that consumers who had access to digital dollars would lose interest in stablecoins and other cryptocurrency products, because these products, being risky and awkward to use, would not be competitive with a system that simply lets people make electronic payments in dollars.

Brazil’s success is especially galling to crypto promoters because it’s in such stark contrast to the results of another Latin American monetary experiment: El Salvador’s attempt to make Bitcoin a major means of payment. The government of President Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin legal tender and spent large sums trying to promote its use. Yet the effort failed: cryptocurrency never caught on as a means of payment, and the plunge in Bitcoin’s price since last fall has inflicted large losses on El Salvador’s government.

Beyond special-interest opposition, Brazil’s digital currency clearly raises the ire of right-wingers who hate the idea of a government providing a service that could have been offered by the private sector, even — or rather especially — if the government can do it better. If we can have a digital dollar, why not a public option for health insurance?

Finally, the furious opposition to central bank digital currencies reminds me of the Trump administration’s all-out efforts to block the development of wind and solar power. In both cases, we see political players beholden to special interests — crypto when it comes to money, fossil fuels when it comes to energy — who claim to favor technological progress, but scream “not like that” when a superior technology doesn’t take the economy where they want it to go.

Now, using tariffs to punish Brazil for its monetary achievements won’t succeed. Politically, the move will only strengthen Brazil’s President Lula. Economically, the reach of the tariffs will be limited by Trump administration fears about driving the prices of coffee, orange juice, beef and other goods even higher. And as Monica de Bolle at the Peterson Institute for International Economics argues, Trump’s tariffs have, on balance, strengthened Brazil’s position: “Trade diversion around the globe as a reaction to US tariffs has turned Brazil into an export powerhouse,” with Brazil, for example, capturing much of the Chinese soybean market.

But the obvious folly of these new tariffs won’t stop them from happening. The Trump administration has declared war on the future — and one thing we know about Trump is that he never admits it when his wars of choice fail.

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 9:51 PM

SECOND

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


In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.

Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html

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

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Monday, July 20, 2026 9:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.

Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html

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




Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.

I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.

Get fucked, losers.

And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.

Just like I told you it would be.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Monday, July 20, 2026 10:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You want to see how much your world has changed and doesn't exist anymore, Shit Golem?

Watch this video.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 11:11 AM

SECOND

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


This sheer terror is driving Trump's 2 a.m. rage tweeting

By Thom Hartmann | July 21, 2026 5:30AM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-prison/

Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Letitia James to Adam Schiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued just last week.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 1:07 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.

Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html

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




Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.

I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.

Get fucked, losers.

And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.

Just like I told you it would be.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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

Tuesday, July 21, 2026 2:28 PM

SECOND

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


Oy, Canada Tariffs
How to lose friends and influence nothing

By Paul Krugman | Jul 21, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oy-canada-tariffs

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable! I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result. This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Jul 17, 2026, 3:24 PM

The Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, lost its standing as the worst trade policy action in US history when Donald Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. But Smoot-Hawley was widely recognized as a terrible mistake soon after its passage, as it provoked widespread retaliation and contributed to the downward spiral of world trade that accompanied and reinforced the Great Depression.

Recognition of Smoot-Hawley’s stupidity led to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, under which the US began negotiating trade deals — we’ll reduce our tariffs if you reduce yours — that helped pave the way for the great recovery of world trade and the global economy as a whole in the decades that followed World War II.

Yesterday the Trump administration invoked an obscure and never-before-used provision of Smoot-Hawley — Section 338 — to impose 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods.

Why? Why now? The White House fact sheet claims that the new tariffs are a response to Canadian policies that discriminate against U.S. products, notably the moves by most Canadian provinces (not the federal Canadian government) to stop importation of US alcoholic beverages. But these policies were themselves a response to the tariffs on Canadian goods Trump had previously imposed, without justification. Canadians were also reacting to Trump’s repeated demands that Canada surrender its independence and become the 51st state.

Were these complaints about Canadian policies the real reason for the new tariffs? On Friday Trump lashed out with the Truth Social post at the top of this article, threatening to impose tariffs on Canadian goods because of … wildfire smoke.

For the record, wildfires have been raging in Canada’s boreal forest, which covers 2 million square miles — the majority of Canada’s land area — and is mostly unmanaged because it’s completely inaccessible. Blaming Canada for not controlling fires that are, in reality, largely a consequence of global warming is unutterably idiotic.

