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

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

Incompetent or Evil: A False Dichotomy
Trump’s people can be and are both

By Paul Krugman | Mar 26, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/incompetent-or-evil-a-false-dichoto
my

The amount of damage the second Trump administration has already done on many fronts, from foreign policy to public health to America’s economic prospects, both for the months ahead and in the long run, is astonishing. And they’re just getting started.

But whenever I talk with other people about one of these disasters, I find them arguing about how to think about what’s happening. Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?

The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.

The big disaster of the week (so far) has been Trump officials accidently sharing secret war planning with the editor of The Atlantic. Somehow including Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal chat was clearly a fuckup, and an incredible one.

But why were they sharing highly sensitive information over a private messaging app rather than using secure channels? The most likely explanation is that they wanted to evade accountability: texts between government officials are supposed to remain part of the record, while Signal texts can be and in this case were set to disappear. As Phillips O’Brien notes, war planning aside, what the group chat reveals is top officials’ contempt for and hostility toward Europe; some of them opposed an operation against the Houthis because clearing the shipping lanes might help our (erstwhile?) allies.

So the disaster reflected both stupidity and bad intentions. And the same is true of other ongoing disasters, including the shockingly rapid collapse of the Social Security Administration.

As I hope you’re aware, Elon Musk’s DOGE, which is supposedly rooting out fraud and waste, has made Social Security a special target. Musk has done this even though it’s one of the federal government’s cleanest, most efficient programs, and has done an immense amount to reduce poverty among the elderly:

Source: The Conversation

Why is he doing this?

One answer is incompetence. Musk sent his child programmers into the agency and they, not understanding how its databases worked, wrongly reported to him that millions of dead people were receiving benefits. He immediately went big with that claim, and his immense but fragile ego won’t let him admit that he messed up so badly on something so big. So he just keeps making wilder and wilder assertions about Social Security fraud, and in the name of preventing fraud and reducing waste has been rapidly degrading the agency’s ability to serve America’s seniors.

An alternative answer sees the damage to Social Security as part of a deliberate scheme to undermine public faith in government, and to create an opening for lucrative privatization schemes. (It remains notable that DOGE hasn’t so much as hinted about doing something about overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans run by private insurers, which we know are costing taxpayers tens of billions a year.)

On this view, Musk and company see crippling the Social Security Administration as a feature, not a bug, part of their overarching plan to undermine the safety net and make America safe for profiteering.

Which of these views is right? My answer is both. Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that makes life better for non-billionaires.

And he shares these traits with Donald Trump, which makes them allies, although I keep wondering when their egos will collide explosively.

Anyway, at this point we should assume that the same combination of incompetence and bad intentions that afflicts national security and budget policy applies to everything the Trump administration touches. Incredibly, quite a few investors and journalists still believe that there’s deep thinking underlying the administration’s trade and currency policy. I guarantee you, there isn’t.

I’ll delve into the “Mar-a-Lago accord” and all that over the weekend, but let’s just say that it’s quite clear, if you know anything about international economics, that these guys have no idea what they’re doing. And all of us 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 26, 2025 8:17 AM

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

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

For most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.

By Aziz Huq | March 23, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-o
rder-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/

On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.

The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.
Download the free book (2017 edition) from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Ernst+Fraenkel+Dual

Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience.

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.

Yet, Fraenkel insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws. After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80 million people,” he noted, needs stable rules. The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.

Fraenkel was born in Cologne in December 1898 in the comfortable home of Georg Fraenkel, a merchant, and Therese Epstein. After his parents died, Ernst and his sister were taken in by their uncle in Frankfurt, where Ernst became interested in trade-union activism. Despite his socialist leanings, he joined the German army and was sent to Poland in April 1917. He later wrote that he’d hoped “the war would mean the end of antisemitism.” Fraenkel survived the trenches of the Western Front. After his discharge in 1919, he earned a law degree, and eventually secured work in Berlin as a labor lawyer.

The war did not, of course, end anti-Semitism, but his military service did save his livelihood, at least for a time. On May 9, 1933—only a few months after the Reichstag burned—Fraenkel and other Jewish lawyers received an official notice prohibiting them from appearing in German courts. But Nazi law made an exception for Jewish lawyers who had served in World War I. And so, while many fled, Fraenkel remained in Berlin, representing litigants such as members of the German Freethinkers Alliance, a leader of the Young Socialist Workers, and a man arrested for insulting a National Socialist newspaper as “old cheese.”

Often, he had to resort to unorthodox strategies. In the last of those three cases, Fraenkel persuaded his client to plead guilty, limiting his arguments to the sentence’s severity. This gambit worked: The man was duly convicted, and received a light sentence, avoiding the fate of others acquitted under similar circumstances. In at least one case, a Gestapo agent appeared as soon as the judge declared a not-guilty verdict, took the defendant into custody, and said, “Kommt nach Dachau” (“Come to Dachau”). Eventually, Fraenkel’s name made it onto a Gestapo list. He and his wife fled first to London, then to Chicago.

From the February 1941 issue: A review of Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1941/02/the-dual-state/65
3254/

Today, we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state. The U.S. has long had a normative state. That system was always imperfect. Our criminal-justice system, for example, sweeps in far too many people, for far too little security in exchange. Even so, it is recognizably part of the normative state.

What the Trump administration and its allies are trying to build now, however, is not. The list of measures purpose-built to cleave off a domain in which the law does not apply grows by the day: the pardons that bless and invite insurrectionary violence; the purges of career lawyers at the Justice Department and in the Southern District of New York, inspectors general across the government, and senior FBI agents; the attorney general’s command that lawyers obey the president over their own understanding of the Constitution; the appointment of people such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who seem to view their loyalty to the president as more compelling than their constitutional oath; the president’s declaration that he and the attorney general are the sole authoritative interpreters of federal law for the executive branch; the transformation of ordinary spending responsibilities into discretionary tools to punish partisan foes; the stripping of security clearances from perceived enemies and opponents; the threat of criminal prosecutions for speech deemed unfavorable by the president; and the verbal attacks on judges for enforcing the law.

The singular aim of these tactics is to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules. By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis. But it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism—such as Congress’s power to impose binding rules on how spending and regulation unfold—without which the normative state cannot persist.

The CEOs who paid for and attended Trump’s second inauguration can look forward to the courts being open for the ordinary business of capitalism. So, too, can many citizens who pay little attention to politics expect to be unscarred by the prerogative state. The normal criminal-justice system, if only in nonpolitical cases, will crank on. Outside the American prerogative state, much will remain as it was. The normative state is too valuable to wholly dismantle.

For that reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.

Building a dual state need not end in genocide: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression. Most people can ignore the construction of the prerogative state simply because it does not touch their lives. They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built, as Fraenkel’s writing and experience suggest, it can swallow anyone.

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 26, 2025 10:30 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

Worthwhile Canadian Observations
About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t
By Paul Krugman | Mar 25, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/worthwhile-canadian-observations I don’t know what set Trump off on Canada,

This: Canada has a record trade surplus with the USA. (So BTW does Mexico) linkages between its own provinces, and built a closer economic relationship with Britain.

Quote:
Sure enough, Mark Carney, the current and probably continuing Canadian prime minister, has emphasized removing remaining obstacles to interprovincial trade and seems to be seeking closer ties to Europe.

Isn't that like tying yourself to a sinking ship? I hope Canadians realize that Carney is a former Bank of England Governor, and that England may be even more predatory towards Canada's resources than Trump.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney

Quote:
surely the main reason was a continuation of the factors that made 2024 a graveyard for incumbents everywhere, especially continuing voter anger about the inflation surge of 2021-22.

Some of us tried to point out that the very universality of the inflation surge meant that it couldn’t be attributed to the policies of any one country’s government. If Bidenomics was responsible for U.S. inflation, why did Europe experience almost the same cumulative rise in prices that we did?

Because we, of the collective west, followed the same Covid, post-Covid, and anti-Russian policies that dumped money into a fragile supply chain world, and cut ourselves off from cheap Russian energy?

Quote:
The Economist declared in a much-quoted article, [Canada] is now poorer than Alabama, as measured by GDP per capita... Yet Canada doesn’t look like Alabama; it doesn’t feel like Alabama; and by any measure other than GDP it isn’t anything like Alabama. Here’s GDP per capita along with a widely used measure of life satisfaction, the same one often cited when pointing out how happy the Nordic countries seem to be, and life expectancy at birth:

Sources: IMF, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gallup, World Bank

Part of the explanation for this discrepancy, no doubt, is that so much of U.S. national income accrues to a small number of wealthy people; inequality in Canada is much lower.

So every time someone brings up "per capita" stats, just remember that when there are points on a bell curve that are so far out you can't see them with the Hubble Telescope, they pull the average so far out it has nothing to do with whatever typical people experience.

One way to assess income equality in the GINI index, higher numbers mean greater inequality. The USA GINI index is about 0.42 (the highest inequality of all developed nations), Canadian GINI index is 0.32.

But Canada's relative equality ISN'T DUE TO TAX POLICIES . Canada's Federal Income Tax and Capital Gains tax rates are roughly the same as ours, and their corporate tax rate ranges from 38% to 15%, unless you're a small business where it seems to be 9%.
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics
/corporations/corporation-tax-rates.html
So next time SECOND starts bitching and whining about taxes, we can look to Canada to refute his argument.

I can only peg our relative poor economic and social performance to a high degree of political corruption in BOTH parties. The kind of corruption that can't even get single payer off the ground bc they're too beholden to the healthcare industry, who sold our manufacturing to China...

AND THE PRICE OF PLAYING "WORLD DOMINATION".

-----------
"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 26, 2025 12:21 PM

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

Ukraine Was Just Knifed In The Back (by Trump) And The Ukrainians Know It
By Phillips P. Obrien | Mar 26, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/ukraine-was-just-knifed-in-the-
back

The outcome of the negotiations between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia is a betrayal to Ukraine. Basically the US has agreed to lift a lot of sanctions from Russia (which you won’t see at the White House statement but will see in the Kremlin one):

• Lifting of sanctions on Rossclkhozbank and other financial institutions involved in facilitating international trade in food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, their reconnection to SWIFT, and the opening of necessary correspondent accounts;

• Lifting of restrictions on trade finance operations;

• Lifting of sanctions on companies that produce and export food products (including fish products) and fertilizers, as well as lifting restrictions on insurance companies working with shipments of food (including fish products) and fertilizers;

• Lifting of restrictions on port servicing of vessels and sanctions on ships flying the Russian flag involved in the trade of food products (including fish products) and fertilizers;

• Lifting of restrictions on the supply of agricultural machinery to the Russian Federation, as well as other goods involved in the production of food (including fish products) and fertilizers.

It is very difficult to see Ustinova writing this if the Ukrainian government did not understand now how it had been betrayed.

