REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 19:07
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PAGE 20 of 36

Tuesday, March 11, 2025 3:11 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:

No. I don't understand retard.

You are a retard. You are a garbage human being. Everyone you know in real life hates you even more than people you know online.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump is running away from his biggest health care success (because Trumptards are fucked up in the head)

By Dylan Scott | Mar 11, 2025

https://www.vox.com/health/403372/trump-rfk-covid-vaccines-anniversary
-mrna

Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic.

With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development of a new vaccine to a new virus was four years Yet vaccines using the new technology of mRNA were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in a matter of months, and were already being put into arms by the first anniversary of the pandemic.

Rather than containing a weakened or dead virus, as most vaccines do, the shots contained mRNA — or messenger RNA, a kind of genetic script — that prompted cells to produce special proteins that would allow the body to develop an immunity to the novel coronavirus.

While new Covid variants would later pose challenges in the pandemic, scholars at the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research group, estimated that the Covid vaccines prevented more than 3 million deaths in the United States alone and 18 million hospitalizations from December 2020 to November 2022.

Scientists, who are usually not prone to crediting divine intervention, called the mRNA vaccines a miracle. Four in five Americans received at least one dose; when we remember less than half of Americans get their flu shot each year, the high uptake of mRNA shots, at least initially, signaled a willingness from the US public to trust this novel technology. After most Americans received their shots, more people returned to work, more kids went back to school, and the economy began to rebound. And there was optimism that mRNA technology could be used to make better vaccines for other diseases.

But even as the vaccines were actively pulling the US out of the pandemic, skepticism about mRNA technology was rising. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still a private citizen at the time and one of the country’s most vocal vaccine skeptics, urged the first Trump administration to pull the shots.

Now the nation’s top health official, Kennedy is reevaluating the US Health and Human Services’s contract with Moderna, which is developing flu vaccines targeting strains with high pandemic potential including the H5N1 bird flu that is currently driving fears of another pandemic.

With Kennedy at the helm of HHS, scientists and public health experts worry that a major breakthrough in medicine development may now backslide. mRNA technology has shown the potential to deliver new cancer treatments and a universal flu vaccine, and could lead scientists to uncover even more applications. But now, mRNA vaccine development is in peril — just a few years after proving its value.

Why so many Americans turned against a vaccine miracle

Scientists had been trying since the 1990s to crack mRNA vaccines, but progress was slow, in part because it was difficult to secure funding. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Operation Warp Speed funded rapid clinical trials, expanded manufacturing capabilities, and offered huge purchase guarantees for companies that delivered an effective vaccine.

mRNA vaccine development proved almost too good to be true during a real-life emergency. During the new Covid vaccines’ early clinical trials, they showed a 90 percent efficacy in preventing any symptoms at all.

In the real world, the efficacy of early vaccines didn’t quite live up to that hype. The Moderna and Pfizer shots were still very effective in preventing severe disease, but some vaccinated people did get infected. Many people reported experiencing unpleasant side effects like fatigue or body aches after their shot; some of them felt ill enough to miss work. And as more variants of the disease emerged and as protection that many people got from the vaccines faded over time, shots became less and less effective.

For such purely biological reasons, there were some important caveats to the “miracle” that public health experts were touting. But those side effects fed into existing anti-vaccine sentiment, and many people — activated by influencers and politicians who portrayed business closures and mask requirements as authoritarian measures of control — began to turn against the Covid vaccines. By autumn 2021, less than a year after the vaccines’ debut, anti-vaccine communities were thriving, constructing an alternative narrative of the pandemic in which the disease itself was not actually that serious but the vaccine could alter your DNA or plant a chip in your body.

Public embrace for the vaccine shattered and never recovered. Data from the CDC speaks for itself: Uptake for the booster shots that succeeded the original mRNA shots has plummeted; in November 2023, only 15 percent of Americans received the latest version of the vaccines.

The low rates for Covid-19 boosters underscored growing misinformation: Four in 10 Republicans said in a January 2025 KFF poll that it was “probably” or “definitely” true that more people had died from the Covid-19 vaccines than from Covid-19 itself, which represented a 15-point increase from a July 2023 survey.

Shifts in the national political mood have only entrenched this skepticism further. In December 2021, Kennedy said the Covid shots were “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” (Scientists have documented at most a few dozen deaths attributable to the vaccines worldwide after billions of doses were administered, and population-level analyses have detected no meaningful increase in mortality after the vaccines were introduced.) By February 2025, Vice President JD Vance was echoing some of those claims. “I took the vax, and, you know, I haven’t been boosted or anything,” Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan. “But the moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was when the sickest that I have been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine.”

Elon Musk, meanwhile, has emerged as something of a double agent, simultaneously embracing skepticism of the Covid-19 vaccine development while underscoring the risk of discrediting mRNA technology entirely.

Musk claimed on his own platform X that he “almost went to hospital” after a Covid booster, before adding: “That said, synthetic mRNA has a lot of potential to cure cancer and other diseases. Research should continue.”

He’s right. As Covid-19 has upended our politics and culture so thoroughly in the past five years, we are at risk of losing out on important medical innovations. That cure for cancer may never materialize if governments stop offering financial support or ban mRNA use, or if people simply don’t trust it and won’t take it because they’ve become convinced by these conspiracies.

But all of those things are unfolding at once.

The US health department’s recent decision to reevaluate a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop a shot that targets flu strains with particularly high pandemic potential has terrified public health experts. With H5N1 already percolating as a pandemic threat, former federal health officials have warned the decision could hamper our ability to quickly produce a new vaccine whenever the next influenza pandemic strikes — be it bird flu or something else.

At the state level, Republican leaders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have called for a ban on any vaccine mandates involving mRNA shots. Some state lawmakers want to press further, banning all mRNA vaccines for the people they represent. No such ban has yet become law but in the last year alone, legislation has been introduced in Idaho, Iowa, and Montana.

“I believe all the gene therapy products that are being used for immunization should be put on hold until we can determine their safety and efficacy,” said Idaho Republican Sen. Brandon Shippy. (The mRNA vaccines do not alter your genes, as gene therapies made specifically for genetic disorders like sickle cell disease are designed to do.)

Many Republican voters not only believe the Covid-19 vaccines killed more people than Covid did, but they’re souring on other parts of the public health consensus, including long-held recommendations for childhood vaccines.

In a November 2024 paper, researchers looked at worldwide attitudes toward mRNA technology and discovered “widespread negative sentiment and a global lack of confidence in the safety, effectiveness, and trustworthiness of mRNA vaccines and therapeutics.”

For now, mRNA development in the US and around the world continues. Scientists are working on a universal flu shot and respiratory virus vaccines. They are showing promising results with cancer vaccines, including for diseases such as pancreatic cancer that have resisted older treatments. Major pharmaceutical firms believe that mRNA could be harnessed to treat rare genetic disorders, too.

Covid showed that the science behind mRNA technology works. The opportunity for major medical breakthroughs still exists. The question now after our collective experiences of the past five years, is whether we still want them.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 3:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Have fun with your future Covid-shot related heart attack, Mudblood.



At least the staff at Vox got that going for them. They're all going to be out of jobs soon, but maybe most of them die off from Myocarditis before they get the bad news.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 3:47 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:
Have fun with your future Covid-shot related heart attack, Mudblood.



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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you are fucked up in the head. Thirty years from now I will be a healthy 103 year old and you will be long dead because you stupidly fucked up your health.

Trump is lying about dead people and Social Security
But we should fix this problem and have a central federal birth/death registry

By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 11, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trump-is-lying-about-dead-people

Last month, Elon Musk complained that the Social Security Administration’s database contains millions of Social Security numbers for people who seem implausibly old but who are not marked as dead in the official files.

“Maybe Twilight is real,” he quipped, “and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”

This is the kind of thing that often happens when a person stumbles into an unfamiliar dataset. For example, I once tried to compute a “new homes per new people” ratio on FRED and noticed that there were consistently weird jumps in the ratio every January. I thought this might have something to do with the seasonality of home building, but when I looked into it, I learned that the Current Population Survey does a revision every January that creates a discontinuity in the population figures.

Literally, this chart says there was a mass death event in January of 2024. But we all know that this didn’t happen. By the same token, the US population did not increase by 2.8 million people in January of 2023. Instead, the population level estimate was revised upward by 2.8 million, and that is recorded in the database in a way that is annoyingly unhelpful.

By the same token, it’s true that the United States of America does not maintain a comprehensive federal death registry. As I have frequently complained, national data about the number of murders committed in the United States is incredibly laggy. The numbers on drug overdoses aren’t quite as delayed, but the most recent release (from late February) told us how many overdoses we had back in September.

In the United States, the tracking of births and deaths of livestock is much more timely and comprehensive than the tracking of births and deaths of humans, because livestock data is recorded by the Department of Agriculture, while collecting data on humans is a disaggregated state and county function. As a result, the CDC has one effort to figure out how many people are dying of drug overdose, while the FBI has another to figure out how many people have been murdered, and the Social Security Administration has a third to figure out how many people are ineligible for benefits due to death.

I find this to be a genuine government efficiency problem, and I think it would be great to create a centralized federal vital statistics database that could share relevant information with other agencies. This would reduce duplicative efforts, give decision-makers access to more up-to-date information, improve benefits administration, and constitute a genuine public good.

I was prepared to leave it at that, but Donald Trump repeated Musk’s claims in the State of the Union Address, again suggesting that money is being paid out to super-centenarians on a scale that is relevant to long-term fiscal policy.

This isn’t true, Trump is not proposing any solutions to the actual problem, and I don’t understand what move he’s trying to set up with this claim.
Super-centenarians and Social Security

The best source of accurate information on the number of active Social Security numbers held by implausibly old people is the SSA Inspector General Report, “Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident.” (The Numident is the name of the file where they list every SSN that has ever been issued.)

The IG report expresses quite a bit of frustration with the Social Security Administration.

They note that, as of 2020, the Numident contained 18.9 million SSNs issued to people born in 1920 or earlier who are marked as alive, even though the Census Bureau says only about 86,000 people over the age of 100 reside in the United States.

Of these SSNs, 1.7 million are issued to people who have more than one SSN and who have already been marked as dead with the other number. In hundreds of thousands of other cases, the death information is available to the Social Security Administration through the payment files or Medicare records, and the Numident simply hasn’t been updated. Beyond that, fully 13.3 million people listed as alive on the Numident are older than the oldest known living person. The IG believes, strongly, that the Social Security Administration should try harder to update the Numident — that they should mark as dead those 13.3 million presumptively dead people and the 1.7 million duplicates.

In most cases, precisely because these people are old, there are no electronic records of their death, which means deaths are hard to identify. But the reports says that in addition to Social Security benefits, the SSA has electronic access to all information about “SSI payments, Medicare benefits, Black Lung benefits, or Railroad Retirement Board benefits since the 1970s.” The IG’s view is that if you are over 100 years old and have not been collecting federal benefits of any kind, you should be marked as dead in the Numident.

The SSA has been slowly improving this document over the years, but keeps rejecting advice to conduct a large-scale purge of the people who are most clearly dead.