Now, Trump officials claim that these tariffs aren’t about wildfire smoke, although the timing of these latest tariffs is curious. Notably, they haven’t ruled out the possibility of wildfire tariffs in the future. “The president has asked for options on that, and options are being shared with him,” one official told the Financial Times.

Also, one has to wonder whether Trump is feeling upset at the way he was massively booed at the World Cup final — while Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister and his co-host, was not.

Whatever the real motivation for these new tariffs, they are almost surely illegal. They are definitely a violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, a revision of NAFTA negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. Indeed, the White House fact sheet explicitly states that the new tariffs will be imposed “regardless of whether a good originates under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).”

So these latest actions confirm what most people around the world, from the European Commission to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, have already figured out: a deal with Donald Trump lasts only until he feels like breaking it.

The immediate economic impact of these tariffs will be limited. As far as I can tell, the highly integrated North American auto industry, which sprawls across both our northern and southern borders, won’t be directly affected. But the auto industry, like business in general, has been put on notice that the huge flows of goods and services that cross those borders every day may be cut off whenever Trump has a temper tantrum.

And this really is a temper tantrum, in the sense that there’s no strategy here. The new tariffs will hurt American consumers, and nobody expects them to extract any concessions from Canadians who are only getting more outraged at the United States.

Canada should be, and used to be, America’s greatest friend in the world. We share essential political and moral values with our northern neighbor. For the most part we even share a common language, eh? And Canadians viewed us very favorably until Trump began his tariffs and threats. Now we’re viewed less favorably than China:



The White House fact sheet on this latest move to further alienate everyone on the planet came with the usual pop-up:


Well, I don’t see a golden age. I see an America that has become an ineffectual bully, sicker, poorer, and riven by political extremism, with no friends anywhere in the world.

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

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026 2:54 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Keep crying Paul. You fucking loser.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.

Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html

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




Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.

I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.

Get fucked, losers.

And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.

Just like I told you it would be.


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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 5:52 AM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Kiss of Death

By Thomas B. Edsall | July 21, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/trump-inept-second-term.htm
l?unlocked_article_code=1.zVA.5cRx.5x6M1sGgcugz&smid=url-share

Donald Trump is the black-thumb president.

Let’s start small. He persuaded FIFA to quash the one-game suspension of the U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, after which the American men’s soccer team suffered a humiliating 4-1 loss to Belgium.

When Trump first announced plans to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he said it would cost $1.5 million. On July 15, The Associated Press reported that despite this initial promise, “the bill ballooned to more than $16 million by June. Trump had said the repairs would last a century, but within days of the project’s initial completion last month, the water was beset by an algae bloom and pieces of the new coating appeared to be peeling off the bottom.”

These setbacks are just two examples of Trump’s kiss of death, the defeats and economic setbacks that have come to characterize his second term in office, including the job losses following Trump’s imposition of tariffs, the surge in the national debt after passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the economic havoc resulting from his war against Iran.

Trump is one of the most — if not the most — ham-handed presidents in the nation’s history.

I asked Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, for his take on Trump in 2026. He replied by email:

Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many cabinet and sub-cabinet agencies, the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.

Trump’s infliction of harm is not a result of bad luck or malign interference by foreign and domestic adversaries — the common fate of American presidents. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump himself initiated the policies and actions that turned belly-up.

One of the most egregious examples, perhaps, is his decision to join Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21, 2025.

“The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump declared in an address to the nation that day. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

Despite these claims of success 13 months ago, the United States and Israel struck again this year, beginning on Feb. 28, and the war on Iran is in its fifth month, with the conflict intensifying and Americans beginning, once again, to die.

On his Substack, Popular Information, Judd Legum documented 24 instances between April 17 and July 13 of Trump making some variation of the claim “that the Strait of Hormuz was ‘open’ or controlled by the United States.”

Trump also let the Iranians know that “You got beat to hell” and boasted that it was a “Total and complete victory. 100 percent.”

More important than Trump’s false claims of victory, the war on Iran — a war of choice — has inflicted severe damage on the United States, including the death of at least 17 American military personnel and the wounding of more than 400 others.

According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, Americans are paying $71.3 billion more for gasoline and diesel alone. The increases in fuel costs translate into average household costs of $543.94 as I write. It will be more when you read this.

Let’s take a closer look at some of Trump’s proudest achievements.

On April 2, 2025, he announced “Liberation Day,” his plan to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners.

“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” the president asserted, adding, “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”

So what actually happened?

When Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, the total number of men and women employed in manufacturing was 12,673,000, according to the Federal Reserve. By June 2026, the number fell to 12,598,000, a loss of 75,000 jobs.

How about Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act?

On June 30, 2025, the title of a White House news release claimed “The One Big Beautiful Bill Slashes Deficits, National Debt While Unleashing Economic Growth.”

The reality:

Just before Trump took office, the nation’s debt was $36.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The debt is now more than $39.5 trillion, an increase of $3.3 trillion.

I asked political and presidential scholars how they think Trump’s mind works. Most pointed to his seemingly exclusive reliance on his own judgment while rejecting expert advice.

“Many presidents have made mistakes, but none have made mistakes so cavalierly as President Trump,” Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote by email in response to my query:

He makes rash, reckless decisions; at best, they are based on bar-stool theories of how the world works, and at worst, they are driven by corrupt motives. Since he “just knows” he is right about how tariffs work, no evidence will sway him.

In the short term, the country has been in many ways resilient, but he is corroding state capacity, democratic norms and the very sense of a unified nation.

How did he pull this off?

Trump is, however, quite skilled as a political leader, combining a hold on the Republican primary electorate with a willingness to relentlessly demand total obedience to his personal goals.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, took a different tack, placing Trump’s misjudgments in separate categories:

There are three categories of Trump failures: disasters of mismanagement, disasters by design and disasters of greed.

What are the achievements of the second Trump presidency thus far? Persistent inflation, sluggish economic growth, an unpopular war, aggressive immigration enforcement that has outraged many and the shredding of the safety net to fund a large tax cut.

In his second term, Moynihan argued,

Trump no longer feels the need to be bound by precedent, norms or good advice. We can see this at the superficial level (the Reflecting Pool) or for issues where there are extraordinary stakes, such as the Iran war.

Trump has lost any inhibitions he had while creating a bubble where he is surrounded by yes men.

Some of the adverse effects of Trump’s policies are not results of bad judgment but are purposeful, Moynihan contended, and he’s not wrong:

Some of the failings of the second administration are by design. More people will lose access to SNAP as One Big Beautiful Bill policies are being implemented. Medicaid restrictions will kick in by next year, similarly excluding millions of eligible citizens. The buildup of an immigration police state was also a feature of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Many of Trump’s most punitive actions are not the result of miscalculation but the faithful implementation of his vision.

When Trump’s favorability ratings are profoundly negative, how does he continue to get away with what he is doing, including personally amassing at least $2.2 billion largely through cryptocurrency companies designed to allow profiteering from foreign sources and domestic figures seeking special favors, including criminal pardons?

Dallek, again:

Several factors account for Trump’s political durability. The U.S. economy has avoided a recession. The stock market is breaking records. Consumer spending and A.I. have helped power the job market.

But more important, Dallek continued,

Trump benefits politically from an anti-establishment sensibility that has become perhaps the single most explosive structural force in American politics.

Millions of Americans believe that a rigged government needs to be eviscerated, and Trump, the ultimate outsider, wins support from some voters as the one man brazen enough to do the job.

Equally important, Dallek argued:

Many voters also continue to like Trump because he has done more than any politician since the 1960s to unwind liberal cultural norms and a rights-based legal order. Trump has delivered for his Christian conservative base. Roe is gone. Civil rights and voting rights have been eroded. The L.G.B.T.Q.+ movement is on defense. And D.E.I. initiatives across private and public institutions have been rolled back.

Trump’s record on social conservatism reads, at least to his base, like a list of long-denied priorities finally fulfilled. They are major achievements in the eyes of his base.

Other scholars make similar arguments.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, wrote by email:

What’s different about Trump is that many of his supporters evaluate him less by traditional policy outcomes and more by whether he’s fighting the political and cultural battles they care about. In today’s polarized environment, political identity often outweighs measurable policy success or failure.

While presidents frequently overpromise and underdeliver, “what distinguishes Trump,” Rottinghaus said, “is his willingness to pursue high-risk, high-visibility policies with relatively little concern for expert consensus or institutional caution. That increases both the potential payoff and the potential for costly failures.”

As a result, Rottinghaus argued that it’s important to use two separate standards in evaluating the Trump presidency:

By conventional measures of policy implementation, several Trump White House initiatives have fallen short of their stated goals.

By political measures — maintaining attention, dominating the news cycle and reshaping the Republican Party — he has been remarkably successful.