This deal stinks and would be a huge win for Russia if it were implemented. A few things might happen. The Trump administration, having crafted it with Putin, might get cold feet and not push to implement it over the heads of the Ukrainians and Europeans. That would be best—but don’t put too much hope on Trump not working with Putin.

If the US-Russian end of the deal stands, then Ukraine will be left either taking the deal or walking away. It can walk away, if European states back it. The participation of Europe will be needed to bust the sanctions (unless the US decides to just ally with Russia fully and openly). However, this will require some real fortitude and determination by European states to stand up to the USA.

Regardless, the last day (including the Atlantic Story I wrote about on Monday) has once again confirmed where we are.

The Story Of The Year For Many Reasons
Phillips P. Obrien · Mar 24
Read full story https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-story-of-the-year-for-many-
reasons

The US is now trying to subvert Ukraine (and Europe) and work with Russia. The US wants to end the sanctions as soon as possible and start making money with Russia. It cares nothing about the success of freedom and democracy in Europe/Ukraine and actually seems to wish to undermine both if possible.

It is up to Ukraine and Europe now to look after themselves. The Black Sea ceasefire deal is screaming that loudly.

More at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/ukraine-was-just-knifed-in-the-
back

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 26, 2025 2:07 PM

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

‘We have to have it’: Trump ups the pressure on Greenland

By Danny Nguyen | 03/26/2025 01:01 PM EDT

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/26/trump-greenland-vance-visit-0
0004791

America has “to let them know that we need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it,” Trump said in an interview with radio host Vince Coglianese on Wednesday. “It’s [an] island from a defensive posture and even offensive posture is something we need. … When you look at the ships going up their shore by the hundreds, it’s a busy place.”

The president told Coglianese he was unsure if Greenlanders were ready to be citizens of the United States, “but I think we have to do it and convince them, and we have to have the land because it’s not possible to properly defend a large section of this Earth — not just the U.S. — without it. So we have to have it, and I think we will have it.”

If you are a Trumptard, be aware that Trump is getting crazier day by day.

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 26, 2025 2:13 PM

How does it feel to wake up every day and be a loser?

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

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 3:31 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Tail Wags the Dog once again?

this time its some low Level Gypsy IDF Jew Israeli Romani guy a journalist who writes crap and will try to end the Trump Admin...the Jew Roma foreign guy a dual citizen leaks the military stuff and now wants to control foreign policy

they do some kind of humiliation on Kash Patel and Tulsi, more political BS

all of them afraid to call out Jeffrey Goldberg

We are very much in Clownworld

however Trump is kind of angry and takes it as a personal attack

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 5:56 PM

BRENDA

Mr. Carney fully admits to being the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

It is Poilievre who has had to walk back comments to try and ditch the "Maple Maga" tag that he's gotten. The other day he had to walk back about taking healthcare down, the dental plan that the Liberals and NDP brought in under Trudeau.

The Conservatives are behind the Liberals in the polls and frankly that's where they should stay. We do not need a trump wanna be leading Canada.

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 5:59 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How does it feel to wake up every day and be a loser?

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

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

The troubling little things about the Signal leak.

America is, indeed, under siege by losers. These are the texts of middle-management doofuses elevated, unexpectedly, to the executive suite. They are mortifyingly self-important about their new status. They cannot stop prancing around in their new suits, bragging about their new toys. Look at how important they are! Look at how they praise God and CENTCOM! Look at Tulsi Gabbard typing, “Great work and effects!” Is it too much to ask our nation’s designated button-pushers to at least act like this is real? Is it too much to ask them to discuss a military operation with statesmanlike assurance, rather than with bluff enthusiasm, high-fives, and the muscular-arm emoji? Is it too much to expect them to act like they’ve been here before?
https://slate.com/life/2025/03/trump-signal-atlantic-leak-hegseth-atta
ck-plans.html

The part that people are missing is that Trump’s people are doing official communications on Signal to avoid those communications being retained. There are Project 2025 training videos that specifically recommended this type of thing as a way to avoid subpoenas. Our government is using 3rd party software to discuss OPSEC, NOFORN, and Top Secret levels of communication in avenues that do not retain data. They can stage a total takeover of the US and there will be no evidence through any official channels.

18 U.S. Code § 2071 – Willful concealment or destruction of records.

Penalty: Fines, up to 3 years in prison, and disqualification from federal office.

Obstruction of justice statutes (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 1519 – destruction of records in federal investigations). Penalty: Up to 20 years if tied to an investigation or official proceeding.

I think the whole thing is that they're using services to communicate that delete the chat records so there is no evidence. It’s difficult to prove this has been done if you can’t get the content of the comms. For this one case, yes there’s evidence. There won’t be for most cases.

The whole purpose of the transparency laws were to know who did what and when so everybody could eventually be held accountable. That is why the Republicans are using third party websites instead of official government channels for internal government communication.

https://imgur.com/gallery/repost-55djqZt

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 26, 2025 6:03 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

April Fool...no, Canada's next election will Not take place on the First Day of April

Trudeau is gone

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 6:23 PM

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

Several recent efforts by members of Congress go far beyond the proper bounds of regulation and look like pretty blatant efforts to destroy the independent authority of the judicial branch for the sin of enforcing constitutional limits on the executive. Their ominous warnings made for a troubling split screen this past week, alongside the Trump administration’s defiance of a court order and contemptuous cover-up of its misdeeds. This mob-style shakedown of the judiciary may not play as a constitutional crisis for pundits on cable news, but it’s emphatically a different variation on the same themes. Last week saw congressional efforts at impeachments for the mere exercise of judicial authority; an amped-up congressional threat to do away with nationwide injunctions; and an overt promise by the House majority to defund the judicial branch. While everyone’s eyes are on the Trump administration’s open contempt for judicial orders, many of us are ignoring congressional efforts to do precisely the same thing.

Congress has voted to impeach judges only 15 times in its history, and there’s no real chance these efforts will pass; if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets. But Musk is using the impeachment cosplay as a litmus test for which primaries he will fund, last week donating the maximum allowable campaign contributions to seven Republican members of Congress working to impeach judges. So even if this is just a fundraising stunt, it’s certainly rewarding the craziest of the crazy.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/judge-impeachment-congress
-mike-johnson-donald-trump.html

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 26, 2025 6:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.

Remember this one.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 6:46 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.

Remember this one.

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

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

Remember this one: "no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present"
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment.htm

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 26, 2025 6:51 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Mr. Carney fully admits to being the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

It is Poilievre who has had to walk back comments to try and ditch the "Maple Maga" tag that he's gotten. The other day he had to walk back about taking healthcare down, the dental plan that the Liberals and NDP brought in under Trudeau.

The Conservatives are behind the Liberals in the polls and frankly that's where they should stay. We do not need a trump wanna be leading Canada.

BRENDA, I don't care what people "say" ... what they "admit" to, what other people call them. I care about what they DO. And if you want to know what someone will do in future, look to their record.

What was Carney's record? He spent a lot of his career representing (private, investment) banks. What were his policies?
What did Poilievre do?
IDK.
But Canadian voters should.

People spend far too much time arguing propaganda. Propaganda is for people who are distracted by shiny objects.

-----------
"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 26, 2025 7:19 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

So, the problem with using SIGNAL isn't that it's insecure, it's that it's unofficial and no records are kept. Kind of like Hillary's 33,000 emails about wedding plans and yoga pants, correct?

And since the only participant who "leaked" anything was Mike Walz (by including Goldberg in the list, whether accidentally or on purpose), and who chose the app to begin with was Mike Walz, I suppose this is all on him?

Seems like the guy should be fired.

-----------
"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 26, 2025 7:41 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
if House Republicans do drag any impeachments across the finish line, there is no way the Senate will convict and remove its targets.

Remember this one.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Remember this one: "no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present"
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/impeachment.htm

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

I see. You're still operating under the false assumption that you are represented by a party that isn't ripping each other apart while desperately trying not to become completely irrelevant.

I guess we'll see what the future brings.

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

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

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Wednesday, March 26, 2025 11:04 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I see. You're still operating under the false assumption that you are represented by a party that isn't ripping each other apart while desperately trying not to become completely irrelevant.

I guess we'll see what the future brings.

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

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

The Future is Here:

Man declared ‘dead’ by Social Security shares the cost of DOGE’s cuts

Questions about the agency’s future move beyond an anecdote here or there. The question now is how much Social Security can take before it stops working.

By Rachel Maddow | March 26, 2025, 1:22 PM CDT

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/social-security-pr
oblems-trump-elon-musk-doge-rcna198196

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 25 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

On Tuesday, during a Senate confirmation hearing for Frank Bisignano, Donald Trump’s nominee for Social Security commissioner, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington shared a report from her hometown paper, The Seattle Times.

“It was like a Depression-era scene, he [Johnson] said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers,” The Seattle Times reported.

The story was that of Leonard “Ned” Johnson, an 82-year-old Washington resident, who was mistakenly declared dead by Social Security, which resulted in his benefits being taken away. As Cantwell recounted during that hearing, when Johnson realized the agency’s error, he tried to resolve the problem over the phone. However, after weeks of waiting for a response, he was forced to travel to the Social Security office in Seattle — one of the buildings proposed to be closed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“They are so understaffed down there,” Johnson told the paper. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”

After waiting for four hours, Johnson told the Times he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”

That’s just one story from one town about one retired person trying to straighten out one problem with Social Security — and finding a Depression-era scene when he did. But, as Trump and Musk continue to hack away at the Social Security Administration, questions about the future of the agency move beyond an anecdote here or there. The question now is how much Social Security can take before it stops working.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post published riveting reporting from Social Security offices around the country. For the report, headlined “Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down,” the paper spoke to more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security. The Post also reviewed internal documents from the agency.

Here’s what it found in Indiana: “In one office in central Indiana, the phone lines are jammed by 9 a.m. with hundreds of retirees, further taxing a staff of less than a dozen that is responsible for nearly 70,000 claimants across the state. … [T]he questions have become predictable: What is the U.S. DOGE Service doing to Social Security? Will the office close? Will my benefits continue?”

The Post reported that employees there received no training on the impending changes and have few answers for those calling in. “I hope we’re going to be here,” one employee told caller after caller, according to the Post. “But I can’t guarantee anything.”

In Baltimore, the Post spoke to an employee who works on critical payment systems who said that as a result of a wave of resignations and retirements, nearly a quarter of his team is either already gone or will soon be.

According to that employee, the reduction in highly skilled staff is already having an impact. “His office is supposed to complete several software updates and modernization processes required by law within the next few weeks and months, he said. But with the departures, it seems increasingly likely that it will miss those deadlines,” the Post reported.