They claim that they lack statutory authority to do this. There also isn’t a very strong incentive to do it, because the IG’s whole point is that you can tell these people are dead precisely because they aren’t drawing any federal benefits. In fact, the IG’s report says that in “Tax Years 2016 through 2020, employers and individuals reported approximately $8.5 billion in wages, tips, and self-employment income using 139,211 SSNs assigned to individuals age 100 or older.” In other words, the main fraudulent use of undead SSNs is not to cheat the government out of money; it’s undocumented immigrants paying into the system.

This is the kind of situation in which an alternate universe DOGE could actually be extremely useful.

There is a known problem of inaccuracies in the Numident that the Social Security Administration is dragging its feet about correcting, because the problem doesn’t have any real downside for Social Security — it’s a problem for other agencies, primarily those charged with enforcing immigration laws. Without impetus from the top to change things, bureaucracies tend to move at the pace of their most lead-footed member, so high-level executive attention to these kind of long-simmering problems could be constructive. Across the whole government, there are lots of inspector general and GAO reports with various program integrity recommendations that are not being acted on with sufficient alacrity.

But the actual DOGE is, as far as we can tell, not doing any of this. Instead, they’re conducting arbitrary layoffs that will make it harder to fix anything. And in the specific case of Social Security, they are lying about the upshot of the undead SSN problem to make it seem like huge sums of money are going out the door when they’re just not.

Very little money is improperly paid to dead people

If you want to learn about improper Social Security payments, you should check out another Inspector General report titled “Preventing, Detecting, and Recovering Improper Payments.”

According to the IG, the SSA does, in fact, make billions of dollars in improper overpayments every year. They also make a smaller number of improper underpayments. (In the chart below, OASDI is Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance — the main Social Security program — and SSI is supplemental income for the disabled.)

Obviously, you’re going to sound like an asshole if you stand up in front of the voters and say, “Hey, what’s the big deal? It’s only $10 billion a year in overpayments!”

But the government paid out around $1.5 trillion in Social Security benefits in 2024, and the IG estimates an improper payment rate of about 0.84 percent. That’s not bad for government work! And it’s worth noting that improper payments are made in both directions, and to an extent, there are tradeoffs between Type 1 and Type 2 errors. If your sole focus is colonizing Mars, you may be obsessively focused on reducing overpayments to zero with no concern about improperly underpaying benefits owed to the elderly, the disabled, widows, or orphans. But normal people can see why the people running this agency may be wary of making mistakes in the wrong direction.

At any rate, the IG report seems to indicate that benefits improperly paid to people who are dead account for less than ten percent of erroneous payments.

The main source of overpayment is people whose checks are supposed to be adjusted downward not reporting their own situations accurately. Some of this has to do with weaknesses in SSAs automatic benefit calculation systems, an area where some smart engineers could probably help. Some of this the IG says the SSA could remedy if they had direct access to IRS income data, which would Congress would need to pass new legislation for. And some of it has to do with the complicated calculations around the Government Pension Offset and Windfall Elimination Provision rules. Congress largely eliminated those rules in an unwise bipartisan bill that passed in December, so there will be much less need to try to do the calculations correctly. Note that this law, the Social Security Fairness Act, costs nearly ten times as much as could be saved by eliminating all improper overpayments.

Which just goes to show that while better program administration is always desirable, the real reason Social Security spending is so high is the actual laws on the books.

The government should track people better

Long story short:

It’s not true that the government could save significant amounts of money by eliminating improper Social Security overpayments.

It is doubly untrue that Social Security overpayments are largely a matter of money going to people who are actually dead.

Eliminating the undead SSNs that Musk and Trump are complaining about might actually leave Social Security with less money, because many of them are being used to illegally pay into the system!

Beyond the fact that the administration is full of extremely dishonest people who like to lie about things, I genuinely don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish by misleading people about this.

Social Security benefits are either going to get cut or they’re not. If they get cut, people will notice. If they don’t get cut, no money will be saved and the bond market will notice. If Trump were running for office, the point of the lying would be to put the incumbent president on the defensive about why he’s not fixing this. But he is the incumbent president, and he’s not going to be able to fix the problem because the problem is fake.

All that said, I do think this whole saga is a case study in why the government both needs better administrative data and should make better use of the data that it does have.

Social Security numbers are sort of odd. They’re the closest thing that we have to a national identification system, but when Social Security was created, only 56 percent of the workforce was covered by the system. The program wasn’t designed to function as a comprehensive national identification. It expanded over time, but it still doesn’t actually cover everyone. And it also doesn’t have the features you would expect a national identification system to have. For example, when a baby is born in a hospital, they’re issued a birth certificate. But the birth certificate does not come with a Social Security Number attached. Instead, parents use the birth certificate to apply for an SSN, which is then issued separately. Similarly, the SSA needs to piece together information about who is and is not dead based on data from state governments, banks, Medicare, and other stakeholders in the system.

It would be better, I think, to put privacy worries aside and actually create a canonical federal database of who is alive and who is dead and where they live.

This would solve a variety of problems. It would be easier to get people signed up for benefits they’re eligible for (and easier to cut people off when they’re ineligible). The FBI and CDC could publish timely statistics on topics of interest, like homicide and overdoses. It would be harder for people to work illegally. It would be easier to obtain accurate information about income and poverty, rather than relying on surveys. We could even have (shudder) a national photo ID card system instead of separate state driver’s license systems. And, of course, if we had a national system like that, we could require photo ID to vote without concerns about excluding anyone.

But this mires us in a timeless (though to me bizarre) debate in the United States, where we let privacy concerns stop us, even though in practice, we end up hacking together a bunch of substitute ID systems, like driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. I think people often don’t even know why they’re opposed to this kind of thing. Federalism has some real virtues in terms of decentralizing decision-making, but vital statistics tracking seems like an odd thing to decentralize. It’s just a legacy of historical happenstance that creates small-bore problems and lets dishonest people lie about Social Security fraud.

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 3:48 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


You're a 23 year old beatoff living in your mom's basement.

Get fucked, loser.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 5:42 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND's posts are by overarticulate liars.

SECOND, you really think anyone is gonna wade thru all that crap?

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 6:21 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


His articles are all written by a Who's Who list of Establishment NeoLib bureaucrats and shills that were all knocked off the raft and are desperately doing whatever they can to not get swallowed up by the rapids before everybody stops paying them to put their words to print.

These are their dying last gasps.

Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:24 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:

Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'd flip that around to Trumptards Die In the Dark. Eventually America's libtards will understand that words don't change robots' degenerate behavior patterns but Canadians pulling the plug on Trumptard robots might work. See the following story:

Donald Trump explosively warned Ontario that it would "pay a financial price" for its retaliatory tariffs "so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come"

"Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?" the president raged on his Truth Social app. (That Trump asks such questions shows he was never a very stable genius, quoting his self-evaluation.)

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/breaking-donald-trump-issues-an
other-34841066

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Stable_Genius

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:27 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I read thru the article by Iglesias, and he has a point: Social Security should be a national database. Every citizen should have a number, and the dead (and illegals paying into the system) should be purged. I see a potential problem in the reporting of home births and deaths. Unreported births don't trigger any benefits, but deaths mean the cessation of benefits.

I think in order to collect insurance, settle estates and so forth you have to get a death certificate from the county, but the way it is now its up to ... somebody ... to notify Social Security of the death. If that "somebody" fails to report, benefits could be collected fraudulently. The county should pass that on to voter registration rolls and to Social Security automatically. N'est ce pas?

Turning Social Security into a comprehensive database, tho, is beyond Social Security's remit. In order to produce the kinds of analyses he's mentioning, Social Security would have to collect all kinds of data, like cause of death. And linking IRS and Medicare/ Medicaid to Social Security data .... they do that already, using your tax return to calculate your Medicare premiums. If someone's gonna cheat, they're gonna cheat on their 1040 with unreported income.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 7:40 PM

SECOND

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


Elon didn’t get the memo

Candidate Trump promised he would not allow any cuts to Social Security or Medicare if elected. Looks like President Musk didn’t get the memo:

Despite reporting from The Washington Post on Monday suggesting that DOGE officials are starting to worry about bad “PR,” Musk suggested later in the day he could push for big cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and other safety net programs.
Quote:
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — most of the federal spending is entitlements — that’s the big one to eliminate,” he said. “That’s sort of half trillion, maybe $600-700 billion a year.”
“There is no expert on the planet who thinks there is $700 billion worth of annual fraud in America’s safety net programs. Musk at one point in the interview cited a Government Accountability Office report which estimated that the government may lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, but that report covered the whole of the federal government — not just those programs. (The sizable frauds occurring in programs like Medicare and Medicaid are typically carried out by scam businesses, not recipients.)”

I’m sure President Musk is lying. He lies as easily as breathing. But as Goebbels and Stalin knew, if you repeat lies often enough, people start to believe them.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-cuts-soc
ial-security-medicaid-medicare-1235293407/

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 8:16 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I read thru the article by Iglesias, and he has a point: Social Security should be a national database. Every citizen should have a number, and the dead (and illegals paying into the system) should be purged. I see a potential problem in the reporting of home births and deaths. Unreported births don't trigger any benefits, but deaths mean the cessation of benefits.

I think in order to collect insurance, settle estates and so forth you have to get a death certificate from the county, but the way it is now its up to ... somebody ... to notify Social Security of the death. If that "somebody" fails to report, benefits could be collected fraudulently. The county should pass that on to voter registration rolls and to Social Security automatically. N'est ce pas?

Turning Social Security into a comprehensive database, tho, is beyond Social Security's remit. In order to produce the kinds of analyses he's mentioning, Social Security would have to collect all kinds of data, like cause of death. And linking IRS and Medicare/ Medicaid to Social Security data .... they do that already, using your tax return to calculate your Medicare premiums. If someone's gonna cheat, they're gonna cheat on their 1040 with unreported income.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA



It would stop crazy people from cutting up their dead mother's body and hiding her in the freezer for years, among other things.

Remember that little gem?

https://abc7chicago.com/eva-batcher-regina-michalski-body-in-freezer-s
ocial-security-fraud/12763071/

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 8:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

His articles are all written by a Who's Who list of Establishment NeoLib bureaucrats and shills that were all knocked off the raft and are desperately doing whatever they can to not get swallowed up by the rapids before everybody stops paying them to put their words to print.

These are their dying last gasps.

Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.

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

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


Nobody cares what you would do.

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

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

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Tuesday, March 11, 2025 8:19 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Their cultural relevance and their diseased vision of our future dies now.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
I'd flip that around to Trumptards Die In the Dark. Eventually America's libtards will understand that words don't change robots' degenerate behavior patterns but Canadians pulling the plug on Trumptard robots might work. See the following story:

Donald Trump explosively warned Ontario that it would "pay a financial price" for its retaliatory tariffs "so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come"

"Why would our Country allow another Country to supply us with electricity, even for a small area? Who made these decisions, and why? And can you imagine Canada stooping so low as to use ELECTRICITY, that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat?" the president raged on his Truth Social app. (That Trump asks such questions shows he was never a very stable genius, quoting his self-evaluation.)