In key respects, polarization works to Trump’s advantage. Rottinghaus wrote:

Partisans increasingly judge presidents relative to the opposing party rather than against an objective performance standard. Many Trump supporters view criticism of his policies through a lens of distrust toward traditional media, academia and political institutions.

As a result, negative coverage often reinforces rather than weakens support. Voters frequently evaluate presidents on identity and values as much as policy outcomes. Supporters may tolerate economic costs if they believe Trump is advancing priorities like immigration enforcement, judicial appointments or cultural issues.

Are Trump’s policies and decisions based on a set of beliefs that lend themselves to adverse consequences?

George C. Edwards III, a political scientist emeritus at Texas A&M University, wrote:

Donald Trump is not the first president to make poor decisions, but he has shown a particular facility for making them.

He begins with faulty assumptions about the nature of problems (the balance of trade is a problem, but climate change is not; longtime undocumented immigrants are detrimental to the country but drastically cutting health research in not; renewable energy must be discouraged and fossil fuels are the future of energy) and the nature of solutions (tariffs will revive industries and will not raise prices, attacking Iran will force it to concede quickly, retribution against his opponents is appropriate, the government needs fewer experts).

Trump, Edwards continued,

is unwilling to assess, much less correct, his misunderstanding with thorough deliberation and advice. He does not read and disdains expertise.

Instead of careful, informed reflection, he acts impulsively and thinks with his gut, in which he has great confidence. He should not. Such an approach is disaster-prone.

The result?

Edwards:

These poor decisions have, among other consequences, hollowed out the government, undermined the rule of law, weakened the economy, degraded the environment, damaged our international alliances and emboldened Iran.

In the meantime, Edwards continued, the president is relentless in blaming others for performance failures, and partisan blinders shield him from attributions of responsibility by his core supporters.

H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas-Austin, succinctly summed up the distractive character of the Trump presidency in an email:

Donald Trump has a strange charisma unique among presidents. He is more like the leader of a cult than of a party, in that the worse things get for his followers, the more stubbornly they stick with him.

The Democrats have helped him by embracing policies, especially on cultural issues, that make them seem hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans.

All too true. The problem is that we are going to have to live with this man in the White House for the next two and a half years. Even worse, what Trump destroys with a snap of his fingers will take years to repair, except in those cases where he has broken something beyond restoration.

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 5:53 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:

Get fucked, losers.

And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.

Just like I told you it would be.
Have you heard of Herbert Hoover? The predecessor to President FDR? Hoover spent the rest of his life accusing Democrats of destroying America. Hoover also crashed the US economy, had no idea how to end the Great Depression, and opposed the US entering WWII. He was an early version of Trump, every instinct was wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=did+herbert+hoover+oppose+early+entry+
into+ww2

Herbert Hoover vehemently opposed early United States entry into World War II. As a vocal non-interventionist, he criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt's diplomatic maneuvers. Hoover believed that the conflict was an unnecessary European power struggle and argued that keeping the U.S. out was the best way to preserve democracy and economic Stability.

Key aspects of Hoover's anti-interventionist stance include:

• Opposition to War Preparations and Aid: He actively opposed measures like the Lend-Lease policy and warned that President Roosevelt was provoking both Germany and Japan. He frequently stated that if the U.S. had not provoked Japan, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would not have occurred.

• Distrust of Alliances: Hoover was a staunch anti-communist. He publicly disparaged any tacit alliance with the Soviet Union, arguing that fighting alongside Joseph Stalin would ultimately result in a greater tragedy.

• Concerns Over Domestic Impact: He feared that fighting a second global war would lead to massive government centralization, destroy the British Empire, and inadvertently empower the Soviet Union.

Hoover summarized his stance in a 1941 radio broadcast, asking: "Are we now to march out into the desert of European war and see the wells of freedom dried up behind us?", as documented by Teaching American History. He maintained this opposition until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Conflict.

Post-War Vindication Efforts -- Hoover's bitterness over the war lasted for decades. He spent much of his later life writing Freedom Betrayed, a massive, posthumously published critique of WWII diplomacy. In it, he argued that the war was entirely unnecessary and that a non-interventionist approach would have resulted in Germany and the Soviet Union destroying each other, sparing American lives and preventing the Cold War.

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

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Wednesday, July 22, 2026 1:55 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Get fucked, losers.

And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.

Just like I told you it would be.
Have you heard of Herbert Hoover?