That staffer also said his team is often called on to fix complicated technology glitches that stop payments, but many of the experts responsible for those fixes will soon be gone. He told the Post: “That has to get cleaned up on a case-by-case basis, and the experts in how to do that are leaving. We will have cases that get stuck, and they’re not going to be able to get fixed.”

That same employee then warned, “People could be out of benefits for months.”

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 26, 2025 11:26 PM

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

The Government’s Rock Librarian

Her work was so quiet and fundamental—to academia and industry, all over the world—that she believed her job would be safe.

(She was fired. She seeks a job in private industry. The government rehired her. The Winds of Change are Blowing Hard and Fast.)

By E. Tammy Kim | March 25, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/deep-state-diaries/the-governments-rock
-librarian

Last September, Mary and her partner moved from Oregon to Colorado by car. On the way, they camped in Idaho and took a detour through Yellowstone National Park. They passed bison grazing on the side of the road, saw Old Faithful shoot into the sky, and, when it snowed, took refuge in an R.V. and baked a frozen pizza. Mary’s love of nature, kindled in the back yard of her childhood home, had inspired her to become a scientist. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was enamored with volcanoes and eventually pursued a doctorate, which focussed on the geochemistry of the East African Rift. At twenty-eight, she was finishing her dissertation and about to start a job with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Being a geologist, you can do a lot of different things in oil or mining or academia,” she told me. “But I always liked the idea of doing science motivated by what the public wants.”

The U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) was founded in 1879, amid a surge in industrial manufacturing and faith in scientific progress. It was charged with the “classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.” Now it conducts satellite mapping, tracks earthquakes, and monitors mineral resources, wildlife, and water. It is one of eleven bureaus under the Department of the Interior, but has no regulatory powers. Mary would be working at the Denver Federal Center, a six-hundred-and-twenty-three-acre campus that was originally a livestock ranch and hosted an ordnance plant during the Second World War. The U.S.G.S. building there looked like it hadn’t changed much since then. Mary’s lab had a broken sink and was cluttered with decades’ worth of beakers and hot plates. Her office was in the corner of a windowless floor that frequently flooded. She tried to dress it up a bit, with a used standing desk and a green velvet armchair from home, which her partner nicknamed the “IKEA dream chair.” When Mary was being hired, she was told, in three rounds of interviews, that a new, state-of-the-art U.S.G.S. facility would soon be built down the road, at the Colorado School of Mines, with funding from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. “That was a big sell,” she said.

She joined a team that studies “critical minerals,” a category of metals that are essential to industry and vulnerable to kinks in the global supply chain. Critical minerals are used in planes, electric cars, smartphones, and many other technologies. Some, such as aluminum, lithium, and cobalt, are better known (and easier to pronounce) than others: dysprosium, fluorspar, ruthenium, ytterbium. They’re often dispersed in small amounts in sections of underlying rock. When a mining company locates an area that contains a critical mineral, it must excavate and grind up that rock, then separate it into component parts for analysis. Mary’s job was to keep a global inventory of these components, in the form of little jars of fine powders, called “reference materials.” A mining company or fellow-researcher might contact her to purchase a jar, at cost, of Reykjavík Iceland Basalt or Knippa Texas Nephelinite (both a hundred and thirty-five dollars) for purposes of calibration and comparison. But Mary was only permitted to ship the materials to certain countries, for reasons of national security, she supposed. She liked helping other scientists “know that they’re measuring something correctly.” Her little jars were the geochemical equivalent of the original kilogram, a metal cylinder that sits in a vault outside Paris. Maintaining measurement standards is a behind-the-scenes task few private entities have the incentive to perform. “My job’s comically boring,” Mary told me. “But I really liked it.”

Mary described her role as largely self-directed. She was constantly trying to make improvements at U.S.G.S., while finishing her dissertation on nights and weekends. One day, she came across a journal article that laid out a method for growing especially pure, regular calcium carbonate using agar and a U-shaped test tube. Such crystals would be handy in her work, so she rummaged for supplies in the lab and set up two U-shaped test tubes side by side. Within a week or two, sparkly white bits appeared in the solution at the base of the tubes. Another time, she took a Python coding class on her own initiative. “Before any data that was generated from labs went out to people, it had to be reviewed,” she said. “You have to do all these checklists of, like, Did they do this on the instrument? Does this Excel sheet have the units?” She began to write Python programs to standardize and automate this quality assurance.

Her work was so quiet and fundamental—to academia and industry, all over the world—that Mary believed her job would be safe, even after President Donald Trump started making cuts to the federal workforce in January. There was also the fact that Trump seemed to be fixated on critical minerals. On his first day back in office, he issued an executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” that referenced U.S.G.S. and encouraged federal support for “critical mineral projects.” He was also trying to broker access to Ukraine’s mineral deposits, such as lithium, manganese, and graphite.

But, by early February, Mary heard that the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human-resources arm, had required the Department of the Interior to submit a list of probationary employees: those less than a year or two into their jobs. She Googled whether she could “get fired randomly,” and read up on the required procedures for a federal reduction in force. Then, on February 13th, she read an article that forecast widespread firings of government workers the next day. Panic spread in the group chats and social-media channels shared by workers at U.S.G.S., the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. For many scientists and nature lovers, these were rare, sought-after positions—“my dream job,” more than one Interior worker told me.

On Valentine’s Day, Mary’s phone rang. “Welp. Just got a call from my boss,” she texted her “Geo Gals” chat. “I’m laid off.” Her friends replied, “No,” and “NO,” and “NO!!!” A few hours later, Trump issued another executive order focused on critical minerals, which established a National Energy Dominance Council. Mary had taken the day off to finish her dissertation, and spent the evening with her partner, their cat, and their aging dog. The couple had been fixing up the house: they hung peel-and-stick wallpaper in the kitchen and painted the office a pleasing green. Mary thought about the garden. “I planted garlic in my yard in September, and garlic takes a year to grow,” she said. “I was, like, Oh, God, I might be moving.” The following week, when she went to collect her belongings from the U.S.G.S. building, she found a note scrawled on torn scrap paper and taped to an office door:

Employment Lawyers who specialize in federal employment:

Colorado Employee Advocates Murray Law LLC

“Not sure who put it there,” she said.

After Mary received her official notice of firing, she changed her status on Microsoft Teams: “Out of office — In memoriam: Sept 2024 - Feb 2025.” Her immediate predecessor had done the job for more years than Mary had been alive. “I don’t know how long I would’ve stayed, but definitely a while,” she told me. “I calculated when I could retire. I think I jinxed it.”

Some twenty-five thousand federal workers, most of them probationary, were fired around the same time as Mary. Their termination e-mails were short, impersonal, and, in many cases, dishonest. The Administration told these employees that they had “failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs,” regardless of their actual records. At U.S.G.S. and other Interior agencies, thousands of emerging scientists saw their careers cut short. And, in fields such as geology and ecology, many were women. “My graduate program, my cohort, was ten women and five men,” Mary said. “Participation was being broadened among younger people.”

Workers, unions, and states filed lawsuits over the mass firings. Mary heard rumors that the Interior agencies might be ordered to bring people back, but nothing was certain, so she started to apply for jobs in the private sector. There was an aerospace position that paid twice as much as U.S.G.S., and a mining venture that promised a novel application of A.I. Mary was not enthusiastic. She felt like a “hypocrite”; Trump and Elon Musk had told federal workers to improve themselves by seeking work in the private sector. “One of my applications said something like ‘Do you commit to signing an N.D.A. to protect trade secrets?’ ” she told me. “I was, like, ‘Oh, God.’ My whole thing was, I really loved that science is for the people.”

When she saw her mother’s neighbor celebrate, on Instagram, Trump’s rooting out of alleged waste and fraud, Mary felt angry. “Is the solution really asking a person who knows nothing about these industries to arbitrarily cut things that make no sense?” she D.M.’d the neighbor. “Does it make sense that I got fired today despite being hired to advance critical mineral supplies as directed by Donald Trumps recent executive order?” Mary wondered how her crystals in the U-shaped test tubes were doing. She called her representatives in Congress. “I’d kind of ramble,” she told me. Her script was “Hi, I just got fired. I’m calling to advocate that our representatives take action on Elon Musk’s purge of the government.”

Last week, just before an interview for a private-sector job she wasn’t sure she wanted, Mary got a text message from her former supervisor at U.S.G.S. “You should receive an email today rescinding your removal from federal service,” he wrote. He had limited information, but told her that “the response window could be fairly short.” Judges in California and Maryland had ordered the temporary rehiring of many thousands of probationary workers who had been summarily fired. (Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.) Mary felt overwhelmed, tossed in a current. “I don’t know if I’ll get brought back and have to leave again,” she told me. But she accepted the offer. The mass reinstatements were as shambolic as the mass firings had been. Some employees were notified by e-mail; some by text; some on conference calls via Microsoft Teams. Some workers were rehired and allowed to resume work. Others were technically rehired but put on administrative leave, which meant that they would likely be fired again soon, this time in accordance with federal rules. I spoke with one fired probationary worker at the National Park Service who never received a reinstatement notice at all.

The e-mail that Mary got didn’t mention her probationary status. It was the nature of her job—the critical minerals—that apparently saved her. “I am rescinding the letter/termination action,” the form e-mail from an agency official read. “Your position should have been exempt for the purposes of either National Security, Public Safety, or Energy Dominance.” She was allowed to return right away, with back pay, but decided to take a few days of unpaid leave to readjust. She was tired. “The idea of immediately returning to the office is very jarring,” she told me. “I assumed I’d be part of the group getting reinstated to only get fired again.” It was hard not to feel survivor’s guilt. But, she said, “I’ll be at work on Monday, and will just keep my head down.”

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 27, 2025 6:56 AM

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

I’ve Seen How ‘America First’ Ends

By Ryan Crow | March 26, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/america-first-trump-
doge/682164/

The United States is rapidly dismantling the world order that it built and maintained over the past 80 years. Donald Trump’s administration is demolishing America’s foreign-aid system, weakening its transatlantic alliances, and curtailing military assistance for key partners, all in the name of putting “America First.”

These decisions emerge in part from a belief that has a growing appeal today: The U.S. should fix its own problems before worrying about everyone else’s. But this view fails to recognize that America’s international relationships are indispensable to its strength and stability. In nearly 15 years working on foreign-aid efforts across continents, I’ve seen that when America withdraws from the world, the world’s problems come knocking on its door.

Trump’s policies resemble those of some American leaders in the early 20th century who withdrew from international commitments, restricted foreign assistance, and pursued objectives mainly through threats and limited force rather than engagement and support. Both American and foreign leaders typically expended blood and treasure abroad only when they sensed a near-term payoff, or when catastrophes had already broken out. Using one’s resources to stabilize the international system and prevent bad outcomes was the exception.