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/breaking-donald-trump-issues-an
other-34841066

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Stable_Genius

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


Yeah. And they pussy'd out and backed down many hours before you made this post, stupid.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66605

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. You are stupid.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 4:30 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
The Legal Loophole That Costs Medicaid Billions


https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/legal-loophole-costs-medicaid-billio
ns

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 6:35 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:

Yeah. And they pussy'd out and backed down many hours before you made this post, stupid.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=66605

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. You are stupid.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
In international affairs, Trump has suggested repeatedly that if he has good personal relations with a foreign head of state, then America ought to have good relations with that country. Bad relations with Canada's head of state? Bad relations with Canada. Trump hated Justin Trudeau but now that Mark Carney is the next prime minister of Canada, Trump flip-flops on Canada, which makes no sense.

The entirely personal nature of Trump’s approach manifests itself domestically. Trump is now reversing what Joe Biden did in Ukraine, just as in his first term, he reflexively reversed Barack Obama. Trump derided Obama for not providing lethal military assistance to Ukraine, so he did just that, sending missiles and more.

Ronald Reagan knew how to handle nations that might commit unprovoked aggression against U.S. interests. Trump clearly does not. This does not reflect differences in strategy, which Trump lacks. Instead, it’s another Trump reversal, this time of The Godfather’s famous line: It’s not business; it’s strictly personal.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/ukraine-trump-putin-
zelensky-russia/681988/

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 6:50 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.

There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.

And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.

Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 7:43 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:
Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.

There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.

And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.

Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly. They let Trump be the loudmouth with a gun. Except Trump isn't a space pirate like Malcolm. Trump is playing. He is on an adventure, the most fun a human can imaginably have. Musk is Trump's pilot, Hoban "Wash" Washburne, on the spaceship. They are buddies making a reality TV version of Firefly. The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 7:44 AM

SECOND

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


A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country

By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-mind-is-a-terrible-thing-to-lose

The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.

I don’t say this because I disagree with their ideologies or believe that they have very bad policy ideas. That’s been true for quite a few politicians over the years. But while I’ve always considered, say, Mitch McConnell a malign influence on America, while I described Paul Ryan as a flimflam man, I never questioned their sanity.

And yes, I’m well aware of the dangers involved in questioning people’s mental stability from afar, especially in a political context. I personally have been the target of that sort of thing, back when people accused me of being unhinged for suggesting that the Bush administration was taking us to war on false pretenses.

But I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.

News reports still tend to sanewash what our leaders have been saying, and even selected quotations often make them sound more rational than they are. Fortunately, both are addicted to posting on social media, and you really have to read some of their posts to get a full sense of the madness.

So here’s Trump, ranting against Canada:
Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Based on Ontario, Canada, placing a 25% Tariff on "Electricity" coming into the United States, I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to ad an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th. Also, Canada must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products, which has long been considered outrageous. I will shortly be declaring a National Emergency on Electricity within the threatened area. This will allow the U.S to quickly do what has to be done to alleviate this abusive threat from Canada. If other egregious, long time Tariffs are not likewise dropped by Canada, I will substantially increase, on April 2nd, the Tariffs on Cars coming into the U.S. which will, essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada. Those cars can easily be made in the USA! Also, Canada pays very little for National Security, relying on the United States for military protection. We are subsidizing Canada to the tune of more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. WHY??? This cannot continue. The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever — And Canada will be a big part of that. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World — And your brilliant anthem, "0 Canada," will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!
Mar 11, 2025,10:01 AM
Leave aside the nonsensical claims that Canada is a high-tariff nation subsidized by the United States. When Trump first began talking about turning Canada into the 51st state, many people treated it as a joke. But Trump doesn’t appear to be in on the joke. He just keeps doubling down, even as the people of Canada grow ever more outraged. No sane leader would imagine that it’s a good idea to threaten a heretofore friendly but proudly patriotic neighbor and ally with annexation. But a sane leader is exactly what we don’t have.

Then there’s Elon Musk. Surely almost everyone except Trump realizes that DOGE has been a bust; despite unprecedented and often illegal access to government agencies, it has yet to come up with any credible major examples of waste or fraud. Even Musk, I suspect, knows at some level that he’s failing. But like Trump on Canada, he just keeps doubling down.

Consider Musk’s quickly and easily refuted claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This was a deeply embarrassing error, one that would have killed most people’s political careers. Still, Musk might have been able to ride it out by admitting that his minions had failed to understand the Social Security Administration’s databases.

But no. Musk has reiterated his claim that we’re making huge payments to dead people, and is now insisting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, showing that he hasn’t made any effort to understand how the bedrock of American retirement works. Musk’s obsession with supposed fraud in Social Security is looking a lot like Trump’s obsession with annexing Canada; apparently he simply can’t admit error, even to himself, and change course.

And then there’s this:
Quote:
Elon Musk @elonmusk
What’s really happening is that the Dems are using Social Security and other government programs to attract and retain illegals, who are their future voters, and will unequivocally shift the electoral college and presidency via census in 2030.
9:05 AM • Mar 10,2025 2.3M Views
Of course, illegal immigrants don’t receive Social Security benefits, because they don’t have valid Social Security numbers. But that’s almost trivial compared with Musk’s open endorsement of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, according to which liberals are deliberately luring nonwhite immigrants to America to tilt the electorate in their favor. This is the conspiracy theory that inspired torch-carrying marchers in Charlottesville to chant “Jews will not replace us.”

And look beyond what Trump and Musk have said to the actions of the people they’ve chosen to oversee key public agencies. Robert F. Kennedy, the secretary of health and human services, refuses to respond to a measles outbreak with a clear call for vaccinations, instead suggesting that people take cod liver oil. The secretary of agriculture has suggested that Americans respond to high egg prices by raising their own chickens.

How did the highest levels of U.S. government become infected by madness? Well, this is what you get when you give flawed people — people prone to grandiosity, vindictiveness and paranoia — so much power that nobody dares tell them when they’re going too far. Cowed Republicans and timid Democrats have effectively given Trump and Musk the freedom to become the worst versions of themselves.

And the whole world will pay the price.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 8:16 AM

SECOND

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


Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?

The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, and an end to woke lunacy — not tariffs and irrelevant indulgences.

By Charles C. W. Cooke | March 11, 2025 1:34 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/does-trump-know-why-he-was-elec
ted/

President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.

Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.

When one observes this aloud, one is typically called names, tarred as a chronic pessimist, or even cast as an omnipotent wrecker. But the thing is: The electorate doesn’t — and never will — have any interest in any of that. As was the case with the Democrats, the MAGA movement’s preoccupations, presumptions, and put-downs are wholly irrelevant to the average American’s life. The public wants the economy humming, the border secure, an end to the illiberal lunacy that was wokeism — and that’s about it. It will not be distracted from those core aims by memes, inside jokes, or the obsequious insistence that the president is “based.” Canada becoming the 51st state, the purchase of Greenland, how people currently perceive Tesla, the “Gulf of America,” the real or imagined infractions of random legislators, the grudges and conspiracy theories of Truth Social users — these are all stupid, extraneous indulgences.

So, too, is the desire now being expressed by some to “remake” America’s economy in the image of 1890 or 1970. Americans want the economy to be strong, and, beyond that, are not especially interested in the details. Telling those who are dissatisfied that the stock market has dropped as the result of tariffs they overwhelmingly oppose that, instead of complaining, they ought to be thankful for Trump’s brilliance is not going to help. Telling them that this development is an act of “love” will irritate them yet more. Telling them that the only people who care about such things are “globalists” or “billionaires” or “elites” is a recipe for disaster. The people who voted Donald Trump back into office wanted him to bring back 2019. They did not sign up for a trade war with Canada, the resurrection of William McKinley, or an endless game of red light/green light that tanks their 401(k) and makes it harder for their kids to buy a house.

Nor, indeed, are voters even one-quarter as invested in Trump and his success as his fans are. It may be important to Trump’s acolytes to defend him at all costs, but it is not important to the electorate — which, to its credit, is almost always unmoved by the bullying, lying, and indignant self-aggrandizement that works so well on Twitter/X. Americans don’t care what “influencers” have to say, they do not consider themselves to be represented by them, and they do not believe that they are a part of some world-historical revolutionary vanguard. They disliked the Democrats and wanted the basics fixed, so they chose Trump and the Republicans to run the federal government. That’s it. That’s literally all there is to this. The Republicans can either do the job well or do the job badly, but they will have to deal with the consequences of their choice. Doing the job badly and then trying to work the refs will be no more fruitful for them than it was for the Democrats. As ought to have become obvious by now, one cannot wheedle the public into accepting preposterous social theories, into liking ever-higher prices, or into enjoying destructive unpredictability. If Donald Trump doesn’t want to swiftly become the lamest duck who ever walked the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he’ll internalize that — and fast.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 10:42 AM

SECOND

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


Here Are the Arguments for Why Senate Ds Should Vote Yes and Why They’re Wrong

By Josh Marshall | March 12, 2025 12:57 a.m.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/here-are-the-arguments-for-why-se
nate-ds-should-vote-yes-and-why-theyre-wrong

Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.

Let me summarize them briefly.

• Democrats are in a tough messaging environment and they’ll get blamed for the shutdown. Trump might even get to blame a recession on them.

• The White House will get to control the pace of the shutdown. In other words, the executive gets flexibility in just how things get shut down, things that will get more or less helpful press attention. Thus he’ll be able to engineer lots of bad press cycles for the Democrats.

• Quite simply, Trump’s presidency and the economy are imploding. Why rush in to make ourselves the story when every day is a bad day for Trump?

• It’s too soon. The public isn’t engaged enough yet. By the fall the economy will likely be in recession and it will be a debate on Medicare, Medicaid, etc. — that’s the time to have the fight.

• Trump and Musk probably want a shutdown. After a shutdown goes on for 30 days, the law opens up new legal avenues for layoffs. A shutdown is actually what they want and they will use it to accelerate the process, get people used to it. In other words, risking a shutdown is a trap because nothing would make them happier.

I’ve thought a lot about each of these arguments. On their own a number of them are compelling and point to very real risks. Indeed, last week I briefly started questioning my own position because Democrats had done nothing to lay any groundwork for why they were choosing this confrontation. And that makes a fight much, much harder.

But I think each of these arguments is mistaken. Indeed, as a whole it’s a bit like sitting in the mess hall in Treblinka planning an escape when someone says, “But if we try to escape they’ll kill us all!”

First, I think Republicans are going to get wrecked in the midterms. I think that’s highly likely whatever happens. As a narrowly electoral calculus I think there’s a decent argument Democrats should just let everything happen, let Trump and Musk go wild. In this sense, James Carville’s argument that Democrats should just do nothing is right, by a narrowly electoral calculus. But there’s more than just an electoral calculus. Trump and Musk are methodically dismantling the republic day by day. Absent some major change in the trajectory of events the government Democrats might half-inherit in a midterm sweep would be all but unrecognizable, a smoldering heap of faits accompli. Democrats need to take some real risks to at least slow the process of destruction and reshape the trajectory.

The same basic argument applies to the “it’s too soon, things aren’t ripe” argument. There’s a political logic. Trump is likely to be much less popular. Popular programs will be on the line in the fall. The public will have had a lot more time to internalize what Trump’s doing. I just don’t think the opposition has the luxury of time. Same argument as above.

On controlling the pace of a shutdown, that is an advantage for Trump. There will be a lot of game playing. But I don’t think that’s decisive.