Your dead whore mother was a Hoover.

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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:40 AM

SECOND

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


The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal

By J. Brian Atwood and Kevin E. Byrnes | 07/22/26 12:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5981243-doge-usaid-lawsuit-civil
-servants/

When Elon Musk and his youthful Department of Government Efficiency warriors boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the U.S. Agency for International Development, they did more than destroy a government agency. They violated the law by summarily firing USAID’s public servants while placing millions of people around the world in mortal danger.

The thousands of public servants, fired without due process, care deeply about the agency’s mission. They did not deserve to be fired, nor did they deserve the efforts by the president himself to pile on by besmirching their reputation.

These actions have ramifications far beyond the impact on the individuals involved. They place every government employee at risk. Career professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community have also been summarily relieved of duty.

If the courts fail to intervene, our nation will be sent hurtling back in history to the era of the corrupt spoils system. That era ended when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created a system based on merit. The law was updated in 1978 and it explicitly states that a public servant can only be removed if there is evidence of misconduct or poor performance — and only then after providing an opportunity for due process.

The administration violated this act, and we are contesting these firings in federal court. One of us is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades. The other served as the head of USAID for over six years in the Clinton administration.

DOGE made no real effort to determine what would be lost, including millions of lives. And it showed no empathy for USAID’s career employees, a professional staff that had made the agency a global leader in development cooperation.

USAID was irresponsibly removed from the world stage, and its employees were locked out. The president and Elon Musk labeled USAID’s professional public servants as “radical, leftist lunatics” and, with no evidence, stated that the agency was rife with “waste, fraud and mismanagement.”

Those labels were not mere insults. In a court of law, they are evidence.

The administration knew it could not fire career employees for their politics or for invented misconduct, so it dressed the purge as a “reorganization.” That was a façade.

The administration’s cover story has continued in court. Ironically, government lawyers now concede that no one was fired for misconduct or poor performance. That concession should end the matter. It is an admission that the lawful basis for these firings never existed.

Instead of acknowledging an unlawful purge, the government recasts the firings as a reorganization, a label engineered to deny employees’ due process. The reorganization is a fiction. The record shows a coordinated mass firing driven by the very motive the law forbids.

The Merit Systems Protection Board, created to oversee and implement the law protecting the civil service, has been reshaped into a rubber stamp for executive excess. The New York Times reported that the White House pressed the board behind closed doors to adopt a sweeping theory of presidential power.

In March, the board complied, breaking with decades of precedent to hold that Article II permits the president to remove career officials without due process. The decision is being appealed through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Fired USAID employees want their procedural rights observed, the law followed and their losses reversed or compensated. They want a reaffirmation of the principle contained in the law that a federal employee be judged not on a perception of their beliefs, but on the actions they take.

That legal principle keeps public service from being reduced to peonage. In the end, this is a battle over whether the rule of law can be quietly replaced by the law of rule.

J. Brian Atwood served as administrator of USAID from 1993 to 1999. Kevin Byrnes is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 4:41 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Man... You got up nice and early and started bouncing on your TDS dildo before they even put out any of the morning stories today, huh Shit Golem.

Good for you, buddy.



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

Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 5:18 AM

SECOND

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


The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War

The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities.

By Tom Nichols | July 22, 2026, 4:03 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/trump-iran-conflict-pentagon
/688026/

For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.

This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.

Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.

All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.

But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)

He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory” and said that Iran had been rendered “combat ineffective for years to come.” These statements were obvious nonsense. (During early briefings at the Pentagon, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, who must live in the world of real facts and figures, was more circumspect in his pronouncements, mostly limiting himself to a recitation of events and numbers regarding U.S. actions.)

Among the president’s favorite words is obliterated—a term he has repeatedly applied to Iran’s nuclear program and its military forces. Such assertions are clearly false and were almost certainly knowably false from the start. Iran’s military capability has been degraded, not obliterated, which is why this wording has come back to haunt Trump. Over the past few days, a clip of the Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo has gone viral; in it, Bartiromo points out what any sensible person who has listened to Trump talk about the war might question: “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out,” she said. She was puzzled, she added, “because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”

Bartiromo’s observation has only three possible responses. One is that the president genuinely has no idea what he’s saying, which would be beyond alarming in any circumstances, but especially during a time of war. Another option is that Hegseth and other advisers are keeping the truth from him, which would be a civil-military crisis of unprecedented gravity. The third option is that Trump is lying.