The costs of this approach became clear soon enough. Even though the U.S. had the world’s largest economy and an exceptional military, the country was deeply vulnerable to international crises, including wars, epidemics, and economic tumult, all of which inflicted great harm on Americans.

Now, in fraying the international order, Trump threatens to reinstate some of the conditions that made the U.S. so unsafe a century ago. The administration claims to want to reduce wasteful spending and inefficiency. I know firsthand that these problems are real, and that effective reforms exist. But tearing down the system isn’t one of them.

Aiding other countries may seem like charity, but it protects American interests in concrete ways. Containing Ebola or Marburg outbreaks before they reach American soil, for example, is clearly preferable to addressing them once they’re already here. But even the more routine work that the U.S. has now halted—such as training nurses and supporting hospitals—ultimately makes Americans more secure. My own experiences illustrate the point.

In 2019, I worked with government officials and medical professionals in Tanzania to curb the excessive use of antibiotics, and thereby reduce the potential for drug-resistant pathogens. In a stuffy conference room four hours outside Dar es Salaam, we created a system that could help stop the next MRSA infection from emerging in Tanzania and coming to America.

During my work in Nigeria in 2016, I saw how training teachers, providing textbooks, and rehabilitating schools not only benefited locals but also promoted America’s strategic priorities. Because we conducted all of our activities with the Nigerian government, we established relationships that could be used to encourage security cooperation, combat local insurgents, and counter Chinese influence in the country.

And while working on tax reform in Tunisia in 2017, I was one small piece of an effort to ensure that the government had sufficient revenue to pay its employees and provide basic services. This wasn’t bleeding-heart altruism: The project ultimately helped equip the country’s emerging democracy to fight extremism, reduce migration that was destabilizing Europe, and pay its debts to Western creditors.

The connection between foreign assistance and U.S. national security was even clearer in Afghanistan, where I spent several months from 2010 to 2013. I was part of a team that reestablished local government offices and cooperated with officials to rebuild schools, repair roads, and improve water systems. The initiative was demanding and dangerous: Local militants attacked our workplaces and—on a day I wasn’t there—car-bombed our Kabul office. Our work benefited the local population, but that wasn’t our primary objective; we were there to convert our military’s gains into lasting security for America. As long as terrorists who opposed the West continued to find refuge in Afghanistan, the U.S. wouldn’t be safe. The Afghan government had to be rehabilitated in order to neutralize them.

America’s efforts obviously failed in Afghanistan, but that was a function of too little involvement, not too much. The U.S. had steadily withdrawn military, economic, and diplomatic support—a long, slow slide that led to the Afghan government’s collapse and our disgraceful withdrawal in 2021. We now face a similar situation in Ukraine, where the elimination of U.S. support may produce the very failure that America says it’s trying to avoid.

Even a purely self-interested America should invest in the world’s security. But it has to improve how it carries out those investments. As with any government program, America’s foreign-aid system suffers from a little fraud, some waste, and a lot of inefficiency.

Let’s start with fraud. Though I never witnessed any directly, some undoubtedly occurs, and the administration is right to want to eliminate it. But firing inspectors general is not the way to do so. These independent watchdogs minimize abuse and make sure Congress knows precisely how taxpayer money is being spent. For example, they identified billions of dollars in misdirected or poorly utilized spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. To actually root out fraud and inefficiency, the federal government must empower IGs, not remove them. Tying IG budgets to the size of the programs they oversee would ensure that their resources are commensurate with the tasks they are asked to perform, including targeting fraud.

In my experience, however, fraud is far from the biggest problem. I saw many projects fail either because they didn’t fully account for local context—in fairness, it’s difficult to hold community meetings under mortar fire—or because they didn’t have enough resources to achieve their aims. But even when projects succeed on their own terms, they don’t always advance America’s interests as clearly as they could. Every foreign-assistance effort should be linked to specific foreign-policy goals, such as decreasing the number of refugees fleeing a given country, or building up a local alternative to Chinese foreign investment. The Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Reviews of recent decades have tried to unite projects with broader objectives, but they’re too cumbersome to be effective.

Simply meeting goals and advancing the national interest aren’t enough, though; America’s foreign-aid system needs to do both much more efficiently than it has in the past. I was part of several efforts that languished under review for well over a year before being canceled. Worse, some applications sat pending for so long that when they were awarded, the circumstances on the ground had changed so dramatically that the original plan had no chance of succeeding. Even when applications are assessed and approved quickly, other onerous processes stand in the way: contracting mechanisms, acquisition regulations, and compliance and reporting requirements all tend to result in lots of wasted money, time, and brainpower.

In theory, some of DOGE’s reforms might help in this regard. Subsuming USAID and other foreign-aid offices within the State Department could allow the government to make sure that more projects meet their goals and promote American priorities. One could also argue that reducing America’s foreign commitments might help the country focus on its most important interventions. The current administration, however, has given little indication that it is carrying out these reforms in good faith—or even wants to improve foreign aid in the first place.

A thoughtful version of DOGE that truly wants to create a leaner, more effective foreign-policy apparatus could use AI to accelerate and improve the many regulatory steps that slow down the provisioning of aid. AI might also help the government identify which applicants are most likely to meet their targets.

But at the moment, DOGE seems less inclined to excise waste and inefficiency than to implode the government. Its impact on American security is already coming into view—in a resurgence of tuberculosis in Kenya, for example, and a measurably growing risk of nuclear war.

By ostensibly putting itself first, America is really dragging the world back to a leaderless, atomized era that undermined its own interests. The administration can continue to disengage and watch chaos fill the void. Or it can make America safer.

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 27, 2025 7:28 AM

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

Trump's war on science
A multi-directional assault on the foundations of American research

By Matthew Yglesias | Mar 27, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science

I try not to do too many pure “Trump is Bad” takes — if you’re here and reading, you almost certainly already believe that — but I think it’s important to contemplate the scope of the harms here.

Thanks to the involvement of Elon Musk and the support of several other prominent technology industry figures, the second Trump administration has a techno-futurist strand that was completely missing from the nostalgia-soaked first. We’re hearing about robots, advanced rockets, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies of tomorrow.

But underlying this forward-looking rhetorical glow is a multi-pronged attack on American scientific research that could genuinely cripple knowledge production and our long-term future.

In order to grasp the full scale of the assault, it’s important to recognize that these threats are converging from multiple directions at once. The centerpiece, politically at least, is a determination to destroy left-aligned institutions, of which universities are a salient example. But that’s hardly the only front:

• Somewhat independent of the administration’s attack on institutions is the involvement of RFK Jr. and his admirers, who until recently, formed a crank antiprogress wing of the left.

• On immigration, the administration’s paranoia extends well beyond a desire for a secure border, and systematically errs on the side of removing more people and making the United States a less desirable place to live and work.

• DOGE’s core fiscal theory is that it's possible to make large reductions in federal spending without any noticeable diminution of service levels, and this creates large, systematic incentives to do things with hidden long-term costs.

• It’s not unique to this administration, but the traditional business community’s hostility to research agendas that might make the case for public interest regulation has not diminished.

• And last but not least, there is a harder-to-define nexus of influence in Trump’s DC that includes both malign foreign actors who don’t want America to safeguard its national interests and believers in a short-term singularity who don’t believe there's a long-term interest that needs to be secured.

More at https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-on-science

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 27, 2025 7:36 AM

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

Lies and the City
New York City is great again, but MAGA can’t handle the truth

By Paul Krugman | Mar 27, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city

I had a civilized evening Tuesday. I did a public event at the CUNY Graduate Center, interviewing Zach Carter, author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Video of the event, which seemed to go well, should be available in a few days.

Then some of us took Zach out for dinner near the GC, which is just across the street from the Empire State Building. The conversation was great, and we lingered until almost 11, after which several of us walked over to the subway and took it home. And you know what happened?

Nothing. There were plenty of people out on the streets, which felt perfectly safe; so did the subway, which efficiently delivered us to our destinations.

It felt like a mental vacation from the grim political news, and if you’ll forgive me I’ll extend that vacation a bit by telling a mostly happy story about life in New York. FYI: I’ll be traveling tomorrow and probably won’t be able to post Friday.

But of course pointing out that life in New York is OK is itself political, because trash talk about our big cities, New York in particular, is a constant theme in MAGA rhetoric. According to Donald Trump, people in New York are afraid to go outside, because they can’t cross the street without getting mugged or raped. Just last Friday Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, called the NYC subway a “shithole,” which nobody wants to ride. Spoiler: It isn’t.

The truth is that New York, which really was a dangerous place a few decades ago, is now incredibly safe. The city’s weekly crime report provides some historical comparisons:

You may say, never mind statistics, it feels dangerous. But actually it doesn’t — not to those who actually live there. The perception that New York is an urban hellscape comes from people who never visit the city, or at most spend a few days around tourist traps like Times Square, which is kind of a hellscape — it’s full of people dressed up as Disney characters, not to mention mimes.

Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-and-the-city

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 27, 2025 10:44 AM

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

The implicit threat in Trump’s push to change election rules

The president just set the stage to challenge election results he doesn’t like.

by Andrew Prokop | Mar 27, 2025, 8:32 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/405990/trump-election-executive-order-cit
izenship-mail-ballots

By withholding federal funds and threatening investigations, President Donald Trump has tried to bend universities to his will.

Now, he’s doing something similar: trying to get states to change their election rules.

In an executive order Tuesday, Trump made what amounts to a series of demands on states to change their election laws and policies. For one, he wants states to be more strict at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/preserving-and
-protecting-the-integrity-of-american-elections/

Trump also wants states to stop counting mailed-in votes that were sent in on or before Election Day but arrive afterward — in fact, he suggests that counting such votes violates federal law. Most judges and mainstream legal experts think this interpretation of the law is ridiculous, but it has gained steam on the right.
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146627

Trump is trying to do all this even though the president has no legal authority to tell states how to run their elections. Indeed, several aspects of his order will likely be challenged in court.

But he’s trying to threaten states anyway, with the pulling of federal election assistance funding and with unspecified action from his Justice Department, in hopes they comply.

The biggest threat of all is implicit — that Trump is setting the stage for a really nasty attempt to use the federal government to dispute election results in states that don’t make the changes he wants. This gives states a tough choice to make: give in now, or have an ugly battle later?

Trump’s demands on states

Trump’s first demand is stricter citizenship proof for voters. He wants to force people registering to vote or renewing their registrations to prove their citizenship. He also wants to force state and local officials to do more to check the citizenship of people on their voter rolls. The order also instructs various federal agencies to make citizenship data more readily available to state and local officials.