Will Democrats get blamed? Maybe. It’s impossible to know how public opinion will evolve. But there are good reasons to doubt they will. First, Republicans almost always get blamed for a shutdown and not Democrats. And that’s for a simple reason: nobody buys the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the government. They’re the party of government. Everybody knows that. It’s basically the Trump Republicans’ whole argument!

Analysts come up with all sort of arcane and baroque arguments why one side gets blamed versus the other. But it almost always comes down to that. It’s the same reason Democrats never get much traction attacking Republicans on defense spending. No one buys the idea that Republicans aren’t super into guns and tanks.

It’s also very early. Maybe a lot of people will blame the Dems. Are they going to remember that in eighteen months? I really doubt it. At the rate things are going I’m not sure they’ll remember it by the summer. Another basic takeaway from the last 25 years is that the opposition can get really unpopular in the moment for opposition tactics but barely anyone remembers by election time and they pay no price.

Now let’s get to what seems to be the most alluring argument: that Musk and Trump really want a shutdown or at least will benefit from it and they’re essentially luring Democrats into a trap. It is true that I believe 30 days into a shutdown the executive branch gets more opportunities to lay people off. So in this specific sense slashing does get easier after a few weeks of a shutdown. The more macro argument would be: how does literally shutting the government down combat someone who’s trying to do exactly that? Sure, it energetically speeds the process along in a sense. I’ve even heard it argued that this scenario allows Musk the optimal situation to figure out just the optimal level of cutting, how much is necessary for the most meager level of government function, where’s the sweet spot for some political backlash but not too much.

Does this make sense? It strikes me as so much whistling past the grave.

Musk is slicing through the federal bureaucracy like butter. It’s not at all clear to me how a shutdown makes his job any easier. He may get additional legal avenues after 30 days, but right now he’s carving his own roads through the federal bureaucracy. Nothing is holding him back. Just today, I heard about another major department of government that is about to shutter regional offices in blue states across the country. It seems absurd to imagine that laying low and providing a fully funded license for Musk to keep cutting for the next six months is a more destructive outcome than drawing a line in the sand now. Really, how exactly could he be any less restrained than removing all restraints from him in advance? How is that possible? As I said, it’s like planning your escape from Treblinka and you decide it’s too risky because they’ll kill you if you get caught.

There are other problems with this argument. Presumably, a shutdown will be unpopular. After all, that’s the whole premise of the argument for who will get the blame. It seems hard to imagine that anger over a shutdown will be a good political climate for pushing for a permanent shutdown. As I wrote a week ago, the current executive orders call for reducing the government to the size of what is left open during a shutdown. In other words, the end state goal here is a permanent government shutdown. It seems more likely that a shutdown will concentrate people’s minds on how and why they like having a functioning government and access to essential services. We’re already seeing that backlash in Republican town halls. Add to this the fact that Trump is acting erratically and throwing the economy into recession. Everybody sees that. I don’t buy that he’ll have much success saying everything was awesome and then Democrats did this.

The reality here is that this isn’t Democrats shutting down anything. Republicans intentionally crafted a bill that ignores literally every Democratic demand. They’re forcing Democrats to either say no or make an abject surrender.

Those are my thoughts on these different arguments. I thought it made sense to discuss them because these are the arguments being made in the corridors of power. The risks here are real. We’re already in a great crisis of the republic. There’s no riskless path.

What unites all these arguments, however, is a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature and uses of political power. Every argument here is reactive, trying to limit harm in a situation in which Democrats, their priorities and their constituencies are already defenseless. There’s a driving penchant to operate wholly within the lines.

This is a topic I’ve given a lot of thought to over many years. Twenty years ago an unnamed Bush administration source in a book by Ron Suskind told Suskind that Democrats were part of the “reality based community” and Republicans in the Bush administration were not. Many Democrats in turn adopted the line as an ironic badge of honor. You still see it in taglines and avatars twenty years later. And for good reason. The Bush administration itself provided lots of grist for the very good life lesson that reality is going to kick your ass every time when you go up against it. But I’ve always thought that center-left folks didn’t quite get what this person was saying.

What this person was saying was that Democrats, at least the Democrats in the world of politics with their quality educations and empiricism were wedded to “reality” in the sense of the world as it is. But that’s not all that can mean. What this person was saying was we’re going to take the power, which we have, and we’re going to use it to change the reality on the ground. And that’s going to open up new opportunities for us that you don’t see. We’re going to get a jump on you. Because we know how to use power.

Now, as I said, the Bush administration was a great object lesson in how reality will kick your ass. No truism or motto works in every case. Life is mostly a matter of having half a dozen mutually contradictory truisms or life lessons and knowing which to apply in different situations. But there was more insight in this remark than a lot of Democrats were able to understand. And there’s an important truth here. You need to know how power works and how to use it. Because if you can use power effectively you can change where the pieces are on the board. And if you lack that insight you’re condemned to always working within the lines in ways that are confining and ultimately self-defeating. Are you acting and forcing your opponents to react or is it the opposite. In adversarial situations that’s always more than half the game.

For Democrats the path of keeping their heads down means locking themselves into a pattern of perpetual reaction, at least until the next election, a pattern of never taking the initiative. In other words, a pattern of never taking actions that force the other guys to react. It’s possible to use a lot of brainpower to come up with an argument in which that totally makes sense. But can anyone imagine any scenario where the shoe was on the other foot and Democrats needed seven Republican votes in exchange for literally nothing and they found seven who said, “Okay, sure why not?”

It’s literally unimaginable.

The public is already visibly turning against what’s happening. We have lots of evidence for that. Democrats have this one chance to bring the matter to a head, increase the attention on something the public is already angry about. They need to take a real risk in order to change or at least slow the trajectory of the destruction.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11:10 AM

SECOND

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


There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball

By Ezra Klein | March 9, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-a
genda.html?unlocked_article_code=1.204.YKRY.xLjxe6aO2xys&smid=url-share

Trump could have run on bringing Texas housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there’s no zoning code, so building is easy, and the median home price is over $300,000. Compare that with Los Angeles, where the median price is around a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco’s housing costs. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.

In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” JD Vance said in the vice-presidential debate. Trump sounded the same theme. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.

Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research. He could have run on making it easier to build energy generation of all kinds in America. Instead he is trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade by imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies — but he is slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.

There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success.

The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.

Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong, and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the past few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.

Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or was decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures instead of fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.

To unmake this machine will be painful. It’s also necessary. In the long run, the way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the superiority of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. They need to offer Americans a liberalism that builds.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 1:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why don't you just take a fucking chill pill and sit back and enjoy the show dude.

There's not a goddamned thing you can do about any of it.

And because you've wrapped yourself so tightly with your politics, you're in the unenviable position of rooting for your country to fail. That's how much you hate Trump. You want to see America fail, just as much as Ted wants to see Elon become broke.

Better to say nothing at all than to say whatever it is you usually have to say.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly. They let Trump be the loudmouth with a gun. Except Trump isn't a space pirate like Malcolm. Trump is playing. He is on an adventure, the most fun a human can imaginably have. Musk is Trump's pilot, Hoban "Wash" Washburne, on the spaceship. They are buddies making a reality TV version of Firefly. The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.


What the fuck are you even going on about?

You're batshit.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 1:49 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here Are the Arguments for Why Senate Ds Should Vote Yes and Why They’re Wrong

By Josh Marshall | March 12, 2025 12:57 a.m.


You have to be a special kind of retarded to read walls of text by this particular college "educated" meat puppet.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 1:51 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country

By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025


Yeah. It is.

Where the fuck were you the last 4 years, PAUL?

Oh right. You were busy telling everyone there wasn't going to be a recession, and then you were busy telling everyone the economy was great and it was all in their heads until January 20th, 2025. And you were also busy telling everyone why Kamala was going to win the election and by more than Trump beat her.

Get fucked, PAUL.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 2:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lose
Especially when you’re running a country

By Paul Krugman | Mar 12, 2025


Yeah. It is.

Where the fuck were you the last 4 years, PAUL?

Oh right. You were busy telling everyone there wasn't going to be a recession, and then you were busy telling everyone the economy was great and it was all in their heads until January 20th, 2025. And you were also busy telling everyone why Kamala was going to win the election and by more than Trump beat her.

Get fucked, PAUL.

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

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



Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?

https://nypost.com/2025/03/12/opinion/who-was-really-running-the-count
ry-while-autopen-biden-snoozed-and-drooled/

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 2:08 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:

Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
Democrats were running it. No Trumptards can I trust to run anything for me, no matter how trivial. They can't even be trusted to get a fast food order back to the site without dumping half the drinks on the ground. Maybe there are trustworthy Trumptards? Where are they hiding?

DOGE Is Courting Catastrophic Risk

Musk has turned a dangerously flawed view of “waste” into a philosophy of government.

By Brian Klaas | March 12, 2025, 9:30 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/doge-musk-catastr
ophic-risk/682011/

On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects.

Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient.

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it.

Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.

As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 3:56 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
Originally posted by SECOND
Firefly is fiction, but you, 6ix, can do what Captain Malcolm Reynolds does: go anywhere, work at anything, talk to anybody, and shoot them. But Trumptards don't. They are too cowardly.


You think shooting from a helicopter means you're brave?

Er... no.

One thing I know about you: you're a coward. You hide behind anonymity, but when you feel the least bit threatend you (allegedly) engineer anonymous harassment and resort to online defamation and threats that you try to disguise.

Dox* yourself. Stand behind your defamation and threats. THAT would be brave.

* I know you won't.




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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA


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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 4:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


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

Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
Democrats were running it.


... right into the fucking ground.

One of the many, many reasons why they're a dead party.

You got what you deserve.

The Democratic Party is NEVER going to come back from this.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11:29 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:

Who was really running the country while Autopen Joe Biden snoozed and drooled?
Democrats were running it.


... right into the fucking ground.

One of the many, many reasons why they're a dead party.

You got what you deserve.

The Democratic Party is NEVER going to come back from this.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Unless the cheapskate Republican Party gets its fat, lazy ass in gear, it will never come back from this:

ICE Isn’t Delivering the Mass Deportation Trump Wants

By Nick Miroff | March 11, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-immigration
-deportation-agenda/682005/

The results of the actual deportation push appear to be modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency.

So far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates.

At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.

ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.

The administration is working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

A bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.

One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer.

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 2:40 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.


DHS Announces Nationwide and International Ad Campaign Warning Illegal Aliens to Self-Deport and Stay Out

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/02/17/dhs-announces-ad-campaign-warning-
illegal-aliens-self-deport-and-stay-out

Nobody is coming in anymore. That's a huge, HUGE step up from every single month of Joe Biden*'s poisonous Presidency just by sheer virtue of the staggering increases coming to an immediate halt.

Nobody gives a single fuck about how many invaders were deported under Obiden when he was letting 10 times as many in every month.


Homeland Security overhauls its asylum phone app. Now it's for 'self-deportation'

https://abc7.com/post/cbp-app-repurposed-home-allows-migrants-country-
illegally-deport-dhs-secretary-kristi-noem-says/16001873/

We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.

We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.


You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.



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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:00 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:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.

We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.


You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work. All of you should self-deport to Mexico. In contrast to shiftless Trumptards in poor health such as 6ix, I work, and everyone in my family works. We are not on government assistance. We are the real Americans. Trumptards are fake.