Now that a poorly negotiated cease-fire has finally fallen apart, Trump has returned to one of his most cringe-inducing howlers: The Iranians, he has said repeatedly, really want a deal. (CNN estimated last month that he has claimed to be close to a deal almost 40 times.) No, they don’t just want a deal: They are pleading for a deal. They are desperate for a deal. Tehran appears to enjoy outing Trump on this one; sometimes the Iranians seem to launch attacks in the region just to make the point that Trump is wrong. (Yesterday, Iran claimed to have struck a data center in Bahrain belonging to Amazon.)

The Pentagon, the institution that should be explaining the details of the war to the public, has fallen mostly silent: Hegseth is happy to offer clips of himself doing comically sloppy pull-ups, but neither he nor Caine has held a briefing on the war since May 5. Americans, after months of war, cannot even be sure how many men and women in uniform have been wounded or how severely.

This information void at America’s military headquarters is a dramatic departure from previous conflicts, when reporters were embedded with American military units; when the Pentagon offered regular, in many cases daily, briefings on operations; and when civilian and military leaders in DOD answered real questions from real journalists. Now those journalists have been banished from the Pentagon, and White House minions lash out at reporters, call them names, and accuse them of bad-faith attacks on America and the U.S. military.

The Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe, for example, recently pressed DOD about a story from The New York Times showing that the Pentagon has been slow to update an online database of those killed and wounded in the Iran war. A Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said on X that “partisan hacks” at the Times were “desperate to smear America’s military,” and another spokesperson, Joel Valdez, blasted Lamothe in an X post as a “disgruntled WaPo hack.” Lamothe’s offense, apparently, had been confirming that the Times’ story was, in fact, accurate.

As the CNN reporter Brian Stelter notes, “Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. It’s all indicative of a larger effort to control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war.” This is more than a lack of transparency; the Pentagon is taking away the ability to query actual human beings, instead redirecting journalists to an online source that is itself an obstacle to getting timely and accurate facts.

And the deceptions continue. When Hegseth and Caine appeared yesterday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Jon Ossoff read chapter and verse from Hegseth’s own statements about victory and the certainty of an Iranian surrender, and asked Hegseth whether he stood by them. In effect, Ossoff was asking Hegseth whether he had been lying then or whether he’s lying now. Hegseth became defensive, trying to talk over Ossoff and responding only with boilerplate deflections about the greatness of the American military and how Iran would never get a nuclear weapon. Hegseth refused to give any other answer; he finished his afternoon of testimony by blowing his stack when Senator Gary Peters called him a failure.

Trump and Hegseth are putting on a brave face, warning Iran that it will pay for killing more Americans. “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier,” Trump posted Monday on Truth Social, “they will pay for that killing many times over!” This morning, Trump posted that for every ship attacked in the strait, “the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” Leaving aside the issue of this threat to commit potential war crimes, the United States seems to be running out of munitions: On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a “U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions,” speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”

But others—including people in the Pentagon and the intelligence community—must know the truth, and if the White House wasn’t aware of these concerns yesterday, it is now. Trump, Hegseth, and others in the administration know many other truths as well. They should start sharing those truths with the American people.

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

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Thursday, July 23, 2026 5:41 PM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Nuclear Doctrine: Anything Is Possible For A Price

By David Averre | Jul 23, 2026 at 02:31 PM EDT

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal-anything-possible-ne
w-doctrine-12234080

The United States’ new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, struck yesterday as American missiles continue to batter Iran, was met with cries of hypocrisy! and warnings it would spur on the race for a nuclear bomb in the Middle East.

This is neither surprising nor unfair, but the criticism fails to address a deeper, and perhaps more consequential, problem.

The agreement—which could purportedly grant Riyadh a path to build its own uranium enrichment facilities as part of its civilian nuclear program without undergoing stringent inspections by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA—signals we are entering a new era of nuclear doctrine.

Nuclear nonproliferation is no longer being treated as a universal standard. Donald Trump likes to make deals, and the White House is telling the world that anyone can pursue their nuclear ambitions—provided you have enough bargaining power.

What may follow is a future in which states with enough money and geopolitical leverage can shop around for special nuclear deals from Washington—or Beijing or Moscow—while international safeguards become something to negotiate around rather than rules to meet.