This demand reflects baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that noncitizens regularly vote for Democrats in huge numbers. For decades, conservatives have believed that this is happening. But they can somehow never find evidence to prove it. Existing data and studies suggest that vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote. For instance, the state of Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2024 and found that, out of more than 8 million registered voters, a mere 20 were noncitizens.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/election-fact-check-noncitizens-vote-instanc
es-vanishingly-rare/story?id=115025674
https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-voter-roll-audit-finds-20-noncitizen
s-8/story?id=115072461

Still, many on the right have long argued that, regardless of whether illegal voting is happening in significant numbers, it is common sense to require voters to prove their citizenship. Critics argue, though, that because there is no actual widespread problem of noncitizen voting, the most consequential impact would be to suppress legitimate voting from citizens who don’t have proof-of-citizenship documents easily available.

Trump’s second demand is that state and local officials not count mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Every state that uses mail-in voting requires ballots to be postmarked — that is, in the mail — either on or before Election Day. But 18 states have later deadlines for when ballots can arrive (for instance, California accepts them until seven days after election day, and Alaska until 10 days after it.) This is to ensure legitimate votes are not excluded due to slow mail delivery and simply to give voters more flexibility.

However, Trump is adopting a fringe legal theory that an existing federal law setting a uniform date for federal elections makes it illegal to count ballots arriving after Election Day. This theory has been rejected by nearly all (though not all) judges who have heard cases about this. But Trump’s order asserts that this is the law and tells his attorney general to “take all necessary action” against states that “violate” it.

This demand reflects baseless theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by fraudulent late-arriving mail ballots. It is not true that late-arriving mail ballots swung the election — Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes, while the state as a whole only received 10,000 mail ballots after Election Day. Many mail ballots were counted quite slowly in a process that took days (and which Republicans in key states refused to help speed up). But such ballots were overwhelmingly received on or before election day itself.

Regardless, Trump is demanding these changes — and threatening states that refuse to go along.

The threats Trump is making to states that refuse to comply

To try to make his demands a reality, Trump is asserting authority over the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC was established in 2002 by Congress as an independent federal commission to help state and local governments improve election administration by distributing grant money and maintaining a template for a mail voter registration form.

As Trump has done with other independent agencies, he’s asserting his authority over the EAC in the (perhaps justified) belief that the current Supreme Court will endorse such a power grab. His order instructs the EAC to add a proof of citizenship requirement to its mail voter registration form. It also says the EAC should withhold funds from states that don’t use that form and from states that count mail ballots arriving after Election Day.

States could get by without EAC money. But the order also makes the more ominous threat of siccing the Justice Department on states that don’t make the changes Trump wants.

Trump’s assertion that mail ballots showing up after Election Day are illegal — even if state law says otherwise — is particularly ominous. That lays the groundwork for him to dispute any close election Democrats win with such ballots. He would probably lose in court, given the Supreme Court’s past refusal to take up this issue. But that outcome is not a totally sure thing, and even the fight would be ugly.

So the 18 states with later deadlines for arriving mail ballots now will be forced to ask: How important is this late deadline, really? Like most state voting rules, the deadline likely has little partisan impact — people adapt to different rules, and most would simply send in ballots earlier.

Still, Trump is clearly hoping this change will be enough to tip some election outcomes in Republicans’ favor by disallowing late-arriving Democratic mail votes, and if a particular election is close enough, maybe he’d be right.

Then again, low-propensity voters have increasingly trended toward the GOP in recent years. These voters would probably be less likely to send in a ballot early. So Trump might not get the outcome he’s hoping for.

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 27, 2025 11:35 AM

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

Forget the Trump administration's buffoonery — here's the real crisis

By John Stoehr | March 27, 2025

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/national-security-crisis/

. . . The president didn’t know about the security breach. “I don't know anything about it,” he told a reporter who asked about it for the first time. “I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. It's a magazine that's going out of business. It’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it.”

Why wasn’t he told? A reasonable guess might be that Hegseth and the others knew they were being careless and didn’t want to tell him.

But that would mean carelessness is a flaw.

It’s not.

Carelessness – or any of the injurious attributes of clowns, idiots and buffoons – is something Trump can trust them. When things go south, as they always do, he can trust them to cling to him more tightly, as by then, he might be the only thing standing between them and a jail cell.

When people talk about loyalty to Trump, they are not talking about it in the positive sense, as if they love him. They are talking about it in the negative sense, as if life as they know it would end without him.

Once the president becomes the only thing standing between them and criminal accountability, he becomes, to them, the law itself, such that whatever they do is in his name, which means it’s “legal,” which means they can do whatever they want without fear of consequence. Those are the kind of people a criminal president wants around him.

That’s the takeaway: Loyalty to Trump is the national security crisis.

Unfortunately, this is not yet widely understood. As things stand, there’s still this idea that failure in matters of national security is the exception to the rule instead of the rule itself under Donald Trump.

“This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships,’” a former CIA officer said. “This is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning,” involving the vice president, the secretary of defense and the CIA director, “all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.”

But criminal negligence isn’t putting troops at risk, not primarily.

Loyalty to Trump is.

“This is the highest level of f---up imaginable,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “These people cannot keep America safe.” (I read this quote and the above quote in Heather Cox Richardson.)

But this f---up isn’t making America unsafe, not primarily.

Loyalty to Trump is.

F----ups happen all the time. There’s always someone willing to take his chances by breaking the law. We are not talking about ordinary human error. We are not talking about ordinary human venality.

We are talking about a president who chose the worst people, because they are the worst people, as the worst people can be counted on to fail so spectacularly that they will be bonded to him forever.

We are talking about a president who decided against excellence, because excellence threatens his control. He can’t afford to have men and women of integrity, who will honor their oath of office, because they might, as they did in the time, stand in the way of his power.

Which brings me back to utter disbelief.

Despite everything we know about Donald Trump, it is still possible, apparently, to be outraged. As Senate Michael Bennet told CIA Director Ratcliffe, “This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect … is entirely unacceptable. It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better!”

But that’s only if we’re still giving Trump some benefit of the doubt – if we still have expectations of him that are just above the level of a criminal. If we drop those, we wouldn't be in utter disbelief anymore. They will never do better, so we should expect them to never do better. We should expect Signalgate to be as good as it’s ever going to get. We should expect him and his goons to harm and betray America.

And, God help us, we will be right.

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 27, 2025 12:04 PM

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

Signalgate

By David Remnick | March 26, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/the-greater-scandal-of-s
ignalgate

In the initial months of Donald Trump’s second Administration, the qualities of malevolence, retribution, and bewildering velocity have obscured somewhat the ineptitude of its principals. This came into sharper view with recent reports in The Atlantic, in which the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tells how he was somehow added to a communal chat on the commercially available messaging system Signal, labelled “Houthi PC small group.” Sitting in his car, in a Safeway parking lot, Goldberg watched incredulously on his phone as the leaders of the national-security establishment discussed the details of bombing Houthi strongholds in Yemen.

The comedy of Goldberg’s reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice-President and the heads of the leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the Administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their President would have them do: they attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter (who proved far more concerned about national security than the national-security adviser), and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. Everyone from Cabinet members to the President’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, followed principles inherited by the President from the late Roy Cohn: Never apologize. And be certain to slander the messenger.

This spectacle of breezy contempt regarding questions of process and policy was humiliating, for sure, but hardly an amazement. In the chat, Vice-President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem to compete in their denigrations of the Europeans. (“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth tells Vance. “It’s PATHETIC.”) And yet much of what is so depressing about the chat is how familiar we are with the details and its spirit. Vance has, publicly and repeatedly, unburdened himself of his and the President’s disdain for Europe—most flagrantly in a speech in Munich, in February, when he lectured European leaders on their supposed failures in the realms of immigration and free speech.

This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Similarly, it does not require months of painstaking investigative reporting or a middle-aged tech fail to discover that another member of the group chat, Steven Witkoff, the President’s leading shuttle negotiator, is no more steeped in the granular details of diplomatic history and strategy than any other New York real-estate developer from the eighties in Trump’s circle. In a long interview with Tucker Carlson, following recent conversations in Moscow with Putin, Witkoff consistently parroted Russian talking points and relayed that the Russian dictator (“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy”) had been “gracious” and gave him a “beautiful portrait” of Trump as a gift for the President. (Trump, in turn, “was clearly touched” by the painting, Witkoff reported.) Throughout, Witkoff’s grasp of the conflict was so wobbly, so Moscow-inflected, that one could almost hear the guffawing from the Kremlin. In a moment of contemplation, Witkoff admitted, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And, no, it was anything but that, you know.”

Pete Hegseth is less prone to misty self-reflection. But his incompetence might have been predictable. Last December, after Trump nominated Hegseth, a weekend host on Fox News, to lead the Pentagon, Jane Mayer wrote a meticulously reported piece in this magazine on his florid background: his bouts of excessive drinking and profoundly sexist behavior on and off the job; his failures at managing enterprises somewhat larger than a dry cleaner but infinitely smaller than the Pentagon. No matter. Congressional Republicans were not inclined to deny Hegseth his appointment or to risk the President’s wrath. And they were similarly accommodating for another participant in the hapless Signal chat, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence.

And so the week’s scandal is rather like the ending of an O. Henry story, surprising yet inevitable. If a journalist is mistakenly dropped into a group text among the leaders of the American health bureaucracy, will we faint when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refuses to recommend proven vaccines?

It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other Administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest confidences and prejudices for private meetings with such aides as Henry Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman, Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media: the autocratic actions intended to undermine the law, academia, and the media; the disregard for democratic partners and the affection for all manner of authoritarians; the hostile designs on Greenland, Canada, Panama, Mexico, and Europe; the ongoing attempt to purge the Republican Party of any remaining dissenters; and the constant effort to intimidate his critics and perceived enemies.

The threat of autocracy advances each day under Donald Trump, and it is a process that hides in plain sight. Some will choose to deny it, to domesticate it, to treat the abnormal as mere politics, to wish it all away in the spirit of “this too shall pass.” But the threat is real and for all to see. No encryption can conceal it.

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 27, 2025 2:20 PM

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

WHO’S AFRAID OF BIG BIRD?

Trump Demands Congress Defund NPR and PBS ‘IMMEDIATELY’ in Late-Night Meltdown

The president lashed out America’s public broadcasters, saying both were “arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party.”

By Janna Brancolini | Mar. 27 2025 9:05AM EDT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-demands-congress-defund-npr
-and-pbs-immediately-in-latest-rant/

“Republicans, don’t miss this opportunity to rid our Country of this giant SCAM, both being arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a bipartisan nonprofit that distributes federal funding to a decentralized network of local affiliate stations.

It quickly featured groundbreaking educational, arts, and culture shows including Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The French Chef with Julia Child, and Masterpiece Theater.

The average public radio station gets about 8 percent of its funding from the federal government, while the average television stations get about 17 percent, according to PBS News Hour. The federal funding costs Americans $1.50 per year on average, according to PBS. The BBC, by comparison, costs Brits about $70 per person per year via a household license fee.