Shifty Trumptards like Musk built his wealth with billions of dollars in government help. Virtually all of his net worth can be pinned to government help. Tesla and SpaceX got started – and survived their early days – with assistance from state and federal policies, government contracts and loans. The foundation for Musk’s financial success has been the US government. Musk should self-deport to South Africa, where he came from.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/business/elon-musk-wealth-government-he
lp/index.html

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:00 AM

SECOND

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


The U.S. has covertly destabilized nations. With Canada, it's being done in public

By Evan Dyer · CBC News · Posted: Mar 12, 2025

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-annexation-destabilizing-canada
-1.7479890

Canadian intelligence officials say Canada needs to be on the lookout for campaigns aimed at destabilizing the country amid U.S. President Donald Trump's escalating 51st state threats.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has worked to destabilize many governments and nations in the past, using methods as mundane as corruption and as drastic as assassination, but the former spy chiefs say a campaign aimed at Canada would likely rely less on cloak-and-dagger tactics and more on social media — such as the Elon Musk-owned X platform.

"Is [Trump] trying to change political views in this country? If so, that's foreign interference," said Dick Fadden, who also headed CSIS and served as national security adviser to former prime minister Stephen Harper.

"It's no more acceptable from the United States than it is from China or Russia or anybody else."

Trump administration officials have given numerous rationales for the tariffs against Canada, but Trump himself has said that he wants to use economic force to join Canada to the U.S. On Tuesday morning, he again said Canada could only avoid economic ruin through annexation.

Trump's talk about Canada parrots Putin's claims on Ukraine
Speaking on borders, economics and security — the 2 leaders sound remarkably similar
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-canada-putin-ukraine-comments-1
.7462337

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:02 AM

SECOND

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


Don’t Trust the Trumpsplainers

Their efforts to sell some MAGA “grand strategy” dull the pain but dim the brain.

By David Frum | March 12, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/maga-strateg
y-spin-machine/682009/

The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.

Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.

The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance:
Quote:
Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.]
I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.

At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.

If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.

Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.

That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese economic pressure on his large business in that country. Trump himself has taken a huge sum from a Chinese investor for his crypto operations.

Trump’s enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin—and avidity for Russian money—dates back 20 years. At a time of economic desperation, Trump earned $54 million on the flip of a Palm Beach property. His former lawyer Michael Cohen told MSNBC that Trump regarded the profit to be the result of Putin’s personal influence. Whatever explains the Trump-Putin bond, acclaiming it as a brilliant, Kissinger-like diplomatic pivot doesn’t pass the laugh test.

An opioid dispenser may try to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border.

Yet the fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, as the opioid dispensers advise, the message is unmistakable: These are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation.

To survive a dangerous environment requires accurate assessments of the predators on the prowl.

Inventing an alternative Trump—one more rational and less malignant than the actual Trump—may assuage anxiety. But only temporarily. The invention soon collapses under the burden of its own untruth, wasting time in which the victims of its fiction could have taken more effective action to protect themselves.

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:33 AM

SECOND

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


The Trump administration announced its intent to roll back major climate policies Wednesday, including rules that target pollution from vehicles and power plants, in a major blow to America’s progress on clean air, clean water and climate action.

The changes are expected to inject even more uncertainty into key industries, including manufacturing, which President Donald Trump has pledged to support.

The administration was announcing rollbacks and actions in such rapid succession — 31 in around two hours — there appeared to still be placeholders or typos in the news releases.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced it will undo rules that would have pushed power plants and carmakers toward cleaner forms of energy. It also intends to roll back rules on soot, mercury and coal ash pollution, as well as the so-called “good neighbor rule” that regulates downwind air pollution, and eliminate its programs overseeing environmental justice and diversity.

Significantly, Trump’s EPA is also preparing to reconsider and strike down a consequential scientific finding on the dangers of climate pollution that has served as the basis behind federal regulations to curb them. Dismissing the precedent would strip the EPA’s authority to manage the pollution that causes global warming.

The Union of Concerned Scientists said the Trump administration’s actions Wednesday would sacrifice human health for the benefit of private industry.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/climate/trump-ev-power-plant-rollbacks/
index.html

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 9:21 AM

SECOND

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


RFK says most vaccine advisers have conflicts of interest. A report shows they don't

March 11, 2025 5:00 AM ET

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/03/11/nx-s1-532377
1/rfk-jr-vaccine-advisers-conflicts-interest

NPR tracked down that 2009 report, spoke with those involved with the CDC's vaccine advisory committee at the time, and learned that Kennedy's statement about it is inaccurate.

"Right now, what we're getting is a total misrepresentation of a 20-year-old report, about a process that was already being improved before that report was issued," says Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director from 2009 to 2017. He signed the agency's letter in response to the report in 2009.

Kennedy reiterated his view, asserting that the agency's federal advisory panels are filled with members that have "severe, severe conflicts of interest" in a subsequent appearance on Fox News.

(To clarify: RFK Jr. hates and fears vaccines. He claims those in government who approved vaccines were being paid by the vaccine manufacturers, a lie. Why is RFK Jr. in charge of vaccines? Because typical Trumptards also hate and fear vaccines – fearing that vaccines contaminate their blood, which is why 6ixStringJack refers to vaccinated people as “Mudbloods”, )

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 1:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.

We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.


You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.


Get fucked, idiot.

We paid our taxes.

And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.

Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.

He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.



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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 3:22 PM

SECOND

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


Making Sweatshops Great Again
Does Trump want us to manufacture sneakers, not semiconductors?

By Paul Krugman | Mar 13, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/making-sweatshops-great-again

On Manhattan’s 7th Avenue, near the corner of 39th St., there’s a larger-than-life statue of a garment worker — a man wearing a skullcap, hunched over a sewing machine. The statue is a tribute to the locale’s history: It stands in the middle of what’s still called the Garment District. After all, in 1950 New York’s apparel industry employed 340,000 workers.

That industry is gone now, not just from midtown Manhattan but from the United States as a whole, having moved to low-wage countries like China and, increasingly, Bangladesh:


No serious person mourns the offshoring of apparel employment. Clothing production is a low-tech industry that even in its heyday mostly employed immigrants who, despite being represented by a powerful union, were paid low wages and often faced harsh working conditions. For a poor nation like Bangladesh, apparel jobs are a big step up from the alternatives. But American workers have better, and better-paying, things to do.

As I said, no serious person wants the apparel industry to come back. But Donald Trump’s economic team aren’t serious people. Last week Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, went on CNBC to declare that Trump’s tariffs will bring back U.S. production of t-shirts, sneakers and towels:
Quote:
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
CNBC hosts literally laugh at Lutnick as he suggests that t-shirts, sneakers, towels, and TVs will again be made in the US as a result of Trump's trade war
March 6, 2025 at 10:42 AM
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1897673628428193798
His hosts started laughing, but there’s no reason to believe that either he or his boss get the joke. And their nostalgia for industries of the past seems to be matched by surprising hostility toward industries of the future.

Now, the Trumpist view of international trade pretty much begins and ends with the view that whenever Americans buy something made abroad, no matter how much cheaper it may be to import a good rather than try to produce it domestically, that’s a win for foreigners and a loss for America.

I mean, he has slapped high tariffs on Canadian aluminum, which is cheap because smelting uses lots of electricity, and Canada has abundant hydropower. And aluminum is important for U.S. manufacturing. Yet Trump somehow thinks Canada is exploiting us by offering us a key industrial input at a good price.

But back to t-shirts and sneakers. We definitely shouldn’t be making those for ourselves. But what should we be making instead?

A free trade purist would answer, whatever the market decides; let private firms figure out what’s profitable to make in America. And even if you aren’t a free trade purist, you have to admit that governments don’t have a great record of picking winners.

Yet I, like many economists, have come around to the view that we should engage in a limited amount of industrial policy, using subsidies and other tools to promote some industries of the future, especially those involving advanced technology.

There are two big reasons limited industrial policy is back in vogue.

One is that it has become increasingly clear that there are important positive spillovers between technology firms. Silicon Valley is more than the sum of the individual companies located south of San Francisco; it’s a kind of industrial ecosystem of shared services, a pool of skilled workers, and exchange of knowledge. If we want America to be competitive in high tech, we need government policies to encourage the formation of these industrial ecosystems.

The other, grimmer reason we need industrial policy is geopolitics. Circa, say, 2010 not many people worried about how much of the world’s production of advanced semiconductors — which are now crucial to almost everything — was concentrated in Taiwan. Now we know that the age of large-scale warfare isn’t over, and it’s dangerous to rely for crucial products on industrial clusters easily threatened by potential adversaries.

These realizations lay behind one of the Biden administration’s two major pieces of industrial policy legislation, the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, designed to encourage production of semiconductors and expand the broader ecosystem surrounding that production.

Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act, which sought to use industrial policy to fight climate change, the CHIPS Act had substantial bipartisan support; even in an era of intense partisanship, a significant number of Republicans were willing to back an effort to retain America’s technology edge while heading off potential Chinese blackmail. And the act’s subsidies have already shown substantial results, with more semiconductor plants opening on U.S. soil.

But during his speech to Congress last week, Trump veered off into a demand that Congress repeal that act, which he called a “horrible, horrible thing.”

It’s not at all clear what he has against the act, although according to the New York Times many semiconductor companies attribute his hostility simply to “personal animus” toward former President Biden. And given the way the Musk/Trump administration has been behaving, companies aren’t just worried that future contracts will be canceled; they’re worried that the government may renege on contracts it has already signed, and maybe even try to claw back money it has already spent.

As you might imagine, all of this will have a chilling effect on U.S. technology development even if Trump doesn’t manage to repeal the act.

So what do you get if you put Lutnick’s remarks and Trump’s diatribe together? You get a picture of an administration that wants to use tariffs to bring back the low-wage, low-technology industries of the past, while killing policies promoting the industries of the future. Apparently they envision an America that produces sneakers, but doesn’t produce semiconductors.

MAGA!

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 3:32 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.

We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.


You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.


Get fucked, idiot.

We paid our taxes.

And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.

Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.

He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.



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

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


He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.

He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.


Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?

I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.

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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 6:20 PM

SECOND

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


When Trump, or somebody just as crazy, Ted Cruz for example, is back in the White House, we are going to regret that Biden was too old, sleepy and cowardly to prosecute Trump because Biden hopes the voters will do what is actually the Dept. of Justice's duty.

All the investigations by Congress will make no difference to the voters if the Dept of Justice won't prosecute Trump because Biden thinks that would be too partisan.
________________________________

Trump’s Great Escape

Dec. 17, 2021

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/why-isnt-justice-department-in
vestigating-trump-over-2020.html

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Donald Trump was searching for a way to stay in power and finally settled on a plan that was improvisational in its tactics but focused in its strategy: Get Republican lawmakers in states Joe Biden had won to disregard the choice of voters and appoint pro-Trump electors to be certified by Congress on January 6.

The spectacle of the riot and the justifiable attention on Trump’s potential liability have managed to overshadow a key day in Trump’s plan, January 2, when he spoke with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, which was recorded, Trump harangued Raffensperger over the course of an hour to find some pretext to change the vote total in the state in his favor. If none of the rest had happened, this alone would have justified a federal criminal investigation into Trump for committing election fraud.