Out With the Old Logic

The full text of the U.S.-Saudi agreement is yet to be made public, and any safeguards contained within remain unclear. Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Thursday: "There will be no enrichment of material!" But several reports suggest Riyadh could process spent atomic fuel and build its own uranium enrichment facilities, pending a joint study to assess feasibility.

Not only do these capabilities present a pathway to producing nuclear weapons, but the Saudis may also be granted leave to operate their nuclear program without signing the "additional protocol"—an extra layer of protection that gives IAEA inspectors special monitoring powers to ensure everything is done by the book.

The logic that giving a country the freedom to enrich uranium, reprocess its fuel and operate free of strict international inspections could increase the risk of weaponization is exactly the premise that governed Washington’s other major civilian nuclear agreement in the Middle East.

In 2009, the U.S. and the U.A.E. signed a deal enabling Washington to transfer nuclear technology to the Emiratis for civilian use. In exchange for America’s help in kick-starting a nuclear energy program, Abu Dhabi agreed it would not pursue enrichment or reprocessing capabilities and would comply with the IAEA’s additional protocol inspections, thereby guaranteeing it could not build a nuclear weapon.

The Saudi agreement seems to point in the opposite direction. Now, at a time when the U.S. military is waging war on Iran to demolish its nuclear program, the White House appears willing to throw out its own nonproliferation principles to give special treatment to an economically valuable ally.

Darya Dolzikova, a Senior Research Fellow for Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the RUSI think tank, told Newsweek: "It’s not surprising that the U.S. treats its allies a little differently from adversaries, even when it comes to nuclear nonproliferation.

"But once a country gets the expertise and technology to process fuel and enrich uranium, that knowledge doesn’t go away. Relationships change—Iran first got its nuclear technology from the United States, but the political winds shifted and now those countries are at war.

A New Buyers’ Market?

Riyadh is not the first partner to negotiate a bespoke nuclear deal with Washington outside of international safeguards.

India signed a deal in 2008 to receive additional U.S. support for its civilian nuclear program while retaining its own enrichment capabilities. But New Delhi already had its own robust civilian and military nuclear program, and is not a signatory of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty that aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons technology.

Saudi Arabia is different. It is entering the nuclear club for the first time, and its de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has openly declared Riyadh would pursue a nuclear weapon, should Iran manage to obtain one.

Even Russia, whose state nuclear company Rosatom has long wielded its nuclear technology as a tool of political and economic soft power, generally retains total control over the enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel provided to its customers throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

By striking a special deal with Riyadh, Washington could effectively launch a new, global nuclear marketplace, where any sufficiently wealthy state that wants an atomic program of its own can play nuclear providers like the U.S., Russia and China off against one another to extract favorable, tailor-made deals.

A scenario where competing nuclear powers are incentivized to offer less restrictive and advantageous provisions of their atomic technology to secure commercial and diplomatic wins over their rivals is a recipe for disaster.

"We must be cautious, given that the full text of the U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal is not yet public," Dolzikova told Newsweek. "But this deal raises the prospect of a new paradigm where states simply negotiate bespoke nuclear agreements and set their own provisions.

"We already have a great international system with the NPT and IAEA safeguards to regulate and safeguard the spread of nuclear technology. We should stick to it."

Nothing Set in Stone

The ink from the pens of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Minister of Energy Abdulaziz bin Salman has barely dried, and details of the U.S.-Saudi agreement remain obscure.

Once it does go public, Congress will have some 90 days to scrutinize, challenge and pull apart all aspects of the deal before it goes into force. There is no guarantee yet that Riyadh can set about building its spinning centrifuges, and if Trump is to be believed, they never will.

There are also plenty of legitimate reasons for the U.S. to pursue this deal. Beyond curbing Russian and Chinese influence over a valuable partner in a volatile region, American companies will reap significant economic benefits.

Nuclear technology is notoriously complex, and original manufacturers remain heavily involved in the life cycle of the reactors and other tools they provide to customers. It could provide long-term economic benefits for American companies, serve as a foundation for stronger diplomatic ties and further commercial deals with a key Middle Eastern partner, and give Washington more influence in the wider region.

However, this diplomatic and economic victory will quickly sour if it ushers in a new norm that pits Washington against its rivals as just one of several nuclear vendors.

The greatest risk is not that Saudi’s newfound nuclear capabilities trigger a renewed dash for a bomb in the Middle East. It’s the creation of a world where nuclear safeguards become another relic of the Cold War: honored in speeches but waived in negotiations, just another price point in great-power deals.

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

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