During a flurry of late-night posts, Trump repeated his calls to “JUST SAY NO” to funding public broadcasters.

How am I going to watch NOVA specials about sharks now?
https://i.imgur.com/LBlq8x6.jpeg
https://imgur.com/gallery/how-am-i-going-to-watch-nova-specials-about-
sharks-now-VykCrtZ

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 27, 2025 3:24 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.

-----------
"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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Thursday, March 27, 2025 4:00 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
BBC, PBS, and CBC used to be reliable, objective reporters of events, but eventually became hostages to their funders.

Who is holding ABCNews hostage? Greenland? Just asking because the News coverage seems biased against Trump's confident self-image.

Trump says US will 'go as far as we have to' to get control of Greenland

The president suggested that "the world needs us to have Greenland."

By David Brennan | March 27, 2025, 7:20 AM

https://abcnews.go.com/International/trump-us-control-greenland/story?
id=120208823

"We need Greenland for national security and international security," Trump said, taking reporters' questions in the Oval Office.

"So we'll, I think, we'll go as far as we have to go," he continued. "We need Greenland. And the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But if we don't have Greenland, we can't have great international security."

Trump added, "I view it from a security standpoint, we have to be there."

Trump also said that he understood "JD might be going," referring to the vice president, but did not offer any details about the trip. Vance is expected to travel to Greenland on Friday.

Greenland's Prime Minister Mute Egede earlier this week called the upcoming visit by U.S. officials part of a "very aggressive American pressure against the Greenlandic community" and called for the international community to rebuke it.

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 27, 2025 4:18 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Yep, Trump is on a tear.

I knew there would be things he'd do that I think are stupid (pro-Zionism comes to mind), against America's interests and against American's interests (I hope you catch the distinction). Unfortunately he was the only candidate with enough push to win against globalists and the deep state.

Too bad for all of us the Dem party became so deeply corrupted and anti-American.

-----------
"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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Thursday, March 27, 2025 4:19 PM

I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.

You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.

You should probably move out of my country now.

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

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

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 5:30 PM

I'm happy to report that my Medicaid got an automatic re-approval for another year.

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

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

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Thursday, March 27, 2025 6:29 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love that Second is posting things that he thinks bothers Americans.

You lost. You are a loser. Your party is dead.

You should probably move out of my country now.

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

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

Why are you crazy, stupid and blissfully ignorant? Whatever reasons, those are why your life, and Trump's, have been so overfilled with dramas for decades. One part of government that does not need drama is Social Security, which is about as simple a concept as ever existed and yet those self-identified geniuses, Trump and Musk, can't keep it running smoothly. It is one drama after another with those two and their handling of Social Security. And 6ixStringJack, another self-identified genius, doesn't understand.

Social Security is in the worst crisis since its 1935 founding

Hint: it’s not running out of money, it’s not being defrauded, nor are administrative costs too high.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-social-security-is-in-the-worst

The crisis is entirely due to Trump and Musk.

So far under Trump, the Social Security Administration has been run by Leland Dudek — elevated by Musk to acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs.

Dudek has issued rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for frontline staff.

Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has already pushed out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000, including dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems.

Musk has announced plans to fire nearly half the Social Security workforce and has already begun shutting down field offices.

Dudek has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge — pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that there’s little to none.

The turmoil at Social Security is leaving many retirees and disabled claimants with less access or shut out of the system altogether.

The Social Security website crashed four times in 10 days this month, blocking millions from logging into their online accounts because the servers were overloaded.

In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones at the front desk as receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. The agency no longer has a system to monitor customers’ experience with these services, because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.

And the phones keep ringing.

Trump swore he would never touch Social Security. But by handing the axe to Musk — who deceptively calls the program a “Ponzi scheme” and is moving at breakneck speed to gut it — Trump could be responsible for killing it.

Trump and Musk are:

Lying about Social Security, including false claims of massive fraud — providing a pretext for actions that could undermine eligible beneficiaries’ access to benefits.

Engaging in deep cuts to staffing, new restrictions on phone-based services for the public, and “agency-wide … restructuring” and “massive reorganizations” of SSA that are neither well thought-out nor wise — all of which threaten SSA’s ability to serve seniors and people with disabilities effectively while providing a potential excuse for privatizing key services.

Jeopardizing the reliability of SSA’s systems by sharply reducing staff with technical expertise of systems. After years of underfunding, the Social Security Administration needs more staff — not fewer — to give the nation’s retirees and people with disabilities the service they deserve.

Threatening the security of people’s personal information by giving untrained DOGE political appointees unprecedented access to sensitive SSA data. Musk has granted his untrained employees access to the most sensitive personal data of every American.

What’s happening to Social Security demonstrates how quickly one of the nation’s best and most popular public programs can be destroyed by Trump and Musk.

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 27, 2025 7:18 PM

You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.

I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.

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

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:18 AM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're the one out of the two of us bitching about literally everything every day.

I wouldn't trade places with you if my life depended on it dude.

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

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

Canada finds Trump's behavior to be stupid, ignorant and hostile. If Trumptards don't see what Canadians see, it would be because they are blind to Trump's defects. Trumptards, open up your eyes and look around.

Canada Announces Bombshell Break With U.S. Over Trump

The new Canadian prime minister announced the two countries’ relationship is “over.”

By Edith Olmsted | March 27, 2025 4:51 p.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/193287/donald-trump-canada-prime-minister
-break

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and auto parts.

“What exactly the United States does next is unclear, but what is clear, what is clear is that we as Canadians have agency. We have power. We are masters in our own home,” Carney said.

“We can control our destiny. We can give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the United States, can ever take away. We can deal with this crisis best by building our own strength right here at home.”

Carney warned that Canada, which is currently one of the top importers of U.S. goods, would need to reshape its economy to wean itself off its southern neighbor.

“We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations,” Carney said.

On Wednesday, Carney called the latest round of tariffs a “very direct attack.”

“We will defend our workers. We will defend our companies. We will defend our country,” he said at the time.

Back stateside, the Big Three automakers took an immediate hit Thursday as the market digested Trump’s tariff announcement, with new tariffs on vehicles expected to go into effect on April 3 and on vehicle parts one month later.

The White House has pretended that the steep tariffs on Canada are a bargaining chip to help curb illegal drug trafficking—a threat so minor that it warranted no mention in the Trump administration’s first Annual Threat Assessment—but Trump openly admitted that he hoped to use tariffs to bully Canada into becoming a U.S. state. His bullying has since escalated into an all-out trade war, which could potentially devastate states along America’s northern border.

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 28, 2025 6:16 AM

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

Trump’s Great American Crypto Scam
We wanted to ignore it. Now we can’t.

March 28, 2025 5:46 AM

https://slate.com/technology/2025/03/donald-trump-crypto-news-scam.htm
l

For years, many people have harbored a secret question: What actually is cryptocurrency? Maybe they understood it in some sense—money that existed via some unhackable code?—but they didn’t really get it. Some of us at Slate didn’t get it, frankly! Perhaps you didn’t really get it either. The thing was, for a long time, you could get by in society without really understanding crypto.

Now, in America, that’s no longer true. Crypto is in ascendance—and to understand what it is, and how it works, is foundational to understanding the great American scam that’s currently playing out right in front of all of us in the White House and beyond. You can’t grasp the reality of the second Trump presidency if you don’t start here.

Though he is a relative latecomer to the crypto universe, Trump has realized that he can personally make vast sums of money off it. And thanks to their steadfast support of his latest run for president, crypto enthusiasts have been rewarded with remarkable positions of power in Trump’s new administration — all while he continues to strip down every governmental means of regulation.

What will this mean in the long run? Financial experts are watching warily. The embrace of crypto will not be contained, they predict. As crypto is integrated more thoroughly into all our financial systems, the entire economy is becoming more vulnerable to the crash experts worry is coming.

What does this mean imminently? It means that we can no longer ignore crypto as an alternative financial universe that does not apply to all of us. That’s where these stories come in: We made this as a guide for anyone who has been sitting on the sidelines of this universe, because now there is no sitting on the sidelines. We are all players in crypto, and we need to know what it’s doing to us.

Here, you’ll find a glossary breaking down what all the ridiculous terms that get batted around when talking about crypto actually mean. We’ve also created a guide to all the crypto dudes (and, yes, they are mainly dudes) who have come to positions of power in this administration. And we’ve pulled together sharp essays on how this is manifesting in ways that have become all too familiar—how it contributes to the eerie feeling that America has devolved into a casino, how Trump uses immigrants as the scapegoat for societal ills like fentanyl but gives a pass to the real culprit (yes, it is crypto), and the crucial crypto connection to our ever-declining environment. We’ve provided a guide detailing what parts of the greater crypto universe are serious and what are not. And Slate’s tech podcast, What Next TBD, has done its own special project: It actually made a meme coin itself. (Don’t worry, the show explains what that is.) It might be the most illustrative avenue here to grasp the scam of crypto—the ultimate explanation of why it is so easy for the rich to get richer and so hard for everyone else. It really is everything you need to know about Trump’s America.

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 28, 2025 11:47 AM

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

Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem

The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.

By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/

Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.

If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.

Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore. Divesting from U.S. suppliers was once unthinkable, but Canada has already begun searching elsewhere. To take just one example, Ottawa is reviewing its $13 billion commitment to buy 88 F-35 fighter aircraft from Lockheed Martin as it hunts for alternative suppliers in Europe. Trump’s threats might compel the CAF to begin decoupling from America—a process that could leave the military even weaker than it is now.

This sudden conflict with the United States fundamentally threatens Canada’s long-standing approach to national defense. But Canadians have responded to crises in the past by dramatically bolstering their military on short notice. Trump may have just prompted them to do it again.

Over the past century, Canada has proved that it can mobilize quickly in response to emergencies, despite skimping on defense spending during peacetime. It sent more than 600,000 soldiers to fight in World War I, a considerable effort for a country that had only 3,000 permanent service members and roughly 70,000 militia members leading up to the conflict. Canada demobilized after the armistice, but rapidly rebuilt itself again during World War II. By 1945, the country had the fourth-largest navy in the world.

After fighting in the Korean War, Canada maintained a military sizable enough to station permanent forces in Western Europe and undertake a series of UN peacekeeping missions. But Canada’s defence spending as a percentage of its GDP began a slow decline in 1957. Notably, that was the same year that the Canadian and American governments agreed to establish the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which still provides a binational defense of the continent. Although Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau started modernizing the military in the 1970s, Canada’s willingness to spend on defense was waning.