A lot has happened since then, but there has been no indication of a criminal investigation focused on Trump and his inner circles, either in the White House or his campaign. Instead, the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland seems to be pursuing misdemeanor trespass cases at the Capitol more aggressively than potential felony charges for Trump, and Garland appears to have left the responsibility of investigating whether the president of the United States broke federal law to local prosecutors in Georgia. It is a baffling course of inaction that poses serious long-term risks to our constitutional order, and time is running out to do anything about it.

The Justice Department has brought charges against more than 700 people involved in the riot, and over 100 have pleaded guilty. Some judges have suggested prosecutors have been too lenient. The well-regarded chief judge of the federal district court in Washington criticized the incongruity between the department’s dramatic rhetoric about the threat to democracy that day and its actual charging decisions as “schizophrenic” and “puzzling.” Another judge, a former public defender, complained more recently that the people who “created the conditions” on that day by telling people that “our election was stolen when it clearly was not” have not been “held to account for their actions and their word.”

Almost as soon as the Capitol riot was over, legal observers flagged Trump’s criminal exposure for what had transpired. The predicate seemed obvious enough. He had fed his supporters months of incendiary garbage and nonsense about purported election fraud. He had heavily promoted the riot’s preceding protest that day, and he gave a provocative speech just before thousands of people breached the Capitol that called on people repeatedly to “fight like hell” and “stop the steal” before directing them to go to the Capitol. Since then, there have been two efforts to fill in the gaps about what exactly Trump was doing and thinking leading up to the siege.

In June, after months of delay due to the intransigence of congressional Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed a select committee to investigate the riot, and it has been moving at an impressive clip. The committee has gathered information from nearly 300 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents, including, most recently, a selection of emails and text messages from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. They indicate that the White House was well aware of the chaos enveloping the Capitol, with a slew of Fox News journalists — and even Trump’s eldest son — texting Meadows and imploring him to get the president to call off the mob. Laura Ingraham told Meadows that Trump “needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home” and that he was “destroying his legacy,” while Sean Hannity suggested Trump “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.” Donald Trump Jr. suggested to Meadows that his father “condemn this shit ASAP.” Trump sent a half-hearted tweet but waited hours before he finally appeared before a camera and told them to go home.

There have also been significant journalistic accounts, but what has emerged is more impressionistic than definitive — a function, no doubt, of limitations in sourcing and cooperation on the part of those closest to Trump. If you read them closely, it is easy to see one of the other major limitations of the method — that it is perfectly legal to lie to journalists — in the form of self-serving and semi-farcical details from Republican sources who present themselves as being far more articulate and confrontational toward Trump in private than they ever were in public then or since. Thus we get House minority leader Kevin McCarthy telling Trump on a call from the Capitol on the day of the riot, “You have to denounce this,” and then–Attorney General William Barr telling Trump in the Oval Office in December that his legal team is “a joke.”  

As these revelations have mounted, observers have continued to debate whether Trump and his inner circle should be under criminal investigation for January 6 itself. Trump seemed on the hook for incitement or seditious conspiracy, but there were serious questions about whether his speech that day might be protected by the First Amendment on the theory that he did not intend to provoke the violence, which was perhaps more spontaneous than deliberate. (He told the mob to proceed “peacefully and patriotically,” and the Meadows text messages indicate that many who were close to him were taken aback by what unfolded.) Incitement or sedition theoretically remains open, but there has been no compelling evidence in the public domain — not yet, at least — that indicates Trump intended for the breach and its chaotic fallout to occur (though the fact that he did nothing for hours as the violence mounted is nontrivial circumstantial evidence).

Other theories rely on the criminal provisions that prohibit any conspiracy to deprive others of their civil rights, any conspiracy to defraud the federal government by interfering with its lawful functions (such as the certification of electoral votes), and corruptly obstructing an official proceeding (a theory that has been used, so far successfully, to prosecute the rioters themselves). These theories seem to be a better fit for the nonviolent machinations directed at persuading Mike Pence to refuse to certify the vote, but they are complicated by the ridiculous “legal” advice that Trump was evidently getting from sycophants acting as lawyers, which would provide a potent defense — outrageous as it may seem — absent some indication that Trump knew their arguments were gibberish.

Still, the best way to get to the bottom of the question of what Trump was doing and thinking in the lead-up to January 6: Conduct an actual criminal investigation.

By early December of last year, Trump’s inchoate rage at losing had gelled into a plan to overturn the results. Around that time, Trump and Meadows directly lobbied state lawmakers to disregard the will of voters. Trump was joined by two lawyers who communicated with him at this time: Jeffrey Clark, a senior official at the Justice Department at the time, and John Eastman, a law professor, dangerous crank, and serial liar. Working in coordination with Trump, Clark tried to get acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue to send letters to officials in Georgia and other contested states to get them to appoint different slates of electors on the pretext that fraud invalidated election results that favored Biden. When that did not work, Eastman came up with a pseudo-legal theory to prevent the certification of Biden electors on January 6 either by simply declaring Trump the winner or Pence refusing to accept those electors. Pence ultimately rejected Eastman’s proposal.

Meanwhile, Trump was getting increasingly angry about Georgia, and on January 2, he called Raffensperger. Along with Meadows and a Republican lawyer named Cleta Mitchell, he pressed Raffensperger to use a grab bag of false claims of voter fraud in the Democratic stronghold of Fulton County to throw the state’s election to him. (The secretary of state had already allowed three recounts to prove there was no such fraud.) For an hour, Raffensperger held firm as Trump grew frustrated. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump told the man in charge of administering the state’s election. Trump also complained about “your Never Trumper U.S. Attorney,” Byung Pak in Atlanta, who refused to open election-fraud investigations about Fulton County that Trump could use to discredit the results in the state. Two days later, after being told that Trump was about to fire him, Pak resigned.

Video: Trump loses appeal to withhold Jan. 6 records (Reuters)

The call was made public the day after it took place, on January 3, by the Washington Post, which later posted the full audio. In a sane world, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Attorney’s office in Atlanta, the public-corruption unit in D.C., or all of the above, would have jumped on the case. We do not know for sure what happened in these offices at the time — a question that may be encompassed in an ongoing internal review — but once Garland took office in early March, the department should have designated a team of lawyers and FBI agents to open an investigation. It could have involved, just to start, interviews with officials in Georgia and efforts to gather internal White House documents concerning the call. Some have suggested that because he was appointed by Biden and would be investigating Biden’s former opponent, Garland has a conflict that would require his recusal, which is questionable, but if necessary, he could have appointed a special counsel to oversee the inquiry.

Either way, there was a very solid legal basis to support an investigation. The civil-rights-conspiracy statute has been used for decades to prosecute federal election fraud, as the Justice Department’s election-crime handbook for prosecutors notes, including efforts at “rendering false tabulations of votes.” It is a felony subject to ten years in prison. A more specific federal election-fraud statute makes it a crime to attempt “to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process” through the “tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious or fraudulent” under state law. Unlike most criminal statutes, the law requires the government to prove that the offender was aware they were doing something unlawful.

And as with so many of Trump’s misdeeds, the question seems to boil down to one of what was in his mind, but intent in white-collar cases is often established through circumstantial evidence. That is, for instance, largely how the government is prosecuting Elizabeth Holmes — by marshaling evidence that she knew the truth when she was saying things that were false. It is rare to have an admission from a defendant that they have knowingly lied or tried to get someone else to lie.

Revisiting the Trump-Raffensperger call after a year, it is striking to see someone tell Trump straightforwardly that he is wrong — that the claims he is making about election fraud in Georgia, which he cycles through as Raffensperger systematically bats them down, are simply not true. Trump is undeterred. Did he know? That is the central question, but prosecutors could pursue it in many ways: by interviewing the people who communicated directly with Trump at the time, including people in the White House, in the campaign, and in state legislatures; by reviewing documents that were provided to Trump, including briefing papers and talking points; and by interviewing more peripheral contacts in order to assemble a comprehensive record of the information that Trump was actually receiving.

Take, for instance, some of the information that was disclosed in October in an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee. It details Rosen and Donoghue’s flailing and buffoonish efforts to resist Trump’s entreaties to open election-fraud investigations. In a series of calls and meetings in late December and early January, Rosen and Donoghue, to their modest credit, told Trump they were looking into all of his crackpot theories and apparently declined to endorse them. (This was not entirely altruistic: Doing so likely would have ended their careers in serious legal circles if Trump’s efforts failed, as they ultimately did.) But somehow they did not tell Trump that the theories he purported to believe had either already been disproven or were transparent nonsense.

Still, according to notes of one call, Trump at one point told them to “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican Congressmen.” That call took place on December 27, about one week before Trump’s call with Raffensperger, and the notes are strong evidence that Trump knew his claims on the call with Raffensperger were false.

Congressional Democrats are clearly pursuing these threads, but most serious observers doubt that Trump or those within his close orbit are the subject of an active criminal investigation by the Justice Department — focused on the specific events of January 6, the Raffensperger call, or the broader campaign in the weeks leading up to and including January 6. Adam Schiff, a member of the January 6 committee, spoke for many people when he said he “vehemently” disagreed with the Justice Department’s apparent inaction, citing the Raffensperger call in particular. It seems safe to assume that if Schiff thought there were a serious criminal investigation of any sort involving Trump, he would not have spoken so pointedly.

Indeed, there is good reason to believe that a criminal investigation focused on Trump and those in his orbit would have already spilled over into public view. For one thing, it is risky for criminal investigators to let all of these overlapping investigations go forward without any apparent intervention to prevent interviews with people who are also witnesses in the criminal inquiry, since they create the risk of inconsistent statements. Also, people who receive grand-jury subpoenas or who voluntarily sit for interviews in criminal investigations (including under so-called queen-for-a-day agreements) are generally free to tell anyone they want, and defense lawyers can selectively disclose this information to journalists in order to generate media coverage that is favorable to their clients. Trump and those closest to him have also been particularly effective at waging war in the media to politicize investigations that appear to be closing in, as we saw throughout the Mueller investigation, and to significantly complicate investigators’ work.

A small number of dissenters on this issue on the left, who have faulted Schiff and others for their rhetoric about the urgent need for a criminal investigation into Trump’s conduct, have offered a series of pseudo-savvy rejoinders that generally run the gamut from trivially correct to specious. Some have questioned the need for an investigation on the theory that the publicly available facts do not establish that Trump committed a crime — arguments that miss the point of conducting a criminal investigation in the first place, which is to uncover and consider new facts when there is a meaningful reason to believe that a crime occurred. Others have noted that an investigation might have been kept secret so far, which is true but hardly something to bank on, or that an investigation focused on Trump could also emerge from evidence gathered in another active case or investigation, but that is far from clear and also needlessly risky, particularly if you believe a sufficient predicate already exists.

Perhaps the government is climbing from the lowest to the highest level of wrongdoings, as is usually the case in large criminal investigations, and the Justice Department may eventually get Trump in its investigative crosshairs through the hundreds of prosecutions related to January 6, particularly as prosecutors work their way up the hierarchy of organizers. This bottom-up investigative strategy is certainly the classic approach when you have limitless time and are short on evidence on the main figures involved, but it is not an unbreakable rule of investigations, as I can attest from my own, modest experience. (I suspect this is part of the reason that experienced organized-crime prosecutors have been sounding the alarm, perhaps realizing they would not have sat idly by if the FBI happened to catch a mob boss on a wiretap.) It is also far from clear, for instance, that you need to understand everything leading up to January 6 in order to fully investigate (and possibly prosecute) Trump for something as discrete as the Raffensperger call.