This became evident in the 1990s, when the seeds of Canada’s current predicament were planted. As the Cold War ended, Canada’s finances were a mess. To help balance its budget and pay off the growing national debt, Ottawa cut defense spending by approximately 30 percent in the middle of the decade. The reductions not only eliminated crucial funding but also drove away personnel and burned out many who remained. The defense budget increased while Canada contributed to the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, but spending never got near 2 percent of GDP.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office, in 2015, he launched the first comprehensive modernization of the military since his father had four decades earlier. Unlike many of his predecessors, Trudeau was willing to incur budget deficits to refurbish the CAF. But his purpose was never to develop an autonomous fighting force. And despite his spending increases, Canada continued to lag behind other NATO members. (Last year, to the exasperation of many allies, Trudeau pledged to reach the alliance’s 2 percent spending target no sooner than 2032.)

To compensate, the Canadian armed forces have grown even closer to their American counterparts over the past decade. Canada adopted a “plug and play” model, tailoring its armed forces for operations that Americans led. It became steadily more dependent on U.S. logistical support and defense manufacturing.

Trump’s return to office, however, has fundamentally changed Canada’s relationship to both America’s military and its own. The country is in the midst of a federal election, one in which defense features prominently. Both major parties—the Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, and the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre—are promising to build a stronger Canada and more capable armed forces.

For both parties to commit to increased defense spending during peacetime is a rarity in Canadian politics, to put it lightly. Canadians may be miserly about defense, but their military resolve in emergencies shouldn’t be underestimated. And they have little doubt that today is an emergency.

About the Author

Philippe Lagassé is an associate professor and Barton Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

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 28, 2025 11:57 AM

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

The Truth About Trump's Greenland Campaign

When the president talks about security in the Arctic, he’s talking about climate change.

By Brett Simpson | March 28, 2025, 10:43 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/03/climate-change-arc
tic-greenland-trump-military/682225/

President Donald Trump has made his fixation on Greenland abundantly clear—enough so to unnerve many of the people who live there. “I think Greenland is going to be something that maybe is in our future,” he told reporters this week, once again teasing the notion of annexation. Vice President J. D. Vance is traveling there today, after what he called the “excitement” around his wife’s plan to attend a famous dogsledding race. As part of the trip, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were scheduled to visit a U.S. military base; Greenland’s prime minister, Mute B. Egede, called the visit a “provocation.” Now dogsledding is out, and the entire delegation will together travel to the base.

Their aim, the vice president said in a video on X, is to check up on Greenland’s security, because unnamed other countries could “use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States.” And these are real concerns for the United States, rooted in climate change: As polar ice melts away, superpowers are vying for newly open shipping routes in the Arctic Ocean and largely unexplored mineral and fossil-fuel reserves. Arctic warming could pose a direct threat to America’s security interests too: Alaska could have new vulnerabilities to both China and Russia; changes in ocean salinity and temperature might interfere with submarine detection systems; the extremes of climate change, including permafrost thaw in Russia, could drive economic instability, social unrest, and territorial claims.

During the Biden administration, the U.S. military and NATO had both started to treat global warming in the Arctic as a matter of real military concern. Whether that will continue under Trump is an open question. Even as the president has tried to erase U.S.-government action on climate change, when he talks about Greenland, he’s tacitly acknowledging that rising temperatures are rapidly changing that part of the world—and U.S. interests there.

“This is a threat environment we haven’t encountered in living history,” Marisol Maddox, a climate-security specialist at Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, told me. For decades, the world’s response to climate change has been one of prevention, driven by scientists and diplomats. The Trump administration is openly rejecting that approach. But as the more dramatic impacts of climate change become reality, even a president who wants to ignore its risks may have no choice in the matter.

In recent years, the world’s largest military apparatuses—the U.S. Department of Defense and NATO—have added climate change to their war games. Both DOD and NATO have started regularly assessing how climate risks could affect both military and civilian security, and NATO opened the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Montreal. In the U.S., national intelligence agencies “are thinking about strategic surprise” from climate change, Julie Pullen, a climate scientist who’s part of a congressionally mandated advisory group of climate-security experts, told me. Just as, for instance, the Defense Intelligence Agency might have to weigh the possibility that Iran might one day have nuclear weapons, intelligence officials should consider the nonzero chance of the Eastern Seaboard going underwater, she said.

A handful of other countries—Germany, Australia, Japan, and several small island states—also have a policy for climate security, and many NATO states refer to such aims in their security agenda. But the U.S. has been leading the world in thinking seriously and systematically about these realities. Although this shift happened during the Biden administration, Sherri Goodman, who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, told me that in the U.S., this push had been a nonpartisan effort and that for the military, “it’s all about risk.” She’s seen four-star generals go from treating climate change with skepticism to facing it like any challenge the military must prepare for.

The second Trump administration doesn’t exactly see it that way. After CNN reported on DOD plans to cut climate programs earlier this month, for instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth affirmed on X, quite bluntly, that the department “does not do climate change crap.” References to climate change have been fast disappearing from major agency websites—including the entire Department of Defense Climate Resilience Portal. In response to a request for comment, a DOD spokesperson told me that the department “is eliminating climate-change programs and initiatives” and that “climate change is not part of the department’s warfighting mission nor the president’s priorities.”

But the logic of climate security still holds. As the region’s ice-covered buffer zone opens up, “we need to be very mindful of the changes that are taking place, and posture to respond,” Iris Ferguson, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and global resilience, told me. Until now, the world has opted to respond to such changes by trying to reduce emissions through climate diplomacy. But those reductions aren’t happening as climate diplomacy promised. In fact, in October 2024, a United Nations report found that atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing “faster than any time experienced during human existence.” At some point, the U.S. military might start to consider its own, more direct options for responding.

Assuming that greenhouse-gas emissions keep rising, scientists predict that climate change will have abrupt, irreversible effects on the planet—the only question is when. For instance, they’ve been tracking the potential slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean-circulation mechanism that regulates global temperatures. If the AMOC eventually collapses, sea levels along parts of the East Coast could rise by up to a meter, and temperatures across Europe could drop dramatically, disrupting the global food supply. (Agriculture in Great Britain, for instance, could be largely wiped out.) Scientists are still debating if and how quickly the AMOC’s collapse might occur, but recently some have begun to warn that it could happen within just a few decades.

If the world is heading that rapidly toward an irreversible tipping point, “that’s where climate interventions start to make a lot of sense” for the U.S. government, Pullen told me. Sandia National Laboratories, the Albuquerque lab dedicated to national security, is investigating technologies that could slow down or reverse the rise of global temperatures. Scientists and engineers from the lab have, for instance, simulated the effects of releasing several million metric tons of sulfur dioxide from planes circling above the Arctic. Those chemicals would reflect sunlight, casting a cooling shade over the planet’s surface and dropping temperatures over several decades. Eventually, some Arctic sea ice might be restored too. (The Department of Energy, which oversees Sandia, did not comment on whether these efforts would continue in the Trump administration.)

To date, the scientific community has largely rejected geoengineering as an overly risky gamble. And injecting chemicals into the stratosphere does present serious ethical and governance challenges. This plan is impossible to test at scale before deploying, rendering most consequences both unknown and possibly irreversible. Any kind of responsible management would require unprecedented international cooperation, potentially including a new multinational body to govern geoengineering. As President Trump casts doubt on NATO, that level of global cooperation seems less likely all the time. And if injections stopped (whether because governance or the technology itself failed), many models suggest that the world could plunge into “termination shock”—rapid global heating with consequences potentially worse than if we’d never used this strategy at all.

Sandia’s simulations are just that: simulations. But Maddox believes that the U.S. government should continue exploring even the most drastic options. Failing to mitigate climate change increases the odds “that we’ll have to rely on a technology that’s pretty extreme,” she said. “When multiple catastrophic events converge at the same time and public outcry reaches a panic level, the government must be ready with options.”

So far this term, Trump has acted as if climate change does not matter: He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, announced plans to reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling, and paused new offshore-wind development and Inflation Reduction Act clean-energy funding. But if the president’s bid for Greenland—or the U.S. military’s quiet cooperation with Canada to boost Arctic defenses—is any indication, the U.S. is weighing its options for a warmer future. “We live in the real world,” Evan Bloom, a global fellow at the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and former State Department official, told me. “The military and other agencies will continue to take climate change into account, because they have to.” When he hears Trump talk about Greenland, he hears the president speaking about the geopolitics of climate change—“whether he’s willing to call it that or not.”

About the Author

Brett Simpson is a writer based in the Arctic city of Tromsø, Norway, on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Nation, and Foreign Policy, among other publications.

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 28, 2025 12:31 PM

Interesting fan-fic.

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

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 12:33 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Canada’s Military Has a Trump Problem

The country’s long-standing assumptions about national defense just got blown up.

By Philippe Lagassé | March 28, 2025, 10:24 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/canada-military-spen
ding-trump/682224/

Canadians have a grudging commitment to their national defense. The country spends well under 2 percent of its GDP on the military. Its fleets are aging, and much of its infrastructure is crumbling. The Canadian Armed Forces are budgeted for 101,500 personnel—a modest figure compared with allies—and they’re 16,500 short. After years of neglect, the government has slowly started to refurbish the CAF, but it has a long way to go.

If there’s one reason Canada’s military is this weak, it’s the United States. Sharing a border with a benign superpower has given Canada a source of security and deterrence that it didn’t need to buy or build itself. That’s why the country has designed its military not as a self-sufficient force but largely as a supplement to America’s. The CAF can’t mount sustained overseas operations on its own, but Canada can meaningfully contribute to U.S.-led missions on a limited budget. Domestic manufacturers can’t supply much of the CAF’s most important equipment, but America’s can.

Virtually every aspect of Canada’s military—its size, structure, budget, and strategy—is predicated on a series of assumptions about the benevolence and support of American leaders. These assumptions have been in place for decades; President Donald Trump has overturned them in a matter of weeks. Because of his threats of economic coercion and annexation, Canada’s leaders have suddenly realized they may not be able to rely on American might anymore.

Nothing I haven't already said about Canada and Europe 100 times already. But especially Canada.

It's real easy for the rest of the world to pay for free healthcare for all when Papa USA has the world's biggest military.

Good luck paying for that healthcare when you've all got to arm yourselves.

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

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 1:31 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Why does Canada need to "arm itself"? Do you imagine that nations around the world (aside from the USA, that is) are slavering to invade Canada?

Whatever the fuck for???

Which leads us to what the USA COULD BE if it wasn't so busy playing World Hegemon/ World Cop.

The vast bulk of our military spending is completely UNNECESSARY. It's either paying for $500 hammers and jets that don't fly, or wars everywhere that don't do us any good.

-----------
"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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Friday, March 28, 2025 2:15 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Which leads us to what the USA COULD BE if it wasn't so busy playing World Hegemon/ World Cop.

The vast bulk of our military spending is completely UNNECESSARY. It's either paying for $500 hammers and jets that don't fly, or wars everywhere that don't do us any good.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Until Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, the Signyms of America were arguing that it is none of America's business what Japan does to China. Momentarily, a declaration of war got the votes of Republicans, but they immediately blamed President Roosevelt for causing the Japanese to attack.

Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory
https://www.britannica.com/event/Pearl-Harbor-and-the-Back-Door-to-War
-Theory-1688287

The Republicans refused to vote for a declaration of war on Germany, but Hitler handled that by declaring war on the US. Everyone should remember what a bunch of worthless assholes Republicans are. Europe gets invaded by Germany but Republicans don't see a problem. The UK under attack for years but that is not a problem for Republicans. What was a problem was Lend-Lease. Opposition to the Lend-Lease bill was strongest among isolationist Republicans in Congress, who feared the measure would be "the longest single step this nation has yet taken toward direct involvement in the war abroad". The vote was largely along party lines. Democrats voted 236 to 25 in favor and Republicans 24 in favor and 135 against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Lend-Lease_proposal

Congress has NOT passed a Declaration of War since WWII because Republicans won't vote for it since they are a bunch of fucking cowards. See Trump cheating his way out of serving in Vietnam. Or George Bush joining the Texas National Guard. Biggest fucking cowards to be President. All his bluster can't hide that Trump is a scared fat man.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm

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 28, 2025 2:17 PM

We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.

You are an idiot and a fool.

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

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 2:30 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.

You are an idiot and a fool.

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

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

6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.

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 28, 2025 2:33 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

When we're attacked, we should respond.

OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.

Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.

JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.

BTW- We have never been an "isolationist" nation. How do you think we acquired most of our land (invading native nations), the southwest (Mexico), Philippines, Puerto Rico, (Spain), involved ourselves in numerous "banana republics“, promoted the creation of Panama, and involved ourselves in WWI?

-----------
"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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Friday, March 28, 2025 2:55 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
When we're attacked, we should respond.

OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.

Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.

JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, did you notice that Germany stopped paying reparations many years before it invaded Austria? The reparations did NOT cause the invasion. Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power, but a new set of goddamn German fools resumed payments in 1953, with the final payment made on October 3, 2010. Signym, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#Modern

Signym, your understanding of Japan is even more screwed up. The United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1941, which effectively cut off its access to US oil, as a response to Japan's aggressive actions in Asia, particularly the occupation of French Indochina.

In the 1930s, Japan expanded its influence in China, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. By 1940, Japan occupied northern Indochina, a move seen as a step towards capturing oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

US Response:
To counter Japanese aggression, the United States began restricting the export of war materials from the US to Japan, including scrap metal, steel, and aviation fuel.

Oil Embargo:
In July 1941, after Japan occupied French Indochina, the United States, along with the British and Dutch, froze Japanese assets and effectively enacted an embargo on oil sales to Japan.

Impact on Japan:
This oil embargo significantly impacted Japan, as it relied heavily on US oil imports. The Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) estimated it had less than two years of bunker oil remaining, which led to the existing plans to seize oil resources in the Dutch East Indies.

Signym, none of this history is esoteric nor hard to understand but you managed to reverse cause and effect:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Did+America+blockade+Japan+oil+shipmen
ts+before+WW2

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 28, 2025 4:08 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.

You are an idiot and a fool.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.

See... This is your problem.

90% of the people unemployed in this country vote Democrat.

90% of the people being kept alive in this country on medicaid and social programs vote Democrat.

Democrats are anti-marriage, and a vast majority of young people who aren't married going well into their 30's and even their 40's vote Democrat.

You're just jealous that in a country that doesn't offer free healthcare that I cracked the code.

I do plenty of things to contribute to plenty of things. I just reject the way that you choose to do it.

Why don't you post another dozen pirated movies and books for us, huh?

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

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 5:57 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
When we're attacked, we should respond.

OTOH, it's apparent you know very little of the origins of WWII.

Germany's fundamental slide to "national socialism" began with punitive war reparations that Germany had to pay for WWI. That led to widespread poverty and even starvation, social decay, and hyperinflation.

JAPAN'S attack on the USA was bc we blockaded Japan 100% from essential commodities, especially oil.

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

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Signym, did you notice that Germany stopped paying reparations many years before it invaded Austria? The reparations did NOT cause the invasion.

I didn't post that the invasion began with reparations, so thanks for your strawman misrepresentation. I posted that the slide to national socialism began with reparations.

Quote:
SECOND:
Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power,

Fools like Biden*?

There were many reasons WHY Hitler was able to eventually take over Germany, but pre-Nazi Germany was such a clusterfuck, and Hitler so materially improved most Germans' lives, they conflated his successful policies with his inimical ones.

SECOND, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?

Quote:
SECOND:
Signym, your understanding of Japan is even more screwed up. The United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan in 1941, which effectively cut off its access to US oil, as a response to Japan's aggressive actions in Asia, particularly the occupation of French Indochina...
US Response:
To counter Japanese aggression, the United States began restricting the export of war materials from the US to Japan, including scrap metal, steel, and aviation fuel

So, our "isolationist" nation interfered on behalf of French Indochina?

You DO realize that you just crashed your own argument about our so-called "isolationist" past, don't you?

We haven't been isolationist for over a couple centuries, doofus.

----------

"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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Friday, March 28, 2025 7:30 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We reject your wikipedia Leftist view of history.

You are an idiot and a fool.

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

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, you are unemployed, unmarried, kept alive by Medicaid after years of self-destructive behavior because of your grotesque emotional immaturity. But you are still very much like all other Trumptards. You just took it to an extreme where you don't even have a half-ass function in society.

See... This is your problem.

90% of the people unemployed in this country vote Democrat.

90% of the people being kept alive in this country on medicaid and social programs vote Democrat.

Democrats are anti-marriage, and a vast majority of young people who aren't married going well into their 30's and even their 40's vote Democrat.

You're just jealous that in a country that doesn't offer free healthcare that I cracked the code.

I do plenty of things to contribute to plenty of things. I just reject the way that you choose to do it.

Why don't you post another dozen pirated movies and books for us, huh?

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

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

You didn't crack any code, no more than tax-cheaters cracked the code to reduce income taxes.

6ix, you did with Medicaid what Trump did with the IRS, you both lied. 6ix about his assets. Trump about his income.

For Indiana Medicaid: Asset limits are also in place, with a maximum of $2,000 for single individuals and $3,000 for married couples.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Does+Indiana+put+a+limit+on+Medicaid%3
F

Asset Limits: In addition to income, Indiana Medicaid also considers an applicant’s assets when determining eligibility. Assets include cash, bank accounts, investments, real estate, and certain personal property. Certain assets may be exempt, however, from consideration, such as a primary residence (up to $713,000), household items, and a vehicle. As of 2024, the asset limit for a single applicant is $2,000 but, again, applicants should verify this figure with the most recent guidelines. Indiana uses a five-year look-back period that effectively prevents an applicant from transferring assets during the five-year period prior to applying for benefits in anticipation of the need to qualify for benefits. Medicaid planning can help you plan for eligibility while protecting your hard-earned assets.
https://frankkraft.com/understanding-medicaid-eligibility-for-seniors-
in-indiana/

6ix, the other "facts" you list are also lies, same as the lies you and Trump told to get on Medicaid and not pay income taxes.

Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance

By Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig, Mike McIntire

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.h
tml

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

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 28, 2025 8:22 PM

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

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
SECOND:
Germany's poverty was caused by the goddamn fools that previously ran Germany before Hitler, who was not going to stupidly continue paying reparations. Germany ceased paying reparations for World War I in 1933 when Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power,
Fools like Biden*?

There were many reasons WHY Hitler was able to eventually take over Germany, but pre-Nazi Germany was such a clusterfuck, and Hitler so materially improved most Germans' lives, they conflated his successful policies with his inimical ones.

SECOND, you understand nothing and you won't read what actually happened, will you?

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

Germany was NOT occupied after WWI. Whatever suffering the Germans endured was the fault of the German government. But after WWII, the Germans suffered because of a deliberate decision to increase their suffering:

The United States and the Refusal to Feed German Civilians after World War II

http://artemis.austincollege.edu/acad/history/htooley/WiggersGermanFoo
d.pdf

. . . But this benchmark was deliberately ignored when it came to planning for the occupation of Germany. The first step towards a retributive food policy was taken during the fall of 1944 in response to a draft SHAEF handbook that suggested that German civilians be guaranteed a base ration of 2000 calories after the war.19 While the authors of the handbook were naturally preoccupied with the postwar rehabilitation of the European economy, this particular undertaking struck officials in Washington as being far too soft and constructive.20 President Roosevelt proposed a much harsher food policy in its place: the Germans "should have simply a subsistence level of food—as he put it, soup kitchens would be ample to sustain life—that otherwise they should be stripped clean and should not have a level of subsistence above the lowest level of the people they had conquered."21 Soviet officials also proposed that the Allies limit grain and food production in postwar Germany, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau conceived of a similar program that would limit the civilian population "to a subsistence level."22

Even State Department planners believed Germany should be guaranteed only bare subsistence for a period of at least several years after the war and not immediately brought up to the level of the other European states that had been the victims of her wartime aggression and occupation.23 Secretary of State Cordell Hull concluded that "it is of the highest importance that the standard of living of the German people in the early years be such as to bring home to them that they have lost the war and to impress on them that they must abandon their pretentious theories that they are a superior race created to govern the world. Through lack of luxuries we may teach them that war does not pay."

. . . In the end, tens of millions of Germans lived through at least several years of malnutrition and deprivation in the wake of the 1945 surrender. It is unlikely that any historian will ever be able to calculate how many civilian deaths can be attributed—either directly or indirectly—to the prolonged suffering that prevailed in postwar Germany. What is certain is that many more POWs and civilians suffered and perished than needed to in the aftermath of World War II, and that the victorious Allies were guided at least partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance in creating the circumstances that contributed to those deaths. Having returned from a tour of devastated Germany in 1947, British socialist and writer Victor Gollancz attempted to put the best face possible on these and other Allied actions:

I have criticised in this essay our treatment of Germany. It cannot be criticised too strongly: for these policies for which we have been jointly or solely responsible—annexations, expulsions, spoliation, economic enslavement, non-fraternization and starvation—are more in the spirit of the Hitler we fought than in that of the western liberalism for which we fought him. But to go on to suggest that all distinction has vanished, and that we have been utterly corrupted by the thing we have been fighting—this would be to exaggerate, and grossly. We have alienated great territories of the enemy: Hitler would have annexed all Europe, and eventually the whole world. We non-fraternised with the Germans: Hitler murdered six million Jews. We are starving the people in our charge, not deliberately but because to feed them as we ought would be to lower our own standards: Hitler would have starved, and did starve, anyone it might suit him to starve, with complete deliberation and even, God forgive him, as a matter of preference. These are vast differences, and we must cling to the thought of them if we are to retain our self-respect.

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

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Friday, March 28, 2025 8:28 PM