Some people doubt that Trump could ever be convicted of a crime related to the election, particularly since the combined efforts of Trump, the Republican Party, and conservative media have managed to convince nearly 60 percent of Republicans that the election was stolen. As a legal matter, however, the most sensible venue would likely be Washington, D.C., and although prosecutors cannot and should not forum-shop for this reason, it is a heavily Democratic jurisdiction. Regardless, it would be unwise to presume that a compelling case could not persuade hard-core Trump supporters — one of whom, for instance, was on the jury that convicted Trump’s ex–campaign chairman Paul Manafort — or to write off the deterrent effect of a prosecution that might still make future presidents and advisers think twice before engaging in serious misconduct.

If there is not already an ongoing criminal investigation with Trump currently and squarely within its remit, it may very well be too late for all practical purposes, even if the House select committee makes criminal referrals to the department as it completes its work — a possibility that Representative Liz Cheney recently and pointedly reaffirmed. In November, the Democrats are widely expected to lose at least the House, at which point, if the committee’s work has not concluded by then, Republicans in January 2023 will presumably disband it. They would also make any criminal investigation as difficult as possible, both through media appearances and oversight hearings, and if Republicans manage to take back the Senate, we can expect the same from them. We have already gotten an early taste of what that might look like, and one thing that even prominent defenders of Garland concede is that he has not been effective at defending the department’s work in the political arena.

And, of course, Trump remains the elephant in the room. If at any point he declares his candidacy for 2024, that would vastly complicate any criminal investigation involving him even peripherally. Before Biden took office, he expressed his discomfort with the prospect of conducting federal investigations that directly concern Trump — on the dubious theory that it would be too politically divisive — and Garland appears to share those concerns, so the idea that the Garland DOJ would criminally investigate Trump while he is actively running for office, much less seriously consider charging him, is hard to envision.

If the Justice Department has not begun a criminal investigation focused on at least Trump’s conduct on the Raffensperger call, it represents an enormous failure on the part of Garland and the department. The ongoing criminal investigation in Fulton County is no substitute: It is far from clear, for instance, that the office could secure access to potentially crucial evidence from within the White House or, more generally, that it has the institutional capacity to pursue someone who has proved elusive to well-resourced investigators elsewhere. It also sets a precedent that has not received the attention it deserves — namely, that local prosecutors are free to criminally investigate former presidents, even when it is clear that the underlying conduct at issue would also be illegal under federal law and that the Justice Department, a nationally representative prosecutorial body, could investigate it.

Meanwhile, our country’s long history of elite political impunity would continue unabated, and the Justice Department’s failure would incentivize even more high-level government misconduct in the future, both related to election tampering and otherwise. As for the next effort to subvert the outcome of a presidential election, that is more likely to look like the Raffensperger call — with the assistance of more pliant state Republicans — than the violence on January 6.

At some point, perhaps in ways that we cannot fully envision, and sooner rather than later, the country will pay the price for this dereliction of duty.

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 6:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a very simple-minded way of looking at things, for sure.
. . .
We are going to make it so miserable for them and take away all government assistance and they'll be deporting themselves.

We've just been working on getting all of your murderers out of the country first, despite your dead party doing whatever they can to protect illegal criminal invader murderers.


You keep cheering against America and see where it gets you, loser.
6ixStringJack, you, your little brother, and probably the whole family, live on government assistance and don't work.


Get fucked, idiot.

We paid our taxes.

And at least I have a family that doesn't hate me.

Funny that, isn't it Sigs? Of all of the thousands and thousands of lies Second has ever told, the one thing he has never lied about was his family liking him.

He cares so little about them he won't even bother to lie to you about that.



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

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


He cares so little about his family AND he knows I'm absolutely right.

He will go out of his way half a dozen times a day to quote me in his replies that have nothing to do with whatever he follows it up with, but this one just goes completely ignored, as per usual.


Did you ever ask yourself WHY your family hates you so much, Second?

I mean, I'm sure that it's all their fault and it has absolutely nothing to do with you.

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

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



Maybe I finally figured out how to get Second to ignore you. Just remind him of how much his family hates him every time he quotes you and replies with personal insults and a post that has nothing to do with what he quoted.

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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 7:15 PM

SECOND

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


Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)

By Brad Reed | March 13, 2025 12:10PM ET

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-putin-2671323455/

Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council staffer who served with President Donald Trump during his first term, tells Foreign Affairs that her one-time boss is utterly clueless when he has high-stakes meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

During a lengthy interview on Foreign Affairs' official podcast, Hill recalled Trump talking with Putin one time and being absolutely enthralled with the respect he believed that he was receiving from his Russian counterpart. ( What Does Trump See in Putin? March 13, 2025 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin )

"The first time I was in one of the phone calls, I was listening very carefully to the Russian, because the interpreters don't always capture everything, they don't capture the nuances, particularly when it's the Russian interpreter," she said. "And Trump said, 'What a great conversation!' and I thought, 'Not really!' There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said, he chooses his words very carefully."

She noted that this put Trump at a natural disadvantage when the two men talked.

"Many times when Putin and Trump were interacting, Putin's actually making fun of him!" she said. "It's just completely lost in the translation. I can give you lots of episodes of this, always trying to goad him and urge him on to something, because he's always trying to see how he'll react and the translation smooths over all that and the context is absolutely missing. And he doesn't do a readout afterwards!"

She went on to say that Trump's approach to dealing with Putin was "amateur hour" because he wasn't getting the deep meaning of Putin's statements beyond surface-level talking points.

“Trump always wanted to be the big strong guy in front of Putin and he does that by beating up on the people he can beat upon.” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/what-does-trump-see-putin

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 7:29 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)


You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.

You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.

You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.

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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 7:53 PM

SECOND

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


Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)


You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.

You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.

You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
Somebody points out that Trumptards are naked fools and the fools have got to shout back. Same with Trump. Trumptards have pretensions of superiority but they are wearing nothing and their silly willies are exposed.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Silly%20Willie

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:12 PM

SECOND

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


WSJ editorial board says they were being ‘kind’ calling Trump’s trade war ‘the dumbest in history’

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-tariffs-canada-doug-ford-trad
e-war-ba0c6147

The Wall Street Journal editorial board says:

President Trump wanted a trade war with the world, and Americans are getting it, good and hard. Stock prices continued to decline on Tuesday amid the latest Canada-U.S. tariff tit-for-tat. By the end of the day the two sides were talking about a temporary truce, but who knows which side of the tariff bed Mr. Trump will wake up on Wednesday?

North Americans awakened Monday to the news that Ontario premier Doug Ford said he was raising the price of his province’s electricity exports to the U.S. by 25% in response to Mr. Trump’s on-and-off 25% tariffs on Canada. That’s a hit to consumers in the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.

Mr. Trump went ballistic, even by his standards. Canada “must immediately drop their Anti-American Farmer Tariff of 250% to 390% on various U.S. dairy products,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. He said he’d double his metals tariffs on Canada to 50%. And oh, “the only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State.”

Nice of him to concede, if obliquely, that his trade war with Canada makes no sense. His exhortation that Canada become a U.S. state is a tacit acknowledgment that the two economies are deeply integrated. His splendid little tariff war will harm businesses and consumers on both sides of the border.

The U.S. sources about two-thirds of its primary aluminum and 60% of scrap aluminum imports from Canada. Both are used by secondary U.S. aluminum manufacturers and fabricators, which oppose Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They have a hard enough time competing against lower-cost producers in China and Turkey.

Canada makes up a smaller share of U.S. steel consumption (about 6%). But Mr. Trump’s tariffs will still raise costs for steel users that depend on Canadian supplies. Hot-rolled coil steel prices are up a third since Mr. Trump took office because U.S. manufacturers like Cleveland-Cliffs and Nucor have raised prices in anticipation of tariffs.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said over the weekend that the President’s tariffs would make some foreign products more expensive but “American products will get cheaper.” Huh? Companies that use foreign components will have to raise prices or swallow narrower profit margins. Does Mr. Lutnick understand, well, commerce?

Domestic manufacturers that compete with foreign goods will raise their prices to take advantage of the protectionism to increase their margins. A study in the American Economic Review found that consumers paid $817,000 for each new manufacturing job created by Mr. Trump’s washing machine tariffs in his first term.

And Mr. Trump is only getting started as he prepares to take his trade war global. He promised Tuesday to “substantially increase” tariffs on cars on April 2, which he said would “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.” So first he whacks U.S. auto makers with tariffs that raise their production costs, then he tries to shield them from foreign competition by whacking American consumers.

Ontario’s Mr. Ford at least showed some maturity late Tuesday, saying he’ll suspend his 25% tax on electricity pending talks. He and Mr. Lutnick plan to meet Thursday about renewing the USMCA trade agreement, which comes up for review next year. Stocks pared some of their losses after the news.

The trouble with trade wars is that once they begin they can quickly escalate and get out of control. All the more so when politicians are nearing an election campaign, as Canada now is. Or when Mr. Trump behaves as if his manhood is implicated because a foreign nation won’t take his nasty border taxes lying down.

We said from the beginning that this North American trade war is the dumbest in history, and we were being kind.

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Putin would regularly 'make fun' of Trump during talks and he had no clue: ex-official
(second would regularly 'make fun' of 6ix during talks and he had no clue: it's official)


You are an idiot and nobody cares about your opinions.

You might shit talk, but you've never said anything funny in your life.

You are a humorless sack of shit, and everybody you have ever known loathes you.
Nothing Important. As per usual.


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

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:23 PM

SECOND

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


Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html

As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.

Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”

“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.

The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.

Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.

After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.

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

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Thursday, March 13, 2025 8:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic


Tell Nancy to calm down. It doesn't matter if Nvidia's stock tanks on her. Once she and her husband are arrested and tried for insider trading the fact that all their assets will be frozen and they'll be left with nothing but the clothes on their back and the cash in their pockets will be the least of their concerns.

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

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

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Friday, March 14, 2025 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.

And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.

The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.

In a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/opinion/trump-economy-tariffs.html

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

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Friday, March 14, 2025 7:03 AM

SECOND

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


Uncertainty Is Trump’s Brand

“Tariff Man” is gonna tariff—and other lessons from the predictably unpredictable President’s return to power.

By Susan B. Glasser | March 13, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-un
certainty-doctrine

If there’s one truth Donald Trump seems to have absorbed in his seventy-eight years, it is that there are advantages to lying all the time—foremost among them that no one knows when you’re bluffing and when you actually mean what you say. Imposing crippling tariffs on allies? Selling out Ukraine? Using the government to enact retribution on political enemies? The President may have threatened all these things, may have said—over and over again—that he is, in fact, intent on carrying them out. But even now, after he has opened his second term with a spate of remarkably destabilizing actions to accompany his inflammatory rhetoric, there persists a degree of uncertainty, in part because no one can ever really offer a definitive answer to the question: How far, after all, is he prepared to go?

Trump loves uncertainty so much that you could call it the first principle of his Presidency—a side benefit, as far as he’s concerned, of the mayhem he generates wherever he goes. The President’s supporters often brag about the supposed openness of his Administration. Trump himself is “the most transparent and accessible President in history,” his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, recently said. But of course “volubility” is not a synonym for “transparency.” The confusion that Trump engenders every time he speaks is not a quirk but a defining feature: it serves to aggrandize his power, leaving men and markets hanging on his every twisting word. This is nothing new. Trump has been trolling the world with this approach since he first entered politics. In his début foreign-policy speech, which I attended nine years ago this spring, at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, Trump said, “We have to be unpredictable.”

The difference this time is that Trump is moving much, much faster. When C.E.O.s have complained, understandably, about their inability to run businesses in an atmosphere where the President’s line varies from day to day on whether he will impose market-distorting tariffs, how much the tariffs will be, and when they will come into effect, Trump’s response has been telling. Over the weekend, when Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo asked him to clarify his position, he answered, “You’ll have a lot. But we may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, but we may go up.” When Bartiromo specifically asked about business leaders’ concerns, he added, “They have plenty of clarity. They just use that. It’s almost like a sound bite. They always say that—‘We want clarity.’ ” It was hardly a surprise, then, that the front page of the Wall Street Journal carried a story on Thursday with the headline “CEO Frustrations with Trump Over Trade Mount—in Private.” “Swinging from one extreme to another is not the right policy approach,” Chevron’s chief executive, Mike Wirth, was quoted as saying. “We really need consistent and durable policy.”

Already, Trump’s endemic lack of clarity has produced a significant amount of real-world backlash. During the past month, amid the near-daily barrage of contradictory information about the President’s trade war, the S. & P. 500 index has fallen more than ten per cent from its February record high, putting it in official market-correction territory. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey, published this week, found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans believed Trump’s economic policies are too “erratic.” The federal government itself has descended into a Trump-induced state of confusion that has no precedent. On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the government to rehire thousands, if not tens of thousands, of workers across six federal agencies who have been caught up in the purges ordered by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The fact that it was not immediately clear how many fired employees would be affected underscored the point.

In foreign affairs, meanwhile, the confusion that Trump has created in a few short weeks boggles the geopolitical mind. Consider this exchange on Thursday after Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, arrived for a summit of world leaders in Canada, awkwardly timed amid Trump’s trade war with Ottawa and threats to annex America’s northern neighbor. Rubio posted on X what might have been, in another Administration, considered diplomatic boilerplate: “I’m in Quebec for my first G7 meeting as Secretary of State. Under @POTUS’s leadership, we are going to use forums like the G7 to counter our adversaries and stand by our allies.” The Times’ diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, quickly responded with one of those questions, the mere asking of which suggests a state of extreme discombobulation. “Who are the allies and who are the adversaries?” he asked.

No response was forthcoming, though I guess it was an answer of sorts to hear Trump repeat his demand, less than an hour later, that Canada become America’s fifty-first state. (Generously, he said that the Canadians could keep their national anthem.) As for the G-7, Trump has said repeatedly that, in his first few weeks back in office, the group should readmit Russia—the adversary whose invasion of Ukraine the other members of the group and the United States, until recently, have been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to counter. No wonder I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a remark I heard from a former senior Pentagon official this week, apropos of Trump’s pivot toward Vladimir Putin. Quoting the late whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the Vietnam War, he observed “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”

A few weeks ago, I attended a lunch at a Washington think tank, where supporters of Ukraine wondered whether Trump would actually abandon the country for Russia. The session took place a few days after Trump publicly blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Ukraine itself—and a few days before Trump’s now-infamous Oval Office confrontation with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, which resulted in Zelensky getting kicked out of the White House and an abrupt, albeit temporary, cutoff of U.S. military and intelligence assistance to his country.

Even so, it was clear to me that many participants were shocked and dismayed that, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, Trump appeared to be proceeding with what he had long threatened to do. My host noticed this, too—afterward, he quoted a favorite line of his, from the poet William Carlos Williams, about “the rare occurrence of the expected.” How perfect. More elegant than “he told you so,” the line might as well be an epigraph for these Trumpy times.

The will to believe otherwise is a sad truth about human nature that a cynic such as Trump has learned to exploit. Hope may not be a strategy, but it remains a default setting. The President’s doublespeak, his purposeful confusion and endless equivocations about how seriously to take his pronouncements, don’t only serve to keep doors open and to maintain plausible deniability; they provide cover to those looking for a way to support his unsupportable actions. I think part of what seems so drastic and different about Trump 2.0 is not the radicalism of his agenda but that he is moving so quickly to act on it. It has become harder and harder to rationalize his words away as merely the empty posturings of an accidental President. For the first time in the more than eight years that he has dominated our politics, America—and the rest of the world—is coming to terms with the idea that Donald Trump might really mean it.

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

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Friday, March 14, 2025 7:14 AM

SECOND

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


How would you rate the condition of the national economy right now?


Trump isn’t having a honeymoon on consumer sentiment. The chart at the top of this post shows a tracker from Civiqs; it’s less well-known than the venerable measures from the University of Michigan and the Conference Board, but it’s conducted by reputable people and is weekly rather than monthly, which is helpful given how quickly things have been changing. The fall in consumer perceptions since Inauguration Day is striking in itself, but even more so in contrast to Trump’s first term.

Trump imposed tariffs higher than anything he suggested during the campaign — then un-imposed, re-imposed, and re-un-imposed them.

Hard-right venues like the Wall Street Journal have turned even more strongly against Trumponomics than consumer sentiment or news reporting. Trump certainly seems to think so:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Globalist Wall Street Journal has no idea what they are doing or saying. They are owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of "screwing" the United States of America. Their (WSJ!) thinking is antiquated and weak, and very bad for the USA. But have no fear, we will WIN on everything!!! Egg prices are down, oil is down, interest rates are down, and TARIFF RELATED MONEY IS POURING INTO THE UNITED STATES. "The only thing you have to fear, is fear itself!"
Mar 13, 2025, 8:56 AM

Another president might be making speeches, even doing fireside chats, to reassure the public. But Trump seems focused instead on annexing Canada, a subject on which he has grown ever more obsessive even as Canadians recoil at any thought of associating themselves with a nation that seems to be turning into the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Trump won the election because a number of people believed, wrongly, that he would do great things for the economy. It has taken him less than two months to squander all that undeserved trust.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/everybody-hates-elon

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

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Friday, March 14, 2025 7:24 AM

SECOND

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


The Corruption Being Obscured by Trump’s Tesla Spectacle

By Sasha Abramsky | March 14, 2025

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-corruption-being-obscur
ed-by-trumps-tesla-spectacle/

Despite how it appeared, Trump wasn’t acting like a used-car salesman for Teslas out of the goodness of his heart.

This week, as the government teetered on the edge of a shutdown, as Trump’s tariff wars threatened to pancake the stock market and crash millions of Americans’ retirement investments, and as consumer confidence plummeted to its lowest levels since the onset of Covid-19, the president of the United States did an impression of a used-car salesman on the White House lawn.

In yet another of those surely-you’re-fucking-joking moments of the current administration, Trump took time out of his busy day wrecking democracy and the economy to hawk Teslas, the OGs of the electric vehicle universe. The same man who has spent years lambasting electric vehicles, and whose administration is moving heaven and earth to gut any and all government investments in EV infrastructure and in climate change mitigation. Why? Trump hoped his purchase would reverse the slump in Tesla’s fortunes that has followed the onset of a global consumer boycott. (In the UK, activists have taken to sticking “swasticar” decals on the unfortunate vehicles.)

And so it was that with five Teslas brought to the White House, America’s corrupter-in-chief put aside all legal and ethical restraints on public officials using their office to financially benefit particular corporations or individuals and, with Elon Musk sitting next to him, livestreamed his fulsome praise on Musk’s X social media site. Not only did the corrupter-in-chief declare the cars to be very fine machines, he also announced that the boycott was “illegal” and that he would seek to define protests against Tesla stores as “domestic terrorism.”

This came days after his administration announced it was pulling $400 million from Columbia University for allegedly failing to address antisemitism and arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate, and sought to deport him—despite his green card status—for his on-campus activism against the war in Gaza. In other words, Khalil was removed from his home and community and his eight-month-pregnant wife not for committing a crime but for the things he said and thought.

That’s really not too huge an intellectual leap from Article 58, which in 1926 criminalized the expression of any dissent in the Soviet Union and provided the legal justification for the populating of the gulag archipelago. But, given the lack of spine in Congress, it’s entirely possible that, after the administration finishes abducting activists with whom they disagree, regardless of their legal status, and defunding universities like Columbia for failing to protect its Jewish students from “persistent harassment,” the invertebrates Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Thune will greenlight some form of legislation to back up Trump’s fever dream of more generally and comprehensively criminalizing dissent, not just against the administration but also against corporations like Tesla.

Of course, Trump wasn’t touting Teslas out of the goodness of his heart. Musk invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars during the election to ensure Trump’s win. Arguably, it was that influx of cash and technology that got Trump over the hump in November, a mutually beneficial relationship that then ensured Musk’s access to the inner circles of decision-making in DC, and ultimately to his unprecedented position in charge of DOGE. That investment, in other words, allowed Musk the opportunity to gut public services and move an array of government functions into private entities run by… Musk. Sure enough, within weeks of DOGE firing up its chainsaws, Musk was on X denigrating the FAA’s multi-billion dollar contract with Verizon and demanding that that contract instead be shifted to his companies. Within days, federal FAA funding was being sent Starlink’s way. I doubt that will be the last time Musk determines that, for a hefty fee, he is the best person to deliver vital government services.

Shortly afterwards, media reports began circulating that Musk was preparing an enormous $100 million case infusion into Trump-controlled political organizations. The cash will provide an ongoing war chest to push the Trumpian agenda, to promote the Trumpiest of political candidates, and to primary any Republican foolish enough to critique any of Trump’s policies or statements.

Again, the chainsaw-wielding, humanitarian aid-destroying, Musk isn’t making nine figure donations because he has been suddenly overwhelmed by the altruistic impulse. These are cold, calculated investments designed to consolidate his immense political and economic power.

I would call this the I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine partnership. But that phrase, really just a bastardized translation of the Latin quid pro quo, doesn’t really do any of this self-dealing justice. What we are seeing is, quite simply, the most grotesque mutual masturbation spectacle in history.

For the brazenly corrupt Tesla endorsement, after weeks and months of other corruption and civil rights violations that have been taken to a new, terrifying level with Khalil’s arrest this week, an impeachment investigation should be well underway. And in fact, more than 250,000 people led by the group Free Speech for People are demanding exactly that. If I had my way, Trump would be impeached every single one of the more than 1,400 days left in his presidency.

Of course, he won’t be, not once, not 1,400 times, not by this Congress. He won’t be, not least because the US Supreme Court has essentially given the president the absolute powers of a medieval monarch and this man-of-no-limits is determined to take full advantage of that extraordinary decision.

But karma has its ways of eventually making itself heard. Personally, Mr. President, I’d recommend you try the self-driving function of your shiny new Tesla. I hear it’s extraordinarily reliable and never accidentally speeds up as it heads towards stationary objects.

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

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